LOOKS LIKE EDWIN FORREST.
“He’s not here yet,” I was informed on my arrival; “but come in and wait. When he comes, anybody will point out Sam to you.” The room filled rapidly, and at length there appeared in the doorway a small man with a great head, covered with a luxuriant growth of very black hair. His short, robust figure, his high forehead, deep-set eyes, heavy mustache and short imperial made him look strikingly like some of the portraits of Edwin Forrest. He came in alone and attracted no special attention, but I knew intuitively that it was Samuel Gompers. With such easy and cordial salutations as “Hello, Jack!” “How are you, Herman?” and “Glad to see you, Mac!” he began to greet his old friends, and they responded in the same spirit, almost invariably addressing him as “Sam.” This did not imply a lack of dignity on his part, for these were his old shopmates,—men who had for years worked with him at the same benches. They recognized each other as fellow-workmen, with no difference between them, and, indeed, the only difference was that Sam Gompers had thought much and seen much in his mental vision as he sat at the mechanical work of cutting and rolling tobacco leaves, while the others had seen only their own environment and machine-like toil. But this difference has made one a leading citizen of the Republic, while his mates have remained humble cigarmakers, looking to Mr. Gompers as their champion and friend.
“It was just at such meetings as you see here to-night,” Mr. Gompers said to me later in the evening, “that I began to try to do something in behalf of the workingmen. Even when a small boy in London, and working pretty hard for the child I was, I used to attend some of the gatherings of workingmen, and I remember how I was stirred by the excitement and enthusiasm when the question of recognizing the Confederate States was before the government and there were great meetings of the working classes to show the feeling of British workmen against slavery of any sort. I had already vaguely begun to feel that there was more than one kind of slavery, and that the workingmen who had protested so vigorously against slaves in America could hardly call themselves free men. I knew little of the matter; I only knew that my own life was hard, while that of many other children was easy.”