Sometimes, even now as I look upon you, it is as if the bodies that I

see were as transparent bubbles wherethrough the red blood boils and

flows, a turbulent stream churning and tossing and leaping, and behind

us and our generation, far, far back, endlessly backwards, where all the

bubbles are broken and not a ripple remains, the silent pouring of the

Great Red River, the unfathomable River,--backwards through the unbroken

forest and the untilled plain, backwards through the forgotten world of

savagery and animal life, back somewhere to its dark sources in deep Sea

and old Night, the rushing River of Blood--no fancy--real, tangible

blood, the blood that hurries in your veins while I speak, bearing with

it the curses and the blessings of the Past. Through what infinite

shadows has that river rolled! Through what desolate wastes has it not

spread its ooze! Through what desperate passages has it been forced!

What strength, what invincible strength is in that hot stream! You are

just the bubble on its crest; where will the current fling you ere you

die? At what moment will the fierce impurities borne from its somber and

tenebrous past be hurled up in you? Shall you then cry out for

punishment if they are hurled up in another? if, flung against the

merciless rocks of the channel, while you swim easily in the midstream,

they fall back and hurt other bubbles?

Can you not feel that

"Men are the heart-beats of Man, the plumes that feather his

wings,

Storm-worn since being began with the wind and the thunder

of things.

Things are cruel and blind; their strength detains and deforms.

And the wearying wings of the mind still beat up the stream

of their storms.

Still, as one swimming up-stream, they strike out blind in the

blast,

In thunder of vision and dream, and lightning of future and

past.

We are baffled and caught in the current and bruised upon

edges of shoals:

As weeds or as reeds in the torrent of things are the wind-shaken

souls.

Spirit by spirit goes under, a foam-bell's bubble of breath,

That blows and opens asunder and blurs not the mirror of

Death."

Is it not enough that "things are cruel and blind"? Must we also be

cruel and blind? When the whole thing amounts to so little at the most,

shall we embitter it more, and crush and stifle what must so soon be

crushed and stifled anyhow? Can we not, knowing what remnants of things

dead and drowned are floating through us, haunting our brains with

specters of old deeds and scenes of violence, can we not learn to pardon

our brother to whom the specters are more real, upon whom greater stress

was laid? Can we not, recalling all the evil things that we have done,

or left undone only because some scarcely perceptible weight struck down

the balance, or because some kindly word came to us in the midst of our

bitterness and showed that not all was hateful in the world; can we not

understand him for whom the balance was not struck down, the kind word

unspoken? Believe me, forgiveness is better than wrath,--better for the

wrong-doer, who will be touched and regenerated by it, and better for

you. And you are wrong if you think it is hard: it is easy, far easier

than to hate. It may sound like a paradox, but the greater the injury

the easier the pardon.

Let us have done with this savage idea of punishment, which is without

wisdom. Let us work for the freedom of man from the oppressions which

make criminals, and for the enlightened treatment of all the sick. And

though we may never see the fruit of it, we may rest assured that the

great tide of thought is setting our way, and that

"While the tired wave, vainly breaking,

Seems here no painful inch to gain,

Far back, through creeks and inlets making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main."

In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation

The light is pleasant, is it not, my friends? It is good to look into

each other's faces, to see the hands that clasp our own, to read the

eyes that search our thoughts, to know what manner of lips give

utterance to our pleasant greetings. It is good to be able to wink

defiance at the Night, the cold, unseeing Night. How weird, how

gruesome, how chilly it would be if I stood here in blackness, a shadow

addressing shadows, in a house of blindness! Yet each would know that he

was not alone; yet might we stretch hands and touch each other, and feel

the warmth of human presence near. Yet might a sympathetic voice ring

thro' the darkness, quickening the dragging moments.--The lonely

prisoners in the cells of Blackwell's Island have neither light nor

sound! The short day hurries across the sky, the short day still more

shortened in the gloomy walls. The long chill night creeps up so early,

weaving its sombre curtain before the imprisoned eyes. And thro' the

curtain comes no sympathizing voice, beyond the curtain lies the prison

silence, beyond that the cheerless, uncommunicating land, and still

beyond the icy, fretting river, black and menacing, ready to drown. A

wall of night, a wall of stone, a wall of water! Thus has the great

State of New York answered =Emma Goldman=; thus have the classes replied

to the masses; thus do the rich respond to the poor; thus does the

Institution of Property give its ultimatum to Hunger!

"Give us work," said =Emma Goldman=; "if you will not give us work, then

give us bread; if you do not give us either work or bread, then we shall

take bread." It wasn't a very wise remark to make to the State of New

York, that is--Wealth and its watch-dogs, the Police. But I fear me much

that the apostles of liberty, the fore-runners of revolt, have never

been very wise. There is a record of a seditious person, who once upon a

time went about with a few despised followers in Palestine, taking corn

out of other people's corn-fields, (on the Sabbath day, too). That same

person, when he wished to ride into Jerusalem told his disciples to go

forward to where they would find a young colt tied, to unloose it and

bring it to him, and if any one interfered or said anything to them,

were to say: "My master hath need of it." That same person said: "Give

to him that asketh of thee, and from him that taketh away thy goods ask

them not back again." That same person once stood before the hungry

multitudes of Galilee and taught them, saying: "The Scribes and the

Pharisees sit in Moses' seat; therefore whatever they bid you observe,

that observe and do. But do not ye after their works, for they say, and

do not. For they bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay

them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one

of their fingers. But all their works they do to be seen of men; they

make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their

garments: and love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in

the synagogues, and greeting in the markets, and to be called of men,

'Rabbi, Rabbi.'" And turning to the Scribes and the Pharisees, he

continued: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye

devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers: therefore

shall ye receive the greater damnation. Woe unto you Scribes and

Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin,

and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgement, and mercy,

and faith: these ought ye to have done and not left the other undone. Ye

blind guides, that strain at a gnat and swallow a camel! Woe unto you,

Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the

cup and platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. Woe

unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited

sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but within are full

of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so ye outwardly appear

righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because ye build the

tombs of the prophets and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous; and

say 'If we had been in the days of our fathers we would not have been

partakers with them in the blood of the prophets'. Wherefore ye be

witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the children of them which killed

the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers! Ye serpents!

Ye generation of vipers! How can ye escape the damnation of hell!"

Yes; these are the words of the outlaw who is alleged to form the

foundation stone of modern civilization, to the authorities of his day.

Hypocrites, extortionists, doers of iniquity, robbers of the poor,

blood-partakers, serpents, vipers, fit for hell!

It wasn't a very wise speech, from beginning to end. Perhaps he knew it

when he stood before Pilate to receive his sentence, when he bore his

heavy crucifix up Calvary, when nailed upon it, stretched in agony, he

cried: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!"

No, it wasn't wise--but it was very grand.

This grand, foolish person, this beggar-tramp, this thief who justified

the action of hunger, this man who set the Right of Property beneath his

foot, this Individual who defied the State, do you know why he was so

feared and hated, and punished? Because, as it is said in the record,

"the common people heard him gladly"; and the accusation before Pontius

Pilate was, "we found this fellow perverting the whole nation. He

stirreth up the people, teaching throughout all Jewry."

Ah, the dreaded "common people"!

When Cardinal Manning wrote: "Necessity knows no law, and a starving

man has a natural right to a share of his neighbor's bread," who

thought of arresting Cardinal Manning? His was a carefully written

article in the _Fortnightly Review_. Who read it? Not the people who

needed bread. Without food in their stomachs, they had not fifty cents

to spend for a magazine. It was not the voice of the people themselves

asserting their rights. No one for one instant imagined that Cardinal

Manning would put himself at the head of ten thousand hungry men to

loot the bakeries of London. It was a piece of ethical hair-splitting

to be discussed in after-dinner speeches by the wine-muddled gentlemen

who think themselves most competent to consider such subjects when

their dress-coats are spoiled by the vomit of gluttony and drunkenness.

But when =Emma Goldman= stood in Union Square and said, "If they do

not give you work or bread, take bread," the common people heard her

gladly; and as of old the wandering carpenter of Nazareth addressed

his own class, teaching throughout all Jewry, stirring up the people

against the authorities, so the dressmaker of New York addressing the

unemployed working-people of New York was the menace of the depths

of society, crying in its own tongue. The authorities heard and were

afraid: therefore the triple wall.

It is the old, old story. When Thomas Paine, one hundred years ago,

published the first part of "The Rights of Man," the part in which he

discusses principles only, the edition was a high-priced one, reaching

comparatively few readers. It created only a literary furore. When the

second part appeared, the part in which he treats of the application of

principles, in which he declares that "men should not petition for

rights but take them," it came out in a cheap form, so that one hundred

thousand copies were sold in a few weeks. That brought down the

prosecution of the government. It had reached the people that might act,

and prosecution followed prosecution till Botany Bay was full of the

best men of England. Thus were the limitations of speech and press

declared, and thus will they ever be declared so long as there are

antagonistic interests in human society.

Understand me clearly. I believe that the term "constitutional right of

free speech" is a meaningless phrase, for this reason: the Constitution

of the United States, and the Declaration of Independence, and

particularly the latter, were, in their day, progressive expressions of

progressive ideals. But they are, throughout, characterized by the

metaphysical philosophy which dominated the thought of the last century.

They speak of "inherent rights," "inalienable rights," "natural rights,"

etc. They declare that men are equal because of a supposed metaphysical

something-or-other, called equality, existing in some mysterious way

apart from material conditions, just as the philosophers of the

eighteenth century accounted for water being wet by alleging a

metaphysical wetness, existing somehow apart from matter. I do not say

this to disparage those grand men who dared to put themselves against

the authorities of the monarchy, and to conceive a better ideal of

society, one which they certainly thought would secure equal rights to

men; because I realize fully that no one can live very far in advance of

the time-spirit, and I am positive in my own mind that, unless some

cataclysm destroys the human race before the end of the twentieth

century, the experience of the next hundred years will explode many of

our own theories. But the experience of this age has proven that

metaphysical quantities do not exist apart from materials, and hence

humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the

material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to

pronounce men equal. And unless there is equality (and by equality I

mean equal chances for every one to make the most of himself), unless, I

say, these equal chances exist, freedom, either of thought, speech, or

action, is equally a mockery.

I once read that one million angels could dance at the same time on the

point of a needle; possibly one million angels might be able to get a

decent night's lodging by virtue of their constitutional rights; one

single tramp couldn't. And whenever the tongues of the non-possessing

class threaten the possessors, whenever the disinherited menace the

privileged, that moment you will find that the Constitution isn't made

for you. Therefore I think Anarchists make a mistake when they contend

for their constitutional rights. As a prominent lawyer, Mr. Thomas Earle

White, of Philadelphia, himself an Anarchist, said to me not long

since: "What are you going to do about it? Go into the courts, and fight

for your legal rights? Anarchists haven't got any." "Well," says the

governmentalist, "you can't consistently claim any. You don't believe in

constitutions and laws." Exactly so; and if any one will right my

constitutional wrongs, I will willingly make him a present of my

constitutional rights. At the same time I am perfectly sure no one will

ever make this exchange; nor will any help ever come to the wronged

class from the outside. Salvation on the vicarious plan isn't worth

despising. Redress of wrongs will not come by petitioning "the powers

that be." "He has rights who dare maintain them." "The Lord helps them

who help themselves." (And when one is able to help himself, I don't

think he is apt to trouble the Lord much for his assistance.) As long as

the working people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give

them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the

streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers

they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman

bid them "move on"; so long as they go from factory to factory, begging

for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and

foremen, getting the old "No," the old shake of the head, in these

factories which they build, whose machines they wrought; so long as they

consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more

and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized,

cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing

through plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made but cannot

buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so

long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power

outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer,

or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be

delayed. When they conceive the possibility of a complete international

federation of labor, whose constituent groups shall take possession of

land, mines, factories, all the instruments of production, issue their

own certificates of exchange, and, in short, conduct their own industry

without regulative interference from law-makers or employers, then we

may hope for the only help which counts for aught--self-help; the only

condition which can guarantee free speech (and no paper guarantee

needed).

But meanwhile, while we are waiting, for there is yet much grist of the

middle class to be ground between the upper and nether millstones of

economic evolution; while we await the formation of the international

labor trust; while we watch for the day when there are enough of people

with nothing in their stomachs and desperation in their heads, to go

about the work of expropriation; what shall those do who are starving

now?

That is the question which =Emma Goldman= had to face; and she answered

it by saying: "Ask, and if you do not receive, take--take bread."

I do not give you that advice. Not because I do not think the bread

belongs to you; not because I do not think you would be morally right in

taking it; not that I am not more shocked and horrified and embittered

by the report of one human being starving in the heart of plenty, than

by all the Pittsburgs, and Chicagos, and Homesteads, and Tennessees, and

Coeur d'Alenes, and Buffalos, and Barcelonas, and Parises; not that I

do not think one little bit of sensitive human flesh is worth all the

property rights in New York city; not that I do not think the world will

ever be saved by the sheep's virtue of going patiently to the shambles;

not that I do not believe the expropriation of the possessing classes is

inevitable, and that that expropriation will begin by just such acts as

=Emma Goldman= advised, viz.: the taking possession of wealth already

produced; not that I think you owe any consideration to the conspirators

of Wall Street, or those who profit by their operations, as such, nor

ever will till they are reduced to the level of human beings having

equal chances with you to earn their share of social wealth, and no

more.

I have said that I do not give you the advice given by =Emma Goldman=,

not that I would have you forget the consideration the expropriators

have shown to you; that they have advised lead for strikers, strychnine

for tramps, bread and water as good enough for working people; not

that I cannot hear yet in my ears the words of one who said to me of

the Studebaker Wagon Works' strikers, "If I had my way I'd mow them

down with Gatling guns", not that I would have you forget the electric

wire of Fort Frick, nor the Pinkertons, nor the militia, nor the

prosecutions for murder and treason; not that I would have you forget

the 4th of May, when your constitutional right of free speech was

vindicated, nor the 11th of November when it was assassinated; not that

I would have you forget the single dinner at Delmonico's which Ward

McAllister tells us cost ten thousand dollars! Would I have you forget

that the wine in the glasses was your children's blood? It must be a

rare drink--children's blood! I have read of the wonderful sparkle on

costly champagne--I have never seen it. If I did I think it would look

to me like mothers' tears over the little, white, wasted forms of dead

babies--dead because there was no milk in their breasts! Yes, I want

you to remember that these rich are blood-drinkers, tearers of human

flesh, gnawers of human bones! Yes, if I had the power I would burn

your wrongs upon your hearts in characters that should glow like coals

in the night!

I have not a tongue of fire as =Emma Goldman= has; I cannot "stir the

people"; I must speak in my own cold, calculated way. (Perhaps that is

the reason I am allowed to speak at all.) But if I had the power, my

will is good enough. You know how Shakespeare's Marc Antony addressed

the populace at Rome:

"I am no orator, as Brutus is,

But as you know me well, a plain blunt man

That love my friend. And that they know full well

That gave me public leave to speak of him.

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,

Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech

To stir men's blood. I only speak right on.

I tell you that which you yourselves do know,

Show you sweet Cæsar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths,

And bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus

And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony

Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue

In every wound of Cæsar's, that should move

The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny."

If, therefore, I do not give you the advice which =Emma Goldman= gave,

let not the authorities suppose it is because I have any more respect

for their constitution and their law than she has, or that I regard

them as having any rights in the matter.

No! My reasons for not giving that advice are two. First, if I were

giving advice at all, I would say: "My friends, that bread belongs to

you. It is you who toiled and sweat in the sun to sow and reap the

wheat; it is you who stood by the thresher, and breathed the

chaff-filled atmosphere in the mills, while it was ground to flour; it

is you who went into the eternal night of the mine and risked drowning,

fire damp, explosion, and cave-in, to get the fuel for the fire that

baked it; it is you who stood in the hell-like heat, and struck the

blows that forged the iron for the ovens wherein it is baked; it is you

who stand all night in the terrible cellar shops, and tend the machines

that knead the flour into dough; it is you, you, you, farmer, miner,

mechanic, who make the bread; but you haven't the power to take it. At

every transformation wrought by toil, some one who didn't toil has taken

part from you; and now he has it all, and you haven't the power to take

it back! You are told you have the power because you have the numbers.

Never make so silly a blunder as to suppose that power resides in

numbers. One good, level-headed policeman with a club, is worth ten

excited, unarmed men; one detachment of well-drilled militia has a power

equal to that of the greatest mob that could be raised in New York City.

Do you know I admire compact, concentrated power. Let me give you an

illustration. Out in a little town in Illinois there is a certain

capitalist, and if ever a human creature sweat and ground the grist of

gold from the muscle of man, it is he. Well, once upon a time, his

workmen, (not his slaves, his workmen,) were on strike; and fifteen

hundred muscular Polacks armed with stones, brick-bats, red-hot pokers,

and other such crude weapons as a mob generally collects, went up to his

house for the purpose of smashing the windows, and so forth; possibly to

do as those people in Italy did the other day with the sheriff who

attempted to collect the milk tax. He alone, one man, met them on the

steps of his porch, and for two mortal hours, by threats, promises,

cajoleries held those fifteen hundred Poles at bay. And finally they

went away, without smashing a pane of glass or harming a hair of his

head. Now that was power; and you can't help but admire it, no matter if

it was your enemy who displayed it; and you must admit that so long as

numbers can be overcome by such relative quantity, power does not reside

in numbers. Therefore, if I were giving advice, I would not say, "take

bread," but take counsel with yourselves how to get the power to take

bread.

There is no doubt but that power is latently in you; there is no doubt

it can be developed; there is no doubt the authorities know this,

and fear it, and are ready to exert as much force as is necessary to

repress any signs of its development. And this is the explanation of

=Emma Goldman='s imprisonment. The authorities do not fear you as you

are; they only fear what you may become. The dangerous thing was "the

voice crying in the wilderness", foretelling the power which was to

come after it. You should have seen how they feared it in Philadelphia.

They got out a whole platoon of police and detectives, and executed a

military manoeuvre to catch the woman who had been running around under

their noses for three days. And when she walked up to them, then they

surrounded and captured her, and guarded the city hall where they kept

her over night, and put a detective in the next cell to make notes. Why

so much fear? Did they shrink from the stab of the dressmaker's needle?

Or did they dread some stronger weapon?

Ah! the accusation before the New York Pontius Pilate was: "She stirreth

up the people." And Pilate sentenced her to the full limit of the law,

because, he said, "You are more than ordinarily intelligent." Why is

intelligence dealt thus harshly with? Because it is the beginning of

power. Strive, then, for power.

My second reason for not repeating =Emma Goldman='s words is, that

I, as an Anarchist, have no right to advise another to do anything

involving a risk to himself; nor would I give a fillip for an action

done by the advice of some one else, unless it is accompanied by

a well-argued, well settled conviction on the part of the person

acting, that it really is the best thing to do. Anarchism, to me,

means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but

a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development

of the individual, as well as the assertion of the individual. It

means self-responsibility, and not leader-worship. I say it is your

business to decide whether you will starve and freeze in sight of food

and clothing, outside of jail, or commit some overt act against the

institution of property and take your place beside =Timmermann= and

=Goldman=. And in saying this I mean to cast no reflection whatever

upon =Miss Goldman= for doing otherwise. She and I hold many different

views on both Economy and Morals; and that she is honest in hers

she has proved better than I have proved mine. =Miss Goldman= is a

Communist; I am an Individualist. She wishes to destroy the right

of property; I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and

authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that

which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes

that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that

competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is

highly desirable it should. But whether she or I be right, or both

of us be wrong, of one thing I am sure: _the spirit which animates

Emma Goldman is the only one which will emancipate the slave from his

slavery, the tyrant from his tyranny--the spirit which is willing to

dare and suffer_.

That which dwells in the frail body in the prison-room to-night is not

the New York dressmaker alone. Transport yourselves there in thought a

moment; look steadily into those fair, blue eyes, upon the sun-brown

hair, the sea-shell face, the restless hands, the woman's figure; look

steadily till in place of the person, the individual of time and place,

you see that which transcends time and place, and flits from house to

house of life, mocking at death. Swinburne in his magnificent "Before a

Crucifix," says:

"With iron for thy linen bands,

And unclean cloths for winding-sheet,

They bind the people's nail-pierced hands,

They hide the people's nail-pierced feet:

And what man, or what angel known

Shall roll back the sepulchral stone?"

Perhaps in the presence of this untrammeled spirit we shall feel that

something has rolled back the sepulchral stone; and up from the cold

wind of the grave is borne the breath that animated =Anaxagoras=,

=Socrates=, =Christ=, =Hypatia=, =John Huss=, =Bruno=, =Robert Emmet=,

=John Brown=, =Sophia Perovskaya=, =Parsons=, =Fischer=, =Engel=,

=Spies=, =Lingg=, =Berkman=, =Pallas=; and all those, known and unknown,

who have died by tree, and axe, and fagot, or dragged out forgotten

lives in dungeons, derided, hated, tortured by men. Perhaps we shall

know ourselves face to face with that which leaps from the throat of the

strangled when the rope chokes, which smokes up from the blood of the

murdered when the axe falls; that which has been forever hunted,

fettered, imprisoned, exiled, executed, and never conquered. Lo, from

its many incarnations it comes forth again, the immortal Race-Christ of

the Ages! The gloomy walls are glorified thereby, the prisoner is

transfigured, and we say, reverently we say:

"O sacred Head, O desecrate,

O labor-wounded feet and hands,

O blood poured forth in pledge to fate

Of nameless lives in divers lands!

O slain, and spent, and sacrificed

People! The grey-grown, speechless Christ."

Direct Action

From the standpoint of one who thinks himself capable of discerning an

undeviating route for human progress to pursue, if it is to be progress

at all, who, having such a route on his mind's map, has endeavored to

point it out to others; to make them see it as he sees it; who in so

doing has chosen what appeared to him clear and simple expressions to

convey his thoughts to others,--to such a one it appears matter for

regret and confusion of spirit that the phrase "Direct Action" has

suddenly acquired in the general mind a circumscribed meaning, not at

all implied in the words themselves, and certainly never attached to it

by himself or his co-thinkers.

However, this is one of the common jests which Progress plays on those

who think themselves able to set metes and bounds for it. Over and over

again, names, phrases, mottoes, watchwords, have been turned inside out,

and upside down, and hindside before, and sideways, by occurrences out

of the control of those who used the expressions in their proper sense;

and still, those who sturdily held their ground, and insisted on being

heard, have in the end found that the period of misunderstanding and

prejudice has been but the prelude to wider inquiry and understanding.

I rather think this will be the case with the present misconception of

the term Direct Action, which through the misapprehension, or else the

deliberate misrepresentation, of certain journalists in Los Angeles, at

the time the McNamaras pleaded guilty, suddenly acquired in the popular

mind the interpretation, "Forcible Attacks on Life and Property." This

was either very ignorant or very dishonest of the journalists; but it

has had the effect of making a good many people curious to know all

about Direct Action.

As a matter of fact, those who are so lustily and so inordinately

condemning it, will find on examination that they themselves have on

many occasions practised direct action, and will do so again.

Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly

and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his

convictions, was a direct actionist. Some thirty years ago I recall that

the Salvation Army was vigorously practising direct action in the

maintenance of the freedom of its members to speak, assemble, and pray.

Over and over they were arrested, fined, and imprisoned; but they kept

right on singing, praying, and marching, till they finally compelled

their persecutors to let them alone. The Industrial Workers are now

conducting the same fight, and have, in a number of cases, compelled the

officials to let them alone by the same direct tactics.

Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or

who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it

with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing

for them, was a direct actionist. All co-operative experiments are

essentially direct action.

Every person who ever in his life had a difference with any one to

settle, and went straight to the other persons involved to settle it,

either by a peaceable plan or otherwise, was a direct actionist.

Examples of such action are strikes and boycotts; many persons will

recall the action of the housewives of New York who boycotted the

butchers, and lowered the price of meat; at the present moment a butter

boycott seems looming up, as a direct reply to the price-makers for

butter.

These actions are generally not due to any one's reasoning overmuch on

the respective merits of directness or indirectness, but are the

spontaneous retorts of those who feel oppressed by a situation. In other

words, all people are, most of the time, believers in the principle of

direct action, and practisers of it. However, most people are also

indirect or political actionists. And they are both these things at the

same time, without making much of an analysis of either. There are only

a limited number of persons who eschew political action under any and

all circumstances; but there is nobody, nobody at all, who has ever been

so "impossible" as to eschew direct action altogether.

The majority of thinking people are really opportunists, leaning, some,

perhaps, more to directness, some more to indirectness, as a general

thing, but ready to use either means when opportunity calls for it. That

is to say, there are those who hold that balloting governors into power

is essentially a wrong and foolish thing; but who, nevertheless, under

stress of special circumstance, might consider it the wisest thing to

do, to vote some individual into office at that particular time. Or

there are those who believe that, in general, the wisest way for people

to get what they want is by the indirect method of voting into power

some one who will make what they want legal; yet who, all the same, will

occasionally, under exceptional conditions, advise a strike; and a

strike, as I have said, is direct action.

Or they may do as the Socialist Party agitators, who are mostly

declaiming now against direct action, did last summer, when the police

were holding up their meetings. They went in force to the

meeting-places, prepared to speak whether-or-no; and they made the

police back down. And while that was not logical on their part, thus to

oppose the legal executors of the majority's will, it was a fine,

successful piece of direct action.

Those who, by the essence of their belief, are committed to Direct

Action only are--just who? Why, the non-resistants; precisely those who

do not believe in violence at all! Now do not make the mistake of

inferring that I say direct action means non-resistance; not by any

means. Direct action may be the extreme of violence, or it may be as

peaceful as the waters of the Brook of Siloa that go softly. What I say

is, that the real non-resistants can believe in direct action only,

never in political action. For the basis of all political action is

coercion; even when the State does good things, it finally rests on a

club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.

Now every school child in the United States has had the direct action of

certain non-resistants brought to his notice by his school history. The

case which every one instantly recalls is that of the early Quakers who

came to Massachusetts. The Puritans had accused the Quakers of

"troubling the world by preaching peace to it." They refused to pay

church taxes; they refused to bear arms; they refused to swear

allegiance to any government. (In so doing, they were direct actionists;

what we may call negative direct actionists.) So the Puritans, being

political actionists, passed laws to keep them out, to deport, to fine,

to imprison, to mutilate, and finally, to hang them. And the Quakers

just kept on coming (which was positive direct action); and history

records that after the hanging of four Quakers, and the flogging of

Margaret Brewster at the cart's tail through the streets of Boston, "the

Puritans gave up trying to silence the new missionaries"; that "Quaker

persistence and Quaker non-resistance had won the day."

Another example of direct action in early colonial history, but this

time by no means of the peaceable sort, was the affair known as Bacon's

Rebellion. All our historians certainly defend the action of the rebels

in that matter, as reason is, for they were right. And yet it was a case

of violent direct action against lawfully constituted authority. For the

benefit of those who have forgotten the details, let me briefly remind

them that the Virginia planters were in fear of a general attack by the

Indians; with reason. Being political actionists, they asked, or Bacon

as their leader asked, that the governor grant him a commission to raise

volunteers in their own defense. The governor feared that such a company

of armed men would be a threat to him; also with reason. He refused the

commission. Whereupon the planters resorted to direct action. They

raised the volunteers without the commission, and successfully fought

off the Indians. Bacon was pronounced a traitor by the governor; but the

people being with him, the governor was afraid to proceed against him.

In the end, however, it came so far that the rebels burned Jamestown;

and but for the untimely death of Bacon, much more might have been done.

Of course the reaction was very dreadful, as it usually is where a

rebellion collapses, or is crushed. Yet even during the brief period of

success, it had corrected a good many abuses. I am quite sure that the

political-action-at-all-costs advocates of those times, after the

reaction came back into power, must have said: "See to what evils

direct action brings us! Behold, the progress of the colony has been set

back twenty-five years"; forgetting that if the colonists had not

resorted to direct action, their scalps would have been taken by the

Indians a year sooner, instead of a number of them being hanged by the

governor a year later.

In the period of agitation and excitement preceding the revolution,

there were all sorts and kinds of direct action from the most peaceable

to the most violent; and I believe that almost everybody who studies

United States history finds the account of these performances the most

interesting part of the story, the part which dents into his memory most

easily.

Among the peaceable moves made, were the non-importation agreements, the

leagues for wearing homespun clothing and the "committees of

correspondence." As the inevitable growth of hostility progressed,

violent direct action developed; e. g., in the matter of destroying the

revenue stamps, or the action concerning the tea-ships, either by not

permitting the tea to be landed, or by putting it in damp storage, or by

throwing it into the harbor, as in Boston, or by compelling a tea-ship

owner to set fire to his own ship, as at Annapolis. These are all

actions which our commonest text-books record, certainly not in a

condemnatory way, not even in an apologetic one, though they are all

cases of direct action against legally constituted authority and

property rights. If I draw attention to them, and others of like nature,

it is to prove to unreflecting repeaters of words that _direct action

has always been used, and has the historical sanction of the very people

now reprobating it_.

George Washington is said to have been the leader of the Virginia

planters' non-importation league: he would now be "enjoined," probably,

by a court, from forming any such league; and if he persisted, he would

be fined for contempt.

When the great quarrel between the North and the South was waxing hot

and hotter, it was again direct action which preceded and precipitated

political action. And I may remark here that political action is never

taken, nor even contemplated, until slumbering minds have first been

aroused by direct acts of protest against existing conditions.

The history of the anti-slavery movement and the Civil War is one of

the greatest of paradoxes, although history is a chain of paradoxes.

Politically speaking, it was the slave-holding States that stood for

greater political freedom, for the autonomy of the single State against

the interference of the United States; politically speaking, it was

the non-slave-holding States that stood for a strong centralized

government, which, Secessionists said, and said truly, was bound

progressively to develop into more and more tyrannical forms. Which

happened. From the close of the Civil War on, there has been continuous

encroachment of the federal power upon what was formerly the concern of

the States individually. The wage-slaves, in their struggles of to-day,

are continually thrown into conflict with that centralized power,

against which the slave-holder protested (with liberty on his lips but

tyranny in his heart). Ethically speaking, it was the non-slave-holding

States that, in a general way, stood for greater human liberty, while

the Secessionists stood for race-slavery. In a general way only;

that is, the majority of northerners, not being accustomed to the

actual presence of negro slavery about them, thought it was probably

a mistake; yet they were in no great ferment of anxiety to have it

abolished. The Abolitionists only, and they were relatively few,

were the genuine ethicals, to whom slavery itself--not secession or

union--was the main question. In fact, so paramount was it with them,

that a considerable number of them were themselves for the dissolution

of the union, advocating that the North take the initiative in the

matter of dissolving, in order that the northern people might shake off

the blame of holding negroes in chains.

Of course, there were all sorts of people with all sorts of temperaments

among those who advocated the abolition of slavery. There were Quakers

like Whittier (indeed it was the peace-at-all-costs Quakers who had

advocated abolition even in early colonial days); there were moderate

political actionists, who were for buying off the slaves, as the

cheapest way; and there were extremely violent people, who believed and

did all sorts of violent things.

As to what the politicians did, it is one long record of

"how-not-to-do-it," a record of thirty years of compromising, and

dickering, and trying to keep what was as it was, and to hand sops to

both sides when new conditions demanded that something be done, or be

pretended to be done. But "the stars in their courses fought against

Sisera"; the system was breaking down from within, and the direct

actionists from without, as well, were widening the cracks

remorselessly.

Among the various expressions of direct rebellion was the organization

of the "underground railroad." Most of the people who belonged to it

believed in both sorts of action; but however much they theoretically

subscribed to the right of the majority to enact and enforce laws, they

didn't believe in it on that point. My grandfather was a member of the

"underground"; many a fugitive slave he helped on his way to Canada. He

was a very patient, law-abiding man, in most respects, though I have

often thought he probably respected it because he didn't have much to do

with it; always leading a pioneer life, law was generally far from him,

and direct action imperative. Be that as it may, and law-respecting as

he was, he had no respect whatever for slave laws, no matter if made by

ten times of a majority; and he conscientiously broke every one that

came in his way to be broken.

There were times when in the operation of the "underground", violence

was required, and was used. I recollect one old friend relating to me

how she and her mother kept watch all night at the door, while a slave

for whom a posse was searching hid in the cellar; and though they were

of Quaker descent and sympathies, there was a shot-gun on the table.

Fortunately it did not have to be used that night.

When the fugitive slave law was passed, with the help of the political

actionists of the North who wanted to offer a new sop to the

slave-holders, the direct actionists took to rescuing recaptured

fugitives. There was the "rescue of Shadrach," and the "rescue of

Jerry," the latter rescuers being led by the famous Gerrit Smith; and a

good many more successful and unsuccessful attempts. Still the

politicals kept on pottering and trying to smooth things over, and the

Abolitionists were denounced and decried by the ultra-law-abiding

pacificators, pretty much as Wm. D. Haywood and Frank Bohn are being

denounced by their own party now.

The other day I read a communication in the Chicago _Daily Socialist_

from the secretary of the Louisville local, Socialist Party, to

the national secretary, requesting that some safe and sane speaker

be substituted for Bohn, who had been announced to speak there. In

explaining why, Mr. Dobbs, secretary, makes this quotation from Bohn's

lecture: "Had the McNamaras been successful in defending the interests

of the working class, they would have been right, just as John Brown

would have been right, had he been successful in freeing the slaves.

Ignorance was the only crime of John Brown, and ignorance was the only

crime of the McNamaras."

Upon this Mr. Dobbs comments as follows: "We dispute emphatically the

statements here made. The attempt to draw a parallel between the

open--if mistaken--revolt of John Brown on the one hand, and the secret

and murderous methods of the McNamaras on the other, is not only

indicative of shallow reasoning, but highly mischievous in the logical

conclusions which may be drawn from such statements."

Evidently Mr. Dobbs is very ignorant of the life and work of John Brown.

John Brown was a man of violence; he would have scorned anybody's

attempt to make him out anything else. And when once a person is a

believer in violence, it is with him only a question of the most

effective way of applying it, which can be determined only by a

knowledge of conditions and means at his disposal. John Brown did not

shrink at all from conspiratical methods. Those who have read the

autobiography of Frederick Douglas and the Reminiscences of Lucy Colman,

will recall that one of the plans laid by John Brown was to organize a

chain of armed camps in the mountains of West Virginia, North Carolina,

and Tennessee, send secret emissaries among the slaves inciting them to

flee to these camps, and there concert such measures as times and

conditions made possible for further arousing revolt among the negroes.

That this plan failed was due to the weakness of the desire for liberty

among the slaves themselves, more than anything else.

Later on, when the politicians in their infinite deviousness contrived a

fresh proposition of how-not-to-do-it, known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act,

which left the question of slavery to be determined by the settlers, the

direct actionists on both sides sent bogus settlers into the territory,

who proceeded to fight it out. The pro-slavery men, who got in first,

made a constitution recognizing slavery, and a law punishing with death

any one who aided a slave to escape; but the Free Soilers, who were a

little longer in arriving, since they came from more distant States,

made a second constitution, and refused to recognize the other party's

laws at all. And John Brown was there, mixing in all the violence,

conspiratical or open; he was "a horse-thief and a murderer," in the

eyes of decent, peaceable, political actionists. And there is no doubt

that he stole horses, sending no notice in advance of his intention to

steal them, and that he killed pro-slavery men. He struck and got away a

good many times before his final attempt on Harper's Ferry. If he did

not use dynamite, it was because dynamite had not yet appeared as a

practical weapon. He made a great many more intentional attacks on life

than the two brothers Secretary Dobbs condemns for their "murderous

methods." And yet, history has not failed to understand John Brown.

Mankind knows that though he was a violent man, with human blood upon

his hands, who was guilty of high treason and hanged for it, yet his

soul was a great, strong, unselfish soul, unable to bear the frightful

crime which kept 4,000,000 people like dumb beasts, and thought that

making war against it was a sacred, a God-called duty, (for John Brown

was a very religious man--a Presbyterian).

It is by and because of the direct acts of the fore-runners of social

change, whether they be of peaceful or warlike nature, that the Human

Conscience, the conscience of the mass, becomes aroused to the need for

change. It would be very stupid to say that no good results are ever

brought about by political action; sometimes good things do come about

that way. But never until individual rebellion, followed by mass

rebellion, has forced it. Direct action is always the clamorer, the

initiator, through which the great sum of indifferentists become aware

that oppression is getting intolerable.

We have now an oppression in the land,--and not only in this land, but

throughout all those parts of the world which enjoy the very mixed

blessings of Civilization. And just as in the question of chattel

slavery, so this form of slavery has been begetting both direct action

and political action. A certain per cent. of our population (probably a

much smaller per cent. than politicians are in the habit of assigning at

mass meetings) is producing the material wealth upon which all the rest

of us live; just as it was the 4,000,000 chattel blacks who supported

all the crowd of parasites above them. These are the _land workers_ and

the _industrial workers_.

Through the unprophesied and unprophesiable operation of institutions

which no individual of us created, but found in existence when he came

here, these workers, the most absolutely necessary part of the whole

social structure, without whose services none can either eat, or clothe,

or shelter himself, are just the ones who get the least to eat, to wear,

and to be housed withal--to say nothing of their share of the other

social benefits which the rest of us are supposed to furnish, such as

education and artistic gratifications.

These workers have, in one form or another, mutually joined their forces

to see what betterment of their condition they could get; primarily by

direct action, secondarily through political action. We have had the

Grange, the Farmers' Alliance, Co-operative Associations, Colonization

Experiments, Knights of Labor, Trade Unions, and Industrial Workers of

the World. All of them have been organized for the purpose of wringing

from the masters in the economic field a little better price, a little

better conditions, a little shorter hours; or on the other hand, to

resist a reduction in price, worse conditions, or longer hours. None of

them has attempted a final solution of the social war. None of them,

except the Industrial Workers, has recognized that there is a social

war, inevitable so long as present legal-social conditions endure. They

accepted property institutions as they found them. They were made up of

average men, with average desires, and they undertook to do what

appeared to them possible and very reasonable things. They were not

committed to any particular political policy when they were organized,

but were associated for direct action of their own initiation, either

positive or defensive.

Undoubtedly there were, and are, among all these organizations, members

who looked beyond immediate demands; who did see that the continuous

development of forces now in operation was bound to bring about

conditions to which it is impossible that life continue to submit, and

against which, therefore, it will protest, and violently protest; that

it will have no choice but to do so; that it must do so, or tamely die;

and since it is not the nature of life to surrender without struggle, it

will not tamely die. Twenty-two years ago I met Farmers' Alliance people

who said so, Knights of Labor who said so, Trade Unionists who said so.

They wanted larger aims than those to which their organizations were

looking; but they had to accept their fellow members as they were, and

try to stir them to work for such things as it was possible to make them

see. And what they could see was better prices, better wages, less

dangerous or tyrannical conditions, shorter hours. At the stage of

development when these movements were initiated, the land workers could

not see that their struggle had anything to do with the struggle of

those engaged in the manufacturing or transporting service; nor could

these latter see that theirs had anything to do with the movement of the

farmers. For that matter very few of them see it yet. They have yet to

learn that there is one common struggle against those who have

appropriated the earth, the money, and the machines.

Unfortunately the great organization of the farmers frittered itself

away in a stupid chase after political power. It was quite successful in

getting the power in certain States; but the courts pronounced its laws

unconstitutional, and there was the burial hole of all its political

conquests. Its original program was to build its own elevators, and

store the products therein, holding these from the market till they

could escape the speculator. Also, to organize labor exchanges, issuing

credit notes upon products deposited for exchange. Had it adhered to

this program of direct mutual aid, it would, to some extent, for a time

at least, have afforded an illustration of how mankind may free itself

from the parasitism of the bankers and the middlemen. Of course, it

would have been overthrown in the end, unless it had so revolutionized

men's minds by the example as to force the overthrow of the legal

monopoly of land and money; but at least it would have served a great

educational purpose. As it was, it "went after the red herring," and

disintegrated merely from its futility.

The Knights of Labor subsided into comparative insignificance, not

because of failure to use direct action, nor because of its tampering

with politics, which was small, but chiefly because it was a

heterogeneous mass of workers who could not associate their efforts

effectively.

The Trade Unions grew strong about as the K. of L. subsided, and have

continued slowly but persistently to increase in power. It is true the

increase has fluctuated; that there have been set-backs; that great

single organizations have been formed and again dispersed. But on the

whole, trade unions have been a growing power. They have been so

because, poor as they are, inefficient as they are, they have been a

means whereby a certain section of the workers have been able to bring

their united force to bear directly upon their masters, and so get for

themselves some portion of what they wanted,--of what their conditions

dictated to them they must try to get. The strike is their natural

weapon, that which they themselves forged. It is the direct blow of the

strike which nine times out of ten the boss is afraid of. (Of course

there are occasions when he is glad of one, but that's unusual.) And the

reason he dreads a strike is not so much because he thinks he cannot win

out against it, but simply and solely because he does not want an

interruption of his business. The ordinary boss isn't in much dread of a

"class-conscious vote"; there are plenty of shops where you can talk

Socialism or any other political program all day long; but if you begin

to talk Unionism, you may forthwith expect to be discharged, or at best

warned to shut up. Why? Not because the boss is so wise as to know that

political action is a swamp in which the workingman gets mired, or

because he understands that political Socialism is fast becoming a

middle-class movement; not at all. He thinks Socialism is a very bad

thing; but it's a good way off! But he knows that if his shop is

unionized, he will have trouble right away. His hands will be

rebellious, he will be put to expense to improve his factory conditions,

he will have to keep workingmen that he doesn't like, and in case of

strike he may expect injury to his machinery or his buildings.

It is often said, and parrot-like repeated, that the bosses are

"class-conscious," that they stick together for their class interest,

and are willing to undergo any sort of personal loss rather than be

false to those interests. It isn't so at all. The majority of business

people are just like the majority of workingmen; they care a whole lot

more about their individual loss or gain than about the gain or loss of

their class. And it is his individual loss the boss sees, when

threatened by a union.

Now everybody knows that a strike of any size means violence. No matter

what any one's ethical preference for peace may be, he knows it will not

be peaceful. If it's a telegraph strike, it means cutting wires and

poles, and getting fake scabs in to spoil the instruments. If it is a

steel rolling mill strike, it means beating up the scabs, breaking the

windows, setting the gauges wrong, and ruining the expensive rollers

together with tons and tons of material. If it's a miners' strike, it

means destroying tracks and bridges, and blowing up mills. If it is a

garment workers' strike, it means having an unaccountable fire, getting

a volley of stones through an apparently inaccessible window, or

possibly a brickbat on the manufacturer's own head. If it's a street-car

strike, it means tracks torn up or barricaded with the contents of

ash-carts and slop-carts, with overturned wagons or stolen fences, it

means smashed or incinerated cars and turned switches. If it is a

system federation strike, it means "dead" engines, wild engines,

derailed freights, and stalled trains. If it is a building trades

strike, it means dynamited structures. And always, everywhere, all the

time, fights between strike-breakers and scabs against strikers and

strike-sympathizers, between People and Police.

On the side of the bosses, it means search-lights, electric wires,

stockades, bull-pens, detectives and provocative agents, violent

kidnapping and deportation, and every device they can conceive for

direct protection, besides the ultimate invocation of police, militia,

State constabulary, and federal troops.

Everybody knows this; everybody smiles when union officials protest

their organizations to be peaceable and law-abiding, because everybody

knows they are lying. They know that violence is used, both secretly and

openly; and they know it is used because the strikers cannot do any

other way, without giving up the fight at once. Nor do they mistake

those who thus resort to violence under stress for destructive

miscreants who do what they do out of innate cussedness. The people in

general understand that they do these things, through the harsh logic of

a situation which they did not create, but which forces them to these

attacks in order to make good in their struggle to live, or else go down

the bottomless descent into poverty, that lets Death find them in the

poorhouse hospital, the city street, or the river-slime. This is the

awful alternative that the workers are facing; and this is what makes

the most kindly disposed human beings,--men who would go out of their

way to help a wounded dog, or bring home a stray kitten and nurse it, or

step aside to avoid walking on a worm--resort to violence against their

fellow-men. They know, for the facts have taught them, that this is the

only way to win, if they can win at all. And it has always appeared to

me one of the most utterly ludicrous, absolutely irrelevant things that

a person can do or say, when approached for relief or assistance by a

striker who is dealing with an immediate situation, to respond with,

"Vote yourself into power!" when the next election is six months, a

year, or two years away.

Unfortunately, the people who know best how violence is used in union

warfare, cannot come forward and say: "On such a day, at such a place,

such and such a specific action was done, and as the result such and

such a concession was made, or such and such a boss capitulated." To do

so would imperil their liberty, and their power to go on fighting.

Therefore those that know best must keep silent, and sneer in their

sleeves, while those that know little prate. Events, not tongues, must

make their position clear.

And there has been a very great deal of prating these last few weeks.

Speakers and writers, honestly convinced, I believe, that political

action, and political action only, can win the workers' battle, have

been denouncing what they are pleased to call "direct action" (what they

really mean is conspiratical violence) as the author of mischief

incalculable. One Oscar Ameringer, as an example, recently said at a

meeting in Chicago that the Haymarket bomb of '86 had set back the

eight-hour movement twenty-five years, arguing that the movement would

have succeeded then but for the bomb. It's a great mistake. No one can

exactly measure in years or months the effect of a forward push or a

reaction. No one can demonstrate that the eight-hour movement could have

been won twenty-five years ago. We know that the eight-hour day was put

on the statute books of Illinois in 1871, by political action, and has

remained a dead letter. That the direct action of the workers could

have won it, then, can not be proved; but it can be shown that many more

potent factors than the Haymarket bomb worked against it. On the other

hand, if the reactive influence of the bomb was really so powerful, we

should naturally expect labor and union conditions to be worse in

Chicago than in the cities where no such thing happened. On the

contrary, bad as they are, the general conditions of labor are better in

Chicago than in most other large cities, and the power of the unions is

more developed there than in any other American city except San

Francisco. So if we are to conclude anything for the influence of the

Haymarket bomb, keep these facts in mind. Personally I do not think its

influence on the labor movement, as such, was so very great.

It will be the same with the present furore about violence. Nothing

fundamental has been altered. Two men have been imprisoned for what they

did (twenty-four years ago they were hanged for what they did not do);

some few more may yet be imprisoned. But the forces of life will

continue to revolt against their economic chains. There will be no

cessation in that revolt, no matter what ticket men vote or fail to

vote, until the chains are broken.

How will the chains be broken?

Political actionists tell us it will be only by means of working-class

party action at the polls; by voting themselves into possession of the

sources of life and the tools; by voting that those who now command

forests, mines, ranches, waterways, mills and factories, and likewise

command the military power to defend them, shall hand over their

dominion to the people.

And meanwhile?

Meanwhile be peaceable, industrious, law-abiding, patient, and frugal

(as Madero told the Mexican peons to be, after he had sold them to Wall

Street)! Even if some of you are disfranchised, don't rise up even

against that, for it might "set back the party."

Well, I have already stated that some good is occasionally accomplished

by political action,--not necessarily working-class party action either.

But I am abundantly convinced that the occasional good accomplished is

more than counterbalanced by the evil; just as I am convinced that

though there are occasional evils resulting from direct action, they are

more than counterbalanced by the good.

Nearly all the laws which were originally framed with the intention of

benefiting the workers, have either turned into weapons in their

enemies' hands, or become dead letters, unless the workers through their

organizations have directly enforced the observance. So that in the end,

it is direct action that has to be relied on anyway. As an example of

getting the tarred end of a law, glance at the anti-trust law, which was

supposed to benefit the people in general, and the working class in

particular. About two weeks since, some 250 union leaders were cited to

answer to the charge of being trust formers, as the answer of the

Illinois Central to its strikers.

But the evil of pinning faith to indirect action is far greater than any

such minor results. The main evil is that it destroys initiative,

quenches the individual rebellious spirit, teaches people to rely on

some one else to do for them what they should do for themselves, what

they alone can do for themselves; finally renders organic the anomalous

idea that by massing supineness together until a majority is acquired,

then, through the peculiar magic of that majority, this supineness is to

be transformed into energy. That is, people who have lost the habit of

striking for themselves as individuals, who have submitted to every

injustice while waiting for the majority to grow, are going to become

metamorphosed into human high-explosives by a mere process of packing!

I quite agree that the sources of life, and all the natural wealth of

the earth, and the tools necessary to co-operative production, must

become free of access to all. It is a positive certainty to me that

unionism must widen and deepen its purposes, or it will go under; and I

feel sure that the logic of the situation will force them to see it

gradually. They must learn that the workers' problem can never be solved

by beating up scabs, so long as their own policy of limiting their

membership by high initiation fees and other restrictions helps to make

scabs. They must learn that the course of growth is not so much along

the line of higher wages, but shorter hours, which will enable them to

increase membership, to take in everybody who is willing to come into

the union. They must learn that if they want to win battles, all allied

workers must act together, act quickly (serving no notice on bosses),

and retain their freedom so to do at all times. And finally they must

learn that even then (when they have a complete organization), they can

win nothing permanent unless they strike for everything,--not for a

wage, not for a minor improvement, but for the whole natural wealth of

the earth. And proceed to the direct expropriation of it all!

They must learn that their power does not lie in their voting strength,

that their power lies in their ability to stop production. It is a great

mistake to suppose that the wage-earners constitute a majority of the

voters. Wage-earners are here to-day and there to-morrow, and that

hinders a large number from voting; a great percentage of them in this

country are foreigners without a voting right. The most patent proof

that Socialist leaders know this is so, is that they are compromising

their propaganda at every point to win the support of the business

class, the small investor. Their campaign papers proclaimed that their

interviewers had been assured by Wall Street bond purchasers that they

would be just as ready to buy Los Angeles bonds from a socialist as a

capitalist administration; that the present Milwaukee administration has

been a boon to the small investor; their reading notices assure their

readers in this city that we need not go to the great department stores

to buy,--buy rather of So-and-so on Milwaukee Avenue, who will satisfy

us quite as well as a "big business" institution. In short, they are

making every desperate effort to win the support, and to prolong the

life, of that middle-class which socialistic economy says must be ground

to pieces, because they know they cannot get a majority without them.

The most that a working-class party could do, even if its politicians

remained honest, would be to form a strong faction in the legislatures,

which might, by combining its vote with one side or the other, win

certain political or economic palliatives.

But what the working-class can do, when once they grow into a solidified

organization, is to show the possessing classes, through a sudden

cessation of all work, that the whole social structure rests on them;

that the possessions of the others are absolutely worthless to them

without the workers' activity; that such protests, such strikes, are

inherent in the system of property, and will continually recur until the

whole thing is abolished,--and having shown that, effectively, proceed

to expropriate.

"But the military power," says the political actionist; "we must get

political power, or the military will be used against us!"

Against a real General Strike, the military can do nothing. Oh, true,

if you have a Socialist Briand in power, he may declare the workers

"public officials" and try to make them serve against themselves! But

against the solid wall of an immobile working-mass, even a Briand would

be broken.

Meanwhile, until this international awakening, the war will go on as it

has been going, in spite of all the hysteria which well-meaning people,

who do not understand life and its necessities, may manifest; in spite

of all the shivering that timid leaders have done; in spite of all the

reactionary revenges that may be taken; in spite of all the capital

politicians make out of the situation. It will go on because Life cries

to live, and Property denies its freedom to live; and Life will not

submit.

And should not submit.

It will go on until that day when a self-freed Humanity is able to chant

Swinburne's Hymn of Man:

"Glory to Man in the highest,

For Man is the master of Things."

The Paris Commune

The Paris Commune, like other spectacular events in human history, has

become the clinging point for many legends, alike among its enemies and

among its friends. Indeed, one must often question which was the real

Commune, the legend or the fact,--what was actually lived, or the

conception of it which has shaped itself in the world-mind during those

forty odd years that have gone since the 18th of March, 1871.

It is thus with doctrines, it is thus with personalities, it is thus

with events.

Which is the real Christianity, the simple doctrine attributed to Christ

or the practical preaching and realizing of organized Christianity?

Which is the real Abraham Lincoln,--the clever politician who

emancipated the chattel slaves as an act of policy, or the legendary

apostle of human liberty, who rises like a gigantic figure of

iconoclastic right smiting old wrongs and receiving the martyr's crown

therefor?

Which is the real Commune,--the thing that was, or the thing our orators

have painted it? Which will be the influencing power in the days that

are to come? Our Commune commemorators are wont to say, and surely they

believe, that the declaration of the Commune was the spontaneous

assertion of independence by the Parisian masses, consciously alive to

the fact that the national government of France had treated them most

outrageously in the matter of defense against the Prussian army. They

believe that the farce of the situation in which the city found itself,

had opened the eyes of the general populace to the fact that the

national government, so far from serving the supposed prime purpose of

government, viz., as a means of defense against a foreign invader, was

in reality a thing so apart from them and their interests that it

preferred to leave them to the mercy of the Prussians, to endangering

its own supremacy by assisting in their defense, or permitting them to

defend themselves.

It is a pity that this legendary figure of Awakened Paris is not a true

one. The Commune, in fact, was not the work of the whole people of

Paris, nor of a majority of the people of Paris. The Commune was really

established by a comparatively small number of able, nay brilliant, and

supremely devoted men and women from _every_ walk in life, but with a

relatively high percentage of military men, engineers, and political

journalists, some of whom had time and again been in prison before for

seditious writing or acts of rebellion. They flocked in from their exile

in the neighboring countries, thinking that now they saw the opportunity

for retrieving former errors, and arousing the people to renew and to

extend the struggle of 1848. It is true that there were also teachers,

artists, designers, architects and builders, skilled craftsmen of every

sort. And perhaps no chapter in the whole story is more inspiring than

the description of the gatherings of the workers, which took place night

after night in every quarter of the beleaguered city, previous to the

18th of March and thereafter. To such meetings went those who burned

with fervor of faith in what the people might and would accomplish, and,

with the radiant vision of a new social day shining in their eyes,

endeavored to make it clear to those who listened. One almost catches

the redolence of outbursting faith, that rising of the sap of hope and

courage and daring, like an incense of spring; almost feels himself

there, partaking in the work, the danger, the glorious, mistaken

assurance which was theirs.

And yet the truth must have been that these apostles of the Commune were

blinded by their own enthusiasm, deafened by the enthusiasm they evoked

in others, to the fact that the great unvoiced majority who did not

attend public meetings, who sat within their houses or kept silent in

the shops, were not converted or affected by their teachings.

We are told by those who should know, the survivors among the Communards

themselves, that the actual number of persons who were aggressive,

moving spirits in the great uprising was not greatly above 2,000. The

mass of the people were, as they would probably be in this city to-day

under like circumstances, indifferent as to what went on over their

heads, so that the peace and quiet of their individual lives was

restored, so that the siege of the Prussians was raised, and themselves

permitted to go about their business. If the Commune could assure that,

good luck to it! They were tired of the siege; and they longed for their

old familiar miseries to which they were in some respect accustomed;

they hardly dreamed of anything better.

But, as is usually the case when strategic moments arise, these same

plain, stolid, indifferent people, who neither know nor care about fine

theories of political right, municipal sovereignty, and so forth, see

more directly into the logic of a situation than those who have confused

their minds with much theorizing. Likewise the people of Paris in

general, when the Commune had become an established fact, saw that the

only consequent proceeding would be to make war economically as well as

politically, to cut off any source of supply to the national army which

lay within the city. Instead of doing that, the government of the

Commune, anxious to prove itself more law-abiding than the old regime,

stupidly defended the property right of its enemies, and continued to

let the Bank of France furnish supplies to those who were financing the

army of Versailles, the very army which was to cut their throats.

Naturally, the plain people grew disgusted with so senseless a program,

and in the main took no part in the final struggle with the Versailles

troops, nor even opposed the idea of their entrance into the city.

Probably a goodly number even drew a sigh of relief at the prospect of a

return to the smaller evil of the two. Little enough did they dream that

the way back lay through their own blood, and that they, who had never

lifted hand or voice for the Commune, would become its martyrs. Little

did they conceive the wild revenge of Law and Order upon Rebellion, the

saturnalia of restored Power.

Did they sleep, I wonder, on the night before the 20th of May, when that

dark thunder of vengeance was gathering to break? Many slept well the

next night, and still sleep; for "then began a murder grim and

great,"--a murder whose painted image, even after these forty years have

risen and sunk upon it, sends the blood shuddering backward, and sets

the teeth in uttermost horror and hate. MacMahon placarded the streets

with peace and sent his troops to make it; in the name of that Peace,

Gallifet, an incarnation of hell, set his men the example and rode up

and down the streets of Paris, dashing out children's brains. Did a hand

appear at a shutter, the window was riddled with bullets. Did a cry of

protest escape from any throat, the house was invaded, its inhabitants

driven out, lined against the walls, and shot where they stood. The

doctors and the nurses at the bedsides of the wounded, the very sick in

the hospitals, themselves were slaughtered where they lay. Such was

MacMahon's peace.

After the street massacres, the organized massacres at the bastions, the

stakes of Satory, the huddled masses of prisoners, the grim visitor with

the lantern, the ghastly call to rise and follow, the trenches dug by

the condemned in the slippery, blood-soaked ground for their own corpses

to fall in. Thirty thousand people butchered! Butchered by the sateless

vengeance of authority and the insane blood-lust of the professional

soldier! Butchered without a pretence of reason, a shadow of inquiry,

merely as the gust of insensate rage blew!

After the orgy of fury, the orgy of the inquisition. The gathering of

the prisoners in cellar holes, where they must squat or lie upon damp

earth, and see the light daily only for some short half hour when an

unexpellable sun ray shot through some unstopped crevice. The shifting

of them day and night across the country, sometimes in stock yard

wagons, stifled, starved, and jammed together, as even our butchering

civilization is ashamed to jam pigs for the slaughter; sometimes by

dreadful marches, mostly by night, often with the rain beating on them,

the butts of the soldiers' muskets striking them, as they lagged through

weakness or through lameness.

Then the detention prisons, with their long-drawn agonies of hunger,

cold, vermin, and disease, and the ever-looming darkness of waiting

death. Follow the tortures of friends and relatives of Communards or

suspected Communards, to make them betray the whereabouts of their

friends.

Could they who had seen these things "forgive and forget"? They who had

seen ten year old children lashed to make them tell where their fathers

were? Women driven mad before the terrible choice of giving up their

sons who had fought, or their daughters who had not, to the brutality of

the soldiery.

After the tortures of the hunt, the tortures of the trials, solemn

farces, cat-like cruelties. Then the long hopeless line of exiles

marching from the prison to the port, crowded on the transport ships,

watched like caged animals, forbidden to speak, the cannon always

threatening above them, and so drifted away, away to exile lands, to

barren islands and fever shores--there to waste away in loneliness, in

uselessness, in futile dreams of freedom that ended in chains upon the

ankles or death on the coral reefs--all this was the Mercy and the

Wisdom shown by the national government to the rebel city whose works

are the glory of France, and whose beauty is the Beauty of the World.

Whatever other lesson we have to learn, this one is certain: the

glutless revenge of restored Authority. If ever one rebels, let him

rebel to the end; there is no hope so futile as hope in either the

justice or the mercy of a power against which a rebellion has been

raised. No faith so simple or so foolish as faith in the discrimination,

the judgement, or the wisdom of a reconquering government.

Whether at that time the essential principle of the independent Commune

could have been realized or not, through a general response of the other

cities of France by like action (in case Paris had continued to maintain

the struggle some months longer), I am not historian enough, nor

historic prophet enough, to say. I incline to think not. But certainly

the struggle would have been far other, far more fruitful in its

results, both then and later, (even if finally overthrown), had it

really been a movement of all those people who were so indiscriminately

murdered for it, so vilely tortured, so mercilessly exiled. For had it

really been the deliberate expression of a million people's will to be

free, they would have seized whatever supplies were being furnished the

enemy from within their own gates; they would have repudiated property

rights created by the very power they were seeking to overthrow. They

would have seen what was necessary, and done it.

Had the real Communards themselves seen the logic of their own effort,

and understood that to overset the political system of dependence which

enslaves the Communes they must overset the economic institutions which

beget the centralized State; had they proclaimed a general

communalization of the city's resources they might have won the people

to full faith in the struggle and aroused a ten-fold effort to win out.

If that again had been followed by a like contagion in the other cities

of France, (which was a possibility) the flame might have caught

throughout Latin Europe, and those countries might now be giving a

practical example of the extension of a modified Socialism and local

autonomy. This is what is likely to happen at the next similar outbreak,

if politicians are so impolitic as to provoke the like. There are those

among the best social students who feel sure that such will be the

course of progress.

I frankly say that I cannot see the path of future progress,--my vision

is not large enough, nor my viewpoint high enough. Where others perhaps

behold the morning sunlight, I can discern only mists--blowing dust and

moving glooms which obscure the future. I do not know where the path

leads nor how it goes. Only when looking backward, I can catch glimpses

of that long, terrible, toilsome way by which humanity has gone forward;

even that I do not see clearly,--just stretches of it here and there.

But I see enough of it to know that never has it been a straight,

undeviating line. Always the path winds and returns, and even in the

moment of gaining something, there is something lost.

Against the onslaught of Nature, Man collects his social strength, and

loses thereby the freedom of his more isolated condition. Against the

inconveniences of primitive society, he hurls his inventive

genius,--compasses land, sea, and air,--and by the very act of

conquering his limitations binds fresh fetters on himself, creating a

wealth which he enslaves himself to produce!

And this is the Path of Progress, which there was no foreseeing!

What waits them? And what hope is there? And what help is there?

What waits? The Unknown waits, as it has always waited,--dark, vague,

immense, impenetrable--the Mystery which allures the young and strong

saying, "Come and cope with me"; the Mystery from which the old and wise

shrink back, saying, "Better to endure the evils that we have than fly

to others that we know not of"; the old and wise, but alas! the

cold-blooded! The Mystery of the still unbound strengths of earth, sun,

and depths, the loosing of any one of which may so alter the face of all

that has been done that what now we think a guarantee of liberty may

become the very chain of slavery, as has been the case before with

freedoms laboriously won by act, and then set down in words for unborn

men to abide by. And yet--It waits.

Are you strong and courageous? The Unknown invites you to the struggle,

dares you to its conquering. Nay, it is perhaps your future beloved,

waiting to reward your daring passion with the fervors of fresh

creation. Are you feeble and timid of spirit? Bow your head to the

ground. Still you must meet the future; still you must go in the track

of the others. You may hinder them, you may make them lag; you cannot

stop them, nor yourself.

Struggle waits--abortive struggle, crushed struggle, mistaken struggle,

long and often. And worse than all this, _Waiting waits_,--the long

dead-level of inaction, when no one does anything, when even the daring

can only move in self-returning circles; when no one knows what to do,

except to endure the ever-tightening pressure of intolerable conditions,

how to better which he knows not; when living appears a monotonous

journey through a featureless wilderness, wherein the same pitiless word

"Useless" stares at one from every aimless path one seeks to follow in

the despairing search for a way out. And happier is he who perishes in

the mistaken struggle than he who, with a hot and chafing soul, but with

clear discernment, sees that he is doomed to go on indefinitely in

submission to the wrongs that are.

What hope is there? That the increasing pressure of conditions may

quicken intelligences; that even out of mistaken struggle, frustrate

struggle, unforeseen good consequences may flow, just as out of

undeniable improvements in material life, unforeseeable ill results are

consequent.

The Commune hoped to free Paris, and by so setting an example free many

other cities. It went down in utter defeat, and no city was freed

thereby. But out of this defeat the knowledge and skill of craftsmanship

of its people went abroad over other lands, both into civilized centers

and to wild waste places; and wherever its art went, its idea went also,

so that the "Commune," the idealized Commune, has become a watchword

through the workshops of the world, wherever there are even a few

workers seeking to awaken their fellows.

There are those who have definite hopes; those who think they know

precisely how overwork and underwork and poverty, and all their

consequences of spiritual enslavement, are to be abolished. Such are

they who think they can see the way of progress broad and clear through

the slit in a ballot box. I fear their works will have some uncalculated

consequences also, if ever they execute them; I fear their narrowly

enclosed view deceives them much. Climbing a hill is a different affair

from voting oneself at the top.

No matter: Man always hopes; Life always hopes. When a definite object

cannot be outlined, the indomitable spirit of hope still impels the

living mass to move toward something--something that shall somehow be

better.

What help is there? No help from outside power; no help from overhead;

no help from the Sky, pray to it ever so much; no help from the strong

hand of wise men, nor of good men, however wise or good. Such help

always ends in despotism. Nor yet is there help in the abnegation of

generous fanatics whose efforts end in deplorable fiasco, as did the

Commune. Help lies only in the general will of those who do the work to

say how, when, and where they shall do it.

The force of the lesson of the Commune is that people cannot be made

free who have not conceived freedom; yet through such examples they may

learn to conceive it. It cannot be bestowed as a gift; it must be taken

by those who want it. Let us hope that those who would have given it,

bought that much by their sacrifice, that they touched the unseeing eyes

of the somnambulist proletariat with a light which has made them dream,

at least, of waking.

The Mexican Revolution

That a nation of people considering themselves enlightened, informed,

alert to the interests of the hour, should be so generally and so

profoundly ignorant of a revolution taking place in their backyard, so

to speak, as the people of the United States are ignorant of the present

revolution in Mexico, can be due only to profoundly and generally acting

causes. That people of revolutionary principles and sympathies should be

so, is inexcusable.

It is as one of such principles and sympathies that I address you,--as

one interested in every move the people make to throw off their chains,

no matter where, no matter how,--though naturally my interest is

greatest where the move is such as appears to me to be most in

consonance with the general course of progress, where the tyranny

attacked is what appears to me the most fundamental, where the method

followed is to my thinking most direct and unmistakable. And I add that

those of you who have such principles and sympathies are in the logic of

your own being bound, first, to inform yourselves concerning so great a

matter as the revolt of millions of people--what they are struggling

for, what they are struggling against, and how the struggle stands--from

day to day, if possible; if not, from week to week, or month to month,

as best you can; and second, to spread this knowledge among others, and

endeavor to do what little you can to awaken the consciousness and

sympathy of others.

One of the great reasons why the mass of the American people know

nothing of the Revolution in Mexico, is, that they have altogether a

wrong conception of what "revolution" means. Thus ninety-nine out of a

hundred persons to whom you broach the subject will say, "Why, I thought

that ended long ago. That ended last May"; and this week the press, even

the _Daily Socialist,_ reports, "A _new_ revolution in Mexico." It isn't

a new revolution at all; it is the same revolution, which did not begin

with the armed rebellion of last May, which has been going on steadily

ever since then, and before then, and is bound to go on for a long time

to come, if the other nations keep their hands off and the Mexican

people are allowed to work out their own destiny.

What is _a_ revolution? and what is _this_ revolution?

A revolution means some great and subversive change in the social

institutions of a people, whether sexual, religious, political, or

economic.

The movement of the Reformation was a great religious revolution; a

profound alteration in human thought--a refashioning of the human mind.

The general movement towards political change in Europe and America

about the close of the eighteenth century, was a revolution. The

American and the French revolutions were only prominent individual

incidents in it, culminations of the teachings of the Rights of Man. The

present unrest of the world in its economic relations, as manifested

from day to day in the opposing combinations of men and money, in

strikes and bread-riots, in literature and movements of all kinds

demanding a readjustment of the whole or of parts of our wealth-owning

and wealth-distributing system,--this unrest is the revolution of our

time, the economic _revolution,_ which is seeking social change, and

will go on until it is accomplished. We are in it; at any moment of our

lives it may invade our own homes with its stern demand for

self-sacrifice and suffering. Its more violent manifestations are in

Liverpool and London to-day, in Barcelona and Vienna to-morrow, in New

York and Chicago the day after. Humanity is a seething, heaving mass of

unease, tumbling like surge over a slipping, sliding, shifting bottom;

and there will never be any ease until a rock bottom of economic justice

is reached.

The Mexican revolution is one of the prominent manifestations of this

world-wide economic revolt. It possibly holds as important a place in

the present disruption and reconstruction of economic institutions, as

the great revolution of France held in the eighteenth century movement.

It did not begin with the odious government of Diaz nor end with his

downfall, any more than the revolution in France began with the

coronation of Louis XVI, or ended with his beheading. It began in the

bitter and outraged hearts of the peasants, who for generations have

suffered under a ready-made system of exploitation, imported and foisted

upon them, by which they have been dispossessed of their homes,

compelled to become slave-tenants of those who robbed them; and under

Diaz, in case of rebellion to be deported to a distant province, a

killing climate, and hellish labor. It will end only when that

bitterness is assuaged by very great alteration in the land-holding

system, or until the people have been absolutely crushed into subjection

by a strong military power, whether that power be a native or a foreign

one.

Now the political overthrow of last May, which was followed by the

substitution of one political manager for another, did not at all touch

the economic situation. It promised, of course; politicians always

promise. It promised to consider measures for altering conditions; in

the meantime, proprietors are assured that the new government intends to

respect the rights of landlords and capitalists, and exhorts the workers

to be patient and--_frugal!_

Frugal! Yes, that was the exhortation in Madero's paper to men who, when

they are able to get work, make twenty-five cents a day. A man owning

5,000,000 acres of land exhorts the disinherited workers of Mexico to be

frugal!

The idea that such a condition can be dealt with by the immemorial

remedy offered by tyrants to slaves, is like the idea of sweeping out

the sea with a broom. And unless that frugality, or in other words,

starvation, is forced upon the people by more bayonets and more strategy

than appear to be at the government's command, the Mexican revolution

will go on to the solution of Mexico's land question with a rapidity and

directness of purpose not witnessed in any previous upheaval.

For it must be understood that the main revolt is a revolt against the

system of land tenure. The industrial revolution of the cities, while it

is far from being silent, is not to compare with the agrarian revolt.

Let us understand why. Mexico consists of twenty-seven states, two

territories and a federal district about the capital city. Its

population totals about 15,000,000. Of these, 4,000,000 are of unmixed

Indian descent, people somewhat similar in character to the Pueblos of

our own southwestern states, primitively agricultural for an immemorial

period, communistic in many of their social customs, and like all

Indians, invincible haters of authority. These Indians are scattered

throughout the rural districts of Mexico, one particularly well-known

and much talked of tribe, the Yaquis, having had its fatherland in the

rich northern state of Sonora, a very valuable agricultural country.

The Indian population--especially the Yaquis and the Moquis--have always

disputed the usurpations of the invaders' government, from the days of

the early conquest until now, and will undoubtedly continue to dispute

them as long as there is an Indian left, or until their right to use the

soil out of which they sprang _without paying tribute in any shape_ is

freely recognized.

The communistic customs of these people are very interesting, and very

instructive too; they have gone on practising them all these hundreds of

years, in spite of the foreign civilization that was being grafted upon

Mexico (grafted in all senses of the word); and it was not until forty

years ago (indeed the worst of it not till twenty-five years ago), that

the increasing power of the government made it possible to destroy this

ancient life of the people.

By them, the woods, the waters, and the lands were held in common. Any

one might cut wood from the forest to build his cabin, make use of the

rivers to irrigate his field or garden patch (and this is a right whose

acknowledgment none but those who know the aridity of the southwest can

fully appreciate the imperative necessity for). Tillable lands were

allotted by mutual agreement before sowing, and reverted to the tribe

after harvesting, for reallotment. Pasturage, the right to collect fuel,

were for all. The habits of mutual aid which always arise among sparsely

settled communities were instinctive with them. Neighbor assisted

neighbor to build his cabin, to plough his ground, to gather and store

this crop.

No legal machinery existed--no taxgatherer, no justice, no jailer. All

that they had to do with the hated foreign civilization was to pay the

periodical rent-collector, and to get out of the way of the recruiting

officer when he came around. Those two personages they regarded with

spite and dread; but as the major portion of their lives was not in

immediate contact with them, they could still keep on in their old way

of life in the main.

With the development of the Diaz regime, which came into power in 1876

(and when I say the Diaz regime I do not especially mean the man Diaz,

for I think he has been both overcursed and overpraised, but the whole

force which has steadily developed centralized power from then on, and

the whole policy of "civilizing Mexico," which was the Diaz boast), with

its development, I say, this Indian life has been broken up, violated

with as ruthless a hand as ever tore up a people by the roots and cast

them out as weeds to wither in the sun.

Historians relate with horror the iron deeds of William the Conqueror,

who in the eleventh century created the New Forest by laying waste the

farms of England, destroying the homes of the people to make room for

the deer. But his edicts were mercy compared with the action of the

Mexican government toward the Indians. In order to introduce

"progressive civilization" the Diaz regime granted away immense

concessions of land, to native and foreign capitalists--chiefly foreign

indeed, though there were enough of native sharks as well. Mostly these

concessions were granted to capitalistic combinations, which were to

build railroads (and in some cases did so in a most uncalled for and

uneconomic way), "develop" mineral resources, or establish "modern

industries."

The government took no note of the ancient tribal rights or customs, and

those who received the concessions proceeded to enforce their property

rights. They introduced the unheard of crime of "trespass." They forbade

the cutting of a tree, the breaking of a branch, the gathering of the

fallen wood in the forests. They claimed the watercourses, forbidding

their free use to the people; and it was as if one had forbidden to us

the rains of heaven. The unoccupied land was theirs; no hand might drive

a plow into the soil without first obtaining permission from a distant

master--a permission granted on the condition that the product be the

landlord's, a small, pitifully small, wage, the worker's.

Nor was this enough: in 1894 was passed "The Law of Unappropriated

Lands." By that law, not only were the great stretches of _vacant_, in

the old time _common_, land appropriated, but the occupied lands

themselves to _which the occupants could not show a legal title_ were to

be "denounced"; that is, the educated and the powerful, who were able to

keep up with the doings of the government, went to the courts and said

that there was no legal title to such and such land, and put in a claim

for it. And the usual hocus-pocus of legality being complied with (the

actual occupant of the land being all the time blissfully unconscious of

the law, in the innocence of his barbarism supposing that the working of

the ground by his generations of forbears was title all-sufficient) one

fine day the sheriff comes upon this hapless dweller on the heath and

drives him from his ancient habitat to wander an outcast.

Such are the blessings of education.

Mankind invents a written sign to aid its intercommunication; and

forthwith all manner of miracles are wrought with the sign. Even such a

miracle as that a part of the solid earth passes under the mastery of an

impotent sheet of paper; and a distant bit of animated flesh which

never even saw the ground, acquires the power to expel hundreds,

thousands, of like bits of flesh, though they grew upon that ground as

the trees grow, labored it with their hands, and fertilized it with

their bones for a thousand years.

"This law of unappropriated lands," says William Archer, "has covered

the country with Naboth's Vineyards." I think it would require a

Biblical prophet to describe the "abomination of desolation" it has

made.

It was to become lords of this desolation that the men who play the

game--landlords who are at the same time governors and magistrates,

enterprising capitalists seeking investments--connived at the iniquities

of the Diaz regime; I will go further and say devised them.

The Madero family alone owns some 8,000 square miles of territory; more

than the entire state of New Jersey. The Terrazas family, in the state

of Chihuahua, owns 25,000 square miles; rather more than the entire

state of West Virginia, nearly one-half the size of Illinois. What was

the plantation owning of our southern states in chattel slavery days,

compared with this? And the peon's share for his toil upon these great

estates is hardly more than was the chattel slave's--wretched housing,

wretched food, and wretched clothing.

It is to slaves like these that Madero appeals to be "frugal."

It is of men who have thus been disinherited that our complacent

fellow-citizens of Anglo-Saxon origin, say: "Mexicans! What do you know

about Mexicans? Their whole idea of life is to lean up against a fence

and smoke cigarettes". And pray, what idea of life should a people have

whose means of life in their own way have been taken from them? Should

they be so mighty anxious to convert their strength into wealth for

some other man to loll in?

It reminds me very much of the answer given by a negro employee on the

works at Fortress Monroe to a companion of mine who questioned him

good-humoredly on his easy idleness when the foreman's back was turned.

"Ah ain't goin' to do no white man's work, fo' Ah don' get no white

man's pay."

But for the Yaquis, there was worse than this. Not only were their lands

seized, but they were ordered, a few years since, to be deported to

Yucatan. Now Sonora, as I said, is a northern state, and Yucatan one of

the southernmost. Yucatan hemp is famous, and so is Yucatan fever, and

Yucatan slavery on the hemp plantations. It was to that fever and that

slavery that the Yaquis were deported, in droves of hundreds at a time,

men, women and children--droves like cattle droves, driven and beaten

like cattle. They died there, like flies, as it was meant they should.

Sonora was desolated of her rebellious people, and the land became

"pacific" in the hands of the new landowners. Too pacific in spots. They

had not left people enough to reap the harvests.

Then the government suspended the deportation act, but with the

provision that for every crime committed by a Yaqui, five hundred of his

people be deported. This statement is made in Madero's own book.

Now what in all conscience would any one with decent human feeling

expect a Yaqui to do? Fight! As long as there was powder and bullet to

be begged, borrowed, or stolen; as long as there is a garden to plunder,

or a hole in the hills to hide in!

When the revolution burst out, the Yaquis and other Indian peoples, said

to the revolutionists: "Promise us our lands back, and we will fight

with you." And they are keeping their word, magnificently. All during

the summer they have kept up the warfare. Early in September, the

Chihuahua papers reported a band of 1,000 Yaquis in Sonora about to

attack El Anil; a week later 500 Yaquis had seized the former quarters

of the federal troops at Pitahaya. This week it is reported that federal

troops are dispatched to Ponoitlan, a town in Jalisco, to quell the

Indians who have risen in revolt again because their delusion that the

Maderist government was to restore their land has been dispelled. Like

reports from Sinaloa. In the terrible state of Yucatan, the Mayas are in

active rebellion; the reports say that "the authorities and leading

citizens of various towns have been seized by the malcontents and put in

prison." What is more interesting is, that the peons have seized not

only "the leading citizens," but still more to the purpose have seized

the plantations, parceled them, and are already gathering the crops for

themselves.

Of course, it is not the pure Indians alone who form the peon class of

Mexico. Rather more than double the number of Indians are mixed breeds;

that is, about 8,000,000, leaving less than 3,000,000 of pure white

stock.

The mestiza, or mixed breed population, have followed the communistic

instincts and customs of their Indian forbears; while from the Latin

side of their make-up, they have certain tendencies which work well

together with their Indian hatred of authority.

The mestiza, as well as the Indians, are mostly ignorant in

book-knowledge, only about sixteen per cent. of the whole population of

Mexico being able to read and write. It was not within the program of

the "civilizing" regime to spend money in putting the weapon of learning

in the people's hands. But to conclude that people are necessarily

unintelligent because they are illiterate, is in itself a rather

unintelligent proceeding.

Moreover, a people habituated to the communal customs of an ancient

agricultural life do not need books or papers to tell them that the soil

is the source of wealth, and they must "get back to the land," even if

their intelligence is limited.

Accordingly, they have got back to the land. In the state of Morelos,

which is a small, south-central state, but a very important one--being

next to the Federal District, and by consequence to the city of

Mexico--there has been a remarkable land revolution. General Zapata,

whose name has figured elusively in newspaper reports now as having made

peace with Madero, then as breaking faith, next wounded and killed, and

again resurrected and in hiding, then anew on the warpath and proclaimed

by the provisional government the arch-rebel who must surrender

unconditionally and be tried by court-martial; who has seized the

strategic points on both the railroads running through Morelos, and who

just a few days ago broke into the federal district, sacked a town,

fought successfully at two or three points, with the federals, blew out

two railroad bridges and so frightened the deputies in Mexico City that

they are clamoring for all kinds of action; this Zapata, the fires of

whose military camps are springing up now in Guerrero, Oaxaca and Puebla

as well, is an Indian with a long score to pay, and all an Indian's

satisfaction in paying it. He appears to be a fighter of the style of

our revolutionary Marion and Sumter; the country in which he is

operating is mountainous, and guerilla bands are exceedingly difficult

of capture; even when they are defeated, they have usually succeeded in

inflicting more damage than they have received, and they always get

away.

Zapata has divided up the great estates of Morelos from end to end,

telling the peasants to take possession. They have done so. They are in

possession, and have already harvested their crops. Morelos has a

population of some 212,000.

In Puebla reports in September told us that eighty leading citizens had

waited on the governor to protest against the taking possession of the

land by the peasantry. The troops were deserting, taking horses and arms

with them. It is they no doubt who are now fighting with Zapata. In

Chihuahua, one of the largest states, prisons have been thrown open and

the prisoners recruited as rebels; a great hacienda was attacked and the

horses run off, whereupon the peons rose and joined the attacking party.

In Sinaloa, a rich northern state--famous in the southwestern United

States some years ago as the field of a great co-operative experiment in

which Mr. C. B. Hoffman, one of the former editors of _The Chicago Daily

Socialist,_ was a leading spirit--this week's paper reports that the

former revolutionary general, Juan Banderas, is heading an insurrection

second in importance only to that led by Zapata.

In the southern border state of Chiapas, the taxes in many places could

not be collected. Last week news items said that the present government

had sent General Paz there, with federal troops, to remedy that state of

affairs. In Tabasco, the peons refused to harvest the crops for their

masters; let us hope they have imitated their brothers in Morelos and

gathered them for themselves.

The Maderists have announced that a stiff repressive campaign will be

inaugurated at once; if we are to believe the papers, we are to believe

Madero guilty of the imbecility of saying, "Five days after my

inauguration the rebellion will be crushed." Just why the crushing has

to wait till five days after the inauguration does not appear. I

conceive there must have been some snickering among the reactionary

deputies if such an announcement was really made; and some astonished

query among his followers.

What are we to conclude from all these reports? That the Mexican people

are satisfied? That it's all good and settled? What should we think if

we read that the people, not of Lower but of Upper, California had

turned out the ranch owners, had started to gather in the field products

for themselves and that the Secretary of War had sent United States

troops to attack some thousands of armed men (Zapata has had 3,000 under

arms the whole summer and that force is now greatly increased) who were

defending that expropriation? if we read that in the state of Illinois

the farmers had driven off the tax collector? that the coast states were

talking of secession and forming an independent combination? that in

Pennsylvania a division of the federal army was to be dispatched to

overpower a rebel force of fifteen hundred armed men doing guerilla work

from the mountains? that the prison doors of Maryland, within hailing

distance of Washington City, were being thrown open by armed revoltees?

Should we call it a condition of peace? Regard it a proof that the

people were appeased? We would not: we would say that revolution was in

full swing. And the reason you have thought it was all over in Mexico,

from last May till now, is that the Chicago press, like the eastern,

northern, and central press in general, has said nothing about this

steady march of revolt. Even _The Socialist_ has been silent. Now that

the flame has shot up more spectacularly for the moment, they call it "a

new revolution."

That the papers pursue this course is partly due to the generally acting

causes that produce our northern indifference, which I shall presently

try to explain, and partly to the settled policy of capitalized interest

in controlling its mouthpieces in such a manner as to give their present

henchmen, the Maderists, a chance to pull their chestnuts out of the

fire. They invested some $10,000,000 in this bunch, in the hope that

they may be able to accomplish the double feat of keeping capitalist

possessions intact and at the same time pacifying the people with

specious promises. They want to lend them all the countenance they can,

till the experiment is well tried; so they deliberately suppress

revolutionary news.

Among the later items of interest reported by the _Los Angeles Times_

are those which announce an influx of ex-officials and many-millioned

landlords of Mexico, who are hereafter to be residents of Los Angeles.

What is the meaning of it? Simply that life in Mexico is not such a safe

and comfortable proposition as it was, and that for the present they

prefer to get such income as their agents can collect without themselves

running the risk of actual residence.

Of course it is understood that some of this notable efflux (the

supporters of Reyes, for example, who have their own little rebellions

in Tabasco and San Luis Potosi this week) are political reactionists,

scheming to get back the political loaves and fishes into their own

hands. But most are simply those who know that their property right is

safe enough to be respected by the Maderist government, but that the

said government is not strong enough to put down the innumerable

manifestations of popular hatred which are likely to terminate fatally

to themselves if they remain there.

Nor is all of this fighting revolutionary; not by any means. Some is

reactionary, some probably the satisfaction of personal grudge, much, no

doubt, the expression of general turbulency of a very unconscious

nature. But granting all that may be thrown in the balance, the main

thing, the mighty thing, the regenerative revolution is the

_Reappropriation of the land by the peasants._ Thousands upon thousands

of them are doing it.

Ignorant peasants: peasants who know nothing about the jargon of land

reformers or of Socialists. Yes: that's just the glory of it! Just the

fact that it is done by ignorant people; that is, people ignorant of

book theories; but _not_ ignorant, not so ignorant by half, of life on

the land, as the theory-spinners of the cities. Their minds are simple

and direct; they act accordingly. For them, there is _one way_ to "get

back to the land"; i. e., to ignore the machinery of paper land-holding

(in many instances they have burned the records of the title-deeds) and

proceed to plough the ground, to sow and plant and gather, and _keep the

product themselves_.

Economists, of course, will say that these ignorant people, with their

primitive institutions and methods, will not develop the agricultural

resources of Mexico, and that they must give way before those who will

so develop its resources; that such is the law of human development.

In the first place, the abominable political combination, which gave

away, as recklessly as a handful of soap-bubbles, the agricultural

resources of Mexico--gave them away to the millionaire speculators who

were to _develop the country_--were the educated men of Mexico. And this

is what they saw fit to do with their higher intelligence and education.

So the ignorant may well distrust the good intentions of educated men

who talk about improvements in land development.

In the second place, capitalistic land-ownership, so far from developing

the land in such a manner as to support a denser population, has

depopulated whole districts, immense districts.

In the third place, what the economists do not say is, that the only

justification for intense cultivation of the land is, that the product

of such cultivation may build up the bodies of men (by consequence their

souls) to richer and fuller manhood. It is not merely to pile up figures

of so many million bushels of wheat and corn produced in a season; but

that this wheat and corn shall first go into the stomachs of those who

planted it--and in abundance; to build up the brawn and sinew of the

arms that work the ground, not meanly maintaining them in a half-starved

condition. And second, to build up the strength of the rest of the

nation who are willing to give needed labor in exchange. But never to

increase the fortunes of idlers who dissipate it. This is the purpose,

and the only purpose, of tilling soil; and the working of it for any

other purpose is _waste_, waste both of land and of men.

In the fourth place, no change ever was, or ever can be, worked out in

any society, except by the mass of the people. Theories may be

propounded by educated people, and set down in books, and discussed in

libraries, sitting-rooms and lecture-halls; but they will remain barren,

unless the people in mass work them out. If the change proposed is such

that it is not adaptable to the minds of the people for whose ills it is

supposed to be a remedy, then it will remain what it was, a barren

theory.

Now the conditions in Mexico have been and are so desperate that some

change is imperative. The action of the peasants proves it. Even if a

strong military dictator shall arise, he will have to allow some

provision going towards peasant proprietorship. These unlettered, but

determined, people must be dealt with _now_; there is no such thing as

"waiting till they are educated up to it." Therefore the wisdom of the

economists is wisdom out of place--rather, _relative unwisdom_. The

people never _can_ be educated, if their conditions are to remain what

they were under the Diaz regime. Bodies and minds are both too

impoverished to be able to profit by a spread of theoretical education,

even if it did not require unavailable money and indefinite time to

prepare such a spread. Whatever economic change is wrought, then, must

be such as the people in their present state of comprehension can

understand and make use of. And we see by the reports what they

understand. They understand they have a right upon the soil, a right to

use it for themselves, a right to drive off the invader who has robbed

them, to destroy landmarks and title-deeds, to ignore the taxgatherer

and his demands.

And however primitive their agricultural methods may be, one thing is

sure; that they are more economical than any system which heaps up

fortunes by destroying men.

Moreover, who is to say how they may develop their methods once they

have a free opportunity to do so? It is a common belief of the

Anglo-Saxon that the Indian is essentially lazy. The reasons for his

thinking so are two: under the various tyrannies and robberies which

white men in general, and Anglo-Saxons in particular (they have even

gone beyond the Spaniard) have inflicted upon Indians, there is no

possible reason why an Indian should want to work, save the idiotic one

that work in itself is a virtuous and exalted thing, even if by it the

worker increases the power of his tyrant. As William Archer says: "If

there are men, _and this is not denied_, who work for no wage, and with

no prospect or hope of any reward, it would be curious to know by what

motive other than the lash or the fear of the lash, they are induced to

go forth to their labor in the morning." The second reason is, that an

Indian really has a different idea of what he is alive for than an

Anglo-Saxon has. And so have the Latin peoples. This different idea is

what I meant when I said that the mestiza have certain tendencies

inherited from the Latin side of their make-up which work well together

with their Indian hatred of authority. The Indian likes to _live_; to be

his own master; to work when he pleases and stop when he pleases. He

does not crave many things, but he craves the enjoyment of the things

that he has. He feels himself more a part of nature than a white man

does. All his legends are of wanderings with nature, of forests, fields,

streams, plants, animals. He wants to live with the same liberty as the

other children of earth. His philosophy of work is, Work so as to live

care-free. This is not laziness; this is sense--to the person who has

that sort of make-up.

Your Latin, on the other hand, also wants to live; and having artistic

impulses in him, his idea of living is very much in gratifying them. He

likes music and song and dance, picture-making, carving, and decorating.

He doesn't like to be forced to create his fancies in a hurry; he likes

to fashion them, and admire them, and improve and refashion them, and

admire again; and all for the fun of it. If he is ordered to create a

certain design or a number of objects at a fixed price in a given time,

he loses his inspiration; the play becomes work, and hateful work. So

he, too, does not want to work, except what is requisite to maintain

himself in a position to do those things that he likes better.

Your Anglo-Saxon's idea of life, however, is to create the useful and

the profitable--whether he has any use or profit out of it or not--and

to keep busy, busy; to bestir himself "like the Devil in a holy water

font." Like all other people, he makes a special virtue of his own

natural tendencies, and wants all the world to "get busy"; it doesn't so

much matter to what end this business is to be conducted, provided the

individual--_scrabbles_. Whenever a true Anglo-Saxon seeks to enjoy

himself, he makes work out of that too, after the manner of a certain

venerable English shopkeeper who in company with his son visited the

Louvre. Being tired out with walking from room to room, consulting his

catalogue, and reading artists' names, he dropped down to rest; but

after a few moments rose resolutely and faced the next room, saying,

"Well, Alfred, we'd better be getting through our work."

There is much question as to the origin of the various instincts. Most

people have the impression that the chief source of variation lies in

the difference in the amount of sunlight received in the native

countries inhabited of the various races. Whatever the origin is, these

are the broadly marked tendencies of the people. And "Business" seems

bent not only upon fulfilling its own fore-ordained destiny, but upon

making all the others fulfill it too. Which is both unjust and stupid.

There is room enough in the world for the races to try out their several

tendencies and make their independent contributions to the achievements

of humanity, without imposing them on those who revolt at them.