THE MASTER HAND
The whole machinery of the colony responded instantly to the grip of
the master's hand. It was the one thing needed to insure successful
progress.
When the Brotherhood realized that the young poet-athlete was not
merely a love-sick dreamer and theorist, but a man of quick decisions,
of firm and inflexible will, and the power to execute his will, they
fell in line, caught the step, and order emerged from chaos.
When a crisis called for decision he made it with lightning rapidity
and stuck to it. The situation demanded a dictatorship for the moment,
and he did not hesitate to assume it. He saw before him sure success.
If fools and cranks interfered with his plans he would crush and push
them aside. The consciousness of power and its daily exercise
developed his faculties to their highest tension. His mind began to
arrange every detail of the vast and complicated system of the new
social scheme. Men became the mere tools with which he would work out
the revolution in human society. Every scrap of knowledge he had ever
gained flashed through his excited imagination and fell into its place
in the creation of the new order.
He put the machine-shops to work constructing the big gold dredge on
which he had experimented one summer.
He had a pet scheme of farming which had come into his mind from
watching his father's gardener the year before raise the most
delicious cantaloups he had ever tasted. He discovered the secret of
their marvellous sweetness and leaped to an instantaneous conclusion.
He had the opportunity to test this inspiration now on a scale as vast
as his dreams.
He called the superintendents and overseers of the farm together, and
asked their plans for the crop on the five hundred acres of fertile
lands under cultivation. They gave him their schedule for a variety of
crops.
"Won't this soil grow cantaloups?" he asked.
They all reported that it would.
"Then I suggest that the entire acreage be planted in these vines."
To a man they declared the plan absurd.
"But suppose," he persisted, "that we raise and send to the East the
most delicious melon they have ever tasted, and suppose we get three
dollars a crate, we will make three hundred dollars an acre and our
first crop will be worth one hundred and fifty thousand dollars."
They laughed at him.
"Do you know," smilingly inquired the superintendent, "how much it
will cost to plant and harvest such a crop?"
"I should say twenty-five dollars an acre," he replied.
"Double it," he cried.
"Very well, fifty dollars an acre," Norman agreed. "In round numbers
it will cost us twenty-five thousand dollars. That leaves a profit of
more than a hundred thousand, doesn't it?"
Again the superintendent laughed.
"And would you risk this enormous sum on one experiment? Suppose your
melons would not be sweet?"
"There is no such possibility," the young enthusiast declared. "Their
sweetness depends solely on two things--the quality of the seed and
the quantity of rain which falls on them while they are growing. We
are wasting a supreme opportunity. No rain falls in Ventura during the
summer. We get our water to the roots by irrigation, not by rainfall.
Get the right seed and your melons must be perfect. This is a
scientific fact I have seen demonstrated. Try it on a vast scale and
success is sure."
They voted unanimously against the proposition. Norman insisted. The
superintendent resigned and appealed to the executive council. Wolf
and Catherine, Tom and Barbara advised against placing so much capital
in a single enterprise.
"I've got to make you rich and successful in spite of yourselves,"
Norman finally declared. "For the present I control these funds and
I'm going to plant this crop. So that settles it. I'm sorry we can't
agree."
His instantaneous decision fairly took Wolf's breath.
Barbara laughed and congratulated him.
"At least you have the courage of your convictions. I can't help
admiring it."
As further opposition was useless, the order was put into execution.
The superintendent finally caught the young man's spirit, withdrew his
resignation, and undertook the work with enthusiasm.
At the end of the summer the success of the colony was astounding. The
wildest prediction of the young leader fell below the facts. The crop
of cantaloups averaged one hundred and five crates to the acre, and
brought three dollars and a half a crate. The net profit on the
melons reached the enormous total of one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars.
The men who raised the crop and added this wealth to the treasury of
the colony were not slow in demanding an immediate readjustment of the
scale of wages.
Two hundred and fifty men had done all the work of planting,
cultivating, harvesting this crop and added ten times as much to the
year's income as the combined labour of all the other members of the
colony.
Brick-masons were receiving two dollars a day and farm-hands one
dollar. The miners who were digging for gold in the mountain ranges
and on the beaches were receiving five dollars a day and had added as
yet not a single dollar to the wealth of the community. They had
discovered gold in three new districts and thousands of dollars had
been wasted in vain efforts to make it pay. The farmers protested
bitterly against such waste, and demanded the equalization of wages.
Their spokesman astonished Norman by the vehemence and audacity of
their demands:
"If Socialism means justice," he shouted, "now is the time to prove
it! Labour creates all value. We have created one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars' worth of wealth for the colony and we have received
a mere pittance. If we created this wealth----"
"Wait a minute, comrades," Norman interrupted, with irritation. "Why
should you continue to repeat that foolish assertion? You didn't
create this wealth."
"Then I'd like to know who did?" shouted the orator. "We turned the
soil, placed the fertilizers, planted every seed, cultivated every
vine, pulled every melon, packed and placed them on the steamer. If we
didn't make the wealth, who did?"
"I did," the young leader declared. "I conceived the possibility of
this crop. I tried to persuade your superintendent and overseers. They
had no faith. I forced them to plant these particular seeds against
their own wishes. Your labour is a fixed thing year in and year out.
All men must work or die. All life is a struggle thus with tooth and
nail for a living. The creator of wealth is the superior intelligence
that conceives something better than this clodhopper's daily task. You
did what you were told to do. Your hands would have worked just as
many hours at labour just as tiresome over a crop of beans that
wouldn't have paid a profit at all this year. Wealth belongs to its
creator. I made the crop, your hands were the mere automata which my
brain directed. Your demands are absurd. I refuse to consider them or
to permit their discussion."
The farmers refused point-blank to submit to this decision, and voted
unanimously to quit work until they were given justice. Every plough
stopped and the entire machinery of food production came to a dead
standstill.
Norman threatened to refuse them admission to the dining-hall unless
they returned to work, and they boldly replied that they would smash
the door down and take what was their own.
Had the farmers been alone in their demands for an equalization of
wages, the situation would have been easier to handle. But discontent
over the question of wages had been growing steadily since the day of
the decision that wages should be unequal.
The distinctions of wealth and poverty were rapidly making their
appearance as in the old world. The cook had married a scrubwoman and
the scrubwoman's daughter had married the drainman who had charge of
the sewers. The combine income of the two highest-salaried workers in
the colony had at once formed the nucleus of a new aristocracy of
wealth.
The strike of the entire farming division of the colony was the match
thrown in the powder magazine. Discontent flamed in every department
of labour.
The demand for absolute equality of wages became resistless. It was
the only thing which could once more bring order out of chaos.
Norman called a meeting of the general assembly and submitted the
question for their discussion and decision. The debate was long,
fierce, and bitter. In vain did the young leader plead with those who
were receiving the highest rates that the profits of the colony would
be greater and that each would share alike in the total wealth of the
community. They denounced the proposed act as the climax of infamy.
The chef was furious.
"You give me the wages of a clodhopper and ask me to prepare a table
fit for a king. Well, try it, and see what you get."
He sat down repeating his threat in a series of endless announcements
to the people around him.
"I think he'll poison us all if you pass this law," Barbara whispered.
"The farmers will run us through with their pitchforks if we don't,"
he laughed.
"Poisoning is the easier way," she sighed.
The leader of the brass band raised the biggest row of all. From the
first these men had refused to lift their hand to do a thing except
to play at stated hours each day and furnish the music for the three
evenings of social amusement.
"You place me on an equality with the lout who holds a calf or the
clodhopper who holds a plough--I, who feed the soul with ravishing
melody--I, who lift man from earth to heaven on the wings of angels!"
The band leader swelled with righteous wrath and sat down beside the
cook who was still muttering incoherently:
"Let 'em try it--and see what they get!"
Yet, in spite of the fierce threats of the cook, the scrubwoman, the
drainman, the musician, and all the high-salaried favourites of
labour, the inevitable occurred. When put to a vote equal wages were
established by an overwhelming majority.
Each member of the colony, man, woman, and child, was voted free food,
clothes, and shelter, and a credit of five hundred dollars a year at
the Brotherhood store.
The executive council was abolished and in its place a board of
governors established, composed of the heads of each department of
labour and presided over by two regents, a man and a woman, elected by
the general assembly. Norman and Barbara were elected regents without
opposition, and the old heads of each department of labour placed on
the board of governors to serve until the approaching annual election.
The assembly proposed:
"Article I. of the constitution of the new State of Ventura as
follows:
"Every citizen of the State must labour according to his ability.
Those who can work and will not shall be made to work."
No man who voted this simple and obviously just law could dream of the
tremendous results. It was merely the enactment into statutory law of
the first principle of an effective Socialism:
"From every man according to his ability, unto every man according to
his needs."
The first obvious requirement of such a law was an immediate increase
of the police and detective force at the command of the regents and
the board of governors.
Norman thanked the assembly for the promptness and thoroughness which
had characterized their work, and closed his congratulations with a
sentence of peculiarly sinister meaning to the man who had ears to
hear.
"Hereafter, comrades, we can move forward without another pause. There
can never be another strike on the island of Ventura. The State is now
supreme."
The Wolfs, who had modestly declined all office, were omnipresent
during the long sessions of the assembly, which had lasted two days.
Everywhere they had counselled compromise, forbearance, good
fellowship, moving quietly from group to group in the big hall, and
always winning new friends.
Wolf's gnarled hand gripped Norman's at the close of the meeting as he
bent his massive head and whispered:
"A great day's work, Comrade Chief--one that will make history."
The young leader's face clouded as he slowly replied:
"I wish I were sure that it will be history of the right kind."
"You doubt it?" the old leader asked incredulously.
"It all depends on our leadership."
"With your hand on the helm"--Wolf paused and smiled curiously--"the
ship of State is safe."