WHY THE REVOLUTION WENT SLOW AT FIRST BUT FAST AT LAST.
"So much for the causes of the Revolution in America, both the general
fundamental cause, consisting in the factor newly introduced into social
evolution by the enlightenment of the masses and irresistibly tending to
equality, and the immediate local causes peculiar to America, which
account for the Revolution having come at the particular time it did and
for its taking the particular course it did. Now, briefly as to that
course:
"The pinching of the economic shoe resulting from the concentration of
wealth was naturally first felt by the class with least reserves, the
wage-earners, and the Revolution may be said to have begun with their
revolt. In 1869 the first great labor organization in America was formed
to resist the power of capital. Previous to the war the number of strikes
that had taken place in the country could be counted on the fingers.
Before the sixties were out they were counted by hundreds, during the
seventies by thousands, and during the eighties the labor reports
enumerate nearly ten thousand, involving two or three million workers.
Many of these strikes were of continental scope, shaking the whole
commercial fabric and causing general panics.
"Close after the revolt of the wage earners came that of the
farmers--less turbulent in methods but more serious and abiding in
results. This took the form of secret leagues and open political parties
devoted to resisting what was called the money power. Already in the
seventies these organizations threw State and national politics into
confusion, and later became the nucleus of the revolutionary party.
"Your contemporaries of the thinking classes can not be taxed with
indifference to these signs and portents. The public discussion and
literature of the time reflect the confusion and anxiety with which the
unprecedented manifestations of popular discontent had affected all
serious persons. The old-fashioned Fourth-of-July boastings had ceased to
be heard in the land. All agreed that somehow republican forms of
government had not fulfilled their promise as guarantees of the popular
welfare, but were showing themselves impotent to prevent the
recrudescence in the New World of all the Old World's evils, especially
those of class and caste, which it had been supposed could never exist in
the atmosphere of a republic. It was recognized on all sides that the old
order was changing for the worse, and that the republic and all it had
been thought to stand for was in danger. It was the universal cry that
something must be done to check the ruinous tendency. Reform was the word
in everybody's mouth, and the rallying cry, whether in sincerity or
pretense, of every party. But indeed, Julian, I need waste no time
describing this state of affairs to you, for you were a witness of it
till 1887."
"It was all quite as you describe it, the industrial and political
warfare and turmoil, the general sense that the country was going wrong,
and the universal cry for some sort of reform. But, as I said before, the
agitation, while alarming enough, was too confused and purposeless to
seem revolutionary. All agreed that something ailed the country, but no
two agreed what it was or how to cure it."
"Just so," said the doctor. "Our historians divide the entire
revolutionary epoch--from the close of the war, or the beginning of the
seventies, to the establishment of the present order early in the
twentieth century--into two periods, the incoherent and the rational. The
first of these is the period of which we have been talking, and with
which Storiot deals with in the paragraphs I have read--the period with
which you were, for the most part, contemporary. As we have seen, and you
know better than we can, it was a time of terror and tumult, of confused
and purposeless agitation, and a Babel of contradictory clamor. The
people were blindly kicking in the dark against the pricks of capitalism,
without any clear idea of what they were kicking against.
"The two great divisions of the toilers, the wage-earners and the
farmers, were equally far from seeing clear and whole the nature
of the situation and the forces of which they were the victims. The
wage-earners' only idea was that by organizing the artisans and manual
workers their wages could be forced up and maintained indefinitely. They
seem to have had absolutely no more knowledge than children of the effect
of the profit system always and inevitably to keep the consuming power of
the community indefinitely below its producing power and thus to maintain
a constant state of more or less aggravated glut in the goods and labor
markets, and that nothing could possibly prevent the constant presence of
these conditions so long as the profit system was tolerated, or their
effect finally to reduce the wage-earner to the subsistence point or
below as profits tended downward. Until the wage-earners saw this and no
longer wasted their strength in hopeless or trivial strikes against
individual capitalists which could not possibly affect the general
result, and united to overthrow the profit system, the Revolution must
wait, and the capitalists had no reason to disturb themselves.
"As for the farmers, as they were not wage-earners, they took no
interest in the plans of the latter, which aimed merely to benefit the
wage-earning class, but devoted themselves to equally futile schemes for
their class, in which, for the same reason that they were merely class
remedies, the wage-earners took no interest. Their aim was to obtain aid
from the Government to improve their condition as petty capitalists
oppressed by the greater capitalists who controlled the traffic and
markets of the country; as if any conceivable device, so long as private
capitalism should be tolerated, would prevent its natural evolution,
which was the crushing of the smaller capitalists by the larger.
"Their main idea seems to have been that their troubles as farmers were
chiefly if not wholly to be accounted for by certain vicious acts of
financial legislation, the effect of which they held had been to make
money scarce and dear. What they demanded as the sufficient cure of the
existing evils was the repeal of the vicious legislation and a larger
issue of currency. This they believed would be especially beneficial to
the farming class by reducing the interest on their debts and raising the
price of their product.
"Undoubtedly the currency and the coinage and the governmental financial
system in general had been shamelessly abused by the capitalists to
corner the wealth of the nation in their hands, but their misuse of this
part of the economic machinery had been no worse than their manipulation
of the other portions of the system. Their trickery with the currency had
only helped them to monopolize the wealth of the people a little faster
than they would have done it had they depended for their enrichment on
what were called the legitimate operations of rent, interest, and
profits. While a part of their general policy of economic subjugation of
the people, the manipulation of the currency had not been essential to
that policy, which would have succeeded just as certainly had it been
left out. The capitalists were under no necessity to juggle with the
coinage had they been content to make a little more leisurely process of
devouring the lands and effects of the people. For that result no
particular form of currency system was necessary, and no conceivable
monetary system would have prevented it. Gold, silver, paper, dear money,
cheap money, hard money, bad money, good money--every form of token from
cowries to guineas--had all answered equally well in different times and
countries for the designs of the capitalist, the details of the game
being only slightly modified according to the conditions.
"To have convinced himself of the folly of ascribing the economic
distress to which his class as well as the people at large had been
reduced, to an act of Congress relating to the currency, the American
farmer need only have looked abroad to foreign lands, where he would have
seen that the agricultural class everywhere was plunged in a misery
greater than his own, and that, too, without the slightest regard to the
nature of the various monetary systems in use.
"Was it indeed a new or strange phenomenon in human affairs that the
agriculturists were going to the wall, that the American farmer should
seek to account for the fact by some new and peculiarly American policy?
On the contrary, this had been the fate of the agricultural class in all
ages, and what was now threatening the American tiller of the soil was
nothing other than the doom which had befallen his kind in every previous
generation and in every part of the world. Manifestly, then, he should
seek the explanation not in any particular or local conjunction of
circumstances, but in some general and always operative cause. This
general cause, operative in all lands and times and among all races, he
would presently see when he should interrogate history, was the
irresistible tendency by which the capitalist class in the evolution of
any society through rent, interest, and profits absorbs to itself the
whole wealth of the country, and thus reduces the masses of the people to
economic, social, and political subjection, the most abject class of all
being invariably the tillers of the soil. For a time the American
population, including the farmers, had been enabled, thanks to the vast
bounty of a virgin and empty continent, to evade the operation of this
universal law, but the common fate was now about to overtake them, and
nothing would avail to avert it save the overthrow of the system of
private capitalism of which it always had been and always must be the
necessary effect.
"Time would fail even to mention the innumerable reform nostrums offered
for the cure of the nation by smaller bodies of reformers. They ranged
from the theory of the prohibitionists that the chief cause of the
economic distress--from which the teetotal farmers of the West were the
worst sufferers--was the use of intoxicants, to that of the party which
agreed that the nation was being divinely chastised because there was no
formal recognition of the Trinity in the Constitution. Of course, these
were extravagant persons, but even those who recognized the concentration
of wealth as the cause of the whole trouble quite failed to see that this
concentration was itself the natural evolution of private capitalism, and
that it was not possible to prevent it or any of its consequences unless
and until private capitalism itself should be put an end to.
"As might be expected, efforts at resistance so ill calculated as these
demonstrations of the wage-earners and farmers, not to speak of the host
of petty sects of so-called reformers during the first phase of the
Revolution, were ineffectual. The great labor organizations which had
sprung up shortly after the war as soon as the wage-earners felt the
necessity of banding themselves to resist the yoke of concentrated
capital, after twenty-five years of fighting, had demonstrated their
utter inability to maintain, much less to improve, the condition of the
workingman. During this period ten or fifteen thousand recorded strikes
and lock-outs had taken place, but the net result of the industrial civil
war, protracted through so long a period, had been to prove to the
dullest of workingmen the hopelessness of securing any considerable
amelioration of their lot by class action or organization, or indeed of
even maintaining it against encroachments. After all this unexampled
suffering and fighting, the wage-earners found themselves worse off than
ever. Nor had the farmers, the other great division of the insurgent
masses, been any more successful in resisting the money power. Their
leagues, although controlling votes by the million, had proved even more
impotent if possible than the wage-earners' organizations to help their
members. Even where they had been apparently successful and succeeded in
capturing the political control of states, they found the money power
still able by a thousand indirect influences to balk their efforts and
turn their seeming victories into apples of Sodom, which became ashes in
the hands of those who would pluck them.
"Of the vast, anxious, and anguished volume of public discussion as to
what should be done, what after twenty-five years had been the practical
outcome? Absolutely nothing. If here and there petty reforms had been
introduced, on the whole the power of the evils against which those
reforms were directed had vastly increased. If the power of the
plutocracy in 1873 had been as the little finger of a man, in 1895 it was
thicker than his loins. Certainly, so far as superficial and material
indications went, it looked as if the battle had been going thus far
steadily, swiftly, and hopelessly against the people, and that the
American capitalists who expended their millions in buying titles of
nobility for their children were wiser in their generation than the
children of light and better judges of the future.
"Nevertheless, no conclusion could possibly have been more mistaken.
During these decades of apparently unvaried failure and disaster the
revolutionary movement for the complete overthrow of private capitalism
had made a progress which to rational minds should have presaged its
complete triumph in the near future."
"Where had the progress been?" I said; "I don't see any."
"In the development among, the masses of the people of the necessary
revolutionary temper," replied the doctor; "in the preparation of the
popular mind by the only process that could have prepared it, to accept
the programme of a radical reorganization of the economic system from the
ground up. A great revolution, you must remember, which is to profoundly
change a form of society, must accumulate a tremendous moral force, an
overwhelming weight of justification, so to speak, behind it before it
can start. The processes by which and the period during which this
accumulation of impulse is effected are by no means so spectacular as the
events of the subsequent period when the revolutionary movement, having
obtained an irresistible momentum, sweeps away like straws the obstacles
that so long held it back only to swell its force and volume at last. But
to the student the period of preparation is the more truly interesting
and critical field of study. It was absolutely necessary that the
American people, before they would seriously think of undertaking so
tremendous a reformation as was implied in the substitution of public for
private capitalism, should be fully convinced not by argument only, but
by abundant bitter experience and convincing object lessons, that no
remedy for the evils of the time less complete or radical would suffice.
They must become convinced by numerous experiments that private
capitalism had evolved to a point where it was impossible to amend it
before they would listen to the proposition to end it. This painful but
necessary experience the people were gaining during the earlier decades
of the struggle. In this way the innumerable defeats, disappointments,
and fiascoes which met their every effort at curbing and reforming the
money power during the seventies, eighties, and early nineties,
contributed far more than as many victories would have done to the
magnitude and completeness of the final triumph of the people. It was
indeed necessary that all these things should come to pass to make the
Revolution possible. It was necessary that the system of private and
class tyranny called private capitalism should fill up the measure of its
iniquities and reveal all it was capable of, as the irreconcilable enemy
of democracy, the foe of life and liberty and human happiness, in order
to insure that degree of momentum to the coming uprising against it which
was necessary to guarantee its complete and final overthrow. Revolutions
which start too soon stop too soon, and the welfare of the race demanded
that this revolution should not cease, nor pause, until the last vestige
of the system by which men usurped power over the lives and liberties of
their fellows through economic means was destroyed. Therefore not one
outrage, not one act of oppression, not one exhibition of conscienceless
rapacity, not one prostitution of power on the part of Executive,
Legislature, or judiciary, not one tear of patriotic shame over the
degradation of the national name, not one blow of the policeman's
bludgeon, not a single bullet or bayonet thrust of the soldiery, could
have been spared. Nothing but just this discipline of failure,
disappointment, and defeat on the part of the earlier reformers could
have educated the people to the necessity of attacking the system of
private capitalism in its existence instead of merely in its particular
manifestations.
"We reckon the beginning of the second part of the revolutionary movement
to which we give the name of the coherent or rational phase, from the
time when there became apparent a clear conception, on the part of at
least a considerable body of the people, of the true nature of the issue
as one between the rights of man and the principle of irresponsible power
embodied in private capitalism, and the realization that its outcome, if
the people were to triumph, must be the establishment of a wholly new
economic system which should be based upon the public control in the
public interest of the system of production and distribution hitherto
left to private management."
"At about what date," I asked, "do you consider that the revolutionary
movement began to pass from the incoherent into the logical phase?"
"Of course," replied the doctor, "it was not the case of an immediate
outright change of character, but only of the beginning of a new spirit
and intelligence. The confusion and incoherence and short-sightedness of
the first period long overlapped the time when the infusion of a more
rational spirit and adequate ideal began to appear, but from about the
beginning of the nineties we date the first appearance of an intelligent
purpose in the revolutionary movement and the beginning of its
development from a mere formless revolt against intolerable conditions
into a logical and self-conscious evolution toward the order of to-day."
"It seems I barely missed it."
"Yes," replied the doctor, "if you had been able to keep awake only a
year or two longer you would not have been so wholly surprised by our
industrial system, and especially by the economic equality for and by
which it exists, for within a couple of years after your supposed demise
the possibility that such a social order might be the outcome of the
existing crisis was being discussed from one end of America to the other.
"Of course," the doctor went on, "the idea of an integrated economic
system co-ordinating the efforts of all for the common welfare, which is
the basis of the modern state, is as old as philosophy. As a theory it
dates back to Plato at least, and nobody knows how much further, for it
is a conception of the most natural and obvious order. Not, however,
until popular government had been made possible by the diffusion of
intelligence was the world ripe for the realization of such a form of
society. Until that time the idea, like the soul waiting for a fit
incarnation, must remain without social embodiment. Selfish rulers
thought of the masses only as instruments for their own aggrandizement,
and if they had interested themselves in a more exact organization of
industry it would only have been with a view of making that organization
the means of a more complete tyranny. Not till the masses themselves
became competent to rule was a serious agitation possible or desirable
for an economic organization on a co-operative basis. With the first
stirrings of the democratic spirit in Europe had come the beginning of
earnest discussion as to the feasibility of such a social order. Already,
by the middle of the century, this agitation in the Old World had become,
to discerning eyes, one of the signs of the times, but as yet America, if
we except the brief and abortive social experiments in the forties, had
remained wholly unresponsive to the European movement.
"I need not repeat that the reason, of course, was the fact that the
economic conditions in America had been more satisfactory to the masses
than ever before, or anywhere else in the world. The individualistic
method of making a living, every man for himself, had answered the
purpose on the whole so well that the people did not care to discuss
other methods. The powerful motive necessary to rouse the sluggish and
habit-bound minds of the masses and interest them in a new and
revolutionary set of ideas was lacking. Even during the early stage of
the revolutionary period it had been found impossible to obtain any
hearing for the notions of a new economic order which were already
agitating Europe. It was not till the close of the eighties that the
total and ridiculous failure of twenty years of desperate efforts to
reform the abuses of private capitalism had prepared the American people
to give serious attention to the idea of dispensing with the capitalist
altogether by a public organization of industry to be administered like
other common affairs in the common interest.
"The two great points of the revolutionary programme--the principle of
economic equality and a nationalized industrial system as its means and
pledge--the American people were peculiarly adapted to understand and
appreciate. The lawyers had made a Constitution of the United States, but
the true American constitution--the one written on the people's
hearts--had always remained the immortal Declaration with its assertion
of the inalienable equality of all men. As to the nationalization of
industry, while it involved a set of consequences which would completely
transform society, the principle on which the proposition was based, and
to which it appealed for justification, was not new to Americans in any
sense, but, on the contrary, was merely a logical development of the idea
of popular self-government on which the American system was founded. The
application of this principle to the regulation of the economic
administration was indeed a use of it which was historically new, but it
was one so absolutely and obviously implied in the content of the idea
that, as soon as it was proposed, it was impossible that any sincere
democrat should not be astonished that so plain and common-sense a
corollary of popular government had waited so long for recognition. The
apostles of a collective administration of the economic system in the
common interest had in Europe a twofold task: first, to teach the general
doctrine of the absolute right of the people to govern, and then to show
the economic application of that right. To Americans, however, it was
only necessary to point out an obvious although hitherto overlooked
application of a principle already fully accepted as an axiom.
"The acceptance of the new ideal did not imply merely a change in
specific programmes, but a total facing about of the revolutionary
movement. It had thus far been an attempt to resist the new economic
conditions being imposed by the capitalists by bringing back the former
economic conditions through the restoration of free competition as it had
existed before the war. This was an effort of necessity hopeless, seeing
that the economic changes which had taken place were merely the necessary
evolution of any system of private capitalism, and could not be
successfully resisted while the system was retained.
"'Face about!' was the new word of command. 'Fight forward, not backward!
March with the course of economic evolution, not against it. The
competitive system can never be restored, neither is it worthy of
restoration, having been at best an immoral, wasteful, brutal scramble
for existence. New issues demand new answers. It is in vain to pit the
moribund system of competition against the young giant of private
monopoly; it must rather be opposed by the greater giant of public
monopoly. The consolidation of business in private interests must be met
with greater consolidation in the public interest, the trust and the
syndicate with the city, State, and nation, capitalism with nationalism.
The capitalists have destroyed the competitive system. Do not try to
restore it, but rather thank them for the work, if not the motive, and
set about, not to rebuild the old village of hovels, but to rear on the
cleared place the temple humanity so long has waited for.'
"By the light of the new teaching the people began to recognize that the
strait place into which the republic had come was but the narrow and
frowning portal of a future of universal welfare and happiness such as
only the Hebrew prophets had colors strong enough to paint.
"By the new philosophy the issue which had arisen between the people and
the plutocracy was seen not to be a strange and unaccountable or
deplorable event, but a necessary phase in the evolution of a democratic
society in passing from a lower to an incomparably higher plane, an issue
therefore to be welcomed not shunned, to be forced not evaded, seeing
that its outcome in the existing state of human enlightenment and
world-wide democratic sentiment could not be doubtful. By the road by
which every republic had toiled upward from the barren lowlands of early
hardship and poverty, just at the point where the steepness of the hill
had been overcome and a prospect opened of pleasant uplands of wealth and
prosperity, a sphinx had ever stood, propounding the riddle, 'How shall a
state combine the preservation of democratic equality with the increase
of wealth?' Simple indeed had been the answer, for it was only needful
that the people should so order their system of economy that wealth
should be equally shared as it increased, in order that, however great
the increase, it should in no way interfere with the equalities of the
people; for the great justice of equality is the well of political life
everlasting for peoples, whereof if a nation drink it may live forever.
Nevertheless, no republic before had been able to answer the riddle, and
therefore their bones whitened the hilltop, and not one had ever survived
to enter on the pleasant land in view. But the time had now come in the
evolution of human intelligence when the riddle so often asked and never
answered was to be answered aright, the sphinx made an end of, and the
road freed forever for all the nations.
"It was this note of perfect assurance, of confident and boundless hope,
which distinguished the new propaganda, and was the more commanding and
uplifting from its contrast with the blank pessimism on the one side of
the capitalist party, and the petty aims, class interests, short vision,
and timid spirit of the reformers who had hitherto opposed them.
"With a doctrine to preach of so compelling force and beauty, promising
such good things to men in so great want of them, it might seem that it
would require but a brief time to rally the whole people to its support.
And so it would doubtless have been if the machinery of public
information and direction had been in the hands of the reformers or in
any hands that were impartial, instead of being, as it was, almost wholly
in those of the capitalists. In previous periods the newspapers had not
represented large investments of capital, having been quite crude
affairs. For this very reason, however, they were more likely to
represent the popular feeling. In the latter part of the nineteenth
century a great newspaper with large circulation necessarily required a
vast investment of capital, and consequently the important newspapers of
the country were owned by capitalists and of course carried on in the
owners' interests. Except when the capitalists in control chanced to be
men of high principle, the great papers were therefore upon the side of
the existing order of things and against the revolutionary movement.
These papers monopolized the facilities of gathering and disseminating
public intelligence and thereby exercised a censorship, almost as
effective as that prevailing at the same time in Russia or Turkey, over
the greater part of the information which reached the people.
"Not only the press but the religious instruction of the people was under
the control of the capitalists. The churches were the pensioners of the
rich and well-to-do tenth of the people, and abjectly dependent on them
for the means of carrying on and extending their work. The universities
and institutions of higher learning were in like manner harnessed to the
plutocratic chariot by golden chains. Like the churches, they were
dependent for support and prosperity upon the benefactions of the rich,
and to offend them would have been suicidal. Moreover, the rich and
well-to-do tenth of the population was the only class which could afford
to send children to institutions of the secondary education, and they
naturally preferred schools teaching a doctrine comfortable to the
possessing class.
"If the reformers had been put in possession of press, pulpit, and
university, which the capitalists controlled, whereby to set home their
doctrine to the heart and mind and conscience of the nation, they would
have converted and carried the country in a month.
"Feeling how quickly the day would be theirs if they could but reach the
people, it was natural that they should chafe bitterly at the delay,
confronted as they were by the spectacle of humanity daily crucified
afresh and enduring an illimitable anguish which they knew was needless.
Who indeed would not have been impatient in their place, and cried as
they did, 'How long, O Lord, how long?' To men so situated, each day's
postponement of the great deliverance might well have seemed like a
century. Involved as they were in the din and dust of innumerable petty
combats, it was as difficult for them as for soldiers in the midst of a
battle to obtain an idea of the general course of the conflict and the
operation of the forces which would determine its issue. To us, however,
as we look back, the rapidity of the process by which during the nineties
the American people were won over to the revolutionary programme seems
almost miraculous, while as to the ultimate result there was, of course,
at no time the slightest ground of question.
"From about the beginning of the second phase of the revolutionary
movement, the literature of the times begins to reflect in the most
extraordinary manner a wholly new spirit of radical protest against the
injustices of the social order. Not only in the serious journals and
books of public discussion, but in fiction and in belles-lettres, the
subject of social reform becomes prominent and almost commanding. The
figures that have come down to us of the amazing circulation of some of
the books devoted to the advocacy of a radical social reorganization are
almost enough in themselves to explain the revolution. The antislavery
movement had one Uncle Tom's Cabin; the anticapitalist movement had many.
"A particularly significant fact was the extraordinary unanimity and
enthusiasm with which the purely agricultural communities of the far West
welcomed the new gospel of a new and equal economic system. In the past,
governments had always been prepared for revolutionary agitation among
the proletarian wage-earners of the cities, and had always counted on the
stolid conservatism of the agricultural class for the force to keep the
inflammable artisans down. But in this revolution it was the
agriculturists who were in the van. This fact alone should have
sufficiently foreshadowed the swift course and certain issue of the
struggle. At the beginning of the battle the capitalists had lost their
reserves.
"At about the beginning of the nineties the revolutionary movement first
prominently appears in the political field. For twenty years after the
close of the civil war the surviving animosities between North and South
mainly determined party lines, and this fact, together with the lack of
agreement on a definite policy, had hitherto prevented the forces of
industrial discontent from making any striking political demonstration.
But toward the close of the eighties the diminished bitterness of feeling
between North and South left the people free to align themselves on the
new issue, which had been steadily looming up ever since the war, as the
irrepressible conflict of the near future--the struggle to the death
between democracy and plutocracy, between the rights of man and the
tyranny of capital in irresponsible hands.
"Although the idea of the public conduct of economic enterprises by
public agencies had never previously attracted attention or favor in
America, yet already in 1890, almost as soon as it began to be talked
about, political parties favoring its application to important branches
of business had polled heavy votes. In 1892 a party, organized in nearly
every State in the Union, cast a million votes in favor of nationalizing
at least the railroads, telegraphs, banking system, and other monopolized
businesses. Two years later the same party showed large gains, and in
1896 its platform was substantially adopted by one of the great historic
parties of the country, and the nation divided nearly equally on the
issue.
"The terror which this demonstration of the strength of the party of
social discontent caused among the possessing class seems at this
distance rather remarkable, seeing that its demands, while attacking many
important capitalist abuses, did not as yet directly assail the principle
of the private control of capital as the root of the whole social evil.
No doubt, what alarmed the capitalists even more than the specific
propositions of the social insurgents were the signs of a settled popular
exasperation against them and all their works, which indicated that what
was now called for was but the beginning of what would be demanded later.
The antislavery party had not begun with demanding the abolition of
slavery, but merely its limitation. The slaveholders were not, however,
deceived as to the significance of the new political portent, and the
capitalists would have been less wise in their generation than their
predecessors had they not seen in the political situation the beginning
of a confrontation of the people and the capitalists--the masses and the
classes, as the expression of the day was--which threatened an economic
and social revolution in the near future."
"It seems to me," I said, "that by this stage of the revolutionary
movement American capitalists capable of a dispassionate view of the
situation ought to have seen the necessity of making concessions if they
were to preserve any part of their advantages."
"If they had," replied the doctor, "they would have been the first
beneficiaries of a tyranny who in presence of a rising flood of
revolution ever realized its force or thought of making concessions until
it was hopelessly too late. You see, tyrants are always materialists,
while the forces behind great revolutions are moral. That is why the
tyrants never foresee their fate till it is too late to avert it."
"We ought to be in our chairs pretty soon," said Edith. "I don't want
Julian to miss the opening scene."
"There are a few minutes yet," said the doctor, "and seeing that I have
been rather unintentionally led into giving this sort of outline sketch
of the course of the Revolution, I want to say a word about the
extraordinary access of popular enthusiasm which made a short story of
its later stages, especially as it is that period with which the play
deals that we are to attend.
"There had been many, you must know, Julian, who, while admitting that a
system of co-operation, must eventually take the place of private
capitalism in America and everywhere, had expected that the process would
be a slow and gradual one, extending over several decades, perhaps half a
century, or even more. Probably that was the more general opinion. But
those who held it failed to take account of the popular enthusiasm which
would certainly take possession of the movement and drive it irresistibly
forward from the moment that the prospect of its success became fairly
clear to the masses. Undoubtedly, when the plan of a nationalized
industrial system, and an equal sharing of results, with its promise of
the abolition of poverty and the reign of universal comfort, was first
presented to the people, the very greatness of the salvation it offered
operated to hinder its acceptance. It seemed too good to be true. With
difficulty the masses, sodden in misery and inured to hopelessness, had
been able to believe that in heaven there would be no poor, but that it
was possible here and now in this everyday America to establish such an
earthly paradise was too much to believe.
"But gradually, as the revolutionary propaganda diffused a knowledge of
the clear and unquestionable grounds on which this great assurance
rested, and as the growing majorities of the revolutionary party
convinced the most doubtful that the hour of its triumph was at hand, the
hope of the multitude grew into confidence, and confidence flamed into a
resistless enthusiasm. By the very magnitude of the promise which at
first appalled them they were now transported. An impassioned eagerness
seized upon them to enter into the delectable land, so that they found
every day's, every hour's delay intolerable. The young said, 'Let us make
haste, and go in to the promised land while we are young, that we may
know what living is': and the old said, 'Let us go in ere we die, that we
may close our eyes in peace, knowing that it will be well with our
children after us.' The leaders and pioneers of the Revolution, after
having for so many years exhorted and appealed to a people for the most
part indifferent or incredulous, now found themselves caught up and borne
onward by a mighty wave of enthusiasm which it was impossible for them to
check, and difficult for them to guide, had not the way been so plain.
"Then, to cap the climax, as if the popular mind were not already in a
sufficiently exalted frame, came 'The Great Revival,' touching this
enthusiasm with religious emotion."
"We used to have what were called revivals of religion in my day," I
said, "sometimes quite extensive ones. Was this of the same nature?"
"Scarcely," replied the doctor. "The Great Revival was a tide of
enthusiasm for the social, not the personal, salvation, and for the
establishment in brotherly love of the kingdom of God on earth which
Christ bade men hope and work for. It was the general awakening of the
people of America in the closing years of the last century to the
profoundly ethical and truly religious character and claims of the
movement for an industrial system which should guarantee the economic
equality of all the people.
"Nothing, surely, could be more self-evident than the strictly Christian
inspiration of the idea of this guarantee. It contemplated nothing less
than a literal fulfillment, on a complete social scale, of Christ's
inculcation that all should feel the same solicitude and make the same
effort for the welfare of others as for their own. The first effect of
such a solicitude must needs be to prompt effort to bring about an equal
material provision for all, as the primary condition of welfare. One
would certainly think that a nominally Christian people having some
familiarity with the New Testament would have needed no one to tell them
these things, but that they would have recognized on its first statement
that the programme of the revolutionists was simply a paraphrase of the
golden rule expressed in economic and political terms. One would have
said that whatever other members of the community might do, the Christian
believers would at once have flocked to the support of such a movement
with their whole heart, soul, mind, and might. That they were so slow to
do so must be ascribed to the wrong teaching and non-teaching of a class
of persons whose express duty, above all other persons and classes, was
to prompt them to that action--namely, the Christian clergy.
"For many ages--almost, indeed, from the beginning of the Christian
era--the churches had turned their backs on Christ's ideal of a kingdom
of God to be realized on earth by the adoption of the law of mutual
helpfulness and fraternal love. Giving up the regeneration of human
society in this world as a hopeless undertaking, the clergy, in the name
of the author of the Lord's Prayer, had taught the people not to expect
God's will to be done on earth. Directly reversing the attitude of Christ
toward society as an evil and perverse order of things needing to be made
over, they had made themselves the bulwarks and defenses of existing
social and political institutions, and exerted their whole influence to
discourage popular aspirations for a more just and equal order. In the
Old World they had been the champions and apologists of power and
privilege and vested rights against every movement for freedom and
equality. In resisting the upward strivings of their people, the kings
and emperors had always found the clergy more useful servants than the
soldiers and the police. In the New World, when royalty, in the act of
abdication, had passed the scepter behind its back to capitalism, the
ecclesiastical bodies had transferred their allegiance to the money
power, and as formerly they had preached the divine right of kings to
rule their fellow-men, now preached the divine right of ruling and using
others which inhered in the possession of accumulated or inherited
wealth, and the duty of the people to submit without murmuring to the
exclusive appropriation of all good things by the rich.
"The historical attitude of the churches as the champions and apologists
of power and privilege in every controversy with the rights of man and
the idea of equality had always been a prodigious scandal, and in every
revolutionary crisis had not failed to cost them great losses in public
respect and popular following. Inasmuch as the now impending crisis
between the full assertion of human equality and the existence of private
capitalism was incomparably the most radical issue of the sort that had
ever arisen, the attitude of the churches was likely to have a critical
effect upon their future. Should they make the mistake of placing
themselves upon the unpopular side in this tremendous controversy, it
would be for them a colossal if not a fatal mistake--one that would
threaten the loss of their last hold as organizations on the hearts and
minds of the people. On the other hand, had the leaders of the churches
been able to discern the full significance of the great turning of the
world's heart toward Christ's ideal of human society, which marked the
closing of the nineteenth century, they might have hoped by taking the
right side to rehabilitate the churches in the esteem and respect of the
world, as, after all, despite so many mistakes, the faithful
representatives of the spirit and doctrine of Christianity. Some there
were indeed--yes, many, in the aggregate--among the clergy who did see
this and sought desperately to show it to their fellows, but, blinded by
clouds of vain traditions, and bent before the tremendous pressure of
capitalism, the ecclesiastical bodies in general did not, with these
noble exceptions, awake to their great opportunity until it had passed
by. Other bodies of learned men there were which equally failed to
discern the irresistible force and divine sanction of the tidal wave of
humane enthusiasm that was sweeping over the earth, and to see that it
was destined to leave behind it a transformed and regenerated world. But
the failure of these others, however lamentable, to discern the nature of
the crisis, was not like the failure of the Christian clergy, for it was
their express calling and business to preach and teach the application to
human relations of the Golden Rule of equal treatment for all which the
Revolution came to establish, and to watch for the coming of this very
kingdom of brotherly love, whose advent they met with anathemas.
"The reformers of that time were most bitter against the clergy for their
double treason to humanity and Christianity, in opposing instead of
supporting the Revolution; but time has tempered harsh judgments of every
sort, and it is rather with deep pity than with indignation that we look
back on these unfortunate men, who will ever retain the tragic
distinction of having missed the grandest opportunity of leadership ever
offered to men. Why add reproach to the burden of such a failure as that?
"While the influence of ecclesiastical authority in America, on account
of the growth of intelligence, had at this time greatly shrunken from
former proportions, the generally unfavorable or negative attitude of the
churches toward the programme of equality had told heavily to hold back
the popular support which the movement might reasonably have expected
from professedly Christian people. It was, however, only a question of
time, and the educating influence of public discussion, when the people
would become acquainted for themselves with the merits of the subject.
'The Great Revival' followed, when, in the course of this process of
education, the masses of the nation reached the conviction that the
revolution against which the clergy had warned them as unchristian was,
in fact, the most essentially and intensely Christian movement that had
ever appealed to men since Christ called his disciples, and as such
imperatively commanded the strongest support of every believer or admirer
of Christ's doctrine.
"The American people appear to have been, on the whole, the most
intelligently religious of the large populations of the world--as
religion was understood at that time--and the most generally influenced
by the sentiment of Christianity. When the people came to recognize that
the ideal of a world of equal welfare, which had been represented to them
by the clergy as a dangerous delusion, was no other than the very dream
of Christ; when they realized that the hope which led on the advocates of
the new order was no baleful _ignis fatuus_, as the churches had
taught, but nothing less nor other than the Star of Bethlehem, it is not
to be wondered at that the impulse which the revolutionary movement
received should have been overwhelming. From that time on it assumes more
and more the character of a crusade, the first of the many so-called
crusades of history which had a valid and adequate title to that name and
right to make the cross its emblem. As the conviction took hold on the
always religious masses that the plan of an equalized human welfare was
nothing less than the divine design, and that in seeking their own
highest happiness by its adoption they were also fulfilling God's purpose
for the race, the spirit of the Revolution became a religious enthusiasm.
As to the preaching of Peter the Hermit, so now once more the masses
responded to the preaching of the reformers with the exultant cry, 'God
wills it!' and none doubted any longer that the vision would come to
pass. So it was that the Revolution, which had begun its course under the
ban of the churches, was carried to its consummation upon a wave of moral
and religious emotion."
"But what became of the churches and the clergy when the people found out
what blind guides they had been?" I asked.
"No doubt," replied the doctor, "it must have seemed to them something
like the Judgment Day when their flocks challenged them with open Bibles
and demanded why they had hid the Gospel all these ages and falsified the
oracles of God which they had claimed to interpret. But so far as
appears, the joyous exultation of the people over the great discovery
that liberty, equality, and fraternity were nothing less than the
practical meaning and content of Christ's religion seems to have left no
room in their heart for bitterness toward any class. The world had
received a crowning demonstration that was to remain conclusive to all
time of the untrustworthiness of ecclesiastical guidance; that was all.
The clergy who had failed in their office of guides had not done so, it
is needless to say, because they were not as good as other men, but on
account of the hopeless falsity of their position as the economic
dependents of those they assumed to lead. As soon as the great revival
had fairly begun they threw themselves into it as eagerly as any of the
people, but not now with any pretensions of leadership. They followed the
people whom they might have led.
"From the great revival we date the beginning of the era of modern
religion--a religion which has dispensed with the rites and ceremonies,
creeds and dogmas, and banished from this life fear and concern for the
meaner self; a religion of life and conduct dominated by an impassioned
sense of the solidarity of humanity and of man with God; the religion of
a race that knows itself divine and fears no evil, either now or
hereafter."
"I need not ask," I said, "as to any subsequent stages of the Revolution,
for I fancy its consummation did not tarry long after 'The Great
Revival.'"
"That was indeed the culminating impulse," replied the doctor; "but while
it lent a momentum to the movement for the immediate realization of an
equality of welfare which no obstacle could have resisted, it did its
work, in fact, not so much by breaking down opposition as by melting it
away. The capitalists, as you who were one of them scarcely need to be
told, were not persons of a more depraved disposition than other people,
but merely, like other classes, what the economic system had made them.
Having like passions and sensibilities with other men, they were as
incapable of standing out against the contagion of the enthusiasm of
humanity, the passion of pity, and the compulsion of humane tenderness
which The Great Revival had aroused, as any other class of people. From
the time that the sense of the people came generally to recognize that
the fight of the existing order to prevent the new order was nothing more
nor less than a controversy between the almighty dollar and the Almighty
God, there was substantially but one side to it. A bitter minority of the
capitalist party and its supporters seems indeed to have continued its
outcry against the Revolution till the end, but it was of little
importance. The greater and all the better part of the capitalists joined
with the people in completing the installation of the new order which all
had now come to see was to redound to the benefit of all alike."
"And there was no war?"
"War! Of course not. Who was there to fight on the other side? It is odd
how many of the early reformers seem to have anticipated a war before
private capitalism could be overthrown. They were constantly referring to
the civil war in the United States and to the French Revolution as
precedents which justified their fear, but really those were not
analogous cases. In the controversy over slavery, two geographical
sections, mutually impenetrable to each other's ideas were opposed and
war was inevitable. In the French Revolution there would have been no
bloodshed in France but for the interference of the neighboring nations
with their brutal kings and brutish populations. The peaceful outcome of
the great Revolution in America was, moreover, potently favored by the
lack as yet of deep class distinctions, and consequently of rooted class
hatred. Their growth was indeed beginning to proceed at an alarming rate,
but the process had not yet gone far or deep and was ineffectual to
resist the glow of social enthusiasm which in the culminating years of
the Revolution blended the whole nation in a common faith and purpose.
"You must not fail to bear in mind that the great Revolution, as it came
in America, was not a revolution at all in the political sense in which
all former revolutions in the popular interest had been. In all these
instances the people, after making up their minds what they wanted
changed, had to overthrow the Government and seize the power in order to
change it. But in a democratic state like America the Revolution was
practically done when the people had made up their minds that it was for
their interest. There was no one to dispute their power and right to do
their will when once resolved on it. The Revolution as regards America
and in other countries, in proportion as their governments were popular,
was more like the trial of a case in court than a revolution of the
traditional blood-and-thunder sort. The court was the people, and the
only way that either contestant could win was by convincing the court,
from which there was no appeal.
"So far as the stage properties of the traditional revolution were
concerned, plots, conspiracies, powder-smoke, blood and thunder, any one
of the ten thousand squabbles in the mediaeval, Italian, and Flemish
towns, furnishes far more material to the romancer or playwright than did
the great Revolution in America."
"Am I to understand that there was actually no violent doings in
connection with this great transformation?"
"There were a great number of minor disturbances and collisions,
involving in the aggregate a considerable amount of violence and
bloodshed, but there was nothing like the war with pitched lines which
the early reformers looked for. Many a petty dispute, causeless and
resultless, between nameless kings in the past, too small for historical
mention, has cost far more violence and bloodshed than, so far as America
is concerned, did the greatest of all revolutions."
"And did the European nations fare as well when they passed through the
same crisis?"
"The conditions of none of them were so favorable to peaceful social
revolution as were those of the United States, and the experience of most
was longer and harder, but it may be said that in the case of none of the
European peoples were the direful apprehensions of blood and slaughter
justified which the earlier reformers seem to have entertained. All over
the world the Revolution was, as to its main factors, a triumph of moral
forces."