There was an excuse for hate.

It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh,
and vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would have
been equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me,
without resentment. I see now clearly and calmly, what I then felt
obscurely and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were
intolerable. My work was tedious and laborious and it took up an
unreasonable proportion of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed,
ill housed, ill educated and ill trained, my will was suppressed
and cramped to the pitch of torture, I had no reasonable pride in
myself and no reasonable chance of putting anything right. It was
a life hardly worth living. That a large proportion of the people
about me had no better a lot, that many had a worse, does not
affect these facts. It was a life in which contentment would have
been disgraceful. If some of them were contented or resigned, so
much the worse for every one. No doubt it was hasty and foolish
of me to throw up my situation, but everything was so obviously
aimless and foolish in our social organization that I do not feel
disposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far as it
pained my mother and caused her anxiety.

Think of the one comprehensive fact of the lock-out!

That year was a bad year, a year of world-wide economic disorganization.
Through their want of intelligent direction the great "Trust" of
American ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded furnace
owners, had smelted far more iron than the whole world had any demand
for. (In those days there existed no means of estimating any need
of that sort beforehand.) They had done this without even consulting