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with a large delegation of Texas editors made an extended tour through Texas, Indian Nation, Missouri, Kansas & Texas railway. I decided to settle in Chicago. I had married in Austin, Tex., in the fall of 1871, and my wife joining me at Philadelphia we came to Chicago together, where we have lived till the present time. I at once became a member of Typographical Union No. 16, and "subbed" for a time on the Inter-Ocean, when I went to work under "permit" on the Times. Here I worked over four years, holding a situation at "the case." In 1874 I became interested in the "labor question," growing out of the effort made by Chicago working people at that time to compel the "Relief and Aid Society" to render the suffering poor of the city an account of the vast sums of money (several million dollars) held by that society and contributed by the whole world to relieve the distress occasioned by the great Chicago fire of 1871. It was claimed by the working people that the money was being used for purposes foreign to the intention of its donors; that rings of speculators were corrupted using the money, while the distressed and impoverished people for whom it was contributed were denied its use. This raised a great sensation and scandal among all the city newspapers, which defended the "Relief and Aid Society," and denounced the dissatisfied workingmen as "Communists, robbers, loafers," etc. I began to examine into this subject, and I found that the complaints of the working people against the society were just and proper. I also discovered a great similarity between the abuse heaped upon those poor people by the organs of the rich and the actions of the late southern slave-holders in Texas toward the newly enfranchised slaves, whom they accused of wanting to make their former masters "divide" by giving them "forty acres and a mule," and it satisfied me there was a great fundamental wrong at work in society and in existing social and industrial arrangements.
From this time dated my interest and activity in the labor movement. The desire to know more about this subject led me in contact with Socialists and their writings, they being the only people who at that time had made any protests against or offered any remedy for the enforced poverty of the wealth-producers and its collateral evils
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