_Martyrdom_
Messages and records of the heroes of past and present who have
sacrificed themselves for the sake of the future.
Social Ideals
BY VIDA D. SCUDDER
(Professor at Wellesley College, Mass.; born 1861)
Deeper than all theories, apart from all discussion, the mighty
instinct for social justice shapes the hearts that are ready to
receive it. The personal types thus created are the harbingers
of the victory of the cause of freedom. The heralds of freedom,
they are also its martyrs. The delicate vibrations of their
consciousness thrill through the larger social self which more
stolid people still ignore, and the pain of the world is their
own. Not for one instant can they know an undimmed joy in art,
in thought, in nature while part of their very life throbs
in the hunger of the dispossessed. All this by no virtue, no
choice of their own. So were they born: the children of the
new age, whom the new intuition governs. In every country, out
of every class, they gather: men and women vowed to simplicity
of life and to social service; possessed by a force mightier
than themselves, over which they have no control; aware of the
lack of social harmony in our civilization, restless with pain,
perplexity, distress, yet filled with deep inward peace as they
obey the imperative claim of a widened consciousness. By active
ministry, and yet more by prayer and fast and vigil, they seek
to prepare the way for the spiritual democracy on which their
souls are set.
Le Père Perdrix
BY CHARLES-LOUIS PHILIPPE
(A poor and obscure clerk of the municipality of Paris, 1875-1909,
who wrote seven volumes of fiction which have placed his name among
the masters of French literature. He wrote of the poor whose lives he
knew, and his work is characterized by fidelity to truth, beauty of
sentiment, and rare charm of style. The following scene is in the home
of a workingman, who by heavy sacrifice has succeeded in educating his
only son. One day unexpectedly the son returns home)
Pierre Bousset said, "How does it happen that you come to-day?"
Jean sat down with slowness enough, and one saw yet another
thing sit down in the house. The mother said, "I guess you
haven't eaten. I'll make a little chocolate before noon-time."
Jean's tongue was loosed. "Here it is. There is something new.
It is necessary to tell you: I have left my place!"
"How! You have left your place!" They sat up all three--Pierre
Bousset with his apron and his back of labor; and Jean saw
that he had gray hair. The mother held a saucepan in her
hand, careful like a kitchen-servant, but with feelings as if
the saucepan were about to fall. Marguerite, the sister, was
already weeping: "Ah, my God! I who was so proud!"
Pierre Bousset said, "And how did you manage that clever
stroke?"
It was then that Jean felt his soul wither, and there rose up
from the depths of his heart all the needs, all the mists of
love. It was necessary that they should live side by side and
understand one another, and it was necessary that someone
should begin to weaken. He said, "Does one ever know what one
does?"
"Ah, indeed!" said the father. "You don't know what you do?"
"There are moments," answered Jean, "when one loses his head,
and afterwards I don't say one should not have regrets."
"For the matter of losing one's head, I know only one thing:
It is that they pay you, and it is up to you always to obey
whatever they command."
The mother watched the chocolate, from which the steam rose
with a warmth of strong nutriment. They loved that in the
family, like a Sunday morning indulgence, like a bourgeois
chocolate for holiday folk. She said, "Anyhow, let it be as it
will, he's got to eat."
Jean went on to speak. His blue eyes had undergone the first
transformation which comes in a man's life, when he is no
longer Jean, son of Pierre, pupil at the Central school, but
Jean Bousset, engineer of applied chemistry. There remained in
them, however, the shining of a young girl, that emotion which
wakens two rays of sunlight in a spring. And now they kept a
sort of supplication, like the sweetness of a naked infant.
"Oh, I know everything that you are going to say. You cannot
excuse me, because you are not in my place, and I cannot
condemn a movement of my heart. You know--I wrote it to
you--the workers were about to go on strike. At once I said
to myself that these were matters which did not concern me;
because, when you are taking care of yourself, it is not
necessary to look any farther. But Cousin François explained it
all to me."
"Ah, I told you so!" cried Pierre Bousset. "When you wanted
to take Cousin François into your factory, I said to you:
'Relatives, it is necessary always to keep them at a distance.
They push themselves forward, and sometimes, to excuse them one
is led to commit whole heaps of lowness.'"
"In truth," said Jean, "I would never have had to complain of
him. On the contrary, he wore his heart on his sleeve."
"Oh, all drunkards are like that. One says: 'They wear their
hearts on their sleeve,' and one does not count all the times
when they lead the others away."
"Ah, I have understood many things, father. How can I explain
everything that I have understood! There are moments still
when, to see and to realize--that makes in my head a noise as
if the world would not stay in place. I tell you again it was
François who made me understand. I saw, in the evenings. I
would say to him: 'I am bored, I haven't even a comrade, and I
eat at hotel-tables a dinner too well served.' He said: 'Come
to my house. You don't know what it is to eat good things,
because you don't work, and because hunger makes a part of
work. You will have some soup with us, and we will tell you
at least that you are happy to be where you are, and to look
upon the workingman while playing the amateur.' I said to him:
'But I work, also. To see, to understand, to analyze, to be an
engineer! You, it's your arms; me, it's my head and my heart
that ache.' He laughed: 'Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! When I come home
in the evening with my throat dry and I eat my soup, I also
have a headache, and I laugh at you with your heart-ache. I am
as tired as a wolf. What's that you call your heart?'"
"Yes, he was right there," said Pierre Bousset. "For my part, I
don't understand at all how you are going to pull through. You
have understood a lot of things! As for me, I understand but
one thing, which is you are unhappy over being too happy."
Jean went on speaking, with his blue eyes, like a madness, like
a ribbon, like a rosette without any reason which a young girl
puts on her forehead. A sweetness came out of his heart to
spread itself in the room, where the furniture gave off angular
and waxy reflections. Marguerite listened, with restlessness,
listened to her father, like a child whose habit it is to be
guided by her parents. The mother saw to the chocolate, in a
state of confusion, shaking her head.
"Yesterday I was in the office of the superintendent. It
was then that the delegation arrived. It seems to me that I
see them again. There were three workingmen. They had taken
to white shirts, and they had just washed their hands. You
know how the poor come into the homes of the rich. There was
a great racket, and their steps were put down with so much
embarrassment that one felt in the hearts of the three men
the shame of crushed things. I had already thought about that
poverty which, knowing that it soils, hides itself, and dares
not even touch an object. They said: 'Well, Mr. Superintendent,
we have been sent to talk to you. For more than ten years now
we have worked in the factory. We get seventy cents a day.
That's not much to tell about. We have wives and children,
and our seventy cents hardly carries us farther than a glass
of brandy and a little plate of soup. We understand that you
also have expenses. But we should like to get eighty cents a
day, and for us to explain every thing to you, it is necessary
that you should consent, because money gives courage to the
workingman.' The other received them with that assurance of the
rich, sitting straight up in his chair and holding his head as
if it dominated your own. He would not have had much trouble,
with his education, his habits of a master, his stability as a
man of affairs, to put them all three ill at ease. 'Gentlemen,
from the first word I say to you: No. The company cannot take
account of your wishes. We pay you seventy cents a day, and we
judge that it is up to you to lower your life to your wages.
As for your insinuations, I shall employ such means as please
me to fortify your courage. For the rest, our profits are not
what you imagine, you who know neither our efforts nor our
disappointments.' It was then, father, that I felt myself your
son, and that I recalled your hands, your back which toils, and
the carriage wheels that you make. The three workingmen seemed
three children in their father's home, with hearts that swell
and can feel no more. Ah, it was in vain I thought myself an
engineer! On the benches of the school I imagined that my head
was full of science, and that that sufficed. But all the blood
of my father, the days that I passed in your shop, the storms
which go to one's head and seem to come from far off, all that
cried out like a grimace, like a lock, like a key.[A] I took
up the argument. 'Mr. Superintendent, I know these men. There
is my cousin who works in the factory. Do you understand what
it is, the life of acids, and that of charcoal?' If you could
have seen him! He looked at me with eyes, as if their pupils
had turned to ice. 'Mr. Engineer, I don't permit either you,
who are a child, or these, who are workingmen, a single word to
discuss my sayings and my actions! Gentlemen, you may retire.'
I went straight off the handle. A door opened at a single
burst. We have at least insolence, we poor, and blows of the
mouth, since their weapons stop our blows of the teeth. I went
away like them. They lowered their heads and thought. For my
part I cried out, I turned about and cried, 'You be hanged!'"
[A] _Tout cela criait comme une grimace, comme une serrure,
comme une clé._
"Ah, now, indeed! I didn't expect anything like that," said
Pierre Bousset. "One raises children to make gentle-folk of
them, so that they will work a little less than you. Now then,
in God's name! go and demand a place of those for whom you have
lost your own!"
The Duty of Civil Disobedience
BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU
(The New England essayist, 1817-1862, author of "Walden," went to
prison because he refused to pay taxes to a government which returned
fugitive slaves to the South. It is narrated that Emerson came to
him and asked, "Henry, what are you doing in here?" "Waldo," was the
answer, "what are you doing out of here?")
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place
for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the
only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and
less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and
locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already
put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the
fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the
Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them;
on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where
the State places those who are not _with_ her but _against_
her--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can
abide with honor.
If any think that their influence would be lost there, and
their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they
would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know
by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more
eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has
experienced a little in his own person.
[Illustration: THE SURPRISE
ILYÁ EFÍMOVITCH REPIN
(_Russian painter, born 1844_)]
[Illustration: THE END
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
(_Contemporary German etching; from the "Weaver-cycle"_)]
Address to the Jury
BY ARTURO M. GIOVANNITTI
(Italian student and clergyman, born 1884, who left the Church for the
labor movement. During the strike at Lawrence, Mass., he was arrested
upon a charge of "constructive murder." He spoke in his own defense at
Salem Court House, November 23, 1912)
MR. FOREMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY:--
It is the first time in my life that I speak publicly in your
wonderful language, and the most solemn moment in my life. I
know not if I will go to the end of my remarks. The District
Attorney and the other gentlemen here who are used to measure
all human emotions with the yardstick may not understand the
tumult that is going on in my soul at this moment. But my
friends and my comrades before me, these gentlemen here who
have been with me for the last seven or eight months, know
exactly, and if my words will fail before I reach the end
of this short statement to you, it will be because of the
superabundance of sentiments that are flooding to my heart.
I speak to you not because I want to review this evidence at
all. I shall not enter into the evidence that has been offered
here, as I feel that you gentlemen of the jury have by this
time a firm and set conviction; by this time you ought to know,
you ought to have realized whether I said or whether I did
not say those words that have been put into my mouth by those
two detectives. You ought to know whether it is possible, not
for a man like me but for any living human being to say those
atrocious, those flagitious words that have been attributed to
me. I say only this in regard to the evidence that has been
introduced in this case, that if there is or ever has been
murder in the heart of any man that is in this courtroom today,
gentlemen of the jury, that man is not sitting in this cage.
We had come to Lawrence, as my noble comrade Mr. Ettor said,
because we were prompted by something higher and loftier than
what the District Attorney or any other man in this presence
here may understand and realize. Were I not afraid that I
was being somewhat sacrilegious, I would say that to go and
investigate into the motives that prompted and actuated us
to go into Lawrence would be the same as to inquire, why did
the Saviour come on earth, or why was Lloyd Garrison in this
very Commonwealth, in the city of Boston, dragged through the
streets with a rope around his neck? Why did all the other
great men and masters of thought--why did they go to preach
this new gospel of fraternity and brotherhood? It is just that
truth should be ascertained, it is right that the criminal
should be brought before the bar of justice. But one side
alone of our story has been told here. There has been brought
only one side of this great industrial question, the method
and the tactics. But what about, I say, the ethical part of
this question? What about the human and humane part of our
ideas? What about the grand condition of tomorrow as we see
it, and as we foretell it now to the workers at large, here
in this same cage where the felon has sat, in this same cage
where the drunkard, where the prostitute, where the hired
assassin has been? What about the better and nobler humanity
where there shall be no more slaves, where no man will ever
be obliged to go on strike in order to obtain fifty cents a
week more, where children will not have to starve any more,
where women no more will have to go and prostitute themselves;
where at last there will not be any more slaves, any more
masters, but one great family of friends and brothers. It may
be, gentlemen of the jury, that you do not believe in that. It
may be that we are dreamers; it may be that we are fanatics,
Mr. District Attorney. But so was a fanatic Socrates, who
instead of acknowledging the philosophy of the aristocrats of
Athens, preferred to drink the poison. And so was a fanatic
the Saviour Jesus Christ, who instead of acknowledging that
Pilate, or that Tiberius was emperor of Rome, and instead of
acknowledging his submission to all the rulers of the time and
all the priestcraft of the time, preferred the cross between
two thieves.
BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
(German philosopher and poet, 1749-1832)
All those who oppose intellectual truths merely stir up the
fire; the cinders fly about and set fire to that which else
they had not touched.
Essay on Liberty
BY JOHN STUART MILL
(English philosopher and economist, 1806-1873)
Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once
a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities
and public opinion of his time, there took place a memorable
collision. Born in an age and country abounding in individual
greatness, this man has been handed down to us by those who
best knew both him and the age, as the most virtuous man in it;
while _we_ know him as the head and prototype of all subsequent
teachers of virtue, the source equally of the lofty inspiration
of Plato and the judicious utilitarianism of Aristotle, the
two headsprings of ethical as of all other philosophy. This
acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have since
lived--whose fame, still growing after more than two thousand
years, all but outweighs the whole remainder of the names
which make his native city illustrious--was put to death by
his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for impiety and
immorality. Impiety, in denying the Gods recognized by the
State; indeed his accusers asserted (see the "Apologia") that
he believed in no gods at all. Immorality, in being, by his
doctrines and instructions, a "corrupter of youth." Of these
charges the tribunal, there is every ground for believing,
honestly found him guilty, and condemned the man who probably
of all then born had deserved best of mankind to be put to
death as a criminal.
FROM THE EPISTLE OF JAMES
So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law
of liberty.
The Walker
BY ARTURO M. GIOVANNITTI
(See page 296)
I hear footsteps over my head all night.
They come and they go. Again they come and they go all night.
They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity
in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is
Silence and the Night and the Infinite.
For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is
the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and
the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and
cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world,
each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal.
* * * * *
Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head.
Who walks? I know not. It is the phantom of the jail, the
sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker.
One--two--three--four: four paces and the wall.
One--two--three--four: four paces and the iron gate.
He has measured his space, he has measured it accurately,
scrupulously, minutely, as the hangman measures the rope and
the grave-digger the coffin--so many feet, so many inches, so
many fractions of an inch for each of the four paces.
One--two--three--four. Each step sounds heavy and hollow over
my head, and the echo of each step sounds hollow within my head
as I count them in suspense and in dread that once, perhaps,
in the endless walk, there may be five steps instead of four
between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate.
But he has measured the space so accurately, so scrupulously,
so minutely that nothing breaks the grave rhythm of the slow,
fantastic march....
* * * * *
All the sounds of the living beings and inanimate things, and
all the noises of the night I have heard in my wistful vigil.
I have heard the moans of him who bewails a thing that is dead
and the sighs of him who tries to smother a thing that will not
die;
I have heard the stifled sobs of the one who weeps with his
head under the coarse blanket, and the whisperings of the one
who prays with his forehead on the hard, cold stone of the
floor;
I have heard him who laughs the shrill, sinister laugh of folly
at the horror rampant on the yellow wall and at the red eyes of
the nightmare glaring through the iron bars;
I have heard in the sudden icy silence him who coughs a dry,
ringing cough, and wished madly that his throat would not
rattle so and that he would not spit on the floor, for no sound
was more atrocious than that of his sputum upon the floor;
I have heard him who swears fearsome oaths which I listen to
in reverence and awe, for they are holier than the virgin's
prayer;
And I have heard, most terrible of all, the silence of two
hundred brains all possessed by one single, relentless,
unforgiving, desperate thought.
All this I have heard in the watchful night,
And the murmur of the wind beyond the walls,
And the tolls of a distant bell,
And the woeful dirge of the rain,
And the remotest echoes of the sorrowful city,
And the terrible beatings, wild beatings, mad beatings of the
One Heart which is nearest to my heart.
All this have I heard in the still night;
But nothing is louder, harder, drearier, mightier, more awful
than the footsteps I hear over my head all night....
* * * * *
All through the night he walks and he thinks. Is it more
frightful because he walks and his footsteps sound hollow over
my head, or because he thinks and speaks not his thoughts?
But does he think? Why should he think? Do I think? I only hear
the footsteps and count them. Four steps and the wall. Four
steps and the gate. But beyond? Beyond? Where goes he beyond
the gate and the wall?
He does not go beyond. His thought breaks there on the iron
gate. Perhaps it breaks like a wave of rage, perhaps like a
sudden flow of hope, but it always returns to beat the wall
like a billow of helplessness and despair.
He walks to and fro within the narrow whirlpit of this ever
storming and furious thought. Only one thought--constant,
fixed, immovable, sinister, without power and without voice.
A thought of madness, frenzy, agony and despair, a hell-brewed
thought, for it is a natural thought. All things natural are
things impossible while there are jails in the world--bread,
work, happiness, peace, love.
But he thinks not of this. As he walks he thinks of the most
superhuman, the most unattainable, the most impossible thing in
the world:
He thinks of a small brass key that turns just half around and
throws open the red iron gate.
* * * * *
That is all the Walker thinks, as he walks throughout the night.
And that is what two hundred minds drowned in the darkness and
the silence of the night think, and that is also what I think.
Wonderful is the supreme wisdom of the jail that makes all
think the same thought. Marvelous is the providence of the law
that equalizes all, even in mind and sentiment. Fallen is the
last barrier of privilege, the aristocracy of the intellect.
The democracy of reason has leveled all the two hundred minds
to the common surface of the same thought.
I, who have never killed, think like the murderer;
I, who have never stolen, reason like the thief;
I think, reason, wish, hope, doubt, wait like the hired
assassin, the embezzler, the forger, the counterfeiter, the
incestuous, the raper, the drunkard, the prostitute, the pimp,
I, I who used to think of love and life and flowers and song
and beauty and the ideal.
A little key, a little key as little as my little finger, a
little key of shining brass.
All my ideas, my thoughts, my dreams are congealed in a little
key of shiny brass.
All my brain, all my soul, all the suddenly surging latent
powers of my deepest life are in the pocket of a white-haired
man dressed in blue.
He is great, powerful, formidable, the man with the white hair,
for he has in his pocket the mighty talisman which makes one
man cry, and one man pray, and one laugh, and one cough, and
one walk, and all keep awake and listen and think the same
maddening thought.
Greater than all men is the man with the white hair and the
small brass key, for no other man in the world could compel two
hundred men to think for so long the same thought. Surely when
the light breaks I will write a hymn unto him which shall hail
him greater than Mohammed and Arbues and Torquemada and Mesmer,
and all the other masters of other men's thoughts. I shall call
him Almighty, for he holds everything of all and of me in a
little brass key in his pocket.
Everything of me he holds but the branding iron of contempt
and the claymore of hatred for the monstrous cabala that can
make the apostle and the murderer, the poet and the procurer,
think of the same gate, the same key and the same exit on the
different sunlit highways of life.
* * * * *
My brother, do not walk any more.
It is wrong to walk on a grave. It is a sacrilege to walk four
steps from the headstone to the foot and four steps from the
foot to the headstone.
If you stop walking, my brother, no longer will this be a
grave, for you will give me back that mind that is chained to
your feet and the right to think my own thoughts.
I implore you, my brother, for I am weary of the long vigil,
weary of counting your steps, and heavy with sleep.
Stop, rest, sleep, my brother, for the dawn is well nigh and it
is not the key alone that can throw open the gate.
BY GEORGE WASHINGTON
(First president of the United States, 1732-1799)
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence--it is force!
Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never
for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
Forcible Feeding
(_From "The Suffragette"_)
BY E. SYLVIA PANKHURST
(English militant leader)
She was then surrounded and held down, whilst the chair was
tilted backwards. She clenched her teeth, but the doctor pulled
her mouth away to form a pouch and the wardress poured in milk
and brandy, some of which trickled in through the crevices.
Later in the day the doctors and wardresses again appeared.
They forced her down on to the bed and held her there. One
of the doctors then produced a tube two yards in length with
a glass junction in the center and a funnel at one end. He
forced the other end of the tube up her nostril, hurting her so
terribly that the matron and two of the wardresses burst into
tears and the second doctor interfered. At last the tube was
pushed down into the stomach. She felt the pain of it to the
end of the breast bone. Then one of the doctors stood upon a
chair holding the funnel end of the tube at arm's length, and
poured food down whilst the wardress and the other doctor all
gripped her tight. She felt as though she would suffocate.
There was a rushing, burning sensation in her head, the drums
of her ears seemed to be bursting. The agony of pain in the
throat and breast bone continued. The thing seemed to go on for
hours. When at last the tube was withdrawn, she felt as though
all the back of her nose and throat were being torn out with it.
Then almost fainting she was carried back to the punishment
cell and put to bed. For hours the pain in the chest, nose and
ears continued and she felt terribly sick and faint. Day after
day the struggle continued; she used no violence, but each
time resisted and was overcome by force of numbers. Often she
vomited during the operation. When the food did not go down
quickly enough the doctor pinched her nose with the tube in it,
causing her even greater pain.
The Subjection of Women
BY JOHN STUART MILL
(See pages 199, 299)
In struggles for political emancipation, everybody knows how
often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by
terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the subject
class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation
combined. In setting up the standard of resistance, a large
number of the leaders, and still more of the followers, must
make an almost complete sacrifice of the pleasures or the
alleviations of their own individual lot. If ever any system of
privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted
on the necks of those who are kept down by it, this has.
The Old Suffragist
BY MARGARET WIDDEMER
(See page 256)
She could have loved--her woman-passions beat
Deeper than theirs, or else she had not known
How to have dropped her heart beneath their feet
A living stepping-stone:
The little hands--did they not clutch her heart?
The guarding arms--was she not very tired?
Was it an easy thing to walk apart,
Unresting, undesired?
She gave away her crown of woman-praise,
Her gentleness and silent girlhood grace
To be a merriment for idle days,
Scorn for the market-place:
She strove for an unvisioned, far-off good,
For one far hope she knew she should not see:
These--not _her_ daughters--crowned with motherhood
And love and beauty--free.
Going to the People
(_From "Memoirs of a Revolutionist"_)
BY PETER KROPOTKIN
(The Russian author and scientist, born 1842, who renounced
the title of prince and spent many years in a dungeon for his
faith, has here told his life story)
"It is bitter, the bread that has been made by slaves," our
poet Nekrasoff wrote. The young generation actually refused
to eat that bread, and to enjoy the riches that had been
accumulated in their fathers' houses by means of servile labor,
whether the laborers were actual serfs or slaves of the present
industrial system.
All Russia read with astonishment, in the indictment which
was produced at the court against Karakozoff and his friends,
that these young men, owners of considerable fortunes, used
to live three or four in the same room, never spending more
than ten roubles (five dollars) apiece a month for all
their needs, and giving at the same time their fortunes for
co-operative associations, co-operative workshops (where they
themselves worked), and the like. Five years later, thousands
and thousands of the Russian youth--the best part of it--were
doing the same. Their watch-word was, "V naród!" (To the
people; be the people.) During the years 1860-65 in nearly
every wealthy family a bitter struggle was going on between
the fathers, who wanted to maintain the old traditions, and
the sons and daughters, who defended their right to dispose
of their life according to their own ideals. Young men left
the military service, the counter and the shop, and flocked
to the university towns. Girls, bred in the most aristocratic
families, rushed penniless to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and
Kieff, eager to learn a profession which would free them
from the domestic yoke, and some day, perhaps, also from the
possible yoke of a husband. After hard and bitter struggles,
many of them won that personal freedom. Now they wanted to
utilize it, not for their own personal enjoyment, but for
carrying to the people the knowledge that had emancipated them.
In every town of Russia, in every quarter of St. Petersburg,
small groups were formed for self-improvement and
self-education; the works of the philosophers, the writings of
the economists, the researches of the young Russian historical
school, were carefully read in these circles, and the reading
was followed by endless discussions. The aim of all that
reading and discussion was to solve the great question which
rose before them: In what way could they be useful to the
masses? Gradually, they came to the idea that the only way was
to settle among the people and to live the people's life. Young
men went into the villages as doctors, doctors' assistants,
teachers, village scribes, even as agricultural laborers,
blacksmiths, woodcutters, and so on, and tried to live there
in closest contact with the peasants. Girls passed teachers'
examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the
hundred into the villages, devoting themselves entirely to the
poorest part of the population....
Here and there, small groups of propagandists had settled
in towns and villages in various capacities. Blacksmiths'
shops and small farms had been started, and young men of the
wealthier classes worked in the shops or on the farms, to be in
daily contact with the toiling masses. At Moscow, a number of
young girls, of rich families, who had studied at the Zurich
university and had started a separate organization, went even
so far as to enter cotton factories, where they worked from
fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and lived in the factory
barracks the miserable life of the Russian factory girls. It
was a grand movement, in which, at the lowest estimate, from
two to three thousand persons took an active part, while twice
or thrice as many sympathizers and supporters helped the active
vanguard in various ways. With a good half of that army our St.
Petersburg circle was in regular correspondence--always, of
course, in cipher.
The literature which could be published in Russia under a
rigorous censorship--the faintest hint of Socialism being
prohibited--was soon found insufficient, and we started a
printing office of our own abroad. Pamphlets for the workers
and the peasants had to be written, and our small "literary
committee," of which I was a member, had its hands full of
work. Serghei wrote a couple of such pamphlets--one in the
Lammenais style, and another containing an exposition of
Socialism in a fairy tale--and both had a wide circulation. The
books and pamphlets which were printed abroad were smuggled
into Russia by thousands, stored at certain spots, and sent
out to the local circles, which distributed them amongst the
peasants and the workers. All this required a vast organization
as well as much traveling about, and a colossal correspondence,
particularly for protecting our helpers and our bookstores from
the police. We had special ciphers for different provincial
circles, and often, after six or seven hours had been passed
in discussing all details, the women, who did not trust to our
accuracy in the cipher correspondence, spent all the night in
covering sheets of paper with cabalistic figures and fractions.
The Revolutionist
BY IVAN TURGÉNEV
(Russian writer, 1818-1883, one of the masters of the novel form. He
was imprisoned and later exiled. In the original the present extract
is a prose poem. The versification is by Arthur Guiterman)
I saw a spacious house. O'erhung with pall,
A narrow doorway pierced the sombre wall.
Within was chill, impenetrable shade;
Without there stood a maid--a Russian maid,
To whom the icy dark sent forth a slow
And hollow-sounding Voice:
"And dost thou know,
When thou hast entered, what awaits thee here?"
"I know," she said, "and knowing do not fear."
"Cold, hunger, hatred, Slander's blighting breath,"
The Voice still chanted, "suffering--and Death?"
"I know," she said.
"Undaunted, wilt thou dare
The sneers of kindred? Art thou steeled to bear
From those whom most thou lovest, spite and scorn?"
"Though Love be paid with Hate, that shall be borne,"
She answered.
"Think! Thy doom may be to die
By thine own hand, with none to fathom why,
Unthanked, unhonored, desolate, alone,
Thy grave unmarked, thy toil, thy love unknown,
And none in days to come shall speak thy name."
She said: "I ask no pity, thanks or fame."
"Art thou prepared for crime?"
She bowed her head:
"Yes, crime, if that shall need," the maiden said.
Now paused the Voice before it asked anew:
"But knowest thou that all thou holdest true
Thy soul may yet deny in bitter pain,
So thou shalt deem thy sacrifice in vain?"
"E'en this I know," she said, "and yet again
I pray thee, let me enter."
"Enter then!"
That hollow Voice replied. She passed the door.
A sable curtain fell--and nothing more.
"A fool!" snarled some one, gnashing. Like a prayer
"A saint!" the whispered answer thrilled the air.
In a Russian Prison
(_From "Memoirs of a Revolutionist"_)
BY PETER KROPOTKIN
(See page 308)
One day in the summer of 1875, in the cell that was next to
mine I distinctly heard the light steps of heeled boots, and
a few minutes later I caught fragments of a conversation.
A feminine voice spoke from the cell, and a deep bass
voice--evidently that of the sentry--grunted something in
reply. Then I recognized the sound of the colonel's spurs,
his rapid steps, his swearing at the sentry, and the click of
the key in the lock. He said something, and a feminine voice
loudly replied: "We did not talk. I only asked him to call the
non-commissioned officer." Then the door was locked, and I
heard the colonel swearing in whispers at the sentry.
So I was alone no more. I had a lady neighbor, who at once
broke down the severe discipline which had hitherto reigned
among the soldiers. From that day the walls of the fortress,
which had been mute during the last fifteen months, became
animated. From all sides I heard knocks with the foot on the
floor: one, two, three, four, ... eleven knocks; twenty-four
knocks, fifteen knocks; then an interruption, followed by three
knocks, and a long succession of thirty-three knocks. Over and
over again these knocks were repeated in the same succession,
until the neighbor would guess at last that they were meant for
"Kto vy?" (Who are you?), the letter v being the third letter
in our alphabet. Thereupon conversation was soon established,
and usually was conducted in the abridged alphabet; that is,
the alphabet being divided into six rows of five letters, each
letter marked by its row and its place in the row.
I discovered with great pleasure that I had at my left my
friend Serdukóff, with whom I could soon talk about everything,
especially when we used our cipher. But intercourse with men
brought its sufferings as well as its joys. Underneath me was
lodged a peasant, whom Serdukóff knew. He talked to him by
means of knocks; and even against my will, often unconsciously
during my work, I followed their conversations. I also spoke
to him. Now, if solitary confinement without any sort of
work is hard for educated men, it is infinitely harder for a
peasant who is accustomed to physical work, and not at all
wont to spend years in reading. Our peasant friend felt quite
miserable, and having been kept for nearly two years in another
prison before he was brought to the fortress--his crime was
that he had listened to Socialists--he was already broken
down. Soon I began to notice, to my terror, that from time to
time his mind wandered. Gradually his thoughts grew more and
more confused, and we two perceived, step by step, day by day,
evidences that his reason was failing, until his talk became
at last that of a lunatic. Frightful noises and wild cries
came next from the lower story; our neighbor was mad, but was
still kept for several months in the casemate before he was
removed to an asylum, from which he never emerged. To witness
the destruction of a man's mind, under such conditions, was
terrible. I am sure it must have contributed to increase the
nervous irritability of my good and true friend Serdukóff.
When, after four years' imprisonment, he was acquitted by the
court and released, he shot himself.
Batuschka
BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
(New England poet and journalist, 1836-1907)
From yonder gilded minaret
Beside the steel-blue Neva set,
I faintly catch, from time to time,
The sweet, aerial midnight chime--
"God save the Tsar!"
Above the ravelins and the moats
Of the white citadel it floats;
And men in dungeons far beneath
Listen, and pray, and gnash their teeth--
"God save the Tsar!"
The soft reiterations sweep
Across the horror of their sleep,
As if some demon in his glee
Were mocking at their misery--
"God save the Tsar!"
In his red palace over there,
Wakeful, he needs must hear the prayer.
How can it drown the broken cries
Wrung from his children's agonies?--
"God save the Tsar!"
Father they called him from of old--
Batuschka!... How his heart is cold!
Wait till a million scourgèd men
Rise in their awful might, and then--
"God save the Tsar!"
Breshkovskaya
BY ELSA BARKER
(Contemporary American poet and novelist. Catherine Breshkovsky,
called "Little Mother" by the Russian peasants, was sentenced to a
long term of exile in Siberia when seventy-seven years of age)
How narrow seems the round of ladies' lives
And ladies' duties in their smiling world,
The day this Titan woman, gray with years,
Goes out across the void to prove her soul!
Brief are the pains of motherhood that end
In motherhood's long joy; but she has borne
The age-long travail of a cause that lies
Still-born at last on History's cold lap.
And yet she rests not; yet she will not drink
The cup of peace held to her parching lips
By smug Dishonor's hand. Nay, forth she fares,
Old and alone, on exile's rocky road--
That well-worn road with snows incarnadined
By blood-drops from her feet long years agone.
Mother of power, my soul goes out to you
As a strong swimmer goes to meet the sea
Upon whose vastness he is like a leaf.
What are the ends and purposes of song,
Save as a bugle at the lips of Life
To sound reveille to a drowsing world
When some great deed is rising like the sun?
Where are those others whom your deeds inspired
To deeds and words that were themselves a deed?
Those who believe in death have gone with death
To the gray crags of immortality;
Those who believed in life have gone with life
To the red halls of spiritual death.
And you? But what is death or life to you?
Only a weapon in the hand of faith
To cleave a way for beings yet unborn
To a far freedom you will never share!
Freedom of body is an empty shell
Wherein men crawl whose souls are held with gyves;
For Freedom is a spirit, and she dwells
As often in a jail as on the hills.
In all the world this day there is no soul
Freer than you, Breshkovsky, as you stand
Facing the future in your narrow cell.
For you are free of self and free of fear,
Those twin-born shades that lie in wait for man
When he steps out upon the wind-blown road
That leads to human greatness and to pain.
Take in your hand once more the pilgrim's staff--
Your delicate hand misshapen from the nights
In Kara's mines; bind on your unbent back
That long has borne the burdens of the race,
The exile's bundle, and upon your feet
Strap the worn sandals of a tireless faith.
You are too great for pity. After you
We send not sobs, but songs; and all our days
We shall walk bravelier knowing where you are.
In Siberia
BY KATHERINE BRESHKOVSKY
(_Reported by Ernest Poole_)
As punishment for my attempt at escape I was sentenced to four
years' hard labor in Kara and to forty blows of the lash. Into
my cell a physician came to see if I were strong enough to live
through the agony. I saw at once that, afraid to flog a woman
"political" without precedent, by this trick of declaring me
too sick to be punished they wished to establish the precedent
of the sentence in order that others might be flogged in the
future. I insisted that I was strong enough, and that the court
had no right to record such a sentence unless they flogged me
at once. The sentence was not carried out.
A few weeks later eight of the men politicals escaped in pairs,
leaving dummies in their places. As the guards never took
more than a hasty look into that noisome cell, they did not
discover the ruse for weeks. Then mounted Cossacks rode out.
The man-hunt spread. Some of the fugitives struggled through
jungles, over mountains and through swamps a thousand miles to
Vladivostok, saw the longed-for American vessels, and there on
the docks were re-captured. All were brought back to Kara.
For this we were all punished. One morning the Cossack guards
entered our cells, seized us, tore off our clothes, and dressed
us in convict suits alive with vermin. That scene cannot be
described. One of us attempted suicide. Taken to an old prison
we were thrown into the "black holes"--foul little stalls
off a low grimy hall which contained two big stoves and two
little windows. Each of us had a stall six feet by five. On
winter nights the stall doors were left open for heat, but in
summer each was locked at night in her own black hole. For
three months we did not use our bunks, but fought with candles
and pails of scalding water, until at last the vermin were
all killed. We had been put on the "black hole diet" of black
bread and water. For three years we never breathed the outside
air. We struggled constantly against the outrages inflicted
on us. After one outrage we lay like a row of dead women for
nine days without touching food, until certain promises were
finally exacted from the warden. This "hunger strike" was used
repeatedly. To thwart it we were often bound hand and foot,
while Cossacks tried to force food down our throats.
Kara grew worse after I left. To hint at what happened I
tell briefly the story of my dear friend Maria, a woman of
broad education and deep refinement. Shortly after my going,
Maria saw Madame Sigida strike an official who had repeatedly
insulted the women. Two days later she watched Sigida die,
moaning and bleeding from the lash; that night she saw three
women commit suicide as a protest to the world; she knew that
twenty men attempted suicide on the night following, and she
determined to double the protest by assassinating the Governor
of Trans-Baikal, who had ordered Sigida's flogging. At this
time Maria was pregnant. Her prison term over, she left her
husband and walked hundreds of miles to the Governor's house
and shot him. She spent three months in a cold, dirty, "secret
cell" not long enough to lie down in or high enough to stand
up in, wearing the cast-off suit of a convict, sleeping on the
bare floor and tormented by vermin. She was then sentenced
to be hanged. She hesitated now whether to save the life of
her unborn child. She knew that if she revealed her condition
her sentence would be changed to imprisonment. She decided to
keep silence and sacrifice her child, that when the execution
was over and her condition was discovered, the effect on
Russia might be still greater. Her condition, however, became
apparent, and she was started off to the Irkutsk prison. It was
midwinter, forty degrees below zero. She walked. She was given
no overcoat and no boots, until some common criminals in the
column gave her theirs. Her child was born dead in prison, and
soon after she too died.
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
BY ALEXANDER BERKMAN
(The life-story of a man who served a fourteen-year sentence
in the Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania for an attempt at
assassination)
(_Introduction by Hutchins Hapgood_)
Not only has this book the interest of the human document, but
it is also a striking proof of the power of the human soul.
Alexander Berkman spent fourteen years in prison, under perhaps
more than commonly harsh and severe conditions. Prison life
tends to destroy the body, weaken the mind and pervert the
character. Berkman consciously struggled with these adverse,
destructive conditions. He took care of his body. He took care
of his mind. He did so strenuously. It was a moral effort. He
felt insane ideas trying to take possession of him. Insanity is
a natural result of prison life. It always tends to come. This
man felt it, consciously struggled against it, and overcame it.
That the prison affected him is true. It always does. But he
saved himself, essentially. Society tried to destroy him, but
failed.
If people will read this book carefully it will tend to do
away with prisons. The public, once vividly conscious of what
prison life is and must be, would not be willing to maintain
prisons. This is the only book that I know which goes deeply
into the corrupting, demoralizing psychology of prison life.
It shows, in picture after picture, sketch after sketch, not
only the obvious brutality, stupidity, ugliness permeating the
institution, but, very touching, it shows the good qualities
and instincts of the human heart perverted, demoralized,
helplessly struggling for life; beautiful tendencies basely
expressing themselves. And the personality of Berkman goes
through it all; idealistic, courageous, uncompromising,
sincere, truthful; not untouched, as I have said, by his
surroundings, but remaining his essential self....
The Russian Nihilistic origin of Berkman, his Anarchistic
experience in America, his attempt on the life of Frick--an
attempt made at a violent industrial crisis, an attempt made as
a result of a sincere if fanatical belief that he was called
on by his destiny to strike a psychological blow for the
oppressed of the community--this part of the book will arouse
extreme disagreement and disapproval of his ideas and his act.
But I see no reason why this, with the rest, should not rather
be regarded as an integral part of a human document, as part
of the record of a life, with its social and psychological
suggestions and explanations. Why not try to understand an
honest man even if he feels called on to kill? There, too, it
may be deeply instructive. There, too, it has its lessons. Read
it not in a combative spirit. Read to understand. Do not read
to agree, of course, but read to see.
_The Dungeon_
In the storeroom I am stripped of my suit of dark gray, and
clad in the hateful stripes. Coatless and shoeless, I am led
through hallways and corridors, down a steep flight of stairs,
and thrown into the dungeon.
* * * * *
Total darkness. The blackness is massive, palpable--I feel its
hand upon my head, my face. I dare not move, lest a misstep
thrust me into the abyss. I hold my hand close to my eyes--I
feel the touch of my lashes upon it, but I cannot see its
outline. Motionless I stand on the spot, devoid of all sense
of direction. The silence is sinister; it seems to me I can
hear it. Only now and then the hasty scrambling of nimble feet
suddenly rends the stillness, and the gnawing of invisible
river rats haunts the fearful solitude.
Slowly the blackness pales. It ebbs and melts; out of the
sombre gray, a wall looms above; the silhouette of a door
rises dimly before me, sloping upward and growing compact and
impenetrable.
The hours drag in unbroken sameness. Not a sound reaches me
from the cell-house. In the maddening quiet and darkness I am
bereft of all consciousness of time, save once a day when the
heavy rattle of keys apprises me of the morning: the dungeon is
unlocked, and the silent guards hand me a slice of bread and a
cup of water. The double doors fall heavily to, the steps grow
fainter and die in the distance, and all is dark again in the
dungeon.
The numbness of death steals upon my soul. The floor is cold
and clammy, the gnawing grows louder and nearer, and I am
filled with dread lest the starving rats attack my bare feet. I
snatch a few unconscious moments leaning against the door; and
then again I pace the cell, striving to keep awake, wondering
whether it be night or day, yearning for the sound of a human
voice.
Utterly forsaken! Cast into the stony bowels of the
underground, the world of man receding, leaving no trace
behind.... Eagerly I strain my ear--only the ceaseless, fearful
gnawing. I clutch the bars in desperation--a hollow echo mocks
the clanking iron. My hands tear violently at the door--"Ho,
there! Any one here?" All is silent. Nameless terrors quiver
in my mind, weaving nightmares of mortal dread and despair.
Fear shapes convulsive thoughts: they rage in wild tempest,
then become calm, and again rush through time and space in a
rapid succession of strangely familiar scenes, wakened in my
slumbering consciousness.
Exhausted and weary I droop against the wall. A slimy creeping
on my face startles me in horror, and again I pace the cell.
I feel cold and hungry. Am I forgotten? Three days must have
passed, and more. Have they forgotten me?...
The clank of keys sends a thrill of joy to my heart. My tomb
will open--oh, to see the light, and breathe the air again....
"Officer, isn't my time up yet?"
"What's your hurry? You've only been here one day."
The doors fall to. Ravenously I devour the bread, so small and
thin, just a bite. Only _one_ day! Despair enfolds me like a
pall. Faint with anguish, I sink to the floor....
_The Sick Line_
One by one the men augment the row; they walk slowly, bent and
coughing, painfully limping down the steep flights. From every
range they come; the old and decrepit, the young consumptives,
the lame and asthmatic, a tottering old negro, an idiotic white
boy. All look withered and dejected,--a ghastly line, palsied
and blear-eyed, blanched in the valley of death.
The rotunda door opens noisily, and the doctor enters,
accompanied by Deputy Warden Graves and Assistant Deputy
Hopkins. Behind them is a prisoner, dressed in dark gray and
carrying a medicine box. Dr. Boyce glances at the long line,
and knits his brows. He looks at his watch, and the frown
deepens. He has much to do. Since the death of the senior
doctor, the young graduate is the sole physician of the big
prison. He must make the rounds of the shops before noon, and
visit the hospital before the Warden or the Deputy drops in.
Mr. Greaves sits down at the officers' desk, near the hall
entrance. The Assistant Deputy, pad in hand, places himself at
the head of the sick line. The doctor leans against the door of
the rotunda, facing the Deputy. The block officers stand within
call, at respectful distances.
"Two-fifty-five!" the Assistant Deputy calls out.
A slender young man leaves the line and approaches the doctor.
He is tall and well featured, the large eyes lustrous in the
pale face. He speaks in a hoarse voice:
"Doctor, there is something the matter with my side. I have
pains, and I cough bad at night, and in the morning----"
"All right," the doctor interrupts, without looking up from his
note book. "Give him some salts," he adds, with a nod to his
assistant.
"Next!" the Deputy calls.
"Will you please excuse me from the shop for a few days?" the
sick prisoner pleads, a tremor in his voice.
The physician glances questioningly at the Deputy. The latter
cries, impatiently, "Next, next man!" striking the desk twice,
in quick succession, with the knuckles of his hand.
"Return to the shop," the doctor says to the prisoner.
"Next," the Deputy calls, spurting a stream of tobacco juice
in the direction of the cuspidor. It strikes sidewise, and
splashes over the foot of the approaching new patient, a young
negro, his neck covered with bulging tumors.
"Number?" the doctor inquires.
"One-thirty-seven, A one-thirty-seven!" the Deputy mumbles, his
head thrown back to receive a fresh handful of "scrap" tobacco.
"Guess Ah's got de big neck, Ah is, Mistah Boyce," the negro
says hoarsely.
"Salts. Return to work. Next!"
"A one-twenty-six!"
A young man with parchment-like face, sere and yellow, walks
painfully from the line.
"Doctor, I seem to be gettin' worser, and I'm afraid----"
"What's the trouble?"
"Pains in the stomach. Gettin' so turrible, I----"
"Give him a plaster. Next!"
"Plaster hell!" the prisoner breaks out in a fury, his face
growing livid. "Look at this, will you?" With a quick motion he
pulls his shirt up to his head. His chest and back are entirely
covered with porous plasters; not an inch of skin is visible.
"Damn your plasters," he cries with sudden sobs, "I ain't got
no more room for plasters. I'm putty near dyin', an' you won't
do nothin' fer me."
The guards pounce upon the man, and drag him into the rotunda.
_The Keepers_
The comparative freedom of the range familiarizes me with the
workings of the institution, and brings me in close contact
with the authorities. The personnel of the guards is of
very inferior character. I find their average intelligence
considerably lower than that of the inmates. Especially does
the element recruited from the police and the detective service
lack sympathy with the unfortunates in their charge. They
are mostly men discharged from city employment because of
habitual drunkenness, or flagrant brutality and corruption.
Their attitude toward the prisoners is summed up in coercion
and suppression. They look upon the men as will-less objects
of iron-handed discipline, exact unquestioning obedience
and absolute submissiveness to peremptory whims, and
harbor personal animosity toward the less pliant. The more
intelligent among the officers scorn inferior duties, and
crave advancement. The authority and remuneration of a Deputy
Wardenship is alluring to them, and every keeper considers
himself the fittest for the vacancy. But the coveted prize
is awarded to the guard most feared by the inmates, and most
subservient to the Warden,--a direct incitement to brutality on
the one hand, to sycophancy on the other....
Daily I behold the machinery at work, grinding and pulverizing,
brutalizing the officers, dehumanizing the inmates. Far removed
from the strife and struggle of the larger world, I yet witness
its miniature replica, more agonizing and merciless within the
walls. A perfected model it is, this prison life, with its
apparent uniformity and dull passivity. But beneath the torpid
surface smolder the fires of being, now crackling faintly under
a dun smothering smoke, now blazing forth with the ruthlessness
of despair. Hidden by the veil of discipline rages the struggle
of fiercely contending wills, and intricate meshes are woven in
the quagmire of darkness and suppression.
Intrigue and counter-plot, violence and corruption, are rampant
in cell-house and shop. The prisoners spy upon each other, and
in turn upon the officers. The latter encourage the trusties in
unearthing the secret doings of the inmates, and the stools
enviously compete with each other in supplying information to
the keepers. Often they deliberately inveigle the trustful
prisoner into a fake plot to escape, help and encourage him in
the preparations, and at the critical moment denounce him to
the authorities. The luckless man is severely punished, usually
remaining in utter ignorance of the intrigue. The _provocateur_
is rewarded with greater liberty and special privileges.
Frequently his treachery proves the stepping-stone to freedom,
aided by the Warden's official recommendation of the "model
prisoner" to the State Board of Pardons.
BY FREDERIC HARRISON
(English philosopher, born 1831)
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never
forgives the preaching of a new gospel.
The Seven That Were Hanged
BY LEONID ANDREYEV
(One of the most famous of the Russian writer's stories, in which he
describes the execution of a group of Terrorists, analyzing their
sensations in their separate cells, and on their journey together to
the foot of the gallows)
The Unknown, surnamed Werner, was a man fatigued by struggle.
He had loved life, the theatre, society, art, literature,
passionately. Endowed with an excellent memory, he spoke
several languages perfectly. He was fond of dress, and had
excellent manners. Of the whole group of terrorists he was
the only one who was able to appear in society without risk of
recognition.
For a long time already, and without his comrades having
noticed it, he had entertained a profound contempt for men.
More of a mathematician than a poet, ecstasy and inspiration
had remained so far things unknown to him; at times he would
look upon himself as a madman seeking to square the circle in
seas of human blood. The enemy against which he daily struggled
could not inspire him with respect; it was nothing but a
compact network of stupidities, treasons, falsehoods, base
deceits....
Werner understood that the execution was not simply death, but
also something more. In any case, he was determined to meet it
calmly, to live until the end as if nothing had happened or
would happen. Only in this way could he repress the profoundest
contempt for the execution and preserve his liberty of mind.
His comrades, although knowing well his cold and haughty
intrepidity, would perhaps not have believed it themselves; but
in the courtroom he thought not of life or of death: he played
in his mind a difficult game of chess, giving it his deepest
and quietest attention. An excellent player, he had begun this
game on the very day of his imprisonment, and he had kept it
up continually. And the verdict that condemned him did not
displace a single piece on the invisible board.
Now he was shrugging his shoulders and feeling his pulse. His
heart beat fast, but tranquilly and regularly, with a sonorous
force. Like a novice thrown into prison for the first time, he
examined attentively the cell, the bolts, the chair screwed to
the wall, and said to himself:
"Why have I such a sensation of joy, of liberty? Yes, of
liberty; I think of to-morrow's execution, and it seems to me
it does not exist. I look at the walls, and they seem to me not
to exist either. And I feel as free as if, instead of being in
prison, I had just come out of another cell in which I had been
confined all my life."
Werner's hands began to tremble, a thing unknown to him. His
thought became more and more vibrant. It seemed to him that
tongues of fire were moving in his head, trying to escape from
his brain to lighten the still obscure distance. Finally the
flame darted forth, and the horizon was brilliantly illuminated.
The vague lassitude that had tortured Werner during the last
two years had disappeared at sight of death; his beautiful
youth came back. It was even something more than beautiful
youth. With the astonishing clearness of mind that sometimes
lifts man to the supreme heights of meditation, Werner saw
suddenly both life and death; and the majesty of this new
spectacle struck him. He seemed to be following a path as
narrow as the edge of a blade, on the crest of the loftiest
mountain. On one side he saw life, and on the other he saw
death; and they were like two seas, sparkling and beautiful,
melting into each other at the horizon in a single infinite
extension.
"What is this, then? What a divine spectacle!" said he slowly.
He arose involuntarily and straightened up, as if in presence
of the Supreme Being. And, annihilating the walls, annihilating
space and time, by the force of his all-penetrating look, he
cast his eyes into the depths of the life that he had quitted.
And life took on a new aspect. He no longer tried, as of old,
to translate into words that he was; moreover, in the whole
range of human language, still so poor and miserly, he found
no words adequate. The paltry, dirty and evil things that
suggested to him contempt and sometimes even disgust at the
sight of men had completely disappeared, just as, to people
rising in a balloon, the mud and filth of the narrow streets
become invisible, and ugliness changes into beauty.
With an unconscious movement Werner walked toward the table and
leaned upon it with his right arm. Haughty and authoritative by
nature, he had never been seen in a prouder, freer, and more
imperious attitude; never had his face worn such a look, never
had he so lifted up his head, for at no previous time had he
been as free and powerful as now, in this prison, on the eve of
execution, at the threshold of death.
In his illuminated eyes men wore a new aspect, an unknown
beauty and charm. He hovered above time, and never had this
humanity, which only the night before was howling like a
wild beast in the forest, appeared to him so young. What had
heretofore seemed to him terrible, unpardonable and base,
became suddenly touching and naïve, just as we cherish in
the child the awkwardness of its behavior, the incoherent
stammerings in which its unconscious genius glimmers, its
laughable errors and blunders, its cruel bruises.
"My dear friends!" ...
What mysterious path had he followed to pass from a feeling of
unlimited and haughty liberty to this passionate and moving
pity? He did not know. Did he really pity his comrades, or did
his tears hide something more passionate, something really
greater? His heart, which had suddenly revived and reblossomed,
could not tell him. Werner wept, and whispered:
"My dear comrades! My dear comrades!"
And in this man who wept, and who smiled through his tears, no
one--not the judges, or his comrades, or himself--would have
recognized the cold and haughty Werner, sceptical and insolent.
A Woman's Execution
BY EDWARD KING
(After the Paris Commune of 1871, the leaders of the people
were led out and slaughtered by thousands. The author of this
poem was an American journalist, 1848-1896)
Sweet-breathed and young,
The people's daughter,
No nerves unstrung,
Going to slaughter!
"Good morning, friends,
You'll love us better,--
Make us amends:
We've burst your fetter!
"How the sun gleams!
(Women are snarling):
Give me your beams,
Liberty's darling!
"Marie's my name;
Christ's mother bore it.
The badge? No shame:
Glad that I wore it!"
(Hair to the waist,
Limbs like a Venus):
Robes are displaced:
"Soldiers, please screen us!
"He at the front?
That is my lover:
Stood all the brunt;--
Now--the fight's over.
"Powder and bread
Gave out together:
Droll to be dead
In this bright weather!
"Jean, boy, we might
Have married in June!
This is the wall? Right!
_Vive la Commune!_"
BY THOMAS JEFFERSON
(See page 228)
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with
the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
These Shifting Scenes
BY CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL
(American editor and Socialist lecturer, born 1860. In the
following paragraphs he has given a newspaper reporter's
reminiscences of the Chicago Anarchists)
After so many years the passions and prejudices of the
half-forgotten struggle ought to have died away, and men may
now speak candidly and without restraint of these things as
they really were. Let me then record my deliberate conviction
that Albert Parsons never entertained the thought of harm
against any human being, for I have seldom met a man of a more
genuine kindness of heart; and if the men he denounced in his
speeches had been in actual danger before him I am certain
he would have been the first to rush to their defense from
physical harm. And while I am on this subject, I may add an
expression of a wonder growing upon me for many years, that
no one has ever paid an adequate tribute to this man. I have
not the slightest sympathy with his doctrines, if he believed
in the violence he seemed sometimes to preach, which I could
never tell. I have lived in the world long enough to know that
the social wrongs that moved him to protest can never be cured
by violence. Say, then, that the man erred grievously; if his
error had been ten times as great it ought to have been wiped
from human recollection by his sacrifice, and there should
remain but the one image of him, leaving his place of safety
and voluntarily entering the prisoner's dock. I doubt if that
magnanimous act has its parallel in history. A hundred men have
been elevated to be national heroes for deeds far less heroic.
The fact that after all these years it is still obscured
and men hesitate to speak about it is marvelous testimony to
the power of the press to produce enduring impressions. Even
the other staggering fact that in the history of American
courts this is the only man that ever came voluntarily and
gave himself up and then was hanged, even that seems to be
eliminated from the little consideration that is ever bestowed
upon a figure of courage so extraordinary.
Similarly I wondered while all these events were passing before
me and wonder now, that no one ever stopped to inquire why such
men as Parsons and Fielden were in revolt. Granted freely that
their idea of the best manner of making a protest was utterly
wrong and impossible; granted that they went not the best way
to work. But what was it that drove them into attack against
the social order as they found it? They and thousands of other
men that stood with them were not bad men, nor depraved, nor
bloodthirsty, nor hard-hearted, nor criminal, nor selfish,
nor crazy. Then what was it that evoked a complaint so bitter
and deep-seated? In all the clamor that filled the press for
the execution of the law and the supremacy of order not one
writer ever stopped to ask this obvious question. No one ever
contemplated the simple fact that men do not band themselves
together to make a protest without the belief that they have
something to protest about, and that in any organized state of
society a widespread protest is something for grave inquiry. I
thought then and I think now that a few words devoted to this
suggestion would have been of far greater service to society
than the insensate demand for blood and more blood with which
the journals of Chicago were mostly filled.
The Eagle that is Forgotten
BY VACHEL LINDSAY
(Poet and minstrel of Springfield, Illinois, born 1879; has tramped
over many parts of the United States with his leaflet of "Rhymes to be
Traded for Bread." He has rediscovered the Homeric chant, and poured
into it the life of the Middle West. The following poem is addressed
to John P. Altgeld, once Governor of Illinois, who, having convinced
himself that the so-called Chicago Anarchists were innocent of the
crime charged against them, pardoned them, and thereby sacrificed his
political career)
Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone.
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
"We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced.
They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced.
They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day,
Now you were ended. They praised you ... and laid you away.
The others, that mourned you in silence and terror and truth,
The widow bereft of her crust, and the boy without youth,
The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor,
That should have remembered forever ... remember no more.
Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call,
The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall?
They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones,
A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons.
The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began,
The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.
Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone.
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
Sleep on, O brave-hearted, O wise man that kindled the flame--
To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name,
To live in mankind, far, far more ... than to live in a name.
Immortality
(_From the Will of Francisco Ferrer_)
(Spanish educator and radical, 1859-1909, executed after the Barcelona
riots by a plot of his clerical enemies)
I also wish my friends to speak little or not at all about
me, because idols are created when men are praised, and this
is very bad for the future of the human race. Acts alone, no
matter by whom committed, ought to be studied, praised, or
blamed. Let them be praised in order that they may be imitated
when they seem to contribute to the common weal; let them be
censured when they are regarded as injurious to the general
well-being, so that they may not to be repeated.
I desire that on no occasion, whether near or remote, nor for
any reason whatsoever, shall demonstrations of a political or
religious character be made before my remains, as I consider
the time devoted to the dead would be better employed in
improving the condition of the living, most of whom stand in
great need of this.
Light Upon Waldheim
BY VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE
(American anarchist writer, 1866-1912. Waldheim is a cemetery in
Chicago, where the executed Anarchists were buried. Upon the monument
is the figure of a woman holding a dying man upon her knees, with one
hand pressing a crown upon his forehead, and with the other drawing a
dagger)
Light upon Waldheim! And the earth is gray;
A bitter wind is driving from the north;
The stone is cold, and strange cold whispers say:
"What do ye here with Death? Go forth! Go forth!"
Is this thy word, O Mother, with stern eyes,
Crowning thy dead with stone-caressing touch?
May we not weep o'er him that martyred lies,
Slain in our name, for that he loved us much?
May we not linger till the day is broad?
Nay, none are stirring in this stinging dawn--
None but poor wretches that make no moan to God:
What use are these, O thou with dagger drawn?
"Go forth, go forth! Stand not to weep for these,
Till, weakened with your weeping, like the snow
Ye melt, dissolving in a coward peace!"
Light upon Waldheim! Brother, let us go!
Assassination
BY AUGUSTE VAILLANT
(From the speech before the French Chamber of Deputies, 1894,
prior to receiving sentence of death for a political crime)
Ah, gentlemen, if the governing classes could go down among
the unfortunates! But no, they prefer to remain deaf to their
appeals. It seems that a fatality impels them, like the royalty
of the eighteenth century, toward the precipice which will
engulf them; for woe be to those who remain deaf to the cries
of the starving, woe to those who, believing themselves of
superior essence, assume the right to exploit those beneath
them! There comes a time when the people no longer reason; they
rise like a hurricane, and rush onward like a torrent. Then we
see bleeding heads impaled on pikes.
Among the exploited, gentlemen, there are two classes of
individuals. Those of one class, not realizing what they
are and what they might be, take life as it comes, believe
that they are born to be slaves, and content themselves with
the little that is given them in exchange for their labor.
But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who study
and, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it
their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others
suffer? Then they throw themselves into the struggle, and make
themselves the bearers of the popular claims.
I know very well that I shall be told that I ought to have
confined myself to speech for the vindication of the people's
claims. But what can you expect! It takes a loud voice to
make the deaf hear. Too long have they answered our voices by
imprisonment, the rope, and rifle-volleys. Make no mistake;
the explosion of my bomb is not only the cry of the rebel
Vaillant, but the cry of an entire class which vindicates its
rights, and which will soon add acts to words. For, be sure of
it, in vain will they pass laws. The ideas of the thinkers will
not halt!
Beyond Human Might
BY BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON
(A drama of modern industry. See page 221. The masters meet in a great
castle, the home of one of them, to plan the destruction of the labor
unions; whereupon a group of conspirators blow up the castle with
dynamite. In the scene following the author gives his reflections upon
this event, in the words of the grief-stricken sister of the chief
conspirator)
HALDEN:--Suppose what has happened should arouse the conscience
of the people?
RACHEL:--Why, that's what he was saying--his very words, I
think--Arouse the conscience of the people! After all these
thousands of years that we have been subject to the influence
of the family and of religion, can it be possible that we
are unable to arouse the people's conscience except by--O ye
silent and exalted witnesses, who hear without answering and
see without reflecting what you see, why don't you show me how
to reach the upward road? For in the midst of all this misery
there is no road that leads upward--nothing but an endless
circling around the same spot, by which I perish!
HALDEN:--Upward means forward.
RACHEL:--But there is no forward in this! We have been thrown
back into sheer barbarism! Once more all faith in a happy
future has been wiped out. Just ask a few questions around
here!... And then the sun, the spring--ever since that dreadful
night--nothing but fine weather, night and day--a stretch of
it the like of which I cannot recall. Is it not as if nature
itself were crying out to us: "Shame! shame! You sprinkle my
leaves with blood, and mingle death-cries with my song. You
darken the air for me with your gruesome complaints." That's
what it is saying to us. "You are soiling the spring for me.
Your diseases and your evil thoughts are crouching in the
woods and on the greenswards. Everywhere a stink of misery is
following you like that of rotting waters." That's what it is
telling us. "Your greed and your envy are a pair of sisters
who have fought each other since they were born"--that's what
it says. "Only my highest mountain peaks, only my sandy wastes
and icy deserts, have not seen those sisters; every other part
of the earth has been filled by them with blood and brutal
bawling. In the midst of eternal glory mankind has invented
Hell and manages to keep it filled. And men, who should stand
for perfection, harbor among them what is worthless and foul."
Chillon
BY LORD BYRON
(Bonnivard, a patriot of Switzerland, was imprisoned with his
sons in Chillon Castle. The story is told in Byron's longer
poem, "The Prisoner of Chillon")
Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art--
For there thy habitation is the heart--
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd--
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom--
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,
And thy sad floor an altar; for 'twas trod
Until his very steps have left a trace
Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God.