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HIS is a question oftenest asked by those who should find it easiest to answer: namely, the members of the working class themselves! They are so little given to analysis and reflection as to be unable to recognize and classify themselves without the aid of others. However, their characteristics are most pronounced, and can never be erased, once they are properly impressed upon the human mind.

Naturally, one is inclined to believe that the working class consists of ALL THOSE WHO WORK, or who take part in or help to maintain the production and distribution of wealth in some way or other. Under this definition, many professional people, like doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc., and many middle class persons, like delicatessen stores and cobbling shop keepers, not to mention farmers, would constitute the working class. For do they not work? Are they not assisting in the modern production and distribution of wealth?

That may all be apparently true; but, nevertheless, all these professional, middle and farming class persons are not of the working class. Their very classifications in the language of the day implies something distinct and different from the working class. And we may rely on it, these classifications are correct. We also may rely on it that doctors, dentists, lawyers, delicatessen store keepers and cobblers generally would feel insulted and deprived of eclat and prestige if reduced to the working class; for it would appear as social degeneracy to them, as we shall make clear later on, to have such a thing befall them.

A few glances at the working class in general will reveal economic contrasts with the professional, middle and farming classes, that make it a class apart from all these. In the first place, the working class is a capital-less class. It does not own the land, machinery, raw material, funds and credit with which it operates. In the second place, it is an employed class. It works directly for wages for the profit of others: namely, employers and capitalists, i. e.' the owners of the machinery, etc., which it uses. In the third place, the working class is an exploited class, giving up in return for wages received all that it produces. In the factory, workshop, mill and mine; on the railroads, steamships, aeroplanes; on the land, and sea, in banks, hotels,-everywhere--will men and women be found producing and distributing wealth by means of capital owned by others, for the profit of the latter,-all for wages received. They constitute the armies of workers, the great working class.

Doctors, dentists, lawyers, delicatessen store keepers, cobblers, farmers, et al., own their own capital and equipment. They are not employed by others. Nor are they exploited for all that they produce in return for wages received. Factories know them not. Nor do any of the other places of exploitation in industry, transportation and finance. Generally,

they are neither employers nor employes. But they aspire to become the former as opposed to the latter, as they know that that is the road to greater enrichment and social advance. Not a few of them are former workers; hence their peculiar aspirations and desires.

It is only when doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc., are employed at salaries and commissions for the profit of insurance companies, railroad companies, company hospitals, hospital and health corporations, and similar institutions, do they become members of the working class. The same holds true of farmers who are farming farms directly for wages for the profit of others. All are then employes, working the capital of others for the profit of the latter in return for wages received.

Whenever one is employed to work the capital of another for the profit of the latter, in return for wages or salary received, he's a worker and belongs to the working class. And there are some thirty millions of them in "little U. S. A." Are you one of them?

Labor Banks Not Enough

Apparently, the labor bank is not all-satisfying. "The Chief's Page," i. e., Warren Stone's page, in the July Locomotive Engineers' Journal, is illustrative of the fact. In the first paragraph the stocks of "The Brotherhood Investment Company" are boomed. But in paragraph 3, headed "Wage Increases," "Warren Stone, Labor Banker," gives way to "Warren Stone, Labor Leader," and as such, is being prodded into securing more wages for locomotive engineers in a way that he, great financier that he is, quite obviously does not relish.

Says "Warren Stone, Labor Leader": "A number of resolutions are coming in from different Divisions criticizing the Grand office, and insisting that a wage movement be put into effect at once Your interests

are being looked after, and the Organization will come out of this as well as any of the rest in the final analysis, so do not be carried away by a few soap-box orators, or a few One Big Union men, who are carrying out their instructions to 'bore from within.'

From which it is safe to conclude that "Warren Stone, Labor Leader" is arrogant and given to insulting his membership. Also that a few dollars annual bank dividends to a few stockholders is no substitute for the tens of dollars that should be in the weekly pay envelopes of all of the 90,000 locomotive engineers enrolled in Stone's Brotherhood.

INDUSTRIAL PIONEER

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FACTORY

Y securing work in a bowling alley it had become possible for me to complete the common school grades. We were very poor people, dwelling in a rear hovel whose entrance was through an alley which communicated on one side to our "home," and on the opposite to a stable. To this day the strong odors peculiar to livery stables assailing my nostrils bring back that rare retreat as an ugly souvenir of a life that was all but bestial.

When Father Dominick understood my ambition -to finish the grades of his parochial school-he used his kind offices to establish me at the receiving end of the bowling alleys. At this station I gyrated up and down, setting pins and returning the huge balls from eight until twelve each night. For this violence they paid me thirty cents a night. The alleys were in the Parish Hall basement, and were controlled and used by societies connected with the Church.

However, even this sinecure failed to make sure the educational journey, and it was terminated after a very brief glimpse of the freshman life at high school. My entire time must be devoted to gainful occupation. There were several children younger than myself in our family, and my father had displayed the ill grace to go seeking "if God improves on better acquaintance." What ever conclusions

he reached as to the Deity, our mundane affairs did not improve with his quest.

Squeezing Through Life

Some of the sensations impressed on us as we squeeze through life are not to be erased. Of such an indelible character are those which were my own on that first February morning that I entered the labor market in earnest. It was six o'clock and still dark, but the streets were filled with workers either homeward bound after the night shift or going to their labors. My small lunch was under my arm against the possibility of finding work at once. And I shivered with a double discomfort, first because the wind did not respect my coat, and then with a deeper chill a little like that of childish fears on being taken to school for the first time. now, with work as a definite objective, where I should find it was not so definite. So I timidly approached one factory gate after another with a halting appeal that seemed to become frozen and changeless. For some unfortunate reason thirteen year old boys of small size did not seem in demand that morning. And while no reasons were advanced for

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refusing me at the outset the same were supplied when my search continued after all the whistles had blown. I was told to come earlier, or asked if I thought these factories were banks.

A Prison Without Bars

At Noon, when the day was not as cold, I munched my sandwich on the tow-path of a canal. Across this waterway lay a damp meadow, and immediately beyond this the State Prison. I meditated this dull pile silently. There men and women were serving sentences of varying lengths. With pity for those behind its bars and walls I did not know that with them I had much in common, for without knowing it I had been sentenced to hard labor for life in penal institutions having a superior economy, being minus bars. This is the sentence pronounced for the crime of entering the world poor. Moreover it is the judgment heaped upon all workers for the crime of lacking solidarity.

Leaving this gloomy landscape my search was renewed. At about four o'clock, with darkness gathering again, I found the Precious Job! In that factory district, with all its blending of productive smells, I had sniffed out from afar what was to be my first real lesson in that course with which most of us are familiar. The watchmen had been instructed to hire someone. I came at the opportune moment, and was told to come back at seven that same evening to work on the night shift. It was a linoleum factory and the paints used for the prints when being dried gave off an odor which dominated all others nearby.

Having received and punched a card at a timeclock I found my foreman and was given a wheelbarrow. As the long strips of linoleum were run through the machinery which printed them, their edges were trimmed by revolving cutters, and these fragments I was to gather into bundles and wheel to a "mill" through the yards where they were again ground up. For twelve hours a night this was a very hard job, but where the bowling alley paid seven and one-half cents hourly, this labor gained me fifteen cents. So, when morning came I was richer by one dollar and eighty cents!

Sympathy, Nearest Kin To Solidarity Sometimes-to my great joy-the machinery would jam and I was reprieved mercifully while the machinist repaired the fault. At such times I used to go out to the "mill" and watch the old man there at his work. Soon we were friends, and I gained

much from knowing him. His name was Harrison and he had been born in England. Two of his fingers were gone, and when I observed the loss sympathetically he divined my thoughts and said abruptly:

"Lucky it wasn't my arm!”

He was one of those thin, wiry old fellows who seemed able to thrive on privation, if merely continuing existence is any sort of thrift. When he discovered that I used my ears and eyes more than my tongue he indorsed this reticence by many confidences. I learned that when one of his fingers had been caught under a "cutter" the management had ordered the machinery to be again started, rather than lose the time of lifting the heavy wheels. Thus was the second finger amputated. Indeed, it is by practising such economies that foremen are advanced and rewarded.

Harrison had been in America since he was a small boy. His mother had recently died at a great age, but his father had been dead for many years. Harrison had once been a skilled mechanic in printing linoleum. It was he who told me how the machines came in to do with a crew of six laborers the work previously done by fifty mechanics. This led us around to mechanical progress generally. The old man working alone in the twilight of his life at a task which called for no mental effort employed his mind on many matters, and as a result of his skill having been superseded by a machine this subject was prominent. I had been denied higher academic training, but Harrison was a man who had read much and well. In the infrequent visits I paid him during the dead of night while the machinery was being repaired, my mind was given some good exercise, and a consciousness was born therein which might never have had a being elsewhere.

An Important Span of Existence One night he was telling me about his mother: "She lived through this kind of a life, that knocks them out usually at forty or so, until she was ninety. My father died at thirty-eight of the 'con.' But, son, what always seems to me as important about my mother's life is the time it was lived in. I guess that a ninety year life a thousand years ago wasn't much different from another ninety year stretch two thousand years past. But with my mother and those others there was a big difference.

"When she was a girl they used candles for lights, when they had the price. She lived to see the electric light. When she was a kid horses and oxen pulled the carriages and carts on bad roads. Before she died she saw airplanes buzzing around the clouds. And news that in her youth traveled at a snail's pace was flashed around the world by wireless in her old age.

"And these factories. When she was born they were just starting. They were weavers at home. She saw that kind of thing broken up, and the family forced to the factories. What the inventions do

to skilled workers I know! Why, son, fifty of us used to do the work by hand that these machines turn out now with half a dozen hunkies and farmers!"

He was out of breath. I had to push my wheelbarrow back to the machine, but he had done something to me that could never be undone. My curiosity was aroused, and I began to try to understand all about the progress of these machines. And thus I learned that the farmers in colonial days were just about as far advanced in agricultural methods as were the ancients. In manufacture, simple, inexpensive tools worked by footpower at home did the spinning and weaving in the 18th Century A. D. in a manner not much different than it was performed a thousand years earlier.

One night I asked Harrison if he thought we were better off now than workers were before the machines were invented.

"Well, son," he said. "With all these machines ripping out products about a hundred times as fast as they used to I suppose the workingman is just a little better off when he has a job. But if you mean has he as much share of the stuff he makes I'll say 'No.' Between the rich and poor of this day and the rich and poor of a hundred years ago there is a big difference. The rich now have a bigger share than the rich did then. If it was twenty-five for the worker before and seventy-five for the boss, it's about five for the worker now and ninety-five for his boss."

"Then we're getting poorer all the time!" I exclaimed.

"Yes, and the others are getting richer," he ended.

It is nearly twenty years since old Harrison started me on the real road of education. The old man has long since quit feeding the "mill" with the trimmings fetched by my barrow. Eternal shadows are around him. He was poor, mangled and twisted by the toils and violence of this ogre, the Machine. But his head was straight.

Fire the Boss!

Seeing that life was all wrong for the workers I remember asking him at last what he thought could be done to make our lives better. And he looked sraight into my heart as he replied:

"It's up to the workers to get together and 'fire' the boss."

Twenty years of study and observation have served to convince me that this simple expedient,— so difficult of effecting!-holds the solution of all economic injustice and the hope of a happier and more enlightened human race.

This little story is substantially true, and contains a lesson for us all. It is not by "uplifters" and "saviors" that the workingclass will win to its freedom. Salvation not self-achieved is worthless. Our emancipation is timed by the blows we beat ourselves against the bars of our own prison, this vast economic system. It is the Harrisons who forever smash at this citadel of wage slavery. Each one has

A

THE

RMISTICE DAY, 1919, was used by lumber

trust interests at Centralia, Wash., to turn a peaceful parade celebrating the end of the world war into a mob raid on the I. W. W. hall there. The raid was successfully repulsed by the I. W. W. Some of the mob were killed.

Instead of holding F. B. Hubbard, lumber magnate, fomentor of the raid, and his criminal associates responsible, 11 I. W. W.'s were arrested for murder. Three were released. Eight are now buried alive in prison, the victims of rank injustice. Even the jurors have revolted against the crime

a duty to perform. A word here, and a deed there, and a leaflet somewhere else these are the deadly weapons endlessly at work to eternally damn human slavery.

An Unsung Educator

Under somewhat better financial circumstances I suppose I should have gone to college, there, to secure knowledge and contempt. Who knows? I might have become a figure in the business world! In such an event I should have lived always with the moneybags bucking big and human life small. How many first-class possibilities of how many

FORCED on THEM. Six of them confess that, such was the atmosphere of terror surrounding the trial, that they dared not acquit the I. W. W.'s What a confession! What a shame!!

A state-wide agitation is now being conducted in Washington against this conspiracy to imprison workmen for manfully defending themselves and their rights. A movement is now afoot to secure a reversal and re-trial. Archie Sinclair and Elmer Smith, the fighting lawyer, are addressing large mass meetings demanding release. The good work will continue until this end is achieved.

potential skinners are side-tracked by such as a wheelbarraw and linoleum trimmings! And how many mediocre minds twisted by our patriotic school training receive the light from unknown, unsung and at last unwept educators such as the Harrisons! He had a light and he did not hide it under a bushel. In the dark night I went in covered with sweat and filth pushing the great weight. And when at last I came out again there was a light in my brain, and a flame in my heart. The miracle was done. Never more would I bow before industrial piracy contentedly, for I was a rebel.

Fifty-five men on hunger diet,

Rotting in solitary,

Some in the dungeon dank and black,

Oh, but the night is dreary! Fifty-five men on hunger diet,

Rotting in solitary.

Fifty-five men on hunger diet,
God! but the days are long!
Fifty-five men in solitary
Trying to mouth a song,
Fifty-five men on bread and water-
Christ! but the hours are long!
Fifty-five men-and what have they done
That they should be treated so?

Did they murder and rape or rob the poor
In the land where the oranges grow?
Say! what is the crime of the fifty-five
That they should be treated so?

Oh, some of them said that they ought to be free
Of hunger and dirt and filth,

And some of them pointed out the fact

That the workers produced the wealth,

And some of them POINTED OUT THE MEN
WHO ROBBED THEM OF THAT WEALTH

For since the days of Jesus, the Christ,
And this all men do know,

To scourge the moneychangers forth,
And strike at Profit a blow,

Is to invite the doom of him
Who did it long ago.

H

And some of them preached that war was hell

And exposed the profiteer,

The pious fraud who mouthed "MY flag"

And sat in a swivel chair,

And tried to hide the million he made
Behind ONE DOLLAR a year.

And some of them helped to organize

The men in the O. B. U.,

And some of them spoke from the old soap-box That Labor must have its due,

And some of them said, IF ANY ARE FED, BY GOD! IT OUGHT TO BE YOU!

YOU mine the COAL, YOU drive the TRAINS,
YOU man the SHIPS AT SEA,

YOU cut the LUMBER, reap the GRAINS,
YOU LABOR MIGHTILY-

YET YOU, THE WORKER, TOILER, DWELL
In DIREST POVERTY.

And all of them preached of a better day
When want should be unknown,

When gold and greed should lose their sway
And hate be overthrown-

AND ALL OF THEM PINE TODAY BEHIND
GRIM WALLS OF STEEL AND STONE.

Fifty-five men on hunger diet,

And this their only crime:

They tried to lift the workingman

Out of the muck and slime, Fifty-five men on bread and waterMen's saviours!-DOING TIME!

ELL is the name of this sensational verse drama by Upton Sinclair. The reason it is called "Hell" is because it is a picture of the awful mess that capitalism has made of the affairs of this world.

The scene opens up in the throne-room of hell. The court jester comes in with the astounding news that he has succeeded in stealing the key to heaven after having locked the pearly gate upon all the angels. The imps and devils rejoice with his Satanic Majesty. Plans are made to organize the universe upon a business basis. Mammon and his efficiency experts are placed in charge. The fun begins.

The people of earth are divided into two groups -the Verticals and Horizontals. War is precipitated. An attorney general with a Quaker countenance and a spiked tail gets on the job. A lot of I. W. W.'s and other rebels are thrown into hell. They start kicking, as usual. As a result of their agitation Satan finds himself without a throne and the Wobblies have job control. An attempt is made

to extend the strike. Condemned souls are organized, the campaign waxes furious. The rule of Mammon on earth and Satan in hell seems doomed to permanent extinction. Victory is at hand. The gates of heaven are opened and Fellow Worker Jesus makes a last plea for brotherhood. Then all the scissor-bill actors in the play go on strike and ... but read the rest of it yourself!

"Hell" is as beautifully written as Romain Rolland's "Liluli," but it is more popular in tone and more modern in spirit. It is full of breathless incidents, subtle contrasts and touches of real poetry. "Hell' sparkles with wit and bubbles with Rabelaisian laughter, and yet its general tone is as sober as a sermon. "Hell" is imagination run riot—a phantasmagoria of unearthly imps, angels and persons. It is distorted, weird, exaggerated, impossible; and yet it portrays the spirit of the jumbled age in which we live more accurately than a photograph. ("Hell," published by Upton Sinclair, Pasadena, Calif. Price, 25c.)