“We believe that union men whenever possible should demand the union label as a guarantee that the goods were manufactured under conditions fair to labour.  We believe that eight hours should constitute a day’s work.”

In the preamble was this statement:  “We do not look upon the labour union as an ultimate conception of labour, but we believe that whatever progress has been made in the lot of the labourer has been due wholly to the organization of the wage-workers!”

The preamble concludes with this paragraph:  “Believing, therefore, in the cause of labour and desiring to add according to our ability to the support of the union movement, we pledge ourselves to study it intelligently and to support it loyally.”

Here was the beginning of a splendid mission work among the students; but the New Haven labour movement wasn’t big enough to take it in; nor was the American Federation of Labour.  The labour men would have no dealings whatever with the students.  We managed to keep the big house for a year, but we kept little else during that period.  Twice we lost the mental image of the monthly rent.  Sam Read supplied it the first time and Anson Phelps Stokes the other.  These were my only borrowings in New Haven.  In that house I had one of the most bitter experiences of my life.

“I think,” said my wife to me, one morning at 2 A.M., “that the baby will be born in an hour.”

The announcement chilled me.  There was but five cents in the house and that was needed to telephone for the family physician.  As I walked down Chapel Street it seemed as if my heart was a nest of scorpions spitting poison.

There was no breakfast in the house for the mother of the new-born babe.  The churches, the homes of the wealthy and the university filled me with unutterable hate as I passed them.  I was in the frame of mind in which murder, theft, violence are committed.

I had held my integrity intact until that exigency.  Then I only lacked opportunity to smash my ideals—­to bend my head, my back, my morals!

Cold sweat covered my body, my teeth chattered and my hands twitched.  My Socialist philosophy told me that society was in process of evolution.  Democracy at heart was correcting its own evils and like a snake sloughing off its outworn skin.  I was part of that process.  Reason pounded these things in on me but hate pushed them aside and demanded something else.  I wondered that morning whether after all there weren’t more reforms wrapped up in a stick of dynamite than in a whole life of preaching and moralizing.  In that fifteen-minute walk there passed through my mind and heart all the elements of hell.

It was a new experience to me—­I had not travelled that way before.  I went into a little restaurant to use the ’phone.  I laid the nickel on the counter, when I had finished, and as I did so the waiter said, “It’s a ’phone on me, Mr. Irvine;” and he rang up five cents in the cash register.