to reveal the basic savagery and thin veneer.  Once, for instance, a man was lynched for brawling on the public square of the county seat; once a mayor who sought to “clean up” was publicly assassinated; always there was theft and rumors of theft, until St. Clair County was a hissing in good men’s ears; but always, too, there were good wages and jolly hoodlums and unchecked wassail of Saturday nights.  Gamblers, big and little, rioted in East St. Louis.  The little gamblers used cards and roulette wheels and filched the weekly wage of the workers.  The greater gamblers used meat and iron and undid the foundations of the world.  All the gods of chance flaunted their wild raiment here, above the brown flood of the Mississippi.

Then the world changed; then civilization, built for culture, rebuilt itself for wilful murder in Europe, Asia, America, and the Southern Seas.  Hands that made food made powder, and iron for railways was iron for guns.  The wants of common men were forgotten before the groan of giants.  Streams of gold, lost from the world’s workers, filtered and trickled into the hands of gamblers and put new power into the thunderbolts of East St. Louis.

Wages had been growing before the World War.  Slowly but remorselessly the skilled and intelligent, banding themselves, had threatened the coffers of the mighty, and slowly the mighty had disgorged.  Even the common workers, the poor and unlettered, had again and again gripped the sills of the city walls and pulled themselves to their chins; but, alas! there were so many hands and so many mouths and the feet of the Disinherited kept coming across the wet paths of the sea to this old El Dorado.

War brought subtle changes.  Wages stood still while prices fattened.  It was not that the white American worker was threatened with starvation, but it was what was, after all, a more important question,—­whether or not he should lose his front-room and victrola and even the dream of a Ford car.

There came a whirling and scrambling among the workers,—­they fought each other; they climbed on each others’ backs.  The skilled and intelligent, banding themselves even better than before, bargained with the men of might and held them by bitter threats; the less skilled and more ignorant seethed at the bottom and tried, as of old, to bring it about that the ignorant and unlettered should learn to stand together against both capital and skilled labor.

It was here that there came out of the East a beam of unearthly light,—­a triumph of possible good in evil so strange that the workers hardly believed it.  Slowly they saw the gates of Ellis Island closing, slowly the footsteps of the yearly million men became fainter and fainter, until the stream of immigrants overseas was stopped by the shadow of death at the very time when new murder opened new markets over all the world to American industry; and the giants with the thunderbolts stamped and raged and peered out across the world and called for men and evermore,—­men!