THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
“You had your fun out of that,” says Mrs. Ogi. “But of course I can’t
judge; somebody who knows about Rome may come along and show that it’s
all nonsense.”
“Those who know about Rome,” says Ogi, “don’t always know about
capitalist America. There has never been such a parallel of two
civilizations in all history. I could write, quite literally, a whole
book of mystifications--quoting American poets and statesmen and
journalists, and mixing in passages from the same kind of people in
Rome, and unless you knew the different passages you couldn’t tell which
was which.”
“We still have our republic, have we not?”
“In every presidential election for the past fifty years that candidate
has won who has had the campaign-funds; and he has had the
campaign-funds because he was the candidate of the plutocracy. Right now
we are at the critical moment--the age of the Gracchi. We are trying to
rouse the people to action; and whether we succeed, or whether we are
going to be slaughtered, as our industrial masters desire and intend--”
Mrs. Ogi’s hand tightens upon her husband’s arm. She never has this
thought out of mind; and whenever in the midnight hours a cat or dog
sets foot upon the porch of her home, she leaps up, expecting to see a
company of bankers and merchants, clad in their new uniform of white
night-shirts and hoods. Our aristocratic party has what it calls the
“Better Roman Federation,” and collects lists of the proscribed, and
issues secret bulletins to its mobbing parties. Last week, down at
Brundisium, our naval harbor, their subsidized mob raided a meeting of
wage slaves, beat some of them insensible with clubs, threw a little
girl into a great receptacle of boiling coffee, scalding her almost to
death, and dragged six men off into the woods and tarred and feathered
them.
“What do you really think is coming?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“There are two factors in modern civilization that did not exist in
Rome. First there is the printing press, a means of spreading
information. So far as the master class can control it, it is a machine
for debauching the race mind; but in spite of everything the masters can
do, the workers get presses of their own, and so get information which
was denied the slaves of Rome.”
“And the other factor?”
“The labor movement. In Rome there were some labor unions, but they were
weak and the slaves were an unorganized mob; when they revolted, as they
did again and again, they were slaughtered wholesale. But the modern
labor movement goes on growing; it trains its members, and gives them
sound ideas. So, out of the final struggle we may have, not another
empire, and another collapse of civilization, but the co-operative
commonwealth of our dreams.”
This, of course, is outright preaching; but it happens that Mrs. Ogi has
just received a letter about the child who was thrown into the scalding
coffee, so her husband gets his way for once. Besides, as he explains,
there is nothing more to be said about Roman art, because there is no
more Roman art. The plutocracy of the empire had brought themselves to a
state where they were incapable of sustained thinking or effort of any
sort. The barbarian hordes, which had been besieging the frontiers,
broke through and overwhelmed the Roman empire, and so came what history
knows as the Dark Ages.
When I was a lad, my Catholic teachers explained to me that these ages
were called dark, not because they had no culture, but because we were
so unfortunate as not to know about it. I was not able to answer the
Catholic gentlemen in those days, but I can answer them now. When groups
of human beings kindle the precious light of the intellect, they make it
into a torch and pass it on to posterity. That is always their first
impulse; and so we may be sure that if an age had no art, it was a dark
age.