It was because of this attitude toward workingmen, and their cause,
that I was accused, now and then, by those who knew nothing about
Socialism, of being a Socialist; by those who did know about it I was
condemned for not being one. Our movement indeed had no opponents in
the town more bitter than the Socialists, that is the authentic and
orthodox Socialists of the class-conscious Marxist order, and they
opposed me so insistently that I might as well have been the capitalist
class and had done with it. I do not intend to confuse myself with
the movement of which I, for a while, was but the merest and weakest
of human instruments; I speak in that personal sense only because the
opposition was of a personal quality so intense that it could hardly
have been expected of an attitude that was always insisted upon as so
entirely impersonal, the cold and scientific attitude of minds that had
comprehended the whole of human history, analyzed the whole amazing
complexity of human life, and reduced its problems to that degree
in which they were all to be solved by a formula so brief that it
could be printed on a visiting card. The complaint these scientists
made of our movement was that its ameliorations in city life were
retarding that evolution of which they were the inspired custodians and
conservators; some of them spoke of it as though it were but a darkling
part of that vast conspiracy against mankind in which the capitalists
were so shamelessly engaged. If we had only let things alone, it was
urged, they might grow so desperate that no one but the Socialists
would be capable of dealing with the appalling situation.
But this was the attitude only of that coterie which, unselfishly,
no doubt, with the purest of motives, and only until the industrial
democracy could be organized and rendered sufficiently class-conscious
to take over the work, was directing the destinies of the Socialist
party, very much to the fleshly eye in the same manner that the
Republican machine controlled that party or the Democratic machine its
party, or, before we were done, certain persons attempted to control
the Independent movement. So far as I could discern, there was not
much difference in them all; the Socialists seemed to rely on all the
old weapons that had so long been employed in the world, and so long
failed; they seemed to contemplate nothing more than replacement of old
orthodoxies with new, old tyrannies with new tyrannies; in a word, to
preserve the old vicious circle in which humanity has been revolving
impotently and stupidly down all the grooves of time.
I could not have been a Socialist because life had somehow taught me
that this is a world of relativities, in which the absolute is the
first impossibility. I could share, of course, their hope, or the
hope of some of them in a well ordered society, though with many of
them the dream seemed to be beautiful chiefly because they expected
to order it themselves; they who felt themselves so long to have been
the slaves were to become the masters; their hard and too logical
theory of classes circumscribed their vision so that they could imagine
nothing more clearly, and possibly nothing more delightful than a
bouleversement which would leave them on top.
I could recognize with them the masters under whom we all alike were
serving in this land, and respect them as little as we might, or
detest them as we would, they presented whatever advantage there is in
familiarity; if nothing more inviting than a change in masters were
proposed, one would prefer those one had to others whose habits and
whims he did not know. One could be pretty sure that the new masters
would use the same old whips and scorpions, or if new ones, with a
sting more bitter. They proposed as much, indeed, in their rigid form
of organization, with a discipline more irksome and relentless, what
with their signing of pledges, and their visitations and committees
of inspection, and trials for heresy and excommunications. They
reminded me of those prosecutors who could behold no defect in the
penal machinery save that it had not been sufficiently drastic; they
would replace all old intolerances and ancient tyrannies by others no
different save that they were employed in the opposing cause, and were
to be even more intolerant and tyrannical.
That is, the Socialists provided for everything in the world except
liberty, and to one whose dissolving illusions had left nothing but the
dream of liberty in a world where liberty was not and probably never
was to be, there was no allure in the proposal to take away even the
dream of liberty.
None of them of course would be impressed by these objections--was not
the great cure for social ill written and printed on a card?--nor would
they consider them even until they had been submitted to the prescribed
test of a joint debate, about the most futile device ever adopted
by mankind, and a nuisance as offensive as any that ever disturbed
society. It was of course the only amusement they had, as popular as
running the gauntlet was with the Indians, and they liked to torture a
capitalist to make a Socialist holiday. It is of course quite useless
to argue with one who is always right, one whose utterances have the
authority of revealed truth, but inasmuch as society had not yet been
developed to a point of communal efficiency sufficient to keep the
streets clean, it seemed idle to undertake the communal control of
production and distribution. And however wrong I may be in every other
thing, I am quite sure that I am right in this, that in their analysis
of society they have failed utterly to take into account that classic
of the ironic spirit, the great law of the contrariety of things,
according to which the expected never happens, at least in the way
it was expected to happen, and nothing ever turns out the way it was
planned.
But there is a more fundamental law--that of the destructive power
of force, which always defeats itself. For their reliance was on
force--and how quietly they, or the most virile of them, entered upon
their last phase in their acceptance of the doctrine of force as
preached now everywhere by the I. W. W. agitator on the curbstone!
Sometimes after all the law does not take a thousand years to work
itself out.
It seemed to me that the single-taxers had a scheme far better
than that of the Socialists, since they suggested a reliance on
the democratic, and not on the authoritarian theory, though in its
mysterious progress, in its constant development of new functions,
democracy may be expected to modify even that theory. I fear at least
that it would not do away with mosquitoes; possibly not even with
reformers.