And out of it all grew a letter, a letter to Myra.  He wrote it in a strange haste, the sentences coming too rapidly for his pen.  It ran: 

DEAR MYRA,—­I must make you understand!  I hurt you when I wanted to help you; I wronged you when I wanted only to do right by you.  Why didn’t you listen to me this morning?

It was at the fire there, at that moment you tugged at my sleeve and I spoke to you, that I saw clearly that my life was no longer my own, that I could not even give it to you, whom I loved, whom I love now with every bit of my existence.  I told you I belonged to those dead girls.  Have you forgotten? Sixty of them—­and three of my men.  It was as if I had killed them myself.  I am a guilty man, and I must expiate this guilt.  There is no use fooling myself with pleasant phrases, no use thinking others to blame.  It was I who was responsible.

And through the death of those girls I learned of the misery of the world, of the millions in want, the women wrenched from their homes to toil in the mills, the little children—­fresh, sweet bodies, bubbling hearts, and tender, whimsical minds—­slaving in factories, tiny boys and girls laboring like men and women in cotton and knitting mills, in glass factory and coal-mine, and on the streets of cities, upon whose frail little spirits is thrust the responsibility, the wage burden, the money, and family trouble, the care and drudgery and mortal burden we grown people ourselves not seldom find too hard.  I have learned of a world gone wrong; I have learned of a new slavery on earth; and I as a member of the master class share the general guilt for the suffering of the poor...I must help to free them from the very conditions that killed the sixty girls...

And when I think of those girls and their families (some of them were the sole support of their mothers and sisters and brothers) the least I can do is to render up my life for the, lives that were lost—­the least I can do is to fill myself with the spirit of the dead and go forth, not to avenge them, but to help build a world where the living will not be sacrificed as they were.

This country is facing a great crisis; civilization is facing a great crisis.  Shall we go forward or be drawn backward?  There is a call to arms and every man must offer his life in the great fight—­that fight for democracy, that fight for lifting up the millions to new levels of life, that fight for a better earth and a superber race of human beings; and in that fight I am with the pioneers, heart and soul; I am ringing with the joy and struggle of it; I am for it, with all my strength and all my power.  It demands everything; its old cry, “Arise, arise, and follow me;” means giving up possessions, giving away all, making every sacrifice.  Before this issue our little lives shrink into nothingness, and we must sink our happiness into the future of the world.