really was a socialist, but "too much of a coward to say so." I
remember one socialist who habitually opened a very telling
address he was in the habit of giving upon the street corners, by
holding me up as an awful example to his fellow socialists, as
one of their number "who had been caught in the toils of
capitalism." He always added as a final clinching of the
statement that he knew what he was talking about because he was a
member of the Hull-House Men's Club. When I ventured to say to
him that not all of the thousands of people who belong to a class
or club at Hull-House could possibly know my personal opinions,
and to mildly inquire upon what he founded his assertions, he
triumphantly replied that I had once admitted to him that I had
read Sombart and Loria, and that anyone of sound mind must see
the inevitable conclusions of such master reasonings.

I could multiply these two instances a hundredfold, and possibly
nothing aided me to stand on my own feet and to select what
seemed reasonable from this wilderness of dogma, so much as my
early encounter with genuine zeal and affectionate solicitude,
associated with what I could not accept as the whole truth.

I do not wish to take callow writing too seriously, but I reproduce
from an oratorical contest the following bit of premature
pragmatism, doubtless due much more to temperament than to
perception, because I am still ready to subscribe to it, although
the grandiloquent style is, I hope, a thing of the past: "Those who
believe that Justice is but a poetical longing within us, the
enthusiast who thinks it will come in the form of a millennium,
those who see it established by the strong arm of a hero, are not
those who have comprehended the vast truths of life. The actual