Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/58

46 it was quite the same with you, I cannot, of course, be sure, but it seems likely enough. I had nothing to teach you—absolutely nothing. You never took Capital and its interests and obligations seriously. The fact of your father's immense wealth, and the little army of workpeople dependent on him, seemed to have little or no effect upon you. How disinterested you were in your philosophic consideration of everything! True, that in those days your elder brother was being trained for the management of the mills and factories, and you proposed to lead the life of the cultured dilettante; but your Liberalism—your Radicalism—I might almost say your Socialism (for as such I now recognise at least portions of your criticisms on the Fact Established)—often called in question the very existence of the whole thing; and so I received it.

'How is all this changed to-day! Four years ago, in the midst of desperate organising work in Chicago as a Labour agent—or, in your current parlance, I suppose, a "paid agitator"—I suddenly heard your name. The Christian name accompanying it could leave me in little doubt that it was my old friend who had stamped out, with an utterly ruthless energy, perhaps the most justifiable strike against the tyrannous iniquity of a capitalistic house (I mean your father and brother) that had occurred in England within