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Here is a man who works on the street railways. Now to begin again. The workingmen on the street railway furnish the labor. The stockholders furnish the capital. By the joint effort of the workingmen and the capital, money is earned. He is the man that is. You have gone up in the air and are arranging a division between the kind of men that ought to be but are not.
But to return to the earth, the workingman, being selfish, wants all he can get in the division. The capitalist, being selfish, wants all he can get in the division. When there is only so much of the same thing, and when two men want all they can get of the same thing, there is a conflict of interest between labor and capital.
And it is an irreconcilable conflict. As long as workingmen and capitalists exist, they will continue to quarrel over the division. Sometimes the laborers refused to work. Sometimes the capitalists refused to let the laborers work. In the violence and turbulence of such disagreements much property was destroyed and many lives lost.
All this is inconceivable to us—as inconceivable as another custom of that time, namely, the habit the men of the lower classes had of breaking the furniture when they quarrelled with their wives. Men should be men, not brutes. There will be violence and murder now, and sorrowing widows and orphans.
Capital and labor should be friends. They should work hand in hand and to their mutual benefit. Remember, we agreed that the average man is selfish. And that is what your church is standing for, what you are preaching for every time you get up in the pulpit. There is no other name for it. As Mr. Everhard said the other night, the function you churchmen perform is to maintain the established order of society, and society is established on that foundation.
The Church condones the frightful brutality and savagery with which the capitalist class treats the working class.
I know that there is much that is sad and wicked in this world. I know that the Church has lost the—what you call the proletariat. With the introduction of machinery and the factory system in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the great mass of the working people was separated from the land.
The old system of labor was broken down. The working people were driven from their villages and herded in factory towns. The mothers and children were put to work at the new machines.
Family life ceased. The conditions were frightful. It is a tale of blood. But it occurred a century and a half ago. While a slaughter-house was made of the nation by the capitalist, the Church was dumb. It did not protest, as to-day it does not protest. Was the Church dumb then? An Englishman by birth, a writer of many books on political economy and philosophy, and one of the Socialist leaders of the times.
In such industrial hells arose some of the proudest fortunes of that day. Bishop Morehouse hesitated. Like Dr. In Chicago there are women who toil all the week for ninety cents. Has the Church protested? It is horrible! But can you wonder that we lose patience with you? When have you protested to your capitalistic congregations at the working of children in the Southern cotton mills? They never see the blessed sunshine. They die like flies. The dividends are paid out of their blood.
And out of the dividends magnificent churches are builded in New England, wherein your kind preaches pleasant platitudes to the sleek, full-bellied recipients of those dividends. In A. The right to buy and sell is clearly stated. Upon the whole, then, whether we consult the Jewish policy instituted by God himself, or the uniform opinion and practice of mankind in all ages, or the injunctions of the New Testament and the moral law, we are brought to the conclusion that slavery is not immoral.
Having established the point that the first African slaves were legally brought into bondage, the right to detain their children in bondage follows as an indispensable consequence. Thus we see that the slavery that exists in America was founded in right. The book was published in of the Christian Era. From what we can make out, Van Dyke must have been a churchman.
The book is a good example of what Everhard would have called bourgeois thinking. He distributes to every man according to His own good pleasure, conformably to general laws. His face was pale, and he seemed suffering from nausea.
I will take you on a journey through hell. And, furthermore, I hold that whatever is horrible in industrial society is due to the ignorance of the capitalist class.
It will mend all that is wrong as soon as it receives the message. And this message it shall be the duty of the Church to deliver.
There is much good in us, though you give us credit for no good at all. Bishop Morehouse is right. The industrial wrong, terrible as you say it is, is due to ignorance. The divisions of society have become too widely separated.
He shook his head. I ask you to prove it to yourself. The food you eat is a bloody stew. The blood of little children and of strong men is dripping from your very roof-beams. I can close my eyes, now, and hear it drip, drop, drip, drop, all about me. And suiting the action to the words, he closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
I burst into tears of mortification and hurt vanity. I had never been so brutally treated in my life. Both the Bishop and my father were embarrassed and perturbed.
They tried to lead the conversation away into easier channels; but Ernest opened his eyes, looked at me, and waved them aside.
His mouth was stern, and his eyes too; and in the latter there was no glint of laughter. What he was about to say, what terrible castigation he was going to give me, I never knew; for at that moment a man, passing along the sidewalk, stopped and glanced in at us. He was a large man, poorly dressed, and on his back was a great load of rattan and bamboo stands, chairs, and screens.
He looked at the house as if debating whether or not he should come in and try to sell some of his wares. They carried their whole stock in trade from door to door. It was a most wasteful expenditure of energy. Distribution was as confused and irrational as the whole general system of society. It was an accident. It was caused by his trying to save the company a few dollars.
The toothed drum of the picker caught his arm. He might have let the small flint that he saw in the teeth go through. It would have smashed out a double row of spikes. But he reached for the flint, and his arm was picked and clawed to shreds from the finger tips to the shoulder.
It was at night. The mills were working overtime. They paid a fat dividend that quarter. Jackson had been working many hours, and his muscles had lost their resiliency and snap. They made his movements a bit slow. That was why the machine caught him.
He had a wife and three children. Oh, yes, they did do something. They successfully fought the damage suit he brought when he came out of hospital. The company employs very efficient lawyers, you know. Maybe the man was insolent. And with his arm chewed off! Nevertheless he was a meek and lowly servant, and there is no record of his having been insolent.
He is a shrewd lawyer. They went away together, leaving me smarting with a sense of injustice that had been done me and my class. The man was a beast. I hated him, then, and consoled myself with the thought that his behavior was what was to be expected from a man of the working class. Jackson himself did not impress me when I hunted him out.
I found him in a crazy, ramshackle [1] house down near the bay on the edge of the marsh. Pools of stagnant water stood around the house, their surfaces covered with a green and putrid-looking scum, while the stench that arose from them was intolerable.
They invariably paid rent, and, considering the value of such houses, enormous rent, to the landlords. I found Jackson the meek and lowly man he had been described. He was making some sort of rattan-work, and he toiled on stolidly while I talked with him.
But in spite of his meekness and lowliness, I fancied I caught the first note of a nascent bitterness in him when he said:. Everybody stole property from everybody else.
The lords of society stole legally or else legalized their stealing, while the poorer classes stole illegally. Nothing was safe unless guarded.
Enormous numbers of men were employed as watchmen to protect property. The houses of the well-to-do were a combination of safe deposit vault and fortress. The appropriation of the personal belongings of others by our own children of to-day is looked upon as a rudimentary survival of the theft-characteristic that in those early times was universal.
I got little out of him. He struck me as stupid, and yet the deftness with which he worked with his one hand seemed to belie his stupidity. This suggested an idea to me. He looked at me in a slow and pondering way, and shook his head. It just happened.
When I asked him if he had broken some rule of working the machinery, he shook his head. And then my arm was chewed off. His mind was rather hazy concerning the damage suit. Only one thing was clear to him, and that was that he had not got any damages.
He had a feeling that the testimony of the foremen and the superintendent had brought about the adverse decision of the court. His wife was in ill health, and he was unable to earn, by his rattan-work and peddling, sufficient food for the family. He was back in his rent, and the oldest boy, a lad of eleven, had started to work in the mills.
My first thought was that it had served Jackson right for getting such a lawyer. It dawned upon me that of course the company could afford finer legal talent than could a workingman like Jackson.
But this was merely a minor detail. The lawyer was perplexed and worried for a moment, and I found it in my heart to pity the wretched little creature. Then he began to whine. I do believe his whine was congenital. He was a man beaten at birth. He whined about the testimony. The witnesses had given only the evidence that helped the other side.
Not one word could he get out of them that would have helped Jackson. They knew which side their bread was buttered on. Jackson was a fool. He had been brow-beaten and confused by Colonel Ingram. Colonel Ingram was brilliant at cross-examination.
He had made Jackson answer damaging questions. Ask any lawyer. You go to Sunday-school to learn what is right. But you go to those books to learn. What chance had I? Colonel Ingram is a great lawyer. Men preyed upon one another like ravening wolves. The big wolves ate the little wolves, and in the social pack Jackson was one of the least of the little wolves.
His face suddenly softened, and he opened his watch and showed me a small photograph of a woman and two little girls pasted inside the case. Look at them. Colonel Ingram and Judge Caldwell are pretty friendly.
And yet I must say that Judge Caldwell did a whole lot to prevent my getting that very testimony. Why, Judge Caldwell and Colonel Ingram belong to the same lodge and the same club. She had her heart set on a trip to the country hard enough as it was. I began as a little lad on the spindles. I worked up ever since. I used to belong to the union. Me only friend is the company. Henry Dallas, the superintendent, was a vulpine-faced creature who regarded me insolently and refused to talk.
Not a word could I get from him concerning the trial and his testimony. But with the other foreman I had better luck. James Smith was a hard-faced man, and my heart sank as I encountered him. He, too, gave me the impression that he was not a free agent, and as we talked I began to see that he was mentally superior to the average of his kind.
He agreed with Peter Donnelly that Jackson should have got damages, and he went farther and called the action heartless and cold-blooded that had turned the worker adrift after he had been made helpless by the accident. I wanted to go through the university. But my father died, and I came to work in the mills. But I came to work in the mills. When I was promoted to foreman I got married, then the family came, and.
The suddenness of his outburst startled and frightened me. He ripped [6] out a savage oath, and clenched his fist as though about to strike me. Reference is here made, of course, not to the oath of Smith, but to the verb ripped used by Avis Everhard. And now I guess you can go away. But let me tell you this before you go. It was quite unexpected, but he met me with his bold eyes and firm hand-clasp, and with that curious blend of his awkwardness and ease.
It was as though our last stormy meeting was forgotten; but I was not in the mood to have it forgotten. He was all interested attention, and waited for me to go on, though I could see in his eyes the certitude that my convictions had been shaken. I felt humble and contrite, and was aware of a sweet feeling that Ernest was a sort of father confessor.
Then, as ever after, his strength appealed to me. It seemed to radiate a promise of peace and protection. It goes on everywhere. Our boasted civilization is based upon blood, soaked in blood, and neither you nor I nor any of us can escape the scarlet stain. The men you talked with—who were they? And the pathos of it and the tragedy is that they are tied by their heartstrings. Their children—always the young life that it is their instinct to protect.
This instinct is stronger than any ethic they possess. My father! He lied, he stole, he did all sorts of dishonorable things to put bread into my mouth and into the mouths of my brothers and sisters. He was a slave to the industrial machine, and it stamped his life out, worked him to death. I am often thankful that I have no children, and I dearly love children.
Yet if I married I should not dare to have any. I am a revolutionist, and it is a perilous vocation. The rise of this vote clearly indicates the swift growth of the party of revolution. Its voting strength in the United States in was ; in , ,; in , ,; in , 1,,; and in , 1,, And we intend to take, not the mere wealth in the houses, but all the sources of that wealth, all the mines, and railroads, and factories, and banks, and stores.
That is the revolution. It is truly perilous. There will be more shooting, I am afraid, than even I dream of. But as I was saying, no one to-day is a free agent. We are all caught up in the wheels and cogs of the industrial machine. You found that you were, and that the men you talked with were.
Talk with more of them. Go and see Colonel Ingram. You will find them all slaves of the machine. A little later in our conversation I asked him a simple little question about the liability of workingmen to accidents, and received a statistical lecture in return. He has. The insurance [8] companies know. They will charge him four dollars and twenty cents a year on a thousand-dollar accident policy, and for the same policy they will charge a laborer fifteen dollars.
Out of fear for the welfare of their families, men devised the scheme of insurance. To us, in this intelligent age, such a device is laughably absurd and primitive. But in that age insurance was a very serious matter. The amusing part of it is that the funds of the insurance companies were frequently plundered and wasted by the very officials who were intrusted with the management of them.
Why did you ask? My eyes fluttered, and I could feel the blood warm in my face. It was not that he had caught me in my solicitude, but that I had caught myself, and in his presence. Just then my father came in and began making preparations to depart with me.
Ernest returned some books he had borrowed, and went away first. But just as he was going, he turned and said:. Wickson and Mrs. Their husbands, you know, are the two principal stockholders in the Mills.
Like all the rest of humanity, those two women are tied to the machine, but they are so tied that they sit on top of it. I was confronted by the concrete. For the first time I was seeing life. My university life, and study and culture, had not been real. I had learned nothing but theories of life and society that looked all very well on the printed page, but now I had seen life itself. It seemed monstrous, impossible, that our whole society was based upon blood.
And yet there was Jackson. I could not get away from him. Constantly my thought swung back to him as the compass to the Pole. He had been monstrously treated. His blood had not been paid for in order that a larger dividend might be paid. If one man could be so monstrously treated and society move on its way unheeding, might not many men be so monstrously treated? And I could see their wan white hands, from which the blood had been pressed, at work upon the cloth out of which had been made my gown.
And then I thought of the Sierra Mills and the dividends that had been paid, and I saw the blood of Jackson upon my gown as well. Jackson I could not escape. Always my meditations led me back to him.
Down in the depths of me I had a feeling that I stood on the edge of a precipice. It was as though I were about to see a new and awful revelation of life. And not I alone. My whole world was turning over. There was my father. I could see the effect Ernest was beginning to have on him. And then there was the Bishop. When I had last seen him he had looked a sick man. He was at high nervous tension, and in his eyes there was unspeakable horror. From the little I learned I knew that Ernest had been keeping his promise of taking him through hell.
And then there arose before me another figure, the Christ! He, too, had taken the part of the lowly and oppressed, and against all the established power of priest and pharisee.
And I remembered his end upon the cross, and my heart contracted with a pang as I thought of Ernest. Was he, too, destined for a cross? And in that moment I knew that I loved him, and that I was melting with desire to comfort him.
I thought of his life. A sordid, harsh, and meagre life it must have been. And I thought of his father, who had lied and stolen for him and been worked to death.
And he himself had gone into the mills when he was ten! All my heart seemed bursting with desire to fold my arms around him, and to rest his head on my breast—his head that must be weary with so many thoughts; and to give him rest—just rest—and easement and forgetfulness for a tender space. I met Colonel Ingram at a church reception. Him I knew well and had known well for many years. I trapped him behind large palms and rubber plants, though he did not know he was trapped.
He met me with the conventional gayety and gallantry. He was ever a graceful man, diplomatic, tactful, and considerate. And as for appearance, he was the most distinguished-looking man in our society. Beside him even the venerable head of the university looked tawdry and small. And yet I found Colonel Ingram situated the same as the unlettered mechanics. He was not a free agent.
He, too, was bound upon the wheel. His smiling good nature vanished like a ghost. A sudden, frightful expression distorted his well-bred face. I felt the same alarm that I had felt when James Smith broke out. But Colonel Ingram did not curse. That was the slight difference that was left between the workingman and him. He was famed as a wit, but he had no wit now. And, unconsciously, this way and that he glanced for avenues of escape.
But he was trapped amid the palms and rubber trees. Why had I brought the matter up? He did not relish my joke. It was poor taste on my part, and very inconsiderate. Did I not know that in his profession personal feelings did not count? He left his personal feelings at home when he went down to the office. At the office he had only professional feelings. But that has nothing to do with the legal aspects of the case. Colonel Ingram blushed, actually blushed, and again he looked anxiously about him for a way of escape.
But I blocked his path and did not offer to move. I did not get an answer. Colonel Ingram had ingloriously bolted, overturning a palm in his flight.
Next I tried the newspapers. I made no charges against the men with whom I had talked, nor, for that matter, did I even mention them. I gave the actual facts of the case, the long years Jackson had worked in the mills, his effort to save the machinery from damage and the consequent accident, and his own present wretched and starving condition.
The three local newspapers rejected my communication, likewise did the two weeklies. I got hold of Percy Layton. He was a graduate of the university, had gone in for journalism, and was then serving his apprenticeship as reporter on the most influential of the three newspapers. He smiled when I asked him the reason the newspapers suppressed all mention of Jackson or his case.
A man who tried to smuggle it in would lose his job. I keep square all right with my own conscience. I was beginning to see through the appearances of the society in which I had always lived, and to find the frightful realities that were beneath. There seemed a tacit conspiracy against Jackson, and I was aware of a thrill of sympathy for the whining lawyer who had ingloriously fought his case. But this tacit conspiracy grew large. Not alone was it aimed against Jackson. It was aimed against every workingman who was maimed in the mills.
And if against every man in the mills, why not against every man in all the other mills and factories? In fact, was it not true of all the industries? And if this was so, then society was a lie.
I shrank back from my own conclusions. It was too terrible and awful to be true. And there were many Jacksons—hundreds of them in the mills alone, as Jackson himself had said.
I saw Mr. Wickson and Mr. Pertonwaithe, the two men who held most of the stock in the Sierra Mills. But I could not shake them as I had shaken the mechanics in their employ. I discovered that they had an ethic superior to that of the rest of society. It was what I may call the aristocratic ethic or the master ethic.
And to me they talked in fatherly ways, patronizing my youth and inexperience. They were the most hopeless of all I had encountered in my quest. They believed absolutely that their conduct was right. There was no question about it, no discussion. They were convinced that they were the saviours of society, and that it was they who made happiness for the many. And they drew pathetic pictures of what would be the sufferings of the working class were it not for the employment that they, and they alone, by their wisdom, provided for it.
Fresh from these two masters, I met Ernest and related my experience. He looked at me with a pleased expression, and said:. You are beginning to dig truth for yourself. It is your own empirical generalization, and it is correct. That is the crowning absurdity of the whole situation. They must have a sanction for their acts. And then they go ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses of the human mind is that the wish is parent to the thought.
No matter what they want to do, the sanction always comes. A manuscript by Avis Everhard, a revolutionist, has been found, dating back to the early part of the twentieth century. The manuscript is analyzed by scholar Anthony Meredith, who lives in There are footnotes by 'Meredith', who comments upon 'Everhards' words, sometimes quite extensively.
One of, if not the , first Dystopian novels, paving the way for the likes of George Orwell's Last week, around 30, people downloaded books from my site - 9 people donated. I love offering these books for free, but need some support to continue doing so.
You don't need an account and it only takes a minute. You can also support it by buying one of the collections. The soft summer wind stirs the redwoods, and Wild-Water ripples sweet cadences over its mossy stones. There are butterflies in the sunshine, and from everywhere arises the drowsy hum of bees. It is so quiet and peaceful, and I sit here, and ponder, and am restless. It is the quiet that makes me restless.
It seems unreal. All the world is quiet, but it is the quiet before the storm. I strain my ears, and all my senses, for some betrayal of that impending storm. Oh, that it may not be premature! That it may not be premature! Small wonder that I am restless. I think, and think, and I cannot cease from thinking. I have been in the thick of life so long that I am oppressed by the peace and quiet, and I cannot forbear from dwelling upon that mad maelstrom of death and destruction so soon to burst forth.
In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can see, as I have seen in the past, all the marring and mangling of the sweet, beautiful flesh, and the souls torn with violence from proud bodies and hurled to God. Thus do we poor humans attain our ends, striving through carnage and destruction to bring lasting peace and happiness upon the earth. And then I am lonely.
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