1907
THE IRON HEEL
by Jack London
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
FOREWORD.
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IT CANNOT BE SAID THAT THE Everhard Manuscript is an important
historical document. To the historian it bristles with errors- not
errors of fact, but errors of interpretation. Looking back across
the seven centuries that have lapsed since Avis Everhard completed her
manuscript, events, and the bearings of events, that were confused and
veiled to her, are clear to us. She lacked perspective. She was too
close to the events she writes about. Nay, she was merged in the
events she has described.
Nevertheless, as a personal document, the Everhard Manuscript is
of inestimable value. But here again enter error of perspective, and
vitiation due to the bias of love. Yet we smile, indeed, and forgive
Avis Everhard for the heroic lines upon which she modelled her
husband. We know to-day that he was not so colossal, and that he
loomed among the events of his times less largely than the
Manuscript would lead us to believe.
We know that Ernest Everhard was an exceptionally strong man, but
not so exceptional as his wife thought him to be. He was, after all,
but one of a large number of heroes who, throughout the world, devoted
their lives to the Revolution; though it must be conceded that he
did unusual work, especially in his elaboration and interpretation
of working-class philosophy. 'Proletarian science' and 'proletarian
philosophy' were his phrases for it, and therein he shows the
provincialism of his mind- a defect, however, that was due to the
times and that none in that day could escape.
But to return to the Manuscript. Especially valuable is it in
communicating to us the feel of those terrible times. Nowhere do we
find more vividly portrayed the psychology of the persons that lived
in that turbulent period embraced between the years 1912 and 1932-
their mistakes and ignorance, their doubts and fears and
misapprehensions, their ethical delusions, their violent passions,
their inconceivable sordidness and selfishness. These are the things
that are so hard for us of this enlightened age to understand. History
tells us that these things were, and biology and psychology tell us
why they were; but history and biology and psychology do not make
these things alive. We accept them as facts, but we are left without
sympathetic comprehension of them.
This sympathy comes to us, however, as we peruse the Everhard
Manuscript. We enter into the minds of the actors in that long-ago
world-drama, and for the time being their mental processes are our
mental processes. Not alone do we understand Avis Everhard's love
for her hero-husband, but we feel, as he felt, in those first days,
the vague and terrible loom of the Oligarchy. The Iron Heel (well
named) we feel descending upon and crushing mankind.
And in passing we note that that historic phrase, the Iron Heel,
originated in Ernest Everhard's mind. This, we may say, is the one
moot question that this new-found document clears up. Previous to
this, the earliest-known use of the phrase occurred in the pamphlet,
'Ye Slaves,' written by George Milford and published in December,
1912. This George Milford was an obscure agitator about whom nothing
is known, save the one additional bit of information gained from the
Manuscript, which mentions that he was shot in the Chicago Commune.
Evidently he had heard Ernest Everhard make use of the phrase in
some public speech, most probably when he was running for Congress
in the fall of 1912. From the Manuscript we learn that Everhard used
the phrase at a private dinner in the spring of 1912. This is, without
discussion, the earliest-known occasion on which the Oligarchy was
so designated.
The rise of the Oligarchy will always remain a cause of secret
wonder to the historian and the philosopher. Other great historical
events have their place in social evolution. They were inevitable.
Their coming could have been predicted with the same certitude that
astronomers to-day predict the outcome of the movements of stars.
Without these other great historical events, social evolution could
not have proceeded. Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf
slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the
evolution of society. But it were ridiculous to assert that the Iron
Heel was a necessary stepping-stone. Rather, to-day, is it adjudged
a step aside, or a step backward, to the social tyrannies that made
the early world a hell, but that were as necessary as the Iron Heel
was unnecessary.
Black as Feudalism was, yet the coming of it was inevitable. What
else than Feudalism could have followed upon the breakdown of that
great centralized governmental machine known as the Roman Empire?
Not so, however, with the Iron Heel. In the orderly procedure of
social evolution there was no place for it. It was not necessary,
and it was not inevitable. It must always remain the great curiosity
of history- a whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and
undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political
theorists of to-day who speak with certitude of social processes.
Capitalism was adjudged by the sociologists of the time to be the
culmination of bourgeois rule, the ripened fruit of the bourgeois
revolution. And we of to-day can but applaud that judgment.
Following upon Capitalism, it was held, even by such intellectual
and antagonistic giants as Herbert Spencer, that Socialism would come.
Out of the decay of self-seeking capitalism, it was held, would
arise that flower of the ages, the Brotherhood of Man. Instead of
which, appalling alike to us who look back and to those that lived
at the time, capitalism, rotten-ripe, sent forth that monstrous
offshoot, the Oligarchy.
Too late did the socialist movement of the early twentieth century
divine the coming of the Oligarchy. Even as it was divined, the
Oligarchy was there- a fact established in blood, a stupendous and
awful reality. Nor even then, as the Everhard Manuscript well shows,
was any permanence attributed to the Iron Heel. Its overthrow was a
matter of a few short years, was the judgment of the revolutionists.
It is true, they realized that the Peasant Revolt was unplanned, and
that the First Revolt was premature; but they little realized that the
Second Revolt, planned and mature, was doomed to equal futility and
more terrible punishment.
It is apparent that Avis Everhard completed the Manuscript during
the last days of preparation for the Second Revolt; hence the fact
that there is no mention of the disastrous outcome of the Second
Revolt. It is quite clear that she intended the Manuscript for
immediate publication, as soon as the Iron Heel was overthrown, so
that her husband, so recently dead, should receive full credit for all
that he had ventured and accomplished. Then came the frightful
crushing of the Second Revolt, and it is probable that in the moment
of danger, ere she fled or was captured by the Mercenaries, she hid
the Manuscript in the hollow oak at Wake Robin Lodge.
Of Avis Everhard there is no further record. Undoubtedly she was
executed by the Mercenaries; and, as is well known, no record of
such executions was kept by the Iron Heel. But little did she realize,
even then, as she hid the Manuscript and prepared to flee, how
terrible had been the breakdown of the Second Revolt. Little did she
realize that the tortuous and distorted evolution of the next three
centuries would compel a Third Revolt and a Fourth Revolt, and many
Revolts, all drowned in seas of blood, ere the world-movement of labor
should come into its own. And little did she dream that for seven long
centuries the tribute of her love to Ernest Everhard would repose
undisturbed in the heart of the ancient oak of Wake Robin Lodge.
-
ANTHONY MEREDITH
Ardis,
November 27, 419 B.O.M.
CHAPTER ONE.
My Eagle.
-
THE SOFT SUMMER WIND stirs the redwoods, and Wild-Water ripples
sweet cadences over its mossy stones. There are butterflies in the
sunshine, and from everywhere arises the drowsy hum of bees. It is
so quiet and peaceful, and I sit here, and ponder, and am restless. It
is the quiet that makes me restless. It seems unreal. All the world is
quiet, but it is the quiet before the storm. I strain my ears, and all
my senses, for some betrayal of that impending storm. Oh, that it
may not be premature! That it may not be premature!*
-
* The Second Revolt was largely the work of Ernest Everhard,
though he cooperated, of course, with the European leaders. The
capture and secret execution of Everhard was the great event of the
spring of 1932 A.D. Yet so thoroughly had he prepared for the
revolt, that his fellow-conspirators were able, with little
confusion or delay, to carry out his plans. It was after Everhard's
execution that his wife went to Wake Robin Lodge, a small bungalow
in the Sonoma Hills of California.
-
Small wonder that I am restless. I think, and think, and I cannot
cease from thinking. I have been in the thick of life so long that I
am oppressed by the peace and quiet, and I cannot forbear from
dwelling upon that mad maelstrom of death and destruction so soon to
burst forth. In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can
see, as I have seen in the past,* all the marring and mangling of
the sweet, beautiful flesh, and the souls torn with violence from
proud bodies and hurled to God. Thus do we poor humans attain our
ends, striving through carnage and destruction to bring lasting
peace and happiness upon the earth.
-
* Without doubt she here refers to the Chicago Commune.
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And then I am lonely. When I do not think of what is to come, I
think of what has been and is no more- my Eagle, beating with tireless
wings the void, soaring toward what was ever his sun, the flaming
ideal of human freedom. I cannot sit idly by and wait the great
event that is his making, though he is not here to see. He devoted all
the years of his manhood to it, and for it he gave his life. It is his
handiwork. He made it.*
-
* With all respect to Avis Everhard, it must be pointed out that
Everhard was but one of many able leaders who planned the Second
Revolt. And we to-day, looking back across the centuries, can safely
say that even had he lived, the Second Revolt would not have been less
calamitous in its outcome than it was.
-
And so it is, in this anxious time of waiting, that I shall write of
my husband. There is much light that I alone of all persons living can
throw upon his character, and so noble a character cannot be
blazoned forth too brightly. His was a great soul, and, when my love
grows unselfish, my chiefest regret is that he is not here to
witness to-morrow's dawn. We cannot fail. He has built too stoutly and
too surely for that. Woe to the Iron Heel! Soon shall it be thrust
back from off prostrate humanity. When the word goes forth, the
labor hosts of all the world shall rise. There has been nothing like
it in the history of the world. The solidarity of labor is assured,
and for the first time will there be an international revolution
wide as the world is wide.*
-
* The Second Revolt was truly international. It was a colossal plan-
too colossal to be wrought by the genius of one man alone. Labor, in
all the oligarchies of the world, was prepared to rise at the
signal. Germany, Italy, France, and all Australasia were labor
countries- socialist states. They were ready to lend aid to the
revolution. Gallantly they did; and it was for this reason, when the
Second Revolt was crushed, that they, too, were crushed by the
united oligarchies of the world, their socialist governments being
replaced by oligarchical governments.
-
You see, I am full of what is impending. I have lived it day and
night utterly and for so long that it is ever present in my mind.
For that matter, I cannot think of my husband without thinking of
it. He was the soul of it, and how can I possibly separate the two
in thought?
As I have said, there is much light that I alone can throw upon
his character. It is well known that he toiled hard for liberty and
suffered sore. How hard he toiled and how greatly he suffered, I
well know; for I have been with him during these twenty anxious
years and I know his patience, his untiring effort, his infinite
devotion to the Cause for which, only two months gone, he laid down
his life.
I shall try to write simply and to tell here how Ernest Everhard
entered my life- how I first met him, how he grew until I became a
part of him, and the tremendous changes he wrought in my life. In this
way may you look at him through my eyes and learn him as I learned
him- in all save the things too secret and sweet for me to tell.
It was in February, 1912, that I first met him, when, as a guest
of my father's* at dinner, he came to our house in Berkeley. I
cannot say that my very first impression of him was favorable. He
was one of many at dinner, and in the drawing-room where we gathered
and waited for all to arrive, he made a rather incongruous appearance.
It was 'preacher's night,' as my father privately called it, and
Ernest was certainly out of place in the midst of the churchmen.
-
* John Cunningham, Avis Everhard's father, was a professor at the
State University at Berkeley, California. His chosen field was
physics, and in addition he did much original research and was greatly
distinguished as a scientist. His chief contribution to science was
his studies of the electron and his monumental work on the
'Identification of Matter and Energy,' wherein he established,
beyond cavil and for all time, that the ultimate unit of matter and
the ultimate unit of force were identical. This idea had been
earlier advanced, but not demonstrated, by Sir Oliver Lodge and
other students in the new field of radio-activity.
-
In the first place, his clothes did not fit him. He wore a
ready-made suit of dark cloth that was ill adjusted to his body. In
fact, no ready-made suit of clothes ever could fit his body. And on
this night, as always, the cloth bulged with his muscles, while the
coat between the shoulders, what of the heavy shoulder-development,
was a maze of wrinkles. His neck was the neck of a prize-fighter,*
thick and strong. So this was the social philosopher and ex-horseshoer
my father had discovered, was my thought. And he certainly looked it
with those bulging muscles and that bull-throat. Immediately I
classified him- a sort of prodigy, I thought, a Blind Tom*(2) of the
working class.
-
* In that day it was the custom of men to compete for purses of
money. They fought with their hands. When one was beaten into
insensibility or killed, the survivor took the money.
*(2) This obscure reference applies to a blind negro musician who
took the world by storm in the latter half of the nineteenth century
of the Christian Era.
-
And then, when he shook hands with me! His handshake was firm and
strong, but he looked at me boldly with his black eyes- too boldly,
I thought. You see, I was a creature of environment, and at that
time had strong class instincts. Such boldness on the part of a man of
my own class would have been almost unforgivable. I know that I
could not avoid dropping my eyes, and I was quite relieved when I
passed him on and turned to greet Bishop Morehouse- a favorite of
mine, a sweet and serious man of middle age, Christ-like in appearance
and goodness, and a scholar as well.
But this boldness that I took to be presumption was a vital clew
to the nature of Ernest Everhard. He was simple, direct, afraid of
nothing, and he refused to waste time on conventional mannerisms. 'You
pleased me,' he explained long afterward; 'and why should I not fill
my eyes with that which pleases me?' I have said that he was afraid of
nothing. He was a natural aristocrat- and this in spite of the fact
that he was in the camp of the non-aristocrats. He was a superman, a
blond beast such as Nietzsche* has described, and in addition he was
aflame with democracy.
-
* Friederich Nietzsche, the mad philosopher of the nineteenth
century of the Christian Era, who caught wild glimpses of truth, but
who, before he was done, reasoned himself around the great circle of
human thought and off into madness.
-
In the interest of meeting the other guests, and what of my
unfavorable impression, I forgot all about the working-class
philosopher, though once or twice at table I noticed him- especially
the twinkle in his eye as he listened to the talk first of one
minister and then of another. He has humor, I thought, and I almost
forgave him his clothes. But the time went by, and the dinner went by,
and he never opened his mouth to speak, while the ministers talked
interminably about the working class and its relation to the church,
and what the church had done and was doing for it. I noticed that my
father was annoyed because Ernest did not talk. Once father took
advantage of a lull and asked him to say something; but Ernest
shrugged his shoulders and with an 'I have nothing to say' went on
eating salted almonds.
But father was not to be denied. After a while he said:
'We have with us a member of the working class. I am sure that he
can present things from a new point of view that will be interesting
and refreshing. I refer to Mr. Everhard.'
The others betrayed a well-mannered interest, and urged Ernest for a
statement of his views. Their attitude toward him was so broadly
tolerant and kindly that it was really patronizing. And I saw that
Ernest noted it and was amused. He looked slowly about him, and I
saw the glint of laughter in his eyes.
'I am not versed in the courtesies of ecclesiastical controversy,'
he began, and then hesitated with modesty and indecision.
'Go on,' they urged, and Dr. Hammerfield said: 'We do not mind the
truth that is in any man. If it is sincere,' he amended.
'Then you separate sincerity from truth?' Ernest laughed quickly.
Dr. Hammerfield gasped, and managed to answer, 'The best of us may
be mistaken, young man, the best of us.'
Ernest's manner changed on the instant. He became another man.
'All right, then,' he answered; 'and let me begin by saying that you
are all mistaken. You know nothing, and worse than nothing, about
the working class. Your sociology is as vicious and worthless as is
your method of thinking.'
It was not so much what he said as how he said it. I roused at the
first sound of his voice. It was as bold as his eyes. It was a
clarion-call that thrilled me. And the whole table was aroused, shaken
alive from monotony and drowsiness.
'What is so dreadfully vicious and worthless in our method of
thinking, young man?' Dr. Hammerfield demanded, and already there
was something unpleasant in his voice and manner of utterance.
'You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics;
and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other
metaphysician wrong- to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in
the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you
dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies
and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and
your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is
phenomena of mental aberration.
'Do you know what I was reminded of as I sat at table and listened
to you talk and talk? You reminded me for all the world of the
scholastics of the Middle Ages who gravely and learnedly debated the
absorbing question of how many angels could dance on the point of a
needle. Why, my dear sirs, you are as remote from the intellectual
life of the twentieth century as an Indian medicine-man making
incantation in the primeval forest ten thousand years ago.'
As Ernest talked he seemed in a fine passion; his face glowed, his
eyes snapped and flashed, and his chin and jaw were eloquent with
aggressiveness. But it was only a way he had. It always aroused
people. His smashing, sledge-hammer manner of attack invariably made
them forget themselves. And they were forgetting themselves now.
Bishop Morehouse was leaning forward and listening intently.
Exasperation and anger were flushing the face of Dr. Hammerfield.
And others were exasperated, too, and some were smiling in an amused
and superior way. As for myself, I found it most enjoyable. I
glanced at father, and I was afraid he was going to giggle at the
effect of this human bombshell he had been guilty of launching amongst
us.
'Your terms are rather vague,' Dr. Hammerfield interrupted. 'Just
precisely what do you mean when you call us metaphysicians?'
'I call you metaphysicians because you reason metaphysically,'
Ernest went on. 'Your method of reasoning is the opposite to that of
science. There is no validity to your conclusions. You can prove
everything and nothing, and no two of you can agree upon anything.
Each of you goes into his own consciousness to explain himself and the
universe. As well may you lift yourselves by your own bootstraps as to
explain consciousness by consciousness.'
'I do not understand,' Bishop Morehouse said. 'It seems to me that
all things of the mind are metaphysical. That most exact and
convincing of all sciences, mathematics, is sheerly metaphysical. Each
and every thought-process of the scientific reasoner is
metaphysical. Surely you will agree with me?'
'As you say, you do not understand,' Ernest replied. 'The
metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The
scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience. The
metaphysician reasons from theory to facts, the scientist reasons from
facts to theory. The metaphysician explains the universe by himself,
the scientist explains himself by the universe.'
'Thank God we are not scientists,' Dr. Hammerfield murmured
complacently.
'What are you then?' Ernest demanded.
'Philosophers.'
'There you go,' Ernest laughed. 'You have left the real and solid
earth and are up in the air with a word for a flying machine. Pray
come down to earth and tell me precisely what you do mean by
philosophy.'
'Philosophy is-' (Dr. Hammerfield paused and cleared his throat)
'something that cannot be defined comprehensively except to such minds
and temperaments as are philosophical. The narrow scientist with his
nose in a test-tube cannot understand philosophy.'
Ernest ignored the thrust. It was always his way to turn the point
back upon an opponent, and he did it now, with a beaming brotherliness
of face and utterance.
'Then you will undoubtedly understand the definition I shall now
make of philosophy. But before I make it, I shall challenge you to
point out error in it or to remain a silent metaphysician.
Philosophy is merely the widest science of all. Its reasoning method
is the same as that of any particular science and of all particular
sciences. And by that same method of reasoning, the inductive
method, philosophy fuses all particular sciences into one great
science. As Spencer says, the data of any particular science are
partially unified knowledge. Philosophy unifies the knowledge that
is contributed by all the sciences. Philosophy is the science of
science, the master science, if you please. How do you like my
definition?'
'Very creditable, very creditable,' Dr. Hammerfield muttered lamely.
But Ernest was merciless.
'Remember,' he warned, 'my definition is fatal to metaphysics. If
you do not now point out a flaw in my definition, you are disqualified
later on from advancing metaphysical arguments. You must go through
life seeking that flaw and remaining metaphysically silent until you
have found it.'
Ernest waited. The silence was painful. Dr. Hammerfield was
pained. He was also puzzled. Ernest's sledge-hammer attack
disconcerted him. He was not used to the simple and direct method of
controversy. He looked appealingly around the table, but no one
answered for him. I caught father grinning into his napkin.
'There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians,' Ernest
said, when he had rendered Dr. Hammerfield's discomfiture complete.
'Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the
spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for
gods? They have added to the gayety of mankind, I grant; but what
tangible good have they wrought for mankind? They philosophized, if
you will pardon my misuse of the word, about the heart as the seat
of the emotions, while the scientists were formulating the circulation
of the blood. They declaimed about famine and pestilence as being
scourges of God, while the scientists were building granaries and
draining cities. They builded gods in their own shapes and out of
their own desires, while the scientists were building roads and
bridges. They were describing the earth as the centre of the universe,
while the scientists were discovering America and probing space for
the stars and the laws of the stars. In short, the metaphysicians have
done nothing, absolutely nothing, for mankind. Step by step, before
the advance of science, they have been driven back. As fast as the
ascertained facts of science have overthrown their subjective
explanations of things, they have made new subjective explanations
of things, including explanations of the latest ascertained facts. And
this, I doubt not, they will go on doing to the end of time.
Gentlemen, a metaphysician is a medicine man. The difference between
you and the Eskimo who makes a fur-clad blubber-eating god is merely a
difference of several thousand years of ascertained facts. That is
all.'
'Yet the thought of Aristotle ruled Europe for twelve centuries,'
Dr. Ballingford announced pompously. 'And Aristotle was a
metaphysician.'
Dr. Ballingford glanced around the table and was rewarded by nods
and smiles of approval.
'Your illustration is most unfortunate,' Ernest replied. 'You
refer to a very dark period in human history. In fact, we call that
period the Dark Ages. A period wherein science was raped by the
metaphysicians, wherein physics became a search for the
Philosopher's Stone, wherein chemistry became alchemy, and astronomy
became astrology. Sorry the domination of Aristotle's thought!'
Dr. Ballingford looked pained, then he brightened up and said:
'Granted this horrible picture you have drawn, yet you must
confess that metaphysics was inherently potent in so far as it drew
humanity out of this dark period and on into the illumination of the
succeeding centuries.'
'Metaphysics had nothing to do with it,' Ernest retorted.
'What?' Dr. Hammerfield cried. 'It was not the thinking and the
speculation that led to the voyages of discovery?'
'Ah, my dear sir,' Ernest smiled, 'I thought you were
disqualified. You have not yet picked out the flaw in my definition of
philosophy. You are now on an unsubstantial basis. But it is the way
of the metaphysicians, and I forgive you. No, I repeat, metaphysics
had nothing to do with it. Bread and butter, silks and jewels, dollars
and cents, and, incidentally, the closing up of the overland
trade-routes to India, were the things that caused the voyages of
discovery. With the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, the Turks blocked
the way of the caravans to India. The traders of Europe had to find
another route. Here was the original cause for the voyages of
discovery. Columbus sailed to find a new route to the Indies. It is so
stated in all the history books. Incidentally, new facts were
learned about the nature, size, and form of the earth, and the
Ptolemaic system went glimmering.'
Dr. Hammerfield snorted.
'You do not agree with me?' Ernest queried. 'Then wherein am I
wrong?'
'I can only reaffirm my position,' Dr. Hammerfield retorted
tartly. 'It is too long a story to enter into now.'
'No story is too long for the scientist,' Ernest said sweetly. 'That
is why the scientist gets to places. That is why he got to America.'
I shall not describe the whole evening, though it is a joy to me
to recall every moment, every detail, of those first hours of my
coming to know Ernest Everhard.
Battle royal raged, and the ministers grew red-faced and excited,
especially at the moments when Ernest called them romantic
philosophers, shadow-projectors, and similar things. And always he
checked them back to facts. 'The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!' he
would proclaim triumphantly, when he had brought one of them a
cropper. He bristled with facts. He tripped them up with facts,
ambuscaded them with facts, bombarded them with broadsides of facts.
'You seem to worship at the shrine of fact,' Dr. Hammerfield taunted
him.
'There is no God but Fact, and Mr. Everhard is its prophet,' Dr.
Ballingford paraphrased.
Ernest smilingly acquiesced.
'I'm like the man from Texas,' he said. And, on being solicited,
he explained. 'You see, the man from Missouri always says, 'You've got
to show me.' But the man from Texas says, 'You've got to put it in
my hand.' From which it is apparent that he is no metaphysician.'
Another time, when Ernest had just said that the metaphysical
philosophers could never stand the test of truth, Dr. Hammerfield
suddenly demanded:
'What is the test of truth, young man? Will you kindly explain
what has so long puzzled wiser heads than yours?'
'Certainly,' Ernest answered. His cocksureness irritated them.
'The wise heads have puzzled so sorely over truth because they went up
into the air after it. Had they remained on the solid earth, they
would have found it easily enough- ay, they would have found that they
themselves were precisely testing truth with every practical act and
thought of their lives.'
'The test, the test,' Dr. Hammerfield repeated impatiently. 'Never
mind the preamble. Give us that which we have sought so long- the test
of truth. Give it us, and we will be as gods.'
There was an impolite and sneering scepticism in his words and
manner that secretly pleased most of them at the table, though it
seemed to bother Bishop Morehouse.
'Dr. Jordan* has stated it very clearly,' Ernest said. 'His test
of truth is: "Will it work? Will you trust your life to it?"'
-
* A noted educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries of the Christian Era. He was president of the Stanford
University, a private benefaction of the times.
-
'Pish!' Dr. Hammerfield sneered. 'You have not taken Bishop
Berkeley* into account. He has never been answered.'
-
* An idealistic monist who long puzzled the philosophers of that
time with his denial of the existence of matter, but whose clever
argument was finally demolished when the new empiric facts of
science were philosophically generalized.
-
'The noblest metaphysician of them all,' Ernest laughed. 'But your
example is unfortunate. As Berkeley himself attested, his
metaphysics didn't work.'
Dr. Hammerfield was angry, righteously angry. It was as though he
had caught Ernest in a theft or a lie.
'Young man,' he trumpeted, 'that statement is on a par with all
you have uttered to-night. It is a base and unwarranted assumption.'
'I am quite crushed,' Ernest murmured meekly. 'Only I don't know
what hit me. You'll have to put it in my hand, Doctor.'
'I will, I will,' Dr. Hammerfield spluttered. 'How do you know?
You do not know that Bishop Berkeley attested that his metaphysics did
not work. You have no proof. Young man, they have always worked.'
'I take it as proof that Berkeley's metaphysics did not work,
because-' Ernest paused calmly for a moment. 'Because Berkeley made an
invariable practice of going through doors instead of walls. Because
he trusted his life to solid bread and butter and roast beef.
Because he shaved himself with a razor that worked when it removed the
hair from his face.'
'But those are actual things!' Dr. Hammerfield cried. 'Metaphysics
is of the mind.'
'And they work- in the mind?' Ernest queried softly.
The other nodded.
'And even a multitude of angels can dance on the point of a
needle- in the mind,' Ernest went on reflectively. 'And a
blubber-eating, fur-clad god can exist and work- in the mind; and
there are no proofs to the contrary- in the mind. I suppose, Doctor,
you live in the mind?'
'My mind to me a kingdom is,' was the answer.
'That's another way of saying that you live up in the air. But you
come back to earth at meal-time, I am sure, or when an earthquake
happens along. Or, tell me, Doctor, do you have no apprehension in
an earthquake that that incorporeal body of yours will be hit by an
immaterial brick?'
Instantly, and quite unconsciously, Dr. Hammerfield's hand shot up
to his head, where a scar disappeared under the hair. It happened that
Ernest had blundered on an apposite illustration. Dr. Hammerfield
had been nearly killed in the Great Earthquake* by a falling
chimney. Everybody broke out into roars of laughter.
-
* The Great Earthquake of 1906 A.D. that destroyed San Francisco.
-
'Well?' Ernest asked, when the merriment had subsided. 'Proofs to
the contrary?'
And in the silence he asked again, 'Well?' Then he added, 'Still
well, but not so well, that argument of yours.'
But Dr. Hammerfield was temporarily crushed, and the battle raged on
in new directions. On point after point, Ernest challenged the
ministers. When they affirmed that they knew the working class, he
told them fundamental truths about the working class that they did not
know, and challenged them for disproofs. He gave them facts, always
facts, checked their excursions into the air, and brought them back to
the solid earth and its facts.
How the scene comes back to me! I can hear him now, with that
war-note in his voice, flaying them with his facts, each fact a lash
that stung and stung again. And he was merciless. He took no quarter,*
and gave none. I can never forget the flaying he gave them at the end:
-
* This figure arises from the customs of the times. When, among
men fighting to the death in their wild-animal way, a beaten man threw
down his weapons, it was at the option of the victor to slay him or
spare him.
-
'You have repeatedly confessed to-night, by direct avowal or
ignorant statement, that you do not know the working class. But you
are not to be blamed for this. How can you know anything about the
working class? You do not live in the same locality with the working
class. You herd with the capitalist class in another locality. And why
not? It is the capitalist class that pays you, that feeds you, that
puts the very clothes on your backs that you are wearing to-night. And
in return you preach to your employers the brands of metaphysics
that are especially acceptable to them; and the especially
acceptable brands are acceptable because they do not menace the
established order of society.'
Here there was a stir of dissent around the table.
'Oh, I am not challenging your sincerity,' Ernest continued. 'You
are sincere. You preach what you believe. There lies your strength and
your value- to the capitalist class. But should you change your belief
to something that menaces the established order, your preaching
would be unacceptable to your employers, and you would be
discharged. Every little while some one or another of you is so
discharged.* Am I not right?'
-
* During this period there were many ministers cast out of the
church for preaching unacceptable doctrine. Especially were they
cast out when their preaching became tainted with socialism.
-
This time there was no dissent. They sat dumbly acquiescent, with
the exception of Dr. Hammerfield, who said:
'It is when their thinking is wrong that they are asked to resign.'
'Which is another way of saying when their thinking is
unacceptable,' Ernest answered, and then went on. 'So I say to you, go
ahead and preach and earn your pay, but for goodness' sake leave the
working class alone. You belong in the enemy's camp. You have
nothing in common with the working class. Your hands are soft with the
work others have performed for you. Your stomachs are round with the
plenitude of eating.' (Here Dr. Ballingford winced, and every eye
glanced at his prodigious girth. It was said he had not seen his own
feet in years.) 'And your minds are filled with doctrines that are
buttresses of the established order. You are as much mercenaries
(sincere mercenaries, I grant) as were the men of the Swiss Guard.* Be
true to your salt and your hire; guard, with your preaching, the
interests of your employers; but do not come down to the working class
and serve as false leaders. You cannot honestly be in the two camps at
once. The working class has done without you. Believe me, the
working class will continue to do without you. And, furthermore, the
working class can do better without you than with you.'
-
* The hired foreign palace guards of Louis XVI, a king of France
that was beheaded by his people.
CHAPTER TWO.
Challenges.
-
AFTER THE GUESTS HAD GONE, father threw himself into a chair and
gave vent to roars of Gargantuan laughter. Not since the death of my
mother had I known him to laugh so heartily.
I'll wager Dr. Hammerfield was never up against anything like it
in his life,' he laughed. '"The courtesies of ecclesiastical
controversy!" Did you notice how he began like a lamb- Everhard, I
mean, and how quickly he became a roaring lion? He has a splendidly
disciplined mind. He would have made a good scientist if his
energies had been directed that way.'
I need scarcely say that I was deeply interested in Ernest Everhard.
It was not alone what he had said and how he had said it, but it was
the man himself. I had never met a man like him. I suppose that was
why, in spite of my twenty-four years, I had not married. I liked him;
I had to confess it to myself. And my like for him was founded on
things beyond intellect and argument. Regardless of his bulging
muscles and prize-fighter's throat, he impressed me as an ingenuous
boy. I felt that under the guise of an intellectual swashbuckler was a
delicate and sensitive spirit. I sensed this, in ways I knew not, save
that they were my woman's intuitions.
There was something in that clarion-call of his that went to my
heart. It still rang in my ears, and I felt that I should like to hear
it again- and to see again that glint of laughter in his eyes that
belied the impassioned seriousness of his face. And there were further
reaches of vague and indeterminate feelings that stirred in me. I
almost loved him then, though I am confident, had I never seen him
again, that the vague feelings would have passed away and that I
should easily have forgotten him.
But I was not destined never to see him again. My father's
new-born interest in sociology and the dinner parties he gave would
not permit. Father was not a sociologist. His marriage with my
mother had been very happy, and in the researches of his own
science, physics, he had been very happy. But when mother died, his
own work could not fill the emptiness. At first, in a mild way, he had
dabbled in philosophy; then, becoming interested, he had drifted on
into economics and sociology. He had a strong sense of justice, and he
soon became fired with a passion to redress wrong. It was with
gratitude that I hailed these signs of a new interest in life,
though I little dreamed what the outcome would be. With the enthusiasm
of a boy he plunged excitedly into these new pursuits, regardless of
whither they led him.
He had been used always to the laboratory, and so it was that he
turned the dining room into a sociological laboratory. Here came to
dinner all sorts and conditions of men,- scientists, politicians,
bankers, merchants, professors, labor leaders, socialists, and
anarchists. He stirred them to discussion, and analyzed their thoughts
of life and society.
He had met Ernest shortly prior to the 'preacher's night.' And after
the guests were gone, I learned how he had met him, passing down a
street at night and stopping to listen to a man on a soap-box who
was addressing a crowd of workingmen. The man on the box was Ernest.
Not that he was a mere soap-box orator. He stood high in the
councils of the socialist party, was one of the leaders, and was the
acknowledged leader in the philosophy of socialism. But he had a
certain clear way of stating the abstruse in simple language, was a
born expositor and teacher, and was not above the soap-box as a
means of interpreting economics to the workingmen.
My father stopped to listen, became interested, effected a
meeting, and, after quite an acquaintance, invited him to the
ministers' dinner. It was after the dinner that father told me what
little he knew about him. He had been born in the. working class,
though he was a descendant of the old line of Everhards that for
over two hundred years had lived in America.* At ten years of age he
had gone to work in the mills, and later he served his
apprenticeship and became a horseshoer. He was self-educated, had
taught himself German and French, and at that time was earning a
meagre living by translating scientific and philosophical works for
a struggling socialist publishing house in Chicago. Also, his earnings
were added to by the royalties from the small sales of his own
economic and philosophic works.
-
* The distinction between being native born and foreign born was
sharp and invidious in those days.
-
This much I learned of him before I went to bed, and I lay long
awake, listening in memory to the sound of his voice. I grew
frightened at my thoughts. He was so unlike the men of my own class,
so alien and so strong. His masterfulness delighted me and terrified
me, for my fancies wantonly roved until I found myself considering him
as a lover, as a husband. I had always heard that the strength of
men was an irresistible attraction to women; but he was too strong.
'No! no!' I cried out. 'It is impossible, absurd!' And on the morrow I
awoke to find in myself a longing to see him again. I wanted to see
him mastering men in discussion, the war-note in his voice; to see
him, in all his certitude and strength, shattering their
complacency, shaking them out of their ruts of thinking. What if he
did swashbuckle? To use his own phrase, 'it worked,' it produced
effects. And, besides, his swashbuckling was a fine thing to see. It
stirred one like the onset of battle.
Several days passed during which I read Ernest's books, borrowed
from my father. His written word was as his spoken word, clear and
convincing. It was its absolute simplicity that convinced even while
one continued to doubt. He had the gift of lucidity. He was the
perfect expositor. Yet, in spite of his style, there was much that I
did not like. He laid too great stress on what he called the class
struggle, the antagonism between labor and capital, the conflict of
interest.
Father reported with glee Dr. Hammerfield's judgment of Ernest,
which was to the effect that he was an insolent young puppy, made
bumptious by a little and very inadequate learning.' Also, Dr.
Hammerfield declined to meet Ernest again.
But Bishop Morehouse turned out to have become interested in Ernest,
and was anxious for another meeting. 'A strong young man,' he said;
'and very much alive, very much alive. But he is too sure, too sure.'
Ernest came one afternoon with father. The Bishop had already
arrived, and we were having tea on the veranda. Ernest's continued
presence in Berkeley, by the way, was accounted for by the fact that
he was taking special courses in biology at the university, and also
that he was hard at work on a new book entitled 'Philosophy and
Revolution.'*
-
* This book continued to be secretly printed throughout the three
centuries of the Iron Heel. There are several copies of various
editions in the National Library of Ardis.
-
The veranda seemed suddenly to have become small when Ernest
arrived. Not that he was so very large- he stood only five feet nine
inches; but that he seemed to radiate an atmosphere of largeness. As
he stopped to meet me, he betrayed a certain slight awkwardness that
was strangely at variance with his bold-looking eyes and his firm,
sure hand that clasped for a moment in greeting. And in that moment
his eyes were just as steady and sure. There seemed a question in them
this time, and as before he looked at me over long.
'I have been reading your "Working-class Philosophy,"' I said, and
his eyes lighted in a pleased way.
'Of course,' he answered, 'you took into consideration the
audience to which it was addressed.'
'I did, and it is because I did that I have a quarrel with you,' I
challenged.
'I, too, have a quarrel with you, Mr. Everhard,' Bishop Morehouse
said.
Ernest shrugged his shoulders whimsically and accepted a cup of tea.
The Bishop bowed and gave me precedence.
'You foment class hatred,' I said. 'I consider it wrong and criminal
to appeal to all that is narrow and brutal in the working class. Class
hatred is anti-social, and, it seems to me, antisocialistic.'
'Not guilty,' he answered. 'Class hatred is neither in the text
nor in the spirit of anything I have every written.'
'Oh!' I cried reproachfully, and reached for his book and opened it.
He sipped his tea and smiled at me while I ran over the pages.
'Page one hundred and thirty-two,' I read aloud: '"The class
struggle, therefore, presents itself in the present stage of social
development between the wage-paying and the wage-paid classes."'
I looked at him triumphantly.
'No mention there of class hatred,' he smiled back.
'But,' I answered, 'you say "class struggle."'
'A different thing from class hatred,' he replied. 'And, believe me,
we foment no hatred. We say that the class struggle is a law of social
development. We are not responsible for it. We do not make the class
struggle. We merely explain it, as Newton explained gravitation. We
explain the nature of the conflict of interest that produces the class
struggle.'
'But there should be no conflict of interest!' I cried.
'I agree with you heartily,' he answered. 'That is what we
socialists are trying to bring about,- the abolition of the conflict
of interest. Pardon me. Let me read an extract.' He took his book
and turned back several pages. 'Page one hundred and twenty-six:
"The cycle of class struggles which began with the dissolution of
rude, tribal communism and the rise of private property will end
with the passing of private property in the means of social
existence."'
'But I disagree with you,' the Bishop interposed, his pale,
ascetic face betraying by a faint glow the intensity of his
feelings. 'Your premise is wrong. There is no such thing as a conflict
of interest between labor and capital- or, rather, there ought not
to be.'
'Thank you,' Ernest said gravely. 'By that last statement you have
given me back my premise.'
'But why should there be a conflict?' the Bishop demanded warmly.
Ernest shrugged his shoulders. 'Because we are so made, I guess.'
'But we are not so made!' cried the other.
'Are you discussing the ideal man?' Ernest asked, '-unselfish and
godlike, and so few in numbers as to be practically non-existent, or
are you discussing the common and ordinary average man?'
'The common and ordinary man,' was the answer.
'Who is weak and fallible, prone to error?'
Bishop Morehouse nodded.
'And petty and selfish?'
Again he nodded.
'Watch out!' Ernest warned. 'I said "selfish."'
'The average man is selfish,' the Bishop affirmed valiantly.
'Wants all he can get?'
'Wants all he can get- true but deplorable.'
'Then I've got you.' Ernest's jaw snapped like a trap. 'Let me
show you. Here is a man who works on the street railways.'
'He couldn't work if it weren't for capital,' the Bishop
interrupted.
'True, and you will grant that capital would perish if there were no
labor to earn the dividends.'
The Bishop was silent.
'Won't you?' Ernest insisted.
The Bishop nodded.
'Then our statements cancel each other,' Ernest said in a
matter-of-fact tone, 'and we are where we were. Now to begin again.
The workingmen on the street railway furnish the labor. The
stockholders furnish the capital. By the joint effort of the
workingmen and the capital, money is earned.* They divide between them
this money that is earned. Capital's share is called "dividends."
Labor's share is called "wages."'
-
* In those days, groups of predatory individuals controlled all
the means of transportation, and for the use of same levied toll
upon the public.
-
'Very good,' the Bishop interposed. 'And there is no reason that the
division should not be amicable.'
'You have already forgotten what we had agreed upon,' Ernest
replied. 'We agreed that the average man is selfish. He is the man
that is. You have gone up in the air and are arranging a division
between the kind of men that ought to be but are not. But to return to
the earth, the workingman, being selfish, wants all he can get in
the division. The capitalist, being selfish, wants all he can get in
the division. When there is only so much of the same thing, and when
two men want all they can get of the same thing, there is a conflict
of interest between labor and capital. And it is an irreconcilable
conflict. As long as workingmen and capitalists exist, they will
continue to quarrel over the division. If you were in San Francisco
this afternoon, you'd have to walk. There isn't a street car running.'
'Another strike?'* the Bishop queried with alarm.
-
* These quarrels were very common in those irrational and anarchic
times. Sometimes the laborers refused to work. Sometimes the
capitalists refused to let the laborers work. In the violence and
turbulence of such disagreements much property was destroyed and
many lives lost. All this is inconceivable to us- as inconceivable
as another custom of that time, namely, the habit the men of the lower
classes had of breaking the furniture when they quarrelled with
their wives.
-
'Yes, they're quarrelling over the division of the earnings of the
street railways.'
Bishop Morehouse became excited.
'It is wrong!' he cried. 'It is so short-sighted on the part of
the workingmen. How can they hope to keep our sympathy-'
'When we are compelled to walk,' Ernest said slyly.
But Bishop Morehouse ignored him and went on:
'Their outlook is too narrow. Men should be men, not brutes. There
will be violence and murder now, and sorrowing widows and orphans.
Capital and labor should be friends. They should work hand in hand and
to their mutual benefit.'
'Ah, now you are up in the air again,' Ernest remarked dryly.
'Come back to earth. Remember, we agreed that the average man is
selfish.'
'But he ought not to be!' the Bishop cried.
'And there I agree with you,' was Ernest's rejoinder. 'He ought
not to be selfish, but he will continue to be selfish as long as he
lives in a social system that is based on pig-ethics.'
The Bishop was aghast, and my father chuckled.
'Yes, pig-ethics,' Ernest went on remorselessly. 'That is the
meaning of the capitalist system. And that is what your church is
standing for, what you are preaching for every time you get up in
the pulpit. Pig-ethics! There is no other name for it.'
Bishop Morehouse turned appealingly to my father, but he laughed and
nodded his head.
'I'm afraid Mr. Everhard is right,' he said. 'Laissez-faire, the
let-alone policy of each for himself and devil take the hindmost. As
Mr. Everhard said the other night, the function you churchmen
perform is to maintain the established order of society, and society
is established on that foundation.'
'But that is not the teaching of Christ!' cried the Bishop.
The Church is not teaching Christ these days,' Ernest put in
quickly. 'That is why the workingmen will have nothing to do with
the Church. The Church condones the frightful brutality and savagery
with which the capitalist class treats the working class.'
'The Church does not condone it,' the Bishop objected.
'The Church does not protest against it,' Ernest replied. 'And in so
far as the Church does not protest, it condones, for remember the
Church is supported by the capitalist class.'
'I had not looked at it in that light,' the Bishop said naively.
'You must be wrong. I know that there is much that is sad and wicked
in this world. I know that the Church has lost the- what you call
the proletariat.'*
-
* Proletariat: Derived originally from the Latin proletarii, the
name given in the census of Servius Tullius to those who were of value
to the state only as the rearers of offspring (proles); in other
words, they were of no importance either for wealth, or position, or
exceptional ability.
-
'You never had the proletariat,' Ernest cried. 'The proletariat
has grown up outside the Church and without the Church.'
'I do not follow you,' the Bishop said faintly.
'Then let me explain. With the introduction of machinery and the
factory system in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the great
mass of the working people was separated from the land. The old system
of labor was broken down. The working people were driven from their
villages and herded in factory towns. The mothers and children were
put to work at the new machines. Family life ceased. The conditions
were frightful. It is a tale of blood.'
'I know, I know,' Bishop Morehouse interrupted with an agonized
expression on his face. 'It was terrible. But it occurred a century
and a half ago.'
'And there, a century and a half ago, originated the modern
proletariat,' Ernest continued. 'And the Church ignored it. While a
slaughter-house was made of the nation by the capitalist, the Church
was dumb. It did not protest, as to-day it does not protest. As Austin
Lewis* says, speaking of that time, those to whom the command "Feed my
lambs" had been given, saw those lambs sold into slavery and worked to
death without a protest.*(2) The Church was dumb, then, and before I
go on I want you either flatly to agree with me or flatly to
disagree with me. Was the Church dumb then?'
-
* Candidate for Governor of California on the Socialist ticket in
the fall election of 1906 Christian Era. An Englishman by birth, a
writer of many books on political economy and philosophy, and one of
the Socialist leaders of the times.
*(2) There is no more horrible page in history than the treatment of
the child and women slaves in the English factories in the latter half
of the eighteenth century of the Christian Era. In such industrial
hells arose some of the proudest fortunes of that day.
-
Bishop Morehouse hesitated. Like Dr. Hammerfield, he was unused to
this fierce 'infighting,' as Ernest called it.
'The history of the eighteenth century is written,' Ernest prompted.
'If the Church was not dumb, it will be found not dumb in the books.'
'I am afraid the Church was dumb,' the Bishop confessed.
'And the Church is dumb to-day.'
'There I disagree,' said the Bishop.
Ernest paused, looked at him searchingly, and accepted the
challenge.
'All right,' he said. 'Let us see. In Chicago there are women who
toil all the week for ninety cents. Has the Church protested?'
'This is news to me,' was the answer. 'Ninety cents per week! It
is horrible!'
'Has the Church protested?' Ernest insisted.
'The Church does not know.' The Bishop was struggling hard.
'Yet the command to the Church was, "Feed my lambs,"' Ernest
sneered. And then, the next moment, 'Pardon my sneer, Bishop. But
can you wonder that we lose patience with you? When have you protested
to your capitalistic congregations at the working of children in the
Southern cotton mills?* Children, six and seven years of age,
working every night at twelve-hour shifts? They never see the
blessed sunshine. They die like flies. The dividends are paid out of
their blood. And out of the dividends magnificent churches are builded
in New England, wherein your kind preaches pleasant platitudes to
the sleek, full-bellied recipients of those dividends.'
-
* Everhard might have drawn a better illustration from the
Southern Church's outspoken defence of chattel slavery prior to what
is known as the 'War of the Rebellion.' Several such illustrations,
culled from the documents of the times, are here appended. In 1835
A.D., the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church resolved that:
'slavery is recognized in both the Old and the New Testaments, and
is not condemned by the authority of God.' The Charleston Baptist
Association issued the following, in an address, in 1835 A.D.: 'The
right of masters to dispose of the time of their slaves has been
distinctly recognized by the Creator of all things, who is surely at
liberty to vest the right of property over any object whomsoever He
pleases.' The Rev. E. D. Simon, Doctor of Divinity and professor in
the Randolph-Macon Methodist College of Virginia, wrote: 'Extracts
from Holy Writ unequivocally assert the right of property in slaves,
together with the usual incidents to that right. The right to buy
and sell is clearly stated. Upon the whole, then, whether we consult
the Jewish policy instituted by God himself, or the uniform opinion
and practice of mankind in all ages, or the injunctions of the New
Testament and the moral law, we are brought to the conclusion that
slavery is not immoral. Having established the point that the first
African slaves were legally brought into bondage, the right to
detain their children in bondage follows as an indispensable
consequence. Thus we see that the slavery that exists in America was
founded in right.'
It is not at all remarkable that this same note should have been
struck by the Church a generation or so later in relation to the
defence of capitalistic property. In the great museum at Asgard
there is a book entitled 'Essays in Application,' written by Henry van
Dyke. The book was published in 1905 of the Christian Era. From what
we can make out, Van Dyke must have been a churchman. The book is a
good example of what Everhard would have called bourgeois thinking.
Note the similarity between the utterance of the Charleston Baptist
Association quoted above, and the following utterance of Van Dyke
seventy years later: 'The Bible teaches that God owns the world. He
distributes to every man according to His own good pleasure,
conformably to general laws.'
-
'I did not know,' the Bishop murmured faintly. His face was pale,
and he seemed suffering from nausea.
'Then you have not protested?'
The Bishop shook his head.
'Then the Church is dumb to-day, as it was in the eighteenth
century?'
The Bishop was silent, and for once Ernest forbore to press the
point.
'And do not forget, whenever a churchman does protest that he is
discharged.'
'I hardly think that is fair,' was the objection.
'Will you protest?' Ernest demanded.
'Show me evils, such as you mention, in our own community, and I
will protest.'
'I'll show you,' Ernest said quietly. 'I am at your disposal. I will
take you on a journey through hell.'
'And I shall protest.' The Bishop straightened himself in his chair,
and over his gentle face spread the harshness of the warrior. 'The
Church shall not be dumb!'
'You will be discharged,' was the warning.
'I shall prove the contrary,' was the retort. 'I shall prove, if
what you say is so, that the Church has erred through ignorance.
And, furthermore, I hold that whatever is horrible in industrial
society is due to the ignorance of the capitalist class. It will
mend all that is wrong as soon as it receives the message. And this
message it shall be the duty of the Church to deliver.'
Ernest laughed. He laughed brutally, and I was driven to the
Bishop's defence.
'Remember,' I said, 'you see but one side of the shield. There is
much good in us, though you give us credit for no good at all.
Bishop Morehouse is right. The industrial wrong, terrible as you say
it is, is due to ignorance. The divisions of society have become too
widely separated.'
'The wild Indian is not so brutal and savage as the capitalist
class,' he answered; and in that moment I hated him.
'You do not know us,' I answered. 'We are not brutal and savage.'
'Prove it,' he challenged.
'How can I prove it... to you?' I was growing angry.
He shook his head. 'I do not ask you to prove it to me. I ask you to
prove it to yourself.'
'I know,' I said.
'You know nothing,' was his rude reply.
'There, there, children,' father said soothingly.
'I don't care-' I began indignantly, but Ernest interrupted.
'I understand you have money, or your father has, which is the
same thing- money invested in the Sierra Mills.'
'What has that to do with it?' I cried.
'Nothing much,' he began slowly, 'except that the gown you wear is
stained with blood. The food you eat is a bloody stew. The blood of
little children and of strong men is dripping from your very
roof-beams. I can close my eyes, now, and hear it drip, drop, drip,
drop, all about me.'
And suiting the action to the words, he closed his eyes and leaned
back in his chair. I burst into tears of mortification and hurt
vanity. I had never been so brutally treated in my life. Both the
Bishop and my father were embarrassed and perturbed. They tried to
lead the conversation away into easier channels; but Ernest opened his
eyes, looked at me, and waved them aside. His mouth was stern, and his
eyes too; and in the latter there was no glint of laughter. What he
was about to say, what terrible castigation he was going to give me, I
never knew; for at that moment a man, passing along the sidewalk,
stopped and glanced in at us. He was a large man, poorly dressed,
and on his back was a great load of rattan and bamboo stands,
chairs, and screens. He looked at the house as if debating whether
or not he should come in and try to sell some of his wares.
'That man's name is Jackson,' Ernest said.
'With that strong body of his he should be at work, and not
peddling,'* I answered curtly.
-
* In that day there were many thousands of these poor merchants
called pedlers. They carried their whole stock in trade from door to
door. It was a most wasteful expenditure of energy. Distribution was
as confused and irrational as the whole general system of society.
-
'Notice the sleeve of his left arm,' Ernest said gently.
I looked, and saw that the sleeve was empty.
'It was some of the blood from that arm that I heard dripping from
your roof-beams,' Ernest said with continued gentleness. 'He lost
his arm in the Sierra Mills, and like a broken-down horse you turned
him out on the highway to die. When I say "you," I mean the
superintendent and the officials that you and the other stockholders
pay to manage the mills for you. It was an accident. It was caused
by his trying to save the company a few dollars. The toothed drum of
the picker caught his arm. He might have let the small flint that he
saw in the teeth go through. It would have smashed out a double row of
spikes. But he reached for the flint, and his arm was picked and
clawed to shreds from the finger tips to the shoulder. It was at
night. The mills were working overtime. They paid a fat dividend
that quarter. Jackson had been working many hours, and his muscles had
lost their resiliency and snap. They made his movements a bit slow.
That was why the machine caught him. He had a wife and three
children.'
'And what did the company do for him?' I asked.
'Nothing. Oh, yes, they did do something. They successfully fought
the damage suit he brought when he came out of hospital. The company
employs very efficient lawyers, you know.'
'You have not told the whole story,' I said with conviction. 'Or
else you do not know the whole story. Maybe the man was insolent.'
'Insolent! Ha! ha!' His laughter was Mephistophelian. 'Great God!
Insolent! And with his arm chewed off! Nevertheless he was a meek
and lowly servant, and there is no record of his having been
insolent.'
'But the courts,' I urged. 'The case would not have been decided
against him had there been no more to the affair than you have
mentioned.'
'Colonel Ingram is leading counsel for the company. He is a shrewd
lawyer.' Ernest looked at me intently for a moment, then went on.
'I'll tell you what you do, Miss Cunningham. You investigate Jackson's
case.'
'I had already determined to,' I said coldly.
'All right,' he beamed good-naturedly, 'and I'll tell you where to
find him. But I tremble for you when I think of all you are to prove
by Jackson's arm.'
And so it came about that both the Bishop and I accepted Ernest's
challenges. They went away together, leaving me smarting with a sense
of injustice that had been done me and my class. The man was a beast.
I hated him, then, and consoled myself with the thought that his
behavior was what was to be expected from a man of the working class.
CHAPTER THREE.
Jackson's Arm.
-
LITTLE DID I DREAM THE FATEFUL part Jackson's arm was to play in
my life. Jackson himself did not impress me when I hunted him out. I
found him in a crazy, ramshackle* house down near the bay on the
edge of the marsh. Pools of stagnant water stood around the house,
their surfaces covered with a green and putrid-looking scum, while the
stench that arose from them was intolerable.
-
* An adjective descriptive of ruined and dilapidated houses in which
great numbers of the working people found shelter in those days.
They invariably paid rent, and, considering the value of such
houses, enormous rent, to the landlords.
-
I found Jackson the meek and lowly man he had been described. He was
making some sort of rattan-work, and he toiled on stolidly while I
talked with him. But in spite of his meekness and lowliness, I fancied
I caught the first note of a nascent bitterness in him when he said:
'They might a-given me a job as watchman,* anyway.'
-
* In those days thievery was incredibly prevalent. Everybody stole
property from everybody else. The lords of society stole legally or
else legalized their stealing, while the poorer classes stole
illegally. Nothing was safe unless guarded. Enormous numbers of men
were employed as watchmen to protect property. The houses of the
well-to-do were a combination of safe deposit vault and fortress.
The appropriation of the personal belongings of others by our own
children of to-day is looked upon as a rudimentary survival of the
theft-characteristic that in those early times was universal.
-
I got little out of him. He struck me as stupid, and yet the
deftness with which he worked with his one hand seemed to belie his
stupidity. This suggested an idea to me.
'How did you happen to get your arm caught in the machine?' I asked.
He looked at me in a slow and pondering way, and shook his head.
'I don't know. It just happened.'
'Carelessness?' I prompted.
'No,' he answered, 'I ain't for callin' it that. I was workin'
overtime, an' I guess I was tired out some. I worked seventeen years
in them mills, an' I've took notice that most of the accidents happens
just before whistle-blow.* I'm willin' to bet that more accidents
happens in the hour before whistle-blow than in all the rest of the
day. A man ain't so quick after workin' steady for hours. I've seen
too many of 'em cut up an' gouged an' chawed not to know.'
-
* The laborers were called to work and dismissed by savage,
screaming, nerve-racking steam-whistles.
-
'Many of them?' I queried.
'Hundreds an' hundreds, an' children, too.'
With the exception of the terrible details, Jackson's story of his
accident was the same as that I had already heard. When I asked him if
he had broken some rule of working the machinery, he shook his head.
'I chucked off the belt with my right hand,' he said, 'an' made a
reach for the flint with my left. I didn't stop to see if the belt was
off. I thought my right hand had done it- only it didn't. I reached
quick, and the belt wasn't all the way off. And then my arm was chewed
off.'
'It must have been painful,' I said sympathetically.
'The crunchin' of the bones wasn't nice,' was his answer.
His mind was rather hazy concerning the damage suit. Only one
thing was clear to him, and that was that he had not got any
damages. He had a feeling that the testimony of the foremen and the
superintendent had brought about the adverse decision of the court.
Their testimony, as he put it, 'wasn't what it ought to have ben.' And
to them I resolved to go.
One thing was plain, Jackson's situation was wretched. His wife
was in ill health, and he was unable to earn, by his rattan-work and
peddling, sufficient food for the family. He was back in his rent, and
the oldest boy, a lad of eleven, had started to work in the mills.
'They might a-given me that watchman's job,' were his last words
as I went away.
By the time I had seen the lawyer who had handled Jackson's case,
and the two foremen and the superintendent at the mills who had
testified, I began to feel that there was something after all in
Ernest's contention.
He was a weak and inefficient-looking man, the lawyer, and at
sight of him I did not wonder that Jackson's case had been lost. My
first thought was that it had served Jackson right for getting such
a lawyer. But the next moment two of Ernest's statements came flashing
into my consciousness: 'The company employs very efficient lawyers'
and 'Colonel Ingram is a shrewd lawyer.' I did some rapid thinking. It
dawned upon me that of course the company could afford finer legal
talent than could a workingman like Jackson. But this was merely a
minor detail. There was some very good reason, I was sure, why
Jackson's case had gone against him.
'Why did you lose the case?' I asked.
The lawyer was perplexed and worried for a moment, and I found it in
my heart to pity the wretched little creature. Then he began to whine.
I do believe his whine was congenital. He was a man beaten at birth.
He whined about the testimony. The witnesses had given only the
evidence that helped the other side. Not one word could he get out
of them that would have helped Jackson. They knew which side their
bread was buttered on. Jackson was a fool. He had been brow-beaten and
confused by Colonel Ingram. Colonel Ingram was brilliant at
cross-examination. He had made Jackson answer damaging questions.
'How could his answers be damaging if he had the right on his side?'
I demanded.
'What's right got to do with it?' he demanded back. 'You see all
those books.' He moved his hand over the array of volumes on the walls
of his tiny office. 'All my reading and studying of them has taught me
that law is one thing and right is another thing. Ask any lawyer.
You go to Sunday-school to learn what is right. But you go to those
books to learn... law.'
'Do you mean to tell me that Jackson had the right on his side and
yet was beaten?' I queried tentatively. 'Do you mean to tell me that
there is no justice in Judge Caldwell's court?'
The little lawyer glared at me a moment, and then the belligerence
faded out of his face.
'I hadn't a fair chance,' he began whining again. 'They made a
fool out of Jackson and out of me, too. What chance had I? Colonel
Ingram is a great lawyer. If he wasn't great, would he have charge
of the law business of the Sierra Mills, of the Erston Land Syndicate,
of the Berkeley Consolidated, of the Oakland, San Leandro, and
Pleasanton Electric? He's a corporation lawyer, and corporation
lawyers are not paid for being fools.* What do you think the Sierra
Mills alone give him twenty thousand dollars a year for? Because
he's worth twenty thousand dollars a year to them, that's what for.
I'm not worth that much. If I was, I wouldn't be on the outside,
starving and taking cases like Jackson's. What do you think I'd have
got if I'd won Jackson's case?'
'You'd have robbed him, most probably,' I answered.
'Of course I would,' he cried angrily. 'I've got to live, haven't
I?'*(2)
-
* The function of the corporation lawyer was to serve, by corrupt
methods, the money-grabbing propensities of the corporations. It is on
record that Theodore Roosevelt, at that time President of the United
States, said in 1905 A.D., in his address at Harvard Commencement: 'We
all know that, as things actually are, many of the most influential
and most highly remunerated members of the Bar in every centre of
wealth, make it their special task to work out bold and ingenious
schemes by which their wealthy clients, individual or corporate, can
evade the laws which were made to regulate, in the interests of the
public, the uses of great wealth.'
*(2) A typical illustration of the internecine strife that permeated
all society. Men preyed upon one another like ravening wolves. The big
wolves ate the little wolves, and in the social pack Jackson was one
of the least of the little wolves.
-
'He has a wife and children,' I chided.
'So have I a wife and children,' he retorted. 'And there's not a
soul in this world except myself that cares whether they starve or
not.'
His face suddenly softened, and he opened his watch and showed me
a small photograph of a woman and two little girls pasted inside the
case.
'There they are. Look at them. We've had a hard time, a hard time. I
had hoped to send them away to the country if I'd won Jackson's
case. They're not healthy here, but I can't afford to send them away.'
When I started to leave, he dropped back into his whine.
'I hadn't the ghost of a chance. Colonel Ingram and Judge Caldwell
are pretty friendly. I'm not saying that if I'd got the right kind
of testimony out of their witnesses on cross-examination, that
friendship would have decided the case. And yet I must say that
Judge Caldwell did a whole lot to prevent my getting that very
testimony. Why, Judge Caldwell and Colonel Ingram belong to the same
lodge and the same club. They live in the same neighborhood- one I
can't afford. And their wives are always in and out of each other's
houses. They're always having whist parties and such things back and
forth.'
'And yet you think Jackson had the right of it?' I asked, pausing
for the moment on the threshold.
'I don't think; I know it,' was his answer. 'And at first I
thought he had some show, too. But I didn't tell my wife. I didn't
want to disappoint her. She had her heart set on a trip to the country
hard enough as it was.'
'Why did you not call attention to the fact that Jackson was
trying to save the machinery from being injured?' I asked Peter
Donnelly, one of the foremen who had testified at the trial.
He pondered a long time before replying. Then he cast an anxious
look about him and said:
'Because I've a good wife an' three of the sweetest children ye ever
laid eyes on, that's why.'
'I do not understand,' I said.
'In other words, because it wouldn't a-ben healthy,' he answered.
'You mean-' I began.
But he interrupted passionately.
'I mean what I said. It's long years I've worked in the mills. I
began as a little lad on the spindles. I worked up ever since. It's by
hard work I got to my present exalted position. I'm a foreman, if
you please. An' I doubt me if there's a man in the mills that'd put
out a hand to drag me from drownin'. I used to belong to the union.
But I've stayed by the company through two strikes. They called me
"scab." There's not a man among 'em to-day to take a drink with me
if I asked him. D'ye see the scars on me head where I was struck
with flying bricks? There ain't a child at the spindles but what would
curse me name. Me only friend is the company. It's not me duty, but me
bread an' butter an' the life of me children to stand by the mills.
That's why.'
'Was Jackson to blame?' I asked.
'He should a-got the damages. He was a good worker an' never made
trouble.'
'Then you were not at liberty to tell the whole truth, as you had
sworn to do?'
He shook his head.
'The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?' I said
solemnly.
Again his face became impassioned, and he lifted it, not to me,
but to heaven.
'I'd let me soul an' body burn in everlastin' hell for them children
of mine,' was his answer.
Henry Dallas, the superintendent, was a vulpine-faced creature who
regarded me insolently and refused to talk. Not a word could I get
from him concerning the trial and his testimony. But with the other
foreman I had better luck. James Smith was a hard-faced man, and my
heart sank as I encountered him. He, too, gave me the impression
that he was not a free agent, as we talked I began to see that he
was mentally superior to the average of his kind. He agreed with Peter
Donnelly that Jackson should have got damages, and he went farther and
called the action heartless and cold-blooded that had turned the
worker adrift after he had been made helpless by the accident. Also,
he explained that there were many accidents in the mills, and that the
company's policy was to fight to the bitter end all consequent
damage suits.
'It means hundreds of thousands a year to the stockholders,' he
said; and as he spoke I remembered the last dividend that had been
paid my father, and the pretty gown for me and the books for him
that had been bought out of that dividend. I remembered Ernest's
charge that my gown was stained with blood, and my flesh began to
crawl underneath my garments.
'When you testified at the trial, you didn't point out that
Jackson received his accident through trying to save the machinery
from damage?' I said.
'No, I did not,' was the answer, and his mouth set bitterly. 'I
testified to the effect that Jackson injured himself by neglect and
carelessness, and that the company was not in any way to blame or
liable.'
'Was it carelessness?' I asked.
'Call it that, or anything you want to call it. The fact is, a man
gets tired after he's been working for hours.'
I was becoming interested in the man. He certainly was of a superior
kind.
'You are better educated than most workingmen,' I said.
'I went through high school,' he replied. 'I worked my way through
doing janitor-work. I wanted to go through the university. But my
father died, and I came to work in the mills.
'I wanted to become a naturalist,' he explained shyly, as though
confessing a weakness. 'I love animals. But I came to work in the
mills. When I was promoted to foreman I got married, then the family
came, and... well, I wasn't my own boss any more.'
'What do you mean by that?' I asked.
'I was explaining why I testified at the trial the way I did- why
I followed instructions.'
'Whose instructions?'
'Colonel Ingram. He outlined the evidence I was to give.'
'And it lost Jackson's case for him.'
He nodded, and the blood began to rise darkly in his face.
'And Jackson had a wife and two children dependent on him.'
'I know,' he said quietly, though his face was growing darker.
'Tell me,' I went on, 'was it easy to make yourself over from what
you were, say in high school, to the man you must have become to do
such a thing at the trial?'
The suddenness of his outburst startled and frightened me. He
ripped* out a savage oath, and clenched his fist as though about to
strike me.
-
* It is interesting to note the virilities of language that were
common speech in that day, as indicative of the life, 'red of claw and
fang,' that was then lived. Reference is here made, of course, not
to the oath of Smith, but to the verb ripped used by Avis Everhard.
-
'I beg your pardon,' he said the next moment. 'No, it was not
easy. And now I guess you can go away. You've got all you wanted out
of me. But let me tell you this before you go. It won't do you any
good to repeat anything I've said. I'll deny it, and there are no
witnesses. I'll deny every word of it; and if I have to, I'll do it
under oath on the witness stand.'
After my interview with Smith I went to my father's office in the
Chemistry Building and there encountered Ernest. It was quite
unexpected, but he met me with his bold eyes and firm hand-clasp,
and with that curious blend of his awkwardness and ease. It was as
though our last stormy meeting was forgotten; but I was not in the
mood to have it forgotten.
'I have been looking up Jackson's case,' I said abruptly.
He was all interested attention, and waited for me to go on,
though I could see in his eyes the certitude that my convictions had
been shaken.
'He seems to have been badly treated,' I confessed. 'I- I- think
some of his blood is dripping from our roof-beams.'
'Of course,' he answered. 'If Jackson and all his fellows were
treated mercifully, the dividends would not be so large.'
'I shall never be able to take pleasure in pretty gowns again,' I
added.
I felt humble and contrite, and was aware of a sweet feeling that
Ernest was a sort of father confessor. Then, as ever after, his
strength appealed to me. It seemed to radiate a promise of peace and
protection.
'Nor will you be able to take pleasure in sackcloth,' he said
gravely. 'There are the jute mills, you know, and the same thing
goes on there. It goes on everywhere. Our boasted civilization is
based upon blood, soaked in blood, and neither you nor I nor any of us
can escape the scarlet stain. The men you talked with- who were they?'
I told him all that had taken place.
'And not one of them was a free agent,' he said. 'They were all tied
to the merciless industrial machine. And the pathos of it and the
tragedy is that they are tied by their heartstrings. Their children-
always the young life that it is their instinct to protect. This
instinct is stronger than any ethic they possess. My father! He
lied, he stole, he did all sorts of dishonorable things to put bread
into my mouth and into the mouths of my brothers and sisters. He was a
slave to the industrial machine, and it stamped his life out, worked
him to death.'
'But you,' I interjected. 'You are surely a free agent.'
'Not wholly,' he replied. 'I am not tied by my heartstrings. I am
often thankful that I have no children, and I dearly love children.
Yet if I married I should not dare to have any.'
'That surely is bad doctrine,' I cried.
'I know it is,' he said sadly. 'But it is expedient doctrine. I am a
revolutionist, and it is a perilous vocation.'
I laughed incredulously.
'If I tried to enter your father's house at night to steal his
dividends from the Sierra Mills, what would he do?'
'He sleeps with a revolver on the stand by the bed,' I answered. 'He
would most probably shoot you.'
'And if I and a few others should lead a million and a half of
men* into the houses of all the well-to-do, there would be a great
deal of shooting, wouldn't there?'
-
* This reference is to the socialist vote cast in the United
States in 1910. The rise of this vote clearly indicates the swift
growth of the party of revolution. Its voting strength in the United
States in 1888 was 2068; in 1902, 127,713; in 1904, 435,040; in
1908, 1,108,427; and in 1910, 1,688,211.
-
'Yes, but you are not doing that,' I objected.
'It is precisely what I am doing. And we intend to take, not the
mere wealth in the houses, but all the sources of that wealth, all the
mines, and railroads, and factories, and banks, and stores. That is
the revolution. It is truly perilous. There will be more shooting, I
am afraid, than even I dream of. But as I was saying, no one to-day is
a free agent. We are all caught up in the wheels and cogs of the
industrial machine. You found that you were, and that the men you
talked with were. Talk with more of them. Go and see Colonel Ingram.
Look up the reporters that kept Jackson's case out of the papers,
and the editors that run the papers. You will find them all slaves
of the machine.'
A little later in our conversation I asked him a simple little
question about the liability of workingmen to accidents, and
received a statistical lecture in return.
'It is all in the books,' he said. 'The figures have been
gathered, and it has been proved conclusively that accidents rarely
occur in the first hours of the morning work, but that they increase
rapidly in the succeeding hours as the workers grow tired and slower
in both their muscular and mental processes.
'Why, do you know that your father has three times as many chances
for safety of life and limb than has a working-man? He has. The
insurance* companies know. They will charge him four dollars and
twenty cents a year on a thousand-dollar accident policy, and for
the same policy they will charge a laborer fifteen dollars.'
-
* In the terrible wolf-struggle of those centuries, no man was
permanently safe, no matter how much wealth he amassed. Out of fear
for the welfare of their families, men devised the scheme of
insurance. To us, in this intelligent age, such a device is
laughably absurd and primitive. But in that age insurance was a very
serious matter. The amusing part of it is that the funds of the
insurance companies were frequently plundered and wasted by the very
officials who were intrusted with the management of them.
-
'And you?' I asked; and in the moment of asking I was aware of a
solicitude that was something more than slight.
'Oh, as a revolutionist, I have about eight chances to the
workingman's one of being injured or killed,' he answered
carelessly. 'The insurance companies charge the highly trained
chemists that handle explosives eight times what they charge the
workingmen. I don't think they'd insure me at all. Why did you ask?'
My eyes fluttered, and I could feel the blood warm in my face. It
was not that he had caught me in my solicitude, but that I had
caught myself, and in his presence.
Just then my father came in and began making preparations to
depart with me. Ernest returned some books he had borrowed, and went
away first. But just as he was going, he turned and said:
'Oh, by the way, while you are ruining your own peace of mind and
I am ruining the Bishop's, you'd better look up Mrs. Wickson and
Mrs. Pertonwaithe. Their husbands, you know, are the two principal
stockholders in the Mills. Like all the rest of humanity, those two
women are tied to the machine, but they are so tied that they sit on
top of it.'
CHAPTER FOUR.
Slaves of the Machine.
-
THE MORE I THOUGHT OF JACKSON'S arm, the more shaken I was. I was
confronted by the concrete. For the first time I was seeing life. My
university life, and study and culture, had not been real. I had
learned nothing but theories of life and society that looked all
very well on the printed page, but now I had seen life itself.
Jackson's arm was a fact of life. 'The fact, man, the irrefragable
fact!' of Ernest's was ringing in my consciousness.
It seemed monstrous, impossible, that our whole society was based
upon blood. And yet there was Jackson. I could not get away from
him. Constantly my thought swung back to him as the compass to the
Pole. He had been monstrously treated. His blood had not been paid for
in order that a larger dividend might be paid. And I knew a score of
happy complacent families that had received those dividends and by
that much had profited by Jackson's blood. If one man could be so
monstrously treated and society move on its way unheeding, might not
many men be so monstrously treated? I remembered Ernest's women of
Chicago who toiled for ninety cents a week, and the child slaves of
the Southern cotton mills he had described. And I could see their
wan white hands, from which the blood had been pressed, at work upon
the cloth out of which had been made my gown. And then I thought of
the Sierra Mills and the dividends that had been paid, and I saw the
blood of Jackson upon my gown as well. Jackson I could not escape.
Always my meditations led me back to him.
Down in the depths of me I had a feeling that I stood on the edge of
a precipice. It was as though I were about to see a new and awful
revelation of life. And not I alone. My whole world was turning
over. There was my father. I could see the effect Ernest was beginning
to have on him. And then there was the Bishop. When I had last seen
him he had looked a sick man. He was at high nervous tension, and in
his eyes there was unspeakable horror. From the little I learned I
knew that Ernest had been keeping his promise of taking him through
hell. But what scenes of hell the Bishop's eyes had seen, I knew
not, for he seemed too stunned to speak about them.
Once, the feeling strong upon me that my little world and all the
world was turning over, I thought of Ernest as the cause of it; and
also I thought, 'We were so happy and peaceful before he came!' And
the next moment I was aware that the thought was a treason against
truth, and Ernest rose before me transfigured, the apostle of truth,
with shining brows and the fearlessness of one of God's own angels,
battling for the truth and the right, and battling for the succor of
the poor and lonely and oppressed. And then there arose before me
another figure, the Christ! He, too, had taken the part of the lowly
and oppressed, and against all the established power of priest and
pharisee. And I remembered his end upon the cross, and my heart
contracted with a pang as I thought of Ernest. Was he, too, destined
for a cross?- he, with his clarion call and war-noted voice, and all
the fine man's vigor of him!
And in that moment I knew that I loved him, and that I was melting
with desire to comfort him. I thought of his life. A sordid, harsh,
and meagre life it must have been. And I thought of his father, who
had lied and stolen for him and been worked to death. And he himself
had gone into the mills when he was ten! All my heart seemed
bursting with desire to fold my arms around him, and to rest his
head on my breast- his head that must be weary with so many
thoughts; and to give him rest- just rest- and easement and
forgetfulness for a tender space.
I met Colonel Ingram at a church reception. Him I knew well and
had known well for many years. I trapped him behind large palms and
rubber plants, though he did not know he was trapped. He met me with
the conventional gayety and gallantry. He was ever a graceful man,
diplomatic, tactful, and considerate. And as for appearance, he was
the most distinguished-looking man in our society. Beside him even the
venerable head of the university looked tawdry and small.
And yet I found Colonel Ingram situated the same as the unlettered
mechanics. He was not a free agent. He, too, was bound upon the wheel.
I shall never forget the change in him when I mentioned Jackson's
case. His smiling good nature vanished like a ghost. A sudden,
frightful expression distorted his well-bred face. I felt the same
alarm that I had felt when James Smith broke out. But Colonel Ingram
did not curse. That was the slight difference that was left between
the workingman and him. He was famed as a wit, but he had no wit
now. And, unconsciously, this way and that he glanced for avenues of
escape. But he was trapped amid the palms and rubber trees.
Oh, he was sick of the sound of Jackson's name. Why had I brought
the matter up? He did not relish my joke. It was poor taste on my
part, and very inconsiderate. Did I not know that in his profession
personal feelings did not count? He left his personal feelings at home
when he went down to the office. At the office he had only
professional feelings.
'Should Jackson have received damages?' I asked.
'Certainly,' he answered. 'That is, personally, I have a feeling
that he should. But that has nothing to do with the legal aspects of
the case.'
He was getting his scattered wits slightly in hand.
'Tell me, has right anything to do with the law?' I asked.
'You have used the wrong initial consonant,' he smiled in answer.
'Might?' I queried; and he nodded his head. 'And yet we are supposed
to get justice by means of the law?'
'That is the paradox of it,' he countered. 'We do get justice.'
'You are speaking professionally now, are you not?' I asked.
Colonel Ingram blushed, actually blushed, and again he looked
anxiously about him for a way of escape. But I blocked his path and
did not offer to move.
'Tell me,' I said, 'when one surrenders his personal feelings to his
professional feelings, may not the action be defined as a sort of
spiritual mayhem?'
I did not get an answer. Colonel Ingram had ingloriously bolted,
overturning a palm in his flight.
Next I tried the newspapers. I wrote a quiet, restrained,
dispassionate account of Jackson's case. I made no charges against the
men with whom I had talked, nor, for that matter, did I even mention
them. I gave the actual facts of the case, the long years Jackson
had worked in the mills, his effort to save the machinery from
damage and the consequent accident, and his own present wretched and
starving condition. The three local newspapers rejected my
communication, likewise did the two weeklies.
I got hold of Percy Layton. He was a graduate of the university, had
gone in for journalism, and was then serving his apprenticeship as
reporter on the most influential of the three newspapers. He smiled
when I asked him the reason the newspapers suppressed all mention of
Jackson or his case.
'Editorial policy,' he said. 'We have nothing to do with that.
It's up to the editors.'
'But why is it policy?' I asked.
'We're all solid with the corporations,' he answered. 'If you paid
advertising rates, you couldn't get any such matter into the papers. A
man who tried to smuggle it in would lose his job. You couldn't get it
in if you paid ten times the regular advertising rates.'
'How about your own policy?' I questioned. 'It would seem your
function is to twist truth at the command of your employers, who, in
turn, obey the behests of the corporations.'
'I haven't anything to do with that.' He looked uncomfortable for
the moment, then brightened as he saw his way out. 'I, myself, do
not write untruthful things. I keep square all right with my own
conscience. Of course, there's lots that's repugnant in the course
of the day's work. But then, you see, that's all part of the day's
work,' he wound up boyishly.
'Yet you expect to sit at an editor's desk some day and conduct a
policy.'
'I'll be case-hardened by that time,' was his reply.
'Since you are not yet case-hardened, tell me what you think right
now about the general editorial policy.'
'I don't think,' he answered quickly. 'One can't kick over the ropes
if he's going to succeed in journalism. I've learned that much, at any
rate.'
And he nodded his young head sagely.
'But the right?' I persisted.
'You don't understand the game. Of course it's all right, because it
comes out all right, don't you see?'
'Delightfully vague,' I murmured; but my heart was aching for the
youth of him, and I felt that I must either scream or burst into
tears.
I was beginning to see through the appearances of the society in
which I had always lived, and to find the frightful realities that
were beneath. There seemed a tacit conspiracy against Jackson, and I
was aware of a thrill of sympathy for the whining lawyer who had
ingloriously fought his case. But this tacit conspiracy grew large.
Not alone was it aimed against Jackson. It was aimed against every
workingman who was maimed in the mills. And if against every man in
the mills, why not against every man in all the other mills and
factories? In fact, was it not true of all the industries?
And if this was so, then society was a lie. I shrank back from my
own conclusions. It was too terrible and awful to be true. But there
was Jackson, and Jackson's arm, and the blood that stained my gown and
dripped from my own roof-beams. And there were many Jacksons- hundreds
of them in the mills alone, as Jackson himself had said. Jackson I
could not escape.
I saw Mr. Wickson and Mr. Pertonwaithe, the two men who held most of
the stock in the Sierra Mills. But I could not shake them as I had
shaken the mechanics in their employ. I discovered that they had an
ethic superior to that of the rest of society. It was what I may
call the aristocratic ethic or the master ethic.* They talked in large
ways of policy, and they identified policy and right. And to me they
talked in fatherly ways, patronizing my youth and inexperience. They
were the most hopeless of all I had encountered in my quest. They
believed absolutely that their conduct was right. There was no
question about it, no discussion. They were convinced that they were
the saviours of society, and that it was they who made happiness for
the many. And they drew pathetic pictures of what would be the
sufferings of the working class were it not for the employment that
they, and they alone, by their wisdom, provided for it.
-
* Before Avis Everhard was born, John Stuart Mill, in his essay,
On Liberty, wrote: 'Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large
portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its
class feelings of superiority.'
-
Fresh from these two masters, I met Ernest and related my
experience. He looked at me with a pleased expression, and said:
'Really, this is fine. You are beginning to dig truth for
yourself. It is your own empirical generalization, and it is
correct. No man in the industrial machine is a free-will agent, except
the large capitalist, and he isn't, if you'll pardon the Irishism.*
You see, the masters are quite sure that they are right in what they
are doing. That is the crowning absurdity of the whole situation. They
are so tied by their human nature that they can't do a thing unless
they think it is right. They must have a sanction for their acts.
-
* Verbal contradictions, called bulls, were long an amiable weakness
of the ancient Irish.
-
'When they want to do a thing, in business of course, they must wait
till there arises in their brains, somehow, a religious, or ethical,
or scientific, or philosophic, concept that the thing is right. And
then they go ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses
of the human mind is that the wish is parent to the thought. No matter
what they want to do, the sanction always comes. They are
superficial casuists. They are Jesuitical. They even see their way
to doing wrong that right may come of it. One of the pleasant and
axiomatic fictions they have created is that they are superior to
the rest of mankind in wisdom and efficiency. Therefrom comes their
sanction to manage the bread and butter of the rest of mankind. They
have even resurrected the theory of the divine right of kings-
commercial kings in their case.*
-
* The newspapers, in 1902 of that era, credited the president of the
Anthracite Coal Trust, George F. Baer, with the enunciation of the
following principle: 'The rights and interests of the laboring man
will be protected by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite
wisdom has given the property interests of the country.'
-
'The weakness in their position lies in that they are merely
business men. They are not philosophers. They are not biologists nor
sociologists. If they were, of course all would be well. A business
man who was also a biologist and a sociologist would know,
approximately, the right thing to do for humanity. But, outside the
realm of business, these men are stupid. They know only business. They
do not know mankind nor society, and yet they set themselves up as
arbiters of the fates of the hungry millions and all the other
millions thrown in. History, some day, will have an excruciating laugh
at their expense.'
I was not surprised when I had my talk out with Mrs. Wickson and
Mrs. Pertonwaithe. They were society women.* Their homes were palaces.
They had many homes scattered over the country, in the mountains, on
lakes, and by the sea. They were tended by armies of servants, and
their social activities were bewildering. They patronized the
university and the churches, and the pastors especially bowed at their
knees in meek subservience.*(2) They were powers, these two women,
what of the money that was theirs. The power of subsidization of
thought was theirs to a remarkable degree, as I was soon to learn
under Ernest's tuition.
-
* Society is here used in a restricted sense, a common usage of
the times to denote the gilded drones that did no labor, but only
glutted themselves at the honey-vats of the workers. Neither the
business men nor the laborers had time or opportunity for society.
Society was the creation of the idle rich who toiled not and who in
this way played.
*(2) 'Bring on your tainted money,' was the expressed sentiment of
the Church during this period.
-
They aped their husbands, and talked in the same large ways about
policy, and the duties and responsibilities of the rich. They were
swayed by the same ethic that dominated their husbands- the ethic of
their class; and they uttered glib phrases that their own ears did not
understand.
Also, they grew irritated when I told them of the deplorable
condition of Jackson's family, and when I wondered that they had
made no voluntary provision for the man. I was told that they
thanked no one for instructing them in their social duties. When I
asked them flatly to assist Jackson, they as flatly refused. The
astounding thing about it was that they refused in almost
identically the same language, and this in face of the fact that I
interviewed them separately and that one did not know that I had
seen or was going to see the other. Their common reply was that they
were glad of the opportunity to make it perfectly plain that no
premium would ever be put on carelessness by them; nor would they,
by paying for accident, tempt the poor to hurt themselves in the
machinery.*
-
* In the files of the Outlook, a critical weekly of the period, in
the number dated August 18, 1906, is related the circumstance of a
workingman losing his arm, the details of which are quite similar to
those of Jackson's case as related by Avis Everhard.
-
And they were sincere, these two women. They were drunk with
conviction of the superiority of their class and of themselves. They
had a sanction, in their own class-ethic, for every act they
performed. As I drove away from Mrs. Pertonwaithe's great house, I
looked back at it, and I remembered Ernest's expression that they were
bound to the machine, but that they were so bound that they sat on top
of it.
CHAPTER FIVE.
The Philomaths.
-
ERNEST WAS OFTEN AT THE house. Nor was it my father, merely, nor the
controversial dinners, that drew him there. Even at that time I
flattered myself that I played some part in causing his visits, and it
was not long before I learned the correctness of my surmise. For never
was there such a lover as Ernest Everhard. His gaze and his hand-clasp
grew firmer and steadier, if that were possible; and the question that
had grown from the first in his eyes, grew only the more imperative.
My impression of him, the first time I saw him, had been
unfavorable. Then I had found myself attracted toward him. Next came
my repulsion, when he so savagely attacked my class and me. After
that, as I saw that he had not maligned my class, and that the harsh
and bitter things he said about it were justified, I had drawn
closer to him again. He became my oracle. For me he tore the sham from
the face of society and gave me glimpses of reality that were as
unpleasant as they were undeniably true.
As I have said, there was never such a lover as he. No girl could
live in a university town till she was twenty-four and not have love
experiences. I had been made love to by beardless sophomores and
gray professors, and by the athletes and the football giants. But
not one of them made love to me as Ernest did. His arms were around me
before I knew. His lips were on mine before I could protest or resist.
Before his earnestness conventional maiden dignity was ridiculous.
He swept me off my feet by the splendid invincible rush of him. He did
not propose. He put his arms around me and kissed me and took it for
granted that we should be married. There was no discussion about it.
The only discussion- and that arose afterward- was when we should be
married.
It was unprecedented. It was unreal. Yet, in accordance with
Ernest's test of truth, it worked. I trusted my life to it. And
fortunate was the trust. Yet during those first days of our love, fear
of the future came often to me when I thought of the violence and
impetuosity of his love-making. Yet such fears were groundless. No
woman was ever blessed with a gentler, tenderer husband. This
gentleness and violence on his part was a curious blend similar to the
one in his carriage of awkwardness and ease. That slight
awkwardness! He never got over it, and it was delicious. His
behavior in our drawing-room reminded me of a careful bull in a
china shop.*
-
* In those days it was still the custom to fill the living rooms
with bric-a-brac. They had not discovered simplicity of living. Such
rooms were museums, entailing endless labor to keep clean. The
dust-demon was the lord of the household. There were a myriad
devices for catching dust, and only a few devices for getting rid of
it.
-
It was at this time that vanished my last doubt of the
completeness of my love for him (a subconscious doubt, at most). It
was at the Philomath Club- a wonderful night of battle, wherein Ernest
bearded the masters in their lair. Now the Philomath Club was the most
select on the Pacific Coast. It was the creation of Miss Brentwood, an
enormously wealthy old maid; and it was her husband, and family, and
toy. Its members were the wealthiest in the community, and the
strongest-minded of the wealthy, with, of course, a sprinkling of
scholars to give it intellectual tone.
The Philomath had no club house. It was not that kind of a club.
Once a month its members gathered at some one of their private
houses to listen to a lecture. The lecturers were usually, though
not always, hired. If a chemist in New York made a new discovery in
say radium, all his expenses across the continent were paid, and as
well he received a princely fee for his time. The same with a
returning explorer from the polar regions, or the latest literary or
artistic success. No visitors were allowed, while it was the
Philomath's policy to permit none of its discussions to get into the
papers. Thus great statesmen- and there had been such occasions-
were able fully to speak their minds.
I spread before me a wrinkled letter, written to me by Ernest twenty
years ago, and from it I copy the following:
'Your father is a member of the Philomath, so you are able to
come. Therefore come next Tuesday night. I promise you that you will
have the time of your life. In your recent encounters, you failed to
shake the masters. If you come, I'll shake them for you. I'll make
them snarl like wolves. You merely questioned their morality. When
their morality is questioned, they grow only the more complacent and
superior. But I shall menace their money-bags. That will shake them to
the roots of their primitive natures. If you can come, you will see
the cave-man, in evening dress, snarling and snapping over a bone. I
promise you a great caterwauling and an illuminating insight into
the nature of the beast.
'They've invited me in order to tear me to pieces. This is the
idea of Miss Brentwood. She clumsily hinted as much w |
