In everything that lives, if one looks searchingly,
is limned the shadow line of an idea—an idea,
dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead,
with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment
with the stern, immobile cast of the non-living.
Daily we move among these unyielding shadows, less
pierceable, more enduring than granite, with the blackness
of ages in them, dominating living, changing bodies,
with dead, unchanging souls. And we meet, also, living
souls dominating dying bodies—living ideas regnant over
decay and death. Do not imagine that I speak of human
life alone. The stamp of persistent or of shifting Will
is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its clod of earth,
as in the gossamer web of being that floats and swims
far over our heads in the free world of air.
Regnant ideas, everywhere! Did you ever see a dead
vine bloom? I have seen it. Last summer I trained
some morning-glory vines up over a second-story balcony;
and every day they blew and curled in the wind,
their white, purple-dashed faces winking at the sun,
radiant with climbing life. Higher every day the green
heads crept, carrying their train of spreading fans waving
before the sun-seeking blossoms. Then all at once
some mischance happened,—some cut-worm or some
mischievous child tore one vine off below, the finest and
most ambitious one, of course. In a few hours the leaves
hung limp, the sappy stem wilted and began to wither;
in a day it was dead,—all but the top, which still clung
longingly to its support, with bright head lifted. I
mourned a little for the buds that could never open now,
and pitied that proud vine whose work in the world was
lost. But the next night there was a storm, a heavy,
driving storm, with beating rain and blinding lightning.
I rose to watch the flashes, and lo! the wonder of the
world! In the blackness of the mid-Night, in the fury
of wind and rain, the dead vine had flowered. Five
white, moon-faced blossoms blew gaily round the skeleton
vine, shining back triumphant at the red lightning.
I gazed at them in dumb wonder. Dear, dead vine,
whose will had been so strong to bloom that in the hour
of its sudden cut-off from the feeding earth it sent the
last sap to its blossoms; and, not waiting for the morning,
brought them forth in storm and flash, as white
night-glories, which should have been the children of
the sun.
In the daylight we all came to look at the wonder,
marveling much, and saying, "Surely these must be the
last." But every day for three days the dead vine
bloomed; and even a week after, when every leaf was
dry and brown, and so thin you could see through it,
one last bud, dwarfed, weak, a very baby of a blossom,
but still white and delicate, with five purple flecks, like
those on the live vine beside it, opened and waved at
the stars, and waited for the early sun. Over death
and decay the Dominant Idea smiled: the vine was in
the world to bloom, to bear white trumpet blossoms
dashed with purple; and it held its will beyond death.
Our modern teaching is that ideas are but attendant
phenomena, impotent to determine the actions or relations
of life, as the image in the glass which should say
to the body it reflects: "I shall shape thee." In truth
we know that directly the body goes from before the
mirror, the transient image is nothingness; but the real
body has its being to live, and will live it, heedless of
vanished phantoms of itself, in response to the ever-shifting
pressure of things without it.
It is thus that the so-called Materialist Conception of
History, the modern Socialists, and a positive majority
of Anarchists would have us look upon the world of
ideas,—shifting, unreal reflections, having naught to do
in the determination of Man's life, but so many mirror
appearances of certain material relations, wholly powerless
to act upon the course of material things. Mind to
them is in itself a blank mirror, though in fact never
wholly blank, because always facing the reality of the
material and bound to reflect some shadow. To-day I
am somebody, to-morrow somebody else, if the scenes
have shifted; my Ego is a gibbering phantom, pirouetting
in the glass, gesticulating, transforming, hourly or
momentarily, gleaming with the phosphor light of a
deceptive unreality, melting like the mist upon the hills.
Rocks, fields, woods, streams, houses, goods, flesh, blood,
bone, sinew,—these are realities, with definite parts to
play, with essential characters that abide under all
changes; but my Ego does not abide; it is manufactured
afresh with every change of these.
I think this unqualified determinism of the material
is a great and lamentable error in our modern progressive
movement; and while I believe it was a wholesome
antidote to the long-continued blunder of Middle Age
theology, viz.: that Mind was an utterly irresponsible
entity making laws of its own after the manner of an
Absolute Emperor, without logic, sequence, or relation,
ruler over matter, and its own supreme determinant, not
excepting God (who was himself the same sort of a mind
writ large)—while I do believe that the modern reconception
of Materialism has done a wholesome thing in
pricking the bubble of such conceit and restoring man
and his "soul" to its "place in nature," I nevertheless
believe that to this also there is a limit; and that the
absolute sway of Matter is quite as mischievous an error
as the unrelated nature of Mind; even that in its direct
action upon personal conduct, it has the more ill effect
of the two. For if the doctrine of free-will has raised
up fanatics and persecutors, who, assuming that men
may be good under all conditions if they merely wish
to be so, have sought to persuade other men's wills with
threats, fines, imprisonments, torture, the spike, the
wheel, the axe, the fagot, in order to make them good
and save them against their obdurate wills; if the doctrine
of Spiritualism, the soul supreme, has done this,
the doctrine of Materialistic Determinism has produced
shifting, self-excusing, worthless, parasitical characters,
who are this now and that at some other time, and anything
and nothing upon principle. "My conditions have
made me so," they cry, and there is no more to be said;
poor mirror-ghosts! how could they help it! To be sure,
the influence of such a character rarely reaches so far
as that of the principled persecutor; but for every one
of the latter, there are a hundred of these easy, doughy
characters, who will fit any baking tin, to whom determinist
self-excusing appeals; so the balance of evil between
the two doctrines is about maintained.
What we need is a true appraisement of the power
and rôle of the Idea. I do not think I am able to give
such a true appraisement; I do not think that any one—even
much greater intellects than mine—will be able to
do it for a long time to come. But I am at least able
to suggest it, to show its necessity, to give a rude
approximation of it.
And first, against the accepted formula of modern
Materialism, "Men are what circumstances make them,"
I set the opposing declaration, "Circumstances are what
men make them"; and I contend that both these things
are true up to the point where the combating powers are
equalized, or one is overthrown. In other words, my
conception of mind, or character, is not that it is a powerless
reflection of a momentary condition of stuff and
form, but an active modifying agent, reacting on its environment
and transforming circumstances, sometimes
greatly, sometimes, though not often, entirely.
All over the kingdom of life, I have said, one may see
dominant ideas working, if one but trains his eyes to
look for them and recognize them. In the human world
there have been many dominant ideas. I cannot conceive
that ever, at any time, the struggle of the body
before dissolution can have been aught but agony. If
the reasoning that insecurity of conditions, the expectation
of suffering, are circumstances which make the soul
of man uneasy, shrinking, timid, what answer will you
give to the challenge of old Ragnar Lodbrog, to that
triumphant death-song hurled out, not by one cast to
his death in the heat of battle, but under slow prison
torture, bitten by serpents, and yet singing: "The goddesses
of death invite me away—now end I my song.
The hours of my life are run out. I shall smile when
I die"? Nor can it be said that this is an exceptional
instance, not to be accounted for by the usual operation
of general law, for old King Lodbrog the Skalder did
only what his fathers did, and his sons and his friends
and his enemies, through long generations; they set the
force of a dominant idea, the idea of the superascendant
ego, against the force of torture and of death, ending
life as they wished to end it, with a smile on their lips.
But a few years ago, did we not read how the helpless
Kaffirs, victimized by the English for the contumacy of
the Boers, having been forced to dig the trenches wherein
for pleasant sport they were to be shot, were lined up
on the edge, and seeing death facing them, began to
chant barbaric strains of triumph, smiling as they fell?
Let us admit that such exultant defiance was owing to
ignorance, to primitive beliefs in gods and hereafters;
but let us admit also that it shows the power of an idea
dominant.
Everywhere in the shells of dead societies, as in the
shells of the sea-slime, we shall see the force of purposive
action, of intent within holding its purpose against obstacles
without.
I think there is no one in the world who can look upon
the steadfast, far-staring face of an Egyptian carving,
or read a description of Egypt's monuments, or gaze
upon the mummied clay of its old dead men, without
feeling that the dominant idea of that people in that age
was to be enduring and to work enduring things, with
the immobility of their great still sky upon them and the
stare of the desert in them. One must feel that whatever
other ideas animated them, and expressed themselves
in their lives, this was the dominant idea. That
which was must remain, no matter at what cost, even if
it were to break the everlasting hills: an idea which
made the live humanity beneath it, born and nurtured
in the coffins of caste, groan and writhe and gnaw its
bandages, till in the fullness of time it passed away: and
still the granite mould of it stares with empty eyes out
across the world, the stern old memory of the Thing-that-was.
I think no one can look upon the marbles wherein
Greek genius wrought the figuring of its soul, without
feeling an apprehension that the things are going to
leap and fly; that in a moment one is like to be set upon
by heroes with spears in their hands, by serpents that
will coil around him; to be trodden by horses that may
trample and flee; to be smitten by these gods that have
as little of the idea of stone in them as a dragon-fly, one
instant poised upon a wind-swayed petal edge. I think
no one can look upon them without realizing at once that
those figures came out of the boil of life; they seem
like rising bubbles about to float into the air, but beneath
them other bubbles rising, and others, and others,—there
will be no end of it. When one's eyes are upon
one group, one feels that behind one, perhaps, a figure
is uptoeing to seize the darts of the air and hurl them
on one's head; one must keep whirling to face the
miracle that appears about to be wrought—stone leaping!
And this though nearly every one is minus some
of the glory the old Greek wrought into it so long ago;
even the broken stumps of arms and legs live. And the
dominant idea is Activity, and the beauty and strength
of it. Change, swift, ever-circling Change! The making
of things and the casting of them away, as children
cast away their toys, not interested that these shall endure,
so that they themselves realize incessant activity.
Full of creative power, what matter if the creature perished.
So there was an endless procession of changing
shapes in their schools, their philosophies, their dramas,
their poems, till at last it wore itself to death. And the
marvel passed away from the world. But still their
marbles live to show what manner of thoughts dominated
them.
And if we wish to know what master-thought ruled the
lives of men when the mediæval period had had time
to ripen it, one has only at this day to stray into some
quaint, out-of-the-way English village, where a strong
old towered Church yet stands in the midst of little
straw-thatched cottages, like a brooding mother-hen surrounded
by her chickens. Everywhere the greatening
of God, and the lessening of Man: the Church so looming,
the home so little. The search for the spirit, for the
enduring thing (not the poor endurance of granite which
in the ages crumbles, but the eternal), the eternal,—and
contempt for the body which perishes, manifest in
studied uncleanliness, in mortifications of the flesh, as
if the spirit should have spat its scorn upon it.
Such was the dominant idea of that middle age which
has been too much cursed by modernists. For the men
who built the castles and the cathedrals were men of
mighty works, though they made no books, and though
their souls spread crippled wings, because of their very
endeavors to soar too high. The spirit of voluntary subordination
for the accomplishment of a great work, which
proclaimed the aspiration of the common soul,—that was
the spirit wrought into the cathedral stones; and it is
not wholly to be condemned.
In waking dream, when the shadow-shapes of world-ideas
swim before the vision, one sees the Middle-Age
Soul an ill-contorted, half-formless thing, with dragon
wings and a great, dark, tense face, strained sunward
with blind eyes.
If now we look around us to see what idea dominates
our own civilization, I do not know that it is even as
attractive as this piteous monster of the old darkness.
The relativity of things has altered: Man has risen and
God has descended. The modern village has better homes
and less pretentious churches. Also the conception of
dirt and disease as much-sought afflictions, the patient
suffering of which is a meet offering to win God's pardon,
has given place to the emphatic promulgation of cleanliness.
We have Public School nurses notifying parents
that "pediculosis capitis" is a very contagious and unpleasant
disease; we have cancer associations gathering
up such cancers as have attached themselves to impecunious
persons, and carefully experimenting with a view
to cleaning them out of the human race; we have tuberculosis
societies attempting the Herculean labor of clearing
the Augean stables of our modern factories of the
deadly bacillus, and they have got as far as spittoons
with water in them in some factories; and others, and
others, and others, which, while not yet overwhelmingly
successful in their avowed purposes, are evidence sufficient
that humanity no longer seeks dirt as a means of grace.
We laugh at those old superstitions, and talk much about
exact experimental knowledge. We endeavor to galvanize
the Greek corpse, and pretend that we enjoy
physical culture. We dabble in many things; but the one
great real idea of our age, not copied from any other,
not pretended, not raised to life by any conjuration, is
the Much Making of Things,—not the making of beautiful
things, not the joy of spending living energy in creative
work; rather the shameless, merciless driving and
over-driving, wasting and draining of the last bit of
energy, only to produce heaps and heaps of things,—things
ugly, things harmful, things useless, and at the
best largely unnecessary. To what end are they produced?
Mostly the producer does not know; still less
does he care. But he is possessed with the idea that he
must do it, every one is doing it, and every year the
making of things goes on more and faster; there are
mountain ranges of things made and making, and still
men go about desperately seeking to increase the list
of created things, to start fresh heaps and to add to the
existing heaps. And with what agony of body, under
what stress and strain of danger and fear of danger,
with what mutilations and maimings and lamings they
struggle on, dashing themselves out against these rocks
of wealth! Verily, if the vision of the Mediæval Soul
is painful in its blind staring and pathetic striving,
grotesque in its senseless tortures, the Soul of the
Modern is most amazing with its restless, nervous eyes,
ever searching the corners of the universe, its restless,
nervous hands ever reaching and grasping for some useless
toil.
And certainly the presence of things in abundance,
things empty and things vulgar and things absurd, as
well as things convenient and useful, has produced the
desire for the possession of things, the exaltation of the
possession of things. Go through the business street of
any city, where the tilted edges of the strata of things
are exposed to gaze, and look at the faces of the people
as they pass,—not at the hungry and smitten ones who
fringe the sidewalks and plaint dolefully for alms, but
at the crowd,—and see what idea is written on their faces.
On those of the women, from the ladies of the horse-shows
to the shop girls out of the factory, there is a
sickening vanity, a consciousness of their clothes, as of
some jackdaw in borrowed feathers. Look for the pride
and glory of the free, strong, beautiful body, lithe-moving
and powerful. You will not see it. You will see
mincing steps, bodies tilted to show the cut of a skirt,
simpering, smirking faces, with eyes cast about seeking
admiration for the gigantic bow of ribbon in the overdressed
hair. In the caustic words of an acquaintance,
to whom I once said, as we walked, "Look at the amount
of vanity on all these women's faces," "No: look at the
little bit of womanhood showing out of all that vanity!"
And on the faces of the men, coarseness! Coarse
desires for coarse things, and lots of them: the stamp
is set so unmistakably that "the wayfarer though a fool
need not err therein." Even the frightful anxiety and
restlessness begotten of the creation of all this, is less
distasteful than the abominable expression of lust for
the things created.
Such is the dominant idea of the western world, at
least in these our days. You may see it wherever you
look, impressed plainly on things and on men; very likely,
if you look in the glass, you will see it there. And if
some archæologist of a long future shall some day unbury
the bones of our civilization, where ashes or flood
shall have entombed it, he will see this frightful idea
stamped on the factory walls he shall uncover, with their
rows and rows of square lightholes, their tons upon tons
of toothed steel, grinning out of the skull of this our
life; its acres of silk and velvet, its square miles of tinsel
and shoddy. No glorious marbles of nymphs and fawns,
whose dead images are yet so sweet that one might wish
to kiss them still; no majestic figures of winged horses,
with men's faces and lions' paws casting their colossal
symbolism in a mighty spell forward upon Time, as those
old stone chimeras of Babylon yet do; but meaningless
iron giants, of wheels and teeth, whose secret is forgotten,
but whose business was to grind men up, and spit
them out as housefuls of woven stuffs, bazaars of trash,
wherethrough other men might wade. The statues he
shall find will bear no trace of mythic dream or mystic
symbol; they will be statues of merchants and iron-masters
and militiamen, in tailored coats and pantaloons
and proper hats and shoes.
But the dominant idea of the age and land does not
necessarily mean the dominant idea of any single life.
I doubt not that in those long gone days, far away by the
banks of the still Nile, in the abiding shadow of the
pyramids, under the heavy burden of other men's stolidity,
there went to and fro restless, active, rebel souls who
hated all that the ancient society stood for, and with burning
hearts sought to overthrow it.
I am sure that in the midst of all the agile Greek
intellect created, there were those who went about with
downbent eyes, caring nothing for it all, seeking some
higher revelation, willing to abandon the joys of life,
so that they drew near to some distant, unknown perfection
their fellows knew not of. I am certain that in the
dark ages, when most men prayed and cowered, and beat
and bruised themselves, and sought afflictions, like that
St. Teresa who said, "Let me suffer, or die," there were
some, many, who looked on the world as a chance jest,
who despised or pitied their ignorant comrades, and
tried to compel the answers of the universe to their
questionings, by the patient, quiet searching which came
to be Modern Science. I am sure there were hundreds,
thousands of them, of whom we have never heard.
And now, to-day, though the Society about us is
dominated by Thing-Worship, and will stand so marked
for all time, that is no reason any single soul should be.
Because the one thing seemingly worth doing to my
neighbor, to all my neighbors, is to pursue dollars, that
is no reason I should pursue dollars. Because my neighbors
conceive they need an inordinate heap of carpets,
furniture, clocks, china, glass, tapestries, mirrors, clothes,
jewels—and servants to care for them, and detectives to
keep an eye on the servants, judges to try the thieves, and
politicians to appoint the judges, jails to punish the culprits,
and wardens to watch in the jails, and tax collectors
to gather support for the wardens, and fees for the tax
collectors, and strong houses to hold the fees, so that
none but the guardians thereof can make off with them,—and
therefore, to keep this host of parasites, need other
men to work for them, and make the fees; because my
neighbors want all this, is that any reason I should devote
myself to such a barren folly? and bow my neck
to serve to keep up the gaudy show?
Must we, because the Middle Age was dark and blind
and brutal, throw away the one good thing it wrought
into the fibre of Man, that the inside of a human being
was worth more than the outside? that to conceive a
higher thing than oneself and live toward that is the only
way of living worthily? The goal strived for should,
and must, be a very different one from that which led
the mediæval fanatics to despise the body and belabor it
with hourly crucifixions. But one can recognize the
claims and the importance of the body without therefore
sacrificing truth, honor, simplicity, and faith, to the vulgar
gauds of body-service, whose very decorations debase
the thing they might be supposed to exalt.
I have said before that the doctrine that men are
nothing and circumstances all, has been, and is, the bane
of our modern social reform movements.
Our youth, themselves animated by the spirit of the
old teachers who believed in the supremacy of ideas,
even in the very hour of throwing away that teaching,
look with burning eyes to the social East, and believe that
wonders of revolution are soon to be accomplished. In
their enthusiasm they foreread the gospel of Circumstances
to mean that very soon the pressure of material
development must break down the social system—they
give the rotten thing but a few years to last; and then,
they themselves shall witness the transformation, partake
in its joys. The few years pass away and nothing happens;
enthusiasm cools. Behold these same idealists then,
successful business men, professionals, property owners,
money lenders, creeping into the social ranks they once
despised, pitifully, contemptibly, at the skirts of some
impecunious personage to whom they have lent money,
or done some professional service gratis; behold them
lying, cheating, tricking, flattering, buying and selling
themselves for any frippery, any cheap little pretense.
The Dominant Social Idea has seized them, their lives
are swallowed up in it; and when you ask the reason
why, they tell you that Circumstances compelled them
so to do. If you quote their lies to them, they smile with
calm complacency, assure you that when Circumstances
demand lies, lies are a great deal better than truth; that
tricks are sometimes more effective than honest dealing;
that flattering and duping do not matter, if the end to be
attained is desirable; and that under existing "Circumstances"
life isn't possible without all this; that it is going
to be possible whenever Circumstances have made truth-telling
easier than lying, but till then a man must look out
for himself, by all means. And so the cancer goes on
rotting away the moral fibre, and the man becomes a
lump, a squash, a piece of slippery slime, taking all shapes
and losing all shapes, according to what particular hole
or corner he wishes to glide into, a disgusting embodiment
of the moral bankruptcy begotten by Thing-Worship.
Had he been dominated by a less material conception
of life, had his will not been rotted by the intellectual
reasoning of it out of its existence, by its acceptance of
its own nothingness, the unselfish aspirations of his earlier
years would have grown and strengthened by exercise
and habit; and his protest against the time might have
been enduringly written, and to some purpose.
Will it be said that the Pilgrim fathers did not hew,
out of the New England ice and granite, the idea which
gathered them together out of their scattered and obscure
English villages, and drove them in their frail ships over
the Atlantic in midwinter, to cut their way against all opposing
forces? Were they not common men, subject to
the operation of common law? Will it be said that Circumstances
aided them? When death, disease, hunger,
and cold had done their worst, not one of those remaining
was willing by an easy lie to return to material comfort
and the possibility of long days.
Had our modern social revolutionists the vigorous and
undaunted conception of their own powers that these
had, our social movements would not be such pitiful
abortions,—core-rotten even before the outward flecks
appear.
"Give a labor leader a political job, and the system
becomes all right," laugh our enemies; and they point
mockingly to Terence Powderly and his like; and they
quote John Burns, who as soon as he went into Parliament
declared: "The time of the agitator is past; the
time of the legislator has come." "Let an Anarchist marry
an heiress, and the country is safe," they sneer:—and
they have the right to sneer. But would they have that
right, could they have it, if our lives were not in the
first instance dominated by more insistent desires than
those we would fain have others think we hold most dear?
It is the old story: "Aim at the stars, and you may
hit the top of the gatepost; but aim at the ground, and
you will hit the ground."
It is not to be supposed that any one will attain to the
full realization of what he purposes, even when those
purposes do not involve united action with others; he will
fall short; he will in some measure be overcome by contending
or inert opposition. But something he will attain,
if he continues to aim high.
What, then, would I have? you ask. I would have men
invest themselves with the dignity of an aim higher than
the chase for wealth; choose a thing to do in life outside
of the making of things, and keep it in mind,—not for
a day, nor a year, but for a lifetime. And then keep
faith with themselves! Not be a light-o'-love, to-day professing
this and to-morrow that, and easily reading oneself
out of both whenever it becomes convenient; not
advocating a thing to-day, and to-morrow kissing its
enemies' sleeve, with that weak, coward cry in the mouth,
"Circumstances make me." Take a good look into yourself,
and if you love Things and the power and the plenitude
of Things better than you love your own dignity,
human dignity, Oh, say so, say so! Say it to yourself, and
abide by it. But do not blow hot and cold in one breath.
Do not try to be a social reformer and a respected
possessor of Things at the same time. Do not preach the
straight and narrow way while going joyously upon the
wide one. Preach the wide one, or do not preach at all;
but do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help
usher in a free society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair
for it. Say honestly, "I love armchairs better than
free men, and pursue them because I choose; not because
circumstances make me. I love hats, large, large hats,
with many feathers and great bows; and I would rather
have those hats than trouble myself about social dreams
that will never be accomplished in my day. The world
worships hats, and I wish to worship with them."
But if you choose the liberty and pride and strength
of the single soul, and the free fraternization of men, as
the purpose which your life is to make manifest, then do
not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is strong and
will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle
perhaps, the strength will grow. And the foregoing of
possessions for which others barter the last possibility of
freedom, will become easy.
At the end of life you may close your eyes, saying:
"I have not been dominated by the Dominant Idea of my
Age; I have chosen mine own allegiance, and served it.
I have proved by a lifetime that there is that in man which
saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance,
which in the end conquers and remoulds Circumstance,—the
immortal fire of Individual Will, which is the salvation
of the Future."
Let us have Men, Men who will say a word to their
souls and keep it—keep it not when it is easy, but keep it
when it is hard—keep it when the storm roars and there
is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder before, and
one's eyes are blinded and one's ears deafened with the
war of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden
sky and the gray dreariness that never lifts. Hold unto
the last: that is what it means to have a Dominant Idea,
where the same idea has been worked out by a whole
and unmake Circumstance.
There are two spirits abroad in the world,—the
spirit of Caution, the spirit of Dare, the spirit of
Quiescence, the spirit of Unrest; the spirit of
Immobility, the spirit of Change; the spirit of Hold-fast-to-that-which-you-have,
the spirit of Let-go-and-fly-to-that-which-you-have-not;
the spirit of the slow and steady
builder, careful of its labors, loath to part with any of
its achievements, wishful to keep, and unable to discriminate
between what is worth keeping and what is better
cast aside, and the spirit of the inspirational destroyer,
fertile in creative fancies, volatile, careless in its luxuriance
of effort, inclined to cast away the good together
with the bad.
Society is a quivering balance, eternally struck afresh,
between these two. Those who look upon Man, as most
Anarchists do, as a link in the chain of evolution, see
in these two social tendencies the sum of the tendencies
of individual men, which in common with the tendencies
of all organic life are the result of the action and counteraction
of inheritance and adaptation. Inheritance, continually
tending to repeat what has been, long, long after
it is outgrown; adaptation continually tending to break
down forms. The same tendencies under other names
are observed in the inorganic world as well, and anyone
who is possessed by the modern scientific mania for
Monism can easily follow out the line to the vanishing
point of human knowledge.
There has been, in fact, a strong inclination to do this
among a portion of the more educated Anarchists, who
having been working men first and Anarchists by reason
of their instinctive hatred to the boss, later became students
and, swept away by their undigested science, immediately
conceived that it was necessary to fit their
Anarchism to the revelations of the microscope, else the
theory might as well be given up. I remember with considerable
amusement a heated discussion some five or
six years since, wherein doctors and embryo doctors
sought for a justification of Anarchism in the development
of the amoeba, while a fledgling engineer searched
for it in mathematical quantities.
Myself at one time asserted very stoutly that no one
could be an Anarchist and believe in God at the same
time. Others assert as stoutly that one cannot accept the
spiritualist philosophy and be an Anarchist.
At present I hold with C. L. James, the most learned
of American Anarchists, that one's metaphysical system
has very little to do with the matter. The chain of reasoning
which once appeared so conclusive to me, namely,
that Anarchism being a denial of authority over the
individual could not co-exist with a belief in a Supreme
Ruler of the universe, is contradicted in the case of Leo
Tolstoy, who comes to the conclusion that none has a
right to rule another just because of his belief in God,
just because he believes that all are equal children of one
father, and therefore none has a right to rule the other.
I speak of him because he is a familiar and notable
personage, but there have frequently been instances
where the same idea has been worked out by a whole
sect of believers, especially in the earlier (and persecuted)
stages of their development.
It no longer seems necessary to me, therefore, that one
should base his Anarchism upon any particular world
conception; it is a theory of the relations due to man
and comes as an offered solution to the societary
problems arising from the existence of these two tendencies
of which I have spoken. No matter where those
tendencies come from, all alike recognize them as existent;
and however interesting the speculation, however
fascinating to lose oneself back, back in the molecular
storm-whirl wherein the figure of man is seen merely as
a denser, fiercer group, a livelier storm centre, moving
among others, impinging upon others, but nowhere separate,
nowhere exempt from the same necessity that acts
upon all other centers of force,—it is by no means necessary
in order to reason oneself into Anarchism.
Sufficient are a good observant eye and a reasonably
reflecting brain, for anyone, lettered or unlettered, to
recognize the desirability of Anarchistic aims. This is
not to say that increased knowledge will not confirm
and expand one's application of this fundamental concept;
(the beauty of truth is that at every new discovery
of fact we find how much wider and deeper it
is than we at first thought it). But it means that first
of all Anarchism is concerned with present conditions,
and with the very plain and common people; and is by
no means a complex or difficult proposition.
Anarchism, alone, apart from any proposed economic
reform, is just the latest reply out of many the past has
given, to that daring, breakaway, volatile, changeful
spirit which is never content. The society of which we
are part puts certain oppressions upon us,—oppressions
which have arisen out of the very changes accomplished
by this same spirit, combined with the hard and fast lines
of old habits acquired and fixed before the changes were
thought of. Machinery, which as our Socialistic comrades
continually emphasize, has wrought a revolution
in Industry, is the creation of the Dare Spirit; it has
fought its way against ancient customs, privilege, and
cowardice at every step, as the history of any invention
would show if traced backward through all its transformations.
And what is the result of it? That a system
of working, altogether appropriate to hand production
and capable of generating no great oppressions while
industry remained in that state, has been stretched,
strained to fit production in mass, till we are reaching
the bursting point; once more the spirit of Dare must
assert itself—claim new freedoms, since the old ones
are rendered null and void by the present methods of
production.
To speak in detail: in the old days of Master and
Man—not so old but what many of the older workingmen
can recall the conditions, the workshop was a fairly
easy-going place where employer and employed worked
together, knew no class feelings, chummed it out of
hours, as a rule were not obliged to rush, and when they
were, relied upon the principle of common interest and
friendship (not upon a slave-owner's power) for overtime
assistance. The proportional profit on each man's
labor may even have been in general higher, but the
total amount possible to be undertaken by one employer
was relatively so small that no tremendous aggregations
of wealth could arise. To be an employer gave no man
power over another's incomings and outgoings, neither
upon his speech while at work, nor to force him beyond
endurance when busy, nor to subject him to fines and
tributes for undesired things, such as ice-water, dirty
spittoons, cups of undrinkable tea and the like; nor to
the unmentionable indecencies of the large factory. The
individuality of the workman was a plainly recognized
quantity: his life was his own; he could not be locked
in and driven to death, like a street-car horse, for the
good of the general public and the paramount importance
of Society.
With the application of steam-power and the development
of Machinery, came these large groupings of
workers, this subdivision of work, which has made of
the employer a man apart, having interests hostile to
those of his employes, living in another circle altogether,
knowing nothing of them but as so many units of power,
to be reckoned with as he does his machines, for the
most part despising them, at his very best regarding them
as dependents whom he is bound in some respects to
care for, as a humane man cares for an old horse he
cannot use. Such is his relation to his employes; while
to the general public he becomes simply an immense
cuttle-fish with tentacles reaching everywhere,—each tiny
profit-sucking mouth producing no great effect, but in
aggregate drawing up such a body of wealth as makes
any declaration of equality or freedom between him and
the worker a thing to laugh at.
The time is come therefore when the spirit of Dare
calls loud through every factory and workshop for a
change in the relations of master and man. There must
be some arrangement possible which will preserve the
benefits of the new production and at the same time restore
the individual dignity of the worker,—give back
the bold independence of the old master of his trade,
together with such added freedoms as may properly
accrue to him as his special advantage from society's
material developments.
This is the particular message of Anarchism to the
worker. It is not an economic system; it does not come
to you with detailed plans of how you, the workers, are
to conduct industry; nor systemized methods of exchange;
nor careful paper organizations of "the administration
of things." It simply calls upon the spirit of
individuality to rise up from its abasement, and hold
itself paramount in no matter what economic reorganization
shall come about. Be men first of all, not held
in slavery by the things you make; let your gospel be,
"Things for men, not men for things."
Socialism, economically considered, is a positive
proposition for such reorganization. It is an attempt, in
the main, to grasp at those great new material gains
which have been the special creation of the last forty
or fifty years. It has not so much in view the reclamation
and further assertion of the personality of the worker as
it has a just distribution of products.
Now it is perfectly apparent that Anarchy, having to
do almost entirely with the relations of men in their
thoughts and feelings, and not with the positive organization
of production and distribution, an Anarchist needs
to supplement his Anarchism by some economic propositions,
which may enable him to put in practical shape to
himself and others this possibility of independent manhood.
That will be his test in choosing any such proposition,—the
measure in which individuality is secured. It
is not enough for him that a comfortable ease, a pleasant
and well-ordered routine, shall be secured; free play for
the spirit of change—that is his first demand.
Every Anarchist has this in common with every other
Anarchist, that the economic system must be subservient
to this end; no system recommends itself to him by the
mere beauty and smoothness of its working; jealous of
the encroachments of the machine, he looks with fierce
suspicion upon an arithmetic with men for units, a society
running in slots and grooves, with the precision so beautiful
to one in whom the love of order is first, but which
only makes him sniff—"Pfaugh! it smells of machine
oil."
There are, accordingly, several economic schools among
Anarchists; there are Anarchist Individualists, Anarchist
Mutualists, Anarchist Communists and Anarchist Socialists.
In times past these several schools have bitterly
denounced each other and mutually refused to recognize
each other as Anarchists at all. The more narrow-minded
on both sides still do so; true, they do not consider
it is narrow-mindedness, but simply a firm and
solid grasp of the truth, which does not permit of
tolerance towards error. This has been the attitude of
the bigot in all ages, and Anarchism no more than any
other new doctrine has escaped its bigots. Each of these
fanatical adherents of either collectivism or individualism
believes that no Anarchism is possible without that particular
economic system as its guarantee, and is of course
thoroughly justified from his own standpoint. With the
extension of what Comrade Brown calls the New Spirit,
however, this old narrowness is yielding to the broader,
kindlier and far more reasonable idea, that all these
economic conceptions may be experimented with, and
there is nothing un-Anarchistic about any of them until
the element of compulsion enters and obliges unwilling
persons to remain in a community whose economic arrangements
they do not agree to. (When I say "do not
agree to" I do not mean that they have a mere distaste
for, or that they think might well be altered for some
other preferable arrangement, but with which, nevertheless,
they quite easily put up, as two persons each living
in the same house and having different tastes in decoration,
will submit to some color of window shade or bit
of bric-a-brac which he does not like so well, but which
nevertheless, he cheerfully puts up with for the satisfaction
of being with his friend. I mean serious differences
which in their opinion threaten their essential liberties.
I make this explanation about trifles, because the objections
which are raised to the doctrine that men may
live in society freely, almost always degenerate into trivialities,—such
as, "what would you do if two ladies
wanted the same hat?" etc. We do not advocate the
abolition of common sense, and every person of sense is
willing to surrender his preferences at times, provided
he is not compelled to at all costs.)
Therefore I say that each group of persons acting
socially in freedom may choose any of the proposed
systems, and be just as thorough-going Anarchists as
those who select another. If this standpoint be accepted,
we are rid of those outrageous excommunications which
belong properly to the Church of Rome, and which serve
no purpose but to bring us into deserved contempt with
outsiders.
Furthermore, having accepted it from a purely theoretical
process of reasoning, I believe one is then in an
attitude of mind to perceive certain material factors in
the problem which account for these differences in proposed
systems, and which even demand such differences,
so long as production is in its present state.
I shall now dwell briefly upon these various propositions,
and explain, as I go along, what the material factors
are to which I have just alluded. Taking the last
first, namely, Anarchist Socialism,—its economic program
is the same as that of political Socialism, in its entirety;—I
mean before the working of practical politics has
frittered the Socialism away into a mere list of governmental
ameliorations. Such Anarchist Socialists hold
that the State, the Centralized Government, has been and
ever will be the business agent of the property-owning
class; that it is an expression of a certain material condition
purely, and with the passing of that condition the
State must also pass; that Socialism, meaning the complete
taking over of all forms of property from the hands
of men as the indivisible possession of Man, brings with
it as a logical, inevitable result the dissolution of the
State. They believe that every individual having an
equal claim upon the social production, the incentive to
grabbing and holding being gone, crimes (which are in
nearly all cases the instinctive answer to some antecedent
denial of that claim to one's share) will vanish, and with
them the last excuse for the existence of the State. They
do not, as a rule, look forward to any such transformations
in the material aspect of society, as some of the
rest of us do. A Londoner once said to me that he believed
London would keep on growing, the flux and reflux
of nations keep on pouring through its serpentine
streets, its hundred thousand 'buses keep on jaunting just
the same, and all that tremendous traffic which fascinates
and horrifies continue rolling like a great flood up and
down, up and down, like the sea-sweep,—after the realization
of Anarchism, as it does now. That Londoner's
name was John Turner; he said, on the same occasion,
that he believed thoroughly in the economics of Socialism.
Now this branch of the Anarchist party came out of
the old Socialist party, and originally represented the
revolutionary wing of that party, as opposed to those
who took up the notion of using politics. And I believe
the material reason which accounts for their acceptance
of that particular economic scheme is this (of course it
applies to all European Socialists) that the social development
of Europe is a thing of long-continued history;
that almost from time immemorial there has been
a recognized class struggle; that no workman living, nor
yet his father, nor his grandfather, nor his great-grandfather
has seen the land of Europe pass in vast blocks
from an unclaimed public inheritance into the hands of
an ordinary individual like himself, without a title or
any distinguishing mark above himself, as we in America
have seen. The land and the land-holder have been
to him always unapproachable quantities,—a recognized
source of oppression, class, and class-possession.
Again, the industrial development in town and city—coming
as a means of escape from feudal oppression,
but again bringing with it its own oppressions, also with
a long history of warfare behind it, has served to bind
the sense of class fealty upon the common people of the
manufacturing towns; so that blind, stupid, and Church-ridden
as they no doubt are, there is a vague, dull, but
very certainly existing feeling that they must look for help
in association together, and regard with suspicion or indifference
any proposition which proposes to help them
by helping their employers. Moreover, Socialism has
been an ever recurring dream through the long story of
revolt in Europe; Anarchists, like others, are born into
it. It is not until they pass over seas, and come in contact
with other conditions, breathe the atmosphere of
other thoughts, that they are able to see other possibilities
as well.
If I may venture, at this point, a criticism of this position
of the Anarchist Socialist, I would say that the
great flaw in this conception of the State is in supposing
it to be of simple origin; the State is not merely the tool
of the governing classes; it has its root far down in the
religious development of human nature; and will not
fall apart merely through the abolition of classes and
property. There is other work to be done. As to the
economic program, I shall criticise that, together with all
the other propositions, when I sum up.
Anarchist Communism is a modification, rather an
evolution, of Anarchist Socialism. Most Anarchist Communists,
I believe, do look forward to great changes in
the distribution of people upon the earth's surface through
the realization of Anarchism. Most of them agree that
the opening up of the land together with the free use
of tools would lead to a breaking up of these vast communities
called cities, and the formation of smaller groups
or communes which shall be held together by a free
recognition of common interests only.
While Socialism looks forward to a further extension
of the modern triumph of Commerce—which is that it
has brought the products of the entire earth to your
door-step—free Communism looks upon such a fever of
exportation and importation as an unhealthy development,
and expects rather a more self-reliant development
of home resources, doing away with the mass of supervision
required for the systematic conduct of such world
exchange. It appeals to the plain sense of the workers,
by proposing that they who now consider themselves
helpless dependents upon the boss's ability to give them
a job, shall constitute themselves independent producing
groups, take the materials, do the work (they do that
now), deposit the products in the warehouses, taking
what they want for themselves, and letting others take
the balance. To do this no government, no employer, no
money system is necessary. There is only necessary a
decent regard for one's own and one's fellow-worker's
self-hood. It is not likely, indeed it is devoutly to be
hoped, that no such large aggregations of men as now
assemble daily in mills and factories, will ever come
together by mutual desire. (A factory is a hot-bed for
all that is vicious in human nature, and largely because
of its crowding only.)
The notion that men cannot work together unless they
have a driving-master to take a percentage of their product,
is contrary both to good sense and observed fact.
As a rule bosses simply make confusion worse confounded
when they attempt to mix in a workman's snarls, as every
mechanic has had practical demonstration of; and as to
social effort, why men worked in common while they
were monkeys yet; if you don't believe it, go and watch
the monkeys. They don't surrender their individual freedom,
either.
In short, the real workmen will make their own regulations,
decide when and where and how things shall be
done. It is not necessary that the projector of an Anarchist
Communist society shall say in what manner
separate industries shall be conducted, nor do they presume
to. He simply conjures the spirit of Dare and
Do in the plainest workmen—says to them: "It is you who
know how to mine, how to dig, how to cut; you will
know how to organize your work without a dictator; we
cannot tell you, but we have full faith that you will find
the way yourselves. You will never be free men until
you acquire that same self-faith."
As to the problem of the exact exchange of equivalents
which so frets the reformers of other schools, to him
it does not exist. So there is enough, who cares? The
sources of wealth remain indivisible forever; who cares
if one has a little more or less, so all have enough? Who
cares if something goes to waste? Let it waste. The
rotted apple fertilizes the ground as well as if it had
comforted the animal economy first. And, indeed, you
who worry so much about system and order and adjustment
of production to consumption, you waste more
human energy in making your account than the precious
calculation is worth. Hence money with all its retinue
of complications and trickeries is abolished.
Small, independent, self-resourceful, freely cooperating
communes—this is the economic ideal which is accepted
by most of the Anarchists of the Old World to-day.
As to the material factor which developed this ideal
among Europeans, it is the recollection and even some
still remaining vestiges of the mediæval village commune—those
oases in the great Sahara of human degradation
presented in the history of the Middle Ages, when the
Catholic Church stood triumphant upon Man in the dust.
Such is the ideal glamored with the dead gold of a sun
which has set, which gleams through the pages of Morris
and Kropotkin. We in America never knew the village
commune. White Civilization struck our shores in a
broad tide-sheet and swept over the country inclusively;
among us was never seen the little commune growing
up from a state of barbarism independently, out of
primary industries, and maintaining itself within itself.
There was no gradual change from the mode of life of
the native people to our own; there was a wiping out
and a complete transplantation of the latest form of
European civilization. The idea of the little commune,
therefore, comes instinctively to the Anarchists of
Europe,—particularly the continental ones; with them it
is merely the conscious development of a submerged
instinct. With Americans it is an importation.
I believe that most Anarchist Communists avoid the
blunder of the Socialists in regarding the State as the
offspring of material conditions purely, though they lay
great stress upon its being the tool of Property, and
contend that in one form or another the State will exist
so long as there is property at all.
I pass to the extreme Individualists,—those who hold
to the tradition of political economy, and are firm in the
idea that the system of employer and employed, buying
and selling, banking, and all the other essential institutions
of Commercialism, centering upon private property,
are in themselves good, and are rendered vicious merely
by the interference of the State. Their chief economic
propositions are: land to be held by individuals or companies
for such time and in such allotments as they use
only; redistribution to take place as often as the members
of the community shall agree; what constitutes use to
be decided by each community, presumably in town meeting
assembled; disputed cases to be settled by a so-called
free jury to be chosen by lot out of the entire group;
members not coinciding in the decisions of the group to
betake themselves to outlying lands not occupied, without
let or hindrance from any one.
Money to represent all staple commodities, to be issued
by whomsoever pleases; naturally, it would come to individuals
depositing their securities with banks and accepting
bank notes in return; such bank notes representing
the labor expended in production and being issued in
sufficient quantity, (there being no limit upon any one's
starting in the business, whenever interest began to rise
more banks would be organized, and thus the rate per
cent would be constantly checked by competition), exchange
would take place freely, commodities would circulate,
business of all kinds would be stimulated, and,
the government privilege being taken away from inventions,
industries would spring up at every turn, bosses
would be hunting men rather than men bosses, wages
would rise to the full measure of the individual production,
and forever remain there. Property, real property,
would at last exist, which it does not at the present day,
because no man gets what he makes.
The charm in this program is that it proposes no
sweeping changes in our daily retinue; it does not bewilder
us as more revolutionary propositions do. Its
remedies are self-acting ones; they do not depend upon
conscious efforts of individuals to establish justice and
build harmony; competition in freedom is the great automatic
valve which opens or closes as demands increase
or diminish, and all that is necessary is to let well enough
alone and not attempt to assist it.
It is sure that nine Americans in ten who have never
heard of any of these programs before, will listen with
far more interest and approval to this than to the others.
The material reason which explains this attitude of mind
is very evident. In this country outside of the Negro
question we have never had the historic division of
classes; we are just making that history now; we have
never felt the need of the associative spirit of workman
with workman, because in our society it has been the individual
that did things; the workman of to-day was
the employer to-morrow; vast opportunities lying open
to him in the undeveloped territory, he shouldered his
tools and struck out single-handed for himself. Even
now, fiercer and fiercer though the struggle is growing,
tighter and tighter though the workman is getting
cornered, the line of division between class and class
is constantly being broken, and the first motto of the
American is "the Lord helps him who helps himself."
Consequently this economic program, whose key-note is
"let alone", appeals strongly to the traditional sympathies
and life habits of a people who have themselves seen
an almost unbounded patrimony swept up, as a gambler
sweeps his stakes, by men who played with them at school
or worked with them in one shop a year or ten years
before.
This particular branch of the Anarchist party does not
accept the Communist position that Government arises
from Property; on the contrary, they hold Government
responsible for the denial of real property (viz.: to
the producer the exclusive possession of what he has
produced). They lay more stress upon its metaphysical
origin in the authority-creating Fear in human nature.
Their attack is directed centrally upon the idea of
Authority; thus the material wrongs seem to flow from
the spiritual error (if I may venture the word without
fear of misconstruction), which is precisely the reverse
of the Socialistic view.
Truth lies not "between the two," but in a synthesis
of the two opinions.
Anarchist Mutualism is a modification of the program
of Individualism, laying more emphasis upon organization,
co-operation and free federation of the workers.
To these the trade union is the nucleus of the free co-operative
group, which will obviate the necessity of an
employer, issue time-checks to its members, take charge
of the finished product, exchange with different trade
groups for their mutual advantage through the central
federation, enable its members to utilize their credit, and
likewise insure them against loss. The mutualist position
on the land question is identical with that of the Individualists,
as well as their understanding of the State.
The material factor which accounts for such differences
as there are between Individualists and Mutualists,
is, I think, the fact that the first originated in the
brains of those who, whether workmen or business men,
lived by so-called independent exertion. Josiah Warren,
though a poor man, lived in an Individualist way
and made his free-life social experiment in small country
settlements, far removed from the great organized industries.
Tucker also, though a city man, has never had
personal association with such industries. They had
never known directly the oppressions of the large factory,
nor mingled with workers' associations. The Mutualists
had; consequently their leaning towards a greater
Communism. Dyer D. Lum spent the greater part of
his life in building up workmen's unions, himself being
a hand worker, a book-binder by trade.
I have now presented the rough skeleton of four different
economic schemes entertained by Anarchists. Remember
that the point of agreement in all is: no compulsion.
Those who favor one method have no intention
of forcing it upon those who favor another, so long
as equal tolerance is exercised toward themselves.
Remember, also, that none of these schemes is proposed
for its own sake, but because through it, its projectors
believe, liberty may be best secured. Every
Anarchist, as an Anarchist, would be perfectly willing
to surrender his own scheme directly, if he saw that another
worked better.
For myself, I believe that all these and many more
could be advantageously tried in different localities; I
would see the instincts and habits of the people express
themselves in a free choice in every community; and I
am sure that distinct environments would call out distinct
adaptations.
Personally, while I recognize that liberty would be
greatly extended under any of these economies, I frankly
confess that none of them satisfies me.
Socialism and Communism both demand a degree of
joint effort and administration which would beget more
regulation than is wholly consistent with Ideal Anarchism;
Individualism and Mutualism, resting upon property,
involve a development of the private policeman
not at all compatible with my notions of freedom.
My ideal would be a condition in which all natural
resources would be forever free to all, and the worker
individually able to produce for himself sufficient for
all his vital needs, if he so chose, so that he need not
govern his working or not working by the times and
seasons of his fellows. I think that time may come;
but it will only be through the development of the modes
of production and the taste of the people. Meanwhile
we all cry with one voice for the freedom to try.
Are these all the aims of Anarchism? They are just
the beginning. They are an outline of what is demanded
for the material producer. If as a worker, you think
no further than how to free yourself from the horrible
bondage of capitalism, then that is the measure of Anarchism
for you. But you yourself put the limit there,
if there it is put. Immeasurably deeper, immeasurably
higher, dips and soars the soul which has come out of
its casement of custom and cowardice, and dared to
claim its Self.
Ah, once to stand unflinchingly on the brink of that
dark gulf of passions and desires, once at last to send a
bold, straight-driven gaze down into the volcanic Me,
once, and in that once, and in that once forever, to throw
off the command to cover and flee from the knowledge
of that abyss,—nay, to dare it to hiss and seethe if it
will, and make us writhe and shiver with its force!
Once and forever to realize that one is not a bundle of
well-regulated little reasons bound up in the front room
of the brain to be sermonized and held in order with
copy-book maxims or moved and stopped by a syllogism,
but a bottomless, bottomless depth of all strange sensations,
a rocking sea of feeling wherever sweep strong
storms of unaccountable hate and rage, invisible contortions
of disappointment, low ebbs of meanness, quakings
and shudderings of love that drives to madness and
will not be controlled, hungerings and moanings and
sobbing that smite upon the inner ear, now first bent to
listen, as if all the sadness of the sea and the wailing
of the great pine forests of the North had met to weep
together there in that silence audible to you alone. To
look down into that, to know the blackness, the midnight,
the dead ages in oneself, to feel the jungle and
the beast within,—and the swamp and the slime, and
the desolate desert of the heart's despair—to see, to
know, to feel to the uttermost,—and then to look at one's
fellow, sitting across from one in the street-car, so decorous,
so well got up, so nicely combed and brushed and
oiled and to wonder what lies beneath that commonplace
exterior,—to picture the cavern in him which somewhere
far below has a narrow gallery running into your
own—to imagine the pain that racks him to the finger-tips
perhaps while he wears that placid ironed-shirt-front
countenance—to conceive how he too shudders at himself
and writhes and flees from the lava of his heart and
aches in his prison-house not daring to see himself—to
draw back respectfully from the Self-gate of the plainest,
most unpromising creature, even from the most debased
criminal, because one knows the nonentity and the criminal
in oneself—to spare all condemnation (how much
more trial and sentence) because one knows the stuff
of which man is made and recoils at nothing since all
is in himself,—this is what Anarchism may mean to you.
It means that to me.
And then, to turn cloudward, starward, skyward, and
let the dreams rush over one—no longer awed by outside
powers of any order—recognizing nothing superior
to oneself—painting, painting endless pictures, creating
unheard symphonies that sing dream sounds to you alone,
extending sympathies to the dumb brutes as equal
brothers, kissing the flowers as one did when a child,
letting oneself go free, go free beyond the bounds of
what fear and custom call the "possible,"—this too Anarchism
may mean to you, if you dare to apply it so.
And if you do some day,—if sitting at your work-bench,
you see a vision of surpassing glory, some picture of
that golden time when there shall be no prisons on the
earth, nor hunger, nor houselessness, nor accusation, nor
judgment, and hearts open as printed leaves, and candid
as fearlessness, if then you look across at your low-browed
neighbor, who sweats and smells and curses at
his toil,—remember that as you do not know his depth
neither do you know his height. He too might dream if
the yoke of custom and law and dogma were broken
from him. Even now you know not what blind, bound,
motionless chrysalis is working there to prepare its
winged thing.
Anarchism means freedom to the soul as to the body,—in
every aspiration, every growth.
A few words as to the methods. In times past Anarchists
have excluded each other on these grounds also;
revolutionists contemptuously said "Quaker" of peace
men; "savage Communists" anathematized the Quakers
in return.
This too is passing. I say this: all methods are to
the individual capacity and decision.
There is Tolstoy,—Christian, non-resistant, artist. His
method is to paint pictures of society as it is, to show
the brutality of force and the uselessness of it; to preach
the end of government through the repudiation of all
military force. Good! I accept it in its entirety. It
fits his character, it fits his ability. Let us be glad that
he works so.
There is John Most—old, work-worn, with the weight
of prison years upon him,—yet fiercer, fiercer, bitterer in
his denunciations of the ruling class than would require
the energy of a dozen younger men to utter—going down
the last hills of life, rousing the consciousness of wrong
among his fellows as he goes. Good! That consciousness
must be awakened. Long may that fiery tongue yet
speak.
There is Benjamin Tucker—cool, self-contained, critical,—sending
his fine hard shafts among foes and friends
with icy impartiality, hitting swift and cutting keen,—and
ever ready to nail a traitor. Holding to passive resistance
as most effective, ready to change it whenever he
deems it wise. That suits him; in his field he is alone,
invaluable.
And there is Peter Kropotkin appealing to the young,
and looking with sweet, warm, eager eyes into every colonizing
effort, and hailing with a child's enthusiasm the
uprisings of the workers, and believing in revolution with
his whole soul. Him too we thank.
And there is George Brown preaching peaceable expropriation
through the federated unions of the workers;
and this is good. It is his best place; he is at home
there; he can accomplish most in his own chosen field.
And over there in his coffin cell in Italy, lies the man
whose method was to kill a king, and shock the nations
into a sudden consciousness of the hollowness of their
law and order. Him too, him and his act, without reserve
I accept, and bend in silent acknowledgement of
the strength of the man.
For there are some whose nature it is to think and
plead, and yield and yet return to the address, and so
make headway in the minds of their fellowmen; and
there are others who are stern and still, resolute, implacable
as Judah's dream of God;—and those men strike—strike
once and have ended. But the blow resounds
across the world. And as on a night when the sky is
heavy with storm, some sudden great white flare sheets
across it, and every object starts sharply out, so in the
flash of Bresci's pistol shot the whole world for a
moment saw the tragic figure of the Italian people,
starved, stunted, crippled, huddled, degraded, murdered;
and at the same moment that their teeth chattered with
fear, they came and asked the Anarchists to explain
themselves. And hundreds of thousands of people read
more in those few days than they had ever read of the
idea before.
Ask a method? Do you ask Spring her method?
Which is more necessary, the sunshine or the rain? They
are contradictory—yes; they destroy each other—yes,
but from this destruction the flowers result.
Each choose that method which expresses your self-hood
best, and condemn no other man because he expresses
his Self otherwise.
American traditions, begotten of religious rebellion,
small self-sustaining communities, isolated
conditions, and hard pioneer life, grew during
the colonization period of one hundred and seventy
years from the settling of Jamestown to the outburst of
the Revolution. This was in fact the great constitution-making
epoch, the period of charters guaranteeing more
or less of liberty, the general tendency of which is well
described by Wm. Penn in speaking of the charter for
Pennsylvania: "I want to put it out of my power, or that
of my successors, to do mischief."
The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness
of these traditions, their loud assertion, the blow dealt by
their indomitable will against the counter force of tyranny,
which has never entirely recovered from the blow,
but which from then till now has gone on remolding and
regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that
the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of
liberty.
To the average American of to-day, the Revolution
means the series of battles fought by the patriot army
with the armies of England. The millions of school
children who attend our public schools are taught to
draw maps of the siege of Boston and the siege of Yorktown,
to know the general plan of the several campaigns,
to quote the number of prisoners of war surrendered
with Burgoyne; they are required to remember the date
when Washington crossed the Delaware on the ice; they
are told to "Remember Paoli," to repeat "Molly Stark's
a widow," to call General Wayne "Mad Anthony Wayne,"
and to execrate Benedict Arnold; they know that the
Declaration of Independence was signed on the Fourth
of July, 1776, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783; and then
they think they have learned the Revolution—blessed be
George Washington! They have no idea why it should
have been called a "revolution" instead of the "English
war," or any similar title: it's the name of it, that's all.
And name-worship, both in child and man, has acquired
such mastery of them, that the name "American Revolution"
is held sacred, though it means to them nothing
more than successful force, while the name "Revolution"
applied to a further possibility, is a spectre detested and
abhorred. In neither case have they any idea of the content
of the word, save that of armed force. That has already
happened, and long happened, which Jefferson
foresaw when he wrote:
"The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our
rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single
zealot may become persecutor, and better men be his victims.
It can never be too often repeated that the time
for fixing every essential right, on a legal basis, is while
our rulers are honest, ourselves united. From the conclusion
of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not
then be necessary to resort every moment to the people
for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their
rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the
sole faculty of making money, and will never think of
uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The
shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the
conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier, till
our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."
To the men of that time, who voiced the spirit of that
time, the battles that they fought were the least of the
Revolution; they were the incidents of the hour, the
things they met and faced as part of the game they were
playing; but the stake they had in view, before, during,
and after the war, the real Revolution, was a change in
political institutions which should make of government
not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the
people with a whip, but a serviceable agent, responsible,
economical, and trustworthy (but never so much trusted
as not to be continually watched), for the transaction of
such business as was the common concern, and to set the
limits of the common concern at the line where one man's
liberty would encroach upon another's.
They thus took their starting point for deriving a minimum
of government upon the same sociological ground
that the modern Anarchist derives the no-government
theory; viz., that equal liberty is the political ideal. The
difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest
approximation to equal liberty might be best secured
by the rule of the majority in those matters involving
united action of any kind (which rule of the majority
they thought it possible to secure by a few simple arrangements
for election), and, on the other hand, the
belief that majority rule is both impossible and undesirable;
that any government, no matter what its forms, will
be manipulated by a very small minority, as the development
of the State and United States governments has
strikingly proved; that candidates will loudly profess
allegiance to platforms before elections, which as officials
in power they will openly disregard, to do as they please;
and that even if the majority will could be imposed, it
would also be subversive of equal liberty, which may be
best secured by leaving to the voluntary association of
those interested in the management of matters of common
concern, without coercion of the uninterested or the
opposed.
Among the fundamental likenesses between the Revolutionary
Republicans and the Anarchists is the recognition
that the little must precede the great; that the local must
be the basis of the general; that there can be a free federation
only when there are free communities to federate;
that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of
the former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument
for general enslavement. Convinced of the supreme
importance of ridding the municipalities of the
institutions of tyranny, the most strenuous advocates of
independence, instead of spending their efforts mainly in
the general Congress, devoted themselves to their home
localities, endeavoring to work out of the minds of their
neighbors and fellow-colonists the institutions of entailed
property, of a State-Church, of a class-divided people,
even the institution of African slavery itself. Though
largely unsuccessful, it is to the measure of success they
did achieve that we are indebted for such liberties as we
do retain, and not to the general government. They tried
to inculcate local initiative and independent action. The
author of the Declaration of Independence, who in the
fall of '76 declined a re-election to Congress in order to
return to Virginia and do his work in his own local assembly,
in arranging there for public education which he
justly considered a matter of "common concern," said his
advocacy of public schools was not with any "view to
take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private
enterprise, which manages so much better the concerns
to which it is equal"; and in endeavoring to make clear
the restrictions of the Constitution upon the functions of
the general government, he likewise said: "Let the general
government be reduced to foreign concerns only,
and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other
nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants
will manage the better the more they are left free to manage
for themselves, and the general government may be
reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive
one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few
servants." This then was the American tradition, that
private enterprise manages better all that to which it is
equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether
individual or co-operative, is equal to all the undertakings
of society. And it quotes the particular two instances,
Education and Commerce, which the governments of the
States and of the United States have undertaken to manage
and regulate, as the very two which in operation have
done more to destroy American freedom and equality, to
warp and distort American tradition, to make of government
a mighty engine of tyranny, than any other cause,
save the unforeseen developments of Manufacture.
It was the intention of the Revolutionists to establish
a system of common education, which should make the
teaching of history one of its principal branches; not with
the intent of burdening the memories of our youth with
the dates of battles or the speeches of generals, nor to
make of the Boston Tea Party Indians the one sacrosanct
mob in all history, to be revered but never on any account
to be imitated, but with the intent that every American
should know to what conditions the masses of people had
been brought by the operation of certain institutions, by
what means they had wrung out their liberties, and how
those liberties had again and again been filched from
them by the use of governmental force, fraud, and privilege.
Not to breed security, laudation, complacent indolence,
passive acquiescence in the acts of a government
protected by the label "home-made," but to beget a wakeful
jealousy, a never-ending watchfulness of rulers, a determination
to squelch every attempt of those entrusted
with power to encroach upon the sphere of individual action—this
was the prime motive of the revolutionists in
endeavoring to provide for common education.
"Confidence," said the revolutionists who adopted the
Kentucky Resolutions, "is everywhere the parent of
despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, not
in confidence; it is jealousy, not confidence, which prescribes
limited constitutions to bind down those whom
we are obliged to trust with power; our Constitution
has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further,
our confidence may go. * * * In questions of power,
let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him
down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
These resolutions were especially applied to the passage
of the Alien laws by the monarchist party during John
Adams' administration, and were an indignant call from
the State of Kentucky to repudiate the right of the general
government to assume undelegated powers, for, said
they, to accept these laws would be "to be bound by laws
made, not with our consent, but by others against our
consent—that is, to surrender the form of government we
have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers
from its own will, and not from our authority." Resolutions
identical in spirit were also passed by Virginia,
the following month; in those days the States still considered
themselves supreme, the general government subordinate.
To inculcate this proud spirit of the supremacy of the
people over their governors was to be the purpose of public
education! Pick up to-day any common school history,
and see how much of this spirit you will find therein. On
the contrary, from cover to cover you will find nothing
but the cheapest sort of patriotism, the inculcation of the
most unquestioning acquiescence in the deeds of government,
a lullaby of rest, security, confidence,—the doctrine
that the Law can do no wrong, a Te Deum in praise of
the continuous encroachments of the powers of the general
government upon the reserved rights of the States,
shameless falsification of all acts of rebellion, to put the
government in the right and the rebels in the wrong, pyrotechnic
glorifications of union, power, and force, and a
complete ignoring of the essential liberties to maintain
which was the purpose of the revolutionists. The anti-Anarchist
law of post-McKinley passage, a much worse
law than the Alien and Sedition acts which roused the
wrath of Kentucky and Virginia to the point of threatened
rebellion, is exalted as a wise provision of our All-Seeing
Father in Washington.
Such is the spirit of government-provided schools.
Ask any child what he knows about Shays's rebellion,
and he will answer, "Oh, some of the farmers
couldn't pay their taxes, and Shays led a rebellion against
the court-house at Worcester, so they could burn up the
deeds; and when Washington heard of it he sent over an
army quick and taught 'em a good lesson"—"And what
was the result of it?" "The result? Why—why—the
result was—Oh yes, I remember—the result was they saw
the need of a strong federal government to collect the
taxes and pay the debts." Ask if he knows what was
said on the other side of the story, ask if he knows that
the men who had given their goods and their health and
their strength for the freeing of the country now found
themselves cast into prison for debt, sick, disabled, and
poor, facing a new tyranny for the old; that their demand
was that the land should become the free communal possession
of those who wished to work it, not subject to
tribute, and the child will answer "No." Ask him if he
ever read Jefferson's letter to Madison about it, in which
he says:
"Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable.
1. Without government, as among our Indians.
2. Under government wherein the will of every
one has a just influence; as is the case in England in a
slight degree, and in our States in a great one. 3. Under
government of force, as is the case in all other monarchies,
and in most of the other republics. To have an
idea of the curse of existence in these last, they must be
seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a
problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is
not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any
great degree of population. The second state has a great
deal of good in it.... It has its evils, too, the
principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject....
But even this evil is productive of good.
It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes
a general attention to public affairs. I hold that a little
rebellion now and then is a good thing."
Or to another correspondent: "God forbid that we
should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion!...
What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers
are not warned from time to time that the people
preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take up arms....
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time
to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its
natural manure." Ask any school child if he was ever
taught that the author of the Declaration of Independence,
one of the great founders of the common
school, said these things, and he will look at you with
open mouth and unbelieving eyes. Ask him if he ever
heard that the man who sounded the bugle note in the
darkest hour of the Crisis, who roused the courage of the
soldiers when Washington saw only mutiny and despair
ahead, ask him if he knows that this man also wrote,
"Government at best is a necessary evil, at worst an
intolerable one," and if he is a little better informed than
the average he will answer, "Oh well, he was an infidel!"
Catechize him about the merits of the Constitution which
he has learned to repeat like a poll-parrot, and you will
find his chief conception is not of the powers withheld
from Congress, but of the powers granted.
Such are the fruits of government schools. We, the
Anarchists, point to them and say: If the believers in
liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them
never intrust that instruction to any government; for the
nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution
existing for its own sake, preying upon the
people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure
in its seat. As the fathers said of the governments of
Europe, so say we of this government also after a century
and a quarter of independence: "The blood of the
people has become its inheritance, and those who fatten
on it will not relinquish it easily."
Public education, having to do with the intellect and
spirit of a people, is probably the most subtle and far-reaching
engine for molding the course of a nation; but
commerce, dealing as it does with material things and
producing immediate effects, was the force that bore
down soonest upon the paper barriers of constitutional
restriction, and shaped the government to its requirements.
Here, indeed, we arrive at the point where we, looking
over the hundred and twenty-five years of independence,
can see that the simple government conceived by the revolutionary
republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was
so because of (1) the essence of government itself; (2)
the essence of human nature; (3) the essence of Commerce
and Manufacture.
Of the essence of government, I have already said, it is
a thing apart, developing its own interests at the expense
of what opposes it; all attempts to make it anything else
fail. In this Anarchists agree with the traditional enemies
of the Revolution, the monarchists, federalists, strong
government believers, the Roosevelts of to-day, the Jays,
Marshalls, and Hamiltons of then,—that Hamilton, who,
as Secretary of the Treasury, devised a financial system
of which we are the unlucky heritors, and whose objects
were twofold: To puzzle the people and make public
finance obscure to those that paid for it; to serve as a
machine for corrupting the legislatures; "for he avowed
the opinion that man could be governed by two motives
only, force or interest;" force being then out of the question,
he laid hold of interest, the greed of the legislators,
to set going an association of persons having an entirely
separate welfare from the welfare of their electors,
bound together by mutual corruption and mutual desire
for plunder. The Anarchist agrees that Hamilton was
logical, and understood the core of government; the
difference is, that while strong governmentalists believe
this is necessary and desirable, we choose the opposite
conclusion, NO GOVERNMENT WHATEVER.
As to the essence of human nature, what our national
experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually
exalted moral condition is not human nature.
That has happened which was prophesied: we have gone
down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed
in "mere money-getting." The desire for material
ease long ago vanquished the spirit of '76. What
was that spirit? The spirit that animated the people of
Virginia, of the Carolinas, of Massachusetts, of New
York, when they refused to import goods from England;
when they preferred (and stood by it) to wear
coarse homespun cloth, to drink the brew of their own
growths, to fit their appetites to the home supply, rather
than submit to the taxation of the imperial ministry.
Even within the lifetime of the revolutionists the spirit
decayed. The love of material ease has been, in the mass
of men and permanently speaking, always greater than
the love of liberty. Nine hundred and ninety-nine
women out of a thousand are more interested in the cut
of a dress than in the independence of their sex; nine
hundred and nine-nine men out of a thousand are more
interested in drinking a glass of beer than in questioning
the tax that is laid on it; how many children are not
willing to trade the liberty to play for the promise of a
new cap or a new dress? This it is which begets the
complicated mechanism of society; this it is which, by
multiplying the concerns of government, multiplies the
strength of government and the corresponding weakness
of the people; this it is which begets indifference to public
concern, thus making the corruption of government easy.
As to the essence of Commerce and Manufacture, it
is this: to establish bonds between every corner of the
earth's surface and every other corner, to multiply the
needs of mankind, and the desire for material possession
and enjoyment.
The American tradition was the isolation of the States
as far as possible. Said they: We have won our liberties
by hard sacrifice and struggle unto death. We wish
now to be let alone and to let others alone, that our principles
may have time for trial; that we may become accustomed
to the exercise of our rights; that we may be
kept free from the contaminating influence of European
gauds, pagents, distinctions. So richly did they esteem
the absence of these that they could in all fervor write:
"We shall see multiplied instances of Europeans coming
to America, but no man living will ever see an instance
of an American removing to settle in Europe, and continuing
there." Alas! In less than a hundred years the
highest aim of a "Daughter of the Revolution" was, and
is, to buy a castle, a title, and a rotten lord, with the
money wrung from American servitude! And the commercial
interests of America are seeking a world-empire!
In the earlier days of the revolt and subsequent independence,
it appeared that the "manifest destiny" of
America was to be an agricultural people, exchanging
food stuffs and raw materials for manufactured articles.
And in those days it was written: "We shall be virtuous
as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will
be the case as long as there remain vacant lands in any
part of America. When we get piled upon one another
in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as
in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there."
Which we are doing, because of the inevitable development
of Commerce and Manufacture, and the concomitant
development of strong government. And the
parallel prophecy is likewise fulfilled: "If ever this vast
country is brought under a single government, it will be
one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and
incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of
surface." There is not upon the face of the earth to-day
a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that
of the United States of America. There are others more
cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none
so utterly venal.
And yet even in the very days of the prophets, even
with their own consent, the first concession to this later
tyranny was made. It was made when the Constitution
was made; and the Constitution was made chiefly because
of the demands of Commerce. Thus it was at the outset
a merchant's machine, which the other interests of the
country, the land and labor interests, even then foreboded
would destroy their liberties. In vain their jealousy of
its central power made them enact the first twelve amendments.
In vain they endeavored to set bounds over which
the federal power dare not trench. In vain they enacted
into general law the freedom of speech, of the press, of
assemblage and petition. All of these things we see
ridden rough-shod upon every day, and have so seen with
more or less intermission since the beginning of the
nineteenth century. At this day, every police lieutenant
considers himself, and rightly so, as more powerful than
the General Law of the Union; and that one who told
Robert Hunter that he held in his fist something stronger
than the Constitution, was perfectly correct. The right
of assemblage is an American tradition which has gone
out of fashion; the police club is now the mode. And
it is so in virtue of the people's indifference to liberty,
and the steady progress of constitutional interpretation
towards the substance of imperial government.
It is an American tradition that a standing army is a
standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the
army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition
that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is
American practice that we meddle with the affairs of
everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from
Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army
of 83,251 men.
It is American tradition that the financial affairs of a
nation should be transacted on the same principles of
simple honesty that an individual conducts his own business;
viz., that debt is a bad thing, and a man's first surplus
earnings should be applied to his debts; that offices
and office-holders should be few. It is American practice
that the general government should always have millions
of debt, even if a panic or a war has to be forced
to prevent its being paid off; and as to the application of
its income, office-holders come first. And within the last
administration it is reported that 99,000 offices have been
created at an annual expense of $63,000,000. Shades of
Jefferson! "How are vacancies to be obtained? Those
by deaths are few; by resignation none." Roosevelt cuts
the knot by making 99,000 new ones! And few will die,—and
none resign. They will beget sons and daughters,
and Taft will have to create 99,000 more! Verily, a simple
and a serviceable thing is our general government.
It is American tradition that the Judiciary shall act
as a check upon the impetuosity of Legislatures, should
these attempt to pass the bounds of constitutional limitation.
It is American practice that the Judiciary justifies
every law which trenches on the liberties of the people
and nullifies every act of the Legislature by which the
people seek to regain some measure of their freedom.
Again, in the words of Jefferson: "The Constitution is a
mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary, which
they may twist and shape in any form they please."
Truly, if the men who fought the good fight for the
triumph of simple, honest, free life in that day, were now
to look upon the scene of their labors, they would cry out
together with him who said: "I regret that I am now
to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves
by the generation of '76 to acquire self-government and
happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the
unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that
my only consolation is to be that I shall not live to see
it."
And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this
bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has
grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say
this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not
trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise
between liberty and government, believing the
latter to be "a necessary evil", and the moment the compromise
was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our
present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are
set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with
which the free are struck.
Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning
speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a
declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will
have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not
mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and
define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of
free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and
we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other
hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their
freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for
tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves
in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise,
to put shackles upon sleeping men.
The problem then becomes, Is it possible to stir men
from their indifference? We have said that the spirit of
liberty was nurtured by colonial life; that the elements of
colonial life were the desire for sectarian independence,
and the jealous watchfulness incident thereto; the isolation
of pioneer communities which threw each individual
strongly on his own resources, and thus developed all-around
men, yet at the same time made very strong such
social bonds as did exist; and, lastly, the comparative
simplicity of small communities.
All this has mostly disappeared. As to sectarianism, it
is only by dint of an occasional idiotic persecution that a
sect becomes interesting; in the absence of this, outlandish
sects play the fool's role, are anything but heroic,
and have little to do with either the name or the substance
of liberty. The old colonial religious parties have
gradually become the "pillars of society," their animosities
have died out, their offensive peculiarities have been
effaced, they are as like one another as beans in a pod,
they build churches and—sleep in them.
As to our communities, they are hopelessly and helplessly
interdependent, as we ourselves are, save that continuously
diminishing proportion engaged in all around
farming; and even these are slaves to mortgages. For
our cities, probably there is not one that is provisioned to
last a week, and certainly there is none which would
not be bankrupt with despair at the proposition that it
produce its own food. In response to this condition and
its correlative political tyranny, Anarchism affirms the
economy of self-sustenance, the disintegration of the great
communities, the use of the earth.
I am not ready to say that I see clearly that this will
take place; but I see clearly that this must take place if
ever again men are to be free. I am so well satisfied that
the mass of mankind prefer material possessions to liberty,
that I have no hope that they will ever, by means of
intellectual or moral stirrings merely, throw off the yoke
of oppression fastened on them by the present economic
system, to institute free societies. My only hope is in the
blind development of the economic system and political
oppression itself. The great characteristic looming factor
in this gigantic power is Manufacture. The tendency of
each nation is to become more and more a manufacturing
one, an exporter of fabrics, not an importer. If this tendency
follows its own logic, it must eventually circle
round to each community producing for itself. What
then will become of the surplus product when the manufacturer
shall have no foreign market? Why, then mankind
must face the dilemma of sitting down and dying in
the midst of it, or confiscating the goods.
Indeed, we are partially facing this problem even now;
and so far we are sitting down and dying. I opine, however,
that men will not do it forever; and when once by
an act of general expropriation they have overcome the
reverence and fear of property, and their awe of government,
they may waken to the consciousness that things
are to be used, and therefore men are greater than things.
This may rouse the spirit of liberty.
If, on the other hand, the tendency of invention to simplify,
enabling the advantages of machinery to be combined
with smaller aggregations of workers, shall also
follow its own logic, the great manufacturing plants will
break up, population will go after the fragments, and
there will be seen not indeed the hard, self-sustaining,
isolated pioneer communities of early America, but thousands
of small communities stretching along the lines of
transportation, each producing very largely for its own
needs, able to rely upon itself, and therefore able to be
independent. For the same rule holds good for societies
as for individuals,—those may be free who are able to
make their own living.
In regard to the breaking up of that vilest creation of
tyranny, the standing army and navy, it is clear that so
long as men desire to fight, they will have armed force in
one form or another. Our fathers thought they had
guarded against a standing army by providing for the
voluntary militia. In our day we have lived to see this
militia declared part of the regular military force of the
United States, and subject to the same demands as the
regulars. Within another generation we shall probably
see its members in the regular pay of the general government.
Since any embodiment of the fighting spirit, any
military organization, inevitably follows the same line of
centralization, the logic of Anarchism is that the least
objectionable form of armed force is that which springs
up voluntarily, like the minute-men of Massachusetts,
and disbands as soon as the occasion which called it into
existence is past: that the really desirable thing is that
all men—not Americans only—should be at peace; and
that to reach this, all peaceful persons should withdraw
their support from the army, and require that all who
make war shall do so at their own cost and risk; that
neither pay nor pensions are to be provided for those who
choose to make man-killing a trade.
As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism
asks that it be carried down to the individual himself.
It demands no jealous barrier of isolation; it knows
that such isolation is undesirable and impossible; but it
teaches that by all men's strictly minding their own business,
a fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs,
wherein all the world shall belong to all men, as much as
each has need or desire, will result.
And when Modern Revolution has thus been carried to
the heart of the whole world—if it ever shall be, as I
hope it will,—then may we hope to see a resurrection
of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the simple
dignity of Man above the gauds of wealth and class, and
held that to be an American was greater than to be a
king.
In that day there shall be neither kings nor Americans,—only
Men; over the whole earth, MEN.
In the long sweep of seventeen hundred years which
witnessed the engulfment of a moribund Roman
civilization, together with its borrowed Greek ideals,
under the red tide of a passionate barbarism that leaped
to embrace the idea of Triumph over Death, and spat
upon the Grecian Joys of Life with the superb contempt
of the Norse savage, there was, for Europe and America,
but one great animating Word in Art and Literature—Christianity.
It boots not here to inquire how close or
how remote the Christian ideal as it developed was in
comparison with the teachings of the Nazarene. Distorted,
blackened, almost effaced, it was yet some faint
echo from the hillsides of Olivet, some indistinct vision
of the Cross, some dull perception of the white glory
of renunciation, that shaped the dreams of the evolving
barbarian, and moulded all his work, whether of stone
or clay, upon canvas or parchment. Wherever we turn
we find a general fixup or caste, an immovable solidity
of orders built upon orders, an unquestioning subordination
of the individual, ruling every effort of genius.
Ascetic shadow upon all; nowhere does a sun-ray of
self-expression creep, save as through water, thin and perturbed.
The theologic pessimism which appealed
to the fighting man as a proper extension of his own
superstition—perhaps hardly that, for Heaven was
but a change of name for Valhalla,—fell heavily upon
the man of dreams, whose creations must come forth,
lifeless, after the uniform model, who must bless and
ban not as he saw before his eyes but as the one eternal
purpose demanded.
At last the barbarian is civilized; he has accomplished
his own refinement—and his own rottenness. Still he
preaches (and practices) contempt of death—when others
do the dying! Still he preaches submission to the will
of God—but that others may submit to him! Still he
proclaims the Cross—but that others may bear it. Where
Rome was in the glut of her vanity and her blood-drunkenness—limbs
wound in cloth of gold suppurating with
crime, head boastfully nodding as Jove and feet rocking
upon slipping slime—there stand the Empires and Republics
of those whose forefathers slew Rome.
And now for these three hundred years the Men of
Dreams have been watching the Christian Ideal go bankrupt.
One by one as they have dared, and each according
to his mood, they have spoken their minds; some
have reasoned, and some have laughed, and some have
appealed, logician, satirist, and exhorter all feeling in
their several ways that humanity stood in need of a new
moral ideal. Consciously or unconsciously, within the
pale of the Church or without, this has been "the spirit
moving upon the face of the waters" within them, and
at last the creation is come forth, the dream that is to
touch the heart-strings of the World anew, and make
it sing a stronger song than any it has sung of old. Mark
you, it must be stronger, wider, deeper, or it cannot be
at all. It must sing all that has been sung, and something
more. Its mission is not to deny the past but to reaffirm
it and explain it, all of it; and to-day too, and to-morrow
too.
And this Ideal, the only one that has power to stir
the moral pulses of the world, the only Word that can
quicken "Dead Souls" who wait this moral resurrection,
the only Word which can animate the dreamer, poet,
sculptor, painter, musician, artist of chisel or pen, with
power to fashion forth his dream, is Anarchism. For
Anarchism means fulness of being. It means the return
of Greek radiance of life, Greek love of beauty,
without Greek indifference to the common man; it means
Christian earnestness and Christian Communism, without
Christian fanaticism and Christian gloom and tyranny.
It means this because it means perfect freedom, material
and spiritual freedom.
The light of Greek idealism failed because with all
its love of life and the infinite diversity of beauty, and
all the glory of its free intellect, it never conceived of
material freedom; to it the Helot was as eternal as the
Gods. Therefore the Gods passed away, and their
eternity was as a little wave of time.
The Christian ideal has failed because with all its
sublime Communism, its doctrine of universal equality,
it was bound up with a spiritual tyranny seeking to mould
into one pattern the thoughts of all humanity, stamping
all men with the stamp of submission, throwing upon
all the dark umber of life lived for the purpose of death,
and fruitful of all other tyrannies.
Anarchism will succeed because its message of freedom
comes down the rising wind of social revolt first of
all to the common man, the material slave, and bids him
know that he, too, should have an independent will, and
the free exercise thereof; that no philosophy, and no
achievement, and no civilization is worth considering or
achieving, if it does not mean that he shall be free to
labor at what he likes and when he likes, and freely
share all that free men choose to produce; that he, the
drudge of all the ages, is the cornerstone of the building
without whose sure and safe position no structure can
nor should endure. And likewise it comes to him who
sits in fear of himself, and says: "Fear no more, neither
what is without or within. Search fully and freely your
Self; hearken to all the voices that rise from that abyss
from which you have been commanded to shrink. Learn
for yourself what these things are. Belike what they
have told you is good, is bad; and this cast mould of
goodness, a vile prison-house. Learn to decide your
own measure of restraint. Value for yourself the merits
of selfishness and unselfishness; and strike you the balance
between these two: for if the first be all accredited
you make slaves of others, and if the second, your own
abasement raises tyrants over you; and none can decide
the matter for you so well as you for yourself; for even
if you err you learn by it, while if he errs the blame is
his, and if he advises well the credit is his, and you are
nothing. Be yourself; and by self-expression learn self-restraint.
The wisdom of the ages lies in the reassertion
of all past positivisms, and the denial of all negations,
that is, all that has been claimed by the individual for
himself is good, but every denial of the freedom of another
is bad; whereby it will be seen that many things
supposed to be claimed for oneself involve the freedom
of others and must be surrendered because they do not
come within the sovereign limit, while many things supposed
to be evil, since they in nowise infringe upon the
liberty of others are wholly good, bringing to dwarfed
bodies and narrow souls the vigor and full growth of
healthy exercise, and giving a rich glow to life that had
else paled out like a lamp in a grave-vault."
To the sybarite it says, Learn to do your own share
of hard work; you will gain by it; to the "Man with the
Hoe," Think for yourself and boldly take your time
for it. The division of labor which makes of one man
a Brain and of another a Hand is evil. Away with it.
This is the ethical gospel of Anarchism to which these
three hundred years of intellectual ferment have been
leading. He who will trace the course of literature for
three hundred years will find innumerable bits of drift
here and there, indicative of the moral and intellectual
revolt. Protestantism itself, in asserting the supremacy
of the individual conscience, fired the long train of
thought which inevitably leads to the explosion of all
forms of authority. The great political writers of the
eighteenth century, in asserting the right of self-government,
carried the line of advance one step further.
America had her Jefferson declaring:
"Societies exist under three forms: 1. Without government
as among the Indians. 2. Under governments
wherein every one has a just influence. 3. Under governments
of force. It is a problem not clear in my
mind that the first condition is not the best."
She had, or she and England together had, her Paine,
more mildly asserting:
"Governments are, at best, a necessary evil."
And England had also Godwin, who, though still milder
in manner and consequently less effective during the
troublous period in which he lived, was nevertheless
more deeply radical than either, presaging that application
of the political ideal to economic concerns so distinctive
of modern Anarchism.
"My neighbor," says he, "has just as much right to
put an end to my existence with dagger or poison as
to deny me that pecuniary assistance without which I
must starve."
Nor did he stop here: he carried the logic of individual
sovereignty into the chiefest of social institutions, and
declared that the sex relation was a matter concerning
the individuals sharing it only. Thus he says:
"The institution of marriage is a system of fraud....
Marriage is law and the worst of all laws....
Marriage is an affair of property and the worst
of all properties. So long as two human beings are
forbidden by positive institution to follow the dictates
of their own mind prejudice is alive and vigorous....
The abolition of marriage will be attended with no
evils. We are apt to consider it to ourselves as the
harbinger of brutal lust and depravity; but it really happens
in this, as in other cases, that the positive laws
which are made to restrain our vices, irritate and multiply
them."
The grave and judicial style of "Political Justice" prevented
its attaining the great popularity of "The Rights
of Man," but the indirect influence of its author bloomed
in the rich profusion of Shelleyan fancy, and in all that
coterie of young litterateurs who gathered about Godwin
as their revered teacher.
Nor was the principle of no-government without its
vindication from one who moved actively in official centers,
and whose name has been alternately quoted by
conservatives and radicals, now with veneration, now
with execration. In his essay "On Government," Edmund
Burke, the great political weathercock, aligned
himself with the germinating movement towards Anarchism
when he exclaimed: "They talk of the abuse
of government; the thing, the thing itself is the abuse!"
This aphoristic utterance will go down in history on its
own merits, as the sayings of great men often do, stripped
of its accompanying explanations. Men have already
forgotten to inquire how and why he said it; the words
stand, and will continue a living message, long after the
thousands of sheets of rhetoric which won him the epithet
of "the Dinner-bell of the House" have been relegated
to the dust of museums.
In later days an essayist whose brilliancy of style and
capacity for getting on all sides of a question connect
him with Burke in some manner as his spiritual offspring,
has furnished the Anarchists with one of their most frequent
quotations. In his essay on "John Milton," Macaulay
declares, "The only cure for the evils of newly
acquired liberty is—more liberty." That he nevertheless
possessed a strong vein of conservatism, sat in parliament,
and took part in legal measures, simply proves that he
had his tether and could not go the length of his own
logic; that is no reason others should not. The Anarchists
accept this fundamental declaration and proceed
to its consequence.
But the world-thought was making way, not only in
England, where, indeed, constitutional phlegmatism,
though stirred beyond its wont by the events of the close
of the last century, acted frigidly upon it, but throughout
Europe. In France, Rabelais drew the idyllic picture
of the Abbey of Thelemes, a community of persons agreeing
to practise complete individual freedom among themselves.
Rousseau, however erroneous his basis for the "Social
Contract," moved all he touched with his belief that
humanity was innately good, and capable of so manifesting
itself in the absence of restrictions. Furthermore,
his "Confessions" appears the most famous fore-runner
of the tendency now shaping itself in Literature—that
of the free expression of a whole man—not in his
stage-character only, but in his dressing-room, not in his
decent, scrubbed and polished moral clothes alone, but
in his vileness and his meanness and his folly, too, these
being indisputable factors in his moral life, and no solution
but a false one to be obtained by hiding them and
playing they are not there. This truth, acknowledged
in America, in our own times, by two powerful writers
of very different cast, is being approached by all the
manifold paths of the soul's travel. "I have in me the
capacity for every crime," says Emerson the transcendentalist.
And Whitman, the stanch proclaimer of blood
and sinew, and the gospel of the holiness of the body,
makes himself one with drunken revelers and the creatures
of debauchery as well as with the anchorite and the
Christ-soul, that fulness of being may be declared. In
the genesis of these declarations we shall find the "Confessions."
It is not the "Social Contract" alone that is open to the
criticism of having reasoned from false premises; all
the early political writers we have named were equally
mistaken, all suffering from a like insufficiency of facts.
Partly this was the result of the habit of thought fostered
by the Church for seventeen hundred years,—which habit
was to accept by faith a sweeping generalization and fit
all future discoveries of fact into it; but partly also it
is in the nature of all idealism to offer itself, however
vaguely in the mist of mind-struggle, and allow time to
correct and sharpen the detail. Probably initial steps
will always be taken with blunders, while those who are
not imaginative enough to perceive the half-shapen figure
will nevertheless accept it later and set it upon a firm
foundation.
This has been the task of the modern historian, who,
no less than the political writer, consciously or unconsciously,
is swayed by the Anarchistic ideal and bends
his services towards it. It is understood that when we
speak of history we do not allude to the unspeakable
trash contained in public school text-books (which in
general resemble a cellar junk-shop of chronologies,
epaulettes, bad drawings, and silly tales, and are a striking
instance of the corrupting influence of State management
of education, by which the mediocre, nay the absolutely
empty, is made to survive), history which is
undertaken with the purpose of discovering the real
course of the development of human society. Among
such efforts, the broken but splendid fragment of his
stupendous project, is Buckle's "History of Civilization,"—a
work in which the author breaks away utterly from
the old method of history writing, viz. that of recording
court intrigues, the doings of individuals in power as a
matter of personal interest, the processions of military
pageant, to inquire into the real lives and conditions of
the people, to trace their great upheavals, and in what
consisted their progress. Gervinus in Germany, who,
within only recent years, drew upon himself a prosecution
for treason, took a like method, and declared that
progress consists in a steady decline of centralized power
and the development of local autonomy and the free federation.
Supplementing the work of the historian proper, there
has arisen a new class of literature, itself the creation
of the spirit of free inquiry, since, up till that had asserted
itself, such writings were impossible; it embraces
a wide range of studies into the conditions and psychology
of prehistoric Man, of which Sir John Lubbock's works
will serve as the type. From these, dark as the subject
yet is, we are learning the true sources of all authority,
and the agencies which are rendering it obsolete; moreover,
a curious cycle of development reveals itself; namely,
that starting from the point of no authority unconsciously
accepted, Man, in the several manifestations
of his activity, evolves through stages of belief in many
authorities to one authority, and finally to no authority
again, but this time conscious and reasoned.
Crowning the work of historian and prehistorian,
comes the labor of the sociologist. Herbert Spencer,
with infinite patience for detail and marvelous power
of classification and generalization, takes up the facts of
the others, and deduces from them the great Law of
Equal Freedom: "A man should have the freedom to
do whatsoever he wills, provided that in the doing thereof
he infringes not the equal freedom of every other man."
The early edition of "Social Statics" is a logical, scientific,
and bold statement of the great fundamental freedoms
which Anarchists demand.
From the rather taxing study of authors like these,
it is a relief to turn to those intermediate writers who
dwell between them and the pure fictionists, whose writings
are occupied with the facts of life as related to
the affections and aspirations of humanity, among whom,
"representative men," we immediately select Emerson,
Thoreau, Edward Carpenter. Now, indeed, we cease to
reason upon the past evolution of liberty, and begin to
feel it; begin to reach out after what it shall mean. None
who are familiar with the thought of Emerson can fail
to recognize that it is spiritual Anarchism; from the
serene heights of self-possession, the Ego looks out upon
its possibilities, unawed by aught without. And he who
has dwelt in dream by Walden, charmed by that pure
life he has not himself led but wished that, like Thoreau,
he might lead, has felt that call of the Anarchistic Ideal
which pleads with men to renounce the worthless luxuries
which enslave them and those who work for them, that
the buried soul which is doomed to mummy cloths by
the rush and jangle of the chase for wealth, may answer
the still small voice of the Resurrection, there, in the
silence, the solitude, the simplicity of the free life.
A similar note is sounded in Carpenter's "Civilization:
Its Cause and Cure," a work which is likely to make the
"Civilizer" see himself in a very different light than that
in which he usually beholds himself. And again the
same vibration shudders through "The City of Dreadful
Night," the masterpiece of an obscure genius who was
at once essayist and poet of too high and rare a quality
to catch the ear stunned by strident commonplaces, but
loved by all who seek the violets of the soul, one Thomson,
known to literature as "B. V." Similarly obscure,
and similarly sympathetic is the "English Peasant," by
Richard Heath, a collection of essays so redolent of
abounding love, so overflowing with understanding for
characters utterly contradictory, painted so tenderly and
yet so strongly, that none can read them without realizing
that here is a man, who, whatever he believes he believes,
in reality desires freedom of expression for the whole
human spirit, which implies for every separate unit of it.
Something of the Emersonian striving after individual
attainment plus the passionate sympathy of Heath is
found in a remarkable book, which is too good to have
obtained a popular hearing, entitled "The Story of My
Heart." No more daring utterance was ever given voice
than this: "I pray to find the Highest Soul,—greater
than deity, better than God." In the concluding pages
of the tenth chapter of this wonderful little book occur
the following lines:
"That any human being should dare to apply to another
the epithet of 'pauper' is to me the greatest, the
vilest, the most unpardonable crime that could be committed.
Each human being, by mere birth, has a birthright
in this earth and all its productions; and if they
do not receive it, then it is they who are injured; and it
is not the 'pauper'—oh! inexpressibly wicked world!—it
is the well-to-do who are the criminals. It matters not
in the least if the poor be improvident, drunken, or evil
in any way. Food and drink, roof and clothes, are the
inalienable right of every child born into the light. If
the world does not provide it freely—not as a grudging
gift, but as a right, as the son of the house sits down to
breakfast,—then is the world mad. But the world is
not mad, only in ignorance."
In catholic sympathy like this, in heart-hunger after
a wider righteousness, a higher idea than God, does the
Anarchistic ideal come to those who have lived through
old phases of religious and social beliefs and "found
them wanting." It is the Shelleyan outburst:
"More life and fuller life we want."
He was the Prometheus of the movement, he, the wild
bird of song, who flew down into the heart of storm and
night, singing unutterably sweet the song of the free man
and woman as he passed. Poor Shelley! Happy Shelley!
He died not knowing the triumph of his genius; but also
he died while the white glow within was yet shining
higher, higher! In the light of it, he smiled above the
world; had he lived, he might have died alive, as Swinburne
and as Tennyson whose old days belie their early
strength. Yet men will remember
"Slowly comes a hungry people as a lion drawing nigher.
Glares at one who nods and winks beside a slowly dying fire."
and
"Let the great World swing forever down the ringing grooves of Change."
and
"Glory to Man in the highest for Man is the Master of Things"
and
"While three men hold together,
The kingdoms are less by three"
until the end "of kingdoms and of kings," though their
authors "take refuge in the kingdom" and quaver palsied
hymns to royalty with their cracked voices and broken
lutes. For this is the glory of the living ideal, that all
that is in accord with it lives, whether the mouthpiece
through which it spoke would recall it or not. The
manifold voice which is one speaks out through all the
tongues of genius in its greatest moments, whether it
be a Heine writing, in supreme contempt,
"For the Law has got long arms,
Priests and Parsons have long tongues
And the People have long ears,"
a Nekrassoff cursing the railroad built of men, a Hugo
painting the battle of the individual man "with Nature,
with the Law, with Society," a Lowell crying:
"Law is holy ay, but what law? Is there nothing more divine
Than the patched up broils of Congress,—venal, full of meat and wine?
Is there, say you, nothing higher—naught, God save us, that transcends
Laws of cotton texture wove by vulgar men for vulgar ends?
Law is holy: but not your law, ye who keep the tablets whole
While ye dash the Law in pieces, shatter it in life and soul."
and again,
"One faith against a whole world's unbelief,
One soul against the flesh of all mankind."
Nor do the master dramatists lag behind the lyric
writers; they, too, feel the intense pressure within, which
is, quoting the deathword of a man of far other stamp,
"germinal." Ibsen's drama, intensely real, common, accepting
none of the received rules as to the conventional
plot, but having to do with serious questions of the lives
of the plain people, holds ever before us the supreme
duty of truth to one's inner being in defiance of Custom
and Law; it is so in Nora, who renounces all notions of
family duty to "find herself"; it is so in Dr. Stockman,
who maintains the rectitude of his own soul against the
authorities and against the mob; it should have been so
in Mrs. Alving, who learns too late that her yielding
to social custom has brought a fore-ruined life into the
world besides wrecking her own; the Master Builder,
John Gabriel Borkman, all his characters are created to
vindicate the separate soul supreme within its sphere;
those that are miserable and in evil condition are so
because they have not lived true to themselves but in
obedience to some social hypocrisy. Gerhart Hauptmann
likewise feels the new pulsation: he has no hero,
no heroine, no intrigue; his picture is the image of the
headless and tailless body of struggle,—the struggle of
the common man. It begins in the middle, it ends in
nothing—as yet. To end in defeat would be to premise
surrender—a surrender humanity does not intend; to
triumph would be to anticipate the future, and paint life
other than it is. Hence it ends where it began, in murmurs.
Thus his "Weavers." Octave Mirbeau, likewise,
offers his criticism on a world of sheep in "The Bad
Shepherds," and Sara Bernhardt plays it. In England
and America we have another phase of the rebel drama—the
drama of the bad woman, as a distinct figure in social
creation with a right to be herself. Have we not the
"Second Mrs. Tanqueray" who comes to grief through an
endeavor to conform to a moral standard that does not
fit? And have we not Zaza, who is worth a thousand of
her respectable lover and his respectable wife? And
does not all the audience go home in love with her?
And begin to quest the libraries for literary justifications
of their preference?
And these are not hard to find, for it is in the novel
particularly, the novel which is the special creation of
the last century, that the new ideal is freest. In a recent
essay in reply to Walter Besant, Henry James pleads
most Anarchistically for his freedom in the novel. All
such pleas will always come as justifications, for as to
the freedom it is already won, and all the formalists from
Besant to the end of days will never tempt the litterateurs
into chains again. But the essay is well worth
reading as a specimen of right reasoning on art. As
in other modes of literary expression this tendency in
the novel dates back; and it is strange enough that out
of the mouth of a toady like Walter Scott should have
spoken the free, devil-may-care, outlaw spirit (read
notably "Quentin Durward"), which is, perhaps, the
first phase of self-assertion that has the initial strength
to declare itself against the tyranny of Custom; this is
why it happens that the fore-runners of social change
are often shocking in their rudeness and contempt of
manners, and, in fact, more or less uncomfortable persons
to have to do with. But they have their irresistible
charm all the same, and Scott, who was a true genius
despite his toadyism, felt it and responded to it, by always
making us love his outlaws best no matter how
gently he dealt with kings. Another phase of the free
man appears in George Borrow's rollicking, full-blooded,
out-of-door gypsies who do not take the trouble to despise
law, but simply ignore it, live unconscious of it altogether.
George Meredith, in another vein, develops the
strong soul over-riding social barriers. Our own Hawthorne
in his preface to the "Scarlet Letter," and still
more in the "Marble Faun," depicts the vacuity of a life
sucking a parasitic existence through government organization,
and asserts over and over that the only strength
is in him or her—and it is noteworthy that the strongest
is in "her"—who resolutely chooses and treads an unbeaten
path.
From far away Africa, there speaks again the note
of soul rebellion in the exquisite "Dreams" of Olive
Schreiner, wherethrough "The Hunter walks alone."
Grant Allen, too, in numerous works, especially "The
Woman Who Did," voices the demand for self-hood.
Morris gives us his idyllic "News from Nowhere." Zola,
the fertile creator of dungheaps crowned with lilies,
whose pages reek with the stench of bodies, laboring,
debauching, rotting, until the words of Christ cry loud
in the ears of him who would put the vision away,
"Whited sepulchres, full of dead men's bones and all
uncleanliness"—Zola was more than an unconscious
Anarchist, he is a conscious one, did so proclaim himself.
And close beside him, Maxim Gorki, Spokesman
of the Tramp, Visionary of the Despised, who whatever
his personal political views may be, and notwithstanding
the condemnations he has visited upon the Anarchist, is
still an Anarchistic voice in literature. And over against
these, austere, simple, but oh! so loving, the critic who
shows the world its faults but does not condemn, the man
who first took the way of renunciation and then preached
it, the Christian whom the Church casts out, the Anarchist
whom the worst government in the world dares not slay,
the author of "Resurrection" and "The Slavery of Our
Times."
They come together, from the side of passionate hate
and limitless love—the volcano and the sea—they come
together in one demand, freedom from this wicked and
debasing tyranny called Government, which makes indescribable
brutes of all who feel its touch, but worse
still of all who touch it.
As for contemporaneous light literature, there are
magazine articles and papers innumerable displaying here
and there the grasp of the idea. Have we not the Philistine
and its witty editor, boldly proclaiming in Anarchistic
spelling, "I am an Anarkist?" By the way, he
may now expect a visitation of the Criminal Anarchy
law. And a few years since, Julian Hawthorne, writing
in the Denver Post, inquired, "Did you ever notice that
all the interesting people you meet are Anarchists?" Reason
why: there is no other living dream to him who has
character enough to be interesting. It is the uninteresting,
the dull, the ready-made minds who go on accepting
"Dead limbs of gibbeted gods," as they accept their dinner
and their bed, which someone else prepares. Let two
names, standing for strangely opposing appeals yet standing
upon common ground, close this sketch—two strong
flashes of the prismatic fires which blent together in the
white ray of our Ideal. The first, Nietzsche, he who
proclaims "the Overman," the receiver of the mantle of
Max Stirner, the scintillant rhetorician, the pride of
Young Germany, who would have the individual acknowledge
nothing, neither science, nor logic, nor any other
creation of his thought, as having authority over him,
its creator. The last, Whitman, the great sympathetic,
all-inclusive Quaker, whose love knew no limits, who
said to Society's most utterly despised outcast,
"Not until the sun excludes you, will I exclude you,"
and who, whether he be called poet, philosopher, or
peasant was supremely Anarchist, and in a moment of
weariness with human slavery, cried:
"I think I could turn and live with animals, they seem so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their conditions,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."
"Here was one guard, and here was the other
at this end; I was here opposite the gate. You
know those problems in geometry of the hare
and the hounds—they never run straight, but always in
a curve, so, see? And the guard was no smarter than
the dogs; if he had run straight to the gate he would
have caught me."
It was Peter Kropotkin telling of his escape from the
Petro-Paulovsky fortress. Three crumbs on the table
marked the relative position of the outwitted guards and
the fugitive prisoner; the speaker had broken them from
the bread on which he was lunching and dropped them on
the table with an amused smile. The suggested triangle
had been the starting-point of the life-long exile of the
greatest man, save Tolstoy alone, that Russia has produced;
from that moment began the many foreign wanderings
and the taking of the simple, love-given title
"Comrade," for which he had abandoned the "Prince,"
which he despises.
We were three together in the plain little home of a
London workingman—Will Wess, a one-time shoemaker—Kropotkin,
and I. We had our "tea" in homely English
fashion, with thin slices of buttered bread; and we talked
of things nearest our hearts, which, whenever two or
three Anarchists are gathered together, means present
evidences of the growth of liberty and what our comrades
are doing in all lands. And as what they do and
say often leads them into prisons, the talk had naturally
fallen upon Kropotkin's experience and his daring escape,
for which the Russian government is chagrined unto this
day.
Presently the old man glanced at the time, and jumped
briskly to his feet: "I am late. Good-by, Voltairine;
good-by, Will. Is this the way to the kitchen? I must
say good-by to Mrs. Turner and Lizzie." And out to
the kitchen he went, unwilling, late though he was, to
leave without a hand-clasp to those who had so much as
washed a dish for him. Such is Kropotkin, a man whose
personality is felt more than any other in the Anarchist
movement—at once the gentlest, the most kindly, and the
most invincible of men. Communist as well as Anarchist,
his very heart-beats are rhythmic with the great common
pulse of work and life.
Communist am not I, though my father was, and his
father before him during the stirring times of '48, which
is probably the remote reason for my opposition to things
as they are: at bottom convictions are mostly temperamental.
And if I sought to explain myself on other
grounds, I should be a bewildering error in logic; for
by early influences and education I should have been a
nun, and spent my life glorifying Authority in its most
concentrated form, as some of my schoolmates are doing
at this hour within the mission houses of the Order of
the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. But the old ancestral
spirit of rebellion asserted itself while I was yet
fourteen, a schoolgirl at the Convent of Our Lady of
Lake Huron, at Sarnia, Ontario. How I pity myself
now, when I remember it, poor lonesome little soul, battling
solitary in the murk of religious superstition, unable
to believe and yet in hourly fear of damnation, hot,
savage, and eternal, if I do not instantly confess and
profess! How well I recall the bitter energy with which
I repelled my teacher's enjoinder, when I told her that
I did not wish to apologize for an adjudged fault, as I
could not see that I had been wrong, and would not feel
my words. "It is not necessary," said she, "that we
should feel what we say, but it is always necessary that
we obey our superiors." "I will not lie," I answered
hotly, and at the same time trembled lest my disobedience
had finally consigned me to torment!
I struggled my way out at last, and was a freethinker
when I left the institution, three years later, though I
had never seen a book or heard a word to help me in
my loneliness. It had been like the Valley of the Shadow
of Death, and there are white scars on my soul yet, where
Ignorance and Superstition burnt me with their hell-fire
in those stifling days. Am I blasphemous? It is their
word, not mine. Beside that battle of my young days all
others have been easy, for whatever was without, within
my own Will was supreme. It has owed no allegiance,
and never shall; it has moved steadily in one direction,
the knowledge and the assertion of its own liberty, with
all the responsibility falling thereon.
This, I am sure, is the ultimate reason for my acceptance
of Anarchism, though the specific occasion which
ripened tendencies to definition was the affair of 1886-7,
when five innocent men were hanged in Chicago for the
act of one guilty who still remains unknown. Till then
I believed in the essential justice of the American law
and trial by jury. After that I never could. The infamy
of that trial has passed into history, and the question
it awakened as to the possibility of justice under law has
passed into clamorous crying across the world. With this
question fighting for a hearing at a time when, young
and ardent, all questions were pressing with a force which
later life would in vain hear again, I chanced to attend a
Paine Memorial Convention in an out-of-the-way corner
of the earth among the mountains and the snow-drifts
of Pennsylvania. I was a freethought lecturer at this
time, and had spoken in the afternoon on the lifework of
Paine; in the evening I sat in the audience to hear
Clarence Darrow deliver an address on Socialism. It
was my first introduction to any plan for bettering the
condition of the working-classes which furnished some
explanation of the course of economic development, and
I ran to it as one who has been turning about in darkness
runs to the light. I smile now at how quickly I
adopted the label "Socialist" and how quickly I cast it
aside. Let no one follow my example; but I was young.
Six weeks later I was punished for my rashness, when I
attempted to argue for my faith with a little Russian Jew,
named Mozersky, at a debating club in Pittsburgh. He
was an Anarchist, and a bit of a Socrates. He questioned
me into all kinds of holes, from which I extricated myself
most awkwardly, only to flounder into others he had
smilingly dug while I was getting out of the first ones.
The necessity of a better foundation became apparent:
hence began a course of study in the principles of sociology
and of modern Socialism and Anarchism as presented
in their regular journals. It was Benjamin
Tucker's Liberty, the exponent of Individualist Anarchism,
which finally convinced me that "Liberty is not
the Daughter but the Mother of Order." And though
I no longer hold the particular economic gospel advocated
by Tucker, the doctrine of Anarchism itself, as then conceived,
has but broadened, deepened, and intensified itself
with years.
To those unfamiliar with the movement, the various
terms are confusing. Anarchism is, in truth, a sort of
Protestantism, whose adherents are a unit in the great
essential belief that all forms of external authority must
disappear to be replaced by self-control only, but variously
divided in our conception of the form of future
society. Individualism supposes private property to be
the cornerstone of personal freedom; asserts that such
property should consist in the absolute possession of one's
own product and of such share of the natural heritage
of all as one may actually use. Communist-Anarchism,
on the other hand, declares that such property is both
unrealizable and undesirable; that the common possession
and use of all the natural sources and means of
social production can alone guarantee the individual
against a recurrence of inequality, and its attendants,
government and slavery. My personal conviction is that
both forms of society, as well as many intermediations,
would, in the absence of government, be tried in various
localities, according to the instincts and material condition
of the people, but that well founded objections may
be offered to both. Liberty and experiment alone can
determine the best forms of society. Therefore I no
longer label myself otherwise than as "Anarchist"
simply.
I would not, however, have the world think that I
am an "Anarchist by trade." Outsiders have some very
curious notions about us, one of them being that Anarchists
never work. On the contrary, Anarchists are nearly
always poor, and it is only the rich who live without
work. Not only this, but it is our belief that every
healthy human being will, by the laws of his own activity,
choose to work, though certainly not as now, for at
present there is little opportunity for one to find his true
vocation. Thus I, who in freedom would have selected
otherwise, am a teacher of language. Some twelve years
since, being in Philadelphia and without employment, I
accepted the proposition of a small group of Russian
Jewish factory workers to form an evening class in the
common English branches. I know well enough that
behind the desire to help me to make a living lay the wish
that I might thus take part in the propaganda of our
common cause. But the incidental became once more
the principal, and a teacher of working men and women
I have remained from that day. In those twelve years
that I have lived and loved and worked with foreign
Jews I have taught over a thousand, and found them, as
a rule, the brightest, the most persistent and sacrificing
students, and in youth dreamers of social ideals. While
the "intelligent American" has been cursing him as the
"ignorant foreigner," while the short-sighted workingman
has been making life for the "sheeny" as intolerable
as possible, silent and patient the despised man has
worked his way against it all. I have myself seen such
genuine heroism in the cause of education practiced by
girls and boys, and even by men and women with families,
as would pass the limits of belief to the ordinary
mind. Cold, starvation, self-isolation, all endured for
years in order to obtain the means for study; and, worse
than all, exhaustion of body even to emaciation—this is
common. Yet in the midst of all this, so fervent is the
social imagination of the young that most of them find
time besides to visit the various clubs and societies where
radical thought is discussed, and sooner or later ally
themselves either with the Socialist Sections, the Liberal
Leagues, the Single Tax Clubs, or the Anarchist Groups.
The greatest Socialist daily in America is the Jewish
Vorwaerts, and the most active and competent practical
workers are Jews. So they are among the Anarchists.
I am no propagandist at all costs, or I would leave the
story here; but the truth compels me to add that as the
years pass and the gradual filtration and absorption of
American commercial life goes on, my students become
successful professionals, the golden mist of enthusiasm
vanishes, and the old teacher must turn for comradeship
to the new youth, who still press forward with burning
eyes, seeing what is lost forever to those whom common
success has satisfied and stupified. It brings tears sometimes,
but as Kropotkin says, "Let them go; we have had
the best of them." After all, who are the really old?
Those who wear out in faith and energy, and take to
easy chairs and soft living; not Kropotkin, with his sixty
years upon him, who has bright eyes and the eager interest
of a little child; not fiery John Most, "the old war-horse
of the revolution," unbroken after his ten years of
imprisonment in Europe and America; not grey-haired
Louise Michel, with the aurora of the morning still shining
in her keen look which peers from behind the barred
memories of New Caledonia; not Dyer D. Lum, who still
smiles in his grave, I think; nor Tucker, nor Turner, nor
Theresa Clairmunt, nor Jean Grave—not these. I have
met them all, and felt the springing life pulsating through
heart and hand, joyous, ardent, leaping into action. Not
such are the old, but your young heart that goes bankrupt
in social hope, dry-rotting in this stale and purposeless
society. Would you be always young? Then be an
Anarchist, and live with the faith of hope, though you
be old.
I doubt if any other hope has the power to keep the
fire alight as I saw it in 1897, when we met the Spanish
exiles released from the fortress of Montjuich. Comparatively
few persons in America ever knew the story of
that torture, though we distributed fifty thousand copies
of the letters smuggled from the prison, and some few
newspapers did reprint them. They were the letters of
men incarcerated on mere suspicion for the crime of an
unknown person, and subjected to tortures the bare
mention of which makes one shudder. Their nails were
torn out, their heads compressed in metal caps, the most
sensitive portions of the body twisted between guitar
strings, their flesh burned with red hot irons; they had
been fed on salt codfish after days of starvation, and
refused water; Juan Ollé, a boy nineteen years old, had
gone mad; another had confessed to something he had
never done and knew nothing of. This is no horrible imagination.
I who write have myself shaken some of
those scarred hands. Indiscriminately, four hundred people
of all sorts of beliefs—Republicans, trade unionists,
Socialists, Free Masons, as well as Anarchists—had
been cast into dungeons and tortured in the infamous
"zero." Is it a wonder that most of them came out
Anarchists? There were twenty-eight in the first lot that
we met at Euston Station that August afternoon,—homeless
wanderers in the whirlpool of London, released without
trial after months of imprisonment, and ordered to
leave Spain in forty-eight hours! They had left it, singing
their prison songs; and still across their dark and
sorrowful eyes one could see the eternal Maytime bloom.
They drifted away to South America chiefly, where four
or five new Anarchist papers have since arisen, and several
colonizing experiments along Anarchist lines are
being tried. So tyranny defeats itself, and the exile becomes
the seed-sower of the revolution.
And not only to the heretofore unaroused does he bring
awakening, but the entire character of the world movement
is modified by this circulation of the comrades of
all nations among themselves. Originally the American
movement, the native creation which arose with Josiah
Warren in 1829, was purely individualistic; the student
of economy will easily understand the material and historical
causes for such development. But within the
last twenty years the communist idea has made great
progress, owing primarily to that concentration in capitalist
production which has driven the American workingman
to grasp at the idea of solidarity, and, secondly,
to the expulsion of active communist propagandists from
Europe. Again, another change has come within the last
ten years. Till then the application of the idea was
chiefly narrowed to industrial matters, and the economic
schools mutually denounced each other; to-day a large
and genial tolerance is growing. The young generation
recognizes the immense sweep of the idea through all the
realms of art, science, literature, education, sex relations
and personal morality, as well as social economy, and
welcomes the accession to the ranks of those who struggle
to realize the free life, no matter in what field. For this
is what Anarchism finally means, the whole unchaining
of life after two thousand years of Christian asceticism
and hypocrisy.
Apart from the question of ideals, there is the question
of method. "How do you propose to get all this?" is
the question most frequently asked us. The same modification
has taken place here. Formerly there were
"Quakers" and "Revolutionists"; so there are still. But
while they neither thought well of the other, now both
have learned that each has his own use in the great play
of world forces. No man is in himself a unit, and in
every soul Jove still makes war on Christ. Nevertheless,
the spirit of peace grows; and while it would be idle to
say that Anarchists in general believe that any of the
great industrial problems will be solved without the use
of force, it would be equally idle to suppose that they
consider force itself a desirable thing, or that it furnishes
a final solution to any problem. From peaceful experiment
alone can come final solution, and that the advocates
of force know and believe as well as the Tolstoyans.
Only they think that the present tyrannies provoke resistance.
The spread of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and
"The Slavery of Our Times," and the growth of numerous
Tolstoy clubs having for their purpose the dissemination
of the literature of non-resistance, is an evidence that
many receive the idea that it is easier to conquer war
with peace. I am one of these. I can see no end of retaliations
unless someone ceases to retaliate. But let no one
mistake this for servile submission or meek abnegation;
my right shall be asserted no matter at what cost to me,
and none shall trench upon it without my protest.
Good-natured satirists often remark that "the best way
to cure an Anarchist is to give him a fortune." Substituting
"corrupt" for "cure," I would subscribe to this;
and believing myself to be no better than the rest of mortals,
I earnestly hope that as so far it has been my lot to
work, and work hard, and for no fortune, so I may continue
to the end; for let me keep the integrity of my soul,
with all the limitations of my material conditions, rather
than become the spineless and ideal-less creation of material
needs. My reward is that I live with the young; I
keep step with my comrades; I shall die in the harness
with my face to the east—the East and the Light.
MEMORIAL ORATION[A]
Let me begin my address with a confession. I
make it sorrowfully and with self-disgust; but
in the presence of great sacrifice we learn humility,
and if my comrades could give their lives for their belief,
why, let me give my pride. Yet I would not give it,
for personal utterance is of trifling importance, were it
not that I think at this particular season it will encourage
those of our sympathizers whom the recent outburst
of savagery may have disheartened, and perhaps
lead some who are standing where I once stood to do
as I did later.
This is my confession: Fifteen years ago last May
when the echoes of the Haymarket bomb rolled through
the little Michigan village where I then lived, I,
like the rest of the credulous and brutal, read one
lying newspaper headline, "Anarchists throw a bomb in
a crowd in the Haymarket in Chicago," and immediately
cried out, "They ought to be hung."—This, though I had
never believed in capital punishment for ordinary criminals.
For that ignorant, outrageous, bloodthirsty sentence
I shall never forgive myself, though I know the
dead men would have forgiven me, though I know those
who loved them forgive me. But my own voice, as it
sounded that night, will sound so in my ears till I die,—a
bitter reproach and shame. What had I done? Credited
the first wild rumor of an event of which I knew
nothing, and, in my mind, sent men to the gallows without
asking one word of defense! In one wild, unbalanced
moment threw away the sympathies of a lifetime, and
became an executioner at heart. And what I did that
night millions did, and what I said millions said. I have
only one word of extenuation for myself and all those
people—ignorance. I did not know what Anarchism was.
I had never seen it used save in histories, and there it
was always synonymous with social confusion and murder.
I believed the newspapers. I thought these men
had thrown that bomb, unprovoked, into a mass of men
and women, from a wicked delight in killing. And so
thought all those millions of others. But out of those
millions there were some few thousand—I am glad I
was one of them—who did not let the matter rest there.
I know not what resurrection of human decency first
stirred within me after that,—whether it was an intellectual
suspicion that may be I did not know all the truth of
the case and could not believe the newspapers, or whether
it was the old strong undercurrent of sympathy which
often prompts the heart to go out to the accused, without
a reason; but this I do know that though I was no
Anarchist at the time of the execution, it was long and
long before that, that I came to the conclusion that the
accusation was false, the trial a farce, that there was
no warrant either in justice or in law for their conviction;
and that the hanging, if hanging there should be,
would be the act of a society composed of people who
had said what I said on the first night, and who had
kept their eyes and ears fast shut ever since, determined
to see nothing and to know nothing but rage and vengeance.
Till the very end I hoped that mercy might intervene,
though justice did not; and from the hour I
knew neither would nor ever could again, I distrusted law
and lawyers, judges and governors alike. And my whole
being cried out to know what it was these men had stood
for, and why they were hanged, seeing it was not proven
they knew anything about the throwing of the bomb.
Little by little, here and there, I came to know that
what they had stood for was a very high and noble ideal
of human life, and what they were hanged for was
preaching it to the common people,—the common people
who were as ready to hang them, in their ignorance, as
the court and the prosecutor were in their malice! Little
by little I came to know that these were men who had
a clearer vision of human right than most of their fellows;
and who, being moved by deep social sympathies,
wished to share their vision with their fellows, and so
proclaimed it in the market-place. Little by little I
realized that the misery, the pathetic submission, the
awful degradation of the workers, which from the time
I was old enough to begin to think had borne heavily
upon my heart, (as they must bear upon all who have
hearts to feel at all), had smitten theirs more deeply
still,—so deeply that they knew no rest save in seeking
a way out,—and that was more than I had ever had the
sense to conceive. For me there had never been a hope
there should be no more rich and poor; but a vague
idea that there might not be so rich and so poor, if the
workingmen by combining could exact a little better
wages, and make their hours a little shorter. It was
the message of these men, (and their death swept that
message far out into ears that would never have heard
their living voices), that all such little dreams are folly.
That not in demanding little, not in striking for an hour
less, not in mountain labor to bring forth mice, can any
lasting alleviation come; but in demanding, much,—all,—in
a bold self-assertion of the worker to toil any hours
he finds sufficient, not that another finds for him,—here
is where the way out lies. That message, and the
message of others, whose works, associated with theirs,
their death drew to my notice, took me up, as it were,
upon a mighty hill, wherefrom I saw the roofs of the
workshops of the little world. I saw the machines, the
things that men had made to ease their burden, the
wonderful things, the iron genii, I saw them set their
iron teeth in the living flesh of the men who made them;
I saw the maimed and crippled stumps of men go limping
away into the night that engulfs the poor, perhaps to be
thrown up in the flotsam and jetsam of beggary for a
time, perhaps to suicide in some dim corner where the
black surge throws its slime.
I saw the rose fire of the furnace shining on the
blanched face of the man who tended it, and knew surely
as I knew anything in life, that never would a free man
feed his blood to the fire like that.
I saw swart bodies, all mangled and crushed, borne
from the mouths of the mines to be stowed away in a
grave hardly less narrow and dark than that in which the
living form had crouched ten, twelve, fourteen hours
a day; and I knew that in order that I might be warm—I,
and you, and those others who never do any dirty
work—those men had slaved away in those black graves,
and been crushed to death at last.
I saw beside city streets great heaps of horrible colored
earth, and down at the bottom of the trench from which
it was thrown, so far down that nothing else was visible,
bright gleaming eyes, like a wild animal's hunted into its
hole. And I knew that free men never chose to labor
there, with pick and shovel in that foul, sewage-soaked
earth, in that narrow trench, in that deadly sewer gas
ten, eight, even six hours a day. Only slaves would
do it.
I saw deep down in the hull of the ocean liner the men
who shoveled the coal—burned and seared like paper before
the grate; and I knew that "the record" of the
beautiful monster, and the pleasure of the ladies who
laughed on the deck, were paid for with these withered
bodies and souls.
I saw the scavenger carts go up and down, drawn
by sad brutes driven by sadder ones; for never a man,
a man in full possession of his self-hood, would freely
choose to spend all his days in the nauseating stench
that forces him to swill alcohol to neutralize it.
And I saw in the lead works how men were poisoned,
and in the sugar refineries how they went insane; and
in the factories how they lost their decency; and in
the stores how they learned to lie; and I knew it was
slavery made them do all this. I knew the Anarchists
were right,—the whole thing must be changed, the
whole thing was wrong,—the whole system of production
and distribution, the whole ideal of life.
And I questioned the government then; they had
taught me to question it. What have you done—you
the keepers of the Declaration and the Constitution—what
have you done about all this? What have you
done to preserve the conditions of freedom to the people?
Lied, deceived, fooled, tricked, bought and sold and
got gain! You have sold away the land, that you
had no right to sell. You have murdered the aboriginal
people, that you might seize the land in the name of
the white race, and then steal it away from them
again, to be again sold by a second and a third robber.
And that buying and selling of the land has driven
the people off the healthy earth and away from the
clean air into these rot-heaps of humanity called cities,
where every filthy thing is done, and filthy labor
breeds filthy bodies and filthy souls. Our boys are
decayed with vice before they come to manhood; our
girls—ah, well might John Harvey write:
"Another begetteth a daughter white and gold,
She looks into the meadow land water, and the world
Knows her no more; they have sought her field and fold
But the City, the City hath bought her,
It hath sold
Her piecemeal, to students, rats, and reek of the graveyard mould."
You have done this thing, gentlemen who engineer
the government; and not only have you caused this
ruin to come upon others; you yourselves are rotten
with this debauchery. You exist for the purpose of
granting privileges to whoever can pay most for you,
and so limiting the freedom of men to employ themselves
that they must sell themselves into this frightful
slavery or become tramps, beggars, thieves, prostitutes,
and murderers. And when you have done all
this, what then do you do to them, these creatures of
your own making? You, who have set them the example
in every villainy? Do you then relent, and
remembering the words of the great religious teacher
to whom most of you offer lip service on the officially
religious day, do you go to these poor, broken,
wretched creatures and love them? Love them and
help them, to teach them to be better? No: you build
prisons high and strong, and there you beat, and starve,
and hang, finding by the working of your system
human beings so unutterably degraded that they are
willing to kill whomsoever they are told to kill at so
much monthly salary.
This is what the government is, has always been,
the creator and defender of privilege; the organization
of oppression and revenge. To hope that it can ever
become anything else is the vainest of delusions. They
tell you that Anarchy, the dream of social order without
government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream
that ever entered the heart of man is the dream that
mankind can ever help itself through an appeal to law,
or to come to any order that will not result in slavery
wherein there is any excuse for government.
It was for telling the people this that these five men
were killed. For telling the people that the only way
to get out of their misery was first to learn what their
rights upon this earth were;—freedom to use the land
and all within it and all the tools of production—and
then to stand all together and take them, themselves,
and not to appeal to the jugglers of the law. Abolish
the law—that is abolish privilege,—and crime will
abolish itself.
They will tell you these men were hanged for advocating
force. What! These creatures who drill men
in the science of killing, who put guns and clubs in
hands they train to shoot and strike, who hail with
delight the latest inventions in explosives, who exult
in the machine that can kill the most with the least
expenditure of energy, who declare a war of extermination
upon people who do not want their civilization,
who ravish, and burn, and garotte and guillotine, and
hang, and electrocute, they have the impertinence to
talk about the unrighteousness of force! True, these
men did advocate the right to resist invasion by force.
You will find scarcely one in a thousand who does
not believe in that right. The one will be either a real
Christian or a non-resistant Anarchist. It will not be
a believer in the State. No, no; it was not for advocating
forcible resistance on principle, but for advocating
forcible resistance to their tyrannies, and for
advocating a society which would forever make an
end of riches and poverty, of governors and governed.
The spirit of revenge, which is always stupid, accomplished
its brutal act. Had it lifted its eyes from
its work, it might have seen in the background of the
scaffold that bleak November morning the dawn-light
of Anarchy whiten across the world.
So it came first,—a gleam of hope to the proletaire,
a summons to rise and shake off his material bondage.
But steadily, steadily the light has grown, as year by
year the scientist, the literary genius, the artist, and
the moral teacher, have brought to it the tribute of
their best work, their unpaid work, the work they
did for love. To-day it means not only material
emancipation, too; it comes as the summing up of all
those lines of thought and action which for three
hundred years have been making towards freedom;
it means fulness of being, the free life.
And I say it boldly, notwithstanding the recent outburst
of condemnation, notwithstanding the cry of
lynch, burn, shoot, imprison, deport, and the Scarlet
Letter A to be branded low down upon the forehead,
and the latest excuse for that fond esthetic decoration
"the button," that for two thousand years no idea has
so stirred the world as this,—none which had such
living power to break down barriers of race and degree,
to attract prince and proletaire, poet and mechanic,
Quaker and Revolutionist. No other ideal but the
free life is strong enough to touch the man whose infinite
pity and understanding goes alike to the hypocrite
priest and the victim of Siberian whips; the
loving rebel who stepped from his title and his wealth
to labor with all the laboring earth; the sweet strong
singer who sang
"No Master, high or low";
the lover who does not measure his love nor reckon on
return; the self-centered one who "will not rule, but
also will not ruled be"; the philosopher who chanted
the Over-man; the devoted woman of the people;
ay, and these too,—these rebellious flashes from the
vast cloud-hung ominous obscurity of the anonymous,
these souls whom governmental and capitalistic brutality
has whipped and goaded and stung to blind rage
and bitterness, these mad young lions of revolt, these
Winkelrieds who offer their hearts to the spears.
Men are of three sorts: the turn backs, the rush-aheads,
and the indifferents. The first and
second are comparatively few in number. The
really conscientious conservative, eternally looking backward
for his models and trying hard to preserve that
which is, is almost as scarce an article as the genuine
radical, who is eternally attacking that which is and looking
forward to some indistinct but glowing vision of a
purified social life. Between them lies the vast nitrogenous
body of the indifferents, who go through life with
no large thoughts or intense feelings of any kind, the
best that can be said of them being that they serve to
dilute the too fierce activities of the other two. Into the
callous ears of these indifferents, nevertheless, the opposing
voices of conservative and radical are continually
shouting; and for years, for centuries, the conservative
wins the day, not because he really touches the consciences
of the indifferent so much (though in a measure he does
that) as because his way causes his hearer the least mental
trouble. It is easier to this lazy, inert mentality to
nod its head and approve the continuance of things as
they are, than to listen to proposals for change, to consider,
to question, to make an innovating decision. These
require activity, application,—and nothing is so foreign
to the hibernating social conscience of your ordinary individual.
I say "social" conscience, because I by no
means wish to say that these are conscienceless people;
they have, for active use, sufficient conscience to go
through their daily parts in life, and they think that is
all that is required. Of the lives of others, of the effects
of their attitude in cursing the existences of thousands
whom they do not know, they have no conception; they
sleep; and they hear the voices of those who cry aloud
about these things, dimly, as in dreams; and they do not
wish to awaken. Nevertheless, at the end of the centuries
they always awaken. It is the radical who always wins at
last. At the end of the centuries institutions are reviewed
by this aroused social conscience, are revised, sometimes
are utterly rooted out.
Thus it is with the institutions of Crime and Punishment.
The conservative holds that these things have been
decided from all time; that crime is a thing-in-itself, with
no other cause than the viciousness of man; that punishment
was decreed from Mt. Sinai, or whatever holy
mountain happens to be believed in in his country; that
society is best served by strictness and severity of judgment
and punishment. And he wishes only to make his
indifferent brothers keepers of other men's consciences
along these lines. He would have all men be hunters of
men, that crime may be tracked down and struck down.
The radical says: All false, all false and wrong. Crime
has not been decided from all time: crime, like everything
else, has had its evolution according to place, time, and
circumstance. "The demons of our sires become the
saints that we adore,"—and the saints, the saints and the
heroes of our fathers, are criminals according to our
codes. Abraham, David, Solomon,—could any respectable
member of society admit that he had done the things
they did? Crime is not a thing-in-itself, not a plant without
roots, not a something proceeding from nothing; and
the only true way to deal with it is to seek its causes as
earnestly, as painstakingly, as the astronomer seeks the
causes of the perturbations in the orbit of the planet he is
observing, sure that there must be one, or many, somewhere.
And Punishment, too, must be studied. The
holy mountain theory is a failure. Punishment is a failure.
And it is a failure not because men do not hunt
down and strike enough, but because they hunt down and
strike at all; because in the chase of those who do ill,
they do ill themselves; they brutalize their own characters,
and so much the more so because they are convinced
that this time the brutal act is done in accord with
conscience. The murderous deed of the criminal was
against conscience, the torture or the murder of the criminal
by the official is with conscience. Thus the conscience
is diseased and perverted, and a new class of imbruted
men created. We have punished and punished for untold
thousands of years, and we have not gotten rid of crime,
we have not diminished it. Let us consider then.
The indifferentist shrugs his shoulders and remarks to
the conservative: "What have I to do with it? I will
hunt nobody and I will save nobody. Let every one take
care of himself. I pay my taxes; let the judges and the
lawyers take care of the criminals. And as for you, Mr.
Radical, you weary me. Your talk is too heroic. You
want to play Atlas and carry the heavens on your
shoulders. Well, do it if you like. But don't imagine I
am going to act the stupid Hercules and transfer your
burden to my shoulders. Rave away until you are tired,
but let me alone."
"I will not let you alone. I am no Atlas. I am no
more than a fly; but I will annoy you, I will buzz in your
ears; I will not let you sleep. You must think about
this."
That is about the height and power of my voice, or of
any individual voice, in the present state of the question.
I do not deceive myself. I do not imagine that the question
of crime and punishment will be settled till long,
long after the memory of me shall be as completely
swallowed up by time as last year's snow is swallowed
by the sea. Two thousand years ago a man whose soul
revolted at punishment, cried out: "Judge not, that ye
be not judged," and yet men and women who have taken
his name upon their lips as holy, have for all those two
thousand years gone on judging as if their belief in what
he said was only lip-belief; and they do it to-day. And
judges sit upon benches and send men to their death,—even
judges who do not themselves believe in capital
punishment; and prosecutors exhaust their eloquence and
their tricks to get men convicted; and women and men
bear witness against sinners; and then they all meet in
church and pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us!"
Do they mean anything at all by it?
And I know that just as the voice of Jesus was not
heard, and is not heard, save here and there; just as the
voice of Tolstoy is not heard, save here and there; and
others great and small are lost in the great echoless desert
of indifferentism, having produced little perceptible effect,
so my voice also will be lost, and barely a slight ripple of
thought be propagated over that dry and fruitless expanse;
even that the next wind of trial will straighten
and leave as unimprinted sand.
Nevertheless, by the continued and unintermitting action
of forces infinitesimal compared with the human
voice, the greatest effects are at length accomplished.
A wave-length of light is but the fifty-thousandth part
of an inch, yet by the continuous action of waves like
these have been produced all the creations of light, the
entire world of sight, out of masses irresponsive, dark,
colorless. And doubt not that in time this cold and irresponsive
mass of indifference will feel and stir and
realize the force of the great sympathies which will
change the attitude of the human mind as a whole
towards Crime and Punishment, and erase both from the
world.
Not by lawyers and not by judges shall the final cause
of the criminal be tried; but lawyer and judge and criminal
together shall be told by the Social Conscience, "Depart
in peace."
A great ethical teacher once wrote words like unto
these: "I have within me the capacity for every crime."
Few, reading them, believe that he meant what he said.
Most take it as the sententious utterance of one who, in
an abandonment of generosity, wished to say something
large and leveling. But I think he meant exactly what
he said. I think that with all his purity Emerson had
within him the turbid stream of passion and desire; for
all his hard-cut granite features he knew the instincts of
the weakling and the slave; and for all the sweetness, the
tenderness, and the nobility of his nature, he had the
tiger and the jackal in his soul. I think that within every
bit of human flesh and spirit that has ever crossed the
enigma bridge of life, from the prehistoric racial morning
until now, all crime and all virtue were germinal.
Out of one great soul-stuff are we sprung, you and I and
all of us; and if in you the virtue has grown and not the
vice, do not therefore conclude that you are essentially
different from him whom you have helped to put in
stripes and behind bars. Your balance may be more even,
you may be mixed in smaller proportions altogether, or
the outside temptation has not come upon you.
I am no disciple of that school whose doctrine is
summed up in the teaching that Man's Will is nothing,
his Material Surroundings all. I do not accept that popular
socialism which would make saints out of sinners
only by filling their stomachs. I am no apologist for
characterlessness, and no petitioner for universal moral
weakness. I believe in the individual. I believe that the
purpose of life (in so far as we can give it a purpose,
and it has none save what we give it) is the assertion
and the development of strong, self-centered personality.
It is therefore that no religion which offers vicarious
atonement for the misdoer, and no philosophy which
rests on the cornerstone of irresponsibility, makes any
appeal to me. I believe that immeasurable mischief has
been wrought by the ceaseless repetition for the last two
thousand years of the formula: "Not through any merit
of mine shall I enter heaven, but through the sacrifice
of Christ."—Not through the sacrifice of Christ, nor
any other sacrifice, shall any one attain strength, save
in so far as he takes the spirit and the purpose of the
sacrifice into his own life and lives it. Nor do I see anything
as the result of the teaching that all men are the
helpless victims of external circumstance and under the
same conditions will act precisely alike, than a lot of
spineless, nerveless, bloodless crawlers in the tracks of
stronger men,—too desirous of ease to be honest, too
weak to be successful rascals.
Let this be put as strongly as it can now, that nothing
I shall say hereafter may be interpreted as a gospel of
shifting and shirking.
But the difference between us, the Anarchists, who
preach self-government and none else, and Moralists who
in times past and present have asked for individual responsibility,
is this, that while they have always framed
creeds and codes for the purpose of holding others to
account, we draw the line upon ourselves. Set the standard
as high as you will; live to it as near as you can; and
if you fail, try yourself, judge yourself, condemn yourself,
if you choose. Teach and persuade your neighbor
if you can; consider and compare his conduct if you
please; speak your mind if you desire; but if he fails to
reach your standard or his own, try him not, judge him
not, condemn him not. He lies beyond your sphere; you
cannot know the temptation nor the inward battle nor
the weight of the circumstances upon him. You do not
know how long he fought before he failed. Therefore
you cannot be just. Let him alone.
This is the ethical concept at which we have arrived,
not by revelation from any superior power, not through
the reading of any inspired book, not by special illumination
of our inner consciousness; but by the study of the
results of social experiment in the past as presented in
the works of historians, psychologists, criminologists,
sociologists and legalists.
Very likely so many "ists" sound a little oppressive,
and there may be those to whom they may even have a
savor of pedantry. It sounds much simpler and less
ostentatious to say "Thus saith the Lord," or "The Good
Book says." But in the meat and marrow these last
are the real presumptions, these easy-going claims of
familiarity with the will and intent of Omnipotence. It
may sound more pedantic to you to say, "I have studied
the accumulated wisdom of man, and drawn certain deductions
therefrom," than to say "I had a talk with
God this morning and he said thus and so"; but to me the
first statement is infinitely more modest. Moreover there
is some chance of its being true, while the other is highly
imaginative fiction.
This is not to impugn the honesty of those who inherit
this survival of an earlier mental state of the race, and
who accept it as they accept their appetites or anything
else they find themselves born with. Nor is it to belittle
those past efforts of active and ardent souls who claimed
direct divine inspiration as the source of their doctrines.
All religions have been, in their great general outlines,
the intuitive graspings of the race at truths which it had
not yet sufficient knowledge to demonstrate,—rude and
imperfect statements of ideas which were yet but germinal,
but which, even then, mankind had urgent need to
conceive, and upon which it afterwards spent the efforts
of generations of lives to correct and perfect. Thus the
very ethical concept of which I have been speaking as
peculiarly Anarchistic, was preached as a religious doctrine
by the fifteenth century Tolstoy, Peter Chilciky;
and in the sixteenth century, the fanatical sect of the
Anabaptists shook Germany from center to circumference
by a doctrine which included the declaration that
"pleadings in courts of law, oaths, capital punishment,
and all absolute power were incompatible with the
Christian faith." It was an imperfect illumination of
the intellect, such only as was possible in those less enlightened
days, but an illumination that defined certain
noble conceptions of justice. They appealed to all they
had, the Bible, the inner light, the best that they knew,
to justify their faith. We to whom a wider day is given,
who can appeal not to one book but to thousands, who
have the light of science which is free to all that can
command the leisure and the will to know, shining white
and open on these great questions, dim and obscure in
the days of Peter Chilciky, we should be the last to cast
a sneer at them for their heroic struggle with tyranny and
cruelty; though to-day the man who would claim their
claims on their grounds would justly be rated atavist or
charlatan.
Nothing or next to nothing did the Anabaptists know
of history. For genuine history, history which records
the growth of a whole people, which traces the evolution
of its mind as seen in its works of peace,—its literature,
its art, its constructions—is the creation of our own age.
Only within the last seventy-five years has the purpose
of history come to have so much depth as this. Before
that it was a mere register of dramatic situations, with
no particular connection, a chronicle of the deeds of
prominent persons, a list of intrigues, scandals, murders
big and little; and the great people, the actual builders
and preservers of the race, the immense patient, silent
mass who painfully filled up all the waste places these
destroyers made, almost ignored. And no man sought
to discover the relations of even the recorded acts to
any general causes; no man conceived the notion of discovering
what is political and moral growth or political
and moral suicide. That they did not do so is because
writers of history, who are themselves incarnations of
their own time spirit, could not get beyond the unscientific
attitude of mind, born of ignorance and fostered by the
Christian religion, that man is something entirely different
from the rest of organized life; that he is a free
moral agent, good if he pleases and bad if he pleases,
that is, according as he accepts or rejects the will of God;
that every act is isolated, having no antecedent, morally,
but the will of its doer. Nor until modern science had
fought its way past prisons, exilements, stakes, scaffolds,
and tortures, to the demonstration that man is no free-will
freak thrust by an omnipotent joker upon a world
of cause and sequence to play havoc therein, but just a
poor differentiated bit of protoplasm as much subject to
the general processes of matter and mind as his ancient
progenitor in the depths of the Silurian sea, not until
then was it possible for any real conception of the scope
of history to begin. Not until then was it said: "The
actions of men are the effects of large and general causes.
Humanity as a whole has a regularity of movement as
fixed as the movement of the tides; and given certain
physical and social environments, certain developments
may be predicted with the certainty of a mathematical
calculation." Thus crime, which for so many ages men
have gone on punishing more or less light-heartedly, so
far from having its final cause in individual depravity,
bears a steady and invariable relation to the production
and distribution of staple food supplies, a thing over
which society itself at times can have no control (as on
the occasion of great natural disturbances), and in general
does not yet know how to manage wisely: how much
less, then, the individual! This regularity of the recurrence
of crime was pointed out long before by the
greatest statisticians of Europe, who, indeed, did not go
so far as to question why it was so, nor to compare these
regularities with other regularities, but upon whom the
constant repetition of certain figures in the statistics of
murder, suicide, assault, etc., made a profound impression.
It was left to the new historians, the great pioneer
among whom was H. T. Buckle in England, to make the
comparisons in the statistics, and show that individual
crimes as well as virtues are always calculable from general
material conditions.
This is the basis from which we argue, and it is a basis
established by the comparative history of civilizations.
In no other way could it have been really established. It
might have been guessed at, and indeed was. But only
when the figures are before us, figures obtained "by
millions of observations extending over different grades
of civilization, with different laws, different opinions,
different habits, different morals" (I am quoting Buckle),
only then are we able to say surely that the human mind
proceeds with a regularity of operation overweighing all
the creeds and codes ever invented, and that if we would
begin to understand the problem of the treatment of crime,
we must go to something far larger than the moral reformation
of the criminal. No prayers, no legal enactments,
will ever rid society of crime. If they would, there
have been prayers enough and preachments enough and
laws enough and prisons enough to have done it long ago.
But pray that the attraction of gravitation shall cease.
Will it cease? Enact that water shall freeze at 100°
heat. Will it freeze? And no more will men be sane
and honest and just when they are compelled to live in
an insane, dishonest, and unjust society, when the natural
operation of the very elements of their being is warred
upon by statutes and institutions which must produce
outbursts destructive both to themselves and to others.
Away back in 1835 Quetelet, the French statistician,
wrote: "Experience demonstrates, in fact, by every possible
evidence, this opinion, which may seem paradoxical
at first, that it is society which prepares the crime, and
that the guilty one is but the instrument which executes
it." Every crime, therefore, is a charge against society
which can only be rightly replied to when society consents
to look into its own errors and rectify the wrong
it has done. This is one of the results which must, in
the end, flow from the labors of the real historians; one
of the reasons why history was worth writing at all.
Now the next point in the problem is the criminal himself.
Admitting what cannot be impeached, that there is
cause and sequence in the action of man; admitting the
pressure of general causes upon all alike, what is the reason
that one man is a criminal and another not?
From the days of the Roman jurisconsults until now
the legalists themselves have made a distinction between
crimes against the law of nature and crimes merely
against the law of society. From the modern scientific
standpoint no such distinction can be maintained. Nature
knows nothing about crime, and nothing ever was a crime
until the social Conscience made it so. Neither is it easy
when one reads their law books, even accepting their
view-point, to understand why certain crimes were catalogued
as against the law of nature, and certain others
as of the more artificial character. But I presume what
were in general classed as crimes against nature were
Acts of Violence committed against persons. Aside from
these we have a vast, an almost interminable number of
offenses big and little, which are in the main attacks
upon the institution of property, concerning which some
very different things have to be said than concerning
the first. As to these first there is no doubt that these are
real crimes, by which I mean simply anti-social acts.
Any action which violates the life or liberty of any individual
is an anti-social act, whether done by one person,
by two, or by a whole nation. And the greatest crime
that ever was perpetrated, a crime beside which all individual
atrocities diminish to nothing, is War; and the
greatest, the least excusable of murderers are those who
order it and those who execute it. Nevertheless, this
chiefest of murderers, the Government, its own hands
red with the blood of hundreds of thousands, assumes
to correct the individual offender, enacting miles of laws
to define the varying degrees of his offense and punishment,
and putting beautiful building stone to very hideous
purposes for the sake of caging and tormenting him
therein.
We do get a fig from a thistle—sometimes! Out of
this noisome thing, the prison, has sprung the study of
criminology. It is very new, and there is considerable
painstaking nonsense about it. But the main results are
interesting and should be known by all who wish to form
an intelligent conception of what a criminal is and how
he should be treated. These men who are cool and quiet
and who move among criminals and study them as Darwin
did his plants and animals, tell us that these prisoners
are reducible to three types: The Born Criminal, the
Criminaloid, and the Accidental Criminal. I am inclined
to doubt a great deal that is said about the born criminal.
Prof. Lombroso gives us very exhaustive reports of the
measurements of their skulls and their ears and their
noses and their thumbs and their toes, etc. But I suspect
that if a good many respectable, decent, never-did-a-wrong-thing-in-their-lives
people were to go up for
measurement, malformed ears and disproportionately
long thumbs would be equally found among them if they
took the precaution to represent themselves as criminals
first. Still, however few in number (and they are really
very few), there are some born criminals,—people who
through some malformation or deficiency or excess of certain
portions of the brain are constantly impelled to violent
deeds. Well, there are some born idiots and some
born cripples. Do you punish them for their idiocy or for
their unfortunate physical condition? On the contrary,
you pity them, you realize that life is a long infliction
to them, and your best and tenderest sympathies go out
to them. Why not to the other, equally a helpless victim
of an evil inheritance? Granting for the moment that you
have the right to punish the mentally responsible, surely
you will not claim the right to punish the mentally irresponsible!
Even the law does not hold the insane man
guilty. And the born criminal is irresponsible; he is a
sick man, sick with the most pitiable chronic disease;
his treatment is for the medical world to decide, and the
best of them,—not for the prosecutor, the judge, and the
warden.
It is true that many criminologists, including Prof.
Lombroso himself, are of opinion that the best thing to
do with the born criminal is to kill him at once, since
he can be only a curse to himself and others. Very
heroic treatment. We may inquire, Is he to be exterminated
at birth because of certain physical indications of
his criminality? Such neo-Spartanism would scarcely
commend itself to any modern society. Moreover the
diagnosis might be wrong, even though we had a perpetual
and incorruptible commission of the learned to sit in
inquiry upon every pink-skinned little suspect three days
old! What then? Is he to be let go, as he is now, until
he does some violent deed and then be judged more hardly
because of his natural defect? Either proposition seems
not only heartless and wicked but,—what the respectable
world is often more afraid of being than either,—ludicrous.
If one is really a born criminal he will manifest
criminal tendencies in early life, and being so recognized
should be cared for according to the most humane
methods of treating the mentally afflicted.
The second, or criminaloid, class is the most numerous
of the three. These are criminals, first, because being
endowed with strong desires and unequal reasoning
powers they cannot maintain the uneven battle against a
society wherein the majority of individuals must all the
time deny their natural appetites, if they are to remain
unstained with crime. They are, in short, the ordinary
man (who, it must be admitted, has a great deal of paste
in him) plus an excess of wants of one sort and another,
but generally physical. Society outside of prisons is full
of these criminaloids, who sometimes have in place of
the power of genuine moral resistance a sneaking cunning
by which they manage to steer a shady course between
the crime and the punishment.
It is true these people are not pleasant subjects to
contemplate; but then, through that very stage of development
the whole human race has had to pass in its
progress from the beast to the man,—the stage, I mean,
of overplus of appetite opposed by weak moral resistance;
and if now some, it is not certain that their number is
very great, have reversed the proportion, it is only because
they are the fortunate inheritors of the results of
thousands of years of struggle and failure, struggle and
failure, but struggle again. It is precisely these criminaloids
who are most sinned against by society, for they
are the people who need to have the right of doing things
made easy, and who, when they act criminally, need the
most encouragement to help the feeble and humiliated
moral sense to rise again, to try again.
The third class, the Accidental or Occasional Criminals,
are perfectly normal, well balanced people, who, through
tremendous stress of outward circumstance, and possibly
some untoward mental disturbance arising from those very
notions of the conduct of life which form part of their
moral being, suddenly commit an act of violence which
is at utter variance with their whole former existence;
such as, for instance, the murder of a seducer by the
father of the injured girl, or of a wife's paramour by
her husband. If I believed in severity at all I should
say that these were the criminals upon whom society
should look with most severity, because they are the ones
who have most mental responsibility. But that also is
nonsense; for such an individual has within him a
severer judge, a more pitiless jailer than any court or
prison,—his conscience and his memory. Leave him to
these; or no, in mercy take him away from these whenever
you can; he will suffer enough, and there is no fear
of his action being repeated.
Now all these people are with us, and it is desirable
that something be done to help the case. What does
Society do? Or rather what does Government do with
them? Remember we are speaking now only of crimes
of violence. It hangs, it electrocutes, it exiles, it imprisons.
Why? For punishment. And why punishment?
"Not," says Blackstone, "by way of atonement
or expiation for the crime committed, for that must be
left to the just determination of the Supreme Being, but
as a precaution against future offenses of the same kind."
This is supposed to be effected in three ways: either by
reforming him, or getting rid of him altogether, or by
deterring others by making an example of him.
Let us see how these precautions work. Exile, which
is still practised by some governments, and imprisonment
are, according to the theory of law, for the purpose of
reforming the criminal that he may no longer be a menace
to society. Logic would say that anyone who wished to
obliterate cruelty from the character of another must
himself show no cruelty; one who would teach regard
for the rights of others must himself be regardful. Yet
the story of exile and prison is the story of the lash, the
iron, the chain and every torture that the fiendish ingenuity
of the non-criminal class can devise by way of
teaching criminals to be good! To teach men to be good,
they are kept in airless cells, made to sleep on narrow
planks, to look at the sky through iron grates, to eat food
that revolts their palates, and destroys their stomachs,—battered
and broken down in body and soul; and this is
what they call reforming men!
Not very many years ago the Philadelphia dailies told
us (and while we cannot believe all of what they say, and
are bound to believe that such cases are exceptional, yet
the bare facts were true) that Judge Gordon ordered an
investigation into the workings of the Eastern Penitentiary
officials; and it was found that an insane man had
been put into a cell with two sane ones, and when he
cried in his insane way and the two asked that he be
put elsewhere, the warden gave them a strap to whip
him with; and they tied him in some way to the heater,
with the strap, so that his legs were burned when he
moved; all scarred with the burns he was brought into
the court, and the other men frankly told what they had
done and why they had done it. This is the way they reform
men.
Do you think people come out of a place like that
better? with more respect for society? with more regard
for the rights of their fellow men? I don't. I think they
come out of there with their hearts full of bitterness,
much harder than when they went in. That this is often
the case is admitted by those who themselves believe in
punishment, and practice it. For the fact is that out of
the Criminaloid class there develops the Habitual Criminal,
the man who is perpetually getting in prison; no
sooner is he out than he does something else and gets in
again. The brand that at first scorched him has succeeded
in searing. He no longer feels the ignominy. He is a
"jail-bird," and he gets to have a cynical pride in his own
degradation. Every man's hand is against him, and his
hand is against every man's. Such are the reforming
effects of punishment. Yet there was a time when he,
too, might have been touched, had the right word been
spoken. It is for society to find and speak that word.
This for prison and exile. Hanging? electrocution?
These of course are not for the purpose of reforming
the criminal. These are to deter others from doing as
he did; and the supposition is that the severer the punishment
the greater the deterrent effect. In commenting
upon this principle Blackstone says: "We may
observe that punishments of unreasonable severity ... have
less effect in preventing crimes and amending
the manners of a people than such as are more merciful
in general...." He further quotes Montesquieu:
"For the excessive severity of laws hinders their execution;
when the punishment surpasses all measure, the
public will frequently, out of humanity, prefer impunity
to it." Again Blackstone: "It is a melancholy truth that
among the variety of actions which men are daily liable
to commit, no less than one hundred and sixty have been
declared by act of Parliament to be felonies ... worthy
of instant death. So dreadful a list instead of
diminishing increases the number of offenders."
Robert Ingersoll, speaking on "Crimes Against Criminals"
before the New York Bar Association, a lawyer
addressing lawyers, treating of this same period of
which Blackstone writes, says: "There is something in
injustice, in cruelty, which tends to defeat itself. There
never were so many traitors in England as when the
traitor was drawn and quartered, when he was tortured
in every possible way,—when his limbs, torn and bleeding,
were given to the fury of mobs, or exhibited pierced
by pikes or hung in chains. The frightful punishments
produced intense hatred of the government, and traitors
increased until they became powerful enough to decide
what treason was and who the traitors were and to
inflict the same torments on others."
The fact that Blackstone was right and Ingersoll was
right in saying that severity of punishment increases
crime, is silently admitted in the abrogation of those
severities by acts of Parliament and acts of Congress. It
is also shown by the fact that there are no more murders,
proportionately, in States where the death penalty does
not exist than in those where it does. Severity is therefore
admitted by the State itself to have no deterrent
influence on the intending criminal. And to take the
matter out of the province of the State, we have only
to instance the horrible atrocities perpetrated by white
mobs upon negroes charged with outrage. Nothing more
fiendishly cruel can be imagined; yet these outrages multiply.
It would seem, then, that the notion of making a
horrible example of the misdoer is a complete failure.
As a specific example of this, Ingersoll (in this same
lecture) instanced that "a few years before a man was
hanged in Alexandria, Va. One who witnessed the execution
on that very day murdered a peddler in the Smithsonian
grounds at Washington. He was tried and executed;
and one who witnessed his hanging went home
and on the same day murdered his wife." Evidently
the brute is rather aroused than terrified by scenes of
execution.
What then? If extreme punishments do not deter,
and if what are considered mild punishments do not
reform, is any measure of punishment conceivable or
attainable which will better our case?
Before answering this question let us consider the class
of crimes which so far has not been dwelt upon, but
which nevertheless comprises probably nine-tenths of all
offenses committed. These are all the various forms of
stealing,—robbery, burglary, theft, embezzlement, forgery,
counterfeiting, and the thousand and one ramifications
and offshoots of the act of taking what the law
defines as another's. It is impossible to consider crimes
of violence apart from these, because the vast percentage
of murders and assaults committed by the criminaloid
class are simply incidental to the commission of the so-called
lesser crime. A man often murders in order to
escape with his booty, though murder was no part of his
original intention. Why, now, have we such a continually
increasing percentage of stealing?
Will you persistently hide your heads in the sand and
say it is because men grow worse as they grow wiser?
that individual wickedness is the result of all our marvelous
labors to compass sea and land, and make the
earth yield up her wealth to us? Dare you say that?
It is not so. The reason men steal is because
their rights are stolen from them before they
are born.
A human being comes into the world; he wants to
eat, he wants to breathe, he wants to sleep; he wants to
use his muscles, his brain; he wants to love, to dream,
to create. These wants constitute him, the whole man;
he can no more help expressing these activities than water
can help running down hill. If the freedom to do any
of these things is denied him, then by so much he is a
crippled creature, and his energy will force itself into
some abnormal channel or be killed altogether. Now I
do not mean that he has a "natural right" to do these
things inscribed on any lawbook of Nature. Nature
knows nothing of rights, she knows power only, and a
louse has as much natural right as a man to the extent
of its power. What I do mean to say is that man, in
common with many other animals, has found that by
associative life he conquers the rest of nature, and that
this society is slowly being perfected; and that this perfectionment
consists in realizing that the solidarity and
safety of the whole arises from the freedom of the
parts; that such freedom constitutes Man's Social Right;
and that any institution which interferes with this right
will be destructive of the association, will breed criminals,
will work its own ruin. This is the word of the
sociologist, of the greatest of them, Herbert Spencer.
Now do we see that all men eat,—eat well? You
know we do not. Some have so much that they are
sickened with the extravagance of dishes, and know not
where next to turn for a new palatal sensation. They
cannot even waste their wealth. Some, and they are
mostly the hardest workers, eat poorly and fast, for their
work allows them no time to enjoy even what they have.
Some,—I have seen them myself in the streets of New
York this winter, and the look of their wolfish eyes was
not pleasant to see—stand in long lines waiting for midnight
and the plate of soup dealt out by some great
newspaper office, stretching out, whole blocks of them,
as other men wait on the first night of some famous
star at the theater! Some die because they cannot eat
at all. Pray tell me what these last have to lose by becoming
thieves. And why shall they not become thieves?
And is the action of the man who takes the necessities
which have been denied to him really criminal? Is he
morally worse than the man who crawls in a cellar and
dies of starvation? I think not. He is only a little more
assertive. Cardinal Manning said: "A starving man
has a natural right to his neighbor's bread." The Anarchist
says: "A hungry man has a social right to bread."
And there have been whole societies and races among
whom that right was never questioned. And whatever
were the mistakes of those societies, whereby they perished,
this was not a mistake, and we shall do well to
take so much wisdom from the dead and gone, the simple
ethics of the stomach which with all our achievement
we cannot despise, or despising, shall perish as our
reward.
"But," you will say, and say truly, "to begin by taking
loaves means to end by taking everything and murdering,
too, very often." And in that you draw the indictment
against your own system. If there is no alternative between
starving and stealing (and for thousands there is
none), then there is no alternative between society's murdering
its members, or the members disintegrating society.
Let Society consider its own mistakes, then: let it
answer itself for all these people it has robbed and killed:
let it cease its own crimes first!
To return to the faculties of Man. All would breathe;
and some do breathe. They breathe the air of the mountains,
of the seas, of the lakes,—even the atmosphere
in the gambling dens of Monte Carlo, for a change!
Some, packed thickly together in closed rooms where
men must sweat and faint to save tobacco, breathe the
noisome reek that rises from the spittle of their consumptive
neighbors. Some, mostly babies, lie on the cellar
doors along Bainbridge street, on summer nights,
and bathe their lungs in that putrid air where a thousand
lungs have breathed before, and grow up pale and decayed
looking as the rotting vegetables whose exhalations
they draw in. Some, far down underground, meet the
choke-damp, and—do not breathe at all! Do you expect
healthy morals out of all these poisoned bodies?
Some sleep. They have so much time that they take
all manner of expensive drugs to try what sleeping it
off a different way is like! Some sleep upon none too
easy beds a few short hours, too few not to waken more
tired than ever, and resume the endless grind of waking
life. Some sleep bent over the books they are too tired
to study, though the mind clamors for food after the
long day's physical toil. Some sleep with hand upon
the throttle of the engine, after twenty-six hours of duty,
and—crash!—they have sleep enough!
Some use their muscles: they use them to punch bags,
and other gentlemen's stomachs when their heads are
full of wine. Some use them to club other men and
women, at $2.50 a day. Some exhaust them welding
them into iron, or weaving them into wool, for ten or
eleven hours a day. And some become atrophied sitting
at desks till they are mere specters of men and women.
Some love; and there is no end to the sensualities of
their love, because all normal expressions have lost their
savor through excess. Some love, and see their love
tried and worn and threadbare, a skeleton of love,
because the practicality of life is always there to repress
the purely emotional. Some are stricken in health, so
robbed of power to feel, that they never love at all.
And some dream, think, create; and the world is filled
with the glory of their dreams. But who knows the
glory of the dream that never was born, lost and dead
and buried away somewhere there under the roofs where
the exquisite brain was ruined by the heavy labor of life?
And what of the dream that turned to madness and
destroyed the thing it loved the best?
These are the things that make criminals, the perverted
forces of man, turned aside by the institution of
property, which is the giant social mistake to-day. It is
your law which keeps men from using the sources and
the means of wealth production unless they pay tribute
to other men; it is this, and nothing else, which is responsible
for all the second class of crimes and all those
crimes of violence incidentally committed while carrying
out a robbery. Let me quote here a most sensible and
appropriate editorial which recently appeared in the
Philadelphia North American, in comment upon the
proposition of some foolish preacher to limit the right
of reproduction to rich families:
"The earth was constructed, made habitable, and populated
without the advice of a commission of superior
persons, and until they appeared and began meddling
with affairs, making laws and setting themselves up as
rulers, poverty and its evil consequences were unknown
to humanity. When social science finds a way to remove
obstructions to the operation of natural law and to the
equitable distribution of the products of labor, poverty
will cease to be the condition of the masses of people,
and misery, CRIME and problems of population will disappear."
And they will never disappear until it does. All hunting
down of men, all punishments, are but so many
ineffective efforts to sweep back the tide with a broom.
The tide will fling you, broom and all, against the idle
walls that you have built to fence it in. Tear down
those walls or the sea will tear them down for you.
Have you ever watched it coming in,—the sea? When
the wind comes roaring out of the mist and a great bellowing
thunders up from the water? Have you watched
the white lions chasing each other towards the walls,
and leaping up with foaming anger as they strike, and
turn and chase each other along the black bars of their
cage in rage to devour each other? And tear back? And
leap in again? Have you ever wondered in the midst of
it all which particular drops of water would strike the
wall? If one could know all the factors one might calculate
even that. But who can know them all? Of one
thing only we are sure: some must strike it.
They are the criminals, those drops of water pitching
against that silly wall and broken. Just why it was these
particular ones we cannot know; but some had to go.
Do not curse them; you have cursed them enough. Let
the people free.
There is a class of crimes of violence which arises
from another set of causes than economic slavery—acts
which are the result of an antiquated moral notion of the
true relations of men and women. These are the Nemesis
of the institution of property in love. If every one
would learn that the limit of his right to demand a certain
course of conduct in sex relations is himself; that
the relation of his beloved ones to others is not a matter
for him to regulate, any more than the relations of those
whom he does not love; if the freedom of each is unquestioned,
and whatever moral rigors are exacted are
exacted of oneself only; if this principle is accepted and
followed, crimes of jealousy will cease. But religions
and governments uphold this institution and constantly
tend to create the spirit of ownership, with all its horrible
consequences.
Ah, you will say, perhaps it is true; perhaps when this
better social condition is evolved, and this freer social
spirit, we shall be rid of crime,—at least nine-tenths of it.
But meanwhile must we not punish to protect ourselves?
The protection does not protect. The violent man does
not communicate his intention; when he executes it, or
attempts its execution, more often than otherwise it is
some unofficial person who catches or stops him. If he
is a born criminal, or in other words an insane man, he
should, I reiterate, be treated as a sick person—not
punished, not made to suffer. If he is one of the accidental
criminals, his act will not be repeated; his punishment
will always be with him. If he is of the middle
class, your punishment will not reform him, it will only
harden him; and it will not deter others.
As for thieves, the great thief is within the law, or
he buys it; and as for the small one, see what you do!
To protect yourself against him, you create a class of
persons who are sworn to the service of the club and
the revolver; a set of spies; a set whose business it is
to deal constantly with these unhappy beings, who in
rare instances are softened thereby, but in the majority
of cases become hardened to their work as butchers to
the use of the knife; a set whose business it is to serve
cell and lock and key; and lastly, the lowest infamy of
all, the hangman. Does any one want to shake his hand,
the hand that kills for pay?
Now against all these persons individually there is
nothing to be said: they may probably be very humane,
well-intentioned persons when they start in; but the end
of all this is imbrutement. One of our dailies recently
observed that "the men in charge of prisons have but
too often been men who ought themselves to have been
prisoners." The Anarchist does not agree with that.
He would have no prisons at all. But I am quite sure
that if that editor himself were put in the prison-keeper's
place, he too would turn hard. And the opportunities
of the official criminal are much greater than those of
the unofficial one. Lawyer and governmentalist as he
was, Ingersoll said: "It is safe to say that governments
have committed far more crimes than they have prevented."
Then why create a second class of parasites
worse than the first? Why not put up with the original
one?
Moreover, you have another thing to consider than the
simple problem of a wrong inflicted upon a guilty man.
How many times has it happened that the innocent man
has been convicted! I remember an instance of a man
so convicted of murder in Michigan. He had served
twenty-seven years in Jackson penitentiary (for Michigan
is not a hang-State) when the real murderer, dying,
confessed. And the State pardoned that innocent man!
Because it was the quickest legal way to let him out!
I hope he has been able to pardon the State.
Not very long ago a man was hanged here in this city.
He had killed his superintendent. Some doctors said
he was insane; the government experts said he was not.
They said he was faking insanity when he proclaimed
himself Jesus Christ. And he was hanged. Afterwards
the doctors found two cysts in his brain. The State of
Pennsylvania had killed a sick man! And as long as
punishments exist, these mistakes will occur. If you
accept the principle at all, you must accept with it the
blood-guilt of innocent men.
Not only this, but you must accept also the responsibility
for all the misery which results to others whose
lives are bound up with that of the convict, for even he
is loved by some one, much loved perhaps. It is a foolish
thing to turn adrift a house full of children, to
become criminals in turn, perhaps, in order to frighten
some indefinite future offender by making an example
of their father or mother. Yet how many times has it
not happened!
And this is speaking only from the practical, selfish
side of the matter. There is another, one from which
I would rather appeal to you, and from which I think
you would after all prefer to be appealed to. Ask yourselves,
each of you, whether you are quite sure that you
have feeling enough, understanding enough, and have
you suffered enough, to be able to weigh and measure
out another man's life or liberty, no matter what he has
done? And if you have not yourself, are you able to
delegate to any judge the power which you have not?
The great Russian novelist, Dostoyevsky, in his psychological
study of this same subject, traces the sufferings
of a man who had committed a shocking murder; his
whole body and brain are a continual prey to torture.
He gives himself up, seeking relief in confession. He
goes to prison, for in barbarous Russia they have not the
barbarity of capital punishment for murderers, unless
political ones. But he finds no relief. He remains for
a year, bitter, resentful, a prey to all miserable feelings.
But at last he is touched by love, the silent, unobtrusive,
all-conquering love of one who knew it all and forgave
it all. And the regeneration of his soul began.
"The criminal slew," says Tolstoy: "are you better,
then, when you slay? He took another's liberty; and
is it the right way, therefore, for you to take his?
Violence is no answer to violence."
"Have good will
To all that lives, letting unkindness die,
And greed and wrath; so that your lives be made
As soft airs passing by."
So said Lord Buddha, the Light of Asia.
And another said: "Ye have heard that it hath been
said 'an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth'; but
I say unto you, resist not him that is evil."
Yet the vengeance that the great psychologist saw was
futile, the violence that the greatest living religious teacher
and the greatest dead ones advised no man to wreak, that
violence is done daily and hourly by every little-hearted
prosecutor who prosecutes at so much a day, by every
petty judge who buys his way into office with common
politicians' tricks, and deals in men's lives and liberties
as a trader deals in pins, by every neat-souled and cheap-souled
member of the "unco guid" whose respectable
bargain-counter maxims of morality have as much effect
to stem the great floods and storms that shake the human
will as the waving of a lady's kid glove against the tempest.
Those who have not suffered cannot understand
how to punish; those who have understanding will not.
I said at the beginning and I say again, I believe that
in every one of us all things are germinal: in judge and
prosecutor and prison-keeper too, and even in those small
moral souls who cut out one undeviating pattern for all
men to fit, even in them there are the germs of passion
and crime and sympathy and forgiveness. And some
day things will stir in them and accuse them and awaken
them. And that awakening will come when suddenly
one day there breaks upon them with realizing force the
sense of the unison of life, the irrevocable relationship
of the saint to the sinner, the judge to the criminal; that
all personalities are intertwined and rushing upon doom
together. Once in my life it was given to me to see
the outward manifestation of this unison. It was in
1897. We stood upon the base of the Nelson monument
in Trafalgar Square. Below were ten thousand people
packed together with upturned faces. They had gathered
to hear and see men and women whose hands and limbs
were scarred all over with the red-hot irons of the tortures
in the fortress of Montjuich. For the crime of
an unknown person these twenty-eight men and women,
together with four hundred others, had been cast into
that terrible den and tortured with the infamies of the
inquisition to make them reveal that of which they knew
nothing. After a year of such suffering as makes the
decent human heart sick only to contemplate, with
nothing proven against them, some even without trial,
they were suddenly released with orders to leave the
country within twenty-four hours. They were then in
Trafalgar Square, and to the credit of old England be it
said, harlot and mother of harlots though she is, for there
was not another country among the great nations of the
earth to which those twenty-eight innocent people could
go. For they were paupers impoverished by that cruel
State of Spain in the terrible battle for their freedom;
they would not have been admitted to free America.
When Francesco Gana, speaking in a language which
most of them did not understand, lifted his poor, scarred
hands, the faces of those ten thousand people moved
together like the leaves of a forest in the wind. They
waved to and fro, they rose and fell; the visible moved
in the breath of the invisible. It was the revelation of
the action of the Unconscious, the fatalistic unity of man.
Sometimes, even now as I look upon you, it is as if
the bodies that I see were as transparent bubbles wherethrough
the red blood boils and flows, a turbulent stream
churning and tossing and leaping, and behind us and our
generation, far, far back, endlessly backwards, where
all the bubbles are broken and not a ripple remains, the
silent pouring of the Great Red River, the unfathomable
River,—backwards through the unbroken forest and
the untilled plain, backwards through the forgotten world
of savagery and animal life, back somewhere to its dark
sources in deep Sea and old Night, the rushing River
of Blood—no fancy—real, tangible blood, the blood that
hurries in your veins while I speak, bearing with it the
curses and the blessings of the Past. Through what
infinite shadows has that river rolled! Through what
desolate wastes has it not spread its ooze! Through what
desperate passages has it been forced! What strength,
what invincible strength is in that hot stream! You are
just the bubble on its crest; where will the current fling
you ere you die? At what moment will the fierce impurities
borne from its somber and tenebrous past be
hurled up in you? Shall you then cry out for punishment
if they are hurled up in another? if, flung against
the merciless rocks of the channel, while you swim easily
in the midstream, they fall back and hurt other bubbles?
Can you not feel that
"Men are the heart-beats of Man, the plumes that feather his wings,
Storm-worn since being began with the wind and the thunder of things.
Things are cruel and blind; their strength detains and deforms.
And the wearying wings of the mind still beat up the stream of their storms.
Still, as one swimming up-stream, they strike out blind in the blast,
In thunder of vision and dream, and lightning of future and past.
We are baffled and caught in the current and bruised upon edges of shoals:
As weeds or as reeds in the torrent of things are the wind-shaken souls.
Spirit by spirit goes under, a foam-bell's bubble of breath,
That blows and opens asunder and blurs not the mirror of Death."
Is it not enough that "things are cruel and blind"?
Must we also be cruel and blind? When the whole thing
amounts to so little at the most, shall we embitter it
more, and crush and stifle what must so soon be crushed
and stifled anyhow? Can we not, knowing what remnants
of things dead and drowned are floating through
us, haunting our brains with specters of old deeds and
scenes of violence, can we not learn to pardon our brother
to whom the specters are more real, upon whom greater
stress was laid? Can we not, recalling all the evil things
that we have done, or left undone only because some
scarcely perceptible weight struck down the balance, or
because some kindly word came to us in the midst of our
bitterness and showed that not all was hateful in the
world; can we not understand him for whom the balance
was not struck down, the kind word unspoken? Believe
me, forgiveness is better than wrath,—better for
the wrong-doer, who will be touched and regenerated by
it, and better for you. And you are wrong if you think
it is hard: it is easy, far easier than to hate. It may
sound like a paradox, but the greater the injury the
easier the pardon.
Let us have done with this savage idea of punishment,
which is without wisdom. Let us work for the freedom
of man from the oppressions which make criminals, and
for the enlightened treatment of all the sick. And though
we may never see the fruit of it, we may rest assured
that the great tide of thought is setting our way, and
that
"While the tired wave, vainly breaking,
Seems here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main."
The light is pleasant, is it not, my friends? It is
good to look into each other's faces, to see the
hands that clasp our own, to read the eyes that
search our thoughts, to know what manner of lips give
utterance to our pleasant greetings. It is good to be able
to wink defiance at the Night, the cold, unseeing Night.
How weird, how gruesome, how chilly it would be if I
stood here in blackness, a shadow addressing shadows,
in a house of blindness! Yet each would know that he
was not alone; yet might we stretch hands and touch each
other, and feel the warmth of human presence near.
Yet might a sympathetic voice ring thro' the darkness,
quickening the dragging moments.—The lonely prisoners
in the cells of Blackwell's Island have neither light nor
sound! The short day hurries across the sky, the short
day still more shortened in the gloomy walls. The long
chill night creeps up so early, weaving its sombre curtain
before the imprisoned eyes. And thro' the curtain comes
no sympathizing voice, beyond the curtain lies the prison
silence, beyond that the cheerless, uncommunicating
land, and still beyond the icy, fretting river, black and
menacing, ready to drown. A wall of night, a wall of
stone, a wall of water! Thus has the great State of
New York answered Emma Goldman; thus have the
classes replied to the masses; thus do the rich respond
to the poor; thus does the Institution of Property give
its ultimatum to Hunger!
"Give us work," said Emma Goldman; "if you will not
give us work, then give us bread; if you do not give us
either work or bread, then we shall take bread." It
wasn't a very wise remark to make to the State of New
York, that is—Wealth and its watch-dogs, the Police.
But I fear me much that the apostles of liberty, the
fore-runners of revolt, have never been very wise. There
is a record of a seditious person, who once upon a time
went about with a few despised followers in Palestine,
taking corn out of other people's corn-fields, (on the
Sabbath day, too). That same person, when he wished
to ride into Jerusalem told his disciples to go forward to
where they would find a young colt tied, to unloose it
and bring it to him, and if any one interfered or said
anything to them, were to say: "My master hath need
of it." That same person said: "Give to him that asketh
of thee, and from him that taketh away thy goods
ask them not back again." That same person once
stood before the hungry multitudes of Galilee and taught
them, saying: "The Scribes and the Pharisees sit in
Moses' seat; therefore whatever they bid you observe,
that observe and do. But do not ye after their works,
for they say, and do not. For they bind heavy burdens,
and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's
shoulders; but they themselves will not move them
with one of their fingers. But all their works they do
to be seen of men; they make broad their phylacteries,
and enlarge the borders of their garments: and love the
uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the
synagogues, and greeting in the markets, and to be called
of men, 'Rabbi, Rabbi.'" And turning to the Scribes
and the Pharisees, he continued: "Woe unto you, Scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses,
and for a pretense make long prayers: therefore shall
ye receive the greater damnation. Woe unto you
Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of
mint, and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the
weightier matters of the law, judgement, and mercy, and
faith: these ought ye to have done and not left the other
undone. Ye blind guides, that strain at a gnat and
swallow a camel! Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and
platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.
Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For
ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear
beautiful outward, but within are full of dead men's bones
and all uncleanness. Even so ye outwardly appear righteous
unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and
iniquity. Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
Because ye build the tombs of the prophets and
garnish the sepulchres of the righteous; and say 'If we
had been in the days of our fathers we would not have
been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets'.
Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are
the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye
up then the measure of your fathers! Ye serpents! Ye
generation of vipers! How can ye escape the damnation
of hell!"
Yes; these are the words of the outlaw who is alleged
to form the foundation stone of modern civilization, to
the authorities of his day. Hypocrites, extortionists,
doers of iniquity, robbers of the poor, blood-partakers,
serpents, vipers, fit for hell!
It wasn't a very wise speech, from beginning to end.
Perhaps he knew it when he stood before Pilate to receive
his sentence, when he bore his heavy crucifix up Calvary,
when nailed upon it, stretched in agony, he cried: "My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!"
No, it wasn't wise—but it was very grand.
This grand, foolish person, this beggar-tramp, this
thief who justified the action of hunger, this man who
set the Right of Property beneath his foot, this Individual
who defied the State, do you know why he was so
feared and hated, and punished? Because, as it is said
in the record, "the common people heard him gladly";
and the accusation before Pontius Pilate was, "we found
this fellow perverting the whole nation. He stirreth up
the people, teaching throughout all Jewry."
Ah, the dreaded "common people"!
When Cardinal Manning wrote: "Necessity knows
no law, and a starving man has a natural right to a share
of his neighbor's bread," who thought of arresting
Cardinal Manning? His was a carefully written article
in the Fortnightly Review. Who read it? Not the
people who needed bread. Without food in their
stomachs, they had not fifty cents to spend for a magazine.
It was not the voice of the people themselves
asserting their rights. No one for one instant imagined
that Cardinal Manning would put himself at the head
of ten thousand hungry men to loot the bakeries of
London. It was a piece of ethical hair-splitting to be
discussed in after-dinner speeches by the wine-muddled
gentlemen who think themselves most competent to consider
such subjects when their dress-coats are spoiled by
the vomit of gluttony and drunkenness. But when Emma
Goldman stood in Union Square and said, "If they do
not give you work or bread, take bread," the common
people heard her gladly; and as of old the wandering
carpenter of Nazareth addressed his own class, teaching
throughout all Jewry, stirring up the people against the
authorities, so the dressmaker of New York addressing
the unemployed working-people of New York was the
menace of the depths of society, crying in its own
tongue. The authorities heard and were afraid: therefore
the triple wall.
It is the old, old story. When Thomas Paine, one
hundred years ago, published the first part of "The Rights
of Man," the part in which he discusses principles only,
the edition was a high-priced one, reaching comparatively
few readers. It created only a literary furore.
When the second part appeared, the part in which he
treats of the application of principles, in which he declares
that "men should not petition for rights but take them,"
it came out in a cheap form, so that one hundred thousand
copies were sold in a few weeks. That brought down
the prosecution of the government. It had reached the
people that might act, and prosecution followed prosecution
till Botany Bay was full of the best men of England.
Thus were the limitations of speech and press
declared, and thus will they ever be declared so long as
there are antagonistic interests in human society.
Understand me clearly. I believe that the term "constitutional
right of free speech" is a meaningless phrase,
for this reason: the Constitution of the United States,
and the Declaration of Independence, and particularly
the latter, were, in their day, progressive expressions of
progressive ideals. But they are, throughout, characterized
by the metaphysical philosophy which dominated the
thought of the last century. They speak of "inherent
rights," "inalienable rights," "natural rights," etc. They
declare that men are equal because of a supposed metaphysical
something-or-other, called equality, existing in
some mysterious way apart from material conditions,
just as the philosophers of the eighteenth century accounted
for water being wet by alleging a metaphysical
wetness, existing somehow apart from matter. I do not
say this to disparage those grand men who dared to put
themselves against the authorities of the monarchy, and
to conceive a better ideal of society, one which they certainly
thought would secure equal rights to men; because
I realize fully that no one can live very far in advance
of the time-spirit, and I am positive in my own mind
that, unless some cataclysm destroys the human race
before the end of the twentieth century, the experience
of the next hundred years will explode many of our own
theories. But the experience of this age has proven that
metaphysical quantities do not exist apart from materials,
and hence humanity can not be made equal by declarations
on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality
exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal.
And unless there is equality (and by equality I mean
equal chances for every one to make the most of himself),
unless, I say, these equal chances exist, freedom,
either of thought, speech, or action, is equally a mockery.
I once read that one million angels could dance at the
same time on the point of a needle; possibly one million
angels might be able to get a decent night's lodging by
virtue of their constitutional rights; one single tramp
couldn't. And whenever the tongues of the non-possessing
class threaten the possessors, whenever the disinherited
menace the privileged, that moment you will find
that the Constitution isn't made for you. Therefore I
think Anarchists make a mistake when they contend for
their constitutional rights. As a prominent lawyer, Mr.
Thomas Earle White, of Philadelphia, himself an Anarchist,
said to me not long since: "What are you going
to do about it? Go into the courts, and fight for your
legal rights? Anarchists haven't got any." "Well," says
the governmentalist, "you can't consistently claim any.
You don't believe in constitutions and laws." Exactly
so; and if any one will right my constitutional wrongs,
I will willingly make him a present of my constitutional
rights. At the same time I am perfectly sure no one
will ever make this exchange; nor will any help ever
come to the wronged class from the outside. Salvation
on the vicarious plan isn't worth despising. Redress of
wrongs will not come by petitioning "the powers that
be." "He has rights who dare maintain them." "The
Lord helps them who help themselves." (And when
one is able to help himself, I don't think he is apt to
trouble the Lord much for his assistance.) As long as
the working people fold hands and pray the gods in
Washington to give them work, so long they will not
get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones
they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig,
yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the
policeman bid them "move on"; so long as they go
from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to
be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen,
getting the old "No," the old shake of the head, in these
factories which they build, whose machines they wrought;
so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities,
driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged
land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered
of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing
through plate glass windows at overcoats, which they
made but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they
produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do
these things vaguely relying upon some power outside
themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer,
or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long
deliverance will be delayed. When they conceive the
possibility of a complete international federation of
labor, whose constituent groups shall take possession of
land, mines, factories, all the instruments of production,
issue their own certificates of exchange, and, in short,
conduct their own industry without regulative interference
from law-makers or employers, then we may
hope for the only help which counts for aught—self-help;
the only condition which can guarantee free speech
(and no paper guarantee needed).
But meanwhile, while we are waiting, for there is yet
much grist of the middle class to be ground between the
upper and nether millstones of economic evolution; while
we await the formation of the international labor trust;
while we watch for the day when there are enough of
people with nothing in their stomachs and desperation
in their heads, to go about the work of expropriation;
what shall those do who are starving now?
That is the question which Emma Goldman had to
face; and she answered it by saying: "Ask, and if you do
not receive, take—take bread."
I do not give you that advice. Not because I do not
think the bread belongs to you; not because I do not
think you would be morally right in taking it; not that
I am not more shocked and horrified and embittered by
the report of one human being starving in the heart of
plenty, than by all the Pittsburgs, and Chicagos, and
Homesteads, and Tennessees, and Coeur d'Alenes, and
Buffalos, and Barcelonas, and Parises; not that I do not
think one little bit of sensitive human flesh is worth all
the property rights in New York city; not that I do not
think the world will ever be saved by the sheep's virtue
of going patiently to the shambles; not that I do not believe
the expropriation of the possessing classes is inevitable,
and that that expropriation will begin by just
such acts as Emma Goldman advised, viz.: the taking
possession of wealth already produced; not that I think
you owe any consideration to the conspirators of Wall
Street, or those who profit by their operations, as such,
nor ever will till they are reduced to the level of human
beings having equal chances with you to earn their share
of social wealth, and no more.
I have said that I do not give you the advice given by
Emma Goldman, not that I would have you forget the
consideration the expropriators have shown to you; that
they have advised lead for strikers, strychnine for tramps,
bread and water as good enough for working people;
not that I cannot hear yet in my ears the words of one
who said to me of the Studebaker Wagon Works'
strikers, "If I had my way I'd mow them down with
Gatling guns", not that I would have you forget the
electric wire of Fort Frick, nor the Pinkertons, nor the
militia, nor the prosecutions for murder and treason;
not that I would have you forget the 4th of May, when
your constitutional right of free speech was vindicated,
nor the 11th of November when it was assassinated; not
that I would have you forget the single dinner at Delmonico's
which Ward McAllister tells us cost ten thousand
dollars! Would I have you forget that the wine
in the glasses was your children's blood? It must be a
rare drink—children's blood! I have read of the wonderful
sparkle on costly champagne—I have never seen
it. If I did I think it would look to me like mothers'
tears over the little, white, wasted forms of dead babies—dead
because there was no milk in their breasts! Yes,
I want you to remember that these rich are blood-drinkers,
tearers of human flesh, gnawers of human
bones! Yes, if I had the power I would burn your
wrongs upon your hearts in characters that should glow
like coals in the night!
I have not a tongue of fire as Emma Goldman has; I
cannot "stir the people"; I must speak in my own cold,
calculated way. (Perhaps that is the reason I am allowed
to speak at all.) But if I had the power, my will
is good enough. You know how Shakespeare's Marc
Antony addressed the populace at Rome:
"I am no orator, as Brutus is,
But as you know me well, a plain blunt man
That love my friend. And that they know full well
That gave me public leave to speak of him.
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech
To stir men's blood. I only speak right on.
I tell you that which you yourselves do know,
Show you sweet Cæsar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue
In every wound of Cæsar's, that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny."
If, therefore, I do not give you the advice which Emma
Goldman gave, let not the authorities suppose it is because
I have any more respect for their constitution and
their law than she has, or that I regard them as having
any rights in the matter.
No! My reasons for not giving that advice are two.
First, if I were giving advice at all, I would say: "My
friends, that bread belongs to you. It is you who toiled
and sweat in the sun to sow and reap the wheat; it is
you who stood by the thresher, and breathed the chaff-filled
atmosphere in the mills, while it was ground to
flour; it is you who went into the eternal night of the
mine and risked drowning, fire damp, explosion, and
cave-in, to get the fuel for the fire that baked it; it is
you who stood in the hell-like heat, and struck the
blows that forged the iron for the ovens wherein it is
baked; it is you who stand all night in the terrible
cellar shops, and tend the machines that knead the
flour into dough; it is you, you, you, farmer, miner,
mechanic, who make the bread; but you haven't the
power to take it. At every transformation wrought by
toil, some one who didn't toil has taken part from you;
and now he has it all, and you haven't the power to
take it back! You are told you have the power because
you have the numbers. Never make so silly a blunder
as to suppose that power resides in numbers. One good,
level-headed policeman with a club, is worth ten excited,
unarmed men; one detachment of well-drilled
militia has a power equal to that of the greatest mob
that could be raised in New York City. Do you know
I admire compact, concentrated power. Let me give
you an illustration. Out in a little town in Illinois
there is a certain capitalist, and if ever a human creature
sweat and ground the grist of gold from the muscle of
man, it is he. Well, once upon a time, his workmen,
(not his slaves, his workmen,) were on strike; and fifteen
hundred muscular Polacks armed with stones, brick-bats,
red-hot pokers, and other such crude weapons as
a mob generally collects, went up to his house for the
purpose of smashing the windows, and so forth; possibly
to do as those people in Italy did the other day with the
sheriff who attempted to collect the milk tax. He alone,
one man, met them on the steps of his porch, and for
two mortal hours, by threats, promises, cajoleries held
those fifteen hundred Poles at bay. And finally they went
away, without smashing a pane of glass or harming a
hair of his head. Now that was power; and you can't
help but admire it, no matter if it was your enemy who
displayed it; and you must admit that so long as numbers
can be overcome by such relative quantity, power
does not reside in numbers. Therefore, if I were giving
advice, I would not say, "take bread," but take counsel
with yourselves how to get the power to take bread.
There is no doubt but that power is latently in you;
there is no doubt it can be developed; there is no doubt
the authorities know this, and fear it, and are ready to
exert as much force as is necessary to repress any signs
of its development. And this is the explanation of Emma
Goldman's imprisonment. The authorities do not fear
you as you are; they only fear what you may become.
The dangerous thing was "the voice crying in the wilderness",
foretelling the power which was to come after it.
You should have seen how they feared it in Philadelphia.
They got out a whole platoon of police and detectives,
and executed a military manoeuvre to catch the woman
who had been running around under their noses for
three days. And when she walked up to them, then
they surrounded and captured her, and guarded the city
hall where they kept her over night, and put a detective
in the next cell to make notes. Why so much fear? Did
they shrink from the stab of the dressmaker's needle?
Or did they dread some stronger weapon?
Ah! the accusation before the New York Pontius
Pilate was: "She stirreth up the people." And Pilate
sentenced her to the full limit of the law, because, he
said, "You are more than ordinarily intelligent." Why
is intelligence dealt thus harshly with? Because it is the
beginning of power. Strive, then, for power.
My second reason for not repeating Emma Goldman's
words is, that I, as an Anarchist, have no right to advise
another to do anything involving a risk to himself; nor
would I give a fillip for an action done by the advice
of some one else, unless it is accompanied by a well-argued,
well settled conviction on the part of the person
acting, that it really is the best thing to do. Anarchism,
to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only
a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality.
It means the development of the individual, as well
as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility,
and not leader-worship. I say it is your business
to decide whether you will starve and freeze in sight of
food and clothing, outside of jail, or commit some overt
act against the institution of property and take your
place beside Timmermann and Goldman. And in saying
this I mean to cast no reflection whatever upon Miss
Goldman for doing otherwise. She and I hold many
different views on both Economy and Morals; and that
she is honest in hers she has proved better than I have
proved mine. Miss Goldman is a Communist; I am an
Individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property;
I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege
and authority, whereby the right of property, the true
right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated.
She believes that co-operation would entirely
supplant competition; I hold that competition in one
form or another will always exist, and that it is highly
desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or
both of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure: the spirit
which animates Emma Goldman is the only one which
will emancipate the slave from his slavery, the tyrant
from his tyranny—the spirit which is willing to dare and
suffer.
That which dwells in the frail body in the prison-room
to-night is not the New York dressmaker alone. Transport
yourselves there in thought a moment; look steadily
into those fair, blue eyes, upon the sun-brown hair,
the sea-shell face, the restless hands, the woman's figure;
look steadily till in place of the person, the individual
of time and place, you see that which transcends time
and place, and flits from house to house of life, mocking
at death. Swinburne in his magnificent "Before a Crucifix,"
says:
"With iron for thy linen bands,
And unclean cloths for winding-sheet,
They bind the people's nail-pierced hands,
They hide the people's nail-pierced feet:
And what man, or what angel known
Shall roll back the sepulchral stone?"
Perhaps in the presence of this untrammeled spirit
we shall feel that something has rolled back the sepulchral
stone; and up from the cold wind of the grave is
borne the breath that animated Anaxagoras, Socrates,
Christ, Hypatia, John Huss, Bruno, Robert Emmet,
John Brown, Sophia Perovskaya, Parsons, Fischer,
Engel, Spies, Lingg, Berkman, Pallas; and all those,
known and unknown, who have died by tree, and axe, and
fagot, or dragged out forgotten lives in dungeons, derided,
hated, tortured by men. Perhaps we shall know
ourselves face to face with that which leaps from the
throat of the strangled when the rope chokes, which
smokes up from the blood of the murdered when the
axe falls; that which has been forever hunted, fettered,
imprisoned, exiled, executed, and never conquered. Lo,
from its many incarnations it comes forth again, the
immortal Race-Christ of the Ages! The gloomy walls
are glorified thereby, the prisoner is transfigured, and
we say, reverently we say:
"O sacred Head, O desecrate,
O labor-wounded feet and hands,
O blood poured forth in pledge to fate
Of nameless lives in divers lands!
O slain, and spent, and sacrificed
People! The grey-grown, speechless Christ."
From the standpoint of one who thinks himself
capable of discerning an undeviating route for
human progress to pursue, if it is to be progress
at all, who, having such a route on his mind's map, has
endeavored to point it out to others; to make them see
it as he sees it; who in so doing has chosen what appeared
to him clear and simple expressions to convey
his thoughts to others,—to such a one it appears matter
for regret and confusion of spirit that the phrase "Direct
Action" has suddenly acquired in the general mind a
circumscribed meaning, not at all implied in the words
themselves, and certainly never attached to it by himself
or his co-thinkers.
However, this is one of the common jests which Progress
plays on those who think themselves able to set
metes and bounds for it. Over and over again, names,
phrases, mottoes, watchwords, have been turned inside
out, and upside down, and hindside before, and sideways,
by occurrences out of the control of those who used the
expressions in their proper sense; and still, those who
sturdily held their ground, and insisted on being heard,
have in the end found that the period of misunderstanding
and prejudice has been but the prelude to wider
inquiry and understanding.
I rather think this will be the case with the present
misconception of the term Direct Action, which through
the misapprehension, or else the deliberate misrepresentation,
of certain journalists in Los Angeles, at the
time the McNamaras pleaded guilty, suddenly acquired
in the popular mind the interpretation, "Forcible Attacks
on Life and Property." This was either very ignorant
or very dishonest of the journalists; but it has had the
effect of making a good many people curious to know
all about Direct Action.
As a matter of fact, those who are so lustily and so
inordinately condemning it, will find on examination that
they themselves have on many occasions practised direct
action, and will do so again.
Every person who ever thought he had a right to
assert, and went boldly and asserted it, himself, or
jointly with others that shared his convictions, was a
direct actionist. Some thirty years ago I recall that the
Salvation Army was vigorously practising direct action
in the maintenance of the freedom of its members to
speak, assemble, and pray. Over and over they were
arrested, fined, and imprisoned; but they kept right on
singing, praying, and marching, till they finally compelled
their persecutors to let them alone. The Industrial
Workers are now conducting the same fight, and
have, in a number of cases, compelled the officials to
let them alone by the same direct tactics.
Every person who ever had a plan to do anything,
and went and did it, or who laid his plan before others,
and won their co-operation to do it with him, without
going to external authorities to please do the thing for
them, was a direct actionist. All co-operative experiments
are essentially direct action.
Every person who ever in his life had a difference
with any one to settle, and went straight to the other
persons involved to settle it, either by a peaceable plan
or otherwise, was a direct actionist. Examples of such
action are strikes and boycotts; many persons will recall
the action of the housewives of New York who boycotted
the butchers, and lowered the price of meat; at
the present moment a butter boycott seems looming up,
as a direct reply to the price-makers for butter.
These actions are generally not due to any one's reasoning
overmuch on the respective merits of directness
or indirectness, but are the spontaneous retorts of those
who feel oppressed by a situation. In other words, all
people are, most of the time, believers in the principle
of direct action, and practisers of it. However, most
people are also indirect or political actionists. And they
are both these things at the same time, without making
much of an analysis of either. There are only a limited
number of persons who eschew political action under any
and all circumstances; but there is nobody, nobody at
all, who has ever been so "impossible" as to eschew direct
action altogether.
The majority of thinking people are really opportunists,
leaning, some, perhaps, more to directness, some
more to indirectness, as a general thing, but ready to
use either means when opportunity calls for it. That
is to say, there are those who hold that balloting governors
into power is essentially a wrong and foolish
thing; but who, nevertheless, under stress of special circumstance,
might consider it the wisest thing to do, to
vote some individual into office at that particular time.
Or there are those who believe that, in general, the
wisest way for people to get what they want is by the
indirect method of voting into power some one who will
make what they want legal; yet who, all the same, will
occasionally, under exceptional conditions, advise a
strike; and a strike, as I have said, is direct action.
Or they may do as the Socialist Party agitators, who
are mostly declaiming now against direct action, did last
summer, when the police were holding up their meetings.
They went in force to the meeting-places, prepared
to speak whether-or-no; and they made the police
back down. And while that was not logical on their
part, thus to oppose the legal executors of the majority's
will, it was a fine, successful piece of direct action.
Those who, by the essence of their belief, are committed
to Direct Action only are—just who? Why, the
non-resistants; precisely those who do not believe in
violence at all! Now do not make the mistake of inferring
that I say direct action means non-resistance; not
by any means. Direct action may be the extreme of
violence, or it may be as peaceful as the waters of the
Brook of Siloa that go softly. What I say is, that the
real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never
in political action. For the basis of all political action
is coercion; even when the State does good things, it
finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power
to carry them through.
Now every school child in the United States has had
the direct action of certain non-resistants brought to
his notice by his school history. The case which every
one instantly recalls is that of the early Quakers
who came to Massachusetts. The Puritans had accused
the Quakers of "troubling the world by preaching peace
to it." They refused to pay church taxes; they refused
to bear arms; they refused to swear allegiance to any
government. (In so doing, they were direct actionists;
what we may call negative direct actionists.) So the
Puritans, being political actionists, passed laws to keep
them out, to deport, to fine, to imprison, to mutilate, and
finally, to hang them. And the Quakers just kept on
coming (which was positive direct action); and history
records that after the hanging of four Quakers, and the
flogging of Margaret Brewster at the cart's tail through
the streets of Boston, "the Puritans gave up trying to
silence the new missionaries"; that "Quaker persistence
and Quaker non-resistance had won the day."
Another example of direct action in early colonial history,
but this time by no means of the peaceable sort,
was the affair known as Bacon's Rebellion. All our
historians certainly defend the action of the rebels in
that matter, as reason is, for they were right. And yet
it was a case of violent direct action against lawfully
constituted authority. For the benefit of those who have
forgotten the details, let me briefly remind them that
the Virginia planters were in fear of a general attack
by the Indians; with reason. Being political actionists,
they asked, or Bacon as their leader asked, that the
governor grant him a commission to raise volunteers in
their own defense. The governor feared that such a
company of armed men would be a threat to him; also
with reason. He refused the commission. Whereupon
the planters resorted to direct action. They raised the
volunteers without the commission, and successfully
fought off the Indians. Bacon was pronounced a traitor
by the governor; but the people being with him, the
governor was afraid to proceed against him. In the
end, however, it came so far that the rebels burned
Jamestown; and but for the untimely death of Bacon,
much more might have been done. Of course the reaction
was very dreadful, as it usually is where a rebellion
collapses, or is crushed. Yet even during the brief period
of success, it had corrected a good many abuses. I am
quite sure that the political-action-at-all-costs advocates
of those times, after the reaction came back into power,
must have said: "See to what evils direct action brings
us! Behold, the progress of the colony has been set
back twenty-five years"; forgetting that if the colonists
had not resorted to direct action, their scalps would have
been taken by the Indians a year sooner, instead of a
number of them being hanged by the governor a year
later.
In the period of agitation and excitement preceding
the revolution, there were all sorts and kinds of direct
action from the most peaceable to the most violent; and
I believe that almost everybody who studies United
States history finds the account of these performances
the most interesting part of the story, the part which
dents into his memory most easily.
Among the peaceable moves made, were the non-importation
agreements, the leagues for wearing homespun
clothing and the "committees of correspondence."
As the inevitable growth of hostility progressed, violent
direct action developed; e. g., in the matter of destroying
the revenue stamps, or the action concerning the tea-ships,
either by not permitting the tea to be landed, or
by putting it in damp storage, or by throwing it into the
harbor, as in Boston, or by compelling a tea-ship owner
to set fire to his own ship, as at Annapolis. These are
all actions which our commonest text-books record, certainly
not in a condemnatory way, not even in an apologetic
one, though they are all cases of direct action
against legally constituted authority and property rights.
If I draw attention to them, and others of like nature,
it is to prove to unreflecting repeaters of words that
direct action has always been used, and has the historical
sanction of the very people now reprobating it.
George Washington is said to have been the leader of
the Virginia planters' non-importation league: he would
now be "enjoined," probably, by a court, from forming
any such league; and if he persisted, he would be fined
for contempt.
When the great quarrel between the North and the
South was waxing hot and hotter, it was again direct
action which preceded and precipitated political action.
And I may remark here that political action is never
taken, nor even contemplated, until slumbering minds
have first been aroused by direct acts of protest against
existing conditions.
The history of the anti-slavery movement and the
Civil War is one of the greatest of paradoxes, although
history is a chain of paradoxes. Politically speaking,
it was the slave-holding States that stood for greater
political freedom, for the autonomy of the single State
against the interference of the United States; politically
speaking, it was the non-slave-holding States that stood
for a strong centralized government, which, Secessionists
said, and said truly, was bound progressively to
develop into more and more tyrannical forms. Which
happened. From the close of the Civil War on, there
has been continuous encroachment of the federal power
upon what was formerly the concern of the States individually.
The wage-slaves, in their struggles of to-day,
are continually thrown into conflict with that centralized
power, against which the slave-holder protested
(with liberty on his lips but tyranny in his heart). Ethically
speaking, it was the non-slave-holding States that,
in a general way, stood for greater human liberty, while
the Secessionists stood for race-slavery. In a general
way only; that is, the majority of northerners, not being
accustomed to the actual presence of negro slavery about
them, thought it was probably a mistake; yet they were
in no great ferment of anxiety to have it abolished. The
Abolitionists only, and they were relatively few, were
the genuine ethicals, to whom slavery itself—not secession
or union—was the main question. In fact, so paramount
was it with them, that a considerable number of
them were themselves for the dissolution of the union,
advocating that the North take the initiative in the matter
of dissolving, in order that the northern people might
shake off the blame of holding negroes in chains.
Of course, there were all sorts of people with all sorts
of temperaments among those who advocated the abolition
of slavery. There were Quakers like Whittier (indeed
it was the peace-at-all-costs Quakers who had advocated
abolition even in early colonial days); there were
moderate political actionists, who were for buying off
the slaves, as the cheapest way; and there were extremely
violent people, who believed and did all sorts of violent
things.
As to what the politicians did, it is one long record
of "how-not-to-do-it," a record of thirty years of compromising,
and dickering, and trying to keep what was
as it was, and to hand sops to both sides when new conditions
demanded that something be done, or be pretended
to be done. But "the stars in their courses fought against
Sisera"; the system was breaking down from within, and
the direct actionists from without, as well, were widening
the cracks remorselessly.
Among the various expressions of direct rebellion was
the organization of the "underground railroad." Most
of the people who belonged to it believed in both sorts
of action; but however much they theoretically subscribed
to the right of the majority to enact and enforce laws,
they didn't believe in it on that point. My grandfather
was a member of the "underground"; many a fugitive
slave he helped on his way to Canada. He was a very
patient, law-abiding man, in most respects, though I
have often thought he probably respected it because he
didn't have much to do with it; always leading a pioneer
life, law was generally far from him, and direct action
imperative. Be that as it may, and law-respecting as he
was, he had no respect whatever for slave laws, no
matter if made by ten times of a majority; and he conscientiously
broke every one that came in his way to
be broken.
There were times when in the operation of the "underground",
violence was required, and was used. I recollect
one old friend relating to me how she and her
mother kept watch all night at the door, while a slave for
whom a posse was searching hid in the cellar; and though
they were of Quaker descent and sympathies, there was
a shot-gun on the table. Fortunately it did not have to
be used that night.
When the fugitive slave law was passed, with the help
of the political actionists of the North who wanted to
offer a new sop to the slave-holders, the direct actionists
took to rescuing recaptured fugitives. There was the
"rescue of Shadrach," and the "rescue of Jerry," the
latter rescuers being led by the famous Gerrit Smith;
and a good many more successful and unsuccessful attempts.
Still the politicals kept on pottering and trying
to smooth things over, and the Abolitionists were denounced
and decried by the ultra-law-abiding pacificators,
pretty much as Wm. D. Haywood and Frank Bohn are
being denounced by their own party now.
The other day I read a communication in the Chicago
Daily Socialist from the secretary of the Louisville local,
Socialist Party, to the national secretary, requesting that
some safe and sane speaker be substituted for Bohn, who
had been announced to speak there. In explaining why,
Mr. Dobbs, secretary, makes this quotation from Bohn's
lecture: "Had the McNamaras been successful in defending
the interests of the working class, they would
have been right, just as John Brown would have been
right, had he been successful in freeing the slaves. Ignorance
was the only crime of John Brown, and ignorance
was the only crime of the McNamaras."
Upon this Mr. Dobbs comments as follows: "We
dispute emphatically the statements here made. The
attempt to draw a parallel between the open—if mistaken—revolt
of John Brown on the one hand, and the secret
and murderous methods of the McNamaras on the other,
is not only indicative of shallow reasoning, but highly
mischievous in the logical conclusions which may be
drawn from such statements."
Evidently Mr. Dobbs is very ignorant of the life and
work of John Brown. John Brown was a man of violence;
he would have scorned anybody's attempt to make him
out anything else. And when once a person is a believer
in violence, it is with him only a question of the most
effective way of applying it, which can be determined
only by a knowledge of conditions and means at his
disposal. John Brown did not shrink at all from conspiratical
methods. Those who have read the autobiography
of Frederick Douglas and the Reminiscences of
Lucy Colman, will recall that one of the plans laid by
John Brown was to organize a chain of armed camps
in the mountains of West Virginia, North Carolina, and
Tennessee, send secret emissaries among the slaves inciting
them to flee to these camps, and there concert such
measures as times and conditions made possible for further
arousing revolt among the negroes. That this plan
failed was due to the weakness of the desire for liberty
among the slaves themselves, more than anything else.
Later on, when the politicians in their infinite deviousness
contrived a fresh proposition of how-not-to-do-it,
known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the question
of slavery to be determined by the settlers, the direct
actionists on both sides sent bogus settlers into the territory,
who proceeded to fight it out. The pro-slavery
men, who got in first, made a constitution recognizing
slavery, and a law punishing with death any one who
aided a slave to escape; but the Free Soilers, who were
a little longer in arriving, since they came from more
distant States, made a second constitution, and refused
to recognize the other party's laws at all. And John
Brown was there, mixing in all the violence, conspiratical
or open; he was "a horse-thief and a murderer," in the
eyes of decent, peaceable, political actionists. And there
is no doubt that he stole horses, sending no notice in
advance of his intention to steal them, and that he killed
pro-slavery men. He struck and got away a good many
times before his final attempt on Harper's Ferry. If
he did not use dynamite, it was because dynamite had
not yet appeared as a practical weapon. He made a great
many more intentional attacks on life than the two
brothers Secretary Dobbs condemns for their "murderous
methods." And yet, history has not failed to understand
John Brown. Mankind knows that though he was
a violent man, with human blood upon his hands, who
was guilty of high treason and hanged for it, yet his
soul was a great, strong, unselfish soul, unable to bear
the frightful crime which kept 4,000,000 people like dumb
beasts, and thought that making war against it was a
sacred, a God-called duty, (for John Brown was a very
religious man—a Presbyterian).
It is by and because of the direct acts of the fore-runners
of social change, whether they be of peaceful
or warlike nature, that the Human Conscience, the conscience
of the mass, becomes aroused to the need for
change. It would be very stupid to say that no good results
are ever brought about by political action; sometimes
good things do come about that way. But never
until individual rebellion, followed by mass rebellion,
has forced it. Direct action is always the clamorer, the
initiator, through which the great sum of indifferentists
become aware that oppression is getting intolerable.
We have now an oppression in the land,—and not only
in this land, but throughout all those parts of the world
which enjoy the very mixed blessings of Civilization.
And just as in the question of chattel slavery, so this
form of slavery has been begetting both direct action and
political action. A certain per cent. of our population
(probably a much smaller per cent. than politicians are
in the habit of assigning at mass meetings) is producing
the material wealth upon which all the rest of us live;
just as it was the 4,000,000 chattel blacks who supported
all the crowd of parasites above them. These are the
land workers and the industrial workers.
Through the unprophesied and unprophesiable operation
of institutions which no individual of us created, but
found in existence when he came here, these workers,
the most absolutely necessary part of the whole social
structure, without whose services none can either eat,
or clothe, or shelter himself, are just the ones who get
the least to eat, to wear, and to be housed withal—to
say nothing of their share of the other social benefits
which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as
education and artistic gratifications.
These workers have, in one form or another, mutually
joined their forces to see what betterment of their condition
they could get; primarily by direct action, secondarily
through political action. We have had the
Grange, the Farmers' Alliance, Co-operative Associations,
Colonization Experiments, Knights of Labor,
Trade Unions, and Industrial Workers of the World.
All of them have been organized for the purpose of
wringing from the masters in the economic field a little
better price, a little better conditions, a little shorter
hours; or on the other hand, to resist a reduction in
price, worse conditions, or longer hours. None of them
has attempted a final solution of the social war. None
of them, except the Industrial Workers, has recognized
that there is a social war, inevitable so long as present
legal-social conditions endure. They accepted property
institutions as they found them. They were made up
of average men, with average desires, and they undertook
to do what appeared to them possible and very reasonable
things. They were not committed to any particular
political policy when they were organized, but were associated
for direct action of their own initiation, either
positive or defensive.
Undoubtedly there were, and are, among all these organizations,
members who looked beyond immediate demands;
who did see that the continuous development
of forces now in operation was bound to bring about
conditions to which it is impossible that life continue to
submit, and against which, therefore, it will protest, and
violently protest; that it will have no choice but to do
so; that it must do so, or tamely die; and since it is not
the nature of life to surrender without struggle, it will
not tamely die. Twenty-two years ago I met Farmers'
Alliance people who said so, Knights of Labor who said
so, Trade Unionists who said so. They wanted larger
aims than those to which their organizations were looking;
but they had to accept their fellow members as they
were, and try to stir them to work for such things as it
was possible to make them see. And what they could
see was better prices, better wages, less dangerous or
tyrannical conditions, shorter hours. At the stage of
development when these movements were initiated, the
land workers could not see that their struggle had anything
to do with the struggle of those engaged in the
manufacturing or transporting service; nor could these
latter see that theirs had anything to do with the movement
of the farmers. For that matter very few of them
see it yet. They have yet to learn that there is one
common struggle against those who have appropriated the
earth, the money, and the machines.
Unfortunately the great organization of the farmers
frittered itself away in a stupid chase after political
power. It was quite successful in getting the power
in certain States; but the courts pronounced its laws
unconstitutional, and there was the burial hole of all its
political conquests. Its original program was to build
its own elevators, and store the products therein, holding
these from the market till they could escape the speculator.
Also, to organize labor exchanges, issuing credit
notes upon products deposited for exchange. Had it
adhered to this program of direct mutual aid, it would,
to some extent, for a time at least, have afforded an
illustration of how mankind may free itself from the
parasitism of the bankers and the middlemen. Of course,
it would have been overthrown in the end, unless it had
so revolutionized men's minds by the example as to force
the overthrow of the legal monopoly of land and money;
but at least it would have served a great educational
purpose. As it was, it "went after the red herring," and
disintegrated merely from its futility.
The Knights of Labor subsided into comparative insignificance,
not because of failure to use direct action,
nor because of its tampering with politics, which was
small, but chiefly because it was a heterogeneous mass
of workers who could not associate their efforts effectively.
The Trade Unions grew strong about as the K. of L.
subsided, and have continued slowly but persistently to
increase in power. It is true the increase has fluctuated;
that there have been set-backs; that great single organizations
have been formed and again dispersed. But on
the whole, trade unions have been a growing power.
They have been so because, poor as they are, inefficient
as they are, they have been a means whereby a certain
section of the workers have been able to bring their united
force to bear directly upon their masters, and so get for
themselves some portion of what they wanted,—of what
their conditions dictated to them they must try to get.
The strike is their natural weapon, that which they themselves
forged. It is the direct blow of the strike which
nine times out of ten the boss is afraid of. (Of course
there are occasions when he is glad of one, but that's
unusual.) And the reason he dreads a strike is not so
much because he thinks he cannot win out against it,
but simply and solely because he does not want an interruption
of his business. The ordinary boss isn't in
much dread of a "class-conscious vote"; there are plenty
of shops where you can talk Socialism or any other political
program all day long; but if you begin to talk
Unionism, you may forthwith expect to be discharged,
or at best warned to shut up. Why? Not because the
boss is so wise as to know that political action is a swamp
in which the workingman gets mired, or because he
understands that political Socialism is fast becoming a
middle-class movement; not at all. He thinks Socialism
is a very bad thing; but it's a good way off! But he
knows that if his shop is unionized, he will have trouble
right away. His hands will be rebellious, he will be put
to expense to improve his factory conditions, he will
have to keep workingmen that he doesn't like, and in
case of strike he may expect injury to his machinery or
his buildings.
It is often said, and parrot-like repeated, that the
bosses are "class-conscious," that they stick together for
their class interest, and are willing to undergo any sort
of personal loss rather than be false to those interests.
It isn't so at all. The majority of business people are
just like the majority of workingmen; they care a whole
lot more about their individual loss or gain than about
the gain or loss of their class. And it is his individual
loss the boss sees, when threatened by a union.
Now everybody knows that a strike of any size means
violence. No matter what any one's ethical preference
for peace may be, he knows it will not be peaceful. If
it's a telegraph strike, it means cutting wires and poles,
and getting fake scabs in to spoil the instruments. If
it is a steel rolling mill strike, it means beating up the
scabs, breaking the windows, setting the gauges wrong,
and ruining the expensive rollers together with tons and
tons of material. If it's a miners' strike, it means destroying
tracks and bridges, and blowing up mills. If it is
a garment workers' strike, it means having an unaccountable
fire, getting a volley of stones through an
apparently inaccessible window, or possibly a brickbat
on the manufacturer's own head. If it's a street-car
strike, it means tracks torn up or barricaded with the
contents of ash-carts and slop-carts, with overturned
wagons or stolen fences, it means smashed or incinerated
cars and turned switches. If it is a system federation
strike, it means "dead" engines, wild engines, derailed
freights, and stalled trains. If it is a building trades
strike, it means dynamited structures. And always,
everywhere, all the time, fights between strike-breakers
and scabs against strikers and strike-sympathizers, between
People and Police.
On the side of the bosses, it means search-lights, electric
wires, stockades, bull-pens, detectives and provocative
agents, violent kidnapping and deportation, and every
device they can conceive for direct protection, besides
the ultimate invocation of police, militia, State constabulary,
and federal troops.
Everybody knows this; everybody smiles when union
officials protest their organizations to be peaceable and
law-abiding, because everybody knows they are lying.
They know that violence is used, both secretly and openly;
and they know it is used because the strikers cannot
do any other way, without giving up the fight at once.
Nor do they mistake those who thus resort to violence
under stress for destructive miscreants who do what
they do out of innate cussedness. The people in general
understand that they do these things, through the harsh
logic of a situation which they did not create, but which
forces them to these attacks in order to make good in
their struggle to live, or else go down the bottomless
descent into poverty, that lets Death find them in the
poorhouse hospital, the city street, or the river-slime.
This is the awful alternative that the workers are facing;
and this is what makes the most kindly disposed
human beings,—men who would go out of their way to
help a wounded dog, or bring home a stray kitten and
nurse it, or step aside to avoid walking on a worm—resort
to violence against their fellow-men. They know,
for the facts have taught them, that this is the only way
to win, if they can win at all. And it has always appeared
to me one of the most utterly ludicrous, absolutely irrelevant
things that a person can do or say, when approached
for relief or assistance by a striker who is dealing
with an immediate situation, to respond with, "Vote
yourself into power!" when the next election is six
months, a year, or two years away.
Unfortunately, the people who know best how violence
is used in union warfare, cannot come forward
and say: "On such a day, at such a place, such and such
a specific action was done, and as the result such and such
a concession was made, or such and such a boss capitulated."
To do so would imperil their liberty, and
their power to go on fighting. Therefore those that
know best must keep silent, and sneer in their sleeves,
while those that know little prate. Events, not tongues,
must make their position clear.
And there has been a very great deal of prating these
last few weeks. Speakers and writers, honestly convinced,
I believe, that political action, and political action
only, can win the workers' battle, have been denouncing
what they are pleased to call "direct action" (what they
really mean is conspiratical violence) as the author of
mischief incalculable. One Oscar Ameringer, as an example,
recently said at a meeting in Chicago that the
Haymarket bomb of '86 had set back the eight-hour
movement twenty-five years, arguing that the movement
would have succeeded then but for the bomb. It's a
great mistake. No one can exactly measure in years or
months the effect of a forward push or a reaction. No
one can demonstrate that the eight-hour movement could
have been won twenty-five years ago. We know that
the eight-hour day was put on the statute books of
Illinois in 1871, by political action, and has remained a
dead letter. That the direct action of the workers could
have won it, then, can not be proved; but it can be shown
that many more potent factors than the Haymarket bomb
worked against it. On the other hand, if the reactive
influence of the bomb was really so powerful, we should
naturally expect labor and union conditions to be worse
in Chicago than in the cities where no such thing happened.
On the contrary, bad as they are, the general
conditions of labor are better in Chicago than in most
other large cities, and the power of the unions is more
developed there than in any other American city except
San Francisco. So if we are to conclude anything for
the influence of the Haymarket bomb, keep these facts
in mind. Personally I do not think its influence on the
labor movement, as such, was so very great.
It will be the same with the present furore about violence.
Nothing fundamental has been altered. Two
men have been imprisoned for what they did (twenty-four
years ago they were hanged for what they did not
do); some few more may yet be imprisoned. But the
forces of life will continue to revolt against their
economic chains. There will be no cessation in that revolt,
no matter what ticket men vote or fail to vote,
until the chains are broken.
How will the chains be broken?
Political actionists tell us it will be only by means of
working-class party action at the polls; by voting themselves
into possession of the sources of life and the tools;
by voting that those who now command forests, mines,
ranches, waterways, mills and factories, and likewise
command the military power to defend them, shall hand
over their dominion to the people.
And meanwhile?
Meanwhile be peaceable, industrious, law-abiding,
patient, and frugal (as Madero told the Mexican peons
to be, after he had sold them to Wall Street)! Even if
some of you are disfranchised, don't rise up even against
that, for it might "set back the party."
Well, I have already stated that some good is occasionally
accomplished by political action,—not necessarily
working-class party action either. But I am abundantly
convinced that the occasional good accomplished is more
than counterbalanced by the evil; just as I am convinced
that though there are occasional evils resulting from
direct action, they are more than counterbalanced by
the good.
Nearly all the laws which were originally framed with
the intention of benefiting the workers, have either turned
into weapons in their enemies' hands, or become dead
letters, unless the workers through their organizations
have directly enforced the observance. So that in the
end, it is direct action that has to be relied on anyway.
As an example of getting the tarred end of a law, glance
at the anti-trust law, which was supposed to benefit the
people in general, and the working class in particular.
About two weeks since, some 250 union leaders were
cited to answer to the charge of being trust formers, as
the answer of the Illinois Central to its strikers.
But the evil of pinning faith to indirect action is far
greater than any such minor results. The main evil is
that it destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious
spirit, teaches people to rely on some one else
to do for them what they should do for themselves,
what they alone can do for themselves; finally renders
organic the anomalous idea that by massing supineness
together until a majority is acquired, then, through the
peculiar magic of that majority, this supineness is to be
transformed into energy. That is, people who have lost
the habit of striking for themselves as individuals, who
have submitted to every injustice while waiting for the
majority to grow, are going to become metamorphosed
into human high-explosives by a mere process of packing!
I quite agree that the sources of life, and all the natural
wealth of the earth, and the tools necessary to co-operative
production, must become free of access to all. It
is a positive certainty to me that unionism must widen
and deepen its purposes, or it will go under; and I feel
sure that the logic of the situation will force them to see
it gradually. They must learn that the workers' problem
can never be solved by beating up scabs, so long as their
own policy of limiting their membership by high initiation
fees and other restrictions helps to make scabs.
They must learn that the course of growth is not so much
along the line of higher wages, but shorter hours, which
will enable them to increase membership, to take in everybody
who is willing to come into the union. They must
learn that if they want to win battles, all allied workers
must act together, act quickly (serving no notice on
bosses), and retain their freedom so to do at all times.
And finally they must learn that even then (when they
have a complete organization), they can win nothing
permanent unless they strike for everything,—not for a
wage, not for a minor improvement, but for the whole
natural wealth of the earth. And proceed to the direct
expropriation of it all!
They must learn that their power does not lie in their
voting strength, that their power lies in their ability to
stop production. It is a great mistake to suppose that
the wage-earners constitute a majority of the voters.
Wage-earners are here to-day and there to-morrow, and
that hinders a large number from voting; a great percentage
of them in this country are foreigners without a
voting right. The most patent proof that Socialist leaders
know this is so, is that they are compromising their
propaganda at every point to win the support of the business
class, the small investor. Their campaign papers
proclaimed that their interviewers had been assured by
Wall Street bond purchasers that they would be just as
ready to buy Los Angeles bonds from a socialist as a
capitalist administration; that the present Milwaukee administration
has been a boon to the small investor; their
reading notices assure their readers in this city that we
need not go to the great department stores to buy,—buy
rather of So-and-so on Milwaukee Avenue, who will
satisfy us quite as well as a "big business" institution.
In short, they are making every desperate effort to win
the support, and to prolong the life, of that middle-class
which socialistic economy says must be ground to pieces,
because they know they cannot get a majority without
them.
The most that a working-class party could do, even
if its politicians remained honest, would be to form a
strong faction in the legislatures, which might, by combining
its vote with one side or the other, win certain
political or economic palliatives.
But what the working-class can do, when once they
grow into a solidified organization, is to show the possessing
classes, through a sudden cessation of all work, that
the whole social structure rests on them; that the possessions
of the others are absolutely worthless to them
without the workers' activity; that such protests, such
strikes, are inherent in the system of property, and will
continually recur until the whole thing is abolished,—and
having shown that, effectively, proceed to expropriate.
"But the military power," says the political actionist;
"we must get political power, or the military will be used
against us!"
Against a real General Strike, the military can do
nothing. Oh, true, if you have a Socialist Briand in
power, he may declare the workers "public officials" and
try to make them serve against themselves! But against
the solid wall of an immobile working-mass, even a Briand
would be broken.
Meanwhile, until this international awakening, the war
will go on as it has been going, in spite of all the hysteria
which well-meaning people, who do not understand life
and its necessities, may manifest; in spite of all the
shivering that timid leaders have done; in spite of all
the reactionary revenges that may be taken; in spite of
all the capital politicians make out of the situation. It
will go on because Life cries to live, and Property denies
its freedom to live; and Life will not submit.
And should not submit.
It will go on until that day when a self-freed Humanity
is able to chant Swinburne's Hymn of Man:
"Glory to Man in the highest,
For Man is the master of Things."
The Paris Commune, like other spectacular events
in human history, has become the clinging point
for many legends, alike among its enemies and
among its friends. Indeed, one must often question
which was the real Commune, the legend or the fact,—what
was actually lived, or the conception of it which has
shaped itself in the world-mind during those forty odd
years that have gone since the 18th of March, 1871.
It is thus with doctrines, it is thus with personalities,
it is thus with events.
Which is the real Christianity, the simple doctrine attributed
to Christ or the practical preaching and realizing
of organized Christianity? Which is the real Abraham
Lincoln,—the clever politician who emancipated the chattel
slaves as an act of policy, or the legendary apostle of
human liberty, who rises like a gigantic figure of iconoclastic
right smiting old wrongs and receiving the martyr's
crown therefor?
Which is the real Commune,—the thing that was, or
the thing our orators have painted it? Which will be the
influencing power in the days that are to come? Our
Commune commemorators are wont to say, and surely
they believe, that the declaration of the Commune was
the spontaneous assertion of independence by the Parisian
masses, consciously alive to the fact that the national
government of France had treated them most
outrageously in the matter of defense against the Prussian
army. They believe that the farce of the situation
in which the city found itself, had opened the eyes of the
general populace to the fact that the national government,
so far from serving the supposed prime purpose of government,
viz., as a means of defense against a foreign
invader, was in reality a thing so apart from them and
their interests that it preferred to leave them to the mercy
of the Prussians, to endangering its own supremacy by
assisting in their defense, or permitting them to defend
themselves.
It is a pity that this legendary figure of Awakened
Paris is not a true one. The Commune, in fact, was not
the work of the whole people of Paris, nor of a majority
of the people of Paris. The Commune was really established
by a comparatively small number of able, nay
brilliant, and supremely devoted men and women from
every walk in life, but with a relatively high percentage
of military men, engineers, and political journalists, some
of whom had time and again been in prison before for
seditious writing or acts of rebellion. They flocked in
from their exile in the neighboring countries, thinking
that now they saw the opportunity for retrieving former
errors, and arousing the people to renew and to extend
the struggle of 1848. It is true that there were also
teachers, artists, designers, architects and builders, skilled
craftsmen of every sort. And perhaps no chapter in the
whole story is more inspiring than the description of the
gatherings of the workers, which took place night after
night in every quarter of the beleaguered city, previous
to the 18th of March and thereafter. To such meetings
went those who burned with fervor of faith in what the
people might and would accomplish, and, with the radiant
vision of a new social day shining in their eyes, endeavored
to make it clear to those who listened. One almost
catches the redolence of outbursting faith, that rising of
the sap of hope and courage and daring, like an incense
of spring; almost feels himself there, partaking in the
work, the danger, the glorious, mistaken assurance which
was theirs.
And yet the truth must have been that these apostles
of the Commune were blinded by their own enthusiasm,
deafened by the enthusiasm they evoked in others, to the
fact that the great unvoiced majority who did not attend
public meetings, who sat within their houses or kept silent
in the shops, were not converted or affected by their
teachings.
We are told by those who should know, the survivors
among the Communards themselves, that the actual number
of persons who were aggressive, moving spirits in the
great uprising was not greatly above 2,000. The mass of
the people were, as they would probably be in this city
to-day under like circumstances, indifferent as to what
went on over their heads, so that the peace and quiet of
their individual lives was restored, so that the siege of the
Prussians was raised, and themselves permitted to go
about their business. If the Commune could assure that,
good luck to it! They were tired of the siege; and they
longed for their old familiar miseries to which they were
in some respect accustomed; they hardly dreamed of anything
better.
But, as is usually the case when strategic moments
arise, these same plain, stolid, indifferent people, who
neither know nor care about fine theories of political
right, municipal sovereignty, and so forth, see more directly
into the logic of a situation than those who have confused
their minds with much theorizing. Likewise the
people of Paris in general, when the Commune had become
an established fact, saw that the only consequent
proceeding would be to make war economically as well as
politically, to cut off any source of supply to the national
army which lay within the city. Instead of doing that,
the government of the Commune, anxious to prove itself
more law-abiding than the old regime, stupidly defended
the property right of its enemies, and continued to let the
Bank of France furnish supplies to those who were
financing the army of Versailles, the very army which
was to cut their throats.
Naturally, the plain people grew disgusted with so
senseless a program, and in the main took no part in the
final struggle with the Versailles troops, nor even opposed
the idea of their entrance into the city. Probably
a goodly number even drew a sigh of relief at the prospect
of a return to the smaller evil of the two. Little
enough did they dream that the way back lay through
their own blood, and that they, who had never lifted hand
or voice for the Commune, would become its martyrs.
Little did they conceive the wild revenge of Law and
Order upon Rebellion, the saturnalia of restored Power.
Did they sleep, I wonder, on the night before the 20th
of May, when that dark thunder of vengeance was gathering
to break? Many slept well the next night, and still
sleep; for "then began a murder grim and great,"—a
murder whose painted image, even after these forty years
have risen and sunk upon it, sends the blood shuddering
backward, and sets the teeth in uttermost horror and
hate. MacMahon placarded the streets with peace and
sent his troops to make it; in the name of that Peace,
Gallifet, an incarnation of hell, set his men the example
and rode up and down the streets of Paris, dashing out
children's brains. Did a hand appear at a shutter, the
window was riddled with bullets. Did a cry of protest
escape from any throat, the house was invaded, its inhabitants
driven out, lined against the walls, and shot
where they stood. The doctors and the nurses at the
bedsides of the wounded, the very sick in the hospitals,
themselves were slaughtered where they lay. Such was
MacMahon's peace.
After the street massacres, the organized massacres at
the bastions, the stakes of Satory, the huddled masses of
prisoners, the grim visitor with the lantern, the ghastly
call to rise and follow, the trenches dug by the condemned
in the slippery, blood-soaked ground for their own
corpses to fall in. Thirty thousand people butchered!
Butchered by the sateless vengeance of authority and the
insane blood-lust of the professional soldier! Butchered
without a pretence of reason, a shadow of inquiry, merely
as the gust of insensate rage blew!
After the orgy of fury, the orgy of the inquisition.
The gathering of the prisoners in cellar holes, where they
must squat or lie upon damp earth, and see the light daily
only for some short half hour when an unexpellable sun
ray shot through some unstopped crevice. The shifting
of them day and night across the country, sometimes in
stock yard wagons, stifled, starved, and jammed together,
as even our butchering civilization is ashamed to jam
pigs for the slaughter; sometimes by dreadful marches,
mostly by night, often with the rain beating on them, the
butts of the soldiers' muskets striking them, as they
lagged through weakness or through lameness.
Then the detention prisons, with their long-drawn
agonies of hunger, cold, vermin, and disease, and the
ever-looming darkness of waiting death. Follow the tortures
of friends and relatives of Communards or suspected
Communards, to make them betray the whereabouts
of their friends.
Could they who had seen these things "forgive and
forget"? They who had seen ten year old children
lashed to make them tell where their fathers were?
Women driven mad before the terrible choice of giving
up their sons who had fought, or their daughters who
had not, to the brutality of the soldiery.
After the tortures of the hunt, the tortures of the trials,
solemn farces, cat-like cruelties. Then the long hopeless
line of exiles marching from the prison to the port,
crowded on the transport ships, watched like caged animals,
forbidden to speak, the cannon always threatening
above them, and so drifted away, away to exile lands, to
barren islands and fever shores—there to waste away in
loneliness, in uselessness, in futile dreams of freedom that
ended in chains upon the ankles or death on the coral
reefs—all this was the Mercy and the Wisdom shown by
the national government to the rebel city whose works
are the glory of France, and whose beauty is the Beauty
of the World. Whatever other lesson we have to learn,
this one is certain: the glutless revenge of restored
Authority. If ever one rebels, let him rebel to the end;
there is no hope so futile as hope in either the justice or
the mercy of a power against which a rebellion has been
raised. No faith so simple or so foolish as faith in the
discrimination, the judgement, or the wisdom of a reconquering
government.
Whether at that time the essential principle of the independent
Commune could have been realized or not,
through a general response of the other cities of France
by like action (in case Paris had continued to maintain
the struggle some months longer), I am not historian
enough, nor historic prophet enough, to say. I incline to
think not. But certainly the struggle would have been
far other, far more fruitful in its results, both then and
later, (even if finally overthrown), had it really been a
movement of all those people who were so indiscriminately
murdered for it, so vilely tortured, so mercilessly
exiled. For had it really been the deliberate expression of
a million people's will to be free, they would have seized
whatever supplies were being furnished the enemy from
within their own gates; they would have repudiated property
rights created by the very power they were seeking
to overthrow. They would have seen what was necessary,
and done it.
Had the real Communards themselves seen the logic
of their own effort, and understood that to overset the
political system of dependence which enslaves the Communes
they must overset the economic institutions which
beget the centralized State; had they proclaimed a general
communalization of the city's resources they might have
won the people to full faith in the struggle and aroused
a ten-fold effort to win out. If that again had been followed
by a like contagion in the other cities of France,
(which was a possibility) the flame might have caught
throughout Latin Europe, and those countries might now
be giving a practical example of the extension of a modified
Socialism and local autonomy. This is what is likely
to happen at the next similar outbreak, if politicians are
so impolitic as to provoke the like. There are those
among the best social students who feel sure that such
will be the course of progress.
I frankly say that I cannot see the path of future
progress,—my vision is not large enough, nor my viewpoint
high enough. Where others perhaps behold the
morning sunlight, I can discern only mists—blowing dust
and moving glooms which obscure the future. I do not
know where the path leads nor how it goes. Only when
looking backward, I can catch glimpses of that long, terrible,
toilsome way by which humanity has gone forward;
even that I do not see clearly,—just stretches of it here
and there. But I see enough of it to know that never has
it been a straight, undeviating line. Always the path
winds and returns, and even in the moment of gaining
something, there is something lost.
Against the onslaught of Nature, Man collects his social
strength, and loses thereby the freedom of his more
isolated condition. Against the inconveniences of primitive
society, he hurls his inventive genius,—compasses
land, sea, and air,—and by the very act of conquering his
limitations binds fresh fetters on himself, creating a
wealth which he enslaves himself to produce!
And this is the Path of Progress, which there was no
foreseeing!
What waits them? And what hope is there? And
what help is there?
What waits? The Unknown waits, as it has always
waited,—dark, vague, immense, impenetrable—the Mystery
which allures the young and strong saying, "Come
and cope with me"; the Mystery from which the old and
wise shrink back, saying, "Better to endure the evils that
we have than fly to others that we know not of"; the old
and wise, but alas! the cold-blooded! The Mystery of
the still unbound strengths of earth, sun, and depths, the
loosing of any one of which may so alter the face of all
that has been done that what now we think a guarantee of
liberty may become the very chain of slavery, as has been
the case before with freedoms laboriously won by act,
and then set down in words for unborn men to abide by.
And yet—It waits.
Are you strong and courageous? The Unknown invites
you to the struggle, dares you to its conquering.
Nay, it is perhaps your future beloved, waiting to reward
your daring passion with the fervors of fresh creation.
Are you feeble and timid of spirit? Bow your head to
the ground. Still you must meet the future; still you
must go in the track of the others. You may hinder
them, you may make them lag; you cannot stop them, nor
yourself.
Struggle waits—abortive struggle, crushed struggle,
mistaken struggle, long and often. And worse than all
this, Waiting waits,—the long dead-level of inaction, when
no one does anything, when even the daring can only
move in self-returning circles; when no one knows what
to do, except to endure the ever-tightening pressure of intolerable
conditions, how to better which he knows not;
when living appears a monotonous journey through a featureless
wilderness, wherein the same pitiless word "Useless"
stares at one from every aimless path one seeks to
follow in the despairing search for a way out. And
happier is he who perishes in the mistaken struggle than
he who, with a hot and chafing soul, but with clear discernment,
sees that he is doomed to go on indefinitely in
submission to the wrongs that are.
What hope is there? That the increasing pressure of
conditions may quicken intelligences; that even out of
mistaken struggle, frustrate struggle, unforeseen good
consequences may flow, just as out of undeniable improvements
in material life, unforeseeable ill results are
consequent.
The Commune hoped to free Paris, and by so setting
an example free many other cities. It went down in utter
defeat, and no city was freed thereby. But out of this
defeat the knowledge and skill of craftsmanship of its
people went abroad over other lands, both into civilized
centers and to wild waste places; and wherever its art
went, its idea went also, so that the "Commune," the
idealized Commune, has become a watchword through
the workshops of the world, wherever there are even a
few workers seeking to awaken their fellows.
There are those who have definite hopes; those who
think they know precisely how overwork and underwork
and poverty, and all their consequences of spiritual enslavement,
are to be abolished. Such are they who think
they can see the way of progress broad and clear through
the slit in a ballot box. I fear their works will have some
uncalculated consequences also, if ever they execute them;
I fear their narrowly enclosed view deceives them much.
Climbing a hill is a different affair from voting oneself at
the top.
No matter: Man always hopes; Life always hopes.
When a definite object cannot be outlined, the indomitable
spirit of hope still impels the living mass to move toward
something—something that shall somehow be better.
What help is there? No help from outside power; no
help from overhead; no help from the Sky, pray to it ever
so much; no help from the strong hand of wise men, nor
of good men, however wise or good. Such help always
ends in despotism. Nor yet is there help in the abnegation
of generous fanatics whose efforts end in deplorable
fiasco, as did the Commune. Help lies only in the general
will of those who do the work to say how, when, and
where they shall do it.
The force of the lesson of the Commune is that people
cannot be made free who have not conceived freedom;
yet through such examples they may learn to conceive it.
It cannot be bestowed as a gift; it must be taken by those
who want it. Let us hope that those who would have
given it, bought that much by their sacrifice, that they
touched the unseeing eyes of the somnambulist proletariat
with a light which has made them dream, at least, of
waking.
That a nation of people considering themselves enlightened,
informed, alert to the interests of the
hour, should be so generally and so profoundly
ignorant of a revolution taking place in their backyard, so
to speak, as the people of the United States are ignorant
of the present revolution in Mexico, can be due only to
profoundly and generally acting causes. That people of
revolutionary principles and sympathies should be so, is
inexcusable.
It is as one of such principles and sympathies that I
address you,—as one interested in every move the people
make to throw off their chains, no matter where, no matter
how,—though naturally my interest is greatest where
the move is such as appears to me to be most in consonance
with the general course of progress, where the
tyranny attacked is what appears to me the most fundamental,
where the method followed is to my thinking
most direct and unmistakable. And I add that those of
you who have such principles and sympathies are in the
logic of your own being bound, first, to inform yourselves
concerning so great a matter as the revolt of millions
of people—what they are struggling for, what they are
struggling against, and how the struggle stands—from
day to day, if possible; if not, from week to week, or
month to month, as best you can; and second, to spread
this knowledge among others, and endeavor to do what
little you can to awaken the consciousness and sympathy
of others.
One of the great reasons why the mass of the American
people know nothing of the Revolution in Mexico,
is, that they have altogether a wrong conception of what
"revolution" means. Thus ninety-nine out of a hundred
persons to whom you broach the subject will say, "Why,
I thought that ended long ago. That ended last May";
and this week the press, even the Daily Socialist, reports,
"A new revolution in Mexico." It isn't a new
revolution at all; it is the same revolution, which did not
begin with the armed rebellion of last May, which has
been going on steadily ever since then, and before then,
and is bound to go on for a long time to come, if the
other nations keep their hands off and the Mexican people
are allowed to work out their own destiny.
What is a revolution? and what is this revolution?
A revolution means some great and subversive change
in the social institutions of a people, whether sexual, religious,
political, or economic.
The movement of the Reformation was a great religious
revolution; a profound alteration in human thought—a
refashioning of the human mind. The general movement
towards political change in Europe and America
about the close of the eighteenth century, was a revolution.
The American and the French revolutions were
only prominent individual incidents in it, culminations of
the teachings of the Rights of Man. The present unrest
of the world in its economic relations, as manifested
from day to day in the opposing combinations of men
and money, in strikes and bread-riots, in literature and
movements of all kinds demanding a readjustment of the
whole or of parts of our wealth-owning and wealth-distributing
system,—this unrest is the revolution of our
time, the economic revolution, which is seeking social
change, and will go on until it is accomplished. We are
in it; at any moment of our lives it may invade our own
homes with its stern demand for self-sacrifice and suffering.
Its more violent manifestations are in Liverpool
and London to-day, in Barcelona and Vienna to-morrow,
in New York and Chicago the day after. Humanity is a
seething, heaving mass of unease, tumbling like surge
over a slipping, sliding, shifting bottom; and there will
never be any ease until a rock bottom of economic justice
is reached.
The Mexican revolution is one of the prominent manifestations
of this world-wide economic revolt. It possibly
holds as important a place in the present disruption
and reconstruction of economic institutions, as the great
revolution of France held in the eighteenth century movement.
It did not begin with the odious government of
Diaz nor end with his downfall, any more than the revolution
in France began with the coronation of Louis XVI,
or ended with his beheading. It began in the bitter and
outraged hearts of the peasants, who for generations
have suffered under a ready-made system of exploitation,
imported and foisted upon them, by which they have
been dispossessed of their homes, compelled to become
slave-tenants of those who robbed them; and under Diaz,
in case of rebellion to be deported to a distant province,
a killing climate, and hellish labor. It will end only when
that bitterness is assuaged by very great alteration in the
land-holding system, or until the people have been absolutely
crushed into subjection by a strong military power,
whether that power be a native or a foreign one.
Now the political overthrow of last May, which was
followed by the substitution of one political manager for
another, did not at all touch the economic situation. It
promised, of course; politicians always promise. It
promised to consider measures for altering conditions; in
the meantime, proprietors are assured that the new government
intends to respect the rights of landlords and
capitalists, and exhorts the workers to be patient and—frugal!
Frugal! Yes, that was the exhortation in Madero's
paper to men who, when they are able to get work, make
twenty-five cents a day. A man owning 5,000,000 acres
of land exhorts the disinherited workers of Mexico to
be frugal!
The idea that such a condition can be dealt with by the
immemorial remedy offered by tyrants to slaves, is like
the idea of sweeping out the sea with a broom. And unless
that frugality, or in other words, starvation, is forced
upon the people by more bayonets and more strategy
than appear to be at the government's command, the
Mexican revolution will go on to the solution of Mexico's
land question with a rapidity and directness of purpose
not witnessed in any previous upheaval.
For it must be understood that the main revolt is a
revolt against the system of land tenure. The industrial
revolution of the cities, while it is far from being
silent, is not to compare with the agrarian revolt.
Let us understand why. Mexico consists of twenty-seven
states, two territories and a federal district about
the capital city. Its population totals about 15,000,000.
Of these, 4,000,000 are of unmixed Indian descent, people
somewhat similar in character to the Pueblos of our
own southwestern states, primitively agricultural for an
immemorial period, communistic in many of their social
customs, and like all Indians, invincible haters of authority.
These Indians are scattered throughout the rural
districts of Mexico, one particularly well-known and
much talked of tribe, the Yaquis, having had its fatherland
in the rich northern state of Sonora, a very valuable
agricultural country.
The Indian population—especially the Yaquis and the
Moquis—have always disputed the usurpations of the
invaders' government, from the days of the early conquest
until now, and will undoubtedly continue to dispute
them as long as there is an Indian left, or until their
right to use the soil out of which they sprang without
paying tribute in any shape is freely recognized.
The communistic customs of these people are very interesting,
and very instructive too; they have gone on
practising them all these hundreds of years, in spite of
the foreign civilization that was being grafted upon Mexico
(grafted in all senses of the word); and it was not
until forty years ago (indeed the worst of it not till
twenty-five years ago), that the increasing power of the
government made it possible to destroy this ancient life of
the people.
By them, the woods, the waters, and the lands were
held in common. Any one might cut wood from the
forest to build his cabin, make use of the rivers to irrigate
his field or garden patch (and this is a right whose acknowledgment
none but those who know the aridity of
the southwest can fully appreciate the imperative necessity
for). Tillable lands were allotted by mutual agreement
before sowing, and reverted to the tribe after harvesting,
for reallotment. Pasturage, the right to collect
fuel, were for all. The habits of mutual aid which always
arise among sparsely settled communities were instinctive
with them. Neighbor assisted neighbor to build
his cabin, to plough his ground, to gather and store this
crop.
No legal machinery existed—no taxgatherer, no justice,
no jailer. All that they had to do with the hated
foreign civilization was to pay the periodical rent-collector,
and to get out of the way of the recruiting officer
when he came around. Those two personages they regarded
with spite and dread; but as the major portion of
their lives was not in immediate contact with them, they
could still keep on in their old way of life in the main.
With the development of the Diaz regime, which came
into power in 1876 (and when I say the Diaz regime I
do not especially mean the man Diaz, for I think he has
been both overcursed and overpraised, but the whole
force which has steadily developed centralized power
from then on, and the whole policy of "civilizing Mexico,"
which was the Diaz boast), with its development, I
say, this Indian life has been broken up, violated with as
ruthless a hand as ever tore up a people by the roots and
cast them out as weeds to wither in the sun.
Historians relate with horror the iron deeds of William
the Conqueror, who in the eleventh century created the
New Forest by laying waste the farms of England, destroying
the homes of the people to make room for the
deer. But his edicts were mercy compared with the
action of the Mexican government toward the Indians.
In order to introduce "progressive civilization" the Diaz
regime granted away immense concessions of land, to
native and foreign capitalists—chiefly foreign indeed,
though there were enough of native sharks as well.
Mostly these concessions were granted to capitalistic
combinations, which were to build railroads (and in some
cases did so in a most uncalled for and uneconomic way),
"develop" mineral resources, or establish "modern industries."
The government took no note of the ancient tribal
rights or customs, and those who received the concessions
proceeded to enforce their property rights. They introduced
the unheard of crime of "trespass." They forbade
the cutting of a tree, the breaking of a branch, the gathering
of the fallen wood in the forests. They claimed the
watercourses, forbidding their free use to the people;
and it was as if one had forbidden to us the rains of
heaven. The unoccupied land was theirs; no hand
might drive a plow into the soil without first obtaining
permission from a distant master—a permission granted
on the condition that the product be the landlord's, a
small, pitifully small, wage, the worker's.
Nor was this enough: in 1894 was passed "The Law
of Unappropriated Lands." By that law, not only were
the great stretches of vacant, in the old time common,
land appropriated, but the occupied lands themselves to
which the occupants could not show a legal title were
to be "denounced"; that is, the educated and the powerful,
who were able to keep up with the doings of the government,
went to the courts and said that there was no
legal title to such and such land, and put in a claim for
it. And the usual hocus-pocus of legality being complied
with (the actual occupant of the land being all the time
blissfully unconscious of the law, in the innocence of his
barbarism supposing that the working of the ground by
his generations of forbears was title all-sufficient) one
fine day the sheriff comes upon this hapless dweller on
the heath and drives him from his ancient habitat to
wander an outcast.
Such are the blessings of education.
Mankind invents a written sign to aid its intercommunication;
and forthwith all manner of miracles are
wrought with the sign. Even such a miracle as that a
part of the solid earth passes under the mastery of an
impotent sheet of paper; and a distant bit of animated
flesh which never even saw the ground, acquires the
power to expel hundreds, thousands, of like bits of flesh,
though they grew upon that ground as the trees grow,
labored it with their hands, and fertilized it with their
bones for a thousand years.
"This law of unappropriated lands," says William
Archer, "has covered the country with Naboth's Vineyards."
I think it would require a Biblical prophet to
describe the "abomination of desolation" it has made.
It was to become lords of this desolation that the men
who play the game—landlords who are at the same time
governors and magistrates, enterprising capitalists seeking
investments—connived at the iniquities of the Diaz
regime; I will go further and say devised them.
The Madero family alone owns some 8,000 square
miles of territory; more than the entire state of New
Jersey. The Terrazas family, in the state of Chihuahua,
owns 25,000 square miles; rather more than the entire
state of West Virginia, nearly one-half the size of Illinois.
What was the plantation owning of our southern
states in chattel slavery days, compared with this? And
the peon's share for his toil upon these great estates is
hardly more than was the chattel slave's—wretched housing,
wretched food, and wretched clothing.
It is to slaves like these that Madero appeals to be
"frugal."
It is of men who have thus been disinherited that our
complacent fellow-citizens of Anglo-Saxon origin, say:
"Mexicans! What do you know about Mexicans?
Their whole idea of life is to lean up against a fence and
smoke cigarettes". And pray, what idea of life should a
people have whose means of life in their own way have
been taken from them? Should they be so mighty
anxious to convert their strength into wealth for some
other man to loll in?
It reminds me very much of the answer given by a
negro employee on the works at Fortress Monroe to a
companion of mine who questioned him good-humoredly
on his easy idleness when the foreman's back was turned.
"Ah ain't goin' to do no white man's work, fo' Ah don'
get no white man's pay."
But for the Yaquis, there was worse than this. Not
only were their lands seized, but they were ordered, a few
years since, to be deported to Yucatan. Now Sonora, as
I said, is a northern state, and Yucatan one of the southernmost.
Yucatan hemp is famous, and so is Yucatan
fever, and Yucatan slavery on the hemp plantations.
It was to that fever and that slavery that the Yaquis
were deported, in droves of hundreds at a time, men,
women and children—droves like cattle droves, driven
and beaten like cattle. They died there, like flies, as it
was meant they should. Sonora was desolated of her
rebellious people, and the land became "pacific" in the
hands of the new landowners. Too pacific in spots.
They had not left people enough to reap the harvests.
Then the government suspended the deportation act,
but with the provision that for every crime committed
by a Yaqui, five hundred of his people be deported. This
statement is made in Madero's own book.
Now what in all conscience would any one with decent
human feeling expect a Yaqui to do? Fight! As long
as there was powder and bullet to be begged, borrowed,
or stolen; as long as there is a garden to plunder, or a
hole in the hills to hide in!
When the revolution burst out, the Yaquis and other
Indian peoples, said to the revolutionists: "Promise us
our lands back, and we will fight with you." And they are
keeping their word, magnificently. All during the summer
they have kept up the warfare. Early in September,
the Chihuahua papers reported a band of 1,000 Yaquis
in Sonora about to attack El Anil; a week later 500
Yaquis had seized the former quarters of the federal
troops at Pitahaya. This week it is reported that federal
troops are dispatched to Ponoitlan, a town in Jalisco, to
quell the Indians who have risen in revolt again because
their delusion that the Maderist government was to restore
their land has been dispelled. Like reports from
Sinaloa. In the terrible state of Yucatan, the Mayas are
in active rebellion; the reports say that "the authorities
and leading citizens of various towns have been seized
by the malcontents and put in prison." What is more interesting
is, that the peons have seized not only "the leading
citizens," but still more to the purpose have seized
the plantations, parceled them, and are already gathering
the crops for themselves.
Of course, it is not the pure Indians alone who form
the peon class of Mexico. Rather more than double the
number of Indians are mixed breeds; that is, about 8,000,000,
leaving less than 3,000,000 of pure white stock.
The mestiza, or mixed breed population, have followed
the communistic instincts and customs of their Indian
forbears; while from the Latin side of their make-up,
they have certain tendencies which work well together
with their Indian hatred of authority.
The mestiza, as well as the Indians, are mostly ignorant
in book-knowledge, only about sixteen per cent. of the
whole population of Mexico being able to read and write.
It was not within the program of the "civilizing" regime
to spend money in putting the weapon of learning in the
people's hands. But to conclude that people are necessarily
unintelligent because they are illiterate, is in itself a
rather unintelligent proceeding.
Moreover, a people habituated to the communal customs
of an ancient agricultural life do not need books or
papers to tell them that the soil is the source of wealth,
and they must "get back to the land," even if their intelligence
is limited.
Accordingly, they have got back to the land. In the
state of Morelos, which is a small, south-central state, but
a very important one—being next to the Federal District,
and by consequence to the city of Mexico—there has been
a remarkable land revolution. General Zapata, whose
name has figured elusively in newspaper reports now as
having made peace with Madero, then as breaking faith,
next wounded and killed, and again resurrected and in
hiding, then anew on the warpath and proclaimed by the
provisional government the arch-rebel who must surrender
unconditionally and be tried by court-martial; who
has seized the strategic points on both the railroads running
through Morelos, and who just a few days ago
broke into the federal district, sacked a town, fought successfully
at two or three points, with the federals, blew
out two railroad bridges and so frightened the deputies in
Mexico City that they are clamoring for all kinds of
action; this Zapata, the fires of whose military camps are
springing up now in Guerrero, Oaxaca and Puebla as
well, is an Indian with a long score to pay, and all an
Indian's satisfaction in paying it. He appears to be a
fighter of the style of our revolutionary Marion and
Sumter; the country in which he is operating is mountainous,
and guerilla bands are exceedingly difficult of
capture; even when they are defeated, they have usually
succeeded in inflicting more damage than they have received,
and they always get away.
Zapata has divided up the great estates of Morelos
from end to end, telling the peasants to take possession.
They have done so. They are in possession, and have
already harvested their crops. Morelos has a population
of some 212,000.
In Puebla reports in September told us that eighty
leading citizens had waited on the governor to protest
against the taking possession of the land by the peasantry.
The troops were deserting, taking horses and arms
with them. It is they no doubt who are now fighting
with Zapata. In Chihuahua, one of the largest states,
prisons have been thrown open and the prisoners recruited
as rebels; a great hacienda was attacked and the
horses run off, whereupon the peons rose and joined the
attacking party. In Sinaloa, a rich northern state—famous
in the southwestern United States some years ago
as the field of a great co-operative experiment in which
Mr. C. B. Hoffman, one of the former editors of The
Chicago Daily Socialist, was a leading spirit—this week's
paper reports that the former revolutionary general, Juan
Banderas, is heading an insurrection second in importance
only to that led by Zapata.
In the southern border state of Chiapas, the taxes in
many places could not be collected. Last week news
items said that the present government had sent General
Paz there, with federal troops, to remedy that state of
affairs. In Tabasco, the peons refused to harvest the
crops for their masters; let us hope they have imitated
their brothers in Morelos and gathered them for themselves.
The Maderists have announced that a stiff repressive
campaign will be inaugurated at once; if we are to believe
the papers, we are to believe Madero guilty of the
imbecility of saying, "Five days after my inauguration
the rebellion will be crushed." Just why the crushing
has to wait till five days after the inauguration does not
appear. I conceive there must have been some snickering
among the reactionary deputies if such an announcement
was really made; and some astonished query among his
followers.
What are we to conclude from all these reports? That
the Mexican people are satisfied? That it's all good and
settled? What should we think if we read that the people,
not of Lower but of Upper, California had turned
out the ranch owners, had started to gather in the field
products for themselves and that the Secretary of War
had sent United States troops to attack some thousands
of armed men (Zapata has had 3,000 under arms the
whole summer and that force is now greatly increased)
who were defending that expropriation? if we read that
in the state of Illinois the farmers had driven off the tax
collector? that the coast states were talking of secession
and forming an independent combination? that in Pennsylvania
a division of the federal army was to be dispatched
to overpower a rebel force of fifteen hundred
armed men doing guerilla work from the mountains? that
the prison doors of Maryland, within hailing distance of
Washington City, were being thrown open by armed revoltees?
Should we call it a condition of peace? Regard
it a proof that the people were appeased? We would not:
we would say that revolution was in full swing. And
the reason you have thought it was all over in Mexico,
from last May till now, is that the Chicago press, like
the eastern, northern, and central press in general, has
said nothing about this steady march of revolt. Even
The Socialist has been silent. Now that the flame has
shot up more spectacularly for the moment, they call it
"a new revolution."
That the papers pursue this course is partly due to the
generally acting causes that produce our northern indifference,
which I shall presently try to explain, and partly
to the settled policy of capitalized interest in controlling
its mouthpieces in such a manner as to give their present
henchmen, the Maderists, a chance to pull their chestnuts
out of the fire. They invested some $10,000,000 in this
bunch, in the hope that they may be able to accomplish
the double feat of keeping capitalist possessions intact
and at the same time pacifying the people with specious
promises. They want to lend them all the countenance
they can, till the experiment is well tried; so they deliberately
suppress revolutionary news.
Among the later items of interest reported by the Los
Angeles Times are those which announce an influx of ex-officials
and many-millioned landlords of Mexico, who
are hereafter to be residents of Los Angeles. What is
the meaning of it? Simply that life in Mexico is not
such a safe and comfortable proposition as it was, and
that for the present they prefer to get such income as
their agents can collect without themselves running the
risk of actual residence.
Of course it is understood that some of this notable
efflux (the supporters of Reyes, for example, who have
their own little rebellions in Tabasco and San Luis Potosi
this week) are political reactionists, scheming to get
back the political loaves and fishes into their own hands.
But most are simply those who know that their property
right is safe enough to be respected by the Maderist government,
but that the said government is not strong
enough to put down the innumerable manifestations of
popular hatred which are likely to terminate fatally to
themselves if they remain there.
Nor is all of this fighting revolutionary; not by any
means. Some is reactionary, some probably the satisfaction
of personal grudge, much, no doubt, the expression
of general turbulency of a very unconscious nature.
But granting all that may be thrown in the balance, the
main thing, the mighty thing, the regenerative revolution
is the Reappropriation of the land by the peasants.
Thousands upon thousands of them are doing it.
Ignorant peasants: peasants who know nothing about
the jargon of land reformers or of Socialists. Yes: that's
just the glory of it! Just the fact that it is done by ignorant
people; that is, people ignorant of book theories;
but not ignorant, not so ignorant by half, of life on the
land, as the theory-spinners of the cities. Their minds
are simple and direct; they act accordingly. For them,
there is one way to "get back to the land"; i. e., to ignore
the machinery of paper land-holding (in many instances
they have burned the records of the title-deeds) and proceed
to plough the ground, to sow and plant and gather,
and keep the product themselves.
Economists, of course, will say that these ignorant
people, with their primitive institutions and methods, will
not develop the agricultural resources of Mexico, and
that they must give way before those who will so develop
its resources; that such is the law of human development.
In the first place, the abominable political combination,
which gave away, as recklessly as a handful of soap-bubbles,
the agricultural resources of Mexico—gave them
away to the millionaire speculators who were to develop
the country—were the educated men of Mexico. And
this is what they saw fit to do with their higher intelligence
and education. So the ignorant may well distrust
the good intentions of educated men who talk about improvements
in land development.
In the second place, capitalistic land-ownership, so far
from developing the land in such a manner as to support
a denser population, has depopulated whole districts, immense
districts.
In the third place, what the economists do not say is,
that the only justification for intense cultivation of the
land is, that the product of such cultivation may build up
the bodies of men (by consequence their souls) to richer
and fuller manhood. It is not merely to pile up figures
of so many million bushels of wheat and corn produced
in a season; but that this wheat and corn shall first go
into the stomachs of those who planted it—and in abundance;
to build up the brawn and sinew of the arms
that work the ground, not meanly maintaining them in a
half-starved condition. And second, to build up the
strength of the rest of the nation who are willing to give
needed labor in exchange. But never to increase the fortunes
of idlers who dissipate it. This is the purpose, and
the only purpose, of tilling soil; and the working of it
for any other purpose is waste, waste both of land and
of men.
In the fourth place, no change ever was, or ever can
be, worked out in any society, except by the mass of the
people. Theories may be propounded by educated people,
and set down in books, and discussed in libraries,
sitting-rooms and lecture-halls; but they will remain barren,
unless the people in mass work them out. If the
change proposed is such that it is not adaptable to the
minds of the people for whose ills it is supposed to be a
remedy, then it will remain what it was, a barren theory.
Now the conditions in Mexico have been and are so
desperate that some change is imperative. The action of
the peasants proves it. Even if a strong military dictator
shall arise, he will have to allow some provision going
towards peasant proprietorship. These unlettered, but
determined, people must be dealt with now; there is no
such thing as "waiting till they are educated up to it."
Therefore the wisdom of the economists is wisdom out
of place—rather, relative unwisdom. The people never
can be educated, if their conditions are to remain what
they were under the Diaz regime. Bodies and minds are
both too impoverished to be able to profit by a spread of
theoretical education, even if it did not require unavailable
money and indefinite time to prepare such a spread.
Whatever economic change is wrought, then, must be
such as the people in their present state of comprehension
can understand and make use of. And we see by the reports
what they understand. They understand they have
a right upon the soil, a right to use it for themselves, a
right to drive off the invader who has robbed them, to
destroy landmarks and title-deeds, to ignore the taxgatherer
and his demands.
And however primitive their agricultural methods may
be, one thing is sure; that they are more economical than
any system which heaps up fortunes by destroying men.
Moreover, who is to say how they may develop their
methods once they have a free opportunity to do so?
It is a common belief of the Anglo-Saxon that the Indian
is essentially lazy. The reasons for his thinking so are
two: under the various tyrannies and robberies which
white men in general, and Anglo-Saxons in particular
(they have even gone beyond the Spaniard) have inflicted
upon Indians, there is no possible reason why an
Indian should want to work, save the idiotic one that
work in itself is a virtuous and exalted thing, even if by
it the worker increases the power of his tyrant. As
William Archer says: "If there are men, and this is not
denied, who work for no wage, and with no prospect or
hope of any reward, it would be curious to know by what
motive other than the lash or the fear of the lash, they
are induced to go forth to their labor in the morning."
The second reason is, that an Indian really has a different
idea of what he is alive for than an Anglo-Saxon has.
And so have the Latin peoples. This different idea is
what I meant when I said that the mestiza have certain
tendencies inherited from the Latin side of their make-up
which work well together with their Indian hatred of
authority. The Indian likes to live; to be his own master;
to work when he pleases and stop when he pleases.
He does not crave many things, but he craves the enjoyment
of the things that he has. He feels himself more a
part of nature than a white man does. All his legends
are of wanderings with nature, of forests, fields, streams,
plants, animals. He wants to live with the same liberty
as the other children of earth. His philosophy of work
is, Work so as to live care-free. This is not laziness; this
is sense—to the person who has that sort of make-up.
Your Latin, on the other hand, also wants to live; and
having artistic impulses in him, his idea of living is very
much in gratifying them. He likes music and song and
dance, picture-making, carving, and decorating. He
doesn't like to be forced to create his fancies in a hurry;
he likes to fashion them, and admire them, and improve
and refashion them, and admire again; and all for the
fun of it. If he is ordered to create a certain design or
a number of objects at a fixed price in a given time, he
loses his inspiration; the play becomes work, and hateful
work. So he, too, does not want to work, except what is
requisite to maintain himself in a position to do those
things that he likes better.
Your Anglo-Saxon's idea of life, however, is to create
the useful and the profitable—whether he has any use or
profit out of it or not—and to keep busy, busy; to bestir
himself "like the Devil in a holy water font." Like all
other people, he makes a special virtue of his own natural
tendencies, and wants all the world to "get busy"; it
doesn't so much matter to what end this business is to be
conducted, provided the individual—scrabbles. Whenever
a true Anglo-Saxon seeks to enjoy himself, he
makes work out of that too, after the manner of a certain
venerable English shopkeeper who in company with
his son visited the Louvre. Being tired out with walking
from room to room, consulting his catalogue, and
reading artists' names, he dropped down to rest; but
after a few moments rose resolutely and faced the next
room, saying, "Well, Alfred, we'd better be getting
through our work."
There is much question as to the origin of the various
instincts. Most people have the impression that the chief
source of variation lies in the difference in the amount of
sunlight received in the native countries inhabited of the
various races. Whatever the origin is, these are the
broadly marked tendencies of the people. And "Business"
seems bent not only upon fulfilling its own fore-ordained
destiny, but upon making all the others fulfill it
too. Which is both unjust and stupid. There is room
enough in the world for the races to try out their several
tendencies and make their independent contributions to
the achievements of humanity, without imposing them
on those who revolt at them.
Granting that the population of Mexico, if freed from
this foreign "busy" idea which the government imported
from the north and imposed on them with such severity
in the last forty years, would not immediately adopt improved
methods of cultivation, even when they should
have free opportunity to do so, still we have no reason
to conclude that they would not adopt so much of it as
would fit their idea of what a man is alive for; and if
that actually proved good, it would introduce still further
development. So that there would be a natural, and
therefore solid, economic growth which would stick;
while a forced development of it through the devastation
of the people is no true growth. The only way to make
it go, is to kill out the Indians altogether, and transport
the "busy" crowd there, and then keep on transporting
for several generations, to fill up the ravages the climate
will make on such an imported population.
The Indian population of our states was in fact dealt
with in this murderous manner. I do not know how
grateful the reflection may be to those who materially
profited by its extermination; but no one who looks forward
to the final unification and liberation of man, to the
incorporation of the several goodnesses of the various
races in the one universal race, can ever read those pages
of our history without burning shame and fathomless
regret.
I have spoken of the meaning of revolution in general;
of the meaning of the Mexican revolution—chiefly an
agrarian one; of its present condition. I think it should
be apparent to you that in spite of the electoral victory of
the now ruling power, it has not put an end even to the
armed rebellion, and cannot, until it proposes some plan
of land restoration; and that it not only has no inward
disposition to do, but probably would not dare to do, in
view of the fact that immense capital financed it into
power.
As to what amount of popular sentiment was actually
voiced in the election, it is impossible to say. The dailies
informed us that in the Federal District where there are
1,000,000 voters, the actual vote was less than 450,000.
They offered no explanation. It is impossible to explain
it on the ground that we explain a light vote in our own
communities, that the people are indifferent to public
questions; for the people of Mexico are not now indifferent,
whatever else they may be. Two explanations are
possible: the first, and most probable, that of governmental
intimidation; the second, that the people are convinced
of the uselessness of voting as a means of settling
their troubles. In the less thickly populated agricultural
states, this is very largely the case; they are relying upon
direct revolutionary action. But although there was
guerilla warfare in the Federal District, even before the
election, I find it unlikely that more than half the voting
population there abstained from voting out of conviction,
though I should be glad to be able to believe they did.
However, Madero and his aids are in, as was expected;
the question is, how will they stay in? As Diaz did, and
in no other way—if they succeed in developing Diaz's
sometime ability; which so far they are wide from having
done, though they are resorting to the most vindictive
and spiteful tactics in their persecution of the genuine
revolutionists, wherever such come near their clutch.
To this whole turbulent situation three outcomes are
possible:
1. A military dictator must arise, with sense enough
to make some substantial concessions, and ability enough
to pursue the crushing policy ably; or
2. The United States must intervene in the interests
of American capitalists and landholders, in case the peasant
revolt is not put down by the Maderist power. And
that will be the worst thing that can possibly happen, and
against which every worker in the United States should
protest with all his might; or
3. The Mexican peasantry will be successful, and freedom
in land become an actual fact. And that means the
death-knell of great land-holding in this country also, for
what people is going to see its neighbor enjoy so great a
triumph, and sit on tamely itself under landlordism?
Whatever the outcome be, one thing is certain: it is a
great movement, which all the people of the world should
be eagerly watching. Yet as I said at the beginning, the
majority of our population know no more about it than
of a revolt on the planet Jupiter. First because they are
so, so, busy; they scarcely have time to look over the
baseball score and the wrestling match; how could they
read up on a revolution! Second, they are supremely
egotistic and concerned in their own big country with its
big deeds—such as divorce scandals, vice-grafting, and
auto races. Third, they do not read Spanish, and they
have an ancient hostility to all that smells Spanish.
Fourth, from our cradles we were told that whatever
happened in Mexico was a joke. Revolutions, or rather
rebellions, came and went, about like April showers, and
they never meant anything serious. And in this indeed
there was only too much truth—it was usually an excuse
for one place-hunter to get another one's scalp. And
lastly, as I have said, the majority of our people do not
know that a revolution means a fundamental change in
social life, and not a spectacular display of armies.
It is not much a few can do to remove this mountain
of indifference; but to me it seems that every reformer,
of whatever school, should wish to watch this movement
with the most intense interest, as a practical manifestation
of a wakening of the landworkers themselves to the
recognition of what all schools of revolutionary economics
admit to be the primal necessity—the social repossession
of the land.
And whether they be victorious or defeated, I, for one,
bow my head to those heroic strugglers, no matter how
ignorant they are, who have raised the cry Land and
Liberty, and planted the blood-red banner on the burning
soil of Mexico.
To speak of Thomas Paine is to mention in one
breath daring tempered by judgment, courage
both mental and physical, foresight and prudence
coupled with unstinted generosity, patience and
endurance for the long race, constancy to the unwon
ideal, that superior power over men, conferred by no
extrinsic dictum, typified best perhaps by the loadstone,
which always bursts forth in times of revolution from the
unexpected place, the unbought and the unsought glory of
the man who is a hero because a hero is required and
does not measure his services nor reckon on their reward;
not that he underrates himself; (it is as impossible as it is
undesirable that a powerful personality should not know
itself as such) but simply that in the moment of decisions
the value of self is abandoned. So far as any or all of
these qualities are concerned Thomas Paine is a name
for them all, in their highest expression. And one feels
in approaching him that there is something like treason
in paying him any but a perfect tribute. Yet such is the
position into which I am forced,—to say less than I
should, less than I would had not words and the art of
using them almost failed me.
I do not like lecturers who come before the public with
apologies, nor do I propose to make any; I simply say
this to let you know that I shall feel, perhaps more keenly
than any of you, my failure to do Paine justice. For the
half century that his history has been being unmined
from the cellar of calumny and filth that the orthodox
had cast upon it, unmined chiefly by small groups of freethinkers
scattered here and there and spreading his words
among men, like the little foxes with the firebrands going
in among the corn, the principal endeavor has been to
establish Paine's reputation as a great reformer in religion.
And such he undoubtedly was. Whoever reads
his "Age of Reason" in anything but a spirit of predisposition
against it, must feel this, however much he may
disagree with Paine's criticism, or consider that he has
come short in his constructive philosophy. And it is
meet, too, that the book that cost him most, both before
and after death, should be the one selected for defense.
Nevertheless the effect has been rather to lose sight of
what appear to me greater thoughts and acts. For just as
the orthodox have forgotten, so have many freethinkers
forgotten, his immense labors in the field of active struggle
against the domination of man by man. It is true
that his mind did not transcend the mental vesture of the
time, and it was all the better in one of his marvelous
capacities for swinging masses of men that it did not.
The lonely heralds of the opening dawn go upon their
paths solitary; no matter how much they desire to draw
others with them, they cannot. And had Paine been one
of these that break through the forms of thought such as
was Copernicus, or Kant, or Darwin, he would have been
at constant war with himself. Half his nature would
have chosen the lonely path; the other half, the zealot,
the propagandist, would have cried out, they must go
with me; I must do something to make them go with
me. Now the secret of Paine's success was that he was
so thoroughly at one with himself, he believed so utterly
what he preached, he had faith, he hoped, and so strongly
that others were drawn to believe and to hope. For spite
of all intellectual pride this is the man whom we love and
admire; this is the man who overcomes us, who gets his
way; this man consistent in himself, who has a remedy
for the world's wrongs and hopes everything from it!
From the point of vantage of 100 years' experience it is
seen that Paine's political creed, like his religious one, will
no longer fit. But that does not matter. Neither will
ours fit in a hundred years, and none of us, no, not one,
is great enough to foresee where the misfit will arise. It
is not our business to bear the evils of the thrice unborn
upon our necks; nor was it Paine's to bear ours.
Yet while not claiming for him the prophetic gift, it is
still true that he did see the moral patchwork in our constitution,
the trouble of 1812 brewing, and the greater
trouble of '61-'65.
When he first came to this country he wrote a number
of contributions to the Pennsylvania Magazine, in one of
which he pleaded justice for the negro, basing his plea
then as always upon the natural equality of man irrespective
of color. Afterwards when the constitution was
framed, he objected that nothing had been done for the
negro, and in his letters to the American people, written
after his imprisonment in France, in which the constitution
was caustically reviewed, he cries out again for this
yoked man not yet to be freed for more than half a hundred
years,—foreseeing that nothing good can in the end
come from slavery, that every evil must bring a compensating
evil. The soldiers' graves in the National
cemeteries, the thousands of limping, haggard tatters and
rags of white men attest how well Paine foresaw Time's
revenges.
In the letter to Washington, partially unjust as it is in
view of the fact that Gouverneur Morris and not Washington
was responsible for the failure to save Paine from
prison in France, as we now know, thanks to Moncure
Conway, but which Paine did not know,—in this letter, I
say, will be found the most terrible arraignment of the
constitution ever penned. We who are Anarchists are
called traitors for much calmer talk. Yet here was the
man "whose pen had done more for the revolution than
Washington's sword," as his bitterest enemy declared;
who believed heart and soul in the republic, who had
given his money and his substance and taken the chances
of his life in battle for it; the man whose devotion to
America could not be gainsaid; this man declared that
the American constitution was the mirror of the most
vicious features of the British constitution, a fecund soil
for monopolies with all their ills. It is we who experience
those ills, we who know what a gigantic tool of oppression
the constitution and the cumbersome machinery
of the lawmaking power have become. Yet probably
even we do not feel so keenly as he the fatal blunder;
for while we know how it grinds us in our flesh and
souls, rears its prisons and scaffolds for us, we have had
the yoke about our necks always,—while he had once seen
the country free. He had been through all the battle, had
fought his fight and won his victory, only to see it lost
through cowardice of thought. That was indeed bitter;
and it is that bitter outcry against this sacrifice which
marks Paine out among most of his time for influence on
future history. The fact that he was the initiator of the
direct movement for political independence in America,
in the famous meeting where Adams, Franklin and
Washington all shrank from uttering the thought heavy
upon their souls, is a matter of past history. The fact
that he was the one man in America to write the right
thing at the right time, his voice the wind to sweep the
scattering flames of insubordination and revolt into the
conflagration of revolution; the fact that he proposed and
headed with the whole contents of his purse the subscription
to save the army when even Washington was in
despair at the prospect of mutiny and desertion among
the soldiers; the fact that he raised all the feeling possible
against the fiction of divine rights and so got himself
hunted out of England; the fact that he took the
most active part possible in aiding the work of the French
revolutionists, which he believed would be the beginning
of the breakdown of monarchy throughout Europe and
the building up either of one universal continental republic
or a confederation of sister republics; the fact that
he was the one man in the convention who dared to stand
for the life of Louis the XVI, and thereby got himself
suspected, thrown into prison, and condemned to death—all
these facts are of import in reading the character
of the man, and in comprehending the record of
those days when they were making history fast. Yet
none of these has so much influence upon the demands of
to-day as the voice of discontent crying for eternal vigilance,
which sounds through these almost unknown letters.
These are the things which it will pay to reprint in the
day when American liberty feels in its tomb the first
stirrings of the resurrection. Did we like Paine believe
in God, we might say "Pray God it may not be far away."
Such are the characters whose historic influence is
greatest; they who hew, and hew hard to the line laid
down for them by the events of their time; yet are not
blinded by the stir and roll of things; who see clearly
where the deflection from the line is likely to occur, and
where it will lead; who raise the warning treble that goes
shrilling to the future, startling, waking with its eerie
cry custom-dulled ears, and sodden souls, who start to ask,
was it not a ghost of the Revolution? In that day which
may not be so distant as we fear, Paine will be more alive
than ever; he will be watching at a million firesides with
the old keen, strong eyes.
While I have deprecated the fact that the religious reformer
has been exalted to the neglect of the political
one, I cannot omit that part of his life-work so well-known
to all, yet never old. The "Age of Reason" has
long been both exaggerated and despised as an iconoclastic
work. But we are indebted to Conway, the greatest
of Paine students, who out of the many biographies he
has written has chosen that of Paine to be the master-piece
of his life (and it is a work which any author
might be proud to regard his master-piece), to him I
say we are indebted for a different view of the "Age of
Reason."
I know not whether Mr. Conway's own Unitarian bias
may not have influenced him; it is possible. It is possible
that his eager search for positivism may have unconsciously
determined his attitude towards the great hero,
and modified his interpretation of Paine's words. I believe
it has; because I believe that is inevitable. I believe
we read our own ideals into other people, and must do so
if we think at all. But making all allowance for the
biographer's prejudgment, Conway has still a magnificent
argument for putting Paine in the defendant's position.
We are no longer to view the book as an attack upon religion
but as its defense,—the defense of what is beneficial,
permanent, necessary, in the religious element of
human nature against the scribes and pharisees on the
one hand and the philistines on the other. It was the
plea for the redemption of the edifice from the dirt and
cobwebs, the protest against smashing the stones to kill
the spiders. The great prerequisite to the understanding
of the "Age of Reason" is an acquaintance with the literature
of that time—especially French literature. The
pamphlets, periodicals, and books are the crystals wherein
the Zeitgeist of the 18th century is preserved. Without
this acquaintance we cannot realize how the people continually
thought, and what was new and what was old,
what was acceptable and what unacceptable to them. And
we shall find by it that the fashion of sneering popularized
by Voltaire, and so admirably embodied by the
finesse of the French language (always a language of
double meanings and hemi-demi-semi-shaded insinuations),
the still more reprehensible habit of deducing immense
generals from very scanty particulars, or in fact
contriving the generals first and then fitting in or suavely
waiving the particulars altogether, had so permeated not
only French philosophy, but the heads of the common
people as well, that religion had become almost a byword,
a baseless superstition unaccounted for by, and
unnecessary according to, the all-accepted theory of Natural
Law. To defend it, to maintain that there was something
else in it, was equivalent to pleading for the life
of the King before the convention! That was to maintain
that there were claims of the human—after the
King had been stripped; this was to say that underneath
the gewgaws and tinsel of religions the undying heart of
man, the man of all the past, had been expressing its
noblest aspirations. And Paine stripped off the tinsel
and said, "Put your hand here,—it beats"; and because
he tore the tinsel, the orthodox would have stoned him;
and because he said "it beats," the philosophers would
have whetted the knife. And between the two he stood
firm, proclaiming what he believed, not counting the cost.
We may not believe as he; most of us do not. But that
is the man we love: who has something in him superior to
the judgments of men; who holds steadfast—steadfast
even in persecution, even to death.
Perhaps there is no more pathetic thing than the last
years, the death, and the burial of Paine. The world
would have been poorer had he died sooner; but to him,
to the man, the gun-shot or the guillotine had been kinder
than the unhappy life rejected by the nation he had given
all to free, shunned by political cowards and persecuted
by religious bigots,—even on his death-bed. But though
so lonely, so pathetically lonely, there is something that
sends a fine, cold thrill along the nerves in that strange
procession and burial—that poor procession, that procession
of the Hicksite Quaker, the two negroes, the widowed
Frenchwoman and her son. I wonder what sort
of day it was; whether the sun shone or the clouds lowered
over the solitary grave on the little farm, when Margaret
Bonneville said to her child, "Stand you there at his
feet, for France; and I will here, for America." I do not
know where the negroes and the Hicksite stood when that
august corpse was lowered to the depths, but there, close,
somewhere, stood the unfreed race, for whom he had
vainly plead, and there, close, somewhere, the soul's revolt
at spiritual masters. And from that tomb there went
away the scattering fires, of the risen ghost, the '61 living
Paine, the Grand Reality.
(February 15, 1839—April 6, 1893)
One of the silent martyrs whose graves are trodden
to the level by their fellows' feet, almost before it
is seen that they have fallen, completed his martyrdom
one year ago to-night.
There are thousands of such, why then commemorate
this one?
Let our answer be that in this one we commemorate
all the others, and if we have chosen his day and name, it
is because his genius, his work, his character was one
of those rare gems produced in the great mine of suffering
and flashing backward with all its changing lights
the hopes, the fears, the gaieties, the griefs, the dreams,
the doubts, the loves, the hates, the sum of that which is
buried, low down there, in the human mine.
No more modest a man than Dyer D. Lum ever lived;
partly, nay mostly, indeed, it was inborn, instinctive; but
it was also fostered by his conception of life, which led
him to consider self as the veriest of soap-bubbles, a
thing to be dispelled by the merest whiff of wind, so to
speak; and therefore, personal recognition or personal
gain as the most silly, as well as unworthy, of motives.
For this reason his works have often gone where his
name did not, and thousands of persons have been influenced
by his logic and his sentiments who never heard
of his personality. Indeed there were some of us who
wondered when he died, what certain labor leaders would
henceforth do for a cheap scribe to furnish them brains.
I have often heard him quote as his motto, both for
organization and for literary effort, the expressive sentence:
"Get in your work." "Let fools take the credit
if they want it," was the implication of his tone, and I
shall never forget the delightful smile with which he
repeated Charles Mackay's lines, most singularly transposing
the author's meaning: "Grub little moles——."
He took an especial pleasure in grubbing, and smiling
when a streak of sunlight fell on some one else.
I have said that this distinguishing characteristic, so
fruitful in results in his later life, was partly instinctive
and partly a philosophic conviction. The instinctive side
may be best understood by a brief sketch of his ancestry.
It is generally complained that the troublesome people
who are never satisfied to let society alone, must necessarily
be foreigners; at least they can never belong to
the same nation as we, the good, the respectable. The
easy method of laying everything pestilent to the charge
of the foreigner, will not serve a conservative American
against Dyer D. Lum. The first of the Lums to set
foot in this country was Samuel L., a Scotchman, in
the year 1732. They rooted in New England soil, and
at the time of the Revolution, Dyer's great grandfather
was a minute-man in the very town, Northampton,
where his own corpse was laid a year ago. On the
maternal side the Tappan family were also revolutionists,
and back of revolutionists Reformationists in the days
of Queen Elizabeth, and still back of that, Crusaders.
All this would be important enough and indeed even distinguishing,
were I relating it by way of "gilding refined
gold"; but they acquire meaning the moment we regard
them as data for a character. They are fraught with
mysterious symbolism, and he himself becomes a symbol
of the deep-rooted faith of humanity, when we see that
subterranean stream of blood running from Jerusalem
through Europe and across the sea to America. It shows
how profound is the well-spring of devotion to cause
in the human heart; through how many centuries the
spirit of rebellion lives. But what, say you, had it to do
with his instinctive modesty? This: the devotee of a
cause is never the devotee of self.
Now as to his philosophic convictions, it would be
easy to deliver a whole lecture upon them; and unfortunately
his profoundest work on that subject has not
yet been printed. Of course, I can present them but
briefly. I must preface that, as you will no doubt observe
later on, his beliefs were in his own case a plain
testimony to their own correctness. It sounds ridiculous
to say that a thing can prove itself; but you will understand
me when I explain that he regarded the conscious
life of man, which includes, of course, his processes of
reasoning and therefore his philosophy, as the merest
fragment of him; that this process itself, which we are
wont so fondly to consider as setting us higher than the
brute, is but an upgrowth of our instincts. Man, the
race Man, psychologically as well as bodily, might be
likened to a tree, which every year adds small new
growths whose bright green verdure opens to the sunlight,
while below and supporting them quivers the great
dark green mass of the tree, which year after year repeats
itself, whispering in its shadows the old whispers
of the centuries. The new verdure would represent the
conscious life and growth of individuals, budding upward
in response to the conditions surrounding them
and adding what tiny mite they may to the experience of
the race; but beneath and through, and all about them
rustle the traditions of the dead—dead as individuals,
but living, more potently living than ever, in the great
trunk and branches of unconscious, or instinctive life.
And as the shape of the newly budding leaf, the shade
of its green, the length of its stem, its size, are determined
more by the nature of the tree than by surrounding
circumstances, so the philosophy of the individual
is determined by the instinctive life of the race.
The winter of death comes; the individual withers like
the leaf; but the small item of growth that he has added
is there, brown and barren though the twig appear. From
him new buds will shoot, though its own leaves hereafter
rustle in the deep green shadows of unconsciousness.
As time passes away useless boughs wither and
die, and are stricken utterly from the life of the race;
such are the worthless lives, the abnormal growths, which
no longer add anything either to the beauty or the
service of the whole.
Or, to adopt one of Comrade Lum's own figures, the
useless or brutish elements in man slowly sink down
like sediment deposited by the moving current. Now, in
a case where we are able to trace a strain of blood as
far back as this of his, and further are able to look at
the conscious work of the man, and see that the one
was the offspring of the other, modified of course by
circumstances, we are able to make the seemingly absurd
statement that the belief proves its own correctness.
Let me particularize concerning this belief. First he
was in all his writings the advocate of resistance, the
champion of rebellion. But long before he had reduced
the matter to a syllogism, he was a resistant in fact.
What else could you expect from the Crusader, the Reformationist,
the Revolutionist? It might be said by
the people who believe in the supreme influence of circumstances,
that it was his social environment which
made him such—that given the ideal social order and
he would have been as mild a pacificator as Jesus: which
is equivalent to saying that given the outward circumstances
and an ear of wheat will grow from a seed corn.
Lum was the resistant, the man of action; the man
who while scarcely more than a boy, enlisted as a volunteer
in the 125th New York infantry to fight a cause
he then deemed just; who being taken prisoner, twice
effected his escape; who sick of the inaction of superiors,
while a third-time prisoner waiting to be exchanged, took
his exchange in his own hands, at the risk of death for
desertion, and within a month re-enlisted in the cavalry,
where by sheer force of daring he rose from private to
captain; the man who smashed the idol of the Greenback
movement, sooner than let him betray its voters,
reckless himself of the rebound of hate from the politicians;
the man who cast all business prospects and
journalistic hopes aside as so much chaff, when he
picked up the fallen banner of the fight in Chicago, by
editing the paper of Albert Parsons, then in prison and
doomed to die; the man who could say to his well-beloved
friend, when that friend asked him whether he
should petition Governor Oglesby for his life, knowing
that that petition would be granted, the man who, under
these circumstances could say: "Die, Parsons"; the man
who poor, defeated, dirty, ragged, hungry, could proudly
refuse the proffered hand of the then king of the labor
movement, that king who had kept his kingdom by repudiating
the martyrs of Chicago from the limitless
height of one soul over another, answer "there's blood
on it, Powderly"; the man who faced a public audience
to defend the shooting of Frick by Alexander Berkman,
a few days after the occurrence, because he felt that
when another has done a thing which you approve as
leading in the direction of your own aspirations, it is
your duty to share the effects of the counterblast his
action may have provoked; the man who seized the unknown
Monster, Death, with a smile on his lips—all of
this man was germinating in the child of the pious home
who even when a mere boy had dared Jehovah.
Having "weighed Him, tried Him, found Him
naught," he threw the Jewish God and cosmogony overboard
with as much equanimity as he would have eaten
his dinner, and set about finding a more reasonable explanation
of phenomena. In this, as in all other matters,
the man of action has a certain advantage over a pure
theorist, which is this: he plunges immediately into the
conflict, he throws the gauntlet, rashly sometimes, but
boldly; he settles the question at once; if there is any
suffering attached to the attempt, he suffers once and has
done with it; while the theorist, the fellow who walks
tiptoe round the edge of the battle-field, dies a hundred
times and still suffers on.
My own conversion from orthodoxy to freethought
was of this latter sort. I never dared God; I always
tried to propitiate him with prayers and tears even while
I was doubting his existence; I suffered hell a thousand
times while I was wondering where it was located. But
my teacher winked at the heavens, braved hell, and then
tossed the whole affair aside with a joke.
Nevertheless, he did not, as nearly all of our modern
image-breakers have done, deny all religions in their entirety,
because he had run a lance through a stuffed
Mumbo-Jumbo. Indeed, the spirit of devotion to something
greater than Self, which will be found as the
kernel of every religion, was so thoroughly in him, or
indeed was he himself that whether he fancied himself
willing it or not, his inclinations directed all his conscious
efforts to read the riddle of life into the channel of
Buddhism. I do not know whether he ever accepted
its peculiarly fanciful side or not; but if he did, it was
early corrected by a no less characteristic trait, also an
inheritance of the Tappan family, that of critical analysis.
An omnivorous reader, he was always abreast of
the times in matters of scientific discovery; and his inexorable
logic would never have permitted him to retain
a creed which necessitated any doctoring of facts; he
rather doctored the creed to fit the facts and thus evolved
a species of modern Buddhism which he called "Evolutional
Ethics," whose principles may be briefly stated as
follows:
Man is the continuation of the process of evolution
up to date. He is thus united to all other products of
evolution, and is governed by the same laws. The two
factors which determine form in the organic world are
adaptation and inheritance; and since evolution is no less
a matter of psychology than physiology, the soul of man
as well as the soul of animals and plants, must be
moulded by these factors. That inheritance tends to
crystallize existing forms, while adaptation, or the influence
of environment, ever tends to modification of forms,
whether physical or intellectual. That mind as much as
body is unconscious, so far as there is perfect adaptation
to surroundings; and that only when inharmony of
the organism with the environment as the result of
change in the latter, arises, can there be consciousness.
That this consciousness is a state of pain, more or less
sharply defined; and will continue to increase in intensity
until the necessary adaptation is accomplished, when as
a result a feeling of satisfaction or pleasure will ensue,
gradually sinking into the blissful unconsciousness of
perfect harmony. That progress thus demands this stepping
constantly up the rough stairway of pain; and that
not even one step is passed until moistened by the blood
of many generations. That the path up the mountain
side is not laid out by us, but for us, and that we must
travel there whether it pleases us or not. That the
chances are it will not please us; that our whole lives, in
so far as they are conscious, will probably be one record
of never achieved struggle; and that rest will come only
when we descend to the unconsciousness of Death.
Thus he was a pessimist of the darkest hue; and yet
he never wasted a moment's regret on the facts. He
watched this passing spectre man, gliding among the
whirling dance of atoms, contemplated his final extinction
with composure, sneered at metaphysicians while he
himself was buried in metaphysics, and cracked jokes
either at his own expense or somebody else's.
The result of all this speculation was the conclusion
that man, being a social animal, must adapt himself to
social ends (not determined by him but for him—unconsciously);
that therefore the one who sets himself and
his egotistic desires against the social ideal is the supreme
traitor. He had a peculiar power of expressing volumes
in an epithet; and the epithet he gave to the Egoist was
"Dung-Beetle." For the sake of those who may not be
familiar with the insect referred to, I may explain that
a dung-beetle is a sort of bug that exhibits its instincts
by rolling a ball of dung, and who sometimes appears to
meditate when he rolls over the ball that the universe
has turned bottom up—because he has.
Now, it is well known that the greater part of the
reform camp—particularly the Anarchistic camp—is
made up of Dung-Beetles, I mean of Egoists; people
who declare that the desire for pleasure is the motive
of action, who think a great deal of their egos and don't
care a rap for society. The result was they sharpened
their pencils and wrote scathing editorials denouncing
him. To which he answered never a word. First, because
he didn't consider himself worth fighting about;
and second, if he had, he was altogether too good a
general to do it. His opponents were a disputatious
sort, who liked nothing better than argument; he knew
what his enemy wanted and didn't do it.
But when a question worth discussing arose, then
woe to those who had courted the rapier of his wit, or
challenged to duel with the diamond-tipped dagger of
his sarcasm. He could answer columns with a paragraph.
I do not know whether this philosophy of his had
crystallized in his own mind before he became an Anarchist
or not. I believe, however, it had not; I think
it grew along with his other conceptions, being broadened
and corrected, and in turn broadening and correcting
his thought in other channels. But at any rate, fully
developed or not, it certainly influenced his conclusions
on economic subjects greatly. True to his instincts he
was always at the front of battle, and when the war
closed his first move was to attach himself to the Greenback
party, the first widespread expression of organized
protest against monopoly of the means of production in
America. He still had faith in the saving grace of
politics, and was active enough in the agitation to be
nominated for Lieut. Governor of Massachusetts with
Wendell Phillips for Governor. The fight, which besides
being a demand for fiat money, embodied a short-hour
movement, took on a national character; and Dyer
D. Lum with five others, including Albert R. Parsons,
was appointed on a committee to push the matter before
Congress. This was in 1880. Six years later, time and
the tide had driven both of them into the great current
of Socialism, and final repudiation of politics as a means
of attaining Socialistic ideals. And here came in the
philosophy of the unconscious. The socialization of industry
was the next step up the mountain side, not because
men wished or planned it; but the pressure of surroundings
made it the only possible move; but on the
other hand the reactionary, system-building Socialism advocated
by the great master Marx, and all his train of
little repeaters, was seen to be at variance with a no
less marked feature of the evolving social ideal, viz.,
elasticity, mobility, constantly increasing differentiation;
which is only possible when units of society are left free
to adapt themselves to the slightest changes, unforced
by the opinions of other people who know nothing
of the matters in question, but who, being in the majority
(for where is ignorance not in the majority?) could
suppress the free movements of the minority by enacting
their ignorance into laws.
Thus it will be seen that he looked forward to free
Socialism as the industrial ideal; the requirements of
that ideal are laid down in his "Economics of Anarchy."
A few of his caustic sentences may here be quoted:
"The Statist assumes that rights increase in some
metaphysical manner, and become incarnate in half the
whole plus one."
"Politics discovers wisdom by taking a general poll
of ignorance."
"Every appeal to legislation to do aught but undo is
as futile as sending a flag of truce to the enemy for
munitions of war."
"When Caesar conquered Greece, he subjugated Olympus,
and the Gods now measure tape behind counters
with Christian decorum."
Lum had faith in humankind. He always trusted
the people; the people that maligned him, the people that
injured him, the people that killed him. When I asked
him once why he did not get angry at an individual who
industriously circulated lies about him, he answered with
a twinkling laugh, "For the same reason that I don't
kick the house-cat." And yet he had an abiding faith
in that man, and other similar men, to work out the
judgments of the human race, undisturbed by the fact
that they let their only honest leaders die in garrets.
And underneath the speculative philosopher who confused
you with long words; underneath the cold logician
who mercilessly scouted at sentiment; underneath the
pessimistic poet that sent the mournful cry of the whip-poor-will
echoing through the widowed chambers of the
heart, that hung and sung over the festival walls of
Life the wreaths and dirges of Death; underneath the
gay joker who delighted to play tricks on politicians,
police and detectives; was the man who took the children
on his knees and told them stories while the night was
falling, the man who gave up a share of his own meagre
meals to save five blind kittens from drowning; the man
who lent his arm to a drunken washerwoman whom he
did not know, and carried her basket for her, that she
might not be arrested and locked up; the man who
gathered four-leafed clovers and sent them to his friends,
wishing them "all the luck which superstition attached
to them"; the man whose heart was beating with the
great common heart, who was one with the simplest and
the poorest.
Lum held that evolutional ethics, or Anarchist ethics,
in fact, must take account of both the altruistic and
egoistic impulses; that while determining causes will
ever lie in the mysterious realm of the unconscious life,
consciousness may discern the trend of development and
throw in its quota of influence for or against. That in
its endeavor to comprehend the trend of development,
it should take fair account of ancient truths, however
enveloped in superstitious husks; should aim to extract
the virtue even in the much mistaken altruistic doctrines
of vicarious atonement and personal abasement; and
while emphasizing the negation of human rulership as
destructive of the possibilities of true growth, at the
same time to acknowledge the vain conceit of self as
anything more than a temporary grouping of instinct
developed in beast, in plant, in man; to acknowledge the
individual creature as a sort of mirrored reflection of
the cosmos, constantly shifting, now scintillant, now
vague and evanescent, now gone forever as Death breaks
the mirror.
The notion of immortality which grows from such a
conception of self is purged of the old vain conceit. It
has been most beautifully voiced in George Eliot's "Choir
Invisible," Mr. Lum's favorite poem; and in the lines
is expressed the last great limitless shadow which engulfs
even this immortality, the blind, tremendous darkness
which lies at the end of all, the sense of the invincibility
of which must have lain upon our teacher's soul when
after the last searching, inexplicable, farewell look into
a friend's eyes he went out into the April night and took
his last walk in the roar of the great city—he who should
soon be so silent!
Most of his comrades were surprised. They said: "I
never thought Dyer D. Lum would go alone." But I
who know how often and how wearily he said "What's
the use," am sure that that mocking question lay at his
heart, and paralyzed the will to do.
Like Olive Schreiner's stars in the African Farm, the
soul about to depart sees the earth so coldly—all the
ages are as one night—and like them he watches little
helpless creatures of the earth come out and crawl awhile
upon its skin, then go back beneath it, and it does not
matter—nothing matters.
In all unsuccessful social upheavals there are two
terrors: the Red—that is, the people, the mob; the
White—that is, the reprisal.
When a year ago to-day the lightning of the White
Terror shot out of that netherest blackness of Social
Depth, the Spanish Torture House, and laid in the ditch
of Montjuich a human being who but a moment before
had been the personification of manhood, in the flower of
life, in the strength and pride of a balanced intellect, full
of the purpose of a great and growing undertaking,—that
of the Modern Schools,—humanity at large received
a blow in the face which it could not understand.
Stunned, bewildered, shocked, it recoiled and stood
gaping with astonishment. How to explain it? The
average individual—certainly the average individual in
America—could not believe it possible that any group of
persons calling themselves a government, let it be of the
worst and most despotic, could slay a man for being a
teacher, a teacher of modern sciences, a builder of
hygienic schools, a publisher of text-books. No: they
could not believe it. Their minds staggered back and
shook refusal. It was not so; it could not be so. The man
was shot,—that was sure. He was dead, and there was
no raising him out of the ditch to question him. The
Spanish government had certainly proceeded in an unjustifiable
manner in court-martialing him and sentencing
him without giving him a chance at defense. But surely
he had been guilty of something; surely he must have
rioted, or instigated riot, or done some desperate act of
rebellion; for never could it be that in the twentieth
century a country of Europe could kill a peaceful man
whose aim in life was to educate children in geography,
arithmetic, geology, physics, chemistry, singing, and
languages.
No: it was not possible!—And, for all that, it was possible;
it was done, on the 13th of October, one year ago
to-day, in the face of Europe, standing with tied hands
to look on at the murder.
And from that day on, controversy between the awakened
who understood, the reactionists who likewise understood,
and their followers on both sides who have half
understood, has surged up and down and left confusion
pretty badly confounded in the mind of him who did not
understand, but sought to.
The men who did him to death, and the institutions
they represent have done all in their power to create the
impression that Ferrer was a believer in violence, a teacher
of the principles of violence, a doer of acts of violence,
and an instigator of widespread violence perpetrated by
a mass of people. In support of the first they have published
reports purporting to be his own writings, have
pretended to reproduce seditious pictures from the walls
of his class-rooms, have declared that he was seen
mingling with the rebels during the Catalonian uprising of
last year, and that upon trial he was found guilty of having
conceived and launched the Spanish rebellion against
the Moroccan war. And that his death was a just act of
reprisal.
On the other hand, we have had a storm of indignant
voices clamoring in his defense, alternately admitting and
denying him to be a revolutionist, alternately contending
that his schools taught social rebellion and that they
taught nothing but pure science; we have had workmen
demonstrating and professors and litterateurs protesting
on very opposite grounds; and almost none were able to
give definite information for the faith that was in them.
And indeed it has been very difficult to obtain exact information,
and still is so. After a year's lapse, it is yet
not easy to get the facts disentangled from the fancies,—the
truths from the lies, and above all from the half-lies.
And even when we have the truths as to the facts, it
is still difficult to valuate them, because of American
ignorance of Spanish ignorance. Please understand the
phrase. America has not too much to boast of in the
way of its learning; but yet it has that much of common
knowledge and common education that it does not enter
into our minds to conceive of a population 68% of which
are unable to read and write, and a good share of the
remaining 32% can only read, not write; neither does it
at all enter our heads to think that of this 32% of the
better informed, the most powerful contingent is composed
of those whose distinct, avowed, and deliberate
purpose it is to keep the ignorant ignorant.
Whatever may be the sins of Government in this
country, or of the Churches—and there are plenty of
such sins—at least they have not (save in the case of
negro slaves) constituted themselves a conspiratical force
to keep out enlightenment,—to prevent the people from
learning to read and write, or to acquire whatever scientific
knowledge their economic circumstances permitted
them to. What the unconscious conspiracy of economic
circumstance has done, and what conscious manipulations
the Government school is guilty of, to render higher education
a privilege of the rich and a maintainer of injustice
is another matter. But it cannot be charged that the
rulers of America seek to render the people illiterate.
People, therefore, who have grown up in a general atmosphere
of thought which regards the government as a
provider of education, even as a compeller of education,
do not, unless their attention is drawn to the facts, conceive
of a state of society in which government is a hostile
force, opposed to the enlightenment of the people,—its
politicians exercising all their ingenuity to sidetrack the
demand of the people for schools. How much less do
they conceive the hostile force and power of a Church,
having behind it an unbroken descent from feudal ages,
whose direct interest it is to maintain a closed monopoly
of learning, and to keep out of general circulation all
scientific information which would tend to destroy the
superstitions whereby it thrives.
I say that the American people in general are not informed
as to these conditions, and therefore the phenomenon
of a teacher killed for instituting and maintaining
schools staggers their belief. And when they read
the assertions of those who defend the murder, that it
was because his schools were instigating the overthrow
of social order in Spain, they naturally exclaim: "Ah,
that explains it! The man taught sedition, rebellion, riot,
in his schools! That is the reason."
Now the truth is, that what Ferrer was teaching in his
schools was really instigating the overthrow of the social
order of Spain; furthermore it was not only instigating
it, but it was making it as certain as the still coming of
the daylight out of the night of the east. But not by the
teaching of riot; of the use of dagger, bomb, or knife;
but by the teaching of the same sciences which are taught
in our public schools, through a generally diffused knowledge
of which the power of Spain's despotic Church must
crumble away. Likewise it was laying the primary foundation
for the overthrow of such portions of the State
organization as exist by reason of the general ignorance
of the people.
The Social Order of Spain ought to be overthrown;
must be overthrown, will be overthrown; and Ferrer was
doing a mighty work in that direction. The men who
killed him knew and understood it well. And they consciously
killed him for what he really did; but they have
let the outside world suppose they did it, for what he did
not do. Knowing there are no words so hated by all
governments as "sedition and rebellion," knowing that
such words will make the most radical of governments
align itself with the most despotic at once, knowing there
is nothing which so offends the majority of conservative
and peace-loving people everywhere as the idea of violence
unordered by authority, they have wilfully created
the impression that Ferrer's schools were places where
children and youths were taught to handle weapons, and
to make ready for armed attacks on the government.
They have, as I said before, created this impression in
various ways; they have pointed to the fact that the man
who in 1906 made the attack on Alfonso's life, had acted
as a translator of books used by Ferrer in his schools;
they have scattered over Europe and America pictures
purporting to be reproductions of drawings in prominent
wall-spaces in his schools, recommending the violent overthrow
of the government.
As to the first of these accusations, I shall consider it
later in the lecture; but as to the last, it should be enough
to remind any person with an ordinary amount of reflection,
that the schools were public places open to any one,
as our schools are; and that if any such pictures had existed,
they would have been sufficient cause for shutting
up the schools and incarcerating the founder within a
day after their appearance on the walls. The Spanish
Government has that much sense of how to preserve its
own existence, that it would not allow such pictures to
hang in a public place for one day. Nor would books
preaching sedition have been permitted to be published
or circulated.—All this is foolish dust sought to be thrown
in foolish eyes.
No; the real offense was the real thing that he did.
And in order to appreciate its enormity, from the Spanish
ruling force's standpoint, let us now consider what that
ruling force is, what are the economic and educational
conditions of the Spanish people, why and how Ferrer
founded the Modern Schools, and what were the subjects
taught therein.
Up to the year 1857 there existed no legal provision
for general elementary education in Spain. In that year,
owing to the liberals having gotten into power in Madrid,
after a bitter contest aroused partially by the general
political events of Europe, a law making elementary education
compulsory was passed. This was two years before
Ferrer's birth.
Now it is one thing for a political party, temporarily
in possession of power, to pass a law. It is quite another
thing to make that law effective, even when wealth and
general sentiment are behind it. But when joined to the
fact that there is a strong opposition is added the fact
that this opposition is in possession of the greatest wealth
of the country, that the people to be benefited are often
quite as bitterly opposed to their own enlightenment as
those who profit by their ignorance, and that those who
do ardently desire their own uplift are extremely poor,
the difficulty of practicalizing this educational law is partially
appreciated.
Ferrer's own boyhood life is an illustration of how
much benefit the children of the peasantry reaped from
the educational law. His parents were vine dressers;
they were eminently orthodox and believed what their
priest (who was probably the only man in the little village
of Alella able to read) told them: that the Liberals
were the emissaries of Satan and that whatever they did
was utterly evil. They wanted no such evil thing as
popular education about, and would not that their children
should have it. Accordingly, even at 13 years of
age, the boy was without education,—a circumstance
which in after years made him more anxious that others
should not suffer as he had.
It is self-understood that if it was difficult to found
schools in the cities where there existed a degree of popular
clamor for them, it was next to impossible in the rural
districts where people like Ferrer's parents were the typical
inhabitants. The best result obtained by this law in the
20 years from 1857 to 1877 was that, out of 16,000,000
people, 4,000,000 were then able to read and write,—75%
remaining illiterate. At the end of 1907 the proportion
was altered to 6,000,000 literate out of 18,500,000 population,
which may be considered as a fairly correct approximate
of the present condition.
One of the very great accounting causes for this situation
is the extreme poverty of the mass of the populace.
In many districts of Spain a laborer's wages are less than
$1.00 a week, and nowhere do they equal the poorest
workman's wages in America. Of course, it is understood
that the cost of living is likewise low; but imagine it
as low as you please, it is still evident that the income of
the workers is too small to permit them to save anything,
even from the most frugal living. The dire struggle to
secure food, clothing and shelter is such that little energy
is left wherewith to aspire to anything, to demand anything,
either for themselves or their children. Unless,
therefore, the government provided the buildings, the
books, and appliances, and paid the teachers' salaries, it
is easy to see that the people most in need of education
are least able, and least likely, to provide it for themselves.
Furthermore the government itself, unless it can
tax the wealthier classes for it, cannot out of such an
impoverished source wring sufficient means to provide
adequate schools and school equipments.
Now, the wealthiest classes are just the religious orders.
According to the statement of Monsignor José
Valeda de Gunjado, these orders own two-thirds of the
money of the country and one-third of the wealth in property.
These orders are utterly opposed to all education
except such as they themselves furnish—a lamentable
travesty on learning.
As a writer who has investigated these conditions personally,
observes, in reply to the question, "Does not the
Church provide numbers of schools, day and night, at its
own expense?"—"It does,—unhappily for Spain." It
provides schools whose principal aim is to strengthen
superstition, follow a mediaeval curriculum, keep out
scientific light,—and prevent other and better schools
from being established.
A Spanish educational journal (La Escuela Espanola),
not Ferrer's journal, declared in 1907 that these schools
were largely "without light or ventilation, dens of death,
ignorance, and bad training." It was estimated that
50,000 children died every year in consequence of the
mischievous character of the school rooms. And even
to schools like these, there were half a million children
in Spain who could gain no admittance.
As to the teachers, they are allowed a salary ranging
from $50.00 to $100.00 a year; but this is provided, not
by the State, but through voluntary donations from the
parents. So that a teacher, in addition to his legitimate
functions, must perform those of collector of his own
salary.
Now conceive that he is endeavoring to collect it from
parents whose wages amount to two or three dollars a
week; and you will not be surprised at the case reported
by a Madrid paper in 1903 of a master's having canvassed
a district to find how many parents would contribute if
he opened a school. Out of one hundred families, three
promised their support!
Is it any wonder that the law of compulsory education
is a mockery? How could it be anything else?
Now let us look at the products of this popular ignorance,
and we shall presently understand why the Church
fosters it, why it fights education; and also why the
Catalonian insurrection of 1909, which began as a strike
of workers in protest against the Moroccan war, ended
in mob attacks upon convents, monasteries, and churches.
I have already quoted the statement of a high Spanish
prelate that the religious orders of Spain own two-thirds
of the money of Spain, and one-third of the wealth
in property. Whether this estimate is precisely correct or
not, it is sufficiently near correctness to make us aware
that at least a great portion of the wealth of the country
has passed into their hands,—a state not widely differing
from that existing in France prior to the great Revolution.
Before the insurrection of last year, the city of
Barcelona alone had 165 convents, many of which were
exceedingly rich. The province of Catalonia maintained
2,300 of these institutions. Aside from these religious
orders with their accumulations of wealth, the Church
itself, the united body of priests not in orders, is immensely
wealthy. Conceive that in the Cathedral at
Toledo there is an image of the Virgin whose wardrobe
alone would be sufficient to build hundreds of schools.
Imagine that this doll, which is supposed to symbolize the
forlorn young woman who in her pain and sorrow and
need was driven to seek shelter in a stable, whose life
was ever lowly, and who is called the Mother of Sorrows,—imagine
that this image of her has become a vulgar
coquette sporting a robe whereinto are sown 85,000
pearls, besides as many more sapphires, amethysts, and
diamonds!
Oh, what a decoration for the mother of the Carpenter
of Nazareth! What a vision for the dying eyes on the
Cross to look forward to! What an outcome of the
gospel of salvation free to the poor and lowly, taught by
the poorest and the lowliest,—that the humble keeper of
the humble household of the despised little village of
Judea should be imaged forth as a Queen of Gauds, bedizened
with a crown worth $25,000 and bracelets valued
at $10,000 more. The Virgin Mary, the Daughter of the
Stable, transformed into a diamond merchant's showcase!
And this in the midst of men and women working for
just enough to keep the skin upon the bone; in the midst
of children who are denied the primary necessities of
childhood.
Now I ask you, when the fury of these people burst, as
under the provocation they received it was inevitable that
it should burst, was it any wonder that it manifested
itself in mob violence against the institutions which mock
their suffering by this useless, senseless, criminal waste
of wealth in the face of utter need?
Will some one now whisper in our ears that there are
women in America who decorate themselves with more
jewels than the Virgin of Toledo, and throw away the
price of a school on a useless decoration in a single night;
while within a radius of five miles from them there are
also uneducated children, for whom our School Boards
can provide no place?
Yes, it is so; let them remember the mobs of Barcelona!
And let me remember I am talking about Spain!
The question naturally intrudes, How does the Church,
how do the religious orders manage to accumulate such
wealth? Remember first that they are old, and of unbroken
continuance for hundreds of years. That various
forms of acquisition, in operation for centuries, would
produce immense accumulations, even supposing nothing
but legitimate purchases and gifts. But when we consider
the actual means whereby money is daily absorbed
from the people by these institutions we receive a shock
which sets all our notions of the triumph of Modern
Science topsy-turvy.
It is almost impossible to realize, and yet it is true, that
the Spanish Church still deals in that infamous "graft"
against which Martin Luther hurled the splendid force of
his wrath four hundred years ago. The Church of Spain
still sells indulgences. Every Catholic bookstore, and
every priest, has them for sale. They are called "bulas."
Their prices range from about 15 to 25 cents, and they
constitute an elastic excuse for doing pretty much what
the possessor pleases to do, providing it is not a capital
crime, for a definitely named period.
Probably there is no one in America so little able to
believe this condition to exist, as the ordinary well-informed
Roman Catholic. I have myself listened to
priests of the Roman faith giving the conditions on which
pardon for venal offenses might be obtained; and they
had nothing to do with money. They consisted in saying
a certain number of prayers at stated periods, with
specified intent. While that may be a very illogical way
of putting things together that have no connection, there
is nothing in it to offend one's ideas of honesty. The
enlightened conscience of an entire mass of people has
demanded that a spiritual offense be dealt with by spiritual
means. It would revolt at the idea that such grace
could be written out on paper and sold either to the
highest bidder or for a fixed price.
But now conceive what happens where a people are
illiterate, regarding written documents with that superstitious
awe which those who cannot read always have for
the mysterious language of learning; regarding them besides
with the combination of fear and reverence which
the ignorant believer entertains for the visible sign of
Supernatural Power, the Power which holds over him the
threat of eternal punishment,—and you will have what
goes on in Spain. Add to this that such a condition of
fear and gullibility on the side of the people, is the great
opportunity of the religious "grafter." Whatever number
of honest, self-sacrificing, devoted people may be attracted
to the service of the Church, there will certainly be found
also, the cheat, the impostor, the searcher for ease and
power.
These indulgences, which for 15 or 25 cents pardon
the buyer for his past sins, but are good only till he sins
again, constitute a species of permission to do what otherwise
is forbidden; the most expensive one, the 25c-one, is
practically a license to hold stolen property up to a certain
amount.
Both rich and poor buy these things, the rich of course
paying a good deal more than the stipulated sum. But it
hardly requires the statement that an immense number
of the very poor buy them also. And from this horrible
traffic the Church of Spain annually draws millions.
There are other sources of income such as the sale of
scapulars, agnus-deis, charms, and other pieces of
trumpery, which goes on all over the Catholic world also,
but naturally to no such extent as in Spain, Portugal, and
Italy, where popular ignorance may be again measured by
the materialism of its religion.
Now, is it reasonable to suppose that the individuals
who are thriving upon these sales, want a condition of
popular enlightenment? Do they not know how all this
traffic would crumble like the ash of a burnt-out fire, once
the blaze of science were to flame through Spain? They
educate! Yes; they educate the people to believe in
these barbaric relics of a dead time,—for their own material
interest. Spain and Portugal are the last resort of
the mediaeval church; the monasticism and the Jesuitry
which have been expelled from other European countries,
and compelled to withdraw from Cuba and the Philippines,
have concentrated there; and there they are making
their last fight. There they will go down into their eternal
grave; but not till Science has invaded the dark corners
of the popular intellect.
The political condition is parallel with the religious
condition of the people, with the exception that the State
is poor while the Church is rich.
There are some elements in the government which are
opposed to the Church religiously, which nevertheless do
not wish to see its power as an institution upset, because
they foresee that the same people who would overthrow
the Church, would later overthrow them. These, too,
wish to see the people kept ignorant.
Nevertheless, there have been numerous political rebellions
in Spain, having for their object the establishment
of a republic.
In 1868 there occurred such a rebellion, under the
leadership of Ruiz Zorilla. At that time, Ferrer was not
quite 20 years old. He had acquired an education by his
own efforts. He was a declared Republican, as it seems
that every young, ardent, bright-minded youth, seeing
what the condition of his country was, and wishing for
its betterment, would be. Zorilla was for a short time
Minister of Public Instruction, under the new government,
and very zealous for popular education.
Naturally he became an object of admiration and imitation
to Ferrer.
In the early eighties, after various fluctuations of political
power, Zorilla, who had been absent from Spain,
returned to it, and began the labor of converting the
soldiers to republicanism. Ferrer was then a director of
railways, and of much service to Zorilla in the practical
work of organization. In 1885 this movement culminated
in an abortive revolution, wherein both Ferrer and Zorilla
took active part, and were accordingly compelled to take
refuge in France upon the failure of the insurrection.
It is therefore certain that from his entrance into public
agitation till the year 1885, Ferrer was an active revolutionary
republican, believing in the overthrow of Spanish
tyranny by violence.
There is no question that at that time he said and wrote
things which, whether we shall consider them justifiable
or not, were openly in favor of forcible rebellion. Such
utterances charged against him at the alleged trial in 1909,
which were really his, were quotations from this period.
Remember he was then 26 years old. When the trial
occurred, he was 50 years old. What had been his mental
evolution during those 24 years?
In Paris, where, with the exception of a short intermission
in 1889 when he visited Spain, he remained for
about fifteen years, he naturally drifted into a method of
making a living quite common to educated exiles in a foreign
land; viz., giving private lessons in his native language.
But while this is with most a mere temporary
makeshift, which they change for something else as soon
as they are able, to Ferrer it revealed what his real business
in life should be; he found teaching to be his genuine
vocation; so much so that he took part in several movements
for popular education in Paris, giving much free
service.
This participation in the labor of training the mind,
which is always a slow and patient matter, began to have
its effect on his conceptions of political change. Slowly
the idea of a Spain regenerated through the storm blasts
of revolution, mightily and suddenly, faded out of his
belief, being replaced, probably almost insensibly, by the
idea that a thorough educational enlightenment must precede
political transformation, if that transformation were
to be permanent. This conviction he voiced with strange
power and beauty of expression, when he said to his old
revolutionary Republican friend, Alfred Naquet: "Time
respects those works alone which Time itself has helped
to build."
Naquet himself, old and sinking man as he is, is at this
day and hour heart and soul for forcible revolution; admitting
all the evils which it engenders and all the dangers
of miscarriage which accompany it, he still believes, to
quote his own words, that "Revolutions are not only the
marvelous accoucheurs of societies; they are also
fecundating forces. They fructify men's intelligences;
and if they determine the final realization of matured
evolutions, they also become, through their action on
human minds, points of departure for newer evolutions."
Yet he, who thus sings the paean of the uprisen people,
with a fire of youth and an ardor of love that sound like
the singing of some strong young blacksmith marching at
the head of an insurgent column, rather than the quavering
voice of an old spent man; he, who was the warm personal
friend of Ferrer for many years, and who would
surely have wished that his ideal love should also have
been his friend's love, he expressly declares that Ferrer
was of those who feel themselves drawn to the field of
preparative labor, making sure the ground over which the
Revolution may march to enduring results.
This then was the ripened condition of his mind, especially
after the death of Zorilla, and all his subsequent
life and labor is explicable only with this understanding of
his mental attitude.
In the confusion of deafening voices, it has been declared
that not only did he not take part in last year's
manifestations, nor instigate them; but that he in fact had
become a Tolstoyan, a non-resistant.
This is not true: he undoubtedly understood that the
introduction of popular education into Spain means revolt,
sooner or later. And he would certainly have been
glad to see a successful revolt overthrow the monarchy at
Madrid. He did not wish the people to be submissive; it
is one of the fundamental teachings of the schools he
founded that the assertive spirit of the child is to be encouraged;
that its will is not to be broken; that the sin
of other schools is the forcing of obedience. He hoped to
help to form a young Spain which would not submit;
which would resist, resist consciously, intelligently,
steadily. He did not wish to enlighten people merely to
render them more sensitive to their pains and deprivations,
but that they might so use their enlightenment as to
rid themselves of the system of exploitation by Church
and State which is responsible for their miseries. By
what means they would choose to free themselves, he did
not make his affair.
How and when were these schools founded? It was
during his long sojourn in Paris, that he had as a private
pupil in Spanish, a middle-aged, wealthy, unmarried,
Catholic lady. After much conflict over religion between
teacher and pupil, the latter modified her orthodoxy
greatly; and especially after her journeys to Spain, where
she herself saw the condition of public instruction.
Eventually she became interested in Ferrer's conceptions
of education, and his desire to establish schools in
his own country. And when she died in 1900 (she was
then somewhat over 50 years old) she devised a certain
part of her property to Ferrer, to be used as he saw fit,
feeling assured no doubt that he would see fit to use it
not for his personal advantage, but for the purpose so
dear to his heart. Which he did.
The bequest amounted to about $150,000; and the first
expenditure was for the establishment of the Modern
School of Barcelona, in the year 1901.
It should be said that this was not the first of the
Modern School movement in Spain; for previous to that,
and for several years, there had sprung up, in various
parts of the country, a spontaneous movement towards
self-education; a very heroic effort, in a way, considering
that the teachers were generally workingmen who had
spent their day in the shops, and were using the remainder
of their exhausted strength to enlighten their fellow-workers
and the children. These were largely night-schools.
As there were no means behind these efforts,
the buildings in which they were held were of course unsuitable;
there was no proper plan of work; no sufficient
equipment, and little co-ordination of labor. A considerable
percentage of these schools were already on the
decline, when Ferrer, equipped with his splendid organizing
ability, his teacher's experience, and Mlle. Meunier's
endowment, opened the Barcelona School, having as pupils
eighteen boys and twelve girls.
So proper to the demand was this effort, that at the
end of four years' earnest activity, fifty schools had been
established, ten in Barcelona, and forty in the provinces.
In 1906, that is, after five years' work, a banquet was
held on Good Friday, at which 1,700 pupils were present.
From 30 to 1,700,—that is something. And a banquet
in Catholic Spain on Good Friday! A banquet of children
who have bade good-bye to the salvation of the soul
by the punishment of the stomach! We here may laugh;
but in Spain it was a triumph and a menace, which both
sides understood.
I have said that Ferrer brought to his work splendid
organizing ability. This he speedily put to purpose by
enlisting the co-operation of a number of the greatest
scientists of Europe in the preparation of text-books embodying
the discoveries of science, couched in language
comprehensible to young minds.
So far, I am sorry to say, I have not succeeded in getting
copies of these manuals; the Spanish government
confiscated most of them, and has probably destroyed
them. Still there are some uncaptured sets (one is already
in the British Museum) and I make no doubt that
within a year or so we shall have translations of most of
them.
There were thirty of these manuals all told, comprising
the work of the three sections, primary, intermediate, and
superior, into which the pupils were divided.
From what I have been able to find out about these
books, I believe the most interesting of them all would
be the First Reading Book. It was prepared by Dr. Odon
de Buen, and is said to be at the same time "a speller, a
grammar and an illustrated manual of evolution," "the
majestic story of the evolution of the cosmos from the
atom to the thinking being, related in a language simple,
comprehensible to the child."
20,000 copies of this book were rapidly sold.
Imagine what that meant to Catholic schools! That the
babies of Spain should learn nothing about eternal punishment
for their deadly sins, and should learn that they
are one in a long line of unfolding life that started in the
lowly sea-slime!
The books on geography, physics, and minerology were
written in like manner and with like intent by the same
author; on anthropology, Dr. Enguerrand wrote, and on
evolution, Dr. Letourneau of Paris.
Among the very suggestive works was one on "The
Universal Substance," a collaborate production of Albert
Bloch and Paraf Javal, in which the mysteries of existence
are resolved into their chemical equivalents, so that the
foundations for magic and miracle are unceremoniously
cleared out of the intellectual field.
This book was prepared at Ferrer's special request, as
an antidote to ancestral leanings, inherited superstitions,
the various outside influences counteracting the influences
of the school.
The methods of instruction were modeled after earlier
attempts in France, and were based on the general idea
that physical and intellectual education must continually
supplement each other. That no one is really educated,
so long as his knowledge is merely the recollection of what
he has read or seen in a book. Accordingly a lesson often
consisted of a visit to a factory, a workshop, a studio, or
a laboratory, where things were explained and illustrated;
or in a class journey to the hills, or the sea, or the open
country, where the geological or topographical conditions
were studied, or botanical specimens collected and individual
observation encouraged.
Very often even book classes were held out of doors,
and the children insensibly put in touch with the great
pervading influences of nature, a touch too often lost, or
never felt at all, in our city environments.
How different was all this from the incomprehensible
theology of the Catholic schools to be learned and believed
but not understood, the impractical rehearsing of
strings of words characteristic of mediaeval survivals!
No wonder the Modern Schools grew and grew, and the
hatred of the priests waxed hotter and hotter.
Their opportunity came; indeed, they did not wait long.
In the year 1906, on the 31st day of May, not so very
long after that Good Friday banquet, occurred the event
which they seized upon to crush the Modern School and
its founder.
I am not here to speak either for or against Mateo
Morral. He was a wealthy young man, of much energy
and considerable learning. He had helped to enrich the
library of the Modern School and being an excellent linguist,
he had offered to make translations of text-books.
Ferrer had accepted the offer. That is all Morral had to
do with the Modern School.
But on the day of royal festivities, Morral had it in his
head to throw a bomb where it would do some royal hurt.
He missed his calculations, and the hurt intended did not
take place; but after a short interval, finding himself about
to be captured, he killed himself.
Think of him as you please: think that he was a madman
who did a madman's act; think that he was a generous
enthusiast who in an outburst of long chafing indignation
at his country's condition wanted to strike a blow
at a tyrannical monarchy, and was willing to give his
own life in exchange for the tyrant's; or better than
this, reserve your judgment, and say that you know not
the man nor his personal condition, nor the special external
conditions that prompted him; and that without
such knowledge he cannot be judged. But whatever
you think of Morral, pray why was Ferrer arrested and
the Modern School of Barcelona closed? Why was he
thrown in prison and kept there for more than a year?
Why was it sought to railroad him before a Court Martial,
and that attempt failing, the civil trial postponed for
all that time?
Why? Why?
Because Ferrer taught science to the children of
Spain,—and for no other thing. His enemies would
have killed him then; but having been compelled to yield
an open trial, by the outcry of Europe, they were also
compelled to release him. But I imagine I hear, yea
hear, the resolute mutter behind the closed walls of the
monasteries, the day Ferrer went free. "Go, then; we
shall get you again. And then——"
And then they would do what three years later they
did,—damn him to the ditch of Montjuich.
Yea, they shut their lips together like the thin lips of
Fate and—waited. The hatred of an order has something
superb in it,—it hates so relentlessly, so constantly,
so transcendently; its personnel changes, its hate never
alters; it wears one priest's face or another's; itself is
identical, inexorable; it pursues to the end.
Did Ferrer know this? Undoubtedly in a general way
he did. And yet he was so far from conceiving its appalling
remorselessness, that even when he found himself
in prison again, and utterly in their power, he could not
believe that he would not be freed.
What was this opportunity for which the Jesuitry of
Spain waited with such terrible security? The Catalonian
uprising. How did they know it would come? As
any sane man, not over-optimistic, knows that uprising
must come in Spain. Ferrer hoped to sap away the foundations
of tyranny through peaceful enlightenment. He
was right. But they are also right who say that there are
other forces hurling towards those foundations; the greatest
of these,—Starvation.
Now it was plain and simple Starvation that rose to
rend its starvers when the Catalonian women rose in
mobs to cry against the command that was taking away
their fathers and sons to their death in Morocco. The
Spanish people did not want the Moroccan war; the
Government, in the interest of a number of capitalists,
did; but like all governments and all capitalists, it wanted
workingmen to do the dying. And they did not want to
die, and leave their wives and children to die too. So
they rebelled. At first it was the conscious, orderly protest
of organized workingmen. But Starvation no more
respects the commands of workingmen's unions, than the
commands of governments, and other orderly bodies. It
has nothing to lose: and it gets away, in its fury, from all
management; and it riots.
Where Churches and Monasteries are offensively rich
and at ease in the face of Hunger, Hunger takes its
revenge. It has long fangs, it rends, and tears, and
tramples—the innocent with the guilty—always. It is
very horrible! But remember,—remember how much
more horrible is the long, slow systematic crushing, wasting,
drying of men upon their bones, which year after
year, century after century, has begotten the Monster,
Hunger. Remember the 50,000 innocent children annually
slaughtered, the blinded and the crippled children, maimed
and forsaken by social power; and behind the smoke and
flame of the burning convents of July, 1909, see the staring
of those sightless eyes.
Ferrer instigate that mad frenzy! Oh, no; it was a
mightier than Ferrer!
"Our Lady of Pain"—Our Lady of Hunger—Our Lady
with uncut nails and wolf-like teeth—Our Lady who
bears the Man-flesh in her body that cannon are to tear—Our
Lady the Workingwoman of Spain, ahungered. She
incarnated the Red Terror.
And the enemies of Ferrer in 1906, as in 1909, knew
that such things would come; and they bided their time.
It is one of those pathetic things which destiny deals,
that it was only for love's sake—and most for the love
of a little child—who died moreover—that the uprising
found Ferrer in Spain at all. He had been in England,
investigating schools and methods there from April until
the middle of June. Word came that his sister-in-law
and his niece were ill, so the 19th of June found him at
the little girl's bedside. He intended soon after to go to
Paris, but delayed to make some inquiries for a friend
concerning the proceedings of the Electrical Society of
Barcelona. So the storm caught him as it caught thousands
of others.
He went about the business of his publishing house as
usual, making the observations of an interested spectator
of events. To his friend Naquet he sent a postal card on
the 26th of July, in which he spoke of the heroism of
the women, the lack of co-ordination in the people's
movements, and the total absence of leaders, as a curious
phenomenon. Hearing soon after that he was to be arrested,
he secluded himself for five weeks. The "White
Terror" was in full sway; 3,000 men, women, and children
had been arrested, incarcerated, inhumanly treated.
Then the Chief Prosecutor issued the statement that
Ferrer was "the director of the revolutionary movement."
Too indignant to listen to the appeals of his friends,
he started to Barcelona to give himself up and demand
trial. He was arrested on the way.
And they court-martialed him.
The proceedings were utterly infamous. No chance to
confront witnesses against him; no opportunity to bring
witnesses; not even the books accused of sedition allowed
to offer their mute testimony in their own defense; no
opportunity given to his defender to prepare; letters sent
from England and France to prove what had been the
doomed man's purposes and occupations during his stay
there, "lost in transit"; the old articles of twenty-four
years before, made to appear as if recent utterances; forgeries
imposed; and with all this, nothing but hearsay
evidence even from his accusers; and yet—he was sentenced
to death.
Sentenced to death and shot.
And all Modern Schools closed, and his property sequestrated.
And the Virgin of Toledo may wear her gorgeous
robes in peace, since the shadow of the darkness has
stolen back over the circle of light he lit.
Only,—somewhere, somewhere, down in the obscurity—hovers
the menacing figure of her rival, "Our Lady
of Pain." She is still now,—but she is not dead. And
if all things be taken from her, and the light not allowed
to come to her, nor to her children,—then—some day—she
will set her own lights in the darkness.
Ferrer—Ferrer is with the immortals. His work is
spreading over the world; it will yet return, and rid Spain
of its tyrants.
Questions of genuine importance to large masses
of people, are not posed by a single questioner,
nor even by a limited number. They are put with
more or less precision, with more or less consciousness
of their scope and demand by all classes involved. This
is a fair test of its being a genuine question, rather than
a temporary fad. Such is the test we are to apply to the
present inquiry, What is wrong with our present method
of Child Education? What is to be done in the way
of altering or abolishing it?
The posing of the question acquired a sudden prominence,
through the world-shocking execution of a great
educator for alleged complicity in the revolutionary
events of Spain during the Moroccan war. People were
not satisfied with the Spanish government's declarations
as to this official murder; they were not convinced that
they were being told the truth. They inquired why the
Government should be so anxious for that man's death.
And they learned that as a teacher he had founded schools
wherein ideas hostile to governmental programs for
learning, were put in practice. And they have gone on
asking to know what these ideas were, how they were
taught, and how can those same ideas be applied to the
practical questions of education confronting them in the
persons of their own children.
But it would be a very great mistake to suppose that
the question was raised out of nothingness, or out of the
brilliancy of his own mind, by Francisco Ferrer. If it
were, if he were the creator of the question instead of
the response to it, his martyr's death could have given it
but an ephemeral prominence which would speedily have
subsided.
On the contrary, the inquiry stimulated by that tragic
death was but the first loud articulation of what has been
asked in thousands of school-rooms, millions of homes,
all over the civilized world. It has been put, by each of
the three classes concerned, each in its own peculiar way,
from its own peculiar viewpoint,—by the Educator, by
the Parent, and by the Child itself.
There is a fourth personage who has had a great deal
to say, and still has; but to my mind he is a pseudo-factor,
to be eliminated as speedily as possible. I mean
the "Statesman." He considers himself profoundly important,
as representing the interests of society in general.
He is anxious for the formation of good citizens
to support the State, and directs education in such channels
as he thinks will produce these.
I prefer to leave the discussion of his peculiar functions
for a later part of this address, here observing
only that if he is a legitimate factor, if by chance he is
a genuine educator strayed into statesmanship, as a statesman
he is interested only from a secondary motive;
i. e., he is not interested in the actual work of schools,
in the children as persons, but in the producing of a
certain type of character to serve certain subsequent
ends.
The criticism offered by the child itself upon the prevailing
system of instruction, is the most simple,—direct;
and at the same time, the critic is utterly unconscious of
its force. Who has not heard a child say, in that fretted
whine characteristic of a creature who knows its protest
will be ineffective: "But what do I have to learn that
for?"—"Oh, I don't see what I have to know that for;
I can't remember it anyway." "I hate to go to school;
I'd just as lief take a whipping!" "My teacher's a
mean old thing; she expects you to sit quiet the whole
morning, and if you just make the least little noise, she
keeps you in at recess. Why do we have to keep still
so long? What good does it do?"
I remember well the remark made to me once by one
of my teachers—and a very good teacher, too, who nevertheless
did not see what her own observation ought to
have suggested. "School-children," she said, "regard
teachers as their natural enemies." The thought which
it would have been logical to suppose would have followed
this observation is, that if children in general are possessed
of that notion, it is because there is a great deal
in the teacher's treatment of them which runs counter to
the child's nature: that possibly this is so, not because of
natural cussedness on the part of the child, but because
of inapplicability of the knowledge taught, or the manner
of teaching it, or both, to the mental and physical needs
of the child. I am quite sure no such thought entered
my teacher's mind,—at least regarding the system of
knowledge to be imposed; being a sensible woman, she
perhaps occasionally admitted to herself that she might
make mistakes in applying the rules, but that the body of
knowledge to be taught was indispensable, and must somehow
be injected into children's heads, under threat of
punishment, if necessary, I am sure she never questioned.
It did not occur to her any more than to most teachers,
that the first business of an educator should be to find
out what are the needs, aptitudes, and tendencies of
children, before he or she attempts to outline a body of
knowledge to be taught, or rules for teaching it. It does
not occur to them that the child's question, "What do I
have to learn that for?" is a perfectly legitimate question;
and if the teacher cannot answer it to the child's satisfaction,
something is wrong either with the thing taught, or
with the teaching; either the thing taught is out of rapport
with the child's age, or his natural tendencies, or his
condition of development; or the method by which it is
taught repels him, disgusts him, or at best fails to interest
him.
When a child says, "I don't see why I have to know
that; I can't remember it anyway," he is voicing a very
reasonable protest. Of course, there are plenty of instances
of wilful shirking, where a little effort can overcome
the slackness of memory; but every teacher who is
honest enough to reckon with himself knows he cannot
give a sensible reason why things are to be taught which
have so little to do with the child's life that to-morrow,
or the day after examination, they will be forgotten;
things which he himself could not remember were he not
repeating them year in and year out, as a matter of his
trade. And every teacher who has thought at all for himself
about the essential nature of the young humanity he
is dealing with, knows that six hours of daily herding
and in-penning of young, active bodies and limbs, accompanied
by the additional injunction that no feet are to be
shuffled, no whispers exchanged, and no paper wads
thrown, is a frightful violation of all the laws of young
life. Any gardener who should attempt to raise healthy,
beautiful, and fruitful plants by outraging all those
plants' instinctive wants and searchings, would meet as
his reward—sickly plants, ugly plants, sterile plants, dead
plants. He will not do it; he will watch very carefully to
see whether they like much sunlight, or considerable
shade, whether they thrive on much water or get drowned
in it, whether they like sandy soil, or fat mucky soil;
the plant itself will indicate to him when he is doing the
right thing. And every gardener will watch for indications
with great anxiety. If he finds the plant revolts
against his experiments, he will desist at once, and try
something else; if he finds it thrives, he will emphasize
the particular treatment so long as it seems beneficial.
But what he will surely not do, will be to prepare a certain
area of ground all just alike, with equal chances of
sun and amount of moisture in every part, and then plant
everything together without discrimination,—mighty close
together!—saying beforehand, "If plants don't want to
thrive on this, they ought to want to; and if they are
stubborn about it, they must be made to."
Or if a raiser of animals were to start in feeding them
on a regimen adapted not to their tastes but to his; if
he were to insist on stuffing the young ones with food
only fitted for the older ones; if he were to shut them
up and compel them somehow to be silent, stiff, and
motionless for hours together,—he would—well, he would
very likely be arrested for cruelty to animals.
Of course there is this difference between the grower
of plants or animals and the grower of children; the
former is dealing with his subject as a superior power
with a force which will always remain subject to his,
while the latter is dealing with a force which is bound to
become his equal, and taking it in the long and large
sense, bound ultimately to supersede him. The fear of
"the footfalls of the young generation" is in his ears,
whether he is aware of it or not, and he instinctively does
what every living thing seeks to do; viz., to preserve his
power. Since he cannot remain forever the superior, the
dictator, he endeavors to put a definite mould upon that
power which he must share—to have the child learn what
he has learned, as he has learned it, and to the same end
that he has learned it.
The grower of flowers, or fruits, or vegetables, or the
raiser of animals, secure in his forever indisputable superiority,
has nothing to fear when he inquires into the
ways of his subjects; he will never think: "But if I
heed such and such manifestation of the flower's or the
animal's desire or repulsion, it will develop certain tendencies
as a result, which will eventually overturn me
and mine, and all that I believe in and labor to preserve."
The grower of children is perpetually beset by this fear.
He must not listen to a child's complaint against the
school: it breaks down the mutual relation of authority
and obedience; it destroys the faith of the child that his
olders know better than he; it sets up little centers of
future rebellion in the brain of every child affected by
the example. No: complaint as to the wisdom of the
system must be discouraged, ignored, frowned down,
crushed by superior dignity; if necessary, punished. The
very best answer a child ever gets to its legitimate inquiry,
"Why do I have to learn such and such a thing?"
is, "Wait till you get older, and you will understand it
all. Just now you are a little too young to understand
the reasons."—(In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the
answerer got the same reply to his own question twenty
years before; and he has never found out since, either).
"Do as we tell you to, now," say the teachers, "and be
sure that we are instructing you for your good. The
explanations will become clear to you some time." And
the child smothers his complaint, cramps his poor little
body to the best of his ability, and continues to repeat
definitions which mean nothing to him but strings of
long words, and rules which to him are simply torture—apparatus
invented by his "natural enemies" to plague
children.—I recall quite distinctly the bitter resentment I
felt toward the inverted divisor. The formula was easy
enough to remember: "Invert the terms of the divisor
and proceed as in multiplication of fractions." I memorized
it in less than a minute, and followed the prescription,
and got my examples, correct. But "Oh, how, how
was the miracle accomplished? Why should a fraction be
made to stand on its head? and how did that change a
division suddenly into a multiplication?"—And I never
found out till I undertook to teach some one else, years
afterward. Yet the thing could have been made plain
then; perhaps would have been, but for the fact that as
a respectful pupil I was so trained to think that my
teachers' methods must not be questioned or their explanations
reflected upon, that I sat mute, mystified, puzzled,
and silently indignant. In the end I swallowed it as
I did a lot of other "pre-digested" knowledge (?) and
consented to use its miraculous nature, very much as my
Christian friends use the body and blood of Christ to
"wash their sins away" without very well understanding
the modus operandi.
Another advantage which the botanical or zoölogical
cultivator has over the child-grower, by which incidentally
the plants and animals profit, is that since he is not
seeking to produce a universal type, but rather to develop
as many new and interesting types as he can, he is very
studious to notice the inclinations of his subjects, observing
possible beginnings of differentiation, and adapting
his treatment to the development of such beginnings.
Of course he also does what no child-cultivator could possibly
do,—he ruthlessly destroys weaklings; and as the
superior intermeddling divinity, he fosters those special
types which are more serviceable to himself, irrespective
of whether they are more serviceable to plant or animal
life apart from man.
But is the fact that children are of the same race as
ourselves, the fact that their development should be regarded
from the point of how best shall they serve themselves,
their own race and generation, not that of a discriminating
overlord, assuming the power of life and death
over them,—a reason for us to disregard their tendencies,
aptitudes, likes and dislikes, altogether?—a reason for us
to treat their natural manifestations of non-adaptation to
our methods of treatment with less consideration than
we give to a fern or a hare? I should, on the contrary,
suppose it was a reason to consider them all the more.
I think the difficulty lies in the immeasurable
vanity of the human adult, particularly the pedagogical
adult, (I presume I may say it with less offense since I
am a teacher myself), which does not permit him to
recognize as good any tendency in children to fly in
the face of his conceptions of a correct human being; to
recognize that may be here is something highly desirable,
to be encouraged, rather than destroyed as pernicious.
A flower-gardener doesn't expect to make another voter
or householder out of his fern, so he lets it show what it
wants to be, without being at all horrified at anything it
does; but your teacher has usually well-defined conceptions
of what men and women have to be. And if a boy
is too lively, too noisy, too restless, too curious, to suit
the concept, he must be trimmed and subdued. And if he
is lazy, he has to be spurred with all sorts of whips,
which are offensive both to the handler and the handled.
The weapons of shaming and arousing the spirit of
rivalry are two which are much used,—the former with
sometimes fatal results, as in the case of the nine year
old boy who recently committed suicide because his
teacher drew attention to his torn coat, or young girls
who have worried themselves into fevers from a scornful
word respecting their failures in scholarship, and arousing
rivalry brings an evil train behind it of spites and jealousies.
I do not say, as some enthusiasts do, "there are
no bad children," or "there are no lazy children"; but
I am quite sure that both badness and laziness often result
from lack of understanding and lack of adaptation; and
that these can only be attained by teachers comprehending
that they must seek to understand as well as to be understood.
Badness is sometimes only dammed up energy,
which can no more help flooding over than dammed up
water. Laziness is often the result of forcing a child to
a task for which it has no natural liking, while it would
be energetic enough, given the thing it liked to do.
At any rate, it is worth while to try to find out what
is the matter, in the spirit of a searcher after truth.
Which is the first point I want to establish: That the
general complaints of children are true criticisms of the
school system; and Superintendents of Public Instruction,
Boards of Education, and Teachers have as their
first duty to heed and consider these complaints.
Let us now consider the complaints of parents. It
must be admitted that the parents of young children, particularly
their mothers, and especially these latter when
they are the wives of workingmen with good-sized families,
regard the school rather as a convenience for getting
rid of the children during a certain period of the day
than anything else. They are not to be blamed for this.
They have obeyed the imperative mandate of nature in
having families, with no very adequate conception of
what they were doing; they find themselves burdened
with responsibilities often greatly beyond their capacity.
They have all they can do, sometimes more than they
can do, to manage the financial end of things, to see to
their children's material wants and to get through the
work of a house; very often they are themselves deficient
in even the elementary knowledge of the schools; they
feel that their children need to know a great deal that
they have never known, but they are utterly without the
ability to say whether what they learn is useful and important
or not. With the helplessness of ignorance towards
wisdom, they receive the system provided by the
State on trust, presuming it is good; and with the pardonable
relief of busy and overburdened people, they
look at the clock as school hour approaches, and breathe
a sigh of relief when the last child is out of the house.
They would be shocked at the idea that they regard
their children as nuisances; they would vigorously defend
themselves by saying that they feel that the children
are in better hands than their own, safe and well
treated. But before long even these ignorant ones observe
that their children have learned a number of things
which are not good. They have mixed with a crowd of
others, and somewhere among them they have learned
bad language, bad ideas, and bad habits. These are complaints
which may be heard from intelligent, educated,
and conservative parents also,—parents who may be presumed
to be satisfied with the spirit and general purpose
of the knowledge imparted in the class-room. Also the
children suffer in health through their schools; and later
on, when the cramming and crowding of their brains
goes on in earnest, as it does in the higher grades, and
particularly the High Schools, Oh then springs up a
terrible crop of headache, nervous prostration, hysterics,
over-delicacy, anaemia, heart-palpitation (especially
among the girls), and a harvest of other physical disorders
which were very probably planted back in the
primary departments, and fostered in the higher rooms.
The students are so overtrained that they often "become
good for nothing in the house," the parents say, and too
late the mothers discover that they themselves become
servants to the whimsical little ladies and gentlemen they
have raised up, who are more interested in text-books
than in practical household matters.
Such are the ordinary complaints heard on every side,
uttered by those who really have no fault to find with
the substance of the instruction itself,—some because
they do not know, and some because it fairly represents
their own ideas.
The complaint becomes much more vital and definite
when it proceeds from a parent who is an informed person,
with a conception of life at variance with that commonly
accepted. I will instance that of a Philadelphia
physician, who recently said to me: "In my opinion many
of the most horrid effects of malformations which I have
to deal with, are the results of the long hours of sitting
imposed on children in the schools. It is impossible for
a healthy active creature to sit stiffly straight so many
hours; no one can do it. They will inevitably twist and
squirm themselves down into one position or another
which throws the internal organs out of position, and
which by iteration and reiteration results in a continuously
accentuating deformity. Motherhood often becomes
extremely painful and dangerous through the narrowing
of the pelvis produced in early years of so much
uncomfortable sitting. I believe that the sort of schooling
which necessitates it should not begin till a child is
fourteen years of age."
He added also that the substance of our education
should be such as would fit the person for the conditions
and responsibilities he or she may reasonably be expected
to encounter in life. Since the majority of boys and
girls will most likely become fathers and mothers in the
future, why does not our system of education take account
of it, and instruct the children not in the Latin
names of bones and muscles so much, as in the practical
functioning and hygiene of the body? Every teacher
knows, and most of our parents know, that no subject is
more carefully ignored by our text-books on physiology
than the reproductive system.
A like book on zoölogy has far more to say about the
reproduction of animals than is thought fit to be said by
human beings to human beings about themselves. And
yet upon such ignorance often depends the ruin of lives.
Such is the criticism of an intelligent physician, himself
the father of five children. It is a typical complaint of
those who have to deal with the physical results of our
school system.
A still more forcible complaint is rising up from a class
of parents who object not only negatively, but positively,
to the instruction of the schools. These are saying: I
do not want to have my children taught things which are
positively untrue, nor truths which have been distorted
to fit some one's political or religious conception. I do
not want any sort of religion or politics to be put into his
head. I want the accepted facts of natural science and
discovery to be taught him, in so far as they are within
the grasp of his intellect. I do not want them colored
with the prejudice of any system. I want a school system
which will be suited to his physical well-being. I
want what he learns to become his, by virtue of its appealing
to his taste, his aptitude for experiment and proof; I
do not want it to be a foreign stream pouring over his
lips like a brook over its bed, leaving nothing behind. I
do not want him to be tortured with formal examinations,
nor worried by credit marks with averages and per cents
and tenths of per cents, which haunt him waking and
sleeping, as if they were the object of his efforts. And
more than that, and above all, I do not want him made an
automaton. I do not want him to become abjectly obedient.
I do not want his free initiative destroyed. I
want him, by virtue of his education, to be well-equipped
bodily and mentally to face life and its problems.
This is my second point: That parents, conservatives
and radicals, criticise the school
1st, As the producer of unhealthy bodies;
2d, As teaching matter inappropriate to life; or rather,
perhaps, as not teaching what is appropriate to life;
3d, As perverting truth to serve a political and religious
system; and as putting an iron mould upon the will of
youth, destroying all spontaneity and freedom of expression.
The third critic is the teacher. Owing to his peculiarly
dependent position, it is very, very seldom that any really
vital criticism comes out of the mouth of an ordinary
employé in the public school service: first, if he has any
subversive ideas, he dares not voice them for fear of his
job; second, it is extremely unlikely that any one with
subversive ideas either will apply for the job, or having
applied, will get it; and third, if through some fortuitous
combination of circumstances, a rebellious personage has
smuggled himself into the camp, with the naive notion
that he is going to work reforms in the system, he finds
before long that the system is rather remoulding him; he
falls into the routine prescribed, and before long ceases
to struggle against it.
Still, however conservative and system-logged teachers
may be, they will all agree upon one criticism; viz., that
they have too much to do; that it is utterly impossible for
them to do justice to every pupil; that with from thirty
to fifty pupils all depending upon one teacher for instruction,
it is out of the question to give any single one sufficient
attention, to say nothing of any special attention
which his peculiar backwardness might require. He could
do so only at the expense of injustice to the rest.
And, indeed, the best teacher in the world could not
attend properly to the mental needs of fifty children, nor
even of thirty. Furthermore, this overcrowding makes
necessary the stiff regulation, the formal discipline, in
the maintenance of which so much of the teacher's energy
is wasted. The everlasting roll-call, the record of tardiness
and absence, the eye forever on the watch to see who
is whispering, the ear forever on the alert to catch the
scraper of feet, the mischievous disturber, the irrepressible
noisemaker; with such a divided and subdivided attention,
how is it possible to teach?
Here and there we find a teacher with original ideas,
not of subjects to be taught, but of the means of teaching.
Sometimes there is one who inwardly revolts at
what he has to teach, and takes such means as he can to
counteract the glorifications of political aggrandizement,
with which our geographies and histories are redolent.
In general, however, public school teachers, like government
clerks, believe very much in the system whereby
they live.
What they do find fault with, and what they have very
much reason to find fault with, is not the school system,
but the counteracting influences of bad homes. Teachers
are often heard to say that they think they could
do far better with the children, if they had entire control
of them, or, as they more commonly express themselves,
"if only their parents had some common sense!" Lessons
of order, neatness, cleanliness, and hygiene, are often entirely
thrown away, because the children regard them as
statements to be memorized, not things to be practised.
Those children whose mothers know nothing of ventilation,
the necessity for exercise, the chemistry of food,
and the functioning of the organs of the body, will forget
instructions because they are never made part of their
lives. (Which criticism is a sort of confirmation of that
sage observation: "If you want to reform a man, begin
with his grandmother.")
So much for criticism.
What, now, can we offer in the way of suggestions for
reform? Speaking abstractly, I should say that the purpose
of education should be to furnish a child with such
fundamental knowledge and habits as will preserve and
strengthen his body, and make him a self-reliant social
being, having an all-around acquaintance with the life
which is to surround him and an adaptability to circumstances
which will render him able to meet varying conditions.
But we are immediately confronted by certain practical
queries, when we attempt to conceive such a school
system.
The fact is that the training of the body should be
begun in very early childhood; and can never be rightly
done in a city. No other animal than man ever conceived
such a frightful apparatus for depriving its young of the
primary rights of physical existence as the human city.
The mass of our city children know very little of nature.
What they have learned of it through occasional picnics,
excursions, visits in the country, etc., they have learned
as a foreign thing, having little relation to themselves;
their "natural" habitat is one of lifeless brick and mortar,
wire and iron, poles, pavements, and noise. Yet all this
ought to be utterly foreign to children. This ought to
be the thing visited once in a while, not lived in.
There is no pure air in a city; it is all poisoned. Yet
the first necessity of lunged animals—especially little ones—is
pure air. Moreover, every child ought to know the
names and ways of life of the things it eats; how to grow
them, etc. How are gardens possible in a city? Every
child should know trees, not as things he has read about,
but as familiar presences in his life, which he recognizes
as quickly as his eyes greet them. He should know his
oneness with nature, not through the medium of a theory,
but through feeling it daily and hourly. He should know
the birds by their songs, and by the quick glimpse of them
among the foliage; the insect in its home, the wild flower
on its stalk, the fruit where it hangs. Can this be done
in a city?
It is the city that is wrong, and its creations can never
be right; they may be improved; they can never be what
they should.
Let me quote Luther Burbank here: he expressed so
well, and just in the tumultuous disorder and un-coordination
dear to a child's soul, the early rights of children.
"Every child should have mud-pies, grasshoppers,
water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries,
wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb,
brooks to wade in, water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees,
butterflies, various animals to pet, hay-fields, pine-cones,
rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries, and hornets;
and any child who has been deprived of these has been
deprived of the best part of his education." He is of
opinion that until ten years of age, these things should
be the real educators of children,—not books. I agree
with him. But neither city homes nor city schools can
give children these things. Furthermore, I believe that
education should be integral; that the true school must
combine physical and intellectual education from the beginning
to the end. But I am confronted by the fact
that this is impossible to the mass of the people, because
of the economic condition in which we are all floundering.
What is possible can be only a compromise. Physical
education will go on in the home principally, and intellectual
education in the school. Something might be
done to organize the teaching of parents; lectures
and demonstrations at the public schools might be given
weekly, in the evenings, for parents, by competent nurses
or hygienists. But they would remain largely ineffective.
Until the whole atrocious system of herding working
people in close-built cities, by way of making them serviceable
cogwheels in the capitalistic machine for grinding
out rent and profit, comes to an end, the physical education
of children will remain at best a pathetic compromise.
We have left to consider what may be done in the
way of improving intellectual education. What is really
necessary for a child to know which he is not taught
now? and what is taught that is unnecessary?
As to reading and writing there is no dispute, though
there is much dispute about the way of doing it. But
beyond that children should know—things; from their
earlier school days they should know the geography of
their own locality, not rehearsing it from a book, but by
going over the ground, having the relations of places explained
to them, and by being shown how to model relief
maps themselves. They should know the indications of
the weather, being taught the use of instruments for
measuring air-pressures, temperatures, amount of sunshine,
etc.; they should know the special geology of their
own locality, the nature of the soil and its products,
through practical exhibition; they should be allowed to
construct, from clay, stone, or brick, such little buildings
as they usually like to make, and from them the simple
principles of geometry taught. You see, every school
needs a big yard, and play-rooms with tools in them,—the
use of which tools they should be taught.
Arithmetic, to be sure, they need to know—but arithmetic
connected with things. Let them learn fractions
by cutting up things and putting them together, and not
be bothered by abstractions running into the hundreds of
thousands, the millions, which never in time will they use.
And drop all that tiresome years' work in interest and
per cent; if decimals are understood, every one who
has need will be amply able to work out systems of interest
when necessary.
Children should know the industrial life through which
they live, into which they are probably going. They
should see how cloth is woven, thread is spun, shoes are
made, iron forged and wrought; again not alone by written
description, but by eye-witness. They should, as they
grow older, learn the history of the arts of peace.
What they do not need to know, is so much of the details
of the history of destruction; the general facts and
results of wars are sufficient. They do not need to be
impressed with the details of killings, which they sensibly
forget, and inevitably also.
Moreover, the revolting patriotism which is being inculcated,
whereby children learn to be proud of their
country, not for its contributions to the general enlightenment
of humanity, but for its crimes against humanity;
whereby they are taught to consider themselves, their
country, their flag, their institutions, as things to be upheld
and maintained, right or wrong; whereby the stupid
and criminal life of the soldier is exalted as honorable,
should be wholly omitted from the educational system.
However, it is utterly impossible to expect that it will
be, by anything short of general public sentiment against
it; and at present such sentiment is for it. I have alluded
before to the function of the statesman in directing education.
So long as schools are maintained by governments,
the Statesman, not the true educator, will determine
what sort of history is to be taught; and it will
be what it is now, only continually growing worse. Political
institutions must justify themselves to the young
generation. They begin by training childish minds to believe
that what they do is to be accepted, not criticised.
A history becomes little better than a catechism of patriotic
formulas in glorification of the State.
Now there is no way of escaping this, for those who
disapprove it, short of eliminating the statesman, establishing
voluntarily supported schools, wherein wholly different
notions shall be taught; in which the spirit of
teaching history shall be one of honest statement and
fearless criticism; wherein the true image of war and
the army and all that it means shall be honestly given.
The really Ideal School, which would not be a compromise,
would be a boarding school built in the country,
having a farm attached, and workshops where useful
crafts might be learned, in daily connection with intellectual
training. It presupposes teachers able to train little
children to habits of health, order, and neatness, in the
utmost detail, and yet not tyrants or rigid disciplinarians.
In free contact with nature, the children would learn to
use their limbs as nature meant, feel their intimate relationship
with the growing life of other sorts, form a profound
respect for work and an estimate of the value of
it; wish to become real doers in the world, and not mere
gatherers in of other men's products; and with the respect
for work, the appreciation of work, the desire to work,
will come the pride of the true workman who will know
how to maintain his dignity and the dignity of what he
does.
At present the major portion of our working people
are sorry they are working people (as they have good
reason to be). They take little joy or pride in what they
do; they consider themselves as less gifted and less valuable
persons in society than those who have amassed
wealth and, by virtue of that amassment, live upon their
employees; or those who by attaining book knowledge
have gotten out of the field of manual production, and
lead an easier life. They educate their children in the
hope that these, at least, may attain that easier existence,
without work, which has been beyond them. Even when
such parents themselves have dreams of a reorganization
of society, wherein all shall labor and all have leisure due,
they impress upon the children that no one should be a
common workingman if he can help it. Workingmen
are slaves, and it is not well to be a slave.
Our radicals fail to realize that to accomplish the reorganization
of work, it is necessary to have workers,—and
workers with the free spirit, the rebellious spirit,
which will consider its own worth and refuse to accept
the slavish conditions of capitalism. These must be bred
in schools where work is done, and done proudly, and
in full consciousness of its value; where the dubious
services of the capitalist will likewise be rated at
their true worth; and no man reckoned as above
another, unless he has done a greater social service.
Where political institutions and the politicians who operate
them—judges, lawmakers, or executives—will be
candidly criticised, and repudiated when justice dictates
so, whether in the teaching of their past history, or their
present actions in current events.
Whether the workers, upon whom so many drains are
already made, will be able to establish and maintain such
schools, is a question to be solved upon trial through
their organizations.
The question is, Will you breed men for the service
of the Cannon, to be aimed at you in the hour of Strikes
and Revolts, men to uphold the machine which is crushing
you, or will you train them in the knowledge of the true
worth of Labor and a determination to reorganize it as
it should be?
Night in a prison cell! A chair, a bed, a small
washstand, four blank walls, ghastly in the
dim light from the corridor without, a narrow
window, barred and sunken in the stone, a grated
door! Beyond its hideous iron latticework, within
the ghastly walls,—a man! An old man, gray-haired
and wrinkled, lame and suffering. There he sits, in
his great loneliness, shut in from all the earth. There
he walks, to and fro, within his measured space,
apart from all he loves! There, for every night in five
long years to come, he will walk alone, while the white
age-flakes drop upon his head, while the last years of the
winter of life gather and pass, and his body draws near
the ashes. Every night, for five long years to come, he
will sit alone, this chattel slave, whose hard toil is taken
by the State,—and without recompense save that the
Southern planter gave his negroes,—every night he will
sit there so within those four white walls. Every night,
for five long years to come, a suffering woman will lie
upon her bed, longing, longing for the end of those three
thousand days; longing for the kind face, the patient
hand, that in so many years had never failed her. Every
night, for five long years to come, the proud spirit must
rebel, the loving heart must bleed, the broken home must
lie desecrated. As I am speaking now, as you are listening,
there within the cell of that accursed penitentiary
whose stones have soaked up the sufferings of so many
victims, murdered, as truly as any outside their walls, by
that slow rot which eats away existence inch-meal,—as
I am speaking now, as you are listening, there sits Moses
Harman!
Why? Why, when murder now is stalking in your
streets, when dens of infamy are so thick within your
city that competition has forced down the price of prostitution
to the level of the wages of your starving shirt-makers;
when robbers sit in State and national Senate and
House, when the boasted "bulwark of our liberties," the
elective franchise, has become a U. S. dice-box, wherewith
great gamblers play away your liberties; when debauchees
of the worst type hold all your public offices
and dine off the food of fools who support them, why,
then, sits Moses Harman there within his prison cell? If
he is so great a criminal, why is he not with the rest of
the spawn of crime, dining at Delmonico's or enjoying
a trip to Europe? If he is so bad a man, why in the
name of wonder did he ever get in the penitentiary?
Ah, no; it is not because he has done any evil thing;
but because he, a pure enthusiast, searching, searching
always for the cause of misery of the kind which he loved
with that broad love of which only the pure soul is capable,
searched for the data of evil. And searching so he
found the vestibule of life to be a prison cell; the holiest
and purest part of the temple of the body, if indeed one
part can be holier or purer than another, the altar where
the most devotional love in truth should be laid, he found
this altar ravished, despoiled, trampled upon. He found
little babies, helpless, voiceless little things, generated in
lust, cursed with impure moral natures, cursed, prenatally,
with the germs of disease, forced into the world to
struggle and to suffer, to hate themselves, to hate their
mothers for bearing them, to hate society and to be hated
by it in return,—a bane upon self and race, draining the
lees of crime. And he said, this felon with the stripes
upon his body, "Let the mothers of the race go free!
Let the little children be pure love children, born of the
mutual desire for parentage. Let the manacles be broken
from the shackled slave, that no more slaves be born, no
more tyrants conceived."
He looked, this obscenist, looked with clear eyes into
this ill-got thing you call morality, sealed with the seal
of marriage, and saw in it the consummation of immorality,
impurity, and injustice. He beheld every married
woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her
master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands,
and serves her master's passion; who passes
through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail
at his dictation,—not at her desire; who can control no
property, not even her own body, without his consent,
and from whose straining arms the children she bears
may be torn at his pleasure, or willed away while they
are yet unborn. It is said the English language has a
sweeter word than any other,—home. But Moses Harman
looked beneath the word and saw the fact,—a prison
more horrible than that where he is sitting now, whose
corridors radiate over all the earth, and with so many
cells, that none may count them.
Yes, our Masters! The earth is a prison, the marriage-bed
is a cell, women are the prisoners, and you are
the keepers!
He saw, this corruptionist, how in those cells are perpetrated
such outrages as are enough to make the cold
sweat stand upon the forehead, and the nails clench, and
the teeth set, and the lips grow white in agony and hatred.
And he saw too how from those cells might none come
forth to break her fetters, how no slave dare cry out,
how all these murders are done quietly, beneath the shelter-shadow
of home, and sanctified by the angelic benediction
of a piece of paper, within the silence-shade of a
marriage certificate, Adultery and Rape stalk freely and
at ease.
Yes, for that is adultery where woman submits herself
sexually to man, without desire on her part, for the sake
of "keeping him virtuous," "keeping him at home," the
women say. (Well, if a man did not love me and respect
himself enough to be "virtuous" without prostituting me,
he might go, and welcome. He has no virtue to keep.)
And that is rape, where a man forces himself sexually
upon a woman whether he is licensed by the marriage
law to do it or not. And that is the vilest of all tyranny
where a man compels the woman he says he loves, to
endure the agony of bearing children that she does not
want, and for whom, as is the rule rather than the exception,
they cannot properly provide. It is worse than any
other human oppression; it is fairly God-like! To the
sexual tyrant there is no parallel upon earth; one must go
to the skies to find a fiend who thrusts life upon his children
only to starve and curse and outcast and damn
them! And only through the marriage law is such tyranny
possible. The man who deceives a woman outside
of marriage (and mind you, such a man will deceive in
marriage too) may deny his own child, if he is mean
enough. He cannot tear it from her arms—he cannot
touch it! The girl he wronged, thanks to your very pure
and tender morality-standard, may die in the street for
want of food. He cannot force his hated presence upon
her again. But his wife, gentlemen, his wife, the woman
he respects so much that he consents to let her merge
her individuality into his, lose her identity and become his
chattel, his wife he may not only force unwelcome children
upon, outrage at his own good pleasure, and keep as
a general cheap and convenient piece of furniture, but if
she does not get a divorce (and she cannot for such
cause) he can follow her wherever she goes, come into
her house, eat her food, force her into the cell, kill her by
virtue of his sexual authority! And she has no redress
unless he is indiscreet enough to abuse her in some less
brutal but unlicensed manner. I know a case in your
city where a woman was followed so for ten years by her
husband. I believe he finally developed grace enough to
die; please applaud him for the only decent thing he ever
did.
Oh, is it not rare, all this talk about the preservation
of morality by marriage law! O splendid carefulness to
preserve that which you have not got! O height and
depth of purity, which fears so much that the children
will not know who their fathers are, because, forsooth,
they must rely upon their mother's word instead of the
hired certification of some priest of the Church, or the
Law! I wonder if the children would be improved to
know what their fathers have done. I would rather,
much rather, not know who my father was than know he
had been a tyrant to my mother. I would rather, much
rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men,
than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of
Nature. For what is it to be legitimate, born "according
to law"? It is to be, nine cases out of ten, the child of
a man who acknowledges his fatherhood simply because
he is forced to do so, and whose conception of virtue is
realized by the statement that "a woman's duty is to keep
her husband at home"; to be the child of a woman who
cares more for the benediction of Mrs. Grundy than the
simple honor of her lover's word, and conceives prostitution
to be purity and duty when exacted of her by her
husband. It is to have Tyranny as your progenitor, and
slavery as your prenatal cradle. It is to run the risk of
unwelcome birth, "legal" constitutional weakness, morals
corrupted before birth, possibly a murder instinct, the
inheritance of excessive sexuality or no sexuality, either
of which is disease. It is to have the value of a piece
of paper, a rag from the tattered garments of the "Social
Contract," set above health, beauty, talent or goodness;
for I never yet had difficulty in obtaining the admission
that illegitimate children are nearly always prettier and
brighter than others, even from conservative women.
And how supremely disgusting it is to see them look from
their own puny, sickly, lust-born children, upon whom
lie the chain-traces of their own terrible servitude, look
from these to some healthy, beautiful "natural" child,
and say, "What a pity its mother wasn't virtuous!"
Never a word about their children's fathers' virtue, they
know too much! Virtue! Disease, stupidity, criminality!
What an obscene thing "virtue" is!
What is it to be illegitimate? To be despised, or
pitied, by those whose spite or whose pity isn't worth the
breath it takes to return it. To be, possibly, the child
of some man contemptible enough to deceive a woman;
the child of some woman whose chief crime was belief
in the man she loved. To be free from the prenatal
curse of a slave mother, to come into the world without
the permission of any law-making set of tyrants who
assume to corner the earth, and say what terms the unborn
must make for the privilege of coming into existence.
This is legitimacy and illegitimacy! Choose.
The man who walks to and fro in his cell in Lansing
penitentiary to-night, this vicious man, said: "The
mothers of the race are lifting their dumb eyes to me,
their sealed lips to me, their agonizing hearts to me.
They are seeking, seeking for a voice! The unborn in
their helplessness, are pleading from their prisons, pleading
for a voice! The criminals, with the unseen ban
upon their souls, that has pushed them, pushed them
to the vortex, out of their whirling hells, are looking,
waiting for a voice! I will be their voice. I will unmask
the outrages of the marriage-bed. I will make
known how criminals are born. I will make one outcry
that shall be heard, and let what will be, be!" He cried
out through the letter of Dr. Markland, that a young
mother lacerated by unskilful surgery in the birth of
her babe, but recovering from a subsequent successful
operation, had been stabbed, remorselessly, cruelly, brutally
stabbed, not with a knife, but with the procreative
organ of her husband, stabbed to the doors of death,
and yet there was no redress!
And because he called a spade a spade, because he
named that organ by its own name, so given in Webster's
dictionary and in every medical journal in the country,
because of this Moses Harman walks to and fro in his
cell to-night. He gave a concrete example of the effect
of sex slavery, and for it he is imprisoned. It remains
for us now to carry on the battle, and lift the standard
where they struck him down, to scatter broadcast the
knowledge of this crime of society against a man and
the reason for it; to inquire into this vast system of
licensed crime, its cause and its effect, broadly upon the
race. The Cause! Let woman ask herself, "Why am I
the slave of Man? Why is my brain said not to be the
equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally
with his? Why must my body be controlled by my husband?
Why may he take my labor in the household,
giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may
he take my children from me? Will them away while
yet unborn?" Let every woman ask.
There are two reasons why, and these ultimately reducible
to a single principle—the authoritarian, supreme-power,
God-idea, and its two instruments, the Church—that
is, the priests—and the State—that is, the legislators.
From the birth of the Church, out of the womb of
Fear and the fatherhood of Ignorance, it has taught the
inferiority of woman. In one form or another through
the various mythical legends of the various mythical
creeds, runs the undercurrent of the belief in the fall
of man through the persuasion of woman, her subjective
condition as punishment, her natural vileness, total depravity,
etc.; and from the days of Adam until now the
Christian Church, with which we have specially to deal,
has made woman the excuse, the scapegoat for the evil
deeds of man. So thoroughly has this idea permeated
Society that numbers of those who have utterly repudiated
the Church, are nevertheless soaked in this stupefying
narcotic to true morality. So pickled is the male
creation with the vinegar of Authoritarianism, that even
those who have gone further and repudiated the State
still cling to the god, Society as it is, still hug the old
theological idea that they are to be "heads of the family"—to
that wonderful formula "of simple proportion"
that "Man is the head of the Woman even as Christ is
the head of the Church." No longer than a week
since an Anarchist (?) said to me, "I will be boss in my
own house"—a "Communist-Anarchist," if you please,
who doesn't believe in "my house." About a year ago
a noted libertarian speaker said, in my presence, that his
sister, who possessed a fine voice and had joined a concert
troupe, should "stay at home with her children;
that is her place." The old Church idea! This man
was a Socialist, and since an Anarchist; yet his highest
idea for woman was serfhood to husband and children,
in the present mockery called "home." Stay at home,
ye malcontents! Be patient, obedient, submissive! Darn
our socks, mend our shirts, wash our dishes, get our
meals, wait on us and mind the children! Your fine
voices are not to delight the public nor yourselves; your
inventive genius is not to work, your fine art taste is not
to be cultivated, your business faculties are not to be
developed; you made the great mistake of being born
with them, suffer for your folly! You are women!
therefore housekeepers, servants, waiters, and child's
nurses!
At Macon, in the sixth century, says August Bebel,
the fathers of the Church met and proposed the decision
of the question, "Has woman a soul?" Having ascertained
that the permission to own a nonentity wasn't
going to injure any of their parsnips, a small majority
vote decided the momentous question in our favor. Now,
holy fathers, it was a tolerably good scheme on your part
to offer the reward of your pitiable "salvation or damnation"
(odds in favor of the latter) as a bait for the
hook of earthly submission; it wasn't a bad sop in those
days of Faith and Ignorance. But fortunately fourteen
hundred years have made it stale. You, tyrant radicals
(?), have no heaven to offer,—you have no delightful
chimeras in the form of "merit cards"; you have
(save the mark) the respect, the good offices, the smiles—of
a slave-holder! This in return for our chains!
Thanks!
The question of souls is old—we demand our bodies,
now. We are tired of promises, God is deaf, and his
church is our worst enemy. Against it we bring the
charge of being the moral (or immoral) force which lies
behind the tyranny of the State. And the State has
divided the loaves and fishes with the Church, the magistrates,
like the priests take marriage fees; the two fetters
of Authority have gone into partnership in the business
of granting patent-rights to parents for the privilege of
reproducing themselves, and the State cries as the
Church cried of old, and cries now: "See how we protect
women!" The State has done more. It has often been
said to me, by women with decent masters, who had no
idea of the outrages practiced on their less fortunate
sisters, "Why don't the wives leave?"
Why don't you run, when your feet are chained together?
Why don't you cry out when a gag is on your
lips? Why don't you raise your hands above your head
when they are pinned fast to your sides? Why don't you
spend thousands of dollars when you haven't a cent in
your pocket? Why don't you go to the seashore or the
mountains, you fools scorching with city heat? If there
is one thing more than another in this whole accursed
tissue of false society, which makes me angry, it is the
asinine stupidity which with the true phlegm of impenetrable
dullness says, "Why don't the women leave!"
Will you tell me where they will go and what they shall
do? When the State, the legislators, has given to itself,
the politicians, the utter and absolute control of the opportunity
to live; when, through this precious monopoly,
already the market of labor is so overstocked that workmen
and workwomen are cutting each others' throats
for the dear privilege of serving their lords; when girls
are shipped from Boston to the south and north, shipped
in carloads, like cattle, to fill the dives of New Orleans
or the lumber-camp hells of my own state (Michigan),
when seeing and hearing these things reported every day,
the proper prudes exclaim, "Why don't the women
leave," they simply beggar the language of contempt.
When America passed the fugitive slave law compelling
men to catch their fellows more brutally than
runaway dogs, Canada, aristocratic, unrepublican Canada,
still stretched her arms to those who might reach her.
But there is no refuge upon earth for the enslaved sex.
Right where we are, there we must dig our trenches, and
win or die.
This, then, is the tyranny of the State; it denies, to
both woman and man, the right to earn a living, and
grants it as a privilege to a favored few who for that
favor must pay ninety per cent. toll to the granters of it.
These two things, the mind domination of the Church,
and the body domination of the State are the causes of
Sex Slavery.
First of all, it has introduced into the world the constructed
crime of obscenity: it has set up such a peculiar
standard of morals that to speak the names of the sexual
organs is to commit the most brutal outrage. It reminds
me that in your city you have a street called "Callowhill."
Once it was called Gallows' Hill, for the elevation
to which it leads, now known as "Cherry Hill," has been
the last touching place on earth for the feet of many a
victim murdered by the Law. But the sound of the
word became too harsh; so they softened it, though the
murders are still done, and the black shadow of the
Gallows still hangs on the City of Brotherly Love. Obscenity
has done the same; it has placed virtue in the
shell of an idea, and labelled all "good" which dwells
within the sanction of Law and respectable (?) custom;
and all bad which contravenes the usage of the shell. It
has lowered the dignity of the human body, below the
level of all other animals. Who thinks a dog is impure
or obscene because its body is not covered with suffocating
and annoying clothes? What would you think
of the meanness of a man who would put a skirt upon
his horse and compel it to walk or run with such a thing
impeding its limbs? Why, the "Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals" would arrest him, take
the beast from him, and he would be sent to a lunatic
asylum for treatment on the score of an impure mind.
And yet, gentlemen, you expect your wives, the creatures
you say you respect and love, to wear the longest skirts
and the highest necked clothing, in order to conceal the
obscene human body. There is no society for the prevention
of cruelty to women. And you, yourselves,
though a little better, look at the heat you wear in this
roasting weather! How you curse your poor body with
the wool you steal from the sheep! How you punish
yourselves to sit in a crowded house with coats and vests
on, because dead Mme. Grundy is shocked at the "vulgarity"
of shirt sleeves, or the naked arm!
Look how the ideal of beauty has been marred by
this obscenity notion. Divest yourselves of prejudice
for once. Look at some fashion-slaved woman, her
waist surrounded by a high-board fence called a corset,
her shoulders and hips angular from the pressure above
and below, her feet narrowest where they should be
widest, the body fettered by her everlasting prison skirt,
her hair fastened tight enough to make her head ache
and surmounted by a thing of neither sense nor beauty,
called a hat, ten to one a hump upon her back like a
dromedary,—look at her, and then imagine such a thing
as that carved in marble! Fancy a statue in Fairmount
Park with a corset and bustle on. Picture to yourselves
the image of the equestrienne. We are permitted to
ride, providing we sit in a position ruinous to the horse;
providing we wear a riding-habit long enough to hide
the obscene human foot, weighed down by ten pounds
of gravel to cheat the Wind in its free blowing, so running
the risk of disabling ourselves completely should
accident throw us from the saddle. Think how we swim!
We must even wear clothing in the water, and run the
gauntlet of derision, if we dare battle in the surf minus
stockings! Imagine a fish trying to make headway with
a water-soaked flannel garment upon it. Nor are you
yet content. The vile standard of obscenity even kills
the little babies with clothes. The human race is murdered,
horribly, "in the name of" Dress.
And in the name of Purity what lies are told! What
queer morality it has engendered. For fear of it you
dare not tell your own children the truth about their
birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a
human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood.
When they come to you with a simple, straightforward
question, which they have a right to ask, you
say, "Don't ask such questions," or tell some silly hollow-log
story; or you explain the incomprehensibility by
another—God! You say "God made you." You know
you are lying when you say it. You know, or you ought
to know, that the source of inquiry will not be dammed
up so. You know that what you could explain purely,
reverently, rightly (if you have any purity in you), will
be learned through many blind gropings, and that around
it will be cast the shadow-thought of wrong, embryo'd
by your denial and nurtured by this social opinion everywhere
prevalent. If you do not know this, then you are
blind to facts and deaf to Experience.
Think of the double social standard the enslavement
of our sex has evolved. Women considering themselves
very pure and very moral, will sneer at the street-walker,
yet admit to their homes the very men who victimized
the street-walker. Men, at their best, will pity the prostitute,
while they themselves are the worst kind of prostitutes.
Pity yourselves, gentlemen—you need it!
How many times do you see where a man or woman
has shot another through jealousy! The standard of
purity has decided that it is right, "it shows spirit," "it
is justifiable" to—murder a human being for doing exactly
what you did yourself,—love the same woman or
same man! Morality! Honor! Virtue!! Passing
from the moral to the physical phase; take the statistics
of any insane asylum, and you will find that, out of
the different classes, unmarried women furnish the largest
one. To preserve your cruel, vicious, indecent standard
of purity (?) you drive your daughters insane, while
your wives are killed with excess. Such is marriage.
Don't take my word for it; go through the report of any
asylum or the annals of any graveyard.
Look how your children grow up. Taught from their
earliest infancy to curb their love natures—restrained
at every turn! Your blasting lies would even blacken
a child's kiss. Little girls must not be tomboyish, must
not go barefoot, must not climb trees, must not learn to
swim, must not do anything they desire to do which
Madame Grundy has decreed "improper." Little boys
are laughed at as effeminate, silly girl-boys if they want
to make patchwork or play with a doll. Then when they
grow up, "Oh! Men don't care for home or children
as women do!" Why should they, when the deliberate
effort of your life has been to crush that nature out of
them. "Women can't rough it like men." Train any
animal, or any plant, as you train your girls, and it won't
be able to rough it either. Now will somebody tell me
why either sex should hold a corner on athletic sports?
Why any child should not have free use of its limbs?
These are the effects of your purity standard, your
marriage law. This is your work—look at it! Half
your children dying under five years of age, your girls
insane, your married women walking corpses, your men
so bad that they themselves often admit Prostitution
holds against Purity a bond of indebtedness. This is
the beautiful effect of your god, Marriage, before which
Natural Desire must abase and belie itself. Be proud
of it!
Now for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word
that ever brought equity anywhere—Liberty! Centuries
upon centuries of liberty is the only thing that
will cause the disintegration and decay of these pestiferous
ideas. Liberty was all that calmed the blood-waves
of religious persecution! You cannot cure serfhood
by any other substitution. Not for you to say "in
this way shall the race love." Let the race alone.
Will there not be atrocious crimes? Certainly. He is
a fool who says there will not be. But you can't stop
them by committing the arch-crime and setting a block
between the spokes of Progress-wheels. You will never
get right until you start right.
As for the final outcome, it matters not one iota. I
have my ideal, and it is very pure, and very sacred to me.
But yours, equally sacred, may be different and we may
both be wrong. But certain am I that with free contract,
that form of sexual association will survive which
is best adapted to time and place, thus producing the
highest evolution of the type. Whether that shall be
monogamy, variety, or promiscuity matters naught to
us; it is the business of the future, to which we dare not
dictate.
For freedom spoke Moses Harman, and for this he
received the felon's brand. For this he sits in his cell
to-night. Whether it is possible that his sentence be
shortened, we do not know. We can only try. Those
who would help us try, let me ask to put your signatures
to this simple request for pardon addressed to Benjamin
Harrison. To those who desire more fully to inform
themselves before signing; I say: Your conscientiousness
is praiseworthy—come to me at the close of the meeting
and I will quote the exact language of the Markland
letter. To those extreme Anarchists who cannot bend
their dignity to ask pardon for an offense not committed,
and of an authority they cannot recognize, let me say:
Moses Harman's back is bent, low bent, by the brute
force of the Law, and though I would never ask anyone
to bow for himself, I can ask it, and easily ask it, for
him who fights the slave's battle. Your dignity is
criminal; every hour behind the bars is a seal to your
partnership with Comstock. No one can hate petitions
worse than I; no one has less faith in them than I. But
for my champion I am willing to try any means that
invades no other's right, even though I have little hope
in it.
If, beyond these, there are those here to-night who
have ever forced sexual servitude from a wife, those
who have prostituted themselves in the name of Virtue,
those who have brought diseased, immoral or unwelcome
children to the light, without the means of provision for
them, and yet will go from this hall and say, "Moses
Harman is an unclean man—a man rewarded by just
punishment," then to you I say, and may the words ring
deep within your ears UNTIL YOU DIE: Go on! Drive
your sheep to the shambles! Crush that old, sick, crippled
man beneath your Juggernaut! In the name of
Virtue, Purity and Morality, do it! In the name of God,
Home, and Heaven, do it! In the name of the Nazarene
who preached the golden rule, do it! In the name of
Justice, Principle, and Honor, do it! In the name of
Bravery and Magnanimity put yourself on the side of
the robber in the government halls, the murderer in the
political convention, the libertine in public places, the
whole brute force of the police, the constabulary, the
court, and the penitentiary, to persecute one poor old man
who stood alone against your licensed crime! Do it.
And if Moses Harman dies within your "Kansas Hell,"
be satisfied when you have murdered him! Kill him!
And you hasten the day when the Future shall bury you
ten thousand fathoms deep beneath its curses. Kill him!
And the stripes upon his prison clothes shall lash you
like the knout! Kill him! And the insane shall glitter
hate at you with their wild eyes, the unborn babes shall
cry their blood upon you, and the graves that you have
filled in the name of Marriage, shall yield food for a
race that will pillory you, until the memory of your
atrocity has become a nameless ghost, flitting with the
shades of Torquemada, Calvin and Jehovah over the horizon
of the World!
Would you smile to see him dead? Would you say,
"We are rid of this obscenist"? Fools! The corpse
would laugh at you from its cold eyelids! The motionless
lips would mock, and the solemn hands, the pulseless,
folded hands, in their quietness would write the last
indictment, which neither Time nor you can efface. Kill
him! And you write his glory and your shame! Moses
Harman in his felon stripes stands far above you now,
and Moses Harman dead will live on, immortal in the
race he died to free! Kill him!
Perhaps I had better say the Mirror-reflection,—the
reflection of all that he has been and is, the
hinting fore-flashing of something of what he
may become. In so considering it, let it be understood
that I speak of no particular form of literature, but the
entire body of a people's expressed thought, preserved
either traditionally, in writing, or in print.
The majority of lightly thinking, fairly read people,
who make use of the word "literature" rather easily, do
so with a very indistinct idea of its content. To them it
usually means a certain limited form of human expression,
chiefly works of the imagination—poetry, drama, the
various forms of the novel. History, philosophy, science
are rather frowning names,—stern second cousins, as it
were, to the beguiling companions of their pleasant leisure
hours,—not legitimately "literature." Biography,—well,
it depends on who writes it! If it can be made so much
like a work of fiction that the subject sketched serves the
purposes of a fictive hero, why then—maybe.
To such talkers about literature, evidence of familiarity
with it, and title to have one's opinions thereon asked and
respected, are witnessed by the ability to run glibly off
the names of the personages in the dramas of Ibsen,
Björnson, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann or Shaw; or in the
novels of Gorki, Andreyev, Tolstoy, Zola, Maupassant,
Hardy, and the dozen or so of lesser lights who revolve
with these through the cycle of the magazine issues.
Not only do these same people thus limit the field of
literature, (at least in their ordinary conversation,—if
you press them they will dubiously admit that the field
may be extended) but they are also possessed of the
notion that only one particular mode even of fiction, is
in fact the genuine thing. That this mode has not always
been in vogue they are aware; and they allow other
modes to have been literature in the past, as a sort of
kindly concession to the past—a blanket-indulgence to its
unevolved state. At present, however, no indulgences
are allowed; whatever is not the mode, is anathema; it is
not literature at all. When confronted by the very great
names of the Past, which they can neither consign to
oblivion, nor patronize by toleration for their undeveloped
condition, names which are names for all ages, which
they need to use as conjuration words in their comparisons
and criticisms, names such as Shakespeare or Hugo, they
complacently close their eyes to contradictions and swear
that fundamentally these men's works are in the modern
mode, the accepted mode, the one and only enduring
mode, the mode that they approve.
"Which is?"—I hear you ask. Which is what they are
pleased to call "Realism."
If you wish to know how far they are obsessed by this
notion, go pick yourself a quiet corner in some café where
light literature readers meet to make comparisons, and
listen to the comments. Before very long, voices will be
getting loud about some character at present stalking
across the pages of the magazines, or bestirring itself
among the latest ton of novel; and the dispute will be,
"Does such a type exist?"—"Of course he exists,"—"He
does not exist,"—"He must exist,"—"He cannot exist,"—"Under
such conditions,"—"There are no such conditions,"—"But
be reasonable: you have not been in all
places, and you cannot say there may not be such conditions;
supposing—" "All right: I will give you the conditions;
all the same, no man would act so under any conditions."
"I swear L have seen such men—" "Impossible—"
"What is there impossible about it?—"
And the voices get louder and louder, as the disputants
proceed to pick the character to pieces, speech by speech,
and action by action, till, nothing being left, each finally
subsides somehow, each confirmed in his own opinion,
each convinced that the main purpose of literature—Realism—has
either been served, or not served, by the
author under discussion. To such disputants "Literature
the Mirror of Man," means that only such literature as
gives so-called absolutely faithful representations of life
as it is demonstrably lived, is a genuine Mirror. No
author is to be considered worthy of a place, unless his
works can be at least twisted to fit this conception. With
some slight refinement of idea, in so far as it recognizes
the obscurer recesses of the mind as entitled to representation
as well as the externals, it corresponds to the one-time
development of portrait painting, which esteemed it
necessary to paint the exact number of hairs in the wart
on Oliver Cromwell's nose, in order to have a true likeness
of him.
As before suggested, I do not, when I speak of Literature
as the Mirror of Man, have any such 12x18 mirror
in view; nor the limitation of literature to any one
form of it, to any one age of it, to any set of standard
names; nor the limitation of Man to any preconceived
notion of just what he may logically be
allowed to be. The composite image we are seeking
to find is an image wrought as much of his dreams
of what he would like to be, as of his actual being; that
is no true picture of Man, which does not include his
cravings for the impossible, as well as his daily performance
of the possible. Indeed, the logical, calculable man,
the man who under certain circumstances may be figured
out to turn murderer and under others saint, is hardly so
interesting as the illogical being who upsets the calculation
by becoming neither, but something not at all predictable.
The objects of my lecture then are these:
1. To insist on a wider view of literature itself than
that generally accepted.
2. To suggest to readers a more satisfactory way of
considering what they read than that usually received.
3. To point to certain phases of the human appearance
reflected in the mirror which are not generally noticed,
but which I find interesting and suggestive.
You would think it very unreasonable, would you not,
for any one to insist that because your highly polished
glass backed by quicksilver, gives back so clear and excellent
an image, therefore the watery vision you catch of
yourself in the shifting, glancing ripples of a clear stream
is not an image at all! With all the curious elongating and
drifting and shortening back and breaking up into wavering
circles, done by that unresting image, you know very
certainly that is you; and if you look into the still waters
of some summer pool, or mountain rain-cup, the image
there is almost as sharp-lined as that in your polished
glass, except for the vague tremor that seems to move
under the water rather than on its surface, and suggest
an ethereal something missing in your drawing-room
shadow. Yet that vision conjured in the water-depth is
you—surely you. Nay, even more,—that first image of
you, you perceived when as a child you danced in the
firelight and saw a misshapen darkness rising and falling
along the wall in teasing mockery,—that too was surely
an image of you—an image of interception, not of reflection;
a blur, a vacancy, a horror, from which you fled
shrieking to your mother's arms;—and yet it was the distorted
outline of you.
You grew familiar with it later, amused yourself with
it, twisted your hands into strange positions to see what
curious shapes they would form upon the wall, and made
whole stories with the shadows. Long afterward you
went back to them with deliberate and careful curiosity,
to see how the figures stumbled on by accident could be
definitely produced, at will, according to the laws of interception.
Even so the first Man-Images, cast back from the
blank wall of Language, are uncouth, ungraspable, vague,
vacant, menacing—to the men who saw them, frightful.
Mankind produced this paradox: the early lights of
literature were darkness!
Later these darknesses grew less fearsome; the child-man
began to jest with them; to multiply figures and
send them chasing past each other up and down the
wall, with fresh glee at each newly created shadow-sport.
The wall at last became luminous, the shadows
shining. And out of the old monosyllabic horror of the
primitive legend, out of Man's fright at the projection
of his own soul, out of his wide stare at those terrific
giants on the wall who suddenly with shadow-like shifting
became grotesque dwarfs, and mocking little beasts
that danced and floated, ever most fearful because of
their elusive emptiness; out of this, bit by bit, grew the
steady contemplation, the gradual effacement of fright,
the feeling of power and amusement, and the sense of
Creative Mastery, which, understanding the shadows, began
to command them, till there arose all the beauty of
fairy tales and shining myths and singing legends.
Now any one who desires to see in Literature the most
that there is in it; who desires to read not merely for
the absorption of the moment but for the sake of permanent
impression; who wishes to have an idea of Man
not only as he is now, but through the whole articulate
record of his existence; who would know the thoughts
of his infancy and the connected course of his development,—and
no one has any adequate conception of the
glory of literature, unless he includes this much in it—any
such a reader, I say, must find among its most attractive
pages, the stories of early superstitions, the fictions
of Fear, the struggles of the Race-Child's intelligence
with overlooming problems. Think of the Ages
and Ages that men saw the Demon Electricity riding the
air; think that even now they do not know what he is;
and yet he played mightily with their daily lives for all
those ages. Think how this staring savage was put face
to face with world-games which were spun and tossed
around him, and compelled by the nature of his own
activity to try to find an explanation to them; think that
most of us, if we were not the heritors of the ages that
have passed since then, should be staggered and out-breathed
even now by all these lights and forms through
which we move; and then turn to the record of those
pathetic strivings of the frightened child with some little
tenderness and sympathy, some solemn curiosity to know
what men were able to think and feel when they led their
lives as in a threatening Wonder-house, where everything
was an Unknown, invested with crouching hostility.
And never be too sure you know just how men will act,
or try to act, under any conditions, if you have not read
the record of what they have thought and fancied and
done; and after you have read it, Oh, then you will
never be sure you know! For then you will realize
that every man is a burial-house, full of dead men's
ghosts,—and the ghosts of very, very ancient days are
there, forever whispering in an ancient, ancient tongue
of ancient passions and desires, and prompting many
actions which the doer thereof can give himself no accounting
for.
There are two ways of reading these old stories; and
as one who has gotten pleasure and profit, too, from
both, I would recommend them both to be used. The
first way is to read yourself backward into it as much as
possible. Do not be a critic, on first reading; put the
critic asleep. Let yourself seem to believe it, as did he
who wrote it. Read it aloud, if you are where you will
not annoy anybody; let the words sing themselves over
your lips, as they sung themselves over the lips of the
people who were dead so long ago,—in their strange far-away
homes with their vanished surroundings; sung
themselves, just as the wind sung through the echoing
forests, and murmured back from the rocks; just as the
songs slipped out of the birds' throats. You will find
that half the beauty and the farce of old-time legend lies
in the bare sound of it. Far, far more is it dependent on
the voice, than any modern writings are. And surely,
the reason is simple enough: for it was not writing in its
creation; ancient literature addressed itself to the ear,
always, while modern literature speaks to the eye.
If once you can get your ears washing with the sounds
of the old language, as with the washing of the seas
when you sit on the beach, or the lapping of the rivers
when the bank-grass caresses you some idle summer
afternoon, it will be much easier for you to forget that
you are the child of another age and thought. You will
begin to luxuriate in fancies and prefigure impossibilities;
then you will know how it feels to be fancy free, loosed
from the chain of the possible; and once having felt, you
will also understand better, when you re-read with other
intent.
When you are ready for such re-reading, then be as
critical as you please,—which does not necessarily mean
be condemnatory. It means rather take notice of all
generals and particulars, and question them.
You will naturally pose yourself the question, Why is
it that the bare sounds of these old stories are so much
more vibrating, drum-like, shrilling, at times, than any
modern song or poem? You will find that the mitigating
influence of civilization,—knowledge, moderation,—creeping
into expression, produces flat, neutral, diluted
sounds,—watery words, so to speak, long-drawn out and
glidingly inoffensive. In any modern writing remarkable
for strength, will be found a preponderance of "barbaric
yawp"—as Whitman called it.
Fear creates sharp cries; the rebound of Fear, which
is Bravado, produces drum-tones, roars, and growls; unrestrained
Passions howl in wind-notes, irregular, breaking
short off. God carries a hammer, and Love a spear.
The hymn clangs, and the love-song clashes. Through
those fierce sounds one feels again hot hearts.
Those who perceive colors accompanying sounds, sense
clean cut lights streaking the night-ground of these
early word-pictures; sharp, hard, reds and yellows. It
is our later world which has produced green tintings not
to be told from gray, nor gray from blue, nor anything
from anything. In our fondness for smoothness and
gradation we have attained practical colorlessness.
If it appears to you that I am talking nonsense, permit
me to tell you it is because you have dulled your own
powers of perception; in seeking to become too intellectually
appreciative, you have lost the power to feel
primitive things. Try to recover it.
Another source of interesting observation, especially
in English literature of early writing: this time the eye.
It is admitted by everybody that as a serviceable instrument
for expressing definite sounds in an expeditious
and comprehensible manner, English written language
is a woeful failure. If any inventor of a theory of
symbols should, would, or could have devised such a
ridiculous conception of spelling, such a hodge-podge
of contradictory jumbles, he would properly have been
adjudged to an insane asylum; and that, every man who
ever contrived an English spelling-book, and every
teacher who is obliged to worry this incongruous mess
through the steadily revolting reason-and-memory process
of children, is ably convinced. But Man, English-speaking
Man, has actually—executed such conception; (he
probably executed it first and conceived it afterward, as
most of our poor victims do when they start on that
terrible blind road through the spelling-book). Whether
or no, the thing is here, and we've all to accept it, and
deal with it as best we may, sadly hoping that possibly
the tenth generation from now may at least be rid of a
few unnecessary "e's."
And since the thing is here, and is a mighty creation,
and very indicative of how the human brain in large
sections works; since we've got to put up with it anyway,
we may as well, in revenge for its many inconveniences,
get what little satisfaction we can out of it.
And I find it one of the most delightful little side amusements
of wandering through the field of old literature,
while in the critical vein, to stray around among the old
stumps and crooked cowpaths of English spelling. Much
pleasure is to be derived from seeing what old words
grew together and made new ones; what syllables or
letters got lopped off or twisted, how silent letters
became silent and why; from what older language
planted, and what its relatives are. It is much the same
pleasure that one gets from trailing around through the
narrow crooked streets and senseless meanderings of
London City. Everybody knows it's a foolish way to
build a city; that all streets should be straight and wide
and well-distributed. But since they are not, and London
is too big for one's individual exertion to reform, one
consents to take interest in explaining the crookedness—in
mentally dissolving the great city into the hundred
little villages which coalesced to make it; in marking this
point as the place where St. Somebody-or-Other knelt
and prayed once and therefore there had to be a cross-street
here; and this other point as the place where the
road swept round because martyrs were wont to be burnt
there, etc., etc. The trouble is that after a while one
gets to love all that quaint illogical tangle, seeing always
the thousand years of history in it; and so one's senses
actually become vitiated enough to permit him to love
the outrages of English spelling, because of the features
of men's souls that are imaged therein. When I look at
the word "laugh," I fancy I hear the joyous deep guttural
"gha-gha-gha" of the old Saxon who died long before
the foreign graft on the English stock softened the
"gh" to an "f"!
Really one must become more patient with the "un-system,"
knowing how it grew, and feeling that this is
the way of Man,—the way he always grows,—not as he
ought, but as he can.
I have spoken of forms: word-sounds, word-symbols;
as to the spirit of those early writings, full of inarticulate
religious sentiment, emotions so strong they burst from
the utterer's throat one might almost say in barks;
gloomy and foreboding; these gradually changing to
more lightsome fancies,—beauty, delicacy, airiness taking
their place, as in the fairy tales and folk-songs of the
people, wherein the deeds of supernaturals are sported
with, and it becomes evident that love and winsomeness
are usurping the kingdom of Power and Fear,—through
all we are compelled to observe one constant tendency
of the human mind,—the desire to free itself from its
own conditions, to be what it is not, to represent itself
as something beyond its powers of accomplishment. In
their minds, men had wings, and breathed in water, and
swam on land, and ate air, and thrived in deserts, and
walked through seas, and gathered roses off ice-bergs,
and collected frozen dew off the tails of sunbeams, dispersed
mountains with mustard seeds of faith, and
climbed into solid caves under the rainbow; did everything
which it was impossible for them to do.
It is in fact this imaginative faculty which has fore-run
the accomplishments of science and while, under the
influence of practical experiment and the extension of
knowledge such dreams have passed away, this much remains
and will long, long remain in humankind, covered
over and shamefacedly concealed as much as may be—that
men perpetually conceive themselves as chrysalid
heroes and wonder workers; and, under strain of occasion,
this element crops out in their actions, making
them do all manner of curious things which the standard-setters
of realism will declare utterly illogical and impossible.
Often it is the commonest men who do them.
I have a fondness for realism myself; at least I have
a very wicked feeling towards what is called "symbolism,"
and various other things which I don't understand;
but as the "Unrealists," the "Exaggeratists," the whatever-you-call-them
express what I believe to be a very
permanent characteristic of humankind, as evidenced in
all the traces of its work, I think they probably give quite
as true reflections of Man's Soul as the present favorites.
These early literatures, most of which have of course
been lost, were the embryos of our more imposing creations;
and it is a pleasant and an instructive thing to follow
the unfolding of Monster Tales into Great Religious
Literatures; to compare them and see how the same few
simple figures, either transplanted or spontaneously produced
at different points, evolved into all manner of
Creators, Redeemers and miracles in their various altered
habitats. No one can so thoroughly appreciate what is
in the face of a man turned upward in prayer, as he who
has followed the evolution of the black Monster up to
that impersonal conception of God prettily called by
Quakers "the Inner Light."
Fairy Tales on the other hand have evolved into allegories
and Dramas,—first the dramas of the sky, now
the dramas of earth.
Tales of Sexual exploits have become novels, novelettes,
short stories, sketches,—a many-expressioned countenance
of Man. But the old Heroic Legend,—and the
Hero is always the next born after the Monster in the
far-back dawn-days, is the lineal progenitor of History,—History
which was first the glorification of a warrior and
his aids; then the story of Kings, courts, and intrigues;
now mostly the report of the deeds of nations in their
ugly moods; and to become the record of what people
have done in their more amiable moments,—the record
of the conquests of peace; how men have lived and
labored; dug and built, hewn and cleared, gardened and
reforested, organized and coöperated, manufactured and
used, educated and amused themselves. Those of us
who aspire to be more or less suggesters of social change,
are greatly at a loss, if we do not know the face of Man
as reflected in history; and I mean as much the reflection
of the minds of historians as seen in their histories as
the reflection of the minds of others they sought to give;
not so much in the direct expression of their opinion
either, as in the choice of what they thought it worth
while to try to stamp perpetuity upon.
When we read in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle these
items which are characteristic of the whole:
"A. D. 611. This year Cynegils succeeded to the government
in Wessex, and held it 31 winters. Cynegils
was the son of Ceol, Ceol of Cutha, Cutha of Cymric."
And then,
"614. This year Cynegils and Cuiehelm fought at
Bampton and slew 2046 of the Welsh."
And then
"678. This year appeared the comet star in August,
and shone every morning during three months like a
sunbeam. Bishop Wilfred being driven from his bishopric
by King Everth, two bishops were consecrated in his
stead."
—when we read these we have not any very adequate
conception of what the Anglo-Saxon people were doing;
but we have a very striking and lasting impression of
what the only men who tried to write history at all in
that period of English existence, thought it was worth
while to record.
"Cynegils was the son of Ceol, and he of Cutha, and
Cutha of Cymric." It reads considerably like a stock-raiser's
pedigree book. The trouble is, we have no particular
notion of Cymric. Probably if we went back
we should find he was the son of Somebody. But at
any rate, he had a grandson, and the grandson was a
king, and the chronicler therefore recorded him. Nothing
happened for three years; and then the chronicle records
that two kings fought and slew 2046 men. Then comes
the momentous year 678 when a comet appeared and a
bishop lost his job. No doubt the comet foretold the loss.
There are no records of when shoemakers lost their jobs
that I know of, nor how many shoemakers were put in
their places; and I imagine it would have been at least as
interesting for us to know as the little matter of Bishop
Wilfred. But the chronicler did not think so; he preserved
the Bishop's troubles—no doubt he did just what
the shoemakers of the time would also have done, providing
they had been also chroniclers. It is a fair sample
of what was in men's minds as important.—If any
one fancies that this disposition has quite vanished, let
him pick up any ordinary history, and see how many
pages, relatively, are devoted to the doings of persons
intent on slaying, and those intent on peaceful occupation;
and how many times we are told that certain politicians
lost their jobs, and how we are not told anything
about the ordinary people losing their jobs; and then reflect
whether the old face of Man-the-Historian is quite
another face yet.
Biography, as a sort of second offspring of the Hero
legend, is another revelation, when we read it, not only
to know its subject, but to know its writer,—the standpoint
from which he values another man's life. Ordinarily
there is a great deal of "Cynegils the son of Cutha
the son of Cymric" in it; and a great deal of emphasis
upon the man as an individual phenomenon; when really
he would be more interesting and more comprehensible
left in connection with the series of phenomena of which
he was part. As an example of what to me is a perfect
biography, I instance Conway's Life of Thomas Paine,
itself a valuable history. But it is not so correct a mirror
of the general attitude of biographers and readers of biography
as Boswell's Life of Johnson, except in so far
as it indicates that the great face in the glass is changing.
It is rather the type of what biography is becoming,
than what it has been, or is.
There are two divisions of literature which are generally
named in one breath, and are certainly closely connected;
and yet the one came to highly perfected forms
long, long ago, while the other is properly speaking very
young; and for all that, the older is the handmaid of the
younger. I mean the literatures of philosophy and
science.
Philosophy is simply the coördination of the sciences;
the formulation of the general, and related principles deduced
from the collection and orderly arrangement of the
facts of existence. Yet Man had rich literatures of philosophy,
while his knowledge of facts was yet so extremely
limited as hardly to be worth while writing books
about. None of the appearances of Man's Soul is more
interesting than that reflected in the continuous succession
of philosophies he has poured out. Let him who
reads them, read them always twice; first, simply to
know and grasp what is said, to become familiar with the
idea as it formed itself in the minds of those who conceived
it; second, for the sake of figuring the restless
activity of brain, the positive need of the mind under
all conditions to formulate what knowledge it has, or
thinks it has, into some sort of connected whole. This
is one of the most pronounced and permanent features
seen in the mirror: the positive refusal of the mind to
accept the isolation of existences; no matter how far
apart they lie, Man proceeds to spin connecting threads
somehow. The woven texture is often comical enough,
but the weaver is just as positively revealed in the
cobwebs of ancient philosophy as in the reasoning of Herbert
Spencer.
Concerning the literature of Science itself, in strict
terms, I should be very presumptuous to speak of it, because
I know extremely little about it; but of those general
popularizations of it, which we have in some of the
works of Haeckel, Darwin, and their similars, I should
say that beyond the important information they contain
in themselves (which surely no one can afford to be in
ignorance of) they present the most transformed reflection
of Man which any literature gives. Their words
are cold, colorless, burdened with the labor of exactness,
machine like, sustained, uncompromising, careless of effect.
The spirit they embody is like unto them. They
offer the image of Man's Soul in the time while imagination
is in abeyance, reason ascendent.
This coldness and quietness sound the doom of poetry.
A people which shall be fully permeated with the spirit
and word of Science will never conceive great poems.
They will never be overcome long enough at a time by
their wonder and admiration, by their primitive impulses,
by their power of simple impression, to think or to speak
poetically. They will never see trees as impaled giants
any more; they will see them as evolved descendants of
phytoplasm. Dewdrops are no more the jewels of the
fairies; they are the produce of condensation under given
atmospheric conditions. Singing stones are not the
prisons of punished spirits, but problems in acoustics.
The basins of fjords are not the track of the anger of
Thor, but the pathways of glaciation. The roar and blaze
and vomit of Etna, are not the rebellion of the Titan,
but the explosion of so and so many million cubic feet
of gas. The comet shall no more be the herald of the
wrath of heaven, it is a nebulous body revolving in an
elliptical orbit of great elongation. Love—love will not
be the wound of Cupid, but the manifestation of universal
reproductive instincts.
No, the great poems of the world have been produced;
they have sung their song and gone their way. Imagination
remains to us, but weakened, mixed, tamed, calmed.
Verses we shall have,—and many fragments,—fragments
of beauty and power; but never again the thunder-roll
of the mighty early song. We have the benefits of
science; we must have its derogations also. The powerful
fragments will be such as deal with the still unexplored
regions of Man's own internity—if I may coin
the word. Science is still balking here. But not for
long. We shall soon have madmen turned inside out, and
their madness painstakingly reduced to so-and-so many
excessive or deficient nerve-vibrations per second. Then
no more of Poe's "Raven" and Ibsen's "Brand."
I have said that I intended to indicate a wider concept
of literature than that generally allowed. So far I have
not done it; at least all that I have dealt with is usually
mentioned in works on literature. But I wish now to
maintain that some very lowly forms of written expression
must be included in literature,—always remembering
that I am seeking the complete composite of Man's
Soul.
Here then: I include in literature, beside what I have
spoken on, not only standard novels, stories, sketches,
travels, and magazine essays of all sorts, but the poorest,
paltriest dime novel, detective story, daily newspaper
report, baseball game account, and splash advertisement.
Oh, what a charming picture of ourselves we see therein!
And a faithful one, mind you! Think what a speaking
likeness of ourselves was the report of national,
international, racial importance—the Jeffries-Johnson
fight! Nay, I am not laughing. The people of the future
are going to look back at the record a thousand
years from now; and say, "This is what interested men in
the year 1910." I wonder which will appear most ludicrous
then, Bishop Wilfred in juxtaposition with the
comet star, or the destiny of the white race put in
jeopardy by a pugilistic contest between one white and
one black man! O the bated breath, the expectant eyes,
the inbitten lip, the taut muscles, the riveted attention,
of hundreds of thousands of people watching the great
"scientific" combat. I wonder whether the year 3000
will admire it more or less than the Song of Beowulf
and the Battle of Brunanburh.
Consider the soul reflected on the sporting page. Oh,
how mercilessly correct it is! Consider the soul reflected
on the advertising page. Oh, the consummate liar
that strides across it! Oh, the gull, the simpleton, the
would-be getter of something for nothing whose existence
it argues! Yea, commercial man has set his image therein;
let him regard himself when he gets time.
And the body of our reform literature, which really
reflects the very best social aspirations of men, how
prodigal in words it is,—how indefinite in ideas! How
generous of brotherhood—and sisterhood—in the large;
how chary in the practice! Do we not appear therein as
curious little dwarfs who have somehow gotten "big
heads"? Mites gesticulating at the stars and imagining
they are afraid because they twinkle. I would not discourage
any comrade of mine in the social struggle, but
sometimes it is a wholesome thing to reconsider our size.
A word in defense of the silly story. Let us not forget
that lowly minds have lowly needs; and the mass of
minds are lowly, and have a right to such gratification
as is not beyond their comprehension. So long as I do
not have to read those stories, I feel quite glad for the
sake of those who are not able to want better that such
gratification is not denied them. I would not wish to
frown the silly story out of existence so long as it is a
veritable expression of many people's need. There are
those who have only learned the art of reading at all because
of the foolish story. And quite in a side way I
learned the other day through the grave assertion of a
physician that the ability to read even these, whereby
some little refinement of conception is introduced into
the idea of love, is one of the restraining influences upon
sexual degradation common among poor and ignorant
young women. The face of man revealed in them is
therefore not altogether without charm, though it may
look foolish to us. I said there were some appearances
in the Mirror not generally remarked, but which to me
are suggestive. One of these is the evident delight of
the human soul in smut. In the older literature these
things are either badly set down, as law and cursing, as
occasionally in the Bible; or they are clothed and mixed
with sprightly imaginations as in the tales of Boccaccio
and Chaucer; or they are thinly veiled with a possible
modest meaning as in the puns of the Shakespearian
period; but in our day, they compose a subterranean
literature of themselves, like segregated harlots among
books. Should I say that I blush for this face of Man?
I ought to, perhaps, but I do not: all I say is, the thing is
there, a very real, a very persistent image in the glass; no
one who looks straight into it can avoid seeing it. Mixed
with the humorous, as it often—rather usually—is, it
seems to be one of the normal expressions of normal
men. We deceive ourselves greatly if we fancy that
Man has become purified of such imaginations because
they are not used openly in modern dramas and stories,
as they were in the older ones.
It may be dangerous to say it, but I believe from the
evidence of literature as a whole, that a moderate amount
of amusement in smut is a saving balance in the psychology
of nearly every man and woman,—a sign of anchorage
in a robust sanity, which takes things as they are—and
laughs at them. I believe it is a much more
wholesome appearance, than that betrayed in our fever-bred
stories and sketches which deal with the abnormalities
of men, and which are growing more and
more in vogue, in spite of our cry about realism.
Personally, I am more interested in the abnormalities,
which I find very fascinating. And I am very eager to
know whether they will prove to be the result of the
abnormal conditions of life which Modern Man has
created for himself in his tampering with the forces of
nature,—his strenuous industrial existence, his turning
of night into day, his whirling himself over the world
at a pace not at all in conformity with his native powers
of locomotion, and other matters in accordance. Or
will they prove to be the revenge of the dammed up,
cribbed, cabined, and confined imagination, which can no
longer exert itself upon externals,—since the Investigating
Man has explained and mastered these or is doing
so—and now turns in to wreak frightful wreck upon the
mind itself?
At any rate, the fact is that we have some very curious
appearances in the Mirror just now; madmen explaining
their own madness, diseased men picking apart their own
diseases, perverted men analyzing their own perversions,
anything, everything but sane and normal men. Does
it mean that in our day there is nothing interesting in
good health, in well-ordered lives? Or does it mean
that the rarest thing in all the world is the so-called
normal man, whom tacit consent assumes to be the commonest?
That everybody, while outwardly wearing a
mask of reputable common sense, is within a raging conglomeration
of psychic elements that hurl themselves on
one another like hissing flames? Or does it mean simply
that the most powerful writers are themselves diseased,
and can only paint disease?
I put these questions and do not presume to answer
them. I point to the mirror,—the Ibsen Drama, the Andreyev
Story, the Maeterlinck Poem, the Artzibashev
novel,—and I say the image is there. Explain it as you
can.
For the rest, let me recall to you what I told you was
my intent:
First: To insist on a more inclusive view of Literature;
you see I would have it extended both up and down,—down
even to the advertisement, the sporting page, and
the surreptitious anecdote,—up to the fullest and most
comprehensive statements of the works of reason.
Second: To suggest that readers acquire the habit
of reading twice, or at least with a double intent. When
serious literature is to be considered, I would insist on
actually reading twice; but of course it would be both
impractical and undesirable to apply such a method to
most of the print we look at.
Those who are confirmed in the habits of would-be
critics will have the greatest trouble in learning to read
a book from the simple man's standpoint,—and yet no
one can ever form a genuine appreciation of a work who
has not first forgotten that he is a critic, and allowed
himself to be carried away into the events and personalities
depicted therein. In that first reading, also, one
should train himself to feel and hear the music of language,—this
great instrument which Men have jointly
built, and out of which come great organ tones, and
trumpet calls, and thin flute notes, sweeping and wailing,
an articulate storm—a conjuring key whereby all the
passions of the dead, the millions of the dead, have given
to the living the power to call their ghosts out of the
grave and make them walk. Yea, every word is the
mystic embodiment of a thousand years of vanished
passion, hope, desire, thought—all that battled through
the living figures turned to dust and ashes long ago.
Train your ears to hear the song of it; it helps to feel
what the writer felt.
And after that read critically, with one eye on the
page, so to speak, and the other on the reflection in the
mirror, looking for the mind behind the work, the things
which interested the author and those he wrote for.
Third: To suggest inquiry into the curious paradox of
the people of the most highly evolved scientific and mechanical
age taking especial delight in psychic abnormalities
and morbidities,—whereby the most utterly unreasonable
fictive creation becomes the greatest center of
curiosity and attraction to the children of Reason.
A Mirror Maze is literature, wherein Man sees all
faces of himself, lengthened here, widened there, distorted
in another place, restored again to due proportion,
with every possible expression on his face, from abjectness
to heroic daring, from starting terror to icy courage,
from love to hate and back again to worship, from the
almost sublime down to the altogether grotesque,—now
giant, now dwarf,—but always with one persistent character,—his
superb curiosity to see himself.
The passions of men are actors, events are their
motions, all history is their speech. In the long
play of the ages a human being sometimes becomes
an event; a nation's passion takes a personnel.
Such beings are the expression of the gathered mind-force
of millions.
He only who keeps himself aloof from all feeling can
remain the spectator of the hour. All that humanity
which is held within the beating, coiling, surging tides
of passion, has no individuality; it sinks its personality
to become a vein in the limb of this giant, a pulse
in the heart of that Titan. Only when out of the spirit
of the times the event is born, only when the act is
complete, the curtain rung down, only then does the
intellectuality of the vein, the pulse, rise to the level of
the dispassionate. Only then can it survey a tragedy
and say, "This was necessary"—a reaction, and say, "This
was inevitable."
Yet as a drop of blood is a quivering, living, flashing
ruby beside the dead, pale pearl of a stagnant pool, so
is one drop of feeling a shining thing, a living thing,
beside the deadness of the intellect which judges while
the heart is stone; beside those quiet bayous of brain
which reflect back the images before them very purely,
very stilly, giving no heed to the great rushing river of
heart that rolls on, hurries on so close beside them. Bye
and bye, bye and bye, the river reaches the grand, great
sea, and the waters spread out calm and deep, so deep
that the stars of the upper sea, the lights of the higher
life, shine far up from them as a babe smiles up into its
mother's eyes, and up still to the distant source of the
light within the eyes.
It is to men and women of feeling that I speak, men
and women of the millions, men and women in the hurrying
current! Not to the shallow egotist who holds himself
apart and with the phariseeism of intellectuality exclaims,
"I am more just than thou"; but to those whose every fiber
of being is vibrating with emotion as aspen leaves quiver
in the breath of Storm! To those whose hearts swell
with a great pity at the pitiful toil of women, the weariness
of young children, the handcuffed helplessness of
strong men! To those whose blood runs quick along
the veins like wild-fire on the dry grass of prairies when
the wind whirls aside the smokings of the holocaust,
and, courting the teeth of the flame, the black priestess,
Injustice, beckons it on while her feet stamp on the
cinders of the sacrifice! To those whose heart-strings
thrill at the touch of Love like the sweet, low, musical
laugh of childhood, or thrum with hate like the singing
vibration of the bowstring speeding the arrow of Death!
I speak to those whose eyes behold all things through a
haze of gray, or rose, or gold, born of their surroundings,
and which mist slips away only when the gaze is leveled
on that dead Past whose passions and whose deeds are
ended: to whom the present is always a morning with
the dimness of morning around it—the past clear and
still—no veil on its face, for the veil has been shredded
asunder.
For he only who intensely perceives the nature of his
surroundings, he, and he only, who has felt, and keenly
felt, all the throbs and throes of life, can judge with any
degree of truth of the action of that which is past. You,
you who have loved, you who have joyed, you who have
suffered, it belongs to you to people the silent streets of
the silent cities with forms now vanished, to comprehend
something of the passions which animated their
action; it belongs to you to understand how the fury of
a great energy, striking terrible aimless blows in the dark,
may yet, across the chasm of awful mistake, touch the
hand of a greater Justice.
If from a panoramic survey of the past some wisdom
may be gathered, then let the dramas of old ages tell us
what have been the mainsprings of their motions; so
we shall understand what action ushered in the drama
of the nineteenth century.
"Westward the Star of Empire holds its way." Following
the course of those majestic spheres of fire which
whirl each in its vast ellipse, trending away in a long,
southwesterly path athwart the heavens, obedient to that
superior attraction which through all the universe holds
good, the attraction of greater for lesser things, the
tide of life upon our world has risen and swelled and
rolled away to the south and west. Away in the orient
source of the sunlight, away where the glitter of ice
shines up to meet the morning, nations have risen and
plunged down impetuously over the sleeping regions of
darkness and of heat, bearing with them the breeze-stirring
life of the north and the on-trending light of
the east. And out of this conquered earth have arisen
the mixed passions of another life and another race.
Still the governing stars wheel on, and the tide of life
which paused only to gather strength rolls up again;
and once more a nation is born, and new passions dictate
the action of the peoples. Down, down it sweeps over
the Altaian hills, over the Himalayan ranges, over the
land of the Euphrates and Tigris, over the deserts of
Arabia the barren, the fields of Arabia the stony, and
the grasses and waters of Arabia the happy, to those
low shores, the home of dark mausoleums and darker
pyramids, on to the now classic land of Greece, and
golden Italy, and the home of the dark-eyed Moors.
Sweeps till it touches the frothing sea, and brightly
borne upon its upper crest shines the glory, the splendor,
the magnificence of the warring powers which dictated
the action of Greece and Rome. For centuries their
hoisted spears send back the burnished glitter of the sun,
and then—the light dies out; down rushing from the
North-land again the tide of vigor pours, and the health
and strength of barbarism conquers the weakness of a
tottering civilization! Far away—away over the miles
of sparkling sea, in the darkness and the silence a continent
lies waiting; waiting for the coming of the light,
waiting for the swelling of the tide. Slowly at last a
ripple creeps up over the strange beach, and the flood
rolls on, and again a continent becomes a cradle, and the
Empire Star sends on its rays to kiss the forehead of
the rising world. Over the breadth of all our continent
that mighty wave is flowing still.
Standing to-day almost upon the threshold of another
world, and looking back down this long-vista'd past,
gradually there dawns upon Reflection's vision, gradually
there grows out of the confusion of forms and the Babel
of sounds, a clearer perception of the motor powers which
have dictated the action of this past, a better idea of the
grand plot which, driven by these motor powers, the
passions are working out. For, above the long procession
of scenes and events, above the monster massings
of happiness and woe, above the War and Peace of
centuries, above the nations that have risen and fallen,
above the life and above the grave, the winged and
shadowy embodiments of two great ideas float and rest.
And those two principles are called Authority and Liberty;
or, if it please you better, God and Liberty. The
one is all clad in the purple and scarlet of pomp and of
power, while the other stands a glorious shining center
in the white radiance of Freedom.
Yet not always; far back in time Authority stood on
thrones and altars, with the plumed sables of despotism
waving on his brow, while in his hands he held two iron
gyves, the one to fetter thought, the other to fetter action;
and these two gyves were called the Church and
State.
Liberty! Ah, Liberty was then a name scarcely to
pass the lips; dreamed of only in solitude, spoken of only
in dungeons! Yet out of the blackest mire the whitest
lily blooms! Out of the dungeon, out of the sorrow,
out of the sacrifice, out of the pain, grew this child of
the heart; and pure and strong she grew until the sabled
plumes have tottered on the despot's brow, and a great
palsy shakes the hands that once so firmly held the gyves
of Church and State. For, ever seeking to overthrow
each other, the one for the aggrandizement of self, the
other for the love of all mankind, these two powers have
contended; and every energy, every passion, every desire,
good or evil, has been ranged on this side or on that,
blunderingly or wisely, and nations have swung to and
fro in their breath as upon a hinge. And one by one
the powers of Authority have been crippled, and step
by step Liberty has advanced, until to-day mankind is
beginning to measure the forces that, struggling blindly
together, are yet evolving light, to drink in the sublime
ideal of freedom. Yet, oh, how long the struggle with
vested ignorance, with greed in power!
When upon the Drama of the Nineteenth Century the
curtain rose, Liberty, triumphant on the younger shores,
lay prone and hurled in Europe. Against fifteen centuries
of crowned and throned and tithed curse and
woe unutterable, she had risen with such a fearful convulsive
strength that when she had mown down king,
priest and throne, and gorged the guillotine with blood,
she sank back, exhausted from the struggle, and the
hated tyrant rose again. The wild desire to conquer, to
possess, to control, to hold in subjection, seemed to
dominate with an unconquerable strength, and the
gathered mind-force of millions of people wrought itself
into the single brain of Napoleon Bonaparte. This
human being became an event—this nation's passion took
a personnel! The spirit of the times produced this man,
and Authority smiled as one after another the despots
of Europe plotted and planned, only to be overthrown
by this incarnation of Ambition, while the scenes were
shifted from the Vine-land to the Rhine-land, from the
sun-land to the snow-land, and through them all the
great event glowed out, lit high by the rust-red light.
How well the plot was working! The Empire triumphant,
nations subjected, the fetter of action closing
its terrible teeth! Liberty manacled on the left! The
armies of God massing their forces—advancing—preparing
to close down the iron jaw of the iron gyve upon
the right; to imprison thought, to re-establish the union
of fetters, to link up the broken chains, to burden human
hope and human will and human life once more with
the awful oppression of Church and State!
But Liberty will not, cannot die! Wounded and bruised
and pinioned sore, condemned to the use of instruments
that were none of hers, she wrought with England's
jealousy, with Wellington's emulation, with fear, with
love, with hate! Impelled by one motive or another
the nations of the coalition moved in concert. Napoleon
had been Marengo—he had been Austerlitz! He became
Waterloo! And when across that awful field rolled
the last long cannon boom, when the silence settled,
when the Quick and the Dead lay sleeping and the
Wounded died, Justice and Suffering touched hands
across the gulf of blood, and Liberty heard them whisper,
"Sic semper tyrannis." In the tableau that followed,
she, the ideal of our dreams, still stood pale and fettered;
but a smile lit up her face and a light gleamed in her
eyes as she saw Authority reel and stagger from the blow
which, though it did not sever, yet shattered half the
strength of both its fetters.
For the strength of God lies in a vast unity, an ownership
of ideas backed up by the brute force under the
command of the individual in whom that ownership of
ideas is vested; while the strength of Liberty lies in the
very essence of things themselves, the fact that no law
or force ever can destroy the individualities of existence;
and of necessity the natural tendency to break all bonds
which seek to control thought, and all force which locks
up those bonds entailing liberty of action as the outcome
of liberty of thought. And just in proportion as Churches
have been dismembered and States have been broken up,
no matter that each new Church and each new State
were but another form of despotism, just in that proportion
has the principle of liberty been served; for
each new religious establishment has been an assertion
of the right to think differently from the fashionable
creed, each change has been a movement away from the
centralization of power.
So with Waterloo in the background, with Authority
lashed to impotent rage before it, and Liberty pinioned,
yet with the lit smile still upon her countenance, the
tableau light flames up and dies, and the curtain falls
upon the first great act. Those who think, those who
feel, those who hope, know why that smile was there.
For looking away over the long blue roll of water that
swelled like an interlude between, she beheld the sublime
opening scene of the act that followed.
Far up the wonderful stage the distant mountains lift
their circling crests, at their feet the waters sweep like
a march of music, vast acres of untrodden grass-land
shower their emerald wealth, nearer the front the lower
hills rise up, and then the short Atlantic slope, all rife
with busy life, bends down to meet the sea. On the
right the hoar-frost sheens and shines on the majestic
northern forests, while the glittering earth, dipped in
its bath of frozen crystal, spreads like a field of diamonds;
on the left the white flakes of the orange bloom fall like
a shimmering bridal veil, the wind floats up like a perfume,
and the hazy, lazy languor of warmth creeps all
about. Behind it all, behind the hills and the prairies
and the lifted summits, the mystical golden light of the
west drops down, filling the dim-lit distance with the
glory of promise. The silver light of the Empire Star
glides over the Atlantic slope, and its rays, like guiding
fingers, point onward to the gathering shadows.
Now the Passions of men begin to move upon this
vast platform with an energy never before witnessed.
Diverted from their old-time channels of struggle against
the oppression of Gods and kings and the bitterness of
birth-hatred, with a freedom of opportunity denied in
the old world, and with such unstinted natural resources
waiting for the magic transformer, the genius of humanity,
Ambition of power, Avarice, Pride, Jealousy, all
those motors born out of the old régime of a State-propped
God, bred and multiplied through generations
till they have come to be looked upon as natural laws
of human existence, begin to work together to plant this
untrodden earth, to sow in its furrows the seed of a
newer race—and, paradoxical as it may sound, to work
for their own destruction, their final elimination from
the human brain. Or perhaps it were more correct to
say, that, with the barriers of old institutions taken away,
they naturally begin their retransformation into those
beautiful sentiments from which they were originally
warped, distorted, misshapen by that warped, distorted,
misshapen idea called God. So do they inaugurate the
grand era of development; so do they answer the oft-repeated
question, "What incentive would there be for
labor or genius if the institutions that compel them to
struggle were broken down?" Look at the stage of the
past and see! Never before had thought been so free,
never before had ability been less cramped, less starved
or less compelled! And never before did genius dare
so much for purposes so great; never before did the
engines which drive the tide of life along a continent
send forth a stream of so much vigor. A new light
breaks along the pathway of the stars, and swells and
rolls and floods the great scene with a dawn-burst so
magnificent that the very hills blush in its rising splendor.
It is the dawn which the night of God so long held
shrouded; it is that which is born when Superstition dies;
it is that Phoenix which rises from the ashes of religion;
it is that clear blent flame of all the great forces of nature,
brought to the knowledge of mankind by delving Reason,
and shot like northern streamers from the heart
of her the Church of God so long held throttled—Science!
It is that which shone reflected in the eyes of Liberty
when pale and manacled she stood before the field of
Waterloo! The ray of the under earth came up to join
the ray of the clouds shot down, the energies of sky and
mine and sea were clasped to bring down the wealth of
the mountains to the shore, and to transport the life of
the now populous strip of slope to the unclaimed regions
of the west.
In the broad blaze of light the scene is shifted, the
golden effulgence melts and flows round that sea-girdled
kingdom, where quietly but surely the two great engines
of Authority are being shriven apart. The dynasties of
kings are growing dusty—much of their power is but
a legend; the Church is shrinking in her garments. The
desires of this people are slow to move, but deeply rooted
and strong; and so far as they have moved forward, they
have never moved back. There have been no gigantic
strides, no reactions. Little by little the idea of divinely-delegated
power has been crippled till the English bishop
and the English lord have become mere titled mockeries in
comparison with their ancient feudal meaning. But stop!
Close lying there, almost beneath her stretching shadows,
another island flashes like a green star in its sea-blue
setting. And from that island there rises up the cry
of a great devotion, clinging blindly to its greatest curse,
its priest-hedged God, while persecuted even unto death
by the fanaticism of another faith; and the pleading of
Hunger while day long and night long the shuttle flies
in the flax loom, and the earth yields her golden fruition,
only to lade the ships that bear it away from the famine-white
lips and the toil-hardened hands that produced it.
Blindly Devotion prays to its God, that God whom it
calls all-wise, all-powerful and all-just, and the English
Lord, who cannot thus subdue his own countrymen, reaches
out the long arm of the law across the channel for his
rent—and, with God looking on, it is given; and still
while the hollow-eyed women kneel at the altar for help,
the scene widens out, and away in the distance the seven-hilled
city lifts up from the sea, and from the dome of
the Vatican, from that great mortared hill of God, the
Vicar of Christ calls out, "My tribute, my Peter pence!"
And with God looking on, it is given! And then from the
foot of that tear-stained altar, where so many lips of
Woe have pressed, where so many helpless hands have
clasped, where so many hearts have broken, comes the
ironical promise of Jehovah, "Ask and thou shalt receive."
Oh, God is a very promising personage indeed—very
promising, but, like some of his disciples, very poor
pay.
Liberty! Shadowed, invisible! Yet a muffled voice
is repeating the words which not so long ago rang from
the lips of one who stood almost beneath the shadow of
the scaffold, who walks to-day in prison gloom:
"Ye see me only in your cells, ye see me only in the grave,
Ye see me only wand'ring lone beside the exile's sullen wave!
Ye fools! Do I not also live where you have sought to pierce in vain?
Rests not a nook for me to dwell in every heart, in every brain?
Not every brow that boldly thinks erect with manhood's honest pride?
Does not each bosom shelter me that beats with honor's generous tide?
Not every workshop brooding woe, not every hut that harbors grief?
Ha! Am I not the breath of life that pants and struggles for relief?"
Ah, poor, panting, struggling, misery-laden Ireland!
How God laughs with glee to see his shackles weight
your misery!
The scene is shifting, the stage is dark'ning—a strange
eclipse obscures the shafted light! Darker, darker! Now
a low, red fire gleams like a winking eye along the foreground;
it runs, it hisses like a snake; there another leaps
up, there another; France, Germany, Italy—the continent
blazes with the fires of the Commune! That spirit which,
drunken with blood, reeled from the guillotine at '93, to
be crushed beneath the upbuilding of the Empire, has
once more arisen. And out of the hot hells of Fury, and
Jealousy, and Hate, out of the pitiless struggle between
"vested rights" and wrongs with high ancestral lineage,
and the great outcrying of a piteous ignorance against
an oppression whose injustice it feels but cannot analyze,
grows the sublime idea which priests have anathematized
and States have outlawed—"the sacred dogma of
Equality."
In so far as that ideal was made possible of conception,
in so far as the masses began to understand something
of the causes of their ills, in so far the purpose of Liberty
was served: no matter that the arms of Oppression
were triumphant, the dawn of the thought of equal liberty
upon the mass of the unthinking was a far greater
victory than any triumph of arms.
So when the fires died down, and the low reflection
gleamed for an instant over those quiescent Indian valleys
and Altaian ranges, where the main plot of old centuries
had been laid, and then paled out before the white flare
lighting the tableau of the second act, Liberty stood with
chained hands lifted toward her enemy, while a proud
look, playing like an iridescent flame in her eyes, said,
plain as lips could speak it, "I have unbound their
thoughts; they will one day unbind my hands."
Slowly the curtain falls on the fair prisoner and the
glowering God.
The solemn ocean interlude rolls in again; again the
rising curtain shows the curving slope, the rock-romance
of hills, the wide, green valley with its threading silver,
the sweeping mountains with the mirage of the blue Pacific
lifted high in the sky behind them, the frosted pines,
the orange groves. Moving upon the nearer stage two
great masses of humanity are seen facing each other;
the fires of ambition, of stubborn pride, of determination
for the mastery flash like flint-sparks in the eyes of
both. Rage is gathering as the stage-light darkens!
Yet these two opposing forces are not all. From under
the groves of bridal bloom comes a mournful, chant-like
requiem; under the bloom four million voices cry in
pain; upon the darkened faces, upturned to that darkening
day, fall the white petals helplessly, as Hope falls
on the faces of the dead—to die beside them. In the
beautiful land of the sun four million human beings
clank the chains of the chattel slave! Ah! what music!
Liberty! Liberty was a wraith, fleeting ghost-like
through the lonely rice-swamps, terrible ignis fatuus of
the quagmire, strange, mystical, vanishing moon-shimmer
on the darkly ominous waters lying so silent, so level,
beneath the droop of Spanish moss and cypress! There
it was they drove thee, there—there—where the quaking
earth shivered with its branded burden, where the
fever and the miasm were thy breathing, and thy sacred
eyes were dimmed with winding-sheets of mist that
floated, O so dankly, O so coldly, a steam of tears that
rose as fast as their dews might fall: there wast thou
exiled, Thou, the God-hunted, Thou, the Law-driven,
Thou, the immortal! Yet, Oh, so dear men love thee,
Liberty, that even here in thy last terrible citadel of woe,
Humanity linked arms with Death, and wooed thee still!
Wooed thee, with the ringing bay of bloodhounds in its
ears; wooed thee, with the wolf of hunger gnawing at
its throat; wooed thee with the clinging miasm winding
its anacondine folds around its fever-thin body; wooed
thee with the dark pathos of a dying eye, while the diseased
and hungered limbs lay stiffening in their agony.
And thou wast true, O Liberty! Out of thy bitter exile
thou didst call to them, and point them on to hope; and
thou didst call, too, to those strange-eyed dreamers, whose
faces shone amidst the rank and file of those dominated
by local Hate alone, as shines a clear star among driving
clouds. Against them Authority has hurled his curses.
Spit upon by the godly, despised by the law abiding, they
yet have dared to say to Church and Law, "Think what
you please of me, but free the slave." Aye, the Church
persecuted, and the Law hunted down, and for the love
of God, men set traps to catch their fellow-men: even
the "wise men," the wise men at Washington, against
whose mandates it is treason to speak, aye, a matter for
the scaffold in these days, even the wise men built a
trap to uphold the divine institution and sent it forth
to the people labelled, "The Fugitive Slave Law", and as
in other days, human beings died for their opinions—but
the opinions did not die. Has not one of our latter-day
martyrs said, "Men die, but principles live"?
See! The light which has been slowly fading from the
right and left shines with a frightful brilliancy upon one
point: North and South lie darkened, but Harper's Ferry
glows! There is a wild, mad charge, a shifting of the
light, a scaffold, a doomed old man bending his grand,
white head, to mount the fatal steps with a child-slave's
kiss yet warm upon his lips, and then—only a dull, lifeless
pendulum in human form, swinging to and fro. And
the Church and the Law were satisfied, when those dumb
lips were cold, and the dead limbs were stiff, and God
and Harper's Ferry had no more to fear from old John
Brown.
But the Church and the Law have not always been
wise; they have not always understood that the martyrs
to Creed and Code have done as much by their death for
the propagation of their principles as the martyrs of
creed and code; and God and the State sowed a wind
whose reaping was a terrible whirlwind, when they hung
John Brown.
Across the dim platform the Passions of hate and
pride move toward each other; it is the old combat of
the forces of Authority, each contending not for the
vindication of right, but for the maintenance of power
over the other. It is a terrific struggle of brute strength
and strategy and cunning and ferocity, and well might
those who conceived the ideal beautiful of freedom,
shrink horror-struck from the blood-soaked path their
feet must tread to reach it. Not strange if some should
pause and shudder and cry out, "Is it worth the sacrifice?"
But up from the dust where Hope lay trodden,
and out of the trenches where the sacrificed lay hid, and
over the plains all scarred with bullets and plowed with
shells, breathed the whisper, "It is not vain." It was
not in vain; for as at Waterloo the struggle of ambition
against ambition defeated the first purpose of Authority,
the centralization of power, and gave a partial victory to
her whom both hated, so Antietam, Fredericksburg,
Vicksburg, Gettysburg, while in themselves representing
only the brutish struggle of opposition, based on the desire
to domineer, really wrought out the victory of that
ideal which dwelt in the minds of those anathematized
by God and outlawed by the State. For when the hot lips
of the iron mouths grew cold, Liberty forsook her lonely
fastness, came forth upon the desolated plain, and mounting
still to the summits of the blue-hazed hills looked
away over the ruined homes, the depopulated cities, the
gloom-clouded faces, and though her tears fell fast, an
ineffable tenderness shone upon her features as the torrent
of pale light flowed round her form, defining its
snow-whiteness in relief against the sable of four million
freedmen smiling o'er their stricken chains.
Swiftly following the tableau fire comes the eastern
scene, where, in the very center of its power the Church
is shaken by an invader, and Garibaldi becomes the personnel
of the event. Then follows the Conclave of the
Vatican, where by that singular logic known to the
Roman Church, the vote of fallible beings renders the
pope infallible; upon the heels of this, the breaking of
that strong tooth of the Church in the expulsion of the
Order of the Society of Jesus by the German Reichstag,
and the overthrow of kingcraft in France.
The curtain falls. Behind, the scene is being prepared
for the last great act!
And now, in the interval of waiting, let us think. So
far we have been surveying the completed. While we
can understand something of the passions which animated
this past, can feel something of the pulsations which
throbbed in its arteries, flowed in its veins, we yet can
speak of it without over-riding emotion either upon one
side or the other. The river of heart has reached the
sea—the troubled waters have spread out deep, and up
from their depths shine the still reflections of those great
lights which gilt the stages of the past. Calmly now we
can look at the reaction from the French Revolution to
the Empire, and say, "This was inevitable,"—of Napoleon's
fall, "this was necessary"; of the awakening of
Science, "this was a natural result"; of the uprising of
'48, "this was the premature birth of an idea forced upon
the people by the oppression of Authority"; we can forget
the choking agony of John Brown, and declare his
death a victory. We can look upon the awful waste of
blood in the Civil War and say, "It was pitiful, but the
goblet of woe must needs have been spilled full of red
life wine, ere the hoarse and hollow throat of tyranny
were satisfied." We can see where each of the contending
principles has lost and gained, and measuring the
sum totals against each other, must decide that the old
despotism is losing ground; that instead of the supreme
authority of God, the supreme sovereignty of the Individual
is the growing idea.
But now we have come to a stage where we can no
longer be cool spectators. In what happens now we
too must be part and parcel of the action; we too must
hope, and toil, and struggle and suffer. We are no longer
looking through the clear still atmosphere of the dead:
around our forms the wheeling mists are circled, and
before our eyes the haze lies thick—the haze of gold or
the haze of gray. The dimness of the "yet to be" befogs
our sight, and the rush of hope and fear blinds all our
faculties. You who stand well upon the heights of love,
of comfort, of happiness, heeding not the darkness and
the sorrow beneath you, behold, with up-cast eyes, the
great figures of God and Freedom wound about, showered
with light. To you there is no menace in their darting
eyes, there is no purpose in their full-drawn statures,
there is no jarring in their clarion voices. No! for your
senses are stupid in your luxury, your brains are dulled,
too dulled to think, your ears are glutted with the ring
of gold. In your vain and foolish hearts you dream that
what you see there is a shadowy bridal; that there, at
last, Religion and Science, Statecraft and Freedom, are
meeting to embrace each other.
Ah, go on, book-makers, press-writers, doctors and
lawyers and preachers and teachers! Go on talking your
incompatibilities; go on teaching your absurdities! Dream
out your short-lived dream! At your feet, beneath the
shadow of your capitols and domes, under the tuition of
your few-facted, much-fictioned literature, from out your
chaos of truth-flavored lies, from before your pulpits,
your rostrums and your seats of learning, something is
growing. Something that is looking you in the eyes, that
is analyzing your statements, that is revolving your institutions
in its brain, that is crushing your sophistries
in its merciless machinery as fine as grain is ground between
the whitened mill-rollers. Freethought is looking
at you, gentlemen!—more than that, it questions you, it
puts you on the witness-stand, it cross-examines you.
It says, "Do you believe in God?" and you answer, "Yes."
"Do you believe him to be omnipotent, omniscient, and
all-just?" "Certainly; less than this would not be God."
"Then you believe he has the power to order all things
as he wills, and being all-just he wills all things according
to justice?" "Yes." "Then you believe him to be the
impartially-loving father of all his created children?"
"Yes." "And each one of those children has an equal
right to life and liberty?" "Yes." Then look upon this
earth beneath you, this earth of beings whose lives are
of so poor account to you, and tell us, where is God
and what is he doing?
Everyone has a right to life! What mockery! When
the control of the necessaries of life is given to the few
by the State, and above the seal of the law the
priest has set the seal of the Church! Verily,
"You do take my life
When you take that whereby I live."
Is this your Divine Justice?
What irony to tell me I am free if at that same time
you have it in your power to withhold the means of my
existence! Free! Will you look down here at these
whose sight is shadowed with the ebon shadow of
despair, these, the homeless, the disinherited, the product
of whose toil you take and leave them barely enough
to live upon—live to toil on and keep you in your luxury!
You, the monied idlers, you, the book-makers and the
journalists, who do more to cry down truth, to laud our
social lies, our economic despots and our pious frauds,
than any other propaganda can! You, the doctors, whose
drugs have cursed the world with poison-eaten bodies,
corroded the health of unborn generations with your medicated
slime, and when the sources of life have yielded
to the hungry body so poor a stream that for lack of
air, and earth, and sun, and food, and clothing, and
recreation, it drooped and sickened, have bottled up some
nauseating stuff, and with oracular wisdom have taught
them to imagine it could undo what years of misery had
done! You, the law-makers, who have twisted Nature's
code till to be natural is to be a criminal; you, who have
lawed away the earth that was not yours to give; you,
who even seek to charter the sea and make the commandment
"across the middle of this river thou shalt not go
unless thou render tribute unto Cæsar!" you, who never
inquire "what is justice," but "what is law!" And you,
the teachers, you who prate of the glory of knowledge as
the remedy for the evils of the world, and boast your
compulsory law of education, while a stronger law than
all the wordy sentences ever graven upon statute books,
is driving the children out of the schoolground into the
factory, into the saw-mill, into the shaft, into the furrow,
into the myriad camps of toil, to the dust of the wheel, to
the heat of the furnace, till their pallid cheeks and bloodless
lips are bleached like bones beneath the desert sun,
and their clogged lungs rattle in their breathing pain!
Will you look at these, the under-stratum of your social
earth, and tell them they are free? Will you tell them
ignorance is their greatest curse and education their only
remedy? Will you say to these children, "We have provided
free schools for you, and now we compel you to
attend them whether you have anything to eat and wear
or not"? Will you tell these people there is a good,
kind, merciful God who loves them, meting out justice
to them from the skies?
No, you will not, you cannot. The words will die
upon your lips ere you utter them.
Do you know what it is they see up there above you,
they whose eyes look through the mist of gray and the
shroud of darkness? They see your God of justice a
pitiless slave-driver, his Church more brutal than the
lash, his State more merciless than the bloodhound; they
see themselves a thousand million serfs more hopelessly
enthralled, more helplessly chained down than e'en the
lashed and tortured body of the chattel slave. For them
there is no refuge, no escape; in every land the Master
rules; no fugitive slave law need now be passed—there
is no place to flee—the whole horizon is iron-bound.
White and black alike are yoked together, and the master
yields no distinction, shows no mercy. The bare pittance
of existence is the meed for him who toils, and for him
who cannot—starvation! with a preacher to help him die!
That is the justice that they see there, in the shadow lines
above your golden haze. And they see, too, a conflict
preparing between those two antagonistic forces such as
never before the world has witnessed. They see your
God concentrating his strength to fight so bitter a battle
with Liberty as shall crush the spirit of individuality forever
from the race. They see him ranging his forces,
those forces blood-imbrued through all the anguished
past, the blacklist, the club, the sword, the rifle, the prison,
aye, the scaffold; they see them all, and know that ere your
God will yield his vested rights, the noblest of the race
will have been stricken, the most unselfish will have been
tortured in his dungeons, the white robes of innocence
will have been reddened in her own martyr's blood, and
Death will have shadowed many and many a home, unless
you shall hearken to the voice of Liberty and save yourselves
while there is yet time. They see the wide stage
spreading out, they see the passions moving over it; they
see there, in the center, beneath the rolling brilliance of
the Empire State, the tragic inauguration of the act!
They see a grim and blackened thing, a silent thing, the
demoniac effigy of Torquemada's spirit, the frozen laugh
of the Dark Ages at our boasted civilization; they see
twelve stolid fools before this Nineteenth Century gallows;
they see the hiding place of that thing masquerading
under the sacred name of Justice, which shrinks even
from the gaze of the lauding press and the imbecile jurymen,
and does unknown its deed of murder; they see
four shrouded forms, they hear four muffled voices, a
broken sentence, and—an awful hush! And then, O
crowning irony of all, they see advancing to speak to
them over the bodies of the murdered (and mouthed
back from a hundred pulpits comes the echo), Jehovah
masked as Jesus. Ah, the divine cowardice of it! Mild
is the light in the Nazarene eyes, tender the tone of the
Nazarene voice!
"Ah, people whom I love! For whom my life was
given long ago on Calvary! What rashness is it that
you meditate? Is it that you are weary of the yoke of
love I lay on you? Is this your faith? Have I not
promised you a sweet release when your dark pilgrimage
on earth is o'er? Exiles ye are upon this world of pain
and if oppression comes to weigh you down, if hunger
shows his long fangs at your hearth, if your chilled limbs
are cramped with bitter cold the while your neighbor
hoards his fuel up, if you are driven out upon the street
with crying children clinging piteously and begging you
for shelter from the storm, if your hard toil is taken by
the law to satisfy a corporation's greed, if fever and
distress gnaw at your heart and still you tread the weary
wine-press out, knowing no rest until the death-hour
comes; if all these things discourage and perplex, know
'tis for love of you I order it. For thus would I point
you to paradise, win you from all the pleasure of the
world, and fix your hopes on Heaven's eternity. 'Whom
the Lord loveth, him he chasteneth'; so then it is for
love that these things are. For love of you I press your
life-blood out; for love of you I load you down with
pain; for love of you I take your rights away; for love
of you I institute the law that slaves you to the grasping
millionaire; for love of you I pile the glutted hoards of
Vanderbilt and Gould and Rothschild and the rest; for
love of you I rent the right to breathe in a poor tenement
of dingy dirt; for love of you I make machines a
curse; for love of you I make you toil long hours, and
those who cannot toil, I turn adrift to wander as they may—sons
into dens where thievery is learned as a fine art,
daughters to barter their virginity till competition forces
down the price of lust and death is left them as a last
resort. Ah, what a golden crown, and sweet-toned harp,
what a resplendent whit robe, await the soul whom so
God loves while on the earth it dwells. Aye, for the love
of you these men were murdered, and for my glory; and
through my holy love they roast in hell: for they would
take away the instruments whereby I lure you to my
blest abode. They would have taught you what your
freedom meant; they would have told you to regain your
rights; they would have contradicted my commands and
lost you heaven, perchance—and if not heaven, hell.
Keep to your faith, my people, trust in God! Break not
the altars where your fathers knelt; trust to your teachers,
keep within the law; bow to the Church and kiss the
State's great toe! So shall good order be observed,
obeyed, and as 'Peace reigned in Warsaw,' so anon shall
'Peace, good-will to men reign on the earth.'"
These are the words that fall from the lips of him you
call "the merciful," "the just." These are the sounds that
sink into the ears of those upon whose toil you are dependent
for your existence; judge you how they will be
received. And now, you, the dwellers on the lifted
heights, listen to the voice that follows him, for these
are words that concern you, and if you listen to their
warning you may yet save yourselves the desolation and
the ruin that otherwise must come. This deep, bell-pealing
voice that echoes through the corridors of thought
till almost Death's chill sleepers might arise again, is the
voice which called for centuries to the Empire, "Cease
your oppressions or the people rise"; and to the Kingdom,
"Curse not the new world with your tyrannies, it
will rebel"; and to the Master, "Put not the lash upon
your bonded slave, for the time will come when every
stroke will rise like a warrior armed, to burn and waste
and kill." The Empire laughed, the Kingdom ignored,
the Planter sneered; but the time came when laugh and
sneer died to white ashes. The time came when "France
got drunk with blood, to vomit crime," when England
"lost the brightest jewel in her coronal," when the South
waded in blood and tears and knelt her pride before a
conqueror. And now, she, the liberator, the destined
conqueror of God, calls out to you, "Yield up your scepters
ere they be torn from you; give back the stolen
earth, the mine, the sea! Give back the source of life,
give back the light! For a black, bitter hour is waiting
you, an awful gulf unfathomed in its depth, if now
you do not pause and render justice."
Ah, thou, whatever be thy awful name, which like a
serpent's trail hath marked the earth, whether Jehovah,
Buddha, Joss, or Christ! Thou who hast done for love
what others do for most envenomed hate, how hast thou
hated these the happy ones! Is this impartial justice then
to these, to pour the golden treasures of the earth into
their laps, that these may feast and toast and so forget
thee and thy promised heaven? Truly thou hast been
most unkind to them, since kindness means with thee a
tearing out of e'en the heart and entrails of existence.
Bah! how thou liest! To what most pitiable trick of
speech hast thou been forced! Think'st thou the dwellers
in the darkness longer take thy creed of crystalline deception!
No! They laugh at thee, they spew thee out,
they spit at thee.
Love! Say! Look—this long procession coming here!
Here are the murderers, with their red-hued eyes; here
the adulterers, with their lecherous glance; here are the
prostitutes, with their mark of shame; here are the gamblers,
with their itching hands; here are the thieves, with
furtive lips and eyes; here are the liars with their dastard
tongues; here all the train that Crime can muster up
reviews before thee! And after them, a ghastly, fearful
sight, follow the victims of their blackened hearts, slain,
ruined, desolated by thy love! And now, behold, another
train comes on—a train whose name is legion! Here
the dark, bruted faces from the mines, here the hard,
sun-browned cheeks from out the furrow, here the dull
visage from the lumber-camp, here the wan eyes from
whirling factory, here the gaunt giants from the furnace
fire, here the tarred hands from off the stream and sea,
here all the aching limbs that stand behind the fashionable
counter, here, O pitiful sight of all, those whose
home is in the street, whose table is the garbage pile,
the vast, helpless body of the unemployed. And, ever
as they march, they drop, and drop, into the earth that
swallows them, and over their graves the march goes
on. These are thy victims, God! These are the creatures
of thy Church and Law! Speak no more of the
breaking of altars, thou who hast broken every altar
that the human heart holds dear! Take thy position at
the head of the murderers' column! And when thou
hast marched away into the past, thou and thy preachers
and thy praters of justice, then will the world return to
justice and the great law of Nature reign upon the earth.
Then will her broad, green acres yield their wealth to
him who toils, and him alone; then will the store-houses
of Nature yield her fuel and her light, not to the corporation
whose high-priced lobbying can buy it, for in that
time no wealth nor intrigue can purchase the heritage
of all, but to all the sons and daughters of Labor. And
then upon this earth there shall be no hungry mouths,
no freezing limbs; no children spending the hours of
youth in gaining a miserable livelihood, no women crying,
"It's Oh, to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save
If this is Christian work!"
no men wandering aimlessly in search of a master for
their slavery.
But O, careless dwellers upon the heights, awaken
now!—do not wait till reason, persuasion, judgment,
coolness are swept down before the rising whirlwind.
Bend your energies now to the eradication of the Authority
idea, to righting the wrongs of your fellow-men. Do
it for your own interest, for if you slumber on—ah me!
ye will awaken one day when an ominous rumble prefaces
the waking of a terrific underground thunder, when
the earth shakes in a frightful ague fit, when from out
the parched throats of the people a burning cry will come
like lava from a crater, "'Bread, bread, bread!' No
more preachers, no more politicians, no more lawyers,
no more gods, no more heavens, no more promises!
Bread!" And then, when you hear a terrible leaden
groan, know that at last, here in your free America, beneath
the floating banner of the stars and stripes, more
than fifty million human hearts have burst! A dynamite
bomb that will shock the continent to its foundations
and knock the sea back from its shores!
"It is no boast, it is no threat,
Thus History's iron law decrees;
The day grows hot! O Babylon,
'Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!"
