but it was what was, after all, a more important question,--whether or
not he should lose his front-room and victrola and even the dream of a
Ford car.

There came a whirling and scrambling among the workers,--they fought
each other; they climbed on each others' backs. The skilled and
intelligent, banding themselves even better than before, bargained with
the men of might and held them by bitter threats; the less skilled and
more ignorant seethed at the bottom and tried, as of old, to bring it
about that the ignorant and unlettered should learn to stand together
against both capital and skilled labor.

It was here that there came out of the East a beam of unearthly
light,--a triumph of possible good in evil so strange that the workers
hardly believed it. Slowly they saw the gates of Ellis Island closing,
slowly the footsteps of the yearly million men became fainter and
fainter, until the stream of immigrants overseas was stopped by the
shadow of death at the very time when new murder opened new markets over
all the world to American industry; and the giants with the thunderbolts
stamped and raged and peered out across the world and called for men and
evermore,--men!

The Unwise Men laughed and squeezed reluctant dollars out of the fists
of the mighty and saw in their dream the vision of a day when labor, as
they knew it, should come into its own; saw this day and saw it with
justice and with right, save for one thing, and that was the sound of
the moan of the Disinherited, who still lay without the walls. When they
heard this moan and saw that it came not across the seas, they were at
first amazed and said it was not true; and then they were mad and said
it should not be. Quickly they turned and looked into the red blackness