up his sleeves and pitched in when the moment came. Philadelphia's famous calm was but skin deep over its seething mass of workers, its energy, its toiling, its triumph. When I reflected on what was going on at night in every newspaper office in town, it seemed to me as unbelievable that, on the verge of this volcano of work, Philadelphians could keep on dancing at parties, at the Dancing Class, at the Assembly, as that men and women should have danced at Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. And newspaper-making was one only of Philadelphia's innumerable industries. That thought gave me the scale of the labour that goes to keep the machinery of life running.
V
Of some of the other industries I got to know a little. My Uncle who, as I have said, was a man of ideas and who had his fair proportion of Philadelphia energy, included among his many interests the subject of education. He deplored existing systems and methods. My belief is that the systems and methods might be of the best and education would still be a mistake, vulgarizing the multitude to whom it does not belong and encouraging in them a prejudice against honest work. My Uncle did not think as I do,—that I do not think now as he did frightens me as a disloyalty to his memory. But he could not overlook the distaste for manual work that had grown out of too much attention to books and as he never let his theories exhaust
