Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/74

 things. At one time there were people dying of actual starvation in India, while men were burning unsaleable wheat in America. It sounds like the account of a particularly mad dream, does it not? It was a dream, a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.

To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth, it seemed that the strikes and lock-outs, the over-production and misery could not possibly result simply from ignorance and want of thought and feeling. We needed more dramatic factors that these mental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils. We fled therefore to that common refuge of the unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous insensate plots -- we called them "plots" -- against the poor.

You can still see how we figured it in any museum by looking up the caricatures of capital and labour that adorned the German and American socialistic papers of the old time.

2

I had cast Nettie off in an eloquent epistle, had really imagined the affair was over for ever -- "I've done with women," I said to Parload -- and then there was silence for more than a week.

Before that week was over I was wonder