Early the next morning in a bedroom in a rooming house for aliens in
Fifteenth Street, a man sat in a chair scanning the want columns of a
newspaper. Occasionally he jotted down something on a slip of paper.
This man's job was rather an unusual one. He hunted jobs for other
men--jobs in steel mills, great factories, in the textile districts, the
street-car lines, the shipping yards and docks, any place where there
might be a grain or two of the powder of unrest and discontent. His
business was to supply the human matches.

No more parading the streets, no more haranguing from soap boxes. The
proper place nowadays was in the yard or shop corners at noontime. A
word or two dropped at the right moment; perhaps a printed pamphlet;
little wedges wherever there were men who wanted something they neither
earned nor deserved. Here and there across the land little flares,
one running into the other, like wildfire on the plains, and then--the
upheaval. As in Russia, so now in Germany; later, England and France and
here. The proletariat was gaining power.

He was no fool, this individual. He knew his clay, the day labourer,
with his parrotlike mentality. Though the victim of this peculiar potter
absorbs sounds he doesn't often absorb meanings. But he takes these
sounds and respouts them and convinces himself that he is some kind
of Moses, headed for the promised land. Inflammable stuff. Hence, the
strikes which puzzle the average intelligent American citizen. What is
it all about? Nobody seems to know.