Transcribed from the 1910 Mills and Boon edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk.
REVOLUTION AND OTHER ESSAYS
Contents:
Revolution
The Somnambulists
The Dignity of Dollars
Goliah
The Golden Poppy
The Shrinkage of the Planet
The House Beautiful
The Gold Hunters of the North
Fomá Gordyéeff
These Bones shall Rise Again
The Other Animals
The Yellow Peril
What Life Means to Me
REVOLUTION
“The present is enough for common souls,
Who, never looking forward, are indeed
Mere clay, wherein the footprints of their age
Are petrified for ever.”
I received a letter the other day. It was from a man in Arizona.
It began, “Dear Comrade.” It ended, “Yours for
the Revolution.” I replied to the letter, and my letter
began, “Dear Comrade.” It ended, “Yours for
the Revolution.” In the United States there are 400,000
men, of men and women nearly 1,000,000, who begin their letters “Dear
Comrade,” and end them “Yours for the Revolution.”
In Germany there are 3,000,000 men who begin their letters “Dear
Comrade” and end them “Yours for the Revolution”;
in France, 1,000,000 men; in Austria, 800,000 men; in Belgium, 300,000
men; in Italy, 250,000 men; in England, 100,000 men; in Switzerland,
100,000 men; in Denmark, 55,000 men; in Sweden, 50,000 men; in Holland,
40,000 men; in Spain, 30,000 men - comrades all, and revolutionists.
These are numbers which dwarf the grand armies of Napoleon and Xerxes.
But they are numbers not of conquest and maintenance of the established
order, but of conquest and revolution. They compose, when the
roll is called, an army of 7,000,000 men, who, in accordance with the
conditions of to-day, are fighting with all their might for the conquest
of the wealth of the world and for the complete overthrow of existing
society.
There has never been anything like this revolution in the history of
the world. There is nothing analogous between it and the American
Revolution or the French Revolution. It is unique, colossal.
Other revolutions compare with it as asteroids compare with the sun.
It is alone of its kind, the first world-revolution in a world whose
history is replete with revolutions. And not only this, for it
is the first organized movement of men to become a world movement, limited
only by the limits of the planet.
This revolution is unlike all other revolutions in many respects.
It is not sporadic. It is not a flame of popular discontent, arising
in a day and dying down in a day. It is older than the present
generation. It has a history and traditions, and a martyr-roll
only less extensive possibly than the martyr-roll of Christianity.
It has also a literature a myriad times more imposing, scientific, and
scholarly than the literature of any previous revolution.
They call themselves “comrades,” these men, comrades in
the socialist revolution. Nor is the word empty and meaningless,
coined of mere lip service. It knits men together as brothers,
as men should be knit together who stand shoulder to shoulder under
the red banner of revolt. This red banner, by the way, symbolizes
the brotherhood of man, and does not symbolize the incendiarism that
instantly connects itself with the red banner in the affrighted bourgeois
mind. The comradeship of the revolutionists is alive and warm.
It passes over geographical lines, transcends race prejudice, and has
even proved itself mightier than the Fourth of July, spread-eagle Americanism
of our forefathers. The French socialist working-men and the German
socialist working-men forget Alsace and Lorraine, and, when war threatens,
pass resolutions declaring that as working-men and comrades they have
no quarrel with each other. Only the other day, when Japan and
Russia sprang at each other’s throats, the revolutionists of Japan
addressed the following message to the revolutionists of Russia: “Dear
Comrades - Your government and ours have recently plunged into war to
carry out their imperialistic tendencies, but for us socialists there
are no boundaries, race, country, or nationality. We are comrades,
brothers, and sisters, and have no reason to fight. Your enemies
are not the Japanese people, but our militarism and so-called patriotism.
Patriotism and militarism are our mutual enemies.”
In January 1905, throughout the United States the socialists held mass-meetings
to express their sympathy for their struggling comrades, the revolutionists
of Russia, and, more to the point, to furnish the sinews of war by collecting
money and cabling it to the Russian leaders. The fact of this
call for money, and the ready response, and the very wording of the
call, make a striking and practical demonstration of the international
solidarity of this world-revolution:
“Whatever may be the immediate results of the present revolt in
Russia, the socialist propaganda in that country has received from it
an impetus unparalleled in the history of modern class wars. The
heroic battle for freedom is being fought almost exclusively by the
Russian working-class under the intellectual leadership of Russian socialists,
thus once more demonstrating the fact that the class-conscious working-men
have become the vanguard of all liberating movements of modern times.”
Here are 7,000,000 comrades in an organized, international, world-wide,
revolutionary movement. Here is a tremendous human force.
It must be reckoned with. Here is power. And here is romance
- romance so colossal that it seems to be beyond the ken of ordinary
mortals. These revolutionists are swayed by great passion.
They have a keen sense of personal right, much of reverence for humanity,
but little reverence, if any at all, for the rule of the dead.
They refuse to be ruled by the dead. To the bourgeois mind their
unbelief in the dominant conventions of the established order is startling.
They laugh to scorn the sweet ideals and dear moralities of bourgeois
society. They intend to destroy bourgeois society with most of
its sweet ideals and dear moralities, and chiefest among these are those
that group themselves under such heads as private ownership of capital,
survival of the fittest, and patriotism - even patriotism.
Such an army of revolution, 7,000,000 strong, is a thing to make rulers
and ruling classes pause and consider. The cry of this army is,
“No quarter! We want all that you possess. We will
be content with nothing less than all that you possess. We want
in our hands the reins of power and the destiny of mankind. Here
are our hands. They are strong hands. We are going to take
your governments, your palaces, and all your purpled ease away from
you, and in that day you shall work for your bread even as the peasant
in the field or the starved and runty clerk in your metropolises.
Here are our hands. They are strong hands.”
Well may rulers and ruling classes pause and consider. This is
revolution. And, further, these 7,000,000 men are not an army
on paper. Their fighting strength in the field is 7,000,000.
To-day they cast 7,000,000 votes in the civilized countries of the world.
Yesterday they were not so strong. Tomorrow they will be still
stronger. And they are fighters. They love peace.
They are unafraid of war. They intend nothing less than to destroy
existing capitalist society and to take possession of the whole world.
If the law of the land permits, they fight for this end peaceably, at
the ballot-box. If the law of the land does not permit, and if
they have force meted out to them, they resort to force themselves.
They meet violence with violence. Their hands are strong and they
are unafraid. In Russia, for instance, there is no suffrage.
The government executes the revolutionists. The revolutionists
kill the officers of the government. The revolutionists meet legal
murder with assassination.
Now here arises a particularly significant phase which it would be well
for the rulers to consider. Let me make it concrete. I am
a revolutionist. Yet I am a fairly sane and normal individual.
I speak, and I think, of these assassins in Russia as “my
comrades.” So do all the comrades in America, and all the
7,000,000 comrades in the world. Of what worth an organized, international,
revolutionary movement if our comrades are not backed up the world over!
The worth is shown by the fact that we do back up the assassinations
by our comrades in Russia. They are not disciples of Tolstoy,
nor are we. We are revolutionists.
Our comrades in Russia have formed what they call “The Fighting
Organization.” This Fighting Organization accused, tried,
found guilty, and condemned to death, one Sipiaguin, Minister of Interior.
On April 2 he was shot and killed in the Maryinsky Palace. Two
years later the Fighting Organization condemned to death and executed
another Minister of Interior, Von Plehve. Having done so, it issued
a document, dated July 29, 1904, setting forth the counts of its indictment
of Von Plehve and its responsibility for the assassination. Now,
and to the point, this document was sent out to the socialists of the
world, and by them was published everywhere in the magazines and newspapers.
The point is, not that the socialists of the world were unafraid to
do it, not that they dared to do it, but that they did it as a matter
of routine, giving publication to what may be called an official document
of the international revolutionary movement.
These are high lights upon the revolution - granted, but they are also
facts. And they are given to the rulers and the ruling classes,
not in bravado, not to frighten them, but for them to consider more
deeply the spirit and nature of this world-revolution. The time
has come for the revolution to demand consideration. It has fastened
upon every civilized country in the world. As fast as a country
becomes civilized, the revolution fastens upon it. With the introduction
of the machine into Japan, socialism was introduced. Socialism
marched into the Philippines shoulder to shoulder with the American
soldiers. The echoes of the last gun had scarcely died away when
socialist locals were forming in Cuba and Porto Rico. Vastly more
significant is the fact that of all the countries the revolution has
fastened upon, on not one has it relaxed its grip. On the contrary,
on every country its grip closes tighter year by year. As an active
movement it began obscurely over a generation ago. In 1867, its
voting strength in the world was 30,000. By 1871 its vote had
increased to 1,000,000. Not till 1884 did it pass the half-million
point. By 1889 it had passed the million point, it had then gained
momentum. In 1892 the socialist vote of the world was 1,798,391;
in 1893, 2,585,898; in 1895, 3,033,718; in 1898, 4,515,591; in 1902,
5,253,054; in 1903, 6,285,374; and in the year of our Lord 1905 it passed
the seven-million mark.
Nor has this flame of revolution left the United States untouched.
In 1888 there were only 2,068 socialist votes. In 1902 there were
127,713 socialist votes. And in 1904 435,040 socialist votes were
cast. What fanned this flame? Not hard times. The
first four years of the twentieth century were considered prosperous
years, yet in that time more than 300,000 men added themselves to the
ranks of the revolutionists, flinging their defiance in the teeth of
bourgeois society and taking their stand under the blood-red banner.
In the state of the writer, California, one man in twelve is an avowed
and registered revolutionist.
One thing must be clearly understood. This is no spontaneous and
vague uprising of a large mass of discontented and miserable people
- a blind and instinctive recoil from hurt. On the contrary, the
propaganda is intellectual; the movement is based upon economic necessity
and is in line with social evolution; while the miserable people have
not yet revolted. The revolutionist is no starved and diseased
slave in the shambles at the bottom of the social pit, but is, in the
main, a hearty, well-fed working-man, who sees the shambles waiting
for him and his children and recoils from the descent. The very
miserable people are too helpless to help themselves. But they
are being helped, and the day is not far distant when their numbers
will go to swell the ranks of the revolutionists.
Another thing must be clearly understood. In spite of the fact
that middle-class men and professional men are interested in the movement,
it is nevertheless a distinctly working-class revolt. The world
over, it is a working-class revolt. The workers of the world,
as a class, are fighting the capitalists of the world, as a class.
The so-called great middle class is a growing anomaly in the social
struggle. It is a perishing class (wily statisticians to the contrary),
and its historic mission of buffer between the capitalist and working-classes
has just about been fulfilled. Little remains for it but to wail
as it passes into oblivion, as it has already begun to wail in accents
Populistic and Jeffersonian-Democratic. The fight is on.
The revolution is here now, and it is the world’s workers that
are in revolt.
Naturally the question arises: Why is this so? No mere whim of
the spirit can give rise to a world-revolution. Whim does not
conduce to unanimity. There must be a deep-seated cause to make
7,000,000 men of the one mind, to make them cast off allegiance to the
bourgeois gods and lose faith in so fine a thing as patriotism.
There are many counts of the indictment which the revolutionists bring
against the capitalist class, but for present use only one need be stated,
and it is a count to which capital has never replied and can never reply.
The capitalist class has managed society, and its management has failed.
And not only has it failed in its management, but it has failed deplorably,
ignobly, horribly. The capitalist class had an opportunity such
as was vouchsafed no previous ruling class in the history of the world.
It broke away from the rule of the old feudal aristocracy and made modern
society. It mastered matter, organized the machinery of life,
and made possible a wonderful era for mankind, wherein no creature should
cry aloud because it had not enough to eat, and wherein for every child
there would be opportunity for education, for intellectual and spiritual
uplift. Matter being mastered, and the machinery of life organized,
all this was possible. Here was the chance, God-given, and the
capitalist class failed. It was blind and greedy. It prattled
sweet ideals and dear moralities, rubbed its eyes not once, nor ceased
one whit in its greediness, and smashed down in a failure as tremendous
only as was the opportunity it had ignored.
But all this is like so much cobwebs to the bourgeois mind. As
it was blind in the past, it is blind now and cannot see nor understand.
Well, then, let the indictment be stated more definitely, in terms sharp
and unmistakable. In the first place, consider the caveman.
He was a very simple creature. His head slanted back like an orang-outang’s,
and he had but little more intelligence. He lived in a hostile
environment, the prey of all manner of fierce life. He had no
inventions nor artifices. His natural efficiency for food-getting
was, say, 1. He did not even till the soil. With his natural
efficiency of 1, he fought off his carnivorous enemies and got himself
food and shelter. He must have done all this, else he would not
have multiplied and spread over the earth and sent his progeny down,
generation by generation, to become even you and me.
The caveman, with his natural efficiency of 1, got enough to eat most
of the time, and no caveman went hungry all the time. Also, he
lived a healthy, open-air life, loafed and rested himself, and found
plenty of time in which to exercise his imagination and invent gods.
That is to say, he did not have to work all his waking moments in order
to get enough to eat. The child of the caveman (and this is true
of the children of all savage peoples) had a childhood, and by that
is meant a happy childhood of play and development.
And now, how fares modern man? Consider the United States, the
most prosperous and most enlightened country of the world. In
the United States there are 10,000,000 people living in poverty.
By poverty is meant that condition in life in which, through lack of
food and adequate shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot
be maintained. In the United States there are 10,000,000 people
who have not enough to eat. In the United States, because they
have not enough to eat, there are 10,000,000 people who cannot keep
the ordinary 1 measure of strength in their bodies. This means
that these 10,000,000 people are perishing, are dying, body and soul,
slowly, because they have not enough to eat. All over this broad,
prosperous, enlightened land, are men, women, and children who are living
miserably. In all the great cities, where they are segregated
in slum ghettos by hundreds of thousands and by millions, their misery
becomes beastliness. No caveman ever starved as chronically as
they starve, ever slept as vilely as they sleep, ever festered with
rottenness and disease as they fester, nor ever toiled as hard and for
as long hours as they toil.
In Chicago there is a woman who toiled sixty hours per week. She
was a garment worker. She sewed buttons on clothes. Among
the Italian garment workers of Chicago, the average weekly wage of the
dressmakers is 90 cents, but they work every week in the year.
The average weekly wage of the pants finishers is $1.31, and the average
number of weeks employed in the year is 27.85. The average yearly
earnings of the dressmakers is $37; of the pants finishers, $42.4l.
Such wages means no childhood for the children, beastliness of living,
and starvation for all.
Unlike the caveman, modern man cannot get food and shelter whenever
he feels like working for it. Modern man has first to find the
work, and in this he is often unsuccessful. Then misery becomes
acute. This acute misery is chronicled daily in the newspapers.
Let several of the countless instances be cited.
In New York City lived a woman, Mary Mead. She had three children:
Mary, one year old; Johanna, two years old; Alice, four years old.
Her husband could find no work. They starved. They were
evicted from their shelter at 160 Steuben Street. Mary Mead strangled
her baby, Mary, one year old; strangled Alice, four years old; failed
to strangle Johanna, two years old, and then herself took poison.
Said the father to the police: “Constant poverty had driven my
wife insane. We lived at No. 160 Steuben Street until a week ago,
when we were dispossessed. I could get no work. I could
not even make enough to put food into our mouths. The babies grew
ill and weak. My wife cried nearly all the time.”
“So overwhelmed is the Department of Charities with tens of thousands
of applications from men out of work that it finds itself unable to
cope with the situation.” - New York Commercial, January
11, 1905.
In a daily paper, because he cannot get work in order to get something
to eat, modern man advertises as follows:
“Young man, good education, unable to obtain employment, will
sell to physician and bacteriologist for experimental purposes all right
and title to his body. Address for price, box 3466, Examiner.”
“Frank A. Mallin went to the central police station Wednesday
night and asked to be locked up on a charge of vagrancy. He said
he had been conducting an unsuccessful search for work for so long that
he was sure he must be a vagrant. In any event, he was so hungry
he must be fed. Police Judge Graham sentenced him to ninety days’
imprisonment.” - San Francisco Examiner.
In a room at the Soto House, 32 Fourth Street, San Francisco, was
found the body of W. G. Robbins. He had turned on the gas.
Also was found his diary, from which the following extracts are made
“March 3. - No chance of getting anything here. What
will I do?
“March 7. - Cannot find anything yet.
“March 8. - Am living on doughnuts at five cents a day.
“March 9. - My last quarter gone for room rent.
“March 10. - God help me. Have only five cents left.
Can get nothing to do. What next? Starvation or - ?
I have spent my last nickel to-night. What shall I do? Shall
it be steal, beg, or die? I have never stolen, begged, or starved
in all my fifty years of life, but now I am on the brink - death seems
the only refuge.
“March 11. - Sick all day - burning fever this afternoon.
Had nothing to eat to-day or since yesterday noon. My head, my
head. Good-bye, all.”
How fares the child of modern man in this most prosperous of lands?
In the city of New York 50,000 children go hungry to school every morning.
From the same city on January 12, a press despatch was sent out over
the country of a case reported by Dr. A. E. Daniel, of the New York
Infirmary for Women and Children. The case was that of a babe,
eighteen months old, who earned by its labour fifty cents per week in
a tenement sweat-shop.
“On a pile of rags in a room bare of furniture and freezing cold,
Mrs. Mary Gallin, dead from starvation, with an emaciated baby four
months old crying at her breast, was found this morning at 513 Myrtle
Avenue, Brooklyn, by Policeman McConnon of the Flushing Avenue Station.
Huddled together for warmth in another part of the room were the father,
James Gallin, and three children ranging from two to eight years of
age. The children gazed at the policeman much as ravenous animals
might have done. They were famished, and there was not a vestige
of food in their comfortless home.” - New York Journal, January
2, 1902.
In the United States 80,000 children are toiling out their lives in
the textile mills alone. In the South they work twelve-hour shifts.
They never see the day. Those on the night shift are asleep when
the sun pours its life and warmth over the world, while those on the
day shift are at the machines before dawn and return to their miserable
dens, called “homes,” after dark. Many receive no
more than ten cents a day. There are babies who work for five
and six cents a day. Those who work on the night shift are often
kept awake by having cold water dashed in their faces. There are
children six years of age who have already to their credit eleven months’
work on the night shift. When they become sick, and are unable
to rise from their beds to go to work, there are men employed to go
on horseback from house to house, and cajole and bully them into arising
and going to work. Ten per cent of them contract active consumption.
All are puny wrecks, distorted, stunted, mind and body. Elbert
Hubbard says of the child-labourers of the Southern cotton-mills:
“I thought to lift one of the little toilers to ascertain his
weight. Straightaway through his thirty-five pounds of skin and
bones there ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward to tie a
broken thread. I attracted his attention by a touch, and offered
him a silver dime. He looked at me dumbly from a face that might
have belonged to a man of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn, and full
of pain it was. He did not reach for the money - he did not know
what it was. There were dozens of such children in this particular
mill. A physician who was with me said that they would all be
dead probably in two years, and their places filled by others - there
were plenty more. Pneumonia carries off most of them. Their
systems are ripe for disease, and when it comes there is no rebound
- no response. Medicine simply does not act - nature is whipped,
beaten, discouraged, and the child sinks into a stupor and dies.”
So fares modern man and the child of modern man in the United States,
most prosperous and enlightened of all countries on earth. It
must be remembered that the instances given are instances only, but
they can be multiplied myriads of times. It must also be remembered
that what is true of the United States is true of all the civilized
world. Such misery was not true of the caveman. Then what
has happened? Has the hostile environment of the caveman grown
more hostile for his descendants? Has the caveman’s natural
efficiency of 1 for food-getting and shelter-getting diminished in modern
man to one-half or one-quarter?
On the contrary, the hostile environment of the caveman has been destroyed.
For modern man it no longer exists. All carnivorous enemies, the
daily menace of the younger world, have been killed off. Many
of the species of prey have become extinct. Here and there, in
secluded portions of the world, still linger a few of man’s fiercer
enemies. But they are far from being a menace to mankind.
Modern man, when he wants recreation and change, goes to the secluded
portions of the world for a hunt. Also, in idle moments, he wails
regretfully at the passing of the “big game,” which he knows
in the not distant future will disappear from the earth.
Nor since the day of the caveman has man’s efficiency for food-getting
and shelter-getting diminished. It has increased a thousandfold.
Since the day of the caveman, matter has been mastered. The secrets
of matter have been discovered. Its laws have been formulated.
Wonderful artifices have been made, and marvellous inventions, all tending
to increase tremendously man’s natural efficiency of in every
food-getting, shelter-getting exertion, in farming, mining, manufacturing,
transportation, and communication.
From the caveman to the hand-workers of three generations ago, the increase
in efficiency for food- and shelter-getting has been very great.
But in this day, by machinery, the efficiency of the hand-worker of
three generations ago has in turn been increased many times. Formerly
it required 200 hours of human labour to place 100 tons of ore on a
railroad car. To-day, aided by machinery, but two hours of human
labour is required to do the same task. The United States Bureau
of Labour is responsible for the following table, showing the comparatively
recent increase in man’s food- and shelter-getting efficiency:
Machine Hand
Hours Hours
Barley (100 bushels) 9 211
Corn (50 bushels shelled, stalks, husks and
blades cut into fodder) 34 228
Oats (160 bushels) 28 265
Wheat (50 bushels) 7 160
Loading ore (loading 100 tons iron ore on cars) 2 200
Unloading coal (transferring 200 tons from
canal-boats to bins 400 feet distant) 20 240
Pitchforks (50 pitchforks, 12-inch tines) 12 200
Plough (one landside plough, oak beams and
handles) 3 118
According to the same authority, under the best conditions for organization
in farming, labour can produce 20 bushels of wheat for 66 cents, or
1 bushel for 3½ cents. This was done on a bonanza farm
of 10,000 acres in California, and was the average cost of the whole
product of the farm. Mr. Carroll D. Wright says that to-day 4,500,000
men, aided by machinery, turn out a product that would require the labour
of 40,000,000 men if produced by hand. Professor Herzog, of Austria,
says that 5,000,000 people with the machinery of to-day, employed at
socially useful labour, would be able to supply a population of 20,000,000
people with all the necessaries and small luxuries of life by working
1½ hours per day.
This being so, matter being mastered, man’s efficiency for food-
and shelter-getting being increased a thousandfold over the efficiency
of the caveman, then why is it that millions of modern men live more
miserably than lived the caveman? This is the question the revolutionist
asks, and he asks it of the managing class, the capitalist class.
The capitalist class does not answer it. The capitalist class
cannot answer it.
If modern man’s food- and shelter-getting efficiency is a thousandfold
greater than that of the caveman, why, then, are there 10,000,000 people
in the United States to-day who are not properly sheltered and properly
fed? If the child of the caveman did not have to work, why, then,
to-day, in the United States, are 80,000 children working out their
lives in the textile factories alone? If the child of the caveman
did not have to work, why, then, to-day, in the United States, are there
1,752,187 child-labourers?
It is a true count in the indictment. The capitalist class has
mismanaged, is to-day mismanaging. In New York City 50,000 children
go hungry to school, and in New York City there are 1,320 millionaires.
The point, however, is not that the mass of mankind is miserable because
of the wealth the capitalist class has taken to itself. Far from
it. The point really is that the mass of mankind is miserable,
not for want of the wealth taken by the capitalist class, but for
want of the wealth that was never created. This wealth was
never created because the capitalist class managed too wastefully and
irrationally. The capitalist class, blind and greedy, grasping
madly, has not only not made the best of its management, but made the
worst of it. It is a management prodigiously wasteful. This
point cannot be emphasized too strongly.
In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the
caveman, and that modern man’s food- and shelter-getting efficiency
is a thousandfold greater than the caveman’s, no other solution
is possible than that the management is prodigiously wasteful.
With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented,
a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally
rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have
to labour more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe
everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure
of little luxuries to everybody. There would be no more material
want and wretchedness, no more children toiling out their lives, no
more men and women and babes living like beasts and dying like beasts.
Not only would matter be mastered, but the machine would be mastered.
In such a day incentive would be finer and nobler than the incentive
of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. No man, woman,
or child, would be impelled to action by an empty stomach. On
the contrary, they would be impelled to action as a child in a spelling
match is impelled to action, as boys and girls at games, as scientists
formulating law, as inventors applying law, as artists and sculptors
painting canvases and shaping clay, as poets and statesmen serving humanity
by singing and by statecraft. The spiritual, intellectual, and
artistic uplift consequent upon such a condition of society would be
tremendous. All the human world would surge upward in a mighty
wave.
This was the opportunity vouchsafed the capitalist class. Less
blindness on its part, less greediness, and a rational management, were
all that was necessary. A wonderful era was possible for the human
race. But the capitalist class failed. It made a shambles
of civilization. Nor can the capitalist class plead not guilty.
It knew of the opportunity. Its wise men told of the opportunity,
its scholars and its scientists told it of the opportunity. All
that they said is there to-day in the books, just so much damning evidence
against it. It would not listen. It was too greedy.
It rose up (as it rises up to-day), shamelessly, in our legislative
halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of
children and babes. It lulled its conscience to sleep with prattle
of sweet ideals and dear moralities, and allowed the suffering and misery
of mankind to continue and to increase, in short, the capitalist class
failed to take advantage of the opportunity.
But the opportunity is still here. The capitalist class has been
tried and found wanting. Remains the working-class to see what
it can do with the opportunity. “But the working-class is
incapable,” says the capitalist class. “What do you
know about it?” the working-class replies. “Because
you have failed is no reason that we shall fail. Furthermore,
we are going to have a try at it, anyway. Seven millions of us
say so. And what have you to say to that?”
And what can the capitalist class say? Grant the incapacity of
the working-class. Grant that the indictment and the argument
of the revolutionists are all wrong. The 7,000,000 revolutionists
remain. Their existence is a fact. Their belief in their
capacity, and in their indictment and their argument, is a fact.
Their constant growth is a fact. Their intention to destroy present-day
society is a fact, as is also their intention to take possession of
the world with all its wealth and machinery and governments. Moreover,
it is a fact that the working-class is vastly larger than the capitalist
class.
The revolution is a revolution of the working-class. How can the
capitalist class, in the minority, stem this tide of revolution?
What has it to offer? What does it offer? Employers’
associations, injunctions, civil suits for plundering of the treasuries
of the labour-unions, clamour and combination for the open shop, bitter
and shameless opposition to the eight-hour day, strong efforts to defeat
all reform, child-labour bills, graft in every municipal council, strong
lobbies and bribery in every legislature for the purchase of capitalist
legislation, bayonets, machine-guns, policemen’s clubs, professional
strike-breakers and armed Pinkertons - these are the things the capitalist
class is dumping in front of the tide of revolution, as though, forsooth,
to hold it back.
The capitalist class is as blind to-day to the menace of the revolution
as it was blind in the past to its own God-given opportunity.
It cannot see how precarious is its position, cannot comprehend the
power and the portent of the revolution. It goes on its placid
way, prattling sweet ideals and dear moralities, and scrambling sordidly
for material benefits.
No overthrown ruler or class in the past ever considered the revolution
that overthrew it, and so with the capitalist class of to-day.
Instead of compromising, instead of lengthening its lease of life by
conciliation and by removal of some of the harsher oppressions of the
working-class, it antagonizes the working-class, drives the working-class
into revolution. Every broken strike in recent years, every legally
plundered trades-union treasury, every closed shop made into an open
shop, has driven the members of the working-class directly hurt over
to socialism by hundreds and thousands. Show a working-man that
his union fails, and he becomes a revolutionist. Break a strike
with an injunction or bankrupt a union with a civil suit, and the working-men
hurt thereby listen to the siren song of the socialist and are lost
for ever to the political capitalist parties.
Antagonism never lulled revolution, and antagonism is about all the
capitalist class offers. It is true, it offers some few antiquated
notions which were very efficacious in the past, but which are no longer
efficacious. Fourth-of-July liberty in terms of the Declaration
of Independence and of the French Encyclopædists is scarcely apposite
to-day. It does not appeal to the working-man who has had his
head broken by a policeman’s club, his union treasury bankrupted
by a court decision, or his job taken away from him by a labour-saving
invention. Nor does the Constitution of the United States appear
so glorious and constitutional to the working-man who has experienced
a bull-pen or been unconstitutionally deported from Colorado.
Nor are this particular working-man’s hurt feelings soothed by
reading in the newspapers that both the bull-pen and the deportation
were pre-eminently just, legal, and constitutional. “To
hell, then, with the Constitution!” says he, and another revolutionist
has been made - by the capitalist class.
In short, so blind is the capitalist class that it does nothing to lengthen
its lease of life, while it does everything to shorten it. The
capitalist class offers nothing that is clean, noble, and alive.
The revolutionists offer everything that is clean, noble, and alive.
They offer service, unselfishness, sacrifice, martyrdom - the things
that sting awake the imagination of the people, touching their hearts
with the fervour that arises out of the impulse toward good and which
is essentially religious in its nature.
But the revolutionists blow hot and blow cold. They offer facts
and statistics, economics and scientific arguments. If the working-man
be merely selfish, the revolutionists show him, mathematically demonstrate
to him, that his condition will be bettered by the revolution.
If the working-man be the higher type, moved by impulses toward right
conduct, if he have soul and spirit, the revolutionists offer him the
things of the soul and the spirit, the tremendous things that cannot
be measured by dollars and cents, nor be held down by dollars and cents.
The revolutionist cries out upon wrong and injustice, and preaches righteousness.
And, most potent of all, he sings the eternal song of human freedom
- a song of all lands and all tongues and all time.
Few members of the capitalist class see the revolution. Most of
them are too ignorant, and many are too afraid to see it. It is
the same old story of every perishing ruling class in the world’s
history. Fat with power and possession, drunken with success,
and made soft by surfeit and by cessation of struggle, they are like
the drones clustered about the honey vats when the worker-bees spring
upon them to end their rotund existence.
President Roosevelt vaguely sees the revolution, is frightened by it,
and recoils from seeing it. As he says: “Above all, we need
to remember that any kind of class animosity in the political world
is, if possible, even more wicked, even more destructive to national
welfare, than sectional, race, or religious animosity.”
Class animosity in the political world, President Roosevelt maintains,
is wicked. But class animosity in the political world is the preachment
of the revolutionists. “Let the class wars in the industrial
world continue,” they say, “but extend the class war to
the political world.” As their leader, Eugene V. Debs says:
“So far as this struggle is concerned, there is no good capitalist
and no bad working-man. Every capitalist is your enemy and every
working-man is your friend.”
Here is class animosity in the political world with a vengeance.
And here is revolution. In 1888 there were only 2,000 revolutionists
of this type in the United States; in 1900 there were 127,000 revolutionists;
in 1904, 435,000 revolutionists. Wickedness of the President Roosevelt
definition evidently flourishes and increases in the United States.
Quite so, for it is the revolution that flourishes and increases.
Here and there a member of the capitalist class catches a clear glimpse
of the revolution, and raises a warning cry. But his class does
not heed. President Eliot of Harvard raised such a cry:
“I am forced to believe there is a present danger of socialism
never before so imminent in America in so dangerous a form, because
never before imminent in so well organized a form. The danger
lies in the obtaining control of the trades-unions by the socialists.”
And the capitalist employers, instead of giving heed to the warnings,
are perfecting their strike-breaking organization and combining more
strongly than ever for a general assault upon that dearest of all things
to the trades-unions - the closed shop. In so far as this assault
succeeds, by just that much will the capitalist class shorten its lease
of life. It is the old, old story, over again and over again.
The drunken drones still cluster greedily about the honey vats.
Possibly one of the most amusing spectacles of to-day is the attitude
of the American press toward the revolution. It is also a pathetic
spectacle. It compels the onlooker to be aware of a distinct loss
of pride in his species. Dogmatic utterance from the mouth of
ignorance may make gods laugh, but it should make men weep. And
the American editors (in the general instance) are so impressive about
it! The old “divide-up,” “men-are-not-born-free-and-equal,”
propositions are enunciated gravely and sagely, as things white-hot
and new from the forge of human wisdom. Their feeble vapourings
show no more than a schoolboy’s comprehension of the nature of
the revolution. Parasites themselves on the capitalist class,
serving the capitalist class by moulding public opinion, they, too,
cluster drunkenly about the honey vats.
Of course, this is true only of the large majority of American editors.
To say that it is true of all of them would be to cast too great obloquy
upon the human race. Also, it would be untrue, for here and there
an occasional editor does see clearly - and in his case, ruled by stomach-incentive,
is usually afraid to say what he thinks about it. So far as the
science and the sociology of the revolution are concerned, the average
editor is a generation or so behind the facts. He is intellectually
slothful, accepts no facts until they are accepted by the majority,
and prides himself upon his conservatism. He is an instinctive
optimist, prone to believe that what ought to be, is. The revolutionist
gave this up long ago, and believes not that what ought to be, is, but
what is, is, and that it may not be what it ought to be at all.
Now and then, rubbing his eyes, vigorously, an editor catches a sudden
glimpse of the revolution and breaks out in naive volubility, as, for
instance, the one who wrote the following in the Chicago Chronicle:
“American socialists are revolutionists. They know that
they are revolutionists. It is high time that other people should
appreciate the fact.” A white-hot, brand-new discovery,
and he proceeded to shout it out from the housetops that we, forsooth,
were revolutionists. Why, it is just what we have been doing all
these years - shouting it out from the housetops that we are revolutionists,
and stop us who can.
The time should be past for the mental attitude: “Revolution is
atrocious. Sir, there is no revolution.” Likewise
should the time be past for that other familiar attitude: “Socialism
is slavery. Sir, it will never be.” It is no longer
a question of dialectics, theories, and dreams. There is no question
about it. The revolution is a fact. It is here now.
Seven million revolutionists, organized, working day and night, are
preaching the revolution - that passionate gospel, the Brotherhood of
Man. Not only is it a cold-blooded economic propaganda, but it
is in essence a religious propaganda with a fervour in it of Paul and
Christ. The capitalist class has been indicted. It has failed
in its management and its management is to be taken away from it.
Seven million men of the working-class say that they are going to get
the rest of the working-class to join with them and take the management
away. The revolution is here, now. Stop it who can.
SACRAMENTO RIVER.
March 1905.
THE SOMNAMBULISTS
“’Tis only fools speak evil of the clay -
The very stars are made of clay like mine.”
The mightiest and absurdest sleep-walker on the planet! Chained
in the circle of his own imaginings, man is only too keen to forget
his origin and to shame that flesh of his that bleeds like all flesh
and that is good to eat. Civilization (which is part of the circle
of his imaginings) has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled
animal known as man. It is a very thin veneer; but so wonderfully
is man constituted that he squirms on his bit of achievement and believes
he is garbed in armour-plate.
Yet man to-day is the same man that drank from his enemy’s skull
in the dark German forests, that sacked cities, and stole his women
from neighbouring clans like any howling aborigine. The flesh-and-blood
body of man has not changed in the last several thousand years.
Nor has his mind changed. There is no faculty of the mind of man
to-day that did not exist in the minds of the men of long ago.
Man has to-day no concept that is too wide and deep and abstract for
the mind of Plato or Aristotle to grasp. Give to Plato or Aristotle
the same fund of knowledge that man to-day has access to, and Plato
and Aristotle would reason as profoundly as the man of to-day and would
achieve very similar conclusions.
It is the same old animal man, smeared over, it is true, with a veneer,
thin and magical, that makes him dream drunken dreams of self-exaltation
and to sneer at the flesh and the blood of him beneath the smear.
The raw animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent
in the crust of the earth. As he persuades himself against the
latter till it arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself
against the former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands
undisguised, a brute like any other brute.
Starve him, let him miss six meals, and see gape through the veneer
the hungry maw of the animal beneath. Get between him and the
female of his kind upon whom his mating instinct is bent, and see his
eyes blaze like an angry cat’s, hear in his throat the scream
of wild stallions, and watch his fists clench like an orang-outang’s.
Maybe he will even beat his chest. Touch his silly vanity, which
he exalts into high-sounding pride - call him a liar, and behold the
red animal in him that makes a hand clutching that is quick like the
tensing of a tiger’s claw, or an eagle’s talon, incarnate
with desire to rip and tear.
It is not necessary to call him a liar to touch his vanity. Tell
a plains Indian that he has failed to steal horses from the neighbouring
tribe, or tell a man living in bourgeois society that he has failed
to pay his bills at the neighbouring grocer’s, and the results
are the same. Each, plains Indian and bourgeois, is smeared with
a slightly different veneer, that is all. It requires a slightly
different stick to scrape it off. The raw animals beneath are
identical.
But intrude not violently upon man, leave him alone in his somnambulism,
and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life up which he
has climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the universe, dreams
sordidly about his own particular god, and maunders metaphysically about
his own blessed immortality.
True, he lives in a real world, breathes real air, eats real food, and
sleeps under real blankets, in order to keep real cold away. And
there’s the rub. He has to effect adjustments with the real
world and at the same time maintain the sublimity of his dream.
The result of this admixture of the real and the unreal is confusion
thrice confounded. The man that walks the real world in his sleep
becomes such a tangled mass of contradictions, paradoxes, and lies that
he has to lie to himself in order to stay asleep.
In passing, it may be noted that some men are remarkably constituted
in this matter of self-deception. They excel at deceiving themselves.
They believe, and they help others to believe. It becomes their
function in society, and some of them are paid large salaries for helping
their fellow-men to believe, for instance, that they are not as other
animals; for helping the king to believe, and his parasites and drudges
as well, that he is God’s own manager over so many square miles
of earth-crust; for helping the merchant and banking classes to believe
that society rests on their shoulders, and that civilization would go
to smash if they got out from under and ceased from their exploitations
and petty pilferings.
Prize-fighting is terrible. This is the dictum of the man who
walks in his sleep. He prates about it, and writes to the papers
about it, and worries the legislators about it. There is nothing
of the brute about him. He is a sublimated soul that treads
the heights and breathes refined ether - in self-comparison with the
prize-fighter. The man who walks in his sleep ignores the flesh
and all its wonderful play of muscle, joint, and nerve. He feels
that there is something godlike in the mysterious deeps of his being,
denies his relationship with the brute, and proceeds to go forth into
the world and express by deeds that something godlike within him.
He sits at a desk and chases dollars through the weeks and months and
years of his life. To him the life godlike resolves into a problem
something like this: Since the great mass of men toil at producing
wealth, how best can he get between the great mass of men and the wealth
they produce, and get a slice for himself? With tremendous
exercise of craft, deceit, and guile, he devotes his life godlike to
this purpose. As he succeeds, his somnambulism grows profound.
He bribes legislatures, buys judges, “controls” primaries,
and then goes and hires other men to tell him that it is all glorious
and right. And the funniest thing about it is that this arch-deceiver
believes all that they tell him. He reads only the newspapers
and magazines that tell him what he wants to be told, listens only to
the biologists who tell him that he is the finest product of the struggle
for existence, and herds only with his own kind, where, like the monkey-folk,
they teeter up and down and tell one another how great they are.
In the course of his life godlike he ignores the flesh - until he gets
to table. He raises his hands in horror at the thought of the
brutish prize-fighter, and then sits down and gorges himself on roast
beef, rare and red, running blood under every sawing thrust of the implement
called a knife. He has a piece of cloth which he calls a napkin,
with which he wipes from his lips, and from the hair on his lips, the
greasy juices of the meat.
He is fastidiously nauseated at the thought of two prize-fighters bruising
each other with their fists; and at the same time, because it will cost
him some money, he will refuse to protect the machines in his factory,
though he is aware that the lack of such protection every year mangles,
batters, and destroys out of all humanness thousands of working-men,
women, and children. He will chatter about things refined and
spiritual and godlike like himself, and he and the men who herd with
him will calmly adulterate the commodities they put upon the market
and which annually kill tens of thousands of babies and young children.
He will recoil at the suggestion of the horrid spectacle of two men
confronting each other with gloved hands in the roped arena, and at
the same time he will clamour for larger armies and larger navies, for
more destructive war machines, which, with a single discharge, will
disrupt and rip to pieces more human beings than have died in the whole
history of prize-fighting. He will bribe a city council for a
franchise or a state legislature for a commercial privilege; but he
has never been known, in all his sleep-walking history, to bribe any
legislative body in order to achieve any moral end, such as, for instance,
abolition of prize-fighting, child-labour laws, pure food bills, or
old age pensions.
“Ah, but we do not stand for the commercial life,” object
the refined, scholarly, and professional men. They are also sleep-walkers.
They do not stand for the commercial life, but neither do they stand
against it with all their strength. They submit to it, to the
brutality and carnage of it. They develop classical economists
who announce that the only possible way for men and women to get food
and shelter is by the existing method. They produce university
professors, men who claim the rôle of teachers, and who
at the same time claim that the austere ideal of learning is passionless
pursuit of passionless intelligence. They serve the men who lead
the commercial life, give to their sons somnambulistic educations, preach
that sleep-walking is the only way to walk, and that the persons who
walk otherwise are atavisms or anarchists. They paint pictures
for the commercial men, write books for them, sing songs for them, act
plays for them, and dose them with various drugs when their bodies have
grown gross or dyspeptic from overeating and lack of exercise.
Then there are the good, kind somnambulists who don’t prize-fight,
who don’t play the commercial game, who don’t teach and
preach somnambulism, who don’t do anything except live on the
dividends that are coined out of the wan, white fluid that runs in the
veins of little children, out of mothers’ tears, the blood of
strong men, and the groans and sighs of the old. The receiver
is as bad as the thief - ay, and the thief is finer than the receiver;
he at least has the courage to run the risk. But the good, kind
people who don’t do anything won’t believe this, and the
assertion will make them angry - for a moment. They possess several
magic phrases, which are like the incantations of a voodoo doctor driving
devils away. The phrases that the good, kind people repeat to
themselves and to one another sound like “abstinence,” “temperance,”
“thrift,” “virtue.” Sometimes they say
them backward, when they sound like “prodigality,” “drunkenness,”
“wastefulness,” and “immorality.” They
do not really know the meaning of these phrases, but they think they
do, and that is all that is necessary for somnambulists. The calm
repetition of such phrases invariably drives away the waking devils
and lulls to slumber.
Our statesmen sell themselves and their country for gold. Our
municipal servants and state legislators commit countless treasons.
The world of graft! The world of betrayal! The world of
somnambulism, whose exalted and sensitive citizens are outraged by the
knockouts of the prize-ring, and who annually not merely knock out,
but kill, thousands of babies and children by means of child labour
and adulterated food. Far better to have the front of one’s
face pushed in by the fist of an honest prize-fighter than to have the
lining of one’s stomach corroded by the embalmed beef of a dishonest
manufacturer.
In a prize-fight men are classed. A lightweight fights with a
light-weight; he never fights with a heavy-weight, and foul blows are
not allowed. Yet in the world of the somnambulists, where soar
the sublimated spirits, there are no classes, and foul blows are continually
struck and never disallowed. Only they are not called foul blows.
The world of claw and fang and fist and club has passed away - so say
the somnambulists. A rebate is not an elongated claw. A
Wall Street raid is not a fang slash. Dummy boards of directors
and fake accountings are not foul blows of the fist under the belt.
A present of coal stock by a mine operator to a railroad official is
not a claw rip to the bowels of a rival mine operator. The hundred
million dollars with which a combination beats down to his knees a man
with a million dollars is not a club. The man who walks in his
sleep says it is not a club. So say all of his kind with which
he herds. They gather together and solemnly and gloatingly make
and repeat certain noises that sound like “discretion,”
“acumen,” “initiative,” “enterprise.”
These noises are especially gratifying when they are made backward.
They mean the same things, but they sound different. And in either
case, forward or backward, the spirit of the dream is not disturbed.
When a man strikes a foul blow in the prize-ring the fight is immediately
stopped, he is declared the loser, and he is hissed by the audience
as he leaves the ring. But when a man who walks in his sleep strikes
a foul blow he is immediately declared the victor and awarded the prize;
and amid acclamations he forthwith turns his prize into a seat in the
United States Senate, into a grotesque palace on Fifth Avenue, and into
endowed churches, universities and libraries, to say nothing of subsidized
newspapers, to proclaim his greatness.
The red animal in the somnambulist will out. He decries the carnal
combat of the prize-ring, and compels the red animal to spiritual combat.
The poisoned lie, the nasty, gossiping tongue, the brutality of the
unkind epigram, the business and social nastiness and treachery of to-day
- these are the thrusts and scratches of the red animal when the somnambulist
is in charge. They are not the upper cuts and short arm jabs and
jolts and slugging blows of the spirit. They are the foul blows
of the spirit that have never been disbarred, as the foul blows of the
prize-ring have been disbarred. (Would it not be preferable for
a man to strike one full on the mouth with his fist than for him to
tell a lie about one, or malign those that are nearest and dearest?)
For these are the crimes of the spirit, and, alas! they are so much
more frequent than blows on the mouth. And whosoever exalts the
spirit over the flesh, by his own creed avers that a crime of the spirit
is vastly more terrible than a crime of the flesh. Thus stand
the somnambulists convicted by their own creed - only they are not real
men, alive and awake, and they proceed to mutter magic phrases that
dispel all doubt as to their undiminished and eternal gloriousness.
It is well enough to let the ape and tiger die, but it is hardly fair
to kill off the natural and courageous apes and tigers and allow the
spawn of cowardly apes and tigers to live. The prize-fighting
apes and tigers will die all in good time in the course of natural evolution,
but they will not die so long as the cowardly, somnambulistic apes and
tigers club and scratch and slash. This is not a brief for the
prize-fighter. It is a blow of the fist between the eyes of the
somnambulists, teetering up and down, muttering magic phrases, and thanking
God that they are not as other animals.
GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
June 1900.
THE DIGNITY OF DOLLARS
Man is a blind, helpless creature. He looks back with pride upon
his goodly heritage of the ages, and yet obeys unwittingly every mandate
of that heritage; for it is incarnate with him, and in it are embedded
the deepest roots of his soul. Strive as he will, he cannot escape
it - unless he be a genius, one of those rare creations to whom alone
is granted the privilege of doing entirely new and original things in
entirely new and original ways. But the common clay-born man,
possessing only talents, may do only what has been done before him.
At the best, if he work hard, and cherish himself exceedingly, he may
duplicate any or all previous performances of his kind; he may even
do some of them better; but there he stops, the composite hand of his
whole ancestry bearing heavily upon him.
And again, in the matter of his ideas, which have been thrust upon him,
and which he has been busily garnering from the great world ever since
the day when his eyes first focussed and he drew, startled, against
the warm breast of his mother - the tyranny of these he cannot shake
off. Servants of his will, they at the same time master him.
They may not coerce genius, but they dictate and sway every action of
the clay-born. If he hesitate on the verge of a new departure,
they whip him back into the well-greased groove; if he pause, bewildered,
at sight of some unexplored domain, they rise like ubiquitous finger-posts
and direct him by the village path to the communal meadow. And
he permits these things, and continues to permit them, for he cannot
help them, and he is a slave. Out of his ideas he may weave cunning
theories, beautiful ideals; but he is working with ropes of sand.
At the slightest stress, the last least bit of cohesion flits away,
and each idea flies apart from its fellows, while all clamour that he
do this thing, or think this thing, in the ancient and time-honoured
way. He is only a clay-born; so he bends his neck. He knows
further that the clay-born are a pitiful, pitiless majority, and that
he may do nothing which they do not do.
It is only in some way such as this that we may understand and explain
the dignity which attaches itself to dollars. In the watches of
the night, we may assure ourselves that there is no such dignity; but
jostling with our fellows in the white light of day, we find that it
does exist, and that we ourselves measure ourselves by the dollars we
happen to possess. They give us confidence and carriage and dignity
- ay, a personal dignity which goes down deeper than the garments with
which we hide our nakedness. The world, when it knows nothing
else of him, measures a man by his clothes; but the man himself, if
he be neither a genius nor a philosopher, but merely a clay-born, measures
himself by his pocket-book. He cannot help it, and can no more
fling it from him than can the bashful young man his self-consciousness
when crossing a ballroom floor.
I remember once absenting myself from civilization for weary months.
When I returned, it was to a strange city in another country.
The people were but slightly removed from my own breed, and they spoke
the same tongue, barring a certain barbarous accent which I learned
was far older than the one imbibed by me with my mother’s milk.
A fur cap, soiled and singed by many camp-fires, half sheltered the
shaggy tendrils of my uncut hair. My foot-gear was of walrus hide,
cunningly blended with seal gut. The remainder of my dress was
as primal and uncouth. I was a sight to give merriment to gods
and men. Olympus must have roared at my coming. The world,
knowing me not, could judge me by my clothes alone. But I refused
to be so judged. My spiritual backbone stiffened, and I held my
head high, looking all men in the eyes. And I did these things,
not that I was an egotist, not that I was impervious to the critical
glances of my fellows, but because of a certain hogskin belt, plethoric
and sweat-bewrinkled, which buckled next the skin above the hips.
Oh, it’s absurd, I grant, but had that belt not been so circumstanced,
and so situated, I should have shrunk away into side streets and back
alleys, walking humbly and avoiding all gregarious humans except those
who were likewise abroad without belts. Why? I do not know,
save that in such way did my fathers before me.
Viewed in the light of sober reason, the whole thing was preposterous.
But I walked down the gang-plank with the mien of a hero, of a barbarian
who knew himself to be greater than the civilization he invaded.
I was possessed of the arrogance of a Roman governor. At last
I knew what it was to be born to the purple, and I took my seat in the
hotel carriage as though it were my chariot about to proceed with me
to the imperial palace. People discreetly dropped their eyes before
my proud gaze, and into their hearts I know I forced the query, What
manner of man can this mortal be? I was superior to convention,
and the very garb which otherwise would have damned me tended toward
my elevation. And all this was due, not to my royal lineage, nor
to the deeds I had done and the champions I had overthrown, but to a
certain hogskin belt buckled next the skin. The sweat of months
was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it was not a creation such as
would appeal to the aesthetic mind; but it was plethoric. There
was the arcanum; each yellow grain conduced to my exaltation, and the
sum of these grains was the sum of my mightiness. Had they been
less, just so would have been my stature; more, and I should have reached
the sky.
And this was my royal progress through that most loyal city. I
purchased a host of things from the tradespeople, and bought me such
pleasures and diversions as befitted one who had long been denied.
I scattered my gold lavishly, nor did I chaffer over prices in mart
or exchange. And, because of these things I did, I demanded homage.
Nor was it refused. I moved through wind-swept groves of limber
backs; across sunny glades, lighted by the beaming rays from a thousand
obsequious eyes; and when I tired of this, basked on the greensward
of popular approval. Money was very good, I thought, and for the
time was content. But there rushed upon me the words of Erasmus,
“When I get some money I shall buy me some Greek books, and afterwards
some clothes,” and a great shame wrapped me around. But,
luckily for my soul’s welfare, I reflected and was saved.
By the clearer vision vouchsafed me, I beheld Erasmus, fire-flashing,
heaven-born, while I - I was merely a clay-born, a son of earth.
For a giddy moment I had forgotten this, and tottered. And I rolled
over on my greensward, caught a glimpse of a regiment of undulating
backs, and thanked my particular gods that such moods of madness were
passing brief.
But on another day, receiving with kingly condescension the service
of my good subjects’ backs, I remembered the words of another
man, long since laid away, who was by birth a nobleman, by nature a
philosopher and a gentleman, and who by circumstance yielded up his
head upon the block. “That a man of lead,” he once
remarked, “who has no more sense than a log of wood, and is as
bad as he is foolish, should have many wise and good men to serve him,
only because he has a great heap of that metal; and that if, by some
accident or trick of law (which sometimes produces as great changes
as chance itself), all this wealth should pass from the master to the
meanest varlet of his whole family, he himself would very soon become
one of his servants, as if he were a thing that belonged to his wealth,
and so was bound to follow its fortune.”
And when I had remembered this much, I unwisely failed to pause and
reflect. So I gathered my belongings together, cinched my hogskin
belt tight about me, and went away to my own country. It was a
very foolish thing to do. I am sure it was. But when I had
recovered my reason, I fell upon my particular gods and berated them
mightily, and as penance for their watchlessness placed them away amongst
dust and cobwebs. Oh no, not for long. They are again enshrined,
as bright and polished as of yore, and my destiny is once more in their
keeping.
It is given that travail and vicissitude mark time to man’s footsteps
as he stumbles onward toward the grave; and it is well. Without
the bitter one may not know the sweet. The other day - nay, it
was but yesterday - I fell before the rhythm of fortune. The inexorable
pendulum had swung the counter direction, and there was upon me an urgent
need. The hogskin belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird
my loins. From my window I could descry, at no great distance,
a very ordinary mortal of a man, working industriously among his cabbages.
I thought: Here am I, capable of teaching him much concerning the field
wherein he labours - the nitrogenic - why of the fertilizer, the alchemy
of the sun, the microscopic cell-structure of the plant, the cryptic
chemistry of root and runner - but thereat he straightened his work-wearied
back and rested. His eyes wandered over what he had produced in
the sweat of his brow, then on to mine. And as he stood there
drearily, he became reproach incarnate. “Unstable as water,”
he said (I am sure he did) - “unstable as water, thou shalt not
excel. Man, where are your cabbages?”
I shrank back. Then I waxed rebellious. I refused to answer
the question. He had no right to ask it, and his presence was
an affront upon the landscape. And a dignity entered into me,
and my neck was stiffened, my head poised. I gathered together
certain certificates of goods and chattels, pointed my heel towards
him and his cabbages, and journeyed townward. I was yet a man.
There was naught in those certificates to be ashamed of. But alack-a-day!
While my heels thrust the cabbage-man beyond the horizon, my toes were
drawing me, faltering, like a timid old beggar, into a roaring spate
of humanity - men, women, and children without end. They had no
concern with me, nor I with them. I knew it; I felt it.
Like She, after her fire-bath in the womb of the world, I dwindled in
my own sight. My feet were uncertain and heavy, and my soul became
as a meal sack, limp with emptiness and tied in the middle. People
looked upon me scornfully, pitifully, reproachfully. (I can swear
they did.) In every eye I read the question, Man, where are your
cabbages?
So I avoided their looks, shrinking close to the kerbstone and by furtive
glances directing my progress. At last I came hard by the place,
and peering stealthily to the right and left that none who knew might
behold mc, I entered hurriedly, in the manner of one committing an abomination.
‘Fore God! I had done no evil, nor had I wronged any man,
nor did I contemplate evil; yet was I aware of evil. Why?
I do not know, save that there goes much dignity with dollars, and being
devoid of the one I was destitute of the other. The person I sought
practised a profession as ancient as the oracles but far more lucrative.
It is mentioned in Exodus; so it must have been created soon after the
foundations of the world; and despite the thunder of ecclesiastics and
the mailed hand of kings and conquerors, it has endured even to this
day. Nor is it unfair to presume that the accounts of this most
remarkable business will not be closed until the Trumps of Doom are
sounded and all things brought to final balance.
Wherefore it was in fear and trembling, and with great modesty of spirit,
that I entered the Presence. To confess that I was shocked were
to do my feelings an injustice. Perhaps the blame may be shouldered
upon Shylock, Fagin, and their ilk; but I had conceived an entirely
different type of individual. This man - why, he was clean to
look at, his eyes were blue, with the tired look of scholarly lucubrations,
and his skin had the normal pallor of sedentary existence. He
was reading a book, sober and leather-bound, while on his finely moulded,
intellectual head reposed a black skull-cap. For all the world
his look and attitude were those of a college professor. My heart
gave a great leap. Here was hope! But no; he fixed me with
a cold and glittering eye, searching with the chill of space till my
financial status stood before him shivering and ashamed. I communed
with myself: By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has been
prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery. His nerve
centres of judgment and will have not been employed in solving the problems
of life, but in maintaining his own solvency by the insolvency of others.
He trades upon sorrow and draws a livelihood from misfortune.
He transmutes tears into treasure, and from nakedness and hunger garbs
himself in clean linen and develops the round of his belly. He
is a bloodsucker and a vampire. He lays unholy hands on heaven
and hell at cent. per cent., and his very existence is a sacrilege and
a blasphemy. And yet here am I, wilting before him, an arrant
coward, with no respect for him and less for myself. Why should
this shame be? Let me rouse in my strength and smite him, and,
by so doing, wipe clean one offensive page.
But no. As I said, he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye,
and in it was the aristocrat’s undisguised contempt for the canaille.
Behind him was the solid phalanx of a bourgeois society. Law and
order upheld him, while I titubated, cabbageless, on the ragged edge.
Moreover, he was possessed of a formula whereby to extract juice from
a flattened lemon, and he would do business with me.
I told him my desires humbly, in quavering syllables. In return,
he craved my antecedents and residence, pried into my private life,
insolently demanded how many children had I and did I live in wedlock,
and asked divers other unseemly and degrading questions. Ay, I
was treated like a thief convicted before the act, till I produced my
certificates of goods and chattels aforementioned. Never had they
appeared so insignificant and paltry as then, when he sniffed over them
with the air of one disdainfully doing a disagreeable task. It
is said, “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury
of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury”;
but he evidently was not my brother, for he demanded seventy per cent.
I put my signature to certain indentures, received my pottage, and fled
from his presence.
Faugh! I was glad to be quit of it. How good the outside
air was! I only prayed that neither my best friend nor my worst
enemy should ever become aware of what had just transpired. Ere
I had gone a block I noticed that the sun had brightened perceptibly,
the street become less sordid, the gutter mud less filthy. In
people’s eyes the cabbage question no longer brooded. And
there was a spring to my body, an elasticity of step as I covered the
pavement. Within me coursed an unwonted sap, and I felt as though
I were about to burst out into leaves and buds and green things.
My brain was clear and refreshed. There was a new strength to
my arm. My nerves were tingling and I was a-pulse with the times.
All men were my brothers. Save one - yes, save one. I would
go back and wreck the establishment. I would disrupt that leather-bound
volume, violate that black skullcap, burn the accounts. But before
fancy could father the act, I recollected myself and all which had passed.
Nor did I marvel at my new-horn might, at my ancient dignity which had
returned. There was a tinkling chink as I ran the yellow pieces
through my fingers, and with the golden music rippling round me I caught
a deeper insight into the mystery of things.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
February 1900.
GOLIAH
In 1924 - to be precise, on the morning of January 3 - the city of San
Francisco awoke to read in one of its daily papers a curious letter,
which had been received by Walter Bassett and which had evidently been
written by some crank. Walter Bassett was the greatest captain
of industry west of the Rockies, and was one of the small group that
controlled the nation in everything but name. As such, he was
the recipient of lucubrations from countless cranks; but this particular
lucubration was so different from the average ruck of similar letters
that, instead of putting it into the waste-basket, he had turned it
over to a reporter. It was signed “Goliah,” and the
superscription gave his address as “Palgrave Island.”
The letter was as follows:
“MR. WALTER BASSETT,
“DEAR SIR:
“I am inviting you, with nine of your fellow-captains of industry,
to visit me here on my island for the purpose of considering plans for
the reconstruction of society upon a more rational basis. Up to
the present, social evolution has been a blind and aimless, blundering
thing. The time has come for a change. Man has risen from
the vitalized slime of the primeval sea to the mastery of matter; but
he has not yet mastered society. Man is to-day as much the slave
to his collective stupidity, as a hundred thousand generations ago he
was a slave to matter.
“There are two theoretical methods whereby man may become the
master of society, and make of society an intelligent and efficacious
device for the pursuit and capture of happiness and laughter.
The first theory advances the proposition that no government can be
wiser or better than the people that compose that government; that reform
and development must spring from the individual; that in so far as the
individuals become wiser and better, by that much will their government
become wiser and better; in short, that the majority of individuals
must become wiser and better, before their government becomes wiser
and better. The mob, the political convention, the abysmal brutality
and stupid ignorance of all concourses of people, give the lie to this
theory. In a mob the collective intelligence and mercy is that
of the least intelligent and most brutal members that compose the mob.
On the other hand, a thousand passengers will surrender themselves to
the wisdom and discretion of the captain, when their ship is in a storm
on the sea. In such matter, he is the wisest and most experienced
among them.
“The second theory advances the proposition that the majority
of the people are not pioneers, that they are weighted down by the inertia
of the established; that the government that is representative of them
represents only their feebleness, and futility, and brutishness; that
this blind thing called government is not the serf of their wills, but
that they are the serfs of it; in short, speaking always of the great
mass, that they do not make government, but that government makes them,
and that government is and has been a stupid and awful monster, misbegotten
of the glimmerings of intelligence that come from the inertia-crushed
mass.
“Personally, I incline to the second theory. Also, I am
impatient. For a hundred thousand generations, from the first
social groups of our savage forbears, government has remained a monster.
To-day, the inertia-crushed mass has less laughter in it than ever before.
In spite of man’s mastery of matter, human suffering and misery
and degradation mar the fair world.
“Wherefore I have decided to step in and become captain of this
world-ship for a while. I have the intelligence and the wide vision
of the skilled expert. Also, I have the power. I shall be
obeyed. The men of all the world shall perform my bidding and
make governments so that they shall become laughter-producers.
These modelled governments I have in mind shall not make the people
happy, wise, and noble by decree; but they shall give opportunity for
the people to become happy, wise, and noble.
“I have spoken. I have invited you, and nine of your fellow-captains,
to confer with me. On March third the yacht Energon will
sail from San Francisco. You are requested to be on board the
night before. This is serious. The affairs of the world
must be handled for a time by a strong hand. Mine is that strong
hand. If you fail to obey my summons, you will die. Candidly,
I do not expect that you will obey. But your death for failure
to obey will cause obedience on the part of those I subsequently summon.
You will have served a purpose. And please remember that I have
no unscientific sentimentality about the value of human life.
I carry always in the background of my consciousness the innumerable
billions of lives that are to laugh and be happy in future aeons on
the earth.
“Yours for the reconstruction of society,
“GOLIAH.”
The publication of this letter did not cause even local amusement.
Men might have smiled to themselves as they read it, but it was so palpably
the handiwork of a crank that it did not merit discussion. Interest
did not arouse till next morning. An Associated Press despatch
to the Eastern states, followed by interviews by eager-nosed reporters,
had brought out the names of the other nine captains of industry who
had received similar letters, but who had not thought the matter of
sufficient importance to be made public. But the interest aroused
was mild, and it would have died out quickly had not Gabberton cartooned
a chronic presidential aspirant as “Goliah.” Then
came the song that was sung hilariously from sea to sea, with the refrain,
“Goliah will catch you if you don’t watch out.”
The weeks passed and the incident was forgotten. Walter Bassett
had forgotten it likewise; but on the evening of February 22, he was
called to the telephone by the Collector of the Port. “I
just wanted to tell you,” said the latter, “that the yacht
Energon has arrived and gone to anchor in the stream off Pier
Seven.”
What happened that night Walter Bassett has never divulged. But
it is known that he rode down in his auto to the water front, chartered
one of Crowley’s launches, and was put aboard the strange yacht.
It is further known that when he returned to the shore, three hours
later, he immediately despatched a sheaf of telegrams to his nine fellow-captains
of industry who had received letters from Goliah. These telegrams
were similarly worded, and read: “The yacht Energon has
arrived. There is something in this. I advise you to come.”
Bassett was laughed at for his pains. It was a huge laugh that
went up (for his telegrams had been made public), and the popular song
on Goliah revived and became more popular than ever. Goliah and
Bassett were cartooned and lampooned unmercifully, the former, as the
Old Man of the Sea, riding on the latter’s neck. The laugh
tittered and rippled through clubs and social circles, was restrainedly
merry in the editorial columns, and broke out in loud guffaws in the
comic weeklies. There was a serious side as well, and Bassett’s
sanity was gravely questioned by many, and especially by his business
associates.
Bassett had ever been a short-tempered man, and after he sent the second
sheaf of telegrams to his brother captains, and had been laughed at
again, he remained silent. In this second sheaf he had said: “Come,
I implore you. As you value your life, come.” He arranged
all his business affairs for an absence, and on the night of March 2
went on board the Energon. The latter, properly cleared,
sailed next morning. And next morning the newsboys in every city
and town were crying “Extra.”
In the slang of the day, Goliah had delivered the goods. The nine
captains of industry who had failed to accept his invitation were dead.
A sort of violent disintegration of the tissues was the report of the
various autopsies held on the bodies of the slain millionaires; yet
the surgeons and physicians (the most highly skilled in the land had
participated) would not venture the opinion that the men had been slain.
Much less would they venture the conclusion, “at the hands of
parties unknown.” It was all too mysterious. They
were stunned. Their scientific credulity broke down. They
had no warrant in the whole domain of science for believing that an
anonymous person on Palgrave Island had murdered the poor gentlemen.
One thing was quickly learned, however; namely, that Palgrave Island
was no myth. It was charted and well known to all navigators,
lying on the line of 160 west longitude, right at its intersection by
the tenth parallel north latitude, and only a few miles away from Diana
Shoal. Like Midway and Fanning, Palgrave Island was isolated,
volcanic and coral in formation. Furthermore, it was uninhabited.
A survey ship, in 1887, had visited the place and reported the existence
of several springs and of a good harbour that was very dangerous of
approach. And that was all that was known of the tiny speck of
land that was soon to have focussed on it the awed attention of the
world.
Goliah remained silent till March 24. On the morning of that day,
the newspapers published his second letter, copies of which had been
received by the ten chief politicians of the United States - ten leading
men in the political world who were conventionally known as “statesmen.”
The letter, with the same superscription as before, was as follows:
“DEAR SIR:
“I have spoken in no uncertain tone. I must be obeyed.
You may consider this an invitation or a summons; but if you still wish
to tread this earth and laugh, you will be aboard the yacht Energon,
in San Francisco harbour, not later than the evening of April 5.
It is my wish and my will that you confer with me here on Palgrave Island
in the matter of reconstructing society upon some rational basis.
“Do not misunderstand me, when I tell you that I am one with a
theory. I want to see that theory work, and therefore I call upon
your cooperation. In this theory of mine, lives are but pawns;
I deal with quantities of lives. I am after laughter, and those
that stand in the way of laughter must perish. The game is big.
There are fifteen hundred million human lives to-day on the planet.
What is your single life against them? It is as naught, in my
theory. And remember that mine is the power. Remember that
I am a scientist, and that one life, or one million of lives, mean nothing
to me as arrayed against the countless billions of billions of the lives
of the generations to come. It is for their laughter that I seek
to reconstruct society now; and against them your own meagre little
life is a paltry thing indeed.
“Whoso has power can command his fellows. By virtue of that
military device known as the phalanx, Alexander conquered his bit of
the world. By virtue of that chemical device, gunpowder, Cortes
with his several hundred cut-throats conquered the empire of the Montezumas.
Now I am in possession of a device that is all my own. In the
course of a century not more than half a dozen fundamental discoveries
or inventions are made. I have made such an invention. The
possession of it gives me the mastery of the world. I shall use
this invention, not for commercial exploitation, but for the good of
humanity. For that purpose I want help - willing agents, obedient
hands; and I am strong enough to compel the service. I am taking
the shortest way, though I am in no hurry. I shall not clutter
my speed with haste.
“The incentive of material gain developed man from the savage
to the semi-barbarian he is today. This incentive has been a useful
device for the development of the human; but it has now fulfilled its
function and is ready to be cast aside into the scrap-heap of rudimentary
vestiges such as gills in the throat and belief in the divine right
of kings. Of course you do not think so; but I do not see that
that will prevent you from aiding me to fling the anachronism into the
scrap-heap. For I tell you now that the time has come when mere
food and shelter and similar sordid things shall be automatic, as free
and easy and involuntary of access as the air. I shall make them
automatic, what of my discovery and the power that discovery gives me.
And with food and shelter automatic, the incentive of material gain
passes away from the world for ever. With food and shelter automatic,
the higher incentives will universally obtain - the spiritual, aesthetic,
and intellectual incentives that will tend to develop and make beautiful
and noble body, mind, and spirit. Then all the world will be dominated
by happiness and laughter. It will be the reign of universal laughter.
“Yours for that day,
“GOLIAH.”
Still the world would not believe. The ten politicians were at
Washington, so that they did not have the opportunity of being convinced
that Bassett had had, and not one of them took the trouble to journey
out to San Francisco to make the opportunity. As for Goliah, he
was hailed by the newspapers as another Tom Lawson with a panacea; and
there were specialists in mental disease who, by analysis of Goliah’s
letters, proved conclusively that he was a lunatic.
The yacht Energon arrived in the harbour of San Francisco on
the afternoon of April 5, and Bassett came ashore. But the Energon
did not sail next day, for not one of the ten summoned politicians
had elected to make the journey to Palgrave Island. The newsboys,
however, called “Extra” that day in all the cities.
The ten politicians were dead. The yacht, lying peacefully at
anchor in the harbour, became the centre of excited interest.
She was surrounded by a flotilla of launches and rowboats, and many
tugs and steamboats ran excursions to her. While the rabble was
firmly kept off, the proper authorities and even reporters were permitted
to board her. The mayor of San Francisco and the chief of police
reported that nothing suspicious was to be seen upon her, and the port
authorities announced that her papers were correct and in order in every
detail. Many photographs and columns of descriptive matter were
run in the newspapers.
The crew was reported to be composed principally of Scandinavians -
fair-haired, blue-eyed Swedes, Norwegians afflicted with the temperamental
melancholy of their race, stolid Russian Finns, and a slight sprinkling
of Americans and English. It was noted that there was nothing
mercurial and flyaway about them. They seemed weighty men, oppressed
by a sad and stolid bovine-sort of integrity. A sober seriousness
and enormous certitude characterized all of them. They appeared
men without nerves and without fear, as though upheld by some overwhelming
power or carried in the hollow of some superhuman hand. The captain,
a sad-eyed, strong-featured American, was cartooned in the papers as
“Gloomy Gus” (the pessimistic hero of the comic supplement).
Some sea-captain recognized the Energon as the yacht Scud,
once owned by Merrivale of the New York Yacht Club. With this
clue it was soon ascertained that the Scud had disappeared several
years before. The agent who sold her reported the purchaser to
be merely another agent, a man he had seen neither before nor since.
The yacht had been reconstructed at Duffey’s Shipyard in New Jersey.
The change in her name and registry occurred at that time and had been
legally executed. Then the Energon had disappeared in the
shroud of mystery.
In the meantime, Bassett was going crazy - at least his friends and
business associates said so. He kept away from his vast business
enterprises and said that he must hold his hands until the other masters
of the world could join with him in the reconstruction of society -
proof indubitable that Goliah’s bee had entered his bonnet.
To reporters he had little to say. He was not at liberty, he said,
to relate what he had seen on Palgrave Island; but he could assure them
that the matter was serious, the most serious thing that had ever happened.
His final word was that, the world was on the verge of a turnover, for
good or ill he did not know, but, one way or the other, he was absolutely
convinced that the turnover was coming. As for business, business
could go hang. He had seen things, he had, and that was all there
was to it.
There was a great telegraphing, during this period, between the local
Federal officials and the state and war departments at Washington.
A secret attempt was made late one afternoon to board the Energon
and place the captain under arrest - the Attorney-General having
given the opinion that the captain could be held for the murder of the
ten “statesmen.” The government launch was seen to
leave Meigg’s Wharf and steer for the Energon, and that
was the last ever seen of the launch and the men on board of it.
The government tried to keep the affair hushed up, but the cat was slipped
out of the bag by the families of the missing men, and the papers were
filled with monstrous versions of the affair.
The government now proceeded to extreme measures. The battleship
Alaska was ordered to capture the strange yacht, or, failing
that, to sink her. These were secret instructions; but thousands
of eyes, from the water front and from the shipping in the harbour,
witnessed what happened that afternoon. The battleship got under
way and steamed slowly toward the Energon. At half a mile
distant the battleship blew up - simply blew up, that was all, her shattered
frame sinking to the bottom of the bay, a riff-raff of wreckage and
a few survivors strewing the surface. Among the survivors was
a young lieutenant who had had charge of the wireless on board the Alaska.
The reporters got hold of him first, and he talked. No sooner
had the Alaska got under way, he said, than a message was received
from the Energon. It was in the international code, and
it was a warning to the Alaska to come no nearer than half a
mile. He had sent the message, through the speaking tube, immediately
to the captain. He did not know anything more, except that the
Energon twice repeated the message and that five minutes afterward
the explosion occurred. The captain of the Alaska had perished
with his ship, and nothing more was to be learned.
The Energon, however, promptly hoisted anchor and cleared out
to sea. A great clamour was raised by the papers; the government
was charged with cowardice and vacillation in its dealings with a mere
pleasure yacht and a lunatic who called himself “Goliah,”
and immediate and decisive action was demanded. Also, a great
cry went up about the loss of life, especially the wanton killing of
the ten “statesmen.” Goliah promptly replied.
In fact, so prompt was his reply that the experts in wireless telegraphy
announced that, since it was impossible to send wireless messages so
great a distance, Goliah was in their very midst and not on Palgrave
Island. Goliah’s letter was delivered to the Associated
Press by a messenger boy who had been engaged on the street. The
letter was as follows:
“What are a few paltry lives? In your insane wars you destroy
millions of lives and think nothing of it. In your fratricidal
commercial struggle you kill countless babes, women, and men, and you
triumphantly call the shambles ‘individualism.’ I
call it anarchy. I am going to put a stop to your wholesale destruction
of human beings. I want laughter, not slaughter. Those of
you who stand in the way of laughter will get slaughter.
“Your government is trying to delude you into believing that the
destruction of the Alaska was an accident. Know here and
now that it was by my orders that the Alaska was destroyed.
In a few short months, all battleships on all seas will be destroyed
or flung to the scrap-heap, and all nations shall disarm; fortresses
shall be dismantled, armies disbanded, and warfare shall cease from
the earth. Mine is the power. I am the will of God.
The whole world shall be in vassalage to me, but it shall be a vassalage
of peace.
“I am
GOLIAH.”
“Blow Palgrave Island out of the water!” was the head-line
retort of the newspapers. The government was of the same frame
of mind, and the assembling of the fleets began. Walter Bassett
broke out in ineffectual protest, but was swiftly silenced by the threat
of a lunacy commission. Goliah remained silent. Against
Palgrave Island five great fleets were hurled - the Asiatic Squadron,
the South Pacific Squadron, the North Pacific Squadron, the Caribbean
Squadron, and half of the North Atlantic Squadron, the two latter coming
through the Panama Canal.
“I have the honour to report that we sighted Palgrave Island on
the evening of April 29,” ran the report of Captain Johnson, of
the battleship North Dakota, to the Secretary of the Navy.
“The Asiatic Squadron was delayed and did not arrive until the
morning of April 30. A council of the admirals was held, and it
was decided to attack early next morning. The destroyer, Swift
VII, crept in, unmolested, and reported no warlike preparations
on the island. It noted several small merchant steamers in the
harbour, and the existence of a small village in a hopelessly exposed
position that could be swept by our fire.
“It had been decided that all the vessels should rush in, scattered,
upon the island, opening fire at three miles, and continuing to the
edge of the reef, there to retain loose formation and engage.
Palgrave Island repeatedly warned us, by wireless, in the international
code, to keep outside the ten-mile limit; but no heed was paid to the
warnings.
“The North Dakota did not take part in the movement of
the morning of May 1. This was due to a slight accident of the
preceding night that temporarily disabled her steering-gear. The
morning of May 1 broke clear and calm. There was a slight breeze
from the south-west that quickly died away. The North Dakota
lay twelve miles off the island. At the signal the squadrons
charged in upon the island, from all sides, at full speed. Our
wireless receiver continued to tick off warnings from the island.
The ten-mile limit was passed, and nothing happened. I watched
through my glasses. At five miles nothing happened; at four miles
nothing happened; at three miles, the New York, in the lead on
our side of the island, opened fire. She fired only one shot.
Then she blew up. The rest of the vessels never fired a shot.
They began to blow up, everywhere, before our eyes. Several swerved
about and started back, but they failed to escape. The destroyer,
Dart XXX, nearly made the ten-mile limit when she blew up.
She was the last survivor. No harm came to the North Dakota,
and that night, the steering-gear being repaired, I gave orders
to sail for San Francisco.”
To say that the United States was stunned is but to expose the inadequacy
of language. The whole world was stunned. It confronted
that blight of the human brain, the unprecedented. Human endeavour
was a jest, a monstrous futility, when a lunatic on a lonely island,
who owned a yacht and an exposed village, could destroy five of the
proudest fleets of Christendom. And how had he done it?
Nobody knew. The scientists lay down in the dust of the common
road and wailed and gibbered. They did not know. Military
experts committed suicide by scores. The mighty fabric of warfare
they had fashioned was a gossamer veil rent asunder by a miserable lunatic.
It was too much for their sanity. Mere human reason could not
withstand the shock. As the savage is crushed by the sleight-of-hand
of the witch doctor, so was the world crushed by the magic of Goliah.
How did he do it? It was the awful face of the Unknown upon which
the world gazed and by which it was frightened out of the memory of
its proudest achievements.
But all the world was not stunned. There was the invariable exception
- the Island Empire of Japan. Drunken with the wine of success
deep-quaffed, without superstition and without faith in aught but its
own ascendant star, laughing at the wreckage of science and mad with
pride of race, it went forth upon the way of war. America’s
fleets had been destroyed. From the battlements of heaven the
multitudinous ancestral shades of Japan leaned down. The opportunity,
God-given, had come. The Mikado was in truth a brother to the
gods.
The war-monsters of Japan were loosed in mighty fleets. The Philippines
were gathered in as a child gathers a nosegay. It took longer
for the battleships to travel to Hawaii, to Panama, and to the Pacific
Coast. The United States was panic-stricken, and there arose the
powerful party of dishonourable peace. In the midst of the clamour
the Energon arrived in San Francisco Bay and Goliah spoke once
more. There was a little brush as the Energon came in,
and a few explosions of magazines occurred along the war-tunnelled hills
as the coast defences went to smash. Also, the blowing up of the
submarine mines in the Golden Gate made a remarkably fine display.
Goliah’s message to the people of San Francisco, dated as usual
from Palgrave Island, was published in the papers. It ran:
“Peace? Peace be with you. You shall have peace.
I have spoken to this purpose before. And give you me peace.
Leave my yacht Energon alone. Commit one overt act against
her and not one stone in San Francisco shall stand upon another.
“To-morrow let all good citizens go out upon the hills that slope
down to the sea. Go with music and laughter and garlands.
Make festival for the new age that is dawning. Be like children
upon your hills, and witness the passing of war. Do not miss the
opportunity. It is your last chance to behold what henceforth
you will be compelled to seek in museums of antiquities.
“I promise you a merry day,
“GOLIAH.”
The madness of magic was in the air. With the people it was as
if all their gods had crashed and the heavens still stood. Order
and law had passed away from the universe; but the sun still shone,
the wind still blew, the flowers still bloomed - that was the amazing
thing about it. That water should continue to run downhill was
a miracle. All the stabilities of the human mind and human achievement
were crumbling. The one stable thing that remained was Goliah,
a madman on an island. And so it was that the whole population
of San Francisco went forth next day in colossal frolic upon the hills
that overlooked the sea. Brass bands and banners went forth, brewery
wagons and Sunday-school picnics - all the strange heterogeneous groupings
of swarming metropolitan life.
On the sea-rim rose the smoke from the funnels of a hundred hostile
vessels of war, all converging upon the helpless, undefended Golden
Gate. And not all undefended, for out through the Golden Gate
moved the Energon, a tiny toy of white, rolling like a straw
in the stiff sea on the bar where a strong ebb-tide ran in the teeth
of the summer sea-breeze. But the Japanese were cautious.
Their thirty- and forty-thousand-ton battleships slowed down half a
dozen miles offshore and manoeuvred in ponderous evolutions, while tiny
scout-boats (lean, six-funnelled destroyers) ran in, cutting blackly
the flashing sea like so many sharks. But, compared with the Energon,
they were leviathans. Compared with them, the Energon was
as the sword of the arch-angel Michael, and they the forerunners of
the hosts of hell.
But the flashing of the sword, the good people of San Francisco, gathered
on her hills, never saw. Mysterious, invisible, it cleaved the
air and smote the mightiest blows of combat the world had ever witnessed.
The good people of San Francisco saw little and understood less.
They saw only a million and a half tons of brine-cleaving, thunder-flinging
fabrics hurled skyward and smashed back in ruin to sink into the sea.
It was all over in five minutes. Remained upon the wide expanse
of sea only the Energon, rolling white and toylike on the bar.
Goliah spoke to the Mikado and the Elder Statesmen. It was only
an ordinary cable message, despatched from San Francisco by the captain
of the Energon, but it was of sufficient moment to cause the
immediate withdrawal of Japan from the Philippines and of her surviving
fleets from the sea. Japan the sceptical was converted.
She had felt the weight of Goliah’s arm. And meekly she
obeyed when Goliah commanded her to dismantle her war vessels and to
turn the metal into useful appliances for the arts of peace. In
all the ports, navy-yards, machine-shops, and foundries of Japan tens
of thousands of brown-skinned artisans converted the war-monsters into
myriads of useful things, such as ploughshares (Goliah insisted on ploughshares),
gasolene engines, bridge-trusses, telephone and telegraph wires, steel
rails, locomotives, and rolling stock for railways. It was a world-penance
for a world to see, and paltry indeed it made appear that earlier penance,
barefooted in the snow, of an emperor to a pope for daring to squabble
over temporal power.
Goliah’s next summons was to the ten leading scientists of the
United States. This time there was no hesitancy in obeying.
The savants were ludicrously prompt, some of them waiting in San Francisco
for weeks so as not to miss the scheduled sailing-date. They departed
on the Energon on June 15; and while they were on the sea, on
the way to Palgrave Island, Goliah performed another spectacular feat.
Germany and France were preparing to fly at each other’s throats.
Goliah commanded peace. They ignored the command, tacitly agreeing
to fight it out on land where it seemed safer for the belligerently
inclined. Goliah set the date of June 19 for the cessation of
hostile preparations. Both countries mobilized their armies on
June 18, and hurled them at the common frontier. And on June 19,
Goliah struck. All generals, war-secretaries, and jingo-leaders
in the two countries died on that day; and that day two vast armies,
undirected, like strayed sheep, walked over each other’s frontiers
and fraternized. But the great German war lord had escaped - it
was learned, afterward, by hiding in the huge safe where were stored
the secret archives of his empire. And when he emerged he was
a very penitent war lord, and like the Mikado of Japan he was set to
work beating his sword-blades into ploughshares and pruning-hooks.
But in the escape of the German Emperor was discovered a great significance.
The scientists of the world plucked up courage, got back their nerve.
One thing was conclusively evident - Goliah’s power was not magic.
Law still reigned in the universe. Goliah’s power had limitations,
else had the German Emperor not escaped by secretly hiding in a steel
safe. Many learned articles on the subject appeared in the magazines.
The ten scientists arrived back from Palgrave Island on July 6.
Heavy platoons of police protected them from the reporters. No,
they had not see Goliah, they said in the one official interview that
was vouchsafed; but they had talked with him, and they had seen things.
They were not permitted to state definitely all that they had seen and
heard, but they could say that the world was about to be revolutionized.
Goliah was in the possession of a tremendous discovery that placed all
the world at his mercy, and it was a good thing for the world that Goliah
was merciful. The ten scientists proceeded directly to Washington
on a special train, where, for days, they were closeted with the heads
of government, while the nation hung breathless on the outcome.
But the outcome was a long time in arriving. From Washington the
President issued commands to the masters and leading figures of the
nation. Everything was secret. Day by day deputations of
bankers, railway lords, captains of industry, and Supreme Court justices
arrived; and when they arrived they remained. The weeks dragged
on, and then, on August 25, began the famous issuance of proclamations.
Congress and the Senate co-operated with the President in this, while
the Supreme Court justices gave their sanction and the money lords and
the captains of industry agreed. War was declared upon the capitalist
masters of the nation. Martial law was declared over the whole
United States. The supreme power was vested in the President.
In one day, child-labour in the whole country was abolished. It
was done by decree, and the United States was prepared with its army
to enforce its decrees. In the same day all women factory workers
were dismissed to their homes, and all the sweat-shops were closed.
“But we cannot make profits!” wailed the petty capitalists.
“Fools!” was the retort of Goliah. “As if the
meaning of life were profits! Give up your businesses and your
profit-mongering.” “But there is nobody to buy our
business!” they wailed. “Buy and sell - is that all
the meaning life has for you?” replied Goliah. “You
have nothing to sell. Turn over your little cut-throating, anarchistic
businesses to the government so that they may be rationally organized
and operated.” And the next day, by decree, the government
began taking possession of all factories, shops, mines, ships, railroads,
and producing lands.
The nationalization of the means of production and distribution went
on apace. Here and there were sceptical capitalists of moment.
They were made prisoners and haled to Palgrave Island, and when they
returned they always acquiesced in what the government was doing.
A little later the journey to Palgrave Island became unnecessary.
When objection was made, the reply of the officials was “Goliah
has spoken” - which was another way of saying, “He must
be obeyed.”
The captains of industry became heads of departments. It was found
that civil engineers, for instance, worked just as well in government
employ as before, they had worked in private employ. It was found
that men of high executive ability could not violate their nature.
They could not escape exercising their executive ability, any more than
a crab could escape crawling or a bird could escape flying. And
so it was that all the splendid force of the men who had previously
worked for themselves was now put to work for the good of society.
The half-dozen great railway chiefs co-operated in the organizing of
a national system of railways that was amazingly efficacious.
Never again was there such a thing as a car shortage. These chiefs
were not the Wall Street railway magnates, but they were the men who
formerly had done the real work while in the employ of the Wall Street
magnates.
Wall Street was dead. There was no more buying and selling and
speculating. Nobody had anything to buy or sell. There was
nothing in which to speculate. “Put the stock gamblers to
work,” said Goliah; “give those that are young, and that
so desire, a chance to learn useful trades.” “Put
the drummers, and salesmen, and advertising agents, and real estate
agents to work,” said Goliah; and by hundreds of thousands the
erstwhile useless middlemen and parasites went into useful occupations.
The four hundred thousand idle gentlemen of the country who had lived
upon incomes were likewise put to work. Then there were a lot
of helpless men in high places who were cleared out, the remarkable
thing about this being that they were cleared out by their own fellows.
Of this class were the professional politicians, whose wisdom and power
consisted of manipulating machine politics and of grafting. There
was no longer any graft. Since there were no private interests
to purchase special privileges, no bribes were offered to legislators,
and legislators for the first time legislated for the people.
The result was that men who were efficient, not in corruption, but in
direction, found their way into the legislatures.
With this rational organization of society amazing results were brought
about. The national day’s work was eight hours, and yet
production increased. In spite of the great permanent improvements
and of the immense amount of energy consumed in systematizing the competitive
chaos of society, production doubled and tripled upon itself.
The standard of living increased, and still consumption could not keep
up with production. The maximum working age was decreased to fifty
years, to forty-nine years, and to forty-eight years. The minimum
working age went up from sixteen years to eighteen years. The
eight-hour day became a seven-hour day, and in a few months the national
working day was reduced to five hours.
In the meantime glimmerings were being caught, not of the identity of
Goliah, but of how he had worked and prepared for his assuming control
of the world. Little things leaked out, clues were followed up,
apparently unrelated things were pieced together. Strange stories
of blacks stolen from Africa were remembered, of Chinese and Japanese
contract coolies who had mysteriously disappeared, of lonely South Sea
Islands raided and their inhabitants carried away; stories of yachts
and merchant steamers, mysteriously purchased, that had disappeared
and the descriptions of which remotely tallied with the crafts that
had carried the Orientals and Africans and islanders away. Where
had Goliah got the sinews of war? was the question. And the surmised
answer was: By exploiting these stolen labourers. It was they
that lived in the exposed village on Palgrave Island. It was the
product of their toil that had purchased the yachts and merchant steamers
and enabled Goliah’s agents to permeate society and carry out
his will. And what was the product of their toil that had given
Goliah the wealth necessary to realize his plans? Commercial radium,
the newspapers proclaimed; and radiyte, and radiosole, and argatium,
and argyte, and the mysterious golyte (that had proved so valuable in
metallurgy). These were the new compounds, discovered in the first
decade of the twentieth century, the commercial and scientific use of
which had become so enormous in the second decade.
The line of fruit boats that ran from Hawaii to San Francisco was declared
to be the property of Goliah. This was a surmise, for no other
owner could be discovered, and the agents who handled the shipments
of the fruit boats were only agents. Since no one else owned the
fruit boats, then Goliah must own them. The point of which is:
that it leaked out that the major portion of the world’s
supply in these precious compounds was brought to San Francisco by those
very fruit boats. That the whole chain of surmise was correct
was proved in later years when Goliah’s slaves were liberated
and honourably pensioned by the international government of the world.
It was at that time that the seal of secrecy was lifted from the lips
of his agents and higher emissaries, and those that chose revealed much
of the mystery of Goliah’s organization and methods. His
destroying angels, however, remained for ever dumb. Who the men
were who went forth to the high places and killed at his bidding will
be unknown to the end of time - for kill they did, by means of that
very subtle and then-mysterious force that Goliah had discovered and
named “Energon.”
But at that time Energon, the little giant that was destined to do the
work of the world, was unknown and undreamed of. Only Goliah knew,
and he kept his secret well. Even his agents, who were armed with
it, and who, in the case of the yacht Energon, destroyed a mighty
fleet of war-ships by exploding their magazines, knew not what the subtle
and potent force was, nor how it was manufactured. They knew only
one of its many uses, and in that one use they had been instructed by
Goliah. It is now well known that radium, and radiyte, and radiosole,
and all the other compounds, were by-products of the manufacture of
Energon by Goliah from the sunlight; but at that time nobody knew what
Energon was, and Goliah continued to awe and rule the world.
One of the uses of Energon was in wireless telegraphy. It was
by its means that Goliah was able to communicate with his agents all
over the world. At that time the apparatus required by an agent
was so clumsy that it could not be packed in anything less than a fair-sized
steamer trunk. To-day, thanks to the improvements of Hendsoll,
the perfected apparatus can be carried in a coat pocket.
It was in December, 1924, that Goliah sent out his famous “Christmas
Letter,” part of the text of which is here given:
“So far, while I have kept the rest of the nations from each other’s
throats, I have devoted myself particularly to the United States.
Now I have not given to the people of the United States a rational social
organization. What I have done has been to compel them to make
that organization themselves. There is more laughter in the United
States these days, and there is more sense. Food and shelter are
no longer obtained by the anarchistic methods of so-called individualism
but are now wellnigh automatic. And the beauty of it is that the
people of the United States have achieved all this for themselves.
I did not achieve it for them. I repeat, they achieved it for
themselves. All that I did was to put the fear of death in the
hearts of the few that sat in the high places and obstructed the coming
of rationality and laughter. The fear of death made those in the
high places get out of the way, that was all, and gave the intelligence
of man a chance to realize itself socially.
“In the year that is to come I shall devote myself to the rest
of the world. I shall put the fear of death in the hearts of all
that sit in the high places in all the nations. And they will
do as they have done in the United States - get down out of the high
places and give the intelligence of man a chance for social rationality.
All the nations shall tread the path the United States is now on.
“And when all the nations are well along on that path, I shall
have something else for them. But first they must travel that
path for themselves. They must demonstrate that the intelligence
of mankind to-day, with the mechanical energy now at its disposal, is
capable of organizing society so that food and shelter be made automatic,
labour be reduced to a three-hour day, and joy and laughter be made
universal. And when that is accomplished, not by me but by the
intelligence of mankind, then I shall make a present to the world of
a new mechanical energy. This is my discovery. This Energon
is nothing more nor less than the cosmic energy that resides in the
solar rays. When it is harnessed by mankind it will do the work
of the world. There will be no more multitudes of miners slaving
out their lives in the bowels of the earth, no more sooty firemen and
greasy engineers. All may dress in white if they so will.
The work of life will have become play and young and old will be the
children of joy, and the business of living will become joy; and they
will compete, one with another, in achieving ethical concepts and spiritual
heights, in fashioning pictures and songs, and stories, in statecraft
and beauty craft, in the sweat and the endeavour of the wrestler and
the runner and the player of games - all will compete, not for sordid
coin and base material reward, but for the joy that shall be theirs
in the development and vigour of flesh and in the development and keenness
of spirit. All will be joy-smiths, and their task shall be to
beat out laughter from the ringing anvil of life.
“And now one word for the immediate future. On New Year’s
Day all nations shall disarm, all fortresses and war-ships shall be
dismantled, and all armies shall be disbanded.
GOLIAH.”
On New Year’s Day all the world disarmed. The millions of
soldiers and sailors and workmen in the standing armies, in the navies,
and in the countless arsenals, machine-shops, and factories for the
manufacture of war machinery, were dismissed to their homes. These
many millions of men, as well as their costly war machinery, had hitherto
been supported on the back of labour. They now went into useful
occupations, and the released labour giant heaved a mighty sigh of relief.
The policing of the world was left to the peace officers and was purely
social, whereas war had been distinctly anti-social.
Ninety per cent. of the crimes against society had been crimes against
private property. With the passing of private property, at least
in the means of production, and with the organization of industry that
gave every man a chance, the crimes against private property practically
ceased. The police forces everywhere were reduced repeatedly and
again and again. Nearly all occasional and habitual criminals
ceased voluntarily from their depredations. There was no longer
any need for them to commit crime. They merely changed with changing
conditions. A smaller number of criminals was put into hospitals
and cured. And the remnant of the hopelessly criminal and degenerate
was segregated. And the courts in all countries were likewise
decreased in number again and again. Ninety-five per cent. of
all civil cases had been squabbles over property, conflicts of property-rights,
lawsuits, contests of wills, breaches of contract, bankruptcies, etc.
With the passing of private property, this ninety-five per cent. of
the cases that cluttered the courts also passed. The courts became
shadows, attenuated ghosts, rudimentary vestiges of the anarchistic
times that had preceded the coming of Goliah.
The year 1925 was a lively year in the world’s history.
Goliah ruled the world with a strong hand. Kings and emperors
journeyed to Palgrave Island, saw the wonders of Energon, and went away,
with the fear of death in their hearts, to abdicate thrones and crowns
and hereditary licenses. When Goliah spoke to politicians (so-called
“statesmen”), they obeyed . . . or died. He dictated
universal reforms, dissolved refractory parliaments, and to the great
conspiracy that was formed of mutinous money lords and captains of industry
he sent his destroying angels. “The time is past for fooling,”
he told them. “You are anachronisms. You stand in
the way of humanity. To the scrap-heap with you.”
To those that protested, and they were many, he said: “This is
no time for logomachy. You can argue for centuries. It is
what you have done in the past. I have no time for argument.
Get out of the way.”
With the exception of putting a stop to war, and of indicating the broad
general plan, Goliah did nothing. By putting the fear of death
into the hearts of those that sat in the high places and obstructed
progress, Goliah made the opportunity for the unshackled intelligence
of the best social thinkers of the world to exert itself. Goliah
left all the multitudinous details of reconstruction to these social
thinkers. He wanted them to prove that they were able to do it,
and they proved it. It was due to their initiative that the white
plague was stamped out from the world. It was due to them, and
in spite of a deal of protesting from the sentimentalists, that all
the extreme hereditary inefficients were segregated and denied marriage.
Goliah had nothing whatever to do with the instituting of the colleges
of invention. This idea originated practically simultaneously
in the minds of thousands of social thinkers. The time was ripe
for the realization of the idea, and everywhere arose the splendid institutions
of invention. For the first time the ingenuity of man was loosed
upon the problem of simplifying life, instead of upon the making of
money-earning devices. The affairs of life, such as house-cleaning,
dish and window-washing, dust-removing, and scrubbing and clothes-washing,
and all the endless sordid and necessary details, were simplified by
invention until they became automatic. We of to-day cannot realize
the barbarously filthy and slavish lives of those that lived prior to
1925.
The international government of the world was another idea that sprang
simultaneously into the minds of thousands. The successful realization
of this idea was a surprise to many, but as a surprise it was nothing
to that received by the mildly protestant sociologists and biologists
when irrefutable facts exploded the doctrine of Malthus. With
leisure and joy in the world; with an immensely higher standard of living;
and with the enormous spaciousness of opportunity for recreation, development,
and pursuit of beauty and nobility and all the higher attributes, the
birth-rate fell, and fell astoundingly. People ceased breeding
like cattle. And better than that, it was immediately noticeable
that a higher average of children was being born. The doctrine
of Malthus was knocked into a cocked hat - or flung to the scrap-heap,
as Goliah would have put it.
All that Goliah had predicted that the intelligence of mankind could
accomplish with the mechanical energy at its disposal, came to pass.
Human dissatisfaction practically disappeared. The elderly people
were the great grumblers; but when they were honourably pensioned by
society, as they passed the age limit for work, the great majority ceased
grumbling. They found themselves better off in their idle old
days under the new regime, enjoying vastly more pleasure and comforts
than they had in their busy and toilsome youth under the old regime.
The younger generation had easily adapted itself too the changed order,
and the very young had never known anything else. The sum of human
happiness had increased enormously. The world had become gay and
sane. Even the old fogies of professors of sociology, who had
opposed with might and main the coming of the new regime, made no complaint.
They were a score of times better remunerated than in the old days,
and they were not worked nearly so hard. Besides, they were busy
revising sociology and writing new text-books on the subject.
Here and there, it is true, there were atavisms, men who yearned for
the flesh-pots and cannibal-feasts of the old alleged “individualism,”
creatures long of teeth and savage of claw who wanted to prey upon their
fellow-men; but they were looked upon as diseased, and were treated
in hospitals. A small remnant, however, proved incurable, and
was confined in asylums and denied marriage. Thus there was no
progeny to inherit their atavistic tendencies.
As the years went by, Goliah dropped out of the running of the world.
There was nothing for him to run. The world was running itself,
and doing it smoothly and beautifully. In 1937, Goliah made his
long-promised present of Energon to the world. He himself had
devised a thousand ways in which the little giant should do the work
of the world - all of which he made public at the same time. But
instantly the colleges of invention seized upon Energon and utilized
it in a hundred thousand additional ways. In fact, as Goliah confessed
in his letter of March 1938, the colleges of invention cleared up several
puzzling features of Energon that had baffled him during the preceding
years. With the introduction of the use of Energon the two-hour
work-day was cut down almost to nothing. As Goliah had predicted,
work indeed became play. And, so tremendous was man’s productive
capacity, due to Energon and the rational social utilization of it,
that the humblest citizen enjoyed leisure and time and opportunity for
an immensely greater abundance of living than had the most favoured
under the old anarchistic system.
Nobody had ever seen Goliah, and all peoples began to clamour for their
saviour to appear. While the world did not minimize his discovery
of Energon, it was decided that greater than that was his wide social
vision. He was a superman, a scientific superman; and the curiosity
of the world to see him had become wellnigh unbearable. It was
in 1941, after much hesitancy on his part, that he finally emerged from
Palgrave Island. He arrived on June 6 in San Francisco, and for
the first time, since his retirement to Palgrave Island, the world looked
upon his face. And the world was disappointed. Its imagination
had been touched. An heroic figure had been made out of Goliah.
He was the man, or the demi-god, rather, who had turned the planet over.
The deeds of Alexander, Cæsar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon were
as the play of babes alongside his colossal achievements.
And ashore in San Francisco and through its streets stepped and rode
a little old man, sixty-five years of age, well preserved, with a pink-and-white
complexion and a bald spot on his head the size of an apple. He
was short-sighted and wore spectacles. But when the spectacles
were removed, his were quizzical blue eyes like a child’s, filled
with mild wonder at the world. Also his eyes had a way of twinkling,
accompanied by a screwing up of the face, as if he laughed at the huge
joke he had played upon the world, trapping it, in spite of itself,
into happiness and laughter.
For a scientific superman and world tyrant, he had remarkable weaknesses.
He loved sweets, and was inordinately fond of salted almonds and salted
pecans, especially of the latter. He always carried a paper bag
of them in his pocket, and he had a way of saying frequently that the
chemism of his nature demanded such fare. Perhaps his most astonishing
failing was cats. He had an ineradicable aversion to that domestic
animal. It will be remembered that he fainted dead away with sudden
fright, while speaking in Brotherhood Palace, when the janitor’s
cat walked out upon the stage and brushed against his legs.
But no sooner had he revealed himself to the world than he was identified.
Old-time friends had no difficulty in recognizing him as Percival Stultz,
the German-American who, in 1898, had worked in the Union Iron Works,
and who, for two years at that time, had been secretary of Branch 369
of the International Brotherhood of Machinists. It was in 1901,
then twenty-five years of age, that he had taken special scientific
courses at the University of California, at the same time supporting
himself by soliciting what was then known as “life insurance.”
His records as a student are preserved in the university museum, and
they are unenviable. He is remembered by the professors he sat
under chiefly for his absent-mindedness. Undoubtedly, even then,
he was catching glimpses of the wide visions that later were to be his.
His naming himself “Goliah” and shrouding himself in mystery
was his little joke, he later explained. As Goliah, or any other
thing like that, he said, he was able to touch the imagination of the
world and turn it over; but as Percival Stultz, wearing side-whiskers
and spectacles, and weighing one hundred and eighteen pounds, he would
have been unable to turn over a pecan - “not even a salted pecan.”
But the world quickly got over its disappointment in his personal appearance
and antecedents. It knew him and revered him as the master-mind
of the ages; and it loved him for himself, for his quizzical short-sighted
eyes and the inimitable way in which he screwed up his face when he
laughed; it loved him for his simplicity and comradeship and warm humanness,
and for his fondness for salted pecans and his aversion to cats.
And to-day, in the wonder-city of Asgard, rises in awful beauty that
monument to him that dwarfs the pyramids and all the monstrous blood-stained
monuments of antiquity. And on that monument, as all know, is
inscribed in imperishable bronze the prophecy and the fulfilment: “ALL
WILL BE JOY-SMITHS, AND THEIR TASK SHALL BE TO BEAT OUT LAUGHTER FROM
THE RINGING ANVIL OF LIFE.”
[EDITORIAL NOTE. - This remarkable production is the work of Harry Beckwith,
a student in the Lowell High School of San Francisco, and it is here
reproduced chiefly because of the youth of its author. Far be
it from our policy to burden our readers with ancient history; and when
it is known that Harry Beckwith was only fifteen when the fore-going
was written, our motive will be understood. “Goliah”
won the Premier for high school composition in 2254, and last year Harry
Beckwith took advantage of the privilege earned, by electing to spend
six months in Asgard. The wealth of historical detail, the atmosphere
of the times, and the mature style of the composition are especially
noteworthy in one so young.]
THE GOLDEN POPPY
I have a poppy field. That is, by the grace of God and the good-nature
of editors, I am enabled to place each month divers gold pieces into
a clerical gentleman’s hands, and in return for said gold pieces
I am each month reinvested with certain proprietary-rights in a poppy
field. This field blazes on the rim of the Piedmont Hills.
Beneath lies all the world. In the distance, across the silver
sweep of bay, San Francisco smokes on her many hills like a second Rome.
Not far away, Mount Tamalpais thrusts a rugged shoulder into the sky;
and midway between is the Golden Gate, where sea mists love to linger.
From the poppy field we often see the shimmering blue of the Pacific
beyond, and the busy ships that go for ever out and in.
“We shall have great joy in our poppy field,” said Bess.
“Yes,” said I; “how the poor city folk will envy when
they come to see us, and how we will make all well again when we send
them off with great golden armfuls!”
“But those things will have to come down,” I added, pointing
to numerous obtrusive notices (relics of the last tenant) displayed
conspicuously along the boundaries, and bearing, each and all, this
legend:
“Private Grounds. No Trespassing.”
“Why should we refuse the poor city folk a ramble over our field,
because, forsooth, they have not the advantage of our acquaintance?”
“How I abhor such things,” said Bess; “the arrogant
symbols of power.”
“They disgrace human nature,” said I.
“They shame the generous landscape,” she said, “and
they are abominable.”
“Piggish!” quoth I, hotly. “Down with them!”
We looked forward to the coming of the poppies, did Bess and I, looked
forward as only creatures of the city may look who have been long denied.
I have forgotten to mention the existence of a house above the poppy
field, a squat and wandering bungalow in which we had elected to forsake
town traditions and live in fresher and more vigorous ways. The
first poppies came, orange-yellow and golden in the standing grain,
and we went about gleefully, as though drunken with their wine, and
told each other that the poppies were there. We laughed at unexpected
moments, in the midst of silences, and at times grew ashamed and stole
forth secretly to gaze upon our treasury. But when the great wave
of poppy-flame finally spilled itself down the field, we shouted aloud,
and danced, and clapped our hands, freely and frankly mad.
And then came the Goths. My face was in a lather, the time of
the first invasion, and I suspended my razor in mid-air to gaze out
on my beloved field. At the far end I saw a little girl and a
little boy, their arms filled with yellow spoil. Ah, thought I,
an unwonted benevolence burgeoning, what a delight to me is their delight!
It is sweet that children should pick poppies in my field. All
summer shall they pick poppies in my field. But they must be little
children, I added as an afterthought, and they must pick from the lower
end - this last prompted by a glance at the great golden fellows nodding
in the wheat beneath my window. Then the razor descended.
Shaving was always an absorbing task, and I did not glance out of the
window again until the operation was completed. And then I was
bewildered. Surely this was not my poppy field. No - and
yes, for there were the tall pines clustering austerely together on
one side, the magnolia tree burdened with bloom, and the Japanese quinces
splashing the driveway hedge with blood. Yes, it was the field,
but no wave of poppy-flame spilled down it, nor did the great golden
fellows nod in the wheat beneath my window. I rushed into a jacket
and out of the house. In the far distance were disappearing two
huge balls of colour, orange and yellow, for all the world like perambulating
poppies of cyclopean breed.
“Johnny,” said I to the nine-year-old son of my sister,
“Johnny, whenever little girls come into our field to pick poppies,
you must go down to them, and in a very quiet and gentlemanly manner,
tell them it is not allowed.”
Warm days came, and the sun drew another blaze from the free-bosomed
earth. Whereupon a neighbour’s little girl, at the behest
of her mother, duly craved and received permission from Bess to gather
a few poppies for decorative purposes. But of this I was uninformed,
and when I descried her in the midst of the field I waved my arms like
a semaphore against the sky.
“Little girl!” called I. “Little girl!”
The little girl’s legs blurred the landscape as she fled, and
in high elation I sought Bess to tell of the potency of my voice.
Nobly she came to the rescue, departing forthwith on an expedition of
conciliation and explanation to the little girl’s mother.
But to this day the little girl seeks cover at sight of me, and I know
the mother will never be as cordial as she would otherwise have been.
Came dark, overcast days, stiff, driving winds, and pelting rains, day
on day, without end, and the city folk cowered in their dwelling-places
like flood-beset rats; and like rats, half-drowned and gasping, when
the weather cleared they crawled out and up the green Piedmont slopes
to bask in the blessed sunshine. And they invaded my field in
swarms and droves, crushing the sweet wheat into the earth and with
lustful hands ripping the poppies out by the roots.
“I shall put up the warnings against trespassing,” I said.
“Yes,” said Bess, with a sigh. “I’m afraid
it is necessary.”
The day was yet young when she sighed again:
“I’m afraid, O Man, that your signs are of no avail.
People have forgotten how to read, these days.”
I went out on the porch. A city nymph, in cool summer gown and
picture hat, paused before one of my newly reared warnings and read
it through with care. Profound deliberation characterized her
movements. She was statuesquely tall, but with a toss of the head
and a flirt of the skirt she dropped on hands and knees, crawled under
the fence, and came to her feet on the inside with poppies in both her
hands. I walked down the drive and talked ethically to her, and
she went away. Then I put up more signs.
At one time, years ago, these hills were carpeted with poppies.
As between the destructive forces and the will “to live,”
the poppies maintained an equilibrium with their environment.
But the city folk constituted a new and terrible destructive force,
the equilibrium was overthrown, and the poppies wellnigh perished.
Since the city folk plucked those with the longest stems and biggest
bowls, and since it is the law of kind to procreate kind, the long-stemmed,
big-bowled poppies failed to go to seed, and a stunted, short-stemmed
variety remained to the hills. And not only was it stunted and
short-stemmed, but sparsely distributed as well. Each day and
every day, for years and years, the city folk swarmed over the Piedmont
Hills, and only here and there did the genius of the race survive in
the form of miserable little flowers, close-clinging and quick-blooming,
like children of the slums dragged hastily and precariously through
youth to a shrivelled and futile maturity.
On the other hand, the poppies had prospered in my field; and not only
had they been sheltered from the barbarians, but also from the birds.
Long ago the field was sown in wheat, which went to seed unharvested
each year, and in the cool depths of which the poppy seeds were hidden
from the keen-eyed songsters. And further, climbing after the
sun through the wheat stalks, the poppies grew taller and taller and
more royal even than the primordial ones of the open.
So the city folk, gazing from the bare hills to my blazing, burning
field, were sorely tempted, and, it must be told, as sorely fell.
But no sorer was their fall than that of my beloved poppies. Where
the grain holds the dew and takes the bite from the sun the soil is
moist, and in such soil it is easier to pull the poppies out by the
roots than to break the stalk. Now the city folk, like other folk,
are inclined to move along the line of least resistance, and for each
flower they gathered, there were also gathered many crisp-rolled buds
and with them all the possibilities and future beauties of the plant
for all time to come.
One of the city folk, a middle-aged gentleman, with white hands and
shifty eyes, especially made life interesting for me. We called
him the “Repeater,” what of his ways. When from the
porch we implored him to desist, he was wont slowly and casually to
direct his steps toward the fence, simulating finely the actions of
a man who had not heard, but whose walk, instead, had terminated of
itself or of his own volition. To heighten this effect, now and
again, still casually and carelessly, he would stoop and pluck another
poppy. Thus did he deceitfully save himself the indignity of being
put out, and rob us of the satisfaction of putting him out, but he came,
and he came often, each time getting away with an able-bodied man’s
share of plunder.
It is not good to be of the city folk. Of this I am convinced.
There is something in the mode of life that breeds an alarming condition
of blindness and deafness, or so it seems with the city folk that come
to my poppy field. Of the many to whom I have talked ethically
not one has been found who ever saw the warnings so conspicuously displayed,
while of those called out to from the porch, possibly one in fifty has
heard. Also, I have discovered that the relation of city folk
to country flowers is quite analogous to that of a starving man to food.
No more than the starving man realizes that five pounds of meat is not
so good as an ounce, do they realize that five hundred poppies crushed
and bunched are less beautiful than two or three in a free cluster,
where the green leaves and golden bowls may expand to their full loveliness.
Less forgivable than the unaesthetic are the mercenary. Hordes
of young rascals plunder me and rob the future that they may stand on
street corners and retail “California poppies, only five cents
a bunch!” In spite of my precautions some of them made a
dollar a day out of my field. One horde do I remember with keen
regret. Reconnoitring for a possible dog, they applied at the
kitchen door for “a drink of water, please.” While
they drank they were besought not to pick any flowers. They nodded,
wiped their mouths, and proceeded to take themselves off by the side
of the bungalow. They smote the poppy field beneath my windows,
spread out fan-shaped six wide, picking with both hands, and ripped
a swath of destruction through the very heart of the field. No
cyclone travelled faster or destroyed more completely. I shouted
after them, but they sped on the wings of the wind, great regal poppies,
broken-stalked and mangled, trailing after them or cluttering their
wake - the most high-handed act of piracy, I am confident, ever committed
off the high seas.
One day I went a-fishing, and on that day a woman entered the field.
Appeals and remonstrances from the porch having no effect upon her,
Bess despatched a little girl to beg of her to pick no more poppies.
The woman calmly went on picking. Then Bess herself went down
through the heat of the day. But the woman went on picking, and
while she picked she discussed property and proprietary rights, denying
Bess’s sovereignty until deeds and documents should be produced
in proof thereof. And all the time she went on picking, never
once overlooking her hand. She was a large woman, belligerent
of aspect, and Bess was only a woman and not prone to fisticuffs.
So the invader picked until she could pick no more, said “Good-day,”
and sailed majestically away.
“People have really grown worse in the last several years, I think,”
said Bess to me in a tired sort of voice that night, as we sat in the
library after dinner.
Next day I was inclined to agree with her. “There’s
a woman and a little girl heading straight for the poppies,” said
May, a maid about the bungalow. I went out on the porch and waited
their advent. They plunged through the pine trees and into the
fields, and as the roots of the first poppies were pulled I called to
them. They were about a hundred feet away. The woman and
the little girl turned to the sound of my voice and looked at me.
“Please do not pick the poppies,” I pleaded. They
pondered this for a minute; then the woman said something in an undertone
to the little girl, and both backs jack-knifed as the slaughter recommenced.
I shouted, but they had become suddenly deaf. I screamed, and
so fiercely that the little girl wavered dubiously. And while
the woman went on picking I could hear her in low tones heartening the
little girl.
I recollected a siren whistle with which I was wont to summon Johnny,
the son of my sister. It was a fearsome thing, of a kind to wake
the dead, and I blew and blew, but the jack-knifed backs never unclasped.
I do not mind with men, but I have never particularly favoured physical
encounters with women; yet this woman, who encouraged a little girl
in iniquity, tempted me.
I went into the bungalow and fetched my rifle. Flourishing it
in a sanguinary manner and scowling fearsomely, I charged upon the invaders.
The little girl fled, screaming, to the shelter of the pines, but the
woman calmly went on picking. She took not the least notice.
I had expected her to run at sight of me, and it was embarrassing.
There was I, charging down the field like a wild bull upon a woman who
would not get out of the way. I could only slow down, supremely
conscious of how ridiculous it all was. At a distance of ten feet
she straightened up and deigned to look at me. I came to a halt
and blushed to the roots of my hair. Perhaps I really did frighten
her (I sometimes try to persuade myself that this is so), or perhaps
she took pity on me; but, at any rate, she stalked out of my field with
great composure, nay, majesty, her arms brimming with orange and gold.
Nevertheless, thenceforward I saved my lungs and flourished my rifle.
Also, I made fresh generalizations. To commit robbery women take
advantage of their sex. Men have more respect for property than
women. Men are less insistent in crime than women. And women
are less afraid of guns than men. Likewise, we conquer the earth
in hazard and battle by the virtues of our mothers. We are a race
of land-robbers and sea-robbers, we Anglo-Saxons, and small wonder,
when we suckle at the breasts of a breed of women such as maraud my
poppy field.
Still the pillage went on. Sirens and gun-flourishings were without
avail. The city folk were great of heart and undismayed, and I
noted the habit of “repeating” was becoming general.
What booted it how often they were driven forth if each time they were
permitted to carry away their ill-gotten plunder? When one has
turned the same person away twice and thrice an emotion arises somewhat
akin to homicide. And when one has once become conscious of this
sanguinary feeling his whole destiny seems to grip hold of him and drag
him into the abyss. More than once I found myself unconsciously
pulling the rifle into position to get a sight on the miserable trespassers.
In my sleep I slew them in manifold ways and threw their carcasses into
the reservoir. Each day the temptation to shoot them in the legs
became more luring, and every day I felt my fate calling to me imperiously.
Visions of the gallows rose up before me, and with the hemp about my
neck I saw stretched out the pitiless future of my children, dark with
disgrace and shame. I became afraid of myself, and Bess went about
with anxious face, privily beseeching my friends to entice me into taking
a vacation. Then, and at the last gasp, came the thought that
saved me: Why not confiscate? If their forays were bootless,
in the nature of things their forays would cease.
The first to enter my field thereafter was a man.
I was waiting for him And, oh joy! it was the “Repeater”
himself, smugly complacent with knowledge of past success. I dropped
the rifle negligently across the hollow of my arm and went down to him.
“I am sorry to trouble you for those poppies,” I said in
my oiliest tones; “but really, you know, I must have them.”
He regarded me speechlessly. It must have made a great picture.
It surely was dramatic. With the rifle across my arm and my suave
request still ringing in my ears, I felt like Black Bart, and Jesse
James, and Jack Sheppard, and Robin Hood, and whole generations of highwaymen.
“Come, come,” I said, a little sharply and in what I imagined
was the true fashion; “I am sorry to inconvenience you, believe
me, but I must have those poppies.”
I absently shifted the gun and smiled. That fetched him.
Without a word he passed them over and turned his toes toward the fence,
but no longer casual and careless was his carriage, I nor did he stoop
to pick the occasional poppy by the way. That was the last of
the “Repeater.” I could see by his eyes that he did
not like me, and his back reproached me all the way down the field and
out of sight.
From that day the bungalow has been flooded with poppies. Every
vase and earthen jar is filled with them. They blaze on every
mantel and run riot through all the rooms. I present them to my
friends in huge bunches, and still the kind city folk come and gather
more for me. “Sit down for a moment,” I say to the
departing guest. And there we sit in the shade of the porch while
aspiring city creatures pluck my poppies and sweat under the brazen
sun. And when their arms are sufficiently weighted with my yellow
glories, I go down with the rifle over my arm and disburden them.
Thus have I become convinced that every situation has its compensations.
Confiscation was successful, so far as it went; but I had forgotten
one thing; namely, the vast number of the city folk. Though the
old transgressors came no more, new ones arrived every day, and I found
myself confronted with the titanic task of educating a whole cityful
to the inexpediency of raiding my poppy field. During the process
of disburdening them I was accustomed to explaining my side of the case,
but I soon gave this over. It was a waste of breath. They
could not understand. To one lady, who insinuated that I was miserly,
I said:
“My dear madam, no hardship is worked upon you. Had I not
been parsimonious yesterday and the day before, these poppies would
have been picked by the city hordes of that day and the day before,
and your eyes, which to-day have discovered this field, would have beheld
no poppies at all. The poppies you may not pick to-day are the
poppies I did not permit to be picked yesterday and the day before.
Therefore, believe me, you are denied nothing.”
“But the poppies are here to-day,” she said, glaring carnivorously
upon their glow and splendour.
“I will pay you for them,” said a gentleman, at another
time. (I had just relieved him of an armful.) I felt a sudden
shame, I know not why, unless it be that his words had just made clear
to me that a monetary as well as an aesthetic value was attached to
my flowers. The apparent sordidness of my position overwhelmed
me, and I said weakly: “I do not sell my poppies. You may
have what you have picked.” But before the week was out
I confronted the same gentleman again. “I will pay you for
them,” he said. “Yes,” I said, “you may
pay me for them. Twenty dollars, please.” He gasped,
looked at me searchingly, gasped again, and silently and sadly put the
poppies down. But it remained, as usual, for a woman to attain
the sheerest pitch of audacity. When I declined payment and demanded
my plucked beauties, she refused to give them up. “I picked
these poppies,” she said, “and my time is worth money.
When you have paid me for my time you may have them.” Her
cheeks flamed rebellion, and her face, withal a pretty one, was set
and determined. Now, I was a man of the hill tribes, and she a
mere woman of the city folk, and though it is not my inclination to
enter into details, it is my pleasure to state that that bunch of poppies
subsequently glorified the bungalow and that the woman departed to the
city unpaid. Anyway, they were my poppies.
“They are God’s poppies,” said the Radiant Young Radical,
democratically shocked at sight of me turning city folk out of my field.
And for two weeks she hated me with a deathless hatred. I sought
her out and explained. I explained at length. I told the
story of the poppy as Maeterlinck has told the life of the bee.
I treated the question biologically, psychologically, and sociologically,
I discussed it ethically and aesthetically. I grew warm over it,
and impassioned; and when I had done, she professed conversion, but
in my heart of hearts I knew it to be compassion. I fled to other
friends for consolation. I retold the story of the poppy.
They did not appear supremely interested. I grew excited.
They were surprised and pained. They looked at me curiously.
“It ill-befits your dignity to squabble over poppies,” they
said. “It is unbecoming.”
I fled away to yet other friends. I sought vindication.
The thing had become vital, and I needs must put myself right.
I felt called upon to explain, though well knowing that he who explains
is lost. I told the story of the poppy over again. I went
into the minutest details. I added to it, and expanded.
I talked myself hoarse, and when I could talk no more they looked bored.
Also, they said insipid things, and soothful things, and things concerning
other things, and not at all to the point. I was consumed with
anger, and there and then I renounced them all.
At the bungalow I lie in wait for chance visitors. Craftily I
broach the subject, watching their faces closely the while to detect
first signs of disapprobation, whereupon I empty long-stored vials of
wrath upon their heads. I wrangle for hours with whosoever does
not say I am right. I am become like Guy de Maupassant’s
old man who picked up a piece of string. I am incessantly explaining,
and nobody will understand. I have become more brusque in my treatment
of the predatory city folk. No longer do I take delight in their
disburdenment, for it has become an onerous duty, a wearisome and distasteful
task. My friends look askance and murmur pityingly on the side
when we meet in the city. They rarely come to see me now.
They are afraid. I am an embittered and disappointed man, and
all the light seems to have gone out of my life and into my blazing
field. So one pays for things.
PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
April 1902.
THE SHRINKAGE OF THE PLANET
What a tremendous affair it was, the world of Homer, with its indeterminate
boundaries, vast regions, and immeasurable distances. The Mediterranean
and the Euxine were illimitable stretches of ocean waste over which
years could be spent in endless wandering. On their mysterious
shores were the improbable homes of impossible peoples. The Great
Sea, the Broad Sea, the Boundless Sea; the Ethiopians, “dwelling
far away, the most distant of men,” and the Cimmerians, “covered
with darkness and cloud,” where “baleful night is spread
over timid mortals.” Phœnicia was a sore journey,
Egypt simply unattainable, while the Pillars of Hercules marked the
extreme edge of the universe. Ulysses was nine days in sailing
from Ismarus the city of the Ciconians, to the country of the Lotus-eaters
- a period of time which to-day would breed anxiety in the hearts of
the underwriters should it be occupied by the slowest tramp steamer
in traversing the Mediterranean and Black Seas from Gibraltar to Sebastopol.
Homer’s world, restricted to less than a drummer’s circuit,
was nevertheless immense, surrounded by a thin veneer of universe -
the Stream of Ocean. But how it has shrunk! To-day, precisely
charted, weighed, and measured, a thousand times larger than the world
of Homer, it is become a tiny speck, gyrating to immutable law through
a universe the bounds of which have been pushed incalculably back.
The light of Algol shines upon it - a light which travels at one hundred
and ninety thousand miles per second, yet requires forty-seven years
to reach its destination. And the denizens of this puny ball have
come to know that Algol possesses an invisible companion, three and
a quarter millions of miles away, and that the twain move in their respective
orbits at rates of fifty-five and twenty-six miles per second.
They also know that beyond it are great chasms of space, innumerable
worlds, and vast star systems.
While much of the shrinkage to which the planet has been subjected is
due to the increased knowledge of mathematics and physics, an equal,
if not greater, portion may be ascribed to the perfection of the means
of locomotion and communication. The enlargement of stellar space,
demonstrating with stunning force the insignificance of the earth, has
been negative in its effect; but the quickening of travel and intercourse,
by making the earth’s parts accessible and knitting them together,
has been positive.
The advantage of the animal over the vegetable kingdom is obvious.
The cabbage, should its environment tend to become worse, must live
it out, or die; the rabbit may move on in quest of a better. But,
after all, the swift-footed creatures are circumscribed in their wanderings.
The first large river almost inevitably bars their way, and certainly
the first salt sea becomes an impassable obstacle. Better locomotion
may be classed as one of the prime aims of the old natural selection;
for in that primordial day the race was to the swift as surely as the
battle to the strong. But man, already pre-eminent in the common
domain because of other faculties, was not content with the one form
of locomotion afforded by his lower limbs. He swam in the sea,
and, still better, becoming aware of the buoyant virtues of wood, learned
to navigate its surface. Likewise, from among the land animals
he chose the more likely to bear him and his burdens. The next
step was the domestication of these useful aids. Here, in its
organic significance, natural selection ceased to concern itself with
locomotion. Man had displayed his impatience at her tedious methods
and his own superiority in the hastening of affairs. Thenceforth
he must depend upon himself, and faster-swimming or faster-running men
ceased to be bred. The one, half-amphibian, breasting the water
with muscular arms, could not hope to overtake or escape an enemy who
propelled a fire-hollowed tree trunk by means of a wooden paddle; nor
could the other, trusting to his own nimbleness, compete with a foe
who careered wildly across the plain on the back of a half-broken stallion.
So, in that dim day, man took upon himself the task of increasing his
dominion over space and time, and right nobly has he acquitted himself.
Because of it he became a road builder and a bridge builder; likewise,
he wove clumsy sails of rush and matting. At a very remote period
he must also have recognized that force moves along the line of least
resistance, and in virtue thereof, placed upon his craft rude keels
which enabled him to beat to windward in a seaway. As he excelled
in these humble arts, just so did he add to his power over his less
progressive fellows and lay the foundations for the first glimmering
civilizations - crude they were beyond conception, sporadic and ephemeral,
but each formed a necessary part of the groundwork upon which was to
rise the mighty civilization of our latter-day world.
Divorced from the general history of man’s upward climb, it would
seem incredible that so long a time should elapse between the moment
of his first improvements over nature in the matter of locomotion and
that of the radical changes he was ultimately to compass. The
principles which were his before history was, were his, neither more
nor less, even to the present century. He utilized improved applications,
but the principles of themselves were ever the same, whether in the
war chariots of Achilles and Pharaoh or the mail-coach and diligence
of the European traveller, the cavalry of the Huns or of Prince Rupert,
the triremes and galleys of Greece and Rome or the East India-men and
clipper ships of the last century. But when the moment came to
alter the methods of travel, the change was so sweeping that it may
be safely classed as a revolution. Though the discovery of steam
attaches to the honour of the last century, the potency of the new power
was not felt till the beginning of this. By 1800 small steamers
were being used for coasting purposes in England; 1830 witnessed the
opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; while it was not until
1838 that the Atlantic was first crossed by the steamships Great
Western and Sirius. In 1869 the East was made next-door
neighbour to the West. Over almost the same ground where had toiled
the caravans of a thousand generations, the Suez Canal was dug.
Clive, during his first trip, was a year and a half en route from
England to India; were he alive to-day he could journey to Calcutta
in twenty-two days. After reading De Quincey’s hyperbolical
description of the English mail-coach, one cannot down the desire to
place that remarkable man on the pilot of the White Mail or of the Twentieth
Century.
But this tremendous change in the means of locomotion meant far more
than the mere rapid transit of men from place to place. Until
then, though its influence and worth cannot be overestimated, commerce
had eked out a precarious and costly existence. The fortuitous
played too large a part in the trade of men. The mischances by
land and sea, the mistakes and delays, were adverse elements of no mean
proportions. But improved locomotion meant improved carrying,
and commerce received an impetus as remarkable as it was unexpected.
In his fondest fancies James Watt could not have foreseen even the approximate
result of his invention, the Hercules which was to spring from the puny
child of his brain and hands. An illuminating spectacle, were
it possible, would be afforded by summoning him from among the Shades
to a place in the engine-room of an ocean greyhound. The humblest
trimmer would treat him with the indulgence of a child; while an oiler,
a greasy nimbus about his head and in his hand, as sceptre, a long-snouted
can, would indeed appear to him a demigod and ruler of forces beyond
his ken.
It has ever been the world’s dictum that empire and commerce go
hand in hand. In the past the one was impossible without the other.
Rome gathered to herself the wealth of the Mediterranean nations, and
it was only by an unwise distribution of it that she became emasculated
and lost both power and trade. With a just system of economics
it is highly probable that for centuries she could have held back the
welling tide of the Germanic peoples. When upon her ruins rose
the institutions of the conquering Teutons, commerce slipped away, and
with it empire. In the present, empire and commerce have become
interdependent. Such wonders has the industrial revolution wrought
in a few swift decades, and so great has been the shrinkage of the planet,
that the industrial nations have long since felt the imperative demand
for foreign markets. The favoured portions of the earth are occupied.
From their seats in the temperate zones the militant commercial nations
proceed to the exploitation of the tropics, and for the possession of
these they rush to war hot-footed. Like wolves at the end of a
gorge, they wrangle over the fragments. There are no more planets,
no more fragments, and they are yet hungry. There are no longer
Cimmerians and Ethiopians, in wide-stretching lands, awaiting them.
On either hand they confront the naked poles, and they recoil from unnavigable
space to an intenser struggle among themselves. And all the while
the planet shrinks beneath their grasp.
Of this struggle one thing may be safely predicated; a commercial power
must be a sea power. Upon the control of the sea depends the control
of trade. Carthage threatened Rome till she lost her navy; and
then for thirteen days the smoke of her burning rose to the skies, and
the ground was ploughed and sown with salt on the site of her most splendid
edifices. The cities of Italy were the world’s merchants
till new trade routes were discovered and the dominion of the sea passed
on to the west and fell into other hands. Spain and Portugal,
inaugurating an era of maritime discovery, divided the new world between
them, but gave way before a breed of sea-rovers, who, after many generations
of attachment to the soil, had returned to their ancient element.
With the destruction of her Armada Spain’s colossal dream of colonial
empire passed away. Against the new power Holland strove in vain,
and when France acknowledged the superiority of the Briton upon the
sea, she at the same time relinquished her designs upon the world.
Hampered by her feeble navy, her contest for supremacy upon the land
was her last effort and with the passing of Napoleon she retired within
herself to struggle with herself as best she might. For fifty
years England held undisputed sway upon the sea, controlled markets,
and domineered trade, laying, during that period, the foundations of
her empire. Since then other naval powers have arisen, their attitudes
bearing significantly upon the future; for they have learned that the
mastery of the world belongs to the masters of the sea.
That many of the phases of this world shrinkage are pathetic, goes without
question. There is much to condemn in the rise of the economic
over the imaginative spirit, much for which the energetic Philistine
can never atone. Perhaps the deepest pathos of all may be found
in the spectacle of John Ruskin weeping at the profanation of the world
by the vandalism of the age. Steam launches violate the sanctity
of the Venetian canals; where Xerxes bridged the Hellespont ply the
filthy funnels of our modern shipping; electric cars run in the shadow
of the pyramids; and it was only the other day that Lord Kitchener was
in a railroad wreck near the site of ancient Luxor. But there
is always the other side. If the economic man has defiled temples
and despoiled nature, he has also preserved. He has policed the
world and parked it, reduced the dangers of life and limb, made the
tenure of existence less precarious, and rendered a general relapse
of society impossible. There can never again be an intellectual
holocaust, such as the burning of the Alexandrian library. Civilizations
may wax and wane, but the totality of knowledge cannot decrease.
With the possible exception of a few trade secrets, arts and sciences
may be discarded, but they can never be lost. And these things
must remain true until the end of man’s time upon the earth.
Up to yesterday communication for any distance beyond the sound of the
human voice or the sight of the human eye was bound up with locomotion.
A letter presupposed a carrier. The messenger started with the
message, and he could not but avail himself of the prevailing modes
of travel. If the voyage to Australia required four months, four
months were required for communication; by no known means could this
time be lessened. But with the advent of the telegraph and telephone,
communication and locomotion were divorced. In a few hours, at
most, there could be performed what by the old way would have required
months. In 1837 the needle telegraph was invented, and nine years
later the Electric Telegraph Company was formed for the purpose of bringing
it into general use. Government postal systems also came into
being, later to consolidate into an international union and to group
the nations of the earth into a local neighbourhood. The effects
of all this are obvious, and no fitter illustration may be presented
than the fact that to-day, in the matter of communication, the Klondike
is virtually nearer to Boston than was Bunker Hill in the time of Warren.
A contemporaneous and remarkable shrinkage of a vast stretch of territory
may be instanced in the Northland. From its rise at Lake Linderman
the Yukon runs twenty-five hundred miles to Bering Sea, traversing an
almost unknown region, the remote recesses of which had never felt the
moccasined foot of the pathfinder. At occasional intervals men
wallowed into its dismal fastnesses, or emerged gaunt and famine-worn.
But in the fall of 1896 a great gold strike was made - greater than
any since the days of California and Australia; yet, so rude were the
means of communication, nearly a year elapsed before the news of it
reached the eager ear of the world. Passionate pilgrims disembarked
their outfits at Dyea. Over the terrible Chilcoot Pass the trail
led to the lakes, thirty miles away. Carriage was yet in its most
primitive stage, the road builder and bridge builder unheard of.
With heavy packs upon their backs men plunged waist-deep into hideous
quagmires, bridged mountain torrents by felling trees across them, toiled
against the precipitous slopes of the ice-worn mountains, and crossed
the dizzy faces of innumerable glaciers. When, after incalculable
toil they reached the lakes, they went into the woods, sawed pine trees
into lumber by hand, and built it into boats. In these, overloaded,
unseaworthy, they battled down the long chain of lakes. Within
the memory of the writer there lingers the picture of a sheltered nook
on the shores of Lake Le Barge, in which half a thousand gold seekers
lay storm-bound. Day after day they struggled against the seas
in the teeth of a northerly gale, and night after night returned to
their camps, repulsed but not disheartened. At the rapids they
ran their boats through, hit or miss, and after infinite toil and hardship,
on the breast of a jarring ice flood, arrived at the Klondike.
From the beach at Dyea to the eddy below the Barracks at Dawson, they
had paid for their temerity the tax of human life demanded by the elements.
A year later, so greatly had the country shrunk, the tourist, on disembarking
from the ocean steamship, took his seat in a modern railway coach.
A few hours later, at Lake Bennet, he stepped aboard a commodious river
steamer. At the rapids he rode around on a tramway to take passage
on another steamer below. And in a few hours more he was in Dawson,
without having once soiled the lustre of his civilized foot-gear.
Did he wish to communicate with the outside world, he strolled into
the telegraph office. A few short months before he would have
written a letter and deemed himself favoured above mortals were it delivered
within the year.
From man’s drawing the world closer and closer together, his own
affairs and institutions have consolidated. Concentration may
typify the chief movement of the age - concentration, classification,
order; the reduction of friction between the parts of the social organism.
The urban tendency of the rural populations led to terrible congestion
in the great cities. There was stifling and impure air, and lo,
rapid transit at once attacked the evil. Every great city has
become but the nucleus of a greater city which surrounds it; the one
the seat of business, the other the seat of domestic happiness.
Between the two, night and morning, by electric road, steam railway,
and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class population.
And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement evil.
In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist. Improvement
in road-beds and the means of locomotion, a tremor of altruism, a little
legislation, and the city by day will sleep in the country by night.
What a play-ball has this planet of ours become! Steam has made
its parts accessible and drawn them closer together. The telegraph
annihilates space and time. Each morning every part knows what
every other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing. A discovery
in a German laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within
twenty-four hours. A book written in South Africa is published
by simultaneous copyright in every English-speaking country, and on
the following day is in the hands of the translators. The death
of an obscure missionary in China, or of a whisky smuggler in the South
Seas, is served up, the world over, with the morning toast. The
wheat output of Argentine or the gold of Klondike is known wherever
men meet and trade. Shrinkage or centralization has been such
that the humblest clerk in any metropolis may place his hand on the
pulse of the world. And because of all this, everywhere is growing
order and organization. The church, the state; men, women, and
children; the criminal and the law, the honest man and the thief, industry
and commerce, capital and labour, the trades and the professions, the
arts and the sciences - all are organizing for pleasure, profit, policy,
or intellectual pursuit. They have come to know the strength of
numbers, solidly phalanxed and driving onward with singleness of purpose.
These purposes may be various and many, but one and all, ever discovering
new mutual interests and objects, obeying a law which is beyond them,
these petty aggregations draw closer together, forming greater aggregations
and congeries of aggregations. And these, in turn, vaguely merging
each into each, present glimmering adumbrations of the coming human
solidarity which shall be man’s crowning glory.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
January 1900.
THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL
Speaking of homes, I am building one now, and I venture to assert that
very few homes have received more serious thought in the planning.
Let me tell you about it. In the first place, there will be no
grounds whatever, no fences, lawns, nor flowers. Roughly, the
dimensions will be forty-five feet by fifteen. That is, it will
be fifteen feet wide at its widest - and, if you will pardon the bull,
it will be narrower than it is wide.
The details must submit to the general plan of economy. There
will be no veranda, no porch entrances, no grand staircases. I’m
ashamed to say how steep the stairways are going to be. The bedrooms
will be seven by seven, and one will be even smaller. A bedroom
is only good to sleep in, anyway. There will be no hallway, thank
goodness. Rooms were made to go through. Why a separate
passage for traffic?
The bath-room will be a trifle larger than the size of the smallest
bath-tub - it won’t require so much work to keep in order.
The kitchen won’t be very much larger, but this will make it easy
for the cook. In place of a drawing-room, there will be a large
living-room - fourteen by six. The walls of this room will be
covered with books, and it can serve as library and smoking-room as
well. Then, the floor-space not being occupied, we shall use the
room as a dining-room. Incidentally, such a room not being used
after bedtime, the cook and the second boy can sleep in it. One
thing that I am temperamentally opposed to is waste, and why should
all this splendid room be wasted at night when we do not occupy it?
My ideas are cramped, you say? - Oh, I forgot to tell you that this
home I am describing is to be a floating home, and that my wife and
I are to journey around the world in it for the matter of seven years
or more. I forgot also to state that there will be an engine-room
in it for a seventy-horse-power engine, a dynamo, storage batteries,
etc.; tanks for water to last long weeks at sea; space for fifteen hundred
gallons of gasolene, fire extinguishers, and life-preservers; and a
great store-room for food, spare sails, anchors, hawsers, tackles, and
a thousand and one other things.
Since I have not yet built my land house, I haven’t got beyond
a few general ideas, and in presenting them I feel as cocksure as the
unmarried woman who writes the column in the Sunday supplement on how
to rear children. My first idea about a house is that it should
be built to live in. Throughout the house, in all the building
of it, this should be the paramount idea. It must be granted that
this idea is lost sight of by countless persons who build houses apparently
for every purpose under the sun except to live in them.
Perhaps it is because of the practical life I have lived that I worship
utility and have come to believe that utility and beauty should be one,
and that there is no utility that need not be beautiful. What
finer beauty than strength - whether it be airy steel, or massive masonry,
or a woman’s hand? A plain black leather strap is beautiful.
It is all strength and all utility, and it is beautiful. It efficiently
performs work in the world, and it is good to look upon. Perhaps
it is because it is useful that it is beautiful. I do not know.
I sometimes wonder.
A boat on the sea is beautiful. Yet it is not built for beauty.
Every graceful line of it is a utility, is designed to perform work.
It is created for the express purpose of dividing the water in front
of it, of gliding over the water beneath it, of leaving the water behind
it - and all with the least possible wastage of stress and friction.
It is not created for the purpose of filling the eye with beauty.
It is created for the purpose of moving through the sea and over the
sea with the smallest resistance and the greatest stability; yet, somehow,
it does fill the eye with its beauty. And in so far as a boat
fails in its purpose, by that much does it diminish in beauty.
I am still a long way from the house I have in my mind some day to build,
yet I have arrived somewhere. I have discovered, to my own satisfaction
at any rate, that beauty and utility should be one. In applying
this general idea to the building of a house, it may be stated, in another
and better way; namely, construction and decoration must be one.
This idea is more important than the building of the house, for without
the idea the house so built is certain to be an insult to intelligence
and beauty-love.
I bought a house in a hurry in the city of Oakland some time ago.
I do not live in it. I sleep in it half a dozen times a year.
I do not love the house. I am hurt every time I look at it.
No drunken rowdy or political enemy can insult me so deeply as that
house does. Let me tell you why. It is an ordinary two-storey
frame house. After it was built, the criminal that constructed
it nailed on, at the corners perpendicularly, some two-inch fluted planks.
These planks rise the height of the house, and to a drunken man have
the appearance of fluted columns. To complete the illusion in
the eyes of the drunken man, the planks are topped with wooden Ionic
capitals, nailed on, and in, I may say, bas-relief.
When I analyze the irritation these fluted planks cause in me, I find
the reason in the fact that the first rule for building a house has
been violated. These decorative planks are no part of the construction.
They have no use, no work to perform. They are plastered gawds
that tell lies that nobody believes. A column is made for the
purpose of supporting weight; this is its use. A column, when
it is a utility, is beautiful. The fluted wooden columns nailed
on outside my house are not utilities. They are not beautiful.
They are nightmares. They not only support no weight, but they
themselves are a weight that drags upon the supports of the house.
Some day, when I get time, one of two things will surely happen.
Either I’ll go forth and murder the man who perpetrated the atrocity,
or else I’ll take an axe and chop off the lying, fluted planks.
A thing must be true, or it is not beautiful, any more than a painted
wanton is beautiful, any more than a sky-scraper is beautiful that is
intrinsically and structurally light and that has a false massiveness
of pillars plastered on outside. The true sky-scraper is beautiful
- and this is the reluctant admission of a man who dislikes humanity-festering
cities. The true sky-scraper is beautiful, and it is beautiful
in so far as it is true. In its construction it is light and airy,
therefore in its appearance it must be light and airy. It dare
not, if it wishes to be beautiful, lay claim to what it is not.
And it should not bulk on the city-scape like Leviathan; it should rise
and soar, light and airy and fairylike.
Man is an ethical animal - or, at least, he is more ethical than any
other animal. Wherefore he has certain yearnings for honesty.
And in no way can these yearnings be more thoroughly satisfied than
by the honesty of the house in which he lives and passes the greater
part of his life.
They that dwelt in San Francisco were dishonest. They lied and
cheated in their business life (like the dwellers in all cities), and
because they lied and cheated in their business life, they lied and
cheated in the buildings they erected. Upon the tops of the simple,
severe walls of their buildings they plastered huge projecting cornices.
These cornices were not part of the construction. They made believe
to be part of the construction, and they were lies. The earth
wrinkled its back for twenty-eight seconds, and the lying cornices crashed
down as all lies are doomed to crash down. In this particular
instance, the lies crashed down upon the heads of the people fleeing
from their reeling habitations, and many were killed. They paid
the penalty of dishonesty.
Not alone should the construction of a house be truthful and honest,
but the material must be honest. They that lived in San Francisco
were dishonest in the material they used. They sold one quality
of material and delivered another quality of material. They always
delivered an inferior quality. There is not one case recorded
in the business history of San Francisco where a contractor or builder
delivered a quality superior to the one sold. A seven-million-dollar
city hall became thirty cents in twenty-eight seconds. Because
the mortar was not honest, a thousand walls crashed down and scores
of lives were snuffed out. There is something, after all, in the
contention of a few religionists that the San Francisco earthquake was
a punishment for sin. It was a punishment for sin; but it was
not for sin against God. The people of San Francisco sinned against
themselves.
An honest house tells the truth about itself. There is a house
here in Glen Ellen. It stands on a corner. It is built of
beautiful red stone. Yet it is not beautiful. On three sides
the stone is joined and pointed. The fourth side is the rear.
It faces the back yard. The stone is not pointed. It is
all a smudge of dirty mortar, with here and there bricks worked in when
the stone gave out. The house is not what it seems. It is
a lie. All three of the walls spend their time lying about the
fourth wall. They keep shouting out that the fourth wall is as
beautiful as they. If I lived long in that house I should not
be responsible for my morals. The house is like a man in purple
and fine linen, who hasn’t had a bath for a month. If I
lived long in that house I should become a dandy and cut out bathing
- for the same reason, I suppose, that an African is black and that
an Eskimo eats whale-blubber. I shall not build a house like that
house.
Last year I started to build a barn. A man who was a liar undertook
to do the stonework and concrete work for me. He could not tell
the truth to my face; he could not tell the truth in his work.
I was building for posterity. The concrete foundations were four
feet wide and sunk three and one-half feet into the earth. The
stone walls were two feet thick and nine feet high. Upon them
were to rest the great beams that were to carry all the weight of hay
and the forty tons of the roof. The man who was a liar made beautiful
stone walls. I used to stand alongside of them and love them.
I caressed their massive strength with my hands. I thought about
them in bed, before I went to sheep. And they were lies.
Came the earthquake. Fortunately the rest of the building of the
barn had been postponed. The beautiful stone walls cracked in
all directions. I started, to repair, and discovered the whole
enormous lie. The walls were shells. On each face were beautiful,
massive stones - on edge. The inside was hollow. This hollow
in some places was filled with clay and loose gravel. In other
places it was filled with air and emptiness, with here and there a piece
of kindling-wood or dry-goods box, to aid in the making of the shell.
The walls were lies. They were beautiful, but they were not useful.
Construction and decoration had been divorced. The walls were
all decoration. They hadn’t any construction in them.
“As God lets Satan live,” I let that lying man live, but
- I have built new walls from the foundation up.
And now to my own house beautiful, which I shall build some seven or
ten years from now. I have a few general ideas about it.
It must be honest in construction, material, and appearance. If
any feature of it, despite my efforts, shall tell lies, I shall remove
that feature. Utility and beauty must be indissolubly wedded.
Construction and decoration must be one. If the particular details
keep true to these general ideas, all will be well.
I have not thought of many details. But here are a few.
Take the bath-room, for instance. It shall be as beautiful as
any room in the house, just as it will be as useful. The chance
is, that it will be the most expensive room in the house. Upon
that we are resolved - even if we are compelled to build it first, and
to live in a tent till we can get more money to go on with the rest
of the house. In the bath-room no delights of the bath shall be
lacking. Also, a large part of the expensiveness will be due to
the use of material that will make it easy to keep the bathroom clean
and in order. Why should a servant toil unduly that my body may
be clean? On the other hand, the honesty of my own flesh, and
the square dealing I give it, are more important than all the admiration
of my friends for expensive decorative schemes and magnificent trivialities.
More delightful to me is a body that sings than a stately and costly
grand staircase built for show. Not that I like grand staircases
less, but that I like bath-rooms more.
I often regret that I was born in this particular period of the world.
In the matter of servants, how I wish I were living in the golden future
of the world, where there will be no servants - naught but service of
love. But in the meantime, living here and now, being practical,
understanding the rationality and the necessity of the division of labour,
I accept servants. But such acceptance does not justify me in
lack of consideration for them. In my house beautiful their rooms
shall not be dens and holes. And on this score I foresee a fight
with the architect. They shall have bath-rooms, toilet conveniences,
and comforts for their leisure time and human life - if I have to work
Sundays to pay for it. Even under the division of labour I recognize
that no man has a right to servants who will not treat them as humans
compounded of the same clay as himself, with similar bundles of nerves
and desires, contradictions, irritabilities, and lovablenesses.
Heaven in the drawing-room and hell in the kitchen is not the atmosphere
for a growing child to breathe - nor an adult either. One of the
great and selfish objections to chattel slavery was the effect on the
masters themselves.
And because of the foregoing, one chief aim in the building of my house
beautiful will be to have a house that will require the minimum of trouble
and work to keep clean and orderly. It will be no spick and span
and polished house, with an immaculateness that testifies to the tragedy
of drudge. I live in California where the days are warm.
I’d prefer that the servants had three hours to go swimming (or
hammocking) than be compelled to spend those three hours in keeping
the house spick and span. Therefore it devolves upon me to build
a house that can be kept clean and orderly without the need of those
three hours.
But underneath the spick and span there is something more dreadful than
the servitude of the servants. This dreadful thing is the philosophy
of the spick and span. In Korea the national costume is white.
Nobleman and coolie dress alike in white. It is hell on the women
who do the washing, but there is more in it than that. The coolie
cannot keep his white clothes clean. He toils and they get dirty.
The dirty white of his costume is the token of his inferiority.
The nobleman’s dress is always spotless white. It means
that he doesn’t have to work. But it means, further, that
somebody else has to work for him. His superiority is not based
upon song-craft nor state-craft, upon the foot-races he has run nor
the wrestlers he has thrown. His superiority is based upon the
fact that he doesn’t have to work, and that others are compelled
to work for him. And so the Korean drone flaunts his clean white
clothes, for the same reason that the Chinese flaunts his monstrous
finger-nails, and the white man and woman flaunt the spick-and-spanness
of their spotless houses.
There will be hardwood floors in my house beautiful. But these
floors will not be polished mirrors nor skating-rinks. They will
be just plain and common hardwood floors. Beautiful carpets are
not beautiful to the mind that knows they are filled with germs and
bacilli. They are no more beautiful than the hectic flush of fever,
or the silvery skin of leprosy. Besides, carpets enslave.
A thing that enslaves is a monster, and monsters are not beautiful.
The fireplaces in my house will be many and large. Small fires
and cold weather mean hermetically-sealed rooms and a jealous cherishing
of heated and filth-laden air. With large fire-places and generous
heat, some windows may be open all the time, and without hardship all
the windows can be opened every little while and the rooms flushed with
clean pure air. I have nearly died in the stagnant, rotten air
of other people’s houses - especially in the Eastern states.
In Maine I have slept in a room with storm-windows immovable, and with
one small pane five inches by six, that could be opened. Did I
say slept? I panted with my mouth in the opening and blasphemed
till I ruined all my chances of heaven.
For countless thousands of years my ancestors have lived and died and
drawn all their breaths in the open air. It is only recently that
we have begun to live in houses. The change is a hardship, especially
on the lungs. I’ve got only one pair of lungs, and I haven’t
the address of any repair-shop. Wherefore I stick by the open
air as much as possible. For this reason my house will have large
verandas, and, near to the kitchen, there will be a veranda dining-room.
Also, there will be a veranda fireplace, where we can breathe fresh
air and be comfortable when the evenings are touched with frost.
I have a plan for my own bedroom. I spend long hours in bed, reading,
studying, and working. I have tried sleeping in the open, but
the lamp attracts all the creeping, crawling, butting, flying, fluttering
things to the pages of my book, into my ears and blankets, and down
the back of my neck. So my bedroom shall be indoors.
But it will be, not be of, indoors. Three sides of it will be
open. The fourth side will divide it from the rest of the house.
The three sides will be screened against the creeping, fluttering things,
but not against the good fresh air and all the breezes that blow.
For protection against storm, to keep out the driving rain, there will
be a sliding glass, so made that when not in use it will occupy small
space and shut out very little air.
There is little more to say about this house. I am to build seven
or ten years from now. There is plenty of time in which to work
up all the details in accord with the general principles I have laid
down. It will be a usable house and a beautiful house, wherein
the aesthetic guest can find comfort for his eyes as well as for his
body. It will be a happy house - or else I’ll burn it down.
It will be a house of air and sunshine and laughter. These three
cannot be divorced. Laughter without air and sunshine becomes
morbid, decadent, demoniac. I have in me a thousand generations.
Laughter that is decadent is not good for these thousand generations.
GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
July 1906.
THE GOLD HUNTERS OF THE NORTH
“Where the Northern Lights come down a’ nights to dance
on the houseless snow.”
“Ivan, I forbid you to go farther in this undertaking. Not
a word about this, or we are all undone. Let the Americans and
the English know that we have gold in these mountains, then we are ruined.
They will rush in on us by thousands, and crowd us to the wall - to
the death.”
So spoke the old Russian governor, Baranov, at Sitka, in 1804, to one
of his Slavonian hunters, who had just drawn from his pocket a handful
of golden nuggets. Full well Baranov, fur trader and autocrat,
understood and feared the coming of the sturdy, indomitable gold hunters
of Anglo-Saxon stock. And thus he suppressed the news, as did
the governors that followed him, so that when the United States bought
Alaska in 1867, she bought it for its furs and fisheries, without a
thought of its treasures underground.
No sooner, however, had Alaska become American soil than thousands of
our adventurers were afoot and afloat for the north. They were
the men of “the days of gold,” the men of California, Fraser,
Cassiar, and Cariboo. With the mysterious, infinite faith of the
prospector, they believed that the gold streak, which ran through the
Americas from Cape Horn to California, did not “peter out”
in British Columbia. That it extended farther north, was their
creed, and “Farther North” became their cry. No time
was lost, and in the early seventies, leaving the Treadwell and the
Silver Bow Basin to be discovered by those who came after, they went
plunging on into the white unknown. North, farther north, they
struggled, till their picks rang in the frozen beaches of the Arctic
Ocean, and they shivered by driftwood fires on the ruby sands of Nome.
But first, in order that this colossal adventure may be fully grasped,
the recentness and the remoteness of Alaska must be emphasized.
The interior of Alaska and the contiguous Canadian territory was a vast
wilderness. Its hundreds of thousands of square miles were as
dark and chartless as Darkest Africa. In 1847, when the first
Hudson Bay Company agents crossed over the Rockies from the Mackenzie
to poach on the preserves of the Russian Bear, they thought that the
Yukon flowed north and emptied into the Arctic Ocean. Hundreds
of miles below, however, were the outposts of the Russian traders.
They, in turn, did not know where the Yukon had its source, and it was
not till later that Russ and Saxon learned that it was the same mighty
stream they were occupying. And a little over ten years later,
Frederick Whymper voyaged up the Great Bend to Fort Yukon under the
Arctic Circle.
From fort to fort, from York Factory on Hudson’s Bay to Fort Yukon
in Alaska, the English traders transported their goods - a round trip
requiring from a year to a year and a half. It was one of their
deserters, in 1867, escaping down the Yukon to Bering Sea, who was the
first white man to make the North-west Passage by land from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. It was at this time that the first accurate description
of a fair portion of the Yukon was given by Dr. W. H. Ball, of the Smithsonian
Institution. But even he had never seen its source, and it was
not given him to appreciate the marvel of that great natural highway.
No more remarkable river in this one particular is there in the world;
taking its rise in Crater Lake, thirty miles from the ocean, the Yukon
flows for twenty-five hundred miles, through the heart of the continent,
ere it empties into the sea. A portage of thirty miles, and then
a highway for traffic one tenth the girth of the earth!
As late as 1869, Frederick Whymper, fellow of the Royal Geographical
Society, stated on hearsay that the Chilcat Indians were believed occasionally
to make a short portage across the Coast Range from salt water to the
head-reaches of the Yukon. But it remained for a gold hunter,
questing north, ever north, to be first of all white men to cross the
terrible Chilcoot Pass, and tap the Yukon at its head. This happened
only the other day, but the man has become a dim legendary hero.
Holt was his name, and already the mists of antiquity have wrapped about
the time of his passage. 1872, 1874, and 1878 are the dates variously
given - a confusion which time will never clear.
Holt penetrated as far as the Hootalinqua, and on his return to the
coast reported coarse gold. The next recorded adventurer is one
Edward Bean, who in 1880 headed a party of twenty-five miners from Sitka
into the uncharted land. And in the same year, other parties (now
forgotten, for who remembers or ever hears the wanderings of the gold
hunters?) crossed the Pass, built boats out of the standing timber,
and drifted down the Yukon and farther north.
And then, for a quarter of a century, the unknown and unsung heroes
grappled with the frost, and groped for the gold they were sure lay
somewhere among the shadows of the Pole. In the struggle with
the terrifying and pitiless natural forces, they returned to the primitive,
garmenting themselves in the skins of wild beasts, and covering their
feet with the walrus mucluc and the moosehide moccasin.
They forgot the world and its ways, as the world had forgotten them;
killed their meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in
famine, and searched unceasingly for the yellow lure. They crisscrossed
the land in every direction, threaded countless unmapped rivers in precarious
birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes and dogs broke trail through thousands
of miles of silent white, where man had never been. They struggled
on, under the aurora borealis or the midnight sun, through temperatures
that ranged from one hundred degrees above zero to eighty degrees below,
living, in the grim humour of the land, on “rabbit tracks and
salmon bellies.”
To-day, a man may wander away from the trail for a hundred days, and
just as he is congratulating himself that at last he is treading virgin
soil, he will come upon some ancient and dilapidated cabin, and forget
his disappointment in wonder at the man who reared the logs. Still,
if one wanders from the trail far enough and deviously enough, he may
chance upon a few thousand square miles which he may have all to himself.
On the other hand, no matter how far and how deviously he may wander,
the possibility always remains that he may stumble, not alone upon a
deserted cabin, but upon an occupied one.
As an instance of this, and of the vastness of the land, no better case
need be cited than that of Harry Maxwell. An able seaman, hailing
from New Bedford, Massachusetts, his ship, the brig Fannie E. Lee,
was pinched in the Arctic ice. Passing from whaleship to whaleship,
he eventually turned up at Point Barrow in the summer of 1880.
He was north of the Northland, and from this point of vantage
he determined to pull south of the interior in search of gold.
Across the mountains from Fort Macpherson, and a couple of hundred miles
eastward from the Mackenzie, he built a cabin and established his headquarters.
And here, for nineteen continuous years, he hunted his living and prospected.
He ranged from the never opening ice to the north as far south as the
Great Slave Lake. Here he met Warburton Pike, the author and explorer
- an incident he now looks back upon as chief among the few incidents
of his solitary life.
When this sailor-miner had accumulated $20,000 worth of dust he concluded
that civilization was good enough for him, and proceeded “to pull
for the outside.” From the Mackenzie he went up the Little
Peel to its headwaters, found a pass through the mountains, nearly starved
to death on his way across to the Porcupine Hills, and eventually came
out on the Yukon River, where he learned for the first time of the Yukon
gold hunters and their discoveries. Yet for twenty years they
had been working there, his next-door neighbours, virtually, in a land
of such great spaces. At Victoria, British Columbia, previous
to his going east over the Canadian Pacific (the existence of which
he had just learned), he pregnantly remarked that he had faith in the
Mackenzie watershed, and that he was going back after he had taken in
the World’s Fair and got a whiff or two of civilization.
Faith! It may or may not remove mountains, but it has certainly
made the Northland. No Christian martyr ever possessed greater
faith than did the pioneers of Alaska. They never doubted the
bleak and barren land. Those who came remained, and more ever
came. They could not leave. They “knew” the
gold was there, and they persisted. Somehow, the romance of the
land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped
hold of them and would not let them go. Man after man of them,
after the most terrible privation and suffering, shook the muck of the
country from his moccasins and departed for good. But the following
spring always found him drifting down the Yukon on the tail of the ice
jams.
Jack McQuestion aptly vindicates the grip of the North. After
a residence of thirty years he insists that the climate is delightful,
and declares that whenever he makes a trip to the States he is afflicted
with home-sickness. Needless to say, the North still has him and
will keep tight hold of him until he dies. In fact, for him to
die elsewhere would be inartistic and insincere. Of three of the
“pioneer” pioneers, Jack McQuestion alone survives.
In 1871, from one to seven years before Holt went over Chilcoot, in
the company of Al Mayo and Arthur Harper, McQuestion came into the Yukon
from the North-west over the Hudson Bay Company route from the Mackenzie
to Fort Yukon. The names of these three men, as their lives, are
bound up in the history of the country, and so long as there be histories
and charts, that long will the Mayo and McQuestion rivers and the Harper
and Ladue town site of Dawson be remembered. As an agent of the
Alaska Commercial Company, in 1873, McQuestion built Fort Reliance,
six miles below the Klondike River. In 1898 the writer met Jack
McQuestion at Minook, on the Lower Yukon. The old pioneer, though
grizzled, was hale and hearty, and as optimistic as when he first journeyed
into the land along the path of the Circle. And no man more beloved
is there in all the North. There will be great sadness there when
his soul goes questing on over the Last Divide - “farther north,”
perhaps - who can tell?
Frank Dinsmore is a fair sample of the men who made the Yukon country.
A Yankee, born, in Auburn, Maine, the Wanderlust early laid him
by the heels, and at sixteen he was heading west on the trail that led
“farther north.” He prospected in the Black Hills,
Montana, and in the Coeur d’Alene, then heard a whisper of the
North, and went up to Juneau on the Alaskan Panhandle. But the
North still whispered, and more insistently, and he could not rest till
he went over Chilcoot, and down into the mysterious Silent Land.
This was in 1882, and he went down the chain of lakes, down the Yukon,
up the Pelly, and tried his luck on the bars of McMillan River.
In the fall, a perambulating skeleton, he came back over the Pass in
a blizzard, with a rag of shirt, tattered overalls, and a handful of
raw flour.
But he was unafraid. That winter he worked for a grubstake in
Juneau, and the next spring found the heels of his moccasins turned
towards salt water and his face toward Chilcoot. This was repeated
the next spring, and the following spring, and the spring after that,
until, in 1885, he went over the Pass for good. There was to be
no return for him until he found the gold he sought.
The years came and went, but he remained true to his resolve.
For eleven long years, with snow-shoe and canoe, pickaxe and gold-pan,
he wrote out his life on the face of the land. Upper Yukon, Middle
Yukon, Lower Yukon - he prospected faithfully and well. His bed
was anywhere. Winter or summer he carried neither tent nor stove,
and his six-pound sleeping-robe of Arctic hare was the warmest covering
he was ever known to possess. Rabbit tracks and salmon bellies
were his diet with a vengeance, for he depended largely on his rifle
and fishing-tackle. His endurance equalled his courage.
On a wager he lifted thirteen fifty-pound sacks of flour and walked
off with them. Winding up a seven-hundred-mile trip on the ice
with a forty-mile run, he came into camp at six o’clock in the
evening and found a “squaw dance” under way. He should
have been exhausted. Anyway, his muclucs were frozen stiff.
But he kicked them off and danced all night in stocking-feet.
At the last fortune came to him. The quest was ended, and he gathered
up his gold and pulled for the outside. And his own end was as
fitting as that of his quest. Illness came upon him down in San
Francisco, and his splendid life ebbed slowly out as he sat in his big
easy-chair, in the Commercial Hotel, the “Yukoner’s home.”
The doctors came, discussed, consulted, the while he matured more plans
of Northland adventure; for the North still gripped him and would not
let him go. He grew weaker day by day, but each day he said, “To-morrow
I’ll be all right.” Other old-timers, “out on
furlough,”, came to see him. They wiped their eyes and swore
under their breaths, then entered and talked largely and jovially about
going in with him over the trail when spring came. But there in
the big easy-chair it was that his Long Trail ended, and the life passed
out of him still fixed on “farther north.”
From the time of the first white man, famine loomed black and gloomy
over the land. It was chronic with the Indians and Eskimos; it
became chronic with the gold hunters. It was ever present, and
so it came about that life was commonly expressed in terms of “grub”
- was measured by cups of flour. Each winter, eight months long,
the heroes of the frost faced starvation. It became the custom,
as fall drew on, for partners to cut the cards or draw straws to determine
which should hit the hazardous trail for salt water, and which should
remain and endure the hazardous darkness of the Arctic night.
There was never food enough to winter the whole population. The
A. C. Company worked hard to freight up the grub, but the gold hunters
came faster and dared more audaciously. When the A. C. Company
added a new stern-wheeler to its fleet, men said, “Now we shall
have plenty.” But more gold hunters poured in over the passes
to the south, more voyageurs and fur traders forced a way through
the Rockies from the east, more seal hunters and coast adventurers poled
up from Bering Sea on the west, more sailors deserted from the whale-ships
to the north, and they all starved together in right brotherly fashion.
More steamers were added, but the tide of prospectors welled always
in advance. Then the N. A. T. & T. Company came upon
the scene, and both companies added steadily to their fleets.
But it was the same old story; famine would not depart. In fact,
famine grew with the population, till, in the winter of 1897-1898, the
United States government was forced to equip a reindeer relief expedition.
As of old, that winter partners cut the cards and drew straws, and remained
or pulled for salt water as chance decided. They were wise of
old time, and had learned never to figure on relief expeditions.
They had heard of such things, but no mortal man of them had ever laid
eyes on one.
The hard luck of other mining countries pales into insignificance before
the hard luck of the North. And as for the hardship, it cannot
be conveyed by printed page or word of mouth. No man may know
who has not undergone. And those who have undergone, out of their
knowledge, claim that in the making of the world God grew tired, and
when He came to the last barrowload, “just dumped it anyhow,”
and that was how Alaska happened to be. While no adequate conception
of the life can be given to the stay-at-home, yet the men themselves
sometimes give a clue to its rigours. One old Minook miner testified
thus: “Haven’t you noticed the expression on the faces of
us fellows? You can tell a new-comer the minute you see him; he
looks alive, enthusiastic, perhaps jolly. We old miners are always
grave, unless were drinking.”
Another old-timer, out of the bitterness of a “home-mood,”
imagined himself a Martian astronomer explaining to a friend, with the
aid of a powerful telescope, the institutions of the earth. “There
are the continents,” he indicated; “and up there near the
polar cap is a country, frigid and burning and lonely and apart, called
Alaska. Now, in other countries and states there are great insane
asylums, but, though crowded, they are insufficient; so there is Alaska
given over to the worst cases. Now and then some poor insane creature
comes to his senses in those awful solitudes, and, in wondering joy,
escapes from the land and hastens back to his home. But most cases
are incurable. They just suffer along, poor devils, forgetting
their former life quite, or recalling it like a dream.”
Again the grip of the North, which will not let one go - for “most
cases are incurable.”
For a quarter of a century the battle with frost and famine went on.
The very severity of the struggle with Nature seemed to make the gold
hunters kindly toward one another. The latch-string was always
out, and the open hand was the order of the day. Distrust was
unknown, and it was no hyperbole for a man to take the last shirt off
his back for a comrade. Most significant of all, perhaps, in this
connection, was the custom of the old days, that when August the first
came around, the prospectors who had failed to locate “pay dirt”
were permitted to go upon the ground of their more fortunate comrades
and take out enough for the next year’s grub-stake.
In 1885 rich bar-washing was done on the Stewart River, and in 1886
Cassiar Bar was struck just below the mouth of the Hootalinqua.
It was at this time that the first moderate strike was made on Forty
Mile Creek, so called because it was judged to be that distance below
Fort Reliance of Jack McQuestion fame. A prospector named Williams
started for the outside with dogs and Indians to carry the news, but
suffered such hardship on the summit of Chilcoot that he was carried
dying into the store of Captain John Healy at Dyea. But he had
brought the news through - coarse gold! Within three
months more than two hundred miners had passed in over Chilcoot, stampeding
for Forty Mile. Find followed find - Sixty Mile, Miller, Glacier,
Birch, Franklin, and the Koyokuk. But they were all moderate discoveries,
and the miners still dreamed and searched for the fabled stream, “Too
Much Gold,” where gold was so plentiful that gravel had to be
shovelled into the sluice-boxes in order to wash it.
And all the time the Northland was preparing to play its own huge joke.
It was a great joke, albeit an exceeding bitter one, and it has led
the old-timers to believe that the land is left in darkness the better
part of the year because God goes away and leaves it to itself.
After all the risk and toil and faithful endeavour, it was destined
that few of the heroes should be in at the finish when Too Much Gold
turned its yellow-treasure to the stars.
First, there was Robert Henderson - and this is true history.
Henderson had faith in the Indian River district. For three years,
by himself, depending mainly on his rifle, living on straight meat a
large portion of the time, he prospected many of the Indian River tributaries,
just missed finding the rich creeks, Sulphur and Dominion, and managed
to make grub (poor grub) out of Quartz Creek and Australia Creek.
Then he crossed the divide between Indian River and the Klondike, and
on one of the “feeders” of the latter found eight cents
to the pan. This was considered excellent in those simple days.
Naming the creek “Gold Bottom,” he recrossed the divide
and got three men, Munson, Dalton, and Swanson, to return with him.
The four took out $750. And be it emphasized, and emphasized again,
that this was the first Klondike gold ever shovelled in and washed
out. And be it also emphasized, that Robert Henderson was
the discoverer of Klondike, all lies and hearsay tales to the contrary.
Running out of grub, Henderson again recrossed the divide, and went
down the Indian River and up the Yukon to Sixty Mile. Here Joe
Ladue ran the trading post, and here Joe Ladue had originally grub-staked
Henderson. Henderson told his tale, and a dozen men (all it contained)
deserted the Post for the scene of his find. Also, Henderson persuaded
a party of prospectors bound for Stewart River, to forgo their trip
and go down and locate with him. He loaded his boat with supplies,
drifted down the Yukon to the mouth of the Klondike, and towed and poled
up the Klondike to Gold Bottom. But at the mouth of the Klondike
he met George Carmack, and thereby hangs the tale.
Carmack was a squawman. He was familiarly known as “Siwash”
George - a derogatory term which had arisen out of his affinity for
the Indians. At the time Henderson encountered him he was catching
salmon with his Indian wife and relatives on the site of what was to
become Dawson, the Golden City of the Snows. Henderson, bubbling
over with good-will, open-handed, told Carmack of his discovery.
But Carmack was satisfied where he was. He was possessed by no
overweening desire for the strenuous life. Salmon were good enough
for him. But Henderson urged him to come on and locate, until,
when he yielded, he wanted to take the whole tribe along. Henderson
refused to stand for this, said that he must give the preference over
Siwashes to his old Sixty Mile friends, and, it is rumoured, said some
things about Siwashes that were not nice.
The next morning Henderson went on alone up the Klondike to Gold Bottom.
Carmack, by this time aroused, took a short cut afoot for the same place.
Accompanied by his two Indian brothers-in-law, Skookum Jim and Tagish
Charley, he went up Rabbit Creek (now Bonanza), crossed into Gold Bottom,
and staked near Henderson’s discovery. On the way up he
had panned a few shovels on Rabbit Creek, and he showed Henderson “colours”
he had obtained. Henderson made him promise, if he found anything
on the way back, that he would send up one of the Indians with the news.
Henderson also agreed to pay for his service, for he seemed to feel
that they were on the verge of something big, and he wanted to make
sure.
Carmack returned down Rabbit Creek. While he was taking a sleep
on the bank about half a mile below the mouth of what was to be known
as Eldorado, Skookum Jim tried his luck, and from surface prospects
got from ten cents to a dollar to the pan. Carmack and his brother-in-law
staked and hit “the high places” for Forty Mile, where they
filed on the claims before Captain Constantine, and renamed the creek
Bonanza. And Henderson was forgotten. No word of it reached
him. Carmack broke his promise.
Weeks afterward, when Bonanza and Eldorado were staked from end to end
and there was no more room, a party of late comers pushed over the divide
and down to Gold Bottom, where they found Henderson still at work.
When they told him they were from Bonanza, he was nonplussed.
He had never heard of such a place. But when they described it,
he recognized it as Rabbit Creek. Then they told him of its marvellous
richness, and, as Tappan Adney relates, when Henderson realized what
he had lost through Carmack’s treachery, “he threw down
his shovel and went and sat on the bank, so sick at heart that it was
some time before he could speak.”
Then there were the rest of the old-timers, the men of Forty Mile and
Circle City. At the time of the discovery, nearly all of them
were over to the west at work in the old diggings or prospecting for
new ones. As they said of themselves, they were the kind of men
who are always caught out with forks when it rains soup. In the
stampede that followed the news of Carmack’s strike very few old
miners took part. They were not there to take part. But
the men who did go on the stampede were mainly the worthless ones, the
new-comers, and the camp hangers on. And while Bob Henderson plugged
away to the east, and the heroes plugged away to the west, the greenhorns
and rounders went up and staked Bonanza.
But the Northland was not yet done with its joke. When fall came
on and the heroes returned to Forty Mile and to Circle City, they listened
calmly to the up-river tales of Siwash discoveries and loafers’
prospects, and shook their heads. They judged by the calibre of
the men interested, and branded it a bunco game. But glowing reports
continued to trickle down the Yukon, and a few of the old-timers went
up to see. They looked over the ground - the unlikeliest place
for gold in all their experience - and they went down the river again,
“leaving it to the Swedes.”
Again the Northland turned the tables. The Alaskan gold hunter
is proverbial, not so much for his unveracity, as for his inability
to tell the precise truth. In a country of exaggerations, he likewise
is prone to hyperbolic description of things actual. But when
it came to Klondike, he could not stretch the truth as fast as the truth
itself stretched. Carmack first got a dollar pan. He lied
when he said it was two dollars and a half. And when those who
doubted him did get two-and-a-half pans, they said they were getting
an ounce, and lo! ere the lie had fairly started on its way, they were
getting, not one ounce, but five ounces. This they claimed was
six ounces; but when they filled a pan of dirt to prove the lie, they
washed out twelve ounces. And so it went. They continued
valiantly to lie, but the truth continued to outrun them.
But the Northland’s hyperborean laugh was not yet ended.
When Bonanza was staked from mouth to source, those who had failed to
“get in,” disgruntled and sore, went up the “pups”
and feeders. Eldorado was one of these feeders, and many men,
after locating on it, turned their backs upon their claims and never
gave them a second thought. One man sold a half-interest in five
hundred feet of it for a sack of flour. Other owners wandered
around trying to bunco men into buying them out for a song. And
then Eldorado “showed up.” It was far, far richer
than Bonanza, with an average value of a thousand dollars a foot to
every foot of it.
A Swede named Charley Anderson had been at work on Miller Creek the
year of the strike, and arrived in Dawson with a few hundred dollars.
Two miners, who had staked No. 29 Eldorado, decided that he was the
proper man upon whom to “unload.” He was too canny
to approach sober, so at considerable expense they got him drunk.
Even then it was hard work, but they kept him befuddled for several
days, and finally, inveigled him into buying No. 29 for $750.
When Anderson sobered up, he wept at his folly, and pleaded to have
his money back. But the men who had duped him were hard-hearted.
They laughed at him, and kicked themselves for not having tapped him
for a couple of hundred more. Nothing remained for Anderson but
to work the worthless ground. This he did, and out of it he took
over three-quarters of a million of dollars.
It was not till Frank Dinsmore, who already had big holdings on Birch
Creek, took a hand, that the old-timers developed faith in the new diggings.
Dinsmore received a letter from a man on the spot, calling it “the
biggest thing in the world,” and harnessed his dogs and went up
to investigate. And when he sent a letter back, saying that he
had never seen “anything like it,” Circle City for the first
time believed, and at once was precipitated one of the wildest stampedes
the country had ever seen or ever will see. Every dog was taken,
many went without dogs, and even the women and children and weaklings
hit the three hundred miles of ice through the long Arctic night for
the biggest thing in the world. It is related that but twenty
people, mostly cripples and unable to travel, were left in Circle City
when the smoke of the last sled disappeared up the Yukon.
Since that time gold has been discovered in all manner of places, under
the grass roots of the hill-side benches, in the bottom of Monte Cristo
Island, and in the sands of the sea at Nome. And now the gold
hunter who knows his business shuns the “favourable looking”
spots, confident in his hard-won knowledge that he will find the most
gold in the least likely place. This is sometimes adduced to support
the theory that the gold hunters, rather than the explorers, are the
men who will ultimately win to the Pole. Who knows? It is
in their blood, and they are capable of it.
PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
February 1902.
FOMÁ GORDYÉEFF
“What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!”
“Fomá Gordyéeff” is a big book - not only
is the breadth of Russia in it, but the expanse of life. Yet,
though in each land, in this world of marts and exchanges, this age
of trade and traffic, passionate figures rise up and demand of life
what its fever is, in “Fomá Gordyéeff” it
is a Russian who so rises up and demands. For Górky, the
Bitter One, is essentially a Russian in his grasp on the facts of life
and in his treatment. All the Russian self-analysis and insistent
introspection are his. And, like all his brother Russians, ardent,
passionate protest impregnates his work. There is a purpose to
it. He writes because he has something to say which the world
should hear. From that clenched fist of his, light and airy romances,
pretty and sweet and beguiling, do not flow, but realities - yes, big
and brutal and repulsive, but real.
He raises the cry of the miserable and the despised, and in a masterly
arraignment of commercialism, protests against social conditions, against
the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution
of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power.
It is to be doubted strongly if the average bourgeois, smug and fat
and prosperous, can understand this man Fomá Gordyéeff.
The rebellion in his blood is something to which their own does not
thrill. To them it will be inexplicable that this man, with his
health and his millions, could not go on living as his class lived,
keeping regular hours at desk and stock exchange, driving close contracts,
underbidding his competitors, and exulting in the business disasters
of his fellows. It would appear so easy, and, after such a life,
well appointed and eminently respectable, he could die. “Ah,”
Fomá will interrupt rudely - he is given to rude interruptions
- “if to die and disappear is the end of these money-grubbing
years, why money-grub?” And the bourgeois whom he rudely
interrupted will not understand. Nor did Mayákin understand
as he laboured holily with his wayward godson.
“Why do you brag?” Fomá, bursts out upon him.
“What have you to brag about? Your son - where is he?
Your daughter - what is she? Ekh, you manager of life! Come,
now, you’re clever, you know everything - tell me, why do you
live? Why do you accumulate money? Aren’t you going
to die? Well, what then?” And Mayákin finds
himself speechless and without answer, but unshaken and unconvinced.
Receiving by heredity the fierce, bull-like nature of his father plus
the passive indomitableness and groping spirit of his mother, Fomá,
proud and rebellious, is repelled by the selfish, money-seeking environment
into which he is born. Ignát, his father, and Mayákin,
the godfather, and all the horde of successful merchants singing the
pæan of the strong and the praises of merciless, remorseless laissez
faire, cannot entice him. Why? he demands. This is a
nightmare, this life! It is without significance! What does
it all mean? What is there underneath? What is the meaning
of that which is underneath?
“You do well to pity people,” Ignát tells Fomá,
the boy, “only you must use judgment with your pity. First
consider the man, find out what he is like, what use can be made of
him; and if you see that he is a strong and capable man, help him if
you like. But if a man is weak, not inclined to work - spit upon
him and go your way. And you must know that when a man complains
about everything, and cries out and groans - he is not worth more than
two kopéks, he is not worthy of pity, and will be of no use to
you if you do help him.”
Such the frank and militant commercialism, bellowed out between glasses
of strong liquor. Now comes Mayákin, speaking softly and
without satire:
“Eh, my boy, what is a beggar? A beggar is a man who is
forced, by fate, to remind us of Christ; he is Christ’s brother;
he is the bell of the Lord, and rings in life for the purpose of awakening
our conscience, of stirring up the satiety of man’s flesh.
He stands under the window and sings, ‘For Christ’s sa-ake!’
and by that chant he reminds us of Christ, of His holy command to help
our neighbour. But men have so ordered their lives that it is
utterly impossible for them to act in accordance with Christ’s
teaching, and Jesus Christ has become entirely superfluous to us.
Not once, but, in all probability, a thousand times, we have given Him
over to be crucified, but still we cannot banish Him from our lives
so long as His poor brethren sing His name in the streets and remind
us of Him. And so now we have hit upon the idea of shutting up
the beggars in such special buildings, so that they may not roam about
the streets and stir up our consciences.”
But Fomá will have none of it. He is neither to be enticed
nor cajoled. The cry of his nature is for light. He must
have light. And in burning revolt he goes seeking the meaning
of life. “His thoughts embraced all those petty people who
toiled at hard labour. It was strange - why did they live?
What satisfaction was it to them to live on the earth? All they
did was to perform their dirty, arduous toil, eat poorly; they were
miserably clad, addicted to drunkenness. One was sixty years old,
but he still toiled side by side with young men. And they all
presented themselves to Fomá’s imagination as a huge heap
of worms, who were swarming over the earth merely to eat.”
He becomes the living interrogation of life. He cannot begin living
until he knows what living means, and he seeks its meaning vainly.
“Why should I try to live life when I do not know what life is?”
he objects when Mayákin strives with him to return and manage
his business. Why should men fetch and carry for him? be slaves
to him and his money?
“Work is not everything to a man,” he says; “it is
not true that justification lies in work . . . Some people never do
any work at all, all their lives long - yet they live better than the
toilers. Why is that? And what justification have I?
And how will all the people who give their orders justify themselves?
What have they lived for? But my idea is that everybody ought,
without fail, to know solidly what he is living for. Is it possible
that a man is born to toil, accumulate money, build a house, beget children,
and - die? No; life means something in itself. . . . A man
has been born, has lived, has died - why? All of us must consider
why we are living, by God, we must! There is no sense in our life
- there is no sense at all. Some are rich - they have money enough
for a thousand men all to themselves - and they live without occupation;
others bow their backs in toil all their life, and they haven’t
a penny.”
But Fomá can only be destructive. He is not constructive.
The dim groping spirit of his mother and the curse of his environment
press too heavily upon him, and he is crushed to debauchery and madness.
He does not drink because liquor tastes good in his mouth. In
the vile companions who purvey to his baser appetites he finds no charm.
It is all utterly despicable and sordid, but thither his quest leads
him and he follows the quest. He knows that everything is wrong,
but he cannot right it, cannot tell why. He can only attack and
demolish. “What justification have you all in the sight
of God? Why do you live?” he demands of the conclave of
merchants, of life’s successes. “You have not constructed
life - you have made a cesspool! You have disseminated filth and
stifling exhalations by your deeds. Have you any conscience?
Do you remember God? A five-kopék piece - that is your
God! But you have expelled your conscience!”
Like the cry of Isaiah, “Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl
for your misfortunes that shall come upon you,” is Fomá’s:
“You blood-suckers! You live on other people’s strength;
you work with other people’s hands! For all this you shall
be made to pay! You shall perish - you shall be called to account
for all! For all - to the last little tear-drop!”
Stunned by this puddle of life, unable to make sense of it, Fomá
questions, and questions vainly, whether of Sófya Medynsky in
her drawing-room of beauty, or in the foulest depths of the first chance
courtesan’s heart. Linboff, whose books contradict one another,
cannot help him; nor can the pilgrims on crowded steamers, nor the verse
writers and harlots in dives and boozingkens. And so, wondering,
pondering, perplexed, amazed, whirling through the mad whirlpool of
life, dancing the dance of death, groping for the nameless, indefinite
something, the magic formula, the essence, the intrinsic fact, the flash
of light through the murk and dark - the rational sanction for existence,
in short - Fomá Gordyéeff goes down to madness and death.
It is not a pretty book, but it is a masterful interrogation of life
- not of life universal, but of life particular, the social life of
to-day. It is not nice; neither is the social life of to-day nice.
One lays the book down sick at heart - sick for life with all its “lyings
and its lusts.” But it is a healthy book. So fearful
is its portrayal of social disease, so ruthless its stripping of the
painted charms from vice, that its tendency cannot but be strongly for
good. It is a goad, to prick sleeping human consciences awake
and drive them into the battle for humanity.
But no story is told, nothing is finished, some one will object.
Surely, when Sásha leaped overboard and swam to Fomá,
something happened. It was pregnant with possibilities.
Yet it was not finished, was not decisive. She left him to go
with the son of a rich vodka-maker. And all that was best in Sófya
Medynsky was quickened when she looked upon Fomá with the look
of the Mother-Woman. She might have been a power for good in his
life, she might have shed light into it and lifted him up to safety
and honour and understanding. Yet she went away next day, and
he never saw her again. No story is told, nothing is finished.
Ah, but surely the story of Fomá Gordyéeff is told; his
life is finished, as lives are being finished each day around us.
Besides, it is the way of life, and the art of Górky is the art
of realism. But it is a less tedious realism than that of Tolstoy
or Turgenev. It lives and breathes from page to page with a swing
and dash and go that they rarely attain. Their mantle has fallen
on his young shoulders, and he promises to wear it royally.
Even so, but so helpless, hopeless, terrible is this life of Fomá
Gordyéeff that we would be filled with profound sorrow for Górky
did we not know that he has come up out of the Valley of Shadow.
That he hopes, we know, else would he not now be festering in a Russian
prison because he is brave enough to live the hope he feels. He
knows life, why and how it should be lived. And in conclusion,
this one thing is manifest: Fomá Gordyéeff is no mere
statement of an intellectual problem. For as he lived and interrogated
living, so in sweat and blood and travail has Górky lived.
PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
November 1901.
THESE BONES SHALL RISE AGAIN
Rudyard Kipling, “prophet of blood and vulgarity, prince of ephemerals
and idol of the unelect” - as a Chicago critic chortles - is dead.
It is true. He is dead, dead and buried. And a fluttering,
chirping host of men, little men and unseeing men, have heaped him over
with the uncut leaves of Kim, wrapped him in Stalky &
Co., for winding sheet, and for headstone reared his unconventional
lines, The Lesson. It was very easy. The simplest
thing in the world. And the fluttering, chirping gentlemen are
rubbing their hands in amaze and wondering why they did not do it long
ago, it was so very, very simple.
But the centuries to come, of which the fluttering, chirping gentlemen
are prone to talk largely, will have something to say in the matter.
And when they, the future centuries, quest back to the nineteenth century
to find what manner of century it was - to find, not what the people
of the nineteenth century thought they thought, but what they really
thought, not what they thought they ought to do, but what they really
did do, then a certain man, Kipling, will be read - and read with understanding.
“They thought they read him with understanding, those people of
the nineteenth century,” the future centuries will say; “and
then they thought there was no understanding in him, and after that
they did not know what they thought.”
But this is over-severe. It applies only to that class which serves
a function somewhat similar to that served by the populace of old time
in Rome. This is the unstable, mob-minded mass, which sits on
the fence, ever ready to fall this side or that and indecorously clamber
back again; which puts a Democratic administration into office one election,
and a Republican the next; which discovers and lifts up a prophet to-day
that it may stone him tomorrow; which clamours for the book everybody
else is reading, for no reason under the sun save that everybody else
is reading it. This is the class of whim and caprice, of fad and
vogue, the unstable, incoherent, mob-mouthed, mob-minded mass, the “monkey-folk,”
if you please, of these latter days. Now it may be reading The
Eternal City. Yesterday it was reading The Master Christian,
and some several days before that it was reading Kipling.
Yes, almost to his shame be it, these folk were reading him. But
it was not his fault. If he depended upon them he well deserves
to be dead and buried and never to rise again. But to them, let
us be thankful, he never lived. They thought he lived, but he
was as dead then as he is now and as he always will be.
He could not help it because he became the vogue, and it is easily understood.
When he lay ill, fighting with close grapples with death, those who
knew him were grieved. They were many, and in many voices, to
the rim of the Seven Seas, they spoke their grief. Whereupon,
and with celerity, the mob-minded mass began to inquire as to this man
whom so many mourned. If everybody else mourned, it were fit that
they mourn too. So a vast wail went up. Each was a spur
to the other’s grief, and each began privately to read this man
they had never read and publicly to proclaim this man they had always
read. And straightaway next day they drowned their grief in a
sea of historical romance and forgot all about him. The reaction
was inevitable. Emerging from the sea into which they had plunged,
they became aware that they had so soon forgotten him, and would have
been ashamed, had not the fluttering, chirping men said, “Come,
let us bury him.” And they put him in a hole, quickly, out
of their sight.
And when they have crept into their own little holes, and smugly laid
themselves down in their last long sleep, the future centuries will
roll the stone away and he will come forth again. For be it known:
That man of us is imperishable who makes his century imperishable.
That man of us who seizes upon the salient facts of our life, who tells
what we thought, what we were, and for what we stood - that man shall
be the mouthpiece to the centuries, and so long as they listen he shall
endure.
We remember the caveman. We remember him because he made his century
imperishable. But, unhappily, we remember him dimly, in a collective
sort of way, because he memorialized his century dimly, in a collective
sort of way. He had no written speech, so he left us rude scratchings
of beasts and things, cracked marrow-bones, and weapons of stone.
It was the best expression of which he was capable. Had he scratched
his own particular name with the scratchings of beasts and things, stamped
his cracked marrowbones with his own particular seal, trade-marked his
weapons of stone with his own particular device, that particular man
would we remember. But he did the best he could, and we remember
him as best we may.
Homer takes his place with Achilles and the Greek and Trojan heroes.
Because he remembered them, we remember him. Whether he be one
or a dozen men, or a dozen generations of men, we remember him.
And so long as the name of Greece is known on the lips of men, so long
will the name of Homer be known. There are many such names, linked
with their times, which have come down to us, many more which will yet
go down; and to them, in token that we have lived, must we add some
few of our own.
Dealing only with the artist, be it understood, only those artists will
go down who have spoken true of us. Their truth must be the deepest
and most significant, their voices clear and strong, definite and coherent.
Half-truths and partial-truths will not do, nor will thin piping voices
and quavering lays. There must be the cosmic quality in what they
sing. They must seize upon and press into enduring art-forms the
vital facts of our existence. They must tell why we have lived,
for without any reason for living, depend upon it, in the time to come,
it will be as though we had never lived. Nor are the things that
were true of the people a thousand years or so ago true of us to-day.
The romance of Homer’s Greece is the romance of Homer’s
Greece. That is undeniable. It is not our romance.
And he who in our time sings the romance of Homer’s Greece cannot
expect to sing it so well as Homer did, nor will he be singing about
us or our romance at all. A machine age is something quite different
from an heroic age. What is true of rapid-fire guns, stock-exchanges,
and electric motors, cannot possibly be true of hand-flung javelins
and whirring chariot wheels. Kipling knows this. He has
been telling it to us all his life, living it all his life in the work
he has done.
What the Anglo-Saxon has done, he has memorialized. And by Anglo-Saxon
is not meant merely the people of that tight little island on the edge
of the Western Ocean. Anglo-Saxon stands for the English-speaking
people of all the world, who, in forms and institutions and traditions,
are more peculiarly and definitely English than anything else.
This people Kipling has sung. Their sweat and blood and toil have
been the motives of his songs; but underlying all the motives of his
songs is the motive of motives, the sum of them all and something more,
which is one with what underlies all the Anglo-Saxon sweat and blood
and toil; namely, the genius of the race. And this is the cosmic
quality. Both that which is true of the race for all time, and
that which is true of the race for all time applied to this particular
time, he has caught up and pressed into his art-forms. He has
caught the dominant note of the Anglo-Saxon and pressed it into wonderful
rhythms which cannot be sung out in a day and which will not be sung
out in a day.
The Anglo-Saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a sea robber. Underneath
his thin coating of culture, he is what he was in Morgan’s time,
in Drake’s time, in William’s time, in Alfred’s time.
The blood and the tradition of Hengist and Horsa are in his veins.
In battle he is subject to the blood-lusts of the Berserkers of old.
Plunder and booty fascinate him immeasurably. The schoolboy of
to-day dreams the dream of Clive and Hastings. The Anglo-Saxon
is strong of arm and heavy of hand, and he possesses a primitive brutality
all his own. There is a discontent in his blood, an unsatisfaction
that will not let him rest, but sends him adventuring over the sea and
among the lands in the midst of the sea. He does not know when
he is beaten, wherefore the term “bulldog” is attached to
him, so that all may know his unreasonableness. He has “some
care as to the purity of his ways, does not wish for strange gods, nor
juggle with intellectual phantasmagoria.” He loves freedom,
but is dictatorial to others, is self-willed, has boundless energy,
and does things for himself. He is also a master of matter, an
organizer of law, and an administrator of justice.
And in the nineteenth century he has lived up to his reputation.
Being the nineteenth century and no other century, and in so far different
from all other centuries, he has expressed himself differently.
But blood will tell, and in the name of God, the Bible, and Democracy,
he has gone out over the earth, possessing himself of broad lands and
fat revenues, and conquering by virtue of his sheer pluck and enterprise
and superior machinery.
Now the future centuries, seeking to find out what the nineteenth century
Anglo-Saxon was and what were his works, will have small concern with
what he did not do and what he would have liked to do. These things
he did do, and for these things will he be remembered. His claim
on posterity will be that in the nineteenth century he mastered matter;
his twentieth-century claim will be, in the highest probability, that
he organized life - but that will be sung by the twentieth-century Kiplings
or the twenty-first-century Kiplings. Rudyard Kipling of the nineteenth
century has sung of “things as they are.” He has seen
life as it is, “taken it up squarely,” in both his hands,
and looked upon it. What better preachment upon the Anglo-Saxon
and what he has done can be had than The Bridge Builders? what
better appraisement than The White Man’s Burden?
As for faith and clean ideals - not of “children and gods, but
men in a world of men” - who has preached them better than he?
Primarily, Kipling has stood for the doer as opposed to the dreamer
- the doer, who lists not to idle songs of empty days, but who goes
forth and does things, with bended back and sweated brow and work-hardened
hands. The most characteristic thing about Kipling is his lover
of actuality, his intense practicality, his proper and necessary respect
for the hard-headed, hard-fisted fact. And, above all, he has
preached the gospel of work, and as potently as Carlyle ever preached.
For he has preached it not only to those in the high places, but to
the common men, to the great sweating thong of common men who hear and
understand yet stand agape at Carlyle’s turgid utterance.
Do the thing to your hand, and do it with all your might. Never
mind what the thing is; so long as it is something. Do it.
Do it and remember Tomlinson, sexless and soulless Tomlinson, who was
denied at Heaven’s gate.
The blundering centuries have perseveringly pottered and groped through
the dark; but it remained for Kipling’s century to roll in the
sun, to formulate, in other words, the reign of law. And of the
artists in Kipling’s century, he of them all has driven the greater
measure of law in the more consummate speech:
Keep ye the Law - be swift in all obedience.
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap what he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.
- And so it runs, from McAndrew’s Law, Order, Duty, and Restraint,
to his last least line, whether of The Vampire or The
Recessional. And no prophet out of Israel has cried out more
loudly the sins of the people, nor called them more awfully to repent.
“But he is vulgar, he stirs the puddle of life,” object
the fluttering, chirping gentlemen, the Tomlinsonian men. Well,
and isn’t life vulgar? Can you divorce the facts of life?
Much of good is there, and much of ill; but who may draw aside his garment
and say, “I am none of them”? Can you say that the
part is greater than the whole? that the whole is more or less than
the sum of the parts? As for the puddle of life, the stench is
offensive to you? Well, and what then? Do you not live in
it? Why do you not make it clean? Do you clamour for a filter
to make clean only your own particular portion? And, made clean,
are you wroth because Kipling has stirred it muddy again? At least
he has stirred it healthily, with steady vigour and good-will.
He has not brought to the surface merely its dregs, but its most significant
values. He has told the centuries to come of our lyings and our
lusts, but he has also told the centuries to come of the seriousness
which is underneath our lyings and our lusts. And he has told
us, too, and always has he told us, to be clean and strong and to walk
upright and manlike.
“But he has no sympathy,” the fluttering gentlemen chirp.
“We admire his art and intellectual brilliancy, we all admire
his art and intellectual brilliancy, his dazzling technique and rare
rhythmical sense; but . . . he is totally devoid of sympathy.”
Dear! Dear! What is to be understood by this? Should
he sprinkle his pages with sympathetic adjectives, so many to the paragraph,
as the country compositor sprinkles commas? Surely not.
The little gentlemen are not quite so infinitesimal as that. There
have been many tellers of jokes, and the greater of them, it is recorded,
never smiled at their own, not even in the crucial moment when the audience
wavered between laughter and tears.
And so with Kipling. Take The Vampire, for instance.
It has been complained that there is no touch of pity in it for the
man and his ruin, no sermon on the lesson of it, no compassion for the
human weakness, no indignation at the heartlessness. But are we
kindergarten children that the tale be told to us in words of one syllable?
Or are we men and women, able to read between the lines what Kipling
intended we should read between the lines? “For some of
him lived, but the most of him died.” Is there not here
all the excitation in the world for our sorrow, our pity, our indignation?
And what more is the function of art than to excite states of consciousness
complementary to the thing portrayed? The colour of tragedy is
red. Must the artist also paint in the watery tears and wan-faced
grief? “For some of him lived, but the most of him died”
- can the heartache of the situation be conveyed more achingly?
Or were it better that the young man, some of him alive but most of
him dead, should come out before the curtain and deliver a homily to
the weeping audience?
The nineteenth century, so far as the Anglo-Saxon is concerned, was
remarkable for two great developments: the mastery of matter and the
expansion of the race. Three great forces operated in it: nationalism,
commercialism, democracy - the marshalling of the races, the merciless,
remorseless laissez faire of the dominant bourgeoisie, and the
practical, actual working government of men within a very limited equality.
The democracy of the nineteenth century is not the democracy of which
the eighteenth century dreamed. It is not the democracy of the
Declaration, but it is what we have practised and lived that reconciles
it to the fact of the “lesser breeds without the Law.”
It is of these developments and forces of the nineteenth century that
Kipling has sung. And the romance of it he has sung, that which
underlies and transcends objective endeavour, which deals with race
impulses, race deeds, and race traditions. Even into the steam-laden
speech of his locomotives has he breathed our life, our spirit, our
significance. As he is our mouthpiece, so are they his mouthpieces.
And the romance of the nineteenth-century man as he has thus expressed
himself in the nineteenth century, in shaft and wheel, in steel and
steam, in far journeying and adventuring, Kipling has caught up in wondrous
songs for the future centuries to sing.
If the nineteenth century is the century of the Hooligan, then is Kipling
the voice of the Hooligan as surely as he is the voice of the nineteenth
century. Who is more representative? Is David Harum more
representative of the nineteenth century? Is Mary Johnston, Charles
Major, or Winston Churchill? Is Bret Harte? William Dean
Howells? Gilbert Parker? Who of them all is as essentially
representative of nineteenth-century life? When Kipling is forgotten,
will Robert Louis Stevenson be remembered for his Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde, his Kidnapped and his David Balfour?
Not so. His Treasure Island will be a classic, to go down
with Robinson Crusoe, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Jungle
Books. He will be remembered for his essays, for his letters,
for his philosophy of life, for himself. He will be the well beloved,
as he has been the well beloved. But his will be another claim
upon posterity than what we are considering. For each epoch has
its singer. As Scott sang the swan song of chivalry and Dickens
the burgher-fear of the rising merchant class, so Kipling, as no one
else, has sung the hymn of the dominant bourgeoisie, the war march of
the white man round the world, the triumphant pæan of commercialism
and imperialism. For that will he be remembered.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
October 1901.
THE OTHER ANIMALS
American journalism has its moments of fantastic hysteria, and when
it is on the rampage the only thing for a rational man to do is to climb
a tree and let the cataclysm go by. And so, some time ago, when
the word nature-faker was coined, I, for one, climbed into my
tree and stayed there. I happened to be in Hawaii at the time,
and a Honolulu reporter elicited the sentiment from me that I thanked
God I was not an authority on anything. This sentiment was promptly
cabled to America in an Associated Press despatch, whereupon the American
press (possibly annoyed because I had not climbed down out of my tree)
charged me with paying for advertising by cable at a dollar per word
- the very human way of the American press, which, when a man refuses
to come down and be licked, makes faces at him.
But now that the storm is over, let us come and reason together.
I have been guilty of writing two animal-stories - two books about dogs.
The writing of these two stories, on my part, was in truth a protest
against the “humanizing” of animals, of which it seemed
to me several “animal writers” had been profoundly guilty.
Time and again, and many times, in my narratives, I wrote, speaking
of my dog-heroes: “He did not think these things; he merely did
them,” etc. And I did this repeatedly, to the clogging of
my narrative and in violation of my artistic canons; and I did it in
order to hammer into the average human understanding that these dog-heroes
of mine were not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation,
and emotion, and by simple reasoning. Also, I endeavoured to make
my stories in line with the facts of evolution; I hewed them to the
mark set by scientific research, and awoke, one day, to find myself
bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers.
President Roosevelt was responsible for this, and he tried to condemn
me on two counts. (1) I was guilty of having a big, fighting bull-dog
whip a wolf-dog. (2) I was guilty of allowing a lynx to kill a
wolf-dog in a pitched battle. Regarding the second count, President
Roosevelt was wrong in his field observations taken while reading my
book. He must have read it hastily, for in my story I had the
wolf-dog kill the lynx. Not only did I have my wolf-dog kill the
lynx, but I made him eat the body of the lynx as well. Remains
only the first count on which to convict me of nature-faking, and the
first count does not charge me with diverging from ascertained facts.
It is merely a statement of a difference of opinion. President
Roosevelt does not think a bull-dog can lick a wolf-dog. I think
a bull-dog can lick a wolf-dog. And there we are. Difference
of opinion may make, and does make, horse-racing. I can understand
that difference of opinion can make dog-fighting. But what gets
me is how difference of opinion regarding the relative fighting merits
of a bull-dog and a wolf-dog makes me a nature-faker and President Roosevelt
a vindicated and triumphant scientist.
Then entered John Burroughs to clinch President Roosevelt’s judgments.
In this alliance there is no difference of opinion. That Roosevelt
can do no wrong is Burroughs’s opinion; and that Burroughs is
always right is Roosevelt’s opinion. Both are agreed that
animals do not reason. They assert that all animals below man
are automatons and perform actions only of two sorts - mechanical and
reflex - and that in such actions no reasoning enters at all.
They believe that man is the only animal capable of reasoning and that
ever does reason. This is a view that makes the twentieth-century
scientist smile. It is not modern at all. It is distinctly
mediaeval. President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, in advancing
such a view, are homocentric in the same fashion that the scholastics
of earlier and darker centuries were homocentric. Had the world
not been discovered to be round until after the births of President
Roosevelt and John Burroughs, they would have been geocentric as well
in their theories of the Cosmos. They could not have believed
otherwise. The stuff of their minds is so conditioned. They
talk the argot of evolution, while they no more understand the essence
and the import of evolution than does a South Sea Islander or Sir Oliver
Lodge understand the noumena of radio-activity.
Now, President Roosevelt is an amateur. He may know something
of statecraft and of big-game shooting; he may be able to kill a deer
when he sees it and to measure it and weigh it after he has shot it;
he may be able to observe carefully and accurately the actions and antics
of tomtits and snipe, and, after he has observed it, definitely and
coherently to convey the information of when the first chipmunk, in
a certain year and a certain latitude and longitude, came out in the
spring and chattered and gambolled - but that he should be able, as
an individual observer, to analyze all animal life and to synthetize
and develop all that is known of the method and significance of evolution,
would require a vaster credulity for you or me to believe than is required
for us to believe the biggest whopper ever told by an unmitigated nature-faker.
No, President Roosevelt does not understand evolution, and he does not
seem to have made much of an attempt to understand evolution.
Remains John Burroughs, who claims to be a thorough-going evolutionist.
Now, it is rather hard for a young man to tackle an old man. It
is the nature of young men to be more controlled in such matters, and
it is the nature of old men, presuming upon the wisdom that is very
often erroneously associated with age, to do the tackling. In
this present question of nature-faking, the old men did the tackling,
while I, as one young man, kept quiet a long time. But here goes
at last. And first of all let Mr. Burroughs’s position be
stated, and stated in his words.
“Why impute reason to an animal if its behaviour can be explained
on the theory of instinct?” Remember these words, for they
will be referred to later. “A goodly number of persons seem
to have persuaded themselves that animals do reason.” “But
instinct suffices for the animals . . . they get along very well without
reason.” “Darwin tried hard to convince himself that
animals do at times reason in a rudimentary way; but Darwin was also
a much greater naturalist than psychologist.” The preceding
quotation is tantamount, on Mr. Burroughs’s part, to a flat denial
that animals reason even in a rudimentary way. And when Mr. Burrough
denies that animals reason even in a rudimentary way, it is equivalent
to affirming, in accord with the first quotation in this paragraph,
that instinct will explain every animal act that might be confounded
with reason by the unskilled or careless observer.
Having bitten off this large mouthful, Mr. Burroughs proceeds with serene
and beautiful satisfaction to masticate it in the following fashion.
He cites a large number of instances of purely instinctive actions on
the part of animals, and triumphantly demands if they are acts of reason.
He tells of the robin that fought day after day its reflected image
in a window-pane; of the birds in South America that were guilty of
drilling clear through a mud wall, which they mistook for a solid clay
bank: of the beaver that cut down a tree four times because it was held
at the top by the branches of other trees; of the cow that licked the
skin of her stuffed calf so affectionately that it came apart, whereupon
she proceeded to eat the hay with which it was stuffed. He tells
of the phœbe-bird that betrays her nest on the porch by trying
to hide it with moss in similar fashion to the way all phœbe-birds
hide their nests when they are built among rocks. He tells of
the highhole that repeatedly drills through the clap-boards of an empty
house in a vain attempt to find a thickness of wood deep enough in which
to build its nest. He tells of the migrating lemmings of Norway
that plunge into the sea and drown in vast numbers because of their
instinct to swim lakes and rivers in the course of their migrations.
And, having told a few more instances of like kidney, he triumphantly
demands: “Where now is your much-vaunted reasoning of the lower
animals?
No schoolboy in a class debate could be guilty of unfairer argument.
It is equivalent to replying to the assertion that 2+2=4, by saying:
“No; because 12/4=3; I have demonstrated my honourable opponent’s
error.” When a man attacks your ability as a foot-racer,
promptly prove to him that he was drunk the week before last, and the
average man in the crowd of gaping listeners will believe that you have
convincingly refuted the slander on your fleetness of foot. On
my honour, it will work. Try it some time. It is done every
day. Mr. Burroughs has done it himself, and, I doubt not, pulled
the sophistical wool over a great many pairs of eyes. No, no,
Mr. Burroughs; you can’t disprove that animals reason by proving
that they possess instincts. But the worst of it is that you have
at the same time pulled the wool over your own eyes. You have
set up a straw man and knocked the stuffing out of him in the complacent
belief that it was the reasoning of lower animals you were knocking
out of the minds of those who disagreed with you. When the highhole
perforated the icehouse and let out the sawdust, you called him a lunatic
. . .
But let us be charitable - and serious. What Mr. Burroughs instances
as acts of instinct certainly are acts of instincts. By the same
method of logic one could easily adduce a multitude of instinctive acts
on the part of man and thereby prove that man is an unreasoning animal.
But man performs actions of both sorts. Between man and the lower
animals Mr. Burroughs finds a vast gulf. This gulf divides man
from the rest of his kin by virtue of the power of reason that he alone
possesses. Man is a voluntary agent. Animals are automatons.
The robin fights its reflection in the window-pane because it is his
instinct to fight and because he cannot reason out the physical laws
that make this reflection appear real. An animal is a mechanism
that operates according to fore-ordained rules. Wrapped up in
its heredity, and determined long before it was born, is a certain limited
capacity of ganglionic response to eternal stimuli. These responses
have been fixed in the species through adaptation to environment.
Natural selection has compelled the animal automatically to respond
in a fixed manner and a certain way to all the usual external stimuli
it encounters in the course of a usual life. Thus, under usual
circumstances, it does the usual thing. Under unusual circumstances
it still does the usual thing, wherefore the highhole perforating the
ice-house is guilty of lunacy - of unreason, in short. To do the
unusual thing under unusual circumstances, successfully to adjust to
a strange environment for which his heredity has not automatically fitted
an adjustment, Mr. Burroughs says is impossible. He says it is
impossible because it would be a non-instinctive act, and, as is well
known animals act only through instinct. And right here we catch
a glimpse of Mr. Burroughs’s cart standing before his horse.
He has a thesis, and though the heavens fall he will fit the facts to
the thesis. Agassiz, in his opposition to evolution, had a similar
thesis, though neither did he fit the facts to it nor did the heavens
fall. Facts are very disagreeable at times.
But let us see. Let us test Mr. Burroughs’s test of reason
and instinct. When I was a small boy I had a dog named Rollo.
According to Mr. Burroughs, Rollo was an automaton, responding to external
stimuli mechanically as directed by his instincts. Now, as is
well known, the development of instinct in animals is a dreadfully slow
process. There is no known case of the development of a single
instinct in domestic animals in all the history of their domestication.
Whatever instincts they possess they brought with them from the wild
thousands of years ago. Therefore, all Rollo’s actions were
ganglionic discharges mechanically determined by the instincts that
had been developed and fixed in the species thousands of years ago.
Very well. It is clear, therefore, that in all his play with me
he would act in old-fashioned ways, adjusting himself to the physical
and psychical factors in his environment according to the rules of adjustment
which had obtained in the wild and which had become part of his heredity.
Rollo and I did a great deal of rough romping. He chased me and
I chased him. He nipped my legs, arms, and hands, often so hard
that I yelled, while I rolled him and tumbled him and dragged him about,
often so strenuously as to make him yelp. In the course of the
play many variations arose. I would make believe to sit down and
cry. All repentance and anxiety, he would wag his tail and lick
my face, whereupon I would give him the laugh. He hated to be
laughed at, and promptly he would spring for me with good-natured, menacing
jaws, and the wild romp would go on. I had scored a point.
Then he hit upon a trick. Pursuing him into the woodshed, I would
find him in a far corner, pretending to sulk. Now, he dearly loved
the play, and never got enough of it. But at first he fooled me.
I thought I had somehow hurt his feelings and I came and knelt before
him, petting him, and speaking lovingly. Promptly, in a wild outburst,
he was up and away, tumbling me over on the floor as he dashed out in
a mad skurry around the yard. He had scored a point.
After a time, it became largely a game of wits. I reasoned my
acts, of course, while his were instinctive. One day, as he pretended
to sulk in the corner, I glanced out of the woodshed doorway, simulated
pleasure in face, voice, and language, and greeted one of my schoolboy
friends. Immediately Rollo forgot to sulk, rushed out to see the
newcomer, and saw empty space. The laugh was on him, and he knew
it, and I gave it to him, too. I fooled him in this way two or
three times; then be became wise. One day I worked a variation.
Suddenly looking out the door, making believe that my eyes had been
attracted by a moving form, I said coldly, as a child educated in turning
away bill-collectors would say: “No my father is not at home.”
Like a shot, Rollo was out the door. He even ran down the alley
to the front of the house in a vain attempt to find the man I had addressed.
He came back sheepishly to endure the laugh and resume the game.
And now we come to the test. I fooled Rollo, but how was the fooling
made possible? What precisely went on in that brain of his?
According to Mr. Burroughs, who denies even rudimentary reasoning to
the lower animals, Rollo acted instinctively, mechanically responding
to the external stimulus, furnished by me, which led him to believe
that a man was outside the door.
Since Rollo acted instinctively, and since all instincts are very ancient,
tracing back to the pre-domestication period, we can conclude only that
Rollo’s wild ancestors, at the time this particular instinct was
fixed into the heredity of the species, must have been in close, long-continued,
and vital contact with man, the voice of man, and the expressions on
the face of man. But since the instinct must have been developed
during the pre-domestication period, how under the sun could his wild,
undomesticated ancestors have experienced the close, long-continued,
and vital contact with man?
Mr. Burroughs says that “instinct suffices for the animals,”
that “they get along very well without reason.” But
I say, what all the poor nature-fakers will say, that Rollo reasoned.
He was born into the world a bundle of instincts and a pinch of brain-stuff,
all wrapped around in a framework of bone, meat, and hide. As
he adjusted to his environment he gained experiences. He remembered
these experiences. He learned that he mustn’t chase the
cat, kill chickens, nor bite little girls’ dresses. He learned
that little boys had little boy playmates. He learned that men
came into back yards. He learned that the animal man, on meeting
with his own kind, was given to verbal and facial greeting. He
learned that when a boy greeted a playmate he did it differently from
the way he greeted a man. All these he learned and remembered.
They were so many observations - so many propositions, if you please.
Now, what went on behind those brown eyes of his, inside that pinch
of brain-stuff, when I turned suddenly to the door and greeted an imaginary
person outside? Instantly, out of the thousands of observations
stored in his brain, came to the front of his consciousness the particular
observations connected with this particular situation. Next, he
established a relation between these observations. This relation
was his conclusion, achieved, as every psychologist will agree, by a
definite cell-action of his grey matter. From the fact that his
master turned suddenly toward the door, and from the fact that his master’s
voice, facial expression, and whole demeanour expressed surprise and
delight, he concluded that a friend was outside. He established
a relation between various things, and the act of establishing relations
between things is an act of reason - of rudimentary reason, granted,
but none the less of reason.
Of course Rollo was fooled. But that is no call for us to throw
chests about it. How often has every last one of us been fooled
in precisely similar fashion by another who turned and suddenly addressed
an imaginary intruder? Here is a case in point that occurred in
the West. A robber had held up a railroad train. He stood
in the aisle between the seats, his revolver presented at the head of
the conductor, who stood facing him. The conductor was at his
mercy.
But the conductor suddenly looked over the robber’s shoulder,
at the same time saying aloud to an imaginary person standing at the
robber’s back: “Don’t shoot him.” Like
a flash the robber whirled about to confront this new danger, and like
a flash the conductor shot him down. Show me, Mr. Burroughs, where
the mental process in the robber’s brain was a shade different
from the mental processes in Rollo’s brain, and I’ll quit
nature-faking and join the Trappists. Surely, when a man’s
mental process and a dog’s mental process are precisely similar,
the much-vaunted gulf of Mr. Burroughs’s fancy has been bridged.
I had a dog in Oakland. His name was Glen. His father was
Brown, a wolf-dog that had been brought down from Alaska., and his mother
was a half-wild mountain shepherd dog. Neither father nor mother
had had any experience with automobiles. Glen came from the country,
a half-grown puppy, to live in Oakland. Immediately he became
infatuated with an automobile. He reached the culmination of happiness
when he was permitted to sit up in the front seat alongside the chauffeur.
He would spend a whole day at a time on an automobile debauch, even
going without food. Often the machine started directly from inside
the barn, dashed out the driveway without stopping, and was gone.
Glen got left behind several times. The custom was established
that whoever was taking the machine out should toot the horn before
starting. Glen learned the signal. No matter where he was
or what he was doing, when that horn tooted he was off for the barn
and up into the front seat.
One morning, while Glen was on the back porch eating his breakfast of
mush and milk, the chauffeur tooted. Glen rushed down the steps,
into the barn, and took his front seat, the mush and milk dripping down
his excited and happy chops. In passing, I may point out that
in thus forsaking his breakfast for the automobile he was displaying
what is called the power of choice - a peculiarly lordly attribute that,
according to Mr. Burroughs, belongs to man alone. Yet Glen made
his choice between food and fun.
It was not that Glen wanted his breakfast less, but that he wanted his
ride more. The toot was only a joke. The automobile did
not start. Glen waited and watched. Evidently he saw no
signs of an immediate start, for finally he jumped out of the seat and
went back to his breakfast. He ate with indecent haste, like a
man anxious to catch a train. Again the horn tooted, again he
deserted his breakfast, and again he sat in the seat and waited vainly
for the machine to go.
They came close to spoiling Glen’s breakfast for him, for he was
kept on the jump between porch and barn. Then he grew wise.
They tooted the horn loudly and insistently, but he stayed by his breakfast
and finished it. Thus once more did he display power of choice,
incidentally of control, for when that horn tooted it was all he could
do to refrain from running for the barn.
The nature-faker would analyze what went on in Glen’s brain somewhat
in the following fashion. He had had, in his short life, experiences
that not one of all his ancestors had ever had. He had learned
that automobiles went fast, that once in motion it was impossible for
him to get on board, that the toot of the horn was a noise that was
peculiar to automobiles. These were so many propositions.
Now reasoning can be defined as the act or process of the brain by which,
from propositions known or assumed, new propositions are reached.
Out of the propositions which I have shown were Glen’s, and which
had become his through the medium of his own observation of the phenomena
of life, he made the new proposition that when the horn tooted it was
time for him to get on board.
But on the morning I have described, the chauffeur fooled Glen.
Somehow and much to his own disgust, his reasoning was erroneous.
The machine did not start after all. But to reason incorrectly
is very human. The great trouble in all acts of reasoning is to
include all the propositions in the problem. Glen had included
every proposition but one, namely, the human proposition, the joke in
the brain of the chauffeur. For a number of times Glen was fooled.
Then he performed another mental act. In his problem he included
the human proposition (the joke in the brain of the chauffeur), and
he reached the new conclusion that when the horn tooted the automobile
was not going to start. Basing his action on this conclusion,
he remained on the porch and finished his breakfast. You and I,
and even Mr. Burroughs, perform acts of reasoning precisely similar
to this every day in our lives. How Mr. Burroughs will explain
Glen’s action by the instinctive theory is beyond me. In
wildest fantasy, even, my brain refuses to follow Mr. Burroughs into
the primeval forest where Glen’s dim ancestors, to the tooting
of automobile horns, were fixing into the heredity of the breed the
particular instinct that would enable Glen, a few thousand years later,
capably to cope with automobiles.
Dr. C. J. Romanes tells of a female chimpanzee who was taught to count
straws up to five. She held the straws in her hand, exposing the
ends to the number requested. If she were asked for three, she
held up three. If she were asked for four, she held up four.
All this is a mere matter of training. But consider now, Mr. Burroughs,
what follows. When she was asked for five straws and she had only
four, she doubled one straw, exposing both its ends and thus making
up the required number. She did not do this only once, and by
accident. She did it whenever more straws were asked for than
she possessed. Did she perform a distinctly reasoning act? or
was her action the result of blind, mechanical instinct? If Mr.
Burroughs cannot answer to his own satisfaction, he may call Dr. Romanes
a nature-faker and dismiss the incident from his mind.
The foregoing is a trick of erroneous human reasoning that works very
successfully in the United States these days. It is certainly
a trick of Mr. Burroughs, of which he is guilty with distressing frequency.
When a poor devil of a writer records what he has seen, and when what
he has seen does not agree with Mr. Burroughs’s mediaeval theory,
he calls said writer a nature-faker. When a man like Mr. Hornaday
comes along, Mr. Burroughs works a variation of the trick on him.
Mr. Hornaday has made a close study of the orang in captivity and of
the orang in its native state. Also, he has studied closely many
other of the higher animal types. Also, in the tropics, he has
studied the lower types of man. Mr. Hornaday is a man of experience
and reputation. When he was asked if animals reasoned, out of
all his knowledge on the subject he replied that to ask him such a question
was equivalent to asking him if fishes swim. Now Mr. Burroughs
has not had much experience in studying the lower human types and the
higher animal types. Living in a rural district in the state of
New York, and studying principally birds in that limited habitat, he
has been in contact neither with the higher animal types nor the lower
human types. But Mr. Hornaday’s reply is such a facer to
him and his homocentric theory that he has to do something. And
he does it. He retorts: “I suspect that Mr. Hornaday is
a better naturalist than he is a comparative psychologist.”
Exit Mr. Hornaday. Who the devil is Mr. Hornaday, anyway?
The sage of Slabsides has spoken. When Darwin concluded that animals
were capable of reasoning in a rudimentary way, Mr. Burroughs laid him
out in the same fashion by saying: “But Darwin was also a much
greater naturalist than psychologist” - and this despite Darwin’s
long life of laborious research that was not wholly confined to a rural
district such as Mr. Burroughs inhabits in New York. Mr. Burroughs’s
method of argument is beautiful. It reminds one of the man whose
pronunciation was vile, but who said: “Damn the dictionary; ain’t
I here?”
And now we come to the mental processes of Mr. Burroughs - to the psychology
of the ego, if you please. Mr. Burroughs has troubles of his own
with the dictionary. He violates language from the standpoint
both of logic and science. Language is a tool, and definitions
embodied in language should agree with the facts and history of life.
But Mr. Burroughs’s definitions do not so agree. This, in
turn, is not the fault of his education, but of his ego. To him,
despite his well-exploited and patronizing devotion to them, the lower
animals are disgustingly low. To him, affinity and kinship with
the other animals is a repugnant thing. He will have none of it.
He is too glorious a personality not to have between him and the other
animals a vast and impassable gulf. The cause of Mr. Burroughs’s
mediaeval view of the other animals is to be found, not in his knowledge
of those other animals, but in the suggestion of his self-exalted ego.
In short, Mr. Burroughs’s homocentric theory has been developed
out of his homocentric ego, and by the misuse of language he strives
to make the facts of life agree with his theory.
After the instances I have cited of actions of animals which are impossible
of explanation as due to instinct, Mr. Burroughs may reply: “Your
instances are easily explained by the simple law of association.”
To this I reply, first, then why did you deny rudimentary reason to
animals? and why did you state flatly that “instinct suffices
for the animals”? And, second, with great reluctance and
with overwhelming humility, because of my youth, I suggest that you
do not know exactly what you do mean by that phrase “the simple
law of association.” Your trouble, I repeat, is with definitions.
You have grasped that man performs what is called abstract reasoning,
you have made a definition of abstract reason, and, betrayed by that
great maker of theories, the ego, you have come to think that all reasoning
is abstract and that what is not abstract reason is not reason at all.
This is your attitude toward rudimentary reason. Such a process,
in one of the other animals, must be either abstract or it is not a
reasoning process. Your intelligence tells you that such a process
is not abstract reasoning, and your homocentric thesis compels you to
conclude that it can be only a mechanical, instinctive process.
Definitions must agree, not with egos, but with life. Mr. Burroughs
goes on the basis that a definition is something hard and fast, absolute
and eternal. He forgets that all the universe is in flux; that
definitions are arbitrary and ephemeral; that they fix, for a fleeting
instant of time, things that in the past were not, that in the future
will be not, that out of the past become, and that out of the present
pass on to the future and become other things. Definitions cannot
rule life. Definitions cannot be made to rule life. Life
must rule definitions or else the definitions perish.
Mr. Burroughs forgets the evolution of reason. He makes a definition
of reason without regard to its history, and that definition is of reason
purely abstract. Human reason, as we know it to-day, is not a
creation, but a growth. Its history goes back to the primordial
slime that was quick with muddy life; its history goes back to the first
vitalized inorganic. And here are the steps of its ascent from
the mud to man: simple reflex action, compound reflex action, memory,
habit, rudimentary reason, and abstract reason. In the course
of the climb, thanks to natural selection, instinct was evolved.
Habit is a development in the individual. Instinct is a race-habit.
Instinct is blind, unreasoning, mechanical. This was the dividing
of the ways in the climb of aspiring life. The perfect culmination
of instinct we find in the ant-heap and the beehive. Instinct
proved a blind alley. But the other path, that of reason, led
on and on even to Mr. Burroughs and you and me.
There are no impassable gulfs, unless one chooses, as Mr. Burroughs
does, to ignore the lower human types and the higher animal types, and
to compare human mind with bird mind. It was impossible for life
to reason abstractly until speech was developed. Equipped with
swords, with tools of thought, in short, the slow development of the
power to reason in the abstract went on. The lowest human types
do little or no reasoning in the abstract. With every word, with
every increase in the complexity of thought, with every ascertained
fact so gained, went on action and reaction in the grey matter of the
speech discoverer, and slowly, step by step, through hundreds of thousands
of years, developed the power of reason.
Place a honey-bee in a glass bottle. Turn the bottom of the bottle
toward a lighted lamp so that the open mouth is away from the lamp.
Vainly, ceaselessly, a thousand times, undeterred by the bafflement
and the pain, the bee will hurl himself against the bottom of the bottle
as he strives to win to the light. That is instinct. Place
your dog in a back yard and go away. He is your dog. He
loves you. He yearns toward you as the bee yearns toward the light.
He listens to your departing footsteps. But the fence is too high.
Then he turns his back upon the direction in which you are departing,
and runs around the yard. He is frantic with affection and desire.
But he is not blind. He is observant. He is looking for
a hole under the fence, or through the fence, or for a place where the
fence is not so high. He sees a dry-goods box standing against
the fence. Presto! He leaps upon it, goes over the barrier,
and tears down the street to overtake you. Is that instinct?
Here, in the household where I am writing this, is a little Tahitian
“feeding-child.” He believes firmly that a tiny dwarf
resides in the box of my talking-machine and that it is the tiny dwarf
who does the singing and the talking. Not even Mr. Burroughs will
affirm that the child has reached this conclusion by an instinctive
process. Of course, the child reasons the existence of the dwarf
in the box. How else could the box talk and sing? In that
child’s limited experience it has never encountered a single instance
where speech and song were produced otherwise than by direct human agency.
I doubt not that the dog is considerably surprised when he hears his
master’s voice coming out of a box.
The adult savage, on his first introduction to a telephone, rushes around
to the adjoining room to find the man who is talking through the partition.
Is this act instinctive? No. Out of his limited experience,
out of his limited knowledge of physics, he reasons that the only explanation
possible is that a man is in the other room talking through the partition.
But that savage cannot be fooled by a hand-mirror. We must go
lower down in the animal scale, to the monkey. The monkey swiftly
learns that the monkey it sees is not in the glass, wherefore it reaches
craftily behind the glass. Is this instinct? No. It
is rudimentary reasoning. Lower than the monkey in the scale of
brain is the robin, and the robin fights its reflection in the window-pane.
Now climb with me for a space. From the robin to the monkey, where
is the impassable gulf? and where is the impassable gulf between the
monkey and the feeding-child? between the feeding-child and the savage
who seeks the man behind the partition? ay, and between the savage and
the astute financiers Mrs. Chadwick fooled and the thousands who were
fooled by the Keeley Motor swindle?
Let us be very humble. We who are so very human are very animal.
Kinship with the other animals is no more repugnant to Mr. Burroughs
than was the heliocentric theory to the priests who compelled Galileo
to recant. Not correct human reason, not the evidence of the ascertained
fact, but pride of ego, was responsible for the repugnance.
In his stiff-necked pride, Mr. Burroughs runs a hazard more humiliating
to that pride than any amount of kinship with the other animals.
When a dog exhibits choice, direction, control, and reason; when it
is shown that certain mental processes in that dog’s brain are
precisely duplicated in the brain of man; and when Mr. Burroughs convincingly
proves that every action of the dog is mechanical and automatic - then,
by precisely the same arguments, can it be proved that the similar actions
of man are mechanical and automatic. No, Mr. Burroughs, though
you stand on the top of the ladder of life, you must not kick out that
ladder from under your feet. You must not deny your relatives,
the other animals. Their history is your history, and if you kick
them to the bottom of the abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself.
By them you stand or fall. What you repudiate in them you repudiate
in yourself - a pretty spectacle, truly, of an exalted animal striving
to disown the stuff of life out of which it is made, striving by use
of the very reason that was developed by evolution to deny the possession
of evolution that developed it. This may be good egotism, but
it is not good science.
PAPEETE, TAHITI.
March 1908.
THE YELLOW PERIL
No more marked contrast appears in passing from our Western land to
the paper houses and cherry blossoms of Japan than appears in passing
from Korea to China. To achieve a correct appreciation of the
Chinese the traveller should first sojourn amongst the Koreans for several
months, and then, one fine day, cross over the Yalu into Manchuria.
It would be of exceptional advantage to the correctness of appreciation
did he cross over the Yalu on the heels of a hostile and alien army.
War is to-day the final arbiter in the affairs of men, and it is as
yet the final test of the worth-whileness of peoples. Tested thus,
the Korean fails. He lacks the nerve to remain when a strange
army crosses his land. The few goods and chattels he may have
managed to accumulate he puts on his back, along with his doors and
windows, and away he heads for his mountain fastnesses. Later
he may return, sans goods, chattels, doors, and windows, impelled by
insatiable curiosity for a “look see.” But it is curiosity
merely - a timid, deerlike curiosity. He is prepared to bound
away on his long legs at the first hint of danger or trouble.
Northern Korea was a desolate land when the Japanese passed through.
Villages and towns were deserted. The fields lay untouched.
There was no ploughing nor sowing, no green things growing. Little
or nothing was to be purchased. One carried one’s own food
with him and food for horses and servants was the anxious problem that
waited at the day’s end. In many a lonely village not an
ounce nor a grain of anything could be bought, and yet there might be
standing around scores of white-garmented, stalwart Koreans, smoking
yard-long pipes and chattering, chattering - ceaselessly chattering.
Love, money, or force could not procure from them a horseshoe or a horseshoe
nail.
“Upso,” was their invariable reply. “Upso,”
cursed word, which means “Have not got.”
They had tramped probably forty miles that day, down from their hiding-places,
just for a “look see,” and forty miles back they would cheerfully
tramp, chattering all the way over what they had seen. Shake a
stick at them as they stand chattering about your camp-fire, and the
gloom of the landscape will be filled with tall, flitting ghosts, bounding
like deer, with great springy strides which one cannot but envy.
They have splendid vigour and fine bodies, but they are accustomed to
being beaten and robbed without protest or resistance by every chance
foreigner who enters their country.
From this nerveless, forsaken Korean land I rode down upon the sandy
islands of the Yalu. For weeks these islands had been the dread
between-the-lines of two fighting armies. The air above had been
rent by screaming projectiles. The echoes of the final battle
had scarcely died away. The trains of Japanese wounded and Japanese
dead were trailing by.
On the conical hill, a quarter of a mile away, the Russian dead were
being buried in their trenches and in the shell holes made by the Japanese.
And here, in the thick of it all, a man was ploughing. Green things
were growing - young onions - and the man who was weeding them paused
from his labour long enough to sell me a handful. Near by was
the smoke-blackened ruin of the farmhouse, fired by the Russians when
they retreated from the riverbed. Two men were removing the debris,
cleaning the confusion, preparatory to rebuilding. They were clad
in blue. Pigtails hung down their backs. I was in China!
I rode to the shore, into the village of Kuelian-Ching. There
were no lounging men smoking long pipes and chattering. The previous
day the Russians had been there, a bloody battle had been fought, and
to-day the Japanese were there - but what was that to talk about?
Everybody was busy. Men were offering eggs and chickens and fruit
for sale upon the street, and bread, as I live, bread in small round
loaves or buns. I rode on into the country. Everywhere a
toiling population was in evidence. The houses and walls were
strong and substantial. Stone and brick replaced the mud walls
of the Korean dwellings. Twilight fell and deepened, and still
the ploughs went up and down the fields, the sowers following after.
Trains of wheelbarrows, heavily loaded, squeaked by, and Pekin carts,
drawn by from four to six cows, horses, mules, ponies, or jackasses
- cows even with their newborn calves tottering along on puny legs outside
the traces. Everybody worked. Everything worked. I
saw a man mending the road. I was in China.
I came to the city of Antung, and lodged with a merchant. He was
a grain merchant. Corn he had, hundreds of bushels, stored in
great bins of stout matting; peas and beans in sacks, and in the back
yard his millstones went round and round, grinding out meal. Also,
in his back yard, were buildings containing vats sunk into the ground,
and here the tanners were at work making leather. I bought a measure
of corn from mine host for my horses, and he overcharged me thirty cents.
I was in China. Antung was jammed with Japanese troops.
It was the thick of war. But it did not matter. The work
of Antung went on just the same. The shops were wide open; the
streets were lined with pedlars. One could buy anything; get anything
made. I dined at a Chinese restaurant, cleansed myself at a public
bath in a private tub with a small boy to assist in the scrubbing.
I bought condensed milk, bitter, canned vegetables, bread, and cake.
I repeat it, cake - good cake. I bought knives, forks, and spoons,
granite-ware dishes and mugs. There were horseshoes and horseshoers.
A worker in iron realized for me new designs of mine for my tent poles.
My shoes were sent out to be repaired. A barber shampooed my hair.
A servant returned with corn-beef in tins, a bottle of port, another
of cognac, and beer, blessed beer, to wash out from my throat the dust
of an army. It was the land of Canaan. I was in China.
The Korean is the perfect type of inefficiency - of utter worthlessness.
The Chinese is the perfect type of industry. For sheer work no
worker in the world can compare with him. Work is the breath of
his nostrils. It is his solution of existence. It is to
him what wandering and fighting in far lands and spiritual adventure
have been to other peoples. Liberty to him epitomizes itself in
access to the means of toil. To till the soil and labour interminably
with rude implements and utensils is all he asks of life and of the
powers that be. Work is what he desires above all things, and
he will work at anything for anybody.
During the taking of the Takú forts he carried scaling ladders
at the heads of the storming columns and planted them against the walls.
He did this, not from a sense of patriotism, but for the invading foreign
devils because they paid him a daily wage of fifty cents. He is
not frightened by war. He accepts it as he does rain and sunshine,
the changing of the seasons, and other natural phenomena. He prepares
for it, endures it, and survives it, and when the tide of battle sweeps
by, the thunder of the guns still reverberating in the distant canyons,
he is seen calmly bending to his usual tasks. Nay, war itself
bears fruits whereof he may pick. Before the dead are cold or
the burial squads have arrived he is out on the field, stripping the
mangled bodies, collecting the shrapnel, and ferreting in the shell
holes for slivers and fragments of iron.
The Chinese is no coward. He does not carry away his doors amid
windows to the mountains, but remains to guard them when alien soldiers
occupy his town. He does not hide away his chickens and his eggs,
nor any other commodity he possesses. He proceeds at once to offer
them for sale. Nor is he to be bullied into lowering his price.
What if the purchaser be a soldier and an alien made cocky by victory
and confident by overwhelming force? He has two large pears saved
over from last year which he will sell for five sen, or for the same
price three small pears. What if one soldier persist in taking
away with him three large pears? What if there be twenty other
soldiers jostling about him? He turns over his sack of fruit to
another Chinese and races down the street after his pears and the soldier
responsible for their flight, and he does not return till he has wrenched
away one large pear from that soldier’s grasp.
Nor is the Chinese the type of permanence which he has been so often
designated. He is not so ill-disposed toward new ideas and new
methods as his history would seem to indicate. True, his forms,
customs, and methods have been permanent these many centuries, but this
has been due to the fact that his government was in the hands of the
learned classes, and that these governing scholars found their salvation
lay in suppressing all progressive ideas. The ideas behind the
Boxer troubles and the outbreaks over the introduction of railroad and
other foreign devil machinations have emanated from the minds of the
literati, and been spread by their pamphlets and propagandists.
Originality and enterprise have been suppressed in the Chinese for scores
of generations. Only has remained to him industry, and in this
has he found the supreme expression of his being. On the other
hand, his susceptibility to new ideas has been well demonstrated wherever
he has escaped beyond the restrictions imposed upon him by his government.
So far as the business man is concerned he has grasped far more clearly
the Western code of business, the Western ethics of business, than has
the Japanese. He has learned, as a matter of course, to keep his
word or his bond. As yet, the Japanese business man has failed
to understand this. When he has signed a time contract and when
changing conditions cause him to lose by it, the Japanese merchant cannot
understand why he should live up to his contract. It is beyond
his comprehension and repulsive to his common sense that he should live
up to his contract and thereby lose money. He firmly believes
that the changing conditions themselves absolve him. And in so
far adaptable as he has shown himself to be in other respects, he fails
to grasp a radically new idea where the Chinese succeeds.
Here we have the Chinese, four hundred millions of him, occupying a
vast land of immense natural resources - resources of a twentieth-century
age, of a machine age; resources of coal and iron, which are the backbone
of commercial civilization. He is an indefatigable worker.
He is not dead to new ideas, new methods, new systems. Under a
capable management he can be made to do anything. Truly would
he of himself constitute the much-heralded Yellow Peril were it not
for his present management. This management, his government, is
set, crystallized. It is what binds him down to building as his
fathers built. The governing class, entrenched by the precedent
and power of centuries and by the stamp it has put upon his mind, will
never free him. It would be the suicide of the governing class,
and the governing class knows it.
Comes now the Japanese. On the streets of Antung, of Feng-Wang-Chang,
or of any other Manchurian city, the following is a familiar scene:
One is hurrying home through the dark of the unlighted streets when
he comes upon a paper lantern resting on the ground. On one side
squats a Chinese civilian on his hams, on the other side squats a Japanese
soldier. One dips his forefinger in the dust and writes strange,
monstrous characters. The other nods understanding, sweeps the
dust slate level with his hand, and with his forefinger inscribes similar
characters. They are talking. They cannot speak to each
other, but they can write. Long ago one borrowed the other’s
written language, and long before that, untold generations ago, they
diverged from a common root, the ancient Mongol stock.
There have been changes, differentiations brought about by diverse conditions
and infusions of other blood; but down at the bottom of their being,
twisted into the fibres of them, is a heritage in common - a sameness
in kind which time has not obliterated. The infusion of other
blood, Malay, perhaps, has made the Japanese a race of mastery and power,
a fighting race through all its history, a race which has always despised
commerce and exalted fighting.
To-day, equipped with the finest machines and systems of destruction
the Caucasian mind has devised, handling machines and systems with remarkable
and deadly accuracy, this rejuvenescent Japanese race has embarked on
a course of conquest the goal of which no man knows. The head
men of Japan are dreaming ambitiously, and the people are dreaming blindly,
a Napoleonic dream. And to this dream the Japanese clings and
will cling with bull-dog tenacity. The soldier shouting “Nippon,
Banzai!” on the walls of Wiju, the widow at home in her paper
house committing suicide so that her only son, her sole support, may
go to the front, are both expressing the unanimity of the dream.
The late disturbance in the Far East marked the clashing of the dreams,
for the Slav, too, is dreaming greatly. Granting that the Japanese
can hurl back the Slav and that the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon
race do not despoil him of his spoils, the Japanese dream takes on substantiality.
Japan’s population is no larger because her people have continually
pressed against the means of subsistence. But given poor, empty
Korea for a breeding colony and Manchuria for a granary, and at once
the Japanese begins to increase by leaps and bounds.
Even so, he would not of himself constitute a Brown Peril. He
has not the time in which to grow and realize the dream. He is
only forty-five millions, and so fast does the economic exploitation
of the planet hurry on the planet’s partition amongst the Western
peoples that, before he could attain the stature requisite to menace,
he would see the Western giants in possession of the very stuff of his
dream.
The menace to the Western world lies, not in the little brown man, but
in the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man
undertake their management. The Chinese is not dead to new ideas;
he is an efficient worker; makes a good soldier, and is wealthy in the
essential materials of a machine age. Under a capable management
he will go far. The Japanese is prepared and fit to undertake
this management. Not only has he proved himself an apt imitator
of Western material progress, a sturdy worker, and a capable organizer,
but he is far more fit to manage the Chinese than are we. The
baffling enigma of the Chinese character is no baffling enigma to him.
He understands as we could never school ourselves nor hope to understand.
Their mental processes are largely the same. He thinks with the
same thought-symbols as does the Chinese, and he thinks in the same
peculiar grooves. He goes on where we are balked by the obstacles
of incomprehension. He takes the turning which we cannot perceive,
twists around the obstacle, and, presto! is out of sight in the ramifications
of the Chinese mind where we cannot follow.
The Chinese has been called the type of permanence, and well he has
merited it, dozing as he has through the ages. And as truly was
the Japanese the type of permanence up to a generation ago, when he
suddenly awoke and startled the world with a rejuvenescence the like
of which the world had never seen before. The ideas of the West
were the leaven which quickened the Japanese; and the ideas of the West,
transmitted by the Japanese mind into ideas Japanese, may well make
the leaven powerful enough to quicken the Chinese.
We have had Africa for the Afrikander, and at no distant day we shall
hear “Asia for the Asiatic!” Four hundred million
indefatigable workers (deft, intelligent, and unafraid to die), aroused
and rejuvenescent, managed and guided by forty-five million additional
human beings who are splendid fighting animals, scientific and modern,
constitute that menace to the Western world which has been well named
the “Yellow Peril.” The possibility of race adventure
has not passed away. We are in the midst of our own. The
Slav is just girding himself up to begin. Why may not the yellow
and the brown start out on an adventure as tremendous as our own and
more strikingly unique?
The ultimate success of such an adventure the Western mind refuses to
consider. It is not the nature of life to believe itself weak.
There is such a thing as race egotism as well as creature egotism, and
a very good thing it is. In the first place, the Western world
will not permit the rise of the yellow peril. It is firmly convinced
that it will not permit the yellow and the brown to wax strong and menace
its peace and comfort. It advances this idea with persistency,
and delivers itself of long arguments showing how and why this menace
will not be permitted to arise. Today, far more voices are engaged
in denying the yellow peril than in prophesying it. The Western
world is warned, if not armed, against the possibility of it.
In the second place, there is a weakness inherent in the brown man which
will bring his adventure to naught. From the West he has borrowed
all our material achievement and passed our ethical achievement by.
Our engines of production and destruction he has made his. What
was once solely ours he now duplicates, rivalling our merchants in the
commerce of the East, thrashing the Russian on sea and land. A
marvellous imitator truly, but imitating us only in things material.
Things spiritual cannot be imitated; they must be felt and lived, woven
into the very fabric of life, and here the Japanese fails.
It required no revolution of his nature to learn to calculate the range
and fire a field gun or to march the goose-step. It was a mere
matter of training. Our material achievement is the product of
our intellect. It is knowledge, and knowledge, like coin, is interchangeable.
It is not wrapped up in the heredity of the new-born child, but is something
to be acquired afterward. Not so with our soul stuff, which is
the product of an evolution which goes back to the raw beginnings of
the race. Our soul stuff is not a coin to be pocketed by the first
chance comer. The Japanese cannot pocket it any more than he can
thrill to short Saxon words or we can thrill to Chinese hieroglyphics.
The leopard cannot change its spots, nor can the Japanese, nor can we.
We are thumbed by the ages into what we are, and by no conscious inward
effort can we in a day rethumb ourselves. Nor can the Japanese
in a day, or a generation, rethumb himself in our image.
Back of our own great race adventure, back of our robberies by sea and
land, our lusts and violences and all the evil things we have done,
there is a certain integrity, a sternness of conscience, a melancholy
responsibility of life, a sympathy and comradeship and warm human feel,
which is ours, indubitably ours, and which we cannot teach to the Oriental
as we would teach logarithms or the trajectory of projectiles.
That we have groped for the way of right conduct and agonized over the
soul betokens our spiritual endowment. Though we have strayed
often and far from righteousness, the voices of the seers have always
been raised, and we have harked back to the bidding of conscience.
The colossal fact of our history is that we have made the religion of
Jesus Christ our religion. No matter how dark in error and deed,
ours has been a history of spiritual struggle and endeavour. We
are pre-eminently a religious race, which is another way of saying that
we are a right-seeking race.
“What do you think of the Japanese?” was asked an American
woman after she had lived some time in Japan. “It seems
to me that they have no soul,” was her answer.
This must not be taken to mean that the Japanese is without soul.
But it serves to illustrate the enormous difference between their souls
and this woman’s soul. There was no feel, no speech, no
recognition. This Western soul did not dream that the Eastern
soul existed, it was so different, so totally different.
Religion, as a battle for the right in our sense of right, as a yearning
and a strife for spiritual good and purity, is unknown to the Japanese.
Measured by what religion means to us, the Japanese is a race without
religion. Yet it has a religion, and who shall say that it is
not as great a religion as ours, nor as efficacious? As one Japanese
has written:
“Our reflection brought into prominence not so much the moral
as the national consciousness of the individual. . . . To us the country
is more than land and soil from which to mine gold or reap grain - it
is the sacred abode of the gods, the spirit of our forefathers; to us
the Emperor is more than the Arch Constable of a Reichsstaat, or even
the Patron of a Kulturstaat; he is the bodily representative of heaven
on earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy.”
The religion of Japan is practically a worship of the State itself.
Patriotism is the expression of this worship. The Japanese mind
does not split hairs as to whether the Emperor is Heaven incarnate or
the State incarnate. So far as the Japanese are concerned, the
Emperor lives, is himself deity. The Emperor is the object to
live for and to die for. The Japanese is not an individualist.
He has developed national consciousness instead of moral consciousness.
He is not interested in his own moral welfare except in so far as it
is the welfare of the State. The honour of the individual, per
se, does not exist. Only exists the honour of the State, which
is his honour. He does not look upon himself as a free agent,
working out his own personal salvation. Spiritual agonizing is
unknown to him. He has a “sense of calm trust in fate, a
quiet submission to the inevitable, a stoic composure in sight of danger
or calamity, a disdain of life and friendliness with death.”
He relates himself to the State as, amongst bees, the worker is related
to the hive; himself nothing, the State everything; his reasons for
existence the exaltation and glorification of the State.
The most admired quality to-day of the Japanese is his patriotism.
The Western world is in rhapsodies over it, unwittingly measuring the
Japanese patriotism by its own conceptions of patriotism. “For
God, my country, and the Czar!” cries the Russian patriot; but
in the Japanese mind there is no differentiation between the three.
The Emperor is the Emperor, and God and country as well. The patriotism
of the Japanese is blind and unswerving loyalty to what is practically
an absolutism. The Emperor can do no wrong, nor can the five ambitious
great men who have his ear and control the destiny of Japan.
No great race adventure can go far nor endure long which has no deeper
foundation than material success, no higher prompting than conquest
for conquest’s sake and mere race glorification. To go far
and to endure, it must have behind it an ethical impulse, a sincerely
conceived righteousness. But it must be taken into consideration
that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism,
urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith
in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies.
So be it. The world is whirling faster to-day than ever before.
It has gained impetus. Affairs rush to conclusion. The Far
East is the point of contact of the adventuring Western people as well
as of the Asiatic. We shall not have to wait for our children’s
time nor our children’s children. We shall ourselves see
and largely determine the adventure of the Yellow and the Brown.
FENG-WANG-CHENG, MANCHURIA.
June 1904,
WHAT LIFE MEANS TO ME
I was born in the working-class. Early I discovered enthusiasm,
ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became the problem of my
child-life. My environment was crude and rough and raw.
I had no outlook, but an uplook rather. My place in society was
at the bottom. Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness,
both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were alike
starved and tormented.
Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to my mind the
only way out was up. Into this edifice I early resolved to climb.
Up above, men wore black clothes and boiled shirts, and women dressed
in beautiful gowns. Also, there were good things to eat, and there
was plenty to eat. This much for the flesh. Then there were
the things of the spirit. Up above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses
of the spirit, clean and noble thinking, keen intellectual living.
I knew all this because I read “Seaside Library” novels,
in which, with the exception of the villains and adventuresses, all
men and women thought beautiful thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue,
and performed glorious deeds. In short, as I accepted the rising
of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble
and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that made
life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and misery.
But it is not particularly easy for one to climb up out of the working-class
- especially if he is handicapped by the possession of ideals and illusions.
I lived on a ranch in California, and was hard put to find the ladder
whereby to climb. I early inquired the rate of interest on invested
money, and worried my child’s brain into an understanding of the
virtues and excellences of that remarkable invention of man, compound
interest. Further, I ascertained the current rates of wages for
workers of all ages, and the cost of living. From all this data
I concluded that if I began immediately and worked and saved until I
was fifty years of age, I could then stop working and enter into participation
in a fair portion of the delights and goodnesses that would then be
open to me higher up in society. Of course, I resolutely determined
not to marry, while I quite forgot to consider at all that great rock
of disaster in the working-class world - sickness.
But the life that was in me demanded more than a meagre existence of
scraping and scrimping. Also, at ten years of age, I became a
newsboy on the streets of a city, and found myself with a changed uplook.
All about me were still the same sordidness and wretchedness, and up
above me was still the same paradise waiting to be gained; but the ladder
whereby to climb was a different one. It was now the ladder of
business. Why save my earnings and invest in government bonds,
when, by buying two newspapers for five cents, with a turn of the wrist
I could sell them for ten cents and double my capital? The business
ladder was the ladder for me, and I had a vision of myself becoming
a bald-headed and successful merchant prince.
Alas for visions! When I was sixteen I had already earned the
title of “prince.” But this title was given me by
a gang of cut-throats and thieves, by whom I was called “The Prince
of the Oyster Pirates.” And at that time I had climbed the
first rung of the business ladder. I was a capitalist. I
owned a boat and a complete oyster-pirating outfit. I had begun
to exploit my fellow-creatures. I had a crew of one man.
As captain and owner I took two-thirds of the spoils, and gave the crew
one-third, though the crew worked just as hard as I did and risked just
as much his life and liberty.
This one rung was the height I climbed up the business ladder.
One night I went on a raid amongst the Chinese fishermen. Ropes
and nets were worth dollars and cents. It was robbery, I grant,
but it was precisely the spirit of capitalism. The capitalist
takes away the possessions of his fellow-creatures by means of a rebate,
or of a betrayal of trust, or by the purchase of senators and supreme-court
judges. I was merely crude. That was the only difference.
I used a gun.
But my crew that night was one of those inefficients against whom the
capitalist is wont to fulminate, because, forsooth, such inefficients
increase expenses and reduce dividends. My crew did both.
What of his carelessness he set fire to the big mainsail and totally
destroyed it. There weren’t any dividends that night, and
the Chinese fishermen were richer by the nets and ropes we did not get.
I was bankrupt, unable just then to pay sixty-five dollars for a new
mainsail. I left my boat at anchor and went off on a bay-pirate
boat on a raid up the Sacramento River. While away on this trip,
another gang of bay pirates raided my boat. They stole everything,
even the anchors; and later on, when I recovered the drifting hulk,
I sold it for twenty dollars. I had slipped back the one rung
I had climbed, and never again did I attempt the business ladder.
From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other capitalists.
I had the muscle, and they made money out of it while I made but a very
indifferent living out of it. I was a sailor before the mast,
a longshoreman, a roustabout; I worked in canneries, and factories,
and laundries; I mowed lawns, and cleaned carpets, and washed windows.
And I never got the full product of my toil. I looked at the daughter
of the cannery owner, in her carriage, and knew that it was my muscle,
in part, that helped drag along that carriage on its rubber tyres.
I looked at the son of the factory owner, going to college, and knew
that it was my muscle that helped, in part, to pay for the wine and
good fellowship he enjoyed.
But I did not resent this. It was all in the game. They
were the strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve
my way to a place amongst them and make money out of the muscles of
other men. I was not afraid of work. I loved hard work.
I would pitch in and work harder than ever and eventually become a pillar
of society.
And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that was of
the same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more than willing
that I should work. I thought I was learning a trade. In
reality, I had displaced two men. I thought he was making an electrician
out of me; as a matter of fact, he was making fifty dollars per month
out of me. The two men I had displaced had received forty dollars
each per month; I was doing the work of both for thirty dollars per
month.
This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may love oysters,
but too many oysters will disincline him toward that particular diet.
And so with me. Too much work sickened me. I did not wish
ever to see work again. I fled from work. I became a tramp,
begging my way from door to door, wandering over the United States and
sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons.
I had been born in the working-class, and I was now, at the age of eighteen,
beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar
of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it
is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss,
the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization.
This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore.
Lack of space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that
the things I there saw gave me a terrible scare.
I was scared into thinking. I saw the naked simplicities of the
complicated civilization in which I lived. Life was a matter of
food and shelter. In order to get food and shelter men sold things.
The merchant sold shoes, the politician sold his manhood, and the representative
of the people, with exceptions, of course, sold his trust; while nearly
all sold their honour. Women, too, whether on the street or in
the holy bond of wedlock, were prone to sell their flesh. All
things were commodities, all people bought and sold. The one commodity
that labour had to sell was muscle. The honour of labour had no
price in the marketplace. Labour had muscle, and muscle alone,
to sell.
But there was a difference, a vital difference. Shoes and trust
and honour had a way of renewing themselves. They were imperishable
stocks. Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew. As the
shoe merchant sold shoes, he continued to replenish his stock.
But there was no way of replenishing the labourer’s stock of muscle.
The more he sold of his muscle, the less of it remained to him.
It was his one commodity, and each day his stock of it diminished.
In the end, if he did not die before, he sold out and put up his shutters.
He was a muscle bankrupt, and nothing remained to him but to go down
into the cellar of society and perish miserably.
I learned, further, that brain was likewise a commodity. It, too,
was different from muscle. A brain seller was only at his prime
when he was fifty or sixty years old, and his wares were fetching higher
prices than ever. But a labourer was worked out or broken down
at forty-five or fifty. I had been in the cellar of society, and
I did not like the place as a habitation. The pipes and drains
were unsanitary, and the air was bad to breathe. If I could not
live on the parlour floor of society, I could, at any rate, have a try
at the attic. It was true, the diet there was slim, but the air
at least was pure. So I resolved to sell no more muscle, and to
become a vendor of brains.
Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge. I returned to California
and opened the books. While thus equipping myself to become a
brain merchant, it was inevitable that I should delve into sociology.
There I found, in a certain class of books, scientifically formulated,
the simple sociological concepts I had already worked out for myself.
Other and greater minds, before I was born, had worked out all that
I had thought and a vast deal more. I discovered that I was a
socialist.
The socialists were revolutionists, inasmuch as they struggled to overthrow
the society of the present, and out of the material to build the society
of the future. I, too, was a socialist and a revolutionist.
I joined the groups of working-class and intellectual revolutionists,
and for the first time came into intellectual living. Here I found
keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits; for here I met strong and
alert-brained, withal horny-handed, members of the working-class; unfrocked
preachers too wide in their Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers;
professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling
class and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they
strove to apply to the affairs of mankind.
Here I found, also, warm faith in the human, glowing idealism, sweetnesses
of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom - all the splendid, stinging
things of the spirit. Here life was clean, noble, and alive.
Here life rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and glorious; and I
was glad to be alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted
flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of
the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance
of commercial expansion and world empire. All about me were nobleness
of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and nights were sunshine
and starshine, all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and
blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ’s own Grail, the warm human, long-suffering
and maltreated, but to be rescued and saved at the last.
And I, poor foolish I, deemed all this to be a mere foretaste of the
delights of living I should find higher above me in society. I
had lost many illusions since the day I read “Seaside Library”
novels on the California ranch. I was destined to lose many of
the illusions I still retained.
As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened its portals
to me. I entered right in on the parlour floor, and my disillusionment
proceeded rapidly. I sat down to dinner with the masters of society,
and with the wives and daughters of the masters of society. The
women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naïve surprise
I discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the
women I had known down below in the cellar. “The colonel’s
lady and Judy O’Grady were sisters under their skins” -
and gowns.
It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked
me. It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled
sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their
prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic.
And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds
of sweet little charities, and informed one of the fact, while all the
time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought
out of dividends stained with the blood of child labour, and sweated
labour, and of prostitution itself. When I mentioned such facts,
expecting in my innocence that these sisters of Judy O’Grady would
at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and jewels, they became excited
and angry, and read me preachments about the lack of thrift, the drink,
and the innate depravity that caused all the misery in society’s
cellar. When I mentioned that I couldn’t quite see that
it was the lack of thrift, the intemperance, and the depravity of a
half-starved child of six that made it work twelve hours every night
in a Southern cotton mill, these sisters of Judy O’Grady attacked
my private life and called me an “agitator” - as though
that, forsooth, settled the argument.
Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. I had expected
to find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean,
noble, and alive. I went about amongst the men who sat in the
high places - the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the
professors, and the editors. I ate meat with them, drank wine
with them, automobiled with them, and studied them. It is true,
I found many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they
were not alive. I do verily believe I could count the exceptions
on the fingers of my two hands. Where they were not alive with
rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied
dead - clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive.
In this connection I may especially mention the professors I met, the
men who live up to that decadent university ideal, “the passionless
pursuit of passionless intelligence.”
I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their diatribes
against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons with which
to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men incoherent
with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the
same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each
year more babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.
I talked in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans, and steamer-chairs
with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little travelled they
were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I discovered
that their intellect, in the business sense, was abnormally developed.
Also, I discovered that their morality, where business was concerned,
was nil.
This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director
and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans.
This gentleman, who collected fine editions and was an especial patron
of literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of
a municipal machine. This editor, who published patent medicine
advertisements and did not dare print the truth in his paper about said
patent medicines for fear of losing the advertising, called me a scoundrelly
demagogue because I told him that his political economy was antiquated
and that his biology was contemporaneous with Pliny.
This senator was the tool and the slave, the little puppet of a gross,
uneducated machine boss; so was this governor and this supreme court
judge; and all three rode on railroad passes. This man, talking
soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the goodness
of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal. This
man, a pillar of the church and heavy contributor to foreign missions,
worked his shop girls ten hours a day on a starvation wage and thereby
directly encouraged prostitution. This man, who endowed chairs
in universities, perjured himself in courts of law over a matter of
dollars and cents. And this railroad magnate broke his word as
a gentleman and a Christian when he granted a secret rebate to one of
two captains of industry locked together in a struggle to the death.
It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime -
men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who were
clean and noble, but who were not alive. Then there was a great,
hopeless mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean. It did
not sin positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and ignorantly
by acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting by it.
Had it been noble and alive it would not have been ignorant, and it
would have refused to share in the profits of betrayal and crime.
I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlour floor of society.
Intellectually I was as bored. Morally and spiritually I was sickened.
I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my unfrocked preachers,
broken professors, and clean-minded, class-conscious working-men.
I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life
was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure
and ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning,
the Holy Grail.
So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and where
I belonged. I care no longer to climb. The imposing edifice
of society above my head holds no delights for me. It is the foundation
of the edifice that interests me. There I am content to labour,
crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals, idealists,
and class-conscious working-men, getting a solid pry now and again and
setting the whole edifice rocking. Some day, when we get a few
more hands and crowbars to work, we’ll topple it over, along with
all its rotten life and unburied dead, its monstrous selfishness and
sodden materialism. Then we’ll cleanse the cellar and build
a new habitation for mankind, in which there will be no parlour floor,
in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and where the air that
is breathed will be clean, noble, and alive.
Such is my outlook. I look forward to a time when man shall progress
upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will
be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day,
which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the
nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual
sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day.
And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some Frenchman
has said, “The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden
shoe going up, the polished boot descending.”
NEWTON, IOWA.
November 1905.