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that. There was one fellow who was the local secretary of the local council of the American Federation of Labor. He had a bald head, a kind of long, pointed chin and was a very nice man. He was the old-fashioned labor man. He was almost old enough to have been in the Knights of Labor and he had that kind of high-minded, idealistic quality that you often found in the men who had started their life in the labor movement within the Knights of Labor, which was full of idealism and which was based on the proposition that working people are better than other people, “gooder” than other people, just out of the nature of the case. I never knew how that started, but always before they were through they would bring in the fact that Our Lord was a carpenter and that the people who followed Him were all working men. The implications and the inferences were that working people would just be “gooder” than other people.

As a matter of fact, in that early period a good deal of my personal observations tended to sustain that point of view. There was an extreme goodness, charity and generosity to others who are in trouble that you got among the poor and working people that you didn't get among other classes of society. I used to notice it. Even the Charity Organization Society would count upon the contributions of the neighbors in the case of an extreme disaster in a poverty stricken