THE UNDER-WORLD
My Dear Heinrich:
Since I wrote you last night I have been through dreadful scenes. I
have traversed death in life. I have looked with my very eyes on
Hell. I am sick at heart. My soul sorrows for humanity.
Max (for so I have come to call my new-found friend) woke me very
early, and we breakfasted by lamp-light.
Yesterday he had himself dyed my fair locks of a dark brown, almost
black hue, and had cut off some of my hair's superfluous length. Then
he sent for a tailor, who soon arrayed me in garments of the latest
fashion and most perfect fit. Instead of the singular-looking
mountaineer of the day before, for whom the police were diligently
searching, and on whose head a reward of one thousand dollars had
been placed (never before had my head been valued so highly), there
was nothing in my appearance to distinguish me from the thousands of
other gallant young gentlemen of this great city.
A carriage waited for us at the door. We chatted together as we drove
along through the quiet streets.
I asked him:
"Are the degraded, and even the vicious, members of your Brotherhood?"
"No; not the criminal class," he replied, "for there is nothing in
their wretched natures on which you can build confidence or trust.
Only those who have fiber enough to persist in labor, under
conditions which so strongly tend to drive them into crime, can be
members of our Brotherhood."
"May I ask the number of your membership?"
"In the whole world they amount to more than one hundred millions."
I started with astonishment.
"But amid such numbers," I said, "there must certainly be some
traitors?"
"True, but the great multitude have nothing to tell. They are the
limbs and members, as it were, of the organization; the directing
intelligence dwells elsewhere. The multitude are like the soldiers of
an army; they will obey when the time comes; but they are not taken
into the councils of war."
A half hour's ride brought us into the domain of the poor.
An endless procession of men and women with pails and
baskets--small-sized pails and smaller baskets--streamed along the
streets on their way to work. It was not yet six o'clock. I observed
that both men and women were undersized, and that they all very much
resembled each other; as if similar circumstances had squeezed them
into the same likeness. There was no spring to their steps and no
laughter in their eyes; all were spare of frame and stolid or
hungry-looking. The faces of the middle-aged men were haggard and
wore a hopeless expression. Many of them scowled at us, with a look
of hatred, as we passed by them in our carriage. A more joyless,
sullen crowd I never beheld. Street after street they unrolled before
us; there seemed to be millions of them. They were all poorly clad,
and many of them in rags. The women, with the last surviving instinct
of the female heart, had tried to decorate themselves; and here and
there I could observe a bit of bright color on bonnet or apron; but
the bonnets represented the fashions of ten years past, and the
aprons were too often frayed and darned, and relics of some former,
more opulent owners. There were multitudes of children, but they were
without the gambols which characterize the young of all animals; and
there was not even the chirp of a winter bird about them; their faces
were prematurely aged and hardened, and their bold eyes revealed that
sin had no surprises for them. And every one of these showed that
intense look which marks the awful struggle for food and life upon
which they had just entered. The multitude seemed, so far as I could
judge, to be of all nations commingled--the French, German, Irish,
English--Hungarians, Italians, Russians, Jews, Christians, and even
Chinese and Japanese; for the slant eyes of many, and their
imperfect, Tartar-like features, reminded me that the laws made by
the Republic, in the elder and better days, against the invasion of
the Mongolian hordes, had long since become a dead letter.
What struck me most was their incalculable multitude and their
silence. It seemed to me that I was witnessing the resurrection of
the dead; and that these vast, streaming, endless swarms were the
condemned, marching noiselessly as shades to unavoidable and
everlasting misery. They seemed to me merely automata, in the hands
of some ruthless and unrelenting destiny. They lived and moved, but
they were without heart or hope. The illusions of the imagination,
which beckon all of us forward, even over the roughest paths and
through the darkest valleys and shadows of life, had departed from
the scope of their vision. They knew that to-morrow could bring them
nothing better than today--the same shameful, pitiable, contemptible,
sordid struggle for a mere existence. If they produced children it
was reluctantly or unmeaningly; for they knew the wretches must tread
in their footsteps, and enter, like them, that narrow, gloomy,
high-walled pathway, out of which they could never climb; which began
almost in infancy and ended in a pauper's grave--nay, I am wrong, not
even in a pauper's grave; for they might have claimed, perhaps, some
sort of ownership over the earth which enfolded them, which touched
them and mingled with their dust. But public safety and the demands
of science had long ago decreed that they should be whisked off, as
soon as dead, a score or two at a time, and swept on iron tram-cars
into furnaces heated to such intense white heat that they dissolved,
crackling, even as they entered the chamber, and rose in nameless
gases through the high chimney. That towering structure was the sole
memorial monument of millions of them. Their graveyard was the air.
Nature reclaimed her own with such velocity that she seemed to grudge
them the very dust she had lent them during their wretched
pilgrimage. The busy, toiling, rushing, roaring, groaning universe,
big with young, appeared to cry out: "Away with them! Away with them!
They have had their hour! They have performed their task. Here are a
billion spirits waiting for the substance we loaned them. The spirits
are boundless in number; matter is scarce. Away with them!"
I need not tell you, my dear brother, of all the shops and factories
we visited. It was the same story everywhere. Here we saw
exemplified, in its full perfection, that "iron law of wages" which
the old economists spoke of; that is to say, the reduction, by
competition, of the wages of the worker to the least sum that will
maintain life and muscular strength enough to do the work required,
with such little surplus of vitality as might be necessary to
perpetuate the wretched race; so that the world's work should not end
with the death of one starved generation. I do not know if there is a
hell in the spiritual universe, but if there is not, one should
certainly be created for the souls of the men who originated, or
justified, or enforced that damnable creed. It is enough, if nothing
else, to make one a Christian, when he remembers how diametrically
opposite to the teaching of the grand doctrine of brotherly love,
enunciated by the gentle Nazarene, is this devil's creed of cruelty
and murder, with all its steadily increasing world-horrors, before
which to-day the universe stands appalled.
Oh! the pitiable scenes, my brother, that I have witnessed! Room
after room; the endless succession of the stooped, silent toilers;
old, young; men, women, children. And most pitiable of all, the
leering, shameless looks of invitation cast upon us by the women, as
they saw two well-dressed men pass by them. It was not love, nor
license, nor even lust; it was degradation,--willing to exchange
everything for a little more bread. And such rooms--garrets,
sheds--dark, foul, gloomy; overcrowded; with such a stench in the
thick air as made us gasp when entering it; an atmosphere full of
life, hostile to the life of man. Think, my brother, as you sit upon
your mountain side; your gentle sheep feeding around you; breathing
the exquisite air of those elevated regions; and looking off over the
mysterious, ancient world, and the great river valleys leading down
to the marvelous Nile-land afar,--land of temples, ruins,
pyramids,--cradle of civilization, grave of buried empires,--think, I
say, of these millions condemned to live their brief, hopeless span
of existence under such awful conditions! See them as they eat their
mid-day meal. No delightful pause from pleasant labor; no brightly
arrayed table; no laughing and loving faces around a plenteous board,
with delicacies from all parts of the world; no agreeable interchange
of wisdom and wit and courtesy and merriment. No; none of these.
Without stopping in their work, under the eyes of sullen
task-masters, they snatch bites out of their hard, dark bread, like
wild animals, and devour it ravenously.{fr. 1}
Toil, toil, toil, from early morn until late at night; then home they
swarm; tumble into their wretched beds; snatch a few hours of
disturbed sleep, battling with vermin, in a polluted atmosphere; and
then up again and to work; and so on, and on, in endless, mirthless,
hopeless round; until, in a few years, consumed with disease, mere
rotten masses of painful wretchedness, they die, and are wheeled off
to the great
I asked one of the foremen what wages these men and women received.
He told me. It seemed impossible that human life could be maintained
upon such a pittance. I then asked whether they ever ate meat. "No,"
he said, "except when they had a rat or mouse" "A rat or mouse!" I
exclaimed. "Oh yes," he replied, "the rats and mice were important
articles of diet,--just as they had been for centuries in China. The
little children, not yet able to work, fished for them in the sewers,
with hook and line, precisely as they had done a century ago in
Paris, during the great German siege. A dog," he added, "was a great
treat. When the authorities killed the vagrant hounds there was a big
scramble among the poor for the bodies."
I was shocked at these statements; and then I remembered that some
philosopher had argued that cannibalism had survived almost to our
own times, in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, because they had
contained no animals of large size with which the inhabitants could
satisfy the dreadful craving of the system for flesh-food; and hence
they devoured their captives.
"Do these people ever marry?" I inquired.
"Marry!" he exclaimed, with a laugh; "why, they could not afford to
pay the fee required by law. And why should they marry? There is no
virtue among them. No," he said, "they had almost gotten down to the
condition of the Australian savages, who, if not prevented by the
police, would consummate their animal-like nuptials in the public
streets."
Maximilian told me that this man was one of the Brotherhood. I did
not wonder at it.
From the shops and mills of honest industry, Maximilian led me--it
was still broad daylight--into the criminal quarters. We saw the wild
beasts in their lairs; in the iron cages of circumstance which
civilization has built around them, from which they too readily break
out to desolate their fellow-creatures. But here, too, were the
fruits of misgovernment. If it were possible we might trace back from
yonder robber and murderer--a human hyena--the long ancestral line of
brutality, until we see it starting from some poor peasant of the
Middle Ages, trampled into crime under the feet of feudalism. The
little seed of weakness or wickedness has been carefully nursed by
society, generation after generation, until it has blossomed at last
in this destructive monster. Civilization has formulated a new
variety of the genus _homo_--and it must inevitably perpetuate its
kind.
The few prey on the many; and in turn a few of the many prey upon
all. These are the brutal violators of justice, who go to prison, or
to the scaffold, for breaking through a code of laws under which
peaceful but universal injustice is wrought. If there were enough of
these outlaws they might establish a system of jurisprudence for the
world under which it would be lawful to rob and murder by the rule of
the strong right hand, but criminal to reduce millions to
wretchedness by subtle and cunning arts; and, hoity-toity, the
prisons would change their tenants, and the brutal plunderers of the
few would give place to the cultured spoilers of the many.
And when you come to look at it, my brother, how shall we compare the
conditions of the well-to-do-man, who has been merely robbed of his
watch and purse, even at the cost of a broken head, which will heal
in a few days, with the awful doom of the poor multitude, who from
the cradle to the grave work without joy and live without hope? Who
is there that would take back his watch and purse at the cost of
changing places with one of these wretches?
And who is there that, if the choice were presented to him, would not
prefer instant death, which is but a change of conditions, a flight
from world to world, or at worst annihilation, rather than to be
hurled into the living tomb which I have depicted, there to grovel
and writhe, pressed down by the sordid mass around him, until death
comes to his relief?
And so it seems to me that, in the final analysis of reason, the
great criminals of the world are not these wild beasts, who break
through all laws, whose selfishness takes the form of the bloody
knife, the firebrand, or the bludgeon; but those who, equally
selfish, corrupt the foundations of government and create laws and
conditions by which millions suffer, and out of which these murderers
and robbers naturally and unavoidably arise.
But I must bring this long letter to a conclusion, and subscribe
myself, with love to all,
Your affectionate brother,
Gabriel