The Arena. Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891

With the coming of June came a number of strangers to the mountain. They always came in the warm season, but they quartered themselves over in the town, beyond the stockade, and the stench, and filth, and crime found there.

Only one, a young man, a minister who had been expelled from the church in the city where he had preached, found his way to the prison. He went out one Sunday afternoon, and asked permission to preach to the convicts. It was freely granted. Such wild heresy! Such odd, eccentric ideas! Such flights of oratory! Such fiery brands tossed into the old tabernacles of religious belief! Such blows upon the old batteries of narrowness and impossibility! They had never heard anything like it. Had he preached thus anywhere else he would have been promptly silenced. But a lot of convicts was not an audience likely to be injured by the too free circulating of the doctrine he advocated. What if he should convince them that eternal punishment was a myth, and an insult flung in the face of the Creator? A slur upon His justice, and a lie to His divine goodness? What if he snapped his finger at a lake of brimstone and of eternal fire? And his wild ravings about an inconsistent Being, accepted as the head of all wisdom, and tenderness,—and mercy, and at the same time as the perfection of all cruelty and injustice, in that He creates only to destroy,—what if the seed scattered should take root? What if those old sin-blackened souls should comfort themselves with the new doctrine, the idea that no good can be lost? God cannot be God and destroy any good thing. It is wicked, it is devilish to kill that which is good. God cannot be wicked and be the good God, the kind All-Father, at the same time. Nor has He created any so vile as to be without some one virtue. In the dust of the evil He has not failed to drop one grain of gold to glisten, and to make glad the dull waste of life. The grain is there, planted by God’s hand, in every soul. It was in their souls, poor, old, sin-covered, forsaken souls, toiling up to the light through those begrimed walls among the filth, and dust, and mould. Not one of them but was God’s work, and bore His grain of gold. None would be lost, not one. What matter if the prison registrar’s table of deaths did record so many, Found dead! Drowned! Killed! Shot! Blank! Blank! Blank! Meaning they disappeared, nobody knows how or when.

It was a strange, sweet hope to them, that came in that wild sermon of a bishop-silenced young heretic. They thought about it a good deal, and began, some of them whose terms were to expire with life, to dig down into the rust and mire with the spade of conscience for the hidden grain.

The minister was at the stockade often, cheering, sympathizing, and always comforting the convicts with the certainty of eternal love, and the folly of eternal punishment. One day he stumbled upon a man who was being strapped and prepared for punishment at the pump. His face was sullen, and there were splotches of blood on his clothes, and he limped when he attempted to walk. Still there was something in the old, young face, that neither cruelty nor threats could kill. They might turn on the icy water, and exhaust themselves with lashing him, but that stoic determination would not yield. They might murder him, but from his fixed, dead eyes, it would glare at them, that same heroic, immovable something that had shone in the staring eyes of his dead mother.

No visitors were allowed in that part of the prison, so the minister held back until, fearing the limp figure under the pump would be beaten to death by the cruel pour of water upon his head, he stepped forward to interfere.

“In God’s name, I beg you stop,” he cried, his hand uplifted, his eyes full of tears. “Your punishment is beastly. What has the fellow done? Is someone murdered?”

“Someone ought to be,” sullenly replied the man at the pump-handle. “And someone might be if this sneaking rascal was the only hope of preventing it.”

There had been a plot among the convicts to batter down the shaky old stockade, and break for freedom. They had secured a gun and some ammunition, where, no one could tell, and the plot had well-nigh succeeded. The guard on the wall had been killed, three men had escaped, and the prison bloodhounds were lying in the kennel with their throats cut.

Already the governor of the State had telegraphed freedom to the convicts not in the scheme who would give the names of those engaged in it. Even the leader’s name; for that freedom was offered, pardon unconditional.

Something let fall discovered to the warden that Jim, while not in, was familiar with the whole history of the insurrection. The offer of freedom had no further effect upon him than a careless refusal to comply with the terms set forth. But when force was suggested, he set his lips in that old way that belonged to his mother, and said nothing. Three days they gave him to “knock under.” But the only change noticeable during that time was a more decided sullenness, a look in the cold, gray eyes that meant death rather than yielding.

Once the soft-voiced young man who had put out his hand in his defence the day of his arrival at the stockade, and had afterward called him “friend,” the only time he had ever heard the word addressed to himself, once he came over where Jim sat cleaning the warden’s boots, and motioned him.

Jim shook his head, and went on blacking the big boots. But when the young convict drew nearer, and tried to take his hand, he drew back, and struck at him viciously with the blacking brush.

“Git out, will you! And don’t come a-fooling with this brush, lest you want your d—n head broke.”

He had seen a guard spying upon them at a half open door in the rear of the young convict. At Jim’s outburst of temper the guard entered.

“Come away from him, Solly,” he said, “the surly beast is as like as not to knock your brains out.”

The convict turned to obey, but the glance he got of Jim’s face carried a full explanation. The temper was affected to keep down suspicion. After that came the punishment at the pump, the merciless beating, and then, all things proving unavailing, he was put in the dungeon to have the “truth starved out of him.”

After three days he was brought out, faint, pale, ready to die at every step, but with that same immovable something shining in his eyes, and his lips still set in the old way that he had of his mother.

His hands were manacled, and an iron chain clanked about his feet as he dragged them wearily one after the other. For three days he had tasted no food, except a rat that he had caught in the dungeon. He ate it raw, like a dog, and searched eagerly for another. Just as he had found it, and skinned it with the help of his teeth, the guard peered through the grating, and seeing what he was doing, entered, and put handcuffs upon him, after first removing the raw flesh to a point where he could see, but not touch it. And there it lay, torturing him while he starved. And there it lay until it became carrion, and tortured him again. And then they had dragged him out again, out under the blue sky, where the trees—the old sweet-smelling pines—were waving their purple plumes upon the distant mountains, and the wild grape filled the air with perfume, and the wild roses were pink as childhood’s sweet, young dreams, and over all was bended the blue heaven. And heaven spread before him, heaven; behind him lay hell, fifteen years of it less one. And they gave him choice again betwixt the two. They even crammed a bit of moral in the offer. “It was right,” they said, “to tell on those who had broken the prison regulations, mere justice to the lessees.” Right! too late to talk to him of right. He glanced once at the pines, going farther away, whiffed at the pleasant odor of the grape blooms, waved his hand to the roses, in farewell, perhaps, lifted his face to the blue heaven—he had never looked heavenward before in all his wretched years,—then, wearing that same old look of his mother’s, he turned, without a word, and re-entered the prison.

Back to the pump, the lash, and at last to the dungeon.

But he no longer dreaded it. It was the Sabbath, and the shackles had been removed, but he was too weary to notice the rat that came out and sat peering at him, nibbling at his wet prison clothes, and his feet and hands. Even the carrion did not disturb any more. The scent of the wild grape blooms was still in his nostrils. And when the day wore on, and the two o’clock bell sounded, calling the men to Sunday school, he started up with a cry of “Here.” He had thought the bell a voice at the dungeon door, and fancied that it said, “friend!”

He dropped back, with a smile on his lips. Could old Nance have peeped in at that moment she would have pronounced him very like his mother with that smile, and that stanch old heroism shining in his wide, dead eyes.

. . . . . . . . . .

Down in the office the registrar entered upon the death list:

“James Royal—Natural death.”

Natural? then God help the unnatural.

“The worst one ever fell into our hands,” the warden told the minster as he came out of the chapel with the soft-voiced friend of the dead man’s. “Not a spark of good in him, parson. Jim Royal knocks your theory all to pieces.”

But the friend had been telling the minister a story. And as he passed out at the rattling stockade gate, he, too, glanced up at the blue sky. His doubts were gone, if there had been any, his faith was planted in God’s eternal goodness.

“Can such die?” he mused, “such faithfulness, such magnificent courage, such glorious fidelity? Is it possible that such can pass away into eternal torment?”

The soft wind touched his cheek and bore heavenward the prayer he breathed:—

“Forbid it, Almighty God.”

EDITORIAL NOTES

RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE TO-DAY. PERSECUTED FOR CONSCIENCE SAKE

The decision recently handed down by Judge Hammond, of the United States District Court, in the celebrated case of R. M. King, is rich in lessons of vital importance to thoughtful minds at the present time of unrest, when conservatism is seeking on every hand, even under the cloak of radical movements, to secure statutes and legal constructions of laws which may at an early day be used to fetter thought, crush liberty, and throttle the vanguard of progress. Briefly stated, the important facts in the case in question are as follows: Mr. King is an honest, hard-working farmer. He is charged with no breach of morals; in fact, it appears that he is a remarkably upright man. But he is a Seventh Day Adventist; that is, he does not hold the same religious views as the majority in his State. He stands in the same relation to his countrymen as that occupied by the early disciples of Christ to Roman society when Nero undertook to punish Christians by kindling nightly human fires for the delectation of conservative or majority thought. He is of the minority, even as the Huguenots were in the minority when the Church tortured, racked, and burned them for the glory of God and the good of humanity. He is of the minority, as was Roger Williams when, in 1635, the popular and conventional thought of Salem banished him. Mr. King is not an infidel or even a doubter. On the contrary he is ardently religious, being a zealous and conscientious member of a sect of Christians noted for their piety and faith. The Adventists, of whom he is an honored member, it must be remembered, hold somewhat peculiar views about the second advent of Christ. They believe they find in the Bible commands making it obligatory upon them to keep holy the seventh day of the week, or the Hebrew Sabbath, instead of Sunday, the holiday and rest day observed by most Christian denominations. Now it was shown in the trial that, conforming to his belief, Mr. King strictly observed the Sabbath on Saturday, but being a poor farmer he could not afford to rest two days each week, or over one hundred days in the year, and, therefore, after having kept the Sabbath he plowed in his field on Sunday. This aroused the pious indignation of the narrow-minded and bigoted members of the community who profess to follow that great Leader who taught us to judge not, to resist not evil, and to do unto others as we would have others do unto us. These Christians (?) who, unfortunately for the cause of justice and religious liberty, are in the majority in Tennessee, had this conscientious, God-fearing man arrested as a common felon, and convicted of the heinous crime (?) of Sabbath-breaking by plowing on Sunday. He appealed to the Supreme Court, and the sentence was affirmed. Then the Adventists and the National Secular Association took up the case. Hon. Don M. Dickinson was engaged as counsel, and the case was taken to the Federal Court last November on a writ of habeas corpus, the contention being that the conviction was contrary to the bill of rights of Tennessee and the Constitution of the United States, and that the defendant was held prisoner by the sheriff without due process of law. The application was argued several months ago, and Judge Hammond has had it under advisement until recently, when his decision was given in which the defendant was remanded back to the custody of the sheriff to pay the fine or serve the time according to the sentence. This decision holds that malice, religious or otherwise, may dictate a prosecution, but if the law has been violated this fact does not shield the law-breaker. Neither do the courts require that there shall be some moral obloquy to support a given law before enforcing it, and it is not necessary to maintain that to violate the Sunday observance customs shall be of itself immoral to make it criminal in the eyes of the law.

Suggestive, indeed, are the lessons of this great judicial crime against liberty, justice, and God. In the first place it illustrates the fact which must long since have become apparent to thinking men that the guarantee of the Constitution of the United States, which, more than aught else, has made this Republic the flower of all preceding nations, is yearly becoming less and less regarded by the small men and narrow minds who interpret law and who, instead of showing how unconstitutional any law is which violates the great charter of right, yield to the present craze for Governmental Paternalism, paying no more heed to our Constitution than if it was the ukase of a Czar. In numerous instances during the past decade has this solemn fact been emphasized, until it is evident that with the reaction toward Paternalism and centralization has come the old time spirit of intolerance and moral obloquy on the part of the governing powers which has been one of the chief curses of the ages, entailing indescribable misery on the noblest and best, and holding in subjection the vanguard of progress, which always has been and always will be the minority, regarded by the majority as dangerous innovators or disseminators of false theories and doctrines. In my article on Socialism I noted the case of Mr. King, observing that:—

He in no way deserves the shameful imprisonment he is suffering; yet the prejudice of the majority sustains the infamous law that makes criminals of the innocent and takes not into consideration the rights of the minority. And what is more, the religious press is so dominated by bigotry and ancient prejudice that it is blind alike to the Golden Rule and the inexorable demands of justice. If in any State the Adventists, the Hebrews, or any other people who believed in observing Saturday instead of Sunday should happen to predominate, and they undertook to throw Christians into dungeons, and after branding them criminals should send them to the penitentiary for working on Saturday, indignation would blaze forth throughout Christendom against the great injustice, the wrong against the liberty of the rights of the citizen. The only difference is that poor Mr. King is in the minority; he is the type of those who always have been and always will be made to suffer when the government is strong enough to persecute all who do not accept what is considered truth and right by the majority.

In replying to my paper Mr. Bellamy thus flippantly dismissed this case: “Of this it may be remarked that had it happened two centuries ago it would have been symptomatic; to-day it is a curiosity.” It will be observed that in order to minify the dangers of Paternalism, Mr. Bellamy entirely ignored the point I had italicized, viz.: the Christian sentiment of society was not outraged and what was more, “the religious press was so dominated by bigotry and ancient prejudice that it was blind alike to the Golden Rule and the inexorable demands of justice.” To-day we are told that this great judicial crime is a curiosity, although the religious bigotry of the majority has been upheld by the lower, the federal, and supreme courts, while the religious press has, with rare exceptions, sanctioned the persecution or ignored the case.

In vain the long-cherished idea that this country was to pass down the cycle of time known as the land of freedom; that it was to be forever the asylum for religious liberty and the cradle of progress, unless the sober thought of our people be at once aroused to stem the rising tide of Governmentalism and the steady encroachment of religious organizations and despotic foreign thought.

Comparatively few of the leading secular journals[6 - Among the few papers which have denounced this judicial crime are the New York Commercial Advertiser and the St. Louis Republic. The former journal observes: “It seems that the glorious clause of the Constitution can give no protection to men who conscientiously believe they should literally observe the Fourth Commandment…. It seems that when a State seeks to enforce religious duty all consciences must bow before it. That is to say, if, for example, the Catholics of Louisiana were to pass a law that no man should taste meat on Friday, the act would be no infringement of religious liberty.There can be but one opinion upon this decision among all liberal-minded men. It is odious sophistry, unworthy of the age in which we live. And under it an American citizen has been condemned to spend the rest of his days in a dungeon unless he shall stoop to deny the dictates of his own conscience and dishonor his own manhood.The Republic in an editorial of August second says: “Not being able to leave his crops unworked for two days in the week, Mr. King ploughed them on Sunday, after having kept the Sabbath the day before. He was arrested under the Sunday law, and in order to make it effective against him it was alleged that his work on his own farm on Sunday created a public nuisance. On this entirely untenable ground he has been harassed from court to court. He was a poor man, but he has been supported by the friends of religious liberty. Mr. King has been greatly wronged, but his only remedy at law is under the law and Constitution of Tennessee. It appears that for the present his remedy is denied him, and this being the case he has no better recourse than to submit to the oppression and go to prison—to the convict camp, if it suits the convenience of his persecutors to send him there.”] have deemed this outrage sufficiently important to call for editorial comment, notwithstanding it marks the establishing of a precedent which must inevitably work great misery to innocent people at the hands of religious fanatics, unless there is a sufficient agitation to cause the repeal of many iniquitous laws which are a menace to the rightful freedom of citizens as long as they remain on the statute books.

SOCIAL CONDITIONS UNDER LOUIS XV. A LESSON FOR THE PRESENT DAY

To the superficial observer who, as guests of royalty, loitered through the sunny days which marked the closing years of Louis XV., France presented the aspect of a gay, thoughtless, happy, butterfly nation, whose government on the whole satisfied the requirements of the rich and powerful, and was sustained by the strong arm of the army on the one hand and the impregnable influence of the Church on the other. Small heed was to be given to the pamphleteers, whose brilliant satire, biting sarcasm, and pointed logic afforded amusement at the Louvre, rather than struck dismay to the hearts of those who fondly believed that the Church still held in thrall the brain of the masses, and that as for centuries the people had been content with slavery and vassalage, it was absurd to imagine they had now come to man’s estate, had, Phœnix-like, arisen from the ashes of old-time sullen obedience or ignorant content, into the tumultuous atmosphere of intellectual activity. It is true, some far-seeing brains beheld the coming storm and warned the king, urging him to either suppress the philosophers, or concede to the masses a greater meed of justice, but their views were scouted by the ruling or conventional thought of the court, and life at the Louvre continued a merry whirl of carnal and selfish delight. The morning brought the chases, and evening the banquet, the theatre, or the ball; while at intervals grand polytechnic exhibitions delighted the populace, being given, probably, in the vain hope that they would satisfy the rising discontent, much as the gladiatorial shows satisfied, while they still further brutalized, the degraded populace of ancient Rome, making possible the toleration of such colossal iniquity as marked the decline of the Empire. Such, then, was the aspect of court life, while above the social and political horizon were gathering clouds which prophesied the greatest cataclysm civilization had witnessed. The wilful short-sightedness, the supreme indifference to the principles of justice, liberty, and fraternity; the conspicuous absence of the spirit of humanity, which characterized those who might have averted the coming baptism of blood, was the legitimate result of the anæsthetizing of the soul of the Court and aristocracy with the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. The divine spark had disappeared. The spiritual nature had given way to the sensual. Ambition and pleasure were enthroned in the seats of justice and humanity. Selfishness was the keynote of aristocratic life. And with this fact kept in view, the short-sightedness of royalty in the presence of the rising tide of intelligent discontent is by no means strange. Indifferent to the fate of the masses in any struggle that might be precipitated, guided by none of the higher impulses of life, and possessing implicit confidence in the impregnability of that triple bulwark of conservatism, the army, the police, and the Church, the ruling party of French aristocracy drifted down the stream garlanded with roses, revelling in wine and music, abandoning itself to pleasure on life’s lowest plane.

To the student of social conditions, who might have been a guest of the philosopher Rousseau, the picture photographed on the mental retina would have been far different. Above he would have beheld the round of selfish, thoughtless gaiety, in which the images and intrigues of Madame Dubarry and Marie Antoinette, of Choiseul and Rohan, of Louis and Richelieu, were strangely mingled and distorted by exaggeration, as they sifted down from the Court through several layers of brains until they reached the world of the newly awakened laborer. Below him would have yawned, in all its hideousness, the blackness of the pit, the social cellar into which he would have seen thousands and scores of thousands of his fellow-men crowded or driven by want, misfortune, or the avarice of the more powerful, and from which so few who once fall ever rose to the noble estate of true manhood and womanhood. Around him he would have noted still another world, more interesting and yet more terrible in its ferocity and power than those above and below—the realm of the common people—the sphere of the masses—the current which passed over the darkest dregs and bore on its surface the scum. In this world the strange and interesting phenomenon would have met his eye of a newly awakened brain, an intellect which after ages of semi-unconsciousness, had, in a surprisingly short time, been aroused by the intellectual brilliancy of thinkers who had flooded a nation with new ideas, who had kindled the fires of justice, who had spoken in the ear of all the people the doctrine of the essential brotherhood of man, the kinship of the throne and the shop, the idler in the palace and the idler in the cellar; the cormorant who dined off the labor of others at Lucerne, and the low-browed outcasts occupied in the same way but pursuing different methods, in the social sewer. And he would have noticed an unusual activity in this working world; secret meetings were being held on every hand. The great philosophical works of Rousseau breathing a new hope and a larger life into the soul of every reader, and the withering satire of Voltaire falling against the battlements of the church and the throne—these were the text-books and watchword of the new revolution. Tens of thousands of men who a few years before had accepted unquestioningly the assurance of the priests and obeyed as children the decrees of Royalty, were now thinking as never before on justice and equity, were students and intelligent expounders of the master brains which blossomed forth on every hand, in spite of priest and police. Heresy and liberty, justice and freedom, progress and equity had joined hands; conventionalism was doomed. The cry for justice went up from every hand to the crown and the aristocracy, only to come back with a mocking laugh or a royal restrictive decree. Thus the flame was fanned. The noble teaching of the great apostles of light and justice which illuminated the brains of the people and at first filled their hearts with holy love and wonderful tenderness, making them ready to accept and only desirous of receiving that measure of justice and consideration to which they knew they were entitled, later changed to feelings of hate and desire for revenge which ever grows as mushrooms in the average mind when justice is denied and oppression bears down more relentlessly at each complaint that comes from the oppressed. It is a law of life on the lower plane that selfishness, indifference, and heartlessness coming from above are photographed upon the sensitive intellect of the struggling minds below, which vainly ask for justice, only to return in time intensified a hundred-fold—selfishness becomes active and is complemented by an insane desire to destroy. Indifference calls forth unbridled ferocity. Heartlessness awakens sentiments of cruelty and brutality as relentless and destructive as the cyclone.

The social sewer or cellar of Paris at this time presented as interesting and suggestive a study as the toiling world above. Here were thousands of human beings dwelling in the atmosphere of crime and brutality, hungry, cold, and well-nigh hopelessly vicious by virtue of want, association, and environment, and ready for, if not eagerly anticipating any social upheaval which would afford them an opportunity to plunder and pillage. This world presented then, as it ever must, the saddest and most hopeless spectacle in the kaleidoscope of life. There were scores of thousands in this social sewer and new recruits coming daily. The avarice and extravagance of the Court pressed upon the great stratum of middle life, which in time bore down upon the lower sphere with crushing weight, while many of its numbers, weary of the eternal struggle, relaxed their hold on respectability and fell into the pit of crime and moral death. The inhabitants of this realm presented a picture of ferocity and despair, which must necessarily prove a frightful element in a revolution. The social cellar was only waiting for the signal when its hideous throat would belch forth death as surely as cannon or mortar ever hurled the life-destroying bomb. Such was life in France in the world of the wealthy and the world of want; while Louis drank Dubarry’s health; while Marie Antoinette longed for her childhood home, and the Dauphin busied himself with geography, lock-making, and clock-repairing.

When Louis XV. died the scum had so thoroughly poisoned the great current of life in France that it is probable that even had there been far wiser heads at the helm of State than Louis XVI. and his councillor they would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to prevent a bloody reckoning, for the love of peace and reverence for justice, the cool judgment and mature wisdom which swayed the popular mind at an early day was well-nigh drowned in the rising tide of angry discontent and intense hate. A settled conviction pervaded the soul of the masses that the hour had come when might should make right the age-long wrongs of the people; and when an idea of this character possesses the rank and file of a nation it is almost impossible even by a liberal policy to avert a bloody issue.

I have dwelt upon this striking passage of history because it bristles with suggestive lessons and warning notes to the great Republic at the present time, and because the grave evils, which are as symptomatic to-day as were the signs of the times portentous in the reign of the easy-going, sensual Louis, are being met by those who have it in their power to avert a social catastrophe in precisely the same short-sighted spirit as characterized the conservative aristocracy when it denied the existence of the universal discontent among the masses and flippantly dismissed the angry muttering of the coming storm as merely the expression of a few shallow-brained malcontents. To-day we find the same brutal indifference and selfishness as was so conspicuous at the Louvre in 1770, exhibited by our mushroom aristocracy of the dollar, composed of those who form and control the great monopolies, syndicates, trusts, and combines, which are so cruelly oppressing the many that the few may grow many times millionnaires; together with the great railway magnates, who have through watering stock on the one hand, and plundering the commonwealth of farmers by exorbitant freights on the other, dishonestly amassed colossal fortunes. And that still more baleful communion which forms such an important part of America’s shoddy aristocracy, the Wall Street gamblers, they who rule “the street,” paralyzing healthy business, causing panics at will, and annually sweeping to the wall, to ruin and to death numbers of victims who have been lured into their snares by deceptive reports industriously circulated and extensively published by paid agents of these same brigands of the commercial world.

This mushroom plutocracy, whose representatives hold colossal fortunes acquired rather than earned, practically rule our business interests by virtue of the enormous opportunities afforded by their great wealth. And year by year are they increasing the rising tide of indignation in the hearts of millions of hard-working men and women, by grinding down more and still more hopelessly the multitude dependent on them, whom they can reduce to starvation if they rebel. Another element, which, viewed from the plane of justice and equity may be rightly termed criminal, is the popular and conservative economist who caters to the plutocracy and with brazen effrontery denies facts susceptible of proof, while he denounces every reformer who seeks to expose the iniquities of the present. This course is precisely a repetition of the policy of those who minified the real danger and misrepresented the grave facts to the Court of France, at a time when an honest, truthful representation might have averted the most terrible revolution in the annals of civilization. Only a short time since a popular economic writer denounced a Boston clergyman for unveiling the horrors of the sweating system in the modern Athens. He could not deny the truth of the sickening facts described, but termed the minister a member of one of the “most dangerous class” of citizens, merely because he spoke the truth with a view to bettering the condition of society’s exiles.

At a recent meeting of the Rhode Island weavers, a distinguished and popular conservative economic writer addressed the hard struggling workingmen. During his remarks he sought to make them blindly and contentedly accept their lot by saying in honeyed tones: “Why, my dear friends, the production of the country only furnishes $200 a head annually, and it is hard to make it go around. It is only by hard pinching and careful economy that we can make it do so;” while almost within gunshot of the speaker rose the palaces of America’s millionnaires, at Newport, where gigantic fortunes are annually squandered with lavish hands; where Mr. McAllister and his butterfly coterie of wealthy gourmands eat, drink, and dance away the summer, and illustrate how these children of idleness and wealth have to “pinch and plan” to make their share “of the $200 go around,” of which the distinguished conservative economist spoke. If the masses of our people were unable to read or write, if they had been accustomed to centuries of oppression, a policy so glaringly unjust and disingenuous might succeed for a time. But with conditions as they are, the persistent crying of peace when there is no peace, and attempting to juggle with facts is more than foolish, it is criminal. One who does not regularly read the labor and agricultural press of this country is incapable of forming an intelligent idea of the nature or extent of the discontent at the present time. Then again, beyond this commonwealth of struggling toilers rises another commonwealth, the frightful condition of which no careful student can ignore. I refer to society’s exiles, or the contingent of the social cellar. This element grows more powerful with each year. It is not securing justice at the hands of civilization and must some day be reckoned with.

In every agitation, every crusade against wrong, every battle for humanity, every contest for a broader sweep of justice, conventional critics have arrayed themselves on the side of the evil conditions, and denounced as dangerous agitators those who have sought to arouse the higher impulses of the people to right the crying wrongs of the hour. The treatment of Garrison and Phillips by this class in Boston, even in the shadow of the Cradle of Liberty, during the anti-slavery agitation, is of sufficiently recent date to emphasize this point, which has been paralleled in every important agitation for a higher civilization and a more just condition. To ignore the serious social unrest of the present, and the bitter cry of the weak for justice, is to follow the fatal precedent set by the French government. To deny the reality of the wrongs complained of, or lightly dismiss them as our popular economists are doing, is to pursue the ostrich policy with the certainty of being overtaken by the results of the evil which might have been averted. It matters not whether our “eminent” authorities are ignorant of the true social condition in city and country life to-day, or are wickedly juggling with truth in order to curry favor with plutocracy and conservatism, the fact remains that they are deceiving their masters as courtiers have often deceived thrones at moments when deception meant ruin. The duty of the hour is to turn on the light, to compel the thoughtful among our wealthy and powerful people to know the truth as it is, and to seek such a just and equitable revolution as will save a baptism of blood. The day for prophesying smooth things is past; we are face to face with problems and conditions which will not brook dishonest treatment. The exigencies of the present hour demand that we frankly face the social problems as they are and honestly discuss them in all their bearings. That we call to witness the impressive lessons of history and if possible, avert the repetition of the cataclysms of the past by prompt measures, marked by wisdom and justice. It is not too late to prevent a revolution of force if wealth and power will heed the cry of want and weakness; if justice, courage, and duty supplant self-interest and indifference in the hearts of those who see and feel the rising tide of angry discontent. To-day if we would demonstrate that a century of civilization and free government has lifted us to a higher ethical level than humanity had attained a hundred years ago, we must face conditions as they are and promptly adopt measures that will secure such a meed of justice for the weak as shall take from his heart the bitterness of injustice and establish a feeling of common brotherhood and good-will.

notes

1

There is a slight modification to be made in this statement. When the Bureaux of the two Chambers are invited either by the President of the Republic, the President of the Senate, or the President of the Chamber, no distinction is made in regard to politics, and on these occasions the members of the Right condescend to break bread with the republicans. I should explain that the Bureaux are composed of a president, four vice-presidents, and eight secretaries, chosen each session by the senators and deputies. Two of the secretaryships are given by courtesy to the Right.