your constitutional rights and propose to take political action, and you will be charged with selling out the organization to some political party. Counsel arbitration, and you will be told that there is nothing to arbitrate. Be conservative, and your tameness will be construed as an appreciation of the conditions thrust upon you by trusts and syndicates. Take what action you will in the interests of labor, the trained beagles in the employ of capital from behind their loathsome fortress of disguised patriotism will howl their tirade of condemnation. Boyce became an associate of Eugene V. Debs, and endorsed the Socialist Party platform. Boyce also urged the WFM to slowly buy up mines and mining company stock, to replace the wage system with union-owned mines. Marriage and retirement On May 14, 1901 in Butte, Montana, Boyce married Eleanor Day, the sister of Harry L. Day, a former bookkeeper who had become a wealthy mine owner. Day and Fred Harper, a local prospector, had discovered the Hercules mine, one of the richest silver and lead mines in the Coeur d'Alene region. The newlyweds honeymooned at the Boyce family home in Ireland. Boyce declined renomination as WFM president in 1902. He had become disillusioned with mismanagement in some WFM locals. But strong opposition to his continuing presidency had emerged in the powerful Butte Miners' Union, Local 1 of the WFM. In his farewell address, Boyce still remained the firebrand: "There are only two classes of people in the world. One is composed of the men and women who produce all; the other is composed of men and women who produce nothing, but live in luxury upon the wealth produced by others." Socialism, he still argued, was the only way "to abolish the wage system which is more destructive of human rights and liberty than any other slave system devised." Later life After his retirement from the WFM, Ed Boyce attended several more WFM conventions. He supported the WFM's creation of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, and testified on behalf of Haywood, Moyer and others at their 1907 murder trial. But Boyce gradually separated himself from organized labor, and eventually declined to discuss his part in the miners' union. The Boyces moved to Wallace, Idaho and then in 1909 to Portland, Oregon. Boyce became an avid reader of social theory and Irish poetry. The Boyces lived quietly, often passing the