within him, ache for his own harvests, ache like the sun for the earth, the man for the woman.

A mad frenzy would seize him and he would plunge into his books and read and think and lash himself to a fury of speculation till the early hours of the morning. Exhaustion alone brought him peace.

But something had to be done. He sat down and wrote to her with a trembling hand:

DEAR MYRA,—Though I am impatient to see you, I must yet wait a little while. Bear with me. You will understand later.

  Yours,
  JOE.

And then she replied:

  DEAR JOE,—Can't I help you?
  MYRA.

He had to fight a whole afternoon before he replied:

  Not yet—later.
  JOE.

And back he went into the whirlwind of the world-vision, a stupendous force upsetting, up-rooting, overturning, demolishing, almost erasing and contradicting everything that Joe had taken for granted, and in the wake of the destruction, rising and ever rising, a new creation, the vision of a new world.

He had taken so much for granted. He had taken for granted that he lived in a democracy—that the Civil War had once for all made America a free nation—a nation of opportunity, riches, and happiness for all. Not so. Literally millions were living in abject poverty, slaves to their pay-envelopes; to lose a job meant to lose everything, there being more laborers than jobs, or if not, at least recurrent "panics" and "hard times" when the mills and the mines shut down. And these wage slaves had practically no voice in one of the chief things of their life—their work. So millions were penned in places of danger and disease and dirt, lived and toiled in squalor, and were cut off from growth, from health, from leisure and culture and recreation; and worse, millions of women had to add the burden of earning a living to the already overwhelming burden of child-bearing and home-making; and, still worse, millions of children had been drafted into the service of industrialism.