"What was it blew? Ah whew, ah whew!"
Three green chipmunks have all turned blue!
The elephant smiles a peaceful smile,
And lifts off a tree-trunk sans haste or guile.
"Seize him, seize him! He's stealing our tree!
We're undone, undone," shriek the chipmunks three.
The elephant calmly upraised his trunk,
And said, "Did I hear a green chipmunk?"
* * * * *
"Ah chee, ah chee, ah chee, ah choo!"
"Chippy, you're blue!" "So're you!" "So're you!"
=Philadelphia=, December, 1895.
GERMINAL
(The last word of Angiolillo.)
Germinal!--The Field of Mars is plowing,
And hard the steel that cuts, and hot the breath
Of the great Oxen, straining flanks and bowing
Beneath his goad, who guides the share of Death.
Germinal!--The Dragon's teeth are sowing,
And stern and white the sower flings the seed
He shall not gather, though full swift the growing;
Straight down Death's furrow treads, and does not heed.
Germinal!--The Helmet Heads are springing
Far up the Field of Mars in gleaming files;
With wild war notes the bursting earth is ringing.
* * * * *
Within his grave the sower sleeps, and smiles.
=London=, October, 1897.
"LIGHT UPON WALDHEIM"
(The figure on the monument over the grave of the Chicago martyrs in
Waldheim Cemetery is a warrior woman, dropping with her left hand a
crown upon the forehead of a fallen man just past his agony, and
with her right drawing a dagger from her bosom.)
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!
=London=, October, 1897.
LOVE'S COMPENSATION
I went before God, and he said,
"What fruit of the life I gave?"
"Father," I said, "It is dead,
And nothing grows on the grave."
Wroth was the Lord and stern:
"Hadst thou not to answer me?
Shall the fruitless root not burn,
And be wasted utterly?"
"Father," I said, "forgive!
For thou knowest what I have done;
That another's life might live
Mine turned to a barren stone."
But the Father of Life sent fire
And burned the root in the grave;
And the pain in my heart is dire
For the thing that I could not save.
For the thing it was laid on me
By the Lord of Life to bring;
Fruit of the ungrown tree
That died for no watering.
Another has gone to God,
And his fruit has pleased Him well;
For he sitteth high, while I--plod
The dry ways down towards hell.
Though thou knowest, thou knowest, Lord,
Whose tears made that fruit's root wet;
Yet thou drivest me forth with a sword,
And thy Guards by the Gate are set.
Thou wilt give me up to the fire,
And none shall deliver me;
For I followed my heart's desire,
And I labored not for thee:
I labored for him thou hast set
On thy right hand, high and fair;
Thou lovest him, Lord; and yet
'Twas my love won Him there.
But this is the thing that hath been,
Hath been since the world began,--
That love against self must sin,
And a woman die for a man.
And this is the thing that shall be,
Shall be till the whole world die,
_Kismet_:--My doom is on me!
Why murmur since I am I?
=Philadelphia=, August, 1898.
THE ROAD BUILDERS
("Who built the beautiful roads?" queried a friend of the present
order, as we walked one day along the macadamised driveway of
Fairmount Park.)
I saw them toiling in the blistering sun,
Their dull, dark faces leaning toward the stone,
Their knotted fingers grasping the rude tools,
Their rounded shoulders narrowing in their chest,
The sweat drops dripping in great painful beads.
I saw one fall, his forehead on the rock,
The helpless hand still clutching at the spade,
The slack mouth full of earth.
And he was dead.
His comrades gently turned his face, until
The fierce sun glittered hard upon his eyes,
Wide open, staring at the cruel sky.
The blood yet ran upon the jagged stone;
But it was ended. He was quite, quite dead:
Driven to death beneath the burning sun,
Driven to death upon the road he built.
He was no "hero," he; a poor, black man,
Taking "the will of God" and asking naught;
Think of him thus, when next your horse's feet
Strike out the flint spark from the gleaming road;
Think that for this, this common thing, The Road,
A human creature died; 'tis a blood gift,
To an o'erreaching world that does not thank.
Ignorant, mean and soulless was he? Well,--
Still human; and you drive upon his corpse.
=Philadelphia=, July 24, 1900.
ANGIOLILLO
We are the souls that crept and cried in the days when they
tortured men;
His was the spirit that walked erect, and met the beast in its den.
Ours are the eyes that were dim with tears for the thing they
shrunk to see;
His was the glance that was crystal keen with the light that
makes men free.
Ours are the hands that were wrung in pain, in helpless pain
and shame;
His was the resolute hand that struck, steady and keen to its aim.
Ours are the lips that quivered with rage, that cursed and prayed
in a breath:
His was the mouth that opened but once to speak from the
throat of Death.
"Assassin, Assassin!" the World cries out, with a shake of its
dotard head;
"Germinal!" rings back the grave where lies the Dead that is
not dead.
"Germinal, Germinal," sings the Wind that is driving before
the Storm;
"Few are the drops that have fallen yet,--scattered, but red and
warm."
"Germinal, Germinal," sing the Fields, where furrows of men
are plowed;
"Ye shall gather a harvest over-rich, when the ear at the full
is bowed."
Springing, springing, at every breath, the Word of invincible
strife,
The word of the Dead, that is calling loud down the battle ranks
of Life!
For these are the Dead that live, though the earth upon them lie:
But the doers of deeds of the Night of the Dead, they are the
Live that die.
=Torresdale, Pa.=, August 1, 1900.
AVE ET VALE
Comrades, what matter the watch-night tells
That a New Year comes or goes?
What to us are the crashing bells
That clang out the Century's close?
What to us is the gala dress?
The whirl of the dancing feet?
The glitter and blare in the laughing press,
And din of the merry street?
Do we not know that our brothers die
In the cold and the dark to-night?
Shelterless faces turned toward the sky
Will not see the New Year's light!
Wandering children, lonely, lost,
Drift away on the human sea,
While the price of their lives in a glass is tossed
And drunk in a revelry!
Ah, know we not in their feasting halls
Where the loud laugh echoes again,
That brick and stone in the mortared walls
Are the bones of murdered men?
Slowly murdered! By day and day,
The beauty and strength are reft,
Till the Man is sapped and sucked away,
And a Human Rind is left!
A Human Rind, with old, thin hair,
And old, thin voice to pray
For alms in the bitter winter air,--
A knife at his heart alway.
And the pure in heart are impure in flesh
For the cost of a little food:
Lo, when the Gleaner of Time shall thresh,
Let these be accounted good.
For these are they who in bitter blame
Eat the bread whose salt is sin;
Whose bosoms are burned with the scarlet shame,
Till their hearts are seared within.
The cowardly jests of a hundred years
Will be thrown where they pass to-night,
Too callous for hate, and too dry for tears,
The saddest of human blight.
Do we forget them, these broken ones,
That our watch to-night is set?
Nay, we smile in the face of the year that comes
_Because we do not forget._
We do not forget the tramp on the track,
Thrust out in the wind-swept waste,
The curses of Man upon his back,
And the curse of God in his face.
The stare in the eyes of the buried man
Face down in the fallen mine;
The despair of the child whose bare feet ran
To tread out the rich man's wine;
The solemn light in the dying gaze
Of the babe at the empty breast,
The wax accusation, the sombre glaze
Of its frozen and rigid rest;
They are all in the smile that we turn to the east
To welcome the Century's dawn;
They are all in our greeting to Night's high priest,
As we bid the Old Year begone.
Begone and have done, and go down and be dead
Deep drowned in your sea of tears!
We smile as you die, for we wait the red
Morn-gleam of a hundred-years
That shall see the end of the age-old wrong,--
The reapers that have not sown,--
The reapers of men with their sickles strong
Who gather, but have not strown.
For the earth shall be his and the fruits thereof
And to him the corn and wine,
Who labors the hills with an even love
And knows not "thine and mine."
And the silk shall be to the hand that weaves,
The pearl to him who dives,
The home to the builder; and all life's sheaves
To the builder of human lives.
And none go blind that another see,
Or die that another live;
And none insult with a charity
That is not theirs to give.
For each of his plenty shall freely share
And take at another's hand:
Equals breathing the Common Air
And toiling the Common Land.
A dream? A vision? Aye, what you will;
Let it be to you as it seems:
Of this Nightmare Real we have our fill;
To-night is for "pleasant dreams."
Dreams that shall waken the hope that sleeps
And knock at each torpid Heart
Till it beat drum taps, and the blood that creeps
With a lion's spring upstart!
For who are we to be bound and drowned
In this river of human blood?
Who are we to lie in a swound,
Half sunk in the river mud?
Are we not they who delve and blast
And hammer and build and burn?
Without us not a nail made fast!
Not a wheel in the world should turn!
Must we, the Giant, await the grace
That is dealt by the puny hand
Of him who sits in the feasting place,
While we, his Blind Jest, stand
Between the pillars? Nay, not so:
Aye, if such thing were true,
Better were Gaza again, to show
What the giant's rage may do!
But yet not this: it were wiser far
To enter the feasting hall
And say to the Masters, "These things are
Not for you alone, but all."
And this shall be in the Century
That opes on our eyes to-night;
So here's to the struggle, if it must be,
And to him who fights the fight.
And here's to the dauntless, jubilant throat
That loud to its Comrade sings,
Till over the earth shrills the mustering note,
And the World Strike's signal rings.
=Philadelphia=, January 1, 1901.
MARSH-BLOOM
(To Gaetano Bresci.)
Requiem, requiem, requiem,
Blood-red blossom of poison stem
Broken for Man,
Swamp-sunk leafage and dungeon bloom,
Seeded bearer of royal doom,
What now is the ban?
What to thee is the island grave?
With desert wind and desolate wave
Will they silence Death?
Can they weight thee now with the heaviest stone?
Can they lay aught on thee with "Be alone,"
That hast conquered breath?
Lo, "it is finished"--a man for a king!
Mark you well who have done this thing:
The flower has roots;
Bitter and rank grow the things of the sea;
Ye shall know what sap ran thick in the tree
When ye pluck its fruits.
Requiem, requiem, requiem,
Sleep on, sleep on, accursed of them
Who work our pain;
A wild Marsh-blossom shall blow again
From a buried root in the slime of men,
On the day of the Great Red Rain.
=Philadelphia=, July, 1901.
WRITTEN--IN--RED[A]
(To Our Living Dead in Mexico's Struggle.)
Written in red their protest stands,
For the Gods of the World to see;
On the dooming wall their bodiless hands
Have blazoned "Upharsin," and flaring brands
Illumine the message: "Seize the lands!
Open the prisons and make men free!"
Flame out the living words of the dead
Written--in--red.
Gods of the World! Their mouths are dumb!
Your guns have spoken and they are dust.
But the shrouded Living, whose hearts were numb,
Have felt the beat of a wakening drum
Within them sounding--the Dead Men's tongue--
Calling: "Smite off the ancient rust!"
Have beheld "Resurrexit," the word of the Dead,
Written--in--red.
Bear it aloft, O roaring flame!
Skyward aloft, where all may see.
Slaves of the World! Our cause is the same;
One is the immemorial shame;
One is the struggle, and in One name--
=Manhood=--we battle to set men free.
"Uncurse us the Land!" burn the words of the Dead,
Written--in--red.
[A] Voltairine de Cleyre's last poem.
ESSAYS
The Dominant Idea
In everything that lives, if one looks searchingly, is limned the shadow
line of an idea--an idea, dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead,
with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment with the
stern, immobile cast of the non-living. Daily we move among these
unyielding shadows, less pierceable, more enduring than granite, with
the blackness of ages in them, dominating living, changing bodies, with
dead, unchanging souls. And we meet, also, living souls dominating dying
bodies--living ideas regnant over decay and death. Do not imagine that I
speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or of shifting Will
is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its clod of earth, as in the
gossamer web of being that floats and swims far over our heads in the
free world of air.
Regnant ideas, everywhere! Did you ever see a dead vine bloom? I have
seen it. Last summer I trained some morning-glory vines up over a
second-story balcony; and every day they blew and curled in the wind,
their white, purple-dashed faces winking at the sun, radiant with
climbing life. Higher every day the green heads crept, carrying their
train of spreading fans waving before the sun-seeking blossoms. Then
all at once some mischance happened,--some cut-worm or some mischievous
child tore one vine off below, the finest and most ambitious one, of
course. In a few hours the leaves hung limp, the sappy stem wilted
and began to wither; in a day it was dead,--all but the top, which
still clung longingly to its support, with bright head lifted. I
mourned a little for the buds that could never open now, and pitied
that proud vine whose work in the world was lost. But the next night
there was a storm, a heavy, driving storm, with beating rain and
blinding lightning. I rose to watch the flashes, and lo! the wonder of
the world! In the blackness of the mid-=Night=, in the fury of wind
and rain, the dead vine had flowered. Five white, moon-faced blossoms
blew gaily round the skeleton vine, shining back triumphant at the red
lightning. I gazed at them in dumb wonder. Dear, dead vine, whose will
had been so strong to bloom that in the hour of its sudden cut-off
from the feeding earth it sent the last sap to its blossoms; and, not
waiting for the morning, brought them forth in storm and flash, as
white night-glories, which should have been the children of the sun.
In the daylight we all came to look at the wonder, marveling much, and
saying, "Surely these must be the last." But every day for three days
the dead vine bloomed; and even a week after, when every leaf was dry
and brown, and so thin you could see through it, one last bud, dwarfed,
weak, a very baby of a blossom, but still white and delicate, with five
purple flecks, like those on the live vine beside it, opened and waved
at the stars, and waited for the early sun. Over death and decay the
Dominant Idea smiled: the vine was in the world to bloom, to bear white
trumpet blossoms dashed with purple; and it held its will beyond death.
Our modern teaching is that ideas are but attendant phenomena, impotent
to determine the actions or relations of life, as the image in the glass
which should say to the body it reflects: "_I_ shall shape _thee_." In
truth we know that directly the body goes from before the mirror, the
transient image is nothingness; but the real body has its being to live,
and will live it, heedless of vanished phantoms of itself, in response
to the ever-shifting pressure of things without it.
It is thus that the so-called Materialist Conception of History, the
modern Socialists, and a positive majority of Anarchists would have us
look upon the world of ideas,--shifting, unreal reflections, having
naught to do in the determination of Man's life, but so many mirror
appearances of certain material relations, wholly powerless to act upon
the course of material things. Mind to them is in itself a blank mirror,
though in fact never wholly blank, because always facing the reality of
the material and bound to reflect some shadow. To-day I am somebody,
to-morrow somebody else, if the scenes have shifted; my Ego is a
gibbering phantom, pirouetting in the glass, gesticulating,
transforming, hourly or momentarily, gleaming with the phosphor light of
a deceptive unreality, melting like the mist upon the hills. Rocks,
fields, woods, streams, houses, goods, flesh, blood, bone, sinew,--these
are realities, with definite parts to play, with essential characters
that abide under all changes; but my Ego does not abide; it is
manufactured afresh with every change of these.
I think this unqualified determinism of the material is a great and
lamentable error in our modern progressive movement; and while I believe
it was a wholesome antidote to the long-continued blunder of Middle Age
theology, viz.: that Mind was an utterly irresponsible entity making
laws of its own after the manner of an Absolute Emperor, without logic,
sequence, or relation, ruler over matter, and its own supreme
determinant, not excepting God (who was himself the same sort of a mind
writ large)--while I do believe that the modern reconception of
Materialism has done a wholesome thing in pricking the bubble of such
conceit and restoring man and his "soul" to its "place in nature," I
nevertheless believe that to this also there is a limit; and that the
absolute sway of Matter is quite as mischievous an error as the
unrelated nature of Mind; even that in its direct action upon personal
conduct, it has the more ill effect of the two. For if the doctrine of
free-will has raised up fanatics and persecutors, who, assuming that men
may be good under all conditions if they merely wish to be so, have
sought to persuade other men's wills with threats, fines, imprisonments,
torture, the spike, the wheel, the axe, the fagot, in order to make them
good and save them against their obdurate wills; if the doctrine of
Spiritualism, the soul supreme, has done this, the doctrine of
Materialistic Determinism has produced shifting, self-excusing,
worthless, parasitical characters, who are _this_ now and _that_ at some
other time, and anything and nothing upon principle. "My conditions have
made me so," they cry, and there is no more to be said; poor
mirror-ghosts! how could they help it! To be sure, the influence of such
a character rarely reaches so far as that of the principled persecutor;
but for every one of the latter, there are a hundred of these easy,
doughy characters, who will fit any baking tin, to whom determinist
self-excusing appeals; so the balance of evil between the two doctrines
is _about_ maintained.
What we need is a true appraisement of the power and rôle of the Idea. I
do not think I am able to give such a true appraisement; I do not think
that any one--even _much_ greater intellects than mine--will be able to
do it for a long time to come. But I am at least able to suggest it, to
show its necessity, to give a rude approximation of it.
And first, against the accepted formula of modern Materialism, "Men
are what circumstances make them," I set the opposing declaration,
"Circumstances are what men make them"; and I contend that both
these things are true up to the point where the combating powers are
equalized, or one is overthrown. In other words, my conception of mind,
or character, is not that it is a powerless reflection of a momentary
condition of stuff and form, but an active modifying agent, reacting
on its environment and transforming circumstances, sometimes greatly,
sometimes, though not often, entirely.
All over the kingdom of life, I have said, one may see dominant ideas
working, if one but trains his eyes to look for them and recognize them.
In the human world there have been many dominant ideas. I cannot
conceive that ever, at any time, the struggle of the body before
dissolution can have been aught but agony. If the reasoning that
insecurity of conditions, the expectation of suffering, are
circumstances which make the soul of man uneasy, shrinking, timid, what
answer will you give to the challenge of old Ragnar Lodbrog, to that
triumphant death-song hurled out, not by one cast to his death in the
heat of battle, but under slow prison torture, bitten by serpents, and
yet singing: "The goddesses of death invite me away--now end I my song.
The hours of my life are run out. I shall smile when I die"? Nor can it
be said that this is an exceptional instance, not to be accounted for by
the usual operation of general law, for old King Lodbrog the Skalder did
only what his fathers did, and his sons and his friends and his enemies,
through long generations; they set the force of a dominant idea, the
idea of the superascendant ego, against the force of torture and of
death, ending life as they wished to end it, with a smile on their lips.
But a few years ago, did we not read how the helpless Kaffirs,
victimized by the English for the contumacy of the Boers, having been
forced to dig the trenches wherein for pleasant sport they were to be
shot, were lined up on the edge, and seeing death facing them, began to
chant barbaric strains of triumph, smiling as they fell? Let us admit
that such exultant defiance was owing to ignorance, to primitive beliefs
in gods and hereafters; but let us admit also that it shows the power of
an idea dominant.
Everywhere in the shells of dead societies, as in the shells of the
sea-slime, we shall see the force of purposive action, of intent
_within_ holding its purpose against obstacles _without_.
I think there is no one in the world who can look upon the steadfast,
far-staring face of an Egyptian carving, or read a description of
Egypt's monuments, or gaze upon the mummied clay of its old dead men,
without feeling that the dominant idea of that people in that age was to
be enduring and to work enduring things, with the immobility of their
great still sky upon them and the stare of the desert in them. One must
feel that whatever other ideas animated them, and expressed themselves
in their lives, this was the dominant idea. _That which was_ must
remain, no matter at what cost, even if it were to break the everlasting
hills: an idea which made the live humanity beneath it, born and
nurtured in the coffins of caste, groan and writhe and gnaw its
bandages, till in the fullness of time it passed away: and still the
granite mould of it stares with empty eyes out across the world, the
stern old memory of the _Thing-that-was_.
I think no one can look upon the marbles wherein Greek genius wrought
the figuring of its soul, without feeling an apprehension that the
things are going to leap and fly; that in a moment one is like to be set
upon by heroes with spears in their hands, by serpents that will coil
around him; to be trodden by horses that may trample and flee; to be
smitten by these gods that have as little of the idea of stone in them
as a dragon-fly, one instant poised upon a wind-swayed petal edge. I
think no one can look upon them without realizing at once that those
figures came out of the boil of life; they seem like rising bubbles
about to float into the air, but beneath them other bubbles rising, and
others, and others,--there will be no end of it. When one's eyes are
upon one group, one feels that behind one, perhaps, a figure is uptoeing
to seize the darts of the air and hurl them on one's head; one must keep
whirling to face the miracle that appears about to be wrought--stone
leaping! And this though nearly every one is minus some of the glory the
old Greek wrought into it so long ago; even the broken stumps of arms
and legs live. And the dominant idea is Activity, and the beauty and
strength of it. Change, swift, ever-circling Change! The making of
things and the casting of them away, as children cast away their toys,
not interested that these shall endure, so that they themselves realize
incessant activity. Full of creative power, what matter if the creature
perished. So there was an endless procession of changing shapes in their
schools, their philosophies, their dramas, their poems, till at last it
wore itself to death. And the marvel passed away from the world. But
still their marbles live to show what manner of thoughts dominated them.
And if we wish to know what master-thought ruled the lives of men when
the mediæval period had had time to ripen it, one has only at this day
to stray into some quaint, out-of-the-way English village, where a
strong old towered Church yet stands in the midst of little
straw-thatched cottages, like a brooding mother-hen surrounded by her
chickens. Everywhere the greatening of God, and the lessening of Man:
the Church so looming, the home so little. The search for the spirit,
for the _enduring_ thing (not the poor endurance of granite which in the
ages crumbles, but the eternal), the eternal,--and contempt for the body
which perishes, manifest in studied uncleanliness, in mortifications of
the flesh, as if the spirit should have spat its scorn upon it.
Such was the dominant idea of that middle age which has been too much
cursed by modernists. For the men who built the castles and the
cathedrals were men of mighty works, though they made no books, and
though their souls spread crippled wings, because of their very
endeavors to soar too high. The spirit of voluntary subordination for
the accomplishment of a great work, which proclaimed the aspiration of
the common soul,--that was the spirit wrought into the cathedral stones;
and it is not wholly to be condemned.
In waking dream, when the shadow-shapes of world-ideas swim before the
vision, one sees the Middle-Age Soul an ill-contorted, half-formless
thing, with dragon wings and a great, dark, tense face, strained sunward
with blind eyes.
If now we look around us to see what idea dominates our own
civilization, I do not know that it is even as attractive as this
piteous monster of the old darkness. The relativity of things has
altered: Man has risen and God has descended. The modern village has
better homes and less pretentious churches. Also the conception of dirt
and disease as much-sought afflictions, the patient suffering of which
is a meet offering to win God's pardon, has given place to the emphatic
promulgation of cleanliness. We have Public School nurses notifying
parents that "pediculosis capitis" is a very contagious and unpleasant
disease; we have cancer associations gathering up such cancers as have
attached themselves to impecunious persons, and carefully experimenting
with a view to cleaning them out of the human race; we have
tuberculosis societies attempting the Herculean labor of clearing the
Augean stables of our modern factories of the deadly bacillus, and they
have got as far as spittoons with water in them in some factories; and
others, and others, and others, which, while not yet overwhelmingly
successful in their avowed purposes, are evidence sufficient that
humanity no longer seeks dirt as a means of grace. We laugh at those old
superstitions, and talk much about exact experimental knowledge. We
endeavor to galvanize the Greek corpse, and pretend that we enjoy
physical culture. We dabble in many things; but the one great real idea
of our age, not copied from any other, not pretended, not raised to life
by any conjuration, is the Much Making of Things,--not the making of
beautiful things, not the joy of spending living energy in creative
work; rather the shameless, merciless driving and over-driving, wasting
and draining of the last bit of energy, only to produce heaps and heaps
of things,--things ugly, things harmful, things useless, and at the best
largely unnecessary. To what end are they produced? Mostly the producer
does not know; still less does he care. But he is possessed with the
idea that he _must_ do it, every one is doing it, and every year the
making of things goes on more and faster; there are mountain ranges of
things made and making, and still men go about desperately seeking to
increase the list of created things, to start fresh heaps and to add to
the existing heaps. And with what agony of body, under what stress and
strain of danger and fear of danger, with what mutilations and maimings
and lamings they struggle on, dashing themselves out against these
rocks of wealth! Verily, if the vision of the Mediæval Soul is painful
in its blind staring and pathetic striving, grotesque in its senseless
tortures, the Soul of the Modern is most amazing with its restless,
nervous eyes, ever searching the corners of the universe, its restless,
nervous hands ever reaching and grasping for some useless toil.
And certainly the presence of things in abundance, things empty and
things vulgar and things absurd, as well as things convenient and
useful, has produced the desire for the possession of things, the
exaltation of the possession of things. Go through the business street
of any city, where the tilted edges of the strata of things are exposed
to gaze, and look at the faces of the people as they pass,--not at the
hungry and smitten ones who fringe the sidewalks and plaint dolefully
for alms, but at the crowd,--and see what idea is written on their
faces. On those of the women, from the ladies of the horse-shows to the
shop girls out of the factory, there is a sickening vanity, a
consciousness of their clothes, as of some jackdaw in borrowed feathers.
Look for the pride and glory of the free, strong, beautiful body,
lithe-moving and powerful. You will not see it. You will see mincing
steps, bodies tilted to show the cut of a skirt, simpering, smirking
faces, with eyes cast about seeking admiration for the gigantic bow of
ribbon in the overdressed hair. In the caustic words of an acquaintance,
to whom I once said, as we walked, "Look at the amount of vanity on all
these women's faces," "No: look at the little bit of womanhood showing
out of all that vanity!"
And on the faces of the men, coarseness! Coarse desires for coarse
things, and lots of them: the stamp is set so unmistakably that "the
wayfarer though a fool need not err therein." Even the frightful anxiety
and restlessness begotten of the creation of all this, is less
distasteful than the abominable expression of lust for the things
created.
Such is the dominant idea of the western world, at least in these our
days. You may see it wherever you look, impressed plainly on things and
on men; very likely, if you look in the glass, you will see it there.
And if some archæologist of a long future shall some day unbury the
bones of our civilization, where ashes or flood shall have entombed it,
he will see this frightful idea stamped on the factory walls he shall
uncover, with their rows and rows of square lightholes, their tons upon
tons of toothed steel, grinning out of the skull of this our life; its
acres of silk and velvet, its square miles of tinsel and shoddy. No
glorious marbles of nymphs and fawns, whose dead images are yet so sweet
that one might wish to kiss them still; no majestic figures of winged
horses, with men's faces and lions' paws casting their colossal
symbolism in a mighty spell forward upon Time, as those old stone
chimeras of Babylon yet do; but meaningless iron giants, of wheels and
teeth, whose secret is forgotten, but whose business was to grind men
up, and spit them out as housefuls of woven stuffs, bazaars of trash,
wherethrough other men might wade. The statues he shall find will bear
no trace of mythic dream or mystic symbol; they will be statues of
merchants and iron-masters and militiamen, in tailored coats and
pantaloons and proper hats and shoes.
But the dominant idea of the age and land does not necessarily mean the
dominant idea of any single life. I doubt not that in those long gone
days, far away by the banks of the still Nile, in the abiding shadow of
the pyramids, under the heavy burden of other men's stolidity, there
went to and fro restless, active, rebel souls who hated all that the
ancient society stood for, and with burning hearts sought to overthrow
it.
I am sure that in the midst of all the agile Greek intellect created,
there were those who went about with downbent eyes, caring nothing for
it all, seeking some higher revelation, willing to abandon the joys of
life, so that they drew near to some distant, unknown perfection their
fellows knew not of. I am certain that in the dark ages, when most men
prayed and cowered, and beat and bruised themselves, and sought
afflictions, like that St. Teresa who said, "Let me suffer, or die,"
there were some, many, who looked on the world as a chance jest, who
despised or pitied their ignorant comrades, and tried to compel the
answers of the universe to their questionings, by the patient, quiet
searching which came to be Modern Science. I am sure there were
hundreds, thousands of them, of whom we have never heard.
And now, to-day, though the Society about us is dominated by
Thing-Worship, and will stand so marked for all time, that is no reason
any single soul should be. Because the one thing seemingly worth doing
to my neighbor, to all my neighbors, is to pursue dollars, that is no
reason I should pursue dollars. Because my neighbors conceive they need
an inordinate heap of carpets, furniture, clocks, china, glass,
tapestries, mirrors, clothes, jewels--and servants to care for them, and
detectives to keep an eye on the servants, judges to try the thieves,
and politicians to appoint the judges, jails to punish the culprits, and
wardens to watch in the jails, and tax collectors to gather support for
the wardens, and fees for the tax collectors, and strong houses to hold
the fees, so that none but the guardians thereof can make off with
them,--and therefore, to keep this host of parasites, need other men to
work for them, and make the fees; because my neighbors want all this, is
that any reason I should devote myself to such a barren folly? and bow
my neck to serve to keep up the gaudy show?
Must we, because the Middle Age was dark and blind and brutal, throw
away the one good thing it wrought into the fibre of Man, that the
inside of a human being was worth more than the outside? that to
conceive a higher thing than oneself and live toward that is the only
way of living worthily? The goal strived for should, and must, be a very
different one from that which led the mediæval fanatics to despise the
body and belabor it with hourly crucifixions. But one can recognize the
claims and the importance of the body without therefore sacrificing
truth, honor, simplicity, and faith, to the vulgar gauds of
body-service, whose very decorations debase the thing they might be
supposed to exalt.
I have said before that the doctrine that men are nothing and
circumstances all, has been, and is, the bane of our modern social
reform movements.
Our youth, themselves animated by the spirit of the old teachers who
believed in the supremacy of ideas, even in the very hour of throwing
away that teaching, look with burning eyes to the social East, and
believe that wonders of revolution are soon to be accomplished. In their
enthusiasm they foreread the gospel of Circumstances to mean that very
soon the pressure of material development must break down the social
system--they give the rotten thing but a few years to last; and then,
they themselves shall witness the transformation, partake in its joys.
The few years pass away and nothing happens; enthusiasm cools. Behold
these same idealists then, successful business men, professionals,
property owners, money lenders, creeping into the social ranks they once
despised, pitifully, contemptibly, at the skirts of some impecunious
personage to whom they have lent money, or done some professional
service gratis; behold them lying, cheating, tricking, flattering,
buying and selling themselves for any frippery, any cheap little
pretense. The Dominant Social Idea has seized them, their lives are
swallowed up in it; and when you ask the reason why, they tell you that
Circumstances compelled them so to do. If you quote their lies to them,
they smile with calm complacency, assure you that when Circumstances
demand lies, lies are a great deal better than truth; that tricks are
sometimes more effective than honest dealing; that flattering and duping
do not matter, if the end to be attained is desirable; and that under
existing "Circumstances" life isn't possible without all this; that it
is going to be possible whenever Circumstances have made truth-telling
easier than lying, but till then a man must look out for himself, by all
means. And so the cancer goes on rotting away the moral fibre, and the
man becomes a lump, a squash, a piece of slippery slime, taking all
shapes and losing all shapes, according to what particular hole or
corner he wishes to glide into, a disgusting embodiment of the moral
bankruptcy begotten by Thing-Worship.
Had he been dominated by a less material conception of life, had his
will not been rotted by the intellectual reasoning of it out of its
existence, by its acceptance of its own nothingness, the unselfish
aspirations of his earlier years would have grown and strengthened by
exercise and habit; and his protest against the time might have been
enduringly written, and to some purpose.
Will it be said that the Pilgrim fathers did not hew, out of the New
England ice and granite, the idea which gathered them together out of
their scattered and obscure English villages, and drove them in their
frail ships over the Atlantic in midwinter, to cut their way against all
opposing forces? Were they not common men, subject to the operation of
common law? Will it be said that Circumstances aided them? When death,
disease, hunger, and cold had done their worst, not one of those
remaining was willing by an _easy lie_ to return to material comfort and
the possibility of long days.
Had our modern social revolutionists the vigorous and undaunted
conception of their own powers that these had, our social movements
would not be such pitiful abortions,--core-rotten even before the
outward flecks appear.
"Give a labor leader a political job, and the system becomes all right,"
laugh our enemies; and they point mockingly to Terence Powderly and his
like; and they quote John Burns, who as soon as _he_ went into
Parliament declared: "The time of the agitator is past; the time of the
legislator has come." "Let an Anarchist marry an heiress, and the
country is safe," they sneer:--and they have the right to sneer. But
would they have that right, could they have it, if our lives were not in
the first instance dominated by more insistent desires than those we
would fain have others think we hold most dear?
It is the old story: "Aim at the stars, and you may hit the top of the
gatepost; but aim at the ground, and you will hit the ground."
It is not to be supposed that any one will attain to the full
realization of what he purposes, even when those purposes do not involve
united action with others; he _will_ fall short; he will in some measure
be overcome by contending or inert opposition. But something he will
attain, if he continues to aim high.
What, then, would I have? you ask. I would have men invest themselves
with the dignity of an aim higher than the chase for wealth; choose a
thing to do in life outside of the making of things, and keep it in
mind,--not for a day, nor a year, but for a lifetime. And then keep
faith with themselves! Not be a light-o'-love, to-day professing this
and to-morrow that, and easily reading oneself out of both whenever it
becomes convenient; not advocating a thing to-day, and to-morrow kissing
its enemies' sleeve, with that weak, coward cry in the mouth,
"Circumstances make me." Take a good look into yourself, and if you love
Things and the power and the plenitude of Things better than you love
your own dignity, human dignity, Oh, say so, say so! Say it to yourself,
and abide by it. But do not blow hot and cold in one breath. Do not try
to be a social reformer and a respected possessor of Things at the same
time. Do not preach the straight and narrow way while going joyously
upon the wide one. _Preach the wide one_, or do not preach at all; but
do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free
society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it. Say honestly, "I
love armchairs better than free men, and pursue them because I choose;
not because circumstances make me. I love hats, large, large hats, with
many feathers and great bows; and I would rather have those hats than
trouble myself about social dreams that will never be accomplished in my
day. The world worships hats, and I wish to worship with them."
But if you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul,
and the free fraternization of men, as the purpose which your life is to
make manifest, then do not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is
strong and will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle
perhaps, the strength will grow. And the foregoing of possessions for
which others barter the last possibility of freedom, will become easy.
At the end of life you may close your eyes, saying: "I have not been
dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine own
allegiance, and served it. I have proved by a lifetime that there is
that in man which saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance,
which in the end conquers and remoulds Circumstance,--the immortal fire
of Individual Will, which is the salvation of the Future."
Let us have Men, Men who will say a word to their souls and keep
it--keep it not when it is easy, but keep it when it is hard--keep it
when the storm roars and there is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder
before, and one's eyes are blinded and one's ears deafened with the war
of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray
dreariness that never lifts. Hold unto the last: that is what it means
to have a Dominant Idea, where the same idea has been worked out by a
whole and unmake Circumstance.
Anarchism
There are two spirits abroad in the world,--the spirit of
Caution, the spirit of Dare, the spirit of Quiescence, the spirit
of Unrest; the spirit of Immobility, the spirit of Change;
the spirit of Hold-fast-to-that-which-you-have, the spirit of
Let-go-and-fly-to-that-which-you-have-not; the spirit of the slow
and steady builder, careful of its labors, loath to part with any
of its achievements, wishful to keep, and unable to discriminate
between what is worth keeping and what is better cast aside, and
the spirit of the inspirational destroyer, fertile in creative
fancies, volatile, careless in its luxuriance of effort, inclined
to cast away the good together with the bad.
Society is a quivering balance, eternally struck afresh, between these
two. Those who look upon Man, as most Anarchists do, as a link in the
chain of evolution, see in these two social tendencies the sum of the
tendencies of individual men, which in common with the tendencies of all
organic life are the result of the action and counteraction of
inheritance and adaptation. Inheritance, continually tending to repeat
what has been, long, long after it is outgrown; adaptation continually
tending to break down forms. The same tendencies under other names are
observed in the inorganic world as well, and anyone who is possessed by
the modern scientific mania for Monism can easily follow out the line
to the vanishing point of human knowledge.
There has been, in fact, a strong inclination to do this among a portion
of the more educated Anarchists, who having been working men first and
Anarchists by reason of their instinctive hatred to the boss, later
became students and, swept away by their undigested science, immediately
conceived that it was necessary to fit their Anarchism to the
revelations of the microscope, else the theory might as well be given
up. I remember with considerable amusement a heated discussion some five
or six years since, wherein doctors and embryo doctors sought for a
justification of Anarchism in the development of the amoeba, while a
fledgling engineer searched for it in mathematical quantities.
Myself at one time asserted very stoutly that no one could be an
Anarchist and believe in God at the same time. Others assert as stoutly
that one cannot accept the spiritualist philosophy and be an Anarchist.
At present I hold with C. L. James, the most learned of American
Anarchists, that one's metaphysical system has very little to do with
the matter. The chain of reasoning which once appeared so conclusive to
me, namely, that Anarchism being a denial of authority over the
individual could not co-exist with a belief in a Supreme Ruler of the
universe, is contradicted in the case of Leo Tolstoy, who comes to the
conclusion that none has a right to rule another just because of his
belief in God, just because he believes that all are equal children of
one father, and therefore none has a right to rule the other. I speak of
him because he is a familiar and notable personage, but there have
frequently been instances where the same idea has been worked out by a
whole sect of believers, especially in the earlier (and persecuted)
stages of their development.
It no longer seems necessary to me, therefore, that one should base his
Anarchism upon any particular world conception; it is a theory of the
relations due to man and comes as an offered solution to the societary
problems arising from the existence of these two tendencies of which I
have spoken. No matter where those tendencies come from, all alike
recognize them as existent; and however interesting the speculation,
however fascinating to lose oneself back, back in the molecular
storm-whirl wherein the figure of man is seen merely as a denser,
fiercer group, a livelier storm centre, moving among others, impinging
upon others, but nowhere separate, nowhere exempt from the same
necessity that acts upon all other centers of force,--it is by no means
necessary in order to reason oneself into Anarchism.
Sufficient are a good observant eye and a reasonably reflecting brain,
for anyone, lettered or unlettered, to recognize the desirability of
Anarchistic aims. This is not to say that increased knowledge will not
confirm and expand one's application of this fundamental concept; (the
beauty of truth is that at every new discovery of fact we find how much
wider and deeper it is than we at first thought it). But it means that
first of all Anarchism is concerned with present conditions, and with
the very plain and common people; and is by no means a complex or
difficult proposition.
Anarchism, alone, apart from any proposed economic reform, is just the
latest reply out of many the past has given, to that daring, breakaway,
volatile, changeful spirit which is never content. The society of which
we are part puts certain oppressions upon us,--oppressions which have
arisen out of the very changes accomplished by this same spirit,
combined with the hard and fast lines of old habits acquired and fixed
before the changes were thought of. Machinery, which as our Socialistic
comrades continually emphasize, has wrought a revolution in Industry, is
the creation of the Dare Spirit; it has fought its way against ancient
customs, privilege, and cowardice at every step, as the history of any
invention would show if traced backward through all its transformations.
And what is the result of it? That a system of working, altogether
appropriate to hand production and capable of generating no great
oppressions while industry remained in that state, has been stretched,
strained to fit production in mass, till we are reaching the bursting
point; once more the spirit of Dare must assert itself--claim new
freedoms, since the old ones are rendered null and void by the present
methods of production.
To speak in detail: in the old days of Master and Man--not so old but
what many of the older workingmen can recall the conditions, the
workshop was a fairly easy-going place where employer and employed
worked together, knew no class feelings, chummed it out of hours, as a
rule were not obliged to rush, and when they were, relied upon the
principle of common interest and friendship (not upon a slave-owner's
power) for overtime assistance. The proportional profit on each man's
labor may even have been in general higher, but the total amount
possible to be undertaken by one employer was relatively so small that
no tremendous aggregations of wealth could arise. To be an employer gave
no man power over another's incomings and outgoings, neither upon his
speech while at work, nor to force him beyond endurance when busy, nor
to subject him to fines and tributes for undesired things, such as
ice-water, dirty spittoons, cups of undrinkable tea and the like; nor to
the unmentionable indecencies of the large factory. The individuality of
the workman was a plainly recognized quantity: his life was his own; he
could not be locked in and driven to death, like a street-car horse, for
the good of the general public and the paramount importance of Society.
With the application of steam-power and the development of Machinery,
came these large groupings of workers, this subdivision of work, which
has made of the employer a man apart, having interests hostile to those
of his employes, living in another circle altogether, knowing nothing of
them but as so many units of power, to be reckoned with as he does his
machines, for the most part despising them, at his very best regarding
them as dependents whom he is bound in some respects to care for, as a
humane man cares for an old horse he cannot use. Such is his relation to
his employes; while to the general public he becomes simply an immense
cuttle-fish with tentacles reaching everywhere,--each tiny
profit-sucking mouth producing no great effect, but in aggregate drawing
up such a body of wealth as makes any declaration of equality or freedom
between him and the worker a thing to laugh at.
The time is come therefore when the spirit of Dare calls loud through
every factory and workshop for a change in the relations of master and
man. There must be some arrangement possible which will preserve the
benefits of the new production and at the same time restore the
individual dignity of the worker,--give back the bold independence of
the old master of his trade, together with such added freedoms as may
properly accrue to him as his special advantage from society's material
developments.
This is the particular message of Anarchism to the worker. It is not an
economic system; it does not come to you with detailed plans of how you,
the workers, are to conduct industry; nor systemized methods of
exchange; nor careful paper organizations of "the administration of
things." It simply calls upon the spirit of individuality to rise up
from its abasement, and hold itself paramount in no matter what economic
reorganization shall come about. Be men first of all, not held in
slavery by the things you make; let your gospel be, "Things for men, not
men for things."
Socialism, economically considered, is a positive proposition for such
reorganization. It is an attempt, in the main, to grasp at those great
new material gains which have been the special creation of the last
forty or fifty years. It has not so much in view the reclamation and
further assertion of the personality of the worker as it has a just
distribution of products.
Now it is perfectly apparent that Anarchy, having to do almost entirely
with the relations of men in their thoughts and feelings, and not with
the positive organization of production and distribution, an Anarchist
needs to supplement his Anarchism by some economic propositions, which
may enable him to put in practical shape to himself and others this
possibility of independent manhood. That will be his test in choosing
any such proposition,--the measure in which individuality is secured. It
is not enough for him that a comfortable ease, a pleasant and
well-ordered routine, shall be secured; free play for the spirit of
change--that is his first demand.
Every Anarchist has this in common with every other Anarchist, that the
economic system must be subservient to this end; no system recommends
itself to him by the mere beauty and smoothness of its working; jealous
of the encroachments of the machine, he looks with fierce suspicion upon
an arithmetic with men for units, a society running in slots and
grooves, with the precision so beautiful to one in whom the love of
order is first, but which only makes him sniff--"Pfaugh! it smells of
machine oil."
There are, accordingly, several economic schools among Anarchists; there
are Anarchist Individualists, Anarchist Mutualists, Anarchist Communists
and Anarchist Socialists. In times past these several schools have
bitterly denounced each other and mutually refused to recognize each
other as Anarchists at all. The more narrow-minded on both sides still
do so; true, they do not consider it is narrow-mindedness, but simply a
firm and solid grasp of the truth, which does not permit of tolerance
towards error. This has been the attitude of the bigot in all ages, and
Anarchism no more than any other new doctrine has escaped its bigots.
Each of these fanatical adherents of either collectivism or
individualism believes that no Anarchism is possible without that
particular economic system as its guarantee, and is of course thoroughly
justified from his own standpoint. With the extension of what Comrade
Brown calls the New Spirit, however, this old narrowness is yielding to
the broader, kindlier and far more reasonable idea, that all these
economic conceptions may be experimented with, and there is nothing
un-Anarchistic about any of them until the element of compulsion enters
and obliges unwilling persons to remain in a community whose economic
arrangements they do not agree to. (When I say "do not agree to" I do
not mean that they have a mere distaste for, or that they think might
well be altered for some other preferable arrangement, but with which,
nevertheless, they quite easily put up, as two persons each living in
the same house and having different tastes in decoration, will submit to
some color of window shade or bit of bric-a-brac which he does not like
so well, but which nevertheless, he cheerfully puts up with for the
satisfaction of being with his friend. I mean serious differences which
in their opinion threaten their essential liberties. I make this
explanation about trifles, because the objections which are raised to
the doctrine that men may live in society freely, almost always
degenerate into trivialities,--such as, "what would you do if two ladies
wanted the same hat?" etc. We do not advocate the abolition of common
sense, and every person of sense is willing to surrender his preferences
at times, provided he is not _compelled_ to at all costs.)
Therefore I say that each group of persons acting socially in freedom
may choose any of the proposed systems, and be just as thorough-going
Anarchists as those who select another. If this standpoint be accepted,
we are rid of those outrageous excommunications which belong properly to
the Church of Rome, and which serve no purpose but to bring us into
deserved contempt with outsiders.
Furthermore, having accepted it from a purely theoretical process of
reasoning, I believe one is then in an attitude of mind to perceive
certain material factors in the problem which account for these
differences in proposed systems, and which even demand such differences,
so long as production is in its present state.
I shall now dwell briefly upon these various propositions, and explain,
as I go along, what the material factors are to which I have just
alluded. Taking the last first, namely, Anarchist Socialism,--its
economic program is the same as that of political Socialism, in its
entirety;--I mean before the working of practical politics has frittered
the Socialism away into a mere list of governmental ameliorations. Such
Anarchist Socialists hold that the State, the Centralized Government,
has been and ever will be the business agent of the property-owning
class; that it is an expression of a certain material condition purely,
and with the passing of that condition the State must also pass; that
Socialism, meaning the complete taking over of all forms of property
from the hands of men as the indivisible possession of Man, brings with
it as a logical, inevitable result the dissolution of the State. They
believe that every individual having an equal claim upon the social
production, the incentive to grabbing and holding being gone, crimes
(which are in nearly all cases the instinctive answer to some antecedent
denial of that claim to one's share) will vanish, and with them the last
excuse for the existence of the State. They do not, as a rule, look
forward to any such transformations in the material aspect of society,
as some of the rest of us do. A Londoner once said to me that he
believed London would keep on growing, the flux and reflux of nations
keep on pouring through its serpentine streets, its hundred thousand
'buses keep on jaunting just the same, and all that tremendous traffic
which fascinates and horrifies continue rolling like a great flood up
and down, up and down, like the sea-sweep,--after the realization of
Anarchism, as it does now. That Londoner's name was John Turner; he
said, on the same occasion, that he believed thoroughly in the economics
of Socialism.
Now this branch of the Anarchist party came out of the old Socialist
party, and originally represented the revolutionary wing of that party,
as opposed to those who took up the notion of using politics. And I
believe the material reason which accounts for their acceptance of that
particular economic scheme is this (of course it applies to all European
Socialists) that the social development of Europe is a thing of
long-continued history; that almost from time immemorial there has been
a recognized class struggle; that no workman living, nor yet his father,
nor his grandfather, nor his great-grandfather has seen the land of
Europe pass in vast blocks from an unclaimed public inheritance into
the hands of an ordinary individual like himself, without a title or any
distinguishing mark above himself, as we in America have seen. The land
and the land-holder have been to him always unapproachable
quantities,--a recognized source of oppression, class, and
class-possession.
Again, the industrial development in town and city--coming as a means of
escape from feudal oppression, but again bringing with it its own
oppressions, also with a long history of warfare behind it, has served
to bind the sense of class fealty upon the common people of the
manufacturing towns; so that blind, stupid, and Church-ridden as they no
doubt are, there is a vague, dull, but very certainly existing feeling
that they must look for help in association together, and regard with
suspicion or indifference any proposition which proposes to help them by
helping their employers. Moreover, Socialism has been an ever recurring
dream through the long story of revolt in Europe; Anarchists, like
others, are born into it. It is not until they pass over seas, and come
in contact with other conditions, breathe the atmosphere of other
thoughts, that they are able to see other possibilities as well.
If I may venture, at this point, a criticism of this position of the
Anarchist Socialist, I would say that the great flaw in this conception
of the State is in supposing it to be of _simple_ origin; the State is
not merely the tool of the governing classes; it has its root far down
in the religious development of human nature; and will not fall apart
merely through the abolition of classes and property. There is other
work to be done. As to the economic program, I shall criticise that,
together with all the other propositions, when I sum up.
Anarchist Communism is a modification, rather an evolution, of
Anarchist Socialism. Most Anarchist Communists, I believe, do look
forward to great changes in the distribution of people upon the earth's
surface through the realization of Anarchism. Most of them agree that
the opening up of the land together with the free use of tools would
lead to a breaking up of these vast communities called cities, and the
formation of smaller groups or communes which shall be held together by
a free recognition of common interests only.
While Socialism looks forward to a further extension of the modern
triumph of Commerce--which is that it has brought the products of the
entire earth to your door-step--free Communism looks upon such a fever
of exportation and importation as an unhealthy development, and expects
rather a more self-reliant development of home resources, doing away
with the mass of supervision required for the systematic conduct of such
world exchange. It appeals to the plain sense of the workers, by
proposing that they who now consider themselves helpless dependents upon
the boss's ability to give them a job, shall constitute themselves
independent producing groups, take the materials, do the work (they do
that now), deposit the products in the warehouses, taking what they want
for themselves, and letting others take the balance. To do this no
government, no employer, no money system is necessary. There is only
necessary a decent regard for one's own and one's fellow-worker's
self-hood. It is not likely, indeed it is devoutly to be hoped, that no
such large aggregations of men as now assemble daily in mills and
factories, will ever come together by mutual desire. (A factory is a
hot-bed for all that is vicious in human nature, and largely because of
its crowding only.)
The notion that men cannot work together unless they have a
driving-master to take a percentage of their product, is contrary both
to good sense and observed fact.
As a rule bosses simply make confusion worse confounded when they
attempt to mix in a workman's snarls, as every mechanic has had
practical demonstration of; and as to social effort, why men worked in
common while they were monkeys yet; if you don't believe it, go and
watch the monkeys. They don't surrender their individual freedom,
either.
In short, the real workmen will make their own regulations, decide when
and where and how things shall be done. It is not necessary that the
projector of an Anarchist Communist society shall say in what manner
separate industries shall be conducted, nor do they presume to. He
simply conjures the spirit of Dare and Do in the plainest workmen--says
to them: "It is you who know how to mine, how to dig, how to cut; you
will know how to organize your work without a dictator; we cannot tell
you, but we have full faith that you will find the way yourselves. You
will never be free men until you acquire that same self-faith."
As to the problem of the exact exchange of equivalents which so frets
the reformers of other schools, to him it does not exist. So there is
enough, who cares? The sources of wealth remain indivisible forever; who
cares if one has a little more or less, so all have enough? Who cares if
something goes to waste? Let it waste. The rotted apple fertilizes the
ground as well as if it had comforted the animal economy first. And,
indeed, you who worry so much about system and order and adjustment of
production to consumption, you waste more human energy in making your
account than the precious calculation is worth. Hence money with all its
retinue of complications and trickeries is abolished.
Small, independent, self-resourceful, freely cooperating communes--this
is the economic ideal which is accepted by most of the Anarchists of the
Old World to-day.
As to the material factor which developed this ideal among Europeans, it
is the recollection and even some still remaining vestiges of the
mediæval village commune--those oases in the great Sahara of human
degradation presented in the history of the Middle Ages, when the
Catholic Church stood triumphant upon Man in the dust. Such is the ideal
glamored with the dead gold of a sun which has set, which gleams through
the pages of Morris and Kropotkin. We in America never knew the village
commune. White Civilization struck our shores in a broad tide-sheet and
swept over the country inclusively; among us was never seen the little
commune growing up from a state of barbarism independently, out of
primary industries, and maintaining itself within itself. There was no
gradual change from the mode of life of the native people to our own;
there was a wiping out and a complete transplantation of the latest form
of European civilization. The idea of the little commune, therefore,
comes instinctively to the Anarchists of Europe,--particularly the
continental ones; with them it is merely the conscious development of a
submerged instinct. With Americans it is an importation.
I believe that most Anarchist Communists avoid the blunder of the
Socialists in regarding the State as the offspring of material
conditions purely, though they lay great stress upon its being the tool
of Property, and contend that in one form or another the State will
exist so long as there is property at all.
I pass to the extreme Individualists,--those who hold to the tradition
of political economy, and are firm in the idea that the system of
employer and employed, buying and selling, banking, and all the other
essential institutions of Commercialism, centering upon private
property, are in themselves good, and are rendered vicious merely by the
interference of the State. Their chief economic propositions are: land
to be held by individuals or companies for such time and in such
allotments as they use only; redistribution to take place as often as
the members of the community shall agree; what constitutes use to be
decided by each community, presumably in town meeting assembled;
disputed cases to be settled by a so-called free jury to be chosen by
lot out of the entire group; members not coinciding in the decisions of
the group to betake themselves to outlying lands not occupied, without
let or hindrance from any one.
Money to represent all staple commodities, to be issued by whomsoever
pleases; naturally, it would come to individuals depositing their
securities with banks and accepting bank notes in return; such bank
notes representing the labor expended in production and being issued in
sufficient quantity, (there being no limit upon any one's starting in
the business, whenever interest began to rise more banks would be
organized, and thus the rate per cent would be constantly checked by
competition), exchange would take place freely, commodities would
circulate, business of all kinds would be stimulated, and, the
government privilege being taken away from inventions, industries would
spring up at every turn, bosses would be hunting men rather than men
bosses, wages would rise to the full measure of the individual
production, and forever remain there. Property, real property, would at
last exist, which it does not at the present day, because no man gets
what he makes.
The charm in this program is that it proposes no sweeping changes in our
daily retinue; it does not bewilder us as more revolutionary
propositions do. Its remedies are self-acting ones; they do not depend
upon conscious efforts of individuals to establish justice and build
harmony; competition in freedom is the great automatic valve which opens
or closes as demands increase or diminish, and all that is necessary is
to let well enough alone and not attempt to assist it.
It is sure that nine Americans in ten who have never heard of any of
these programs before, will listen with far more interest and approval
to this than to the others. The material reason which explains this
attitude of mind is very evident. In this country outside of the Negro
question we have never had the historic division of classes; we are just
making that history now; we have never felt the need of the associative
spirit of workman with workman, because in our society it has been the
individual that did things; the workman of to-day was the employer
to-morrow; vast opportunities lying open to him in the undeveloped
territory, he shouldered his tools and struck out single-handed for
himself. Even now, fiercer and fiercer though the struggle is growing,
tighter and tighter though the workman is getting cornered, the line of
division between class and class is constantly being broken, and the
first motto of the American is "the Lord helps him who helps himself."
Consequently this economic program, whose key-note is "let alone",
appeals strongly to the traditional sympathies and life habits of a
people who have themselves seen an almost unbounded patrimony swept up,
as a gambler sweeps his stakes, by men who played with them at school or
worked with them in one shop a year or ten years before.
This particular branch of the Anarchist party does not accept the
Communist position that Government arises from Property; on the
contrary, they hold Government responsible for the denial of real
property (viz.: to the producer the exclusive possession of what he
has produced). They lay more stress upon its metaphysical origin in
the authority-creating Fear in human nature. Their attack is directed
centrally upon the idea of Authority; thus the material wrongs seem to
flow from the spiritual error (if I may venture the word without fear
of misconstruction), which is precisely the reverse of the Socialistic
view.
Truth lies not "_between_ the two," but in a synthesis of the two
opinions.
Anarchist Mutualism is a modification of the program of Individualism,
laying more emphasis upon organization, co-operation and free federation
of the workers. To these the trade union is the nucleus of the free
co-operative group, which will obviate the necessity of an employer,
issue time-checks to its members, take charge of the finished product,
exchange with different trade groups for their mutual advantage through
the central federation, enable its members to utilize their credit, and
likewise insure them against loss. The mutualist position on the land
question is identical with that of the Individualists, as well as their
understanding of the State.
The material factor which accounts for such differences as there are
between Individualists and Mutualists, is, I think, the fact that the
first originated in the brains of those who, whether workmen or business
men, lived by so-called independent exertion. Josiah Warren, though a
poor man, lived in an Individualist way and made his free-life social
experiment in small country settlements, far removed from the great
organized industries. Tucker also, though a city man, has never had
personal association with such industries. They had never known directly
the oppressions of the large factory, nor mingled with workers'
associations. The Mutualists had; consequently their leaning towards a
greater Communism. Dyer D. Lum spent the greater part of his life in
building up workmen's unions, himself being a hand worker, a book-binder
by trade.
I have now presented the rough skeleton of four different economic
schemes entertained by Anarchists. Remember that the point of agreement
in all is: _no compulsion_. Those who favor one method have no intention
of forcing it upon those who favor another, so long as equal tolerance
is exercised toward themselves.
Remember, also, that none of these schemes is proposed for its own sake,
but because through it, its projectors believe, liberty may be best
secured. Every Anarchist, as an Anarchist, would be perfectly willing to
surrender his own scheme directly, if he saw that another worked better.
For myself, I believe that all these and many more could be
advantageously tried in different localities; I would see the instincts
and habits of the people express themselves in a free choice in every
community; and I am sure that distinct environments would call out
distinct adaptations.
Personally, while I recognize that liberty would be greatly extended
under any of these economies, I frankly confess that none of them
satisfies me.
Socialism and Communism both demand a degree of joint effort and
administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly
consistent with Ideal Anarchism; Individualism and Mutualism, resting
upon property, involve a development of the private policeman not at all
compatible with my notions of freedom.
My ideal would be a condition in which all natural resources would be
forever free to all, and the worker individually able to produce for
himself sufficient for all his vital needs, if he so chose, so that he
need not govern his working or not working by the times and seasons of
his fellows. I think that time may come; but it will only be through the
development of the modes of production and the taste of the people.
Meanwhile we all cry with one voice for the freedom _to try_.
Are these all the aims of Anarchism? They are just the beginning. They
are an outline of what is demanded for the material producer. If as a
worker, you think no further than how to free yourself from the horrible
bondage of capitalism, then that is the measure of Anarchism for you.
But you yourself put the limit there, if there it is put. Immeasurably
deeper, immeasurably higher, dips and soars the soul which has come out
of its casement of custom and cowardice, and dared to claim its Self.
Ah, once to stand unflinchingly on the brink of that dark gulf of
passions and desires, once at last to send a bold, straight-driven gaze
down into the volcanic Me, once, and in that once, and in that once
_forever_, to throw off the command to cover and flee from the knowledge
of that abyss,--nay, to dare it to hiss and seethe if it will, and make
us writhe and shiver with its force! Once and forever to realize that
one is not a bundle of well-regulated little reasons bound up in the
front room of the brain to be sermonized and held in order with
copy-book maxims or moved and stopped by a syllogism, but a bottomless,
bottomless depth of all strange sensations, a rocking sea of feeling
wherever sweep strong storms of unaccountable hate and rage, invisible
contortions of disappointment, low ebbs of meanness, quakings and
shudderings of love that drives to madness and will not be controlled,
hungerings and moanings and sobbing that smite upon the inner ear, now
first bent to listen, as if all the sadness of the sea and the wailing
of the great pine forests of the North had met to weep together there in
that silence audible to you alone. To look down into that, to know the
blackness, the midnight, the dead ages in oneself, to feel the jungle
and the beast within,--and the swamp and the slime, and the desolate
desert of the heart's despair--to see, to know, to feel to the
uttermost,--and then to look at one's fellow, sitting across from one in
the street-car, so decorous, so well got up, so nicely combed and
brushed and oiled and to wonder what lies beneath that commonplace
exterior,--to picture the cavern in him which somewhere far below has a
narrow gallery running into your own--to imagine the pain that racks him
to the finger-tips perhaps while he wears that placid ironed-shirt-front
countenance--to conceive how he too shudders at himself and writhes and
flees from the lava of his heart and aches in his prison-house not
daring to see himself--to draw back respectfully from the Self-gate of
the plainest, most unpromising creature, even from the most debased
criminal, because one knows the nonentity and the criminal in
oneself--to spare all condemnation (how much more trial and sentence)
because one knows the stuff of which man is made and recoils at nothing
since all is in himself,--this is what Anarchism may mean to you. It
means that to me.
And then, to turn cloudward, starward, skyward, and let the dreams rush
over one--no longer awed by outside powers of any order--recognizing
nothing superior to oneself--painting, painting endless pictures,
creating unheard symphonies that sing dream sounds to you alone,
extending sympathies to the dumb brutes as equal brothers, kissing the
flowers as one did when a child, letting oneself go free, go free beyond
the bounds of what _fear_ and _custom_ call the "possible,"--this too
Anarchism may mean to you, if you dare to apply it so. And if you do
some day,--if sitting at your work-bench, you see a vision of surpassing
glory, some picture of that golden time when there shall be no prisons
on the earth, nor hunger, nor houselessness, nor accusation, nor
judgment, and hearts open as printed leaves, and candid as fearlessness,
if then you look across at your low-browed neighbor, who sweats and
smells and curses at his toil,--remember that as you do not know his
depth neither do you know his height. He too might dream if the yoke of
custom and law and dogma were broken from him. Even now you know not
what blind, bound, motionless chrysalis is working there to prepare its
winged thing.
Anarchism means freedom to the soul as to the body,--in every
aspiration, every growth.
A few words as to the methods. In times past Anarchists have excluded
each other on these grounds also; revolutionists contemptuously said
"Quaker" of peace men; "savage Communists" anathematized the Quakers in
return.
This too is passing. I say this: all methods are to the individual
capacity and decision.
There is Tolstoy,--Christian, non-resistant, artist. His method is to
paint pictures of society as it is, to show the brutality of force and
the uselessness of it; to preach the end of government through the
repudiation of all military force. Good! I accept it in its entirety. It
fits his character, it fits his ability. Let us be glad that he works
so.
There is John Most--old, work-worn, with the weight of prison years upon
him,--yet fiercer, fiercer, bitterer in his denunciations of the ruling
class than would require the energy of a dozen younger men to
utter--going down the last hills of life, rousing the consciousness of
wrong among his fellows as he goes. Good! That consciousness must be
awakened. Long may that fiery tongue yet speak.
There is Benjamin Tucker--cool, self-contained, critical,--sending his
fine hard shafts among foes and friends with icy impartiality, hitting
swift and cutting keen,--and ever ready to nail a traitor. Holding to
passive resistance as most effective, ready to change it whenever he
deems it wise. That suits him; in his field he is alone, invaluable.
And there is Peter Kropotkin appealing to the young, and looking with
sweet, warm, eager eyes into every colonizing effort, and hailing with a
child's enthusiasm the uprisings of the workers, and believing in
revolution with his whole soul. Him too we thank.
And there is George Brown preaching peaceable expropriation through the
federated unions of the workers; and this is good. It is his best place;
he is at home there; he can accomplish most in his own chosen field.
And over there in his coffin cell in Italy, lies the man whose method
was to kill a king, and shock the nations into a sudden consciousness of
the hollowness of their law and order. Him too, him and his act, without
reserve I accept, and bend in silent acknowledgement of the strength of
the man.
For there are some whose nature it is to think and plead, and yield and
yet return to the address, and so make headway in the minds of their
fellowmen; and there are others who are stern and still, resolute,
implacable as Judah's dream of God;--and those men strike--strike once
and have ended. But the blow resounds across the world. And as on a
night when the sky is heavy with storm, some sudden great white flare
sheets across it, and every object starts sharply out, so in the flash
of Bresci's pistol shot the whole world for a moment saw the tragic
figure of the Italian people, starved, stunted, crippled, huddled,
degraded, murdered; and at the same moment that their teeth chattered
with fear, they came and asked the Anarchists to explain themselves.
And hundreds of thousands of people read more in those few days than
they had ever read of the idea before.
Ask a method? Do you ask Spring her method? Which is more necessary, the
sunshine or the rain? They are contradictory--yes; they destroy each
other--yes, but from this destruction the flowers result.
Each choose that method which expresses your self-hood best, and condemn
no other man because he expresses his Self otherwise.
Anarchism and American Traditions
American traditions, begotten of religious rebellion, small
self-sustaining communities, isolated conditions, and hard pioneer life,
grew during the colonization period of one hundred and seventy years
from the settling of Jamestown to the outburst of the Revolution. This
was in fact the great constitution-making epoch, the period of charters
guaranteeing more or less of liberty, the general tendency of which is
well described by Wm. Penn in speaking of the charter for Pennsylvania:
"I want to put it out of my power, or that of my successors, to do
mischief."
The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness of these
traditions, their loud assertion, the blow dealt by their indomitable
will against the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely
recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on
remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that
the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.
To the average American of to-day, the Revolution means the series of
battles fought by the patriot army with the armies of England. The
millions of school children who attend our public schools are taught to
draw maps of the siege of Boston and the siege of Yorktown, to know the
general plan of the several campaigns, to quote the number of prisoners
of war surrendered with Burgoyne; they are required to remember the date
when Washington crossed the Delaware on the ice; they are told to
"Remember Paoli," to repeat "Molly Stark's a widow," to call General
Wayne "Mad Anthony Wayne," and to execrate Benedict Arnold; they know
that the Declaration of Independence was signed on the Fourth of July,
1776, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783; and then they think they have
learned the Revolution--blessed be George Washington! They have no idea
why it should have been called a "revolution" instead of the "English
war," or any similar title: it's the name of it, that's all. And
name-worship, both in child and man, has acquired such mastery of them,
that the name "American Revolution" is held sacred, though it means to
them nothing more than successful force, while the name "Revolution"
applied to a further possibility, is a spectre detested and abhorred. In
neither case have they any idea of the content of the word, save that of
armed force. That has already happened, and long happened, which
Jefferson foresaw when he wrote:
"The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become
corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may become persecutor, and
better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the
time for fixing every essential right, on a legal basis, is while our
rulers are honest, ourselves united. _From the conclusion of this war we
shall be going down hill._ It will not then be necessary to resort every
moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and
their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the sole
faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due
respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be
knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier,
till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."
To the men of that time, who voiced the spirit of that time, the battles
that they fought were the least of the Revolution; they were the
incidents of the hour, the things they met and faced as part of the game
they were playing; but the stake they had in view, before, during, and
after the war, the real Revolution, was a change in political
institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a
superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable
agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy (but never so much
trusted as not to be continually watched), for the transaction of such
business as was the common concern, and to set the limits of the common
concern at the line where one man's liberty would encroach upon
another's.
They thus took their starting point for deriving a minimum of government
upon the same sociological ground that the modern Anarchist derives the
no-government theory; viz., that equal liberty is the political ideal.
The difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest
approximation to equal liberty might be best secured by the rule of the
majority in those matters involving united action of any kind (which
rule of the majority they thought it possible to secure by a few simple
arrangements for election), and, on the other hand, the belief that
majority rule is both impossible and undesirable; that any government,
no matter what its forms, will be manipulated by a very small minority,
as the development of the State and United States governments has
strikingly proved; that candidates will loudly profess allegiance to
platforms before elections, which as officials in power they will openly
disregard, to do as they please; and that even if the majority will
could be imposed, it would also be subversive of equal liberty, which
may be best secured by leaving to the voluntary association of those
interested in the management of matters of common concern, without
coercion of the uninterested or the opposed.
Among the fundamental likenesses between the Revolutionary Republicans
and the Anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the
great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can
be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate;
that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the
former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument for general
enslavement. Convinced of the supreme importance of ridding the
municipalities of the institutions of tyranny, the most strenuous
advocates of independence, instead of spending their efforts mainly in
the general Congress, devoted themselves to their home localities,
endeavoring to work out of the minds of their neighbors and
fellow-colonists the institutions of entailed property, of a
State-Church, of a class-divided people, even the institution of African
slavery itself. Though largely unsuccessful, it is to the measure of
success they did achieve that we are indebted for such liberties as we
do retain, and not to the general government. They tried to inculcate
local initiative and independent action. The author of the Declaration
of Independence, who in the fall of '76 declined a re-election to
Congress in order to return to Virginia and do his work in his own local
assembly, in arranging there for public education which he justly
considered a matter of "common concern," said his advocacy of public
schools was not with any "view to take its ordinary branches out of the
hands of private enterprise, which manages _so much better_ the concerns
to which it is equal"; and in endeavoring to make clear the restrictions
of the Constitution upon the functions of the general government, he
likewise said: "Let the general government be reduced to foreign
concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all
other nations, except as to commerce, _which the merchants will manage
the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves_, and
the general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and
a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few
servants." This then was the American tradition, that private enterprise
manages better all that to which it is equal. Anarchism declares that
private enterprise, whether individual or co-operative, is equal to all
the undertakings of society. And it quotes the particular two instances,
Education and Commerce, which the governments of the States and of the
United States have undertaken to manage and regulate, as the very two
which in operation have done more to destroy American freedom and
equality, to warp and distort American tradition, to make of government
a mighty engine of tyranny, than any other cause, save the unforeseen
developments of Manufacture.
It was the intention of the Revolutionists to establish a system of
common education, which should make the teaching of history one of its
principal branches; not with the intent of burdening the memories of our
youth with the dates of battles or the speeches of generals, nor to make
of the Boston Tea Party Indians the one sacrosanct mob in all history,
to be revered but never on any account to be imitated, but with the
intent that every American should know to what conditions the masses of
people had been brought by the operation of certain institutions, by
what means they had wrung out their liberties, and how those liberties
had again and again been filched from them by the use of governmental
force, fraud, and privilege. Not to breed security, laudation,
complacent indolence, passive acquiescence in the acts of a government
protected by the label "home-made," but to beget a wakeful jealousy, a
never-ending watchfulness of rulers, a determination to squelch every
attempt of those entrusted with power to encroach upon the sphere of
individual action--this was the prime motive of the revolutionists in
endeavoring to provide for common education.
"Confidence," said the revolutionists who adopted the Kentucky
Resolutions, "is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is
founded in jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy, not confidence,
which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are
obliged to trust with power; our Constitution has accordingly fixed the
limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go. * * * In
questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind
him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
These resolutions were especially applied to the passage of the Alien
laws by the monarchist party during John Adams' administration, and were
an indignant call from the State of Kentucky to repudiate the right of
the general government to assume undelegated powers, for, said they, to
accept these laws would be "to be bound by laws made, not with our
consent, but by others against our consent--that is, to surrender the
form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its
powers from its own will, and not from our authority." Resolutions
identical in spirit were also passed by Virginia, the following month;
in those days the States still considered themselves supreme, the
general government subordinate.
To inculcate this proud spirit of the supremacy of the people over their
governors was to be the purpose of public education! Pick up to-day any
common school history, and see how much of this spirit you will find
therein. On the contrary, from cover to cover you will find nothing but
the cheapest sort of patriotism, the inculcation of the most
unquestioning acquiescence in the deeds of government, a lullaby of
rest, security, confidence,--the doctrine that the Law can do no wrong,
a Te Deum in praise of the continuous encroachments of the powers of the
general government upon the reserved rights of the States, shameless
falsification of all acts of rebellion, to put the government in the
right and the rebels in the wrong, pyrotechnic glorifications of union,
power, and force, and a complete ignoring of the essential liberties to
maintain which was the purpose of the revolutionists. The anti-Anarchist
law of post-McKinley passage, a much worse law than the Alien and
Sedition acts which roused the wrath of Kentucky and Virginia to the
point of threatened rebellion, is exalted as a wise provision of our
All-Seeing Father in Washington.
Such is the spirit of government-provided schools. Ask any child what he
knows about Shays's rebellion, and he will answer, "Oh, some of the
farmers couldn't pay their taxes, and Shays led a rebellion against the
court-house at Worcester, so they could burn up the deeds; and when
Washington heard of it he sent over an army quick and taught 'em a good
lesson"--"And what was the result of it?" "The result? Why--why--the
result was--Oh yes, I remember--the result was they saw the need of a
strong federal government to collect the taxes and pay the debts." Ask
if he knows what was said on the other side of the story, ask if he
knows that the men who had given their goods and their health and their
strength for the freeing of the country now found themselves cast into
prison for debt, sick, disabled, and poor, facing a new tyranny for the
old; that their demand was that the land should become the free communal
possession of those who wished to work it, not subject to tribute, and
the child will answer "No." Ask him if he ever read Jefferson's letter
to Madison about it, in which he says:
"Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable.
1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under government wherein
the will of every one has a just influence; as is the case in England in
a slight degree, and in our States in a great one. 3. Under government
of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the
other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence in these
last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is
a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best.
But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population.
The second state has a great deal of good in it.... It has its evils,
too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject....
But even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of
government, and nourishes a general attention to public affairs. I hold
that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing."
Or to another correspondent: "God forbid that we should ever be twenty
years without such a rebellion!... What country can preserve its
liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that the people
preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take up arms.... The tree of
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots
and tyrants. It is its natural manure." Ask any school child if he was
ever taught that the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of
the great founders of the common school, said these things, and he will
look at you with open mouth and unbelieving eyes. Ask him if he ever
heard that the man who sounded the bugle note in the darkest hour of the
Crisis, who roused the courage of the soldiers when Washington saw only
mutiny and despair ahead, ask him if he knows that this man also wrote,
"Government at best is a necessary evil, at worst an intolerable one,"
and if he is a little better informed than the average he will answer,
"Oh well, _he_ was an infidel!" Catechize him about the merits of the
Constitution which he has learned to repeat like a poll-parrot, and you
will find his chief conception is not of the powers withheld from
Congress, but of the powers granted.
Such are the fruits of government schools. We, the Anarchists, point to
them and say: If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty
taught, let them never intrust that instruction to any government; for
the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution
existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching
whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat. As the fathers said of
the governments of Europe, so say we of this government also after a
century and a quarter of independence: "The blood of the people has
become its inheritance, and those who fatten on it will not relinquish
it easily."
Public education, having to do with the intellect and spirit of a
people, is probably the most subtle and far-reaching engine for molding
the course of a nation; but commerce, dealing as it does with material
things and producing immediate effects, was the force that bore down
soonest upon the paper barriers of constitutional restriction, and
shaped the government to its requirements. Here, indeed, we arrive at
the point where we, looking over the hundred and twenty-five years of
independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the
revolutionary republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was so because of
(1) the essence of government itself; (2) the essence of human nature;
(3) the essence of Commerce and Manufacture.
Of the essence of government, I have already said, it is a thing apart,
developing its own interests at the expense of what opposes it; all
attempts to make it anything else fail. In this Anarchists agree with
the traditional enemies of the Revolution, the monarchists, federalists,
strong government believers, the Roosevelts of to-day, the Jays,
Marshalls, and Hamiltons of then,--that Hamilton, who, as Secretary of
the Treasury, devised a financial system of which we are the unlucky
heritors, and whose objects were twofold: To puzzle the people and make
public finance obscure to those that paid for it; to serve as a machine
for corrupting the legislatures; "for he avowed the opinion that man
could be governed by two motives only, force or interest;" force being
then out of the question, he laid hold of interest, the greed of the
legislators, to set going an association of persons having an entirely
separate welfare from the welfare of their electors, bound together by
mutual corruption and mutual desire for plunder. The Anarchist agrees
that Hamilton was logical, and understood the core of government; the
difference is, that while strong governmentalists believe this is
necessary and desirable, we choose the opposite conclusion, NO
GOVERNMENT WHATEVER.
As to the essence of human nature, what our national experience has made
plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition
is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied: we have
gone down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed in "mere
money-getting." The desire for material ease long ago vanquished the
spirit of '76. What was that spirit? The spirit that animated the people
of Virginia, of the Carolinas, of Massachusetts, of New York, when they
refused to import goods from England; when they preferred (and stood by
it) to wear coarse homespun cloth, to drink the brew of their own
growths, to fit their appetites to the home supply, rather than submit
to the taxation of the imperial ministry. Even within the lifetime of
the revolutionists the spirit decayed. The love of material ease has
been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than
the love of liberty. Nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a
thousand are more interested in the cut of a dress than in the
independence of their sex; nine hundred and nine-nine men out of a
thousand are more interested in drinking a glass of beer than in
questioning the tax that is laid on it; how many children are not
willing to trade the liberty to play for the promise of a new cap or a
new dress? This it is which begets the complicated mechanism of society;
this it is which, by multiplying the concerns of government, multiplies
the strength of government and the corresponding weakness of the people;
this it is which begets indifference to public concern, thus making the
corruption of government easy.
As to the essence of Commerce and Manufacture, it is this: to establish
bonds between every corner of the earth's surface and every other
corner, to multiply the needs of mankind, and the desire for material
possession and enjoyment.
The American tradition was the isolation of the States as far as
possible. Said they: We have won our liberties by hard sacrifice and
struggle unto death. We wish now to be let alone and to let others
alone, that our principles may have time for trial; that we may become
accustomed to the exercise of our rights; that we may be kept free from
the contaminating influence of European gauds, pagents, distinctions. So
richly did they esteem the absence of these that they could in all
fervor write: "We shall see multiplied instances of Europeans coming to
America, but no man living will ever see an instance of an American
removing to settle in Europe, and continuing there." Alas! In less than
a hundred years the highest aim of a "Daughter of the Revolution" was,
and is, to buy a castle, a title, and a rotten lord, with the money
wrung from American servitude! And the commercial interests of America
are seeking a world-empire!
In the earlier days of the revolt and subsequent independence, it
appeared that the "manifest destiny" of America was to be an
agricultural people, exchanging food stuffs and raw materials for
manufactured articles. And in those days it was written: "We shall be
virtuous as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be
the case as long as there remain vacant lands in any part of America.
When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we
shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they
do there." Which we are doing, because of the inevitable development of
Commerce and Manufacture, and the concomitant development of strong
government. And the parallel prophecy is likewise fulfilled: "If ever
this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one
of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a
wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface." There is not upon the
face of the earth to-day a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt
as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel,
more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none so utterly venal.
And yet even in the very days of the prophets, even with their own
consent, the first concession to this later tyranny was made. It was
made when the Constitution was made; and the Constitution was made
chiefly because of the demands of Commerce. Thus it was at the outset a
merchant's machine, which the other interests of the country, the land
and labor interests, even then foreboded would destroy their liberties.
In vain their jealousy of its central power made them enact the first
twelve amendments.
In vain they endeavored to set bounds over which the federal power dare
not trench. In vain they enacted into general law the freedom of speech,
of the press, of assemblage and petition. All of these things we see
ridden rough-shod upon every day, and have so seen with more or less
intermission since the beginning of the nineteenth century. At this day,
every police lieutenant considers himself, and rightly so, as more
powerful than the General Law of the Union; and that one who told Robert
Hunter that he held in his fist something stronger than the
Constitution, was perfectly correct. The right of assemblage is an
American tradition which has gone out of fashion; the police club is now
the mode. And it is so in virtue of the people's indifference to
liberty, and the steady progress of constitutional interpretation
towards the substance of imperial government.
It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to
liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It
is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations.
It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody
else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do
it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.
It is American tradition that the financial affairs of a nation should
be transacted on the same principles of simple honesty that an
individual conducts his own business; viz., that debt is a bad thing,
and a man's first surplus earnings should be applied to his debts; that
offices and office-holders should be few. It is American practice that
the general government should always have millions of debt, even if a
panic or a war has to be forced to prevent its being paid off; and as to
the application of its income, office-holders come first. And within the
last administration it is reported that 99,000 offices have been
created at an annual expense of $63,000,000. Shades of Jefferson! "How
are vacancies to be obtained? Those by deaths are few; by resignation
none." Roosevelt cuts the knot by making 99,000 new ones! And few will
die,--and none resign. They will beget sons and daughters, and Taft will
have to create 99,000 more! Verily, a simple and a serviceable thing is
our general government.
It is American tradition that the Judiciary shall act as a check upon
the impetuosity of Legislatures, should these attempt to pass the bounds
of constitutional limitation. It is American practice that the Judiciary
justifies every law which trenches on the liberties of the people and
nullifies every act of the Legislature by which the people seek to
regain some measure of their freedom. Again, in the words of Jefferson:
"The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary,
which they may twist and shape in any form they please." Truly, if the
men who fought the good fight for the triumph of simple, honest, free
life in that day, were now to look upon the scene of their labors, they
would cry out together with him who said: "I regret that I am now to die
in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation
of '76 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to
be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and
that my only consolation is to be that I shall not live to see it."
And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of
republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our
early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that
they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to
compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be "a
necessary evil", and the moment the compromise was made, the whole
misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments
which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the
free are struck.
Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will
be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be
free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not
mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define
freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every
man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper
declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to
exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for
tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of
any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon
sleeping men.