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

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 of _habitués_.

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 upper _bourgeoisie_, 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 the _bourgeoisie_;

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.

[Illustration: 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 by _bourgeois_ civilization 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.