We were all seated when Miss Brentwood brought Ernest in. They moved at once to
the head of the room, from where he was to speak. He was in evening dress, and,
what of his broad shoulders and kingly head, he looked magnificent. And then
there was that faint and unmistakable touch of awkwardness in his movements. I
almost think I could have loved him for that alone. And as I looked at him I
was aware of a great joy. I felt again the pulse of his palm on mine, the touch
of his lips; and such pride was mine that I felt I must rise up and cry out to
the assembled company: “He is mine! He has held me in his arms, and I,
mere I, have filled that mind of his to the exclusion of all his multitudinous
and kingly thoughts!”
At the head of the room, Miss Brentwood introduced him to Colonel Van Gilbert,
and I knew that the latter was to preside. Colonel Van Gilbert was a great
corporation lawyer. In addition, he was immensely wealthy. The smallest fee he
would deign to notice was a hundred thousand dollars. He was a master of law.
The law was a puppet with which he played. He moulded it like clay, twisted and
distorted it like a Chinese puzzle into any design he chose. In appearance and
rhetoric he was old-fashioned, but in imagination and knowledge and resource he
was as young as the latest statute. His first prominence had come when he broke
the Shardwell will.[2] His fee for this one act was five hundred thousand
dollars. From then on he had risen like a rocket. He was often called the
greatest lawyer in the country—corporation lawyer, of course; and no
classification of the three greatest lawyers in the United States could have
excluded him.
[2]
This breaking of wills was a peculiar feature of the period. With the
accumulation of vast fortunes, the problem of disposing of these fortunes after
death was a vexing one to the accumulators. Will-making and will-breaking
became complementary trades, like armor-making and gun-making. The shrewdest
will-making lawyers were called in to make wills that could not be broken. But
these wills were always broken, and very often by the very lawyers that had
drawn them up. Nevertheless the delusion persisted in the wealthy class that an
absolutely unbreakable will could be cast; and so, through the generations,
clients and lawyers pursued the illusion. It was a pursuit like unto that of
the Universal Solvent of the mediæval alchemists.
He arose and began, in a few well-chosen phrases that carried an undertone of
faint irony, to introduce Ernest. Colonel Van Gilbert was subtly facetious in
his introduction of the social reformer and member of the working class, and
the audience smiled. It made me angry, and I glanced at Ernest. The sight of
him made me doubly angry. He did not seem to resent the delicate slurs. Worse
than that, he did not seem to be aware of them. There he sat, gentle, and
stolid, and somnolent. He really looked stupid. And for a moment the thought
rose in my mind, What if he were overawed by this imposing array of power and
brains? Then I smiled. He couldn’t fool me. But he fooled the others,
just as he had fooled Miss Brentwood. She occupied a chair right up to the
front, and several times she turned her head toward one or another of her
confrères and smiled her appreciation of the remarks.
Colonel Van Gilbert done, Ernest arose and began to speak. He began in a low
voice, haltingly and modestly, and with an air of evident embarrassment. He
spoke of his birth in the working class, and of the sordidness and wretchedness
of his environment, where flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented. He
described his ambitions and ideals, and his conception of the paradise wherein
lived the people of the upper classes. As he said:
“Up above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses of the spirit, clean and noble
thinking, keen intellectual living. I knew all this because I read
‘Seaside Library’[3] novels, in which, with the exception of the
villains and adventuresses, all men and women thought beautiful thoughts, spoke
a beautiful tongue, and performed glorious deeds. In short, as I accepted the
rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble
and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that made life
worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and misery.”
[3]
A curious and amazing literature that served to make the working class
utterly misapprehend the nature of the leisure class.
He went on and traced his life in the mills, the learning of the horseshoeing
trade, and his meeting with the socialists. Among them, he said, he had found
keen intellects and brilliant wits, ministers of the Gospel who had been broken
because their Christianity was too wide for any congregation of
mammon-worshippers, and professors who had been broken on the wheel of
university subservience to the ruling class. The socialists were
revolutionists, he said, struggling to overthrow the irrational society of the
present and out of the material to build the rational society of the future.
Much more he said that would take too long to write, but I shall never forget
how he described the life among the revolutionists. All halting utterance
vanished. His voice grew strong and confident, and it glowed as he glowed, and
as the thoughts glowed that poured out from him. He said:
“Amongst the revolutionists I found, also, warm faith in the human,
ardent idealism, sweetnesses of unselfishness, renunciation, and
martyrdom—all the splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was
clean, noble, and alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and
spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum
child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and
world empire. All about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and
my days and nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before
my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ’s own Grail,
the warm human, long-suffering and maltreated but to be rescued and saved at
the last.”
As before I had seen him transfigured, so now he stood transfigured before me.
His brows were bright with the divine that was in him, and brighter yet shone
his eyes from the midst of the radiance that seemed to envelop him as a mantle.
But the others did not see this radiance, and I assumed that it was due to the
tears of joy and love that dimmed my vision. At any rate, Mr. Wickson, who sat
behind me, was unaffected, for I heard him sneer aloud, “Utopian.”[4]
[4]
The people of that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of their servitude is
incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words greater than the
conjurer’s art. So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the
utterance of a single word could negative the generalizations of a lifetime of
serious research and thought. Such a word was the adjective Utopian. The
mere utterance of it could damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of
economic amelioration or regeneration. Vast populations grew frenzied over such
phrases as “an honest dollar” and “a full dinner pail.”
The coinage of such phrases was considered strokes of genius.
Ernest went on to his rise in society, till at last he came in touch with
members of the upper classes, and rubbed shoulders with the men who sat in the
high places. Then came his disillusionment, and this disillusionment he
described in terms that did not flatter his audience. He was surprised at the
commonness of the clay. Life proved not to be fine and gracious. He was
appalled by the selfishness he encountered, and what had surprised him even
more than that was the absence of intellectual life. Fresh from his
revolutionists, he was shocked by the intellectual stupidity of the master
class. And then, in spite of their magnificent churches and well-paid
preachers, he had found the masters, men and women, grossly material. It was
true that they prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities, but in
spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was
materialistic. And they were without real morality—for instance, that
which Christ had preached but which was no longer preached.
“I met men,” he said, “who invoked the name of the Prince of
Peace in their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of
Pinkertons[5] with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men
incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the
same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more
babes than even red-handed Herod had killed.
[5]
Originally, they were private detectives; but they quickly became hired
fighting men of the capitalists, and ultimately developed into the Mercenaries
of the Oligarchy.
“This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman was a dummy director and
a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. This gentleman,
who collected fine editions and was a patron of literature, paid blackmail to a
heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of a municipal machine. This editor, who
published patent medicine advertisements, called me a scoundrelly demagogue
because I dared him to print in his paper the truth about patent medicines.[6]
This man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the
goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. This man, a
pillar of the church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, worked his shop
girls ten hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby directly encouraged
prostitution. This man, who endowed chairs in universities and erected
magnificent chapels, perjured himself in courts of law over dollars and cents.
This railroad magnate broke his word as a citizen, as a gentleman, and as a
Christian, when he granted a secret rebate, and he granted many secret rebates.
This senator was the tool and the slave, the little puppet, of a brutal
uneducated machine boss;[7] so was this governor and this supreme court judge;
and all three rode on railroad passes; and, also, this sleek capitalist owned
the machine, the machine boss, and the railroads that issued the passes.
[6]
Patent medicines were patent lies, but, like the charms and indulgences
of the Middle Ages, they deceived the people. The only difference lay in that
the patent medicines were more harmful and more costly.
[7]
Even as late as 1912, A.D., the great mass of the people still persisted in
the belief that they ruled the country by virtue of their ballots. In reality,
the country was ruled by what were called political machines. At first
the machine bosses charged the master capitalists extortionate tolls for
legislation; but in a short time the master capitalists found it cheaper to own
the political machines themselves and to hire the machine bosses.
“And so it was, instead of in paradise, that I found myself in the arid
desert of commercialism. I found nothing but stupidity, except for business. I
found none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who were
alive—with rottenness. What I did find was monstrous selfishness and
heartlessness, and a gross, gluttonous, practised, and practical
materialism.”
Much more Ernest told them of themselves and of his disillusionment.
Intellectually they had bored him; morally and spiritually they had sickened
him; so that he was glad to go back to his revolutionists, who were clean,
noble, and alive, and all that the capitalists were not.
“And now,” he said, “let me tell you about that
revolution.”
But first I must say that his terrible diatribe had not touched them. I looked
about me at their faces and saw that they remained complacently superior to
what he had charged. And I remembered what he had told me: that no indictment
of their morality could shake them. However, I could see that the boldness of
his language had affected Miss Brentwood. She was looking worried and
apprehensive.
Ernest began by describing the army of revolution, and as he gave the figures
of its strength (the votes cast in the various countries), the assemblage began
to grow restless. Concern showed in their faces, and I noticed a tightening of
lips. At last the gage of battle had been thrown down. He described the
international organization of the socialists that united the million and a half
in the United States with the twenty-three millions and a half in the rest of
the world.
“Such an army of revolution,” he said, “twenty-five millions
strong, is a thing to make rulers and ruling classes pause and consider. The
cry of this army is: ‘No quarter! We want all that you possess. We will
be content with nothing less than all that you possess. We want in our hands
the reins of power and the destiny of mankind. Here are our hands. They are
strong hands. We are going to take your governments, your palaces, and all your
purpled ease away from you, and in that day you shall work for your bread even
as the peasant in the field or the starved and runty clerk in your
metropolises. Here are our hands. They are strong hands!’”
And as he spoke he extended from his splendid shoulders his two great arms, and
the horseshoer’s hands were clutching the air like eagle’s talons.
He was the spirit of regnant labor as he stood there, his hands outreaching to
rend and crush his audience. I was aware of a faintly perceptible shrinking on
the part of the listeners before this figure of revolution, concrete,
potential, and menacing. That is, the women shrank, and fear was in their
faces. Not so with the men. They were of the active rich, and not the idle, and
they were fighters. A low, throaty rumble arose, lingered on the air a moment,
and ceased. It was the forerunner of the snarl, and I was to hear it many times
that night—the token of the brute in man, the earnest of his primitive
passions. And they were unconscious that they had made this sound. It was the
growl of the pack, mouthed by the pack, and mouthed in all unconsciousness. And
in that moment, as I saw the harshness form in their faces and saw the
fight-light flashing in their eyes, I realized that not easily would they let
their lordship of the world be wrested from them.
Ernest proceeded with his attack. He accounted for the existence of the million
and a half of revolutionists in the United States by charging the capitalist
class with having mismanaged society. He sketched the economic condition of the
cave-man and of the savage peoples of to-day, pointing out that they possessed
neither tools nor machines, and possessed only a natural efficiency of one in
producing power. Then he traced the development of machinery and social
organization so that to-day the producing power of civilized man was a thousand
times greater than that of the savage.
“Five men,” he said, “can produce bread for a thousand. One
man can produce cotton cloth for two hundred and fifty people, woollens for
three hundred, and boots and shoes for a thousand. One would conclude from this
that under a capable management of society modern civilized man would be a
great deal better off than the cave-man. But is he? Let us see. In the United
States to-day there are fifteen million[8] people living in poverty; and by
poverty is meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and
adequate shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained.
In the United States to-day, in spite of all your so-called labor legislation,
there are three millions of child laborers.[9] In twelve years their numbers
have been doubled. And in passing I will ask you managers of society why you
did not make public the census figures of 1910? And I will answer for you, that
you were afraid. The figures of misery would have precipitated the revolution
that even now is gathering.
[8]
Robert Hunter, in 1906, in a book entitled “Poverty,” pointed out
that at that time there were ten millions in the United States living in
poverty.
[9]
In the United States Census of 1900 (the last census the figures of which
were made public), the number of child laborers was placed at 1,752,187.
“But to return to my indictment. If modern man’s producing power is
a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, why then, in the United
States to-day, are there fifteen million people who are not properly sheltered
and properly fed? Why then, in the United States to-day, are there three
million child laborers? It is a true indictment. The capitalist class has
mismanaged. In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the
cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of
the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class
has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally
and selfishly mismanaged. And on this count you cannot answer me here to-night,
face to face, any more than can your whole class answer the million and a half
of revolutionists in the United States. You cannot answer. I challenge you to
answer. And furthermore, I dare to say to you now that when I have finished you
will not answer. On that point you will be tongue-tied, though you will talk
wordily enough about other things.
“You have failed in your management. You have made a shambles of
civilization. You have been blind and greedy. You have risen up (as you to-day
rise up), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were
impossible without the toil of children and babes. Don’t take my word for
it. It is all in the records against you. You have lulled your conscience to
sleep with prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities. You are fat with power
and possession, drunken with success; and you have no more hope against us than
have the drones, clustered about the honey-vats, when the worker-bees spring
upon them to end their rotund existence. You have failed in your management of
society, and your management is to be taken away from you. A million and a half
of the men of the working class say that they are going to get the rest of the
working class to join with them and take the management away from you. This is
the revolution, my masters. Stop it if you can.”
For an appreciable lapse of time Ernest’s voice continued to ring through
the great room. Then arose the throaty rumble I had heard before, and a dozen
men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from Colonel Van Gilbert. I
noticed Miss Brentwood’s shoulders moving convulsively, and for the
moment I was angry, for I thought that she was laughing at Ernest. And then I
discovered that it was not laughter, but hysteria. She was appalled by what she
had done in bringing this firebrand before her blessed Philomath Club.
Colonel Van Gilbert did not notice the dozen men, with passion-wrought faces,
who strove to get permission from him to speak. His own face was
passion-wrought. He sprang to his feet, waving his arms, and for a moment could
utter only incoherent sounds. Then speech poured from him. But it was not the
speech of a one-hundred-thousand-dollar lawyer, nor was the rhetoric
old-fashioned.
“Fallacy upon fallacy!” he cried. “Never in all my life have
I heard so many fallacies uttered in one short hour. And besides, young man, I
must tell you that you have said nothing new. I learned all that at college
before you were born. Jean Jacques Rousseau enunciated your socialistic theory
nearly two centuries ago. A return to the soil, forsooth! Reversion! Our
biology teaches the absurdity of it. It has been truly said that a little
learning is a dangerous thing, and you have exemplified it to-night with your
madcap theories. Fallacy upon fallacy! I was never so nauseated in my life with
overplus of fallacy. That for your immature generalizations and childish
reasonings!”
He snapped his fingers contemptuously and proceeded to sit down. There were
lip-exclamations of approval on the part of the women, and hoarser notes of
confirmation came from the men. As for the dozen men who were clamoring for the
floor, half of them began speaking at once. The confusion and babel was
indescribable. Never had Mrs. Pertonwaithe’s spacious walls beheld such a
spectacle. These, then, were the cool captains of industry and lords of
society, these snarling, growling savages in evening clothes. Truly Ernest had
shaken them when he stretched out his hands for their moneybags, his hands that
had appeared in their eyes as the hands of the fifteen hundred thousand
revolutionists.
But Ernest never lost his head in a situation. Before Colonel Van Gilbert had
succeeded in sitting down, Ernest was on his feet and had sprung forward.
“One at a time!” he roared at them.
The sound arose from his great lungs and dominated the human tempest. By sheer
compulsion of personality he commanded silence.
“One at a time,” he repeated softly. “Let me answer Colonel
Van Gilbert. After that the rest of you can come at me—but one at a time,
remember. No mass-plays here. This is not a football field.
“As for you,” he went on, turning toward Colonel Van Gilbert,
“you have replied to nothing I have said. You have merely made a few
excited and dogmatic assertions about my mental caliber. That may serve you in
your business, but you can’t talk to me like that. I am not a workingman,
cap in hand, asking you to increase my wages or to protect me from the machine
at which I work. You cannot be dogmatic with truth when you deal with me. Save
that for dealing with your wage-slaves. They will not dare reply to you because
you hold their bread and butter, their lives, in your hands.
“As for this return to nature that you say you learned at college before
I was born, permit me to point out that on the face of it you cannot have
learned anything since. Socialism has no more to do with the state of nature
than has differential calculus with a Bible class. I have called your class
stupid when outside the realm of business. You, sir, have brilliantly
exemplified my statement.”
This terrible castigation of her hundred-thousand-dollar lawyer was too much
for Miss Brentwood’s nerves. Her hysteria became violent, and she was
helped, weeping and laughing, out of the room. It was just as well, for there
was worse to follow.
“Don’t take my word for it,” Ernest continued, when the
interruption had been led away. “Your own authorities with one unanimous
voice will prove you stupid. Your own hired purveyors of knowledge will tell
you that you are wrong. Go to your meekest little assistant instructor of
sociology and ask him what is the difference between Rousseau’s theory of
the return to nature and the theory of socialism; ask your greatest orthodox
bourgeois political economists and sociologists; question through the pages of
every text-book written on the subject and stored on the shelves of your
subsidized libraries; and from one and all the answer will be that there is
nothing congruous between the return to nature and socialism. On the other
hand, the unanimous affirmative answer will be that the return to nature and
socialism are diametrically opposed to each other. As I say, don’t take
my word for it. The record of your stupidity is there in the books, your own
books that you never read. And so far as your stupidity is concerned, you are
but the exemplar of your class.
“You know law and business, Colonel Van Gilbert. You know how to serve
corporations and increase dividends by twisting the law. Very good. Stick to
it. You are quite a figure. You are a very good lawyer, but you are a poor
historian, you know nothing of sociology, and your biology is contemporaneous
with Pliny.”
Here Colonel Van Gilbert writhed in his chair. There was perfect quiet in the
room. Everybody sat fascinated—paralyzed, I may say. Such fearful
treatment of the great Colonel Van Gilbert was unheard of, undreamed of,
impossible to believe—the great Colonel Van Gilbert before whom judges
trembled when he arose in court. But Ernest never gave quarter to an enemy.
“This is, of course, no reflection on you,” Ernest said.
“Every man to his trade. Only you stick to your trade, and I’ll
stick to mine. You have specialized. When it comes to a knowledge of the law,
of how best to evade the law or make new law for the benefit of thieving
corporations, I am down in the dirt at your feet. But when it comes to
sociology—my trade—you are down in the dirt at my feet. Remember
that. Remember, also, that your law is the stuff of a day, and that you are not
versatile in the stuff of more than a day. Therefore your dogmatic assertions
and rash generalizations on things historical and sociological are not worth
the breath you waste on them.”
Ernest paused for a moment and regarded him thoughtfully, noting his face dark
and twisted with anger, his panting chest, his writhing body, and his slim
white hands nervously clenching and unclenching.
“But it seems you have breath to use, and I’ll give you a chance to
use it. I indicted your class. Show me that my indictment is wrong. I pointed
out to you the wretchedness of modern man—three million child slaves in
the United States, without whose labor profits would not be possible, and
fifteen million under-fed, ill-clothed, and worse-housed people. I pointed out
that modern man’s producing power through social organization and the use
of machinery was a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man. And I
stated that from these two facts no other conclusion was possible than that the
capitalist class had mismanaged. This was my indictment, and I specifically and
at length challenged you to answer it. Nay, I did more. I prophesied that you
would not answer. It remains for your breath to smash my prophecy. You called
my speech fallacy. Show the fallacy, Colonel Van Gilbert. Answer the indictment
that I and my fifteen hundred thousand comrades have brought against your class
and you.”
Colonel Van Gilbert quite forgot that he was presiding, and that in courtesy he
should permit the other clamorers to speak. He was on his feet, flinging his
arms, his rhetoric, and his control to the winds, alternately abusing Ernest
for his youth and demagoguery, and savagely attacking the working class,
elaborating its inefficiency and worthlessness.
“For a lawyer, you are the hardest man to keep to a point I ever
saw,” Ernest began his answer to the tirade. “My youth has nothing
to do with what I have enunciated. Nor has the worthlessness of the working
class. I charged the capitalist class with having mismanaged society. You have
not answered. You have made no attempt to answer. Why? Is it because you have
no answer? You are the champion of this whole audience. Every one here, except
me, is hanging on your lips for that answer. They are hanging on your lips for
that answer because they have no answer themselves. As for me, as I said
before, I know that you not only cannot answer, but that you will not attempt
an answer.”
“This is intolerable!” Colonel Van Gilbert cried out. “This
is insult!”
“That you should not answer is intolerable,” Ernest replied
gravely. “No man can be intellectually insulted. Insult, in its very
nature, is emotional. Recover yourself. Give me an intellectual answer to my
intellectual charge that the capitalist class has mismanaged society.”
Colonel Van Gilbert remained silent, a sullen, superior expression on his face,
such as will appear on the face of a man who will not bandy words with a
ruffian.
“Do not be downcast,” Ernest said. “Take consolation in the
fact that no member of your class has ever yet answered that charge.” He
turned to the other men who were anxious to speak. “And now it’s
your chance. Fire away, and do not forget that I here challenge you to give the
answer that Colonel Van Gilbert has failed to give.”
It would be impossible for me to write all that was said in the discussion. I
never realized before how many words could be spoken in three short hours. At
any rate, it was glorious. The more his opponents grew excited, the more Ernest
deliberately excited them. He had an encyclopaedic command of the field of
knowledge, and by a word or a phrase, by delicate rapier thrusts, he punctured
them. He named the points of their illogic. This was a false syllogism, that
conclusion had no connection with the premise, while that next premise was an
impostor because it had cunningly hidden in it the conclusion that was being
attempted to be proved. This was an error, that was an assumption, and the next
was an assertion contrary to ascertained truth as printed in all the
text-books.
And so it went. Sometimes he exchanged the rapier for the club and went
smashing amongst their thoughts right and left. And always he demanded facts
and refused to discuss theories. And his facts made for them a Waterloo. When
they attacked the working class, he always retorted, “The pot calling the
kettle black; that is no answer to the charge that your own face is
dirty.” And to one and all he said: “Why have you not answered the
charge that your class has mismanaged? You have talked about other things and
things concerning other things, but you have not answered. Is it because you
have no answer?”
It was at the end of the discussion that Mr. Wickson spoke. He was the only one
that was cool, and Ernest treated him with a respect he had not accorded the
others.
“No answer is necessary,” Mr. Wickson said with slow deliberation.
“I have followed the whole discussion with amazement and disgust. I am
disgusted with you gentlemen, members of my class. You have behaved like
foolish little schoolboys, what with intruding ethics and the thunder of the
common politician into such a discussion. You have been outgeneralled and
outclassed. You have been very wordy, and all you have done is buzz. You have
buzzed like gnats about a bear. Gentlemen, there stands the bear” (he
pointed at Ernest), “and your buzzing has only tickled his ears.
“Believe me, the situation is serious. That bear reached out his paws
tonight to crush us. He has said there are a million and a half of
revolutionists in the United States. That is a fact. He has said that it is
their intention to take away from us our governments, our palaces, and all our
purpled ease. That, also, is a fact. A change, a great change, is coming in
society; but, haply, it may not be the change the bear anticipates. The bear
has said that he will crush us. What if we crush the bear?”
The throat-rumble arose in the great room, and man nodded to man with
indorsement and certitude. Their faces were set hard. They were fighters, that
was certain.
“But not by buzzing will we crush the bear,” Mr. Wickson went on
coldly and dispassionately. “We will hunt the bear. We will not reply to
the bear in words. Our reply shall be couched in terms of lead. We are in
power. Nobody will deny it. By virtue of that power we shall remain in
power.”
He turned suddenly upon Ernest. The moment was dramatic.
“This, then, is our answer. We have no words to waste on you. When you
reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will
show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of
machine-guns will our answer be couched.[10] We will grind you revolutionists down
under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are
its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in
the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it
shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power.
There is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Not God, not Mammon,
but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.”
[10]
To show the tenor of thought, the following definition is quoted from
“The Cynic’s Word Book” (1906 A.D.), written by one Ambrose
Bierce, an avowed and confirmed misanthrope of the period: “Grapeshot,
n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of
American Socialism.”
“I am answered,” Ernest said quietly. “It is the only answer
that could be given. Power. It is what we of the working class preach. We know,
and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for
justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. Your hearts are hard as your heels
with which you tread upon the faces of the poor. So we have preached power. By
the power of our ballots on election day will we take your government away from
you—”
“What if you do get a majority, a sweeping majority, on election
day?” Mr. Wickson broke in to demand. “Suppose we refuse to turn
the government over to you after you have captured it at the ballot-box?”
“That, also, have we considered,” Ernest replied. “And we
shall give you an answer in terms of lead. Power you have proclaimed the king
of words. Very good. Power it shall be. And in the day that we sweep to victory
at the ballot-box, and you refuse to turn over to us the government we have
constitutionally and peacefully captured, and you demand what we are going to
do about it—in that day, I say, we shall answer you; and in roar of shell
and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns shall our answer be couched.
“You cannot escape us. It is true that you have read history aright. It
is true that labor has from the beginning of history been in the dirt. And it
is equally true that so long as you and yours and those that come after you
have power, that labor shall remain in the dirt. I agree with you. I agree with
all that you have said. Power will be the arbiter, as it always has been the
arbiter. It is a struggle of classes. Just as your class dragged down the old
feudal nobility, so shall it be dragged down by my class, the working class. If
you will read your biology and your sociology as clearly as you do your
history, you will see that this end I have described is inevitable. It does not
matter whether it is in one year, ten, or a thousand—your class shall be
dragged down. And it shall be done by power. We of the labor hosts have conned
that word over till our minds are all a-tingle with it. Power. It is a kingly
word.”
And so ended the night with the Philomaths.
CHAPTER VI.
ADUMBRATIONS
It was about this time that the warnings of coming events began to fall about
us thick and fast. Ernest had already questioned father’s policy of
having socialists and labor leaders at his house, and of openly attending
socialist meetings; and father had only laughed at him for his pains. As for
myself, I was learning much from this contact with the working-class leaders
and thinkers. I was seeing the other side of the shield. I was delighted with
the unselfishness and high idealism I encountered, though I was appalled by the
vast philosophic and scientific literature of socialism that was opened up to
me. I was learning fast, but I learned not fast enough to realize then the
peril of our position.
There were warnings, but I did not heed them. For instance, Mrs. Pertonwaithe
and Mrs. Wickson exercised tremendous social power in the university town, and
from them emanated the sentiment that I was a too-forward and self-assertive
young woman with a mischievous penchant for officiousness and interference in
other persons’ affairs. This I thought no more than natural, considering
the part I had played in investigating the case of Jackson’s arm. But the
effect of such a sentiment, enunciated by two such powerful social arbiters, I
underestimated.
True, I noticed a certain aloofness on the part of my general friends, but this
I ascribed to the disapproval that was prevalent in my circles of my intended
marriage with Ernest. It was not till some time afterward that Ernest pointed
out to me clearly that this general attitude of my class was something more
than spontaneous, that behind it were the hidden springs of an organized
conduct. “You have given shelter to an enemy of your class,” he
said. “And not alone shelter, for you have given your love, yourself.
This is treason to your class. Think not that you will escape being
penalized.”
But it was before this that father returned one afternoon. Ernest was with me,
and we could see that father was angry—philosophically angry. He was
rarely really angry; but a certain measure of controlled anger he allowed
himself. He called it a tonic. And we could see that he was tonic-angry when he
entered the room.
“What do you think?” he demanded. “I had luncheon with
Wilcox.”
Wilcox was the superannuated president of the university, whose withered mind
was stored with generalizations that were young in 1870, and which he had since
failed to revise.
“I was invited,” father announced. “I was sent for.”
He paused, and we waited.
“Oh, it was done very nicely, I’ll allow; but I was reprimanded. I!
And by that old fossil!”
“I’ll wager I know what you were reprimanded for,” Ernest
said.
“Not in three guesses,” father laughed.
“One guess will do,” Ernest retorted. “And it won’t be
a guess. It will be a deduction. You were reprimanded for your private
life.”
“The very thing!” father cried. “How did you guess?”
“I knew it was coming. I warned you before about it.”
“Yes, you did,” father meditated. “But I couldn’t
believe it. At any rate, it is only so much more clinching evidence for my
book.”
“It is nothing to what will come,” Ernest went on, “if you
persist in your policy of having these socialists and radicals of all sorts at
your house, myself included.”
“Just what old Wilcox said. And of all unwarranted things! He said it was
in poor taste, utterly profitless, anyway, and not in harmony with university
traditions and policy. He said much more of the same vague sort, and I
couldn’t pin him down to anything specific. I made it pretty awkward for
him, and he could only go on repeating himself and telling me how much he
honored me, and all the world honored me, as a scientist. It wasn’t an
agreeable task for him. I could see he didn’t like it.”
“He was not a free agent,” Ernest said. “The leg-bar[1] is not
always worn graciously.”
[1]
Leg-bar—the African slaves were so manacled; also criminals. It
was not until the coming of the Brotherhood of Man that the leg-bar passed out
of use.
“Yes. I got that much out of him. He said the university needed ever so
much more money this year than the state was willing to furnish; and that it
must come from wealthy personages who could not but be offended by the swerving
of the university from its high ideal of the passionless pursuit of passionless
intelligence. When I tried to pin him down to what my home life had to do with
swerving the university from its high ideal, he offered me a two years’
vacation, on full pay, in Europe, for recreation and research. Of course I
couldn’t accept it under the circumstances.”
“It would have been far better if you had,” Ernest said gravely.
“It was a bribe,” father protested; and Ernest nodded.
“Also, the beggar said that there was talk, tea-table gossip and so
forth, about my daughter being seen in public with so notorious a character as
you, and that it was not in keeping with university tone and dignity. Not that
he personally objected—oh, no; but that there was talk and that I would
understand.”
Ernest considered this announcement for a moment, and then said, and his face
was very grave, withal there was a sombre wrath in it:
“There is more behind this than a mere university ideal. Somebody has put
pressure on President Wilcox.”
“Do you think so?” father asked, and his face showed that he was
interested rather than frightened.
“I wish I could convey to you the conception that is dimly forming in my
own mind,” Ernest said. “Never in the history of the world was
society in so terrific flux as it is right now. The swift changes in our
industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious,
political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking
place in the fibre and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these
things. But they are in the air, now, to-day. One can feel the loom of
them—things vast, vague, and terrible. My mind recoils from contemplation
of what they may crystallize into. You heard Wickson talk the other night.
Behind what he said were the same nameless, formless things that I feel. He
spoke out of a superconscious apprehension of them.”
“You mean . . . ?” father began, then paused.
“I mean that there is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that
even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an
oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its
nature may be I refuse to imagine.[2] But what I wanted to say was this: You are
in a perilous position—a peril that my own fear enhances because I am not
able even to measure it. Take my advice and accept the vacation.”
[2]
Though, like Everhard, they did not dream of the nature of it, there were men,
even before his time, who caught glimpses of the shadow. John C. Calhoun said:
“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people
themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined
into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in
the banks.” And that great humanist, Abraham Lincoln, said, just
before his assassination: “I see in the near future a crisis
approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my
country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high
places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong
its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is
aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
“But it would be cowardly,” was the protest.
“Not at all. You are an old man. You have done your work in the world,
and a great work. Leave the present battle to youth and strength. We young
fellows have our work yet to do. Avis will stand by my side in what is to come.
She will be your representative in the battle-front.”
“But they can’t hurt me,” father objected. “Thank God I
am independent. Oh, I assure you, I know the frightful persecution they can
wage on a professor who is economically dependent on his university. But I am
independent. I have not been a professor for the sake of my salary. I can get
along very comfortably on my own income, and the salary is all they can take
away from me.”
“But you do not realize,” Ernest answered. “If all that I
fear be so, your private income, your principal itself, can be taken from you
just as easily as your salary.”
Father was silent for a few minutes. He was thinking deeply, and I could see
the lines of decision forming in his face. At last he spoke.
“I shall not take the vacation.” He paused again. “I shall go
on with my book.[3] You may be wrong, but whether you are wrong or right, I shall
stand by my guns.”
[3]
This book, “Economics and Education,” was published in that year.
Three copies of it are extant; two at Ardis, and one at Asgard. It dealt, in
elaborate detail, with one factor in the persistence of the established,
namely, the capitalistic bias of the universities and common schools. It was a
logical and crushing indictment of the whole system of education that developed
in the minds of the students only such ideas as were favorable to the
capitalistic regime, to the exclusion of all ideas that were inimical and
subversive. The book created a furor, and was promptly suppressed by the
Oligarchy.
“All right,” Ernest said. “You are travelling the same path
that Bishop Morehouse is, and toward a similar smash-up. You’ll both be
proletarians before you’re done with it.”
The conversation turned upon the Bishop, and we got Ernest to explain what he
had been doing with him.
“He is soul-sick from the journey through hell I have given him. I took
him through the homes of a few of our factory workers. I showed him the human
wrecks cast aside by the industrial machine, and he listened to their life
stories. I took him through the slums of San Francisco, and in drunkenness,
prostitution, and criminality he learned a deeper cause than innate depravity.
He is very sick, and, worse than that, he has got out of hand. He is too
ethical. He has been too severely touched. And, as usual, he is unpractical. He
is up in the air with all kinds of ethical delusions and plans for mission work
among the cultured. He feels it is his bounden duty to resurrect the ancient
spirit of the Church and to deliver its message to the masters. He is
overwrought. Sooner or later he is going to break out, and then there’s
going to be a smash-up. What form it will take I can’t even guess. He is
a pure, exalted soul, but he is so unpractical. He’s beyond me. I
can’t keep his feet on the earth. And through the air he is rushing on to
his Gethsemane. And after this his crucifixion. Such high souls are made for
crucifixion.”
“And you?” I asked; and beneath my smile was the seriousness of the
anxiety of love.
“Not I,” he laughed back. “I may be executed, or
assassinated, but I shall never be crucified. I am planted too solidly and
stolidly upon the earth.”
“But why should you bring about the crucifixion of the Bishop?” I
asked. “You will not deny that you are the cause of it.”
“Why should I leave one comfortable soul in comfort when there are
millions in travail and misery?” he demanded back.
“Then why did you advise father to accept the vacation?”
“Because I am not a pure, exalted soul,” was the answer.
“Because I am solid and stolid and selfish. Because I love you and, like
Ruth of old, thy people are my people. As for the Bishop, he has no daughter.
Besides, no matter how small the good, nevertheless his little inadequate wail
will be productive of some good in the revolution, and every little bit
counts.”
I could not agree with Ernest. I knew well the noble nature of Bishop
Morehouse, and I could not conceive that his voice raised for righteousness
would be no more than a little inadequate wail. But I did not yet have the
harsh facts of life at my fingers’ ends as Ernest had. He saw clearly the
futility of the Bishop’s great soul, as coming events were soon to show
as clearly to me.
It was shortly after this day that Ernest told me, as a good story, the offer
he had received from the government, namely, an appointment as United States
Commissioner of Labor. I was overjoyed. The salary was comparatively large, and
would make safe our marriage. And then it surely was congenial work for Ernest,
and, furthermore, my jealous pride in him made me hail the proffered
appointment as a recognition of his abilities.
Then I noticed the twinkle in his eyes. He was laughing at me.
“You are not going to . . . to decline?” I quavered.
“It is a bribe,” he said. “Behind it is the fine hand of
Wickson, and behind him the hands of greater men than he. It is an old trick,
old as the class struggle is old—stealing the captains from the army of
labor. Poor betrayed labor! If you but knew how many of its leaders have been
bought out in similar ways in the past. It is cheaper, so much cheaper, to buy
a general than to fight him and his whole army. There was—but I’ll
not call any names. I’m bitter enough over it as it is. Dear heart, I am
a captain of labor. I could not sell out. If for no other reason, the memory of
my poor old father and the way he was worked to death would prevent.”
The tears were in his eyes, this great, strong hero of mine. He never could
forgive the way his father had been malformed—the sordid lies and the
petty thefts he had been compelled to, in order to put food in his
children’s mouths.
“My father was a good man,” Ernest once said to me. “The soul
of him was good, and yet it was twisted, and maimed, and blunted by the
savagery of his life. He was made into a broken-down beast by his masters, the
arch-beasts. He should be alive to-day, like your father. He had a strong
constitution. But he was caught in the machine and worked to death—for
profit. Think of it. For profit—his life blood transmuted into a
wine-supper, or a jewelled gewgaw, or some similar sense-orgy of the parasitic
and idle rich, his masters, the arch-beasts.”
CHAPTER VII.
THE BISHOP’S VISION
“The Bishop is out of hand,” Ernest wrote me. “He is clear up
in the air. Tonight he is going to begin putting to rights this very miserable
world of ours. He is going to deliver his message. He has told me so, and I
cannot dissuade him. To-night he is chairman of the I.P.H.,[1] and he will embody
his message in his introductory remarks.
[1]
There is no clew to the name of the organization for which these initials
stand.
“May I bring you to hear him? Of course, he is foredoomed to futility. It
will break your heart—it will break his; but for you it will be an
excellent object lesson. You know, dear heart, how proud I am because you love
me. And because of that I want you to know my fullest value, I want to redeem,
in your eyes, some small measure of my unworthiness. And so it is that my pride
desires that you shall know my thinking is correct and right. My views are
harsh; the futility of so noble a soul as the Bishop will show you the
compulsion for such harshness. So come to-night. Sad though this night’s
happening will be, I feel that it will but draw you more closely to me.”
The I.P.H. held its convention that night in San Francisco.[2] This convention
had been called to consider public immorality and the remedy for it. Bishop
Morehouse presided. He was very nervous as he sat on the platform, and I could
see the high tension he was under. By his side were Bishop Dickinson; H. H.
Jones, the head of the ethical department in the University of California; Mrs.
W. W. Hurd, the great charity organizer; Philip Ward, the equally great
philanthropist; and several lesser luminaries in the field of morality and
charity. Bishop Morehouse arose and abruptly began:
[2]
It took but a few minutes to cross by ferry from Berkeley to San Francisco.
These, and the other bay cities, practically composed one community.
“I was in my brougham, driving through the streets. It was night-time.
Now and then I looked through the carriage windows, and suddenly my eyes seemed
to be opened, and I saw things as they really are. At first I covered my eyes
with my hands to shut out the awful sight, and then, in the darkness, the
question came to me: What is to be done? What is to be done? A little later the
question came to me in another way: What would the Master do? And with the
question a great light seemed to fill the place, and I saw my duty sun-clear,
as Saul saw his on the way to Damascus.
“I stopped the carriage, got out, and, after a few minutes’
conversation, persuaded two of the public women to get into the brougham with
me. If Jesus was right, then these two unfortunates were my sisters, and the
only hope of their purification was in my affection and tenderness.
“I live in one of the loveliest localities of San Francisco. The house in
which I live cost a hundred thousand dollars, and its furnishings, books, and
works of art cost as much more. The house is a mansion. No, it is a palace,
wherein there are many servants. I never knew what palaces were good for. I had
thought they were to live in. But now I know. I took the two women of the
street to my palace, and they are going to stay with me. I hope to fill every
room in my palace with such sisters as they.”
The audience had been growing more and more restless and unsettled, and the
faces of those that sat on the platform had been betraying greater and greater
dismay and consternation. And at this point Bishop Dickinson arose, and with an
expression of disgust on his face, fled from the platform and the hall. But
Bishop Morehouse, oblivious to all, his eyes filled with his vision, continued:
“Oh, sisters and brothers, in this act of mine I find the solution of all
my difficulties. I didn’t know what broughams were made for, but now I
know. They are made to carry the weak, the sick, and the aged; they are made to
show honor to those who have lost the sense even of shame.
“I did not know what palaces were made for, but now I have found a use
for them. The palaces of the Church should be hospitals and nurseries for those
who have fallen by the wayside and are perishing.”
He made a long pause, plainly overcome by the thought that was in him, and
nervous how best to express it.
“I am not fit, dear brethren, to tell you anything about morality. I have
lived in shame and hypocrisies too long to be able to help others; but my
action with those women, sisters of mine, shows me that the better way is easy
to find. To those who believe in Jesus and his gospel there can be no other
relation between man and man than the relation of affection. Love alone is
stronger than sin—stronger than death. I therefore say to the rich among
you that it is their duty to do what I have done and am doing. Let each one of
you who is prosperous take into his house some thief and treat him as his
brother, some unfortunate and treat her as his sister, and San Francisco will
need no police force and no magistrates; the prisons will be turned into
hospitals, and the criminal will disappear with his crime.
“We must give ourselves and not our money alone. We must do as Christ
did; that is the message of the Church today. We have wandered far from the
Master’s teaching. We are consumed in our own flesh-pots. We have put
mammon in the place of Christ. I have here a poem that tells the whole story. I
should like to read it to you. It was written by an erring soul who yet saw
clearly.[3] It must not be mistaken for an attack upon the Catholic Church. It is
an attack upon all churches, upon the pomp and splendor of all churches that
have wandered from the Master’s path and hedged themselves in from his
lambs. Here it is:
“The silver trumpets rang across the Dome;
The people knelt upon the ground with awe;
And borne upon the necks of men I saw,
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.
“Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam,
And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red,
Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head;
In splendor and in light the Pope passed home.
“My heart stole back across wide wastes of years
To One who wandered by a lonely sea;
And sought in vain for any place of rest:
‘Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest,
I, only I, must wander wearily,
And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears.’”
[3]
Oscar Wilde, one of the lords of language of the nineteenth century of the
Christian Era.
The audience was agitated, but unresponsive. Yet Bishop Morehouse was not aware
of it. He held steadily on his way.
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