Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre
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Title: Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre
Author: Voltairine De Cleyre
Contributor: Hippolyte Havel
Editor: Alexander Berkman
Release date: July 6, 2013 [eBook #43098]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECTED WORKS OF VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE ***
SELECTED WORKS
OF
VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE
Edited by
ALEXANDER BERKMAN
Biographical Sketch by
HIPPOLYTE HAVEL
NEW YORK
MOTHER EARTH PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION
1914
Set up and electrotyped.
Published May, 1914.
CONTENTS
Poems
Page
The Burial of My Past Self . . . . . . 17
Night on the Graves . . . . . . . . . 18
The Christian's Faith . . . . . . . . 18
The Freethinker's Plea . . . . . . . . 22
To My Mother . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Betrayed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Optimism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
At the Grave in Waldheim . . . . . . . 33
The Hurricane . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Ut Sementem Feceris, Ita Metes . . . . 36
Bastard Born . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Hymn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
You and I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
The Toast of Despair . . . . . . . . . 44
In Memoriam--To Dyer D. Lum . . . . . 45
Out of the Darkness . . . . . . . . . 47
Mary Wollstonecraft . . . . . . . . . 49
The Gods and the People . . . . . . . 50
John P. Altgeld . . . . . . . . . . . 56
The Cry of the Unfit . . . . . . . . . 56
In Memoriam--To Gen. M. M. Trumbull . 58
The Wandering Jew . . . . . . . . . . 58
The Feast of Vultures . . . . . . . . 59
The Suicide's Defense . . . . . . . . 62
A Novel of Color . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Germinal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
"Light Upon Waldheim" . . . . . . . . 66
Love's Compensation . . . . . . . . . 66
The Road Builders . . . . . . . . . . 68
Angiolillo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Ave et Vale . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Marsh-Bloom . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Written--in--Red . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Essays
Page
The Dominant Idea . . . . . . . . . . 79
Anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Anarchism and American Traditions . . 118
Anarchism in Literature . . . . . . . 136
The Making of an Anarchist . . . . . . 154
The Eleventh of November, 1887 . . . . 164
Crime and Punishment . . . . . . . . . 173
In Defense of Emma Goldman . . . . . . 205
Direct Action . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
The Paris Commune . . . . . . . . . . 243
The Mexican Revolution . . . . . . . . 253
Thomas Paine . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
Dyer D. Lum . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
Francisco Ferrer . . . . . . . . . . . 297
Modern Educational Reform . . . . . . 321
Sex Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
Literature the Mirror of Man . . . . . 359
The Drama of the Nineteenth Century . 381
Sketches and Stories
Page
A Rocket of Iron . . . . . . . . . . . 409
The Chain Gang . . . . . . . . . . . . 414
The Heart of Angiolillo . . . . . . . 420
The Reward of an Apostate . . . . . . 433
At the End of the Alley--I . . . . . . 437
Alone--II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441
To Strive and Fail . . . . . . . . . . 446
The Sorrows of the Body . . . . . . . 451
The Triumph of Youth . . . . . . . . . 454
The Old Shoemaker . . . . . . . . . . 464
Where the White Rose Died . . . . . . 466
Transcriber's Notes:
Consistent spelling and hyphen usage are maintained within each
poem/essay.
Punctuation typos with a single solution are corrected; those
having more than one solution remain unchanged.
In the essay "Literature the Mirror of Man," the reference to
"Bosworth's Life of Johnson" is corrected to "Boswell's Life of
Johnson."
Words printed in the text as mixed small caps are surrounded by
equal signs, as in =Voltairine de Cleyre=.
Introduction
"Nature has the habit of now and then producing a type of human being
far in advance of the times; an ideal for us to emulate; a being devoid
of sham, uncompromising, and to whom the truth is sacred; a being whose
selfishness is so large that it takes in the whole human race and treats
self only as one of the great mass; a being keen to sense all forms of
wrong, and powerful in denunciation of it; one who can reach into the
future and draw it nearer. Such a being was =Voltairine de Cleyre=."
What could be added to this splendid tribute by Jay Fox to the memory of
=Voltairine de Cleyre=? These admirable words express the sentiments of
all the friends and comrades of that remarkable woman whose whole life
was dedicated to a dominant idea.
Like many other women in public life, =Voltairine de Cleyre= was a
voluminous letter writer. Those letters addressed to her comrades,
friends, and admirers would form her real biography; in them we trace
her heroic struggles, her activity, her beliefs, her doubts, her mental
changes--in short, her whole life, mirrored in a manner no biographer
will ever be able to equal. To collect and publish this correspondence
as a part of =Voltairine de Cleyre's= works is impossible; the task is
too big for the present undertaking. But let us hope that we will find
time and means to publish at least a part of this correspondence in the
near future.
The average American still holds to the belief that Anarchism is a
foreign poison imported into the States from decadent Europe by
criminal paranoiacs. Hence the ridiculous attempt of our lawmakers to
stamp out Anarchy, by passing a statute which forbids Anarchists from
other lands to enter the country. Those wise Solons are ignorant of the
fact that Anarchist theories and ideas were propounded in our
Commonwealth ere Proudhon or Bakunin entered the arena of intellectual
struggle and formulated their thesis of perfect freedom and economic
independence in Anarchy. Neither are they acquainted with the writings
of Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William B.
Greene, or Benjamin Tucker, nor familiar with the propagandistic work of
Albert R. Parsons, Dyer D. Lum, C. L. James, Moses Harman, Ross Winn,
and a host of other Anarchists who sprang from the native stock and
soil. To call their attention to these facts is quite as futile as to
point out that the tocsin of revolt resounds in the writings of Emerson,
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other seers
of America; just as futile as to prove to them that the pioneers in the
movement for woman's emancipation in America were permeated with
Anarchist thoughts and feelings. Hardened by a fierce struggle and
strengthened by a vicious persecution, those brave champions of
sex-freedom defied the respectable mob by proclaiming their independence
from prevailing cant and hypocrisy. They inaugurated the tremendous sex
revolt among the American women--a purely native movement which has yet
to find its historian.
=Voltairine de Cleyre= belongs to this gallant array of rebels who swore
allegiance to the cause of universal liberty, thus forfeiting the
respect of all "honorable citizens," and bringing upon their heads the
persecution of the ruling class. In the real history of the struggle for
human emancipation, her name will be found among the foremost of her
time. Born shortly after the close of the Civil War, she witnessed
during her life the most momentous transformation of the nation; she saw
the change from an agricultural community into an industrial empire; the
tremendous development of capital in this country, with the accompanying
misery and degradation of labor. Her life path was sketched ere she
reached the age of womanhood: she had to become a rebel! To stand
outside of the struggle would have meant intellectual death. She chose
the only way.
=Voltairine de Cleyre= was born on November 17, 1866, in the town of
Leslie, Michigan. She died on June 6, 1912, in Chicago. She came from
French-American stock, on her mother's side of Puritan descent. Her
father, Auguste de Cleyre, was a native of western Flanders, but his
family was of French origin. He emigrated to America in 1854. Being a
freethinker and a great admirer of Voltaire, he insisted on the birthday
of the child that the new member of the family should be called
Voltairine. Though born in Leslie, the earliest recollections of
Voltairine were of the small town of St. John's, in Clinton County, her
parents having removed to that place a year after her birth. Voltairine
did not have a happy childhood; her earliest life was embittered by want
of the common necessities, which her parents, hard as they tried, could
not provide. A vein of sadness can be traced in her earliest poems--the
songs of a child of talent and great fantasy. A deep sorrow fell into
her heart at the age of four, when the teacher of the primary school
refused to admit her because she was too young. But she soon succeeded
in forcing her entrance into the temple of knowledge. An earnest
student, she was graduated from the grammar school at the age of twelve.
Strength of mind does not seem to have been a characteristic of Auguste
de Cleyre, for he recanted his libertarian ideas, returned to the fold
of the church, and became obsessed with the idea that the highest
vocation for a woman was the life of a nun. He determined to put the
child into a convent. Thus began the great tragedy of =Voltairine's=
_early life_. Her beloved mother, a member of the Presbyterian Church,
opposed this idea with all her strength, but in vain: the will of the
lord of the household prevailed, and the child was sent to the Convent
of Our Lady of Lake Huron, at Sarnia, in the Province of Ontario,
Canada. Here she experienced four years of terrible ordeal; only after
much repression, insubordination, and atonement, she forced her way back
into the living world. In the sketch, "The Making of an Anarchist," she
tells us of the strain she underwent in that living tomb:
"How I pity myself now, when I remember it, poor lonesome little soul,
battling solitary in the murk of religious superstition, unable to
believe and yet in hourly fear of damnation, hot, savage, and eternal,
if I do not instantly confess and profess! How well I recall the bitter
energy with which I repelled my teacher's enjoinder, when I told her I
did not wish to apologize for an adjudged fault as I could not see that
I had been wrong and would not feel my words. 'It is not necessary,'
said she, 'that we should feel what we say, but it is always necessary
that we obey our superiors.' 'I will not lie,' I answered hotly, and at
the same time trembled lest my disobedience had finally consigned me to
torment! I struggled my way out at last, and was a freethinker when I
left the institution, three years later, though I had never seen a book
or heard a word to help me in my loneliness. It had been like the Valley
of the Shadow of Death, and there are white scars on my soul yet, where
Ignorance and Superstition burnt me with their hell-fire in those
stifling days. Am I blasphemous? It is their word, not mine. Beside that
battle of my young days all others have been easy, for whatever was
without, within my own Will was supreme. It has owed no allegiance, and
never shall; it has moved steadily in one direction, the knowledge and
assertion of its own liberty, with all the responsibility falling
thereon."
During her stay at the convent there was little communication between
her and her parents. In a letter from Mrs. Eliza de Cleyre, the mother
of =Voltairine=, we are informed that she decided to run away from the
convent after she had been there a few weeks. She escaped before
breakfast, and crossed the river to Port Huron; but, as she had no
money, she started to walk home. After covering seventeen miles, she
realized that she never could do it; so she turned around and walked
back, and entering the house of an acquaintance in Port Huron asked for
something to eat. They sent for her father, who afterwards took her back
to the convent. What penance they inflicted she never told, but at
sixteen her health was so bad that the convent authorities let her come
home for a vacation, telling her, however, that she would find her every
movement watched, and that everything she said would be reported to
them. The result was that she started at every sound, her hands shaking
and her face as pale as death. She was about five weeks from graduating
at that time. When her vacation was over, she went back and finished her
studies. And then she started for home again, but this time she had
money enough for her fare, and she got home to stay, never to go back to
the place that had been a prison to her. She had seen enough of the
convent to decide for herself that she could not be a nun.
The child who had sung:
"There's a love supreme in the Great Hereafter,
The buds of Earth are bloom in Heaven,
The smiles of the world are ripples of laughter
When back to its Aidenn the soul is given,
And the tears of the world, though long in flowing,
Water the fields of the bye-and-bye;
They fall as dews on the sweet grass growing,
When the fountains of sorrow and grief run dry.
Though clouds hang over the furrows now sowing
There's a harvest sun-wreath in the After-sky.
"No love is wasted, no heart beats vainly,
There's a vast perfection beyond the grave;
Up the bays of heaven the stars shine plainly--
The stars lying dim on the brow of the wave.
And the lights of our loves, though they flicker and wane, they
Shall shine all undimmed in the ether nave.
For the altars of God are lit with souls
Fanned to flaming with love where the star-wind rolls."
returned from the convent a strong-minded freethinker. She was received
with open arms by her mother, almost as one returned from the grave.
With the exception of the education derived from books, she knew no more
than a child, having almost no knowledge of practical things.
Already in the convent she had succeeded in impressing her strong
personality upon her surroundings. Her teachers could not break her;
they were therefore forced to respect her. In a polemic with the
editor of the Catholic _Buffalo Union_ and _Times_, a few years ago,
=Voltairine= wrote: "If you think that I, as your opponent, deserve
the benefit of truth, but as a stranger you doubt my veracity, I
respectfully request you to submit this letter to Sister Mary Medard,
my former teacher, now Superioress at Windsor, or to my revered friend,
Father Siegfried, Overbrook Seminary, Overbrook, Pa., who will tell
you whether, in their opinion, my disposition to tell the truth may be
trusted."
Reaction from the repression and the cruel discipline of the Catholic
Church helped to develop =Voltairine's= inherent tendency toward
free-thought; the five-fold murder of the labor leaders in Chicago, in
1887, shocked her mind so deeply that from that moment dates her
development toward Anarchism. When in 1886 the bomb fell on the
Haymarket Square, and the Anarchists were arrested, =Voltairine de
Cleyre=, who at that time was a free-thought lecturer, shouted: "They
ought to be hanged!" They were hanged, and now her body rests in
Waldheim Cemetery, near the grave of those martyrs. Speaking at a
memorial meeting in honor of those comrades, in 1901, she said: "For
that ignorant, outrageous, bloodthirsty sentence I shall never forgive
myself, though I know the dead men would have forgiven me, though I know
those who loved them forgive me. But my own voice, as it sounded that
night, will sound so in my ears till I die--a bitter reproach and a
shame. I have only one word of extenuation for myself and the millions
of others who did as I did that night--ignorance."
She did not remain long in ignorance. In "The Making of an Anarchist"
she describes why she became a convert to the idea and why she entered
the movement. "Till then," she writes, "I believed in the essential
justice of the American law and trial by jury. After that I never could.
The infamy of that trial has passed into history, and the question it
awakened as to the possibility of justice under law has passed into
clamorous crying across the world."
At the age of nineteen =Voltairine= had consecrated herself to the
service of humanity. In her poem, "The Burial of My Past Self," she
thus bids farewell to her youthful life:
"And now, Humanity, I turn to you;
I consecrate my service to the world!
Perish the old love, welcome to the new--
Broad as the space-aisles where the stars are whirled!"
Yet the pure and simple free-thought agitation in its narrow circle
could not suffice her. The spirit of rebellion, the spirit of Anarchy,
took hold of her soul. The idea of universal rebellion saved her;
otherwise she might have stagnated like so many of her contemporaries,
suffocated in the narrow surroundings of their intellectual life. A
lecture of Clarence Darrow, which she heard in 1887, led her to the
study of Socialism, and then there was for her but one step to
Anarchism. Dyer D. Lum, the fellow worker of the Chicago martyrs, had
undoubtedly the greatest influence in shaping her development; he was
her teacher, her confidant, and comrade; his death in 1893 was a
terrible blow to =Voltairine=.
=Voltairine= spent the greater part of her life in Philadelphia. Here,
among congenial friends, and later among the Jewish emigrants, she did
her best work. In 1897 she went on a lecture tour to England and
Scotland, and in 1902, after an insane youth had tried to take her life,
she went for a short trip to Norway to recuperate from her wounds. Hers
was a life of bitter economic struggle and an unceasing fight with
physical weakness, partly resulting from this very economic struggle.
One wonders how, under such circumstances, she could have produced such
an amount of work. Her poems, sketches, propagandistic articles and
essays may be found in the _Open Court_, _Twentieth Century_, _Magazine
of Poetry_, _Truth_, _Lucifer_, _Boston Investigator_, _Rights of
Labor_, _Truth Seeker_, _Liberty_, _Chicago Liberal_, _Free Society_,
_Mother Earth_, and in _The Independent_. She translated Jean Grave's
"Moribund Society and Anarchy" from the French, and left an unfinished
translation of Louise Michel's work on the Paris Commune. In _Mother
Earth_ appeared her translations from the Jewish of Libin and Peretz. In
collaboration with Dyer D. Lum she wrote a novel on social questions,
which has unfortunately remained unfinished.
=Voltairine de Cleyre's= views on the sex-question, on agnosticism and
free-thought, on individualism and communism, on non-resistance and
direct action, underwent many changes. In the year 1902 she wrote: "The
spread of Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' and 'The Slavery of Our Times,' and
the growth of the numerous Tolstoy clubs having for their purpose the
dissemination of the literature of non-resistance, is an evidence that
many receive the idea that it is easier to conquer war with peace. I am
one of these. I can see no end of retaliation, unless some one ceases to
retaliate." She adds, however: "But let no one mistake this for servile
submission or meek abnegation; my right shall be asserted no matter at
what cost to me, and none shall trench upon it without my protest." But
as she used to quote her comrade, Dyer D. Lum: "Events proved to be the
true schoolmasters." The last years of her life were filled with the
spirit of direct action, and especially with the social importance of
the Mexican Revolution. The splendid propaganda work of Wm. C. Owen in
behalf of this tremendous upheaval inspired her to great effort. She,
too, had found out by experience that only action counts, that only a
direct participation in the struggle makes life worth while.
=Voltairine de Cleyre= was one of the most remarkable personalities
of our time. She was a born iconoclast; her spirit was too free, her
taste too refined, to accept any idea that has the slightest degree
of limitation. A great sadness, a knowledge that there is a universal
pain, filled her heart. Through her own suffering and through the
suffering of others she reached the highest exaltation of mind; she was
conscious of all the vanities of life. In the service of the poor and
oppressed she found her life mission. In an exquisite tribute to her
memory, Leonard D. Abbott calls =Voltairine de Cleyre= a priestess of
Pity and of Vengeance, whose voice has a vibrant quality that is unique
in literature. We are convinced that her writings will live as long as
humanity exists.
=Hippolyte Havel.=
POEMS
THE BURIAL OF MY PAST SELF
Poor Heart, so weary with thy bitter grief!
So thou art dead at last, silent and chill!
The longed-for death-dart came to thy relief,
And there thou liest, Heart, forever still.
Dead eyes, pain-pressed beneath their black-fringed pall!
Dead cheeks, dark-furrowed with so many tears!
So thou art passed far, far beyond recall,
And all thy hopes are past, and all thy fears.
Thy lips are closed at length in the long peace!
Pale lips! so long they have thy woe repressed,
They seem even now when life has run its lease
All dumbly pitiful in their mournful rest.
And now I lay thee in thy silent tomb,
Printing thy brow with one last solemn kiss;
Laying upon thee one fair lily bloom,
A symbol of thy rest;--oh, rest is bliss.
No, Heart, I would not call thee back again;
No, no; too much of suffering hast thou known;
But yet, but yet, it was not all in vain--
Thy unseen tears, thy solitary moan!
For out of sorrow joy comes uppermost;
Where breaks the thunder soon the sky smiles blue;
A better love replaces what is lost,
And phantom sunlight pales before the true!
The seed must burst before the germ unfolds,
The stars must fade before the morning wakes;
Down in her depths the mine the diamond holds;
A new heart pulses when the old heart breaks.
And now, Humanity, I turn to you;
I consecrate my service to the world!
Perish the old love, welcome to the new--
Broad as the space-aisles where the stars are whirled!
=Greenville, Mich., 1885.=
NIGHT ON THE GRAVES
O'er the sweet, quiet homes in the silent grave-city,
Softly the dewdrops, the night-tears, fall;
Broadly about, like the wide arms of pity,
The silver-shot darkness lies over all.
Heroes, asleep 'neath the red-hearted rose-wreaths,
Leaf-crowned with honor, flower-crowned with rest,
Gently above you each moon-dripping bough breathes
A far-echoed whisper, "Sleep well; ye are blest."
Oh! never, as long as the heart pulses quicker
At the dear name of Country may yours be forgot;
Nor may we, till the last puny life spark shall flicker,
Your deeds from the tablets of Memory blot!
Spirits afloat in the night-shrouds that bound us,
Souls of the "Has-Been" and of the "To-Be,"
Keep the fair light of Liberty shining around us,
Till our souls may go back to the mighty SOUL-SEA.
=St. Johns, Mich., 1886= (Decoration Day).
THE CHRISTIAN'S FAITH
(The two following poems were written at that period of my life when
the questions of the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus had
but recently been settled, and they present the pros and cons which
had been repeating themselves over and over again in my brain for
some years.)
We contrast light and darkness,--light of God,
And darkness from the Stygian shades of hell;
Fumes of the pit infernal rising up
Have clouded o'er the brain, laid reason low;--
For when the eye looks on fair Nature's face
And sees not God, then is she blind indeed!
No night so starless, even in its gloom,
As his who wanders on without a hope
In that great, just Hereafter all must meet!--
No heart so dull, so heavy, and so void,
As that which lives for this chill world alone!
No soul so groveling, unaspiring, base,
As that which, here, forgets the afterhere!
And still through all the darkness and the gloom
Its voice will not be stilled, its hopes be quenched;
It cries, it screams, it struggles in its chains,
And bleeds upon the altar of the mind,--
Unwilling sacrifice to thought misled.
The soul that knows no God can know no peace.
Thus speaketh light, the herald of our God!
In that far dawn where shone each rolling world
First lit with shadowed splendor of the stars,
In that fair morning when Creation sang
Its praise of God, e'er yet it dreamed of sin,
Pure and untainted as the source of life
Man dwelt in Eden. There no shadows came,
No question of the goodness of our Lord,
Until the prince of darkness tempted man,
And, yielding to the newly born desire,
He fell! Sank in the mire of ignorance!
And Man, who put himself in Satan's power,
Since then has wandered far in devious ways,
Seeing but now and then a glimpse of light,
Till Christ is come, the living Son of God!
Far in his heavenly home he viewed the world,
Saw all her sadness and her sufferings,
Saw all her woes, her struggles, and her search
For some path leading up from out the Night.
Within his breast the fount of tears was touched;
His great heart swelled with pity, and he said:
"Father, I go to save the world from sin."
Ah! What power but a soul divinely clad
In purity, in holiness and love,
Could leave a home of happiness and light
For this lost World of suffering and death?
He came: the World tossed groaning in her sleep;
He touched her brow: the nightmare passed away;
He soothed her heart, red with the stain of sin;
And she forgot her guilt in penitence;
She washed the ruby out with pearls of tears.
He came, he suffered, and he died for us;
He felt the bitterest woes a soul can feel;
He probed the darkest depths of human grief;
He sounded all the deeps and shoals of pain;
Was cursed for all his love; thanked with the cross,
Whereon he hung nailed, bleeding, glorified,
As the last smoke of holocaust divine.
"Ah! This was all two thousand years ago!"
Two thousand years ago, and still he cries,
With voice sweet calling through the distant dark:
"O souls that labor, struggling in your pain,
Come unto me, and I will give you rest!
For every woe of yours, and every smart,
I, too, have felt:--the mockery, the shame,
The sneer, the scoffing lip, the hate, the lust,
The greed of gain, the jealousy of man,
Unstinted have been measured out to me.
I know them all, I feel them all with you!
And I have known the pangs of poverty,
The cry of hunger and the weary heart
Of childhood burdened with the weight of age!
O sufferers, ye all are mine to love!
The pulse-beats of my heart go out with you,
And every drop of agony that drips
From my nailed hands adown this bitter cross,
Cries out, 'O God! accept the sacrifice,
And ope the gates of heaven to the world!'
Ye vermin of the garret, who do creep
Your weary lives away within its walls;
Ye children of the cellar, who behold
The sweet, pale light, strained through the lothsome air
And doled to you in tid-bits, as a thing
Too precious for your use; ye rats in mines,
Who knaw within the black and somber pits
To seek poor living for your little ones;
Ye women who stitch out your lonely lives,
Unmindful whether sun or stars keep watch;
Ye slaves of wheels; ye worms that bite the dust
Where pride and scorn have ground you 'neath the heel;
Ye Toilers of the earth, ye weary ones,--
I know your sufferings, I feel your woes;
My peace I give you; in a little while
The pain will all be over, and the grave
Will sweetly close above your folded hands!
And then?--Ah, Death, no conqueror art thou!
For I have loosed thy chains; I have unbarred
The gates of heaven! In my Father's house
Of many mansions I prepare a place;
And rest is there for every heart that toils!
Oh, all ye sick and wounded ones who grieve
For the lost health that ne'er may come again;
Ye who do toss upon a couch of pain,
Upon whose brow disease has laid his hand,
Within whose eyes the dull and heavy sight
Burns like a taper burning very low,
Upon whose lips the purple fever-kiss
Rests his hot breath, and dries the sickened palms,
Scorches the flesh and e'en the very air;
Ye who do grope along without the light;
Ye who do stumble, halting on your way;
Ye whom the world despises as unclean;
Know that the death-free soul has none of these:
The unbound spirit goes unto its God,
Pure, whole, and beauteous as newly born!
Oh, all ye mourners, weeping for the dead;
Your tears I gather as the grateful rain
Which rises from the sea and falls again,
To nurse the withering flowers from its touch;
No drop is ever lost! They fall again
To nurse the blossoms of some other heart!
I would not dry one single dew of grief:
The sorrow-freighted lashes which bespeak
The broken heart and soul are dear to me;
I mourn with them, and mourning so I find
The grief-bowed soul with weeping oft grows light!
But yet ye mourn for them not without hope:
Beyond the woes and sorrows of the earth,
As stars still shine though clouds obscure the sight,
The friends ye mourn as lost immortal live;
And ye shall meet and know their souls again,
Through death transfigured, through love glorified!
Oh, all ye patient waiters for reward,
Scorned and despised by those who know not worth,
I know your merit and I give you hope;
For in my Father's law is justice found.
See how the seed-germ, toiling underground,
Waits patiently for time to burst its shell;
And by and by the golden sunlight warms
The dark, cold earth; the germ begins to shoot.
And upward trends until two small green leaves
Unfold and wave and drink the pure, fresh air.
The blossoms come and go with Summer's breath,
And Autumn brings the fruit-time in her hand.
So ye, who patient watch and wait and hope,
Trusting the sun may bring the blossoms out,
Shall reap the fruited labor by and by.
I am your friend; I wait and hope with you,
Rejoice with you when the hard vict'ry's won!
And still for you, O prisoners in cells,
I hold the dearest gifts of penitence,
Forgiveness and charity and hope!
I stretch the hands of mercy through the bars;
White hands,--like doves they bring the branch of peace!
Repent, believe,--and I will expiate
Upon this bitter cross all your deep guilt!
Oh, take my gift, accept my sacrifice!
I ask no other thing but only--trust!
Oh, all ye martyrs, bleeding in your chains;
Oh, all ye souls that live for others' good;
Oh, all ye mourners, all ye guilty ones,
And all ye suffering ones, come unto me!
Ye are all my brothers, all my sisters, all!
And as I love one, so I love you all.
Accept my love, accept my sacrifice;
Make not my cross more bitter than it is
By shrinking from the peace I bring to you!"
=St. Johns, Mich., April, 1887.=
THE FREETHINKER'S PLEA
Grand eye of Liberty, light up my page!
Like promised morning after night of age
Thy dawning youth breaks in the distant east!
Thy cloudy robes like silken curtains creased
And swung in folds are floating fair and free!
The shadows of the cycles turn and flee;
The budding stars, bright minds that gemmed the night,
Are bursting into broad, bright-petaled light!
Sweet Liberty, how pure thy very breath!
How dear in life, how doubly dear in death!
Ah, slaves that suffer in your self-forged chains,
Praying your Christ to touch and heal your pains,
Tear off your shackling irons, unbind your eyes,
Seize the grand hopes that burn along the skies!
Worship not God in temples built of gloom;
Far sweeter incense is the flower-bloom
Than all the fires that Sacrifice may light;
And grander is the star-dome gleaming bright
With glowing worlds, than all your altar lamps
Pale flickering in your clammy, vaulted damps;
And richer is the broad, full, fair sun sheen,
Dripping its orient light in streams between
The fretted shafting of the forest trees,
Throwing its golden kisses to the breeze,
Lifting the grasses with its finger-tips,
And pressing the young blossoms with warm lips,
Show'ring its glory over plain and hill,
Wreathing the storm and dancing in the rill;
Far richer in wild freedom falling there,
Shaking the tresses of its yellow hair,
Than all subdued within the dim half-light
Of stained glass windows, drooping into night.
Oh, grander far the massive mountain walls
Which bound the vista of the forest halls,
Than all the sculptured forms which guard the piles
That arch your tall, dim, gray, cathedral aisles!
And gladder is the carol of a bird
Than all the anthems that were ever heard
To steal in somber chanting from the tone
Of master voices praising the Unknown.
In the great wild, where foot of man ne'er trod,
There find we Nature's church and Nature's God!
Here are no fetters! though is free as air;
Its flight may spread far as its wings may dare;
And through it all one voice cries, "God is love,
And love is God!" Around, within, above,
Behold the working of the perfect law,--
The law immutable in which no flaw
Exists, and from which no appeal is made;
Ev'n as the sunlight chases far the shade
And shadows chase the light in turn again,
So every life is fraught with joy and pain;
The stinging thorn lies hid beside the rose;
The bud is blighted ere its leave unclose;
So pleasure born of Hope may oft-time yield
A stinging smart of thorns, a barren field!
But let it be: the buds will bloom again,
The fields will freshen in the summer rain;
And never storm scowls dark but still, somewhere,
A bow is bending in the upper air.
Then learn the law if thou wouldst live aright;
And know no unseen power, no hand of might,
Can set aside the law which wheels the stars;
No incompleteness its perfection mars;
The buds will wake in season, and the rain
will fall when clouds hang heavy, and again
The snows will tremble when the winter's breath
Congeals the cloud-tears, as the touch of Death
Congeals the last drop on the sufferer's cheek.
Thus do all Nature's tongues in chorus speak:
"Think not, O man, that thou canst e'er escape
One jot of Justice's law, nor turn thy fate
By yielding sacrifice to the Unseen!
Purged by thyself alone canst thou be clean.
One guide to happiness thou mayst learn:
_Love toward the world begets love in return._
And if to others you the measure mete
Of love, be sure your harvest will be sweet;
But if ye sow broadcast the seed of hate,
Ye'll reap again, albeit ye reap it late.
Then let your life-work swell the great flood-tide
Of love towards all the world; the world is wide,
The sea of life is broad; its waves stretch far;
No range, no barrier, its sweep may bar;
The world is filled, is trodden down with pain;
The sea of life is gathered up of rain,--
A throat, a bed, a sink, for human tears,
A burial of hopes, a miasm of fears!
But see! the sun of love shines softly out,
Flinging its golden fingers all about,
Pressing its lips in loving, soft caress,
Upon the world's pale cheek; the pain grows less,
The tears are dried upon the quivering lashes,
An answering sunbeam 'neath the white lids flashes!
The sea of life is dimpled o'er with smiles,
The sun of love the cloud of woe beguiles,
And turns its heavy brow to forehead fair,
Framed in the glory of its sun-gilt hair.
Be thine the warming touch, the kiss of love;
Vainly ye seek for comfort from above,
Vainly ye pray the Gods to ease your pain;
The heavy words fall back on you again!
Vainly ye cry for Christ to smooth your way;
The thorns sting sharper while ye kneeling pray!
Vainly ye look upon the world of woe,
And cry, "O God, avert the bitter blow!"
Ye cannot turn the lightning from its track,
Nor call one single little instant back;
The law swerves not, and with unerring aim
The shaft of justice falls; he bears the blame
Who violates the rule: do well your task,
For justice overtakes you all at last.
Vainly ye patient ones await reward,
Trusting th' Almighty's angel to record
Each bitter tear, each disappointed sigh;
Reward descends not, gifted from on high,
But is the outgrowth of the eternal law:
As from the earth the toiling seed-germs draw
The food which gives them life and strength to bear
The storms and suns which sweep the upper air,
So ye must draw from out the pregnant earth
The metal true wherewith to build your worth;
So shall ye brave the howling of the blast,
And smile triumphant o'er the storm at last.
Nor dream these trials are without their use;
Between your joys and griefs ye cannot choose,
And say your life with either is complete:
Ever the bitter mingles with the sweet.
The dews must press the petals down at night,
If in the dawning they would glisten bright;
If sunbeams needs must ripen out the grain
Not less the early blades must woo the rain:
If now your eyes be wet with weary tears,
Ye'll gather them as gems in after years;
And if the rains now sodden down your path,
Ye'll reap rich harvest in the aftermath.
Ye idle mourners, crying in your grief,
The souls ye weep have found the long relief:
Why grieve for those who fold their hands in peace?
Their sore-tried hearts have found a glad release;
Their spirits sink into the solemn sea!
Mourn ye the prisoner from his chains let free?
Nay, ope your ears unto the living cry
That pleads for living comfort! Hark, the sigh
Of million heartaches rising in your ears!
Kiss back the living woes, the living tears!
Go down into the felon's gloomy cell;
Send there the ray of love: as tree-buds swell
When spring's warm breath bids the cold winter cease,
So will his heart swell with the hope of peace.
Be filled with love, for love is Nature's God;
The God which trembles in the tender sod,
The God which tints the sunset, lights the dew,
Sprinkles with stars the firmament's broad blue,
And draws all hearts together in a free
Wide sweep of love, broad as the ether-sea.
No other law or guidance do we need;
The world's our church, to do good is our creed.
=St. Johns, Mich., 1887.=
TO MY MOTHER
Some souls there are which never live their life;
Some suns there are which never pierce their cloud;
Some hearts there are which cup their perfume in,
And yield no incense to the outer air.
Cloud-shrouded, flower-cupped heart: such is thine own:
So dost thou live with all thy brightness hid;
So dost thou dwell with all thy perfume close;
Rich in thy treasured wealth, aye, rich indeed--
And they are wrong who say thou "dost not feel."
But I--I need blue air and opened bloom;
To keep my music means that it must die;
And when the thrill, the joy, the love of life is gone,
I, too, am dead--a corpse, though not entombed.
Let me live then--but a while--the gloom soon comes,
The flower closes and the petals shut;
Through them the perfume slips out, like a soul--
The long, still sleep of death--and then the Grave.
=Cleveland, Ohio=, March, 1889.
BETRAYED
So, you're the chaplain! You needn't say what you have come
for; I can guess.
You've come to talk about Jesus' love, and repentance and rest
and forgiveness!
You've come to say that my sin is great, yet greater the mercy
Heaven will mete,
If I, like Magdalen, bend my head, and pour my tears at your
Saviour's feet.
Your promise is fair, but I've little faith: I relied on promises
once before;
They brought me to this--this prison cell, with its iron-barred
window, its grated door!
Yet he, too, was fair who promised me, with his tender mouth
and his Christ-like eyes;
And his voice was as sweet as the summer wind that sighs
through the arbors of Paradise.
And he seemed to me all that was good and pure, and noble and
strong, and true and brave!
I had given the pulse of my heart for him, and deemed it a
precious boon to crave.
You say that Jesus so loved the world he died to redeem it
from its sin:
It isn't redeemed, or no one could be so fair without, and so
black within.
I trusted his promise, I gave my life;--the truth of my love is
known on high,
If there is a God who knows all things;--his promise was false,
his _love_ was a lie!
It was over soon, Oh! soon, the dream,--and me, he had called
"his life," "his light,"
He drove me away with a sneering word, and you Christians
said that "it served me right."
I was proud, Mr. Chaplain, even then; I set my face in the
teeth of Fate,
And resolved to live honestly, come what might, and sink beneath
neither scorn nor hate.
Yes, and I prayed that the Christ above would help to bear the
bitter cross,
And put something here, where my heart had been, to fill up the
aching void of loss.
It's easy for you to say what I should do, but none of you ever
dream how hard
Is the way that you Christians make for us, with your "sin no
more," "trust the Lord."
When for days and days you are turned from work with cold
politeness, or open sneer,
You get so you don't trust a far-off God, whose creatures are
cold, and they, so near.
You hold your virtuous lives aloof, and refuse us your human
help and hand,
And set us apart as accursèd things, marked with a burning,
Cain-like brand.
But I didn't bend, though many days I was weary and hungry,
and worn and weak,
And for many a starless night I watched, through tears that
grooved down my pallid cheek.
They are all dry now! They say I'm hard, because I never weep
or moan!
You can't draw blood when the heart's bled out! you can't find
tears or sound in a stone!
And I don't know why _I_ should be mild and meek: no one has
been very mild to me.
You say that Jesus would be--perhaps! but Heaven's a long way
off, you see.
That will do; I know what you're going to say: "I can have it
right here in this narrow cell."
The _soul_ is slow to accept Christ's heav'n when his followers
chain the body in hell.
Not but I'm just as well off here,--better, perhaps, than I was
outside.
The world was a prison-house to me, where I dwelt, defying
and defied.
I don't know but I'd think more of what you say, if they'd
given us both a common lot;
If justice to me had been justice to him, and covered our names
with an equal blot;
But they took him into the social court, and pitied, and said he'd
been "led astray";
In a month the stain on _his_ name had passed, as a cloud that
crosses the face of day!
He joined the Church, and he's preaching now, just as you are,
the love of God,
And the duty of sinners to kneel and pray, and humbly to kiss
the chastening rod.
If they'd dealt with me as they dealt by him, may be I'd credit
your Christian love;
If they'd dealt with him as they dealt by me, I'd have more faith
in a just Above.
I don't know, but sometimes I used to think that she, who was
told there was no room
In the inn at Bethlehem, might look down with softened eyes
thro' the starless gloom.
Christ wasn't a woman--he couldn't know the pain and endurance
of it; but _she_,
The mother who bore him, she might know, and Mary in
Heaven might pity me.
Still that was useless: it didn't bring a single mouthful for me
to eat,
Nor work to get it, nor sheltering from the dreary wind and
the howling street.
Heavenly pity won't pass as coin, and earthly shame brings a
higher pay.
Sometimes I was tempted to give it up, and go, like others, the
easier way;
But I didn't; no, sir, I kept my oath, though my baby lay in my
arms and cried,
And at last, to spare it--I poisoned it; and kissed its murdered
lips when it died.
I'd never seen him since it was born (he'd said that it wasn't
his, you know);
But I took its body and laid it down at the steps of his door, in
the pallid glow
Of the winter morning; and when he came, with a love-tune
hummed on those lips of lies,
It lay at his feet, with its pinched white face staring up at him
from its dead, blue eyes;
I hadn't closed them; they were like his, and so was the mouth
and the curled gold hair,
And every feature so like his own,--for I am dark, sir, and he
is fair.
'Twas a moment of triumph, that showed me yet there was a
passion I could feel,
When I saw him bend o'er its meagre form, and, starting backwards,
cry out and reel!
If there _is_ a time when all souls shall meet the reward of the
deeds that are done in the clay,
When accused and accuser stand face to face, he will cry out
so in the Judgment Day!
The rest? Oh, nothing. They hunted me, and with virtuous
lawyers' virtuous tears
To a virtuous jury, convicted me; and I'm sentenced to stay here
for twenty years.
Do I repent? Yes, I do; but wait till I tell you of what I repent,
and why.
I repent that I ever believed a man could be anything but a
living lie!
I repent because every noble thought, or hope, or ambition, or
earthly trust,
Is as dead as dungeon-bleached bones in me,--as dead as my
child in its murdered dust!
Do I repent that I killed the babe? Am I repentant for that,
you ask?
I'll answer the truth as I feel it, sir; I leave to others the pious
mask.
Am I repentant because I saved its starving body from Famine's
teeth?
Because I hastened what time would do, to spare it pain and
relieve its death?
Am I repentant because I held it were better a _grave_ should
have no name
Than a _living being_, whose only care must come from a mother
weighed with shame?
Am I repentant because I thought it were better the tiny form
lay hid
From the heartless stings of a brutal world, unknown, unnamed,
'neath a coffin lid?
Am I repentant for the act, the last on earth in my power, to save
From the long-drawn misery of life, in the early death and the
painless grave?
I'm _glad_ that I did it! Start if you will! I'll repeat it over; I
say I'm _glad_!
No, I'm neither a fiend, nor a maniac--don't look as if I were
going mad!
Did I not love it? Yes, I loved with a strength that you, sir, can
never feel;
It's only a strong love can kill to save, tho' itself be torn where
time cannot heal.
You see my hands--they are red with its blood! Yet I would
have cut them, bit by bit,
And fed them, and smiled to see it eat, if that would have
saved and nourished it!
"Beg!" I _did_ beg,--and "pray!" I _did_ pray! God was as stony
and hard as Earth,
And Christ was as deaf as the stars that watched, or the night
that darkened above his birth!
And I--I feel stony now, too, like them; deaf to sorrow and
mute to grief!
Am I heartless?--yes:--it-is-_all_-=cut=-OUT! Torn! Gone! All
gone! Like my dead belief.
Do I not fear for the judgment hour? So unrepentant, so hard
and cold?
Wait! It is little I trust in that; but if ever the scrolled sky
shall be uprolled,
And the lives of men shall be read and known, and their acts be
judged by their very worth,
And the Christ you speak of shall come again, and the thunders
of Justice shake the earth,
You will hear the cry, "Who murdered here? Come forth to
the judgment, false heart and eyes,
That pulsed with accurséd strength of lust, and loaded faith
with envenomed lies!
Come forth to the judgment, haughty dames, who scathed the
mother with your scorn,
And answer here, to the poisoned child, _who_ decreed its murder
ere it was born?
Come forth to the judgment ye who heaped the gold of earth
in your treasured hoard,
And answer, 'guilty,' to those who stood all naked and starving,
beneath your board.
Depart, accurséd! I know you not! Ye heeded not the command
of Heaven,
'Unto the least of these ye give, it is even unto the Master
given.'"
Judgment! Ah, sir, to see that day, I'd willingly pass thro' a
hundred hells!
I'd believe, then, the Justice that hears each voice buried alive
in these prison cells!
But, no--it's not that; that will never be! I trusted too long,
and He answered not.
There _is_ no avenging God on high!--we live, we struggle,
and--_we rot_.
_Yet does Justice come!_ and, O Future Years! sorely ye'll reap,
and in weary pain,
When ye garner the sheaves that are sown to-day, when the
clouds that are gathering fall in rain!
The time will come, aye! the time _will_ come, when the child
ye conceive in lust and shame,
Quickened, will mow you like swaths of grass, with a sickle
born of Steel and Flame.
Aye, tremble, shrink, in your drunken den, coward, traitor, and
Child of Lie!
The unerring avenger stands close to you, and the dread hour
of parturition's nigh!
Aye! wring your hands, for the air is black! thickly the
cloud-troops whirl and swarm!
See! yonder, on the horizon's verge, play the lightning-shafts of
the coming storm!
=Adrian, Mich.,= July, 1889.
OPTIMISM
There's a love supreme in the great hereafter,
The buds of earth are blooms in heaven;
The smiles of the world are ripples of laughter
When back to its Aidenn the soul is given:
And the tears of the world, though long in flowing,
Water the fields of the bye-and-bye;
They fall as dews on the sweet grass growing
When the fountains of sorrow and grief run dry.
Though clouds hang over the furrows now sowing
There's a harvest sun-wreath in the After-sky!
No love is wasted, no heart beats vainly,
There's a vast perfection beyond the grave;
Up the bays of heaven the stars shine plainly,
The stars lying dim on the brow of the wave.
And the lights of our loves, though they flicker and wane, they
Shall shine all undimmed in the ether-nave.
For the altars of God are lit with souls
Fanned to flaming with love where the star-wind rolls.
=St. Johns, Michigan, 1889.=
AT THE GRAVE IN WALDHEIM
Quiet they lie in their shrouds of rest,
Their lids kissed close 'neath the lips of peace;
Over each pulseless and painless breast
The hands lie folded and softly pressed,
As a dead dove presses a broken nest;
Ah, broken hearts were the price of these!
The lips of their anguish are cold and still,
For them are the clouds and the gloom all past;
No longer the woe of the world can thrill
The chords of those tender hearts, or fill
The silent dead-house! The "people's will"
Has mapped asunder the strings at last.
"The people's will!" Ah, in years to come,
Dearly ye'll weep that ye did not save!
Do ye not hear now the muffled drum,
The tramping feet and the ceaseless hum,
Of the million marchers,--trembling, dumb,
In their tread to a yawning, giant grave?
And yet, ah! yet there's a rift of white!
'Tis breaking over the martyrs' shrine!
Halt there, ye doomed ones,--it scathes the night,
As lightning darts from its scabbard bright
And sweeps the face of the sky with light!
"No more shall be spilled out the blood-red wine!"
These are the words it has written there,
Keen as the lance of the northern morn;
The sword of Justice gleams in its glare,
And the arm of Justice, upraised and bare,
Is true to strike, aye, 'tis strong to dare;
It will fall where the curse of our land is born.
No more shall the necks of the nations be crushed,
No more to dark Tyranny's throne bend the knee;
No more in abjection be ground to the dust!
By their widows, their orphans, our dead comrades' trust,
By the brave heart-beats stilled, by the brave voices hushed,
We swear that humanity yet shall be free!
=Pittsburg, 1889.=
THE HURRICANE[A]
("We are the birds of the coming storm."--_August Spies._)
The tide is out, the wind blows off the shore;
Bare burn the white sands in the scorching sun;
The sea complains, but its great voice is low.
Bitter thy woes, O People,
And the burden
Hardly to be borne!
Wearily grows, O People,
All the aching
Of thy pierced heart, bruised and torn!
But yet thy time is not,
And low thy moaning.
Desert thy sands!
Not yet is thy breath hot,
Vengefully blowing;
It wafts o'er lifted hands.
The tide has turned; the vane veers slowly round;
Slow clouds are sweeping o'er the blinding light;
White crests curl on the sea,--its voice grows deep.
Angry thy heart, O People,
And its bleeding
Fire-tipped with rising hate!
Thy clasped hands part, O People,
For thy praying
Warmed not the desolate!
God did not hear thy moan:
Now it is swelling
To a great drowning cry;
A dark wind-cloud, a groan,
Now backward veering
From that deaf sky!
The tide flows in, the wind roars from the depths,
The whirled-white sand heaps with the foam-white waves;
Thundering the sea rolls o'er its shell-crunched wall!
Strong is thy rage, O People,
In its fury
Hurling thy tyrants down!
Thou metest wage, O People.
Very swiftly,
Now that thy hate is grown:
Thy time at last is come;
Thou heapest anguish,
Where thou thyself wert bare!
No longer to thy dumb
God clasped and kneeling,
_Thou answerest thine own prayer._
=Sea Isle City, N. J.=, August, 1889.
[A] Since the death of the author this poem has been put to
music by the young American composer, George Edwards.
UT SEMENTEM FECERIS, ITA METES
(To the Czar, on a woman, a political prisoner, being flogged to death
in Siberia.)
How many drops must gather to the skies
Before the cloud-burst comes, we may not know;
How hot the fires in under hells must glow
Ere the volcano's scalding lavas rise,
Can none say; but all wot the hour is sure!
Who dreams of vengeance has but to endure!
He may not say how many blows must fall,
How many lives be broken on the wheel,
How many corpses stiffen 'neath the pall,
How many martyrs fix the blood-red seal;
But certain is the harvest time of Hate!
And when weak moans, by an indignant world
Re-echoed, to a throne are backward hurled,
Who listens, hears the mutterings of Fate!
=Philadelphia=, February, 1890.
BASTARD BORN
Why do you clothe me with scarlet of shame?
Why do you point with your finger of scorn?
What is the crime that you hissingly name
When you sneer in my ears, "Thou bastard born?"
Am I not as the rest of you,
With a hope to reach, and a dream to live?
With a soul to suffer, a heart to know
The pangs that the thrusts of the heartless give?
I am no monster! Look at me--
Straight in my eyes, that they do not shrink!
Is there aught in them you can see
To merit this hemlock you make me drink?
This poison that scorches my soul like fire,
That burns and burns until love is dry,
And I shrivel with hate, as hot as a pyre,
A corpse, while its smoke curls up to the sky?
Will you touch my hand? It is flesh like yours;
Perhaps a little more brown and grimed,
For it could not be white while the drawers' and hewers',
My brothers, were calloused and darkened and slimed.
Yet touch it! It is no criminal's hand!
No children are toiling to keep it fair!
It is free from the curse of the stolen land,
It is clean of the theft of the sea and air!
It has set no seals to a murderous law,
To sign a bitter, black league with death!
No covenants false do these fingers draw
In the name of "The State" to barter Faith!
It bears no stain of the yellow gold
That earth's wretches give as the cost of heaven!
No priestly garment of silken fold
I wear as the price of their "sins forgiven"!
Still do you shrink! Still I hear the hiss
Between your teeth, and I feel the scorn
That flames in your gaze! Well, what is this,
This crime I commit, being "bastard born"?
What! You whisper my "eyes are gray,"
The "color of hers," up there on the hill,
Where the white stone gleams, and the willow spray
Falls over her grave in the starlight still!
My "hands are shaped like" those quiet hands,
Folded away from their life, their care;
And the sheen that lies on my short, fair strands
Gleams darkly down on her buried hair!
My voice is toned like that silent tone
That might, if it could, break up through the sod
With such rebuke as would shame your stone,
Stirring the grass-roots in their clod!
And my heart-beats thrill to the same strong chords;
And the blood that was hers is mine to-day;
And the thoughts she loved, I love; and the words
That meant most to her, to me most say!
_She was my mother--I her child!_
Could ten thousand priests have made us more?
Do you curse the bloom of the heather wild?
Do you trample the flowers and cry "impure"?
Do you shun the bird-songs' silver shower?
Does their music arouse your curling scorn
That none but God blessed them? The whitest flower,
The purest song, were but "bastard born"!
_This is my sin_,--I was born of her!
_This is my crime_,--that I reverence deep!
God, that her pale corpse may not stir,
Press closer down on her lids--the sleep!
Would you have me hate her? Me, who knew
That the gentlest soul in the world looked there,
Out of the gray eyes that pitied you
E'en while you cursed her? The long brown hair
That waved from her forehead, has brushed my cheek,
When her soft lips have drunk up my salt of grief;
And the voice, whose echo you hate, would speak
The hush of pity and love's relief!
And those still hands that are folded now
Have touched my sorrows for years away!
Would you have me question her whence and how
The love-light streamed from her heart's deep ray?
Do you question the sun that it gives its gold?
Do you scowl at the cloud when it pours its rain
Till the fields that were withered and burnt and old
Are fresh and tender and young again?
Do you search the source of the breeze that sweeps
The rush of the fever from tortured brain?
Do you ask whence the perfume that round you creeps
When your soul is wrought to the quick with pain?
She was my Sun, my Dew, my Air,
The highest, the purest, the holiest;
=Peace=--was the shade of her beautiful hair,
=Love=--was all that I knew on her breast!
Would you have me forget? Or remembering
Say that her love had bloomed from Hell?
Then =Blessed be Hell=! And let Heaven sing
"_Te Deum laudamus_," until it swell
And ring and roll to the utterest earth,
That the damned are free,--since out of sin
Came the whiteness that shamed all ransomed worth
Till God opened the gates, saying "Enter in!"
* * * * *
What! In the face of the witness I bear
To her measureless love and her purity,
Still of your hate would you make me to share,
Despising that she gave life to me?
You would have me stand at her helpless grave,
To dig through its earth with a venomed dart!
This is Honor! and Right! and Brave!
To fling a stone at her pulseless heart!
This is Virtue! To blast the lips
Speechless beneath the Silence dread!
To lash with Slander's scorpion whips
The voiceless, defenseless, helpless dead!
* * * * *
God! I turn to an adder now!
Back upon you I hurl your scorn!
Bind the scarlet upon your brow!
_Ye_ it is, who are "bastard born"!
Touch me not! These hands of mine
Despise your fairness--the leper's white!
Tanned and hardened and black with grime,
They are clean beside your souls to-night!
Basely born! 'Tis ye are base!
Ye who would guerdon holy trust
With slavish law to a tyrant race,
To sow the earth with the seed of lust.
Base! By Heaven! Prate of peace,
When your garments are red with the stain of wars.
Reeling with passion's mad release
By your sickly gaslight damn the stars!
Blurred with wine ye behold the snow
Smirched with the foulness that blots within!
What of purity can ye know,
Ye ten-fold children of Hell and Sin?
Ye to judge her! Ye to cast
The stone of wrath from your house of glass!
Know ye the Law, that ye dare to blast
The bell of gold with your clanging brass?
Know ye the harvest the reapers reap
Who drop in the furrow the seed of scorn?
Out of this anguish ye harrow deep,
Ripens the sentence: "_Ye_, bastard born!"
Ay, sin-begotten, hear the curse;
Not mine--not hers--but the fatal Law!
"Who bids one suffer, shall suffer worse;
Who scourges, himself shall be scourgèd raw!
"For the thoughts ye think, and the deeds ye do,
Move on, and on, till the flood is high,
And the dread dam bursts, and the waves roar through,
Hurling a cataract dirge to the sky!
"To-night ye are deaf to the beggar's prayer;
To-morrow the thieves shall batter your wall!
Ye shall feel the weight of a starved child's care
When your warders under the Mob's feet fall!
"'Tis the roar of the whirlwind ye invoke
When ye scatter the wind of your brother's moans;
'Tis the red of your hate on your own head broke,
When the blood of the murdered spatters the stones!
"Hark ye! Out of the reeking slums,
Thick with the fetid stench of crime,
Boiling up through their sickening scums,
Bubbles that burst through the crimson wine,
"Voices burst--with terrible sound,
Crying the truth your dull souls ne'er saw!
_We_ are _your_ sentence! The wheel turns round!
The bastard spawn of your bastard law!"
This is bastard: That Man should say
How Love shall love, and how Life shall live!
Setting a tablet to groove God's way,
Measuring how the divine shall give!
* * * * *
O, Evil Hearts! Ye have maddened me,
That I should interpret the voice of God!
Quiet! Quiet! O angered Sea!
Quiet! I go to her blessed sod!
* * * * *
Mother, Mother, I come to you!
Down in your grasses I press my face!
Under the kiss of their cold, pure dew,
I may dream that I lie in the dear old place!
Mother, sweet Mother, take me back,
Into the bosom from whence I came!
Take me away from the cruel rack,
Take me out of the parching flame!
Fold me again with your beautiful hair,
Speak to this terrible heaving Sea!
Over me pour the soothing of prayer,
The words of the Love-child of Galilee:
"=Peace--be still=!" Still,--could I but hear!
Softly,--I listen.--O fierce heart, cease!
Softly,--I breathe not,--low,--in my ear,--
Mother, Mother--I heard you!--=Peace=!
=Enterprise, Kansas,= January, 1891.
HYMN
(This hymn was written at the request of a Christian Science friend
who proposed to set it to music. It did not represent my beliefs
either then or since, but rather what I wish might be my beliefs,
had I not an inexorable capacity for seeing things as they are,--a
vast scheme of mutual murder, with no justice anywhere, and no God
in the soul or out of it.)
I am at peace--no storm can ever touch me;
On my clear heights the sunshine only falls;
Far, far below glides the phantom voice of sorrows,
In peace-lifted light the Silence only calls.
Ah, Soul, ascend! The mountain way, up-leading,
Bears to the heights whereon the Blest have trod!
Lay down the burden;--stanch the heart's sad bleeding;
=Be ye at peace=, for know that Ye are God!
Not long the way, not far in a dim heaven;
In the locked Self seek ye the guiding star:
Clear shine its rays, illumining the shadow;
There, where God is, there, too, O Souls ye are.
Ye are at one, and bound in Him forever,
Ev'n as the wave is bound in the great sea;
Never to drift beyond, below Him, never!
Whole as God is, so, even so, are ye.
=Philadelphia,= 1892.
YOU AND I
(A reply to "You and I in the Golden Weather," by Dyer D. Lum.)
You and I, in the sere, brown weather,
When clouds hang thick in the frowning sky,
When rain-tears drip on the bloomless heather,
Unheeding the storm-blasts will walk together,
And look to each other--You and I.
You and I, when the clouds are shriven
To show the cliff-broods of lightnings high;
When over the ramparts, swift, thunder-driven,
Rush the bolts of Hate from a Hell-lit Heaven,
Will smile at each other--You and I.
You and I, when the bolts are falling,
The hot air torn with the earth's wild cries,
Will lean through the darkness where Death is calling,
Will search through the shadows where Night is palling,
And find the light in each other's eyes.
You and I, when black sheets of water
Drench and tear us and drown our breath,
Below this laughter of Hell's own daughter,
Above the smoke of the storm-girt slaughter,
Will hear each other and gleam at Death.
You and I, in the gray night dying,
When over the east-land the dawn-beams fly,
Down in the groans, in the low, faint crying,
Down where the thick blood is blackly lying,
Will reach out our weak arms, You and I.
You and I, in the cold, white weather,
When over our corpses the pale lights lie,
Will rest at last from the dread endeavor,
Pressed to each other, for parting--never!
Our dead lips together, You and I.
You and I, when the years in flowing
Have left us behind with all things that die,
With the rot of our bones shall give soil for growing
The loves of the Future, made sweet for blowing
By the dew of the kiss of a last good-bye!
=Philadelphia=, 1892.
THE TOAST OF DESPAIR
We have cried,--and the Gods are silent;
We have trusted,--and been betrayed;
We have loved,--and the fruit was ashes;
We have given,--the gift was weighed.
We know that the heavens are empty,
That friendship and love are names;
That truth is an ashen cinder,
The end of life's burnt-out flames.
Vainly and long have we waited,
Through the night of the human roar,
For a single song on the harp of Hope,
Or a ray from a day-lit shore.
Songs aye come floating, marvelous sweet,
And bow-dyed flashes gleam;
But the sweets are Lies, and the weary feet
Run after a marsh-light beam.
In the hour of our need the song departs,
And the sea-moans of sorrow swell;
The siren mocks with a gurgling laugh
That is drowned in the deep death-knell.
The light we chased with our stumbling feet
As the goal of happier years,
Swings high and low and vanishes,--
The bow-dyes were of our tears.
God is a lie, and Faith is a lie,
And a tenfold lie is Love;
Life is a problem without a why,
And never a thing to prove.
It adds, and subtracts, and multiplies,
And divides without aim or end;
Its answers all false, though false-named true,--
Wife, husband, lover, friend.
We know it now, and we care no more;
What matters life or death?
We tiny insects emerge from earth,
Suffer, and yield our breath.
Like ants we crawl on our brief sand-hill,
Dreaming of "mighty things,"--
Lo, they crunch, like shells in the ocean's wrath,
In the rush of Time's awful wings.
The sun smiles gold, and the planets white,
And a billion stars smile, still;
Yet, fierce as we, each wheels towards death,
And cannot stay his will.
Then build, ye fools, your mighty things,
That Time shall set at naught;
Grow warm with the song the sweet Lie sings,
And the false bow your tears have wrought.
For us, a truce to Gods, loves, and hopes,
And a pledge to fire and wave;
A swifter whirl to the dance of death,
And a loud huzza for the Grave!
=Philadelphia,= 1892.
IN MEMORIAM
(To Dyer D. Lum, my friend and teacher, who died April 6, 1893.)
Great silent heart! These barren drops of grief
Are not for you, attained unto your rest;
This sterile salt upon the withered leaf
Of love, is mine--mine the dark burial guest.
Far, far within that deep, untroubled sea
We watched together, walking on the sands,
Your soul has melted,--painless, silent, free;
Mine the wrung heart, mine the clasped, useless hands.
Into the whirl of life, where none remember,
I bear your image, ever unforgot;
The "Whip-poor-will," still "wailing in December,"
Cries the same cry--cries, cries, and ceases not.
The future years with all their waves of faces
Roll shoreward singing the great undertone;
Yours is not there;--in the old, well-loved places
I look, and pass, and watch the sea alone.
Alone along the gleaming, white sea-shore,
The sea-spume spraying thick around my head,
Through all the beat of waves and winds that roar,
I go, remembering that you are dead.
That you are dead, and nowhere is there one
Like unto you;--and nowhere Love leaps Death;--
And nowhere may the broken race be run;--
Nowhere unsealed the seal that none gainsaith.
Yet in my ear that deep, sweet undertone
Grows deeper, sweeter, solemner to me,--
Dreaming your dreams, watching the light that shone
So whitely to you, yonder, on the sea.
Your voice is there, there in the great life-sound--
Your eyes are there, out there, within the light;
Your heart, within the pulsing Race-heart drowned,
Beats in the immortality of Right.
O Life, I love you for the love of him
Who showed me all your glory and your pain!
"Unto Nirvana"--so the deep tones sing--
And there--and there--we--shall--be--one--again.
=Greensburg, Pa.,= April 9th, 1893.
OUT OF THE DARKNESS
Who am I? Only one of the commonest common people,
Only a worked-out body, a shriveled and withered soul,
What right have I to sing then? None; and I do not, I cannot.
Why ruin the rhythm and rhyme of the great world's songs with
moaning?
I know not--nor why whistles must shriek, wheels ceaselessly
mutter;
Nor why all I touch turns to clanging and clashing and discord;
I know not;--I know only this,--I was born to this, live in it
hourly,
Go round with it, hum with it, curse with it, would laugh with
it, had it laughter;
It is my breath--and that breath goes outward from me in
moaning.
O you, up there, I have heard you; I am "God's image defaced,"
"In heaven reward awaits me," "hereafter I shall be perfect";
Ages you've sung that song, but what is it to me, think you?
If you heard down here in the smoke and the smut, in the smear
and the offal,
In the dust, in the mire, in the grime and in the slime, in the
hideous darkness,
How the wheels turn your song into sounds of horror and
loathing and cursing,
The offer of lust, the sneer of contempt and acceptance, thieves'
whispers,
The laugh of the gambler, the suicide's gasp, the yell of the
drunkard,
If you heard them down here you would cry, "The reward of
such is damnation,"
If you heard them, I say, your song of "rewarded hereafter"
would fail.
You, too, with your science, your titles, your books, and your
long explanations
That tell me how I am come up out of the dust of the cycles,
Out of the sands of the sea, out of the unknown primeval
forests,--
Out of the growth of the world have become the bud and the
promise,--
Out of the race of the beasts have arisen, proud and triumphant,--
You, if you knew how your words rumble round in the wheels
of labor!
If you knew how my hammering heart beats, "Liar, liar, you lie!
Out of all buds of the earth we are most blasted and blighted!
What beast of all the beasts is not prouder and freer than we?"
You, too, who sing in high words of the glory of Man universal,
The beauty of sacrifice, debt of the future, the present immortal,
The glory of use, absorption by Death of the being in Being,
You, if you knew what jargon it makes, down here, would be
quiet.
Oh, is there no one to find or to speak a meaning to _me_,
To me as I am,--the hard, the ignorant, withered-souled worker?
To me upon whom God and Science alike have stamped "failure,"
To me who know nothing but labor, nothing but sweat, dirt, and
sorrow,
To me whom you scorn and despise, you up there who sing while
I moan?
To me as I am,--for me as I am--not dying but living;
_Not_ my future, my present! my body, my needs, my desires! Is
there no one,
In the midst of this rushing of phantoms--of Gods, of Science,
of Logic,
Of Philosophy, Morals, Religion, Economy,--all this that helps
not,
All these ghosts at whose altars you worship, these ponderous,
marrowless Fictions,
Is there no one who thinks, is there nothing to help this dull
moaning me?
=Philadelphia,= April, 1893.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
The dust of a hundred years
Is on thy breast,
And thy day and thy night of tears
Are centurine rest.
Thou to whom joy was dumb,
Life a broken rhyme,
Lo, thy smiling time is come,
And our weeping time.
Thou who hadst sponge and myrrh
And a bitter cross,
Smile, for the day is here
That we know our loss;--
Loss of thine undone deed,
Thy unfinished song,
Th' unspoken word for our need,
Th' unrighted wrong;
Smile, for we weep, we weep,
For the unsoothed pain,
The unbound wound burned deep,
That we might gain.
Mother of sorrowful eyes
In the dead old days,
Mother of many sighs,
Of pain-shod ways;
Mother of resolute feet
Through all the thorns,
Mother soul-strong, soul-sweet,--
Lo, after storms
Have broken and beat thy dust
For a hundred years,
Thy memory is made just,
And the just man hears.
Thy children kneel and repeat:
"Though dust be dust,
Though sod and coffin and sheet
And moth and rust
Have folded and molded and pressed,
Yet they cannot kill;
In the heart of the world at rest
She liveth still."
=Philadelphia,= April 27th, 1893.
THE GODS AND THE PEOPLE
What have you done, O skies,
That the millions should kneel to you?
Why should they lift wet eyes,
Grateful with human dew?
Why should they clasp their hands,
And bow at thy shrines, O heaven,
Thanking thy high commands
For the mercies that thou hast given?
What have those mercies been,
O thou, who art called the Good,
Who trod through a world of sin,
And stood where the felon stood?
What is that wondrous peace
Vouchsafed to the child of dust,
For whom all doubt shall cease
In the light of thy perfect trust?
How hast Thou heard their prayers
Smoking up from the bleeding sod,
Who, crushed by their weight of cares,
Cried up to Thee, Most High God?
* * * * *
Where the swamps of Humanity sicken,
Read the answer, in dumb, white scars!
You, Skies, gave the sore and the stricken
The light of your far-off stars!
The children who plead are driven,
Shelterless, through the street,
Receiving the mercy of Heaven
Hard-frozen in glittering sleet!
The women who prayed for pity,
Who called on the saving Name,
Through the walks of your merciless city
Are crying the rent of shame.
The starving, who gazed on the plenty
In which they might not share,
Have died in their hunger, rent by
The anguish of unheard prayer!
The weary who plead for remission,
For a moment, only, release,
Have sunk, with unheeded petition:
This is the Christ-pledged Peace.
These are the mercies of Heaven,
These are the answers of God,
To the prayers of the agony-shriven,
From the paths where the millions plod!
The silent scorn of the sightless!
The callous ear of the deaf!
The wrath of might to the mightless!
The shroud, and the mourning sheaf!
Light--to behold their squalor!
Breath--to draw in life's pain!
Voices to plead and call for
Heaven's help!--hearts to bleed--in vain!
* * * * *
What have you done, O Church,
That the weary should bless your name?
Should come with faith's holy torch
To light up your altar'd fane?
Why should they kiss the folds
Of the garment of your High Priest?
Or bow to the chalice that holds
The wine of your Sacred Feast?
Have you blown out the breath of their sighs?
Have you strengthened the weak, the ill?
Have you wiped the dark tears from their eyes,
And bade their sobbings be still?
Have you touched, have you known, have you felt,
Have you bent and softly smiled
In the face of the woman, who dwelt
In lewdness--to feed her child?
Have you heard the cry in the night
Going up from the outraged heart,
Masked from the social sight
By the cloak that but angered the smart?
Have you heard the children's moan,
By the light of the skies denied?
Answer, O Walls of Stone,
In the name of your Crucified!
* * * * *
Out of the clay of their heart-break,
From the red dew of its sod,
You have mortar'd your brick, for Christ's sake,
And reared a palace to God!
Your painters have dipped their brushes
In the tears and the blood of the race,
Whom, LIVING, your dark frown crushes--
And limned--a DEAD Savior's face!
You have seized, in the name of God, the
Child's crust from famine's dole;
You have taken the price of its body
And sung a mass for its soul!
You have smiled on the man, who, deceiving,
Paid exemption to ease your wrath!
You have cursed the poor fool who believed him,
Though her body lay prone in your path!
You have laid the seal on the lip!
You have bid us to be content!
To bow 'neath our master's whip,
And give thanks for the scourge--"heav'n sent."
These, O Church, are your thanks;
These are the fruits without flaw,
That flow from the chosen ranks
Who keep in your perfect law;
Doors hard-locked on the homeless!
Stained glass windows for bread!
On the living, the law of dumbness,
And the law of need, for--the _dead_!
Better the dead, who, not needing,
Go down to the vaults of the Earth,
Than the living whose hearts lie bleeding,
Crushed by you at their very birth.
* * * * *
What have you done, O State,
That the toilers should shout your ways;
Should light up the fires of their hate
If a "traitor" should dare dispraise?
How do you guard the trust
That the people repose in you?
Do you keep to the law of the just,
And hold to the changeless true?
What do you mean when you say
"The home of the free and brave"?
How free are your people, pray?
Have you no such thing as a slave?
What are the lauded "rights,"
Broad-sealed, by your Sovereign Grace?
What are the love-feeding sights
You yield to your subject race?
* * * * *
The rights!--Ah! the right to toil,
That another, idle, may reap;
The right to make fruitful the soil
And a meagre pittance to keep!
The right of a woman to own
Her body, spotlessly pure,
And starve in the street--alone!
The right of the wronged--to endure!
The right of the slave--to his yoke!
The right of the hungry--to pray!
The right of the toiler--to vote
For the master who buys his day!
You have sold the sun and the air!
You have dealt in the price of blood!
You have taken the lion's share
While the lion is fierce for food!
You have laid the load of the strong
On the helpless, the young, the weak!
You have trod out the purple of wrong;--
Beware where its wrath shall wreak!
"Let the Voice of the People be heard!
O----" You strangled it with your rope!
Denied the last dying word,
While your Trap and your Gallows spoke!
But a thousand voices rise
Where the words of the martyr fell;
The seed springs fast to the Skies
Watered deep from that bloody well!
* * * * *
Hark! Low down you will hear
The storm in the underground!
Listen, Tyrants, and fear!
Quake at that muffled sound!
"Heavens, that mocked our dust,
Smile on, in your pitiless blue!
Silent as you are to us,
So silent are we to you!
"Churches that scourged our brains!
Priests that locked fast our hands!
We planted the torch in your chains:
Now gather the burning brands!
"States that have given us LAW,
When we asked for THE RIGHT TO EARN BREAD!
The Sword that Damocles saw
By a hair swings over your head!
"What ye have sown ye shall reap:
Teardrops, and Blood, and Hate,
Gaunt gather before your Seat,
And knock at your palace gate!
"There are murderers on your Thrones!
There are thieves in your Justice-halls!
White Leprosy cancers their stones,
And gnaws at their worm-eaten walls!
"And the Hand of Belshazzar's Feast
Writes over, in flaming light:
=Thought's kingdom no more to the Priest;
Nor the Law of Right unto Might=."
JOHN P. ALTGELD
(After an incarceration of six long years in Joliet state prison for
an act of which they were entirely innocent, namely, the throwing of
the Haymarket bomb, in Chicago, May 4th, 1886, Oscar Neebe, Michael
Schwab and Samuel Fielden, were liberated by Gov. Altgeld, who thus
sacrificed his political career to an act of justice.)
There was a tableau! Liberty's clear light
Shone never on a braver scene than that.
Here was a prison, there a Man who sat
High in the Halls of state! Beyond, the might
Of ignorance and Mobs, whose hireling press
Yells at their bidding like the slaver's hounds,
Ready with coarse caprice to curse or bless,
To make or unmake rulers!--Lo, there sounds
A grating of the doors! And three poor men,
Helpless and hated, having naught to give,
Come from their long-sealed tomb, look up, and live,
And thank this Man that they are free again.
And He--to all the world this Man dares say,
"Curse as you will! I have been just this day."
=Philadelphia,= June, 1893.
THE CRY OF THE UNFIT
The gods have left us, the creeds have crumbled;
There are none to pity and none to care:
Our fellows have crushed us where we have stumbled;
They have made of our bodies a bleeding stair.
Loud rang the bells in the Christmas steeples;
We heard them ring through the bitter morn:
The promise of old to the weary peoples
Came floating sweetly,--"Christ is born."
But the words were mocking, sorely mocking,
As we sought the sky through our freezing tears,
We children, who've hung the Christmas stocking,
And found it empty two thousand years.
No, there is naught in the old creed for us;
Love and peace are to those who win;
To them the delight of the golden chorus,
To us the hunger and shame and sin.
Why then live on since our lives are fruitless,
Since peace is certain and death is rest;
Since our masters tell us the strife is bootless,
And Nature scorns her unwelcome guest?
You who have climbed on our aching bodies,
You who have thought because we have toiled,
Priests of the creed of a newer goddess,
Searchers in depths where the Past was foiled.
Speak in the name of the faith that you cherish!
Give us the truth! We have bought it with woe!
Must we forever thus worthlessly perish,
Burned in the desert and lost in the snow?
Trampled, forsaken, foredoomed, and forgotten,--
Helplessly tossed like the leaf in the storm?
Bred for the shambles, with curses begotten,
Useless to all save the rotting grave-worm?
Give us some anchor to stay our mad drifting!
Give, for your own sakes! for lo, where our blood,
A red tide to drown you, is steadily lifting!
Help! or you die in the terrible flood!
=Philadelphia,= 1893.
IN MEMORIAM
To Gen. M. M. Trumbull.
(No man better than Gen. Trumbull defended my martyred comrades in
Chicago.)
Back to thy breast, O Mother, turns thy child,
He whom thou garmentedst in steel of truth,
And sent forth, strong in the glad heart of youth,
To sing the wakening song in ears beguiled
By tyrants' promises and flatterers' smiles;
These searched his eyes, and knew nor threats nor wiles
Might shake the steady stars within their blue,
Nor win one truckling word from off those lips,--
No--not for gold nor praise, nor aught men do
To dash the Sun of Honor with eclipse,
O Mother Liberty, those eyes are dark,
And the brave lips are white and cold and dumb;
But fair in other souls, through time to come,
Fanned by thy breath glows the Immortal Spark.
=Philadelphia,= May, 1894.
THE WANDERING JEW
(The above poem was suggested by the reading of an article
describing an interview with the "wandering Jew," in which he was
represented as an incorrigible grumbler. The Jew has been, and will
continue to be, the grumbler of earth,--until the prophetic ideal of
justice shall be realized: "BLESSED BE HE.")
_"Go on."--"THOU shalt go on till I come."_
Pale, ghostly Vision from the coffined years,
Planting the cross with thy world-wandering feet,
Stern Watcher through the centuries' storm and beat,
In those sad eyes, between those grooves of tears,--
Those eyes like caves where sunlight never dwells
And stars but dimly shine--stand sentinels
That watch with patient hope, through weary days,
That somewhere, sometime, He indeed may "come,"
And thou at last find thee a resting place,
Blast-driven leaf of Man, within the tomb.
Aye, they have cursed thee with the bitter curse,
And driven thee with scourges o'er the world;
Tyrants have crushed thee, Ignorance has hurled
Its black anathema;--but Death's pale hearse,
That bore them graveward, passed them silently;
And vainly didst thou stretch thy hands and cry,
"Take me instead";--not yet for thee the time,
Not yet--not yet: thy bruised and mangled limbs
Must still drag on, still feed the Vulture, Crime,
With bleeding flesh, till rust its steel beak dims.
Aye, "till He come,"--=He,--freedom, justice, peace=--
Till then shalt thou cry warning through the earth,
Unheeding pain, untouched by death and birth,
Proclaiming "Woe, woe, woe," till men shall cease
To seek for Christ within the senseless skies,
And, joyous, find him in each other's eyes.
Then shall be builded such a tomb for thee
Shall beggar kings' as diamonds outshine dew!
The Universal Heart of Man shall be
The sacred urn of "the accursed Jew."
=Philadelphia,= 1894.
THE FEAST OF VULTURES
(As the three Anarchists, Vaillant, Henry and Caserio, were led to
their several executions, a voice from the prison cried loudly,
"Vive l'anarchie!" Through watch and ward the cry escaped, and no
man owned the voice; but the cry is still resounding through the
world.)
A moan in the gloam in the air-peaks heard--
The Bird of Omen--the wild, fierce Bird,
Aflight
In the night,
Like a whizz of light,
Arrowy winging before the storm,
Far away flinging,
The whistling, singing,
White-curdled drops, wind-blown and warm,
From its beating, flapping,
Thunderous wings;
Crashing and clapping
The split night swings,
And rocks and totters,
Bled of its levin,
And reels and mutters
A curse to Heaven!
Reels and mutters and rolls and dies,
With a wild light streaking its black, blind eyes.
Far, far, far,
Through the red, mad morn,
Like a hurtling star,
Through the air upborne,
The Herald-Singer,
The Terror-Bringer,
Speeds--and behind, through the cloud-rags torn,
Gather and wheel a million wings,
Clanging as iron where the hammer rings;
The whipped sky shivers,
The White Gate shakes,
The ripped throne quivers,
The dumb God wakes,
And feels in his heart the talon-stings--
The dead bodies hurled from beaks for slings.
"Ruin! Ruin!" the Whirlwind cries,
And it leaps at his throat and tears his eyes;
"Death for death, as ye long have dealt;
The heads of your victims your heads shall pelt;
The blood ye wrung to get drunk upon,
Drink, and be poisoned! On, Herald, on!"
Behold, behold,
How a moan is grown!
A cry hurled high 'gainst a scaffold's joist!
The Voice of Defiance--the loud, wild Voice!
Whirled
Through the world,
A smoke-wreath curled
(Breath 'round hot kisses) around a fire!
See! the ground hisses
With curses, and glisses
With red-streaming blood-clots of long-frozen ire,
Waked by the flying
Wild voice as it passes;
Groaning and crying,
The surge of the masses
Rolls and flashes
With thunderous roar--
Seams and lashes
The livid shore--
Seams and lashes and crunches and beats,
And drags a ragged wall to its howling retreats!
Swift, swift, swift,
'Thwart the blood-rain's fall,
Through the fire-shot rift
Of the broken wall,
The prophet-crying
The storm-strong sighing,
Flies--and from under Night's lifted pall,
Swarming, menace ten million darts,
Uplifting fragments of human shards!
Ah, white teeth chatter,
And dumb jaws fall,
While winged fires scatter
Till gloom gulfs all
Save the boom of the cannon that storm the forts
That the people bombard with their comrades' hearts;
"Vengeance! Vengeance!" the voices scream,
And the vulture pinions whirl and stream!
"Knife for knife, as ye long have dealt;
The edge ye whetted for us be felt,
Ye chopper of necks, on your own, your own!
Bare it, Coward! On, Prophet, on!"
Behold how high
Rolls a prison cry!
=Philadelphia,= August 1894.
THE SUICIDE'S DEFENSE
(Of all the stupidities wherewith the law-making power has signaled
its own incapacity for dealing with the disorders of society, none
appears so utterly stupid as the law which punishes an attempted
suicide. To the question "What have you to say in your defense?" I
conceive the poor wretch might reply as follows:)
To say in my defense? Defense of what?
Defense to whom? And why defense at all?
Have I wronged any? Let that one accuse!
Some priest there mutters I "have outraged God"!
Let God then try me, and let none dare judge
Himself as fit to put Heaven's ermine on!
Again I say, let the wronged one accuse.
Aye, silence! There is none to answer me.
And whom could I, a homeless, friendless tramp,
To whom all doors are shut, all hearts are locked,
All hands withheld--whom could I wrong, indeed
By taking that which benefited none
And menaced all?
Aye, since ye will it so,
Know then your risk. But mark, 'tis not defense,
'Tis accusation that I hurl at you.
See to't that ye prepare your own defense.
My life, I say, is an eternal threat
To you and yours; and therefore it were well
To have foreborne your unasked services.
And why? Because I hate you! Every drop
Of blood that circles in your plethoric veins
Was wrung from out the gaunt and sapless trunks
Of men like me, who in your cursed mills
Were crushed like grapes within the wine-press ground.
To us ye leave the empty skin of life;
The heart of it, the sweet of it, ye pour
To fete your dogs and mistresses withal!
Your mistresses! Our daughters! Bought, for bread,
To grace the flesh that once was father's arms!
Yes, I accuse you that ye murdered me!
Ye killed the Man--and this that speaks to you
Is but the beast that ye have made of me!
What! Is it life to creep and crawl and beg,
And slink for shelter where rats congregate?
And for one's ideal dream of a fat meal?
Is it, then, life, to group like pigs in sties,
And bury decency in common filth,
Because, forsooth, your income must be made,
Though human flesh rot in your plague-rid dens?
Is it, then, life, to wait another's nod,
For leave to turn yourself to gold for him?
Would it be life to you? And was I less
Than you? Was I not born with hopes and dreams
And pains and passions even as were you?
But these ye have denied. Ye seized the earth,
Though it was none of yours, and said: "Hereon
Shall none rest, walk or work, till first to me
Ye render tribute!" Every art of man,
Born to make light of the burdens of the world,
Ye also seized, and made a tenfold curse
To crush the man beneath the thing he made.
Houses, machines, and lands--all, all are yours;
And us you do not need. When we ask work
Ye shake your heads. Homes?--Ye evict us. Bread?--
"Here, officer, this fellow's begging. Jail's
The place for him!" After the stripes, what next?--
Poison!--I took it!--Now you say 'twas sin
To take this life which troubled you so much.
Sin to escape insult, starvation, brands
Of felony, inflicted for the crime
Of asking food! Ye hypocrites! Within
Your secret hearts the sin is that I _failed_!
Because I failed ye judge me to the stripes,
And the hard toil denied when I was free.
So be it. But beware!--A prison cell's
An evil bed to grow morality!
Black swamps breed black miasms; sickly soils
Yield poison fruit; snakes warmed to life will sting.
This time I was content to go alone;
Perchance the next I shall not be so kind.
=Philadelphia=, September, 1894.
A NOVEL OF COLOR
(The following is a true and particular account of what happened on
the night of December 11, 1895; but it is likely to be
unintelligible to all save the Chipmunks and the Elephant, who,
however, will no doubt recognize themselves.)
Chapter I.
Chipmunks three sat on a tree,
And they were as green as green could be;
They cracked nuts early, they cracked nuts late,
And chirruped and chirruped, and ate and ate;
"'Tis a pity of chipmunks without nuts,
And a gnawing hunger in their guts;
But they should be wise like you and me,
And color themselves to suit the tree.
Ah chee, ah chee, ah chee, ah chee!
Gay chaps are we, we chipmunks three!"
An elephant white in sorry plight,
Hungry and dirty and sad bedight,
Straggled one day on the nutting ground;
"Lo," chattered the chipmunks, "our chance is found!
Behold the beast's color; were he as we,
Green and sleek and nut-full were he!
But the beast is big, and the beast is white,
And his skin full of emptiness serves him right!
Ah chee, ah chee, ah chee, ah chee!
Let us 'sit on him, sit on him,' chipmunks three."
Chapter II.
Three chipmunks green right gay were seen
To leap on the beast his brows between;
They munched at his ears and chiffered his chin,
And sat and sat and sat on him!
Not a single available spot of hide
Where a well-sleeked chipmunk could sit with pride,
But was chipped and chipped and chip-chip-munked,
Till aught but an elephant must have flunked.
"Ah chee, ah chee, ah chee, ah chee!
What a ride we're having, we chipmunks three!"
Chapter III.
Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-f-f-f-f-f!!!
Chapter IV.
"What was it blew? Ah whew, ah whew!"
Three green chipmunks have all turned blue!
The elephant smiles a peaceful smile,
And lifts off a tree-trunk sans haste or guile.
"Seize him, seize him! He's stealing our tree!
We're undone, undone," shriek the chipmunks three.
The elephant calmly upraised his trunk,
And said, "Did I hear a green chipmunk?"
* * * * *
"Ah chee, ah chee, ah chee, ah choo!"
"Chippy, you're blue!" "So're you!" "So're you!"
=Philadelphia=, December, 1895.
GERMINAL
(The last word of Angiolillo.)
Germinal!--The Field of Mars is plowing,
And hard the steel that cuts, and hot the breath
Of the great Oxen, straining flanks and bowing
Beneath his goad, who guides the share of Death.
Germinal!--The Dragon's teeth are sowing,
And stern and white the sower flings the seed
He shall not gather, though full swift the growing;
Straight down Death's furrow treads, and does not heed.
Germinal!--The Helmet Heads are springing
Far up the Field of Mars in gleaming files;
With wild war notes the bursting earth is ringing.
* * * * *
Within his grave the sower sleeps, and smiles.
=London=, October, 1897.
"LIGHT UPON WALDHEIM"
(The figure on the monument over the grave of the Chicago martyrs in
Waldheim Cemetery is a warrior woman, dropping with her left hand a
crown upon the forehead of a fallen man just past his agony, and
with her right drawing a dagger from her bosom.)
Light upon Waldheim! And the earth is gray;
A bitter wind is driving from the north;
The stone is cold, and strange cold whispers say:
"What do ye here with Death? Go forth! Go forth!"
Is this thy word, O Mother, with stern eyes,
Crowning thy dead with stone-caressing touch?
May we not weep o'er him that martyred lies,
Slain in our name, for that he loved us much?
May we not linger till the day is broad?
Nay, none are stirring in this stinging dawn--
None but poor wretches that make no moan to God:
What use are these, O thou with dagger drawn?
"Go forth, go forth! Stand not to weep for these,
Till, weakened with your weeping, like the snow
Ye melt, dissolving in a coward peace!"
Light upon Waldheim! Brother, let us go!
=London=, October, 1897.
LOVE'S COMPENSATION
I went before God, and he said,
"What fruit of the life I gave?"
"Father," I said, "It is dead,
And nothing grows on the grave."
Wroth was the Lord and stern:
"Hadst thou not to answer me?
Shall the fruitless root not burn,
And be wasted utterly?"
"Father," I said, "forgive!
For thou knowest what I have done;
That another's life might live
Mine turned to a barren stone."
But the Father of Life sent fire
And burned the root in the grave;
And the pain in my heart is dire
For the thing that I could not save.
For the thing it was laid on me
By the Lord of Life to bring;
Fruit of the ungrown tree
That died for no watering.
Another has gone to God,
And his fruit has pleased Him well;
For he sitteth high, while I--plod
The dry ways down towards hell.
Though thou knowest, thou knowest, Lord,
Whose tears made that fruit's root wet;
Yet thou drivest me forth with a sword,
And thy Guards by the Gate are set.
Thou wilt give me up to the fire,
And none shall deliver me;
For I followed my heart's desire,
And I labored not for thee:
I labored for him thou hast set
On thy right hand, high and fair;
Thou lovest him, Lord; and yet
'Twas my love won Him there.
But this is the thing that hath been,
Hath been since the world began,--
That love against self must sin,
And a woman die for a man.
And this is the thing that shall be,
Shall be till the whole world die,
_Kismet_:--My doom is on me!
Why murmur since I am I?
=Philadelphia=, August, 1898.
THE ROAD BUILDERS
("Who built the beautiful roads?" queried a friend of the present
order, as we walked one day along the macadamised driveway of
Fairmount Park.)
I saw them toiling in the blistering sun,
Their dull, dark faces leaning toward the stone,
Their knotted fingers grasping the rude tools,
Their rounded shoulders narrowing in their chest,
The sweat drops dripping in great painful beads.
I saw one fall, his forehead on the rock,
The helpless hand still clutching at the spade,
The slack mouth full of earth.
And he was dead.
His comrades gently turned his face, until
The fierce sun glittered hard upon his eyes,
Wide open, staring at the cruel sky.
The blood yet ran upon the jagged stone;
But it was ended. He was quite, quite dead:
Driven to death beneath the burning sun,
Driven to death upon the road he built.
He was no "hero," he; a poor, black man,
Taking "the will of God" and asking naught;
Think of him thus, when next your horse's feet
Strike out the flint spark from the gleaming road;
Think that for this, this common thing, The Road,
A human creature died; 'tis a blood gift,
To an o'erreaching world that does not thank.
Ignorant, mean and soulless was he? Well,--
Still human; and you drive upon his corpse.
=Philadelphia=, July 24, 1900.
ANGIOLILLO
We are the souls that crept and cried in the days when they
tortured men;
His was the spirit that walked erect, and met the beast in its den.
Ours are the eyes that were dim with tears for the thing they
shrunk to see;
His was the glance that was crystal keen with the light that
makes men free.
Ours are the hands that were wrung in pain, in helpless pain
and shame;
His was the resolute hand that struck, steady and keen to its aim.
Ours are the lips that quivered with rage, that cursed and prayed
in a breath:
His was the mouth that opened but once to speak from the
throat of Death.
"Assassin, Assassin!" the World cries out, with a shake of its
dotard head;
"Germinal!" rings back the grave where lies the Dead that is
not dead.
"Germinal, Germinal," sings the Wind that is driving before
the Storm;
"Few are the drops that have fallen yet,--scattered, but red and
warm."
"Germinal, Germinal," sing the Fields, where furrows of men
are plowed;
"Ye shall gather a harvest over-rich, when the ear at the full
is bowed."
Springing, springing, at every breath, the Word of invincible
strife,
The word of the Dead, that is calling loud down the battle ranks
of Life!
For these are the Dead that live, though the earth upon them lie:
But the doers of deeds of the Night of the Dead, they are the
Live that die.
=Torresdale, Pa.=, August 1, 1900.
AVE ET VALE
Comrades, what matter the watch-night tells
That a New Year comes or goes?
What to us are the crashing bells
That clang out the Century's close?
What to us is the gala dress?
The whirl of the dancing feet?
The glitter and blare in the laughing press,
And din of the merry street?
Do we not know that our brothers die
In the cold and the dark to-night?
Shelterless faces turned toward the sky
Will not see the New Year's light!
Wandering children, lonely, lost,
Drift away on the human sea,
While the price of their lives in a glass is tossed
And drunk in a revelry!
Ah, know we not in their feasting halls
Where the loud laugh echoes again,
That brick and stone in the mortared walls
Are the bones of murdered men?
Slowly murdered! By day and day,
The beauty and strength are reft,
Till the Man is sapped and sucked away,
And a Human Rind is left!
A Human Rind, with old, thin hair,
And old, thin voice to pray
For alms in the bitter winter air,--
A knife at his heart alway.
And the pure in heart are impure in flesh
For the cost of a little food:
Lo, when the Gleaner of Time shall thresh,
Let these be accounted good.
For these are they who in bitter blame
Eat the bread whose salt is sin;
Whose bosoms are burned with the scarlet shame,
Till their hearts are seared within.
The cowardly jests of a hundred years
Will be thrown where they pass to-night,
Too callous for hate, and too dry for tears,
The saddest of human blight.
Do we forget them, these broken ones,
That our watch to-night is set?
Nay, we smile in the face of the year that comes
_Because we do not forget._
We do not forget the tramp on the track,
Thrust out in the wind-swept waste,
The curses of Man upon his back,
And the curse of God in his face.
The stare in the eyes of the buried man
Face down in the fallen mine;
The despair of the child whose bare feet ran
To tread out the rich man's wine;
The solemn light in the dying gaze
Of the babe at the empty breast,
The wax accusation, the sombre glaze
Of its frozen and rigid rest;
They are all in the smile that we turn to the east
To welcome the Century's dawn;
They are all in our greeting to Night's high priest,
As we bid the Old Year begone.
Begone and have done, and go down and be dead
Deep drowned in your sea of tears!
We smile as you die, for we wait the red
Morn-gleam of a hundred-years
That shall see the end of the age-old wrong,--
The reapers that have not sown,--
The reapers of men with their sickles strong
Who gather, but have not strown.
For the earth shall be his and the fruits thereof
And to him the corn and wine,
Who labors the hills with an even love
And knows not "thine and mine."
And the silk shall be to the hand that weaves,
The pearl to him who dives,
The home to the builder; and all life's sheaves
To the builder of human lives.
And none go blind that another see,
Or die that another live;
And none insult with a charity
That is not theirs to give.
For each of his plenty shall freely share
And take at another's hand:
Equals breathing the Common Air
And toiling the Common Land.
A dream? A vision? Aye, what you will;
Let it be to you as it seems:
Of this Nightmare Real we have our fill;
To-night is for "pleasant dreams."
Dreams that shall waken the hope that sleeps
And knock at each torpid Heart
Till it beat drum taps, and the blood that creeps
With a lion's spring upstart!
For who are we to be bound and drowned
In this river of human blood?
Who are we to lie in a swound,
Half sunk in the river mud?
Are we not they who delve and blast
And hammer and build and burn?
Without us not a nail made fast!
Not a wheel in the world should turn!
Must we, the Giant, await the grace
That is dealt by the puny hand
Of him who sits in the feasting place,
While we, his Blind Jest, stand
Between the pillars? Nay, not so:
Aye, if such thing were true,
Better were Gaza again, to show
What the giant's rage may do!
But yet not this: it were wiser far
To enter the feasting hall
And say to the Masters, "These things are
Not for you alone, but all."
And this shall be in the Century
That opes on our eyes to-night;
So here's to the struggle, if it must be,
And to him who fights the fight.
And here's to the dauntless, jubilant throat
That loud to its Comrade sings,
Till over the earth shrills the mustering note,
And the World Strike's signal rings.
=Philadelphia=, January 1, 1901.
MARSH-BLOOM
(To Gaetano Bresci.)
Requiem, requiem, requiem,
Blood-red blossom of poison stem
Broken for Man,
Swamp-sunk leafage and dungeon bloom,
Seeded bearer of royal doom,
What now is the ban?
What to thee is the island grave?
With desert wind and desolate wave
Will they silence Death?
Can they weight thee now with the heaviest stone?
Can they lay aught on thee with "Be alone,"
That hast conquered breath?
Lo, "it is finished"--a man for a king!
Mark you well who have done this thing:
The flower has roots;
Bitter and rank grow the things of the sea;
Ye shall know what sap ran thick in the tree
When ye pluck its fruits.
Requiem, requiem, requiem,
Sleep on, sleep on, accursed of them
Who work our pain;
A wild Marsh-blossom shall blow again
From a buried root in the slime of men,
On the day of the Great Red Rain.
=Philadelphia=, July, 1901.
WRITTEN--IN--RED[A]
(To Our Living Dead in Mexico's Struggle.)
Written in red their protest stands,
For the Gods of the World to see;
On the dooming wall their bodiless hands
Have blazoned "Upharsin," and flaring brands
Illumine the message: "Seize the lands!
Open the prisons and make men free!"
Flame out the living words of the dead
Written--in--red.
Gods of the World! Their mouths are dumb!
Your guns have spoken and they are dust.
But the shrouded Living, whose hearts were numb,
Have felt the beat of a wakening drum
Within them sounding--the Dead Men's tongue--
Calling: "Smite off the ancient rust!"
Have beheld "Resurrexit," the word of the Dead,
Written--in--red.
Bear it aloft, O roaring flame!
Skyward aloft, where all may see.
Slaves of the World! Our cause is the same;
One is the immemorial shame;
One is the struggle, and in One name--
=Manhood=--we battle to set men free.
"Uncurse us the Land!" burn the words of the Dead,
Written--in--red.
[A] Voltairine de Cleyre's last poem.
ESSAYS
The Dominant Idea
In everything that lives, if one looks searchingly, is limned the shadow
line of an idea--an idea, dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead,
with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment with the
stern, immobile cast of the non-living. Daily we move among these
unyielding shadows, less pierceable, more enduring than granite, with
the blackness of ages in them, dominating living, changing bodies, with
dead, unchanging souls. And we meet, also, living souls dominating dying
bodies--living ideas regnant over decay and death. Do not imagine that I
speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or of shifting Will
is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its clod of earth, as in the
gossamer web of being that floats and swims far over our heads in the
free world of air.
Regnant ideas, everywhere! Did you ever see a dead vine bloom? I have
seen it. Last summer I trained some morning-glory vines up over a
second-story balcony; and every day they blew and curled in the wind,
their white, purple-dashed faces winking at the sun, radiant with
climbing life. Higher every day the green heads crept, carrying their
train of spreading fans waving before the sun-seeking blossoms. Then
all at once some mischance happened,--some cut-worm or some mischievous
child tore one vine off below, the finest and most ambitious one, of
course. In a few hours the leaves hung limp, the sappy stem wilted
and began to wither; in a day it was dead,--all but the top, which
still clung longingly to its support, with bright head lifted. I
mourned a little for the buds that could never open now, and pitied
that proud vine whose work in the world was lost. But the next night
there was a storm, a heavy, driving storm, with beating rain and
blinding lightning. I rose to watch the flashes, and lo! the wonder of
the world! In the blackness of the mid-=Night=, in the fury of wind
and rain, the dead vine had flowered. Five white, moon-faced blossoms
blew gaily round the skeleton vine, shining back triumphant at the red
lightning. I gazed at them in dumb wonder. Dear, dead vine, whose will
had been so strong to bloom that in the hour of its sudden cut-off
from the feeding earth it sent the last sap to its blossoms; and, not
waiting for the morning, brought them forth in storm and flash, as
white night-glories, which should have been the children of the sun.
In the daylight we all came to look at the wonder, marveling much, and
saying, "Surely these must be the last." But every day for three days
the dead vine bloomed; and even a week after, when every leaf was dry
and brown, and so thin you could see through it, one last bud, dwarfed,
weak, a very baby of a blossom, but still white and delicate, with five
purple flecks, like those on the live vine beside it, opened and waved
at the stars, and waited for the early sun. Over death and decay the
Dominant Idea smiled: the vine was in the world to bloom, to bear white
trumpet blossoms dashed with purple; and it held its will beyond death.
Our modern teaching is that ideas are but attendant phenomena, impotent
to determine the actions or relations of life, as the image in the glass
which should say to the body it reflects: "_I_ shall shape _thee_." In
truth we know that directly the body goes from before the mirror, the
transient image is nothingness; but the real body has its being to live,
and will live it, heedless of vanished phantoms of itself, in response
to the ever-shifting pressure of things without it.
It is thus that the so-called Materialist Conception of History, the
modern Socialists, and a positive majority of Anarchists would have us
look upon the world of ideas,--shifting, unreal reflections, having
naught to do in the determination of Man's life, but so many mirror
appearances of certain material relations, wholly powerless to act upon
the course of material things. Mind to them is in itself a blank mirror,
though in fact never wholly blank, because always facing the reality of
the material and bound to reflect some shadow. To-day I am somebody,
to-morrow somebody else, if the scenes have shifted; my Ego is a
gibbering phantom, pirouetting in the glass, gesticulating,
transforming, hourly or momentarily, gleaming with the phosphor light of
a deceptive unreality, melting like the mist upon the hills. Rocks,
fields, woods, streams, houses, goods, flesh, blood, bone, sinew,--these
are realities, with definite parts to play, with essential characters
that abide under all changes; but my Ego does not abide; it is
manufactured afresh with every change of these.
I think this unqualified determinism of the material is a great and
lamentable error in our modern progressive movement; and while I believe
it was a wholesome antidote to the long-continued blunder of Middle Age
theology, viz.: that Mind was an utterly irresponsible entity making
laws of its own after the manner of an Absolute Emperor, without logic,
sequence, or relation, ruler over matter, and its own supreme
determinant, not excepting God (who was himself the same sort of a mind
writ large)--while I do believe that the modern reconception of
Materialism has done a wholesome thing in pricking the bubble of such
conceit and restoring man and his "soul" to its "place in nature," I
nevertheless believe that to this also there is a limit; and that the
absolute sway of Matter is quite as mischievous an error as the
unrelated nature of Mind; even that in its direct action upon personal
conduct, it has the more ill effect of the two. For if the doctrine of
free-will has raised up fanatics and persecutors, who, assuming that men
may be good under all conditions if they merely wish to be so, have
sought to persuade other men's wills with threats, fines, imprisonments,
torture, the spike, the wheel, the axe, the fagot, in order to make them
good and save them against their obdurate wills; if the doctrine of
Spiritualism, the soul supreme, has done this, the doctrine of
Materialistic Determinism has produced shifting, self-excusing,
worthless, parasitical characters, who are _this_ now and _that_ at some
other time, and anything and nothing upon principle. "My conditions have
made me so," they cry, and there is no more to be said; poor
mirror-ghosts! how could they help it! To be sure, the influence of such
a character rarely reaches so far as that of the principled persecutor;
but for every one of the latter, there are a hundred of these easy,
doughy characters, who will fit any baking tin, to whom determinist
self-excusing appeals; so the balance of evil between the two doctrines
is _about_ maintained.
What we need is a true appraisement of the power and rôle of the Idea. I
do not think I am able to give such a true appraisement; I do not think
that any one--even _much_ greater intellects than mine--will be able to
do it for a long time to come. But I am at least able to suggest it, to
show its necessity, to give a rude approximation of it.
And first, against the accepted formula of modern Materialism, "Men
are what circumstances make them," I set the opposing declaration,
"Circumstances are what men make them"; and I contend that both
these things are true up to the point where the combating powers are
equalized, or one is overthrown. In other words, my conception of mind,
or character, is not that it is a powerless reflection of a momentary
condition of stuff and form, but an active modifying agent, reacting
on its environment and transforming circumstances, sometimes greatly,
sometimes, though not often, entirely.
All over the kingdom of life, I have said, one may see dominant ideas
working, if one but trains his eyes to look for them and recognize them.
In the human world there have been many dominant ideas. I cannot
conceive that ever, at any time, the struggle of the body before
dissolution can have been aught but agony. If the reasoning that
insecurity of conditions, the expectation of suffering, are
circumstances which make the soul of man uneasy, shrinking, timid, what
answer will you give to the challenge of old Ragnar Lodbrog, to that
triumphant death-song hurled out, not by one cast to his death in the
heat of battle, but under slow prison torture, bitten by serpents, and
yet singing: "The goddesses of death invite me away--now end I my song.
The hours of my life are run out. I shall smile when I die"? Nor can it
be said that this is an exceptional instance, not to be accounted for by
the usual operation of general law, for old King Lodbrog the Skalder did
only what his fathers did, and his sons and his friends and his enemies,
through long generations; they set the force of a dominant idea, the
idea of the superascendant ego, against the force of torture and of
death, ending life as they wished to end it, with a smile on their lips.
But a few years ago, did we not read how the helpless Kaffirs,
victimized by the English for the contumacy of the Boers, having been
forced to dig the trenches wherein for pleasant sport they were to be
shot, were lined up on the edge, and seeing death facing them, began to
chant barbaric strains of triumph, smiling as they fell? Let us admit
that such exultant defiance was owing to ignorance, to primitive beliefs
in gods and hereafters; but let us admit also that it shows the power of
an idea dominant.
Everywhere in the shells of dead societies, as in the shells of the
sea-slime, we shall see the force of purposive action, of intent
_within_ holding its purpose against obstacles _without_.
I think there is no one in the world who can look upon the steadfast,
far-staring face of an Egyptian carving, or read a description of
Egypt's monuments, or gaze upon the mummied clay of its old dead men,
without feeling that the dominant idea of that people in that age was to
be enduring and to work enduring things, with the immobility of their
great still sky upon them and the stare of the desert in them. One must
feel that whatever other ideas animated them, and expressed themselves
in their lives, this was the dominant idea. _That which was_ must
remain, no matter at what cost, even if it were to break the everlasting
hills: an idea which made the live humanity beneath it, born and
nurtured in the coffins of caste, groan and writhe and gnaw its
bandages, till in the fullness of time it passed away: and still the
granite mould of it stares with empty eyes out across the world, the
stern old memory of the _Thing-that-was_.
I think no one can look upon the marbles wherein Greek genius wrought
the figuring of its soul, without feeling an apprehension that the
things are going to leap and fly; that in a moment one is like to be set
upon by heroes with spears in their hands, by serpents that will coil
around him; to be trodden by horses that may trample and flee; to be
smitten by these gods that have as little of the idea of stone in them
as a dragon-fly, one instant poised upon a wind-swayed petal edge. I
think no one can look upon them without realizing at once that those
figures came out of the boil of life; they seem like rising bubbles
about to float into the air, but beneath them other bubbles rising, and
others, and others,--there will be no end of it. When one's eyes are
upon one group, one feels that behind one, perhaps, a figure is uptoeing
to seize the darts of the air and hurl them on one's head; one must keep
whirling to face the miracle that appears about to be wrought--stone
leaping! And this though nearly every one is minus some of the glory the
old Greek wrought into it so long ago; even the broken stumps of arms
and legs live. And the dominant idea is Activity, and the beauty and
strength of it. Change, swift, ever-circling Change! The making of
things and the casting of them away, as children cast away their toys,
not interested that these shall endure, so that they themselves realize
incessant activity. Full of creative power, what matter if the creature
perished. So there was an endless procession of changing shapes in their
schools, their philosophies, their dramas, their poems, till at last it
wore itself to death. And the marvel passed away from the world. But
still their marbles live to show what manner of thoughts dominated them.
And if we wish to know what master-thought ruled the lives of men when
the mediæval period had had time to ripen it, one has only at this day
to stray into some quaint, out-of-the-way English village, where a
strong old towered Church yet stands in the midst of little
straw-thatched cottages, like a brooding mother-hen surrounded by her
chickens. Everywhere the greatening of God, and the lessening of Man:
the Church so looming, the home so little. The search for the spirit,
for the _enduring_ thing (not the poor endurance of granite which in the
ages crumbles, but the eternal), the eternal,--and contempt for the body
which perishes, manifest in studied uncleanliness, in mortifications of
the flesh, as if the spirit should have spat its scorn upon it.
Such was the dominant idea of that middle age which has been too much
cursed by modernists. For the men who built the castles and the
cathedrals were men of mighty works, though they made no books, and
though their souls spread crippled wings, because of their very
endeavors to soar too high. The spirit of voluntary subordination for
the accomplishment of a great work, which proclaimed the aspiration of
the common soul,--that was the spirit wrought into the cathedral stones;
and it is not wholly to be condemned.
In waking dream, when the shadow-shapes of world-ideas swim before the
vision, one sees the Middle-Age Soul an ill-contorted, half-formless
thing, with dragon wings and a great, dark, tense face, strained sunward
with blind eyes.
If now we look around us to see what idea dominates our own
civilization, I do not know that it is even as attractive as this
piteous monster of the old darkness. The relativity of things has
altered: Man has risen and God has descended. The modern village has
better homes and less pretentious churches. Also the conception of dirt
and disease as much-sought afflictions, the patient suffering of which
is a meet offering to win God's pardon, has given place to the emphatic
promulgation of cleanliness. We have Public School nurses notifying
parents that "pediculosis capitis" is a very contagious and unpleasant
disease; we have cancer associations gathering up such cancers as have
attached themselves to impecunious persons, and carefully experimenting
with a view to cleaning them out of the human race; we have
tuberculosis societies attempting the Herculean labor of clearing the
Augean stables of our modern factories of the deadly bacillus, and they
have got as far as spittoons with water in them in some factories; and
others, and others, and others, which, while not yet overwhelmingly
successful in their avowed purposes, are evidence sufficient that
humanity no longer seeks dirt as a means of grace. We laugh at those old
superstitions, and talk much about exact experimental knowledge. We
endeavor to galvanize the Greek corpse, and pretend that we enjoy
physical culture. We dabble in many things; but the one great real idea
of our age, not copied from any other, not pretended, not raised to life
by any conjuration, is the Much Making of Things,--not the making of
beautiful things, not the joy of spending living energy in creative
work; rather the shameless, merciless driving and over-driving, wasting
and draining of the last bit of energy, only to produce heaps and heaps
of things,--things ugly, things harmful, things useless, and at the best
largely unnecessary. To what end are they produced? Mostly the producer
does not know; still less does he care. But he is possessed with the
idea that he _must_ do it, every one is doing it, and every year the
making of things goes on more and faster; there are mountain ranges of
things made and making, and still men go about desperately seeking to
increase the list of created things, to start fresh heaps and to add to
the existing heaps. And with what agony of body, under what stress and
strain of danger and fear of danger, with what mutilations and maimings
and lamings they struggle on, dashing themselves out against these
rocks of wealth! Verily, if the vision of the Mediæval Soul is painful
in its blind staring and pathetic striving, grotesque in its senseless
tortures, the Soul of the Modern is most amazing with its restless,
nervous eyes, ever searching the corners of the universe, its restless,
nervous hands ever reaching and grasping for some useless toil.
And certainly the presence of things in abundance, things empty and
things vulgar and things absurd, as well as things convenient and
useful, has produced the desire for the possession of things, the
exaltation of the possession of things. Go through the business street
of any city, where the tilted edges of the strata of things are exposed
to gaze, and look at the faces of the people as they pass,--not at the
hungry and smitten ones who fringe the sidewalks and plaint dolefully
for alms, but at the crowd,--and see what idea is written on their
faces. On those of the women, from the ladies of the horse-shows to the
shop girls out of the factory, there is a sickening vanity, a
consciousness of their clothes, as of some jackdaw in borrowed feathers.
Look for the pride and glory of the free, strong, beautiful body,
lithe-moving and powerful. You will not see it. You will see mincing
steps, bodies tilted to show the cut of a skirt, simpering, smirking
faces, with eyes cast about seeking admiration for the gigantic bow of
ribbon in the overdressed hair. In the caustic words of an acquaintance,
to whom I once said, as we walked, "Look at the amount of vanity on all
these women's faces," "No: look at the little bit of womanhood showing
out of all that vanity!"
And on the faces of the men, coarseness! Coarse desires for coarse
things, and lots of them: the stamp is set so unmistakably that "the
wayfarer though a fool need not err therein." Even the frightful anxiety
and restlessness begotten of the creation of all this, is less
distasteful than the abominable expression of lust for the things
created.
Such is the dominant idea of the western world, at least in these our
days. You may see it wherever you look, impressed plainly on things and
on men; very likely, if you look in the glass, you will see it there.
And if some archæologist of a long future shall some day unbury the
bones of our civilization, where ashes or flood shall have entombed it,
he will see this frightful idea stamped on the factory walls he shall
uncover, with their rows and rows of square lightholes, their tons upon
tons of toothed steel, grinning out of the skull of this our life; its
acres of silk and velvet, its square miles of tinsel and shoddy. No
glorious marbles of nymphs and fawns, whose dead images are yet so sweet
that one might wish to kiss them still; no majestic figures of winged
horses, with men's faces and lions' paws casting their colossal
symbolism in a mighty spell forward upon Time, as those old stone
chimeras of Babylon yet do; but meaningless iron giants, of wheels and
teeth, whose secret is forgotten, but whose business was to grind men
up, and spit them out as housefuls of woven stuffs, bazaars of trash,
wherethrough other men might wade. The statues he shall find will bear
no trace of mythic dream or mystic symbol; they will be statues of
merchants and iron-masters and militiamen, in tailored coats and
pantaloons and proper hats and shoes.
But the dominant idea of the age and land does not necessarily mean the
dominant idea of any single life. I doubt not that in those long gone
days, far away by the banks of the still Nile, in the abiding shadow of
the pyramids, under the heavy burden of other men's stolidity, there
went to and fro restless, active, rebel souls who hated all that the
ancient society stood for, and with burning hearts sought to overthrow
it.
I am sure that in the midst of all the agile Greek intellect created,
there were those who went about with downbent eyes, caring nothing for
it all, seeking some higher revelation, willing to abandon the joys of
life, so that they drew near to some distant, unknown perfection their
fellows knew not of. I am certain that in the dark ages, when most men
prayed and cowered, and beat and bruised themselves, and sought
afflictions, like that St. Teresa who said, "Let me suffer, or die,"
there were some, many, who looked on the world as a chance jest, who
despised or pitied their ignorant comrades, and tried to compel the
answers of the universe to their questionings, by the patient, quiet
searching which came to be Modern Science. I am sure there were
hundreds, thousands of them, of whom we have never heard.
And now, to-day, though the Society about us is dominated by
Thing-Worship, and will stand so marked for all time, that is no reason
any single soul should be. Because the one thing seemingly worth doing
to my neighbor, to all my neighbors, is to pursue dollars, that is no
reason I should pursue dollars. Because my neighbors conceive they need
an inordinate heap of carpets, furniture, clocks, china, glass,
tapestries, mirrors, clothes, jewels--and servants to care for them, and
detectives to keep an eye on the servants, judges to try the thieves,
and politicians to appoint the judges, jails to punish the culprits, and
wardens to watch in the jails, and tax collectors to gather support for
the wardens, and fees for the tax collectors, and strong houses to hold
the fees, so that none but the guardians thereof can make off with
them,--and therefore, to keep this host of parasites, need other men to
work for them, and make the fees; because my neighbors want all this, is
that any reason I should devote myself to such a barren folly? and bow
my neck to serve to keep up the gaudy show?
Must we, because the Middle Age was dark and blind and brutal, throw
away the one good thing it wrought into the fibre of Man, that the
inside of a human being was worth more than the outside? that to
conceive a higher thing than oneself and live toward that is the only
way of living worthily? The goal strived for should, and must, be a very
different one from that which led the mediæval fanatics to despise the
body and belabor it with hourly crucifixions. But one can recognize the
claims and the importance of the body without therefore sacrificing
truth, honor, simplicity, and faith, to the vulgar gauds of
body-service, whose very decorations debase the thing they might be
supposed to exalt.
I have said before that the doctrine that men are nothing and
circumstances all, has been, and is, the bane of our modern social
reform movements.
Our youth, themselves animated by the spirit of the old teachers who
believed in the supremacy of ideas, even in the very hour of throwing
away that teaching, look with burning eyes to the social East, and
believe that wonders of revolution are soon to be accomplished. In their
enthusiasm they foreread the gospel of Circumstances to mean that very
soon the pressure of material development must break down the social
system--they give the rotten thing but a few years to last; and then,
they themselves shall witness the transformation, partake in its joys.
The few years pass away and nothing happens; enthusiasm cools. Behold
these same idealists then, successful business men, professionals,
property owners, money lenders, creeping into the social ranks they once
despised, pitifully, contemptibly, at the skirts of some impecunious
personage to whom they have lent money, or done some professional
service gratis; behold them lying, cheating, tricking, flattering,
buying and selling themselves for any frippery, any cheap little
pretense. The Dominant Social Idea has seized them, their lives are
swallowed up in it; and when you ask the reason why, they tell you that
Circumstances compelled them so to do. If you quote their lies to them,
they smile with calm complacency, assure you that when Circumstances
demand lies, lies are a great deal better than truth; that tricks are
sometimes more effective than honest dealing; that flattering and duping
do not matter, if the end to be attained is desirable; and that under
existing "Circumstances" life isn't possible without all this; that it
is going to be possible whenever Circumstances have made truth-telling
easier than lying, but till then a man must look out for himself, by all
means. And so the cancer goes on rotting away the moral fibre, and the
man becomes a lump, a squash, a piece of slippery slime, taking all
shapes and losing all shapes, according to what particular hole or
corner he wishes to glide into, a disgusting embodiment of the moral
bankruptcy begotten by Thing-Worship.
Had he been dominated by a less material conception of life, had his
will not been rotted by the intellectual reasoning of it out of its
existence, by its acceptance of its own nothingness, the unselfish
aspirations of his earlier years would have grown and strengthened by
exercise and habit; and his protest against the time might have been
enduringly written, and to some purpose.
Will it be said that the Pilgrim fathers did not hew, out of the New
England ice and granite, the idea which gathered them together out of
their scattered and obscure English villages, and drove them in their
frail ships over the Atlantic in midwinter, to cut their way against all
opposing forces? Were they not common men, subject to the operation of
common law? Will it be said that Circumstances aided them? When death,
disease, hunger, and cold had done their worst, not one of those
remaining was willing by an _easy lie_ to return to material comfort and
the possibility of long days.
Had our modern social revolutionists the vigorous and undaunted
conception of their own powers that these had, our social movements
would not be such pitiful abortions,--core-rotten even before the
outward flecks appear.
"Give a labor leader a political job, and the system becomes all right,"
laugh our enemies; and they point mockingly to Terence Powderly and his
like; and they quote John Burns, who as soon as _he_ went into
Parliament declared: "The time of the agitator is past; the time of the
legislator has come." "Let an Anarchist marry an heiress, and the
country is safe," they sneer:--and they have the right to sneer. But
would they have that right, could they have it, if our lives were not in
the first instance dominated by more insistent desires than those we
would fain have others think we hold most dear?
It is the old story: "Aim at the stars, and you may hit the top of the
gatepost; but aim at the ground, and you will hit the ground."
It is not to be supposed that any one will attain to the full
realization of what he purposes, even when those purposes do not involve
united action with others; he _will_ fall short; he will in some measure
be overcome by contending or inert opposition. But something he will
attain, if he continues to aim high.
What, then, would I have? you ask. I would have men invest themselves
with the dignity of an aim higher than the chase for wealth; choose a
thing to do in life outside of the making of things, and keep it in
mind,--not for a day, nor a year, but for a lifetime. And then keep
faith with themselves! Not be a light-o'-love, to-day professing this
and to-morrow that, and easily reading oneself out of both whenever it
becomes convenient; not advocating a thing to-day, and to-morrow kissing
its enemies' sleeve, with that weak, coward cry in the mouth,
"Circumstances make me." Take a good look into yourself, and if you love
Things and the power and the plenitude of Things better than you love
your own dignity, human dignity, Oh, say so, say so! Say it to yourself,
and abide by it. But do not blow hot and cold in one breath. Do not try
to be a social reformer and a respected possessor of Things at the same
time. Do not preach the straight and narrow way while going joyously
upon the wide one. _Preach the wide one_, or do not preach at all; but
do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free
society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it. Say honestly, "I
love armchairs better than free men, and pursue them because I choose;
not because circumstances make me. I love hats, large, large hats, with
many feathers and great bows; and I would rather have those hats than
trouble myself about social dreams that will never be accomplished in my
day. The world worships hats, and I wish to worship with them."
But if you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul,
and the free fraternization of men, as the purpose which your life is to
make manifest, then do not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is
strong and will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle
perhaps, the strength will grow. And the foregoing of possessions for
which others barter the last possibility of freedom, will become easy.
At the end of life you may close your eyes, saying: "I have not been
dominated by the Dominant Idea of my Age; I have chosen mine own
allegiance, and served it. I have proved by a lifetime that there is
that in man which saves him from the absolute tyranny of Circumstance,
which in the end conquers and remoulds Circumstance,--the immortal fire
of Individual Will, which is the salvation of the Future."
Let us have Men, Men who will say a word to their souls and keep
it--keep it not when it is easy, but keep it when it is hard--keep it
when the storm roars and there is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder
before, and one's eyes are blinded and one's ears deafened with the war
of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray
dreariness that never lifts. Hold unto the last: that is what it means
to have a Dominant Idea, where the same idea has been worked out by a
whole and unmake Circumstance.
Anarchism
There are two spirits abroad in the world,--the spirit of
Caution, the spirit of Dare, the spirit of Quiescence, the spirit
of Unrest; the spirit of Immobility, the spirit of Change;
the spirit of Hold-fast-to-that-which-you-have, the spirit of
Let-go-and-fly-to-that-which-you-have-not; the spirit of the slow
and steady builder, careful of its labors, loath to part with any
of its achievements, wishful to keep, and unable to discriminate
between what is worth keeping and what is better cast aside, and
the spirit of the inspirational destroyer, fertile in creative
fancies, volatile, careless in its luxuriance of effort, inclined
to cast away the good together with the bad.
Society is a quivering balance, eternally struck afresh, between these
two. Those who look upon Man, as most Anarchists do, as a link in the
chain of evolution, see in these two social tendencies the sum of the
tendencies of individual men, which in common with the tendencies of all
organic life are the result of the action and counteraction of
inheritance and adaptation. Inheritance, continually tending to repeat
what has been, long, long after it is outgrown; adaptation continually
tending to break down forms. The same tendencies under other names are
observed in the inorganic world as well, and anyone who is possessed by
the modern scientific mania for Monism can easily follow out the line
to the vanishing point of human knowledge.
There has been, in fact, a strong inclination to do this among a portion
of the more educated Anarchists, who having been working men first and
Anarchists by reason of their instinctive hatred to the boss, later
became students and, swept away by their undigested science, immediately
conceived that it was necessary to fit their Anarchism to the
revelations of the microscope, else the theory might as well be given
up. I remember with considerable amusement a heated discussion some five
or six years since, wherein doctors and embryo doctors sought for a
justification of Anarchism in the development of the amoeba, while a
fledgling engineer searched for it in mathematical quantities.
Myself at one time asserted very stoutly that no one could be an
Anarchist and believe in God at the same time. Others assert as stoutly
that one cannot accept the spiritualist philosophy and be an Anarchist.
At present I hold with C. L. James, the most learned of American
Anarchists, that one's metaphysical system has very little to do with
the matter. The chain of reasoning which once appeared so conclusive to
me, namely, that Anarchism being a denial of authority over the
individual could not co-exist with a belief in a Supreme Ruler of the
universe, is contradicted in the case of Leo Tolstoy, who comes to the
conclusion that none has a right to rule another just because of his
belief in God, just because he believes that all are equal children of
one father, and therefore none has a right to rule the other. I speak of
him because he is a familiar and notable personage, but there have
frequently been instances where the same idea has been worked out by a
whole sect of believers, especially in the earlier (and persecuted)
stages of their development.
It no longer seems necessary to me, therefore, that one should base his
Anarchism upon any particular world conception; it is a theory of the
relations due to man and comes as an offered solution to the societary
problems arising from the existence of these two tendencies of which I
have spoken. No matter where those tendencies come from, all alike
recognize them as existent; and however interesting the speculation,
however fascinating to lose oneself back, back in the molecular
storm-whirl wherein the figure of man is seen merely as a denser,
fiercer group, a livelier storm centre, moving among others, impinging
upon others, but nowhere separate, nowhere exempt from the same
necessity that acts upon all other centers of force,--it is by no means
necessary in order to reason oneself into Anarchism.
Sufficient are a good observant eye and a reasonably reflecting brain,
for anyone, lettered or unlettered, to recognize the desirability of
Anarchistic aims. This is not to say that increased knowledge will not
confirm and expand one's application of this fundamental concept; (the
beauty of truth is that at every new discovery of fact we find how much
wider and deeper it is than we at first thought it). But it means that
first of all Anarchism is concerned with present conditions, and with
the very plain and common people; and is by no means a complex or
difficult proposition.
Anarchism, alone, apart from any proposed economic reform, is just the
latest reply out of many the past has given, to that daring, breakaway,
volatile, changeful spirit which is never content. The society of which
we are part puts certain oppressions upon us,--oppressions which have
arisen out of the very changes accomplished by this same spirit,
combined with the hard and fast lines of old habits acquired and fixed
before the changes were thought of. Machinery, which as our Socialistic
comrades continually emphasize, has wrought a revolution in Industry, is
the creation of the Dare Spirit; it has fought its way against ancient
customs, privilege, and cowardice at every step, as the history of any
invention would show if traced backward through all its transformations.
And what is the result of it? That a system of working, altogether
appropriate to hand production and capable of generating no great
oppressions while industry remained in that state, has been stretched,
strained to fit production in mass, till we are reaching the bursting
point; once more the spirit of Dare must assert itself--claim new
freedoms, since the old ones are rendered null and void by the present
methods of production.
To speak in detail: in the old days of Master and Man--not so old but
what many of the older workingmen can recall the conditions, the
workshop was a fairly easy-going place where employer and employed
worked together, knew no class feelings, chummed it out of hours, as a
rule were not obliged to rush, and when they were, relied upon the
principle of common interest and friendship (not upon a slave-owner's
power) for overtime assistance. The proportional profit on each man's
labor may even have been in general higher, but the total amount
possible to be undertaken by one employer was relatively so small that
no tremendous aggregations of wealth could arise. To be an employer gave
no man power over another's incomings and outgoings, neither upon his
speech while at work, nor to force him beyond endurance when busy, nor
to subject him to fines and tributes for undesired things, such as
ice-water, dirty spittoons, cups of undrinkable tea and the like; nor to
the unmentionable indecencies of the large factory. The individuality of
the workman was a plainly recognized quantity: his life was his own; he
could not be locked in and driven to death, like a street-car horse, for
the good of the general public and the paramount importance of Society.
With the application of steam-power and the development of Machinery,
came these large groupings of workers, this subdivision of work, which
has made of the employer a man apart, having interests hostile to those
of his employes, living in another circle altogether, knowing nothing of
them but as so many units of power, to be reckoned with as he does his
machines, for the most part despising them, at his very best regarding
them as dependents whom he is bound in some respects to care for, as a
humane man cares for an old horse he cannot use. Such is his relation to
his employes; while to the general public he becomes simply an immense
cuttle-fish with tentacles reaching everywhere,--each tiny
profit-sucking mouth producing no great effect, but in aggregate drawing
up such a body of wealth as makes any declaration of equality or freedom
between him and the worker a thing to laugh at.
The time is come therefore when the spirit of Dare calls loud through
every factory and workshop for a change in the relations of master and
man. There must be some arrangement possible which will preserve the
benefits of the new production and at the same time restore the
individual dignity of the worker,--give back the bold independence of
the old master of his trade, together with such added freedoms as may
properly accrue to him as his special advantage from society's material
developments.
This is the particular message of Anarchism to the worker. It is not an
economic system; it does not come to you with detailed plans of how you,
the workers, are to conduct industry; nor systemized methods of
exchange; nor careful paper organizations of "the administration of
things." It simply calls upon the spirit of individuality to rise up
from its abasement, and hold itself paramount in no matter what economic
reorganization shall come about. Be men first of all, not held in
slavery by the things you make; let your gospel be, "Things for men, not
men for things."
Socialism, economically considered, is a positive proposition for such
reorganization. It is an attempt, in the main, to grasp at those great
new material gains which have been the special creation of the last
forty or fifty years. It has not so much in view the reclamation and
further assertion of the personality of the worker as it has a just
distribution of products.
Now it is perfectly apparent that Anarchy, having to do almost entirely
with the relations of men in their thoughts and feelings, and not with
the positive organization of production and distribution, an Anarchist
needs to supplement his Anarchism by some economic propositions, which
may enable him to put in practical shape to himself and others this
possibility of independent manhood. That will be his test in choosing
any such proposition,--the measure in which individuality is secured. It
is not enough for him that a comfortable ease, a pleasant and
well-ordered routine, shall be secured; free play for the spirit of
change--that is his first demand.
Every Anarchist has this in common with every other Anarchist, that the
economic system must be subservient to this end; no system recommends
itself to him by the mere beauty and smoothness of its working; jealous
of the encroachments of the machine, he looks with fierce suspicion upon
an arithmetic with men for units, a society running in slots and
grooves, with the precision so beautiful to one in whom the love of
order is first, but which only makes him sniff--"Pfaugh! it smells of
machine oil."
There are, accordingly, several economic schools among Anarchists; there
are Anarchist Individualists, Anarchist Mutualists, Anarchist Communists
and Anarchist Socialists. In times past these several schools have
bitterly denounced each other and mutually refused to recognize each
other as Anarchists at all. The more narrow-minded on both sides still
do so; true, they do not consider it is narrow-mindedness, but simply a
firm and solid grasp of the truth, which does not permit of tolerance
towards error. This has been the attitude of the bigot in all ages, and
Anarchism no more than any other new doctrine has escaped its bigots.
Each of these fanatical adherents of either collectivism or
individualism believes that no Anarchism is possible without that
particular economic system as its guarantee, and is of course thoroughly
justified from his own standpoint. With the extension of what Comrade
Brown calls the New Spirit, however, this old narrowness is yielding to
the broader, kindlier and far more reasonable idea, that all these
economic conceptions may be experimented with, and there is nothing
un-Anarchistic about any of them until the element of compulsion enters
and obliges unwilling persons to remain in a community whose economic
arrangements they do not agree to. (When I say "do not agree to" I do
not mean that they have a mere distaste for, or that they think might
well be altered for some other preferable arrangement, but with which,
nevertheless, they quite easily put up, as two persons each living in
the same house and having different tastes in decoration, will submit to
some color of window shade or bit of bric-a-brac which he does not like
so well, but which nevertheless, he cheerfully puts up with for the
satisfaction of being with his friend. I mean serious differences which
in their opinion threaten their essential liberties. I make this
explanation about trifles, because the objections which are raised to
the doctrine that men may live in society freely, almost always
degenerate into trivialities,--such as, "what would you do if two ladies
wanted the same hat?" etc. We do not advocate the abolition of common
sense, and every person of sense is willing to surrender his preferences
at times, provided he is not _compelled_ to at all costs.)
Therefore I say that each group of persons acting socially in freedom
may choose any of the proposed systems, and be just as thorough-going
Anarchists as those who select another. If this standpoint be accepted,
we are rid of those outrageous excommunications which belong properly to
the Church of Rome, and which serve no purpose but to bring us into
deserved contempt with outsiders.
Furthermore, having accepted it from a purely theoretical process of
reasoning, I believe one is then in an attitude of mind to perceive
certain material factors in the problem which account for these
differences in proposed systems, and which even demand such differences,
so long as production is in its present state.
I shall now dwell briefly upon these various propositions, and explain,
as I go along, what the material factors are to which I have just
alluded. Taking the last first, namely, Anarchist Socialism,--its
economic program is the same as that of political Socialism, in its
entirety;--I mean before the working of practical politics has frittered
the Socialism away into a mere list of governmental ameliorations. Such
Anarchist Socialists hold that the State, the Centralized Government,
has been and ever will be the business agent of the property-owning
class; that it is an expression of a certain material condition purely,
and with the passing of that condition the State must also pass; that
Socialism, meaning the complete taking over of all forms of property
from the hands of men as the indivisible possession of Man, brings with
it as a logical, inevitable result the dissolution of the State. They
believe that every individual having an equal claim upon the social
production, the incentive to grabbing and holding being gone, crimes
(which are in nearly all cases the instinctive answer to some antecedent
denial of that claim to one's share) will vanish, and with them the last
excuse for the existence of the State. They do not, as a rule, look
forward to any such transformations in the material aspect of society,
as some of the rest of us do. A Londoner once said to me that he
believed London would keep on growing, the flux and reflux of nations
keep on pouring through its serpentine streets, its hundred thousand
'buses keep on jaunting just the same, and all that tremendous traffic
which fascinates and horrifies continue rolling like a great flood up
and down, up and down, like the sea-sweep,--after the realization of
Anarchism, as it does now. That Londoner's name was John Turner; he
said, on the same occasion, that he believed thoroughly in the economics
of Socialism.
Now this branch of the Anarchist party came out of the old Socialist
party, and originally represented the revolutionary wing of that party,
as opposed to those who took up the notion of using politics. And I
believe the material reason which accounts for their acceptance of that
particular economic scheme is this (of course it applies to all European
Socialists) that the social development of Europe is a thing of
long-continued history; that almost from time immemorial there has been
a recognized class struggle; that no workman living, nor yet his father,
nor his grandfather, nor his great-grandfather has seen the land of
Europe pass in vast blocks from an unclaimed public inheritance into
the hands of an ordinary individual like himself, without a title or any
distinguishing mark above himself, as we in America have seen. The land
and the land-holder have been to him always unapproachable
quantities,--a recognized source of oppression, class, and
class-possession.
Again, the industrial development in town and city--coming as a means of
escape from feudal oppression, but again bringing with it its own
oppressions, also with a long history of warfare behind it, has served
to bind the sense of class fealty upon the common people of the
manufacturing towns; so that blind, stupid, and Church-ridden as they no
doubt are, there is a vague, dull, but very certainly existing feeling
that they must look for help in association together, and regard with
suspicion or indifference any proposition which proposes to help them by
helping their employers. Moreover, Socialism has been an ever recurring
dream through the long story of revolt in Europe; Anarchists, like
others, are born into it. It is not until they pass over seas, and come
in contact with other conditions, breathe the atmosphere of other
thoughts, that they are able to see other possibilities as well.
If I may venture, at this point, a criticism of this position of the
Anarchist Socialist, I would say that the great flaw in this conception
of the State is in supposing it to be of _simple_ origin; the State is
not merely the tool of the governing classes; it has its root far down
in the religious development of human nature; and will not fall apart
merely through the abolition of classes and property. There is other
work to be done. As to the economic program, I shall criticise that,
together with all the other propositions, when I sum up.
Anarchist Communism is a modification, rather an evolution, of
Anarchist Socialism. Most Anarchist Communists, I believe, do look
forward to great changes in the distribution of people upon the earth's
surface through the realization of Anarchism. Most of them agree that
the opening up of the land together with the free use of tools would
lead to a breaking up of these vast communities called cities, and the
formation of smaller groups or communes which shall be held together by
a free recognition of common interests only.
While Socialism looks forward to a further extension of the modern
triumph of Commerce--which is that it has brought the products of the
entire earth to your door-step--free Communism looks upon such a fever
of exportation and importation as an unhealthy development, and expects
rather a more self-reliant development of home resources, doing away
with the mass of supervision required for the systematic conduct of such
world exchange. It appeals to the plain sense of the workers, by
proposing that they who now consider themselves helpless dependents upon
the boss's ability to give them a job, shall constitute themselves
independent producing groups, take the materials, do the work (they do
that now), deposit the products in the warehouses, taking what they want
for themselves, and letting others take the balance. To do this no
government, no employer, no money system is necessary. There is only
necessary a decent regard for one's own and one's fellow-worker's
self-hood. It is not likely, indeed it is devoutly to be hoped, that no
such large aggregations of men as now assemble daily in mills and
factories, will ever come together by mutual desire. (A factory is a
hot-bed for all that is vicious in human nature, and largely because of
its crowding only.)
The notion that men cannot work together unless they have a
driving-master to take a percentage of their product, is contrary both
to good sense and observed fact.
As a rule bosses simply make confusion worse confounded when they
attempt to mix in a workman's snarls, as every mechanic has had
practical demonstration of; and as to social effort, why men worked in
common while they were monkeys yet; if you don't believe it, go and
watch the monkeys. They don't surrender their individual freedom,
either.
In short, the real workmen will make their own regulations, decide when
and where and how things shall be done. It is not necessary that the
projector of an Anarchist Communist society shall say in what manner
separate industries shall be conducted, nor do they presume to. He
simply conjures the spirit of Dare and Do in the plainest workmen--says
to them: "It is you who know how to mine, how to dig, how to cut; you
will know how to organize your work without a dictator; we cannot tell
you, but we have full faith that you will find the way yourselves. You
will never be free men until you acquire that same self-faith."
As to the problem of the exact exchange of equivalents which so frets
the reformers of other schools, to him it does not exist. So there is
enough, who cares? The sources of wealth remain indivisible forever; who
cares if one has a little more or less, so all have enough? Who cares if
something goes to waste? Let it waste. The rotted apple fertilizes the
ground as well as if it had comforted the animal economy first. And,
indeed, you who worry so much about system and order and adjustment of
production to consumption, you waste more human energy in making your
account than the precious calculation is worth. Hence money with all its
retinue of complications and trickeries is abolished.
Small, independent, self-resourceful, freely cooperating communes--this
is the economic ideal which is accepted by most of the Anarchists of the
Old World to-day.
As to the material factor which developed this ideal among Europeans, it
is the recollection and even some still remaining vestiges of the
mediæval village commune--those oases in the great Sahara of human
degradation presented in the history of the Middle Ages, when the
Catholic Church stood triumphant upon Man in the dust. Such is the ideal
glamored with the dead gold of a sun which has set, which gleams through
the pages of Morris and Kropotkin. We in America never knew the village
commune. White Civilization struck our shores in a broad tide-sheet and
swept over the country inclusively; among us was never seen the little
commune growing up from a state of barbarism independently, out of
primary industries, and maintaining itself within itself. There was no
gradual change from the mode of life of the native people to our own;
there was a wiping out and a complete transplantation of the latest form
of European civilization. The idea of the little commune, therefore,
comes instinctively to the Anarchists of Europe,--particularly the
continental ones; with them it is merely the conscious development of a
submerged instinct. With Americans it is an importation.
I believe that most Anarchist Communists avoid the blunder of the
Socialists in regarding the State as the offspring of material
conditions purely, though they lay great stress upon its being the tool
of Property, and contend that in one form or another the State will
exist so long as there is property at all.
I pass to the extreme Individualists,--those who hold to the tradition
of political economy, and are firm in the idea that the system of
employer and employed, buying and selling, banking, and all the other
essential institutions of Commercialism, centering upon private
property, are in themselves good, and are rendered vicious merely by the
interference of the State. Their chief economic propositions are: land
to be held by individuals or companies for such time and in such
allotments as they use only; redistribution to take place as often as
the members of the community shall agree; what constitutes use to be
decided by each community, presumably in town meeting assembled;
disputed cases to be settled by a so-called free jury to be chosen by
lot out of the entire group; members not coinciding in the decisions of
the group to betake themselves to outlying lands not occupied, without
let or hindrance from any one.
Money to represent all staple commodities, to be issued by whomsoever
pleases; naturally, it would come to individuals depositing their
securities with banks and accepting bank notes in return; such bank
notes representing the labor expended in production and being issued in
sufficient quantity, (there being no limit upon any one's starting in
the business, whenever interest began to rise more banks would be
organized, and thus the rate per cent would be constantly checked by
competition), exchange would take place freely, commodities would
circulate, business of all kinds would be stimulated, and, the
government privilege being taken away from inventions, industries would
spring up at every turn, bosses would be hunting men rather than men
bosses, wages would rise to the full measure of the individual
production, and forever remain there. Property, real property, would at
last exist, which it does not at the present day, because no man gets
what he makes.
The charm in this program is that it proposes no sweeping changes in our
daily retinue; it does not bewilder us as more revolutionary
propositions do. Its remedies are self-acting ones; they do not depend
upon conscious efforts of individuals to establish justice and build
harmony; competition in freedom is the great automatic valve which opens
or closes as demands increase or diminish, and all that is necessary is
to let well enough alone and not attempt to assist it.
It is sure that nine Americans in ten who have never heard of any of
these programs before, will listen with far more interest and approval
to this than to the others. The material reason which explains this
attitude of mind is very evident. In this country outside of the Negro
question we have never had the historic division of classes; we are just
making that history now; we have never felt the need of the associative
spirit of workman with workman, because in our society it has been the
individual that did things; the workman of to-day was the employer
to-morrow; vast opportunities lying open to him in the undeveloped
territory, he shouldered his tools and struck out single-handed for
himself. Even now, fiercer and fiercer though the struggle is growing,
tighter and tighter though the workman is getting cornered, the line of
division between class and class is constantly being broken, and the
first motto of the American is "the Lord helps him who helps himself."
Consequently this economic program, whose key-note is "let alone",
appeals strongly to the traditional sympathies and life habits of a
people who have themselves seen an almost unbounded patrimony swept up,
as a gambler sweeps his stakes, by men who played with them at school or
worked with them in one shop a year or ten years before.
This particular branch of the Anarchist party does not accept the
Communist position that Government arises from Property; on the
contrary, they hold Government responsible for the denial of real
property (viz.: to the producer the exclusive possession of what he
has produced). They lay more stress upon its metaphysical origin in
the authority-creating Fear in human nature. Their attack is directed
centrally upon the idea of Authority; thus the material wrongs seem to
flow from the spiritual error (if I may venture the word without fear
of misconstruction), which is precisely the reverse of the Socialistic
view.
Truth lies not "_between_ the two," but in a synthesis of the two
opinions.
Anarchist Mutualism is a modification of the program of Individualism,
laying more emphasis upon organization, co-operation and free federation
of the workers. To these the trade union is the nucleus of the free
co-operative group, which will obviate the necessity of an employer,
issue time-checks to its members, take charge of the finished product,
exchange with different trade groups for their mutual advantage through
the central federation, enable its members to utilize their credit, and
likewise insure them against loss. The mutualist position on the land
question is identical with that of the Individualists, as well as their
understanding of the State.
The material factor which accounts for such differences as there are
between Individualists and Mutualists, is, I think, the fact that the
first originated in the brains of those who, whether workmen or business
men, lived by so-called independent exertion. Josiah Warren, though a
poor man, lived in an Individualist way and made his free-life social
experiment in small country settlements, far removed from the great
organized industries. Tucker also, though a city man, has never had
personal association with such industries. They had never known directly
the oppressions of the large factory, nor mingled with workers'
associations. The Mutualists had; consequently their leaning towards a
greater Communism. Dyer D. Lum spent the greater part of his life in
building up workmen's unions, himself being a hand worker, a book-binder
by trade.
I have now presented the rough skeleton of four different economic
schemes entertained by Anarchists. Remember that the point of agreement
in all is: _no compulsion_. Those who favor one method have no intention
of forcing it upon those who favor another, so long as equal tolerance
is exercised toward themselves.
Remember, also, that none of these schemes is proposed for its own sake,
but because through it, its projectors believe, liberty may be best
secured. Every Anarchist, as an Anarchist, would be perfectly willing to
surrender his own scheme directly, if he saw that another worked better.
For myself, I believe that all these and many more could be
advantageously tried in different localities; I would see the instincts
and habits of the people express themselves in a free choice in every
community; and I am sure that distinct environments would call out
distinct adaptations.
Personally, while I recognize that liberty would be greatly extended
under any of these economies, I frankly confess that none of them
satisfies me.
Socialism and Communism both demand a degree of joint effort and
administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly
consistent with Ideal Anarchism; Individualism and Mutualism, resting
upon property, involve a development of the private policeman not at all
compatible with my notions of freedom.
My ideal would be a condition in which all natural resources would be
forever free to all, and the worker individually able to produce for
himself sufficient for all his vital needs, if he so chose, so that he
need not govern his working or not working by the times and seasons of
his fellows. I think that time may come; but it will only be through the
development of the modes of production and the taste of the people.
Meanwhile we all cry with one voice for the freedom _to try_.
Are these all the aims of Anarchism? They are just the beginning. They
are an outline of what is demanded for the material producer. If as a
worker, you think no further than how to free yourself from the horrible
bondage of capitalism, then that is the measure of Anarchism for you.
But you yourself put the limit there, if there it is put. Immeasurably
deeper, immeasurably higher, dips and soars the soul which has come out
of its casement of custom and cowardice, and dared to claim its Self.
Ah, once to stand unflinchingly on the brink of that dark gulf of
passions and desires, once at last to send a bold, straight-driven gaze
down into the volcanic Me, once, and in that once, and in that once
_forever_, to throw off the command to cover and flee from the knowledge
of that abyss,--nay, to dare it to hiss and seethe if it will, and make
us writhe and shiver with its force! Once and forever to realize that
one is not a bundle of well-regulated little reasons bound up in the
front room of the brain to be sermonized and held in order with
copy-book maxims or moved and stopped by a syllogism, but a bottomless,
bottomless depth of all strange sensations, a rocking sea of feeling
wherever sweep strong storms of unaccountable hate and rage, invisible
contortions of disappointment, low ebbs of meanness, quakings and
shudderings of love that drives to madness and will not be controlled,
hungerings and moanings and sobbing that smite upon the inner ear, now
first bent to listen, as if all the sadness of the sea and the wailing
of the great pine forests of the North had met to weep together there in
that silence audible to you alone. To look down into that, to know the
blackness, the midnight, the dead ages in oneself, to feel the jungle
and the beast within,--and the swamp and the slime, and the desolate
desert of the heart's despair--to see, to know, to feel to the
uttermost,--and then to look at one's fellow, sitting across from one in
the street-car, so decorous, so well got up, so nicely combed and
brushed and oiled and to wonder what lies beneath that commonplace
exterior,--to picture the cavern in him which somewhere far below has a
narrow gallery running into your own--to imagine the pain that racks him
to the finger-tips perhaps while he wears that placid ironed-shirt-front
countenance--to conceive how he too shudders at himself and writhes and
flees from the lava of his heart and aches in his prison-house not
daring to see himself--to draw back respectfully from the Self-gate of
the plainest, most unpromising creature, even from the most debased
criminal, because one knows the nonentity and the criminal in
oneself--to spare all condemnation (how much more trial and sentence)
because one knows the stuff of which man is made and recoils at nothing
since all is in himself,--this is what Anarchism may mean to you. It
means that to me.
And then, to turn cloudward, starward, skyward, and let the dreams rush
over one--no longer awed by outside powers of any order--recognizing
nothing superior to oneself--painting, painting endless pictures,
creating unheard symphonies that sing dream sounds to you alone,
extending sympathies to the dumb brutes as equal brothers, kissing the
flowers as one did when a child, letting oneself go free, go free beyond
the bounds of what _fear_ and _custom_ call the "possible,"--this too
Anarchism may mean to you, if you dare to apply it so. And if you do
some day,--if sitting at your work-bench, you see a vision of surpassing
glory, some picture of that golden time when there shall be no prisons
on the earth, nor hunger, nor houselessness, nor accusation, nor
judgment, and hearts open as printed leaves, and candid as fearlessness,
if then you look across at your low-browed neighbor, who sweats and
smells and curses at his toil,--remember that as you do not know his
depth neither do you know his height. He too might dream if the yoke of
custom and law and dogma were broken from him. Even now you know not
what blind, bound, motionless chrysalis is working there to prepare its
winged thing.
Anarchism means freedom to the soul as to the body,--in every
aspiration, every growth.
A few words as to the methods. In times past Anarchists have excluded
each other on these grounds also; revolutionists contemptuously said
"Quaker" of peace men; "savage Communists" anathematized the Quakers in
return.
This too is passing. I say this: all methods are to the individual
capacity and decision.
There is Tolstoy,--Christian, non-resistant, artist. His method is to
paint pictures of society as it is, to show the brutality of force and
the uselessness of it; to preach the end of government through the
repudiation of all military force. Good! I accept it in its entirety. It
fits his character, it fits his ability. Let us be glad that he works
so.
There is John Most--old, work-worn, with the weight of prison years upon
him,--yet fiercer, fiercer, bitterer in his denunciations of the ruling
class than would require the energy of a dozen younger men to
utter--going down the last hills of life, rousing the consciousness of
wrong among his fellows as he goes. Good! That consciousness must be
awakened. Long may that fiery tongue yet speak.
There is Benjamin Tucker--cool, self-contained, critical,--sending his
fine hard shafts among foes and friends with icy impartiality, hitting
swift and cutting keen,--and ever ready to nail a traitor. Holding to
passive resistance as most effective, ready to change it whenever he
deems it wise. That suits him; in his field he is alone, invaluable.
And there is Peter Kropotkin appealing to the young, and looking with
sweet, warm, eager eyes into every colonizing effort, and hailing with a
child's enthusiasm the uprisings of the workers, and believing in
revolution with his whole soul. Him too we thank.
And there is George Brown preaching peaceable expropriation through the
federated unions of the workers; and this is good. It is his best place;
he is at home there; he can accomplish most in his own chosen field.
And over there in his coffin cell in Italy, lies the man whose method
was to kill a king, and shock the nations into a sudden consciousness of
the hollowness of their law and order. Him too, him and his act, without
reserve I accept, and bend in silent acknowledgement of the strength of
the man.
For there are some whose nature it is to think and plead, and yield and
yet return to the address, and so make headway in the minds of their
fellowmen; and there are others who are stern and still, resolute,
implacable as Judah's dream of God;--and those men strike--strike once
and have ended. But the blow resounds across the world. And as on a
night when the sky is heavy with storm, some sudden great white flare
sheets across it, and every object starts sharply out, so in the flash
of Bresci's pistol shot the whole world for a moment saw the tragic
figure of the Italian people, starved, stunted, crippled, huddled,
degraded, murdered; and at the same moment that their teeth chattered
with fear, they came and asked the Anarchists to explain themselves.
And hundreds of thousands of people read more in those few days than
they had ever read of the idea before.
Ask a method? Do you ask Spring her method? Which is more necessary, the
sunshine or the rain? They are contradictory--yes; they destroy each
other--yes, but from this destruction the flowers result.
Each choose that method which expresses your self-hood best, and condemn
no other man because he expresses his Self otherwise.
Anarchism and American Traditions
American traditions, begotten of religious rebellion, small
self-sustaining communities, isolated conditions, and hard pioneer life,
grew during the colonization period of one hundred and seventy years
from the settling of Jamestown to the outburst of the Revolution. This
was in fact the great constitution-making epoch, the period of charters
guaranteeing more or less of liberty, the general tendency of which is
well described by Wm. Penn in speaking of the charter for Pennsylvania:
"I want to put it out of my power, or that of my successors, to do
mischief."
The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness of these
traditions, their loud assertion, the blow dealt by their indomitable
will against the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely
recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on
remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that
the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.
To the average American of to-day, the Revolution means the series of
battles fought by the patriot army with the armies of England. The
millions of school children who attend our public schools are taught to
draw maps of the siege of Boston and the siege of Yorktown, to know the
general plan of the several campaigns, to quote the number of prisoners
of war surrendered with Burgoyne; they are required to remember the date
when Washington crossed the Delaware on the ice; they are told to
"Remember Paoli," to repeat "Molly Stark's a widow," to call General
Wayne "Mad Anthony Wayne," and to execrate Benedict Arnold; they know
that the Declaration of Independence was signed on the Fourth of July,
1776, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783; and then they think they have
learned the Revolution--blessed be George Washington! They have no idea
why it should have been called a "revolution" instead of the "English
war," or any similar title: it's the name of it, that's all. And
name-worship, both in child and man, has acquired such mastery of them,
that the name "American Revolution" is held sacred, though it means to
them nothing more than successful force, while the name "Revolution"
applied to a further possibility, is a spectre detested and abhorred. In
neither case have they any idea of the content of the word, save that of
armed force. That has already happened, and long happened, which
Jefferson foresaw when he wrote:
"The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become
corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may become persecutor, and
better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the
time for fixing every essential right, on a legal basis, is while our
rulers are honest, ourselves united. _From the conclusion of this war we
shall be going down hill._ It will not then be necessary to resort every
moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and
their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the sole
faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due
respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be
knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier,
till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."
To the men of that time, who voiced the spirit of that time, the battles
that they fought were the least of the Revolution; they were the
incidents of the hour, the things they met and faced as part of the game
they were playing; but the stake they had in view, before, during, and
after the war, the real Revolution, was a change in political
institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a
superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable
agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy (but never so much
trusted as not to be continually watched), for the transaction of such
business as was the common concern, and to set the limits of the common
concern at the line where one man's liberty would encroach upon
another's.
They thus took their starting point for deriving a minimum of government
upon the same sociological ground that the modern Anarchist derives the
no-government theory; viz., that equal liberty is the political ideal.
The difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest
approximation to equal liberty might be best secured by the rule of the
majority in those matters involving united action of any kind (which
rule of the majority they thought it possible to secure by a few simple
arrangements for election), and, on the other hand, the belief that
majority rule is both impossible and undesirable; that any government,
no matter what its forms, will be manipulated by a very small minority,
as the development of the State and United States governments has
strikingly proved; that candidates will loudly profess allegiance to
platforms before elections, which as officials in power they will openly
disregard, to do as they please; and that even if the majority will
could be imposed, it would also be subversive of equal liberty, which
may be best secured by leaving to the voluntary association of those
interested in the management of matters of common concern, without
coercion of the uninterested or the opposed.
Among the fundamental likenesses between the Revolutionary Republicans
and the Anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the
great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can
be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate;
that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the
former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument for general
enslavement. Convinced of the supreme importance of ridding the
municipalities of the institutions of tyranny, the most strenuous
advocates of independence, instead of spending their efforts mainly in
the general Congress, devoted themselves to their home localities,
endeavoring to work out of the minds of their neighbors and
fellow-colonists the institutions of entailed property, of a
State-Church, of a class-divided people, even the institution of African
slavery itself. Though largely unsuccessful, it is to the measure of
success they did achieve that we are indebted for such liberties as we
do retain, and not to the general government. They tried to inculcate
local initiative and independent action. The author of the Declaration
of Independence, who in the fall of '76 declined a re-election to
Congress in order to return to Virginia and do his work in his own local
assembly, in arranging there for public education which he justly
considered a matter of "common concern," said his advocacy of public
schools was not with any "view to take its ordinary branches out of the
hands of private enterprise, which manages _so much better_ the concerns
to which it is equal"; and in endeavoring to make clear the restrictions
of the Constitution upon the functions of the general government, he
likewise said: "Let the general government be reduced to foreign
concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all
other nations, except as to commerce, _which the merchants will manage
the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves_, and
the general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and
a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few
servants." This then was the American tradition, that private enterprise
manages better all that to which it is equal. Anarchism declares that
private enterprise, whether individual or co-operative, is equal to all
the undertakings of society. And it quotes the particular two instances,
Education and Commerce, which the governments of the States and of the
United States have undertaken to manage and regulate, as the very two
which in operation have done more to destroy American freedom and
equality, to warp and distort American tradition, to make of government
a mighty engine of tyranny, than any other cause, save the unforeseen
developments of Manufacture.
It was the intention of the Revolutionists to establish a system of
common education, which should make the teaching of history one of its
principal branches; not with the intent of burdening the memories of our
youth with the dates of battles or the speeches of generals, nor to make
of the Boston Tea Party Indians the one sacrosanct mob in all history,
to be revered but never on any account to be imitated, but with the
intent that every American should know to what conditions the masses of
people had been brought by the operation of certain institutions, by
what means they had wrung out their liberties, and how those liberties
had again and again been filched from them by the use of governmental
force, fraud, and privilege. Not to breed security, laudation,
complacent indolence, passive acquiescence in the acts of a government
protected by the label "home-made," but to beget a wakeful jealousy, a
never-ending watchfulness of rulers, a determination to squelch every
attempt of those entrusted with power to encroach upon the sphere of
individual action--this was the prime motive of the revolutionists in
endeavoring to provide for common education.
"Confidence," said the revolutionists who adopted the Kentucky
Resolutions, "is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is
founded in jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy, not confidence,
which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are
obliged to trust with power; our Constitution has accordingly fixed the
limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go. * * * In
questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind
him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
These resolutions were especially applied to the passage of the Alien
laws by the monarchist party during John Adams' administration, and were
an indignant call from the State of Kentucky to repudiate the right of
the general government to assume undelegated powers, for, said they, to
accept these laws would be "to be bound by laws made, not with our
consent, but by others against our consent--that is, to surrender the
form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its
powers from its own will, and not from our authority." Resolutions
identical in spirit were also passed by Virginia, the following month;
in those days the States still considered themselves supreme, the
general government subordinate.
To inculcate this proud spirit of the supremacy of the people over their
governors was to be the purpose of public education! Pick up to-day any
common school history, and see how much of this spirit you will find
therein. On the contrary, from cover to cover you will find nothing but
the cheapest sort of patriotism, the inculcation of the most
unquestioning acquiescence in the deeds of government, a lullaby of
rest, security, confidence,--the doctrine that the Law can do no wrong,
a Te Deum in praise of the continuous encroachments of the powers of the
general government upon the reserved rights of the States, shameless
falsification of all acts of rebellion, to put the government in the
right and the rebels in the wrong, pyrotechnic glorifications of union,
power, and force, and a complete ignoring of the essential liberties to
maintain which was the purpose of the revolutionists. The anti-Anarchist
law of post-McKinley passage, a much worse law than the Alien and
Sedition acts which roused the wrath of Kentucky and Virginia to the
point of threatened rebellion, is exalted as a wise provision of our
All-Seeing Father in Washington.
Such is the spirit of government-provided schools. Ask any child what he
knows about Shays's rebellion, and he will answer, "Oh, some of the
farmers couldn't pay their taxes, and Shays led a rebellion against the
court-house at Worcester, so they could burn up the deeds; and when
Washington heard of it he sent over an army quick and taught 'em a good
lesson"--"And what was the result of it?" "The result? Why--why--the
result was--Oh yes, I remember--the result was they saw the need of a
strong federal government to collect the taxes and pay the debts." Ask
if he knows what was said on the other side of the story, ask if he
knows that the men who had given their goods and their health and their
strength for the freeing of the country now found themselves cast into
prison for debt, sick, disabled, and poor, facing a new tyranny for the
old; that their demand was that the land should become the free communal
possession of those who wished to work it, not subject to tribute, and
the child will answer "No." Ask him if he ever read Jefferson's letter
to Madison about it, in which he says:
"Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable.
1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under government wherein
the will of every one has a just influence; as is the case in England in
a slight degree, and in our States in a great one. 3. Under government
of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the
other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence in these
last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is
a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best.
But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population.
The second state has a great deal of good in it.... It has its evils,
too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject....
But even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of
government, and nourishes a general attention to public affairs. I hold
that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing."
Or to another correspondent: "God forbid that we should ever be twenty
years without such a rebellion!... What country can preserve its
liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that the people
preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take up arms.... The tree of
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots
and tyrants. It is its natural manure." Ask any school child if he was
ever taught that the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of
the great founders of the common school, said these things, and he will
look at you with open mouth and unbelieving eyes. Ask him if he ever
heard that the man who sounded the bugle note in the darkest hour of the
Crisis, who roused the courage of the soldiers when Washington saw only
mutiny and despair ahead, ask him if he knows that this man also wrote,
"Government at best is a necessary evil, at worst an intolerable one,"
and if he is a little better informed than the average he will answer,
"Oh well, _he_ was an infidel!" Catechize him about the merits of the
Constitution which he has learned to repeat like a poll-parrot, and you
will find his chief conception is not of the powers withheld from
Congress, but of the powers granted.
Such are the fruits of government schools. We, the Anarchists, point to
them and say: If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty
taught, let them never intrust that instruction to any government; for
the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution
existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching
whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat. As the fathers said of
the governments of Europe, so say we of this government also after a
century and a quarter of independence: "The blood of the people has
become its inheritance, and those who fatten on it will not relinquish
it easily."
Public education, having to do with the intellect and spirit of a
people, is probably the most subtle and far-reaching engine for molding
the course of a nation; but commerce, dealing as it does with material
things and producing immediate effects, was the force that bore down
soonest upon the paper barriers of constitutional restriction, and
shaped the government to its requirements. Here, indeed, we arrive at
the point where we, looking over the hundred and twenty-five years of
independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the
revolutionary republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was so because of
(1) the essence of government itself; (2) the essence of human nature;
(3) the essence of Commerce and Manufacture.
Of the essence of government, I have already said, it is a thing apart,
developing its own interests at the expense of what opposes it; all
attempts to make it anything else fail. In this Anarchists agree with
the traditional enemies of the Revolution, the monarchists, federalists,
strong government believers, the Roosevelts of to-day, the Jays,
Marshalls, and Hamiltons of then,--that Hamilton, who, as Secretary of
the Treasury, devised a financial system of which we are the unlucky
heritors, and whose objects were twofold: To puzzle the people and make
public finance obscure to those that paid for it; to serve as a machine
for corrupting the legislatures; "for he avowed the opinion t
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