Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/58

 *tude from which he could regard the race of men impersonally, and permit them to stumble on in error, without the desire to set them right. It was quite useless to question him, and in the end the only satisfaction he would give me was to say, with an effort of dismissing the subject:

"Ask some of the boys."

For a young citizen to whom society is yet an illusion, lying, in Emerson's figure, before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men and institutions rooted like oak trees to the center, round which all arrange themselves the best they can, to have one of those oak trees torn violently up by the roots, is to experience a distinct shock. And by two words, and an expression that played for an instant in lowered eyes, and about lips that were more concerned just then with the flattened end of a fresh cigarette than the divulgence of great truths! Yes, decidedly a shock, to leave one shaken for days. If there were any doubt as to what to do with anarchists, what was the use of going on with the study of the law? I went out from that cheap little restaurant in Fifth Avenue, into Chicago's depressing midnight streets—and the oak tree never took root again. For, as Charlie R had lightly suggested, I asked the boys, and by the boys he meant, of course, the reporters.

They were boys in spirit, though in the knowledge of this world they were as aged men, some of whom had seen so much of life that they were able to dwell with it only by refusing any longer to accept it seriously. They formed in that day an unusual group,