The Coal War by Upton Sinclair

promises, and were sure they would never sell out. But the workers were embittered, and Paris, the center of the world’s new thought, was swarming with the advocates of “direct action”.
    Hal tried his best to be interested in art-galleries and monuments; he went patiently and looked at the multiplied Madonnas, and walked through cathedrals with his head tilted backwards and a guide-book in his hand. But how could a man think about art, with the whining in his ears of pitiful beggars on the steps of these temples of submission? How could a man shut his eyes to the pitiful faces of starving children in the slums through which he drove? An American could not encounter such things without having his soul one cry of determination to save his country from these old paths of misery and oppression. The more Hal tried to contemplate the past, the more he found himself impelled to seek out the pale and undernourished men with restless, burning eyes, who had offices in obscure quarters and homes in slum-garrets, and who were building the cathedrals of the future, the mighty arches of labor solidarity, the towering spires of proletarian dream!
    Hal had as much French as is imparted in American colleges—enough to order a meal in a restaurant where the waiters speak English. Now, wishing to take part in revolutionary conversations, he hired a student-contributor to working-men’s papers, and the two of them went about jabbering. Jessie liked this young man, because he had a face full of melancholy, with a dear artistic little beard. Her boarding-school French did not admit her to the conversation; and this was just as well, for the young Frenchman’s revolutionism was of a kind that startled even Hal.
    Pitiful were Jessie’s efforts to follow her lover, to overcome her instinctive shrinking from the sordid and shabby, to understand his hostility to the elegant and refined! The Arthurs had brought letters of introduction to rich Americans, and were taken up by the “colony”, and even began to break into the diplomatic set. Jessie was invited to a thrilling reception at the embassy—and made the discovery that Hal had arranged to attend a congress of railwaymen!
    Now and then she went with him to these terrible places. In the Salle Wagram they listened to an address by Gustave Herve, who had just begun to recede from his position of anti-patriotism. His speech sounded wild to Jessie—but apparently it was too tame for this audience, for there was a constant clamor of protest, and at the culmination a man leaped upon the platform and began to exhort the crowd. A terrifying figure, with long black hair and a face of ashen grey, the pallor of prison; Malatesta, the anarchist, expressing his opinion of renegades and compromisers! His supporters danced about and howled; the supporters of Hervé rushed to the platform, there were scuffles, blows, chairs uplifted and hurled about. In the midst of the tumult the lights went out, there were screams, and then half a dozen shots. Hal fought his way out, with his fiancée fainting in his arms; and that was the end of revolutionary activity for the daughter of Robert Arthur!

[23]
    Jessie kept this episode from her mother. But little by little the painful truth was becoming clear to both ladies that the trip abroad was doing Hal no good at all. They crossed the channel, but only to meet worse trouble. England was in the midst of an historic labor convulsion, the strike of the coal-miners. Here was Syndicalism in action—gripping the world’s second-greatest industrial nation by the throat! How could anyone go about doing tourist-stunts, while such an event as this was shaking civilization?
    So Jessie and her mother wandered alone among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, while Hal was in the Westminster Hotel across the street, where the delegates of the miners were meeting. He had brought letters from John Harmon, and his story won the trust of