Revolution, and Other Essays
by Jack London · English · Gutenberg #4953 · 346,844 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Revolution, and Other Essays
Author: Jack London
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #4953]
Most recently updated: July 11, 2007
Language: English
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Credits: Transcribed from the 1910 Mills and Boon edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REVOLUTION, AND OTHER ESSAYS ***
Transcribed from the 1910 Mills and Boon edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
REVOLUTION AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY
JACK LONDON
"History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to
begin as heresies and to end as superstitions."
HUXLEY.
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.1
_Copyright in the United States of America_, 1910, _by The Macmillan
Company_.
Contents:
Revolution
The Somnambulists
The Dignity of Dollars
Goliah
The Golden Poppy
The Shrinkage of the Planet
The House Beautiful
The Gold Hunters of the North
Foma Gordyeeff
These Bones shall Rise Again
The Other Animals
The Yellow Peril
What Life Means to Me
REVOLUTION
"The present is enough for common souls,
Who, never looking forward, are indeed
Mere clay, wherein the footprints of their age
Are petrified for ever."
I received a letter the other day. It was from a man in Arizona. It
began, "Dear Comrade." It ended, "Yours for the Revolution." I replied
to the letter, and my letter began, "Dear Comrade." It ended, "Yours for
the Revolution." In the United States there are 400,000 men, of men and
women nearly 1,000,000, who begin their letters "Dear Comrade," and end
them "Yours for the Revolution." In Germany there are 3,000,000 men who
begin their letters "Dear Comrade" and end them "Yours for the
Revolution"; in France, 1,000,000 men; in Austria, 800,000 men; in
Belgium, 300,000 men; in Italy, 250,000 men; in England, 100,000 men; in
Switzerland, 100,000 men; in Denmark, 55,000 men; in Sweden, 50,000 men;
in Holland, 40,000 men; in Spain, 30,000 men--comrades all, and
revolutionists.
These are numbers which dwarf the grand armies of Napoleon and Xerxes.
But they are numbers not of conquest and maintenance of the established
order, but of conquest and revolution. They compose, when the roll is
called, an army of 7,000,000 men, who, in accordance with the conditions
of to-day, are fighting with all their might for the conquest of the
wealth of the world and for the complete overthrow of existing society.
There has never been anything like this revolution in the history of the
world. There is nothing analogous between it and the American Revolution
or the French Revolution. It is unique, colossal. Other revolutions
compare with it as asteroids compare with the sun. It is alone of its
kind, the first world-revolution in a world whose history is replete with
revolutions. And not only this, for it is the first organized movement
of men to become a world movement, limited only by the limits of the
planet.
This revolution is unlike all other revolutions in many respects. It is
not sporadic. It is not a flame of popular discontent, arising in a day
and dying down in a day. It is older than the present generation. It
has a history and traditions, and a martyr-roll only less extensive
possibly than the martyr-roll of Christianity. It has also a literature
a myriad times more imposing, scientific, and scholarly than the
literature of any previous revolution.
They call themselves "comrades," these men, comrades in the socialist
revolution. Nor is the word empty and meaningless, coined of mere lip
service. It knits men together as brothers, as men should be knit
together who stand shoulder to shoulder under the red banner of revolt.
This red banner, by the way, symbolizes the brotherhood of man, and does
not symbolize the incendiarism that instantly connects itself with the
red banner in the affrighted bourgeois mind. The comradeship of the
revolutionists is alive and warm. It passes over geographical lines,
transcends race prejudice, and has even proved itself mightier than the
Fourth of July, spread-eagle Americanism of our forefathers. The French
socialist working-men and the German socialist working-men forget Alsace
and Lorraine, and, when war threatens, pass resolutions declaring that as
working-men and comrades they have no quarrel with each other. Only the
other day, when Japan and Russia sprang at each other's throats, the
revolutionists of Japan addressed the following message to the
revolutionists of Russia: "Dear Comrades--Your government and ours have
recently plunged into war to carry out their imperialistic tendencies,
but for us socialists there are no boundaries, race, country, or
nationality. We are comrades, brothers, and sisters, and have no reason
to fight. Your enemies are not the Japanese people, but our militarism
and so-called patriotism. Patriotism and militarism are our mutual
enemies."
In January 1905, throughout the United States the socialists held
mass-meetings to express their sympathy for their struggling comrades,
the revolutionists of Russia, and, more to the point, to furnish the
sinews of war by collecting money and cabling it to the Russian leaders.
The fact of this call for money, and the ready response, and the very
wording of the call, make a striking and practical demonstration of the
international solidarity of this world-revolution:
"Whatever may be the immediate results of the present revolt in Russia,
the socialist propaganda in that country has received from it an impetus
unparalleled in the history of modern class wars. The heroic battle for
freedom is being fought almost exclusively by the Russian working-class
under the intellectual leadership of Russian socialists, thus once more
demonstrating the fact that the class-conscious working-men have become
the vanguard of all liberating movements of modern times."
Here are 7,000,000 comrades in an organized, international, world-wide,
revolutionary movement. Here is a tremendous human force. It must be
reckoned with. Here is power. And here is romance--romance so colossal
that it seems to be beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. These
revolutionists are swayed by great passion. They have a keen sense of
personal right, much of reverence for humanity, but little reverence, if
any at all, for the rule of the dead. They refuse to be ruled by the
dead. To the bourgeois mind their unbelief in the dominant conventions
of the established order is startling. They laugh to scorn the sweet
ideals and dear moralities of bourgeois society. They intend to destroy
bourgeois society with most of its sweet ideals and dear moralities, and
chiefest among these are those that group themselves under such heads as
private ownership of capital, survival of the fittest, and
patriotism--even patriotism.
Such an army of revolution, 7,000,000 strong, is a thing to make rulers
and ruling classes pause and consider. The cry of this army is, "No
quarter! We want all that you possess. We will be content with nothing
less than all that you possess. We want in our hands the reins of power
and the destiny of mankind. Here are our hands. They are strong hands.
We are going to take your governments, your palaces, and all your purpled
ease away from you, and in that day you shall work for your bread even as
the peasant in the field or the starved and runty clerk in your
metropolises. Here are our hands. They are strong hands."
Well may rulers and ruling classes pause and consider. This is
revolution. And, further, these 7,000,000 men are not an army on paper.
Their fighting strength in the field is 7,000,000. To-day they cast
7,000,000 votes in the civilized countries of the world.
Yesterday they were not so strong. To-morrow they will be still
stronger. And they are fighters. They love peace. They are unafraid of
war. They intend nothing less than to destroy existing capitalist
society and to take possession of the whole world. If the law of the
land permits, they fight for this end peaceably, at the ballot-box. If
the law of the land does not permit, and if they have force meted out to
them, they resort to force themselves. They meet violence with violence.
Their hands are strong and they are unafraid. In Russia, for instance,
there is no suffrage. The government executes the revolutionists. The
revolutionists kill the officers of the government. The revolutionists
meet legal murder with assassination.
Now here arises a particularly significant phase which it would be well
for the rulers to consider. Let me make it concrete. I am a
revolutionist. Yet I am a fairly sane and normal individual. I speak,
and I _think_, of these assassins in Russia as "my comrades." So do all
the comrades in America, and all the 7,000,000 comrades in the world. Of
what worth an organized, international, revolutionary movement if our
comrades are not backed up the world over! The worth is shown by the
fact that we do back up the assassinations by our comrades in Russia.
They are not disciples of Tolstoy, nor are we. We are revolutionists.
Our comrades in Russia have formed what they call "The Fighting
Organization." This Fighting Organization accused, tried, found guilty,
and condemned to death, one Sipiaguin, Minister of Interior. On April 2
he was shot and killed in the Maryinsky Palace. Two years later the
Fighting Organization condemned to death and executed another Minister of
Interior, Von Plehve. Having done so, it issued a document, dated July
29, 1904, setting forth the counts of its indictment of Von Plehve and
its responsibility for the assassination. Now, and to the point, this
document was sent out to the socialists of the world, and by them was
published everywhere in the magazines and newspapers. The point is, not
that the socialists of the world were unafraid to do it, not that they
dared to do it, but that they did it as a matter of routine, giving
publication to what may be called an official document of the
international revolutionary movement.
These are high lights upon the revolution--granted, but they are also
facts. And they are given to the rulers and the ruling classes, not in
bravado, not to frighten them, but for them to consider more deeply the
spirit and nature of this world-revolution. The time has come for the
revolution to demand consideration. It has fastened upon every civilized
country in the world. As fast as a country becomes civilized, the
revolution fastens upon it. With the introduction of the machine into
Japan, socialism was introduced. Socialism marched into the Philippines
shoulder to shoulder with the American soldiers. The echoes of the last
gun had scarcely died away when socialist locals were forming in Cuba and
Porto Rico. Vastly more significant is the fact that of all the
countries the revolution has fastened upon, on not one has it relaxed its
grip. On the contrary, on every country its grip closes tighter year by
year. As an active movement it began obscurely over a generation ago.
In 1867, its voting strength in the world was 30,000. By 1871 its vote
had increased to 1,000,000. Not till 1884 did it pass the half-million
point. By 1889 it had passed the million point, it had then gained
momentum. In 1892 the socialist vote of the world was 1,798,391; in
1893, 2,585,898; in 1895, 3,033,718; in 1898, 4,515,591; in 1902,
5,253,054; in 1903, 6,285,374; and in the year of our Lord 1905 it passed
the seven-million mark.
Nor has this flame of revolution left the United States untouched. In
1888 there were only 2,068 socialist votes. In 1902 there were 127,713
socialist votes. And in 1904 435,040 socialist votes were cast. What
fanned this flame? Not hard times. The first four years of the
twentieth century were considered prosperous years, yet in that time more
than 300,000 men added themselves to the ranks of the revolutionists,
flinging their defiance in the teeth of bourgeois society and taking
their stand under the blood-red banner. In the state of the writer,
California, one man in twelve is an avowed and registered revolutionist.
One thing must be clearly understood. This is no spontaneous and vague
uprising of a large mass of discontented and miserable people--a blind
and instinctive recoil from hurt. On the contrary, the propaganda is
intellectual; the movement is based upon economic necessity and is in
line with social evolution; while the miserable people have not yet
revolted. The revolutionist is no starved and diseased slave in the
shambles at the bottom of the social pit, but is, in the main, a hearty,
well-fed working-man, who sees the shambles waiting for him and his
children and recoils from the descent. The very miserable people are too
helpless to help themselves. But they are being helped, and the day is
not far distant when their numbers will go to swell the ranks of the
revolutionists.
Another thing must be clearly understood. In spite of the fact that
middle-class men and professional men are interested in the movement, it
is nevertheless a distinctly working-class revolt. The world over, it is
a working-class revolt. The workers of the world, as a class, are
fighting the capitalists of the world, as a class. The so-called great
middle class is a growing anomaly in the social struggle. It is a
perishing class (wily statisticians to the contrary), and its historic
mission of buffer between the capitalist and working-classes has just
about been fulfilled. Little remains for it but to wail as it passes
into oblivion, as it has already begun to wail in accents Populistic and
Jeffersonian-Democratic. The fight is on. The revolution is here now,
and it is the world's workers that are in revolt.
Naturally the question arises: Why is this so? No mere whim of the
spirit can give rise to a world-revolution. Whim does not conduce to
unanimity. There must be a deep-seated cause to make 7,000,000 men of
the one mind, to make them cast off allegiance to the bourgeois gods and
lose faith in so fine a thing as patriotism. There are many counts of
the indictment which the revolutionists bring against the capitalist
class, but for present use only one need be stated, and it is a count to
which capital has never replied and can never reply.
The capitalist class has managed society, and its management has failed.
And not only has it failed in its management, but it has failed
deplorably, ignobly, horribly. The capitalist class had an opportunity
such as was vouchsafed no previous ruling class in the history of the
world. It broke away from the rule of the old feudal aristocracy and
made modern society. It mastered matter, organized the machinery of
life, and made possible a wonderful era for mankind, wherein no creature
should cry aloud because it had not enough to eat, and wherein for every
child there would be opportunity for education, for intellectual and
spiritual uplift. Matter being mastered, and the machinery of life
organized, all this was possible. Here was the chance, God-given, and
the capitalist class failed. It was blind and greedy. It prattled sweet
ideals and dear moralities, rubbed its eyes not once, nor ceased one whit
in its greediness, and smashed down in a failure as tremendous only as
was the opportunity it had ignored.
But all this is like so much cobwebs to the bourgeois mind. As it was
blind in the past, it is blind now and cannot see nor understand. Well,
then, let the indictment be stated more definitely, in terms sharp and
unmistakable. In the first place, consider the caveman. He was a very
simple creature. His head slanted back like an orang-outang's, and he
had but little more intelligence. He lived in a hostile environment, the
prey of all manner of fierce life. He had no inventions nor artifices.
His natural efficiency for food-getting was, say, 1. He did not even
till the soil. With his natural efficiency of 1, he fought off his
carnivorous enemies and got himself food and shelter. He must have done
all this, else he would not have multiplied and spread over the earth and
sent his progeny down, generation by generation, to become even you and
me.
The caveman, with his natural efficiency of 1, got enough to eat most of
the time, and no caveman went hungry all the time. Also, he lived a
healthy, open-air life, loafed and rested himself, and found plenty of
time in which to exercise his imagination and invent gods. That is to
say, he did not have to work all his waking moments in order to get
enough to eat. The child of the caveman (and this is true of the
children of all savage peoples) had a childhood, and by that is meant a
happy childhood of play and development.
And now, how fares modern man? Consider the United States, the most
prosperous and most enlightened country of the world. In the United
States there are 10,000,000 people living in poverty. By poverty is
meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate
shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained.
In the United States there are 10,000,000 people who have not enough to
eat. In the United States, because they have not enough to eat, there
are 10,000,000 people who cannot keep the ordinary 1 measure of strength
in their bodies. This means that these 10,000,000 people are perishing,
are dying, body and soul, slowly, because they have not enough to eat.
All over this broad, prosperous, enlightened land, are men, women, and
children who are living miserably. In all the great cities, where they
are segregated in slum ghettos by hundreds of thousands and by millions,
their misery becomes beastliness. No caveman ever starved as chronically
as they starve, ever slept as vilely as they sleep, ever festered with
rottenness and disease as they fester, nor ever toiled as hard and for as
long hours as they toil.
In Chicago there is a woman who toiled sixty hours per week. She was a
garment worker. She sewed buttons on clothes. Among the Italian garment
workers of Chicago, the average weekly wage of the dressmakers is 90
cents, but they work every week in the year. The average weekly wage of
the pants finishers is $1.31, and the average number of weeks employed in
the year is 27.85. The average yearly earnings of the dressmakers is
$37; of the pants finishers, $42.41. Such wages means no childhood for
the children, beastliness of living, and starvation for all.
Unlike the caveman, modern man cannot get food and shelter whenever he
feels like working for it. Modern man has first to find the work, and in
this he is often unsuccessful. Then misery becomes acute. This acute
misery is chronicled daily in the newspapers. Let several of the
countless instances be cited.
In New York City lived a woman, Mary Mead. She had three children:
Mary, one year old; Johanna, two years old; Alice, four years old.
Her husband could find no work. They starved. They were evicted
from their shelter at 160 Steuben Street. Mary Mead strangled her
baby, Mary, one year old; strangled Alice, four years old; failed to
strangle Johanna, two years old, and then herself took poison. Said
the father to the police: "Constant poverty had driven my wife
insane. We lived at No. 160 Steuben Street until a week ago, when we
were dispossessed. I could get no work. I could not even make
enough to put food into our mouths. The babies grew ill and weak.
My wife cried nearly all the time."
"So overwhelmed is the Department of Charities with tens of thousands
of applications from men out of work that it finds itself unable to
cope with the situation."--_New York Commercial_, January 11, 1905.
In a daily paper, because he cannot get work in order to get something to
eat, modern man advertises as follows:
"Young man, good education, unable to obtain employment, will sell to
physician and bacteriologist for experimental purposes all right and
title to his body. Address for price, box 3466, _Examiner_."
"Frank A. Mallin went to the central police station Wednesday night
and asked to be locked up on a charge of vagrancy. He said he had
been conducting an unsuccessful search for work for so long that he
was sure he must be a vagrant. In any event, he was so hungry he
must be fed. Police Judge Graham sentenced him to ninety days'
imprisonment."--_San Francisco Examiner_.
In a room at the Soto House, 32 Fourth Street, San Francisco, was found
the body of W. G. Robbins. He had turned on the gas. Also was found his
diary, from which the following extracts are made
"_March_ 3.--No chance of getting anything here. What will I do?
"_March_ 7.--Cannot find anything yet.
"_March_ 8.--Am living on doughnuts at five cents a day.
"_March_ 9.--My last quarter gone for room rent.
"_March_ 10.--God help me. Have only five cents left. Can get
nothing to do. What next? Starvation or--? I have spent my last
nickel to-night. What shall I do? Shall it be steal, beg, or die?
I have never stolen, begged, or starved in all my fifty years of
life, but now I am on the brink--death seems the only refuge.
"_March_ 11.--Sick all day--burning fever this afternoon. Had
nothing to eat to-day or since yesterday noon. My head, my head.
Good-bye, all."
How fares the child of modern man in this most prosperous of lands? In
the city of New York 50,000 children go hungry to school every morning.
From the same city on January 12, a press despatch was sent out over the
country of a case reported by Dr. A. E. Daniel, of the New York Infirmary
for Women and Children. The case was that of a babe, eighteen months
old, who earned by its labour fifty cents per week in a tenement
sweat-shop.
"On a pile of rags in a room bare of furniture and freezing cold,
Mrs. Mary Gallin, dead from starvation, with an emaciated baby four
months old crying at her breast, was found this morning at 513 Myrtle
Avenue, Brooklyn, by Policeman McConnon of the Flushing Avenue
Station. Huddled together for warmth in another part of the room
were the father, James Gallin, and three children ranging from two to
eight years of age. The children gazed at the policeman much as
ravenous animals might have done. They were famished, and there was
not a vestige of food in their comfortless home."--_New York
Journal_, January 2, 1902.
In the United States 80,000 children are toiling out their lives in the
textile mills alone. In the South they work twelve-hour shifts. They
never see the day. Those on the night shift are asleep when the sun
pours its life and warmth over the world, while those on the day shift
are at the machines before dawn and return to their miserable dens,
called "homes," after dark. Many receive no more than ten cents a day.
There are babies who work for five and six cents a day. Those who work
on the night shift are often kept awake by having cold water dashed in
their faces. There are children six years of age who have already to
their credit eleven months' work on the night shift. When they become
sick, and are unable to rise from their beds to go to work, there are men
employed to go on horseback from house to house, and cajole and bully
them into arising and going to work. Ten per cent of them contract
active consumption. All are puny wrecks, distorted, stunted, mind and
body. Elbert Hubbard says of the child-labourers of the Southern
cotton-mills:
"I thought to lift one of the little toilers to ascertain his weight.
Straightaway through his thirty-five pounds of skin and bones there
ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward to tie a broken
thread. I attracted his attention by a touch, and offered him a
silver dime. He looked at me dumbly from a face that might have
belonged to a man of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn, and full of
pain it was. He did not reach for the money--he did not know what it
was. There were dozens of such children in this particular mill. A
physician who was with me said that they would all be dead probably
in two years, and their places filled by others--there were plenty
more. Pneumonia carries off most of them. Their systems are ripe
for disease, and when it comes there is no rebound--no response.
Medicine simply does not act--nature is whipped, beaten, discouraged,
and the child sinks into a stupor and dies."
So fares modern man and the child of modern man in the United States,
most prosperous and enlightened of all countries on earth. It must be
remembered that the instances given are instances only, but they can be
multiplied myriads of times. It must also be remembered that what is
true of the United States is true of all the civilized world. Such
misery was not true of the caveman. Then what has happened? Has the
hostile environment of the caveman grown more hostile for his
descendants? Has the caveman's natural efficiency of 1 for food-getting
and shelter-getting diminished in modern man to one-half or one-quarter?
On the contrary, the hostile environment of the caveman has been
destroyed. For modern man it no longer exists. All carnivorous enemies,
the daily menace of the younger world, have been killed off. Many of the
species of prey have become extinct. Here and there, in secluded
portions of the world, still linger a few of man's fiercer enemies. But
they are far from being a menace to mankind. Modern man, when he wants
recreation and change, goes to the secluded portions of the world for a
hunt. Also, in idle moments, he wails regretfully at the passing of the
"big game," which he knows in the not distant future will disappear from
the earth.
Nor since the day of the caveman has man's efficiency for food-getting
and shelter-getting diminished. It has increased a thousandfold. Since
the day of the caveman, matter has been mastered. The secrets of matter
have been discovered. Its laws have been formulated. Wonderful
artifices have been made, and marvellous inventions, all tending to
increase tremendously man's natural efficiency of in every food-getting,
shelter-getting exertion, in farming, mining, manufacturing,
transportation, and communication.
From the caveman to the hand-workers of three generations ago, the
increase in efficiency for food- and shelter-getting has been very great.
But in this day, by machinery, the efficiency of the hand-worker of three
generations ago has in turn been increased many times. Formerly it
required 200 hours of human labour to place 100 tons of ore on a railroad
car. To-day, aided by machinery, but two hours of human labour is
required to do the same task. The United States Bureau of Labour is
responsible for the following table, showing the comparatively recent
increase in man's food- and shelter-getting efficiency:
Machine Hours Hand Hours
Barley (100 bushels) 9 211
Corn (50 bushels 34 228
shelled, stalks,
husks and blades cut
into fodder)
Oats (160 bushels) 28 265
Wheat (50 bushels) 7 160
Loading ore (loading 2 200
100 tons iron ore on
cars)
Unloading coal 20 240
(transferring 200
tons from canal-boats
to bins 400 feet
distant)
Pitchforks (50 12 200
pitchforks, 12-inch
tines)
Plough (one landside 3 118
plough, oak beams and
handles)
According to the same authority, under the best conditions for
organization in farming, labour can produce 20 bushels of wheat for 66
cents, or 1 bushel for 3.5 cents. This was done on a bonanza farm of
10,000 acres in California, and was the average cost of the whole product
of the farm. Mr. Carroll D. Wright says that to-day 4,500,000 men, aided
by machinery, turn out a product that would require the labour of
40,000,000 men if produced by hand. Professor Herzog, of Austria, says
that 5,000,000 people with the machinery of to-day, employed at socially
useful labour, would be able to supply a population of 20,000,000 people
with all the necessaries and small luxuries of life by working 1.5 hours
per day.
This being so, matter being mastered, man's efficiency for food- and
shelter-getting being increased a thousandfold over the efficiency of the
caveman, then why is it that millions of modern men live more miserably
than lived the caveman? This is the question the revolutionist asks, and
he asks it of the managing class, the capitalist class. The capitalist
class does not answer it. The capitalist class cannot answer it.
If modern man's food- and shelter-getting efficiency is a thousandfold
greater than that of the caveman, why, then, are there 10,000,000 people
in the United States to-day who are not properly sheltered and properly
fed? If the child of the caveman did not have to work, why, then,
to-day, in the United States, are 80,000 children working out their lives
in the textile factories alone? If the child of the caveman did not have
to work, why, then, to-day, in the United States, are there 1,752,187
child-labourers?
It is a true count in the indictment. The capitalist class has
mismanaged, is to-day mismanaging. In New York City 50,000 children go
hungry to school, and in New York City there are 1,320 millionaires. The
point, however, is not that the mass of mankind is miserable because of
the wealth the capitalist class has taken to itself. Far from it. The
point really is that the mass of mankind is miserable, not for want of
the wealth taken by the capitalist class, _but for want of the wealth
that was never created_. This wealth was never created because the
capitalist class managed too wastefully and irrationally. The capitalist
class, blind and greedy, grasping madly, has not only not made the best
of its management, but made the worst of it. It is a management
prodigiously wasteful. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly.
In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the
caveman, and that modern man's food- and shelter-getting efficiency is a
thousandfold greater than the caveman's, no other solution is possible
than that the management is prodigiously wasteful.
With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented,
a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally
rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to
labour more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe
everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of
little luxuries to everybody. There would be no more material want and
wretchedness, no more children toiling out their lives, no more men and
women and babes living like beasts and dying like beasts. Not only would
matter be mastered, but the machine would be mastered. In such a day
incentive would be finer and nobler than the incentive of to-day, which
is the incentive of the stomach. No man, woman, or child, would be
impelled to action by an empty stomach. On the contrary, they would be
impelled to action as a child in a spelling match is impelled to action,
as boys and girls at games, as scientists formulating law, as inventors
applying law, as artists and sculptors painting canvases and shaping
clay, as poets and statesmen serving humanity by singing and by
statecraft. The spiritual, intellectual, and artistic uplift consequent
upon such a condition of society would be tremendous. All the human
world would surge upward in a mighty wave.
This was the opportunity vouchsafed the capitalist class. Less blindness
on its part, less greediness, and a rational management, were all that
was necessary. A wonderful era was possible for the human race. But the
capitalist class failed. It made a shambles of civilization. Nor can
the capitalist class plead not guilty. It knew of the opportunity. Its
wise men told of the opportunity, its scholars and its scientists told it
of the opportunity. All that they said is there to-day in the books,
just so much damning evidence against it. It would not listen. It was
too greedy. It rose up (as it rises up to-day), shamelessly, in our
legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the
toil of children and babes. It lulled its conscience to sleep with
prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities, and allowed the suffering
and misery of mankind to continue and to increase, in short, the
capitalist class failed to take advantage of the opportunity.
But the opportunity is still here. The capitalist class has been tried
and found wanting. Remains the working-class to see what it can do with
the opportunity. "But the working-class is incapable," says the
capitalist class. "What do you know about it?" the working-class
replies. "Because you have failed is no reason that we shall fail.
Furthermore, we are going to have a try at it, anyway. Seven millions of
us say so. And what have you to say to that?"
And what can the capitalist class say? Grant the incapacity of the
working-class. Grant that the indictment and the argument of the
revolutionists are all wrong. The 7,000,000 revolutionists remain.
Their existence is a fact. Their belief in their capacity, and in their
indictment and their argument, is a fact. Their constant growth is a
fact. Their intention to destroy present-day society is a fact, as is
also their intention to take possession of the world with all its wealth
and machinery and governments. Moreover, it is a fact that the
working-class is vastly larger than the capitalist class.
The revolution is a revolution of the working-class. How can the
capitalist class, in the minority, stem this tide of revolution? What
has it to offer? What does it offer? Employers' associations,
injunctions, civil suits for plundering of the treasuries of the
labour-unions, clamour and combination for the open shop, bitter and
shameless opposition to the eight-hour day, strong efforts to defeat all
reform, child-labour bills, graft in every municipal council, strong
lobbies and bribery in every legislature for the purchase of capitalist
legislation, bayonets, machine-guns, policemen's clubs, professional
strike-breakers and armed Pinkertons--these are the things the capitalist
class is dumping in front of the tide of revolution, as though, forsooth,
to hold it back.
The capitalist class is as blind to-day to the menace of the revolution
as it was blind in the past to its own God-given opportunity. It cannot
see how precarious is its position, cannot comprehend the power and the
portent of the revolution. It goes on its placid way, prattling sweet
ideals and dear moralities, and scrambling sordidly for material
benefits.
No overthrown ruler or class in the past ever considered the revolution
that overthrew it, and so with the capitalist class of to-day. Instead
of compromising, instead of lengthening its lease of life by conciliation
and by removal of some of the harsher oppressions of the working-class,
it antagonizes the working-class, drives the working-class into
revolution. Every broken strike in recent years, every legally plundered
trades-union treasury, every closed shop made into an open shop, has
driven the members of the working-class directly hurt over to socialism
by hundreds and thousands. Show a working-man that his union fails, and
he becomes a revolutionist. Break a strike with an injunction or
bankrupt a union with a civil suit, and the working-men hurt thereby
listen to the siren song of the socialist and are lost for ever to the
_political capitalist_ parties.
Antagonism never lulled revolution, and antagonism is about all the
capitalist class offers. It is true, it offers some few antiquated
notions which were very efficacious in the past, but which are no longer
efficacious. Fourth-of-July liberty in terms of the Declaration of
Independence and of the French Encyclopaedists is scarcely apposite
to-day. It does not appeal to the working-man who has had his head
broken by a policeman's club, his union treasury bankrupted by a court
decision, or his job taken away from him by a labour-saving invention.
Nor does the Constitution of the United States appear so glorious and
constitutional to the working-man who has experienced a bull-pen or been
unconstitutionally deported from Colorado. Nor are this particular
working-man's hurt feelings soothed by reading in the newspapers that
both the bull-pen and the deportation were pre-eminently just, legal, and
constitutional. "To hell, then, with the Constitution!" says he, and
another revolutionist has been made--by the capitalist class.
In short, so blind is the capitalist class that it does nothing to
lengthen its lease of life, while it does everything to shorten it. The
capitalist class offers nothing that is clean, noble, and alive. The
revolutionists offer everything that is clean, noble, and alive. They
offer service, unselfishness, sacrifice, martyrdom--the things that sting
awake the imagination of the people, touching their hearts with the
fervour that arises out of the impulse toward good and which is
essentially religious in its nature.
But the revolutionists blow hot and blow cold. They offer facts and
statistics, economics and scientific arguments. If the working-man be
merely selfish, the revolutionists show him, mathematically demonstrate
to him, that his condition will be bettered by the revolution. If the
working-man be the higher type, moved by impulses toward right conduct,
if he have soul and spirit, the revolutionists offer him the things of
the soul and the spirit, the tremendous things that cannot be measured by
dollars and cents, nor be held down by dollars and cents. The
revolutionist cries out upon wrong and injustice, and preaches
righteousness. And, most potent of all, he sings the eternal song of
human freedom--a song of all lands and all tongues and all time.
Few members of the capitalist class see the revolution. Most of them are
too ignorant, and many are too afraid to see it. It is the same old
story of every perishing ruling class in the world's history. Fat with
power and possession, drunken with success, and made soft by surfeit and
by cessation of struggle, they are like the drones clustered about the
honey vats when the worker-bees spring upon them to end their rotund
existence.
President Roosevelt vaguely sees the revolution, is frightened by it, and
recoils from seeing it. As he says: "Above all, we need to remember that
any kind of class animosity in the political world is, if possible, even
more wicked, even more destructive to national welfare, than sectional,
race, or religious animosity."
Class animosity in the political world, President Roosevelt maintains, is
wicked. But class animosity in the political world is the preachment of
the revolutionists. "Let the class wars in the industrial world
continue," they say, "but extend the class war to the political world."
As their leader, Eugene V. Debs says: "So far as this struggle is
concerned, there is no good capitalist and no bad working-man. Every
capitalist is your enemy and every working-man is your friend."
Here is class animosity in the political world with a vengeance. And
here is revolution. In 1888 there were only 2,000 revolutionists of this
type in the United States; in 1900 there were 127,000 revolutionists; in
1904, 435,000 revolutionists. Wickedness of the President Roosevelt
definition evidently flourishes and increases in the United States.
Quite so, for it is the revolution that flourishes and increases.
Here and there a member of the capitalist class catches a clear glimpse
of the revolution, and raises a warning cry. But his class does not
heed. President Eliot of Harvard raised such a cry:
"I am forced to believe there is a present danger of socialism never
before so imminent in America in so dangerous a form, because never
before imminent in so well organized a form. The danger lies in the
obtaining control of the trades-unions by the socialists." And the
capitalist employers, instead of giving heed to the warnings, are
perfecting their strike-breaking organization and combining more strongly
than ever for a general assault upon that dearest of all things to the
trades-unions--the closed shop. In so far as this assault succeeds, by
just that much will the capitalist class shorten its lease of life. It
is the old, old story, over again and over again. The drunken drones
still cluster greedily about the honey vats.
Possibly one of the most amusing spectacles of to-day is the attitude of
the American press toward the revolution. It is also a pathetic
spectacle. It compels the onlooker to be aware of a distinct loss of
pride in his species. Dogmatic utterance from the mouth of ignorance may
make gods laugh, but it should make men weep. And the American editors
(in the general instance) are so impressive about it! The old
"divide-up," "men-are-_not_-born-free-and-equal," propositions are
enunciated gravely and sagely, as things white-hot and new from the forge
of human wisdom. Their feeble vapourings show no more than a schoolboy's
comprehension of the nature of the revolution. Parasites themselves on
the capitalist class, serving the capitalist class by moulding public
opinion, they, too, cluster drunkenly about the honey vats.
Of course, this is true only of the large majority of American editors.
To say that it is true of all of them would be to cast too great obloquy
upon the human race. Also, it would be untrue, for here and there an
occasional editor does see clearly--and in his case, ruled by
stomach-incentive, is usually afraid to say what he thinks about it. So
far as the science and the sociology of the revolution are concerned, the
average editor is a generation or so behind the facts. He is
intellectually slothful, accepts no facts until they are accepted by the
majority, and prides himself upon his conservatism. He is an instinctive
optimist, prone to believe that what ought to be, is. The revolutionist
gave this up long ago, and believes not that what ought to be, is, but
what is, is, and that it may not be what it ought to be at all.
Now and then, rubbing his eyes, vigorously, an editor catches a sudden
glimpse of the revolution and breaks out in naive volubility, as, for
instance, the one who wrote the following in the _Chicago Chronicle_:
"American socialists are revolutionists. They know that they are
revolutionists. It is high time that other people should appreciate the
fact." A white-hot, brand-new discovery, and he proceeded to shout it
out from the housetops that we, forsooth, were revolutionists. Why, it
is just what we have been doing all these years--shouting it out from the
housetops that we are revolutionists, and stop us who can.
The time should be past for the mental attitude: "Revolution is
atrocious. Sir, there is no revolution." Likewise should the time be
past for that other familiar attitude: "Socialism is slavery. Sir, it
will never be." It is no longer a question of dialectics, theories, and
dreams. There is no question about it. The revolution is a fact. It is
here now. Seven million revolutionists, organized, working day and
night, are preaching the revolution--that passionate gospel, the
Brotherhood of Man. Not only is it a cold-blooded economic propaganda,
but it is in essence a religious propaganda with a fervour in it of Paul
and Christ. The capitalist class has been indicted. It has failed in
its management and its management is to be taken away from it. Seven
million men of the working-class say that they are going to get the rest
of the working-class to join with them and take the management away. The
revolution is here, now. Stop it who can.
SACRAMENTO RIVER.
_March_ 1905.
THE SOMNAMBULISTS
"'Tis only fools speak evil of the clay--
The very stars are made of clay like mine."
The mightiest and absurdest sleep-walker on the planet! Chained in the
circle of his own imaginings, man is only too keen to forget his origin
and to shame that flesh of his that bleeds like all flesh and that is
good to eat. Civilization (which is part of the circle of his
imaginings) has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled
animal known as man. It is a very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man
constituted that he squirms on his bit of achievement and believes he is
garbed in armour-plate.
Yet man to-day is the same man that drank from his enemy's skull in the
dark German forests, that sacked cities, and stole his women from
neighbouring clans like any howling aborigine. The flesh-and-blood body
of man has not changed in the last several thousand years. Nor has his
mind changed. There is no faculty of the mind of man to-day that did not
exist in the minds of the men of long ago. Man has to-day no concept
that is too wide and deep and abstract for the mind of Plato or Aristotle
to grasp. Give to Plato or Aristotle the same fund of knowledge that man
to-day has access to, and Plato and Aristotle would reason as profoundly
as the man of to-day and would achieve very similar conclusions.
It is the same old animal man, smeared over, it is true, with a veneer,
thin and magical, that makes him dream drunken dreams of self-exaltation
and to sneer at the flesh and the blood of him beneath the smear. The
raw animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in
the crust of the earth. As he persuades himself against the latter till
it arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against
the former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands
undisguised, a brute like any other brute.
Starve him, let him miss six meals, and see gape through the veneer the
hungry maw of the animal beneath. Get between him and the female of his
kind upon whom his mating instinct is bent, and see his eyes blaze like
an angry cat's, hear in his throat the scream of wild stallions, and
watch his fists clench like an orang-outang's. Maybe he will even beat
his chest. Touch his silly vanity, which he exalts into high-sounding
pride--call him a liar, and behold the red animal in him that makes a
hand clutching that is quick like the tensing of a tiger's claw, or an
eagle's talon, incarnate with desire to rip and tear.
It is not necessary to call him a liar to touch his vanity. Tell a
plains Indian that he has failed to steal horses from the neighbouring
tribe, or tell a man living in bourgeois society that he has failed to
pay his bills at the neighbouring grocer's, and the results are the same.
Each, plains Indian and bourgeois, is smeared with a slightly different
veneer, that is all. It requires a slightly different stick to scrape it
off. The raw animals beneath are identical.
But intrude not violently upon man, leave him alone in his somnambulism,
and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life up which he has
climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the universe, dreams sordidly
about his own particular god, and maunders metaphysically about his own
blessed immortality.
True, he lives in a real world, breathes real air, eats real food, and
sleeps under real blankets, in order to keep real cold away. And there's
the rub. He has to effect adjustments with the real world and at the
same time maintain the sublimity of his dream. The result of this
admixture of the real and the unreal is confusion thrice confounded. The
man that walks the real world in his sleep becomes such a tangled mass of
contradictions, paradoxes, and lies that he has to lie to himself in
order to stay asleep.
In passing, it may be noted that some men are remarkably constituted in
this matter of self-deception. They excel at deceiving themselves. They
believe, and they help others to believe. It becomes their function in
society, and some of them are paid large salaries for helping their
fellow-men to believe, for instance, that they are not as other animals;
for helping the king to believe, and his parasites and drudges as well,
that he is God's own manager over so many square miles of earth-crust;
for helping the merchant and banking classes to believe that society
rests on their shoulders, and that civilization would go to smash if they
got out from under and ceased from their exploitations and petty
pilferings.
Prize-fighting is terrible. This is the dictum of the man who walks in
his sleep. He prates about it, and writes to the papers about it, and
worries the legislators about it. There is nothing of the brute about
_him_. He is a sublimated soul that treads the heights and breathes
refined ether--in self-comparison with the prize-fighter. The man who
walks in his sleep ignores the flesh and all its wonderful play of
muscle, joint, and nerve. He feels that there is something godlike in
the mysterious deeps of his being, denies his relationship with the
brute, and proceeds to go forth into the world and express by deeds that
something godlike within him.
He sits at a desk and chases dollars through the weeks and months and
years of his life. To him the life godlike resolves into a problem
something like this: _Since the great mass of men toil at producing
wealth_, _how best can he get between the great mass of men and the
wealth they produce_, _and get a slice for himself_? With tremendous
exercise of craft, deceit, and guile, he devotes his life godlike to this
purpose. As he succeeds, his somnambulism grows profound. He bribes
legislatures, buys judges, "controls" primaries, and then goes and hires
other men to tell him that it is all glorious and right. And the
funniest thing about it is that this arch-deceiver believes all that they
tell him. He reads only the newspapers and magazines that tell him what
he wants to be told, listens only to the biologists who tell him that he
is the finest product of the struggle for existence, and herds only with
his own kind, where, like the monkey-folk, they teeter up and down and
tell one another how great they are.
In the course of his life godlike he ignores the flesh--until he gets to
table. He raises his hands in horror at the thought of the brutish
prize-fighter, and then sits down and gorges himself on roast beef, rare
and red, running blood under every sawing thrust of the implement called
a knife. He has a piece of cloth which he calls a napkin, with which he
wipes from his lips, and from the hair on his lips, the greasy juices of
the meat.
He is fastidiously nauseated at the thought of two prize-fighters
bruising each other with their fists; and at the same time, because it
will cost him some money, he will refuse to protect the machines in his
factory, though he is aware that the lack of such protection every year
mangles, batters, and destroys out of all humanness thousands of
working-men, women, and children. He will chatter about things refined
and spiritual and godlike like himself, and he and the men who herd with
him will calmly adulterate the commodities they put upon the market and
which annually kill tens of thousands of babies and young children.
He will recoil at the suggestion of the horrid spectacle of two men
confronting each other with gloved hands in the roped arena, and at the
same time he will clamour for larger armies and larger navies, for more
destructive war machines, which, with a single discharge, will disrupt
and rip to pieces more human beings than have died in the whole history
of prize-fighting. He will bribe a city council for a franchise or a
state legislature for a commercial privilege; but he has never been
known, in all his sleep-walking history, to bribe any legislative body in
order to achieve any moral end, such as, for instance, abolition of
prize-fighting, child-labour laws, pure food bills, or old age pensions.
"Ah, but we do not stand for the commercial life," object the refined,
scholarly, and professional men. They are also sleep-walkers. They do
not stand for the commercial life, but neither do they stand against it
with all their strength. They submit to it, to the brutality and carnage
of it. They develop classical economists who announce that the only
possible way for men and women to get food and shelter is by the existing
method. They produce university professors, men who claim the _role_ of
teachers, and who at the same time claim that the austere ideal of
learning is passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence. They serve
the men who lead the commercial life, give to their sons somnambulistic
educations, preach that sleep-walking is the only way to walk, and that
the persons who walk otherwise are atavisms or anarchists. They paint
pictures for the commercial men, write books for them, sing songs for
them, act plays for them, and dose them with various drugs when their
bodies have grown gross or dyspeptic from overeating and lack of
exercise.
Then there are the good, kind somnambulists who don't prize-fight, who
don't play the commercial game, who don't teach and preach somnambulism,
who don't do anything except live on the dividends that are coined out of
the wan, white fluid that runs in the veins of little children, out of
mothers' tears, the blood of strong men, and the groans and sighs of the
old. The receiver is as bad as the thief--ay, and the thief is finer
than the receiver; he at least has the courage to run the risk. But the
good, kind people who don't do anything won't believe this, and the
assertion will make them angry--for a moment. They possess several magic
phrases, which are like the incantations of a voodoo doctor driving
devils away. The phrases that the good, kind people repeat to themselves
and to one another sound like "abstinence," "temperance," "thrift,"
"virtue." Sometimes they say them backward, when they sound like
"prodigality," "drunkenness," "wastefulness," and "immorality." They do
not really know the meaning of these phrases, but they think they do, and
that is all that is necessary for somnambulists. The calm repetition of
such phrases invariably drives away the waking devils and lulls to
slumber.
Our statesmen sell themselves and their country for gold. Our municipal
servants and state legislators commit countless treasons. The world of
graft! The world of betrayal! The world of somnambulism, whose exalted
and sensitive citizens are outraged by the knockouts of the prize-ring,
and who annually not merely knock out, but kill, thousands of babies and
children by means of child labour and adulterated food. Far better to
have the front of one's face pushed in by the fist of an honest
prize-fighter than to have the lining of one's stomach corroded by the
embalmed beef of a dishonest manufacturer.
In a prize-fight men are classed. A lightweight fights with a
light-weight; he never fights with a heavy-weight, and foul blows are not
allowed. Yet in the world of the somnambulists, where soar the
sublimated spirits, there are no classes, and foul blows are continually
struck and never disallowed. Only they are not called foul blows. The
world of claw and fang and fist and club has passed away--so say the
somnambulists. A rebate is not an elongated claw. A Wall Street raid is
not a fang slash. Dummy boards of directors and fake accountings are not
foul blows of the fist under the belt. A present of coal stock by a mine
operator to a railroad official is not a claw rip to the bowels of a
rival mine operator. The hundred million dollars with which a
combination beats down to his knees a man with a million dollars is not a
club. The man who walks in his sleep says it is not a club. So say all
of his kind with which he herds. They gather together and solemnly and
gloatingly make and repeat certain noises that sound like "discretion,"
"acumen," "initiative," "enterprise." These noises are especially
gratifying when they are made backward. They mean the same things, but
they sound different. And in either case, forward or backward, the
spirit of the dream is not disturbed.
When a man strikes a foul blow in the prize-ring the fight is immediately
stopped, he is declared the loser, and he is hissed by the audience as he
leaves the ring. But when a man who walks in his sleep strikes a foul
blow he is immediately declared the victor and awarded the prize; and
amid acclamations he forthwith turns his prize into a seat in the United
States Senate, into a grotesque palace on Fifth Avenue, and into endowed
churches, universities and libraries, to say nothing of subsidized
newspapers, to proclaim his greatness.
The red animal in the somnambulist will out. He decries the carnal
combat of the prize-ring, and compels the red animal to spiritual combat.
The poisoned lie, the nasty, gossiping tongue, the brutality of the
unkind epigram, the business and social nastiness and treachery of
to-day--these are the thrusts and scratches of the red animal when the
somnambulist is in charge. They are not the upper cuts and short arm
jabs and jolts and slugging blows of the spirit. They are the foul blows
of the spirit that have never been disbarred, as the foul blows of the
prize-ring have been disbarred. (Would it not be preferable for a man to
strike one full on the mouth with his fist than for him to tell a lie
about one, or malign those that are nearest and dearest?)
For these are the crimes of the spirit, and, alas! they are so much more
frequent than blows on the mouth. And whosoever exalts the spirit over
the flesh, by his own creed avers that a crime of the spirit is vastly
more terrible than a crime of the flesh. Thus stand the somnambulists
convicted by their own creed--only they are not real men, alive and
awake, and they proceed to mutter magic phrases that dispel all doubt as
to their undiminished and eternal gloriousness.
It is well enough to let the ape and tiger die, but it is hardly fair to
kill off the natural and courageous apes and tigers and allow the spawn
of cowardly apes and tigers to live. The prize-fighting apes and tigers
will die all in good time in the course of natural evolution, but they
will not die so long as the cowardly, somnambulistic apes and tigers club
and scratch and slash. This is not a brief for the prize-fighter. It is
a blow of the fist between the eyes of the somnambulists, teetering up
and down, muttering magic phrases, and thanking God that they are not as
other animals.
GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
_June_ 1900.
THE DIGNITY OF DOLLARS
Man is a blind, helpless creature. He looks back with pride upon his
goodly heritage of the ages, and yet obeys unwittingly every mandate of
that heritage; for it is incarnate with him, and in it are embedded the
deepest roots of his soul. Strive as he will, he cannot escape
it--unless he be a genius, one of those rare creations to whom alone is
granted the privilege of doing entirely new and original things in
entirely new and original ways. But the common clay-born man, possessing
only talents, may do only what has been done before him. At the best, if
he work hard, and cherish himself exceedingly, he may duplicate any or
all previous performances of his kind; he may even do some of them
better; but there he stops, the composite hand of his whole ancestry
bearing heavily upon him.
And again, in the matter of his ideas, which have been thrust upon him,
and which he has been busily garnering from the great world ever since
the day when his eyes first focussed and he drew, startled, against the
warm breast of his mother--the tyranny of these he cannot shake off.
Servants of his will, they at the same time master him. They may not
coerce genius, but they dictate and sway every action of the clay-born.
If he hesitate on the verge of a new departure, they whip him back into
the well-greased groove; if he pause, bewildered, at sight of some
unexplored domain, they rise like ubiquitous finger-posts and direct him
by the village path to the communal meadow. And he permits these things,
and continues to permit them, for he cannot help them, and he is a slave.
Out of his ideas he may weave cunning theories, beautiful ideals; but he
is working with ropes of sand. At the slightest stress, the last least
bit of cohesion flits away, and each idea flies apart from its fellows,
while all clamour that he do this thing, or think this thing, in the
ancient and time-honoured way. He is only a clay-born; so he bends his
neck. He knows further that the clay-born are a pitiful, pitiless
majority, and that he may do nothing which they do not do.
It is only in some way such as this that we may understand and explain
the dignity which attaches itself to dollars. In the watches of the
night, we may assure ourselves that there is no such dignity; but
jostling with our fellows in the white light of day, we find that it does
exist, and that we ourselves measure ourselves by the dollars we happen
to possess. They give us confidence and carriage and dignity--ay, a
personal dignity which goes down deeper than the garments with which we
hide our nakedness. The world, when it knows nothing else of him,
measures a man by his clothes; but the man himself, if he be neither a
genius nor a philosopher, but merely a clay-born, measures himself by his
pocket-book. He cannot help it, and can no more fling it from him than
can the bashful young man his self-consciousness when crossing a ballroom
floor.
I remember once absenting myself from civilization for weary months.
When I returned, it was to a strange city in another country. The people
were but slightly removed from my own breed, and they spoke the same
tongue, barring a certain barbarous accent which I learned was far older
than the one imbibed by me with my mother's milk. A fur cap, soiled and
singed by many camp-fires, half sheltered the shaggy tendrils of my uncut
hair. My foot-gear was of walrus hide, cunningly blended with seal gut.
The remainder of my dress was as primal and uncouth. I was a sight to
give merriment to gods and men. Olympus must have roared at my coming.
The world, knowing me not, could judge me by my clothes alone. But I
refused to be so judged. My spiritual backbone stiffened, and I held my
head high, looking all men in the eyes. And I did these things, not that
I was an egotist, not that I was impervious to the critical glances of my
fellows, but because of a certain hogskin belt, plethoric and
sweat-bewrinkled, which buckled next the skin above the hips. Oh, it's
absurd, I grant, but had that belt not been so circumstanced, and so
situated, I should have shrunk away into side streets and back alleys,
walking humbly and avoiding all gregarious humans except those who were
likewise abroad without belts. Why? I do not know, save that in such
way did my fathers before me.
Viewed in the light of sober reason, the whole thing was preposterous.
But I walked down the gang-plank with the mien of a hero, of a barbarian
who knew himself to be greater than the civilization he invaded. I was
possessed of the arrogance of a Roman governor. At last I knew what it
was to be born to the purple, and I took my seat in the hotel carriage as
though it were my chariot about to proceed with me to the imperial
palace. People discreetly dropped their eyes before my proud gaze, and
into their hearts I know I forced the query, What manner of man can this
mortal be? I was superior to convention, and the very garb which
otherwise would have damned me tended toward my elevation. And all this
was due, not to my royal lineage, nor to the deeds I had done and the
champions I had overthrown, but to a certain hogskin belt buckled next
the skin. The sweat of months was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it
was not a creation such as would appeal to the aesthetic mind; but it was
plethoric. There was the arcanum; each yellow grain conduced to my
exaltation, and the sum of these grains was the sum of my mightiness.
Had they been less, just so would have been my stature; more, and I
should have reached the sky.
And this was my royal progress through that most loyal city. I purchased
a host of things from the tradespeople, and bought me such pleasures and
diversions as befitted one who had long been denied. I scattered my gold
lavishly, nor did I chaffer over prices in mart or exchange. And,
because of these things I did, I demanded homage. Nor was it refused. I
moved through wind-swept groves of limber backs; across sunny glades,
lighted by the beaming rays from a thousand obsequious eyes; and when I
tired of this, basked on the greensward of popular approval. Money was
very good, I thought, and for the time was content. But there rushed
upon me the words of Erasmus, "When I get some money I shall buy me some
Greek books, and afterwards some clothes," and a great shame wrapped me
around. But, luckily for my soul's welfare, I reflected and was saved.
By the clearer vision vouchsafed me, I beheld Erasmus, fire-flashing,
heaven-born, while I--I was merely a clay-born, a son of earth. For a
giddy moment I had forgotten this, and tottered. And I rolled over on my
greensward, caught a glimpse of a regiment of undulating backs, and
thanked my particular gods that such moods of madness were passing brief.
But on another day, receiving with kingly condescension the service of my
good subjects' backs, I remembered the words of another man, long since
laid away, who was by birth a nobleman, by nature a philosopher and a
gentleman, and who by circumstance yielded up his head upon the block.
"That a man of lead," he once remarked, "who has no more sense than a log
of wood, and is as bad as he is foolish, should have many wise and good
men to serve him, only because he has a great heap of that metal; and
that if, by some accident or trick of law (which sometimes produces as
great changes as chance itself), all this wealth should pass from the
master to the meanest varlet of his whole family, he himself would very
soon become one of his servants, as if he were a thing that belonged to
his wealth, and so was bound to follow its fortune."
And when I had remembered this much, I unwisely failed to pause and
reflect. So I gathered my belongings together, cinched my hogskin belt
tight about me, and went away to my own country. It was a very foolish
thing to do. I am sure it was. But when I had recovered my reason, I
fell upon my particular gods and berated them mightily, and as penance
for their watchlessness placed them away amongst dust and cobwebs. Oh
no, not for long. They are again enshrined, as bright and polished as of
yore, and my destiny is once more in their keeping.
It is given that travail and vicissitude mark time to man's footsteps as
he stumbles onward toward the grave; and it is well. Without the bitter
one may not know the sweet. The other day--nay, it was but yesterday--I
fell before the rhythm of fortune. The inexorable pendulum had swung the
counter direction, and there was upon me an urgent need. The hogskin
belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird my loins. From my window
I could descry, at no great distance, a very ordinary mortal of a man,
working industriously among his cabbages. I thought: Here am I, capable
of teaching him much concerning the field wherein he labours--the
nitrogenic--why of the fertilizer, the alchemy of the sun, the
microscopic cell-structure of the plant, the cryptic chemistry of root
and runner--but thereat he straightened his work-wearied back and rested.
His eyes wandered over what he had produced in the sweat of his brow,
then on to mine. And as he stood there drearily, he became reproach
incarnate. "Unstable as water," he said (I am sure he did)--"unstable as
water, thou shalt not excel. Man, where are _your_ cabbages?"
I shrank back. Then I waxed rebellious. I refused to answer the
question. He had no right to ask it, and his presence was an affront
upon the landscape. And a dignity entered into me, and my neck was
stiffened, my head poised. I gathered together certain certificates of
goods and chattels, pointed my heel towards him and his cabbages, and
journeyed townward. I was yet a man. There was naught in those
certificates to be ashamed of. But alack-a-day! While my heels thrust
the cabbage-man beyond the horizon, my toes were drawing me, faltering,
like a timid old beggar, into a roaring spate of humanity--men, women,
and children without end. They had no concern with me, nor I with them.
I knew it; I felt it. Like She, after her fire-bath in the womb of the
world, I dwindled in my own sight. My feet were uncertain and heavy, and
my soul became as a meal sack, limp with emptiness and tied in the
middle. People looked upon me scornfully, pitifully, reproachfully. (I
can swear they did.) In every eye I read the question, Man, where are
your cabbages?
So I avoided their looks, shrinking close to the kerbstone and by furtive
glances directing my progress. At last I came hard by the place, and
peering stealthily to the right and left that none who knew might behold
me, I entered hurriedly, in the manner of one committing an abomination.
'Fore God! I had done no evil, nor had I wronged any man, nor did I
contemplate evil; yet was I aware of evil. Why? I do not know, save
that there goes much dignity with dollars, and being devoid of the one I
was destitute of the other. The person I sought practised a profession
as ancient as the oracles but far more lucrative. It is mentioned in
Exodus; so it must have been created soon after the foundations of the
world; and despite the thunder of ecclesiastics and the mailed hand of
kings and conquerors, it has endured even to this day. Nor is it unfair
to presume that the accounts of this most remarkable business will not be
closed until the Trumps of Doom are sounded and all things brought to
final balance.
Wherefore it was in fear and trembling, and with great modesty of spirit,
that I entered the Presence. To confess that I was shocked were to do my
feelings an injustice. Perhaps the blame may be shouldered upon Shylock,
Fagin, and their ilk; but I had conceived an entirely different type of
individual. This man--why, he was clean to look at, his eyes were blue,
with the tired look of scholarly lucubrations, and his skin had the
normal pallor of sedentary existence. He was reading a book, sober and
leather-bound, while on his finely moulded, intellectual head reposed a
black skull-cap. For all the world his look and attitude were those of a
college professor. My heart gave a great leap. Here was hope! But no;
he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, searching with the chill of
space till my financial status stood before him shivering and ashamed. I
communed with myself: By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has
been prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery. His nerve
centres of judgment and will have not been employed in solving the
problems of life, but in maintaining his own solvency by the insolvency
of others. He trades upon sorrow and draws a livelihood from misfortune.
He transmutes tears into treasure, and from nakedness and hunger garbs
himself in clean linen and develops the round of his belly. He is a
bloodsucker and a vampire. He lays unholy hands on heaven and hell at
cent. per cent., and his very existence is a sacrilege and a blasphemy.
And yet here am I, wilting before him, an arrant coward, with no respect
for him and less for myself. Why should this shame be? Let me rouse in
my strength and smite him, and, by so doing, wipe clean one offensive
page.
But no. As I said, he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, and in it
was the aristocrat's undisguised contempt for the _canaille_. Behind him
was the solid phalanx of a bourgeois society. Law and order upheld him,
while I titubated, cabbageless, on the ragged edge. Moreover, he was
possessed of a formula whereby to extract juice from a flattened lemon,
and he would do business with me.
I told him my desires humbly, in quavering syllables. In return, he
craved my antecedents and residence, pried into my private life,
insolently demanded how many children had I and did I live in wedlock,
and asked divers other unseemly and degrading questions. Ay, I was
treated like a thief convicted before the act, till I produced my
certificates of goods and chattels aforementioned. Never had they
appeared so insignificant and paltry as then, when he sniffed over them
with the air of one disdainfully doing a disagreeable task. It is said,
"Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of
victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury"; but he evidently
was not my brother, for he demanded seventy per cent. I put my signature
to certain indentures, received my pottage, and fled from his presence.
Faugh! I was glad to be quit of it. How good the outside air was! I
only prayed that neither my best friend nor my worst enemy should ever
become aware of what had just transpired. Ere I had gone a block I
noticed that the sun had brightened perceptibly, the street become less
sordid, the gutter mud less filthy. In people's eyes the cabbage
question no longer brooded. And there was a spring to my body, an
elasticity of step as I covered the pavement. Within me coursed an
unwonted sap, and I felt as though I were about to burst out into leaves
and buds and green things. My brain was clear and refreshed. There was
a new strength to my arm. My nerves were tingling and I was a-pulse with
the times. All men were my brothers. Save one--yes, save one. I would
go back and wreck the establishment. I would disrupt that leather-bound
volume, violate that black skullcap, burn the accounts. But before fancy
could father the act, I recollected myself and all which had passed. Nor
did I marvel at my new-horn might, at my ancient dignity which had
returned. There was a tinkling chink as I ran the yellow pieces through
my fingers, and with the golden music rippling round me I caught a deeper
insight into the mystery of things.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
_February_ 1900.
GOLIAH
In 1924--to be precise, on the morning of January 3--the city of San
Francisco awoke to read in one of its daily papers a curious letter,
which had been received by Walter Bassett and which had evidently been
written by some crank. Walter Bassett was the greatest captain of
industry west of the Rockies, and was one of the small group that
controlled the nation in everything but name. As such, he was the
recipient of lucubrations from countless cranks; but this particular
lucubration was so different from the average ruck of similar letters
that, instead of putting it into the waste-basket, he had turned it over
to a reporter. It was signed "Goliah," and the superscription gave his
address as "Palgrave Island." The letter was as follows:
"MR. WALTER BASSETT,
"DEAR SIR:
"I am inviting you, with nine of your fellow-captains of industry, to
visit me here on my island for the purpose of considering plans for
the reconstruction of society upon a more rational basis. Up to the
present, social evolution has been a blind and aimless, blundering
thing. The time has come for a change. Man has risen from the
vitalized slime of the primeval sea to the mastery of matter; but he
has not yet mastered society. Man is to-day as much the slave to his
collective stupidity, as a hundred thousand generations ago he was a
slave to matter.
"There are two theoretical methods whereby man may become the master
of society, and make of society an intelligent and efficacious device
for the pursuit and capture of happiness and laughter. The first
theory advances the proposition that no government can be wiser or
better than the people that compose that government; that reform and
development must spring from the individual; that in so far as the
individuals become wiser and better, by that much will their
government become wiser and better; in short, that the majority of
individuals must become wiser and better, before their government
becomes wiser and better. The mob, the political convention, the
abysmal brutality and stupid ignorance of all concourses of people,
give the lie to this theory. In a mob the collective intelligence
and mercy is that of the least intelligent and most brutal members
that compose the mob. On the other hand, a thousand passengers will
surrender themselves to the wisdom and discretion of the captain,
when their ship is in a storm on the sea. In such matter, he is the
wisest and most experienced among them.
"The second theory advances the proposition that the majority of the
people are not pioneers, that they are weighted down by the inertia
of the established; that the government that is representative of
them represents only their feebleness, and futility, and brutishness;
that this blind thing called government is not the serf of their
wills, but that they are the serfs of it; in short, speaking always
of the great mass, that they do not make government, but that
government makes them, and that government is and has been a stupid
and awful monster, misbegotten of the glimmerings of intelligence
that come from the inertia-crushed mass.
"Personally, I incline to the second theory. Also, I am impatient.
For a hundred thousand generations, from the first social groups of
our savage forbears, government has remained a monster. To-day, the
inertia-crushed mass has less laughter in it than ever before. In
spite of man's mastery of matter, human suffering and misery and
degradation mar the fair world.
"Wherefore I have decided to step in and become captain of this
world-ship for a while. I have the intelligence and the wide vision
of the skilled expert. Also, I have the power. I shall be obeyed.
The men of all the world shall perform my bidding and make
governments so that they shall become laughter-producers. These
modelled governments I have in mind shall not make the people happy,
wise, and noble by decree; but they shall give opportunity for the
people to become happy, wise, and noble.
"I have spoken. I have invited you, and nine of your
fellow-captains, to confer with me. On March third the yacht
_Energon_ will sail from San Francisco. You are requested to be on
board the night before. This is serious. The affairs of the world
must be handled for a time by a strong hand. Mine is that strong
hand. If you fail to obey my summons, you will die. Candidly, I do
not expect that you will obey. But your death for failure to obey
will cause obedience on the part of those I subsequently summon. You
will have served a purpose. And please remember that I have no
unscientific sentimentality about the value of human life. I carry
always in the background of my consciousness the innumerable billions
of lives that are to laugh and be happy in future aeons on the earth.
"Yours for the reconstruction of society,
"GOLIAH."
The publication of this letter did not cause even local amusement. Men
might have smiled to themselves as they read it, but it was so palpably
the handiwork of a crank that it did not merit discussion. Interest did
not arouse till next morning. An Associated Press despatch to the
Eastern states, followed by interviews by eager-nosed reporters, had
brought out the names of the other nine captains of industry who had
received similar letters, but who had not thought the matter of
sufficient importance to be made public. But the interest aroused was
mild, and it would have died out quickly had not Gabberton cartooned a
chronic presidential aspirant as "Goliah." Then came the song that was
sung hilariously from sea to sea, with the refrain, "Goliah will catch
you if you don't watch out."
The weeks passed and the incident was forgotten. Walter Bassett had
forgotten it likewise; but on the evening of February 22, he was called
to the telephone by the Collector of the Port. "I just wanted to tell
you," said the latter, "that the yacht _Energon_ has arrived and gone to
anchor in the stream off Pier Seven."
What happened that night Walter Bassett has never divulged. But it is
known that he rode down in his auto to the water front, chartered one of
Crowley's launches, and was put aboard the strange yacht. It is further
known that when he returned to the shore, three hours later, he
immediately despatched a sheaf of telegrams to his nine fellow-captains
of industry who had received letters from Goliah. These telegrams were
similarly worded, and read: "The yacht _Energon_ has arrived. There is
something in this. I advise you to come."
Bassett was laughed at for his pains. It was a huge laugh that went up
(for his telegrams had been made public), and the popular song on Goliah
revived and became more popular than ever. Goliah and Bassett were
cartooned and lampooned unmercifully, the former, as the Old Man of the
Sea, riding on the latter's neck. The laugh tittered and rippled through
clubs and social circles, was restrainedly merry in the editorial
columns, and broke out in loud guffaws in the comic weeklies. There was
a serious side as well, and Bassett's sanity was gravely questioned by
many, and especially by his business associates.
Bassett had ever been a short-tempered man, and after he sent the second
sheaf of telegrams to his brother captains, and had been laughed at
again, he remained silent. In this second sheaf he had said: "Come, I
implore you. As you value your life, come." He arranged all his
business affairs for an absence, and on the night of March 2 went on
board the _Energon_. The latter, properly cleared, sailed next morning.
And next morning the newsboys in every city and town were crying "Extra."
In the slang of the day, Goliah had delivered the goods. The nine
captains of industry who had failed to accept his invitation were dead.
A sort of violent disintegration of the tissues was the report of the
various autopsies held on the bodies of the slain millionaires; yet the
surgeons and physicians (the most highly skilled in the land had
participated) would not venture the opinion that the men had been slain.
Much less would they venture the conclusion, "at the hands of parties
unknown." It was all too mysterious. They were stunned. Their
scientific credulity broke down. They had no warrant in the whole domain
of science for believing that an anonymous person on Palgrave Island had
murdered the poor gentlemen.
One thing was quickly learned, however; namely, that Palgrave Island was
no myth. It was charted and well known to all navigators, lying on the
line of 160 west longitude, right at its intersection by the tenth
parallel north latitude, and only a few miles away from Diana Shoal.
Like Midway and Fanning, Palgrave Island was isolated, volcanic and coral
in formation. Furthermore, it was uninhabited. A survey ship, in 1887,
had visited the place and reported the existence of several springs and
of a good harbour that was very dangerous of approach. And that was all
that was known of the tiny speck of land that was soon to have focussed
on it the awed attention of the world.
Goliah remained silent till March 24. On the morning of that day, the
newspapers published his second letter, copies of which had been received
by the ten chief politicians of the United States--ten leading men in the
political world who were conventionally known as "statesmen." The
letter, with the same superscription as before, was as follows:
"DEAR SIR:
"I have spoken in no uncertain tone. I must be obeyed. You may
consider this an invitation or a summons; but if you still wish to
tread this earth and laugh, you will be aboard the yacht _Energon_,
in San Francisco harbour, not later than the evening of April 5. It
is my wish and my will that you confer with me here on Palgrave
Island in the matter of reconstructing society upon some rational
basis.
"Do not misunderstand me, when I tell you that I am one with a
theory. I want to see that theory work, and therefore I call upon
your cooperation. In this theory of mine, lives are but pawns; I
deal with quantities of lives. I am after laughter, and those that
stand in the way of laughter must perish. The game is big. There
are fifteen hundred million human lives to-day on the planet. What
is your single life against them? It is as naught, in my theory.
And remember that mine is the power. Remember that I am a scientist,
and that one life, or one million of lives, mean nothing to me as
arrayed against the countless billions of billions of the lives of
the generations to come. It is for their laughter that I seek to
reconstruct society now; and against them your own meagre little life
is a paltry thing indeed.
"Whoso has power can command his fellows. By virtue of that military
device known as the phalanx, Alexander conquered his bit of the
world. By virtue of that chemical device, gunpowder, Cortes with his
several hundred cut-throats conquered the empire of the Montezumas.
Now I am in possession of a device that is all my own. In the course
of a century not more than half a dozen fundamental discoveries or
inventions are made. I have made such an invention. The possession
of it gives me the mastery of the world. I shall use this invention,
not for commercial exploitation, but for the good of humanity. For
that purpose I want help--willing agents, obedient hands; and I am
strong enough to compel the service. I am taking the shortest way,
though I am in no hurry. I shall not clutter my speed with haste.
"The incentive of material gain developed man from the savage to the
semi-barbarian he is to-day. This incentive has been a useful device
for the development of the human; but it has now fulfilled its
function and is ready to be cast aside into the scrap-heap of
rudimentary vestiges such as gills in the throat and belief in the
divine right of kings. Of course you do not think so; but I do not
see that that will prevent you from aiding me to fling the
anachronism into the scrap-heap. For I tell you now that the time
has come when mere food and shelter and similar sordid things shall
be automatic, as free and easy and involuntary of access as the air.
I shall make them automatic, what of my discovery and the power that
discovery gives me. And with food and shelter automatic, the
incentive of material gain passes away from the world for ever. With
food and shelter automatic, the higher incentives will universally
obtain--the spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual incentives that
will tend to develop and make beautiful and noble body, mind, and
spirit. Then all the world will be dominated by happiness and
laughter. It will be the reign of universal laughter.
"Yours for that day,
"GOLIAH."
Still the world would not believe. The ten politicians were at
Washington, so that they did not have the opportunity of being convinced
that Bassett had had, and not one of them took the trouble to journey out
to San Francisco to make the opportunity. As for Goliah, he was hailed
by the newspapers as another Tom Lawson with a panacea; and there were
specialists in mental disease who, by analysis of Goliah's letters,
proved conclusively that he was a lunatic.
The yacht _Energon_ arrived in the harbour of San Francisco on the
afternoon of April 5, and Bassett came ashore. But the _Energon_ did not
sail next day, for not one of the ten summoned politicians had elected to
make the journey to Palgrave Island. The newsboys, however, called
"Extra" that day in all the cities. The ten politicians were dead. The
yacht, lying peacefully at anchor in the harbour, became the centre of
excited interest. She was surrounded by a flotilla of launches and
rowboats, and many tugs and steamboats ran excursions to her. While the
rabble was firmly kept off, the proper authorities and even reporters
were permitted to board her. The mayor of San Francisco and the chief of
police reported that nothing suspicious was to be seen upon her, and the
port authorities announced that her papers were correct and in order in
every detail. Many photographs and columns of descriptive matter were
run in the newspapers.
The crew was reported to be composed principally of
Scandinavians--fair-haired, blue-eyed Swedes, Norwegians afflicted with
the temperamental melancholy of their race, stolid Russian Finns, and a
slight sprinkling of Americans and English. It was noted that there was
nothing mercurial and flyaway about them. They seemed weighty men,
oppressed by a sad and stolid bovine-sort of integrity. A sober
seriousness and enormous certitude characterized all of them. They
appeared men without nerves and without fear, as though upheld by some
overwhelming power or carried in the hollow of some superhuman hand. The
captain, a sad-eyed, strong-featured American, was cartooned in the
papers as "Gloomy Gus" (the pessimistic hero of the comic supplement).
Some sea-captain recognized the _Energon_ as the yacht _Scud_, once owned
by Merrivale of the New York Yacht Club. With this clue it was soon
ascertained that the _Scud_ had disappeared several years before. The
agent who sold her reported the purchaser to be merely another agent, a
man he had seen neither before nor since. The yacht had been
reconstructed at Duffey's Shipyard in New Jersey. The change in her name
and registry occurred at that time and had been legally executed. Then
the _Energon_ had disappeared in the shroud of mystery.
In the meantime, Bassett was going crazy--at least his friends and
business associates said so. He kept away from his vast business
enterprises and said that he must hold his hands until the other masters
of the world could join with him in the reconstruction of society--proof
indubitable that Goliah's bee had entered his bonnet. To reporters he
had little to say. He was not at liberty, he said, to relate what he had
seen on Palgrave Island; but he could assure them that the matter was
serious, the most serious thing that had ever happened. His final word
was that, the world was on the verge of a turnover, for good or ill he
did not know, but, one way or the other, he was absolutely convinced that
the turnover was coming. As for business, business could go hang. He
had seen things, he had, and that was all there was to it.
There was a great telegraphing, during this period, between the local
Federal officials and the state and war departments at Washington. A
secret attempt was made late one afternoon to board the _Energon_ and
place the captain under arrest--the Attorney-General having given the
opinion that the captain could be held for the murder of the ten
"statesmen." The government launch was seen to leave Meigg's Wharf and
steer for the _Energon_, and that was the last ever seen of the launch
and the men on board of it. The government tried to keep the affair
hushed up, but the cat was slipped out of the bag by the families of the
missing men, and the papers were filled with monstrous versions of the
affair.
The government now proceeded to extreme measures. The battleship
_Alaska_ was ordered to capture the strange yacht, or, failing that, to
sink her. These were secret instructions; but thousands of eyes, from
the water front and from the shipping in the harbour, witnessed what
happened that afternoon. The battleship got under way and steamed slowly
toward the _Energon_. At half a mile distant the battleship blew
up--simply blew up, that was all, her shattered frame sinking to the
bottom of the bay, a riff-raff of wreckage and a few survivors strewing
the surface. Among the survivors was a young lieutenant who had had
charge of the wireless on board the _Alaska_. The reporters got hold of
him first, and he talked. No sooner had the _Alaska_ got under way, he
said, than a message was received from the _Energon_. It was in the
international code, and it was a warning to the _Alaska_ to come no
nearer than half a mile. He had sent the message, through the speaking
tube, immediately to the captain. He did not know anything more, except
that the _Energon_ twice repeated the message and that five minutes
afterward the explosion occurred. The captain of the _Alaska_ had
perished with his ship, and nothing more was to be learned.
The _Energon_, however, promptly hoisted anchor and cleared out to sea.
A great clamour was raised by the papers; the government was charged with
cowardice and vacillation in its dealings with a mere pleasure yacht and
a lunatic who called himself "Goliah," and immediate and decisive action
was demanded. Also, a great cry went up about the loss of life,
especially the wanton killing of the ten "statesmen." Goliah promptly
replied. In fact, so prompt was his reply that the experts in wireless
telegraphy announced that, since it was impossible to send wireless
messages so great a distance, Goliah was in their very midst and not on
Palgrave Island. Goliah's letter was delivered to the Associated Press
by a messenger boy who had been engaged on the street. The letter was as
follows:
"What are a few paltry lives? In your insane wars you destroy
millions of lives and think nothing of it. In your fratricidal
commercial struggle you kill countless babes, women, and men, and you
triumphantly call the shambles 'individualism.' I call it anarchy.
I am going to put a stop to your wholesale destruction of human
beings. I want laughter, not slaughter. Those of you who stand in
the way of laughter will get slaughter.
"Your government is trying to delude you into believing that the
destruction of the _Alaska_ was an accident. Know here and now that
it was by my orders that the _Alaska_ was destroyed. In a few short
months, all battleships on all seas will be destroyed or flung to the
scrap-heap, and all nations shall disarm; fortresses shall be
dismantled, armies disbanded, and warfare shall cease from the earth.
Mine is the power. I am the will of God. The whole world shall be
in vassalage to me, but it shall be a vassalage of peace.
"I am
"GOLIAH."
"Blow Palgrave Island out of the water!" was the head-line retort of the
newspapers. The government was of the same frame of mind, and the
assembling of the fleets began. Walter Bassett broke out in ineffectual
protest, but was swiftly silenced by the threat of a lunacy commission.
Goliah remained silent. Against Palgrave Island five great fleets were
hurled--the Asiatic Squadron, the South Pacific Squadron, the North
Pacific Squadron, the Caribbean Squadron, and half of the North Atlantic
Squadron, the two latter coming through the Panama Canal.
"I have the honour to report that we sighted Palgrave Island on the
evening of April 29," ran the report of Captain Johnson, of the
battleship _North Dakota_, to the Secretary of the Navy. "The Asiatic
Squadron was delayed and did not arrive until the morning of April 30. A
council of the admirals was held, and it was decided to attack early next
morning. The destroyer, _Swift VII_, crept in, unmolested, and reported
no warlike preparations on the island. It noted several small merchant
steamers in the harbour, and the existence of a small village in a
hopelessly exposed position that could be swept by our fire.
"It had been decided that all the vessels should rush in, scattered, upon
the island, opening fire at three miles, and continuing to the edge of
the reef, there to retain loose formation and engage. Palgrave Island
repeatedly warned us, by wireless, in the international code, to keep
outside the ten-mile limit; but no heed was paid to the warnings.
"The _North Dakota_ did not take part in the movement of the morning of
May 1. This was due to a slight accident of the preceding night that
temporarily disabled her steering-gear. The morning of May 1 broke clear
and calm. There was a slight breeze from the south-west that quickly
died away. The _North Dakota_ lay twelve miles off the island. At the
signal the squadrons charged in upon the island, from all sides, at full
speed. Our wireless receiver continued to tick off warnings from the
island. The ten-mile limit was passed, and nothing happened. I watched
through my glasses. At five miles nothing happened; at four miles
nothing happened; at three miles, the _New York_, in the lead on our side
of the island, opened fire. She fired only one shot. Then she blew up.
The rest of the vessels never fired a shot. They began to blow up,
everywhere, before our eyes. Several swerved about and started back, but
they failed to escape. The destroyer, _Dart XXX_, nearly made the
ten-mile limit when she blew up. She was the last survivor. No harm
came to the _North Dakota_, and that night, the steering-gear being
repaired, I gave orders to sail for San Francisco."
To say that the United States was stunned is but to expose the inadequacy
of language. The whole world was stunned. It confronted that blight of
the human brain, the unprecedented. Human endeavour was a jest, a
monstrous futility, when a lunatic on a lonely island, who owned a yacht
and an exposed village, could destroy five of the proudest fleets of
Christendom. And how had he done it? Nobody knew. The scientists lay
down in the dust of the common road and wailed and gibbered. They did
not know. Military experts committed suicide by scores. The mighty
fabric of warfare they had fashioned was a gossamer veil rent asunder by
a miserable lunatic. It was too much for their sanity. Mere human
reason could not withstand the shock. As the savage is crushed by the
sleight-of-hand of the witch doctor, so was the world crushed by the
magic of Goliah. How did he do it? It was the awful face of the Unknown
upon which the world gazed and by which it was frightened out of the
memory of its proudest achievements.
But all the world was not stunned. There was the invariable
exception--the Island Empire of Japan. Drunken with the wine of success
deep-quaffed, without superstition and without faith in aught but its own
ascendant star, laughing at the wreckage of science and mad with pride of
race, it went forth upon the way of war. America's fleets had been
destroyed. From the battlements of heaven the multitudinous ancestral
shades of Japan leaned down. The opportunity, God-given, had come. The
Mikado was in truth a brother to the gods.
The war-monsters of Japan were loosed in mighty fleets. The Philippines
were gathered in as a child gathers a nosegay. It took longer for the
battleships to travel to Hawaii, to Panama, and to the Pacific Coast.
The United States was panic-stricken, and there arose the powerful party
of dishonourable peace. In the midst of the clamour the _Energon_
arrived in San Francisco Bay and Goliah spoke once more. There was a
little brush as the _Energon_ came in, and a few explosions of magazines
occurred along the war-tunnelled hills as the coast defences went to
smash. Also, the blowing up of the submarine mines in the Golden Gate
made a remarkably fine display. Goliah's message to the people of San
Francisco, dated as usual from Palgrave Island, was published in the
papers. It ran:
"Peace? Peace be with you. You shall have peace. I have spoken to
this purpose before. And give you me peace. Leave my yacht
_Energon_ alone. Commit one overt act against her and not one stone
in San Francisco shall stand upon another.
"To-morrow let all good citizens go out upon the hills that slope
down to the sea. Go with music and laughter and garlands. Make
festival for the new age that is dawning. Be like children upon your
hills, and witness the passing of war. Do not miss the opportunity.
It is your last chance to behold what henceforth you will be
compelled to seek in museums of antiquities.
"I promise you a merry day,
"GOLIAH."
The madness of magic was in the air. With the people it was as if all
their gods had crashed and the heavens still stood. Order and law had
passed away from the universe; but the sun still shone, the wind still
blew, the flowers still bloomed--that was the amazing thing about it.
That water should continue to run downhill was a miracle. All the
stabilities of the human mind and human achievement were crumbling. The
one stable thing that remained was Goliah, a madman on an island. And so
it was that the whole population of San Francisco went forth next day in
colossal frolic upon the hills that overlooked the sea. Brass bands and
banners went forth, brewery wagons and Sunday-school picnics--all the
strange heterogeneous groupings of swarming metropolitan life.
On the sea-rim rose the smoke from the funnels of a hundred hostile
vessels of war, all converging upon the helpless, undefended Golden Gate.
And not all undefended, for out through the Golden Gate moved the
_Energon_, a tiny toy of white, rolling like a straw in the stiff sea on
the bar where a strong ebb-tide ran in the teeth of the summer
sea-breeze. But the Japanese were cautious. Their thirty- and
forty-thousand-ton battleships slowed down half a dozen miles offshore
and manoeuvred in ponderous evolutions, while tiny scout-boats (lean,
six-funnelled destroyers) ran in, cutting blackly the flashing sea like
so many sharks. But, compared with the _Energon_, they were leviathans.
Compared with them, the _Energon_ was as the sword of the arch-angel
Michael, and they the forerunners of the hosts of hell.
But the flashing of the sword, the good people of San Francisco, gathered
on her hills, never saw. Mysterious, invisible, it cleaved the air and
smote the mightiest blows of combat the world had ever witnessed. The
good people of San Francisco saw little and understood less. They saw
only a million and a half tons of brine-cleaving, thunder-flinging
fabrics hurled skyward and smashed back in ruin to sink into the sea. It
was all over in five minutes. Remained upon the wide expanse of sea only
the _Energon_, rolling white and toylike on the bar.
Goliah spoke to the Mikado and the Elder Statesmen. It was only an
ordinary cable message, despatched from San Francisco by the captain of
the _Energon_, but it was of sufficient moment to cause the immediate
withdrawal of Japan from the Philippines and of her surviving fleets from
the sea. Japan the sceptical was converted. She had felt the weight of
Goliah's arm. And meekly she obeyed when Goliah commanded her to
dismantle her war vessels and to turn the metal into useful appliances
for the arts of peace. In all the ports, navy-yards, machine-shops, and
foundries of Japan tens of thousands of brown-skinned artisans converted
the war-monsters into myriads of useful things, such as ploughshares
(Goliah insisted on ploughshares), gasolene engines, bridge-trusses,
telephone and telegraph wires, steel rails, locomotives, and rolling
stock for railways. It was a world-penance for a world to see, and
paltry indeed it made appear that earlier penance, barefooted in the
snow, of an emperor to a pope for daring to squabble over temporal power.
Goliah's next summons was to the ten leading scientists of the United
States. This time there was no hesitancy in obeying. The savants were
ludicrously prompt, some of them waiting in San Francisco for weeks so as
not to miss the scheduled sailing-date. They departed on the _Energon_
on June 15; and while they were on the sea, on the way to Palgrave
Island, Goliah performed another spectacular feat. Germany and France
were preparing to fly at each other's throats. Goliah commanded peace.
They ignored the command, tacitly agreeing to fight it out on land where
it seemed safer for the belligerently inclined. Goliah set the date of
June 19 for the cessation of hostile preparations. Both countries
mobilized their armies on June 18, and hurled them at the common
frontier. And on June 19, Goliah struck. All generals, war-secretaries,
and jingo-leaders in the two countries died on that day; and that day two
vast armies, undirected, like strayed sheep, walked over each other's
frontiers and fraternized. But the great German war lord had escaped--it
was learned, afterward, by hiding in the huge safe where were stored the
secret archives of his empire. And when he emerged he was a very
penitent war lord, and like the Mikado of Japan he was set to work
beating his sword-blades into ploughshares and pruning-hooks.
But in the escape of the German Emperor was discovered a great
significance. The scientists of the world plucked up courage, got back
their nerve. One thing was conclusively evident--Goliah's power was not
magic. Law still reigned in the universe. Goliah's power had
limitations, else had the German Emperor not escaped by secretly hiding
in a steel safe. Many learned articles on the subject appeared in the
magazines.
The ten scientists arrived back from Palgrave Island on July 6. Heavy
platoons of police protected them from the reporters. No, they had not
see Goliah, they said in the one official interview that was vouchsafed;
but they had talked with him, and they had seen things. They were not
permitted to state definitely all that they had seen and heard, but they
could say that the world was about to be revolutionized. Goliah was in
the possession of a tremendous discovery that placed all the world at his
mercy, and it was a good thing for the world that Goliah was merciful.
The ten scientists proceeded directly to Washington on a special train,
where, for days, they were closeted with the heads of government, while
the nation hung breathless on the outcome.
But the outcome was a long time in arriving. From Washington the
President issued commands to the masters and leading figures of the
nation. Everything was secret. Day by day deputations of bankers,
railway lords, captains of industry, and Supreme Court justices arrived;
and when they arrived they remained. The weeks dragged on, and then, on
August 25, began the famous issuance of proclamations. Congress and the
Senate co-operated with the President in this, while the Supreme Court
justices gave their sanction and the money lords and the captains of
industry agreed. War was declared upon the capitalist masters of the
nation. Martial law was declared over the whole United States. The
supreme power was vested in the President.
In one day, child-labour in the whole country was abolished. It was done
by decree, and the United States was prepared with its army to enforce
its decrees. In the same day all women factory workers were dismissed to
their homes, and all the sweat-shops were closed. "But we cannot make
profits!" wailed the petty capitalists. "Fools!" was the retort of
Goliah. "As if the meaning of life were profits! Give up your
businesses and your profit-mongering." "But there is nobody to buy our
business!" they wailed. "Buy and sell--is that all the meaning life has
for you?" replied Goliah. "You have nothing to sell. Turn over your
little cut-throating, anarchistic businesses to the government so that
they may be rationally organized and operated." And the next day, by
decree, the government began taking possession of all factories, shops,
mines, ships, railroads, and producing lands.
The nationalization of the means of production and distribution went on
apace. Here and there were sceptical capitalists of moment. They were
made prisoners and haled to Palgrave Island, and when they returned they
always acquiesced in what the government was doing. A little later the
journey to Palgrave Island became unnecessary. When objection was made,
the reply of the officials was "Goliah has spoken"--which was another way
of saying, "He must be obeyed."
The captains of industry became heads of departments. It was found that
civil engineers, for instance, worked just as well in government employ
as before, they had worked in private employ. It was found that men of
high executive ability could not violate their nature. They could not
escape exercising their executive ability, any more than a crab could
escape crawling or a bird could escape flying. And so it was that all
the splendid force of the men who had previously worked for themselves
was now put to work for the good of society. The half-dozen great
railway chiefs co-operated in the organizing of a national system of
railways that was amazingly efficacious. Never again was there such a
thing as a car shortage. These chiefs were not the Wall Street railway
magnates, but they were the men who formerly had done the real work while
in the employ of the Wall Street magnates.
Wall Street was dead. There was no more buying and selling and
speculating. Nobody had anything to buy or sell. There was nothing in
which to speculate. "Put the stock gamblers to work," said Goliah; "give
those that are young, and that so desire, a chance to learn useful
trades." "Put the drummers, and salesmen, and advertising agents, and
real estate agents to work," said Goliah; and by hundreds of thousands
the erstwhile useless middlemen and parasites went into useful
occupations. The four hundred thousand idle gentlemen of the country who
had lived upon incomes were likewise put to work. Then there were a lot
of helpless men in high places who were cleared out, the remarkable thing
about this being that they were cleared out by their own fellows. Of
this class were the professional politicians, whose wisdom and power
consisted of manipulating machine politics and of grafting. There was no
longer any graft. Since there were no private interests to purchase
special privileges, no bribes were offered to legislators, and
legislators for the first time legislated for the people. The result was
that men who were efficient, not in corruption, but in direction, found
their way into the legislatures.
With this rational organization of society amazing results were brought
about. The national day's work was eight hours, and yet production
increased. In spite of the great permanent improvements and of the
immense amount of energy consumed in systematizing the competitive chaos
of society, production doubled and tripled upon itself. The standard of
living increased, and still consumption could not keep up with
production. The maximum working age was decreased to fifty years, to
forty-nine years, and to forty-eight years. The minimum working age went
up from sixteen years to eighteen years. The eight-hour day became a
seven-hour day, and in a few months the national working day was reduced
to five hours.
In the meantime glimmerings were being caught, not of the identity of
Goliah, but of how he had worked and prepared for his assuming control of
the world. Little things leaked out, clues were followed up, apparently
unrelated things were pieced together. Strange stories of blacks stolen
from Africa were remembered, of Chinese and Japanese contract coolies who
had mysteriously disappeared, of lonely South Sea Islands raided and
their inhabitants carried away; stories of yachts and merchant steamers,
mysteriously purchased, that had disappeared and the descriptions of
which remotely tallied with the crafts that had carried the Orientals and
Africans and islanders away. Where had Goliah got the sinews of war? was
the question. And the surmised answer was: By exploiting these stolen
labourers. It was they that lived in the exposed village on Palgrave
Island. It was the product of their toil that had purchased the yachts
and merchant steamers and enabled Goliah's agents to permeate society and
carry out his will. And what was the product of their toil that had
given Goliah the wealth necessary to realize his plans? Commercial
radium, the newspapers proclaimed; and radiyte, and radiosole, and
argatium, and argyte, and the mysterious golyte (that had proved so
valuable in metallurgy). These were the new compounds, discovered in the
first decade of the twentieth century, the commercial and scientific use
of which had become so enormous in the second decade.
The line of fruit boats that ran from Hawaii to San Francisco was
declared to be the property of Goliah. This was a surmise, for no other
owner could be discovered, and the agents who handled the shipments of
the fruit boats were only agents. Since no one else owned the fruit
boats, then Goliah must own them. The point of which is: _that it leaked
out that the major portion of the world's supply in these precious
compounds was brought to San Francisco by those very fruit boats_. That
the whole chain of surmise was correct was proved in later years when
Goliah's slaves were liberated and honourably pensioned by the
international government of the world. It was at that time that the seal
of secrecy was lifted from the lips of his agents and higher emissaries,
and those that chose revealed much of the mystery of Goliah's
organization and methods. His destroying angels, however, remained for
ever dumb. Who the men were who went forth to the high places and killed
at his bidding will be unknown to the end of time--for kill they did, by
means of that very subtle and then-mysterious force that Goliah had
discovered and named "Energon."
But at that time Energon, the little giant that was destined to do the
work of the world, was unknown and undreamed of. Only Goliah knew, and
he kept his secret well. Even his agents, who were armed with it, and
who, in the case of the yacht _Energon_, destroyed a mighty fleet of
war-ships by exploding their magazines, knew not what the subtle and
potent force was, nor how it was manufactured. They knew only one of its
many uses, and in that one use they had been instructed by Goliah. It is
now well known that radium, and radiyte, and radiosole, and all the other
compounds, were by-products of the manufacture of Energon by Goliah from
the sunlight; but at that time nobody knew what Energon was, and Goliah
continued to awe and rule the world.
One of the uses of Energon was in wireless telegraphy. It was by its
means that Goliah was able to communicate with his agents all over the
world. At that time the apparatus required by an agent was so clumsy
that it could not be packed in anything less than a fair-sized steamer
trunk. To-day, thanks to the improvements of Hendsoll, the perfected
apparatus can be carried in a coat pocket.
It was in December, 1924, that Goliah sent out his famous "Christmas
Letter," part of the text of which is here given:
"So far, while I have kept the rest of the nations from each other's
throats, I have devoted myself particularly to the United States.
Now I have not given to the people of the United States a rational
social organization. What I have done has been to compel them to
make that organization themselves. There is more laughter in the
United States these days, and there is more sense. Food and shelter
are no longer obtained by the anarchistic methods of so-called
individualism but are now wellnigh automatic. And the beauty of it
is that the people of the United States have achieved all this for
themselves. I did not achieve it for them. I repeat, they achieved
it for themselves. All that I did was to put the fear of death in
the hearts of the few that sat in the high places and obstructed the
coming of rationality and laughter. The fear of death made those in
the high places get out of the way, that was all, and gave the
intelligence of man a chance to realize itself socially.
"In the year that is to come I shall devote myself to the rest of the
world. I shall put the fear of death in the hearts of all that sit
in the high places in all the nations. And they will do as they have
done in the United States--get down out of the high places and give
the intelligence of man a chance for social rationality. All the
nations shall tread the path the United States is now on.
"And when all the nations are well along on that path, I shall have
something else for them. But first they must travel that path for
themselves. They must demonstrate that the intelligence of mankind
to-day, with the mechanical energy now at its disposal, is capable of
organizing society so that food and shelter be made automatic, labour
be reduced to a three-hour day, and joy and laughter be made
universal. And when that is accomplished, not by me but by the
intelligence of mankind, then I shall make a present to the world of
a new mechanical energy. This is my discovery. This Energon is
nothing more nor less than the cosmic energy that resides in the
solar rays. When it is harnessed by mankind it will do the work of
the world. There will be no more multitudes of miners slaving out
their lives in the bowels of the earth, no more sooty firemen and
greasy engineers. All may dress in white if they so will. The work
of life will have become play and young and old will be the children
of joy, and the business of living will become joy; and they will
compete, one with another, in achieving ethical concepts and
spiritual heights, in fashioning pictures and songs, and stories, in
statecraft and beauty craft, in the sweat and the endeavour of the
wrestler and the runner and the player of games--all will compete,
not for sordid coin and base material reward, but for the joy that
shall be theirs in the development and vigour of flesh and in the
development and keenness of spirit. All will be joy-smiths, and
their task shall be to beat out laughter from the ringing anvil of
life.
"And now one word for the immediate future. On New Year's Day all
nations shall disarm, all fortresses and war-ships shall be
dismantled, and all armies shall be disbanded.
"GOLIAH."
On New Year's Day all the world disarmed. The millions of soldiers and
sailors and workmen in the standing armies, in the navies, and in the
countless arsenals, machine-shops, and factories for the manufacture of
war machinery, were dismissed to their homes. These many millions of
men, as well as their costly war machinery, had hitherto been supported
on the back of labour. They now went into useful occupations, and the
released labour giant heaved a mighty sigh of relief. The policing of
the world was left to the peace officers and was purely social, whereas
war had been distinctly anti-social.
Ninety per cent. of the crimes against society had been crimes against
private property. With the passing of private property, at least in the
means of production, and with the organization of industry that gave
every man a chance, the crimes against private property practically
ceased. The police forces everywhere were reduced repeatedly and again
and again. Nearly all occasional and habitual criminals ceased
voluntarily from their depredations. There was no longer any need for
them to commit crime. They merely changed with changing conditions. A
smaller number of criminals was put into hospitals and cured. And the
remnant of the hopelessly criminal and degenerate was segregated. And
the courts in all countries were likewise decreased in number again and
again. Ninety-five per cent. of all civil cases had been squabbles over
property, conflicts of property-rights, lawsuits, contests of wills,
breaches of contract, bankruptcies, etc. With the passing of private
property, this ninety-five per cent. of the cases that cluttered the
courts also passed. The courts became shadows, attenuated ghosts,
rudimentary vestiges of the anarchistic times that had preceded the
coming of Goliah.
The year 1925 was a lively year in the world's history. Goliah ruled the
world with a strong hand. Kings and emperors journeyed to Palgrave
Island, saw the wonders of Energon, and went away, with the fear of death
in their hearts, to abdicate thrones and crowns and hereditary licenses.
When Goliah spoke to politicians (so-called "statesmen"), they obeyed . . .
or died. He dictated universal reforms, dissolved refractory
parliaments, and to the great conspiracy that was formed of mutinous
money lords and captains of industry he sent his destroying angels. "The
time is past for fooling," he told them. "You are anachronisms. You
stand in the way of humanity. To the scrap-heap with you." To those
that protested, and they were many, he said: "This is no time for
logomachy. You can argue for centuries. It is what you have done in the
past. I have no time for argument. Get out of the way."
With the exception of putting a stop to war, and of indicating the broad
general plan, Goliah did nothing. By putting the fear of death into the
hearts of those that sat in the high places and obstructed progress,
Goliah made the opportunity for the unshackled intelligence of the best
social thinkers of the world to exert itself. Goliah left all the
multitudinous details of reconstruction to these social thinkers. He
wanted them to prove that they were able to do it, and they proved it.
It was due to their initiative that the white plague was stamped out from
the world. It was due to them, and in spite of a deal of protesting from
the sentimentalists, that all the extreme hereditary inefficients were
segregated and denied marriage.
Goliah had nothing whatever to do with the instituting of the colleges of
invention. This idea originated practically simultaneously in the minds
of thousands of social thinkers. The time was ripe for the realization
of the idea, and everywhere arose the splendid institutions of invention.
For the first time the ingenuity of man was loosed upon the problem of
simplifying life, instead of upon the making of money-earning devices.
The affairs of life, such as house-cleaning, dish and window-washing,
dust-removing, and scrubbing and clothes-washing, and all the endless
sordid and necessary details, were simplified by invention until they
became automatic. We of to-day cannot realize the barbarously filthy and
slavish lives of those that lived prior to 1925.
The international government of the world was another idea that sprang
simultaneously into the minds of thousands. The successful realization
of this idea was a surprise to many, but as a surprise it was nothing to
that received by the mildly protestant sociologists and biologists when
irrefutable facts exploded the doctrine of Malthus. With leisure and joy
in the world; with an immensely higher standard of living; and with the
enormous spaciousness of opportunity for recreation, development, and
pursuit of beauty and nobility and all the higher attributes, the
birth-rate fell, and fell astoundingly. People ceased breeding like
cattle. And better than that, it was immediately noticeable that a
higher average of children was being born. The doctrine of Malthus was
knocked into a cocked hat--or flung to the scrap-heap, as Goliah would
have put it.
All that Goliah had predicted that the intelligence of mankind could
accomplish with the mechanical energy at its disposal, came to pass.
Human dissatisfaction practically disappeared. The elderly people were
the great grumblers; but when they were honourably pensioned by society,
as they passed the age limit for work, the great majority ceased
grumbling. They found themselves better off in their idle old days under
the new regime, enjoying vastly more pleasure and comforts than they had
in their busy and toilsome youth under the old regime. The younger
generation had easily adapted itself too the changed order, and the very
young had never known anything else. The sum of human happiness had
increased enormously. The world had become gay and sane. Even the old
fogies of professors of sociology, who had opposed with might and main
the coming of the new regime, made no complaint. They were a score of
times better remunerated than in the old days, and they were not worked
nearly so hard. Besides, they were busy revising sociology and writing
new text-books on the subject. Here and there, it is true, there were
atavisms, men who yearned for the flesh-pots and cannibal-feasts of the
old alleged "individualism," creatures long of teeth and savage of claw
who wanted to prey upon their fellow-men; but they were looked upon as
diseased, and were treated in hospitals. A small remnant, however,
proved incurable, and was confined in asylums and denied marriage. Thus
there was no progeny to inherit their atavistic tendencies.
As the years went by, Goliah dropped out of the running of the world.
There was nothing for him to run. The world was running itself, and
doing it smoothly and beautifully. In 1937, Goliah made his
long-promised present of Energon to the world. He himself had devised a
thousand ways in which the little giant should do the work of the
world--all of which he made public at the same time. But instantly the
colleges of invention seized upon Energon and utilized it in a hundred
thousand additional ways. In fact, as Goliah confessed in his letter of
March 1938, the colleges of invention cleared up several puzzling
features of Energon that had baffled him during the preceding years.
With the introduction of the use of Energon the two-hour work-day was cut
down almost to nothing. As Goliah had predicted, work indeed became
play. And, so tremendous was man's productive capacity, due to Energon
and the rational social utilization of it, that the humblest citizen
enjoyed leisure and time and opportunity for an immensely greater
abundance of living than had the most favoured under the old anarchistic
system.
Nobody had ever seen Goliah, and all peoples began to clamour for their
saviour to appear. While the world did not minimize his discovery of
Energon, it was decided that greater than that was his wide social
vision. He was a superman, a scientific superman; and the curiosity of
the world to see him had become wellnigh unbearable. It was in 1941,
after much hesitancy on his part, that he finally emerged from Palgrave
Island. He arrived on June 6 in San Francisco, and for the first time,
since his retirement to Palgrave Island, the world looked upon his face.
And the world was disappointed. Its imagination had been touched. An
heroic figure had been made out of Goliah. He was the man, or the
demi-god, rather, who had turned the planet over. The deeds of
Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon were as the play of babes
alongside his colossal achievements.
And ashore in San Francisco and through its streets stepped and rode a
little old man, sixty-five years of age, well preserved, with a
pink-and-white complexion and a bald spot on his head the size of an
apple. He was short-sighted and wore spectacles. But when the
spectacles were removed, his were quizzical blue eyes like a child's,
filled with mild wonder at the world. Also his eyes had a way of
twinkling, accompanied by a screwing up of the face, as if he laughed at
the huge joke he had played upon the world, trapping it, in spite of
itself, into happiness and laughter.
For a scientific superman and world tyrant, he had remarkable weaknesses.
He loved sweets, and was inordinately fond of salted almonds and salted
pecans, especially of the latter. He always carried a paper bag of them
in his pocket, and he had a way of saying frequently that the chemism of
his nature demanded such fare. Perhaps his most astonishing failing was
cats. He had an ineradicable aversion to that domestic animal. It will
be remembered that he fainted dead away with sudden fright, while
speaking in Brotherhood Palace, when the janitor's cat walked out upon
the stage and brushed against his legs.
But no sooner had he revealed himself to the world than he was
identified. Old-time friends had no difficulty in recognizing him as
Percival Stultz, the German-American who, in 1898, had worked in the
Union Iron Works, and who, for two years at that time, had been secretary
of Branch 369 of the International Brotherhood of Machinists. It was in
1901, then twenty-five years of age, that he had taken special scientific
courses at the University of California, at the same time supporting
himself by soliciting what was then known as "life insurance." His
records as a student are preserved in the university museum, and they are
unenviable. He is remembered by the professors he sat under chiefly for
his absent-mindedness. Undoubtedly, even then, he was catching glimpses
of the wide visions that later were to be his.
His naming himself "Goliah" and shrouding himself in mystery was his
little joke, he later explained. As Goliah, or any other thing like
that, he said, he was able to touch the imagination of the world and turn
it over; but as Percival Stultz, wearing side-whiskers and spectacles,
and weighing one hundred and eighteen pounds, he would have been unable
to turn over a pecan--"not even a salted pecan."
But the world quickly got over its disappointment in his personal
appearance and antecedents. It knew him and revered him as the
master-mind of the ages; and it loved him for himself, for his quizzical
short-sighted eyes and the inimitable way in which he screwed up his face
when he laughed; it loved him for his simplicity and comradeship and warm
humanness, and for his fondness for salted pecans and his aversion to
cats. And to-day, in the wonder-city of Asgard, rises in awful beauty
that monument to him that dwarfs the pyramids and all the monstrous
blood-stained monuments of antiquity. And on that monument, as all know,
is inscribed in imperishable bronze the prophecy and the fulfilment: "ALL
WILL BE JOY-SMITHS, AND THEIR TASK SHALL BE TO BEAT OUT LAUGHTER FROM THE
RINGING ANVIL OF LIFE."
[EDITORIAL NOTE.--This remarkable production is the work of Harry
Beckwith, a student in the Lowell High School of San Francisco, and it is
here reproduced chiefly because of the youth of its author. Far be it
from our policy to burden our readers with ancient history; and when it
is known that Harry Beckwith was only fifteen when the fore-going was
written, our motive will be understood. "Goliah" won the Premier for
high school composition in 2254, and last year Harry Beckwith took
advantage of the privilege earned, by electing to spend six months in
Asgard. The wealth of historical detail, the atmosphere of the times,
and the mature style of the composition are especially noteworthy in one
so young.]
THE GOLDEN POPPY
I have a poppy field. That is, by the grace of God and the good-nature
of editors, I am enabled to place each month divers gold pieces into a
clerical gentleman's hands, and in return for said gold pieces I am each
month reinvested with certain proprietary-rights in a poppy field. This
field blazes on the rim of the Piedmont Hills. Beneath lies all the
world. In the distance, across the silver sweep of bay, San Francisco
smokes on her many hills like a second Rome. Not far away, Mount
Tamalpais thrusts a rugged shoulder into the sky; and midway between is
the Golden Gate, where sea mists love to linger. From the poppy field we
often see the shimmering blue of the Pacific beyond, and the busy ships
that go for ever out and in.
"We shall have great joy in our poppy field," said Bess. "Yes," said I;
"how the poor city folk will envy when they come to see us, and how we
will make all well again when we send them off with great golden
armfuls!"
"But those things will have to come down," I added, pointing to numerous
obtrusive notices (relics of the last tenant) displayed conspicuously
along the boundaries, and bearing, each and all, this legend:
"_Private Grounds_. _No Trespassing_."
"Why should we refuse the poor city folk a ramble over our field,
because, forsooth, they have not the advantage of our acquaintance?"
"How I abhor such things," said Bess; "the arrogant symbols of power."
"They disgrace human nature," said I.
"They shame the generous landscape," she said, "and they are abominable."
"Piggish!" quoth I, hotly. "Down with them!"
We looked forward to the coming of the poppies, did Bess and I, looked
forward as only creatures of the city may look who have been long denied.
I have forgotten to mention the existence of a house above the poppy
field, a squat and wandering bungalow in which we had elected to forsake
town traditions and live in fresher and more vigorous ways. The first
poppies came, orange-yellow and golden in the standing grain, and we went
about gleefully, as though drunken with their wine, and told each other
that the poppies were there. We laughed at unexpected moments, in the
midst of silences, and at times grew ashamed and stole forth secretly to
gaze upon our treasury. But when the great wave of poppy-flame finally
spilled itself down the field, we shouted aloud, and danced, and clapped
our hands, freely and frankly mad.
And then came the Goths. My face was in a lather, the time of the first
invasion, and I suspended my razor in mid-air to gaze out on my beloved
field. At the far end I saw a little girl and a little boy, their arms
filled with yellow spoil. Ah, thought I, an unwonted benevolence
burgeoning, what a delight to me is their delight! It is sweet that
children should pick poppies in my field. All summer shall they pick
poppies in my field. But they must be little children, I added as an
afterthought, and they must pick from the lower end--this last prompted
by a glance at the great golden fellows nodding in the wheat beneath my
window. Then the razor descended. Shaving was always an absorbing task,
and I did not glance out of the window again until the operation was
completed. And then I was bewildered. Surely this was not my poppy
field. No--and yes, for there were the tall pines clustering austerely
together on one side, the magnolia tree burdened with bloom, and the
Japanese quinces splashing the driveway hedge with blood. Yes, it was
the field, but no wave of poppy-flame spilled down it, nor did the great
golden fellows nod in the wheat beneath my window. I rushed into a
jacket and out of the house. In the far distance were disappearing two
huge balls of colour, orange and yellow, for all the world like
perambulating poppies of cyclopean breed.
"Johnny," said I to the nine-year-old son of my sister, "Johnny, whenever
little girls come into our field to pick poppies, you must go down to
them, and in a very quiet and gentlemanly manner, tell them it is not
allowed."
Warm days came, and the sun drew another blaze from the free-bosomed
earth. Whereupon a neighbour's little girl, at the behest of her mother,
duly craved and received permission from Bess to gather a few poppies for
decorative purposes. But of this I was uninformed, and when I descried
her in the midst of the field I waved my arms like a semaphore against
the sky.
"Little girl!" called I. "Little girl!"
The little girl's legs blurred the landscape as she fled, and in high
elation I sought Bess to tell of the potency of my voice. Nobly she came
to the rescue, departing forthwith on an expedition of conciliation and
explanation to the little girl's mother. But to this day the little girl
seeks cover at sight of me, and I know the mother will never be as
cordial as she would otherwise have been.
Came dark, overcast days, stiff, driving winds, and pelting rains, day on
day, without end, and the city folk cowered in their dwelling-places like
flood-beset rats; and like rats, half-drowned and gasping, when the
weather cleared they crawled out and up the green Piedmont slopes to bask
in the blessed sunshine. And they invaded my field in swarms and droves,
crushing the sweet wheat into the earth and with lustful hands ripping
the poppies out by the roots.
"I shall put up the warnings against trespassing," I said.
"Yes," said Bess, with a sigh. "I'm afraid it is necessary."
The day was yet young when she sighed again:
"I'm afraid, O Man, that your signs are of no avail. People have
forgotten how to read, these days."
I went out on the porch. A city nymph, in cool summer gown and picture
hat, paused before one of my newly reared warnings and read it through
with care. Profound deliberation characterized her movements. She was
statuesquely tall, but with a toss of the head and a flirt of the skirt
she dropped on hands and knees, crawled under the fence, and came to her
feet on the inside with poppies in both her hands. I walked down the
drive and talked ethically to her, and she went away. Then I put up more
signs.
At one time, years ago, these hills were carpeted with poppies. As
between the destructive forces and the will "to live," the poppies
maintained an equilibrium with their environment. But the city folk
constituted a new and terrible destructive force, the equilibrium was
overthrown, and the poppies wellnigh perished. Since the city folk
plucked those with the longest stems and biggest bowls, and since it is
the law of kind to procreate kind, the long-stemmed, big-bowled poppies
failed to go to seed, and a stunted, short-stemmed variety remained to
the hills. And not only was it stunted and short-stemmed, but sparsely
distributed as well. Each day and every day, for years and years, the
city folk swarmed over the Piedmont Hills, and only here and there did
the genius of the race survive in the form of miserable little flowers,
close-clinging and quick-blooming, like children of the slums dragged
hastily and precariously through youth to a shrivelled and futile
maturity.
On the other hand, the poppies had prospered in my field; and not only
had they been sheltered from the barbarians, but also from the birds.
Long ago the field was sown in wheat, which went to seed unharvested each
year, and in the cool depths of which the poppy seeds were hidden from
the keen-eyed songsters. And further, climbing after the sun through the
wheat stalks, the poppies grew taller and taller and more royal even than
the primordial ones of the open.
So the city folk, gazing from the bare hills to my blazing, burning
field, were sorely tempted, and, it must be told, as sorely fell. But no
sorer was their fall than that of my beloved poppies. Where the grain
holds the dew and takes the bite from the sun the soil is moist, and in
such soil it is easier to pull the poppies out by the roots than to break
the stalk. Now the city folk, like other folk, are inclined to move
along the line of least resistance, and for each flower they gathered,
there were also gathered many crisp-rolled buds and with them all the
possibilities and future beauties of the plant for all time to come.
One of the city folk, a middle-aged gentleman, with white hands and
shifty eyes, especially made life interesting for me. We called him the
"Repeater," what of his ways. When from the porch we implored him to
desist, he was wont slowly and casually to direct his steps toward the
fence, simulating finely the actions of a man who had not heard, but
whose walk, instead, had terminated of itself or of his own volition. To
heighten this effect, now and again, still casually and carelessly, he
would stoop and pluck another poppy. Thus did he deceitfully save
himself the indignity of being put out, and rob us of the satisfaction of
putting him out, but he came, and he came often, each time getting away
with an able-bodied man's share of plunder.
It is not good to be of the city folk. Of this I am convinced. There is
something in the mode of life that breeds an alarming condition of
blindness and deafness, or so it seems with the city folk that come to my
poppy field. Of the many to whom I have talked ethically not one has
been found who ever saw the warnings so conspicuously displayed, while of
those called out to from the porch, possibly one in fifty has heard.
Also, I have discovered that the relation of city folk to country flowers
is quite analogous to that of a starving man to food. No more than the
starving man realizes that five pounds of meat is not so good as an
ounce, do they realize that five hundred poppies crushed and bunched are
less beautiful than two or three in a free cluster, where the green
leaves and golden bowls may expand to their full loveliness.
Less forgivable than the unaesthetic are the mercenary. Hordes of young
rascals plunder me and rob the future that they may stand on street
corners and retail "California poppies, only five cents a bunch!" In
spite of my precautions some of them made a dollar a day out of my field.
One horde do I remember with keen regret. Reconnoitring for a possible
dog, they applied at the kitchen door for "a drink of water, please."
While they drank they were besought not to pick any flowers. They
nodded, wiped their mouths, and proceeded to take themselves off by the
side of the bungalow. They smote the poppy field beneath my windows,
spread out fan-shaped six wide, picking with both hands, and ripped a
swath of destruction through the very heart of the field. No cyclone
travelled faster or destroyed more completely. I shouted after them, but
they sped on the wings of the wind, great regal poppies, broken-stalked
and mangled, trailing after them or cluttering their wake--the most
high-handed act of piracy, I am confident, ever committed off the high
seas.
One day I went a-fishing, and on that day a woman entered the field.
Appeals and remonstrances from the porch having no effect upon her, Bess
despatched a little girl to beg of her to pick no more poppies. The
woman calmly went on picking. Then Bess herself went down through the
heat of the day. But the woman went on picking, and while she picked she
discussed property and proprietary rights, denying Bess's sovereignty
until deeds and documents should be produced in proof thereof. And all
the time she went on picking, never once overlooking her hand. She was a
large woman, belligerent of aspect, and Bess was only a woman and not
prone to fisticuffs. So the invader picked until she could pick no more,
said "Good-day," and sailed majestically away.
"People have really grown worse in the last several years, I think," said
Bess to me in a tired sort of voice that night, as we sat in the library
after dinner.
Next day I was inclined to agree with her. "There's a woman and a little
girl heading straight for the poppies," said May, a maid about the
bungalow. I went out on the porch and waited their advent. They plunged
through the pine trees and into the fields, and as the roots of the first
poppies were pulled I called to them. They were about a hundred feet
away. The woman and the little girl turned to the sound of my voice and
looked at me. "Please do not pick the poppies," I pleaded. They
pondered this for a minute; then the woman said something in an undertone
to the little girl, and both backs jack-knifed as the slaughter
recommenced. I shouted, but they had become suddenly deaf. I screamed,
and so fiercely that the little girl wavered dubiously. And while the
woman went on picking I could hear her in low tones heartening the little
girl.
I recollected a siren whistle with which I was wont to summon Johnny, the
son of my sister. It was a fearsome thing, of a kind to wake the dead,
and I blew and blew, but the jack-knifed backs never unclasped. I do not
mind with men, but I have never particularly favoured physical encounters
with women; yet this woman, who encouraged a little girl in iniquity,
tempted me.
I went into the bungalow and fetched my rifle. Flourishing it in a
sanguinary manner and scowling fearsomely, I charged upon the invaders.
The little girl fled, screaming, to the shelter of the pines, but the
woman calmly went on picking. She took not the least notice. I had
expected her to run at sight of me, and it was embarrassing. There was
I, charging down the field like a wild bull upon a woman who would not
get out of the way. I could only slow down, supremely conscious of how
ridiculous it all was. At a distance of ten feet she straightened up and
deigned to look at me. I came to a halt and blushed to the roots of my
hair. Perhaps I really did frighten her (I sometimes try to persuade
myself that this is so), or perhaps she took pity on me; but, at any
rate, she stalked out of my field with great composure, nay, majesty, her
arms brimming with orange and gold.
Nevertheless, thenceforward I saved my lungs and flourished my rifle.
Also, I made fresh generalizations. To commit robbery women take
advantage of their sex. Men have more respect for property than women.
Men are less insistent in crime than women. And women are less afraid of
guns than men. Likewise, we conquer the earth in hazard and battle by
the virtues of our mothers. We are a race of land-robbers and
sea-robbers, we Anglo-Saxons, and small wonder, when we suckle at the
breasts of a breed of women such as maraud my poppy field.
Still the pillage went on. Sirens and gun-flourishings were without
avail. The city folk were great of heart and undismayed, and I noted the
habit of "repeating" was becoming general. What booted it how often they
were driven forth if each time they were permitted to carry away their
ill-gotten plunder? When one has turned the same person away twice and
thrice an emotion arises somewhat akin to homicide. And when one has
once become conscious of this sanguinary feeling his whole destiny seems
to grip hold of him and drag him into the abyss. More than once I found
myself unconsciously pulling the rifle into position to get a sight on
the miserable trespassers. In my sleep I slew them in manifold ways and
threw their carcasses into the reservoir. Each day the temptation to
shoot them in the legs became more luring, and every day I felt my fate
calling to me imperiously. Visions of the gallows rose up before me, and
with the hemp about my neck I saw stretched out the pitiless future of my
children, dark with disgrace and shame. I became afraid of myself, and
Bess went about with anxious face, privily beseeching my friends to
entice me into taking a vacation. Then, and at the last gasp, came the
thought that saved me: _Why not confiscate_? If their forays were
bootless, in the nature of things their forays would cease.
The first to enter my field thereafter was a man.
I was waiting for him--And, oh joy! it was the "Repeater" himself, smugly
complacent with knowledge of past success. I dropped the rifle
negligently across the hollow of my arm and went down to him.
"I am sorry to trouble you for those poppies," I said in my oiliest
tones; "but really, you know, I must have them."
He regarded me speechlessly. It must have made a great picture. It
surely was dramatic. With the rifle across my arm and my suave request
still ringing in my ears, I felt like Black Bart, and Jesse James, and
Jack Sheppard, and Robin Hood, and whole generations of highwaymen.
"Come, come," I said, a little sharply and in what I imagined was the
true fashion; "I am sorry to inconvenience you, believe me, but I must
have those poppies."
I absently shifted the gun and smiled. That fetched him. Without a word
he passed them over and turned his toes toward the fence, but no longer
casual and careless was his carriage, I nor did he stoop to pick the
occasional poppy by the way. That was the last of the "Repeater." I
could see by his eyes that he did not like me, and his back reproached me
all the way down the field and out of sight.
From that day the bungalow has been flooded with poppies. Every vase and
earthen jar is filled with them. They blaze on every mantel and run riot
through all the rooms. I present them to my friends in huge bunches, and
still the kind city folk come and gather more for me. "Sit down for a
moment," I say to the departing guest. And there we sit in the shade of
the porch while aspiring city creatures pluck my poppies and sweat under
the brazen sun. And when their arms are sufficiently weighted with my
yellow glories, I go down with the rifle over my arm and disburden them.
Thus have I become convinced that every situation has its compensations.
Confiscation was successful, so far as it went; but I had forgotten one
thing; namely, the vast number of the city folk. Though the old
transgressors came no more, new ones arrived every day, and I found
myself confronted with the titanic task of educating a whole cityful to
the inexpediency of raiding my poppy field. During the process of
disburdening them I was accustomed to explaining my side of the case, but
I soon gave this over. It was a waste of breath. They could not
understand. To one lady, who insinuated that I was miserly, I said:
"My dear madam, no hardship is worked upon you. Had I not been
parsimonious yesterday and the day before, these poppies would have been
picked by the city hordes of that day and the day before, and your eyes,
which to-day have discovered this field, would have beheld no poppies at
all. The poppies you may not pick to-day are the poppies I did not
permit to be picked yesterday and the day before. Therefore, believe me,
you are denied nothing."
"But the poppies are here to-day," she said, glaring carnivorously upon
their glow and splendour.
"I will pay you for them," said a gentleman, at another time. (I had
just relieved him of an armful.) I felt a sudden shame, I know not why,
unless it be that his words had just made clear to me that a monetary as
well as an aesthetic value was attached to my flowers. The apparent
sordidness of my position overwhelmed me, and I said weakly: "I do not
sell my poppies. You may have what you have picked." But before the
week was out I confronted the same gentleman again. "I will pay you for
them," he said. "Yes," I said, "you may pay me for them. Twenty
dollars, please." He gasped, looked at me searchingly, gasped again, and
silently and sadly put the poppies down. But it remained, as usual, for
a woman to attain the sheerest pitch of audacity. When I declined
payment and demanded my plucked beauties, she refused to give them up.
"I picked these poppies," she said, "and my time is worth money. When
you have paid me for my time you may have them." Her cheeks flamed
rebellion, and her face, withal a pretty one, was set and determined.
Now, I was a man of the hill tribes, and she a mere woman of the city
folk, and though it is not my inclination to enter into details, it is my
pleasure to state that that bunch of poppies subsequently glorified the
bungalow and that the woman departed to the city unpaid. Anyway, they
were my poppies.
"They are God's poppies," said the Radiant Young Radical, democratically
shocked at sight of me turning city folk out of my field. And for two
weeks she hated me with a deathless hatred. I sought her out and
explained. I explained at length. I told the story of the poppy as
Maeterlinck has told the life of the bee. I treated the question
biologically, psychologically, and sociologically, I discussed it
ethically and aesthetically. I grew warm over it, and impassioned; and
when I had done, she professed conversion, but in my heart of hearts I
knew it to be compassion. I fled to other friends for consolation. I
retold the story of the poppy. They did not appear supremely interested.
I grew excited. They were surprised and pained. They looked at me
curiously. "It ill-befits your dignity to squabble over poppies," they
said. "It is unbecoming."
I fled away to yet other friends. I sought vindication. The thing had
become vital, and I needs must put myself right. I felt called upon to
explain, though well knowing that he who explains is lost. I told the
story of the poppy over again. I went into the minutest details. I
added to it, and expanded. I talked myself hoarse, and when I could talk
no more they looked bored. Also, they said insipid things, and soothful
things, and things concerning other things, and not at all to the point.
I was consumed with anger, and there and then I renounced them all.
At the bungalow I lie in wait for chance visitors. Craftily I broach the
subject, watching their faces closely the while to detect first signs of
disapprobation, whereupon I empty long-stored vials of wrath upon their
heads. I wrangle for hours with whosoever does not say I am right. I am
become like Guy de Maupassant's old man who picked up a piece of string.
I am incessantly explaining, and nobody will understand. I have become
more brusque in my treatment of the predatory city folk. No longer do I
take delight in their disburdenment, for it has become an onerous duty, a
wearisome and distasteful task. My friends look askance and murmur
pityingly on the side when we meet in the city. They rarely come to see
me now. They are afraid. I am an embittered and disappointed man, and
all the light seems to have gone out of my life and into my blazing
field. So one pays for things.
PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
_April_ 1902.
THE SHRINKAGE OF THE PLANET
What a tremendous affair it was, the world of Homer, with its
indeterminate boundaries, vast regions, and immeasurable distances. The
Mediterranean and the Euxine were illimitable stretches of ocean waste
over which years could be spent in endless wandering. On their
mysterious shores were the improbable homes of impossible peoples. The
Great Sea, the Broad Sea, the Boundless Sea; the Ethiopians, "dwelling
far away, the most distant of men," and the Cimmerians, "covered with
darkness and cloud," where "baleful night is spread over timid mortals."
Phoenicia was a sore journey, Egypt simply unattainable, while the
Pillars of Hercules marked the extreme edge of the universe. Ulysses was
nine days in sailing from Ismarus the city of the Ciconians, to the
country of the Lotus-eaters--a period of time which to-day would breed
anxiety in the hearts of the underwriters should it be occupied by the
slowest tramp steamer in traversing the Mediterranean and Black Seas from
Gibraltar to Sebastopol.
Homer's world, restricted to less than a drummer's circuit, was
nevertheless immense, surrounded by a thin veneer of universe--the Stream
of Ocean. But how it has shrunk! To-day, precisely charted, weighed,
and measured, a thousand times larger than the world of Homer, it is
become a tiny speck, gyrating to immutable law through a universe the
bounds of which have been pushed incalculably back. The light of Algol
shines upon it--a light which travels at one hundred and ninety thousand
miles per second, yet requires forty-seven years to reach its
destination. And the denizens of this puny ball have come to know that
Algol possesses an invisible companion, three and a quarter millions of
miles away, and that the twain move in their respective orbits at rates
of fifty-five and twenty-six miles per second. They also know that
beyond it are great chasms of space, innumerable worlds, and vast star
systems.
While much of the shrinkage to which the planet has been subjected is due
to the increased knowledge of mathematics and physics, an equal, if not
greater, portion may be ascribed to the perfection of the means of
locomotion and communication. The enlargement of stellar space,
demonstrating with stunning force the insignificance of the earth, has
been negative in its effect; but the quickening of travel and
intercourse, by making the earth's parts accessible and knitting them
together, has been positive.
The advantage of the animal over the vegetable kingdom is obvious. The
cabbage, should its environment tend to become worse, must live it out,
or die; the rabbit may move on in quest of a better. But, after all, the
swift-footed creatures are circumscribed in their wanderings. The first
large river almost inevitably bars their way, and certainly the first
salt sea becomes an impassable obstacle. Better locomotion may be
classed as one of the prime aims of the old natural selection; for in
that primordial day the race was to the swift as surely as the battle to
the strong. But man, already pre-eminent in the common domain because of
other faculties, was not content with the one form of locomotion afforded
by his lower limbs. He swam in the sea, and, still better, becoming
aware of the buoyant virtues of wood, learned to navigate its surface.
Likewise, from among the land animals he chose the more likely to bear
him and his burdens. The next step was the domestication of these useful
aids. Here, in its organic significance, natural selection ceased to
concern itself with locomotion. Man had displayed his impatience at her
tedious methods and his own superiority in the hastening of affairs.
Thenceforth he must depend upon himself, and faster-swimming or
faster-running men ceased to be bred. The one, half-amphibian, breasting
the water with muscular arms, could not hope to overtake or escape an
enemy who propelled a fire-hollowed tree trunk by means of a wooden
paddle; nor could the other, trusting to his own nimbleness, compete with
a foe who careered wildly across the plain on the back of a half-broken
stallion.
So, in that dim day, man took upon himself the task of increasing his
dominion over space and time, and right nobly has he acquitted himself.
Because of it he became a road builder and a bridge builder; likewise, he
wove clumsy sails of rush and matting. At a very remote period he must
also have recognized that force moves along the line of least resistance,
and in virtue thereof, placed upon his craft rude keels which enabled him
to beat to windward in a seaway. As he excelled in these humble arts,
just so did he add to his power over his less progressive fellows and lay
the foundations for the first glimmering civilizations--crude they were
beyond conception, sporadic and ephemeral, but each formed a necessary
part of the groundwork upon which was to rise the mighty civilization of
our latter-day world.
Divorced from the general history of man's upward climb, it would seem
incredible that so long a time should elapse between the moment of his
first improvements over nature in the matter of locomotion and that of
the radical changes he was ultimately to compass. The principles which
were his before history was, were his, neither more nor less, even to the
present century. He utilized improved applications, but the principles
of themselves were ever the same, whether in the war chariots of Achilles
and Pharaoh or the mail-coach and diligence of the European traveller,
the cavalry of the Huns or of Prince Rupert, the triremes and galleys of
Greece and Rome or the East India-men and clipper ships of the last
century. But when the moment came to alter the methods of travel, the
change was so sweeping that it may be safely classed as a revolution.
Though the discovery of steam attaches to the honour of the last century,
the potency of the new power was not felt till the beginning of this. By
1800 small steamers were being used for coasting purposes in England;
1830 witnessed the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; while
it was not until 1838 that the Atlantic was first crossed by the
steamships _Great Western_ and _Sirius_. In 1869 the East was made
next-door neighbour to the West. Over almost the same ground where had
toiled the caravans of a thousand generations, the Suez Canal was dug.
Clive, during his first trip, was a year and a half _en route_ from
England to India; were he alive to-day he could journey to Calcutta in
twenty-two days. After reading De Quincey's hyperbolical description of
the English mail-coach, one cannot down the desire to place that
remarkable man on the pilot of the White Mail or of the Twentieth
Century.
But this tremendous change in the means of locomotion meant far more than
the mere rapid transit of men from place to place. Until then, though
its influence and worth cannot be overestimated, commerce had eked out a
precarious and costly existence. The fortuitous played too large a part
in the trade of men. The mischances by land and sea, the mistakes and
delays, were adverse elements of no mean proportions. But improved
locomotion meant improved carrying, and commerce received an impetus as
remarkable as it was unexpected. In his fondest fancies James Watt could
not have foreseen even the approximate result of his invention, the
Hercules which was to spring from the puny child of his brain and hands.
An illuminating spectacle, were it possible, would be afforded by
summoning him from among the Shades to a place in the engine-room of an
ocean greyhound. The humblest trimmer would treat him with the
indulgence of a child; while an oiler, a greasy nimbus about his head and
in his hand, as sceptre, a long-snouted can, would indeed appear to him a
demigod and ruler of forces beyond his ken.
It has ever been the world's dictum that empire and commerce go hand in
hand. In the past the one was impossible without the other. Rome
gathered to herself the wealth of the Mediterranean nations, and it was
only by an unwise distribution of it that she became emasculated and lost
both power and trade. With a just system of economics it is highly
probable that for centuries she could have held back the welling tide of
the Germanic peoples. When upon her ruins rose the institutions of the
conquering Teutons, commerce slipped away, and with it empire. In the
present, empire and commerce have become interdependent. Such wonders
has the industrial revolution wrought in a few swift decades, and so
great has been the shrinkage of the planet, that the industrial nations
have long since felt the imperative demand for foreign markets. The
favoured portions of the earth are occupied. From their seats in the
temperate zones the militant commercial nations proceed to the
exploitation of the tropics, and for the possession of these they rush to
war hot-footed. Like wolves at the end of a gorge, they wrangle over the
fragments. There are no more planets, no more fragments, and they are
yet hungry. There are no longer Cimmerians and Ethiopians, in
wide-stretching lands, awaiting them. On either hand they confront the
naked poles, and they recoil from unnavigable space to an intenser
struggle among themselves. And all the while the planet shrinks beneath
their grasp.
Of this struggle one thing may be safely predicated; a commercial power
must be a sea power. Upon the control of the sea depends the control of
trade. Carthage threatened Rome till she lost her navy; and then for
thirteen days the smoke of her burning rose to the skies, and the ground
was ploughed and sown with salt on the site of her most splendid
edifices. The cities of Italy were the world's merchants till new trade
routes were discovered and the dominion of the sea passed on to the west
and fell into other hands. Spain and Portugal, inaugurating an era of
maritime discovery, divided the new world between them, but gave way
before a breed of sea-rovers, who, after many generations of attachment
to the soil, had returned to their ancient element. With the destruction
of her Armada Spain's colossal dream of colonial empire passed away.
Against the new power Holland strove in vain, and when France
acknowledged the superiority of the Briton upon the sea, she at the same
time relinquished her designs upon the world. Hampered by her feeble
navy, her contest for supremacy upon the land was her last effort and
with the passing of Napoleon she retired within herself to struggle with
herself as best she might. For fifty years England held undisputed sway
upon the sea, controlled markets, and domineered trade, laying, during
that period, the foundations of her empire. Since then other naval
powers have arisen, their attitudes bearing significantly upon the
future; for they have learned that the mastery of the world belongs to
the masters of the sea.
That many of the phases of this world shrinkage are pathetic, goes
without question. There is much to condemn in the rise of the economic
over the imaginative spirit, much for which the energetic Philistine can
never atone. Perhaps the deepest pathos of all may be found in the
spectacle of John Ruskin weeping at the profanation of the world by the
vandalism of the age. Steam launches violate the sanctity of the
Venetian canals; where Xerxes bridged the Hellespont ply the filthy
funnels of our modern shipping; electric cars run in the shadow of the
pyramids; and it was only the other day that Lord Kitchener was in a
railroad wreck near the site of ancient Luxor. But there is always the
other side. If the economic man has defiled temples and despoiled
nature, he has also preserved. He has policed the world and parked it,
reduced the dangers of life and limb, made the tenure of existence less
precarious, and rendered a general relapse of society impossible. There
can never again be an intellectual holocaust, such as the burning of the
Alexandrian library. Civilizations may wax and wane, but the totality of
knowledge cannot decrease. With the possible exception of a few trade
secrets, arts and sciences may be discarded, but they can never be lost.
And these things must remain true until the end of man's time upon the
earth.
Up to yesterday communication for any distance beyond the sound of the
human voice or the sight of the human eye was bound up with locomotion.
A letter presupposed a carrier. The messenger started with the message,
and he could not but avail himself of the prevailing modes of travel. If
the voyage to Australia required four months, four months were required
for communication; by no known means could this time be lessened. But
with the advent of the telegraph and telephone, communication and
locomotion were divorced. In a few hours, at most, there could be
performed what by the old way would have required months. In 1837 the
needle telegraph was invented, and nine years later the Electric
Telegraph Company was formed for the purpose of bringing it into general
use. Government postal systems also came into being, later to
consolidate into an international union and to group the nations of the
earth into a local neighbourhood. The effects of all this are obvious,
and no fitter illustration may be presented than the fact that to-day, in
the matter of communication, the Klondike is virtually nearer to Boston
than was Bunker Hill in the time of Warren.
A contemporaneous and remarkable shrinkage of a vast stretch of territory
may be instanced in the Northland. From its rise at Lake Linderman the
Yukon runs twenty-five hundred miles to Bering Sea, traversing an almost
unknown region, the remote recesses of which had never felt the
moccasined foot of the pathfinder. At occasional intervals men wallowed
into its dismal fastnesses, or emerged gaunt and famine-worn. But in the
fall of 1896 a great gold strike was made--greater than any since the
days of California and Australia; yet, so rude were the means of
communication, nearly a year elapsed before the news of it reached the
eager ear of the world. Passionate pilgrims disembarked their outfits at
Dyea. Over the terrible Chilcoot Pass the trail led to the lakes, thirty
miles away. Carriage was yet in its most primitive stage, the road
builder and bridge builder unheard of. With heavy packs upon their backs
men plunged waist-deep into hideous quagmires, bridged mountain torrents
by felling trees across them, toiled against the precipitous slopes of
the ice-worn mountains, and crossed the dizzy faces of innumerable
glaciers. When, after incalculable toil they reached the lakes, they
went into the woods, sawed pine trees into lumber by hand, and built it
into boats. In these, overloaded, unseaworthy, they battled down the
long chain of lakes. Within the memory of the writer there lingers the
picture of a sheltered nook on the shores of Lake Le Barge, in which half
a thousand gold seekers lay storm-bound. Day after day they struggled
against the seas in the teeth of a northerly gale, and night after night
returned to their camps, repulsed but not disheartened. At the rapids
they ran their boats through, hit or miss, and after infinite toil and
hardship, on the breast of a jarring ice flood, arrived at the Klondike.
From the beach at Dyea to the eddy below the Barracks at Dawson, they had
paid for their temerity the tax of human life demanded by the elements.
A year later, so greatly had the country shrunk, the tourist, on
disembarking from the ocean steamship, took his seat in a modern railway
coach. A few hours later, at Lake Bennet, he stepped aboard a commodious
river steamer. At the rapids he rode around on a tramway to take passage
on another steamer below. And in a few hours more he was in Dawson,
without having once soiled the lustre of his civilized foot-gear. Did he
wish to communicate with the outside world, he strolled into the
telegraph office. A few short months before he would have written a
letter and deemed himself favoured above mortals were it delivered within
the year.
From man's drawing the world closer and closer together, his own affairs
and institutions have consolidated. Concentration may typify the chief
movement of the age--concentration, classification, order; the reduction
of friction between the parts of the social organism. The urban tendency
of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities.
There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked
the evil. Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city
which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of
domestic happiness. Between the two, night and morning, by electric
road, steam railway, and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class
population. And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement
evil. In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist. Improvement
in road-beds and the means of locomotion, a tremor of altruism, a little
legislation, and the city by day will sleep in the country by night.
What a play-ball has this planet of ours become! Steam has made its
parts accessible and drawn them closer together. The telegraph
annihilates space and time. Each morning every part knows what every
other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing. A discovery in a German
laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within twenty-four
hours. A book written in South Africa is published by simultaneous
copyright in every English-speaking country, and on the following day is
in the hands of the translators. The death of an obscure missionary in
China, or of a whisky smuggler in the South Seas, is served up, the world
over, with the morning toast. The wheat output of Argentine or the gold
of Klondike is known wherever men meet and trade. Shrinkage or
centralization has been such that the humblest clerk in any metropolis
may place his hand on the pulse of the world. And because of all this,
everywhere is growing order and organization. The church, the state;
men, women, and children; the criminal and the law, the honest man and
the thief, industry and commerce, capital and labour, the trades and the
professions, the arts and the sciences--all are organizing for pleasure,
profit, policy, or intellectual pursuit. They have come to know the
strength of numbers, solidly phalanxed and driving onward with singleness
of purpose. These purposes may be various and many, but one and all,
ever discovering new mutual interests and objects, obeying a law which is
beyond them, these petty aggregations draw closer together, forming
greater aggregations and congeries of aggregations. And these, in turn,
vaguely merging each into each, present glimmering adumbrations of the
coming human solidarity which shall be man's crowning glory.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
_January_ 1900.
THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL
Speaking of homes, I am building one now, and I venture to assert that
very few homes have received more serious thought in the planning. Let
me tell you about it. In the first place, there will be no grounds
whatever, no fences, lawns, nor flowers. Roughly, the dimensions will be
forty-five feet by fifteen. That is, it will be fifteen feet wide at its
widest--and, if you will pardon the bull, it will be narrower than it is
wide.
The details must submit to the general plan of economy. There will be no
veranda, no porch entrances, no grand staircases. I'm ashamed to say how
steep the stairways are going to be. The bedrooms will be seven by
seven, and one will be even smaller. A bedroom is only good to sleep in,
anyway. There will be no hallway, thank goodness. Rooms were made to go
through. Why a separate passage for traffic?
The bath-room will be a trifle larger than the size of the smallest
bath-tub--it won't require so much work to keep in order. The kitchen
won't be very much larger, but this will make it easy for the cook. In
place of a drawing-room, there will be a large living-room--fourteen by
six. The walls of this room will be covered with books, and it can serve
as library and smoking-room as well. Then, the floor-space not being
occupied, we shall use the room as a dining-room. Incidentally, such a
room not being used after bedtime, the cook and the second boy can sleep
in it. One thing that I am temperamentally opposed to is waste, and why
should all this splendid room be wasted at night when we do not occupy
it?
My ideas are cramped, you say?--Oh, I forgot to tell you that this home I
am describing is to be a floating home, and that my wife and I are to
journey around the world in it for the matter of seven years or more. I
forgot also to state that there will be an engine-room in it for a
seventy-horse-power engine, a dynamo, storage batteries, etc.; tanks for
water to last long weeks at sea; space for fifteen hundred gallons of
gasolene, fire extinguishers, and life-preservers; and a great store-room
for food, spare sails, anchors, hawsers, tackles, and a thousand and one
other things.
Since I have not yet built my land house, I haven't got beyond a few
general ideas, and in presenting them I feel as cocksure as the unmarried
woman who writes the column in the Sunday supplement on how to rear
children. My first idea about a house is that it should be built to live
in. Throughout the house, in all the building of it, this should be the
paramount idea. It must be granted that this idea is lost sight of by
countless persons who build houses apparently for every purpose under the
sun except to live in them.
Perhaps it is because of the practical life I have lived that I worship
utility and have come to believe that utility and beauty should be one,
and that there is no utility that need not be beautiful. What finer
beauty than strength--whether it be airy steel, or massive masonry, or a
woman's hand? A plain black leather strap is beautiful. It is all
strength and all utility, and it is beautiful. It efficiently performs
work in the world, and it is good to look upon. Perhaps it is because it
is useful that it is beautiful. I do not know. I sometimes wonder.
A boat on the sea is beautiful. Yet it is not built for beauty. Every
graceful line of it is a utility, is designed to perform work. It is
created for the express purpose of dividing the water in front of it, of
gliding over the water beneath it, of leaving the water behind it--and
all with the least possible wastage of stress and friction. It is not
created for the purpose of filling the eye with beauty. It is created
for the purpose of moving through the sea and over the sea with the
smallest resistance and the greatest stability; yet, somehow, it does
fill the eye with its beauty. And in so far as a boat fails in its
purpose, by that much does it diminish in beauty.
I am still a long way from the house I have in my mind some day to build,
yet I have arrived somewhere. I have discovered, to my own satisfaction
at any rate, that beauty and utility should be one. In applying this
general idea to the building of a house, it may be stated, in another and
better way; namely, construction and decoration must be one. This idea
is more important than the building of the house, for without the idea
the house so built is certain to be an insult to intelligence and
beauty-love.
I bought a house in a hurry in the city of Oakland some time ago. I do
not live in it. I sleep in it half a dozen times a year. I do not love
the house. I am hurt every time I look at it. No drunken rowdy or
political enemy can insult me so deeply as that house does. Let me tell
you why. It is an ordinary two-storey frame house. After it was built,
the criminal that constructed it nailed on, at the corners
perpendicularly, some two-inch fluted planks. These planks rise the
height of the house, and to a drunken man have the appearance of fluted
columns. To complete the illusion in the eyes of the drunken man, the
planks are topped with wooden Ionic capitals, nailed on, and in, I may
say, bas-relief.
When I analyze the irritation these fluted planks cause in me, I find the
reason in the fact that the first rule for building a house has been
violated. These decorative planks are no part of the construction. They
have no use, no work to perform. They are plastered gawds that tell lies
that nobody believes. A column is made for the purpose of supporting
weight; this is its use. A column, when it is a utility, is beautiful.
The fluted wooden columns nailed on outside my house are not utilities.
They are not beautiful. They are nightmares. They not only support no
weight, but they themselves are a weight that drags upon the supports of
the house. Some day, when I get time, one of two things will surely
happen. Either I'll go forth and murder the man who perpetrated the
atrocity, or else I'll take an axe and chop off the lying, fluted planks.
A thing must be true, or it is not beautiful, any more than a painted
wanton is beautiful, any more than a sky-scraper is beautiful that is
intrinsically and structurally light and that has a false massiveness of
pillars plastered on outside. The true sky-scraper _is_ beautiful--and
this is the reluctant admission of a man who dislikes humanity-festering
cities. The true sky-scraper is beautiful, and it is beautiful in so far
as it is true. In its construction it is light and airy, therefore in
its appearance it must be light and airy. It dare not, if it wishes to
be beautiful, lay claim to what it is not. And it should not bulk on the
city-scape like Leviathan; it should rise and soar, light and airy and
fairylike.
Man is an ethical animal--or, at least, he is more ethical than any other
animal. Wherefore he has certain yearnings for honesty. And in no way
can these yearnings be more thoroughly satisfied than by the honesty of
the house in which he lives and passes the greater part of his life.
They that dwelt in San Francisco were dishonest. They lied and cheated
in their business life (like the dwellers in all cities), and because
they lied and cheated in their business life, they lied and cheated in
the buildings they erected. Upon the tops of the simple, severe walls of
their buildings they plastered huge projecting cornices. These cornices
were not part of the construction. They made believe to be part of the
construction, and they were lies. The earth wrinkled its back for
twenty-eight seconds, and the lying cornices crashed down as all lies are
doomed to crash down. In this particular instance, the lies crashed down
upon the heads of the people fleeing from their reeling habitations, and
many were killed. They paid the penalty of dishonesty.
Not alone should the construction of a house be truthful and honest, but
the material must be honest. They that lived in San Francisco were
dishonest in the material they used. They sold one quality of material
and delivered another quality of material. They always delivered an
inferior quality. There is not one case recorded in the business history
of San Francisco where a contractor or builder delivered a quality
superior to the one sold. A seven-million-dollar city hall became thirty
cents in twenty-eight seconds. Because the mortar was not honest, a
thousand walls crashed down and scores of lives were snuffed out. There
is something, after all, in the contention of a few religionists that the
San Francisco earthquake was a punishment for sin. It was a punishment
for sin; but it was not for sin against God. The people of San Francisco
sinned against themselves.
An honest house tells the truth about itself. There is a house here in
Glen Ellen. It stands on a corner. It is built of beautiful red stone.
Yet it is not beautiful. On three sides the stone is joined and pointed.
The fourth side is the rear. It faces the back yard. The stone is not
pointed. It is all a smudge of dirty mortar, with here and there bricks
worked in when the stone gave out. The house is not what it seems. It
is a lie. All three of the walls spend their time lying about the fourth
wall. They keep shouting out that the fourth wall is as beautiful as
they. If I lived long in that house I should not be responsible for my
morals. The house is like a man in purple and fine linen, who hasn't had
a bath for a month. If I lived long in that house I should become a
dandy and cut out bathing--for the same reason, I suppose, that an
African is black and that an Eskimo eats whale-blubber. I shall not
build a house like that house.
Last year I started to build a barn. A man who was a liar undertook to
do the stonework and concrete work for me. He could not tell the truth
to my face; he could not tell the truth in his work. I was building for
posterity. The concrete foundations were four feet wide and sunk three
and one-half feet into the earth. The stone walls were two feet thick
and nine feet high. Upon them were to rest the great beams that were to
carry all the weight of hay and the forty tons of the roof. The man who
was a liar made beautiful stone walls. I used to stand alongside of them
and love them. I caressed their massive strength with my hands. I
thought about them in bed, before I went to sheep. And they were lies.
Came the earthquake. Fortunately the rest of the building of the barn
had been postponed. The beautiful stone walls cracked in all directions.
I started, to repair, and discovered the whole enormous lie. The walls
were shells. On each face were beautiful, massive stones--on edge. The
inside was hollow. This hollow in some places was filled with clay and
loose gravel. In other places it was filled with air and emptiness, with
here and there a piece of kindling-wood or dry-goods box, to aid in the
making of the shell. The walls were lies. They were beautiful, but they
were not useful. Construction and decoration had been divorced. The
walls were all decoration. They hadn't any construction in them. "As
God lets Satan live," I let that lying man live, but--I have built new
walls from the foundation up.
And now to my own house beautiful, which I shall build some seven or ten
years from now. I have a few general ideas about it. It must be honest
in construction, material, and appearance. If any feature of it, despite
my efforts, shall tell lies, I shall remove that feature. Utility and
beauty must be indissolubly wedded. Construction and decoration must be
one. If the particular details keep true to these general ideas, all
will be well.
I have not thought of many details. But here are a few. Take the
bath-room, for instance. It shall be as beautiful as any room in the
house, just as it will be as useful. The chance is, that it will be the
most expensive room in the house. Upon that we are resolved--even if we
are compelled to build it first, and to live in a tent till we can get
more money to go on with the rest of the house. In the bath-room no
delights of the bath shall be lacking. Also, a large part of the
expensiveness will be due to the use of material that will make it easy
to keep the bathroom clean and in order. Why should a servant toil
unduly that my body may be clean? On the other hand, the honesty of my
own flesh, and the square dealing I give it, are more important than all
the admiration of my friends for expensive decorative schemes and
magnificent trivialities. More delightful to me is a body that sings
than a stately and costly grand staircase built for show. Not that I
like grand staircases less, but that I like bath-rooms more.
I often regret that I was born in this particular period of the world.
In the matter of servants, how I wish I were living in the golden future
of the world, where there will be no servants--naught but service of
love. But in the meantime, living here and now, being practical,
understanding the rationality and the necessity of the division of
labour, I accept servants. But such acceptance does not justify me in
lack of consideration for them. In my house beautiful their rooms shall
not be dens and holes. And on this score I foresee a fight with the
architect. They shall have bath-rooms, toilet conveniences, and comforts
for their leisure time and human life--if I have to work Sundays to pay
for it. Even under the division of labour I recognize that no man has a
right to servants who will not treat them as humans compounded of the
same clay as himself, with similar bundles of nerves and desires,
contradictions, irritabilities, and lovablenesses. Heaven in the
drawing-room and hell in the kitchen is not the atmosphere for a growing
child to breathe--nor an adult either. One of the great and selfish
objections to chattel slavery was the effect on the masters themselves.
And because of the foregoing, one chief aim in the building of my house
beautiful will be to have a house that will require the minimum of
trouble and work to keep clean and orderly. It will be no spick and span
and polished house, with an immaculateness that testifies to the tragedy
of drudge. I live in California where the days are warm. I'd prefer
that the servants had three hours to go swimming (or hammocking) than be
compelled to spend those three hours in keeping the house spick and span.
Therefore it devolves upon me to build a house that can be kept clean and
orderly without the need of those three hours.
But underneath the spick and span there is something more dreadful than
the servitude of the servants. This dreadful thing is the philosophy of
the spick and span. In Korea the national costume is white. Nobleman
and coolie dress alike in white. It is hell on the women who do the
washing, but there is more in it than that. The coolie cannot keep his
white clothes clean. He toils and they get dirty. The dirty white of
his costume is the token of his inferiority. The nobleman's dress is
always spotless white. It means that he doesn't have to work. But it
means, further, that somebody else has to work for him. His superiority
is not based upon song-craft nor state-craft, upon the foot-races he has
run nor the wrestlers he has thrown. His superiority is based upon the
fact that he doesn't have to work, and that others are compelled to work
for him. And so the Korean drone flaunts his clean white clothes, for
the same reason that the Chinese flaunts his monstrous finger-nails, and
the white man and woman flaunt the spick-and-spanness of their spotless
houses.
There will be hardwood floors in my house beautiful. But these floors
will not be polished mirrors nor skating-rinks. They will be just plain
and common hardwood floors. Beautiful carpets are not beautiful to the
mind that knows they are filled with germs and bacilli. They are no more
beautiful than the hectic flush of fever, or the silvery skin of leprosy.
Besides, carpets enslave. A thing that enslaves is a monster, and
monsters are not beautiful.
The fireplaces in my house will be many and large. Small fires and cold
weather mean hermetically-sealed rooms and a jealous cherishing of heated
and filth-laden air. With large fire-places and generous heat, some
windows may be open all the time, and without hardship all the windows
can be opened every little while and the rooms flushed with clean pure
air. I have nearly died in the stagnant, rotten air of other people's
houses--especially in the Eastern states. In Maine I have slept in a
room with storm-windows immovable, and with one small pane five inches by
six, that could be opened. Did I say slept? I panted with my mouth in
the opening and blasphemed till I ruined all my chances of heaven.
For countless thousands of years my ancestors have lived and died and
drawn all their breaths in the open air. It is only recently that we
have begun to live in houses. The change is a hardship, especially on
the lungs. I've got only one pair of lungs, and I haven't the address of
any repair-shop. Wherefore I stick by the open air as much as possible.
For this reason my house will have large verandas, and, near to the
kitchen, there will be a veranda dining-room. Also, there will be a
veranda fireplace, where we can breathe fresh air and be comfortable when
the evenings are touched with frost.
I have a plan for my own bedroom. I spend long hours in bed, reading,
studying, and working. I have tried sleeping in the open, but the lamp
attracts all the creeping, crawling, butting, flying, fluttering things
to the pages of my book, into my ears and blankets, and down the back of
my neck. So my bedroom shall be indoors.
But it will be, not be of, indoors. Three sides of it will be open. The
fourth side will divide it from the rest of the house. The three sides
will be screened against the creeping, fluttering things, but not against
the good fresh air and all the breezes that blow. For protection against
storm, to keep out the driving rain, there will be a sliding glass, so
made that when not in use it will occupy small space and shut out very
little air.
There is little more to say about this house. I am to build seven or ten
years from now. There is plenty of time in which to work up all the
details in accord with the general principles I have laid down. It will
be a usable house and a beautiful house, wherein the aesthetic guest can
find comfort for his eyes as well as for his body. It will be a happy
house--or else I'll burn it down. It will be a house of air and sunshine
and laughter. These three cannot be divorced. Laughter without air and
sunshine becomes morbid, decadent, demoniac. I have in me a thousand
generations. Laughter that is decadent is not good for these thousand
generations.
GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
_July_ 1906.
THE GOLD HUNTERS OF THE NORTH
"Where the Northern Lights come down a' nights to dance on the
houseless snow."
"Ivan, I forbid you to go farther in this undertaking. Not a word about
this, or we are all undone. Let the Americans and the English know that
we have gold in these mountains, then we are ruined. They will rush in
on us by thousands, and crowd us to the wall--to the death."
So spoke the old Russian governor, Baranov, at Sitka, in 1804, to one of
his Slavonian hunters, who had just drawn from his pocket a handful of
golden nuggets. Full well Baranov, fur trader and autocrat, understood
and feared the coming of the sturdy, indomitable gold hunters of
Anglo-Saxon stock. And thus he suppressed the news, as did the governors
that followed him, so that when the United States bought Alaska in 1867,
she bought it for its furs and fisheries, without a thought of its
treasures underground.
No sooner, however, had Alaska become American soil than thousands of our
adventurers were afoot and afloat for the north. They were the men of
"the days of gold," the men of California, Fraser, Cassiar, and Cariboo.
With the mysterious, infinite faith of the prospector, they believed that
the gold streak, which ran through the Americas from Cape Horn to
California, did not "peter out" in British Columbia. That it extended
farther north, was their creed, and "Farther North" became their cry. No
time was lost, and in the early seventies, leaving the Treadwell and the
Silver Bow Basin to be discovered by those who came after, they went
plunging on into the white unknown. North, farther north, they
struggled, till their picks rang in the frozen beaches of the Arctic
Ocean, and they shivered by driftwood fires on the ruby sands of Nome.
But first, in order that this colossal adventure may be fully grasped,
the recentness and the remoteness of Alaska must be emphasized. The
interior of Alaska and the contiguous Canadian territory was a vast
wilderness. Its hundreds of thousands of square miles were as dark and
chartless as Darkest Africa. In 1847, when the first Hudson Bay Company
agents crossed over the Rockies from the Mackenzie to poach on the
preserves of the Russian Bear, they thought that the Yukon flowed north
and emptied into the Arctic Ocean. Hundreds of miles below, however,
were the outposts of the Russian traders. They, in turn, did not know
where the Yukon had its source, and it was not till later that Russ and
Saxon learned that it was the same mighty stream they were occupying.
And a little over ten years later, Frederick Whymper voyaged up the Great
Bend to Fort Yukon under the Arctic Circle.
From fort to fort, from York Factory on Hudson's Bay to Fort Yukon in
Alaska, the English traders transported their goods--a round trip
requiring from a year to a year and a half. It was one of their
deserters, in 1867, escaping down the Yukon to Bering Sea, who was the
first white man to make the North-west Passage by land from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. It was at this time that the first accurate description
of a fair portion of the Yukon was given by Dr. W. H. Ball, of the
Smithsonian Institution. But even he had never seen its source, and it
was not given him to appreciate the marvel of that great natural highway.
No more remarkable river in this one particular is there in the world;
taking its rise in Crater Lake, thirty miles from the ocean, the Yukon
flows for twenty-five hundred miles, through the heart of the continent,
ere it empties into the sea. A portage of thirty miles, and then a
highway for traffic one tenth the girth of the earth!
As late as 1869, Frederick Whymper, fellow of the Royal Geographical
Society, stated on hearsay that the Chilcat Indians were believed
occasionally to make a short portage across the Coast Range from salt
water to the head-reaches of the Yukon. But it remained for a gold
hunter, questing north, ever north, to be first of all white men to cross
the terrible Chilcoot Pass, and tap the Yukon at its head. This happened
only the other day, but the man has become a dim legendary hero. Holt
was his name, and already the mists of antiquity have wrapped about the
time of his passage. 1872, 1874, and 1878 are the dates variously
given--a confusion which time will never clear.
Holt penetrated as far as the Hootalinqua, and on his return to the coast
reported coarse gold. The next recorded adventurer is one Edward Bean,
who in 1880 headed a party of twenty-five miners from Sitka into the
uncharted land. And in the same year, other parties (now forgotten, for
who remembers or ever hears the wanderings of the gold hunters?) crossed
the Pass, built boats out of the standing timber, and drifted down the
Yukon and farther north.
And then, for a quarter of a century, the unknown and unsung heroes
grappled with the frost, and groped for the gold they were sure lay
somewhere among the shadows of the Pole. In the struggle with the
terrifying and pitiless natural forces, they returned to the primitive,
garmenting themselves in the skins of wild beasts, and covering their
feet with the walrus _mucluc_ and the moosehide moccasin. They forgot
the world and its ways, as the world had forgotten them; killed their
meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in famine, and
searched unceasingly for the yellow lure. They crisscrossed the land in
every direction, threaded countless unmapped rivers in precarious
birch-bark canoes, and with snowshoes and dogs broke trail through
thousands of miles of silent white, where man had never been. They
struggled on, under the aurora borealis or the midnight sun, through
temperatures that ranged from one hundred degrees above zero to eighty
degrees below, living, in the grim humour of the land, on "rabbit tracks
and salmon bellies."
To-day, a man may wander away from the trail for a hundred days, and just
as he is congratulating himself that at last he is treading virgin soil,
he will come upon some ancient and dilapidated cabin, and forget his
disappointment in wonder at the man who reared the logs. Still, if one
wanders from the trail far enough and deviously enough, he may chance
upon a few thousand square miles which he may have all to himself. On
the other hand, no matter how far and how deviously he may wander, the
possibility always remains that he may stumble, not alone upon a deserted
cabin, but upon an occupied one.
As an instance of this, and of the vastness of the land, no better case
need be cited than that of Harry Maxwell. An able seaman, hailing from
New Bedford, Massachusetts, his ship, the brig _Fannie E. Lee_, was
pinched in the Arctic ice. Passing from whaleship to whaleship, he
eventually turned up at Point Barrow in the summer of 1880. He was
_north_ of the Northland, and from this point of vantage he determined to
pull south of the interior in search of gold. Across the mountains from
Fort Macpherson, and a couple of hundred miles eastward from the
Mackenzie, he built a cabin and established his headquarters. And here,
for nineteen continuou
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