Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/329

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even visit it, so far as I know. There were no guards and no policemen needed. And when I asked one of the labor leaders to account for this strange oversight, this surprising lack of solidarity and discipline in their ranks, he said, as though he must exculpate himself: "Oh well, you know—Mayor Jones. We haven't forgotten him and what he was."



LIV


It was because of this attitude toward working-*men, and their cause, that I was accused, now and then, by those who knew nothing about Socialism, of being a Socialist; by those who did know about it I was condemned for not being one. Our movement indeed had no opponents in the town more bitter than the Socialists, that is the authentic and orthodox Socialists of the class-conscious Marxist order, and they opposed me so insistently that I might as well have been the capitalist class and had done with it. I do not intend to confuse myself with the movement of which I, for a while, was but the merest and weakest of human instruments; I speak in that personal sense only because the opposition was of a personal quality so intense that it could hardly have been expected of an attitude that was always insisted upon as so entirely impersonal, the cold and scientific attitude of minds that had comprehended the whole of human history, analyzed the whole amazing complexity of human life, and reduced its problems to that degree in which