CHAPTER VAMONG THE REVOLUTIONARIES
No. — Sangamon Street, Chicago, Ill.,
February 27, 1892.
Again I am in the army of the unemployed, and have been there for the past three weeks and more, but on other than the terms of my first experience in Chicago. I have been looking for work and testing many phases of this lurid life of enforced idleness, but with a wide difference from the original venture here. My savings from wages earned in the factory have put me on quite another footing. The room in which I am writing has been an adequate shelter, and I have paid for it only one dollar and a half a week. Odd jobs have helped me often in the matter of securing food, and, when these failed, I have had my dwindling store of savings to fall back upon; and I have a not inconsiderable knowledge of the cheap eating-houses of the town.
All through my time of service in the factory, I saved scrupulously. A wage of nine dollars a week held out a hopeful prospect as the result of seven weeks of labor. I did not miss even a fraction of a working day, and so the total of my earnings would have reached sixty-three dollars but for the unfortunate fact that, besides Sundays, there fell two holidays within the limits of that period. On Christmas and New Year’s Day the factory was closed, and I found, to my surprise, that holidays, which I should have supposed were joyously welcome to all the world, are really of very doubtful blessedness to the vast number of workers who are paid for the actual amount accomplished, and by the detailed reckoning of time. I lost three dollars in hard cash by Christmas Day and that of the New Year, while my living expenses were uninterrupted; and three dollars would pay for two weeks of comfortable housing from the cruelties of this inclement life.
It was three weeks before I could get appreciably ahead in the matter of saving. Nearly all the first instalment of my wages was already due for board, and a bill for washing cut deep into the small remainder. A pair of shoes was an absolute necessity at the end of the next week, for I was going about almost barefooted, and some other articles of clothing were equally requisite. And so my wages for week by week together were already mortgaged to nearly the last penny before I had actually earned them. But at last the materials of a fairly respectable appearance had been secured, and then, out of the wages of the last four weeks of factory work, I managed, by closest economy, to save seventeen dollars and a half.
Gradation in respectability in the matter of dress, from the point at which a man is unmistakably in his working-clothes to that in which he readily passes as a workman in his Sunday best, has furnished the means of some range in the experiment of church-going. From the first I have gone regularly to church. But appearing in the garb of a day-laborer in the fashionable churches of a great city is far removed as a matter of experience from attending the service of a village meeting-house. I am inclined to think that the latter would be the greater ordeal to a real workman. Country parishioners turn out on Sundays with an amazing show of dress, and one of their own number in flannel shirt and labor-stained clothing would be oddly conspicuous; and he would feel his peculiarity much more, I imagine, than if he found himself among persons whom he did not know on equal social footing. For me the case was different and was wholly artificial, but in going to church in the country, dressed in working clothes which had been carefully protected by overalls, and mended, and brushed, and cleaned to the utmost, I yet could but feel how intolerable to a workingman the actual situation would have been. To slip early into a quiet corner of the village church which was usually free, and then out again before most of the congregation had well started for the door, was a widely dissimilar thing from regularly attending service with your neighbors.
In overalls and a “jumper,” a man is easily classified; without them, however plain may be the stamp upon him of attempted cleanliness, it is difficult to place him among a Sunday-dressed community, whether in the country or in town, unless he, too, is evidently in Sunday clothes. It is not, in its general application, a question of fashion; the cut of a man’s garments may be that of ten years back, or may be foreign to any fashion known, but his clothing must not bear the marks of toil, and must have the linen accompaniments which render, while they are worn, all manual labor difficult. If he would conform, a man must never worship in garments in which he could work.
A want of conformity might quite possibly expose him to aggressive criticism and ridicule among his accustomed fellows. I never found it so myself in the country, where I always went to church in working clothes because I had no others, for never once was I made to feel the least embarrassment, while many times I wondered at the gracious courtesy which met me. But I was always a stranger, and had never to face companions of long standing. And so, as in many phases of my experiment, the unreality of my position marred, in large measure, the value of the result.
In Chicago, however, the circumstances were not so clearly against me, and they served to give to my own experience something of a normal character. In entering a church door on Sunday mornings, I was objectively in no other station than that of any workingman who may have wished to worship there. The treatment which I received is, therefore, a fair gauge of the reception which another worker might expect.
If it were a single instance I should not mention it, and I venture to offer no generalization, although I am speaking of tests which covered many Sundays and included all the principal churches of the town. All that can be said, I think, is that the uniformity of result is some evidence of what a like-conditioned workingman might count upon in the way of treatment at the hands of fashionable churches.
I was sure, in the first venture or two, that the circumstances were exceptional, and that I had chanced upon churches which, although most evidently of the rich, were yet watchful for every opportunity of welcoming the poor. It was not until I had made the rounds of many churches of many denominations that I realized how general and how sincere among them is the spirit of hospitality to the working poor.
In the vestibules, I always found young men who acted as ushers, and who were charged with the duty of receiving strangers. Never once did I fail of a friendly greeting. With every test I felt increasingly the difficulties of the situation for these young men, and my wonder grew at their graceful tactfulness. A touch of the patronizing in their tone or manner would have changed the welcome to an insult, and any marked effusiveness of cordiality would have robbed it as effectually of all virtue. It was the golden mean of a man’s friendly recognition of his fellow-man, with no regard for difference in social standing, which was the course so successfully followed by these young ushers.
People gathered in a room lit by the sun streaming in from a window. Some are seated in pews and some are standing.NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING.
NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING.
NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING.
I had always to avoid a more desirable seat by particularly asking for one far to the rear. And in the pews there was no withdrawing of skirts, nor were there other signs of objection to me as a fellow-worshipper. On the contrary, a hymnal, or a prayer-book would be promptly offered, and sometimes shared; and, at the service-end, a cordial invitation to come again would often follow me from the pew-door, although frequently I noticed that I was conspicuously lonely, as a representative of the poor.
How natural it was and how inevitable that the poor should not be there shone clear as day the moment that I regarded the matter from the subjective attitude of a genuine worker.
From their status as citizens in a free land, American workingmen have acquired, together with the sense of individual freedom, the quality, in very marked degree, of self-respect. It exhibits itself sometimes in highly contradictory fashion, for it is sensitive and jealous in the making; but self-respect is none the less a fundamental characteristic.
Besides Dennis and three others, who were Roman Catholics, the men at Mrs. Schulz’s boarding-house did not go to church. In talking with them I discovered that all had been more or less in the habit of church-going in their country homes, but that the habit had dropped completely from them upon coming to live in town. The case was perfectly apparent. The mere suggestion of a mission church was insulting to them and, from the new idea of churches for the rich, they had learned their first lesson in class distinctions. Every feature of such a church, its richly dressed occupants in their high-priced pews, and the general atmosphere of merely social superiority, would have inflicted upon these men, in spite of a cordial welcome, as deep a wound to their self-respect as they would have felt in being decoyed to a formal reception in a lady’s drawing-room. To them, the latter function could not be more obviously intended for another class than theirs.
One night, before I left the factory, Albert spoke his mind to me on the subject with much freedom. Several times I had asked him to come with me to church, and on this particular Saturday evening I spoke of a preacher whom I hoped to hear in the morning, and who, I urged, would surely interest him.
“Look here, John,” he said, finally, “it’s all right you asking me to go to church, but I ain’t going. I used to go regular when I lived to home, although I ain’t no church-member. It was different out there, for most everybody went and chipped in what they could, and everybody sat where they liked, and it wasn’t one man’s church more than another’s. You go to church if you like. That’s your own business. But I ain’t going to no one-horse mission chapel that the rich has put up so they won’t be bothered with the poor in their own churches. You say they treat you well when you go to church on Michigan Avenue. I don’t doubt it. What reason would they have for not treating you well? But, all the same, they take you in for charity, for you couldn’t pay for a seat in one of them churches. No, sir, the rich folks build their churches for themselves, and they keep them up for themselves, and I ain’t never going to interfere with that arrangement. I don’t mind going to the meetings of the Association once in awhile, for there’s fellows of your own kind there, and you hear some good speaking and singing. I ain’t got much use even for that, for it’s only a sideshow that’s run mostly by the rich, but I ain’t got no use at all for your churches.”
Nevertheless, on the whole, I was sorry the next morning that Albert was not with me. There were moments when I did not regret it, but the sermon, for all its strange setting, was one which could scarcely have failed to impress him.
After a seven o’clock breakfast, which seemed luxuriously late, and which Dennis and I shared alone on Sunday mornings, I set out as usual for the South Side. It was five miles to my destination in that section of the city, and I always walked both ways, for sometimes I had not the fare, and, in any case, ten cents saved was no mean item in a careful account of possible economy.
The Sundays of my term of service in the factory were, for the most part, splendid winter days, and this was of the best. No snow lay on the ground, no winter wind stirred the dust in the long, quiet streets, and clear from out the cloudless sky came the glowing rays of the sun, tempering the cold air to the exquisite delicacy of reviving warmth wherein you catch your breath with wonder, so charged is it with the mystery of the coming spring. Walking, on such a day, is of the essence of delight. Some measure of bodily exercise is needed to keep one warm, and this forth-faring on a holiday, free from the necessity of labor, which begins almost with the dawn of consciousness after sleep and ends only as the night of sleep closes down upon one, is a form of pleasure which life does not often match.
The spell of it bore me company through the factory region, and where there opened to my view mile after mile of lumber-yards, with unsightly piles of seasoning timber stretching away to where the vessels lie in the canals which are fed from the river, and there rise the gaunt bulks of towering elevators, and the tall chimneys that everywhere send forth their ceaseless volumes of black smoke. All this was eloquent of work, and wages, and the means of decent living, and it therefore had a beauty which will not be denied to it by one who knows something of the misery of the unemployed. Even the grotesque ugliness of the long lines of buildings, as I entered the closely built-up sections of the town, could not rob me of the comforting sense of shelter and much legitimate business among the well-paid working poor.
But, before crossing thence to the South Side, there remains a belt through which even the stanchest optimism on its way to church on a bright Sunday morning could scarcely pass without misgivings. A varying foreign population, chiefly from southern and eastern Europe, thickens here to a point of incredible crowding, and sweat-shops abound, and cheap bakeries, and there is a marked increase in the number of pawn-shops and saloons.
The crowds in the streets had been in Sunday dress thus far for the most part, and were evidently on the way to mass or just returning. Many children were among them, uniformly well-booted and dressed, and here and there appeared the white veil and crowning flowers of a first communion.
There was no sharp transition to a region which knows no Sunday, for everywhere were the outward symbols of the day in closed shops, and streets free from the noise of traffic, and the presence of holiday garments; and yet more obvious on every hand became now the evidences of a poverty which finds no day of rest. The unemployed, in the uniform of rags, were loafing on the streets—the long, relentless waiting which is an honest workman’s torment until he finds employment, or loses hope and self-respect, when it becomes his sure destruction. Children who have scant knowledge of clean water or clean clothes were playing in the unclean streets, or emerging from the “family entrances” of saloons with pitchers or tin-pails of beer, destined for rooms swarming with workers whose labor never ceases, except for a few hours each night, unless there comes the calamity of no work at even a bare-living rate.
It was the age-old picture of the lot of the very poor, which alters not with the varying fortune of the State. “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” one epoch of society merges into another, and the lives of men are lived on other planes; but there is a constant quantity in it all at the point where the pressure upon the limits of subsistence is the strongest, and the weakest, driven to the wall, live from hand to mouth in squalid wretchedness.
How familiar to our day has the picture come to be of children who breathe moral death with every breath they draw, and grow up to certain crime and shamelessness from out the haggard struggle for daily bread in sordid attics where disease is born in reeking filth and in warrens of beastly incest! Familiarity with it breeds no contempt, but rather a wondering recognition of the touch of better nature which reveals itself—the shouts of true delight from children hard at play; their rapt absorption in the game, an ecstasy in which all the hidden beauty of their faces is disclosed; the loving tending of a plant that grows in the fetid air of a working-chamber; and, more than all, the unfailing miracle of ministry, wherein the poor, out of cramping penury, relieve the grimmer needs of yet poorer brethren.
Once through the belt, and over a narrow river which flows black with the noisome sewage of the city, and past the region of unceasing railway traffic, and through the chilling gloom of streets which are like sunless caverns between sheer walls of stone, almost a single step in an eastward walk brought to sudden view the revelation of new order. A long, wide avenue, bathed in winter sunlight, lay radiant from polished windows and the garnished pavements of all its length. Glimpses were had of an inland sea which reflected, as from clearest crystal, the infinite serenity of unclouded skies. Down the far extent of the thoroughfare, blending into indistinguishable unity in distant, gleaming haze, were homes where, in quiet and comfort, some in high refinement and some in barbaric splendor, live the strong of their generation, working out life’s fateful ends.
It was down this avenue that I passed on the way to church. An outward calm, as of perfect peace, possessed it. There was no hint of hunger there, nor of the cruel need which eats into the living souls of men until it devours them or leaves them maimed and stunted of their rightful growth. Plethora here took the place of want. Then quickly came the sense of excess, with its end in sad satiety, and hard upon the sight of lavish luxury followed the impression of a world of men seeking at any cost to hedge themselves with unstinted plenty from all sight and knowledge of their kindred who know but little relief from pangs of plague and famine.
Among the first to enter it, I walked up the steps of a large stone church and into an inviting vestibule. Several young men were grouped in conversation between the inner doors, and the one who first marked my entrance stepped out at once to meet me. A little painfully regardful of his dress, he yet was frank and cordial, and the ease with which he greeted me could not have become him better had he spent his life in leading workingmen up the aisles of rich churches.
“I have a seat well up on this side, where you can hear perfectly,” he suggested, looking me full in the eyes, as we stood for a moment at the door. “May I show you to that?”
“I should like to sit here if I may,” I said, and I pointed to the corner of the first seat from the wall.
“I am sorry,” he answered, “but that seat is reserved for an old gentleman who has occupied it for years, and who always prefers to sit there. Would you mind taking the seat just in front of it?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “That will suit me quite as well,” and I sat myself down in the place in question.
Not half a dozen persons were in the building, and its restful quiet was unbroken even by the prelude from the organ. Two ladies in deep mourning entered now, in the company of the church treasurer. It appeared, from their conversation, that they had met him by appointment; and, although they were speaking in low tones, yet they stood so near me that I could not help overhearing what they said.
The point in discussion among them related to a pew, and the treasurer politely pointed out a small one not far from where I sat, which was at their service for two hundred dollars a year, and also two sittings farther to the front, which they might have on the same terms. There was much considering of theprosandconsof this alternative, and, incidentally, the treasurer indicated the range of prices in the pews, from two hundred dollars near the door to sixteen hundred where seats were most in demand.
In growing numbers the congregation was assembling, and above the gentle breathing of the organ, which began to spread in soothing waves of prayerful music through the church, rose the soft rustle of rich dress, and the air, glowing with deep colors from stained glass, took on a subtle perfume.
When the pews were dense with worshippers, scarcely a vacant seat remaining, and my closest watchfulness had failed to note the presence of a single other person of my class, there broke faintly on the waiting company the clear, uplifting sweetness of a rare contralto voice. Vague and lightly stirring at the first, as when some deeply buried feeling, recalled to life, gives utterance to new being in “the language of a cry,” it rose to ever fuller power, unfaltering and pure in every tone, until it smote with the touch of truth each silent chord of life and waked them all to perfect harmony, wherein they sing the mystic unity of things, where the senses mix and whence they radiate, and where,
... in the midmost heart of griefOur passions clasp a secret joy.
... in the midmost heart of griefOur passions clasp a secret joy.
... in the midmost heart of griefOur passions clasp a secret joy.
... in the midmost heart of grief
Our passions clasp a secret joy.
I was not present, however, merely as a worshipper, but also as a member of my chosen order. I tried to see with their eyes, and then to think their thoughts and feel their emotions. When I held myself honestly to this task, with the aid of what I had learned directly from the men and caught of their ways of thinking, it was another revulsion of feeling which set in.
I thought of my nine dollars a week, and of the meagre pittance which resulted from utmost care in saving, even when my own support was the only claim upon me, and how far beyond my reach was all possibility of a seat in the pews which were held for barter. The image of Mrs. Schulz rose up to me, worn, and wan, and almost ill, yet always cheerful, and I remembered the patient, unflinching courage with which she faced the obligations of her life, and the heart-breaking economies by which she must meet many of its duties. On that very day, the two older children had gone at different hours to church, because there was but one pair of shoes and stockings between them, and Mrs. Schulz herself went out to mass, through the tingling cold of the early morning, in clothing which would have been light for summer.
While here, on every hand, was dress whose cost, as indicating not warmth and comfort but mere conformity to changing fashion, represented, in scores of cases, more of annual individual expenditure than the whole net income of many a workman’s family. And even more poignant to a mind made sensitive by this train of thought was the impression which weighed upon it of a company well-fed to a degree of comfort beyond the sense of sympathy with hunger that rarely learns the meaning of enough. The mere suggestion of a breakfast of rich food in wide variety, and served often at great cost in almost wasteful plenty, to be followed soon after the hour of worship by another meal yet more varied, and abundant, and rich, seemed the very pitch of heartless mockery, in the full presence almost of hundreds of men and women to whom bare day’s bread is an agony of anxious seeking, and of multitudes of little children to whom, not nourishing food alone but even food enough to stay the pangs of hunger, is a luxury.
These familiar feelings, roused, as always, by the common contrasts of life, which one follows in close study through the bewildering complexities of casual relations, were dominant, from the new point of view, as the outcome of patent facts. Superficial and undiscriminating, and yet most real and living, is the thought of the actual workman, as his mind responds to the obvious leading of the things he sees. I was glad at this point that Albert was not with me. A few minutes later I deeply regretted his absence.
The minister had begun his sermon. I scarcely heard the opening sentences, so oppressed was my mind with the workman’s sense of the ruthless Philistinism of this phase of modern Christianity. It was the preacher’s tone which first attracted me. There was quiet in it and a great reserve, and he spoke as a pastor who holds earnest conversation with his flock. I was all attention in a moment, and I saw that I listened to a man who knew his fellow-men, and whose words made strong appeal to their intelligence.
It was as though he spoke from a heart well-nigh broken with personal grief, but chastened to new love and truth, and tenderness, by the sorrow which it had borne.
He was speaking of the needs of men, and through his thoughts there breathed a knowledge of theWeltschmerzof to-day, and deep sympathy with it. There was no weak ignoring of the difficulties of honest doubt, and no false claims for the basis of belief; and, when he spoke of the awful suffering of our time, his words were true to the high dignity of man through the infinite consequences of free choice in his life upon the earth. His appeal was no emotional blending of the false and true, wherewith to blind men’s eyes to the eternal verities, and to cause to rest lightly upon comfortable consciences the sense of personal responsibility for one’s fellows, but rather the sure claim of clear conviction which comes from out the facts of daily life seen in the light of their true meaning.
The effect upon his hearers was unmistakable. I was unaware of it for a time, so engrossed was I in the speaker’s words, and in the strongly human personality of the man, but by degrees I awoke to the fact that all about me were listeners as eagerly intent as I. The sense of hardened, pampered, Philistinism gave way before the overwhelming consciousness of a sympathetic unity of thought and feeling. Indifferent to the vital needs of the world and to the pressing problems of its life? No emotion could have been farther from these men and women, the intensity of whose interest could be felt in almost an agony of breathless attention to the sober truthfulness of the minister. The very stillness was charged with mute appeal for guidance from hearts wrung with the hurt of the world and pleading for some useful outlet to the tide of generous feeling. It was as though distress had ceased to be for them the visible sufferings of the poor, and had grown, through the deepening sense of brotherhood, into an anguish of their own, which must find healing in forms of effective helpfulness. Very clearly dawned the conviction that, if one could but point out to the members of this waiting company some “way,” “something to do,” which would square well with their practical business sense of things, instant and unmeasured would be their response for the furthering of an end which would work them such glad relief!
From the church my destination was the meeting of the Socialists. But not immediately, for I stopped on the way at the well-known haunt in Madison Street for the usual Sunday dinner.
By this time I had attended several of the Socialists’ meetings, and had come to know personally a number of the members of the order, and I was not surprised, upon taking a seat in the restaurant, to catch sight of three Socialists who were nodding pleasantly to me from a neighboring table. One was the broad-minded Pedler, whose good impression made in the first speech of his which I had heard was heightened by all my later knowledge of him. Another I had learned to know as a near approach to my original preconception of a revolutionary. He was a Communistic Anarchist, and just what peculiar variation of individual belief it was which led him to ally himself with the Socialists I could never make clearly out.
It puzzled me not a little; for, by this time I had thoroughly in mind the fundamental fact that Socialism and Anarchy, as two schools of social doctrine, are at the very poles of hostile opposition to each other. And, if I may judge from the little that I have seen and heard between them, the vituperative heat of their controversies is equalled only by the warmth and malignancy which has marked the history of theological debate.
I soon learned that Socialist and Anarchist are not interchangeable terms, to be used with light indifference in describing the general advocate of revolution against established order. Indeed, to my great surprise, I found that a policy of active, aggressive revolution among these men had almost no adherents. Certainly none among the Socialists, for they repudiated the bare suggestion of violence as being wholly inadequate and absurd, and pinned their faith instead to what they called the “natural processes of evolution.” These, to their belief, would, in any case, work out the appointed ends with men, but their operation could be stimulated by education, they said, and helped on by organized effort toward the achievement of manifest destiny in the highly centralized and perfected order which is to result from the common ownership and administration by all the people of all land and capital used in production and distribution, for the common good of all.
And even among the Anarchists the upholders of a policy of bloody revolt against social order were rare. Most of those whom I came to know were distinctly of a metaphysical turn of mind. It was easy to trace their intellectual kinship with the Physiocrats of the last century, in their implicit confidence in the universal efficacy oflaissez faire. Their views, reduced to simplest terms, seemed to take the form of the epigram—that “the cure for the evils of freedom is more freedom.” The removal of all artificial restraint in the form of man-made laws would result eventually, to their thinking, in a society as natural and as wholesome as is all physical order, which is the exact resultant of the free play of natural law.
It was the Socialist’s conception of a highly centralized administration which drove the Anarchist into a frenzy of vehement antagonism. And it was the Anarchist’slaissez faireideal which roused the latent fighting-spirit of the Socialist. The Anarchist would maintain with stout conviction that centralized administration is already the core of the malady of the world, and that our need is for freedom in the absence of artificial limitations wherein natural forces can work their rightful ends. And the Socialist would retort, with rising anger, that it is from anarchy—the absence of wisely regulated system—that the world even now suffers most, and that the hope of men lies in the orderly management of their own affairs in the interests of all, and in the light of the revelations of science. They were heartily at one in their dislike for what they were fond of calling the present “bourgeoissociety,” and for the existing rights of private property, which they regarded as its chiefest bulwark, but they parted company at once, and with sharp recriminations, on the grounds of their dislike, and of their purposes and hopes for a regenerated state of things.
Such Anarchists were of the “Individualistic” type. Not all of those I met were so philosophical, however. The Communistic one, who was nodding at me in a friendly manner from a near table, notably was not. Very much the reverse. He was for open revolution to the death, and he made no secret of it. He had little patience for the slow pace of evolution believed in by the Socialists, but he had less, apparently, for thelaissez faireconception of his brother Anarchists. At all events, I found him most commonly in the meetings of the former sect, where his revolutionary views were frowned down, but his invectives against society were tolerated in a spirit of free speech, and as being warranted by the evils of the existing state.
He was a German, of tall, muscular frame, erect, square-shouldered, well-poised, as a result of long service, most bitterly against his will, in the Prussian Army, and he hated kings and potentates and all governmental authority, with a burning hatred. His was the broad-featured likeness of his race, and his stiff, fair hair was brushed back in straight lines from a well-shaped forehead, while his beard, brown and streaked with white, bristled from his lower face like the bayonets of a square in full formation. He was a mechanic by trade, and a good one, as I had happened to learn.
Four men gathered around a table. One man is expounding to the others.HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY.
HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY.
HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY.
The last of the three, like the Pedler, was a Socialist, but was very unlike his two companions as a man. My acquaintance among the Socialists had not gone far before I began to observe that I was meeting men who, whatever their mental vagaries, were craftsmen of no mean order. They were machinists and skilled workmen mostly, and some were workers in sweat-shops. All of them had known the full stress of the struggle for bread, but they were decidedly not the inefficients of their class, having fought their way to positions of some advantage in the general fight.
Here, however, was an exception in this third “comrade,” and I marvelled at the rarity of his type. Incompetence was stamped on every feature. His long, lank, flabby figure, with its disjointed movements, suggested no virility. The hair grew thin and blonde from his head and from his colorless face, and his large, pale-blue eyes flitted in their movements, as though there were behind them not intelligence enough to hold them in fixed attention. The man’s emotions were boundless. He had, moreover, a gift of utterance, and, when he spoke in meeting, it was sheer feeling that expressed itself in words which were marvellously void of any sane concatenation. It was a psychological phenomenon, this public speech of his. We had premonitory warnings of it, for we could see him writhing in his seat when his emotions were aroused, and starting nervously until he had gained the floor, when a half-suppressed, general groan would greet the torrent of his sentences, which flowed directly from chaotic feeling which had never reached his mind.
We four left the restaurant together, and walked on to Waverley Hall. I fell in with the Pedler, and from him I was glad to learn that the Poet was to read that afternoon his long-deferred paper on the “Opening of the Exposition Grounds on Sunday.”
It was a little before the appointed hour when we reached the hall, but already there was promise of an uncommon meeting. The audience was larger than usual, the benches on both sides of the central aisle being well filled nearly to the door. The Pedler and I had some difficulty in finding seats near the front. More than ever marked was the atmosphere of keen alertness, which, from the first, had so attracted me in the gatherings of the Socialists. They might be futile, but their meetings were never dull. And, while they could not have been more orderly, they might easily have proved far less engaging than they were, had a saving sense of humor been more conspicuously a characteristic of the members.
There was a sense of pleasurable excitement in sinking back into my seat, whence, by turning a little to the right, I could command the hall. The afternoon sun was streaming through the two large windows in the south end. The heavy draperies, looped up to admit the light, were in perfect keeping with the carpet on the daïs and the pulpit chairs upholstered with plush, on one of which sat the Leader, behind a reading-desk. There were other paraphernalia of the Masonic lodge which habitually held its meetings there, and among the life-sized portraits on the walls was one of Washington in the full regalia of a Mason. At small wooden tables, resting on the floor at the Leader’s right, sat a few young reporters, sharpening their pencils in preparation for any points which could be turned to good account as “copy.”
To the pleasure of excited interest was added the ease of some familiarity, for, besides the heads of meeting, I recognized among the gathering company the faces ofhabitués. In a seat across the aisle the Poet sat in earnest conversation with the Citizeness, holding fast a roll of manuscript in both hands. And at the end of the bench behind them was a young man who interested me far more than any of the Socialists whom I had met. A long black overcoat of cheap material concealed his work-worn garments to the knees, and his hands, dark with the dye of clothing, lay folded in his lap. His face showed faintly the marks of Jewish origin, and, although he was full three-and-twenty, he bore a strange resemblance to the Christ-child in Hoffmann’s picture of “Jesus among the Doctors in the Temple.”
Quite oblivious to what was passing about him, he sat in his usual mood, with an expression of much serenity on his pale face, and his great, dark, luminous eyes glowing with the ardor of his thought.
I have never lost the first impression which he made upon me; it was in one of these meetings, when an idle slur had been cast upon his race and the Leader had given him an opportunity to reply. He rose modestly to his feet, and from the first my attention was riveted by the convincing quality in his rich, deep voice. Without a word of cheap rejoinder, he simply restated the issues of debate in clear, incisive sentences, which seemed to gather force from their broken English, until he had shown the entire irrelevance of the insulting charge, even had it been true.
I had waited for him on that afternoon at the meeting’s end, and we began an acquaintance which to me has been of great value. It is easy to predict for such a man an eventual escape from the bondage of a sweat-shop, but, inasmuch as he has been held in slavery to that work from his earliest infant memories of a crowded den in Poland, where he was born, I feel some measure of justice in naming him “The Victim.”
Promptly on the hour the Leader called the meeting to order, and introduced the Poet, whose paper presented the topic of the day’s debate. In a few moments we were all following in close attention the ready flow of the Poet’s voice as it passed with clear articulation over the well-chosen words of his introductory sentences. There was admirable precision in the statement of the case at issue, and we were bracing ourselves with pleasure for the logical sequences of detailed discussion, when, to our surprise, the Poet broke abruptly from all judicial treatment of his theme. At a single leap, he took the ground that certainly the Exposition should be accessible every day—that its opening on Sundays was not a subject for debate.
Then there followed a storm of hot invective. Christianity was assailed as the giant superstition of historic civilization, still, daring, to the shame of high intelligence, to hold its fetich head aloft in the light of modern science. Its ministers were attacked as sycophantic parasites, whose only motive, in urging the closing of the Fair on Sundays, was the fear of the spread among working people of that enlightenment which will achieve the overthrow of capitalistic society and with it the tottering structure of the Church. Most of all, his bitterness spent itself upon these “blind leaders of the blind,” as he called them, who will not themselves enter into a knowledge of a better state nor suffer others to enter it, and who grievously break the law of rest on Sundays in befooling their fellow-men, and then live through the remaining days in luxurious unproductiveness upon the labor of their dupes.
What was coming next we could not guess, and it seemed a long cry to any shout of exultation from all this, but he accomplished it with facility, for his paper closed with a peroration, wherein he rose to fervid panegyric upon the increasing intellectual emancipation of workingmen. The Romish Church, he said, keeps many of them in bondage yet, but the Protestant organizations have all but lost their hold upon them; and the widening gulf between the two great classes in society has left these churches in the nakedness of their true character, as mere centres of the social life of the very rich and of the upperbourgeoisie, and as a prop to the social order from which these idle classes so richly profit, at the merciless cost of the wage-earners.
Instantly this was accepted as the dominant note of the meeting. The applause which greeted it was genuine and prolonged. With light-hearted disregard of the subject appointed for debate, men began ardently to speak to this new theme: Modern Christianity a vast hypocrisy—a cloak made use of by vested interest to conceal from the common people the real nature of the grounds on which it stands.
But for the masterly qualities of the Leader, who held the meeting to strict parliamentary order, it might have degenerated into a mob. Men were crowding one another in their desire to gain the floor, but not for a moment was the peaceful conduct of the gathering disturbed. With accurate knowledge of the shades of social belief there represented and of the personalities of the men, the Leader chose for recognition with discriminating justice.
At one moment an American workman was speaking, a Socialist of the general school of Social Democracy. There was self-respecting dignity about him and a calm reserve as he began.
The Christian Church served as well as any institution of the capitalistic order, he said, to measure the growing cleavage between the classes in society. But, to his mind, the paper of the afternoon had emphasized unnecessarily the existence of thebourgeoisie; for, economically considered, there is no longer a middle-class to be reckoned with in vital questions. There remain simply the capitalists and the proletarians. The old middle-class, which had made its living by individual enterprise, was fast being forced (by the play of natural laws, which showed themselves in the increasing centralization of capital) out of the possibility of successful competition with aggregated wealth, and down, for the most part, to the level of those who can bring to production, not land nor capital, but merely their native qualities of physical strength, or manual skill, or mental ability—proletarians, all of them, whether manual or intellectual, and coming surely, in the slow development of evolution, to a conscious knowledge of their community of interest as against the vested “rights” of monopoly in the material instruments of production. But athwart this path of progress rose the hardened structure of the Christian Church, bringing to bear against it all her temporal power and the full force of her accumulated superstitions.
But now the speaker’s calm deserted him, and, with fist uplifted in threatening gesture, and his strong, bronzed face working with the fervor of his hate, he cried out against the ministers of Christ, who preach to the wronged and downtrodden poor the duty of patience with their “divinely appointed lot,” and who try to soothe them to blind submission with promises of an endless future of ecstatic blessedness, when the rich of this world shall burn in the unquenchable fires of hell.
Several people are seated in pews. One man is standing exclaiming passionately. A dais with a seated man is visible in the background.THE SOCIALIST MEETING.
THE SOCIALIST MEETING.
THE SOCIALIST MEETING.
“Oh! the fiendishness of these men,” he shouted, “who hide from ignorant minds the truth, which they themselves know full well, that for no mortal man is there any heaven or hell which he does not realize in the span of his earthly history, and if he misses here the happiness to which he was rightly born, he misses it forever! And the miserable paltriness of their motive in working this cruel wrong—merely that they may exempt themselves from toil and live in comfort upon the labor of others, instead of being, where most of them belong, out in the open fields hoeing corn!”
In another moment a man of widely different cult was speaking. For some time he had been trying to gain the floor, and now the Leader recognized him. He was a Christian Socialist, chief spokesman of the little band of his persuasion, who were very regular in their attendance upon these meetings. An insignificant Englishman he was, whose h’s transposed themselves with consistent perversity, and whose general qualities of physique, and tone, and manner reminded one strongly of the type of parson with weak lungs and a large family who is incumbent in out-of-the-way English churches on the Continent. He was not wanting in pluck nor in a certain strength of conviction, but the gentleness of the dove was his without the wisdom of the serpent, and the words he spoke, in weak voice and apologetic manner, while they would have met with sympathy in a company of believers whose emotions were already stirred, served here only to inflame the antagonisms of men whose views were stoutly materialistic.
The Communistic Anarchist was the first to rise when the Christian Socialist sat down, and the Leader gave to him the privilege of the floor. There was the power of primal force in the suppressed passion of the man, and joined to this the exciting struggle of a human will in keeping rage in bounds. His heavy frame heaved with paroxysms of volcanic wrath, and the sibilants of English speech, augmented by the z’s in Teutonic struggle with the sound of th, came hissing and sputtering through his teeth from a tongue which could not frame words fast enough for his impatience.
I have no power to reproduce his actual sentences, and at best I can but suggest the purport of his talk, which was in full sympathy with most of what had gone before:
“God a decaying myth, and the Bible a silly legend, and Jesus a good man seeing some human truth, but gone mad in the credulous ignorance of his age, and dead these two thousand years, and Christianity a hoary superstition, made use of in its last days bybourgeoiscivilization to stave off a little longer its own fateful day of reckoning! And here is a man, who calls himself a Socialist, who dares to bring before us this enfeebled monster of worn-out faith, which has been the tyrant of the poor from the moment of gaining temporal power, trying to hide its oppressions under a guise of so-called charity! It has been, too, from the beginning the stubbornest foe of scientific knowledge, and even now, in the last hour of its heartless cruelties, employs its utmost craft to put off the manifest dawn of freedom to the workers.”
Breaking through the forced restraint of the beginning, his feelings bore him in resistless course until, in the full sweep of his long arms, his fingers were clutching wildly at the empty air, and his blood-shot eyes were rolling in a frenzy, and his hair stood straight on end, while his voice rose to its highest pitch in fierce scorn and denunciation.
The hall was still echoing to the roar, when a scattered number of us were on our feet, straining forward in our efforts to catch the Leader’s eye. The Victim was recognized, and almost immediately the meeting began to feel the calming effect of a cool, conciliatory mind. Clearness was highly characteristic of the Victim’s mental processes, and, as his ideas slowly framed themselves, in translation to English from the native language in which he thought, they took on a charming piquancy and precision, in the oddest mixtures of strange idioms and bookish phrases and the current coin of common slang.
“The assigned subject for debate this afternoon,” he was saying (in a paraphrase which wholly lacks his strongly individual character), “is one which opens up questions of great economic value and importance. It is a pity, it seems to me, that the time has been consumed in a discussion of side issues, rather than of the fundamental question of the observance of Sunday as an economic institution, and the relation borne to that great issue by the present agitation over the opening of the Exposition grounds on Sundays. It is well to remember that this is a meeting of Socialists. Freedom of speech is one of our cardinal beliefs. But a freedom of speech which ignores the subject appointed for debate would make better use of its liberty by asking for a particular afternoon to be devoted to the theme which it wishes to discuss.
“Not only has the talk of to-day been wide of the mark, but it has been out of harmony with the genius of Socialism. I am proud to own myself a Scientific Socialist, and a disciple of Karl Marx. To my way of thinking, there can be no verified truth which the mind of man can accept as such aside from the established results of naturalistic science. I, therefore, attach no more value to Christianity, as an authoritative source of truth, than I do to the sacred writings of my race. Both are merely historical facts, to be dealt with precisely as are all the facts of history. This afternoon, however, they have been dealt with in a spirit of intolerance, as malignant and uncompromising as the spirit which is charged against historic Christianity. It will be well for us who profess Socialism to be on our guard, lest there grow up among us an intolerance bred of dogmatic science, which may prove in the future as destructive of free thought and of true progress as has proved in the past the bigotry of dogmatic theology.”
It was now well past the ordinary time for adjourning. The Leader announced the fact, and I feared that he meant to call for a motion to adjourn without making his usual closing speech. It was his habit to sum up the discussion, and we always looked forward to that address, for the Leader had the gift of speech and a liking for it, and a knowledge, moreover, of the minds of Socialists which was by no means common. There was little of the declamatory in his habitual speaking, and he lacked the analytical skill of some of the other members, but he had a shrewd perception of the dramatic, and he could make use of it to striking purpose. He had been born and bred a workingman, and was an artisan of much ability, and he knew thoroughly the workmen’s point of view. I have watched him play upon their feelings with the skill of a native orator.
He spoke now in high commendation of what The Victim had said, and deplored the fact that the afternoon had passed without discussion of the appointed theme. As a Socialist, he regretted, he said, that the talk had taken the form of an attack upon Christianity. Such a spirit was directly counter to the tolerance of Socialism. For his own part, although he had been brought up under the influence of the Protestant religion, he found himself very little in sympathy with modern Christianity. Supernaturalism he was willing to regard as a question apart, and as being entitled to fair, dispassionate discussion, but the Christian Church, as a practical embodiment of the teachings of its founder, he felt justified in judging in the light of every-day facts, and in their light he was free to say that Christianity was a failure.
“Let us take an illustration,” he went on. “A very urgent problem in our city just now is that of ‘the unemployed.’ Certain of the newspapers have made a careful investigation in the last few weeks, and the result of their inquiry shows that, within the city limits to-day, there are at least thirty thousand men out of work. There may be fifty thousand, but the first estimate is well within the truth.
“It is a matter primarily of supply and demand. Among these idle men there may be many inefficients and many chronic loafers, and many who, from one cause and another, are incapable of effective work. But the nature of the present status is unaffected by these considerations. It means, in its last analysis, that the local labor market is overstocked to the extent of thirty thousand men. However willing to work, and however efficient as workmen they might be, these men, or their equivalent in number, under existing conditions, would invariably find themselves unemployed.
“And how does the Christian Church among us hold itself in relation to this problem? Its members profess themselves the disciples of ‘the meek and lowly Jesus,’ whom they call ‘divine.’ He said of Himself that ‘He had not where to lay His head,’ and He was the first Socialist in His teaching of universal brotherhood.
“His followers build gorgeous temples to His worship in our city, and out of the fear, apparently, that some of the shelterless waifs, whom He taught them to know as brothers and who are in the very plight their Master was, should lay their weary heads upon the cushioned seats, they keep the churches tight locked through six days of the week, and then open them on one day for the exclusive purpose of praising that Master’s name!
“Nor is this condition truer of Chicago than it is of any large industrial centre in this country, or even in all Christendom,” he went on, warming to his theme as the intently listening company hailed vociferously the name of the Redeemer as the first teacher of Socialism. “Only last week news came from London that the unemployed there had grown to an army of one hundred thousand men. Picture the horror of it, and the suffering, and the awful degradation, not in these men alone, but among the women and children whom they represent! Cold, and hunger, and the ravages of disease were bad enough, in the ferocity of this inclement winter; but imagine, if you can, the pitiless despair which is eating the hearts out of these our brothers, and then tell me whether we have not here a fairly good imitation of the hell where ‘the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.’
“Suppose, for a moment, that the Christ were to appear in the heart of that ‘Christian’ city. Most certainly He would be found among the poor, ministering to their needs, and comforting them in their sorrows, and bringing life and hope among them. I can imagine His perplexity at sight of the man-inflicted suffering and degradation, and the Godless tyranny of men over their brother men, in the very stronghold of Christianity and two thousand years after He had taught that, under the Fatherhood of God, to love our neighbor as ourselves is the fulfilling of the law to all who have need of our sympathy and help.
“I hear Him ask in His amazement for some authoritative head of the brotherhood which He established upon earth. I hear men tell Him that He must see the Archbishop of Canterbury. I watch Him as He walks to the palace of the Archbishop, along narrow streets which thunder to the din of mammon-worship and which are blackened with the smoke from off its countless altars, seeing everywhere the hideous contrasts between rich and poor, and the lives of His toiling ones worn out in ceaseless labor.
“Weighed down with the heartless misery of the world, I see Him stand patiently at the palace-gate. A footman in rich livery answers to His knock.
“‘I would see the Archbishop,’ says the Christ.
“‘And who shall I say wishes to see his Lordship?’ asks the flunky.
“‘Tell him that his Master is at the gate.’
“‘Oh,’ replies the servant, ‘but his Lordship has no “master”; he is the primate of all England!’”
Here the speaker abruptly ceased, but for that gathered company the picture was complete, and the cheers with which the hall had rung at the mention of Christ, the social teacher, were changed to hisses against the church which calls itself by His name.
On the crowded stairs, as we descended to the street, I found myself beside a young German mechanic whose acquaintance I had made in these meetings. My knowledge of him was limited to the fact that he was a Socialist and was employed in a large factory on the North Side.
“What are you going to do, this evening?” he asked, after our exchange of greetings.
“I have no definite plan,” I said.
“Then come home with me,” he suggested, and I assented gladly.
We were a long time getting there, but when, at last, we reached his door, the journey was quickly forgotten.
As flat as the untroubled sea, the open prairie lay about us, browned and seared by frosts and gleaming faintly under the winter stars. Long parallels of street-lamps, cutting one another at right angles, marked the outlines of city “blocks,” and threw into stronger relief the deep black of clustered trees and the forms of lonely cottages with lights glancing dimly from their windows.
When my friend opened the door of his house, there was nothing in the domestic scene which met us to suggest the home of a revolutionary. It was the typical home, rather, of the prosperous American workman. The living-room, which we entered, was aglow with light, and redolent of dry, unwholesome, excessive heat from a closed iron stove, and it seemed at first to be already crowded by occupants. The wife was standing over a cradle, in which she softly rocked her baby, whose sleep was undisturbed by the conversation between two young men of the family. An old couple, seated in easy chairs, were reading to themselves, and formed a feature of the picture that fitted well with the books which stood ranged in swinging brackets on the wall. There was the usual floral paper, with a border sad enough to move one to tears, and the worsted tidies, and the prints wherein sentimentality has so long and so often posed as sentiment. But the plain, rough furniture was redeemed by the marks of long usefulness, and the room, as a whole, had all the cosey homeliness of fitness to those whom it served.