humanity, on one half of the globe going out to meet the sunrise, on the
other, the stars. He heard the music of that Hymn of Human Victory,
which from millions of throats lifts on that day when all the race is
woven into a harmony of labor and joy and home and great unselfish
deeds. That day, possibly, might never arrive, forever fading farther
and farther into the sunlit distances--but it is the day which leads the
race forward. To Joe, however, came that vision, and when it came it
seemed as if the last drop of his blood would be little to offer, even
in anguish, to help, even by ever so little, the coming and the
consummation of that Victory.

He would awake in the night, and cry out in a fever:

"By God, I'm going to help change things."

The vision shook him--tugged at his heart, downward, like the clutch of
a convulsive child; seized him now and again like a madness. Even unto
such things had the "dead girls" brought him.

So, crammed with theories--theories as yet untested by experience--Joe
became an iconoclast lusting for change. He was bursting with good news,
he wanted to cry the intimations from the housetops, he wanted to
proselytize, convert. He was filled with Shelley's passion for reforming
the world, and like young Shelley, he felt that all he had to do was to
show the people the truth and the truth would make them free.

All this was in his great moments,... there were reactions when his
human humorous self--backed by ten years of the printery--told him that
the world is a complex mix-up, and that there are many visions; moments
that made him wonder what he was about, and why so untrained a man