Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/326

 No one who meets W. S. U'Ren now could believe that he ever had a temper. It took time, but the character-building done for the boy both by his parents and by himself was good work well done. And his mental development was still more interesting. Though his father's discontent kept the conditions of their life critically before him, there was no understanding of causes. The family read "Greeley's Paper," and both father and son followed politics. But the first definite sense of the economic problems underlying politics came to William himself when he was hardly thirteen. The farmers in the Nebraska district where his father had his homestead, needing a school, met to devise ways of making the absentee land-owners pay for it.

"It seemed to me, as a boy, U'Ren says now, "that something was wrong in this. If it was right for those non-voting landholders to own the land, it was wrong to tax them for the school they did not use. Or, if it was right to tax them, it was wrong for them to hold the land they did not use. I puzzled over this, but I could not put my finger on the injustice I felt lurking somewhere."

He never spoke of this. He was a solitary soul, as his sports show. He didn't dance, nor even play much. He liked to hunt and think, to work