LIV
It was because of this attitude toward workingmen, and their cause, that I was accused, now and then, by those who knew nothing about Socialism, of being a Socialist; by those who did know about it I was condemned for not being one. Our movement indeed had no opponents in the town more bitter than the Socialists, that is the authentic and orthodox Socialists of the class-conscious Marxist order, and they opposed me so insistently that I might as well have been the capitalist class and had done with it. I do not intend to confuse myself with the movement of which I, for a while, was but the merest and weakest of human instruments; I speak in that personal sense only because the opposition was of a personal quality so intense that it could hardly have been expected of an attitude that was always insisted upon as so entirely impersonal, the cold and scientific attitude of minds that had comprehended the whole of human history, analyzed the whole amazing complexity of human life, and reduced its problems to that degree in whichthey were all to be solved by a formula so brief that it could be printed on a visiting card. The complaint these scientists made of our movement was that its ameliorations in city life were retarding that evolution of which they were the inspired custodians and conservators; some of them spoke of it as though it were but a darkling part of that vast conspiracy against mankind in which the capitalists were so shamelessly engaged. If we had only let things alone, it was urged, they might grow so desperate that no one but the Socialists would be capable of dealing with the appalling situation.
But this was the attitude only of that coterie which, unselfishly, no doubt, with the purest of motives, and only until the industrial democracy could be organized and rendered sufficiently class-conscious to take over the work, was directing the destinies of the Socialist party, very much to the fleshly eye in the same manner that the Republican machine controlled that party or the Democratic machine its party, or, before we were done, certain persons attempted to control the Independent movement. So far as I could discern, there was not much difference in them all; the Socialists seemed to rely on all the old weapons that had so long been employed in the world, and so long failed; they seemed to contemplate nothing more than replacement of old orthodoxies with new, old tyrannies with new tyrannies; in a word, to preserve the old vicious circle in which humanity has been revolving impotently and stupidly down all the grooves of time.
I could not have been a Socialist because life had somehow taught me that this is a world of relativities, in which the absolute is the first impossibility. I could share, of course, their hope, or the hope of some of them in a well ordered society, though with many of them the dream seemed to be beautiful chiefly because they expected to order it themselves; they who felt themselves so long to have been the slaves were to become the masters; their hard and too logical theory of classes circumscribed their vision so that they could imagine nothing more clearly, and possibly nothing more delightful than a bouleversement which would leave them on top.
I could recognize with them the masters under whom we all alike were serving in this land, and respect them as little as we might, or detest them as we would, they presented whatever advantage there is in familiarity; if nothing more inviting than a change in masters were proposed, one would prefer those one had to others whose habits and whims he did not know. One could be pretty sure that the new masters would use the same old whips and scorpions, or if new ones, with a sting more bitter. They proposed as much, indeed, in their rigid form of organization, with a discipline more irksome and relentless, what with their signing of pledges, and their visitations and committees of inspection, and trials for heresy and excommunications. They reminded me of those prosecutors who could behold no defect in the penal machinery save that it had not been sufficiently drastic; they would replace all old intolerances and ancient tyrannies by others nodifferent save that they were employed in the opposing cause, and were to be even more intolerant and tyrannical.
That is, the Socialists provided for everything in the world except liberty, and to one whose dissolving illusions had left nothing but the dream of liberty in a world where liberty was not and probably never was to be, there was no allure in the proposal to take away even the dream of liberty.
None of them of course would be impressed by these objections—was not the great cure for social ill written and printed on a card?—nor would they consider them even until they had been submitted to the prescribed test of a joint debate, about the most futile device ever adopted by mankind, and a nuisance as offensive as any that ever disturbed society. It was of course the only amusement they had, as popular as running the gauntlet was with the Indians, and they liked to torture a capitalist to make a Socialist holiday. It is of course quite useless to argue with one who is always right, one whose utterances have the authority of revealed truth, but inasmuch as society had not yet been developed to a point of communal efficiency sufficient to keep the streets clean, it seemed idle to undertake the communal control of production and distribution. And however wrong I may be in every other thing, I am quite sure that I am right in this, that in their analysis of society they have failed utterly to take into account that classic of the ironic spirit, the great law of the contrariety of things, according to which the expected never happens, at least in the way itwas expected to happen, and nothing ever turns out the way it was planned.
But there is a more fundamental law—that of the destructive power of force, which always defeats itself. For their reliance was on force—and how quietly they, or the most virile of them, entered upon their last phase in their acceptance of the doctrine of force as preached now everywhere by the I. W. W. agitator on the curbstone! Sometimes after all the law does not take a thousand years to work itself out.
It seemed to me that the single-taxers had a scheme far better than that of the Socialists, since they suggested a reliance on the democratic, and not on the authoritarian theory, though in its mysterious progress, in its constant development of new functions, democracy may be expected to modify even that theory. I fear at least that it would not do away with mosquitoes; possibly not even with reformers.