"What can it mean?" asked Nelle impersonally of the world at large. We knew nothing of the woman except that she was very young, and that she had come to the boarding house with her baby a week before to work for mere board only.

"She is always so silent and timid," Nelle said. "Who'd have guessed that she is canned-up hate and tenderness?"

From our landlady we first learned their story, and afterward, when the man found that we were Socialists, he told it himself, seated on the gallery steps with his baby on his knee, in the midst of the flowers and fragrance that tempt one to believe the South an earthly paradise. A good night's rest and nourishing food had revived him wonderfully. The wound on his forehead (caused, as we had learned, by his falling headlong from sheer weakness while climbing a fence), was hidden by a neat white bandage. His voice was even and unemotional.

"I was raised on a farm," he said, "but I had a lot of brothers and wasn't needed at home, so I got a little education and taught school in the mountains. The pay was low-twenty-five a month-but board was five a month and other things in proportion. I kept on teaching after we were married and worked on her father's farm in the summer time.

"But after the baby came we took a notion we wanted a home of our own, so last summer we came to town so as to make more money.

"I got a job from the telephone company-unskilled labor, a dollar and a half a day-but I was taking a correspondence course at night; you know electricians get good wages. But it costs lots more to live in town, and the baby got sick; we thought it was the town milk and the hot little rooms we had to live in, so I went out in the country and got work on a farm.

"The farmer promised thirty dollars a month and a house and garden and fuel. After I'd been there a week Hilda and the baby came, and I went to a little cross-roads store and went in debt for a few things to set up housekeeping. We had rented furnished rooms in town and had nothing but our trunks, but we only went in debt twelve dollars. We've always been used to the simple life and we believe in plain living and high thinking, as Emerson says."

Nelle was looking at him with delighted approval. It is a bit unusual to hear a convict, just from the coal mines, quoting Emerson. I saw that Nelle was mentally putting it down in her notes of the new South.

"I promised to pay the cross-roads storekeeper in three weeks," the man's even voice went on. "Sanders, that's the farmer's name, had promised to pay me monthly and I had already worked a week. But when pay day came he counted

out the rainy days and said I had to make up for them before he would pay a cent. And then the storekeeper came down on me for the twelve dollars."

The little woman seated near him moved nearer and her hand crept involuntarily toward his, but changed the direction. and began playing with the baby's toes. Mountain women are seldom demonstrative.

"It seems strange, the way they treated me. You'd hardly believe it. I don't know how to believe it myself, though I've known of other cases just as bad and even worse.

"Of course I understand why the sheriff sent me to the mines without a trial. That was graft. But the storekeeper didn't get any graft, I don't reckon, unless Sanders paid him more than the twelve I owed him. Whatever Sanders paid he kept the rest of my thirty dollars. I never saw a cent of it. I reckon he wanted to get me off his place too because I'm a Socialist. He didn't know it when he hired me and after I told him he seemed kind of scared of me. He's powerful ignorant and reads only capitalist papers.

"It came off one Sunday evening Sanders sent for us to go over to his house and pick the banjo and sing. He had some whiskey and tried to get me to drink with him. I wouldn't, and he kept drinking and quarreling at me for not drinking till I was disgusted and got up to go home.

"Then of a sudden he was on me like a tiger. I thought he'd choke me. I was that surprised I couldn't get my fight up for a minute. I tore loose then. I didn't want to hurt a drunken fool, and Hilda was scared and the baby was screaming, so I started home with them. He said he'd shoot me and went in the house, so we started running, for I was unarmed. He did bring out his gun but his wife gave him a good bawling out and he didn't shoot.

"We walked twelve miles that night back to town. They arrested me next day, and the stoorkeeper corroborated everything Sanders charged and together they got me sent to the mines--without trial.

"Those coal mines are hell. Sick or well, men are lashed to their tasks-and such tasks. The shaft we walked through to our work was four feet high. I walked three miles in the morning and three miles at night bent down in that shaft, besides doing the inhuman day's work they demanded. I was sick and worked till I literally dropped in my tracks, and they kicked and cuffed me before and after-the regular lashing. They killed a man at least twice a month in that shaft. They tortured others to death."

The man's voice was still even and unemotional but his eyes

glowed with red-hot rage, and the veins in his temples were throbbing. I noticed that the stress of his emotion had reopened the wound on his forehead. It had been badly cut by his fall on some sharp stones, and the red blood was moistening the lower edge of the bandage. He paused and when Nelle and the landlady had voiced their indignant horror I changed the subject. "What did you do all that time?" I asked the little woman whose hand rested in his now, openly and unashamed.

I sat on the steps of the jail till dark and then the sheriff's wife let me sleep on some quilts in her kitchen. Then a preacher's wife took me to work for my board; but she had eleven children, so I came here as soon as I had a chance."

"I reckon," said the landlady, "that you're as much of a Socialist now as your husband."

"I'm no Socialist at all," said the other woman fiercely, "I'm an anarchist. I'd love to shoot down like dogs every cowardly cur that laid their hands on him, and then some."

The baby, dozing in its father's arms, startled perhaps by the vehemence of its mother's voice, stirred and whimpered uneasily. The father patted it soothingly and raised it to his shoulder.

"There, there, honey," he murmured. "There, there, honey." MAY BEALS.

Marysville, Tennessee.

Doubly Enslaved.

TOM SELBY.

Though whipt, though shackled, though in bondage pent, No slave is he who struggles to be free;

But slave indeed-aye, twice enslaved is he

Who bears his servitude in dull content!

You Can Change Conditions.

E are in the midst of a widespread revolt of the workers against oppression and misrule. Political bosses, owned body and soul by the big trusts and monopolies, are endeavoring to raise up here the same forms of oppression which exist in the autocracies of the Old World. Our political life is a nest of corruption. Over municipal councillors and legislators, over even our executives and judges, is the rule of the boss. And as the Czar gives orders to HIS agents, big and little, so it is coming about with us that great capitalists give orders to THEIR public officials.

Unquestionably this private ownership of our government and of our public officials is the greatest political issue of our time. No one can doubt but that the people alone will decide the outcome of this issue. It is a matter for their choosing whether we shall have in this country Czarism or Democracy, Oligarchy or Republicanism, Capitalism or Socialism.

One must speak of this as our foremost issue because the workers are helpless to protect themselves from injustice and oppression so long as the government is owned and controlled by the capitalists. The first duty, therefore, before the workers of this country is to exercise their political power intelligently, -is to smash corrupt and despotic political machines, to rid themselves of self-seeking bosses, and to take into their own hands the governing institutions. Until this is done no great or lasting improvement can be effected in the condition of the people, and no really effective effort made against the manifold forms of economic oppression.

Every citizen will agree that all this is obvious, but some may ask, "How shall the workers gain control of the government?" We answer that the ownership and control of the government by the workers is possible ONLY through the agency of the Socialist party. It is an organization of the workers themselves. It is the ONLY political party which is not owned, controlled and dominated by capitalists. It is the ONLY party without bosses, the ONLY party in which the decision of the rank and file is final. Furthermore it is the ONLY party which expresses every hope and aspiration of the working-class, the ONLY party which has declared for uncompromising warfare

against every form of oppression and misrule in our political, in our economic, and in our social life. Its whole LIFE AND BEING is democratic: ITS BODY, the working-class; ITS SPIRIT, the revolution.

Nearly all the voters of American cities are wage-workers. They do not own the tools with which they work. They do not own the houses in which they live. They depend from day to day upon the wages which they receive from their masters. In times like the present when factories and sweatshops are closed they and their families are forced into destitution. They roam the street in want. And as the baker is shut out of the bakery, and the sweatshop worker out of the sweatshop, they cannot produce bread and clothing even for themselves. As a plant rooted up from its soil and left to wither and die, so is the unemployed wage-worker.

During this last winter, scores of thousands of fathers and mothers have been unemployed; thousands upon thousands of school-children have gone hungry; and although all our public officials knew of this widespread distress among the workers, not a single public act was taken to relieve their misery. When the unemployed came out into Union Square they were beaten and clubbed by policemen, ridden down by American Cossacks, and denied the exercise of their constitutional rights to peaceably assemble and state their grievances. And as the Tammany government in New York ignored this misery so likewise did the Republican legislature at Albany. During all the sad months. of last winter the legislature discussed everything under the heavens except the misery and starvation of this multitude of wage-workers.

In face of such a record can wage-workers fail to ask: Are these public officials OUR representatives, and is this government OUR government? If New York State were part of a great despotism one would expect its public officials to ignore the distress of the people, and even to ride them down when they assembled to voice their wrongs; one would then expect our representatives at Albany to ignore destitution and hunger, and at the same time to pass legislation for the benefit of the rich. But what shall we think when these very things happen in this socalled Republic?

It is impossible to suppose that the workers are content to have their distress so ignored. They are not different from other men. They are rightly determined to force upon the community some recognition of their necessities. They want, and intend to have, an opportunity to work until they and their families have the food they require. They want, and are determined to have, wages increased and hours of labor decreased. They want, and