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Here followed a detailed statement of some of the ills they were compelled to hear and which I have in part enumerated above. And then:

Involved in this fight are questions weightier than any question of dollars and cents. The present miner has had his day. He has been oppressed and ground down; but there is another generation coming up, a generation of little children prematurely doomed to the whirl of the mill and the noise and blackness of the breaker. It is for these children that we are fighting. We have not underestimated the strength of our opponents; we have not overestimated our own power of resistance. Accustomed always to live upon a little, a little less is no unendurable hardship. It was with a quaking of hearts that we called for a strike. It was with a quaking of hearts that we asked for our last pay envelopes. But in the grimy, bruised hand of the miner was the little white hand of the child, a child like the children of the rich, and in the heart of the miner was the soul rooted determination to starve to the last crust of bread and fight out the long dreary battle to the end, in order to win a life for the child and secure for it a place in the world in keeping with advancing civilization.

Messieurs, I know the strong must rule the weak, the big brain the little one, but why not some small approximation towards equilibrium, just a slightly less heavily loaded table for Dives and a few more crumbs for Lazarus? I beg you--a few more crumbs! You will appear so much more pleasing because of your generosity.

Wilkes-Barr? proved a city of charm--a city so instinct with a certain constructive verve that merely to enter it was to feel revivified. After our long, dreary drive in the rain the sun was now shining through sultry clouds and it was pleasant to see the welter of thriving foundries and shops, smoky and black, which seemed to sing of prosperity; the long, smooth red brick pavement of the street by which we entered, so very kempt and sanitary; the gay public square, one of the most pleasing small parks I have ever seen, crowded with long distance trolley cars and motors--the former bearing the names of towns as much as a hundred and a hundred and fifty miles away. The stores were bright, the throngs interesting and cheerful. We actually, spontaneously and unanimously exclaimed for joy.

Most people seem to have concluded that America is a most uninteresting land to travel in--not nearly so interesting as Europe, or Asia or Africa--and from the point of view of patina, ancient memories, and the presence of great and desolate monuments, they are right. But there is another phase of life which is equally interesting to me and that is the youth of a great country. America, for all its hundreds and some odd years of life, is a mere child as yet, or an uncouth stripling at best--gaunt, illogical, elate. It has so much to do before it can call itself a well organized or historic land, and yet humanly and even architecturally contrasted with Europe, I am not so sure that it has far to go. Contrasted with our mechanical equipment Europe is a child. Show me a country abroad in which you can ride by trolley the distance that New York is from Chicago, or a state as large as Ohio or Indiana--let alone both together--gridironed by comfortable lines, in such a way that you can travel anywhere at almost any time of the night or day. Where but in America can you at random step into a comfortable telephone booth and telephone to any city, even one so far as three thousand miles away; or board a train in almost any direction at any time, which will take you a thousand miles or more without change; or travel, as we did, two hundred miles through a fruitful, prosperous land with wonderful farms and farming machinery and a general air of sound prosperity--even lush richness? For this country in so far as we had traversed it seemed wonderfully prosperous to me, full of airy, comfortable homes, of spirited, genial and even witty people--a really happy people. I take that to be worth something--and a sight to see.

In Europe the country life did not always strike me as prosperous, or the people as intelligent, or really free in their souls. In England, for instance, the peasantry were heavy, sad, dull.

But Wilkes-Barr? gave evidences of a real charm. All the streets about this central heart were thriving marts of trade. The buildings were new, substantial and with a number of skyscrapers--these inevitable evidences of America's local mercantile ambitions, quite like the cathedrals religionists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries loved to build. As the Florentines, Venetians and European high mightinesses of the middle ages generally went in for castles, palaces, and "hotels de Ville," so Americans of money today "go in" for high buildings. We love them. We seem to think they are typical of our strength and power. As the Florentines, Venetians, Pisans and Genoese looked on their leaning towers and campaniles, so we on these. When America is old, and its present vigor and life hunger has gone and an alien or degenerate race tramp where once we lived and builded so vigorously, perhaps some visitors from a foreign country will walk here among these ruins and sigh: "Ah, yes. The Americans were a great people. Their cities were so wonderful. These mouldy crumbling skyscrapers, and fallen libraries and post offices and city halls and state capitals!"

In Wilkes-Barr? it was easy to find a very pretentious restaurant of the "grill" and "rathskeller" type, so familiar and so dear, apparently, to the American heart--a partly underground affair, with the usual heavy Flemish paneling, a colored frieze of knights and goose girls and an immense yellow bill of fare. And here from our waiter, who turned out to be one of those dreadful creatures one sees tearing along country roads in khaki, army boots and goggles--a motor cyclist--we learned there were not good roads west of Wilkes-Barr?. He had motorcycled to all places within a hundred or so miles east of here--Philadelphia, Dover, the Water Gap; but he knew of no good roads west. They were all dirt or rubble and full of ruts.

Later advice from a man who owned a drug and stationery store, where we laid in a stock of picture postcards, was to the same effect. There were no large towns and no good roads west. He owned a Ford. We should take the road to Binghamton, via Scranton , and from there on by various routes to Buffalo. We would save time going the long way round. It seemed the only thing to do. Our motor-cycling waiter had said as much.

Right here began the most delightful portion of this trip--indeed one of the most delightful rides I have ever had anywhere. Hitherto the Susquehanna had never been anything much more than a name to me. I now learned that it takes its rise from Otsego Lake in Otsego County, New York, flows west to Binghamton and Owego and thence southeast via Scranton, Wilkes-Barr? and Harrisburg to the Chesapeake Bay at Havre de Grace. Going west over the Pennsylvania I had occasionally seen a small portion of it gemmed with rocky islands and tumbling along, thinly bright it seemed to me, over a wide area of stones and boulders. Here at Wilkes-Barr?, bordered for a part of the way by a public park, alongside of which our road lay, it was quite sizable, smooth and greenish grey. Perhaps it was due to the recent heavy rains that it was so presentable.

At any rate, sentineled by great hills, it seemed to come with gentle windings hither and yon, direct from the north. And the valley through which it moved--how beautiful it really was! Here and there, on every hand between Wilkes-Barr? and Scranton were to be seen immense breakers with their attendant hills of coal or slag marking the mouths of mines. As we rode out tonight, finding it easy to make five to thirty miles an hour, even through the various mining towns we encountered on the way, we were constantly passing groups of miners, some on foot, some in trolleys, some in that new invention, the jitney bus, which seemed to be employed even on these stretches of road where one would have imagined the street car service was ample. How many long lines of miners' cottages and yellowish frame tenements we passed! I wonder why it is that a certain form of such poverty and work seems to be inseparably identified with yellow or drab paints? So many of these cheap wooden tenements were thus enameled, and then darkened or smudged by grey soot.

Many of the dwellers in these hives were to be seen camped upon their thresholds. We ran through one long dreary street--all these towns followed the shores of the river--and had the interest of seeing a runaway horse, drawing a small load of fence posts, dashing toward us and finally swerving and crashing into a tree. Again a group of boys, seeing the New York license tag on our car, hailed us with a disconcerting, "Eh, look at the New York bums!" Still farther on, finding some difficulty with the lamps, Speed drew up by the roadside to attend to them while Franklin made a rough sketch of a heavenly scene that was just below us--great hills, a wide valley, some immense breakers in the foreground, a few clouds tinted pink by the last expiring rays of the day. This was such a sky and such a scene as might prelude a voice from heaven.

IN AND OUT OF SCRANTON

Darkness had fallen when we reached Scranton. We approached from the south along a ridge road which skirted the city and could see it lying below to the east and ablaze with arc lights. There is something so appealing about a city in a valley at dark. Although we had no reason for going in--our road lay really straight on--I wanted to go down, because of my old weakness, curiosity. Nothing is more interesting to me than the general spectacle of life itself in these thriving towns of our new land--though they are devoid of anything historic or in the main artistic . I cannot help speculating as to what their future will be. What writers, what statesmen, what arts, what wars may not take their rise in some such place as this?

And there are the indefinable and yet sweet ways of just life. We dwellers in big cities are inclined to overlook or forget entirely the half or quarter cities in which thousands upon thousands spend all their lives. For my part, I am never tired of looking at just mills and factories and those long lines of simple streets where just common people, without a touch perhaps of anything that we think of as great or beautiful or dramatic, dwell. I was not particularly pleased with Scranton after I saw it--a sprawling world of perhaps a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand people without the verve or snap of a half hundred places half its size,--but still here were all these people. It was a warm night and as we descended into commonplace streets we could look through the open windows of homes or "apartments" or "flats" and see the usual humdrum type of furniture and hangings, the inevitable lace curtains, the centre tables, the huge, junky lamps, the upright pianos or victrolas. Whenever I see long, artless streets like these in the hot, breathless summer time, I feel a wave of commiseration sweep over me, and yet I am drawn to them by something which makes me want to live among these people.

Oh, to escape endless cogitation! To feel that a new centre table or a new lamp or a new pair of shoes in the autumn might add something to my happiness! To believe that mere eating and drinking, the cooking of meals, the prospect of promotion in some small job might take away the misery of life, and so to escape chemistry and physics and the horror of ultimate brutal law! "In the streets of Ur," says an old Chaldean chronicle, "the women were weeping for that Bel was dead." Bel was their Christ and they were weeping as some people weep on Good Friday to this day. Such women one might find here in Scranton, no doubt; believers in old tales of old things. After five or six thousand years there is still weeping in simple streets over myths as vain!

Once down in the heart of Scranton, I did not care for it at all. It was so customary--an American city like Utica or Syracuse or Rochester or Buffalo--and American cities of the hundred thousand class are so much alike. They all have the long principal street--possibly a mile long. They all have the one or two skyscrapers and the principal dry goods store and the hotel and the new post office building and the new Carnegie library and sometimes the new court house , or the new city hall. Sometimes these structures are very charming in themselves--tastefully done and all that--but most American cities of this class have no more imagination than an owl. They never think of doing an original thing.

Do you think they would allow the natural configuration of their land or any river front, or lake, or water of any kind to do anything for them? Not at all. It's the rarest exception when, as at Wilkes-Barr? for instance, a city will take the slightest aesthetic advantage of any natural configuration of land or water.

What! put a park or esplanade or a wall along a handsome river bank in the heart of the town! Impossible. Put it far out in the residence section where it truly belongs and let the river go hang. Isn't the centre of a city for business? What right has a park there?

Or perhaps it is a great lake front as at Buffalo or Cleveland, which could or should be made into something splendid--the municipal centre, for instance, or the site of a great park. No. Instead the city will bend all its energies to growing away from it and leave it to shabby factories and warehouses and tumble-down houses, while it constructs immense parks in some region where a park could never possibly have as much charm as on the water front.

Take the City of St. Louis as a case in point. Here is a metropolis which has a naturally fascinating water front along the Mississippi. Here is a stream that is quite wonderful to look at--broad and deep. Years ago, when St. Louis was small and river traffic was important, all the stores were facing this river. Later railroads came and the town built west. Today blocks and blocks of the most interesting property in the city is devoted to dead-alive stores, warehouses and tenements. It would be an easy matter and a profitable one for the city to condemn sufficient property to make a splendid drive along this river and give the city a real air. It would transform it instantly into a kind of wonder world which thousands would travel a long way to see. It would provide sites for splendid hotels and restaurants and give the city a suitable front door or facade.

But do you think this would ever be seriously contemplated? It would cost money. One had better build a park away from the river where there are no old houses. The mere thought of trading the old houses for a wonderful scene which would add beauty and life to the city is too much of a stretch of the imagination for St. Louisians to accomplish. It can't be done. American cities are not given to imagination outside the walks of trade.

Scranton was no worse than many another American city of the same size and class that I have seen--or indeed than many of the newer European cities. It was well paved, well lighted and dull. There were the usual traffic policemen , but with no traffic to guide, the one hotel designed to impress, the civic square surrounded by rows of thickly placed five-lamp standards. It was presentable, and, because Speed wanted to get oil and gasoline and we wanted to see what the town was like, we ran the machine into a garage and wandered forth, looking into shoe and bookstore windows and studying the people.

Here again I could see no evidence of that transformation of the American by the foreigner into something different from what he has ever been--the peril which has been so much discussed by our college going sociologists. On the contrary, America seemed to me to be making over the foreigner into its own image and likeness. I learned here that there were thousands of Poles, Czechs, Croatians, Silesians, Hungarians, etc., working here in the coal mines and at Wilkes-Barr?, but the young men on the streets and in the stores were Americans. Here were the American electric signs in great profusion, the American bookstores and newsstands crowded with all that mushy adventure fiction of which our lady critics are so fond. Five hundred magazines and weekly publications blazed the faces of alleged pretty girls. "The automat," the "dairy kitchen," the "Boston," "Milwaukee" or "Chicago" lunch, and all the smart haberdasheries so beloved of the ambitious American youth, were in full bloom. I saw at least a half dozen moving-picture theatres in as many blocks--and business and correspondence schools in ample array.

What becomes of all the young Poles, Czechs, Croatians, Serbians, etc., who are going to destroy us? I'll tell you. They gather on the street corners when their parents will permit them, arrayed in yellow or red ties, yellow shoes, dinky fedoras or beribboned straw hats and "style-plus" clothes, and talk about "when I was out to Dreamland the other night," or make some such observation as "Say, you should have seen the beaut that cut across here just now. Oh, mamma, some baby!" That's all the menace there is to the foreign invasion. Whatever their original intentions may be, they can't resist the American yellow shoe, the American moving picture, "Stein-Koop" clothes, "Dreamland," the popular song, the automobile, the jitney. They are completely undone by our perfections. Instead of throwing bombs or lowering our social level, all bogies of the sociologist, they would rather stand on our street corners, go to the nearest moving pictures, smoke cigarettes, wear high white collars and braided yellow vests and yearn over the girls who know exactly how to handle them, or work to some day own an automobile and break the speed laws. They are really not so bad as we seem to want them to be. They are simple, gauche, de jeune, "the limit." In other words, they are fast becoming Americans.

I think it was during this evening at Scranton that it first dawned on me what an agency for the transmission of information and a certain kind of railway station gossip the modern garage has become. In the old days, when railroads were new or the post road was still in force, the depot or the inn was always the centre for a kind of gay travelers' atmosphere or way station exchange for gossip, where strangers alighted, refreshed themselves and did a little talking to pass the time. Today the garage has become a third and even more notable agency for this sort of exchange, automobile travelers being for the most part a genial company and constantly reaching out for information. Anyone who knows anything about the roads of his native town and country is always in demand, for he can fall into long conversation with chauffeurs or tourists in general, who will occasionally close the conversation with an offer of a drink or a cigar, or, if he is going in their direction, take him for a part of the way at least as a guide.

Having found Scranton so dull that we could not make up our minds to remain overnight, we returned to the garage we were patronizing and found it crowded to the doors with cars of all descriptions and constantly being invaded by some others in search of something. Here were a group of those typical American hangers-on or loafers or city gossips or chair warmers--one scarcely knows what to call them--who, like the Roman frequenters of the Forum or the Greek "sitters at the place of customs," gather to pass the time by watching the activity and the enthusiasm of others. Personally my heart rather yearns over that peculiar temperament, common enough to all the abodes of men, which for lack of spirit or strength or opportunity in itself to get up and do, is still so moved by the spectacle of life that it longs to be where others are doing. Here they were, seven or eight of them, leaning against handsome machines, talking, gesticulating and proffering information to all and sundry who would have it. Owing to the assertion of the proprietor's helper that the roads were bad between here and Binghamton, a distance of sixtynine miles, we were a little uncertain whether to go on or no. But this charge of a dollar was an irritation, for in most garages, as Speed informed us, the night charge was only fifty cents. Besides, the same youth was foolish enough to confess, after Speed questioned him, that the regular charge to local patrons was only fifty cents.

Something in the youth's description of the difficulties of the road between here and Binghamton caused me to feel that he was certainly laying it on a little thick. According to him, there had been terrible rains in the last few weeks. The road in spots was all but impassable. There were great hills, impossible ravines, and deadly railroad crossings. I am not so much of an enthusiast for night riding as to want to go in the face of difficulties--indeed I would much rather ride by day, when the beauties of the landscape can be seen,--still this attempt to frighten us irritated me.

And then the hangers-on joined in. Obviously they were friends of the owner and, like a Greek chorus, were brought on at critical moments to emphasize the tragedy or the terror or the joy, as the case might be. Instantly we were assailed with new exaggerations--there were dreadful, unguarded railway crossings, a number of robberies had been committed recently, one bridge somewhere was weak.

This finished me.

"They are just talking to get that dollar," I whispered to Franklin.

"Sure," he replied; "it's as plain as anything. I think we might as well go on."

My opposition was complete. Speed looked a little tired and I think would have preferred to stay. But my feeling was that at least we could run on to some small inn or country town hotel where the air would be fresher and the noises less offensive. After a long year spent in the heart of New York, I was sick of the city--any city.

So we climbed in and were off again.

It was not so long after dark. The road lay north, through summery crowded streets for a time and then out under the stars. A cool wind was blowing. One old working man whom we had met and of whom we had asked the way had given us something to jest over.

"Which way to Dalton?" we called. This was the next town on our road.

"Over the viderdock," he replied, with a wave of his arm, and thereafter all viaducts became "viderdocks" for us. We sank into the deep leather cushions and, encountering no bad roads, went comfortably on. The trees in places hung low and seemed to make arched green arbors through which we were speeding, so powerful were our lamps. At one place we came upon a brilliantly lighted amusement resort and there we could not resist stopping. There was music and dancing and all the young clerks and beaus for miles around were here with their girls. I was so entranced that I wanted to stay on, hoping that some young girl might talk to me, but not one gave me even so much as a smile. Then we came to a country inn--an enticing looking thing among great trees--but we were awake now, enjoying the ride, and Speed was smoking a cigarette--why quit now? So on and on, up hills and down dale, and now and then we seemed to be skirting the Susquehanna. At other times we seemed to be off in side hills where there were no towns of any size. A railroad train came into view and disappeared; a trolley track joined us and disappeared; a toll road made us pay fifteen cents--and disappeared. At last as it neared unto midnight I began to get sleepy and then I argued that, whatever town came next, we should pause there for the night.

"All right," said Franklin genially, and then more aisles and more streams and more stores--and then in the distance some manufactories came into view, brightly lighted windows reflected in some water.

"Here we are," I sighed sleepily, but we weren't, not quite. This was a crossroad somewhere--a dividing of the ways--but the readable signs to say which way were not visible. We got out and struck matches to make the words more intelligible. They had been obliterated by rust. I saw a light in a house and went there. A tall, spare man of fifty came out on the porch and directed us. This was Factoryville or near it, he said--another mile on we would find an inn. We were something like twentyfive miles from Scranton. If you stop and look at electric parks and watch the dancers, you can't expect to make very good time. In Factoryville, as dark and silent as a small sleeping town may be, we found one light--or Franklin did--and behind it the village barber reading a novel. In the shadow of his doorway Franklin entered into a long and intimate discussion with him--about heaven only knows what. I had already noted of Franklin that he could take up more time securing seeming information than any human being I had ever known. It was astounding how he could stand and gossip, coming back finally with such a simple statement as, "He says turn to the right," or "We go north." But why a week to discover this, I used to think. Finally, almost arm in arm with the barber, they disappeared around a corner. A weary string of moments rolled past before Franklin strolled back to say there was no real inn--no hotel that had a license--but there was a man who kept a "kind of a hotel" and he had a barn or shed, which would do as a garage.

"Better stay, eh?" he suggested.

"Well, rather," I answered.

When we had unslung our bags and coats, Speed took the car to the barn in the rear and up we went into a typical American papier m?ch? room. The least step, the least movement, and wooden floors and partitions seemed to shout. But there were two large rooms with three beds and, what was more, a porch with a wooden swing. There was a large porcelain bath in a room at the rear and pictures of all the proprietor's relatives done in crayon.

How we slept! There were plenty of windows, with a fresh breeze blowing and no noises, except some katydids sawing lustily. I caught the perfume of country woods and fields and, afar off, as I stretched on an easy bed, I could hear a train whistling and rumbling faintly--that far off Ooh!--ooh!--oo!--oo!

I lay there thinking what a fine thing it was to motor in this haphazard fashion--how pleasant it was not to know where you were going or where you would be tomorrow, exactly. Franklin's car was so good, Speed so careful. Then I seemed to be borne somewhere on great wings, until the dawn coming in at the window awakened me. The birds were singing.

"Oh, yes, Factoryville," I sighed. "That's where we are. We're motoring to Indiana."

And I turned over and slept another hour.

A LITTLE AMERICAN TOWN

Factoryville, as we found this morning, was one of these very small places which, to one weary of metropolitan life, occasionally prove entertaining through an extreme simplicity and a sense of rest and peace. It was, as I saw sitting in my dressing gown in our convenient wooden swing, a mere collection of white cottages with large lawns or country yard spaces and flowers in profusion and a few stores. Dr. A. B. Fitch, Druggist , was over the way sweeping off the sidewalk in front of his store. I knew it was Dr. A. B. Fitch by his solemn proprietary air, his alpaca coat, his serious growth of thick grey whiskers. He was hatless and serene. I could almost hear him saying: "Now, Annie, you tell your mother that this medicine is to be taken one teaspoonful every three hours, do you hear?"

Farther down the street H. B. Wendel, hardware dealer, was setting out a small red and green lawnmower and some zinc cans capable of holding anything from rain water to garbage. This was his inducement to people to come and buy. Although it was still very early, citizens were making their way down the street, a working man or two, going to some distant factory not in Factoryville, a woman in a gingham poke bonnet standing at a corner of her small white home examining her flowers, a small barefooted boy kicking the damp dust of the road with his toes. It reminded me of the time when, as a youth in a similar town, I used to get up early and see my mother browsing over early, dew-laden blossoms. I was for staying in Factoryville for some time.

But Franklin, energetic soul, would have none of it. He had lived in a small town or on a farm for the greater part of his life and, unlike me, had never really deserted the country. Inside the room, on the balcony of which I was already swinging and idly musing, he was industriously shaving--a task I was reserving for some city barber. Presently he came out and sat down.

"Isn't it wonderful--the country!" I said. "This town! See old Dr. Fitch over there, and that grocery man putting out his goods."

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