From my first day, however, I continued to see visions,--not visions of great numbers, not of saints, but of thousands of workingmen's vacant homes, deserted for lack of work due to the inability of these workingmen to earn a living. I saw the truth most forcibly revealed that again the foundation of all business was a comfortable existence and an opportunity to earn those comforts and the right of existence by labor, and that people must have that privilege or be forced to go where it _can_ be had. I saw many of those who remained struggling to tide themselves over, hoping for a better day. Many were helpless for lack of means to get away, and had therefore become dependents of the State and city.
I saw nearly all of our attempted factories in ruins, and four thousand workingmen driven from the city by the smelter trust; and then came again the glowing vision of sixty million pounds of wool, and an enormous production of cotton, grown annually in a radius of five hundred miles around our very doors. This raw material was being shipped two thousand miles to be worked into the most essential commodities. Every day we were walking over the finest glass sand in the world, yet we were denied the benefit of that most needful and profitable industry. I knew we dwelt in the heart of the leather producing district of the nation and yet no shoe factories. These are but a few of the raw materials in the region of the Rocky Mountain Western States. One who has made a study of industrial economics knows too well why the State of Colorado has (to speak comparatively) but seven people to the square mile. He well knows one reason to be the protective associations which protect _big business_ instead of protecting the people,--forever crying down co-operative industry which is for the good of all.
In the homes of these asking alms which I visited, I saw the fearful destroying effect on character of the wolf as he peered through broken pane, and the cracks and crannies of door and wall. I saw the humiliating tears and flushed faces of those who for the first time were forced to beg. It was exactly like those of my associates who for the first time had been thrust into prison. It needed but a glance to tell me whether they had received "charity" before, for there is always the spirit of being hardened to the "disgrace," just as there is in the manner in which the prisoner treats the situation if he has previously "done time."