Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 3 - Part II - Finding Steady Work

I crossed the river and passed under the dark-steel framework of the elevated railway.

The snow was falling through the still, sooty air in heavy flakes, which clung to every exposed surface, and turned the street-slime into a dark, granular slush.

It seemed to be a region of warehouses and cheap shops, but chiefly of saloons; scarcely a soul was to be seen on the pavements; and brooding over the long, deserted street was the decorous quiet of Sunday.

I quickened my pace to overtake three men in front of me.

Before I caught up with them they disappeared through a door which opened on the pavement.

It was that of a saloon.

The shades were drawn, and the place, like all the others of its kind, had every appearance of being closed for the day.

I tried the door, and, finding it unlocked, followed the men inside.

They had already mingled in a group of workingmen who sat about a large stove in the far corner of the bar-room, drinking beer and talking quietly.

They did not notice me until the one of whom I inquired appealed to the others for some knowledge of the question.

Then there was a moment of passing the inquiry from one to another, until a good-looking young workman spoke up.

“Why, I know,” he said; “I’ve just come from there.

It’s over in Waverley Hall, corner of Lake and Clark.

” “Will you help me to get into the meeting?

” I asked.

“I am a stranger here, and I should very much like to go.

” “There ain’t no trouble,” he responded; “you just go up two flights of steps from the street, and walk right in.

” It was even as he said.

At the level of the first landing was a restaurant, with a strikingly fine portrait of Burns near the entrance.

My curiosity was at a high pitch when I reached the second landing.

It was ill-lighted, and it opened first into an almost dark store-room, in whose deep recesses were great stacks of chairs.

But a single step to the right brought one to the wide-open door of Waverley Hall and a company of Socialists in full session.

A man sat beside the door with a small table before him, on which in neat array were some attractive paper editions for sale.

My eye fell in passing upon “The Fabian Essays,” and Thorold Rogers’s “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” and an English version of Schäffle’s “Quintessence of Socialism.

” “May I go in?

” I asked of the man.

“Oh, certainly,” he replied.

“Walk right in, and take any vacant seat you choose.

” I thanked him, and walked up a central aisle with rows of seats on either side, where sat from two or three hundred men and a few women.

By the time that I had found a seat half way to the daïs, at the far end of the hall, where sat the chairman of the meeting, I was already deeply interested in the speech of a man who stood facing the company from the side, with his back against the wall.

Slender and of medium height, with sandy hair slightly touched with gray, with an expression of ready alertness on his intelligent face, he was speaking fluently in good, well articulated English, and with deep conviction his evident inspiration.

“What we want is education,” he was saying; “an education which will enlighten the capitalistic class as well as our own.

We serve no useful end in denouncing the capitalists.

They, like us, are simply a product of the competitive system, and individually many of them are good and generous men.

But we shall be furthering the cause of Socialism in trying to show them their share of the evils under which we all live.

How that, for example, owing to the present organization of society, in spite of all the safeguards which entrench private property, not even a capitalist can feel assured that his children or grandchildren may not be beggars upon the streets.

” Such views, it seemed to me, at least suggested some catholicity of mind in “the Peddler,” as the speaker afterward declared himself to be.

When he took his seat several men were on their feet at once, appealing to the chair, and I saw that the meeting was well in hand, for the chairman instantly singled out one for the privilege of the floor, addressing him politely by name, prefixing, however, the title “Comrade,” much as “Citizen” was used in the French Revolution and after.

The well-grown muscular, intelligent workingman was the dominant type among them, but the general average in point of respectability was so high that it gave to the company rather the appearance of a gathering of the _bourgeoisie_ than of proletarians.

Had the proportion between men and women been reversed, without change of average status, I might have been in a prayer-meeting.

But the prayer-meeting in sustaining the resemblance would have been one of marked vitality.

Speeches were following one another in quick succession.

Some were good and some were vapid; some were in broken English, and others were in English more than broken; but all were surcharged with the kind of earnestness which captivates attention.

Irresistibly at times one was reminded of the propaganda of a new faith.

Much was said the meaning of which I could not catch, but the spirit of it all was not far to seek.

Here there was no cant; there was room for none.

These men believed that they had hold of a truth which is regenerating society.

In the face of a world deep-rooted in an individualistic organization of industry and of social order, they preached a gospel of collectivism, with unbounded belief in its ultimate triumph.

At times there was a malignant animus in what they said, when argument was enforced from sources of personal experience; for men would speak with the intensity of feeling of those who know what hunger is and what it is to hear their children cry for bread, while within their sight is the wasteful luxury of the rich.

But a certain earnest moderateness of speech was far more common, and it sometimes revealed a breadth of view and an acquaintance with economics which to me were astonishing.

Yet, after all, it was the personal note that they touched most effectively in what they said.

Strong, sturdy men, with every mark upon them of workmanlike efficiency, spoke feelingly of the relation, which they said, was growing up between what they called “the two great classes of society,” the employing and the employed.

They declared the wage-earner essentially a “wage-slave” under present conditions, and they contrasted his lot unfavorably with that of an actual bondsman.

The chattel-slave, they said, his master buys outright, and having made him thus a part of his invested capital, he shields him, out of a purely selfish motive, it is true, yet shields him, from bodily harm.

But not the body of an industrial slave, merely his capacity for work, his employer buys, and he may drive him to the exhaustion of his last power of endurance, knowing perfectly well that, should he wreck him physically, the labor market would instantly supply a hundred men eager to take the vacant place on the same terms.

And it is little relief to the feelings of the wage-slave, they added, to be assured that he is not sold, but is free to sell his labor in the open market, when he recalls the hard necessity that conditions that freedom.

It was interesting to find them paraphrasing, as Old Pete had done in the logging camp, the dictum of Carlyle-- “Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing.

Liberty, when it becomes the liberty to die by starvation, is not so divine.

” Then, as an expression of the belief of the gathering, a member introduced a resolution which pronounced it to be a truth in the relation of the individual to society, that “in case a man, acting upon the theory that society owes him a living, should refuse to work, and should steal, _he_ would be a criminal, and ought to be deprived of his personal liberty and be forced to work.

But in case a man, acting upon the theory that society owes him a chance to earn a living, should find no opportunity, and should, therefore, be forced to steal, _society_ would be the criminal, and ought to furnish the remedy.

” The resolution was passed unanimously and with much show of approval.

But I was more interested in its introducer.

He was a curious departure from the prevailing type; short and straight and slender, with a small, thin face whose skin was like old, exquisite, wrinkled parchment.

His bright eyes, set close together, moved ceaselessly as though sensitive to a certain mental restlessness; a thin aquiline nose curved delicately in the nostrils above a gray mustache which half concealed a thin-lipped mouth of uncertain drawing.

Over all was a really fine, dome-like brow, quite bald and polished, while from the sides and back of his head there grew a mass of iron-gray hair which fell curling to his shoulders.

I shall take the liberty of calling him “the Poet.

” There was a nervous grace in his movements, and a thorough self-possession in his manner, and a quality of cultivation and refinement in his voice and speech, which were clearly indicative of breeding and education and of native talent.

Yet his position among the Socialists seemed not at all that of a distinctive leader;

he was simply one of the company, on terms of perfect equality, and he addressed the others and was himself addressed with the fraternal “Comrade” in all the intimacy of primitive Christianity.

It was with instant anticipation of the pleasure of it that I learned from the announcements that the Poet would read, in an early meeting, a paper on the burning question of the opening of the World’s Fair on Sundays.

A woman sat near the front.

I had seen her in frequent whispered consultation with the chairman, whom I shall call “the Leader,” and with the Poet and the Peddler and other members who sat about her, and I judged that she was high in the councils of the Socialists, and I shall name her “the Citizeness.

” In the midst of the applause which marked the passage of the resolution, she was on her feet--a dark, portly woman of middle age, dressed very simply in black, bearing herself with an air of accustomedness which showed that she was by no means a novice on the floor, and speaking, when quiet was restored, with a directness and an unaffected ease which had in them no loss of femininity.

But you had only to watch closely in order to see nature avenge herself in a certain self-assertation which the Citizeness felt forced at times to assume, for the sake of emphasis, and in a certain very feminine straining after the sarcastic.

[Illustration: IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF THE RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET.

] She held a newspaper in her hand, and from it, she said, she wished to read a fragment of a speech made by Mr. ---- to a large gathering of his subordinates in the administration of a railway system of which he is the president.

It was a short paragraph, in the characteristic, oratorical English of that genial railway president when he becomes serious, and its purport was simply a charge to those who bear to workingmen the relation of authoritative direction to treat them with the utmost consideration.

“These are anxious times,” he said, substantially, “and there are grave indications which go to show that workingmen are increasingly regarding themselves as a class apart and their interests as being antagonized by those of their employers.

All employers and directors of labor in all personal contact with their men should, therefore, exercise the greatest care in their treatment of them, to the end that these men may not be made to feel unnecessarily what is distasteful to them in their condition of subordination.

” “That,” said the Citizeness, “is a significant sign of the times.

I

have rarely seen words which indicate more clearly the growing frame of mind of the capitalists.

They are beginning to wake up to the fact of danger.

Oh, yes, when it begins to be a question of self-preservation they show signs of some knowledge of the actual situation!

But just see how foxy they are.

Mr. ---- does not tell his fellow-employers to treat their men well because they ought to, and he doesn’t talk any foolishness about the interests of labor and capital being identical.

He knows better than that.

He knows perfectly well that the men in the employ of his corporation are wage-slaves.

He knows it a good deal better than most of the men themselves know it.

And what he is telling his fellow-capitalists, who are beginning to feel alarm over the situation, is this, that in all their treatment of their men they must make a point of disguising from them their real condition of servitude.

Keep them in servitude, of course, but by all possible means keep them in ignorance of it, for the greatest danger to the existing order of things lies in an awakening of workingmen, and already there are signs of such an awakening, and ‘the times’ are, therefore, ‘anxious.

’” Tumultuous applause followed this sally.

It expressed the prevalent thought as no word of the afternoon had done.

“Capital conspiring to maintain the existing bondage of labor--growing anxious at symptoms of dawning intelligence among its slaves, and disclosing, in a moment of unguarded anxiety, its real spirit through a feigned one!

” “What clearer proof of the truth could be asked?

” men seemed to say, as they looked eagerly into one another’s faces, and kept on applauding.

Before the noise subsided the Peddler again had gained the floor.

He harked back to his original theme of “education,” and was showing its applicability to the situation from the new point of view.

“The greatest obstacle to Socialism,” he exclaimed, with some vehemence, “is the brute ignorance among ourselves, the working-classes.

And the greatest bulwark of the cruel, crushing, competitive anarchy under which we suffer and die is this same ignorance of the workers.

It is not organized capital that blocks the way of Socialism, for organized capital is unconsciously hastening the day when all capital will be organized under the common ownership of all the people.

It is the dead weight of poor, blinded, befooled wage-slaves which hangs like an incubus about the neck of Socialism.

It is through this that the truth must make its way, and will make its way, until workingmen at last awake to an acceptance of that which so long has been striving with them to get itself accepted.

“But alas!

alas!

how slow the process is!

And through what density of ignorance and indifference and prejudice must the light shine!

“Sitting in the street-car beside me, as I rode down this afternoon, was a workingman whom I know well.

I invited him to come to this meeting with me.

I told him that we were going to talk about matters which concerned him deeply.

And what did he say?

Why, he laughed in my face, and said that he did not see much sense in talking about such things, and that he preferred putting in his Sunday afternoon at the ‘mat-in-ee,’ and having a good laugh.

Poor, miserable wretch!

working like a galley-slave through the week, and caring for nothing on his day of rest but an extra allowance of sleep, and then further forgetfulness of his daily lot in the crowds and the lights and the illusions and heart-breaking fun of the cheap theatres.

All that remains for him then is to go home drunk, and get up the next morning to the twofold hell of his common life.

” It was growing dark within the hall, and the meeting was quietly adjourned until the next Sunday.

But the members were slow in leaving.

They formed into small groups, and went on discussing earnestly the topics of the afternoon, as they stood among the benches, or moved slowly toward the door.

The street-lights were burning with flickering, dancing effect through the falling snow, and under them great crowds of working-people came streaming through the wide-open doors of the theatres, swarming upon the pavements and in the street-cars, well-dressed, and quiet in the pre-occupation of pleasure-seekers homeward bound, and not a little impatient for early transportation.

I walked alone in the direction of the lodging-house.

Deep is the spell of real conviction, and the thoughts of these working-people, all alive with belief, were passing warm and glowing through my mind.

That there are multitudes of workers who are looking earnestly for a better social order, and who intelligently and firmly believe in its possibility, I had known, but never before had I felt the inspiration of actual contact with them.

And the fascination of their point of view!

“A world full of want and misery and cruelty, by reason, most of all, of the wasteful war of competition between man and his brother man in the wilderness of anarchical production in which the people blindly wander; while over against them, awaiting their occupation, is a promised land of peace and plenty, where poverty and want, and their attendant miseries and tendencies to moral evil, will be unknown, if men can but be induced to cross the Jordan which separates lawless competition from intelligent and provident co-operation.

” How quick and sure is such an appeal to the human heart!

It is the world-old charm, charming men anew.

A royal road at last, a wide gate and a broad way leading unto life!

The way of salvation made easy!

It is the Patriarchs again trusting to their sacrifices; the old Jews to circumcision and the blood of Abraham; the spiritually blinded Christians to their outward symbols; and all of them deaf to that truest word of all philosophy, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.

” It is so easy to conceive of some change in outward conditions, some “remedy,” some “solution” for the ills from which we suffer, and which, having been accepted, would lift life to a plane of harmonious and frictionless movement, and set us free henceforth to follow our own wills and purposes and desires.

And it is so supremely difficult to realize that the way of life lies not that way at all, not in the pursuit of happiness nor in the fulfilment of our own wills, but in realizing that the universe is governed by laws of right and justice and truth, and in bringing our wills into subjection to those laws and our actions into harmony with them.

One of these laws, I take it, is the law “the universal brotherhood of man.

” And it is by the practical denial of this law in the dealing of men with their fellow-men that much of the world’s cruelest misery has been caused, and much of the seed of terrible retribution has been sown.

It was their firm belief in the truth of brotherhood which gave to the words of the Socialists their greatest strength and charm.

It was plainly fundamental to all their views.

Ignorance and prejudice and unphilosophical thinking warped their expressed ideas and made their speeches very human, but yet in them all was this saving hold on truth, a living belief in the solidarity of the human race and in the responsibilities which grow out of the bond of universal kinship.