But Americans are a strange people! No sooner did they see that I had such feelings for their country than they began to knock it out of me in a very unceremonious fashion. The first American I met on landing was a man very quaintly dressed (later on I learned he was wearing “overalls”), who had been sent to me to take care of my trunk. I gave him my trunk, which he threw from the deck of the ship down to the wharf–a matter of some eight or ten feet.

Not knowing enough colloquial English, I quoted to him the magnificent lines of Milton: “Him the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky.”

The expressman looked at me very quizzically and exclaimed: “Cut it out! You're too fresh!” This was my initiation into America. 

A turning point occurs when Mukerji meets Leo, an intellectual and former Jesuit student who has turned to individualistic anarchism. 
And a very large majority believed, with me, that professors were not allowed to teach the truth because it was dangerous. So whenever we were assigned a dangerous topic such as the French Revolution, or civil war in England under Cromwell, we read up more books on the subject than were prescribed. We did it for the purpose of contradicting the professor and finding out the truth. I must say I missed this intellectual stimulus altogether in the American university. The undergraduate took notes as if the professor's utterances were gospel truth. There was no questioning and probing. And what astonished me most was that even if a student knew that the professor was not up to the mark, it did not enter his head to file a protest. Of course in India, protests were of no avail, but the entire student mentality in America, at that time, seemed to me to be purely apathetic. They were there to pass examinations and learn a vocation, and as long as they did that well, they did not care whether the professor was right or Wrong. One day as I was waiting on table, one young man looked up at me and said, “I see you in my class. Come up to my room and let's have a talk.” Of course I had the oriental’s attitude of a servant to his employer. I just bowed to him and went on waiting on table, and never let him know by even the slightest sign that I had understood. So when the meal was over he came into the kitchen, where I was eating my meal, and said: “Do you get me, that I want you to come upstairs to my room?” 
And I answered, “Which room?” 
He said, “You know my room.”

In amazement, I asked, “What did you do? What did they do?” 
Leo answered, “They notified my people. But I, who had been taught to hate the Socialists, went next morning straight to their headquarters. I did not tell them where I had come from, and they gave me Darwin and Spencer to read. I filled my mind with the Darwinian viewpoint. Page after page vanished, and I began to feel the entire structure of my belief and disbelief not only severed, but as something that had never existed. And yet, I did not know at the moment that the philosophy that was severing it had no structure either. “To make a long story short, I began to speak from soap boxes for the Socialists on different street corners, but as I associated with them, I came to see that the majority of them had perfectly ragged minds. They did not have the finish or system of the Jesuit fathers who had taught me. They began to pall on me, for in order to overcome the system of the church, the Socialists gave me the system of social order, and that seemed even more gruesome. It had none of the sanctities, nor any of the sacerdotal superstititions which I had been accustomed to, so I threw over the whole Socialist régime and took to individualistic anarchism. “I read Tolstoi, Kropotkin and a lot of others. This suited my temperament. It substituted ‘no system’ for ‘system,” liberty for authority, and personality for social gregariousness. “But you see, by this time my people had found out where I was, and what I was doing and because they were good capitalists, they became quite worried. They urged me to give up this useless life of vagabondage and study. They promised me a monthly allowance if I would go to college and study law. So here I am, trying to acquire knowledge out of the darkness in which all professors wander.”

Jerry asked, “What makes you so interested in anarchism?” 
I replied, “Why, it's the vision of the future.” 
“That shows you know nothing about it,” laughed Jerry. “Vision of the future! That's a bourgeois phraseology. They tell that in every church, every Sunday. You are not an anarchist. An anarchist never uses phrases that are grandiose. By the way, why don't you go back to India? Your ancestors found the truths you are seeking thousands of years ago; Buddha was the greatest of all anarchists.” 
“But you, surely, don't believe in God, do you?” I asked very much astonished. 
“Why not? God is nothing but a phantasm as I am a phantasm myself,” Jerry replied. “It is good to hail a brother phantasm anywhere.” 
“But,” I said, “Jerry, you are an anarchist.” 
He answered, “Yes, if spending twenty-seven years of your life without doing a stroke of work makes one an anarchist, then I am the only anarchist that exists. I have not worked for the last twenty-seven years, because I was present at the ‘Haymarket' in Chicago. You remember when that bomb was thrown, because the police beat up the crowds. What was it about? Those poor people were agitating for eight hours a day. I was there on the spot. I saw the policeman charge with their sticks. And then out of the terrible welter of humanity came a fierce, an awful noise that made everybody stand still, policeman and crowds alike. The world shook for a moment. And that convinced me.”
“Of what? Didn't you have any philosophical background or anything?” I asked him. 
“No,” said he, “that explosion was my background. And now I pray to myself, ‘Let it be my foreground as well!’” 
Jerry rose before me like a god, a sort of Triton from the deeps—an explosion before him and an explosion behind him. 
I said, “What did you do?” “I never did a stroke of work since, and I vowed to myself that I’d never help the capitalist system with the slightest exertion of a single muscle.” I could not understand.

And Jerry added: “They are always barking and howling and clamoring. They don't realize that the thing is too deep. A system of doubt will never overcome a system of belief.” 
I must say that Jerry and Leo were not earning a penny, and it was time I got my twenty dollars. With five dollars deducted from it, I did not feel inclined to give them five dollars, and yet I felt bound to do so, because they were improving my mind. All day they studied and at night they would tell me what they had studied. Thus they took me across Hegel and Hume. They also took me across what are called the thick and thin kinds of social theories. 
One day when I came with my salary of fifteen dollars in my pocket, Leo said: “Dhan, we've got a job and we're going to take it. We are going to lecture for the I.W.W. They are the only branch of Socialists we can support. They are going to give us as compensation the floor of their hall to sleep on. Jerry and I won't have to sleep on the streets any more, and sleeping in box cars is tiresome.” I asked, “What do you do in exchange?” “We are supposed to speak twice a week on a street corner,” Leo answered, adding, “Do you mind carrying the soap box for us?” 
The narrative takes a grimmer turn when Mukerji seeks work in the industrial town of Cannington. Employed as an assistant chemist in a sugar factory despite knowing no chemistry, he witnesses the "ghastly" nature of modern industrialism. He describes the factory as a "monster" into whose belly men and women crawl like "roaches". The experience exposes him to the "bitter indifference" and "colossal frauds" of Western civilization. He is particularly struck by the hypocrisy of the factory community, which maintains a rigid and dehumanizing social code regarding the local prostitutes while the laborers themselves are reduced to a "soulless" condition by fourteen-hour shifts.

WHEN I reached San Francisco I found that the college had opened already. I paid my fees there and found a good job under a Negro woman, waiting on tables, washing dishes, keeping the house clean. My zest for anarchism was coming to an end. I began to see that there was nothing to do but to find a new philosophy, something that had little concern with the material future of mankind. It was during this period that I began to rediscover India. We had reached the fall of the year nineteen hundred and twelve. Things, both political and otherwise, were fermenting in India. Batches of Indian students began to come to America for wisdom and knowledge and the more I saw these men coming, the more I grew convinced that they were coming through a desert to slake their thirst with the waters of a mirage. By now I had drunk the dregs of the Western civilization. I found it had its vulgarity, its bitter indifference, its colossal frauds. It has made just as many mistakes as India has in her time. And yet there was something constructive in both of these civilizations. All these Indian students I met were nationalists. They wanted to free India. As if a politically free India meant an India traditionally and uniquely herself Bitter quarrels ensued between myself and many of these Indians. These people thought that if India had factories and a government as well as an army and navy of her own, she would be one of the civilized countries of the earth. Take the typical Indian revolutionist. Many people remember him in San Francisco.

SPIRITUALISM LEFT the hop fields about three weeks before college opened and went back to town to see my comrades. When I reached town Jerry told me that there was a woman who wanted to rent a room free to a Hindu. So I looked up this lady, and she really gave me a room free in her house, and what is more, she asked me to put on my Hindu robe and sit in the parlor one hour a day in exchange for which she offered to give me my meals. I was astounded at this kindness. She never put any hindrances to my coming and going and I ate my meals there whenever I pleased.  This gave me the opportunity of being with the boys, who had by now discovered Bergson's philosophy and were reading William James as well. We spent no end of time discussing free will. Every evening when I came back to my house I always found the parlor door closed and heard people whispering. 
Every morning at a certain hour I was asked to put on my Hindu robes and come down and sit in the parlor for an hour. At last my suspicions were aroused and I asked my landlady, “Is there nothing else I can do for you?” 
She said, “If someone asks you what you do here, will you please tell them that you demonstrate.” 
“Demonstrate?” I asked, not having the slightest idea what she meant. 
She said, “Yes, materialize, you know.” 
“Materialize what?” I asked, more and more mystified. 
“You know,” she said, “the thing that you do in the old country.” 
“What do we do in our country?” 
She said, “You know—the spirit.” 
“Spirit what?” I asked. 
“Why, the spirit of the dead?”

THIS was the last of my I.W.W. friends. I got my degree, gave a course of lectures on comparative literature in a college and later began to make lecture tours which brought me into contact with many other kinds of Americans. I found the United States divided into four psychological groups; the East; the Middle West; the South; and the Pacific Coast. The first section, the East, is in direct touch with Europe and is more like Europe than it is like the rest of America. The second has very little contact with any great external influence. So its culture is more provincial and more indigenous. The South is extremely difficult to make clear. It might seem open to the influence of the Africans, yet that is not the case. It has no great indigenous element. It is full of the eighteenth century European conservatism. 

But if the climate can be trusted, the Southern men and women will build a tropical culture—sinister and beautiful. As regards the Pacific Coast, it cannot resist the culture of Asia, as the East cannot be impervious to Europe. Oriental decorations along with Oriental aloofness are becoming discernible elements. In the homes of the Pacific Coast I have found that the people are aloof. They build a Chinese wall of pride around themselves. On the Pacific Coast one also finds something Spanish, not altogether European, but rather Africo-Saracenic in character. Suppose that the forces of race and culture that I have mentioned go on permeating the whole continent. Then will it be too much to say that in five hundred years America will have a culture unique, magnificent and overpowering? America's tradition is her future.