“What chance has your girl or mine to marry and build a home? Not one in a hundred will ever feel the breath of a babe at her breast.
“No!” he closed in thunder tones. “I ’ll fight the encroachment of the Negro on our life with every power of body and soul!”
A hundred men leaped to their feet at once, shouting and gesticulating. The chairman recognised a tall dark man with a Russian face, but who spoke perfect English.
“I, gentlemen, am an anarchist in principle, and differ slightly in the process by which I come to the same conclusion as my friend who has taken his seat. I grieve at the necessity before the workingmen of returning to slavery. All we can hope now for a century or two centuries, is socialism. Socialism is simply a system of slavery—that is, enforced labour in which a Bureaucracy is master. We must enter again a condition of involuntary servitude for the guarantee by the State of food and clothes, shelter and children.
“It is no time to weep over slavery. The one thing we demand now is the nationalisation of industries under the control of State Bureaux which will enforce labour from every citizen according to his capacity, for the simple guarantee of what the negro slave received, the satisfaction of the two elemental passions, hunger and love.”
Again a clamour broke out that drowned the speaker’s voice. A Socialist and an Anarchist clinched in a fight, and for five minutes pandemonium reigned, but at the end of it Harris was tying on the sidewalk with a gash in his head, and Halliday was bending over him.
When Harris had recovered from his wound, Halliday took him on a round of visits to big mills in a populous manufacturing city across in New Jersey.
“These mills are all owned by Simon Legree,” he informed Harris, “and the unions have been crushed out of them by methods of which he is past master. I don’t know, but it may be possible to get you in there.”
They tried a half dozen mills in vain, and at last they met a foreman who knew Halliday who consented to hear his plea.
“You are fooling away your time and this man’s time, Halliday,” he told him in a friendly way. “I’d cut my right arm off sooner than take a negro in these mills and precipitate a strike.”