OTHERS: AND SALLY HEFFER

Joe filled a stiff cloth portfolio with a batch of 9/10s (abbreviation for home use), pulled his gray hat over his bushy hair, and went over and tapped the collapsible Slate on the shoulder.

“Yes, Mr. Joe.”

“Nathan,” cried Joe, excitedly, “if there’s a rush of subscribers while I’m gone, make ’em stand in line, and each wait his turn. But don’t let them block the car tracks string ’em around the corner.”

Nathan gazed at Joe like a lost soul.

“But I think, Mr. Joe,” he said, slowly, “you place your hopes too high. I don’t like to be too gloomy, Mr. Joe, but I have my doubts about a rush.”

“Slate,” cried Joe, slapping the tragic bookkeeper a whack, “you’re inspiring!”

And he swung out to the street in the brilliant morning sunshine, ready to begin his canvass.

“Next door,” he mused, “is the place to start.”

There was a woman sitting on the stoop, a two-year-old girl in her arms. Joe paused and looked at the baby.

“Hello, you.”

The baby looked at him a little doubtfully, and then laughed.

“Girl or boy?” asked Joe of the mother.

“Girl.”

“How old?”

“Two.”

“She’s a darling! What’s her name?”

“Name’s Annie.”

“Named after you?”

“Sure!”

“You wouldn’t mind if I gave her a peppermint to suck?”

“Would you mind some candy, Annie?”

“Candy!” shrieked the child.

Joe dove into his bulging pocket and produced a good hard white one. Annie snatched it up and sucked joyously.

“Thank the man, Annie.”

“Thank you.”

“Is this your only one, Mrs. ”

“Cassidy’s my name! No, I’ve buried two others.”

“From this house?”

“No, we keep movin’ ” Mrs. Cassidy laughed a little.

Joe made a grim face.

“Jump your rent, eh?”

Mrs. Cassidy shrugged her shoulders.

“What can poor people do?”

“But hasn’t Mr. Cassidy a job?”

“He has when he has it but it’s bum work. Slave like a nigger and then laid off for six months, maybe.”

“What kind of work is that?”

“’Longshore he’s a ’longshoreman.”

“And when he’s unemployed you have a hard time, don’t you?”

“Hard?” Mrs. Cassidy’s voice broke. “What can we do? There’s the insurance every week fifteen cents for my man, ten cents for me, and five cents for Annie. We couldn’t let that go; it’s buryin’-money, and there ain’t a Cassidy isn’t going to have as swell a funeral as any in the ward. And then we’ve got to live. I’ve found one thing in this world the harder you work the less you get.”

Joe spoke emphatically.

“Mrs. Cassidy, when your husband’s out of work, through no fault of his own, he ought to get a weekly allowance to keep you going.”

“And who’s to give it to him?”

“Who? Do you know what they do in Germany?”

“What do they do in Germany?”

“They have insurance for the unemployed, and when a man’s out he gets so-and-so-much a week. We ought to have it in America.”

“How can we get it? Who listens to the poor?”

“Your man belongs to a union, doesn’t he?”

“Sure!”

“Well, the trouble is our people here don’t know these things. If they knew them, they’d get together and make the bosses come round. It’s ignorance holding us all back.”

“I’ve often told Tim he ought to study something. There’s grand lectures in the schools every Tuesday and Thursday night. But Tim don’t put stock in learning. He says learning never bought a glass of beer.”

Joe laughed.

“Mrs. Cassidy, that’s not what I mean. Listen. I’m a neighbor of yours live next door ”

“Sure! Didn’t I see you move in? When my friend, Mrs. Leupp, seen your iron beds, she up and went to Macy’s and bought one herself. What yer doing in there, anyway, with that printing-press? It gives me the trembles.”

Joe laughed heartily.

“You feel the press in this house?”

“First time, I thought it was an earthquake, Mr. Blaine.”

Joe was abashed.

“How’d you know my name?”

“Ast it off your landlady.”

“Well, you’re wrong I’m Mr. Joe.”

Mrs. Cassidy was hugely amused.

“You’re one grand fellow, let me tell you. But, oh, that black, thin one he’s creepy, Mr. Joe. But your mother she’s all right. I was telling Mrs. Rann so myself.”

Joe sighed tragically.

“I suppose the whole neighborhood knows all my family secrets.”

“Pretty near,” laughed Mrs. Cassidy.

“Well, there’s one thing you didn’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“About my newspaper.”

“What about it?”

“What paper do you take?”

Mrs. Cassidy mentioned a daily penny paper.

“Let’s see,” said Joe, “that’s eleven cents a week, isn’t it? Will you spend two cents more, and take The Nine-Tenths?”

“Yours?”

“It’s a paper that tells about the rich and the poor, and what the poor ought to do to get more out of life. Here, take this copy, keep it; make Tim read it.”

Mrs. Cassidy was handed a neat little sheet, eight by twelve inches, clearly printed. There was something homely and inviting about it, something hospitable and honest. The woman fingered it curiously.

“Ain’t it cute?” she cried.

“It’s all written for just such people as you, and I want you to take it.”

“How much is it?”

“Well, you pay twenty-five cents and get it for three months, once a week, and let Tim read it out loud. Say, don’t you think Annie’d like to see the printing-press?”

“’Deed she would!”

And then Joe did the one thing that won. He seized up little Annie himself, and bore her down to the press-room, Mrs. Cassidy following, and mentally concluding that there was no one in the ward like Mr. Joe.

Result: first subscription, and Joe elated with victory. All of which shows, it must be confessed, that Joe was considerable of a politician, and did not hesitate to adopt the methods of Tammany Hall.

It was the next day, at a street corner, that, quite accidentally, Joe met Michael Dunan, truckman.

“I’ve got a cigar,” said Joe, “but I haven’t a match.”

“I’ve got a match,” said Michael, easily, “but I haven’t a cigar.”

“My name’s Joe Blaine,” said Joe, handing over a panetela.

“Mine’s Mike Dunan,” said Michael, passing a match.

They lit up together.

“The drinks are on me,” murmured Michael.

They stepped into the saloon at the corner a bright, mirrory place, whose tiled floor was covered with sawdust, and whose bar shone like mahogany.

“Two beers, Donovan.”

“Dark or light, Mike?”

“Dark.”

They drank. Michael pounded the bar.

“Joe Blaine, the times are hard.”

“How so, Michael?”

“The rich are too rich, and the poor too poor. I’m tired of it!”

“Then look this over.”

Michael looked it over, and bubbled with joy.

“That’s great. Did you spiel it out? Did you say this little piece? Joe, I want to join your union!”

Joe laughed; he sized up the little man, with his sparkling eyes, his open face, his fiery, musical voice, his golden hair. And he had an inspiration.

“Mike,” he said, “I’m getting out this paper up the street. Have a press there and an office. Run in and see my mother. If you like her, tell me, and you can join the Stove Circle.”

“And what may the Stove Circle be?”

“The get-together club my advisory board.”

“I’m on.”

“See here, you,” said a blunt, biting, deep-chested voice at their side. “Let me get a look.”

Joe turned and met Oscar Heming, delicatessen man, stumpy, bull-necked, with fierce bristling mustache, and clothes much too big for him. He was made a member at once of the Stove Circle.

That same evening Joe went down three steps into a little, low, cigar store, whose gas-blazing atmosphere reeked with raw and damp tobacco. He stepped up to the dusty counter.

“What’s your best?”

The proprietor, a wise little owl of a man, with thin black hair, and untidy spade beard, and big round glasses enlarging his big brown eyes, placed a box before him.

“My own make Underdogs clear Havana six cents apiece.”

“I like the name. Give me ten. But explain!”

“Well” Nathan Latsky (for so he proved to be) shrugged his shoulders “I’m one myself. But what’s in a name?”

“He’s a red revolutionist!” said a voice, and Joe, turning, noticed two men leaning beside him at the counter; one, a fine and fiery Jew, handsome, dark, young; the other, a large and gentle Italian, with pallid features, dark hair sprinkled with gray, and a general air of largeness and leadership about him. The Jew had spoken.

“Why a red?” asked Joe.

“Oh,” said Latsky, quietly, “I come from Russia, you know!”

“Well, I’m a revolutionist myself,” said Joe. “But I haven’t any color yet.”

“Union man?” asked the Italian.

“Not exactly. I run a radical newspaper.”

“What’s the name of it?” asked the Jew.

“The Nine-Tenths.”

The words worked magic. They were all eagerness, and exchanged names. Thus Joe came to know Jacob Izon and Salvatore Giotto and Nathan Latsky. He was greatly interested in Izon, the facts of whose life he soon came to know. Izon was a designer, working at Marrin’s, the shirtwaist manufacturer; he made thirty dollars a week, had a wife and two children, and was studying engineering in a night school. He and his wife had come from Russia, where they had been revolutionists.

The three men examined the paper closely.

“That’s what we need,” said Izon. “You must let us help to spread it!”

Joe added the three to the Stove Circle.

He went to Giotto’s house with him, up to the sixth floor of a tenement, and met the Italian’s neat, dark-eyed wife, and looked in on the three sleeping children. Then under the blazing gas in the crowded room, with its cheap, frail, shiny furniture, its crayons on the wall, its crockery and cheap clocks, and with the noise of the city’s night rising all about them, the two big men talked together. Joe was immensely interested. The Italian was large-hearted, open-minded, big in body and soul, and spoke quaintly, but thoughtfully.

“Tell me about yourself,” said Joe.

Giotto spread out the palms of his hands.

“What to tell? I get a good education in the old country but not much spik English better read, better write it. I try hard to learn. Come over here, and education no good. Nobody want Italian educated man. So worked on Italian paper go round and see the poor many tragedies, many like the theater. Write a novel, a romance, about the poor. Wish I could write it in English.”

“Good work,” cried Joe. “Then what did you do?”

Giotto laughed.

“Imported the wine got broke open the saloon. Toughs come there, thieves, to swindle the immigrants. Awfully slick. No good to warn immigrants they lose all their money. Come in crying. What can I do? I get after the bums and they say, ‘Giotto no good; we will kill him.’ Then I get broke again. Go to West Virginia and work in the coal-mine break my leg. And that was the baddest place in the world.”

“The mine?”

“And the town. Laborers Italian, nigger; saloons and politics Jews; bosses all Irish nothing but the saloons and the women to spenda the money. Company own everything stores, saloons, women. Pay you the money and get it all back. Every day a man killed. Hell!”

“Then where did you go?”

“Chicago printing anything to do I could get. Sometimes make forty cents a day. Little. Have to feed and work for wife and three children. I try and try. Hod-carrier” Giotto laughed at the memory “press coats anything. Then come back here.”

“And what are you doing now?”

“I try to make labor union with Italians. Hard work. Italians live like pigs ignorant not not social. Down-stairs live a Calabria man, makes ice-cream got four rooms in the four rooms man, wife, mother, five children, fifteen boarders ”

“Go on!” cried Joe. “Why do you stop?”

Giotto laughed.

“So maybe your paper help. Many Italians read English. I make them read your paper, Mr. Joe.”

It was not until nearly the end of the week that Joe sought out Sally Heffer. Though every day he meditated stepping down that narrow red side street, each time he had felt unprepared, throbbingly incapable; but this evening as he finished his work and was on the way home it seemed that beyond his own volition he suddenly swerved at her corner, hurried down the lamp-lit pave, searched out the faded number in the meager light, mounted the stoop, and pushed open the unlocked door.

He was very weary heart-sick and foot-sore as he climbed the dark steps of the three-story house. He felt pent in the vast pulsations of life about him a feeling of impossibility, of a task greater than he could bear. He simply had to see the young woman who was responsible for sending him here. He had a vivid mental image of her tragic loveliness, of how she had stepped back and forth before him and suddenly put her hands to her face and wept, of how she had divined his suffering, and impulsively seized his hand, and whispered, “I have faith in you.” He expected a sort of self-illumined Joan of Arc with eyes that saw visions, with spirit flaming. And even in the dark top-floor hallway he was awed, and almost afraid.

Then in the blackness, his eyes on the thread of light beneath the rear door, he advanced, reached up his hand, and knocked.

There came, somehow surprising him, a definite, clear-edged voice:

“Come in!”

He opened the door, which swung just free of the narrow cot. Just beyond, Sally Heffer was writing at a little table, and the globed gas burned above her, lighting the thin gold of her sparse hair. She turned her face to him quite casually, the same pallid, rounded face, the same broad forehead and gray eyes, of remarkable clarity eyes that were as clear windows allowing one to peer in. And she was dressed in a white shirtwaist and the same brown skirt, and over a hook, behind her, hung the same brown coat. Yet Joe was shocked. This was not the Sally Heffer of his dreams but rather a refreshing, forceful, dynamic young woman, brimming over with the joy of life. And even in that flash of strangeness he sensed the fact that at the time he had met her she was merely the voice of a vast insurgent spirit, merely the instrument of a great event. This was the everyday Sally, a quite livable, lovable human being, healthy, free in her actions, pulsing with the life about her. The very words she used were of a different order.

And as she casually glanced around she began to stare, her eyes lit with wonder, and she arose, exclaiming:

“Mr. Blaine!”

At the sound of her voice the tension snapped within him; he felt common and homely again; he felt comfortable and warm; and he smiled wearily.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m here.”

She came close to him, more and more incredulous, and the air became electric.

“But what brings you here?”

“I live here West Tenth.”

“Live here? Why?”

Her eyes seemed to search through his.

“You made me,” he murmured.

She smiled strangely.

“That night?”

“Yes.”

Impulsively her hand went out, and he clasped it ... her hand seemed almost frozen. Tears of humility sprang to her eyes.

“I was high and mighty that night,... but I couldn’t help it.... But you ... do you realize what a wonderful thing you’ve done?”

He laughed awkwardly.

“Yes, here’s what I’ve done” he handed her a copy of The Nine-Tenths “and it’s very wonderful.”

She gave a strange, short laugh again excitement, exultation and held the paper as if it were a living thing.

“This ... The Nine-Tenths ... oh!... for the working people.... Let me see!”

She went to the light, spread the paper and eagerly read. Then she glanced back a moment and saw his worn face and the weary droop of his back.

“Say you’re dead tired. Sit down. You don’t mind the bed, do you?”

He smiled softly.

“I don’t! I am pretty much done up.” And he sank down, and let his hands droop between his knees.

Sally read, and then suddenly turned to him.

“This editorial is it’s just a ripper.”

The author felt the thrill of a creator. She went on:

“I wish every working-girl in New York could read this.”

“So do I.”

She turned and looked at him, more and more excited.

“So this is what you’re doing. I must pinch myself it’s all a dream! Too good to be true.”

Suddenly there seemed to be a reversal in their relationships. Before, his end of the beam was down, hers up. But subtly in her voice he felt the swing to the other extreme. She had set him in a realm above herself.

“Tell me,” she said, “just how you came to go into this.”

He told her a little, and as he spoke he became thoroughly at his ease with her, as if she were a man, and in the pleasure of their swift comradeship they could laugh at each other.

“Mr. Blaine,” she said, suddenly, “if I got you into this, it’s up to me to help you win. I’m going to turn into an agent for you I’ll make ’em subscribe right and left.”

Joe laughed at her.

“Lordy, if you knew how good it is to hear this after tramping up three miles of stairs and more and nabbing a tawdry twenty subscriptions.”

“Is that all you got?”

“People don’t understand.”

“We’ll make them!” cried Sally, clenching her fist.

Joe laughed warmly; he was delighted with her.

“Are you working here?” he asked.

“Yes you know I used to be in Newark I was the president of the
Newark Hat-Trimmers’ Union.”

“And now?”

“I’m trying to organize the girls here.”

“Well,” he muttered, grimly. “I wouldn’t like to be your boss, Miss Heffer.”

She laughed in her low voice.

“Let me tell you what sort I am!” And she sat down, crossed her legs, and clasped her hands on her raised knee. “I was working in that Newark factory, and the girls told me to ask the boss, Mr. Plump, for a half holiday. So I went into his office and said: ’Mr. Plump, the girls want a half holiday.’ He was very angry. He said: ’You won’t get it. Mind your own business.’ So I said, quietly: ’All right, Mr. Plump, we’ll take a whole holiday. We won’t show up Monday.’ Then he said to me, ‘Sally Heffer, go to hell!’ He was the first man to say such a thing to my face. Well, one of the girls found me in the hall drying my eyes, and when she got the facts she went back and told the others, and the bunch walked out, leaving this message: ’Mr. Plump, we won’t come back till you apologize to Sally.’ Well, we were out a week, and what do you think?” Sally laughed with quiet joy. “Plump took it to the Manufacturers Association, and they backed him? Not a bit! Made him apologize!”

Joe chuckled.

“Great! Great!”

“Oh, I’m doing things all the time,” said Sally. “Organized the Jewish hat-trimmers in Newark, and all my friends went back on me for sticking up for the Jews. Did I care? Ten years ago every time the men got a raise through their union, the girls had their salaries cut. Different now. We’ve enough sense to give the easy jobs to the old ladies and there’s lots of old ones trimming hats.”

“What’s trimming hats?”

Sally plucked up Joe’s gray hat, and then looked at Joe, her eyes twinkling.

“It’s a little hard to show you on this. But see the sweat-band? It has a lot of needle holes in it, and the trimmer has to stitch through those holes and then sew the band on to the hat, and all the odds and ends. It kills eyes. What do you think?” she went on. “The girls used to drink beer bosses let ’em do it to keep them stimulated and it’s ruined lots. I stopped that.”

Joe looked at Sally. And he had a wild impulse then, a crazy thought.

“How much do you get a week?”

“Fifteen.”

“Well,” said Joe, “I want a woman’s department in the paper. Will you handle it for fifteen a week?”

“But you don’t know me!”

“Well,” said Joe, “I’m willing to gamble on you.”

Sally’s low voice loosed exultation.

“You’re a wonder, Mr. Blaine. I’ll do it! But we’re both plumb crazy.”

“I know it,” said Joe, “and I like it!”

They shook hands.

“Come over to-morrow and meet my mother!” He gave her the address.

“Good-by,” she said. “And let me tell you, I’m simply primed for woman stuff. It is the women” she repeated the phrase slowly “it is the women, as you’ll find, who bear the burden of the world! Good-by!”

“Good-by!”

He went down into the open air exulting.

He could not overcome his astonishment. She was so different than he had anticipated, so much more human and simple; so much more easy to fit into the every-day shake-up of life, and full of that divine allowance for other people’s shortcomings. It was impossible to act the tragedian before her. And, most wondrous of all, she was a “live wire.” He had gone to her abasing himself; he came away as her employer, subtly cheered, encouraged, and lifted to new heights of vivid enterprise.

“Sally Heffer!” he kept repeating. “Isn’t she a marvel! And, miracle of miracles, she is going to swing the great work with me!”

And so the Stove Circle was founded with Sally Heffer, Michael Dunan, Oscar Heming, Nathan Latsky, Salvatore Giotto, and Jacob Izon. Its members met together a fortnight later on a cold wintry night. The stove was red-hot, the circle drew about it on their kitchen chairs, and Joe spent the first meeting in going over his plans for the paper. There were many invaluable practical comments especially on how to get news and what news to get and each member was delegated to see to one department. Latsky and Giotto took immigration, Dunan took politics and the Irish, Heming took the East Side, Izon, foreign news, and Sally Heffer took workwomen. Thereafter each one in his way visited labor unions, clubs, and societies and got each group to pledge itself to send in news. They helped, too, to get subscriptions both among their friends and in the unions. In this way Joe founded his paper. He never repeated the personal struggle of that first week, for he now had an enthusiastic following to spread the work for him men and a woman, every one of whom had access to large bodies of people and was an authority in his own world.

But that wonderful week was never forgotten by Joe. Each day he had risen early and gone forth and worked till late at night, making a canvass in good earnest. House after house he penetrated, knocking at doors, inquiring for a mythical Mrs. (or Mr.) Parsons (this to hush the almost universal fear that he had come to collect the rent or the instalment on the furniture or clothes of the family). In this way he started conversation. He found first that the immediate neighborhood knew him already. And he found many other things. He found rooms tidy, exquisite in their cleanliness and good taste of arrangement; and then other rooms slovenly and filthy. He found young wives just risen from bed, chewing gum and reading the department-store advertisements in the paper, their hair in curl-papers. He found fat women hanging out of windows, their dishes unwashed, their beds unmade, their floors unswept. He found men sick in bed, and managed to sit down at their side and give them an interesting twenty minutes. He found other men, out of work, smoking and reading. He found one Italian family making “willow plumes” in two narrow rooms one a bedroom, the other a kitchen every one at work, twisting the strands of feathers to make a swaying plume every one, including the grandmother and little dirty tots of four and six and every one of them cross-eyed as a result of the terrific work. He found one dark cellar full of girls twisting flowers; and one attic where, in foul, steaming air, a Jewish family were “finishing” garments the whole place stacked with huge bundles which had been given out to them by the manufacturer. He found one home where an Italian “count” was the husband of an Irish girl, and the girl told him how she had been led into the marriage by the man’s promise of title and castle in Venice, only to bring her from Chicago to New York and confess that he was a poor laborer.

“But I made the best of it,” she cried. “I put down my foot, hustled him out to work, and we’ve done well ever since. I’ve been knocking the dago out of him as hard as I can hit!”

“You’re ambitious,” said Joe.

“My! I’d give my hands for education!”

Joe prescribed The Nine-Tenths.

Everywhere he invited people to call “drop over” and see his plant and meet his mother. Even the strange specimen of white woman who had married a negro and was proud of it.

“Daniel’s black outside, but there’s many stuck-up women I know whose white man is black inside.”

Absorbingly interesting was the quest opening up one vista of life after another. Joe gained a moving-picture knowledge of life saw flashed before him dramatic scene after scene, destiny after destiny squalor, ignorance, crime, neatness, ambition, thrift, respectability. He never forgot the shabby dark back room where under gas-light a frail, fine woman was sewing ceaselessly, one child sick in a tumble-down bed, and two others playing on the floor.

“I’m all alone in the world,” she said. “And all I make is two hundred and fifty dollars a year less than five dollars a week to keep four people.”

Joe put her on the free list.

He learned many facts, vital elements in his history.

For instance, that on less than eight hundred dollars a year no family of five (the average family) could live decently, and that nearly half the people he met had less, and the rest not much more. That, as a rule, there were three rooms for five people; and many of the families gathered their fuel on the street; that many had no gas used oil and wood; that many families spent about twenty-five cents a day for food; that few clothes were bought, and these mainly from the instalment man and second hand at that; that many were recipients of help; and that recreation and education were everywhere reduced to the lowest terms. That is, boys and girls were hustled to work at twelve by giving their age as fourteen, and recreation meant an outing a year to Coney Island, and beer, and, once in a while, the nickel theater; that there were practically no savings. And there was one conclusion he could not evade namely, that while overcrowding, improvidence, extravagance, and vice explained the misery of some families, yet there were limits. For instance:

On Manhattan Island no adequate housing can be obtained at less than twelve or fourteen dollars a month.

That there is no health in a diet of bread and tea.

That curious facts! coal burns up, coats and shoes wear out in spite of mending.

That the average housewife cannot take time to go bargain-hunting or experimenting with new food combinations, or in making or mending garments, and neither has she the ability nor training to do so.

That, in fact, the poor, largely speaking, were between the upper and nether millstones of low wages and high prices.

Of course there was the vice, but while drink causes poverty, poverty causes drink. Joe found intemperance among women; he found little children running to the saloon for cans of beer; he found plenty of men drunkards. But what things to offset these! The woman who bought three bushels of coal a week for seventy-five cents, watched her fires, picked out the half-burned pieces, reused them, and wasted no heat; the children foraging the streets for kindling-wood; the family in bed to keep warm; the wife whose husband had pawned her wedding-ring for drink, and who had bought a ten-cent brass one, “to keep the respect of her children”; the man working for ten dollars a week, who once had owned his own saloon, but, so he said, “it was impossible to make money out of a saloon unless I put in gambling-machines or women, and I wouldn’t stand for it”; the woman whose husband was a drunkard, and who, therefore, went to the Battery 5 A.M. to 10, then 5 P.M. to 7, every day to do scrubbing for twenty dollars a month; the wonderful Jewish family whose income was seven hundred and ninety-seven dollars and who yet contrived to save one hundred and twenty-three dollars a year to later send their two boys to Columbia University.

And everywhere he found the miracle of miracles: the spirit of charity and mutual helpfulness the poor aiding the poorer; the exquisite devotion of mothers to children; the courage that braved a terrible life.

For a week the canvass went on. Joe worked feverishly, and came home late at night too tired almost to undress himself. Again and again he exclaimed to his mother:

“I never dreamed of such things! I never dreamed of such poverty! I never dreamed of such human nature!”

Greenwich Village, hitherto a shabby red clutter of streets, uninviting, forbidding, dull, squalid, became for Joe the very swarm and drama and warm-blooded life of humanity. He began to sense the fact that he was in the center of a human whirlpool, in the center of beauty and ugliness, love and bitterness, misery and joy. The whole neighborhood began to palpitate for him; the stone walls seemed bloody with struggling souls; the pavements stamped with the steps of a battle.

“What can I do,” he kept thinking, “with these people?”

And to his amazement he began to see that just as up-town offered the rivals of luxury, pleasure, and ease, so down-town offered the rivals of intemperance, grinding poverty, ignorance. His theories were beginning to meet the shock of facts.

“How move them? How touch them off?” he asked himself.

But the absorbing interest the faces the shadowy scenes the gas-lit interiors everywhere human beings, everywhere life, packed, crowded, evolving.

At the end of the week he stopped, though the fever was still on him. He had gained two hundred and fifty subscribers; he had distributed twelve hundred copies of the paper. He now felt that he could delay no longer in bringing out the next number. So he sat down, and, with Sally Heffer’s words ringing in his mind, he wrote his famous editorial, “It is the Women”:

It is the women who bear the burden of this world the poor women. Perhaps they have beauty when they marry. Then they plunge into drudgery. All day and night they are in dark and damp rooms, scrubbing, washing, cooking, cleaning, sewing. They wear the cheapest clothes thin calico wrappers. They take their husbands’ thin pay-envelopes, and manage the finances. They stint and save they buy one carrot at a time, one egg. When rent-week comes and it comes twice a month they cut the food by half to pay for housing. They are underfed, they are denied everything but toil save love. Child after child they bear. The toil increases, the stint is sharper, the worry infinite. Now they must clothe their children, feed them, dress them, wash them, amuse them. They must endure the heart-sickness of seeing a child underfed. They must fight the demons of disease. Possibly they must stop a moment in the speed of their labor and face death. Only for a moment! Need calls them: mouths ask for food, floors for the broom, and the pay-envelope for keen reckonings. Possibly then the husband will begin to drink possibly he will come home and beat his wife, drag her about the floor, blacken her eyes, break a rib. The next day the task is taken up again the man is fed, the children clothed, the food marketed, the floor scrubbed, the dress sewn. And then as the family grows there come hard times. The man is out of work he wants to work but cannot. Rent and the butcher and grocer must be paid, but there are no wages brought home. The woman takes in washing. She goes through the streets to the more prosperous and drags home a basket of soiled clothes. The burden of life grows heavier the husband becomes accustomed to the changed relationships. Very often he ceases to be a wage-earner and loafs about saloons. From then on the woman wrestles with worlds of trouble unimaginable difficulties. Truly, running a state may be easier than running a family. And yet the woman toils on; she does not complain; she sets three meals each day before husband and children; she sees that they have clothes; she gives the man his drink money; she endures his cruelty; she plans ambitiously for her children. Or possibly the man begins to work again, and then one day is killed in an accident. There is danger of the family breaking up. But the woman rises to the crisis and works miracles. She keeps her head; she takes charge; she toils late into the night; she goes without food, without sleep. Somehow she manages. There was a seamstress in Greenwich Village who pulled her family of three and herself along on two hundred and fifty dollars a year less than five dollars a week! If luck is with the woman the children grow up, go to work, and for a time ease the burden. But then, what is left? The woman is prematurely old her hair is gray, her face drawn and wrinkled, or flabby and soiled, her back bent, her hands raw and red and big. Beauty has gone, and with the years of drudgery, much of the over-glory, much of the finer elements of love and joy, have vanished. Her mind is absorbed by little things details of the day. She has ceased to attend church, she has not stepped beyond the street corner for years, she has not read or played or rested. Much is dead in her. Love only is left. Love of a man, love of children. She is a fierce mother and wife, as of old. And she knows the depth of sorrow and the truth of pain.

He repeated his programme. Perhaps he afterward thought so himself this editorial was a bit too pessimistic. But he had to write it had to ease his soul. He set it off, however, by a lovely little paragraph which he printed boxed. Here it is:

Possibly much of the laughter heard on this planet comes from
the mothers and fathers who are thinking or talking of the children.

In this way, then, Joe entered into the life of the people.