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I wrote up a labor meeting or two, and at one of these saw for the first time Terence V. Powderly, the head of the dominant labor organization—the Knights of Labor. This meeting was held in a dingy hall at Ninth or Tenth and Walnut, a dismal institution known as the Workingman’s Club or some such thing as that, which had a single red light hanging out over its main entrance. This long, lank leader, afterward so much discussed in the so-called “capitalistic press,” was sitting on a wretched platform surrounded by local labor leaders and discussed in a none too brilliant way, I thought, the need of a closer union between all classes of labor.

In regard to all matters relating to the rights of labor and capital I was at this time perfectly ignorant. Although I was a laborer myself in a fair sense of the word I was more or less out of sympathy with laborers, not as a class struggling for their “rights” (I did not know what their rights or wrongs were) but merely as individuals. I thought, I suppose, that they were not quite as nice as I was, not as refined and superior in their aspirations, and therefore not as worthy or at least not destined to succeed as well as I. I even then felt dimly what subsequently, after many rough disillusionments, I came to accept as a fact: that some people are born dull, some shrewd, some wise and some undisturbedly ignorant, some tender and some savage, ad infinitum. Some are silk purses and others sows’ ears and cannot be made the one into the other by any accident of either poverty or wealth. At this time, however, after listening to Mr. Powderly and taking notes of his speech, I came to the conclusion that all laborers had a just right to much better pay and living conditions, and in consequence had a great cause and ought to stick together. I also saw that Mr. Powderly was a very shrewd man and something of a hypocrite, very simple-seeming and yet not so. Something he said or did—I believe it was a remark to the effect that “I always say a little prayer whenever I have a stitch in my side”—irritated me. It was so suave, so English-chapel-people-like; and he was an Englishman, as I recall it. Anyhow, I came away disliking him and his local labor group, and yet liking his cause and believing in it, and wrote as favorable a comment as I dared. The Globe was not pro-corporation exactly, at least I did not understand so, and yet it was by no means pro-workingman either. If I recall correctly, it merely gave the barest facts and let it go at that.