We may now consider the proletarian in our cities. The worker in our
modern world is the subject of innumerable unapplied doctrines. The
lordliest things are predicated of him, which do not affect in the least
the relationship with him of those who employ his labor. The ancient
wisdom, as it is recounted to him on God's day, assures him of his
immortality: that the divine signature is over all his being, that in
some way he is co-related with the Eternal, that he is fashioned in a
likeness to It. He is a symbol of God Himself. He is the child of Deity.
His life is Its very breath. The Habitations of Eternity await his
coming, and the divine event to which he moves is the dwelling within
him of the Divine Mind, so that Deity may become his very self. So proud
a tale is told of him, and when he wakens on the morrow after the day of
God he finds that none will pay him reverence. He, the destined comrade
of Seraphim and Cherubim, is herded with other Children of the King in
fetid slum and murky alleys, where the devil hath his many mansions,
where light and air, the great purifiers, are already dimmed and
corrupted before they do him service. He is insecure in the labor by
which he lives. He works today, and tomorrow he may be told there is no
further need for him, and his fate and the fate of those dependent on
him are not remembered by those who dismissed him. If he dies, leaving
wife or children, the social order makes but the most inhuman provision
for them. How ghastly is the brotherhood of the State for its poor the
workhouses declare, and our social decrees which turn loving-kindness
into official acts and make legal and formal what should be natural
impulse and the overflow of the heart. So great a disparity exists
between spiritual theory and the realities of the social order that it
might almost be said that spiritual theory has no effect at all on our
civilization, and its inhuman contours seem softened at no point where
we could say, "Here the Spirit has mastery. Here God possesses the
world."
The imagination, following the worker in our industrial system, sees
him laboring without security in his work, in despair, locked out, on
strike, living in slums, rarely with enough food for health, bringing
children into the world who suffer from malnutrition from their earliest
years, a pauper when his days of strength are passed. He dies in
charitable institutions. Though his labors are necessary he is yet not
integrated into the national economy. He has no share of his own in the
wealth of the nation. He cannot claim work as a right from the holders
of economic power, and this absolute dependence upon the autocrats of
industry for a livelihood is the greatest evil of any, for it puts a
spiritual curse on him and makes him in effect a slave. Instinctively he
adopts a servile attitude to those who can sentence him and his children
to poverty and hunger without trial or judgment by his peers. A hasty
word, and he may be told to draw his pay and begone. The spiritual wrong
done him by the social order is greater than the material ill, and that
spiritual wrong is no less a wrong because generation after generation
of workers have grown up and are habituated to it, and do not realize
the oppression; because in childhood circumstance and the black art of
education alike conspire to make the worker humble in heart and to take
the crown and sceptre from his spirit, and his elders are already tamed
and obsequious.
Yet the workers in the modern world have great qualities. This class
in great masses will continually make sacrifices for the sake of a
principle. They have lived so long in the depths: many of them have
reached the very end of all the pain which is the utmost life can bear
and have in their character that fearlessness which comes from long
endurance and familiarity with the worst hardships. I am a literary
man, a lover of ideas, and I have found few people in my life who would
sacrifice anything for a social principle; but I will never forget the
exultation with which I realized in a great labor trouble, when the
masters of industry issued a document asking men on peril of dismissal
to swear never to join a trades union, that there were thousands of men
in my own city who refused to obey, though they had no membership or
connection with the objectionable association. Nearly all the real
manhood of Dublin I found was among the obscure myriads who are paid
from twenty to thirty shillings a week. The men who will sacrifice
anything for brotherhood get rarer and rarer above that limit of wealth.
These men would not sign away their freedom, their right to choose their
own heroes and their own ideals. Most of them had no strike funds to
fall back on. They had wives and children depending on them. Quietly
and grimly they took through hunger the path to the Heavenly City, yet
nobody praised them, no one put a crown upon their brows. Beneath their
rags and poverty there was in these obscure men a nobility of spirit. It
is in these men and the men in the cabins in the country that the hope
of Ireland lies. The poor have always helped each other, and it is
they who listen eagerly to the preachers of a social order based on
brotherhood in industry. It is these workers, always necessary but never
yet integrated into the social order, who must be educated, who must
be provided for, who must be accepted fully as comrade in any scheme
of life to be devised and which would call itself Christian. That word,
expressing the noblest and most spiritual conception of humanity, has
been so degraded by misuse in the world that we could almost hate it
with the loathing we have for evil, if we did not know that Hell can as
disguise put on the outward garments of Heaven. Yet what is eternally
true remains pure and uncorrupted, and those who turn to it find it
there--as all finally must turn to it to fulfill their destiny of
inevitable beauty.