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 spit