MY SOCIALISM, MY RELIGION AND MY HOME
My vision spiritual came to me out of the unknown. The facts and
experiences of life led me to Socialism. In each case it was a
rebirth.
"The Way" of Jesus was at first a state of mind; it had no relation to
a book; it had no connection with a church. Socialism is a passion for
the regeneration of society, it is a state of mind, a point of view.
The religion of the peasant Saviour and the movement for industrial
democracy expand as they are understood. Both thrive under opposition
and are retarded only by unfaithful friends. I caught the spirit, then
studied the forms. I got tired of doling out alms. It became degrading
to me either to take them from the rich or to give them to the poor.
Almsgiving deludes the one and demoralizes the other. I had
distributed the crumbs that fall from rich men's tables until my soul
became sick. I expected Lazarus the legion to be grateful; I expected
him to become pious, to attend church, to number himself with the
saved, and he didn't.
Almsgiving not only degrades the recipient but the medium also. The
average minister or missionary is looked upon by the middle and upper
classes as a sort of refined pauper himself. So, like a mendicant he
goes to the merchant and trades his piety for a rebate of ten per
cent.; or he travels on a child's fare on the railroads. I have scores
of times given away my own clothes and have gone to the missionary
"Dorcas Room" and fitted myself out with somebody's worn-out garments;
and I, too, was expected to be grateful and to write of my gratitude
to the person who, "for Jesus' sake," had cleaned out his cellar or
garret. In the West I have been the recipient of Home Missionary
barrels packed in some rich church in New York or New England--annual
barrels in which there is usually a ten-dollar suit for the
missionary, bought by some dear old lady to whom all men were
alike--in size. This whole process is hoary, antiquated, stupid and
degrading.
My Socialism is the outcome of my desire to make real the dreams I
have dreamed of God. It came to me, not through Marx or Lassalle, but
by the way of Moses and Jesus. Twenty years' experience in reform
movements taught me the hopelessness of reformation from without. It
was like soldering up a thousand little holes in the bottom of a
kettle.
For a hundred years men and women have been begging the industrial
lords to spare the little children of the poor. Have they? Ask the
census taker. Millions of them are the victims of the sweater--the
dealer in human endurance. The cure for child labour is justice to the
father, and justice to the father is his full share of the good things
of life. As long as he has to pay tribute to a horde of non-producers,
who have merely invested in his endurance, so long will he be unable
to keep his child at school.
It is the daughters of the poor that become the victims of
middle-class lust--Fantine is the daughter of a working man. She is
multiplied by tens of thousands on the streets of great cities,
selling her soul for a morsel of bread. We are hardened to that and we
think we are meriting the approbation of angels when we start a rescue
mission for her special class.
How pure in the sight of God is poor Fantine when compared with the
cowards who will not smash the mill of which she is the mere grist.
Just so long as there is a cash consideration in her life must
capitalism bear the burden of her sin!
There were millions of men out of work last winter. The political
parties took no notice. The leaders knew the minds of the electors.
They knew that those millions of unemployed were too stupid to see any
connection between government and work.
Mr. Taft was asked in the campaign what a workless, homeless man could
do to find employment.
"God knows!" was his reply.
Out of this army of the unemployed the ranks of the criminals are
reinforced, and the search for creature comforts recruits the ranks
of women who are not fallen, but knocked down. The supreme function of
the state is to make it easy for citizens to live in harmony with one
another and hard to be out of joint.
Poverty is the mother curse of the ages. No man suffering from her
withering, blighting touch can be in harmony with the best. Socialism
tackles the master job of abolishing it. Not by any fantastic plan of
redistribution but by giving to the creator all that he creates and to
the social charges, pensioners and cripples an assurance of life
without the stigma of pauperism.
Socialism asks for the application of science to the disease of
poverty. Science has chained the lightning and harnessed the ether
waves, it has filled the world with horseless carriages and is now
filling the air with machines that fly like birds. The inventions of
the last twenty years are modern miracles but the sunken millions of
our fellowmen never speak through a telephone, never ride in an
automobile, never send a telegram, never read good books, or see good
plays! They make all these things. They make them all possible for
others, but the enjoyment of them is beyond their wildest dreams!
The strength of the social chain cannot be greater than its weakest
link.
Socialists are grouped around the thin places, the leakages, the
weaknesses of democracy, and engross themselves in making them
strong. The propaganda in times past wielded only a sword; now it has
a trowel. Socialism is a positive force; it is leaven in the lump.
The party has a discipline which often hampers its own progress, but
in the regimentation of an idea discipline can not be dispensed with.
There are Socialists who see only the goal--are not willing to see
anything else or less. There are others who see every step of the way
and emphasize each step.
"What kind of a Socialist are you?" a rich man asked me the other day.
"Catalogue me with the worst!" I said, "for he who numbers himself
with the transgressors is in direct apostolic succession."
The Socialists are the only people who seem to have the Bible idea of
work. The scriptures make no provision for parasites. In the
commonwealth of Israel everybody worked. When there was a departure
from this ideal, came the prophet to speak for God and the divine
order.
Socialists are doing for America what the prophets did for Israel
thousands of years ago: we are pointing the way to simple and right
living, to justice, brotherhood and religion. Socialism is not an
ultimate conception of society: it only paves the way for a divine
individualism. When the fear of hunger is vanished men will have a
chance to be individuals.
Men striving all their lives to live--to merely live--have no time, no
opportunity for a career.
Opposition to the democratic ideal of Socialism is based on ignorance.
Opponents ask for a mechanical contrivance that will wind up and go
like a clock. We are asked questions that only our great-grandchildren
can answer. We are told by the good people that the ideal leaves out
God. The British Parliament proclaimed that bloodhounds and scalping
were "means that God and nature had given into its hand." A coal baron
of Pennsylvania declares that God has entrusted a few men with untold
wealth and consigned a multitude to degrading poverty--that kind of a
God the democratic ideal does leave out. He is a God spun out of the
fertile brain of the materialist. Critics of Socialism assume and
herald their own patriotism, their devotion to law and order, but they
are usually men who distrust any extension of the functions of the
state not directly beneficial to their personal interests.
The Socialists of to-day know that their ideal can not be realized
during their lifetime; they are people of vision; they are not saying,
"Lord, Lord," but they are bringing in His Kingdom.
The early Socialists met their worst opposition in a corrupt church
and their writings were coloured by the conflict. We are asked to
stand sponsor for all they said. One might as well charge 20th century
Christians with the horrors of the Inquisition!
We are not even willing to stand sponsor for their economics. Many of
their prophecies are yet unfulfilled, the currents of thought and
action are not flowing in the direction they anticipated, but the
facts they faced have altered little and we moderns have made our own
diagnosis, and we have decided on a remedy. The remedy is not
revolution in the historic sense; it is not a cataclysm, it has no
room for hatred. Its method is evolutionary; its watch-word is
solidarity, its hope is regeneration.
The process levels up, not down. It has an upward look. It will
abolish class struggles and divisions. It will usher in a reign of
peace. Just at present it is a class struggle, a struggle on behalf of
that social group of labourers on whose back are borne the world's
heaviest burdens, but it is no more a labour movement than the
emancipation of the slaves was a Negro movement.
The man who enunciated the doctrine of the class struggle belonged
only by soul contact to the struggling class. The Socialist appeal is
made directly to that class, for until it is awakened to its own peril
and its own need little progress can be made.
Changes in society are like changes in human character: they must have
their origin in the heart and work outward. It is at the heart of
things we place our hope and the secret of the social passion to me is
the knowledge that I am a coöperator with God.
There comes over me occasionally an idea, as I look into the future,
that the fact may become the mockery of the dream. Our temples are
built with hands, they are fair to look upon even in the dream, but
other builders will come and build on other foundations temples of the
soul more fair, more enduring. Socialism the fact will have the higher
individualism as the dream; but the conflict will be lifted from the
sordid plane of the stomach to the realm of mind, heart, and soul.
The apologist of the _status quo_ is of all things the most pitiful.
If a politician, he has no dream; if a business man, he has no vision;
if a preacher, he lives in a mausoleum of dead hopes. To these the ten
commandments sum up the moral order of the universe. The eleventh
commandment shares the fate of the seed that fell on stony ground.
The worst that a man can do against the democratic ideal is not to
work for it. He might as well fight against the stars in their
courses. What does it matter who brings it to pass or how it comes?
To work for it is the thing. To feel the thrill of a
world-comradeship, a world-endeavour, to be in line with the workers
and touch hands with men of all creeds, all classes, this is social
joy, this is incentive for life!
"Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds
of his hand,
Nor yet come home in the even, too faint and weary to stand.
Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear
For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf a-near.
Oh, strange, new wonderful justice! But for whom shall we gather
the gain?
For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labour
in vain.
Then all mine and all thine shall be ours and no more shall any
man crave
For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.
And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather gold
To buy his friend in the market and pinch and pine the sold?
Nay, what save the lovely city and the little house on the hill,
And the wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till,
And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead,
And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head.
And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow,
And the banded choirs of music--all those that do and know.
For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share
Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world grows
fair."
In the very advent of my spiritual life I gravitated toward the
church. There I added to my faith a theology. A theologian is a
fighter--a doctrinaire. Every item of knowledge I got I sharpened into
a weapon to confound the Catholics.
Before my nakedness was wholly covered I was shouting with my sect for
"Queen and Constitution," and I could discuss the historic Episcopate
before I could write my own name. Then came a hidebound orthodoxy. I
measured life by a book and for every ill that flesh is heir to I had
an "appropriate" text. I had a formula for the salvation of the race.
I divided humanity into two camps--the goats and the sheep. I had a
literal hell for one crowd and a beautiful heaven for the other. The
logical result of this was a caste of good (saved) people for whom I
became a sort of an ecclesiastical attorney. Naturally one outgrows
such obsolescence. Such archaism has an antidote: it is an open-minded
study of the life of Jesus. The result of such a study to me was a
rediscovery of myself, that I think is what Jesus always does for an
inquiring soul. He is the Supreme Individualist, the Master of
Personality.
I did not ask him what to wear or how to vote. I did not even ask him
what was moral or immoral, for these things change with time and place
and circumstance.
I asked him the old eternal questions of life and death and
immortality, of God and my neighbour, of sin and service. The answers
stripped me of fear and gave me a scorn of consequences. The secret of
Jesus is to find God in the soul of humanity. The cause of Jesus is
the righting of world wrongs; the religion of Jesus the binding
together of souls in the solidarity of the race.
* * * * *
Three miles north of Peekskill and two miles east of the Hudson river
lies this farm place that I have named Happy Hollow. It looks to me as
if God had just taken a big handful of earth out from between these
hills of Putnam County and made a shelter here for man and beast.
[Illustration: "Happy Hollow," Mr. Irvine's Present Home Near
Peekskill, New York]
The Hollow is meadow-land through which runs a brook. Across the
meadow in front of the house, rises almost perpendicularly a hill five
hundred feet high. It is clothed now in autumnal glory. On the summit
there are several bare patches of granite rock surrounded by tall dark
green cedars that look like forest monks, from my study window. There
are over two hundred acres, two-thirds of them woodland. Through the
woods there are miles and miles of old lumber roads over which my
predecessors have hauled lumber since the days of the Revolution.
"Is there a view of the Hudson River from any of these hills?" I asked
when buying.
"Somewhere," said the owner, but she was not quite sure.
One day I was exploring the fastnesses and came upon a rock ledge
standing a hundred feet high. I walked to the edge, pushed the
branches of the elder bushes aside and out there in front of me lay
that glorious valley and beyond the valley over the top of my house
lay the mighty river like an unsheathed sword!
On that ledge I have built a platform of white birch and behind the
platform a bungalow from the window of which I have a full view of the
valley, the Westchester County hills and the river. I have named the
ledge "Ascension Point" in memory of the valued friendships formed at
the church on Fifth Avenue.
On the edge of the amphitheatre-shaped meadow, beside the old road
that leads to the river, stands the farmhouse. It is sheltered from
winter winds by the hills and from summer sun by elm, maple and walnut
trees.
There is nothing to boast of in the arrangement; it was built quickly
and not over-well. If the man who planned it had any more taste than a
cow he must have expressed it on the building of the barn, not on the
house. It had been heated with stoves for years, but I tore away the
boards that covered the open fireplaces. I built a cistern on the hill
and a cesspool down in the meadow, and between them, in a large room
in the house, arranged a bathroom, a big bathroom, big enough to swing
a cat around.
I am now knocking a wall down here and there, wiping some outbuildings
off the map, and by degrees making it habitable throughout the year.
There is a five-acre orchard on the hill east of the house and through
it runs a brook that can be turned to good account.
I had a population of twenty-five during the summer. They were
encamped within a few hundred yards of each other in tents, overhauled
barns, etc. We were all hand-picked Socialists--dreamers of dreams.
Of course we had to eat and as the raw-food fad did not appeal to us
we had to have a fire on which to cook; and as there was an abundance
of wood I instituted a wood pile!
To any one about to form a coöperative community I can recommend this
institution as an infinitely better gauge of human character than
either the ten commandments or the royal eight-fold pathway! We didn't
need much wood and there were plenty of men. We had good tools and--I
was going to say, "wood to burn."
"It was jolly good fun, don't you know," to hack up about three
sticks; then the woodcutter would have a story to tell or he "had
something he had left undone for days." There was an atmosphere around
the pile that affected us as the hookworm affects its victims in some
Southern communities--we grew listless, dull, flaccid.
The influence was baneful, subtle. None of us ever confessed to being
affected. It rather emphasized our idealism.
"In the future," said one comrade as he laid the axe down after his
second stick, "wood will be cut by machinery!" We looked interested.
"Yes," he said as he rolled a cigarette, "there will be a machine that
will cut a cord a second!"
"Why don't you invent one?" we asked.
"How can one invent anything in this slave age?" he asked, as he
glared at us between the curling puffs of smoke.
"That's true," we said, and piped down.
He went over to the well to get a drink. The housekeeper called for
firewood. He smiled--he was a jolly good-natured chap.
"Keep cool, comrades," he said gently, "it'll be all the same in a
thousand years!" The axe was blunt. He took it to the grindstone--a
new patent, with a bicycle seat on it, and there he sat puffing and
grinding until a neighbour's cow broke into our corn. He dropped the
axe and went after the cow.
The housekeeper kept calling for wood. Another comrade was pressed
into the killing ether and he smashed and hacked for five minutes;
then he straightened himself up and, said, with a look of disgust on
his face, "That's a mucker's job!"
"Who will be the muckers under Socialism?" I asked mildly.
"The dull, brainless clods who can do nothing else!" he said.
Just then our neighbour's hired man, a Russian muzik, passed with his
ox-team. He wore a smock of his own making and a pair of shoes he had
made of hickory bark.
"That," said the comrade at the block in a stage whisper, "is the type
that will do the rough work. You couldn't wake that thing up with a
plug of dynamite!"
We watched Michael and his ox-team as they lumbered lazily along the
lane.
[Illustration: "Happy Hollow" in the Winter, Looking From the House]
We had one poet in our midst--just one. He had lately completed a poem
on the glories of our valley. Two men stooped to pick up the axe.
Gaston and Alphonse like, they stooped together. As they did so the
poet came along with a beaming face. "Stop!" he said; "listen, boys,
listen."
We all straightened up, and stood at attention. He read:
"Not far from turmoil, strife, the mountain-vying waves
Of life's antagonisms that delude the world--
Amidst elysian valleys, slopes, majestic hills and caves
That mark the path where ages wrought their wrath and hurled
The crumbling sinews of the soil down to defeat,
To linger in the depth as symbols that all power
Is at the will of the Supreme--in this retreat,
Filled with the chirping music of the nightly hour,
And seeking rest from joyous toil, reward for which
Is given by the thought that all is mine, that none
Do rob, that love adds to each stroke its rich
And sweetening cheer: In such rare world that I have won----"
The housekeeper rudely broke the spell!
"You comrades had better eat that poetry for dinner," she said.
We all looked and all understood--all save the poet. He looked aghast,
thinking in Yiddish.
"Go on," somebody said, but the poet was a sensitive youth and could
sense an atmosphere quicker than most of us.
"Wood," said the housekeeper, pointing at the few sticks lying around
the block.
"Ah," exclaimed the poet as he took up the axe, "you shall have it,
comrade--have it good and plenty."
He laid the poem in the white birch frame against a stone and
proceeded. We moved away, every man to his own place.
In a community where the communers have to chop the fire-wood, canned
salmon is a good standby.
That day we had salmon for dinner.
Just as a matter of encouragement I had the artist of the community
print a Latin motto in fine Gothic characters:
"LABORARE EST ORARE"
This I tacked to the block at the woodpile. We had one orator in the
community--just one.
Next morning, when the motto stared him in the face, he said: "Gee
whiz! that's great--Labour is oratory!" It was a blow at a venture in
the interpretation of Latin and instead of wood to cook the breakfast
we had a speech on the labour of the orator!
The idea that I was giving land away got noised abroad, and a thousand
letters of inquiry came to me. Most of the inquirers asked if I gave
"deeds" to the land.
Others got an idea that I had a coöperative colony and all they had to
do was to come and plant themselves on the land. I never intended to
organize a colony but I did invite some families to enjoy the summer
on the farm.
I shall not ask as many next year for I have no talent as a manager
and it takes more management than I imagined to look after even half a
dozen families.
I had a number of parties from the city during the summer--the largest
being from the Church of the Ascension and the Cosmopolitan Church.
From Ascension Church came a young men's club on Decoration day. I
introduced the boys to their first experience in archery.
The people from the Cosmopolitan Church came on a Sunday and I took
them over the hill to call on my friends, the Franciscan monks, of the
society of the Atonement. The Franciscans are my nearest neighbours on
the north and on the south is my neighbour Mr. Epstein, a Russian
Jewish farmer.
From the north we have had an intellectual and moral fellowship and
from the south the comradeship of the soil.
To Mr. Epstein's bull we are indebted for the element of excitement--a
very necessary element if one could get it in any sort of orderly
arrangement.
The bull objected to Mr. Epstein interfering in what might be called
his (the bull's) family affairs. He tossed his owner into the air
three times one afternoon in my meadow and, but for the timely
interference of a dog, would have gathered the farmer to his fathers.
Several of our community saw the incident, but the vibrations had a
more enervating effect than even those around the woodpile, and being
armed only with the first law of nature they left the honours of the
incident to the dog.
The following Sunday morning I saw a crowd in Mr. Epstein's orchard.
It looked like a small county fair. A cow doctor had been imported to
perform an operation on the bull. Mr. Epstein and his muzik, Michael,
almost came to blows in trying to decide which of them should put the
yoke on the bull's neck. No decent farmer will stand aloof in such a
crisis: so I threw my coat off and offered my services. The patient
made serious objections to me, but permitted the yoke to be adjusted
by a day labourer named Harvey Outhouse.
This Holstein aristocrat had a terrible come-down. He used to stalk
around as if he owned the earth, but now he is a common "hewer of wood
and drawer of water" like ourselves.
I see him occasionally, now, pulling a heavy load of stones or hay
past our place as meekly and quiet as the dull ox by his side, and
involuntarily I exclaim: "How are the mighty fallen!"
I have a horse and a cow. The artist of the community, who remains as
one of my family, took charge of the cow and the care of the horse was
distributed among the rest of us. The house is made comfortable and
snug for the winter and I have settled down here for the remainder of
my life.
With my family are these two comrades, the artist and the mechanic,
and we are in complete harmony in work and ideals. I have been a gypsy
most of my life. I am to have a respite now. Here in this corner of
Putnam County I have found my happy hills of rest. My work will always
be in the city but here my home is to me and here I am to do my
writing, thinking, living. In the solitude of these woods I am to find
inspiration and quiet, here I am to dream my dreams and see my
visions. I am forty-seven years of age now, but I have the health and
vigour of a boy and I feel that for me life has just really begun. I
have but one ambition: it is not wealth, or fame, or even rest. It is
to be of service to my fellow-men; for that is my highest conception
of service to God.
This memoir is but a catalogue of events--a series of milestones that
I have passed. My life has been at times such a tempest and at other
times such a calm, and between these extremes I have failed so often
and my successes have been so phenomenal that the world would not
believe a true recital of the facts, even though I were able to write
them.
The conflicts of the soul, the scalding tears that bespeak the
breaking heart, can not be reduced to print. Nevertheless, I hope that
what I have written may be of encouragement to my fellow-travellers
along the highway of life, especially men who mistakenly imagine they
have been worsted in the fight.
There is a great truth in the doctrine of the economic interpretation
of history but there is also truth, and a mighty truth, in the
spiritual interpretation of life. The awakened human soul is
indissolubly inknit with the warp and woof of things divine. It fights
not alone, it is linked with God.
"No man is born into the world whose work
Is not born with him; there is always work
And tools to work withal for those who will.
And blessed are the horny hands of toil!
The busy world shoves angrily aside
The man who stands with arms akimbo set,
Until occasion tells him what to do;
And he who waits to have his task worked out--
Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled."
* * * * *
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