My vision spiritual came to me out of the unknown. The facts and experiences of life led me to Socialism. In each case it was a rebirth.
"The Way" of Jesus was at first a state of mind; it had no relation to a book; it had no connection with a church. Socialism is a passion for the regeneration of society, it is a state of mind, a point of view. The religion of the peasant Saviour and the movement for industrial democracy expand as they are understood. Both thrive under opposition and are retarded only by unfaithful friends. I caught the spirit, then studied the forms. I got tired of doling out alms. It became degrading to me either to take them from the rich or to give them to the poor. Almsgiving deludes the one and demoralizes the other. I had distributed the crumbs that fall from rich men's tables until my soul became sick. I expected Lazarus the legion to be grateful; I expected him to become pious, to attend church, to number himself with the saved, and he didn't.
Almsgiving not only degrades the recipient but themedium also. The average minister or missionary is looked upon by the middle and upper classes as a sort of refined pauper himself. So, like a mendicant he goes to the merchant and trades his piety for a rebate of ten per cent.; or he travels on a child's fare on the railroads. I have scores of times given away my own clothes and have gone to the missionary "Dorcas Room" and fitted myself out with somebody's worn-out garments; and I, too, was expected to be grateful and to write of my gratitude to the person who, "for Jesus' sake," had cleaned out his cellar or garret. In the West I have been the recipient of Home Missionary barrels packed in some rich church in New York or New England—annual barrels in which there is usually a ten-dollar suit for the missionary, bought by some dear old lady to whom all men were alike—in size. This whole process is hoary, antiquated, stupid and degrading.
My Socialism is the outcome of my desire to make real the dreams I have dreamed of God. It came to me, not through Marx or Lassalle, but by the way of Moses and Jesus. Twenty years' experience in reform movements taught me the hopelessness of reformation from without. It was like soldering up a thousand little holes in the bottom of a kettle.
For a hundred years men and women have been begging the industrial lords to spare the little children of the poor. Have they? Ask the census taker. Millions of them are the victims of thesweater—the dealer in human endurance. The cure for child labour is justice to the father, and justice to the father is his full share of the good things of life. As long as he has to pay tribute to a horde of non-producers, who have merely invested in his endurance, so long will he be unable to keep his child at school.
It is the daughters of the poor that become the victims of middle-class lust—Fantine is the daughter of a working man. She is multiplied by tens of thousands on the streets of great cities, selling her soul for a morsel of bread. We are hardened to that and we think we are meriting the approbation of angels when we start a rescue mission for her special class.
How pure in the sight of God is poor Fantine when compared with the cowards who will not smash the mill of which she is the mere grist. Just so long as there is a cash consideration in her life must capitalism bear the burden of her sin!
There were millions of men out of work last winter. The political parties took no notice. The leaders knew the minds of the electors. They knew that those millions of unemployed were too stupid to see any connection between government and work.
Mr. Taft was asked in the campaign what a workless, homeless man could do to find employment.
"God knows!" was his reply.
Out of this army of the unemployed the ranks of the criminals are reinforced, and the search forcreature comforts recruits the ranks of women who are not fallen, but knocked down. The supreme function of the state is to make it easy for citizens to live in harmony with one another and hard to be out of joint.
Poverty is the mother curse of the ages. No man suffering from her withering, blighting touch can be in harmony with the best. Socialism tackles the master job of abolishing it. Not by any fantastic plan of redistribution but by giving to the creator all that he creates and to the social charges, pensioners and cripples an assurance of life without the stigma of pauperism.
Socialism asks for the application of science to the disease of poverty. Science has chained the lightning and harnessed the ether waves, it has filled the world with horseless carriages and is now filling the air with machines that fly like birds. The inventions of the last twenty years are modern miracles but the sunken millions of our fellowmen never speak through a telephone, never ride in an automobile, never send a telegram, never read good books, or see good plays! They make all these things. They make them all possible for others, but the enjoyment of them is beyond their wildest dreams!
The strength of the social chain cannot be greater than its weakest link.
Socialists are grouped around the thin places, the leakages, the weaknesses of democracy, and engrossthemselves in making them strong. The propaganda in times past wielded only a sword; now it has a trowel. Socialism is a positive force; it is leaven in the lump.
The party has a discipline which often hampers its own progress, but in the regimentation of an idea discipline can not be dispensed with. There are Socialists who see only the goal—are not willing to see anything else or less. There are others who see every step of the way and emphasize each step.
"What kind of a Socialist are you?" a rich man asked me the other day.
"Catalogue me with the worst!" I said, "for he who numbers himself with the transgressors is in direct apostolic succession."
The Socialists are the only people who seem to have the Bible idea of work. The scriptures make no provision for parasites. In the commonwealth of Israel everybody worked. When there was a departure from this ideal, came the prophet to speak for God and the divine order.
Socialists are doing for America what the prophets did for Israel thousands of years ago: we are pointing the way to simple and right living, to justice, brotherhood and religion. Socialism is not an ultimate conception of society: it only paves the way for a divine individualism. When the fear of hunger is vanished men will have a chance to be individuals.
Men striving all their lives to live—to merely live—have no time, no opportunity for a career.
Opposition to the democratic ideal of Socialism is based on ignorance. Opponents ask for a mechanical contrivance that will wind up and go like a clock. We are asked questions that only our great-grandchildren can answer. We are told by the good people that the ideal leaves out God. The British Parliament proclaimed that bloodhounds and scalping were "means that God and nature had given into its hand." A coal baron of Pennsylvania declares that God has entrusted a few men with untold wealth and consigned a multitude to degrading poverty—that kind of a God the democratic ideal does leave out. He is a God spun out of the fertile brain of the materialist. Critics of Socialism assume and herald their own patriotism, their devotion to law and order, but they are usually men who distrust any extension of the functions of the state not directly beneficial to their personal interests.
The Socialists of to-day know that their ideal can not be realized during their lifetime; they are people of vision; they are not saying, "Lord, Lord," but they are bringing in His Kingdom.
The early Socialists met their worst opposition in a corrupt church and their writings were coloured by the conflict. We are asked to stand sponsor for all they said. One might as well charge 20th century Christians with the horrors of the Inquisition!
We are not even willing to stand sponsor for their economics. Many of their prophecies are yet unfulfilled, the currents of thought and action are not flowing in the direction they anticipated, but the facts they faced have altered little and we moderns have made our own diagnosis, and we have decided on a remedy. The remedy is not revolution in the historic sense; it is not a cataclysm, it has no room for hatred. Its method is evolutionary; its watch-word is solidarity, its hope is regeneration.
The process levels up, not down. It has an upward look. It will abolish class struggles and divisions. It will usher in a reign of peace. Just at present it is a class struggle, a struggle on behalf of that social group of labourers on whose back are borne the world's heaviest burdens, but it is no more a labour movement than the emancipation of the slaves was a Negro movement.
The man who enunciated the doctrine of the class struggle belonged only by soul contact to the struggling class. The Socialist appeal is made directly to that class, for until it is awakened to its own peril and its own need little progress can be made.
Changes in society are like changes in human character: they must have their origin in the heart and work outward. It is at the heart of things we place our hope and the secret of the social passion to me is the knowledge that I am a coöperator with God.
There comes over me occasionally an idea, as Ilook into the future, that the fact may become the mockery of the dream. Our temples are built with hands, they are fair to look upon even in the dream, but other builders will come and build on other foundations temples of the soul more fair, more enduring. Socialism the fact will have the higher individualism as the dream; but the conflict will be lifted from the sordid plane of the stomach to the realm of mind, heart, and soul.
The apologist of thestatus quois of all things the most pitiful. If a politician, he has no dream; if a business man, he has no vision; if a preacher, he lives in a mausoleum of dead hopes. To these the ten commandments sum up the moral order of the universe. The eleventh commandment shares the fate of the seed that fell on stony ground.
The worst that a man can do against the democratic ideal is not to work for it. He might as well fight against the stars in their courses. What does it matter who brings it to pass or how it comes?
To work for it is the thing. To feel the thrill of a world-comradeship, a world-endeavour, to be in line with the workers and touch hands with men of all creeds, all classes, this is social joy, this is incentive for life!
"Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand,Nor yet come home in the even, too faint and weary to stand.Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fearFor to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf a-near.Oh, strange, new wonderful justice! But for whom shall we gather the gain?For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labour in vain.Then all mine and all thine shall be ours and no more shall any man craveFor riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather goldTo buy his friend in the market and pinch and pine the sold?Nay, what save the lovely city and the little house on the hill,And the wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till,And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead,And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head.And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow,And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know.For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a shareOf the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world grows fair."
"Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand,Nor yet come home in the even, too faint and weary to stand.Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fearFor to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf a-near.Oh, strange, new wonderful justice! But for whom shall we gather the gain?For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labour in vain.Then all mine and all thine shall be ours and no more shall any man craveFor riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather goldTo buy his friend in the market and pinch and pine the sold?Nay, what save the lovely city and the little house on the hill,And the wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till,And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead,And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head.And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow,And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know.For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a shareOf the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world grows fair."
In the very advent of my spiritual life I gravitated toward the church. There I added to my faith a theology. A theologian is a fighter—a doctrinaire. Every item of knowledge I got I sharpened into a weapon to confound the Catholics.
Before my nakedness was wholly covered I was shouting with my sect for "Queen and Constitution," and I could discuss the historic Episcopate before I could write my own name. Then came a hidebound orthodoxy. I measured life by a book and for every ill that flesh is heir to I had an "appropriate" text. I had a formula for the salvation of the race. I divided humanity into two camps—the goats andthe sheep. I had a literal hell for one crowd and a beautiful heaven for the other. The logical result of this was a caste of good (saved) people for whom I became a sort of an ecclesiastical attorney. Naturally one outgrows such obsolescence. Such archaism has an antidote: it is an open-minded study of the life of Jesus. The result of such a study to me was a rediscovery of myself, that I think is what Jesus always does for an inquiring soul. He is the Supreme Individualist, the Master of Personality.
I did not ask him what to wear or how to vote. I did not even ask him what was moral or immoral, for these things change with time and place and circumstance.
I asked him the old eternal questions of life and death and immortality, of God and my neighbour, of sin and service. The answers stripped me of fear and gave me a scorn of consequences. The secret of Jesus is to find God in the soul of humanity. The cause of Jesus is the righting of world wrongs; the religion of Jesus the binding together of souls in the solidarity of the race.
Three miles north of Peekskill and two miles east of the Hudson river lies this farm place that I have named Happy Hollow. It looks to me as if God had just taken a big handful of earth out from between these hills of Putnam County and made a shelter here for man and beast.
"Happy Hollow""Happy Hollow," Mr. Irvine's Present Home Near Peekskill, New YorkToList
"Happy Hollow," Mr. Irvine's Present Home Near Peekskill, New YorkToList
The Hollow is meadow-land through which runs a brook. Across the meadow in front of the house, rises almost perpendicularly a hill five hundred feet high. It is clothed now in autumnal glory. On the summit there are several bare patches of granite rock surrounded by tall dark green cedars that look like forest monks, from my study window. There are over two hundred acres, two-thirds of them woodland. Through the woods there are miles and miles of old lumber roads over which my predecessors have hauled lumber since the days of the Revolution.
"Is there a view of the Hudson River from any of these hills?" I asked when buying.
"Somewhere," said the owner, but she was not quite sure.
One day I was exploring the fastnesses and came upon a rock ledge standing a hundred feet high. I walked to the edge, pushed the branches of the elder bushes aside and out there in front of me lay that glorious valley and beyond the valley over the top of my house lay the mighty river like an unsheathed sword!
On that ledge I have built a platform of white birch and behind the platform a bungalow from the window of which I have a full view of the valley, the Westchester County hills and the river. I have named the ledge "Ascension Point" in memory of the valued friendships formed at the church on Fifth Avenue.
On the edge of the amphitheatre-shaped meadow, beside the old road that leads to the river, stands the farmhouse. It is sheltered from winter winds by the hills and from summer sun by elm, maple and walnut trees.
There is nothing to boast of in the arrangement; it was built quickly and not over-well. If the man who planned it had any more taste than a cow he must have expressed it on the building of the barn, not on the house. It had been heated with stoves for years, but I tore away the boards that covered the open fireplaces. I built a cistern on the hill and a cesspool down in the meadow, and between them, in a large room in the house, arranged a bathroom, a big bathroom, big enough to swing a cat around.
I am now knocking a wall down here and there, wiping some outbuildings off the map, and by degrees making it habitable throughout the year.
There is a five-acre orchard on the hill east of the house and through it runs a brook that can be turned to good account.
I had a population of twenty-five during the summer. They were encamped within a few hundred yards of each other in tents, overhauled barns, etc. We were all hand-picked Socialists—dreamers of dreams.
Of course we had to eat and as the raw-food fad did not appeal to us we had to have a fire on whichto cook; and as there was an abundance of wood I instituted a wood pile!
To any one about to form a coöperative community I can recommend this institution as an infinitely better gauge of human character than either the ten commandments or the royal eight-fold pathway! We didn't need much wood and there were plenty of men. We had good tools and—I was going to say, "wood to burn."
"It was jolly good fun, don't you know," to hack up about three sticks; then the woodcutter would have a story to tell or he "had something he had left undone for days." There was an atmosphere around the pile that affected us as the hookworm affects its victims in some Southern communities—we grew listless, dull, flaccid.
The influence was baneful, subtle. None of us ever confessed to being affected. It rather emphasized our idealism.
"In the future," said one comrade as he laid the axe down after his second stick, "wood will be cut by machinery!" We looked interested. "Yes," he said as he rolled a cigarette, "there will be a machine that will cut a cord a second!"
"Why don't you invent one?" we asked.
"How can one invent anything in this slave age?" he asked, as he glared at us between the curling puffs of smoke.
"That's true," we said, and piped down.
He went over to the well to get a drink. The housekeeper called for firewood. He smiled—he was a jolly good-natured chap.
"Keep cool, comrades," he said gently, "it'll be all the same in a thousand years!" The axe was blunt. He took it to the grindstone—a new patent, with a bicycle seat on it, and there he sat puffing and grinding until a neighbour's cow broke into our corn. He dropped the axe and went after the cow.
The housekeeper kept calling for wood. Another comrade was pressed into the killing ether and he smashed and hacked for five minutes; then he straightened himself up and, said, with a look of disgust on his face, "That's a mucker's job!"
"Who will be the muckers under Socialism?" I asked mildly.
"The dull, brainless clods who can do nothing else!" he said.
Just then our neighbour's hired man, a Russian muzik, passed with his ox-team. He wore a smock of his own making and a pair of shoes he had made of hickory bark.
"That," said the comrade at the block in a stage whisper, "is the type that will do the rough work. You couldn't wake that thing up with a plug of dynamite!"
We watched Michael and his ox-team as they lumbered lazily along the lane.
"Happy Hollow" in the Winter"Happy Hollow" in the Winter, Looking From the HouseToList
"Happy Hollow" in the Winter, Looking From the HouseToList
We had one poet in our midst—just one. He had lately completed a poem on the glories of our valley. Two men stooped to pick up the axe. Gaston and Alphonse like, they stooped together. As they did so the poet came along with a beaming face. "Stop!" he said; "listen, boys, listen."
We all straightened up, and stood at attention. He read:
"Not far from turmoil, strife, the mountain-vying wavesOf life's antagonisms that delude the world—Amidst elysian valleys, slopes, majestic hills and cavesThat mark the path where ages wrought their wrath and hurledThe crumbling sinews of the soil down to defeat,To linger in the depth as symbols that all powerIs at the will of the Supreme—in this retreat,Filled with the chirping music of the nightly hour,And seeking rest from joyous toil, reward for whichIs given by the thought that all is mine, that noneDo rob, that love adds to each stroke its richAnd sweetening cheer: In such rare world that I have won——"
"Not far from turmoil, strife, the mountain-vying wavesOf life's antagonisms that delude the world—Amidst elysian valleys, slopes, majestic hills and cavesThat mark the path where ages wrought their wrath and hurledThe crumbling sinews of the soil down to defeat,To linger in the depth as symbols that all powerIs at the will of the Supreme—in this retreat,Filled with the chirping music of the nightly hour,And seeking rest from joyous toil, reward for whichIs given by the thought that all is mine, that noneDo rob, that love adds to each stroke its richAnd sweetening cheer: In such rare world that I have won——"
The housekeeper rudely broke the spell!
"You comrades had better eat that poetry for dinner," she said.
We all looked and all understood—all save the poet. He looked aghast, thinking in Yiddish.
"Go on," somebody said, but the poet was a sensitive youth and could sense an atmosphere quicker than most of us.
"Wood," said the housekeeper, pointing at the few sticks lying around the block.
"Ah," exclaimed the poet as he took up the axe,"you shall have it, comrade—have it good and plenty."
He laid the poem in the white birch frame against a stone and proceeded. We moved away, every man to his own place.
In a community where the communers have to chop the fire-wood, canned salmon is a good standby.
That day we had salmon for dinner.
Just as a matter of encouragement I had the artist of the community print a Latin motto in fine Gothic characters:
"LABORARE EST ORARE"
This I tacked to the block at the woodpile. We had one orator in the community—just one.
Next morning, when the motto stared him in the face, he said: "Gee whiz! that's great—Labour is oratory!" It was a blow at a venture in the interpretation of Latin and instead of wood to cook the breakfast we had a speech on the labour of the orator!
The idea that I was giving land away got noised abroad, and a thousand letters of inquiry came to me. Most of the inquirers asked if I gave "deeds" to the land.
Others got an idea that I had a coöperative colony and all they had to do was to come and plant themselves on the land. I never intended to organize a colony but I did invite some families to enjoy the summer on the farm.
I shall not ask as many next year for I have no talent as a manager and it takes more management than I imagined to look after even half a dozen families.
I had a number of parties from the city during the summer—the largest being from the Church of the Ascension and the Cosmopolitan Church. From Ascension Church came a young men's club on Decoration day. I introduced the boys to their first experience in archery.
The people from the Cosmopolitan Church came on a Sunday and I took them over the hill to call on my friends, the Franciscan monks, of the society of the Atonement. The Franciscans are my nearest neighbours on the north and on the south is my neighbour Mr. Epstein, a Russian Jewish farmer.
From the north we have had an intellectual and moral fellowship and from the south the comradeship of the soil.
To Mr. Epstein's bull we are indebted for the element of excitement—a very necessary element if one could get it in any sort of orderly arrangement.
The bull objected to Mr. Epstein interfering in what might be called his (the bull's) family affairs. He tossed his owner into the air three times one afternoon in my meadow and, but for the timely interference of a dog, would have gathered the farmer to his fathers. Several of our community saw the incident, but the vibrations had a more enervatingeffect than even those around the woodpile, and being armed only with the first law of nature they left the honours of the incident to the dog.
The following Sunday morning I saw a crowd in Mr. Epstein's orchard. It looked like a small county fair. A cow doctor had been imported to perform an operation on the bull. Mr. Epstein and his muzik, Michael, almost came to blows in trying to decide which of them should put the yoke on the bull's neck. No decent farmer will stand aloof in such a crisis: so I threw my coat off and offered my services. The patient made serious objections to me, but permitted the yoke to be adjusted by a day labourer named Harvey Outhouse.
This Holstein aristocrat had a terrible come-down. He used to stalk around as if he owned the earth, but now he is a common "hewer of wood and drawer of water" like ourselves.
I see him occasionally, now, pulling a heavy load of stones or hay past our place as meekly and quiet as the dull ox by his side, and involuntarily I exclaim: "How are the mighty fallen!"
I have a horse and a cow. The artist of the community, who remains as one of my family, took charge of the cow and the care of the horse was distributed among the rest of us. The house is made comfortable and snug for the winter and I have settled down here for the remainder of my life.
With my family are these two comrades, the artistand the mechanic, and we are in complete harmony in work and ideals. I have been a gypsy most of my life. I am to have a respite now. Here in this corner of Putnam County I have found my happy hills of rest. My work will always be in the city but here my home is to me and here I am to do my writing, thinking, living. In the solitude of these woods I am to find inspiration and quiet, here I am to dream my dreams and see my visions. I am forty-seven years of age now, but I have the health and vigour of a boy and I feel that for me life has just really begun. I have but one ambition: it is not wealth, or fame, or even rest. It is to be of service to my fellow-men; for that is my highest conception of service to God.
This memoir is but a catalogue of events—a series of milestones that I have passed. My life has been at times such a tempest and at other times such a calm, and between these extremes I have failed so often and my successes have been so phenomenal that the world would not believe a true recital of the facts, even though I were able to write them.
The conflicts of the soul, the scalding tears that bespeak the breaking heart, can not be reduced to print. Nevertheless, I hope that what I have written may be of encouragement to my fellow-travellers along the highway of life, especially men who mistakenly imagine they have been worsted in the fight.
There is a great truth in the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history but there is also truth, and a mighty truth, in the spiritual interpretation of life. The awakened human soul is indissolubly inknit with the warp and woof of things divine. It fights not alone, it is linked with God.
"No man is born into the world whose workIs not born with him; there is always workAnd tools to work withal for those who will.And blessed are the horny hands of toil!The busy world shoves angrily asideThe man who stands with arms akimbo set,Until occasion tells him what to do;And he who waits to have his task worked out—Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled."
"No man is born into the world whose workIs not born with him; there is always workAnd tools to work withal for those who will.And blessed are the horny hands of toil!The busy world shoves angrily asideThe man who stands with arms akimbo set,Until occasion tells him what to do;And he who waits to have his task worked out—Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled."
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