HARRIS immediately resigned his office in the custom house which he owed to Lowell and began a search for employment.

“I will not be a pensioner of a government of hypocrites and liars,” he exclaimed as he sealed his letter of resignation.

And then began his weary tramp in search of work. Day after day, week after week, he got the same answer—an emphatic refusal. The only thing open to a negro was a position as porter, or bootblack, or waiter in second-rate hotels and restaurants, or in domestic service as coachman, butler or footman. He was no more fitted for these places than he was to live with his head under water.

“I will blow my brains out before I will prostitute my intellect, and my consciousness of free manhood by such degrading associates and such menial service!” he declared with sullen fury.

At last he determined to lay aside his pride and education and learn a manual trade. Not a labour union would allow him to enter its ranks.

He managed to earn a few dollars at odd jobs and went to New York. Here he was treated with greater brutality than in Boston. At last he got a position in a big clothing factory. He was so bright in colour that the manager never suspected that he was a negro, as he was accustomed to employing swarthy Jews from Poland and Russia.

When Harris entered the factory the employees discovered within an hour his race, laid down their work, and walked out on a strike until he was removed.

He again tried to break into a labour union and get the protection of its constitution and laws. He managed at last to make the acquaintance of a labour leader who had been a Quaker preacher, and was elated to discover that his name was Hugh Halliday, and that he was a son of one of the Hallidays who had assisted in the rescue of his mother and father from slavery. He told Halliday his history and begged his intercession with the labour union.

“I ’ll try for you, Harris,” he said, “but it’s a doubtful experiment. The men fear the Negro as a pestilence.”

“Do the best you can for me. I must have bread. I only ask a man’s chance,” answered Harris. Halliday proposed his name and backed it up with a strong personal endorsement, gave a brief sketch of his culture and accomplishments and asked that he be allowed to learn the bricklayer’s trade.

When his name came up before the Brick Layers’ union, and it was announced that he was a negro, it precipitated a debate of such fury that it threatened to develop into a riot.

One of the men sprang toward the presiding officer with blazing eyes, gesticulating wildly until recognised.

“I have this to say,” he shouted. “No negro shall ever enter the door of this union except over my dead body. The Negro can under live us. We can not compete with him, and as a race we can not organise him. Let him stay in the South. We have no room for him here, and we will kill him if he tries to take our bread from us!”

“Have you no sympathy for his age-long sufferings in slavery?” interrupted Halliday.

“Slavery! of all the delusions the idea that slavery was abolished in this country in 1865 is the silliest, Slavery was never firmly established until the chattel form was abandoned for the wage system in 1865. Chattel slavery was too expensive. The wage system is cheaper. Now they never have to worry about food, or clothes, or houses, or the children, or the aged and infirm among wage slaves.

“Once the master hunted the slave,—now the slave must hunt the master, beg for the privilege of serving him and trample others to death trying to fasten the chains on when a brother slave drops dead in his tracks.

“No, I don’t shed any crocodile tears over the Negro slavery of the South. It was a mild form of servitude, in which the Negro had plenty to eat and wear, never suffered from cold, slept soundly and reared his children in droves with never a thought for the morrow.

“Then mothers and babes were sometimes, though not often, separated by an executor’s or sheriff’s sale. Now, we know better than to allow babes to be born. Then, a babe was a valuable asset and received the utmost care. Now, we have baby farms which we fertilise with their bones. I know of one old hag in this city who has killed over two thousand babes.

“What chance has your girl or mine to marry and build a home? Not one in a hundred will ever feel the breath of a babe at her breast.

“No!” he closed in thunder tones. “I ’ll fight the encroachment of the Negro on our life with every power of body and soul!”

A hundred men leaped to their feet at once, shouting and gesticulating. The chairman recognised a tall dark man with a Russian face, but who spoke perfect English.

“I, gentlemen, am an anarchist in principle, and differ slightly in the process by which I come to the same conclusion as my friend who has taken his seat. I grieve at the necessity before the workingmen of returning to slavery. All we can hope now for a century or two centuries, is socialism. Socialism is simply a system of slavery—that is, enforced labour in which a Bureaucracy is master. We must enter again a condition of involuntary servitude for the guarantee by the State of food and clothes, shelter and children.

“It is no time to weep over slavery. The one thing we demand now is the nationalisation of industries under the control of State Bureaux which will enforce labour from every citizen according to his capacity, for the simple guarantee of what the negro slave received, the satisfaction of the two elemental passions, hunger and love.”

Again a clamour broke out that drowned the speaker’s voice. A Socialist and an Anarchist clinched in a fight, and for five minutes pandemonium reigned, but at the end of it Harris was tying on the sidewalk with a gash in his head, and Halliday was bending over him.

When Harris had recovered from his wound, Halliday took him on a round of visits to big mills in a populous manufacturing city across in New Jersey.

“These mills are all owned by Simon Legree,” he informed Harris, “and the unions have been crushed out of them by methods of which he is past master. I don’t know, but it may be possible to get you in there.”

They tried a half dozen mills in vain, and at last they met a foreman who knew Halliday who consented to hear his plea.

“You are fooling away your time and this man’s time, Halliday,” he told him in a friendly way. “I’d cut my right arm off sooner than take a negro in these mills and precipitate a strike.”

“But would a strike occur with no union organisation?”

“Yes, in a minute. You know Simon Legree who owns these mills. If a disturbance occurred here now the old devil wouldn’t hesitate to close every mill next day and beggar fifty thousand people.”

“Why would he do such a stupid thing?”

“Just to show the brute power of his fifty millions of dollars over the human body. The awful power in that brute’s hands, represented in that money, is something appalling. Before the war he cracked a blacksnake whip over the backs of a handful of negroes. Now look at him, in his black silk hat and faultless dress. With his millions he can commit any and every crime from theft to murder with impunity. His power is greater than a monarch. He controls fleets of ships, mines and mills, and has under his employ many thousands of men. Their families and associates make a vast population. He buys Judges, Juries, Legislatures, and Governors and with one stroke of his pen to-day c............