I taught history and economics and something called "sociology" at
Atlanta University, where, as our Mr. Webster used to say, we professors
occupied settees and not mere chairs. I was fortunate with this teaching
in having vivid in the minds of my pupils a concrete social problem of
which we all were parts and which we desperately desired to solve. There
was little danger, then, of my teaching or of their thinking becoming
purely theoretical. Work and wage were thrilling realities to us all.
What did we study? I can tell you best by taking a concrete human case,
such as was continually leaping to our eyes and thought and demanding
understanding and interpretation and what I could bring of prophecy.

* * * * *

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet,--as broad as Philadelphia,
but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier
atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows
into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy
cloud. The other city is dusty and hot beyond all dream,--a feverish
Pittsburg in the Mississippi Valley--a great, ruthless, terrible thing!
It is the sort that crushes man and invokes some living superman,--a
giant of things done, a clang of awful accomplishment.

Three men came wandering across this place. They were neither kings nor
wise men, but they came with every significance--perhaps even
greater--than that which the kings bore in the days of old. There was
one who came from the North,--brawny and riotous with energy, a man of
concentrated power, who held all the thunderbolts of modern capital in
his great fists and made flour and meat, iron and steel, cunning
chemicals, wood, paint and paper, transforming to endless tools a
disemboweled earth. He was one who saw nothing, knew nothing, sought