As far as I could see, this anarchist-shoemaker held the right. On my third day in Eden my interest in the community life about me led me to inquire my way to the place where Jones lived ... a shack built practically in its entirety of old dry goods boxes ... a two-room affair with a sort of enlarged dog-kennel adjunct that stood out nearer the road—Jones's workshop.
The man looked like the philosopher he was—the anarchist-philosopher, as the newspapers were to dub him ... as he sat there before his last, hammering away at the shoe he was heeling, not stopping the motions of his hands, while he put that pair aside, to sew at another pair, while he discoursed at large with me over men and affairs.
"What is all this trouble I'm hearing about?" I asked him.
"Trouble?—same old thing: Alfred Grahame, when he founded, started, this colony, was a true idealist. But success has turned his head, worsened him, since,—as it has done with many a good man before. Now he goes about the country lecturing, on Shakespeare, God, the Devil, or anything else that he knows nothing about....
"But it isn't that that I object to ... it is that he's allowing the original object of this colony, and of the Single Tax Idea, to become gradually perverted here. We're becoming nothing but a summer resort for the aesthetic quasi-respectables ... these folk are squeezing us poor, honest radicals out, by making the leases prohibitive in price and condition."
He stopped speaking, while he picked up another pair of shoes, examined them, chose one, and began sewing a patch on it....
He rose, with his leathern apron on, and saw me out....
"—glad you came to see old Jones ... you'll see and hear a lot more of me, the next week or so!" and he smiled genially, prophetically.
He looked like Socrates as he stood there ... jovially homely, round-faced ... head as bald as ivory ... red, bushy eyebrows that were so heavy he shrugged them....
"I'm just beginning the fight (would you actually believe it) for free speech here ... it takes a radical community, you know, to teach the conservatives how to suppress freedom....