The incalculable influence of the spoken word and the consequent
responsibility that weighs upon the lightest phrase have so long
been urged that men might well go about with their fingers on their
lips, oracular as presidential candidates, deliberating each thought
before giving it wing. And yet, as Carlyle said of French speech, the
immeasurable tide flows on and ebbs only toward the small hours of
the morning. Though even then in certain quarters, the tide does not
ebb, and in those hours truths are sometimes spoken--for instance, by
newspaper reporters, who, their night’s work done, turn to each other
for relaxation and speak those thoughts they have not dared to write in
their chronicles of the day that is done. The thought itself is only
a vagrant, encountered along the way back to such an evening, when
a reporter uttered two little words that acquired for me a profound
significance.
“Oh, nothing.” Those were the exact words, just those two, and yet a
negative so simple contained within itself such an affirmation of an
awful truth, that I have never been able to forget them, though for a
time I tried. Charlie R---- and I had gone one night, after the paper
had gone to press, into a little restaurant in Chicago to get some
supper. It was sometime in the year 1891, and, in our idle gossip, the
hanging of the anarchists, then an event so recent that the reporters
now and then spoke of it, had come up in our talk.
“Where were you when that occurred?” he asked.
“In Toledo,” I answered.
“What did people think of it there?”
“Of the hanging?”
“Yes.”
I looked at him, I suppose, in some astonishment. What did people
in Toledo think of the hanging of the Chicago anarchists! Could any
question have been more stupid, more banal? What did any people,
anywhere, think of it? What was customary, what was proper and
appropriate and indispensable under such circumstances? In a word, what
was there to do with anarchists except to hang them? Really, I was
quite at a loss what to say. It seemed so superfluous, so ridiculous,
as though he had asked what the people in Toledo thought of the world’s
being round, or of the force of gravity. More than superfluous, it was
callous; he might as well have asked what Toledo people thought of the
hanging of Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, or of the suicide
of Judas Iscariot. And I answered promptly in their defense:
“Why, they thought it was right, of course.”
He had his elbows on the table and was lighting a cigarette, and as
he raised the match, his dark face, with its closely trimmed pointed
beard, was suddenly and vividly illuminated by the yellow flame. His
eyes were lowered, their vision fixed just then on the interesting
process of igniting the end of the cigarette. But about his puckered
lips, about his narrowed eyes there played a little smile, faint,
elusive, and yet of a meaning so indubitable that it was altogether
disconcerting. And in that instant I wondered--it could not be! It was
preposterous, absurd!
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he said.
The end of the cigarette was glowing, little coils of fire in the tiny
particles of tobacco; he blew out the match and the smile disappeared
from his face with its ruddy illumination, and he tossed the charred
stick into his coffee cup.
Were there, then, two opinions? Was it possible that anyone doubted?
When _anarchists_ were in question! Still, on that kindly face
before me there lingered the shadow of that strange expression,
inscrutable, perplexing, piquing curiosity. And yet by some strange,
almost clairvoyant process, it had gradually acquired the effect of a
persistent, irresistible and implacable authority, in the presence of
which one felt--well, cheap, as though there were secrets from which
one had been excluded, as though there were somewhere in this universe
a stupendous joke which alone of all others one lacked the wit to see.
It gave one a disturbed, uneasy sensation, a _mauvaise honte_.
The innate sense of personal dignity, the instinct to retire into
one’s self, the affectation of repose and self-sufficiency which leads
one lightly to wave aside a subject one does not understand, to pass
it over for other and more familiar topics--these were ineffectual.
Curiosity perhaps in a sense much less refined than that in which
Matthew Arnold considered it when he exalted it to the plane of the
higher virtues, broke down reticence, and, at last I asked, and even
begged my companion to tell me what he meant. But he was implacable; he
had reached, it appeared, a stage of development in which the opinions
of others were of no consequence; an altitude from which he could
regard the race of men impersonally, and permit them to stumble on in
error, without the desire to set them right. It was quite useless to
question him, and in the end the only satisfaction he would give me was
to say, with an effort of dismissing the subject:
“Ask some of the boys.”
For a young citizen to whom society is yet an illusion, lying, in
Emerson’s figure, before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men
and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the center, round which all
arrange themselves the best they can, to have one of those oak-trees
torn violently up by the roots, is to experience a distinct shock. And
by two words, and an expression that played for an instant in lowered
eyes, and about lips that were more concerned just then with the
flattened end of a fresh cigarette than the divulgence of great truths!
Yes, decidedly a shock, to leave one shaken for days. If there were any
doubt as to what to do with anarchists, what was the use of going on
with the study of the law? I went out from that cheap little restaurant
in Fifth Avenue, into Chicago’s depressing midnight streets--and the
oak tree never took root again. For, as Charlie R---- had lightly
suggested, I asked the boys, and by the boys he meant, of course, the
reporters.
They were boys in spirit, though in the knowledge of this world they
were as aged men, some of whom had seen so much of life that they
were able to dwell with it only by refusing any longer to accept it
seriously. They formed in that day an unusual group, gathered in the
old Whitechapel Club, and many of their names have since become known
to literature. They, or most of them, had worked on the anarchist
cases, from the days of the strike in McCormick’s reaper works, down
to the night when the vivid pen of Charlie Seymour could describe the
spark that soared in a parabolic curve from the alley into Haymarket
Square, and then to the black morning of the hanging; and they knew.
It was all very simple, too. If it were not for the tragedy, and the
wrong that is so much worse than any tragedy, one might almost laugh at
the simplicity. It shows the power of words, the force of phrases, the
obdurate and terrible tyranny of a term. The men who had been hanged
were called anarchists, when, as it happens, they were men, just men.
And out of that original error in terminology there was evolved that
overmastering fear which raved and slew in a frenzy of passion that
decades hence will puzzle the psychologist who studies the mind of
the crowd. And the student of ethics will find in the event another
proof of the inerrancy and power of that old law of moral action and
reaction, according to which hatred ceaseth not by hatred, but by love
alone. It may be found stated accurately and simply in the Sermon on
the Mount, and there is still hope that Christendom, after another
thousand years or so, may discover it, and drawing therefrom the law of
social relations, apply it to human affairs, and so solve the problems
that trouble and perplex mankind.