Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/329

 illusions," but more often the character of youth. Not so with U'Ren, however. His dream of Congress vanished, but his hope of inventing laws to make such evils less easy and profitable—that stayed. Indeed, this was the time when the dominant idea of his life took its first definite form.

"As I watched this fraud, and saw that it was the means by which the other evils were maintained, I felt clearly that a modicum of the thought and ingenuity which had been devoted to machinery, if given to government, would make this a pleasant world to live in. That men were all right at bottom, I was convinced, for I noticed that we young men were honest and capable of some unselfish service. It was the older men that were 'bad.

Sickness befell U'Ren, a long, lingering, weakening illness, that took all the sand out of him. He was admitted to the bar, and practised long enough to see the trickery and the injustice of the Law. He edited a newspaper at Tin Cup, a mining town, but he saw that that business had its frauds, too, and that the editor is no freer than his father, the blacksmith, was. So he quit, and began just such a wandering life as his father had led. In pursuit of liberty and health, he moved about from Denver to Iowa, back to