Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 5 - Part II - Among the Revolutionaries

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 the _pros_ and _cons_ of 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 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 the _Weltschmerz_ of 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 of _laissez 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’s _laissez faire_ ideal 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 “_bourgeois_ society,” 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 the _laissez faire_ conception 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.

[Illustration: 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.