LV

But I would not be unfair, and I counted many friends among the

Socialists of my town and time whose best ideals one could gladly

share. They were immensely intelligent, or immensely informed; they had

made a fairly valid indictment against society as it is organized, or

disorganized. But like Mr. H. G. Wells, who calls himself a Socialist,

these exceptions, in Mr. Wells’s words, were by no means fanatical or

uncritical adherents. To them as to him Socialism was a noble, and yet

a very human and fallible system of ideas. To them, as, again to him,

it was an intellectual process, a project for the reshaping of human

society upon new and better lines--the good will of the race struggling

to make things better. This broad and tolerant view was the one to

which they held, though they seemed too closely to identify all the

good will in the race, operating, as I believe it to be, in many ways

and through many agencies, as Socialism, and the pontifical Socialism

taught in our town, at least, was so explicitly a class hatred that

most of the time it was anything in the world rather than good will.

Anyone with a good heart could be a Socialist on Mr. Wells’s terms,

if it were not his inevitable fate to be assured by the orthodox

custodians of the party faith, the high priests who alone could enter

the holy of holies and bear forth, as occasion required, the ark of the

covenant, that Mr. Wells’s Socialism is no Socialism at all and that he

is no man to consult or accept.

My friends among them were like him in the condemnation they had to

hear from the machine, or, perhaps I should say, the governing or

directing committee--whatever the euphemism that cloaks the familiar

phenomenon with them--they too were said to be no Socialists at all;

they were mere “intellectuals” or “sentimentalists,” or easily fell

into some other of the categories the Socialists have provided for

every manifestation of life. They have doubtless rendered society a

service by their minute classification; which seems complete if they

would only recognize the order of the sectarian mind, and since the

orthodox among them afford so typical an example, include themselves

in it. I am not sure that it is not quite as distinct a species as the

capitalist class itself, at least it causes as much trouble in the

world as the Socialists say the capitalist class creates. Socialists,

at least of the impossibilist wing, evangelists, prohibitionists,

Puritans, policemen and most of the rest of the reformers are endowed

with this order of mind. While they all form subdivisions of a distinct

intellectual class of humanity these are generally the same. That is,

they are, all of them, always under all circumstances, right. All of

these classes, fundamentally, follow the same sequences of thought.

They differ of course in minor details, but they always meet on that

narrow strip of ground upon which they have erected their inflexible

model for humanity, with just room enough by its side for the scaffold

upon which to hang those who do not accept it.

Now, when, by any coincidence, the representatives of any two of

these species meet in the mistaken supposition that there is any

disagreement between them, there is bound to be trouble of course, and

whenever say a Socialist of the impossibilist wing of the party, and

a policeman--and all good policemen are impossibilists--meet, we have

posited the old problem in physics of an irresistible body meeting an

impenetrable substance.

This phenomenon occurred on two or three occasions when policemen

interfered with Socialists speaking in the streets. I am sure the

Socialists in question could have regretted the circumstance no

more than I, for if there was one right which I tried to induce the

police to respect, it was the right of free speech. On the whole they

did fairly well, and at a time when there seemed to be an epidemic

of ferocity among municipal officials in the land that led them to

all sorts of unwarranted interferences with human and constitutional

rights, we had folk of all sorts preaching their strange doctrines

in our streets--Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, of their several

sorts, I. W. W.’s, evangelists, anarchists, suffragists, Mormons,

Salvationists, to say nothing of all the religious sects; wisdom was

veritably crying in the streets. Emma Goldman, during that period of

hysteria when the advent of that little woman in a city precipitated a

siege of fear, delivered her course of lectures in Toledo to audiences

that were very small, since there were no police to insure the

attendance of those who were interested more in sensations than in her

philosophic discussions of the German drama. And we tried to respect

the rights of all.

But it is one thing to give orders, and another to have them implicitly

obeyed. Those of the indurated sectarian mind, who would order all

life by mechanism, are given to saying that if they were in authority

the police would do so and so, and would not do such and such a thing,

that they would have the police see to this and that, etc., etc.,

etc. After they had been in power a while they would grow humble,

if not discouraged, and, like me, be gratified if they succeeded in

accomplishing about one-third of what they had hoped and planned

to accomplish. Thus I, who had tried to give everybody the right of

free speech, was now and then chagrined to find that someone had been

interfered with for preaching some new heresy.

The right of free speech cherished by all and exercised by none, since,

owing to a disposition on the part of humanity to apply the hemlock

or the noose in such cases, few say what they actually think, is one

which certain of the Socialists preferred to have honored in the breach

rather than in the observance. They would be never so happy, never

so much in their element as when their address was interrupted; the

greater the interference, the more acute the suffering for the cause,

and when a man begins to feel that there is in him the blood of the

martyrs, which, as he has heard somewhere, is the seed of the churches,

why, of course, he is in such an exalted state of mind that there is no

human way of dealing with him.

And then that strange human spark, that mysterious thing we call

personality, is always there--that element which makes impossible

any perfectly or ideally organized state, social or otherwise. It is

assumed by those of the order of mind under notice that it is possible

so to organize human affairs that they will work automatically, with

the precision of a machine, that they will work just as they are

intended to work and in no other way, that it is, indeed, impossible

for them to work in any other way, and that it may be predicted long in

advance exactly how they will work at any given instant and under any

exigency, or circumstance. This, of course, is impossible, as everybody

knows, except the impossibilists. That is why they are impossibilists.

These speakers, however, who would dehumanize everything yet cannot

after all dehumanize themselves, would frequently court arrest in the

belief that the meed of pseudo-martyrdom thereby made possible was

an ornament to their cause, and they would often try the patience

of officers, who like the speakers themselves and all of us, are

unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, only human. Thus a Socialist

speaker standing on his soap box, in the course of his remarks,

indulged in certain reflections on the police as an institution.

His sentiments in that respect were not perhaps heterodox, from the

standpoint of my own orthodoxy, but we had been trying to create

_esprit de corps_ in the police department, and the policeman on that

beat chancing to arrive at that inauspicious moment, and viewing life

from an altitude less lofty and impersonal than the Socialist claimed

for his outlook, took the scientific statements of the Socialist not in

the academic sense, but as a personal reflection upon the body of which

he, it seems, was growing rather proud of being a member, and at the

conclusion of the effort he privately informed the speaker that if he

said anything more against the Toledo Police Department he would “knock

his block off.” He was reprimanded by his lieutenant, even after he had

explained that he intended to execute his rude intention in his private

and not in his official capacity.

The incident could be represented by the Socialists as a veritable

reflection of the views of the administration on the important subject

of Socialism, but they could not derive quite the satisfaction from

it they had in another incident, or accident, which befell the most

prominent and authoritative of their local leaders. He was speaking

one evening in a crowded street, when he had the good fortune to be

arrested by a captain of police. He made the occasion the opportunity

for an edifying debate, and lingered as long as the captain would let

him; but, in the end, was led to the police headquarters. This was the

irresistible meeting the impenetrable. While everybody had a right to

speak his mind in the streets, everybody else, we felt, had an equal

right not to listen, even to free speech, and the police had orders to

keep the streets and sidewalks clear for traffic. Now this captain was

a chap who carried out orders given to him, and, as he was in command

of the traffic squad, traffic was his specialty. If streets were to

be cleared, then, in his philosophy, they were to be cleared, and no

little thing like a constitutional inhibition against the abridgment

of human speech would stand in his way. And then, after all, police

are more apt to arrest people they do not like than those they do,

and no one likes those who disagree with him. But after the arrest,

the offender is turned out without chances of reparation. In this

instance, feeling that the Socialist had had an indignity put upon

him by his arrest, while I could not undo what had been done, I could

order his release and tender him an official apology in writing, which

was accepted, though not acknowledged. And an order was issued that

a policemen who thereafter interfered with any voice crying in the

wilderness should be dismissed from the department.