“We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift.  But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press heavily down on us.

“Public officials have only words of warning to us—­warning that we must be intensely orderly and intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings.

“I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here.  Too much blood has been spilled.  I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves.  The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”

Joe heard nothing further.  There were several other speakers, but no words penetrated to his brain.  He felt as if he must stifle.  He felt the globe of earth cracking, breaking in two under his feet, and for the first time in his life he was acutely aware of the division of humanity.  All through his career he had taken his middle-class position for granted; he tacitly agreed that there were employees and employers; but in his own case his camaraderie had hidden the cleavage.  Now he saw a double world—­on the one side the moneyed owners, on the other the crowded, scrambling, disorganized hordes of the toilers—­each one of them helpless, a victim, worked for all that was in him, and then flung aside in the scrap heap.  And behold, this horde was becoming self-conscious, was beginning to organize, was finding a voice.  And he, who was one of the “good people,” was rejected by this voice.  He had been “tried” and found wanting.  He was on the other side of the fence.  And it was the fault of his class that fire horrors and all the chaos and cruelty of industry arose.  So that now the working people had found that they must “save themselves.”

In an agony of guilt again he felt what he had said to Myra:  “From now on I belong to those dead girls”—­yes, and to their fellow-workers.  Suddenly it seemed to him that he must see Sally Heffer—­that to her he must carry the burden of his guilt—­to her he must personally make answer to the terrible accusations she had voiced.  It was all at once, as if only in this way could he go on living, that otherwise he would end in the insanity of the mad-house or the insanity of suicide.

He was walking down the stairs with Fannie, and he was trembling.

“Do you know this Sally Heffer?”

“Know her?  We all do!” she cried, with all a young girl’s enthusiasm.

“I want to see her, Fannie.  Where does she live?”

“Oh, somewhere in Greenwich Village.  But she’ll be up at the Woman’s League after the meeting.”

He went up to the Woman’s League and found the office crowded with women and men.  He asked for Miss Heffer.

“I’ll take your name,” said the young woman, and then came back with the answer that “he’d have to wait.”