"None," he ejaculated. "'I dwell among my own people'—I must live among them to understand them."
"I should think them rather easy to understand."
"I mean to be in sympathy with them," he said gently. "Besides, I am trying to teach them two or three things."
"What?" For I confess that my soul had revolted at his surroundings. That surging, foreign-born, foreign-looking, foreign-spoken multitude who had filled the street as I came along through the vile reek of "Little Russia," as it was called, had smothered my charitable feelings.
"Well, for one thing, to learn the use of freedom—for another, to learn the proper method and function of organization."
"They certainly appear to me to have the latter already—simply by being what they are," I said lightly.
"I mean of business organization," Wolffert explained. "I want to break up the sweat shop and the sweat system. We are already making some headway, and have thousands in various kinds of organized business which are quite successful."
"I should not think they would need your assistance—from what I saw. They appear to me to have an instinct."
"They have," said Wolffert, "but we are teaching them how to apply it. The difficulty is their ignorance and prejudice. You think that they hold you in some distrust and dislike, possibly?" As his tone implied a question, I nodded.
"Well, that is nothing to the way in which they regard me. You they distrust as a gentile, but me they detest as a renegade."