In the beginning, of course, it was inevitable that Jones should have
been called a Socialist. I suppose he did not care much himself, but
the Socialists cared, and promptly disowned him, and were at one with
the capitalists in their hatred and abuse of him. He shared, no doubt,
the Socialists’ great dream of an ordered society, though he would not
have ordered it by any kind of force or compulsion, but in that spirit
which they sneer at as mere sentimentalism. He was patient with them;
he saw their point of view; he had, indeed, the immense advantage of
being in advance of them in his development. He saw Socialism not,
as most see it, from the hither side, but from the farther side, as
one who has passed through it; he was like a man who having left the
dusty highway and entered a wood which he thinks his journey’s end,
suddenly emerges and from a hill beholds the illimitable prospect that
lies beyond. Of course he could never endure anything so doctrinaire as
Socialism, in the form in which he was accustomed to see it exemplified
in the Socialists about him. He could not endure their orthodoxy, any
more than he could endure the orthodoxy they were contending against.
Their sectarianism was to him quite as impossible as that sectarianism
he had known in other fields. Their bigotry was as bad as any. He saw
no good to come from a substitution of their tyranny for any other of
the many old tyrannies in the world. And naturally to one of his spirit
the class hatred they were always inciting under the name of class
consciousness was as abhorrent to him as all hatred was.
Sometimes the Socialists, with their passion for generalization, for
labeling and pigeonholing everything in the universe, said he was
an anarchist. The more charitable of them, wishing to sterilize the
term and rid it of its sinister implication, but still insistently
scientific, said he was a “philosophic” anarchist. That is a term
too vague to use, though in one sense, I suppose, all good men are
anarchists, in that they would live their lives as well without laws as
with them. Jones himself would have scorned those classifications as
readily as he would had anyone said he was a duke or an earl. “No title
is higher than Man,” he wrote once in a little campaign song. And he
was that--a Man.
He would not join any society or, as he said, “belong” to anything. I
have thought so often of what he said to a book agent one day. We were
just on the point of leaving the Mayor’s office for luncheon, and the
individual who wishes “just a minute” was inevitably there, blocking
the way out of the office. He was indubitably a book agent; anyone
who has a rudimentary knowledge of human nature can identify them at
once, but this one had as his insinuating disguise some position as a
representative of a Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, and he was
there to confer on the Mayor the honor of a membership in that society.
“And what books am I required to buy?” asked Jones.
“Well,” the agent said, “you are not required to buy any books,
but, of course, a member of the association would naturally want
Mr. Jefferson’s complete works.” Jones’s eyes were twinkling; “Mr.”
Jefferson amused him immensely, of course.
“They are very popular,” the man went on, “many persons are buying
them.”
“I don’t find the ideas in them very popular; certainly those in Mr.
Jefferson’s greatest work are not popular; no one wants to see them
adopted.”
“To which one of his works do you refer?” asked the agent.
“Why, the one that is best known,” said Jones, “its title is ‘The
Declaration of Independence.’ I already have a copy of that.”
The poor fellow was conscious that his enterprise was not going very
well, but he said, with a flourish of magnanimity:
“Oh, well, it’s immaterial to me whether you take the books or not, but
of course you will wish to belong to the association?”
“But I already belong to the association in which Mr. Jefferson was
chiefly interested,” said Jones.
“What is that, may I ask?” said the agent.
“The United States of America,” said Jones, “and as I am a member of
that, I see no reason why I should join anything smaller.”
And then he laughed, and if there had been any uneasiness because of
his gentle guying, it disappeared when he laid his hand on the agent’s
shoulder and looked into his eyes in that spirit of friendliness which
enveloped him like an aureole.
He had a conception of unity that was far beyond his contemporaries,
a conception that will be beyond humanity for many years. It was that
conception which enabled him to see through the vast superstition of
war, and the superstition of partizanship, and all the other foolish
credulities that have misled the people in all times.
One evening, it was just at dark, we were leaving the mayor’s office
to walk home--we walked home together nearly every evening--and in the
dusk a tramp, a negro, came up and asked him for the price of a night’s
lodging. The Mayor fumbled in his pockets, but he had no small change,
he had only a five-dollar bill, but he gave this to the tramp and said:
“Go get it changed, and bring it back.”
The tramp took it and disappeared, and we waited. Jones talked on about
other things, but I was interested in the tramp; my expectation of his
return was far more uncertain than Jones’s. But after a while the tramp
did come back, and he poured out into the Mayor’s hand the change in
silver coin. The Mayor complained humanly of the heavy silver which
the Secretary of the Treasury always sends out to us, so that the new
one-dollar bills may go to New York City, and tumbled the money into
his trousers pocket.
“But ain’t you goin’ to count it?” asked the negro in surprise.
“Did you count it?” asked Jones.
“Yes, suh, I counted it.”
“Was it all there, wasn’t it all right?”
“Yes, suh.”
“Well, then, there’s no need for me to count it, is there?”
The negro looked in wide white-eyed surprise.
“Did you take out what you wanted?” asked the Mayor.
“No, suh, I didn’t take any.”
“Here, then,” said Jones, and he gave the man a half-dollar and went on.
There was no possible ostentation in this; it was perfectly natural; he
was doing such things every hour of the day.
He had no need to stop there, in the dark, to impress me, his friend
and intimate. I do him wrong even to stoop to explain so much. But I
wonder how much good his confidence did that wandering outcast? How
much good did it do to me? By the operation of the same law which
brought that vagrant back to Jones’s side with all the money, I with my
distrust, might have been treated far differently.
Or so, at least, it seems to me, and I tell this incident as one which
proves the reverence Jones had for the great natural law of love.
For the chief count in the indictment respectability brought against
him was that he had no reverence for law. To see and hear them when
they said this, one would have supposed that a council or legislature
had never been corrupted in the land. It used to amuse Jones to
reflect that his literal acceptance of the fundamental principle of
Christianity should have been such a novel and unprecedented thing that
it instantly marked him out from all the other Christians and made him
famous in Christendom.