young robins in the nest must starve. Nature had other robins
that would escape the enemy. But among men it is wrong for the
little ones to suffer when the hand that feeds them is destroyed.
For man has sympathy, which beasts have not. Sympathy is the iron
fiber in man that welds him to his fellows. Envy is the sulphur
that pollutes these bonds and makes them brittle. Suppose some
master puddler of humanity could gather thousands of men into a
melting-pot, a fraternity whose purpose was to boil out the envy,
greed and malice as much as possible, and purify the good metal
of human sympathy. How much greater the social value of these men
would be. Bound together by good fellowship and human sympathy
these men could pool their charity and build a happy city where
all the children of their stricken comrades could be sent to
school together, there to learn that man is moral, that the
strong do not destroy the weak, that the nestling is not left to
fate, but that the fatherless are fathered by all men whose
hearts have heard their cry.

This vision came to me in the darkest days of my life. I had
seen the children of my dead comrades scattered like leaves from
a smitten tree never to meet again. I had left my parents' roof
to be buffeted about by strikes and unemployment, and I feared
that our home would be lost and my brothers scattered forever.
The voice of hate was whispering that the "classes" would ride
down the children of the poor, and with this gloomy thought I
went to bed. My couch was a bed of coal slack, and I was
journeying to a mill town in a freight car.

As we rolled along, I saw in a vision train after train of
lodge men going to some happy city. They were miners and steel