In the front room the little assemblage had the effect of some small
religious sect. The people were plainly dressed in a sort of keeping
with their serious faces; there was one girl who had no sign of a ribbon
or lace about her, and looked like a rather athletic boy in her short
hair and black felt hat, and her jacket buttoned to her throat. She sat
with her hands in the side pockets of her coat, and her feet pushed out
beyond the hem of her skirt. There were several men of a foreign type,
with beards pointed and parted; an American, who looked like a
school-master, and whose mouth worked up into his cheek at one side with
a sort of mechanical smile when he talked, sat near a man who was so
bald as not to have even a spear of hair anywhere on his head. The rest
were people who took a color of oddity from these types; a second glance
showed them to be of the average humanity; and their dress and its
fashion showed them to be of simple condition. They were attired with a
Sunday consciousness and cleanliness, though one gentleman, whose coat
sleeves and seams were brilliant with long use, looked as if he would be
the better for a little benzining, where his moustache had dropped soup
and coffee on his waistcoat; he had prominent eyes, with a straining,
near-sighted look.
Kane sat among them with an air at once alert and aloof; his arms were
folded, and he glanced around from one to another with grave interest.
They were all listening, when Ray came in, to a young man who was
upholding the single-tax theory, with confidence and with eagerness, as
something which, in its operation, would release the individual energies
to free play and to real competition. Hughes broke in upon him:
“That is precisely what I object to in your theory. I don’t _want_ that
devil released. Competition is the Afreet that the forces of
civilization have bottled up after a desperate struggle, and he is
always making fine promises of what he will do for you if you will let
him out. The fact is he will do nothing but mischief, because that is
his nature. He is Beelzebub, he is Satan; in the Miltonic fable he
attempted to compete with the Almighty for the rule of heaven; and the
fallen angels have been taking the consequence ever since. Monopoly is
the only prosperity. Where competition is there can be finally nothing
but disaster and defeat for one side or another. That is self-evident.
Nothing succeeds till it begins to be a monopoly. This holds good from
the lowest to the highest endeavor--from the commercial to the æsthetic,
from the huckster to the artist. As long, for instance, as an author is
young and poor”--Ray felt, looking down, that the speaker’s eye turned
on him--“he must compete, and his work must be deformed by the struggle;
when it becomes known that he alone can do his kind of work, he
monopolizes and prospers in the full measure of his powers; and he
realizes his ideal unrestrictedly. Competition enslaves, monopoly
liberates. We must, therefore, have the greatest possible monopoly; one
that includes the whole people economically as they are now included
politically. Try to think of competition in the political administration
as we now have it in the industrial. It isn’t thinkable! Or, yes! They
do have it in those Eastern countries where the taxes are farmed to the
highest bidder, and the taxpayer’s life is ground out of him.”
“I think,” said the school-masterly-looking man, “we all feel this
instinctively. The trusts and the syndicates are doing our work for us
as rapidly as we could ask.”
A voice, with a German heaviness of accent, came from one of the
foreigners. “But they are not doing it for our sake, and they mean to
stop distinctly short of the whole-people trust. As far back as Louis
Napoleon’s rise we were expecting the growth of the corporate industries
to accomplish our purposes for us. But between the corporation and the
collectivity there is a gulf--a chasm that has never yet been passed.”
“We must bridge it!” cried Hughes.
A young man, with a clean-cut, English intonation, asked, “Why not fill
it up with capitalists?”
“No,” said Hughes, “our cause should recognize no class as enemies.”
“I don’t think it matters much to them whether we recognize them or not,
if we let them have their own w’y,” said the young man, whose cockney
origin betrayed itself in an occasional vowel and aspirate.
“We shall not let them have their own way unless it is the way of the
majority, too,” Hughes returned. “From my point of view they are simply
and purely a part of the movement, as entirely so as the proletariat.”
“The difficulty will be to get them to take your point of view,” the
young man suggested.
“It isn’t necessary they should,” Hughes answered, “though some of them
do already. Several of the best friends of our cause are capitalists;
and there are numbers of moneyed people who believe in the
nationalization of the telegraphs, railroads, and expresses.”
“Those are merely the first steps,” urged the young man, “which may lead
now’ere.”
“They are the first steps,” said Hughes, “and they are not to be taken
over the bodies of men. We must advance together as brothers, marching
abreast, to the music of our own heart-beats.”
“Good!” said Kane. Ray did not know whether he said it ironically or
not. It made the short-haired girl turn round and look at him where he
sat behind her.
“We, in Russia,” said another of the foreign-looking people, “have seen
the futility of violence. The only force that finally prevails is love;
and we must employ it with those that can feel it best--with the little
children. The adult world is hopeless; but with the next generation we
may do something--everything. The highest office is the teacher’s, but
we must become as little children if we would teach them, who are of
the kingdom of heaven. We must begin by learning of them.”
“It appears rather complicated,” said the young Englishman, gayly; and
Ray heard Kane choke off a laugh into a kind of snort.
“Christ said He came to call sinners to repentance,” said the man who
would have been the better for benzining. “He evidently thought there
was some hope of grown-up people if they would cease to do evil.”
“And several of the disciples were elderly men,” the short-haired girl
put in.
“Our Russian friend’s idea seems to be a version of our Indian policy,”
said Kane. “Good adults, dead adults.”
“No, no. You don’t understand, all of you,” the Russian began, but
Hughes interrupted him.
“How would you deal with the children?”
“In communities here, at the heart of the trouble, and also in the West,
where they could be easily made self-supporting.”
“I don’t believe in communities,” said Hughes. “If anything in the world
has thoroughly failed, it is communities. They have failed all the more
lamentably when they have succeeded financially, because that sort of
success comes from competition with the world outside. A community is an
aggrandized individual; it is the extension, of the egoistic motive to a
large family, which looks out for its own good against other families,
just as a small family does. I have had enough of communities. The
family we hope to found must include all men who are willing to work; it
must recognize no aliens except the drones, and the drones must not be
suffered to continue. They must either cease to exist by going to work,
or by starving to death. But this great family--the real human
family--must be no agglutinated structure, no mere federation of
trades-unions; it must be a natural growth from indigenous stocks, which
will gradually displace individual and corporate enterprises by pushing
its roots and its branches out wider and over them, till they have no
longer earth or air to live in. It will then slowly possess itself of
the whole field of production and distribution.”
“_Very_ slowly,” said the young Englishman; and he laughed.
The debate went on, and it seemed as if there were almost as many
opinions as there were people present. At times it interested Ray, at
times it bored him; but at all times he kept thinking that if he could
get those queer zealots into a book, they would be amusing material,
though he shuddered to find himself personally among them. Hughes
coughed painfully in the air thickened with many breaths, and the
windows had to be opened for him; then the rush of the elevated trains
filled the room, and the windows were shut again. After one of these
interludes, Ray was aware of Hughes appealing to some one in the same
tone in which he had asked him to go and send in his whiskey and milk;
he looked up, and saw that Hughes was appealing to him.
“Young man, have you nothing to say on all these questions? Is it
possible that you have not thought of them?”
Ray was so startled that for a moment he could not speak. Then he said,
hardily, but in the frank spirit of the discussion, “No, I have never
thought of them at all.”
“It is time you did,” said Hughes. “All other interests must yield to
them. We can have no true art, no real literature, no science worthy the
name, till the money-stamp of egoism is effaced from success, and it is
honored, not paid.”
The others turned and stared at Ray; old Kane arched his eyebrows at
him, and made rings of white round his eyes; he pursed his mouth as if
he would like to laugh. Ray saw Mrs. Denton put her hand on her mouth;
her husband glowered silently; her sister sat with downcast eyes.
Hughes went on: “I find it easier to forgive enmity than indifference;
he who is not for us is against us in the worst sense. Our cause has a
sacred claim upon all generous and enlightened spirits; they are
recreant if they neglect it. But we must be patient, even with
indifference; it is hard to bear, but we cannot fight it, and we must
bear it. Nothing has astonished me more, since my return to the world,
than to find the great mass of men living on, as when I left it, in
besotted indifference to the vital interests of the hour. I find the
politicians still talking of the tariff, just as they used to talk; low
tariff and cheap clothes for the working-man; high tariff and large
wages for the working-man. Whether we have high tariff or low, the
working-man always wins. But he does not seem to prosper. He is poor; he
is badly fed and housed; when he is out of work he starves in his den
till he is evicted with a ruthlessness unknown in the history of Irish
oppression. Neither party means to do anything for the working-man, and
he hasn’t risen himself yet to the conception of anything more
philosophical than more pay and fewer hours.”
A sad-faced man spoke from a corner of the room. “We must have time to
think, and something to eat to-day. We can’t wait till to-morrow.”
“That is true,” Hughes answered. “Many must perish by the way. But we
must have patience.”
His son-in-law spoke up, and his gloomy face darkened. “I have no heart
for patience. When I see people perishing by the way, I ask myself how
they shall be saved, not some other time, but now. Some one is guilty of
the wrong they suffer. How shall the sin be remitted?” His voice shook
with fanatical passion.
“We must have patience,” Hughes repeated. “We are all guilty.”
“It would be a good thing,” said the man with a German accent, “if the
low-tariff men would really cut off the duties. The high-tariff men
don’t put wages up because they have protection, but they would surely
put them down if they didn’t have it. Then you would see labor troubles
everywhere.”
“Yes,” said Hughes; “but such hopes as that would make me hate the
cause, if anything could. Evil that good may come? Never! Always good,
and good for evil, that the good may come more and more! We must have
the true America in the true American way, by reasons, by votes, by
laws, and not otherwise.”
The spirit which he rebuked had unlocked the passions of those around
him. Ray had a vision of them in the stormy dispute which followed, as
waves beating and dashing upon the old man; the head of the bald man was
like a buoy among the breakers, as it turned and bobbed about, in his
eagerness to follow all that was said.
Suddenly the impulses spent themselves, and a calm succeeded. One of the
men looked at his watch; they all rose one after another to go.
Hughes held them a little longer. “I don’t believe the good time is so
far off as we are apt to think in our indignation at wrong. It is coming
soon, and its mere approach will bring sensible relief. We must have
courage and patience.”
Ray and Kane went away together. Mrs. Denton looked at him with demure
question in her eyes when they parted; Peace imparted no feeling in her
still glance. Hughes took Ray’s little hand in his large, loose grasp,
and said:
“Come again, young man; come again!”