on the other hand, acquired a strong sense of liking and understanding of working-men. While he never overvalued them, he knew their worth and liked their life. There is a natural fraternity among craftsmen, especially among printers, and into this fellowship he had unconsciously entered.

But a blow which broke his peace came to him with the death of his wife. He found himself left with two little babies, and his restlessness began again. For some years he drifted from place to place perfecting both his skill as a printer and his knowledge as a physician. His understanding of medical science brought him into contact with a well known practitioner in one of the Western States with whom he eventually became associated and under whose advice he opened an office first in one of the small Massachusetts towns and finally in Boston.

Here his natural desire to help people was gratified. Patients came in numbers; he prospered, and his bankaccount grew; but before long dissatisfaction began to grow also. There was one thing he could not do, and that was to pretend, and more and more his rigid sense of honesty came between him and contentment in his profession. While he was indeed a fully licensed physician, his training had never been as thorough as is now given to medical students. The idea of being something of a hypocrite grew in him year by year until it became almost an obsession, and finally, despite his assured prosperity, he could not go on with his work. To look wise before his patients and prescribe a course of treatment the benefit of which was uncertain, he would not continue even though paid well for it. He disposed of his practice and went South.

With a little orange grove he expected to be able to support himself and his family, but at this point nature took a hand, and an early frost completely ruined his chance for a livelihood and left him almost penniless. So North he came again to earn a living at his old trade. He joined the union and always carried a card. Through his unusual skill as a craftsman it was possible to earn enough money to support the modest needs of himself and his children. Printing was honest; it was worth the pay, but there was something else that disturbed him. After all, his life was not of much use.

At this time it was not so much sharp business practices or professional incompetence which made him dissatisfied as the injustice which he saw about him, particularly that suffered by the boys in the trade. He knew well enough that no one could make the world perfectly just, but the only periods he really knew any peace were those when he was persuading some man who was misusing his power into giving a better chance to some one who could not help himself.

In

Arthur Blue was no blusterer. deed, he was almost the quietest man I ever knew. I never heard him raise his voice above a low speaking tone, but this quietness of manner was a velvet glove. The iron rarely showed itself, and at its hardest only when some child or woman was being mistreated. At one time he secretly removed from their home a mother and her children who had hardly the claim of his acquaintance, but who could not get redress in the courts from a drunken husband and father. Ordinarily he never borrowed trouble, but I have known him to become an ardent

liked to spend the nights in the houses which he had built. At other times he would disappear altogether, and be gone for days visiting the neighboring farms as he followed the streams and creeks through the woods and fields from their source to where they emptied into the river. These excursions These excursions were the cause of much perturbation in the family circle and seriously interfered with progress at school.

The father was ambitious for his sons. He wanted them to become professional men, and willy-nilly Arthur was apprenticed to a country physician who was much the type that Edgar Lee Masters has drawn in his country doctors. In size and appearance he was a great brute of a man who wrote poetry when not otherwise engaged. Unlike some physicians and poets, he was a hard worker. Taking his responsibilities seriously, he had his assistant out of bed every morning at four, and hard at work on his medical studies before any one else had begun the day.

The doctor was forced to take over a little printing-office in payment for a bad debt, and after this life had a new interest for master and student alike. They went to work learning to set type. The doctor's delight in poetry was greatly increased by seeing his own verses in print, and young Blue's liking for medicine became second to his love of printer's ink and type. He made himself expert, and felt more at home among the printing-cases than anywhere else.

§ 2

The old desire to see new places and faces took hold of him all the more strongly as he approached manhood. He had become friendly with one of the

engineers who ran a locomotive on the railroad line that passed through his home town, and one night he set off on a journey which brought him to the Eastern cities. His newly acquired skill made it possible for him to earn a living wherever he might be, so he worked as a tramp printer for some time. As he gradually drifted back toward the West, he found himself employed on a newspaper of which an exceedingly attractive young woman was editor, and after a time they were married and settled down to a comfortable life in a small Mid-Western town.

The responsibility of supporting a family forced him to seek more money. He invested his savings in what looked like a promising printing firm where he was the working partner while the older man from whom he had bought an interest was the financial agent. The business began well. The habit of early morning hours kept the printing-shop always well ahead of the orders. Blue liked the work and got on especially well with the men. They respected an employer who stood at the cases with them and knew more about the technical side of their trade than they did, who was not only honest, but had a kind of passion for fairdealing. For the first few months the new adventure absorbed him completely, and then the young employer found that his partner, while displaying to the most the assets, had concealed the liabilities, and the firm failed.

This experience destroyed any ambition Blue may have had to be at the head of a business. He knew that employers were necessary, but he never again desired to be one of them. Disgust with prevailing methods had gone like iron into his soul. He had,

on the other hand, acquired a strong sense of liking and understanding of working-men. While he never overvalued them, he knew their worth and liked their life. There is a natural fraternity among craftsmen, especially among printers, and into this fellowship he had unconsciously entered.

But a blow which broke his peace came to him with the death of his wife. He found himself left with two little babies, and his restlessness began again. For some years he drifted from place to place perfecting both his skill as a printer and his knowledge as a physician. His understanding of medical science brought him into contact with a well known practitioner in one of the Western States with whom he eventually became associated and under whose advice he opened an office first in one of the small Massachusetts towns and finally in Boston.

Here his natural desire to help people was gratified. Patients came in numbers; he prospered, and his bankaccount grew; but before long dissatisfaction began to grow also. There was one thing he could not do, and that was to pretend, and more and more his rigid sense of honesty came between him and contentment in his profession. While he was indeed a fully licensed physician, his training had never been as thorough as is now given to medical students. The idea of being something of a hypocrite grew in him year by year until it became almost an obsession, and finally, despite his assured prosperity, he could not go on with his work. To look wise before his patients and prescribe a course of treatment the benefit of which was uncertain, he would not continue even though paid well for it. He disposed of his practice and went South.

With a little orange grove he expected to be able to support himself and his family, but at this point nature took a hand, and an early frost completely ruined his chance for a livelihood and left him almost penniless. So North he came again to earn a living at his old trade. He joined the union and always carried a card. Through his unusual skill as a craftsman it was possible to earn enough money to support the modest needs of himself and his children. Printing was honest; it was worth the pay, but there was something else that disturbed him. After all, his life was not of much use.

At this time it was not so much sharp business practices or professional incompetence which made him dissatisfied as the injustice which he saw about him, particularly that suffered by the boys in the trade. He knew well enough that no one could make the world perfectly just, but the only periods he really knew any peace were those when he was persuading some man who was misusing his power into giving a better chance to some one who could not help himself.

In

Arthur Blue was no blusterer. deed, he was almost the quietest man I ever knew. I never heard him raise his voice above a low speaking tone, but this quietness of manner was a velvet glove. The iron rarely showed itself, and at its hardest only when some child or woman was being mistreated. At one time he secretly removed from their home a mother and her children who had hardly the claim of his acquaintance, but who could not get redress in the courts from a drunken husband and father. Ordinarily he never borrowed trouble, but I have known him to become an ardent

partizan, indeed to be the main instigator in a church quarrel, although he himself belonged to no church, when he thought that a minister was being unfairly treated by his congregation.

83

In this way he had lived for nearly half a century, seemingly destined to become the quietest man in the printing industry, breaking the monotony of life only by a change from one office to another, and by a few quixotic attempts to promote the cause of fair dealing, when the advertisement announcing the chance to become a printing instructor caught his eye. He cut out the slip of paper, put it away to think over for a few days and to consult with his friends and relatives. They told him, as they often had, that he was a fool; no self-respecting working-man had anything to do with settlement houses, which were nondescript institutions to be classified somewhere between a church social and a city mission. But Arthur Blue had never taken any one's advice yet except as a stimulus to his own thinking. He investigated the new opportunity and decided to try it.

The first time I met him was in a dark little cellar room of the settlement house where the classes were to be held. After shaking hands, I said:

"Are you willing to teach boys?" "It's the only part of your proposition I am interested in."

And as I think of it now, it must have been a very deep interest that led him to leave one of the best printing establishments in the city, with its light and air and convenience and high pay, and make his place of work in such a shop as he found in the cellar. All the equipment, so far as equipment

existed, was in disorder. The few cases of type were hopelessly pied; the little foot-press was broken; dingy light came in from the windows near the ceiling: the chance to teach boys was the only thing the shop really had. For years he had been helping young apprentices to steal a knowledge of their trade in odd hours, which was and is the generally accepted method of training manual workers in America. Here, whatever else was lacking, he would have a chance to make the interest of the boy his sole objective.

Almost without money or equipment he began his work, but within a few months his little office was put in shape, and the boys from the streets began to drift in. But when they found that if they were going to stay, they would have to work, they promptly began to drift out. This was a critical time in the history of the adventure. Not to find a response from those whom one really wants to help was for Arthur Blue, as it has been for many another, the sharpest of disappointments; but his ideal had begun to take root, and an ideal is the one thing in the world that perhaps is hardest to kill. Some of the boys even in those earlier days and in the dilapidated office did stay on, and there are many competent workmen in the printing-offices of New York who are drawing wages above the scale simply because they came in contact with this true craftsman and teacher.

But the plan of work still seemed to him unsatisfactory and amateurish. He knew of many hundreds of boys who needed the training, but they would not come, and so he began to say, "The employers would be interested in this plan if they knew of it," or again, "The trade-unions would

Wearily I would give assent, for I had heard through the years of my apprenticeship among the tenements of so many who might be interested, and had discussed so many will-o'-thewisp projects that had come to nothing, that it seemed to me very unlikely that the leaders of a great industry would be interested in a little trainingschool.

He was so persistent, however, that finally I went with him to call on some of the employers. They were mildly attentive and abstractedly polite. There was, however, much greater need than I had imagined, and to one appeal they were never unresponsive the chance for the boy. Most of those whom we saw, even the heads of the largest firms, had themselves begun as printers' devils. They knew how hard the road was, and even those who were not willing to help grew emotional in telling us of their own experiences. Before we were through we could have written the early history of nearly all the men on whom we called, but the net result was not great.

Union officials said the employers should educate the boys, just as the employers had informed us the union should do it; but man by man, official by official, they were finally won over, and I shall never forget the almost unanimous vote made on the floor of the union one Sunday afternoon in the old Veronica Hall in Brooklyn giving a thousand dollars to the school and the promise of continued partnership.

After the union's decision, the employers took an equal interest, and from then the work grew. From four o'clock in the morning until late at night Arthur Blue was at his post,

ing out lesson leaves, organizing the school. Not very many months went by before the union made it obligatory that all apprentices should spend two nights a week in the classes. After that there was a long campaign waged with the employers to induce them to grant the boy one afternoon a week for training without any reduction in pay.

Every year, almost every month, brought some innovation, some development, and the brain and the hand and the body and the soul of Arthur Blue were its animating force. At the end of twelve years he found himself at the head of the largest printing-school in America. It is the only school of which I know that employers and unions manage in partnership. It points a sure way to industrial peace, and while it is only one link, it is a genuine and indubitable example of joint partnership and coöperation. At last Arthur Blue had found contentment in life.

In his later years he had built a tiny cottage up the Hudson on a little hilltop, and there he went week-ends and vacations to rest, and so far as I know he carried on there only one altercation, that with the hunters. No man with a gun could set foot near his house, and nothing gave him so much satisfaction as to see the rabbits and other hunted animals shooting through the grass and taking refuge under his cabin floor. Here the final call that brings labor and life to an end came to him, and he finished both with the satisfaction and peace that can be won only by a man who has made his life square with justice and fair-dealing and found in his work a great adventure.