John Shannon, of Ohio, at about the same time, stole a turkey and a duck; and John Shannon is now serving out in the Ohio penitentiary a penal sentence of five years!
John Shannon, my jo, John!
Why didn’t you wear a silk hat, and steal a million dollars from the inside of a bank?
Wayland’s Mistake
One of the most interesting and powerful men of this generation is J. A. Wayland.
He is a pioneer Socialist.
He is a hard worker, a hard hitter, and a man who never quits.
For the last fifteen years he has been a wonder of the world, to me. Henry Gronlund was not more unselfish, John P. Altgeld was not more intense, and Arthur Brisbane is not more effectively equipped.
When I first knew of Wayland, he had come down to Tennessee to put his beautiful dream into operation. He had founded a Colony on the basis of Universal Brotherhood. He meant to demonstrate to mankind the ease with which we could make angels out of one another, if we would only set about it in the right way.
As I remember, the name of Wayland’s Happy Land was Ruskin—the name of an English dreamer who wrote many beautiful things and lived one of the saddest lives imaginable.