Cornell University Library HX 86.B97 Revolutionary essays in socialist faitti iiiiiir ■■ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY NEW YORK STATE SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS THE GIFT OF The Family of Dr. I M. RuBiNOW 1875-1936 M\\\ Cornell University WE Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92400231 1 086 ' ^^--^^^ ' i-^WKti^ "^^Hl i " " .'':■ T'^^JM \ .'■■''*', \ % *^ 1 ■ ' vi^^^ X' '1 W^^ -^ ' ■' M ^^hF' A f % Photo by MaiJiielkern, Ne V VHrk,Copyri(:IU, 1902 "^^ ^ ^^^. Revolutionary Essays ...IN... SOCIALIST FAITH AND FANCY BY PETER E. BURROWES. (FIRST SERIES) God is Human; the whole human race is God. Socialism is the way of life. , Copyright, 1903. By Peter E. Burrowes, fifth avenue and 79th street, brooklyn^ n. y. DEDICATION. If this book tuere a. young life of fearless faith facing the resentments of the officially good and about to be sacrificed to them because of the stuord he bears; and if this knightly life should say to me, "Who in this my unknown hour dares to smile upon me?" I 'mould answer. Good Sir, I knotv of one — GEORGE D. HERRON. CONTENTS. Portrait — Dedication — Forestalment — Drum Tap — Pisgah. I. Monsieur DiaboJus , . II. What is Truth? .... III. The Discovery of America . IV. The Connectivist Thought V. SeU-Extension .... VI. The New Way in Politics . VII. The External Order .... VIII. The Men on the Way . IX. The Larger Groups . . . X. The Spiritual Life of Man XI. The Nature of Holiness . XII. The Environer . . . XIII. Struggle for a Substitute XIV. Competition . . . XV. Surplus-Power Value. . XVI. The World's Activity XVII. The Far Man XVIII. Adjectivist Thought . . XIX Nature and I . . . . XX. My Moral Paradoxy . . . XXI. The Master-Force of Society XXII. The Master-Fact of Society . . XXIII. The Flowing Life - . XXIV. The Makings of Socialism XXV. The Socialist Recession . XXVL Which is Your Pump? . XXVII. Religion XXVIII. Law of Laws XXIX The Revolutionary Message XXX. The Weaver Woven XXXI. Seliishness XXXII. The Anarch and Social Germs . XXXIII. Finalities XXXIV. The Socialist Mind . XXXV. The Sodalist Passion . XXXVL Soul Makers XXXVII. What is the Mind? . . XXXVIII. The Broken Life . . XXXIX. Control Value .... XL. The Social Sacrament . XLI. The Balance of Labor . XLII. Pillars of Truth . . - . XLIII. The Elements of Revolution XLIV. The Gospel of Organization . XLV* Collective Determinism . XLVI. The Art of Kickmg . . . . XLVII. The Wrong of Revolution . . XLVIII. The Sociaf Concept of History - XLIX. Our Democracy ..... L. Spiritual Enlargem'ent , LI. Mind and Conscience , LII. Pass it On LIII. That Little Wretch . . LIV. Outgoing Thoughts LV. The Socialism Outside LVI. Immortality To Her PAGE. 7 14 =5 3" 34 - 40 44 49 54 64 69 76 81 87 90 93 XU2 . TO6 log ■ "4 "9 .123 127 - 131 134 .14a 148 •154 IS8 . 162 '^ . 109 172 - "75 179 ->83 187 . 20X 2ZO . 9X9 223 -238 244 . 252 256 . 262 27X . 276 284 . 289 294 •=97 307 .311 320 REVOI^UTIONARY ESSAYS. FORESTALMEITT. There is no political party, no private person, and no group of thinkers to be held responsible for this book. I have taken counsel with none. I alone stand up for the whole contents of it and for what may follow. ' DRtTM TAP. To equalize and balance all public duties is the func- tion of government, and to express them for private use in terms of labor force is the function of money. To man the intervening social zone, known as the middle class, with the ambitious and unfaithful sons of labor is the program of capitalism proper ; to destroy the economy called middle class and to occupy the place now filled in government by capitalism — is the program of the people. PISGAH. Come with me to Pisgah, the mountain of great hope, the point of shining vision, the high place of universal outlook from whence the whole meaning and blessed cer- tainty of things working together may be understood. It was not in triumphs but in great emergehcies that we found the beginnings of our collectivist life. It was not in the conceit of a self-made success that we first stretched forth, redemptively, our hands to our fellows. Long time had we possessed the material factors for a beautiful manhood. Long time had we the resources of soul-making in our hands, but whither brought we them ? To the kennels of an ungrowing, ungracious, self-comple- ting ego. We delivered ourselves behind the fortresses of property in quantities of Jiard, loose, broken missiles against democracy, to be used or hurled at ourselves by the kingships above us. Loudly we boasted of our riches advancing — oh, the darkness of our riches; oh, the deso- lation of our advance! Every step was outward from life's fertility to the frozen night — away and away from the collective soul, from the common joy, from the light of the world. To that atheist desolation were we, the 6 Revolutionary Essays laborers, the chief instruments and slaves of progress, pressed. The commercialists might retire a little from before the face of their own sterile conflicts, and rest on one of the inner circles among what few amenities Philistinism had not yet cashed. But the workers, they must remain and labor and die by the stuff which, making, they may not use, but only guard. All the material for a common manhood was ours; but the material only was appropriated and the manhood lost. When we reached self-consciousness, the point of return to spiritual life, we loved that little self only, and elected to stay by the hog trough and to wallow in the boastful delusions of a self that conquers all. Others, of truer vision, saw themselves, and saw to conquer; sickened by the sight of self-deceiving, they arose and came here among the truth-bleached hills to this white, shining peak of Pisgah, from thence to see, with the brain of us all, how moves the human life. Now come near to me, my brother's soul, for thus we impart immortality to each other ; thus, by interchange, we keep ourselves alive forever in the race. Dost thou see the many uncorrelated achievements of art, labor, and letters, and the famine of riches ! How all men alike carry the ages' progress, like sulky, overburdened camels ; how tired they are with their broken souls. Dost thou see the spirit's hunger-look in their eyes as they dream of Pisgah? Ah, but the sundown of weary minds and bodies, with its call to dreamless sleep for the dead men's advance of to-morrow, closes their eyelids, and they fall down. In the morning they shall awake, as all slave- doers everywhere awake, with a sigh, still to toil and still to think of this crag spot, sunlit, hopelit, God-lit — but only to leave me upon it all shamefully alone. The dreamers are in their galley chains again, lack- ing the race throb, lacking the Socialist mind and the blush which comes to the cheek, not out of a single heart shame, but out of that whole blood shame with which we have been made into one nation of resentment. Hark ! There is a moving among the decent people ; they begin In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 7 to listen to the cries of the children, oh, my brothers, and to look at the anemic women of the slums and factories, oh, my sisters, and at the aged men waiting under the churlish portals of this world's affluence for the few crusts yet required by them, and then to die— leaving their already overburdened friends the difficulty of find- ing graves for their carcasses in this little, poverty- pinched and picked-up world. High youth is becoming studious of the Socialist morality; the refined shudder for the culture that is in them, bought of a leisure so guil,tily theirs. God's men are running hither, with fingers in their'ears, crying as they run, "Life, life, eter- nal life." They are running to Socialism, to learn and to, know what it becomes men, who would be wise and just, to do in this age of money captivity.. Art thou so coming, opener of this book ? Then sit thee down to linger awhile, that we may commune .to- gether in these racialisms of mine. I. MONSIEUR DIABOLUS. The "true" of everything is on the outside of it. A man has not in himself life; his life is an adjustment with- the environment, and the right hand and left hand of that adjustment are labor and property. The wisdom called for in this age of miscigenic liv- ing is the wisdom which knows what circles of activity are true-blooded for the development of the race as an economic unit, which knows what circles of activity are normal for all mankind. Life would never have been a problem if the workers of the world had been its thinkers, and it will lose its problems when they find their brains. They shall find them, despite the army of rich prophets and prophets of riches who are unbraining them by false patriotisms, false heavens, and false hells. Within the circle of man's activities, and there only, is truth to be found, the days of truthing by meditation and star-gazing having gone forever with other barren 8 Revolutionary Essays days and their dreaming. Our moral and spiritual life is no longer a direction and an obedience, but a doing; and it is no longer by whimsical deeds on the field of the undetermined or supernatural that we are to obtain growth of soul, but upon the field of property. Our wills, our wishes, our necessity concerning property, must henceforth constitute the whole spiritual life of man; it is upon that question and upon that Calvary we will crucify or accept our salvation. The whole gamut of life runs along the property scale; religion has no other question before it but labor and capital. None, least, less, little, much, more, most, all. These were its real considerations had it not everywhere sold out its high commission to cloudland and the dollar. If Least leave None behind it, there are a Dives and a Lazarus in the world as truly as when All leaves Most; that is if the survivor succeeds at the other's cost. When these eight notes are tuned to- gether in active concord, we have civilization, and not before. Although to the split ears of our times such a harmony may seem a very distant sound, yet it is unto such a harmony that we are turning by the new involu- tion. The union of work and property is the basic har- mony ; it is the urge of all concordant notes, and it is the goal which we shall surely experience when men become men on property questions, not in books and sermons only, but well inside the heart of the world's workshop, directing, through fundamental activity, the wholesome life of the human race. I am speaking of unambiguous, present-day laboring life; for I know of no other subject as a teacher of true divinity in the new moral revolution. Aback of the things we do are the necessities, the wishes, the wills, the habits, that drive our doing. Some of these mere local whififs, blowing men alternately from little heavens to little hells ; but there is another, a steady, economic wind belonging to the whole nature of things, as sure in its returns and direction as the seasons them- selves, the maker of nations. In the life of humanity it is the fundamental movement behind civilization, and it is as potent in soul-building, as vernal and autumnal In Socialist Faith and Fancy. g equinoxes — ^as Gulf streams — are in the building of the merchants' fortunes ; it is the labor that we do, why we do it, and for whom. But, above and before all, it is labor, labor, labor. If you and I ever find ourselves to be in and of the true activity, if we are the men who do the striking rather than the holding, whether our labor power be misdirected or not, we are of the socially active class. We are truly and fundamentally alive as persons; indeed, we are our- selves life and the subjects of its philosophy, waiting to be redeemed from private control. Now we are but little grovtps, whirling around the private employer ; a number of orbital activities, intensely separated each from the rest of mankind; and each circle contracting itself away, gathering in its skirts from all the rest. Only the people in one of all these circles are fundamentally revolving and altogether right; they may be neither better nor worse than the people of the other circles personally, but only in one circle are men going around with the world; they are the socially directed workers. There remain, therefore, outside of life a great number of false activities, of which the modern profit- mongers' or traders' circle is the most inorganic. The men in this circle grow rich on the circulation of slavery, by hot money, called capital, which they lay on the anvils of the laborers to be multiplied; and it is by the blows there given to it only, that glowing capital is converted into wealth, riches, power, and all the modern forms of human slavery. Every age has its Barrabas or its Jesus, whom it needs must take to its bosom as its leading man. If it is an age of grip-sackers, it chooses Barrabas, and if it is an age of unambiguous labor, it needs must choose its Jesus — Socialism. Let us see what sort of a leader this hapless generation has chosen, for its typical man before we turn to the man of the Socialist mind. . Commercial society men are all interested in warding off harm from the banker. The interest of one banker is the interest of all the traders, and has, therefore, become 10 Revolutionary Essays the interest of the State ; for the traders, owning as they do the means necessary for the livelihood of the majority of the people, necessarily own the State. They, con- trolling labor, control victuals, and, therefore, control law. In other days men who owned the lands owned to some extent the men who lived by land-labor or owned sheep and cattle, and in agricultural or pastoral times, the land-owner and sheep-owner was the favored type of man, and his interest in a general way was the interest of the community ; because all who were not land-owners or sheep-owners were employed in these industries or hoped to be themselves such owners. And when, owing to the number of independent nations and rulers, the people's property in land or cattle was rendered precari- ous by the incursions of armed bands from other States^, the great necessity for self-defense became apparent, and the man of arms became the saving man, the favored type of man. And when the whole life of the people, owing to the turmoil of ambitious and greedy aristo- crats, became only an agony of fear and uncertainty, so that the world was called a vale of tears, the type of man who offered consolations boundless here, and bliss eternal hereafter, for a small consideration, became a very desir- able type of man. Or when, at last, the lesser turbulent barons were all merged into one State, one court, and one king, the king and his dynasty became the selected type, because, as things were then, the fall of the king meant the desolation by fire and sword of town and country. And as the king could be in but one part of all his great dominions, a few persons only had access to him; and these few courtiers, patrons, advocates and lawyers at last became very favored classes or types of men; because in their hands lay so much of the people's means of salvation. Some parts of the population of those times struggled to get into those directly or indi- rectly dominating economic classes; and all were inter- ested in what they alone, had right and privilege to do. In turn the fortunes of these several classes varied, but In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 1 1 the onward growth of the world was identified with the issue of their struggles as classes. A great king and a great nobility and a great religious hierarchy at last learned to unite their common interest, and by their union the life of the masses of the people was correspondingly depressed. The religious factor in this triple alliance of classes soon obtained mental dominion over the others, because they alone were possessors of the basic element of wealth and power — time. So, the kings and the nobles threw themselves against the walls of the Saracen cities for the sake of the Holy Sepulchre. Then and there they discov- ered that while, as stay-at-homes, their property and their name gave them all the power they needed, abroad they required some portable and duly appreciated equivalent. In this emergency the reign of ready money began to be generally acknowledged by potentates who formerly only recognized the sword's point or a point of what they called honor. Some inferior persons now began to lend them money on their estates at home, in order that they might buy what they lacked abroad; and others began to make for them what they desired to buy. It was not so much war as an enlarged intercourse that now multiplied the wants of the ov/ning classes and to multiply and vary the pursuits of the men who had no fields or who found more benefit in making things in the towns than raising crops in the fields. Thus came the artisan, the trader, and the money-lender, contending for a share in supply- ing the great lords first and other folk thereafter. It was not for a long time clear which of these was the master class until, the smoke of the French revolution having cleared away, the profit-monger arose, the giant spectre of the nineteenth century ; and with him appeared the world's most important acquisition since mankind be- gan to sweat — the machine. With the appearance of the machine, a strangely hellish sort of mastery became possible. The new class had learned the secret of getting rich by selling things for more value than really existed in the things sold — 12 Revolutionary Essays they put a plus price upon the exchange value of their commodity according to what they observed to be its use value to the buyers — a state of exchanging which could not last long; could, in fact, last only while there were few sellers and many needy buyers ; and that would surely not be for very long, while there was gain in it for other traders. When natural wanters came out, exchanging commo- dities for symbols or other commodities, the normal con- dition of value for value, neither more nor less, would be bound to prevail. Use value being always equally as- sumed in every exchange, it would have no eccentric action in lowering or raising the price. All buying and selling would be merely a convenient exchange of so many days' socially necessary labor as embodied in one equally useful article for the same number embodied in another; and it is evident that no separate class could ever come into existence, as the white horse and its rider, between such a natural supply and demand. There was nothing in the world for them to fatten on — ^nothing but the simple positive values created in the quantity of social labor passed from the social workman into existing usables, and as everybody had gradually learned the equivalent of these values, either in money or other ordinary commodities, prices would always be values only. This profit-phantom class, really the meanest and unworthiest people of the age, are served and surrounded by a population of mere workers, unable to possess them- selves of the new machine-tools. This middle class took possession of the people of all countries by taking pos- session of the world tools; and then appeared for the first time the monstrosity of surplus value and the capi- talist man. The men who had no tools to work could only sell their power to work the tools; and as that power was really worth nothing of itself now, they gave the men bread for it ; and all the time passed into the making of the tools and passed out of the tools into the commodities and returned again through the human worker who, In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 13 with his iron partner, had now so greatly multiplied his power to create value. The new creation appears on the earth — called Surplus Value, and with it appears as a slave class the proletariat, who, creating all, gets only bread. This devil's love for gambling has always been third only to his other two loves — ^the love of what he wins, and the love of the power brought by his winnings. But instead of playing a petty game with a Doctor Faust, here and there, for one miserable soul, which he could have had anyway by getting the key of the larder, he began to play only for the key of the larder, all over the world, to play for economic control. There used to be many larders. But under the good managernent of His Sinister Majesty, the highways to and from the world markets have been reduced to a small number and securely placed under infernal control; so that he knows within an ace what is the natural and industrial wealth crop of the world; what the wages of the world; and how much of both it is necessary to waste in order to maintain the two orders of society, democracy and aristocracy, in their respective places of slaves and masters. But even the Devil cannot always have things his own way. Like all gamblers, he has been going it at such a terrible pace that "fast and faster" has now become the spur of his divinity. He cannot pull up. He cannot ease off. He must forever on! Swifter and faster yet, for ever on ! He is now playing with the whirlwind that he him- self set in motion ;. he is playing for more and yet for the impossible space necessary to the increasing demands of his all-impelling greed. He holds his last card in his hand, the golden key of the world market he has won. But that which seemed much yesterday is nothing to him to-day. He wants more, and this is what he is playing against the demo- cratic life of humanity, against the organization and 14 - Revolutionary Essays manhood of the human race as they have historically come to-day to be embodied in the cause of Labor. Remember, capitalism falls when it falters. It is a mad, abnormal, self-compelling, more-demanding speed. It is not a star controlled, but a star falling away from control, and so long thus falling, that the intoxication of the descent has become its joy and its demand. To keep so falling, capitalism demands a holocaust of human lives. In this fearful craze of acceleration, therefore, he must burn out all mankind or burn himself out. II. WHAT IS TRUTH? That persistency in me which asks this question and puts me to the pains of answering it, has one quality- surviving all its other ostensibles, and that one is per- sistency, not for its own satisfaction; for that is its very antithesis — ^it is persistency. Finalities are utterly in its way. Statements of truth have no other truth in them than their display of congenial will and choice of a subject for eternal persistency. The truthing character- istic about a. verbal statement will be that element in it which does not assume ' finality ; it will be a provision obviously assumed and contained in it for its own revi- sion; nothing will be more sacred about it than the sacred right of its successor to go on, the right to resume the subject and to think otherwise. Truth is a war on finalities, and it is a human affair only when the thinker chooses to move with it. The activity of the human mind is but a reflexion of the eternal activities outside of us, which is truth. The mind is permitted to be a spectator of the active drama, but while it continues as a reflective spectator of that eternal persistency, it reflects but a little segment of the circle. Not until it arises and mingles with the persistency of going on which it beholds, has it become truth, and. the mind's onlj'- relation to it is the relation of becoming its persistency. The mind, therefore, is not the seat of truth, tiie fixed form of words, the printed book, the college ros- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 15 trum, the voice on Sinai, the chair of Peter, for truth is afoot, truth is a flowing. The mind may have something to say about what is truth, though I apprehend that it is easy for us to make too much of that httle. Certainly it has been the great misfortune of mankind that its dwarfed minds have hitherto been the custodians of its truth. Truth is in the will. .It is choosing the way witli others. It is the choice of that way which abhors arrival. It is the march of the marching. Most true, therefore, is death, which casts the body of my beloved out of the way of the marching. Most true is the reviser of formula, the repealer of laws, the thing, whatever it may be, whicji goes on, goes on with the others, goes on for the going on, and contains its own perpetuity. Greatly exaggerated, indeed, has been the place given to the leisure classes in the functions of truth. The idle thinker has given us only the finalities of private property for life's glorious persistency; he has given us only slavery for the liberty that goes. He has taught us the logical way of losing power, of not moving with truth. The mind of man is undoubtedly a very small side show in the business of the world truthing; it is a segment of the mirrored circle, which can never show the whole, because it is only a segment, because reflecting or seeing it is not IT, because truth is a movement of the universe into which, if I, who am a mind-seer, have the will to choose and go, I am truthing, and my truth will never be ascertained because it is comparative upon how many I go with, how much of the universe I am in the march with, how much I am a power — that is, with others. Surely truth is the great persistency, and •my share of it is the will of society, while society's share of it is the will of the universe. The mind is a mechanic of the will ; it is blindly automatic, doing the same thing with ever3rthing, a mill grinding whatsoever you may commit to it into its own favored form. It is related to truth only by acci- i6 Revolutionary Essays dent of the topic it grinds and by the will of the grinding. But the factor of all its facts and fancies is the social choice. It is in choosing wha:t we are going to do about, and what we are going to think about, that man has truthing. Behold the activities of the world! Behind that book-case, behind that immense building, behind that battlefield, embodiments as they are of things that have been chosen and are now choosing, there moves the story of the world's tragedy ; there moves that which might have been chosen. Yet the mind of man, in spite of charlatanism and burlesque of truth throughout the whole human experi- ence, is not really cast out from the life march of truth- ing. When warmed by the social will, it becomes a real perception of what to choose for man's activities. In this wedlock, and thus impregnated, the mind' is a veritable part of vital social and universal connectivism greatly engaged in choosing ; greatly engaged in drawing the subtler atoms of the location to itself and passing them in among the things elect and fit .to be forever parts of the world's persistent, everlasting life. The mind is the womb of matter's nobler elements, and its gestation of that matter as its truthing — ^this will of solid choice is the mind's partnership with truth. My conception in these socio-moral idealisms is that a process of mind extension goes on from man to matter, that the various evolutionary processions up the ladder of life, set forth by the illustrious Darwin, are the involutionary responses of matter to this mind extension from us, or rather this reclamation of matter by mind, tending to a final universe wherein all matter shall be held in the solution of mind moving. The action in all cases is on surfaces, the mental and progressive sensitives being all superficial responsers. Mentation flies from leaf to leaf, from skin to skin, from life to life, as echoes fly to and from the mountain sides. Surfaces give up their elect atoms from hour to hour; as the affinity particles rise to these surfaces, they are lib- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 17 erated into the freedom of worldly-mindness and towards cosmic unity. No greater hindrance to the satisfaction of hu- manity in this, its ancient question of questions, "What is truth?" has ever appeared among us than the man of whom it is now fashionable to be so blindly proud, the specialist. Broken up into self- centred complete departments of science, every apple that falls will suggest to him only a life-long study of its peculiar circumstances; the specialist mind loses intuition of a universal message. If an apple falls, he refers you to the 131st volume of "Researches on the relative tenacity of apple stalks and the angularities of their falling." He is the disintegration of science. He is the habit of local fixture and finality, of snatching in the flowing life, and binding it in formula for preserva- tion; he has unbound the chaplet of life and broken men into parts. We are a generation of no faith, no common property, of no democracy, of no divinity in the passing day, of no universalism in the passing deed. The necessity and fruitfulness of this specific treat- ment where a limited observer is upon a limitless field, may not be denied ; but while consenting to it in physics, let us be aware of admitting it into humanics; it is the cause of all closures and despotisms. In humanics that which is fixed is, therefore, wrong, excepting when such fixity is understood to be but points in a motograph or map for truthing. Instead of an endless differentiation of truth into kingdoms, towns, villages, and dollars, with an increas- ing probability of never getting a wholeness out of these differences, humanics calls for the opposite process. Things now differentiated and having the appearance of being complete statements, are reducible to and restate- able in the terms of some one indifferent thing ; anything so that it is a reducer, a motograph for the process of truthing. In the persistent practice of this reducing all things to common denominators, the individual in time contracts the will of collectivism, and so draws spiritual i8 Revolutionary Essays will-force out of the moving cosmos. This reduction is, in fact, the mechanism of the mind by which the will is adopted into the universe, and we become sub-consciously controlled men, with the Socialist mind. The practice of restating the separate laws of many realms in the terms of one realm is always right, and the best of all terminology for vital thought are those of property. The terms employed are not in themselves regarded as the truth, but the exercise made upon them is trutliing the life flowing along them, for there is no truth of yours but the choice of subject for your moto- graph. The mind has always been compelled to make to itself motographs, but it has also fallen into the habit of choosing wrong ones, and of allowing the "graph" to be its truth more than the "moto." Such a motograph the property experience supplies for the daily alternating of the current mind, and so in- timately personal and vital is this motography that, in the pendulous reaction from one alternative to the other, the will of the person and his emotions are called into fight or affection, and thus the property theme for truth- ing is the most fruitful of all themes for humanics. Here, then, is a motograph to the terms of which all other topics may be truthingly reduced and expressed, and out of which the single mind may draw the collective will and enter social immortality. When I hear a workingman congratulating himself on the aphorism that "knowledge is power," and there- upon possessing himself of ten cents' worth of second- hand science from the nearest literary junk shop, I con- clude that his ambition has fallen into the hands of the bad Samaritan. Poor man! what can you know of science more than enough to increase the priggery of unbelief? Just enough to join you to the men who laugh. But that conceited laugh of junk science, how laugha!ble it is after all. Why, even the old priest, at whom it is most commonly directed, laughs from his diaphragm more deeply and truly back. Knowledge is not power; there is not enough of it ' In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 19 anywhere to be power; it ends with each life and it will always be held by the property class while there is one. Social will, habit, activity, these constitute that continuity in humanics which is power. Popular science is as effective an instrument with which to carry on the class war against democracy as ever was theology. In this age of decayed faith and enfeebled reason, it is the most available instrument ready to the hand of the fool-making class to offer all the workers front seats in the temple of Minerva, and then to smile. We remember how the man in the blouse was conducted from popular religion to nature in the early museums, where she was exhibited in sample bottles. What delightfully naughty infidels were we in those Halls of Science days! Our chaperon was the middle-class friend of labor; and as we stood before the glass cases of "nature," his mental attitude was that of a thumb-over-the-shoulder, pointing to the poor deluded ones who were so silly as still to be at church instead of staring at these glass cases. Oh dear, oh dear, what an ineffable humbug that middle-class man was, whether he took in Brown's Bible in shilling parts or the Penny Cyclopaedia. And I think he is a more fruitless humbug in the role of a scientific atheist than in that of Pecksniff. It is certainly more conservative of knavery to have no creed point at which the folk we defraud may direct their reproaches. Social- ism needs not to be a bourgeois cover-myself-and-get- back-at-the-Bible revolution, it will put the middle-class man, with or without his Bible, where he must be to be kicked as a scientific prig, a religious hypocrite, an econo- mic thief. The ruHng class is quite willing to supply the ten- dollar-a-week democratic donkey with all the "Institutes'" and public libraries he can mope on; libraries in plenty he may have, but leisure none to use them. Prodigiously learned blacksmiths and shepherd-boy astronomers, and other miraculously persevering workmen in these li- braries afford the humble reader encouraging examples of how to acquire a knowledge of the universe by dip- 20 Revolutionary Essays light on fifty cents a day. You are vastly mistaken, my working friend, who think that the public schools will afford cessation from the class war. If you have fled from despotism in religion, think not that it is absent from our official science. Ah, no! the common people must be slaves anyway, religiously or scientifically — ^take your choice. You are offered a change from the sacer- dotal to the academic sandbag to soften your head withal. You are mistaken who believe that knowledge is power enough to change the heart of the master class, or your fate of slavery, while you are not class conscious. No knowledge on earth is more powerful than the compulsion laid Upon the present oj-der of society to sacrifice the laborer to the aristocrat through the middle class. Spencer teaches that that which is inconceivable to the mind (the single mind of course)' is not in the universe ; that is, it is not true. Or, to put it in his own way, he says, "Truth is that, the opposite of which is in- conceivable." What else can they do who are making a new sort of property dominion to overshadow you, the dominion of the well-stuffed mind, than to make it a question of comparative knowing? How much do you know? So much. Ugh! return to your slums. It works as well as religion. We bring our youth to lyceums and give them time enough to admire our supe- rior expanse of mental abdomen, and so they very mod- estly go back to work. But, after all, knowledge is power if you let it be stolen away from you and used by the same hand that has already taken so many reefs out of your stomach. Perhaps we meant something else than knowledge; perhaps we meant that truth is power, or, better still, that truthing is power. This is the sense in which I appreciate the popular aphorism. Getting morality out of the quiescent form of print into vocal speech, and to outside movement, is the recovery of ourselves from fixities to currencies. Mind vocalized in the presence of others is the first stage of truthing. Now, no activity can continue long without correlation. Action is a kin In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 21 seeker and a kin finder. Whatsoever becomes an active movement enters into a world relation. Every activity is a passer on of itself for its own continuity. It is in this second terminal that the mind uncovers its interrela- tion with other movings which we call truths. Truth is, -therefore, the mind finding continuants of its own move- ments outside. The individualist substitutes himself for the universe and makes the test of truth to be the mortal inconceiv- ability of the opposite of what he sees. The inconceiv- ability of the opposite, who shall declare ? Surely it will not be any mind so blunt as thine, thou clod of a work- man; surely it will be the minds of the aristocrats and their professors when they put their heads together in a congress, and so abandon the inconceivability of ego to decide that which cannot be truth. The private mind is too perturbed, too much under the influence and interests of its own particular skin to ever become a cosmic register (without noting the physical limitations of space), for such positive science as is finally translatable into moral and governmental authority, whither, mark you, all their science is steering. No priesthood or aristocracy could desire to be better armed against the democratic life than one which is empowered to say to the progress of the plain man, "Wait until all the facts are in, otherwise you are engaged in an unscientific movement." Facts which so intimidate the workman may, nevertheless, not be the facts they seem. No fact that can have any bearing on the social relation is ever presented by one to another in the raw material; they are always coated with interpretation, so that there is more fact in the significance than in itself. The common people should, then, be on their watch towers to see that the physical sciences are not manoeuvred by the ruling class into ethics. When the mind has found its truthing in social con- tinuity, then, and not before, is knowledge power. Then all knowledges shall fall subordinately into their places behind, or contributory to, man's social intercourse. This 22 Revolutionary Essays does not mean a stop put to science research; it only means that science is the servant and not the master of truthing. Every event or fact that I am conscious of is a manifestation of motion, and there is no motion mani- fested anywhere of which I am not a part. I can observe no motion of this universe from outside. I am both objectively and subjectively in all things about me. I am an integral part of themselves, my brain is a moving section of the larger machinery of action, all things are moving together in a fixed motograph, the world in its orbit, and my mind in its social interlacings, the orb of the mind weavers, I am socially thinking. That we can reduce the universe to terms of logic is most true; but the universe does not care, if we are satisfied there is no harm done except the harm of others becoming satisfied as to the value of our powers of verification. Have we really a science of true causa- tion whose register on a single mind is as causal as the successive birthings of the causes and effects observed. To get cosmos to evolute my way, and for the benefit of my property, is very important, but it requires something more than a thread of words straggling here and there through a partially observed universe. Indeed it seems that to be found talking at all of an evolution of the universe in the direction of a private life ought of itself to suggest what a big child game it is. But there is a mechanism of the universe within which moves the evolu- tionist and his doctrine. There is no subjective, no objective in it; there is nothing outside of its motion; it is the whole thing, self-operating. Aye, there is a moral evolution, but it is the involution of ego away from himself to the collective consideration and interest. It is a movement for which the volition and energy is racial, but available to every man. I need not wait to know good or to grow good ; it is sufficient for me to know the evil. And this, owing to the hard history of mankind, is a sort of knowledge which has fallen in abundance to us all. We have no need for college diplomas; we have In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 23 learned it amidst hunger and rags. It is not by reflec- tion Of selection, but by fight and rejection, that the moral species grows on the field of the bar sinister, in the everyday battles of property and man, in the hitherto irrepressible conflict of the antithetic social classes. In its self-defense the truthing of the mind is a repudiation of fixity, and directly over against this de- fense stands every evil of the world.' Philosophy has assumed the mind to be a fixed and moldable thing, and that outside of it there is another fixedness by it to be found and disentangled from the movements of the uni- verse, which is called Law. But the reports of the things observed by the mind are inverted in the reporting. The objective and subjective merely turn themselves inside out to each other, and there is no fixity but balanced and related motion. In one case the cause comes after, in the other the efifect comes before, and there only appears to be a difference because they invert to each other. This is the way the mental machine works. And the intellectual squabbles of thousands of years only prove that the mind is not the finder of truth. It is the interest and the will growing out of the interest, and the deed and habit proceeding from both, and the matter of its digestion are questions of labor and property. Collectivism and individualism take up the parable of the ages in the new terms of economics. The old way of this investigation of truth was by investigating the nature of the mind; and now I ask myself what is it that I am thinking of my mind with. The mind is never detected; the mind that thinks it thinks about itself is not thinking about itself, but about an objective image formed outside of itself, which it calls the mind. The last step-back of all my thoughts is the mind; and that is ever changing; none of it remains, it does not grow, it is not built, it offers nothing for a science of psychology built on its own experience. The blunder comes of im- agining the mind stationary, because we want to build a private experiential school upon it. But the mind is no such stationary thing; it is not a private, it is an army 24 Revolutionary Essays marching; it is a mingling and balancing among other energy manifests; it is our own unknowable and there- fore, and thereby, our knowing. I presume that humanity alone is a laggard in the world's movement because man alone is afflicted with property. He only is concerned with questions of morals who is thus afflicted. Every other creature is on the movement itself; morals are but the shadows of this evil. We sense ourselves morally because we are off it, and rightness is not a private possession. Immorality or untruth is the moral vision of the private mind until it loses its fear and unfaith in the public life, and no longer looks to private property as a provision against the unsureness of the world, but rather looks to the sureness of the world's eternal life as the cure for private "property. Now we are all full of fear-making provision against the deceit, avarice and dishonesty of our neigh- bors, and so we steal property, the fortress of ego against everything on earth. This being our disease and its manifestation, truthing is the opposite. Therefore, truth- ing is the life of public faith, the self-translating of men's minds everywhere into public mind; it is the act of acquiring public thought, interest and habit; it is the substitution of another life outside of me for my own and another interest. Truth is not a topic, it cannot be written down, it cannot be prescribed to another, nor commanded; it is entirely an adjustment, a relation, a course of conduct which comes to every man with social faith. And each man understands it for himself better than any other, and better than God. For God being the soul of the whole, may have no local understanding; and we, by thought and practice, may at best but acquire his ignorance. In one place, and one place only, on the bar sinister, the property question in human affairs, the property-willing, the property-doing, the property-habit- ing, can truth be found. In separating truth, unconditionally, from science, we leave science for ever unfettered of the money-man, whose endeavor is always to reconcile things with himself. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 25 and therefore to put God, science, politics, philosophy, and the mind's whole energy into the smelting pot of profit. But morals, religion and politics go the other way; their effort is for collectivism, they are spurning from human affairs tlje imperialism of the private con- sideration. Man is a history; we do not know all of it, but all of it is here; humanity's childhood may be hidden, but it is here in its. I, humanily, am as a great circular , plane of the experienced and experiencing ; I am I know not how many centuries old, and my circle is the whole of human history. I have lost nothing of my own, I have gained nothing of my own ; I have only been weav- ing in with the other movements. By and by my thread will have passed into the whole of history, as the whole of past history am I. -III. THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. By America, I do not mean this continent, which is, after all, only that human space as needful to mankind as air space is to the bird's wing. I do not mean our rent rolls, the degeneracy of private property in the soil here, nor the fences around the theft, nor the watch-dog behind the fence, nor the gun behind the dog. I mean by America that habit of comprehensive, or- ganized, authoritative action, and its machinery, which has grown up among the people and which they have grown into the habit of obeying, called government or the State. You do not discover America in the tomes of laws, but in the character behind the hands which have written and turn those pages, and behind the faces which so dili- gently bend over them to find the spirit of them. In the spirit of the books themselves, in the spirit of the law consultor and obeyer, who, from the village court-house up to Washington, feels himself subordinately and intelli- gently in touch with an entity which was before the presi- dent was, and has survived, and will survive, many gen- erations of presidents and citizens. The people's consent 26 Revolutionary Essays and habit to be governed, the rulers' will and way of governing, and the net outcome of generations of these two agreements. Citizens do not fight with this America; this America does not fight with citizens. Citizens may contend with, or be helpful to, one another, and in either case they pass in the net of their conflict or helpfulness to this America. This America is the heir of all our lives ; it bears that relation to all the people which a last analysis does to the analysis that preceded, or which that last slip of paper with a few brief figures upon it bears to the basketful of calculations, of which it is the worked-out correctness. It is to the social, organic struggle of men for a living-together, what the blossom is at last to the plant. It is to the social experiments and successes and failures of all the past what the honorable man is to the human experience of fault, and hope, and trust, that went before him. In the times when men are striving rather than travel- ing together : that is, in modern money times, the economic pressure, the bread pressure, forces them into defensive classes, and these classes are the germinals of future civil- ization. First, because they arise out of the world's most universal predicate, bread-getting. Second, because they occur among the world's most necessary and inalienable people — ^the bread-getters. Third, because they are born, as all right is born, in a wrong. They are man's requirement versus his priva- tions; they are the universal man's requirement versus his wrong — ^therefore, the universal wrong. When on this continent we discover persons en- gaged as above, at whatever stage of the engagement they may have arrived, those persons are the Americans. This is the Socialist's discovery of America and the Americans. In monarchic countries every effective reform must first write revolution on its banners and be baptized with blood. In this country we are under no such necessity. We are not seeking to revolutionize the government, that is already all that any popular revolutionists re- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 27 quire — it is a democracy. The revolution which a Rus- sian must first achieve has been achieved already for us; we seek only to give expression to the democratic revo- lution of the eighteenth century, which lost us a King George and gave us a President George. But in our political democracy we are still afflicted with a civil war between the people who live by work and those who live by letting them work. The capitalists have succeeded each other for a hun- dred years or more at the ballot boxes, and manned alternately the ship of State out of their own ranks under the guise of two opposing parties. In a State governed by rival parties, in which the rival parties almost balance each other, the most that we can ever say at any one time, is that one half of the inhabitants governs the other half. In truth, the device of government by parties was always a sham; it was two mill-stones which our revolu- tionary fathers thoughtfully tied around the neck of our democracy, to keep it from being alive too much. The one only meaning of the word revolution to-day, in the mouth of an American Socialist, is the discovery of America. This community is divided into Americans and non- Americans, people who make usables and people who sell them for a profit. This distinction of the continental population is as true a divider to the fact as the Isthmus at the Gulf is of the whole physical continent itself. Socialists are realizing and giving economic utter- ance to what has taken place among us. They set about righting as much of it as is at present correctable, and they try to indicate the form and direction of the rightness to come. We assail the fundamental lie, that life is a battle — a lie out of which so many parasitic men have lived gluttonous lives of guilty peace. Society, having once entered even upon a moderate experience and prac- tice of economic organization, it will take all the wit and resources of the most wickedly potent statesman to main- tain the semblance of competition. Competition is in its nature ephemeral; it can only endure during a brief 28 Revolutionary Essays period of experimental ignorance; it is the ghost lie of the profit mongers. The labor of struggling, striving, fighting, is all waste labor after you grow. The success of competing is its own ending, as the child weeps only to end its weeping. The Socialistic mind will always goal for the largest human unit in America; the anarch or commercial mind will always goal for the smallest unit — ^the individual life. The anarch philosopher believes that taking care of him- self is the only way of taking care of America, the Social- ist believes that to be a transparently comfortable lie for the philosopher who lies at his ease in other people's clothes and upon the lands and labors of the community; so he revolutes the lie. The individual life, like compe- tition, is an impossible thing; it is a freak in this day of organic social experience. Its activities of private prop- erty-getting are the outcome of crime-begotten fear, unnecessary and wasteful of precious life, ideal manhood and harmonious society. Battle is but the suspended animation of the human soul. Competing and strug- gling only develop the character required in the brute creation, or by madmen, who think greatness to be the destiny of dominating other lives. Under the criminal delusions of the private-life civ- ilization, every American has to learn, and do, and ad- vance, for himself. Practically this doom of the isolate struggle chiefly falls to the servile class. This class of the propertyless being throughout the whole historic period the vast majority of us, our human life has been a groping of separate millions in the dark, or only with a little glow- worm ego lamp in the hand of each. Out of the resulting phantasmagoric movements of mankind, some ordained social minds, unable, as the scientific mind anointed for humanity always is, to look upon bewilderment without seeking to set it in order, commenced to observe some leading trends along which the weary footsteps of this our Israel in the wilderness must go. And soon certain leading habits of history's wander- ing mobs were tabulated as the laws of society — ^that is In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 29 the historical habits of men. One of these laws is known among Socialists as economic determinism. It was found that as a whole, the lawless man of the wilderness, the individualist, followed his loaf; he invariably followed his loaf, and this law of the lawless became the. first and most determinative of all sociologic laws. Where the man went to get his loaf there went his temple, his priest, his God. How the man got his loaf, thus he moralized, thus he poetized, thus he legalized, and thus he prayed. If in the course of history, some certain few were able to determine how and where the man should get his loaf; that few determined what sort of a God, what sort of a temple, what sort of a State the age should have. When the whole of organized society is able to determine for itself what shall be its economic determinism, when it takes back from this recreant private-property man the fire he has stolen from social altars, and by becoming the possessor of its own loaf-getting — ^the soil, the machin- ery, (now no longer personal implements, but vast fac- tories and railroads, which no man can use, and which, therefore, no man shall own) — ^then society will be able, economically, to determine the private life, instead of the private life (the property life) economically determining the whole life of all the gods and men. By a democracy of workers voting, and of voters working, this America would pass on to other ages a clean, wholesome growing race, its government being the matrix of man's contem- porary needs, his tasks, and his abilities. During the footsore, ragged, empty-stomached meandering of ego's mobs through the un^social wilder- ness, another determinism was discovered, the social determinism of human creatures into groups. Cry, as ego would, about the paramount necessity of preserving his own splendid interior characteristics apart, he always showed them to somebody, he must come to somebody else. This is the development of man by social group- ing: — and there is no other development of mankind but what is social. That class consciousness and class strug- gle, of which onlookers at the Socialist propaganda think 30 Revolutionary Essays so badly, is necessitated and justified by history and the analysis of capitalistic value production. The Americans, now discovered, when they became class conscious, do as the crew of a ship might do which has been ti-eacherously scuttled by its captain and officers; they become con- scious, as a betrayed and abandoned crew, and they unite as such for the saving of themselves. Class-conscious, organized resistance soon evolutes into mutual assistance. Repeated failures in strikes broaden our views as to the magnitude and solidarity of the labor sweaters, who amalgamate and federate their unions into trusts. We become conscious of the identity of our own liberties and welfare with the liberty and wel- fare of the whole country; our unions are the only parlia- ments in which a patriot should deign to sit. In the par- liaments of labor alone are discussed the vital issues of the State and world. We hold history's commission for the rescue of all States from the despotism of the mer- chants. Between the value-making and the value-mongering class, there is no relation but wages, slavery or war. "Slave" or "free" are class terms applying to masses only of persons below or above a certain social line of subpel- sion. As with a plow of fire across the social organism comes this line of subpelsion. Below it the majority of the human family are smitten by the golden feet of the money-master class. To get some money above the price of your daily loaf is to be that much above this line of sub- pelsion, and below it is the class of the hired laborers. Like the diver, who builds under the water, labor grows nothing where it builds, labor has no sunshine there, no life of its own there. All it can hope for there, and all that it mostly endeavors for, is to keep breath, and yet for the right of breathing at all it must breathe there ten hours out of every day's sunshine. It goes down to labor at its own charges; it sends up out of its slavery by its own labor-force in one day five loaves, but when it comes up to eat, the master gives it one of these loaves, the others he has sold for his own profit or eaten for his own fatten- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 31 ing. They are his profit for permitting the man to credit him with four loaves to make more capital with and farther to enslave the man. After a time society improves the diving apparatus, the diver now can send up more loaves than ever; but too many for the master to sell. Because the diver can send up too many loaves he cannot be per- mitted to go down more than half time for the one he wants. Thus as a penalty for the world's having made prog- ress, the diver is put on half rations. Such multitudes of divers are now urged by the half-loaf need to go down, that the money-master can get them at less than the old fifth of what they produce ; and at less than what Ameri- can nature needs they can hire others. There is a wail, therefore, in the land, the people below the line of sub- pelsion are in the valley of the shadow of death. There is a great image overtowering and overpowering the peo- ple. It is the image of Nebuchadnezzer's dream inverted. This one's head is of clay, its feet of gold. It is a tre- mendous giant, it lives, it moves, it smites us down with its golden feet; below the line of manhood, womanhood, childhood, it smites us. This is capitalism. What are you going to do about it? " Mene, mene, tekel upharsin." IV. THE CONNECTIVIST THOUGHT. To have been part of the town and factory experi- ence of the nineteenth century is the greatest advantage ever enjoyed by thinkers. It was a period of local politi- cal revolutions occurring together with wide-spreading industrial connectiveness. Royal and commercial an- archy were rampant on top; the foundations of creed conservatism were broken up, the "better" class went mad, and the property relations between man and man fell outside the realm of law and reason. Great gold- tailed comets of plutocracy swept unheralded across the social sky, and ancient nobilities dropped from their places like meteors. It was like a huge glacial period in 32 Revolutionary Essays its might, in its confusion, in its revelation and in its final settlement. The proportionateness of the old individuals to the new property was tragic and absurd; and thus it became a splendid time for mental revulsions. The capi- talist was not only a physical despot, but he was ridicu- lously dangerous; too ridiculous to last long. Under- neath him the fundamentals of society were finding each other; the true foundations were drawing together. And this took place through his own transformation and unification of work for himself only, to be followed by a corresponding transformation and unification of the peo- ple's thought concerning him and themselves. The conducting of power from one distant place to another, and the diffusion and specializing of it through the machine wheel, this was revolution. The thin thread of steam or electric energy running, or rather continuing, like a little hot serpent in a pipe, a wired energy invisible, like nothing but itself, which were industrially captured like giants for the creation of alienable wealth at the point of the machines, were emphasizing the invisible and giving it potentiality even more than the visible. Life was continuous and from without; the person was not the whole of it, individualism was ended. These subtle abili- ties reduced to horse-power and volts did indeed usher in the age of materialistic wealth and conquest, but only as a brief interregnum preceding the greater inauguration of a connective spiritual life among the men of all nations. Oh, what an age of revolution it was ! The masters, the workers, the properties, the States, the sinners, the saints and the sciences were blundered together by too much private power ; and now comes the afterthought of it all. The continuous machine power, and the ability for its own reproduction promoted a correspondence in the minds of men. With its bands, phonographs, telegraphs, waveographs, bank credits, steel rails and ocean lines, all in one strong swing, keeping time to the single purpose of exploiting labor and alienating riches from the State, machine power had a mightier mission than the produc- tion of barnacles. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 33 The philosopher who does not see in these things the supply and demand for new thought misses the ad- vantage of having lived in the nineteenth century. Out of the whole confusion two things shall surely survive, the collectivist State and the collectivist thinking. The revolution has been so complete as to render obsolete the old vegetable motograph of thought, and provides one more befitting the mental activity of the time. Dominated by the agricultural experience the mind had been forced to move on the primitive moto- graph of growth. Roots, stems, leaves^ fruit, develop- ment, nourishment, hue, form, feature, character, con- trast, value, vigor, decay, death, were plant attributes that supplied the modes of our thinking. But the new revela- tion of nature energy, unlimited and continuable as a power in one's house by which to connect with the world for doing one's everyday business; to level a mountain, to carry up a meal, to sew on a button, reveals life itself to this age, and it is no longer an individual like a plant or an animal, but it is the amazing convolution of a universe in motion, its own unit, its own purpose, its own sufificiency, and including as one of its particles the race of man. The single persons of our race it draws into the sublimity of its larger relations, with its orbs and orbits of heaven seen or not yet seen by the eyes of science. The vegetable and animal motograph was essentially individualistic; it limited life by growth and to units; the new motograph will be of circles, coils and other forms, along which industrial energy moves. Life will no longer be a descent to man like the rain, but the passing of each man into the other; the making of connections every day, the apparent depersonalization of egO' in exchange for public spirit, connective energy and race immortality. Life will no longer appeal to us as an annual bud, a flower and then a rustling death waiting in its winter snow-shroud for its successor, the time of spring buds and the youthful green to come again. Life was never so truly revealed in any page of nature as it has exposed itself to us in the continuous moving of a little thread of 34 Revolutionary Essays steam to deliver its mighty blows at the factory bench. Never was the might of the invisible thing so annunciated as in the limitless energy on the electric wire. Invisibility, motion, connection and reserve-of-strength-possibility for the sons of men. This is what the machine age has contributed to philosophy. How miserably guilty then are the thinkers of this machine-blessed age, if poor Spinoza — ^the lonely, pining, wounded Jew, Spinoza— in that fiercely individualistic age of his had more intimation of the one-life than have we! What a penalty shall I have paid for living on pri- vate possessions, if I have been robbed thereby of the power to think outside myself; if I have not learned that he who can only reason with his own mind reasons with but a broken piece of the human brain. Comrade thinker, the private mind cannot explain itself to thee, for it is itself but a part of that great explainer — Socialism. Com- rade Thinker, neither thou nor I are morally great enough to know how wrong are the wrongs about us. When all men are working together they shall to- gether know the meaning of life; they shall see it with social vision of heart, and head, and hand. Many have been the thinkers, and multitudinous the unharnessed thoughts of the world, but the race shall have found its philosophy when all these are one, every thinker doing and every thought bearing its part in the strain of life. These thoughts to have and be, constitute my part and thine of the everlasting life, the immortality that is not future. The world's science is as a great empty house waiting for its guest, the organized man, to Qome home, whose doing and thinking shall be separated never more. Is this thy faith and hope? Then let us onward to the ballot boxes. V. SELF-EXTENSION. The man who formerly traveled long journeys afoot confronted certain physical grievances. If he were a re- sistant, he took a great deal of notice of what leather and stitching were put into his §hQ?s, Roa^s that were not In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 35 macadamized he greatly favored, and if good halting places were too far apart, he declined to walk two days' journey in one without a wherefore; and if there was no inn, he knocked loudly at the doors of private homes for shelter. This done often, the inn came to the traveling Mahomet or his successor, because he would not go to the inn. Whichever of them, the innkeeper or the trav- eler, were more strenuously selfish was he that set the ball of reform rolling. Perhaps the innkeeper came before the traveler had knocked loud enough to be heard by him, because he found travelers coming to his place too late and too tired at night to spend much money; and so, in order to get at his men while they were yet fresh, or before the simple villagers down the road had a chance of ministering to their necessities, he moves down and opens another inn there. Perhaps that innkeeper had been laboring many days to provide shelter, rest and fel- lowship for the weary-footed; but the fellows came not. When he moves he eases ofif these old troubles and calls in some of his misplaced labor. Boniface brings to his new circle a wife and two sons; the wife is no hurt to him, she always submitted; she is no moral force in his life. Had she resented twenty years earlier, her sons would not have been so immorally hurt, that they could not get out of that old inn, and their boyhood labors would not have been so wasted ; neither would she be now so insipid and doomed so soon to die dynamically out of the family, a non-resisting and revolutionarily barren unit. So he, the husband, looks upon the son, and very selfishly comes to the conclusion that about the best thing he can do with John is to co-operate with him. For yesterday, because of a paternal rebuke, that John dropped a whole tray of beer glasses upon the floor, and told Pap that if he did not like the way he was waiting upon the guests, to wait upon them himself. The father strikes him no more, that was the old way, but he reverts to his new dynamic of mind, will and judgment, still perfectly selfish ; for indeed it is no longer safe to hit John. So, guided on his way by a mature selfishness, he 36 Revolutionary Essays makes an alliance, and a new shingle appears over the inn to this effect, "John Beerman & Sons," who are now living on the next inner circle of experiences, resisting new wrongs or evils. In this circle he comes nearer^ to the man behind us, the racial experiential energy which accumulates to our credit as resisting egos succeed each other. We need not resent tlie re-appearance of our old friend Selfishness in this better time. As it was our friend before, so will it remain in every evil of our involution until we reach the race man behind us, the great liold- ing-up soul of mankind. This energy of saving goes out- wards to the resentful individuals, the sentries, and gives them what they as persons had given into it from_ their local segments of revolt. From our experiences, it has digested for us and sends all our revolt back as race vitality. Local resisters sent in a kick from the trades- unions — an organizing experience, and local political Socialist campaigns; these it amalgamates and essential- izes, and then returns, not to the localities which sent them in, nor as stuf? for this or that special experience alone, but it diffuses the net result of all over and among as much of the human family as are in free and open in- tercourse. What was sent in as the crude product of personal selfing is given out in a refined tendency to co- operation, and its result is the easier formation of wrong- resisting groups until we reach the more scientific selfish- ness of the true state. Thus from the primal anarch sel- fishness of a hurt ego sent into the race soul, comes back that imperial selfishness which the Socialist proletarian movement is reaching out for in the industrial nation. This is the selfishness of the whole, no longer a rebuke, no longer a shame, no longer broken into unkindly blind parts. Returning to the earlier stages of the inn removed. We should not forget the number of people who suffered wrongs from the repeated midnight knockings of the travelers. They who could not sleep at night because of the clamor, resolved no longer to. sleep by day in rela- tion to their troubles; the bedless sons of the night and In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 37 road were a nuisance, and their protest would certainly have brought some new innkeeper into existence, if our Boniface had not decided to stand his own local nuisance no longer; and so resolved at about that time to kick himself into a change; for timeliness is the better part of wisdom. A wisdom concerning the movements of the population had come to him. He had stepped out of the mere Boniface who hit or grabbed the next thing, to a Boniface who studied matters pertinent to aggregations of men and their movements outside of the inn. And this was an infusion into him of that which had accrued in the bank behind us to all our credit, and it came to him for his courage with usury; and it will always come to the man who in honest selfishness resists whatever hurts or menaces his life. The articulate wrong of the world, though it develop right, does not develop it articulately. The right appears to be an articulation which no man has ever yet uttered or heard. A bill of rights is at the best a bill of words. A declaration of rights, or a constitution conferring rights, is but the map of a future battlefield. The sense of a wrong suffered is one that we share with all living ani- mals; the experience of organized resistance is entirely human and distinct from the wrong itself. To be starved out by employers is a wrong felt, but the corrective intel- lection of a boycott following thereon is another thing. It is a rational, advanced and eminently human resent- ment. Class conflict, the mature form of personal con- flict, is an advance of the sufferer into the realm of larger foresight, judgment, provision and fortitude. It is not the sudden and unexpected result of ill-temper, or acci- dent, but it is the next step from the uncontrollable to the control — it is a movement from the accidence of things into the realm of ability for ordering them, which is found only in the mind to be translated into the will and courage of men. Class consciousness might be an inert non-moral consciousness yielding nothing more honorable than resignation, but there is a consciousness which includes 38 Revolutionary Essays within it the spiritual potentiaHty of the race. If I saw that personal resistance to wrongs was in its nature a thing that remained fixed of kind, I would not be an apostle of resistance emanating from the offended self. But because I realize that resistance on the field provided by capitalism must speedily become organic, I hail capitalism as the splendid and abundant occasion for the spiritual collective life of man. Truly placed, as never before was conflict placed, on the emergencies and demands of our very existence; we find ourselves to be personal conflictors, whose self-interest has been merged in the largest and most vitally fundamental issue that ever man against man has stood upon in the history of the world. The men who stand for maintaining a broken and a desultory conflict between persons for their own separate nourishment stand for a racially fruitless con- flict and one that terminates in the degradation of the contestants. Wherefore he is the apostle of the soul of man, the spiritual pioneer of the race, who is a militant Socialist, while the capitalist, though he provides that good battlefield, stands only for the desolate life of private property. He adds not to the vitality of the race while fighting to enfeeble its fundamental class. If he fails to realize, and loses the ownership of the century's money and machine, it is only the defeat of an alien. We are not better men, we are not wiser men, we are not less selfish (I wish we were more), but ours is the selfish stream upon which the race has launched its argosy for the success, satisfaction and splendor of future civilization. When the traveler whose wrongs produced the firm of John Beerman & Son's began to ride in coaches, he did not escape all hurts or wrongs. The jolting of the coach into deep ruts, the compulsion to descend in the night to pull the wheels out of their difficulty, the lame horse and the angry driver, caused him to call for the macadamiza- tion which he formerly shunned. When these loose stones, instead of cutting his sole leather, begin to stick in the horses' hoofs, he protests against the wrong of not ramming them to a smooth surface. Formerly he es- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 39 caped the injury of sharp stones by walking around the patch; he then left the evil for the next fellow just as he found it, unfought and unexplained. He was then selfish in the single way, the time had not come yet when his selfishness would have to be for the next man also. When the traveling man underwent the process of self-extension, which made him a creature with four wheels under him, and a mass of iron, timber and leather round and above him, and eight legs running before him, he could only make it all right for himself by making it right for all this extension, and so, while he improves the road for one journey, he improves it for years and for thousands of other travelers. Later on, when instead of driving over the stones he takes the train,' he becomes a very much enlarged extension of his former self for the purpose of his journey; but he has new wrongs on the line of the larger life. The trains are not heated, they are overcrowded, ill-ventilated, unclean. If he owned the train, he might cleanse it and regulate the temperature, as he formerly could help the carriage wheel and the horse's hoof. But the thing now drawing him is an entity of great dimensions. If he ventures to regulate anything, its speed or lighting, he will either be blown up or locked up. As one person, he can feel the wrongs as keen and grievous as ever, but as one he can do noth- ing to remedy them ; and this is true progress. Formerly the road along which he traveled was owned in sections, townships, each of which contained some of his fellow-sufiferers and counted for something as resistants ; rates were therefore levied all along to mend the roads. But the modern railroad is not of any village, or town, or State; indeed it can hardly be said to be in America. It is self-owned and self-controlled, a little nation on wheels. The man who is hurt by this new con- cern can, alone, ofifer no intelligent resistance; he must wait for the agreement of a great multitude of other peo- ple. How long will he have to wait until they learn to get together to find how they may balance the wrong of one man's hurt? A long time, but depend upon it, this is 40 Revolutionary Essays progress; this is education. When they do agree, and find that in order to relieve one poor little fellow's trouble they must relieve the president's, they begin to think big. No longer is it a shoemaker, a stone patch, an inn, a horse carriage to be dealt with, it is an almost independent inter-state oligarchy on wheels, but this is progress; this is education. The traveler has now a new extension to be considered — from himself to the govern- ment. In order to cope with the wrong of one sore foot, he must become as great or greater than a railroad. While getting the exact measure of his wrong, he is driven from State to State, until he finds that the railroads are all planted at Washington ; and there he finds them a very efifective part of the government, ready to smite him back. Shall he who has gone so far and learned so much of this Washington return a weaker man? No! for he has been growing a governmental awareness during his journeys. It is impossible for him to go back as ^ mere sore-footed man, for that sore foot has marched him right into the ruling life of the nation, he is no longer mentally one, but a multitude. Such is now the stage reached by the wrongied traveler and the wronged worker. The one having lost control of his conveyance and the ways it went on, and the other ability to do anything with himself without access to tools and machines of almost national extent and cost, there remains but the same remedy to the worker and the walker — ^the control of Washington. VI. THE NEW WAY IN POLITICS. Political action is to the whole of social life what speech is to the science of sociology — always an experi- ment in expression, pending the arrival of that which expresses, and shall meet with universal approval; the scientific governor, the race soul. The Socialist worker being out for a democratic government, the Socialist teacher must also be out for a democratic pre-statement of it, a statement, not only dem- ocratic as to its alleged intent, but democratically ac- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 41 cepted. The democracy must understand and recognize the statement which is fittest to survive, and adopt it. Social statements may originate in the college chair or in the brain of the unlettered prophet who claims a social vision; but not until they "touch the spot" in the public mind are they the science called sociology, for it is no mastery; this science of sociology must be sown in the public mind, received by it; and from the public mind be impregnated into governmental blossom ere it is science. But we all know our wrongs. Teachers, humanitarians and prophets should there- fore withdraw from Utopian affirmatives and concentrate on the wrongs and oppressions of the time, honoring that pathology with first place whose relief for to-day's pain is a preventative for to-morrow. It is not I, by thought within me, that state a truth ; truth is balanced so as to be between me and others; but it is mine to be sifting, restating and arranging my truths as if I were the public, until that outer public mind ac- cords the balance true. When amidst the clangor of bells the social ear at last finds that harmony statement, there shall be comparatively a great silence. The democratic reasonableness, which shall then as- sert itself to be the science of society, will from the mo- ment be clothed with so human an interest, use and indorsement that it thenceforth is forever vitalized as the abiding law of life. It will be perm.anent law, but not by document, not by force, but by usage and approval. No outcry against it, as the rule of the dead, shall be raised by the living of the future ; for the wise livers in that future will know that to dispute the right of the dead in us, and, therefore, to rule us, is to deny our own right to life: That future will have learned to discriminate and balance. It will be well acquainted with the fact that no man ever dies out of this life, be he lord or master. The truthings towards social science are ours, because we deal with the four vitalities of society, the four pillars of every State. Social 42 Revolutionary Essays wants, social wills, social powers and social works, and because our effort is towards strength through simplicity, to reduce wants to want, wills to will, powers to power, works to work; because we place the evolution of the in- dividual life on an involution towards the heart of society. And because we stand for the redemption of ego by humanity from the heterogenous to the homogenous, from isolation and anarchy to unity and order. 'Nowadays a politician is felt to be a trickster, the diplomat and the statesman are silhouettes of deceit. We do not know why we think so, but we do think so, and also we rightly so think. Politics is now the device of maintaining the property dominion over the lives of the poor by two parties, so staged as to seem real antagonists; so historied, news- papered and talked about as to make the victory of one or the other at the ballot boxes seem to be the victory of something other than of the property and capitalistic ele- ment of society. Socialism strips this mask off politics and exposes the naked truth of the class war necessarily made by the private capitalist on the dignity and liberty of all the rest of mankind, and, therefore, of the war made by the Democratic and Republican parties on the liberty and manhood of Americans. The process of the profit monger, for which the whole machinery of bi-party government is a mere protectorate, is a process of evolution into slavery.^ Capitalism is a pro- cess of evolution into slavery only, let that be remem- bered, and not an automatic movement (as some, for the sake of settling things by law, once for all, would have it called) into Socialism. Consulting the interests of the people on our con- tinent as an organic physical whole, to be supplied from nature with material for the preservation and beautifying of life, we find ourselves face to face with the organically active. All those who are engaged in feeding, preserving and beautifying the life of the organism of society are on the living way. Any that are not thus engaged are not in our present thought live Americans. Our revolution is In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 43 turning from them and letting the roots of democracy strike into their proper soil the organically active workers of the continent. These organic activities will be found, of course, to extend over a vastly wider field than that of manual labor; so wide a field that every hale and sane man who wants to be a live man can always find his place. The dream of democracy is still among the idealists, it is the idealism of the Socialist. The value mongers have only touched this ark of God to defile it. They have stolen it into their Pagan camp, thinking that its blessings would follow and honor their crime; but nay, this ark will only smite them. Already the ruling class of value mongers are gone morally blind, they will soon be glad to give back that ark of democracy to the workers of the nation. The public opinion with which we are now ac- quainted in the scrap bag of the ballot boxes must be accepted as the democracy until the great human entity that is waiting for its development upon our public activities is fully come. But mere politics of expediency will not bring it; they will not long support a man in that apostolic zeal which the actual and impending crimes of property despotism call for. They dig not deep enough for social sources. So long as reformers confine their efforts tO' what is called "practical politics," that is, to the consideration and booming of such things only as are likely to go through, so long is the public life only a life of expediency; and so long does the strong man armed alone keep the house, just so long is lacking that virile enthusiasm that saves a nation. Ah. my brothers, the fearless white brow of the moral revolutionist must always be above the reformers and in the midst of them. Just as much as that brow gleams out its thought on the people, just as much as they hearken, just as they are ready to move up to him there as his soul burns above their practical politics are they ready for the saving of the nation. This is not pouring contempt upon the practical. It is only calling attention 44 Revolutionary Essays to the fact, and so warning, that the practical is but a iiew name for an old, old sinner; that it means only bowing to that which is accomplished and, therefore, accomplish- able; that it only means the rule of success and the death of progress. Who knows what is practical? Hpw many of the masterfully practical men of affairs who gripped the world in their iron wills in the days of Claudius, Caesar, knew that Jesus Christ and his 'poor troupe of unpracti- cal followers were the grand masters of the new practi- cal which was to supersede their great Pagan dominion of might and genius? Let us be modest as to the men and the changes that are not practical, and let us have this good faith, that — Whatsoever the wrongs of any time require to destroy them, thatsoever is right and at hand, and if preachers and politicians will allow the Eternal Right to use them, it shall be practical. VII. THE EXTERNAL ORDER. There is to me a great outer me, an all-containing circle; in whose fidelity all may trust; for the life of all is within him. If we are a malady, or a mistake, the malady and mistake are his, we are all three within him. He is an everlasting security to us, we are an everlasting consequence to him.' Only this we know of him, and he again of us. Even as the skull is the fortress, container and boundary of the brain, though afifected and moulded by the brain, so is God to all of us. I cannot relate him specifically to life any more than the bone of my skull can I relate to my thoughts; yet he is my stability in being; he alone holds me out of the clouds, as the skull keeps thought in a material world anchored within its walls. But he is more than this simile to me. And yet what more I can only exclaim by the word "unknown." And if I should have reverence for him, what greater reverence can I declare, with my personal moral limita- tions, than is expressed in that same word unknown. He is even greater and farther from me than the whole un- conscious moral of society ; because he is the net return of In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 45 all things. He and I have no existence in rest, we are that which flows along the surface of each other's ex- periences. I, who can only feel and know it as it flows outside of me, bow to it while yet unknown. I am as yet only a verbalist of him, it is clearly inadequate to tell you, or you to know, what God is to the whole of us by words. Truly I know, that whatsoever he may be to me men- tally, that he cannot be in himself. I must do him, rather than speak him, and if any pietist, wriggling on the gold, diamond-mounted pin of sin-consciousness, or self-consciousness, can raise a more God-honoring stand- ard than this way of doing first to know God thereby, let us have it, Mr. Pin, the world has not yet gazed upon it. It is at the end of this, our evolution out of the un- righteousness of personal rightness, that we shall at last see him. And surely the human race, which has been content so long with its ignorance of the divine through social unrighteousness, need not complain, if its own continued choice still bars it out. He, therefore, is the truest prophet of God who declares that we do not and cannot know him in our social sin, save to know him as the one who is waiting for that sin to be ended. As a personal life, I am one of God's hindrances; but as a col- lectivist, I am one engaged in not blocking the way. The social mystic restores the external order to the moral world, but not as an absolute substance of truth fixed outside. To us it is the evolution of progressive perception, growing out of our active resistance to wrong. We shall never see him, but we shall be him outside of the private life. He is the balance of mutually supporting movements. He is the common sense of the universe. Other mystics hired into the ruck of the prop- erty thinkers made that external order an inner order, moving from the heart of the personal life; the social mystic declares the personal life to be as incapable of uniting with living order as books with the movements of the stars which they relate. Morality is to be re- deemed from the book grave, and set into the active 46 Revolutionary Essays social outside of ego, or the universe goes on without its philosophers. There is no place, no space for morality in the single heart, or any domain that fancy may attrib- ute to the private life ; I can no longer help morality, but by getting out to it. The external order is indeed re- stored; but it is an order to mere thinkers and specula- tors to step out, and with the rest of mankind, and learn the paces of human organization; it is the new order of learning to organize the work and workers of the world, so that there shall no work be done in the world more than is necessary, and none less. The external order is restored and human nature, protesting as an animal against the wrongs done to it by the old interior moral- ists of property becomes the cradle of the spir- itual life — the physical rebuker becomes the teacher of the spiritual man, and the soul of the world becomes securely anchored in the rightness of its daily work. The moral order is mentally restored to its place outside the private life when ego contemplates men as moving in classes. Whether the single thinker can see the resemblance between his own movements and univer- sal organization, he must do as a worker that way, until he becomes so obediently subconscious of all this as to will and to do it. Then is he as immortal as are all the movements of the world. Whoever reflects upon the pleasures of the mind or of the body, which may at any time have been his, can recall how extraneous and uncontrolled in their coming those pleasures were. I care not whether it was a great joy of the body or a great joy of the mind, you may re- member that you only made preparations for it, or made none. You prepared certain conditions precedent and the joy flowed ; the source was not yours, nor the moment to control. You, at best, seem to have been but a spectator of your own pleasure, and a memory or a result of it; you were an experience of something else. Of all your pleas- ures and so-called triumphs of the mind how little you have controlled ! Follow it up, I beseech you, and see if your brain has not been a highway for something else In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 47 to walk and triumph upon! There is no way by which you can conceive of yourself, subjectively, as any other than an experience of something else. Nor will you be more logically satisfied by any attempt you may make at sensing yourself, or proving yourself, to be an experi- ence agent any more than a moral agent. None of the pleasures I have asked you to recall are now at your com- mand. I challenge thee, oh, thou self -controlling cripple, to arise, take up thy bed and walk again into those pleas- ures we are thinking of; they are not thine, as part of thee, to command. And 1 want to know if, they being thy experiences of something else moving upon thee, or of thy moving upon something else, and yet you cannot and know not how to repeat them, whether you are your own. Will you accept your nonentity with folded hands as an experience of something outside of yourself, or as something outside experiencing itself in you? It is an inglorious dilemma, and your ego must be easily pleased with honors if it finds vanity in either. But the loss of honor is the least of your privation in this alternative. Your barrenness as a moral agent in the world is fixed as soon as you fix on either choice. And so may you range up and down the mountains and among the tombs, crying and wounding yourself with stones, there will be no satisfaction to you; you are but dead bones and flesh so long as your moral experience is overshadowed by the thought of a self-being, the survivor and the precedor of experience. The solution of life's problem is found for thee and me in that which no longer separates that ante- cedent from this survivor, in that which breaks up the dual life and its concept, which here in this analysis, as everywhere, turns up again the old legacy of history, to blight the best efiforts of human thought in search for the balancing of life by the mind, the objective and sub- jective. Let us, therefore, boldly abandon the self, either as objective or subjective, since they alike land us in the same fallacious unrest and barrenness; let us courage- ously deny the antecedent and consequent self, before 48 Revolutionary Essays and after each experience; the quiescent self barrenly moved upon, or moving barrenly upon something else, let us take the moral world movement itself as ours. I am that movement, let me say, which formerly I divided, as a subject moved upon, as a tabula rasa written upon, as a memory of something that was, and that did, or was done to ; as the container-after-the-fact of that being, do- ing, suffering. We have seen the recurring difficulties of all this. We have seen the ghosts of dualism rising again out of every settlement which included in its separate ego a compound of the active and passive of the universe which kept ego impaled on its private property, and chat- tered on about the making of a State. Let us abandon all but the recognition of one movement; let us break up life's cosmic movement no more into personal agents and subjects. Let us abandon that which does not move, for this is the primary source of error. I conceive agent, object, cause, operation and result to be one motion. I see alt things around me to be a common self-sustaining operation. Everything I see, and hear, and know around me are part of the same big, live machine as I am, all a movement, thinking and working; it is our fellowship together. I retain an element of resistance in me, but by consecration to the perceived sociableness of things, I have learned how to arrange this resistance ofifered by a separate stomach and a separate brain to a general stom- ach and a general brain. I see how I can fill my stomach out of enlarged social storehouses and how my brain may become quickened and inspired with whole thoughts from the deep, clear reservoir of the to-me-always-uncon- scious social spirit. This moral resistant I deplore ; but I cannot lose it while my body holds together. I, there- fore use it. I need not fear that but by borrowed moral energy I may so reduce the virulence of the disease of egoism that the self-shadow will only sometimes blind me. Whatever I do to reduce the sense of self in me; whether it be good self, bad self, or indififerent self, or to reduce even this struggle to see no s^lf, is but a step into In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 49 the moral life of society. I am, therefore, an otherhood, laboring now for the sense of otherhood, laboring for the reduction of self-identity, laboring after the sacred joy of depersonalization; that is, laboring to reduce per- sonalism by henceforth ceasing to think about it; by be- coming a worker in otherhoods, an organizer of other- hood activities, a perpetual outlooker — a man, breathing, moving, working, thinking, on the outside of himself. I am a workman, a workmaster, or a master workman. No longer a mere observer, but a doer. For life and I are now revealed as no more a private musing, but an outside public doing. VIII. THE MEN ON THE WAY. Recognizing the class war that is at the heart of capi- talism upon the labor of the world, the necessary struggle that is in its bowels for, and against all mankind, the Socialist goes into politics. Not to create, not to pro- voke, not to intensify, no, not even to exploit the war of capital upon the people; but to make war upon that war; to lead this great hog into harmlessness by a string in its nose. Sometimes, by suffering it to lead us, letting it display its cruel, selfish, filthy wallowing in blood and crime; sometimes, by checking and tripping it over, to let its followers and worshippers see the nature of the beast to which they have committed the cause of civiliza- tion, and at last, when exhausted by its fat and rotten- ness, letting it fall forever. The difference between a well-meaning man in the two old parties and in the temporary party of Socialism is that the man in the old party has no excelsior, he only makes Republican-party or Democratic-party provision for a day, two old inns on either side of the broad politi- cal highway at which, alternately, the dollarocracy of the land bait their horses. The political activity of the Socialist, as I have under- stood it, does not consist directly of the class struggle between capital .and labor, it is not the men of that strug- l*i^6PERTY OF LIBRARY 50 Revolutionary Essays gle gone for themselves only into politics. It is the wise men of the country pulling ofif the disguise by which that struggle in and out of politics is so skilfully concealed from the victims by the beneficiaries of profit versus Americans. Direct combat between any two things ends only in the destruction of either and always In the produc- tion of something dififerent from both. The class struggle is an abnormal, socially unnatural activity, and both contestants are the victims of the crime. Political Socialism is not engaged in that struggle. Socialism is diagnosing it, doctoring it, sometimes giving . it a chill and sometimes giving it a fever, with a view to sometime exterminating it from the system. Between this and the time for permanent establish- ment of America's democracy upon its own industrialism, there is no such thing as real Socialism; the real is not yet. As writers, speakers or elected men we are, until then, a band of idealists, with Socialism for our goal. Against this, the Republican and Democrat only offer Americans a new janitor every four years, to take charge of the White House and divide salaries among his friends. As the State machine goes round after the manner of the steam hippodrome of wooden, highly painted horses at the country fair, round and round they go to the tune of "Hail Columbia," but they never go on. Tliere is before the mere quadrennial revolving of the old parties a neces- sary winding-up point, a congenial time and place for lying down, when their man gets in. The time for So- cialist agitators to halt is when the revolution of the eighteenth century, no longer intercepted by the prop- erty-loyal classes, shall be established, and mankind shall have dominion over property and things forever. When the farce of bi-party government is played out, and the game of democracy, which the liberals of revolu- tionary America and France played, sincerely or insin- cerely, into the life of nations, has really become a sincere, fact in the life of nations; when conscious of itself, and power; and private property, as such, shall be forever In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 51 driven from public office, then the Socialist agitator halts and Socialism begins. The evolution of capitalism into slavery is then frustrated, and instead of a slaughter- house it shall turn out to have been a seminary for the study of slave-making; but one wherein the workman students learned how and where to arrest developments, a seminary where they became true evolutionists by not waiting upon the law of evolution, but by making evolu- tion obey the law of their resolution that they would not be slaves, and that capitalism should not be their evolu- tion, nor the father nor the mother of anything in the new economy but its caution, its intercourse and its mechani- cal appliances for the saving of labor. On their way to that resting place, the Socialists, as humanitarians and disciples of the true spiritual life of the soul in society, will have much to do in the way of ameliorating the human misery produced under this antagonistic system; much to do in the way of cheating capitalism into occa- sional acts of mercy or harassing capitalism into pru- dential abatement of its almost omnipotent power; much to do in contending for public health and exposing to the public gaze such dangerous aspects of the private-prop- erty hog life over human life that all men, without being Socialists, may easily see. By finding common footing in common wrong, whereon men of both parties may swear together at their own folly and impotency, and may be led to think them- selves into a more potent mood and into wider politics, by doing everything in the way of minimizing capital- ism's hurt of the people which can be done for the per- manent benefit of the people without helping crime to a longer life by ceasing its sorrowful friction. To help the wounded without prolonging the war; to remove sufifer- ing without removing consequences that might, if un- removed, help to condone the guilty cause of it. With the red cross of the Socialist to follow on the heel of economic war, supplying the victims, yet not so supplying them that the victor has that much more money and energy spared to continue the slaughter. To 52 Revolutionary Essays relieve the hardships of society, yet not as a reformer who thinks that to be all that the present society needs. To remove the dead, if you will, and relieve the dying; but always, like Marc Anthony, putting a live tongue into their dumb wound-mouths, so that dead or dying, every victim shall denounce the criminal that led to his undoing. During this transcient stage from capitalism's menace of slavery to Socialism's deliverance, the "ideal" of Socialism seizes upon the "real" and ex- ploits it for the future, turning its head to tlae needs of present correction as subordinate and educational for the future. In putting up candidates for such an ofiEce as that of President, it is more with a view to letting the figures of the vote instruct our despots and letting the thoughts provoked during the heat of our elections instruct our slaves than with any desire at present to place a Socialist at the head of a capitalist administration. The Socialist knows very well that no radical reformer can go into a radically corrupt government with any other advantage than the disadvantage of lending his presence and im- plied approval to the administration of the crime. To some common posts of human serviceableness, local Socialists may be elected with consistency, but in Congress the Socialist must stand unmoved, with finger uplifted for- ever, the Nathan of the house. In the United States Congress he finds his natural political enemy in the Tory Republican party. Socialism is democracy, Toryism is monarchy; they are born to hate each other. The mere tendency to centralism mani- fested by republicanism is no ground of affinity. That tendency is but the developed instinct of a class which seeks a larger territory to reign over without dis- turbance under the name of a Union, and which sees in centralization the secret of the most effective authori- tarianism. In Republicanism and its natural ally Roman- ism, the Socialist sees the exploitation of the physical man and all the abilities of improved modern labor, In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 53 backed up by the spectre of the feudal dominion over the minds of the hapless laborers. Rome is our natural enemy, and she says so; that handmaid of monarchy, the foe of democracy every- where. It is not as a religion that the SociaHst finds him- self foot to foot with her and her cardinal's mandate, but as a feudal political institution, living upon a necessary everlasting slavery of ignorance and superstition which it justifies by the lie that because Adam sinned, God de- mands that the working class everywhere should sufifer without seeking to improve their condition. This mon- strous parasite creed of the church is so obviously politi- cal and held and taught for a price paid, or expected to be paid, by the money masters of the world, that the Socialist finds his natural political enemy always in Rome. Whatever religion there is in the Catholic Church will never antagonize, nor be antagonized by Socialism, but officially Rome is our anti-democratic police. The Socialists of France understand this; and for this, as for other recent modern reasons (while we look to Germany for economics and philosophy), we look to France for experience and instruction in the knowledge of our enemies. In the other democratic wing of capitalism we find our affinities and antipathies. In the Democratic party, as incarnated in the yard stick (minus an inch) and the pound weight (minus a drachm) of the little profit monger, Socialism sees a natural antagonist both on the plane of philosophy and of economics. In the infinite selfishness and meanness of the profit monger we have all that is possible to have off the gallows, of individualism ;• and so to keep on his busi- ness and off the gallows or out of prison which leads to it, is about all that he desires. The profit monger is self- isolated. We have no affiliation with him, or in his com- petitive politics. His philosophy is that of ego alone, as his Protestant religion is, and with neither can the So- cialist ride in the same automobile. All the run-to-seed- personal-experience-alone rehgions are repugnant to 54 Revolutionary Essays Socialism. The larger, deeper spiritual sources of the Socialist's religion, whatever church he belongs to, he will surely find outside of himself in God and society. His righteousness and his salvation shall never be his. own. Rather than appropriate godliness to his own pri- vate use, he would drop it on the way and wait nearby that he may .have the pleasure of seeing people get the God-likeness into their lives altogether. The reform tinker, who has no higher aim in poli- tics than to mend the passing pots, we do not endorse. He shall pass through life mending pots, and shall leave the world with yet more pots to mend than he found there when he came. With the Populist, Socialism has the affinity that must spring up between two travelers afoot together for a long time and making for the same safety. Even if they speak not the same tongue, their backs are turned with a like horror upon the same cities of the plain. IX. THE LARGER GROUPS. One time I saw the domination of the economic elements of society and cried, "This is all"; at another I recognized the persistence of State entity, its almost immobility in the midst of great economic changes; I saw the superseding of feudal industry by factory indus- try sweep by the thrones and customs of the States, yet leaving the entourage apparently untouched, and I said, "These are much." At another time I was impressed with the tremendous power of the international value mongers, their machinery for currency, exchange and credit, their organization of Bureaus, Boards of Trade and Consulates; and again the money seemed to be the masterful thing of all the world. Then I beheld the amazing vitality of religion, and the valor and persistency of the ideal life in the midst of our sordid generation; and what I saw, I knew that others were seeing and making their account with. Also I saw the strenuousness with which crooked politicians in high places, hoary in In Socialist Faith and Fancy. $5 experience and cunning, though thoroughly fortified in their conquests were seeking to woo their way to the child- hood of the world and its womanhood, and I cried, "Great is the cradle-rpcker and the master of school." I witnessed the manifest deference of triumphant force to what there was yet left of intellectual life in the con- quered people, called public opinion, how the conquerors courted respect even from those whom they had de- graded; how they craved the consent of those whom they will in any case compel; how they shrank from the hisses and catered for the huzzas of crowds which they regard as composed of individual fools; and how war itself seeks first to rest on the approval of the peaceful mind, and then I thought much of the desire for public approval as the greatest thing. Now, I see that the ideal overspans the present real in a circle which sweeps through the past and future ; that the ideal is a persistent voice; that it is as if mankind were one vast being, living a lifetime of cefituries, dream- ing over the best and most beautiful parts of its past actual experience, and unconsciously setting up those day-dreams as the image of what is to be reached after now and in the days to come. I saw thus that the ideal and real are first ingrowths of each other and then out- growths. The present real, that it is the attar of many genera- tions of tradition, that it is the collective life essence of the genus man, many thousands of years old, from under the wine press of some trials and the shine of some day dreams, the unconscious and beautiful best of one of its past continuous experiences still going on through the present, and as potently as if all history were one lake of water. It does not seem possible, mechanically, to order the economic ascendant to stand first at the head of my social thoughts; it stays in my book, but not with me. The national thought comes and jostles it; the religious ideal, wearing a red, seamless robe — the undivided unity of the race — comes and claims precedence of it, and after 56 Revolutionary Essays many challenges on this changeful surface, I know not which to own. Now I look down and think me of the great sub- conscious realm beneath, which is sending up its life drops to glisten in my experience — the daily sweat and duty doing of the world. When I glance at the universal laborers, the true, unconscious world life is well discov- ered. Labor comes to the front, and lo, all other social integers arrange themselves subordinately around it, government, trade, arms, the church ; all, like the brethren of Joseph, bow down to the physically necessary man of the world, and the State becomes his bride. The working people of America do now, as a physical fact, actually constitute the fundamental nation, and have ever so in all nations. It was labor in Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome which the sun kissed as Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome, and which the seasons greeted, the god knew; the nation in whose womb the race as an experience and a continuous entity had beginning and nourishment was the fundamental- worker. Whatever artificial classes may from .time to time have stepped on to the surface and held the at- tention of bastard history as being the salient coun- try, this working experience of the world, in spite of many other vagaries, asserts and reasserts itself as the one blood. It asserts itself in the collective experience, as it does in the personal, to be the perpetual self of every nation. Look into the auto-biographies which are not merely pathological introsights of distorted lives (aye, some- times even in these), and you will find the tranquil under- current of the person's life to be his daily work. Not for very long can the recorder support himself, nor the reader continue to look up to him on the stilts of a psychologic analysis; he is forced to balance his tale with the restful- ness of tasks pursued and things done from day to day. Labor is larger than the workshop; its intellect is political economy. At work it reveals itself as the muscles, arteries and nerves of society, but thinking it In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 57 reveals itself as the national life. In the course of last century's development, our trade and our nation have become synonyms, and though other specialists may say historically as much for the army, the church, the press, the courts of justice; the statesmen now following such specialists would soon be without a nation. In representative government, the mandate behind each congressman is now to look after the interests of his own constituents ; but no representative ever suffered himself to be so pinched down to his local commission as to believe that such mandate was all the nation had for him to do. The ideal government is not a local self-defensive- ness nor a glorification of the whole before other govern- ments by wit or war; but it is a power exercised in cherishing something which is deemed essential to the whole of the people, it is selfishness at home. Such an ideal grows into a force, which is nature's anti-selfishness, because it is impersonal — and it lays strong hands on all politicians, despite the Babel of clamorous personals and local interests which constitute a modern parliament. This governing force takes hold of the ship of State and saves her from the trade pirates and wreckers that have multiplied on the shady side of our constitutional and representative systems. Politics is greater than politicians. The ideal government for the present hour and for all future times is a focussed vision of the nation's best view, ultimately of the best view of all nations, for the guardianship of that which is fundamental to public life, the health, the leisure, the intercourse, the mutual under- standing and co-operation of all the people; and that fundamental matter in public life around which all other matters cluster is the daily doing of its working people. It may not now appear to be an heroic role, it may not suit the stomachs of flash statesmen, but labor is the role of the statesmanship that shall abide forever. When we are ripely in Socialism, every one will see that the preservation and happiness of the worker is the 58 Revolutionary Essays interest of all; and the best men will devote themselves to that, because it is the nation's life. But the class consciousness, so indispensable to the proletariat to-day, in saving itself from being ground under the feet of plutocracy, is not a consciousness fit to survive into Socialistic government. In the course of the proletarian struggle that consciousness will be taken up into the nation. While getting there, it is now the mission of labor, vicariotisly and alone, to tread the wine-press for the nation's soul. In its crude way now, and for its own self-preservation, it has to save the liberties of the world. It is now the lot of labor to be deprived not only of honor, but of the decencies of manhood, and, as an animal in want of food, to fight to win it back, arid in securing these for itself, it incidentally secures the whole program of humanity. It is the mission of the worker, while hounded as an anarchist, to restore government to its right and perma- nent foundations, even though he cares not a jot for any other thing in the doing of it than the daily filling of his own stomach. It is the mission of the mere animal worker to bring solidarity to the world while seeking only his own crust; to bring the ruling intellects and theological consciences of the world to shame-facedness while in the act of simply extricating himself from the toils of bread bondage. It is the mission — the privilege — of the worker to deliver up out of the pit where he has been hidden from the amenities and the sunshine of the civilization — to give out of that darkness and degradation — a clue to the world, which when followed shall lead us to the estab- lishment of an everlasting society of tranquil righteous- ness, based upon the daily labors of the people. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 59 X. THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF MAN. As a philosophy, collectivism stands conspicuously a revolution in the world's thinking. Society is an or- ganism, having within itself all of its own evils and all of its own goods; itself originating either and both, according to the wisdom with which it administers its own economic forces, exercises its own genius for organ- ization, and fosters its own best, that is, most useful, thinking — an organism self-sufficient, up to the attained point of human progress in all things pertaining to human life, having no foreign sources of evil and no foreign sources of good. That it is all self-contained and self-sufficient disposes of the astrologers, as well as all the other helps or hindrances from without, which it cannot by known law or human power secure or prevent. Neither gods, wandering angels nor men from other planets can give it anything that will help it, except more knowledge of itself. Why should the human race look for help outside of itself? Why suppose that God lives outside? Why should we think that angels or any other race of beings have any more wisdom than just what they require to manage their own affairs? Why charge God with such poor economy in distribution? Mankind has never had any more, and seems not to have this much. Why should we expect that other orders of beings have any surplus to bestow upon the denizens of this old ball terrestrial ? Society, considered as an organism, self-sufficient and having all its causes of deviation and its sources of rectification within itself, becomes of necessity a school for the study of the earth and its environments, and especially for the study of the humanity upon it, and the laws of its subsistence, beauty and endurance. With this conception of Socialism, every spot of earth and every human experience becomes holy ground ; and every present hour, being at once the sum of all hours and the germ of all hours, thrills with interest. 6o Revolutionary Essays In a physical organism the notion of a war among its own organs or atoms — say the blood corpuscles — is not thinkable. So in a social organism, the hideous doctrine of competition with, and the destruction of, one's own healthy parts for the survival of other parts is equally repugnant to reason. In an organism self-help means other help, and no one can be benefited without the relative good of all. In an organism, all the parts sufifer or rejoice together; and no American gentleman can drop into the habit of shooting Filipinos or China- men without hurting much more human life than that of the slain. The physical death of a few, I kriow, cannot by tape measure be proven an actual violence to the whole social organism, which still holds by history and will and habit in the lives of those who remain together. Yet the or- ganism I speak of cannot be considered as without its due physical basis of living men at any time, and all that are here are that basis, neither more nor less. There is a balance among living things, considered in the quantity of separate bodies, which forms the physical basis of the social whole at any time, and that balance cannot be disturbed without social crime, a waste of social organic energy in what is lost, and another in what is called for to adjust society to the false numbers and falsely differentiated districts of life on the earth's surface that ensue. It is not merely an ideal organism I speak of; it is not a sentimental communism thought of afterwards and imagined-to-be-real by the benevolent philosopher; but it is verily a physical whole, consisting of the quantitative in parts and distribution, held together by vital prin- ciples of intercourse. The destruction of some of these people by anything less than the consent of all nature and all society not only destroys an existing balance, but violates the social operation of the principle of inter- course by vital continuity, without which, though there may be many men, there can be no social organism. There may be physical men in the world, and many In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 6i of them for whom we care Httle, but who can tell which human body may be a social continuant? Who knows enough to kill any man ? Who knows enough to deprive any person of his normal opportunities for self-expres- sion on the earth? When we approach the question of what that com- pleteness of self-communion by the whole of society means and calls for, we begin to realize what a splendid opening to the spiritual life is Socialism. Think of it! We men who have run the churches and philanthropies of the world were proud of putting the individual man down, each by his own trough, to feed his hog soul like a hog ; and if he had no trough of his own, it was a great achievement of piety to bid him steal one from some weaker pig. What sort of a change of mind is this that no longer is content with the separate stuffing out of individualistic swill tubs, one at a time? Even hogs become gentler when the trough is a great one, holding abundance, and accessible to all. What is that thing plus pork which grows out of abundance, continuous abundance and per- fect accessibility of each and all to the source of supply ? What is that thing plus the strenuous man that begins to grow when a similar state of things prevails at the family table, at the city table, at the national table? Whatever you call it, it is the nourishment of intercourse, and inter- course is the spinal cord of the social organism. Based upon the physical manhood, it is this social surplus which constitutes that splendid international grace for which Socialism stands. Compared with the miserable concep- tion that humanity consists of a billion or so of struggling atoms, striving only to succeed, ahead of each other, to get big slices of this earth's good things now, or bigger slices of heavenly things to come, how supremely high and holy is Socialism ! He that desires to be a master in this philosophy, and a workman in the cause, who shall have no need to be ashamed, will surely, ere he attain to either excellence, find out that this is the working thought as well as the 62 Revolutionary Essays physical fact with which the spiritual life builds and on which it is builded. It will not be on his part the acceptance of a theoretic or ideal collective as a standpoint from which to obtain novel and revolu- tionary perceptions ; but it will l?e as plain to him as his hand that the race is one, and from the moment of that perception he goes on to conquer with the energy of the Lord Almighty. And let it be remembered that the progress of the agitator's power will be his progress from this fact to its perception ; the fact itself lies behind, as the absolute true; the perception of it is our progress in the philosophy of Socialism. The doctrine of social labor time, of socially necessary labor, socially initiated and socially directed labor, and the fixed nature of value, in spite of fluctuations apparent in exchange through pricing, will all come to be easily understood when we get this right foothold in Socialism, that the race i§ one physical and spiritual fact, with its mental and moral corollary, "No man can get the advantage of another." Then we know that the energy in the labor organism is the same that holds the stars together. It is this thought of society being one organism that makes the interna- tional man, with one mind, one life, one interest, a needful concept for the agitator who delivers the great collectivist message. The social organism is not to be considered as something which includes and assimilates every one of us whether we will or not. True, it physically includes and historically affects the habits and thoughts of every one, but there is a sense in which, though this kingdom of heaven be ever at hand, some men may never with the hand touch it or with the foot enter it. Human society was, of course, always an organism, more or less, and will always be an organism while it is society; but how much of an organism ? That is a matter resting with those who will or will not seek the social re-birth. In this respect Socialism offers to all men a sabbath in every hour, an opening to the higher life in every deed. You can live in society and be affectionally outside In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 63 the higher social organism. But all the day long this wisdom will cry upon your streets, and all the day long you will be invited and prompted to the new and better way. Society is an organism, but this fact does not bear upon each life as a physical fatalism which says, "Yon are in me and you cannot get out." It is indeed a physical fact, and will in time become more completely so; even so, that we all shall enter it by a universal predetermination of social will. But now, though it be the physical temple, you need not wholly enter it, if you love it not. Yet to all those who desire to live rightly and to do justly, it gives the invitation to enter upon the open intercourse of a larger life. The will of the indivi- dual still has free play, but a time will come when it shall be a shame to be so free. The Socialism, however, which it is our lot to unfold to this age, is to be contemplated more as a physical than a spiritual organism. The spiritual may, even at this time, affect for good its own cause, the physical environ- ment. Some minds are produced and can yet be pro- duced out of our present condition that can, though themselves its product, become the producers of better conditions; for the community conscience is a historical heritage for every man. While waiting for the production of more such con- science and gladly availing ourselves of whatsoever there may be of it within reach, we are not going to wait for it to grow, because we know how to grow it without waiting. It is just here that the proletarian struggle, the present peculiar characteristic of Socialisin, demands attention as the foremost and most powerful of revolu- tionary philosophies. Had we been compelled to wait for the growth of more social mindedness and a clearer com- munity conscience, it might indeed be said that there is as much fatalism in being forced to wait for an event that comes without you and forces itself upon you when it comes, as there is in starting out with an event already forced upon you. 64 Revolutionary Essays The creative force of society is the working man. He is not a working force, producing only a part of society; he produces it all. Tliere is none other but he who is wholly necessary; none other but he whose rest or absence never can be endured. Upon this necessary man, this salvation man and his interest alone Socialism plants its banner, and over his rights we unfold it. XL THE NATURE OF HOLINESS. There is a man behind us whom we nourish by -the social energy of our resistance to evils, even as our char- acteristic personality was cultivated out of repulsion to primitive injuries (wrongs). The things which consti- tute John Brown to me are not his heart-beats and physical inches ; John Brown to me is a very real, though unphysical, summary of wrongs resisted. If his conflicts have been truly fielded, he is a true involution from the details of wrong and evil through the various classes and corporations of resistancy into the collective reality of organized administration; he is a man moved in from the single to the governmental life; from being an indi- vidual vicissitude, he has moved in to a social control— the man behind him, he is becoming a government. Brown is a net result of his conflicts. If the conflicts upon which this man was engaged are lineally descended economics, then the thing that was John Brown is a nexus of veritable social vitalities ; he is one of the spiri- tual tissues of society. If not,' he may be only a saint or part of a newspaper and no part of the race. John is not a copy product of his environment; no skill in word-painting can verify the likeness between him and his producing antecedents. Perhaps he was born on that day when Baby Brown burnt his finger or fell off the chair — perhaps he was born that day before his physical nativity when his mother saw the poor hideous leper Lazarus smitten by a gorgeously arrayed, but more hideous, Dives. If John Brown be alive at all, he is so as the spiritual resister (spiritual because resis- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 65 ter) of the evils perceived; he is the lineal descendant of an aversion commenced by the mother perhaps ere he was fully born. You men and women reformers who think you can re-make the social man by getting possession of the chil- dren to teach them, how vain is your conceit! When, think you, and where will you get any child at its begin- ning? You have drawn a multitude of girl mothers and boy fathers into your factories; do you think the priest and the schoolmaster can easily undo, by kinder- garten, your smiting of the child father and the child mother? I tell you, nay; our evils are all social, and the blow you gave in the factory can only be commuted in general treatment through the man behind us — the nation and the government. A very physical and force- ful thing is this State; but it is all the righteousness, all the holiness that you and I can ever know. It is the lens to which converge all the lines of personal trial. It is the to-all-through-all-from-each. In the physical organism, when the foot digs, the hand holds, the shoulder bears, the brain directs, and the heart keeps up good courage to sow and hoe and reap; and when the mouth grasps and grinds the meal and the stately stomach receives it, there is no exclusive local demand made for the digested product by any of these active members. Less than what suffices for the whole body is not enough for any single part, and the thing produced by each is the vitality of the whole. Even so runs the social John Brown from his primarily mate- rial, unordered and anarch conflicts at the extremities into the conservatory of nations and governments. Even so all manhood is born of the sweat ^nd difficulty of radically overcoming substantial wrongs. It takes up the crudities of nature and pounds them into the walls of cities and the garnitures of dwellings. And if >the man be duly discharging his function as a social organ for the man behind him, the, nation, that man will return to him the whole of the product, never fear. The city built will not be the unrelatable dwellings of men, but 66 Revolutionary Essays the place of one man (maybe a 3,000,000 unit), and its many homes will be each and all but the vestibules of the larger house. The cause of all our decrepitude and failure is to be looked for in the conditions that give rise to private property. This, and this alone, is the prolific source of universal crime and confusion ; it is this that shuts a man out from the spirit of the State and race, causing millions to fall out of the eternal life, like withered, worthless leaves. The private property life is the inevitable curse of a spiritually, racially, socially and governmentally unbap- tized generation. The private property man, though forced to wear the garments of respect, is the self- ordained and necessary interceptor between the scattered uttermost men of the human family and the democratic soul behind us, the soul of nations and governments. The advantage of the private man is the assassin's dagger for the State, whether he use a sharp steel or a cunningly devised law for to slay democracy. He takes that in which the laborious lives of other persons have invested, wherein they._have sown value, and as he writes his name upon them, they become alien- ated from the producers and are fortresses, with guns directed against the government or any other thing on earth that is against his private property. He steals the substance of the democracy outside and starves the soul of it inside; and though he thinks he owns both, he never really possesses either. He withdraws public wealth from public use, and he holds back the crowd, including him- self, from the use of the public soul. Professing loyalty to democracy, he is its only enemy; an enemy already chafing under the laborious role of political hypocrisy, already laughing at the theories of the constitution with which he has piped us, the children of labor, away from our products, and the officers of a coi-rupted State hold it all for him except our living wages, until he returns from his crime of yesterday and gets ready for the similar crime of to-morrow, He iptercepts and he also In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 67 scatters the currents of democracy life ; tells the befooled millions that the ballot box is an instrument only for gathering' up the opinions, the quips and cranks, the whims and whams of a democracy of nervous feather- heads ; and he tells them that the government is the net result of this fantastic collection, which he takes care to make and keep fantastic. Opinions are not the feet upon which the will of the democracy should walk into the capitol; we shall go there only with our evils and our overcomings. The realism of daily life in facing of wrongs has immediate reflexion in government. These experiences alone enter and mould the State. It is one of the policies of interception between the race soul and its labor, that some huge imposing thing be rolled back and forth to the people, a snowball that never can be rolled to Washington. So long as I spend my time rolling the church snowball, its creed and its history, or my fool party politics, back and forward, thus I am kept safely away from the essential holiness of the motion and government. No church on earth can ever be as religious, holy or spiritual as the economically influenced law-making State. The great church unreality has ever been a thing in itself ; it has ever contained the soul of private property and individualism ; for that it has played, and in this it has always terminated. Its limitations are those of the single life alone, its moral qualities have always been exact facsimiles of local, personal, material, and property vice. The property men roll their snowball churches in as buffers between the State they have stolen and the people they have wronged, until the ball, like its starters, rolls itself, and rolls only on its own account. It sucks from the master and it sucks from the man ; it sets up one and the same God for a capitalist and a mill child. Think of it! It sets up a worshipping of God instead of a serving; it tells us that he is out of the earth. Think of it ! It makes the firmament above us to be a mirror wherein the race reflects, and then it asks us to run away from our- 68 Revolutionary Essays selves, to be greatly afraid of the original. They fill us with that fear, and thus occupy our time away from the concerns of human experience, away from the crimes of property getting and the destruction of souls. It par- takes of all vices ; it is dyed to the bone with insincerity, cruelty, and treason. On one side, it bears the impress of the slave, humble, cowering, tricky, treacherous, wait- ing for an advantage. On the other side, it is the arro- gance and pride of victorious property, allowing no man nor State to interfere with its business, yet holding the hat and taking the sermon notes from both sides. Never in the world has the church been the conscience of the State, as Dante and others have fondly dreamed; what- ever conscience has been found in any age was the conscience of the nation as organized into State authority and law, and to this in a far-off way, the ecclesiastics of the world have cut the coats of their souls with such cloth and under such direction as States have seen fit to give. At no time has the church been better than the State, at no time has it resisted wrongs and eyils so hon- estly or earnestly as laymen have in the councils of nations and governments. When this great roUing-for- itself snowball has been melted by its own utter unfitness for the light of day, then the race will find out the doors . of its true temples, and those doors will lead, not into an empty space where men are prostrate before cloud cartoons of themselves, which are also caricatures, but into the halls of reasoning for doing of fully contactual legislation, whose men are in receipt of the unbroken currents of actual experience from the uttermost circles, who know that the soul of the country is the collective net experience of all its realities, and of nothing but its realities. Oh, let us be hushed! Behind every constel- lation of stars and their peoples there is yet another and an inner soul, the spirit of the universe, and it is the spirit of any two or three assembled together to resist their wrongs. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 69 XII. THE ENVIRONER. There is the environment that molds us, the historic environment, there is the interpretation of that environ- ment, and there is the interpreter; these three; and you cannot have any one of them witliout having all. When we speak in human society, now, of man's environment, we no longer mean trees and creatures, rivers and undulations of the earth; these things, while they are themselves as they were thousands of years ago, look down upon men changed many times, as we call change and feel it, are the environed; we environ the materials outside of us which are usable for human purposes. As to our own environments, they are, after a certain stage of human proficiency in bread-getting has been attained to, purely and simply other men. The organization of artificial privation, the organization of force, the organization of fear, as to things of the mind and of the body. The lawmaker or the agitator, the man conscious for labor who can procure to himself a following of others for this greatest interest of mankind, is our greatest environment. Personal influence wielded for good is by common consent the greatest godliness; and when the greatest of such a godliness appears, it must be unham- pered by the little pegs and threads of the Liliputians. The class man, the Gulliver, consults only his own inter- ests, because it is every one's interest when that class is labor. His is the only selfishness upon which the world can civilize. And his will and its speech are the economic forces of mankind. In the economic and political field, capitalism now rules by" the arithmetic of money and majorities; and we find the money with which they rule came from us as truly as the votes with which we enable them to smite us — all is ours, yet all is against us; all comes from us, yet all is found in their possession. The man who is content to sit down on mere environmental socialism, accustoming himself to the thought that it all 70 Revolutionary Essays grows outside of and independent of him, molding his thoughts, opinions, creeds and governments as it grows, may be passing into a fatally enervating fatalism. When I consider this strange concession of itself; its monies and its majorities to the capitalistic class by the active and actual manhood of the world, I know it is the work of active men. If the present subjugation of the masses by the classes is the result of a chain of historic environments, am I permitted to say that the classes have subjugated the masses, as stones roll down into the river? I think no Socialist among us would have himself so understood, as if he taught there is a sovereign decree of dead environment foreordaining what shall be the thoughts, opinions, creeds, and forms of government of any given nation and age ascertainable by the preceding links in the historic chain of that nation's evolution. I think the really scientific Socialist will be ready to admit that something must have taken place between man and man, the populations and the capitalists for instance, before the science of external evolul^ion could say, "He that subdues the workers subdues the world, he that obtains from society the right to own the tools of the workers owns that society." Socialism is the science of proletarian experience. In these sentences describing the relation between the populations and the capitalists, I must use the verbs ruling, smiting, enabling, conceding, subjugating, obtain- ing, owning, or other verbs, and however I may vary my way of putting the facts of economic and political evolu- tion, these or some substitute terms of human agency and subjectiveness will certainly appear, they are vital coloring which must always distinguish sociology as a science from mineralogy, say, as a science. In fact these are the colors and pulses of other forces with which we seek to become, and will become, better acquainted through their phenomena of social and economic evolution. * What do the recorded facts of economic history stand In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 71 for, looking behind them? What do the verbs I have just repeated stand for? Is it a law only? or a struggle that scientists describe in the terms of law; a human struggle which scientists describe in terms of principles evoluting ? The world is indeed greatly indebted to the men who have given us a point of view ; but greater still will be our gratitude to the men who can translate their evolutionary law for us into the way to do, jvho lead us to our environer. When we say the populations surrendered their majority and their money powers to the capitalists, and when we say the capitalist class subjugated the popula- tions by possessing themselves of their tools, we have evidently only described the last act of a drama. The untold part of that history was the environer, the told is but the result of the last blow. It is not even the last blow, but only the layout of the last blow, for the history itself was the will of men that waxed, and the will of men that waned. The whole record of conquest, as the aris- tocrats rightly put it, is a record of strenuousness more or less. Scientific Socialism, the materialist conception of his- tory, the philosophy of social forms sequently evoluting, are the topics properly chosen by the teacher Socialist who shows the way of history ; but the Socialist agitator whose forces are aimed at the dynamics of nations; who is at the power behind the law, is the man who molds the will of history. He preceded the revolution, for he made it ; and he preceded the evolution, for he is the evolution. XIII. STRUGGLE FOR A SUBSTITUTE. The sharpest line of difference between the phil- osophy of collectivism and individualism is to be found in the . estimated sufficiency of the personal interest or happiness only, for the purposes of organized public life and everybody else's interest. If the pursuit of the personal interest only be ade- 72 Revolutionary Essays qtiate in the end (as the advocates of ramrod individual- ism claim) to the best interests of all, then unquestionably the laisses faire doctrine of anarch commerciaUsm is the true doctrine of the world, tempered with the knife of the anarchist, the sandbag of the highwayman and the injunction of the property judge which keep the too zeal- ous self of others in their places, with respect to my self ; let the world of unregulated egos go on trampling each other down until everybody is happy and well off. On the other hand I, a collectivist, contend that until the individualist can prove that the majority of mankind are happier, and are having their interests better served while being trampled under foot by the fittest, the case is not settled in favor of the sufficiency of the separate personal consideration only, for all the purposes of pub- lic welfaring. As yet the collectivist has only reason, a very inadequate experience and a general indictment of failure to urge against the sufficiency of king ego for all public purposes. Individualistic laissez-fairists do not claim that the scramble of egos brings about the best public results for everybody because that is what they scramble for. On the contrary, they claim that the re- sultant best-of-all-possible societies has nothing what- soever to do with the definite or deliberate intentions of the scramblers; that it comes of itself in spite of non- intention; nay, a little step farther, by means of inatten- tion to others and an exclusive attention to self by keep- ing away from others, the best interests of the other fellow is finally conserved. The people who hold this doctrine sit upon the thrones of the world and are exe- cuting the anarchists of the world for carrying out their common faith in the eternal right of the individual to do as he likes until he is knocked down. _ There is, in my opinion, to-day a lamentable con- fusion among Socialists upon this vital question of the sufficiency of the personal. Coming as most of us do out of a reaction from the hypocritical self-denials of old theology, we started out into free thought with a sweep- ing affirmation to the contrary of the self-abnegationists In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 73 of the churches who did not abnegate; and thus we find ourselves in Socialism with a mere anti-theologic protest, instead of a social, for our philosophy. It was all right in the early nineteenth or latter eighteenth century to say to the priest, " This self of mine upon whose alleged depravity and mortification you have become holy by contrast and fat by the fees of repentance, is not vile, it is clean and good; I will, therefore, no longer neglect it, but I will cherish it." To that point the protest was sound. But when it went farther than the occasion called for, as protests have a habit of doing, it said, " Not only is this self of mine right, but it is all the right, and there is no other way of getting to the best society, or getting to heaven itself, only by looking entirely after myself; contrary to the religion imposed upon my child- hood by you, commanding me to neglect or punish my- self that others might be better off, and that I might get to heaven." The personal pursuit by everybody of his own happi- ness alone, the deification of one's own inwardness, the sanctification of self all round, was the opposition doc- trine to the church. And with that we have been trying to do most of the work of Socialism. We have canted as much of Jefferson's inalienable right of everybody to pursuit of happiness, as ever the church canted about the sinfulness and vanity of pursuing pleasure. Certainly self-sufficiency cannot be the philosophy of two opposites, it cannot be the philosophy of the master and the slave at the same time, in the same contest, and yet serve both of them. Collectivism, being the phil- osophy of all, must save both and find some substitute for them, and it must not be the theologian's substitute of a soul for a body, or of a hereafter for a here; it must be a substantial substitute here and now. I take the position that the so-called struggle for self-existence which some evolutionists have transferred to organized human society from the animal world and misinterpreted; and with which, in these early days of coUectivist philosophy, so many Socialists are identified. 74 Revolutionary Essays is a falsehood. I believe the naturalists can more easily find the struggle throughout nature to be of another character. All living creatures are giving their greatest struggle to the finding of a substitute for themselves — another selfhood. This phrase, "the struggle for a substitute," covers the whole sex struggle of the animal world, which really constitutes the most energetic and exhausting activities of all creatures. The mere struggle for self-existence does not cover the sacrifices of the present self-interest which is taking place throughout all creation for the other self-interest of offspring. In fact, it is so much in evi- dence everywhere that I venture to assert, on the strong testimony of its constant activity, that there is an instinct everywhere in operation among all creatures, including mankind, an instinct as strong or stronger than self- preservation, and that this instinct may be rightly named the struggle for a substitute. It is an altruism, but not the old altruism of conscious and deliberate self-denial in deference to the interests and welfare of some other; it is an altruism which seeks some other, larger life, in which to invest my own. The altruism of a parasitic plant, if you will, which seeks the great tree, the altruism which seeks to externalize itself in some other. The altruism of all self-consciousness which manifests the development towards manhood and womanhood by its flush of deference to others; that consciousness of self which immediately, from the moment of its birth, seeks a substitute for itself in some other; that consciousness which is always progressive and enlarging in its search for an external, which seeks a family, a clan, a tribe, a nation; and which»in this age of economic struggle prop- erly and in due historic order seeks its own class on its way to finally making all mankind its family, its clan, its tribe, its nation, its self. Selfism, as the moralists of commercialism and the competitive private life under- stand it, should have been dead and gone out of the world with the primitive races. This profit-mongering age has retained it too long from among the bones of the savage In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 75 dead, without a blush, for there is money in it. As a motor for profit it may be all right, as a motor for the creation of aristocracies it has proved effective; but as a motor for civilization it is about as suitable as an old wheelbarrow might be beside a modern locomotive for the purpose of a modern railroad. When man was purely and simply a self-supporting creature in the midst of strange and hostile animals, it was the law of his preservation; but when he joined his fellow-creatures in a family or tribe, that sort of selfism was defunct and should have passed out consciously to' the associate man. Selfishness did put on clannishness and tribishness, and tribishness became classial, and classial became national. We need not apologize for this selfishness at the be- ginning of any struggle, for it is justified by our physical wrongs in society; but its survival as a doctrine of life among us needs more apology than the human brain can ever supply. If we take the practices of war to which the self-life was obliged to resort in savage days, in order to keep its flesh out of the stomach of a brother cannibal, or to get his other brother inside of him, and turn them both over to a nation or a tribe, we find that, what is odious among friends fo'r one to do, is lawful and right for an organized multitude to do to another enemy organized for murderous reciprocity. The selfishness of one be- comes the virtue of the larger social unit, when opposed by an armed counterpart. When a comrade Socialist says that ego's search for its own pleasureable sensations is the activity which ulti- mately redeems society, he mistakes the ego sensation hunting of the private debauchee, and the ego property hunting of the private gambler, for their multiple by which they are modified as the pleasure and need of a class. Having this distinction clearly in view, we may use the selfishness terms of the individualist with pro- priety and reason. One man should not deprive another; but a nation may deprive any one man. One man is "jd Revolutionary Essays capable of robbing another one; but a nation cannot rob one of its men. In general terms, it may be said that the immorality of one person may be the morality of many in one class. My self-preservation at all costs cannot be conceded to the single person; but it must be conceded to the nation, or class, containing him. Wrong becomes right when it is turned over from the personal to the public life. There are no moral problems for the single life when it has found its true external substitute, when it has found its class and carried it into the nation. XIV. COMPETITION. Can there be any benevolent educative competition? Has it any ethical value ? Can it yield any social benefits to a community where it is invited to prevail? Ten horses are sent running around a ring — ^the object of the promoters of the running is to ascertain which is the swiftest horse. One of them comes in first and is deemed the best runner. They run again to- morrow and do not come to the post in the same order. What have the promoters learned? They have learned that horse competition is a game of chance with appear- ances of certainty, and therefore a fine thing to fool with. What have the horses learned? Oh, they have learned to run fast. Is it a good thing for them to run so fast? Ask the seamstress at the sewing machine. In this horse-racing example we have a case of pure competition; and the first thing to be noted about it is that it is involuntary as to initiative, and delusive as to results, except to the gamblers who are really only playing a game of arithmetic under the name of horses. There is a young woman to be wed. Five young men set out to win her hand. If it is to be a. competition for her love, some of the following conditions will be present. The young men must know they are competing, for there can be no competition without knowledge of it among human beings. Now the real competition here will be, not the art In Socialist Faith and Fancy. j"] of love-making, but in the art of hindering one another from making love. If the lady does not know that they are competing for her,, she may refuse to marry the sur- vivor (if there be on^), on account of certain predilec- tions of her own whi^ the competition did not consult and can not satisfy. Nay, the only one she could have thought of may not have survived. If, on the other hand, she knew they were competing, and awaited the issue with a fluttering heart; and if, which is a bare probability, the man that won by the ordeal of battle was also the very man she would have chosen in the silent twilight; what was the use of the battle; what did it prove but the absence of the silent twilight ? But if her victor lover comes to her maimed out of the battle, she might say to him, "What, maimed ! physi- cally, mentally, morally maimed in a battle for one who loved you as you were before the battle, but cannot love you now ? No, you have become too unlovely, go !" She might have set these lovers to compete for her hand only in order to eliminate, with the least slaughter, all but one from the affair, upon whom she had already set her choice. She is herself to be the referee and the prize. In this case the competition is just as blind and unauthenticated by its result as the law by which a loose signboard falls down upon the head of a poor, harmless old canary, while several republican and democratic bosses pass by unscathed. In this case also appears the inevit- ably developed law of competition, viz., from the horse race with its apparent certainty and its actual chances (outside the set figures of the bookmakers), to the love match, with its apparent chances and actual certainty. No competition could be endured for an hour among rational creatures which is not predicated on the assump- tion that it is an effort to destroy competition. The curse of a perpetual competition was born in the commercial mind, and even there it lives the life of a lie, hypocritically nourished and fondled in public, but never permitted to 78 Revolutionary Essays enter the home circle of those who fondle it; treated by words as a favorite child of the capitalist's family, yet forced to live in the stables with the horses, or in the factories with the workers. Turn to what field for the output of human energy we may, this truth commands attention, competition can exist only for the conscious, earnest and speediest destruc- tion of itself that is attainable. Competition, as soon as we are called upon to contemplate it as a thing, a force, must have a togetherness — synthesis, and this is its synthesis — an effort at self-destruction, for instance the conflict between capital and labor as to which shall control the State. The competition between two pugilists for the cham^ pion belt or a money prize can only be real as long as they do not know each other's reach or methods of fight- ing; after that it is mere deceit or brutality. Now, the ignorant working classes who are bearing the burdens and paying for the culture of their aristoc- racy, are asked to believe that they are living under com- petitive conditions; that is, that the lawyers, legislators, capitalists and the whole annual output of endowed col- leges and private tuitions are still sparring in that blind- folded state of ignorance which precedes the discovery of the opponent's reach and method of fighting, that we are in America still permitted to live in this ignorant and preliminary school of competition. We know, however, that that stage has long been passed. We know that they know our reach, our meth- ods, and OUT resources. If they continue to honor us by putting the gloves on and suffering little defeats in public at our hands, it is only that the contest may be kept in the present economic ring, where they can afford to lose a little to keep so very much, and where there is room only for one at a time, rather than let the contest go to the larger field of politics, where there may develop room 'for all at a time, and room for thought, room for character; or, if it must be so — room for physical war. Assuming competition to be still the actual arbiter between In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 79 the classes of labor and capital, what a wild-eyed dream the call for reform or recognition of the unions must appear. Who calls for it? One of the competitors. From whom does he ask it? The other competitor. What is the truthful answer? "This competition of ours is a business arrangement, it is a universal law. You ask for more justice, that is less competition; you ask us to let up on you a little. How can you ask such a thing while you are competing? Can we give you more justice than we can do business with ? You ask us to recognize your unions. How can you be so childish? This is competition. We cannot give you 'such an advantage. You must compete for it. You are cowards, we know it. You are afraid of hunger and strikes; therefore, take that on the right eye, to keep the left eye company." "This is war. All that you ask us for you have lost. You ask for the recognition of your unions. What, are they sp vaporous that we cannot see them, so unsub- stantial that you must solicit us to feel them? Are you so childish as not to know that that is the only real detail in your slavery which has not been settled beyond the chances of competition ? Grant you the right to organize and meet us in the strength of united labor! Why, you ask for our death. But you are only asking for it, thank heaven, and therefore you are as good as dead. When you are united, no one will need to recognize a fact so tremendous. When you find out that we are as great cowards as yourselves, you will increase your numbers, you will sharpen your wits, and conquer by the potential- ities of your votes along with your union." It is a shame for the working men of America to be asking, with bared, bowed heads, for the recognition of their unions. The weak people of the world are de- pendent upon the intellectual pity of their age for mercy, having no other source of strength. Before what tribunal shall the laborers of America bring their wrongs? Capi- talism orders the doors of appeal to be closed against them. What other weapons of address or redress shall 8o Revolutionary Essays theji seek? Considering themselves and their opponents as competitors, yet suitors and judges, how shall they advance ? A wide-awake, fighting class-consciousness is the state of mind necessary to effective union, and non- competition in the class struggle, without which class struggle the commercial nations must in future be popu- lated and manned by races of hopelessly emasculated slaves. This is a manhood evolution, a mental movement from the first dawn of class discontent up to that last moment when the process shall materialize in the seizure by wagery of all the functions necessary to the true public life. It is the mind that must unclass us now, the practical mind, having a very materialistic conception of what justice means, not only a very highly developed ideal of Tightness, but that grosser way of crystalizing sermons into salaries, as the coming substitute for wages, salaries for everybody who serves society, and sermons only for those who will not serve society. Thus, both classes will get what they like in the socialist kingdom of heaven. The man behind the ballot is the subject of our culture if we are to win by the ballot. Voting is an operation of the judgment. A revolution that is to be accomplished by votes, or that is to be attempted by votes, is a new thing in the world's history. The world may not be prepared for it, the people of the commercial nations may be compelled to fight for their emancipation. But come what will, this is a magnificent and ennobling experiment, this attempt of ours to let the light of reason in upon a whole people, so that they may think them- selves free. The intellectual empire, the reign of justice, the co-operative commonwealth, the true destiny of the race — becomes possible only through the establishment of united intelligent democracy, and it first came within the distance of a visible probability when the democracy, inaugurated by the politicians, was economically dis- armed, and denuded; and so compelled to save itself by In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 8i the brain, by thinking, and thinking all together ; and thus breaking with subtle thoughts the iron bands of slavery. When such a revolution, by such means, takes place, the human race passes on to an entirely other and higher plane of civilization, and, wonder of wonders, the prole- tarian leads the way, the man of sorrows and acquainted with griefs, the crucified laborer who has learned to defend his loaf and his life by a thought, leads the way. XV. SURPLUS POWER VALUE. We are deeply indebted to the intellects that investi- gated and reduced to social economic formula the intri- cate phenomena of exchange values. The mercantile exchange of commodities gave us the Marxian analysis and successfully led the human mind, as no other ex- perience of history and no other analysis could, to a perception of the national and international life of man. Money has been the revelator of mankind's unity as an organism, however badly that money may have broken the organism into competitions, warring elements. But as it continued to break, so did it continue to reveal this unbroken truth that all men are one. Though the consideration of mercantile values in ex- change suggested book Socialism, it did not afford the fundamental basis of true society, because it dealt with things instead of men, and because the things dealt with were of a transitory and secondary nature and part of a siclc experience. It assumed that the effort for bread is the primary and always to be present effort of man- kind, and it conceded a fundamentalness to the process of commodity exchanges which should not have been conceded. For the haggling of the market and the whole business of commodity production and exchange was, after all, but the transitory mercantile experience of the race. We ought not to have sat down to predicate the permanencies of Socialism from the passing symp- toms of that sickness. Rather should we have looked behind the merchant and his money to see what funda- 82 Revolutionary Essays mentalness had thrust him into the overweighted ab- surdity that he was in human aiifairs. Whenever the human mind is engaged in original investigation (I am not now speaking of logic), it is con- scious of one ever-present obstacle, for the overcoming of which its activities are nearly all employed; that ob- stacle is some sort of a surplus, which chokes up the ways of truthing. The mind's hindrance is evermore the dis- tracting surplusage of false issues or irrelevancies. To find out all this verbal or fact surplusage, is the economics of the truly necessary thought, to reject the irrelevant surplus and to pass all surplus over and above what the individual life requires, into the life of the whole society constitutes the entire range of the Socialist con- cern ; for the personal life is still the giver and the social life is the receiver of the surplus. Individually, we have a deficit of mental and social digestion and an excess of physical energy above what is or ever was required by intelligent man for his self- maintenance; much of it is wasted in sex energy, more of it in folly, but most of it in slavery. There never was a time during the social experience of the race when selfishness had any well-grounded reason to concern itself about supporting its own physical existence. And, therefore, rio fundamental permanent theory or society, worthy at all of the dignity of man, should have been attempted, or can be accepted by Socialism as our philosophy on that basis. There is something more universally fundamental in human experience than work for the supply of our necessities; there is something that always was and is more surely destined to be always with us, to afford the basis of a Socialist philosophy; something truer than the want of bread; a want, by the way, which is surely passing from us even during the present childhood of ou(r race. This truer thing is the physical disparity between per- sons and its corollary, their mental disparity. This disparity is per se, it is not an effect but a cause, it stands always as despotism to slavery, it is the primitive master In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 83 form, the menace of invasion upon our weaker lives. After we have rejected the surplus and irrelevant from sociology as a study, we find ourselves face to face with this last analysis of its factors, viz., invasions by the per- son of persons, already achieved and permanently af- firmed; invasions by the person of persons now menaced, and invasions of the same sort now in process. The in- strument of invasion is primarily the physical or mental surplus possessed by one individual more than another, subsequently to be increased by what can be stolen from the life of the victim. In terms of mind this conflict may be reduced to the phrase of self-afErmation. The invader (the actual or would-be master) has the right of self-afifirmation, so has the invaded (the servant). Yet there is a point at which the servant's affirmative stops, while the master's goes on, and all above that point is the master's invasive surplus power, which in the commercial experience has come to be known as surplus value. What is the radical difference between the servant's self- afi&rmative and the master's? It is the difiference between a specific affirmation and afifirmation itself. Eight hours a day may be a specific afifirmation of the servant's self in defense. But inasmuch as it is a specific at all, it is no match for the indefinite power of re-afiSrmation, which is parted with the moment a specified number of hours is to constitute the day's work of the life invaded. And here, lest no other opportunity should occur to me in these papers so timely, I will state it: That, in my opinion, our Socialist movement in politics should get rid of a lot of its surplus platform planking and re- duce its temporary demands to some one vitally anti- capitalistic issue between the present-hour Socialist and the present-hour capitalist: and that issue should be a universal demand for an eight-hour day, under way for less. An eight-hour day would not mean Socialism; but the fight for an eight-hour day would be such a well- fielded fight as to bring all the disguised enemies of labor out of the woods, and our issue with capitalism would be 84 Revolutionary Essays a well-defined self-affirmation of the invaded labor life; and a well-defined intention of further encroachment upon those eight hours until at last labor and capital would be stripped to the skin for the final struggle of Socialism and man versus property and slavery. To re- sume: The master passes the servant's affirmation of himself at the point where that affirmative becomes a definite number of hours, and the thing that constitutes the master's advance is that he contains and retains the surplus power of re-affirmation; the servant's is an affirmation made, the master's is the power, commonly called the right, of affirmation itself. One is a finality, the other is a contiuance. One is an individual defect, the other is a social efficiency used for unsocial purposes, and against the social personal life of civilization's labor victim, and then against the social will to defend its weaker units. When we look at what the laborer does with himself as laborer, we get a fresh light on the nature of surplus- power value. The laborer and the capitalist are engaged in a, series of self-affirmations which, in the course of an infernally wrong evolution, have turned out -to be af- firmations against each other. The capitalist's advantage is a surplus value, or power of re-affirming himself to- morrow against the laborer; while the laborer's advan- tage passes into the maintenance of his own existence, leaving him no surplus. In a fight with another who has retained the surplus forces of making labor definitely reaffirm to-morrow, and to-morrow only — to end its af- firmation in personal consumption, to eat its own words as it were, and its own deeds, and thus simply to live upon itself — the advantage is all with the invasive life — it has all the surplus power-value, a phrase which seems more to the purpose of Socialism than exchange value. But in this his complete conquest and betrayal by false society, the worker leaves the race the model of its true Socialism in one part of his own personal experience, viz., his self-consumption of the whole advantage. In Socialism, when these two men, no longer master In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 85 and man, have reached that point of affirmation where one begins to be plus the other, that surplus power value will not be appropriated by the foremost against the hind- most, but it will pass into the new unit, it will be passed on and self-consumed by society for its own maintenance. The life of society will be just the same as the life of the laborer now, save for its conflicts and self-defeats. Society will no more consist of invasive and de- fensive lives. Money will no more signify men's loss of Ufe below the subpeision line, and masters' gain of what they lost, in the form of things, above the subpeision line. Money will no longer stand for the awful tragedy of surplus energies thrown out of life altogether because they were not translatable into commodity or re-invasive values. Getting rid of the surplus will no longer be the stupid, inhuman way of disposing of the surplus. There will be no class in the world so accursedly alienated in heart from the human family as to hail great wars of slaughter because they help them to get rid of that surplus of the human family which they cannot hold and use under their private dominion. No such shameless wick- edness and unfaith will ever be heard from the world's religion masters as that which was started by the Rev. Malthus, and has been tacitly or openly adopted by most other hireling reverends to this day. Money will no longer be a broken piece money for small affirmations, little bits of metal which one must carry in the hand as the measure of what each has lost, the measure of the ineffectuality he has become; not the measure of how very much he can do with money, but the measure of what he is no longer able to do with- out it; but money shall be to all what it now is to the master class, a document, with the skill and organization of the mass man behind it. Money will be a continuant of the public life, and not of any antipathetic private lives. In one respect it will have the same basis, though not invasively, as capitalist money; for its basis will be that which capitalism invades, and steals and wastes 86 Revolutionary Essays away out of the social organism. Money will mean the time of life, it will be as a social clock in every private home. Pieces of it will be the gold, silver or paper numerals in the balancing of my life's time with the whole life claim of my society ; it will no longer be a little meas- ure by which I dip out into myself from the social reser- voir, but it will be a vital balance along which I shall pass into society all the surplus power value above my needs with which modern economy has already endowed me. The function of money, which is indeed the true sac- rament of society to every weak individual, will be the balancing of labor and duty; a social device set over against the oldest of world-facts — the physical and men- tal surplus power value of one rnan anti another. To check the invasive intent and the invasive power of that surplus life and to check the social devices by which its invasive power on others might be increased, and there- fore to protect society by limiting the anti-social functions of its own money in the hands of anarch aristocrats ; and, therefore, specifically against the anarch aristocrat, to protect by means of money itself, the natural citizen — the laborer. Hitherto all increase of money beyond what the in- vasive profit-monger could use for labor exploitation was called inflated currency; then whatsoever amount of money may anywhere be discovered in use by the in- vasive life for the exploitation of another man ais his privately serviceable thing will be taken as the local record of a contracted currency, and an anti-deficit will speedily be set up in defense of the-time-of-life of the man invaded; not of his labor time, for that is included, that is man's normal use of time, that is the specialism of our poor passing slave experience only. The time of life, now, alas, all too brief ! Oh, mothers, fathers, brothers, let us arise against its awful confiscation, let us arise to its rescue, for our own little remainder of it, and for that which, because of what we know now, we surely owe to the children. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 87 XVI. THE WORLD'S ACTIVITY. Those who are engaged in the business of bringing all men into their debt are strenuous for the action that surrenders its fruit to them. And as they have had very- much to do with the instruction of the world, they have given currency to a sort of religious toil. It has been doped into the stupid head of the poor old world, that it is moral to get up with the sun and to lie down a long time after it. The word lazy stands for something worse than the word selfish, and lyeing is worse than lying. This is one illustration of how the master class can work up moral notions to suit its own economic requirements. And so well inoculated are the poor folk with this gilt- edged doctrine, that all over the world you will find them who think it a sin to rest. One Russian philosopher makes labor a cardinal virtue, and another turns sweat into a sacrament. There is a gospel of activity coming. But never shall any fruit-bearing activity have the sanction of my mind until I know where the fruit is going. There needs to be a wise economy of everything potent; and labor itself, by far the most sacred of human potencies, should be kept at least as well from waste as the fruit of it is in the masters' garner houses. How frequently we hear generals who weary their men with unnecessary exercises censured by the public for that misuse and waste of public force. This public wisdom for the soldier we need surely on the grim battle- field of the world's labor; not that any battle may be won over any adversary here, but that the sacred force with which society obtains its all, may not be cruelly wasted and shamefully split upon the barren wildernesses of private interest and will. How the democracy of the world should work and how the gentlemen of the world should play, is a pretty story. Our lords give us work, but who shall give us rest ? There are points beyond which, if the capitalists do not bestow rest on the world's ruck, they can at least com- 88 Revolutionary Essays mand stillness, and this is their second crime. They who have assumed to themselves the stupendous power of passing the initiative word to human labor, and in so pass- ing it, who consider only their own profit and their own ability to control what tliey initiate, they who resolve upon initiating only what they can control, are but incidently captains of action. ^ Oh, captains of industry, captains of labor, where were your shoulder straps, had you not been (ill-omened creatures that ye are), for the greater part of your mastery, allies of the tomb, commanders of stillness ! You, indeed, who have been shining in borrowed glory, because the iron wheels flew around; and the steam never called for sleep, while you slept luxuriously behind them. Have you not grown both falsely and gorgeously great on this iron and hot-water reputation? You, under whose cap- taincy the century seems to have become unique in its activity, have you not been principally engaged, as a society, for the suspension, restraint and disorganization of the world's activity? I do not say of the world's economic capitivity only; that is but half your crime; but I say of mankind's activity. How terrible a crime am I laying to the charge of the world's property lords, I whose doctrine it is that motion, and motion only, is the life of God; I who am teaching that God was not born until things began to move and fall, and that he lives only to keep them moving all together, that he sprung into the glory of life like an echo trumpeting to the universe, "All together," that he is the breath, the soul, the brain, the hand, the voice, the spirit of united and diffused activity. I charge the private interest in labor with being a blasphemy in arrest of this divine motion in the world, the motion that seeks to affiliate with it the beat of every heart that beats. Of this I accuse the profit-mongers, who, laying their hand upon the hand with which all the world feeds itself, lay their hand of famine on all the world. It is a small matter, only among small men, that In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 89 labor should be dishonored or restrained of work. Men of larger growth see in the laboring class not only the hand and shovel, but the average life of the community, the stuff out of which democracy is made. Not by a figure of speech only has labor come to be the represen- tative class of America, nor as a majority of persons, but as the constructive actual life of the community. Our communities are clearly so many economic societies, and these men, the laboring class, are the economic. It is simply true, therefore, to say that they are the nation. What more there are of men and women in the nation beside these workers are economic subordinates, getting fed. They are, on the last look — ^the world's activity. The world's activity! Truly, a very sacred thing! This activity is not a fitful, intermitting thing, to be im- posed upon or withheld by some. The world's activity is not a task, nor a duty, nor a privilege; it is the existence of the world, it is the life of God, it is our sole reason for our having survived through centuries: the plank upon which we are alive. And he who puts forth the arm of power to take it away, is a murderer. Let us understand this. I say, to be alive is to be doing. To have been brought into life was to have been made a link in the world's doing; and here am I and you, two links in this doing of the world, eternal links who must do. Yet, my comrade, is it true that we must wait the bidding of others less than God ere we do. The wealth of the human family, all gathered to- gether in its objective realized forms, and piled up in one resplendent mountain of glorious crystals dropped spark- ling out of the brains and hands of man, were all as noth- ing beside the glory of a day's doing of men, a day's right to do, a day's human co-operative intelligence engaged in doing — a day's social organization risen to the require- ments of the human family and resting when satisfied, a day's human collective conscience, which is, as you know, the root of the social intellect and the social will; a day of such a conscience in full health, and that day in a full doing, what will you name beside such a day? go Revolutionary Essays XVII. THE FAR MAN. There is no victory in this world for the strenuous man who knows what he is about all the time, who knows what is right all the time and whose determination is to get there and nothing else. His is merely the experience of a great bull with an hour's vision of the moral world. Well am I persuaded that all thought, outside the property relation, belongs to the eternal life of man, well am I convinced that every philosopher who was not hungry, or rich, or who, being either, had his own uncon- scious far life with him, has light and leading for us all, and that there will come a day when all the systems of philosophy, not vitiated by, or constructed for, the prop- erty relation, shall be reconciled; and a pleasant, grand festa there will be in the world, gathering up all crumbs of the cranks and free lancers into social baskets, that nothing may be lost. If you are to have a god in your universe at all, he must have you. You cannot have him as a soldier, to carry your gun. It is only during a very brief season of our experi- ence, indeed, that, as persons, we have any will in regions of thought connected with our interests, privileges and enjoyments. The " gentleman " thinking is a serf, he is seldom more than a dollar thinking on his side. His is personally a guiltless thought, his thought of dominion over the lives of those whom he has ordained to be poor. He, therefore, who values nobility of thought, let him see to it that the work of the world is nobly done ; for as you sow in labor so shall you reap in poetry, philosophy, religion,' and all the farther visions of the soul. The man who plays the lord and the sponge over his poor fellow creatures feeding and enriching him, and who then, in addition to this fundamental wrong, hates them, slanders them, and deceives them, cannot have high thoughts nor know them when they come to him. Such a man will fight earnestly against permitting our labor- ways with our people to be the measure of our moralities. ■ In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 91 Yet such a man will of himself instinctively know and direct his political life along the line of hostility to labor, for that is his natural war. There is one question only in his mind, "my property." It has long since become a class thought, that property of his, which is the inevitable maturity of the private-property relation. The principal thing that becomes impossible to a property- conscious class is intellectual originality, or any tint near to it that would entitle the tinted to the quality of a hero. If you will have heroes to admire, you must go back to individualism, or find spots of it in history; you cannot find heroes after class-consciousness is estab- lished. Now, if the property mastership dominates all the thought within it, so as to unheroize all the class and to abolish the differential in thought, and to efface all per- sonal worthiness and personal blame as nailed to the door of the rich thinker, how can I say that the class man opposing the rights of labor may not be, from the far man's point of view, at the end of evolution? Am I not also lost in my class? How do I know, having lost me, that I am right? Nevertheless, it is mine to over- come witliout knowing. Happy will I be if, having over- come, I know; for upon me and all the world, history has thrust the labor question. This thing the property relation has done greatly for mankind, it gave birth to ego ; and after its development it made ego and the private life a thing impossible. It made the class and it unmade the person. Born as ego was, tied to a stump, a strange experience on the plane of accident, tied to a little bit of a stump of property, tied to it and ever struggling to get away from it. Yet be- cause of the great unfaith of private property, never willing to go. Surrounded by a universe, yet bound to this stump ; longing to be away, yet loving to be here, the near and the far man phenomenalized together. The far man, for whom I stand, might never have looked forth and longed, and so in time become as broad as his hori- zon, if the man at the stump had never been here. Who 92 Revolutionary Essays knows! I do not know. Yet, as not knowing, will I overcome the things that are in the way between me and my far man? On my side, how stands it ? Since the property mas- terhood eliminates responsible, deliberative free will and personality from among the " gentlemen " thinkers, am I to understand that poverty treats its victims any better? What of my personal will? Will class-consciousness leave to me, the worker, more than property conscious- ness leaves to the aristocrat? We are never more than a summary of history, whether you consider us in moments of our best or mo- ments of our worst, as we say. With thoughts we can, get out of ourselves and inspect and survey ourselves, but it is only by history that we are made. My thoughts are now running about me, summing me up, inquiring into me with note-book in hand. They have made me up, and this is what they say, "You are a little volume of history." Of 'Cvhat history, good note- takers? "Of economic class history." Then I am not different from the man of the master class, who dominates me and is dominated by his economics. "Oh, yes, you are, in this respect: Thine is a history of a class defeated, of a class conquered, and not of a class conquering." "The mystery of a great surrender is being unfolded in the history of mankind and of the workingman." It was of vastly greater ethical significance that in all ages the majority of mankind should have suffered defeat at the hands of its own minority than to have trampled it. The far manhood of the world — the social manhood, which is in vision to the coUectivist, could never have grown out of a local or anyway partialized experience. A basis for that universal experience out of whose history alone the social manhood could grow, might only be found in a condition actualized or possible to the greatest number. It was possible and most neces- sary for the vast majority of men to have lived among the In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 93 blades of grass, to have been trampled upon and de- feated; and it seems necessary, as between man and man, that some moral victims shall do the trampling. The property aristocrat must do the trampling. Alas for him, his experience can never be man's. This, therefore, is the chief characterization of the upper class as from the lower masses. The former has but a special class experience which has not been, and could not be, the experience of the race. The other has been made up out of the actual history of the vast majority always in the past: labor, privation and servitude. The worker is historically, therefore, the epitome of universal humanly experienced history; not of history written in books or imperial de- crees, but of history written in our bones, our trend of thought, our manners, our customs, and our habits. But it is written chiefly in that unconscious man who is ever standing at the doors of States, the man who has not yet spoken, but who will. This far man only lets us once and again see a little flash of his sword blade, as it starts an inch from its scab- bard. Oh, that terrible far man, whom history has made ! Ye unjust rulers of the earth, be pitiful to yourselves. Nothing of all earth's comings comes surer than he. "And if ye have done evil, behold, sin lieth at the door." Lo, the giant is moving ; go ye forth to meet him. XVIII. ADJECTIVIST THOUGHT. The most contiguous and substantial school of thought is the objective, but the teachers whose concep- tion of history is materialistic only, who believe that the materialistic exigencies of generations of men are the conceptive causes of their history, must still offer to the private mind a vast amount of ultra experiential fact to be by him accepted on the credibility of the teacher, his final statement or explanation. This mind has filled the baskets of science to over- flowing and sent it staggering through the nineteenth century with more knowledge and more power than it 94 Revolutionary Essays had the moral fitness to use. It is naturally the phil- osophy of private property and force, although in a mood of rebellion against the crudities of idealism in theology it has, in the course of a general kick, kicked itself over, in our time, to the cause of the poor as represented by collectivism ; yet it has only come to us as a " Scientific Socialism " of commodities rather than of men. And it has not committed itself very definitely to the concept of a united race. It is distinctly and rationally out for the proletarian militant Socialism, thank God, but it is not so favorable to mental progress, after itself, as the subjective mind appears to me to be. You have witnessed the gradual growth of a set win- dow device at a great department store. It has grown steadily, built from behind, at last the design is closed, and you see a hand drawn in. Which of these two is the ultimate? Is it the design just finished or the hand drawn in? Look where we will upon any department of human action, and follow step by step, as diligently as we may, we shall surely discover that the ultimately absolute, so earnestly sought for by all, is not a product, but a pro- ducer; it is not a solution, but a live difficulty, seeking relief; it is not a satisfaction, but a requirement. Thus the transitory life of man, which it has been the habit of theologians and others to speak of as a passing shadow, a drop of morning dew, is truly the one always mani- fested and the only absolute thing in our world. The latest response to the latest difficulty, the latest protest against the latest explanation shall to-morrow be suc- ceeded by two others of their kind, yet later; and yet again by two others, later still; and, no never, latest. But never shall creed, or formula, or explanation, get behind that hand in the window which sets them forward as expressions. This discloses to us the supreme authority of the living over the dead, of the current mentality of subjec- tivism over the objective. It is upon this recognition that the requirements of the living constitute the only In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 95 absolute law of life and the needs-be reasoning of all philosophy, that the doctrine of economic determinism or . the materialistic conception of history, so fundamental to practical Socialism, is based. Nevertheless, to say that a doctrine is entirely and for ever true, is a bad way of recommending a true doc- trine; but to say that your doctrine is such a one as will adjust itself to that which is next to be known, or known as the current requirement of every age and country, is to base it upon life itself, whose current needs alone have given rise to the ideas of truth and falsehood by supply- ing the experiences without which talking of right and wrong were as impossible, as talking of shadow where there is no sun. The ranks of Socialism are not getting filled up with students of political economy — ^there is, in fact, a general dislike to the science and its terminology. Our strongest men, the backbone of the movement, are, of course, students of Marx and affirmative men; but our majority are antis only, opposed to competition, opposed to rob- bery by wages, opposed to government by dollars, to rent, usury, profit; not because they are deep students, but because they are mere every-day, shallow men, hav- ing requirements. And these men, together with the students of deeper tendency, must find equal satisfaction to keep them in an international movement. The thought most dynamic in the writings of Marx is that which socializes and makes one of all the work done in the world by everybody who works, or produces, in response to social requirement, and which reduces all that to one economic social day. By that mental abstrac- tion of a day's labor from its multitudinous diversities into a one-thought, he made Socialism international and brought political economy from Manchester to the world. He thereby also raised the proletarian revolt to the sub- lime dignity of being the beautiful gate of the temple through which the requirement of the ages — the social evolution^ — must pass, and at the same time he made it 96 Revolutionary Essays subordinate to the temple itself — ^the temple of collect- ivism. By his illuminating teachings concerning the process of historic social evolution through economic classes, he showed that the tap root of his power as a thinker was to be found in the coUectivist thought which he had cul- tivated before he took to mathematical economics. The abundant scholarship which he brought to bear in his illustrations do not constitute the power of his book, but the coUectivist hand that grouped them in the window is that power we feel. Is this coUectivist thought difficult of assimilation? Yes. Because it stands for the very opposite of our per- verted morals and inverted laws, it requires a consider- able effort of the whole man to become a coUectivist. It is revolutionary to you as you are in your upside-down slavery, and it demands nothing less than that you be turned completely back upon your feet; People cannot become Socialists in a day; they may vote its ticket, but they cannot acquire its point of view in that time. All men, everywhere, are thinking; with or without much knowledge they are thinking; this is our common foundation. Cannot all men, everywhere, therefore, think Socialism? Even if it were a thinking for men in the cities, only the economic philosophy of machinery and surplus values, the proletarian Socialism would be but a partial presentation of that which constitutes its strength, collectivism. Nevertheless, though but a part only in statement, it is the whole in program — the Socialist plat- form being all that collectivism has really to-day to say or to do in politics ; that is, in potential public life. But, containing all we are, and ask, as we come to the polls, there is this bigger thing, collectivism. For that there is another philosophy than mathe- matical economy. Never can the inquirer so put his thoughts outside of himself, nor separate himself from external things, as to be able to give sufficient answer concerning the law of his own life ; it is too small. The observer cannot be an i In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 97 individual atomic part of the great observed and be its judge. For this reason the Darwinians were thrust into the necessity of externalizing the observed universe as a whole; in order to explain some parts. They individual- ized cosmos and gave it a will and a purpose, like their own, and upon that hypothesis they discovered them- selves in nature and explained the universe by their own evolution. Who can tell which? It was individualism thinking with the coUectivist process. Poor fellows, they cannot think any other way. The same great necessity which has been laid upon ego evolutionists for an intelligent explanation of nature, is laid upon the student of human society. The student of nature has a general unity of result as his justification for continuing nature studies, with a view to other unity. Either there is a fixed law outside of his immediate circle at the back of recurring phenomena, and he must find it, or there is no law, and he must drop his studies as useless. He feels that he cannot drop his studies, and so he proceeds and finds his law outside. Perhaps that " cannot " was the greatest factor in his studies. If this student had been studying humanity only, he would have, reasoned in much the same way. Either there is a law outside of my life in this society, or there is not. If there is, I must study it and know it. If there is not, humanics is no study for me, and I will drop it. But he " cannot " drop it, and that " cannot " is the great- est factor in the whole solution. His will and his mind both belong to the outside community, and he must con- sider it, as it was in the case of the scientist. Now, suppose the physical philosopher were sud- denly to become a mere idealist, subjecting every phe- nomena to his own moods, and calling his process investigation and the results a science, what would we say of him, but that as a physicist he had gone mad. Society is a study of human interests. Now, suppose our student of the social interest, that is, sociology, were to subject all the phenomena to his own interest, and call his method investigation and the result a science. 98 Revolutionary Essays what should we say of him? That he had gone mad. And such is the actual position of the individualist as a student of sociology while he is a private propertarian. The physical philosopher confesses that the law of the tides, or of the growth of wings, and hoofs, and fins, is a hard law to bring home to himself for ethical pur- poses. But being something else besides a philosopher, that is, an owner of slaves, or part owner, he tries; and capitalism becomes the political economy of Darwinism. Other men were struck with the might of the universal point of view before him, and as a matter of fact philosophers had already begun so to interpret history, ere Spencer commenced his great interpretation of nature for the middle-class men of England. The world was no longer willing to view itself through private glasses when Marx and Darwin came. The broader vision in nature and in society were, there- fore, born in almost the same day. Now, individual subjectivism was always true, its persistence in the world of thought was not a vanity. But while out of place in physical studies, it was " the whole show " in sociologic studies. The materialist philosopher, half perceiving this, gave us an external law of economic and natural deter- minism for all the race, not perceiving that as yet we had no race capable of being considered as a unit for impressions. On the other hand, the subjective philoso- pher, rightly recognizing his single inability to study the whole, of which he was himself in mind and will so receptive and susceptive a part, realized that he could not modify or improve any social law after discovering it, and concluded that there is a whole social and a law of the whole social, as the cosmist had done before him, also he concluded that that law was progressive, and good, and beneficent for the whole, though he certainly could not now prove it to be so for the parts ; he, therefore, de- cided that the best student of the social law is the man who studies how to be in it, with a profound faith that all is right for the world. When al! hands ar? on deck he In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 99 comes on deck. He is a subjectivist, first to the law of social life and habit. He places himself where he be- longs in society, with everybody else; he tries to acquire in his own person the symptoms of society, and thus he becomes a philosopher by participation in the gospel of organization. To escape from the limitations of being a separate personal observer is the direction of his emancipation in natural, mental and social science. The order of thought seems to be: 1. The circle of the universe. I outside of it think- ing. — What else? 2. The circle of the universe. I inside of it think- ing. — What else? 3. The circle of the universe. I along with it think- ing. — Nothing else. So, applying the order to humanology: 1. Humanity. I outside of it thinking. — What else? 2. Humanity. I inside of it thinking. — What else? 3. Humanity. I along with it thinking. — Nothing else. There is no class property in any of the essential thought of the world. It is all practically yet unclaimed and open to the common people. Fear not about your ignorance, my poor souls of the democracy, the essential thought of God's good world, and this great unstained humanity is as freely yours as the sunshine. I say this to encourage the humble Socialist com- radeship, who are amazed to find how hard Marx is, and who are later to be overwhelmed by the dialectic lore and logic of some of the deep knowers, who are quickly sub- stituting new logics for old creeds. The philosophic relation between me and everything else is that of thinking. Thinking is always a picture process. Some of the process may be now sanctioned by physical counterparts, but the picture process of thinking is not impaired by the absence now of such verification. The modes of thinking just referred to as subjective ICK) Revolutionary Essays and objective are also analytic and synthetic. But I fancy that we sometimes mix things a little when we think of the synthetic or constructive as the tendency of the idealist or subjective mind, and that of analysis as of the objective. It is a picture process with both. In each case the thinker is thinking with a bit of the human mind only. In the case of the subjective thinker, his own mind is the whole of the picture, and he proceeds to separate that arithmetically into parts, a thoroughly fundamental process, and the only veritable one in the realm of mind. As it is only while the mind has space dimension and number to work upon that it can work. Geometry and numbers are parental sciences, not so much because they measure our environments as because they are the very breathing spaces of the mind itself, they are its mechan- ism. Analysis, separation, contrast are easily more possible and more important than synthesis, most of our mental construction being without that confirmation in externalism which is fondly claimed for it, in the past, the present and the future. To be sure, there is a constructive thought locally verifiable in mechanics. One person alone can think con- structively in the same ratio as he can construct thought- fully, but constructive thinking by one person amounts to nothing in humanology. The thinker, as an indi- vidual, has granted to him in sociology this limited sphere, to criticize, to object, to remove. The single thinker, or part of the mind, goes before the whole mind with a lantern, discovering hindrances, and warning of them, or putting them away. I do not insist that the synthetic history thinker is useless, but that while he is only thinking with a bit of the human mind he is powerless, his very powerlessness having uses. When the synthetic thinker drops indi- vidualism and thinks together with the rest of the human mind, he will justify the ways of God to me. It is not any wonder that the larger concepts of social life-unity and cosmic physical-unity for which In Socialist Faith and Fancy. loi Marx and Darwin stand, should have come to us in the last century, so well affirmed and, in a non-denial way, so well received. But it is a wonder that such concept should have so long waited for expositors. The religious people of the world, old age and child- hood, have been singing and praying the unity of the universe, though they did not understand it; and the unity of the race. Notwithstanding the imported crime of hell into Christian doctrine that was evidently the basic for both the doctrine of the fall and of the atone- ment. The world-unity truth was always with us, but there was also always with us that little devil of an ego, forced into conflicts and contrasts by the falsities of pri- vate property, who would not tolerate any law in the universe that was bigger than himself. John Smith personalized the universe as soon as it was declared to be a unity, and gave it an intention and a will, just like his own. He imagined it to be, just like himself, working out a problem, or a task, or engaged, in some great or honorable achievement, and he discov- ered that to be the preparation continuance and first achievement of accomplishing the character of a splendid fellow named John Smith, the man who imagined it. Now, it seems to me that cosmos never intended John Smith, that cosmos has no way of being expressed in John Smith, no more than the social cosmos which we call humanity has, or the moral cosmos which we call God. John Smith is not in it, as John, and it can never be in John Smith. The private life as a bit cannot register the whole, nor be the " intention " of the whole. What, then, is the human cosmic urge, this law that presses us? To integrate the family of man, to make one of all the nations of the earth. Nature is giving birth to a new force, a law of mental integration, a law of free gravity, a law of mental fellowships and affinities, which shall lay its gentle hands upon the wild men of the individualistic strenuous school, draw them under the in- fluence of the social spirit and set them, clothed and in their right mind, at the feet of the social man. I02 Revolutionary Essays Socialism is the first great movement of this re- demption. By reconciling all schools of thought and all interests, it is the monistic philosophy by inclusion. It includes, not by logic, but by fellowship and by frank co-operation, every thinker and every school of thought, Socialism belongs to them all as they belong to mankind. There is but ONE. Call it a purpose if you will, or a law, or a necessity; call it what you will, remembering this of it, that it and it alone must be. In its relation pro or con to this must every other thing become right or wrong. Nothing else makes it right but its harmony with mankind's natural and historic necessity to be one. Nothing else makes it wrong but unfitness for, or hos- tility to, this. Of this great synthesis no private mind is the builder. The historic mind and experience of the race is its moulder. And if any individualist assumes the synthetic role for the race before becoming monopsychic, be assured that he thinks without warrant; he is an enemy to the freedom of the private mind which shall find its own rest rightly altogether. He who teaches the race its own synthesis is a priest in science and an ob- structionist in evolution, however good his intent. Yet there is room for him, and room for you, so long as we remember that the right of private judgment involves the right of rejection, and is as safe in science as it is sound in democracy. XIX. NATURE AND I. Now, why have we taken it for granted so long that mankind has been working as a warrior, that he has been taking the weapons of action out in his hands to labor, to encounter, to overcome, or to be overcome of other forces native to the fields ? They fight low down indeed who still prate of man's war with poor, old nature. " What have I, oh, man," saith she, "to oppose thee for or with? What is there of me that would not be joyfully surrendered to my re- deemer, the organized activity of man?" In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 103 " The great rocks that never knew a sigh, how glad will they be when summoned by man's behest to the surfaces of things?" "How gladly will the half-slumber^ ing clays obey thee, who marshals buried matter into a world's life." There is no field on all the breast of nature but will gladly suckle the organizing man, who now begins fo draw the elected atoms of universe into one organism, like the organism of human society. How will every atom newly summoned to light thrill when in their dark deeps they shall hear the voice of man bidding them to come to co-mate with that spiritual bridegroom, the human thought of organization. Nature has no hostility, she only waits on man; she knows no opposing, she only has not yet the privilege to come; she waits as the bride waits in her chamber. We have gravely erred in ascribing to nature our own peculiar qvtalities. She is not an army of forces to be overcome or made treaty with. She is no dictatress, she has no laws in or for herself and none to give us. She has no secrets wrapped up in folded petals of con- cealment from us, called her principles. She is not a pin- cushion, having stuck all over her poor constitution a lot of self-evidents and other such eternal rubbish of nominal truthing. Such things never were, either in or out of nature. She is not afflicted with any eternal substance called truth. She never knew such a substance as truth, and she has no idea of what we mean by truth, written down. She has the timber, and the stone, and the mortar, for our human house of organization and all our motograph, but she keeps no eternal essence of architecture in stock; she builds nothing. When she moves at all, she only slips or falls somewhere, if life is not at hand and the master workman. She has no god, though haply now the sound of god's horses are heard upon her highways. She is not a mask behind which any god stands revealing himself or suggesting to any other eyes his lineaments. God knows no other eyes to play masks at. We are his own I04 Revolutionary Essays eyes, his own body. Does he need to put a mask on that his feet may see, or not see, their own face a little at a time, and so by gradual revelation learn not to run away from him? We are not two, nature and I. We have no secrets between us, God and I; no separation. I am thoughts, and men, and god, moving mounted upon acci- dents, the slips and falls of natural motion. I am organ- ization intellect. Nature is no volume of pictures of ideas, lying in the mind of God, to be read by me and dug out, or somehow got out. God has no ideas lying in anything waiting to be dug out. When God has any idea, you will find him as the master workman, digging it into something, through the hand of man. Nature, the old name of God (and still used inter- changeably by pietists who are not yet humanitarians), is not a pharmacy shop, into which mankind, like a lot of perfectly virgin protoplastic noses is dropped, having fingers to match, to take corks out with, on the great smelling expedition of experience, the voyage of sen- sation, tasting, squinting, peeping, touching, prodding, listening; a voyage by which mankind has hitherto been supposed to build up his human understanding. Poor humanity! Never poorer than when your understanding was considered to be the product of noses, smelling they know not why. Poor God! poor nature! Ye were never presented in a sorrier plight than when dug out thus by the philosophers of the strictly material- istic school with their noses. With the doctrine of a plastic world into which has come motion, to transform into itself and thus supersede matter, by making it a continuous motion, the master workman has given us action, his own vital necessity as ours, for he can suffer no breaks, continuing-to-go-on being the very life. Action thus becomes divine power when it enters the human plane as organization. Say power only, since there is no action that is not divine, or waiting to be made divine, by contact with the organic thoughts of man. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 105 Nature offers no resistances to us, her destiny and ours are one, to be together. Unity is the maturity of nature, just as it is of man, and man is the chosen vessel through which the unity of nature is to be accom- phshed — a unity of surface, a fellowship of sensitiveness running from one point of our globe to another, and from one to another of us. Surely, there is no supremacy of nature over man! Surely, we have nothing to solicit, nothing to fear from nature! Nature has long ago given us the key of the front gate. If we lack anything, it is for want of taking it, and if we find any difficulty in taking it, certainly nature has not set up the difficulty. What is it that hin- ders you men from being free in the domain of nature? Ask the parchment, ask the sword, ask the priest who is on sentry at the gates of individualism and its properties. We meet nature first-hand no more. Man has in- corporated her into his uncivilization. From the wire fence to the fertilizer in the soil, from the bed of the river to the forests on the mountains, man has been winding up this old clock of nature to his own time. MAN is written upon her everywhere, her surface is already impregnated with him. Later on, she will be almost the. one skin with him, as she is now bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. We are married. I do not grow in this social life, I fade and pass away. My activities do not increase, they relax and go away from my body, leaving it a dry stalk. It is not an evolution of a little ego into a god, but it is the evolution, through me, already reclaimed, of God into every part of nature, until we all know ourselves to be one life. I and this platform of matter which stands between me and my horizon, you also, and every other man with his in- tervening spaces godward, all thrilling with the one life sense. You, Brother Nature, I, and God, and all these living things, are one life ; we are moving together in the joy of the all-containing God, whose surrounding fellow- ship and present everywhereness has been giving and taking with us all the way along. io6 Revolutionary Essays XX. MY MORAL PARADOXY. What I am not in myself, that I morally am. That is not mine which is my moral strength. I am an experi- ence of something else. I am that through which the other flows. When I become the experience of something else I shall be saved from myself into the otherhood and be immortal. I have a power of remembering what the other has been to me and of arranging myself out of its way, so that it may come again. I am an automatic move- ment for self-relegation. I am as an egoist, an obstruc- tionist, a natural-born hindrance to the moral growth of society, who, therefore, because of this ascertained, fixed perversity of my nature, may become an element in pro- moting the growth of that which I am not — ^the flowing thing — the otherhood. As an animal, I am a fact, perish- ing; as a morality, I am only possible when lost in society. I am an organizer of social gain by self-loss. I am without any sense of right as one, without any moral, that is social, sense at all, as one; and being never- theless called into a moral life, I am compelled to join myself to others that I may discover right through wrong. I am one who, alone, do not know what is wrong to others and who am compelled to join myself to others that I may, by sharing, know it, and so ma!ke way for the rightness of the whole social experience to flow in among our interested littlenesses. Because I am what I am, I cannot personally experi- ence right, but I can experience wrong, as a failing pulse which marks the absence of public life. Public life is all that I can ever touch of morality, it is all the morality that can ever touch me. And I know that the organization of an anti-wrong government is all that human nature can accomplish to let the right social life flow. I know social life to be the moral and spiritual es- sence of the race, and its flowing always to be outside of me. I never look to see positive righteousness on the In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 107 earth, for me to see so, and so to approve of it would be to prove its unrighteousness. I know that the integrity of morals and society can only be preserved by governments strongly fortifying themselves against their owti enemy everywhere — ^the pri- vate life. I am, therefore, on the positive side of my nature, morally and socially, blind and immoral. I can only receive good indirectly, through a society controlling me, and I can only do good, indirectly; first, by attacking such of my wrongs as hurt me physically in that part of me where alone I am correctly responsive, because I am not alone, but with the rest of nature, and from thence stepping up into the realm of humanity, there to attack other wrongs, which are the wrongs of others also. My moral agency being marred only by the extent to which I feel myself a sharer in them, and strengthened to the extent that I do not so feel them. I know the greatest possibility of the private life as a moral agency is that of organizing the otherhood wrongs. He, therefore, who would go into the immortality of the otherhood life must do so through wrong, must be- come a student of wrongs, in such sort as to know them only in groups' external ; he is a grouper of wrongs, an organizer of external personal wrongs, a student of class afflictions and a captain of class resistance. •To the private, distorted nebulae of personal wrong, floating before the angry and distorted vision of the pri- vate life, I can only give consistency by giving it class expression; if it be not a class wrong, it is no wrong at all. Thus am I externalized morally. My message is not the message of Ruskin. I am no lover of the beautiful. I have no right to the beautiful. This is not the time for my beauty, no more than it is the time for my God. I must wait many a day for both. I am a student of the ugly, the distorted, the broken, the abandoned, the betrayed life of the class of burden- bearers wronged. I am in the world's sewers, digging for the world's eternal health. I clean before no man's io8 Revohitionary Essays private door, but I send a flood of righteousness down the street of all. Alas, "that I must say it that way, I so place my wrongs in the way, that they are as walls be- tween which righteousness flows down. When thinking of God, I think of him as that great, silent, patient fidelity, which has left us to ourselves, but left us where we could not be lost, being within his great circle of strength, and time, and mercy, there to remain until all, to the very uttermost atom that is mov- able, shall be saved into action, direction, organization, and the whole living. I draw a great circle, this is my present motograph; when we are wiser I shall draw thee a better, but will not guarantee that it will be any more like God or me; but it is a motograph along which my mind can this moment step towards light, and perhaps thine, and that is all there is in my motograph of Socialist faith and fancy, save the truth of my work, the life itself. I draw a little circle within that great one, around the same center. The outer surface from the center of that little circle is where I live, and all the human family inside of that circle is the sub-conscious or social man of history. The inner side of the great circle without is the reflective surface from whence returns upon me and all men the net product of ourselves — ^the tides of history coming back upon us in tradition, tendency, will, habit, opinion, social emotion, enthusiasm, wisdom, folly, and the world habit, that great salvation, and entering the smaller circle beneath us is our collective sub-conscious. Between me and that great shore of returns yonder, lies all the realm of nature, my workshop, when I go to work every day upon the bar sinister, the property-wrong relations of the world. I go to the fields and till them as a workman. I go to the owners of the fields and all the property wrongs of the fields and denounce them as a workmaster. I go to the workmen and organize their separate wrongs into groups of wrongs, and the men themselves into classes of men, corresponding to those groups of wrong. As a master workman, I give body. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 109 shape and expression to all the bad things done to man- kind that I know of. I am a designer into patterns of these wrongs to make them very well known and to organize classes upon them, because wrong is the road to right when you know it to be wrong, and class formation is the way to such social knowing and to salvation; that is, after you have discovered that self is the only thing knowable and positive in human affairs, and it is the absolute wrong. Thus ascertained wrong affords us the one clue only ever given, and the only one that ever shall be given to mankind to find righteousness by finding a moral substitute for himself, that is, a class interest that is big enough to lead him to society. I do not preach Socialism to ego as the growth of its better manhood; I preach that message as the gospel of ego's dissolution. I work to integrate mankind by organ- izing their wrongs into the way of righteousness. I work to embarrass and resist every agency that disintegrates mankind into private properties. I try to open many new ways of intercourse between wrong and wrong — so that deep may call unto deep. I am forming together an awful caravan of crippled mankind, a terrible procession of rags, and shame, and cruel captivity. I am looking for shadows everywhere to make the sun shine with. I am a virtue artist by shade pictures and backgrounds. I know no other art for presenting the fore front of a moral world picture but by laboring longest on the dark places. My gospel is the organization of labor on behalf of social morality. XXI. THE MASTER FORCE OF SOCIETY. A moment there was on the eve of time which gave birth to control, it was the moment of the first happening. All had heretofore been still, no breath, no motion, no tick of time in the dark realm of immobile matter; that moment's accident gave us God and Socialism. It was when a first movement declared itself and disturbed all the no Revolutionary Essays antecedent death. Something slipped out of dead place, and the world awoke. God was, time began, and order took to its hand the sceptre of dominion, henceforth to be the father of disorderly force, to balance, to relate, to comprehend and unite it, to stand under, over and around it, to fix forever the one great motograph of a moving universe, to be itself the moving of it and to be the thing that was moving. The mind, the will, the force and the matter of the universe, locally in each life, on each planet, of each orb of the planet groups, and of the grand orbit containing all from one germ, one insect, one man to all, and back again. Something moved, and form, and life, and mind, and God was the result. He was its experience, he was its memory, its mind and reason, he was that by which it could not be and was not lost. He was that by which it was instantly repeated. And all this he was to it, because he was that which started into life when it happened. He was all this to it, because' he wholly was outside of the accident and of its elements. He was born like an echo, and he then became a swift reminiscence; and the instant suggestor of another moment of motion like unto that, which when it came he received, returned and sug- gested back — a looking-glass with an urge in it. He is the spectator God always; the outside spectator — ^the con- sciousness of every happening. The sum of it also in ex- pression is he to the receptively potent. He is all of any- thing historically that you can take the gist of, because he is the experience reservoir of all our pasts. He is not author, nor planner, nor foreseer, nor fore- doer, but just the intellectually necessary — next — after everything that happens, and every time" he is a wiser next for the whole of us. He is not the producer, but the produced reproducing. When all producers have moved, there is in the universe a spiritual sum of their producing. It is not he who does the summing up, but it is he who constitutes in the last total racial experience of it, vicari- ously holding for all of us that sum. He has no cause In Socialist Faith and Fancy. in but ours. He has no party among us. Our enemies are the bone of his bone as we are. If we only knew how all things are reconciled in him, there would be no enemies. He has no apart-by- himself. He has no himself. He is only trustee for humanity, giving back to it as much of its self as it has open doors for. He is our soul's rainfall from the skies of human fact and experience. No thought drop was ever lost in him. He has grown through us. He is the correlation of that whole mechanical period and realm of surfaces and motions which have preceded now; he is the power of organization. In the second experience he took upon him the ex- perience of lives, many and conflicting, in the animal and human world. In the third experience he records, be- holds, and gives back to us the gendering power of group, class, national and race organics. He is we ourselves totalized and coming back to ourselves with nothing good forgotten and nothing bad lost. Before this God we cannot debase ourselves as whining sinners, nor before him can we exalt ourselves as intoxicated saints. The very best that we can ever do with the great and blessed God is to know that he is wholly outside of us, and to become ourselves like him as much as may be, spectators and reciprocators to our largest limit of the whole human life. . The last stage of divine growth is the human organ- ization with the whole. In that relating lies the ethical realm of human personal life, its gracious flavor, its holy purpose and its new virility for the single ego. This experience of the whole is of the whole; it is not an arithmetical experience only; it is not a fighting experience only, nor a surrendering experience; it is not victory nor defeat; it is not what we call sin nor virtue; it is not hate nor love; but it is all of them blended in one inclusive experience, one outside-of-all power which, by reflexive action, is sending experience, kindly, graciously, benevolently back upon ourselves. 112 Revolutionary Essays This kindness, this grace, this benevolence is not an extra attribute, exercised on and for us, for our good merely, by a well-disposed, big, strong one called God. These' three words merely stand for three qualities grown out of one pro-organic experience; they have been an- swers to the requirements of the human mind on its new involution into society. Kindness, grace, benevolence are no more extra humanics, when the requirement is social organization, than mortar and nails are where a large form in brick and wood is to express the social requirement. They are the requirement in current progress and expression of any sort of social organization whatsoever. This divine life places no man on the pension list, to be the recipient of special aids or rewards of grace. He has nothing to give to persons — no pardons and no condemnations, although he well may be the medium through which they hurt or harm themselves. But so general and sure are the appropriate priva- tions ensuing to us because of what we do not remove from between ourselves and the common weal, that we know beforehand the whole law of the Lord. The un- removed evil informs us by its own shadow how much of the royal intercourse from outermost souls of democ- racy from the all-encircling god-life we are losing. This God cannot be debased and cannot be exalted, but in the intelligent praise of him there is every element of growth for the soul. This God you cannot glorify by himself. The glory you give him is all another's, and if you are giving it to him out of an appreciative experience of what the all-inclusive life means to you through the comradeship, that other, to whom the glory comes, is yourself, and it comes right into your own glad life. This God just keeps pace with you and me. He is the spiritual bank of old humanity. Do you know anything of the value of that plus X which stands for what three men in one enterprise mean more than each one in ?i third of the same enter- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 113 prise? Do you know the strangely, mighty, spiritual plus X which, like the crown of celestial light and power, hovers over the potencies of all those who are working together with one heart and mind? Brother of mine, the God of whose presence I am whispering to thee now, the God of an organizing and organized humanity is the plus of all these pluses. Uncover thy head. Be- tween that bare head, it and all the immensities and all the undiscovered, unnamed forces of the air and its outer infinites, there is now nothing. All are resting upon that little head of thine. Thy head may kiss unabashed the universe thus. The universe holds nothing in it that is not brother to thee, since you have found this dear God of humanity. Lift thy bare face up to him, let the nuns and the foolishly sin-conscious veil theirs; you have noth- ing to be ashamed of, for this God that I disclose to thee has been your school, shop and room-mate all through your growth. When you passed through the three rivers he was with you. When you were sin-consciously de- ceived, when you were deceived into personal virtue, and became self-consciously righteous, when you laid yourself aside and found your substitute in the class which histori- cally claimed you, and the state to which by ancient motherhood you belonged; this God was always your spectator. He was your advance thought always, and always he returned into your experience as the latest thought for a better next. Ah, he has been in partnership with you all the time, and you knew it not. Think, I pray you, of the many now half-forgotten mornings of delicious sunbaths of the soul you have shared with him. Oh, he is a very present, very near and dear God — the God whose new name I whisper to thee. Socialism. And as you think of the glistening morning thoughts, wherewith so often he has coronated your brow, that brow of yours, which is in the thought world as a rich rose, giving out of its folds delightful particles of fragrantly blessed fancies, you know never- more aught of the terrible nearness of God. He is no longer that awful live eye which the priests pulled out of 114 Revolutionary Essays a socket and set staring at you from the altar, staring in among your poor little heart thoughts, to shrivel you up with a horrible fear of God and make you slaves. The God of humanity is so sweetly near, and you so sweetly fearless of his nearness are, that you would, if yon could, let him into your bosom's heart to stay among the red pulses. But why should you? There is nothing there. You have learned that there is nothing of God or of humanity hidden about you; it is all upon surfaces that spirit moves, all in the open, where the feet of the living tread, where the flowers are pumping up the refined par- ticles into surface upon which, and by which, life shall continue to answer unto life from one end of the earth to another. Can you perish in the hands of this God? Not unless all things else, perishing, shall fall out of ex- istence and God is buried beneath. How can you perish in his hands, which are but the mightier, wiser hands of yourself plus that sacred x of ages' travail. Of travailing experience from the famine, the barrenness and waste of fierce single struggling for self alone. How, with the whole of history's sad but sacred struggle out of self behind you, can you perish in his hands who was always here, the spectator, the sum- mary of it all? This God of the human soul's whole ex- perience everywhere, what a sweet amazement it is! Think of how much he has to give, and thus learn how hard it would be for thee to perish in his hands. But, above all, think that he stores nothing, that like a great circuit wire, he only holds this eternal life power and ex- perience while passing it on. Infinitely rich is he, with a wise richness that has nothing to spare. 'Tis all for thee and me. Let us rejoice. XXn. THE MASTER-FACT OF SOCIETY. Our cause rests squarely upon and is the direct ex- pression of the one great master-fact of this human world. This master-fact may be properly regarded as the peculijir In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 115 revelation of Socialism; and it is in this sense and in the light of it only that we speak of our Socialism as scientific. We do not tell the world that man's salvation rests upon the benevolent impulses of good men, or that its disasters have flowed from the malignant influence of unfriendly spirits. We do not attribute the revolutions which have come upon nations to the crimes of the am- bitious or to the strenuous virtues of heroes; but we declare these great events of history to be always and obviously traceable to the master-fact — the system of economic production, the way the people were getting their living before the revolution was forced into history. This economic conception of history's process which leads to Socialism is itself an outflow from the master- fact. As clear as that the direction of the mountain ranges is the master-fact in the direction of the rivers, so clear is it that the economic conditions under which the race lives direct the flow of politics and indicate the path- way of the ethical, poetical and religious life coming after. . It is not with love, nor fellowship, nor hope, nor resolu- tion, nor anger, nor selfishness, nor despair (for these are all modified by the master-fact), that Socialism makes its alliance, but with the economic activity. Is this activity in bondage, its very body in peril of stripes, starvation and death at the caprice of a flesh owner? Then there is no love on earth. The prevailing virtues will then be two sorts of falsehoods : The appear- ance of contentment, good humor, or even happiness, on the part of the slave industrians; and the appearance of much knowing considerateness for the slaves and devo- tion to another law than his own will, on the part of the flesh owner. But the whole trend of progress will be mentally against this double team of lies, and, therefore, the revolution coming next after that will not be an evolution into a superficial show of more content, good humor and happiness by the slave ; but a breaking up of the sealed hells, and an unrobing and unmasking to shameless depravity, a diabolic pessimism, and a scorn of all other than the law of his own imperial whim, by the ii6 Revolutionary Essays flesh owner. In such a period there will be no love left with which to regenerate society, even if any amount of love could regenerate it. But the awful dearth of safety to life will be apparent to the prophets, and they will, therefore, come forth preaching the safe virtue of non- resistance. Thus upon the dissolution of bread and wealth- making by slavery did the flesh owner and the men he owned break loose in ancient Rome — the first becoming callous, cynical, cultivating only courage in the face of death, because it was the most useful virtue for a class out- numbered by their former victims; and the slaves culti- vating the virtue of organization, which ever was and ever will be the virtue by which life is secured to the un- propertied masses. Where is the man who has no care for the life of the world? There is the man who will be no prophet for the cause of Socialism. Where is the man who has a care for, and would cherish the life of the world? That man will find no word of hope outside of Socialism. The pi-iest of the world was primarily a world life- saver, though he has fearfully wandered from his mission and mistaken his ideals for their goal. Ideal of love, non- resistance, fellowship, fortitude, were given him only as expedients for the times, as instruments of life-saving, and they were all economically and lawfully begotten ideals for preservation. When the world of slaves was wholly defenseless in the unrestrained hands of the flesh owner, the world prophet brought forth another gospel for the despairing — ^the viaticum of this present world, which said in efiFect: "We cannot afford you any se- curity of physical life under your present economic bonds, but we can give you the hope of a personal life hereafter much more splendid even than that your masters enjoy to-day." Thus this idealist, this teacher of life preservatives sent life out of the world and lost his way utterly. After the disappearance of slavery, in order to have been true to his functions as a life-saver, he should have taken back In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 117 the kingdom of life from heaven and begun again to replant it in the place from whence in his hasty, zealous despair he had so unwisely plucked it. It was as a response to this obviously necessary recall that so many prophets, from Jesus to Dante, did preach the kingdom of life on earth, and called it everlasting. And it was in the spirit of this response that the new church which began to be formed during the gradual dis- solution of Roman slavery based itself partly upon a recognition of the master-fact of bread-getting and was an anti-property religion. Along, upon and within the shining rails of economic activity must move all our future prophets and the recog- nition that the arterial life of heart, brain and spirit is in the workshop ; and there alone should be the priest's mes- sage of future ages. This inspiration of the idealist will henceforth be the life of the world, and how to free it, to beautify it, and to make it abound through the abolition of the fact and the eradication of all the remnants of economic inequality and dependency between one man and another. The slave condition, with its flesh owner and its flesh that was owned, called for dissimulation. The slave sometimes grew sensible of his own dissimulation, as did his master. A general unfaith in one another would soon have rendered all the efforts of the life-savers null and void, if not fortified by something else. The reality of contentment or its possibility once doubted by the master, would make the appearance of content only the mask of a deeper and more slavish vic- tim. So the reality of the master's professed concern for the welfare of the slave, and his professed deference to higher laws and purposes than the slave wot of, would only make the slave despise this polished hypocrite all the more. What human experience, human conditions and human nature forbid both the slaves and the masters any longer to believe possible concerning each other was then said to be made possible by the importing of an entirely ii8 Revolutionary Essays new personality inside each one and coming into him from heaven. Upon this assurance, and this alone, individualism in society in its successive phases has supported its prophets. But the same necessity which in former times compelled them to transplant the life kingdom from this earth to another will soon compel them to transpose the seat of the new birth from the heart of the single indi- vidualist to the heart of society — ^that is, to its master- fact. And the prophets of Socialism are in the world to do this very thing to regenerate our plan of economic production from a private, competing, profit-grabbing villainy to a universal, mutual organization for the easiest and most abundant supply of all things necessary for a sweet and righteous collective living in all the world. The summary of all human interests is thus to be found in the message of social transformation from pri- vate profit production to equality production by organ- ized society and for the whole life of the whole people. The famine of the life lived alone, for itself, without any external enthusiasm for the life of others, has been the experience and the moan of wisdom in all ages; and no power of faith exercised upon themselves by doctors of divinity and sages of philosophy has sufficed to stifle this world moan. Augustine, Francis, Theresa, all were mourners, all were among the self-unsatisfied; and in spite of their desperate faith in a new birth inside them- selves, they continued their moaning and heart-breaking against the rocks of time until the tide of life went out beyond the bar, and the breakers ceased their moaning. It is only by that law of inversion which the seeker for truth so frequently meets with, that the truth-seeker is at last himself found by his truth; and he discovers to his astonishment that the inside of life is always its out- side; that it is in our environments and not in our hearts that we must first plant the seeds of regeneration. This again is the message of Socialism to the souls of men: Sow your gospel seeds in the master-fact of economic In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 119 production, and that vine will make every single life to bear the fruit of an eternal best. XXIII. THE FLOWING LIFE. With the doctrine of a flowing thought, a river of life passing evermore by men's doors upon which we are casting or not casting our labor we have the element of power, that is continuity; and we have it where alone there can be power outside of the private life — it is the social river. See, ye comrade citizens, the children when the rain is falling and the street gutters are full to overflowing! Come, let us out with them. What care we who are chil- dren, for the tepid downpouring! How merry are the water bubbles; how they go rollicking along. Now we have made our little paper boats and launched them, and they are jostling each other. But they cannot sail far, be- cause of the sand and refuse swept together in our little Mississippi gutter. So we drop our boats, and all hands are engaged in undamming the street torrent, to let it flow and float our little fleet of enterprise. See, I have released a great pool, and how gladly it rolls! The next boy down notes its coming and he swiftly clears the way for it, and all the other boys down the street do the like, and thus all goes aflowing, aflowing by the little feet of each bare-legged ego all down the street. Our surfaces feel it; it is a passing power. It is a power because continuous, a water serpent. Thus our surfaces sense the secret of immortality, and we have had a share in it, for we have cleared its way. The boys. A., B. and C, have sensed it in connection with themselves as being somehow cause and efifect. C. regards his sensation as an efifect from B., because it passed from B. to him; and both look to A. as a causal previous to their two effects. It is in this personal de- lusion concerning cause and effects that men also are mentally floundering. Let us drop the notion that we are power; let us cherish the true sense that our surfaces I20 Revolutionary Essays are acted upon by a power in motion which is nowhere in all the world broken. A serpentine power I have called it for home-bringing illustration; long, infinitely long, being everywhere present and touching everything in the superficial world. When it touches man, it leaves one of two consciousnesses, namely, that the sensation of it is that power, or that the sensation is a product of that power. In our illustration, A., B. and C. have been but separate, successive records of a continuous and inde- pendent factor outside of them. The involution of A., B. and C. would be mentally the united consciousness and common recognition of that outside unity whose prop- erty was their three sensations. With this doctrine of a larger moving outside self, I who am writing know that I am, with all my outlooks and purposes, and sensations, but a little part of my great outer self; a part most vitally and indispensably connected with that greater me, the whole of history. Aye, with the whole infinite remainder of the divine universe, oh, blessed life, swinging through the eternities of which I am here a time-segment and, behold, all is mine. I can- not die because we cannot but live. Dying has been the murderer's word, the murderer's thought. I know not how it came to us nor whence; I am every day breathing with immortality. Let us take this affirmative of eternal life and its right of way and hasten the economic redemption of the Taborers by which alone the individual interests will no longer be dead spots on the social organism. The individual, behold him and what he costs. He is a disease center, which grows malignant with the growth of his private property. He is a property inflammation at many points of the city and the State; the cancerous tax-gatherer of human energy from all its spiritual functions. By semi-atrophy he demands life, only to destroy in waste that which the suffering system is compelled to yield. When such iso- lates are no longer playing vampire on the brain of man, great streams of new thought shall come to us ; for one atrophied person with a million dollars of his own to look In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 121 after and nothing more, is a sigh and a sorrow and a closing up of the human flow of life. When every pore of life is alike, and alike open to every visiting sunbeam, when ultra personalities born of property or property- lessness are alike ground into their ultimate dusts, and the atoms of all — ^the democratic atoms of all men — are fearlessly sifted and spread out like child's thoughts in the sunlight, no man, no woman being ashamed of aught; when every human Jaeing is thus smiled upon by sunny opportunity alike, touched and kissed as sweetly by the social joy as any dvtst may be through which the sun- shine trickles; when thus alike exposed and invited to freedom of opportunity, who dares even to dream a limit for the loveliness and power of human life?. Now I know that the vast majority of human thoughts, like the vast majority of men, are wasted. Though they be God's horses, they are fastened all day long to hitching posts, awaiting the private user. And the weary travelers of the world are passing by, bowed and footsore, moaning within themselves, " Oh, that in this extremity I had one of God's horses ! " A pliilosopher of Socialism has many of these thoughts, his mind is full of them. Like a man with a hundred horses in his stables, what can he do but look at them and wish he were more men? Comrade reader, this is my wish of happiness — I wish I were more men. If I were a man of action, I could use more of them run- ning hither and thither with tidings of new connections. If I were many men of action, if — ah, let me wish it all — if I were the whole human family, I would be found standing at the gates of the trade wind. With a chaplet of fellowship would I bind it to the moving of the Gulf stream. I would know the ice-meltings of the North, and just as they began to soften down the rugged rime of the isolate poles (where the soul of private property, if soul it has, should be bound), I would invite by infor- mation some zephyrs then straying nearest, to come with releasing breath to this point of need. If I were all men, no ships would wait ice-blocked, and none would wait. 122 Revolutionary Essays longing to go up to them. I would watch the floods on the rivers and the floods in the clouds, and I would hurry the farmers to meet them, I would call the boatmen, I would whisper the village wells to get them ready and be cleansed for the coming rainstorm. I would link all the currents of nature together with the little red nerve cord of social intellect until here and there every wandering force would find its correlation, and there would not be in all my comrades' house of earth one little rivulet; in any distant mountain solitude not one without a social line passing over it like the connecting belts passing over the great wheels of our great factories, to maintain the joy of power for humanity; to put human thoughts, liuman interests, human zeal, human hope, human en- thusiasm riding upon one motograph and linked to- gether as the organs in a body, moving at one behest for one use. They would move for humanity and for all the auxiliary lives of other creatures now lost for lack of har- mony, but destined in a way not yet seen to share with us the social redemption. Some may find it hard to think how mere motion can pass into human life as spirit; they experience this difficulty through having acquired the habit of thinking that they think inside of them; that there is a little man within each of us who sits like a spider to observe, to wait, to catch, to gain, to go to heaven for himself. Now, there is no such little man inside ; there is none outside. The rudimentary thinking we do in words of books and conversations, which we so falsely overprize as our intellectual life, are but its faint expressions. All the elements of the spirit are outside the cuticle. This concept gives us back God,; from the isolate it returns him to the public man; it opens up the great external highways of the future to the spiritual life. Tliis doctrine of a flowing life is of a power picking up through the thoughts of man such atoms out of the material world as stand next on the roll-call for election to take place in organic progress as part of us, to be again promoted up the Santa Scala of organic life until they In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 123 reach the individual man, and from thence incoming to the man of the collective mind. To us now, but whither after us? Be sure that the nerve line is never broken, be sure that the thing in the spinal marrow which writes this line has touched every man of every age, and has its pre- ceding, as it shall have its succeeding, in the motion of every star, in all the universe, for evermore. XXIV. THE MAKINGS OF SOCIALISM. There are two opposite contentious movements manifested whenever numbers of human beings are found together, the movement of the mass drawing the man, and of the man repulsing the mass. During the trans- lation by historic experience of the man intO' the mass, which is really the sum total of our human business on the earth since the race became human, we convert every cur- rent experience into terms or the weapons of the contest. It is a conflict which would have come to an early termination had it remained one of bare personalism against collectivism. Mass attractiveness should alone have triumphantly established society over ego, but before men could develop spiritual perception enough to be mass-conscious, or be socially appreciative, the balance of human relation was stricken out of their lives, and they found themselves deeply sensible of personal physical wants, while insensible to the wants of the social life. This materialistic minus class consciousness was made by a surplus in the property of some other persons. Egoism has thus armed itself against humanity, and its weapon was private property, so both the robber and the robbed became social prodigals. The overcovering, all-including force fact of our human story on the earth is this: You and I are being transformed, alas how slowly, into the social life of the earth on our way to the larger translation back into an intellectual cosmos, from whence at first we were sent forth, insentient atoms, on a great pilgrimage through the ages, to be moulded and transformed into spirituali- 124 Revolutionary Essays ties, the elementals of a newly evoluted universe. We are not the moulders of society, but its moulded. We are the instruments of this industrious involution of ego from self to society, and wherever or however the facts of life come to us, or whatsoever those facts may be, we needs must gather them up, run them, or ride on them, and by them, into the social transformation. We are not the subjects of any 'economic determinism. All things are determined and used by this destiny and urgency of man to Socialism. The human side is social, the property side is unsocial. In politics, the first is the effort of democracy to organize itself, and the second is the effort of others to organize themselves. The first always means the human trend towards any given age's measure of Socialism, the second always means the other trend towards aristocracy. Whether the aristocracy be old or new, Russian or American, it is charged with hostility and contempt for the people, and the cause of this alienism from the soul of the race is their consciousness of the crime of property, the apprehensions with which it fills them in the face of growing intelligence. These hostile sentiments constitute the necessary selfishness of their position and are among the earlier and most potent elements for the making of Socialism. Class conscious and organized, before their victims had yet realized the nature of property and individualistic insti- tutions, they, all unaware, bring to birth and educate a counter class consciousness and organization of their vic- tims, the true democracy. It may be that for a century yet to come the weaker men will be content with a repeal of the wrongs of prop- erty (now called rights), so far as they effect the common means of living and certain obvious state integrities, but in time the nations and the race will learn to absolutely deny and abolish private property — ^then selfishness and egoism will be dead, having done their good work. Sel- fishness, after the property fright has gone from mankind. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 125 will become connectiveness, and egoism, when flattery is dead, will pass into Socialism. By Socialism I mean the concrete state to be ulti- mately formed out of history's divided experiences and formed by that unifying power, the soul of the human race, the sire of all new and the son of all ancient history. I also understand by Socialism all the movements of men that are consciously made towards concentrivism, and all the group revulsions of oppressed labor tending to one life, together with all organizations of those who are socially hurt to resist their wrongs, all combinations and political parties which look to a revolution in favor of the working masses of mankind as the natural basis of society, and all efforts to enable the weak to combine and by ballot or otherwise obtain access to the centers of redress. The force of society is to us an unconsciousable thing, we cannot, think we ever so mightily, foresee or foremould its movements. The constructionists are, in fact, pipe dreamers. The old constructive thinker was no fool, for him- self, inasmuch as he succeeded in getting a world of vic- timized humanity to believe in him through the many tragedies and comedies over which he presided since he became the statesman of the ages. He constructed pri- vate property into a juncture between aristocracy and the unnatural state; and the day is far, far ahead ere the rest of humanity will know enough to depose him, or know how to utter itself in affirmative as he does. Cen- turies of established wrongs are still with us, anchored to which we must, by our faithful negations of them, blindly, but with great faith, build up the unconscious affirmative life, when men shall be as gods, knowing good from evil, instead of mere negationists, knowing only evil from good. The constructivist thinker stands invariably for the fear, unfaith and cowardice of the world, and, therefore, he fastens himself upon and harasses the forwardness of the race, he is wedded to the visible and specific only, 126 Revolutionary Essays and that which he cannot reduce to his intellect of units is too big a sum for the world's safety. He is the literal man of men, the man that puts everything in a nutshell, because he does not realize that nothing less than the whole cosmic circle is the shell of Socialism. With his little note-book, he is in the Socialist propaganda meet- ing, one of the petulant questioners, who want to know just how Socialism is going to sweep the chimney. He is in our own counsels also, the same petulancy wanting to know the same just how, a fearful, wonderful and inde- fatigable rabbi rabid in drawing up constitutions, amend- ments, by-laws and referendums, which will let no evil in nor any good either in or out. The Socialism which he cannot write in his little book, or read in his little book, is to him not Socialism. This is the dreary man who draws " a rigid system of evolution " out of printers' ink. This is the man who drones us asleep even when he is talking of Socialism. This is the man who can never impulse a revolution. The makings of Socialism are mainly to be found in the old historic state-ascendancy over persons, allied to the new economic ascendant, in the wrongs of the downcast and in the over-force of the collective souls. In every social limitation and social tribulation of the private life, in the open eyes of the world's pauperism, looking out on the splendid results of its own conquest, in the habit that all things have of either producing them- selves or an anti of themselves in sentient beholders, that fateful educator which reads out death to all displayed opposites or reads life into them. In the education which capitalism must give somebody to do its work for it, in the accelerated brain activity which the roar, and btistle, and hustle of capitalism's business ways forces into the normal head, and by the vivid variety which the profit-mongering press must every day teem, be it sense or nonsense, on the cerebral life of the readers, in the tricks, sham cohflicts and real hypocrisies of its re- formers, in the daily record of its own business, in its own doctrines of strenuousness, competition and battle, In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 127 in the whole self of capitalism, we find every day the makings of SociaHsm. XXV. THE SOCIALIST RECESSION. Capital is but property, spelled large and vitalized by enforced labor for its own reproduction through the control and mastership of human business. It is the uttermost upper experience of private property, just as physical privation, wrongs and evils of social unuse are the uttermost under experiences of its victims. From these two experiences two recesssions will occur. The man who is physically hurt by the long, mis- used historic experience of private property — the victim of the capitalist catastrophe — ^will commence the reces- sion, because he must. The other, finding that outward and away from the otherhood of human society and fel- lowship, private property has become a colossal madness, will return, after his former victim, and there will remain a man who will not return. As a person, the capitalist lost the ability to appro- priate, or make his own of, in any satisfactory way, the tremendous procreative powers of money. As a toy, it is too big for his puny hands; as a weapon it is twice edged and heavy beyond the power of private use; as an instrument it only gets him more of itself and less of himself; he is lost in it. If the man capitalist is thus to be lost in the capi- talist man, there will be many of them who, wanting a personal life, but finding they must surrender it to capital, will call a halt upon the further effacement of themselves, until they know for what it is they are to be deperson- alized. In the further development of individuality along the lines of property civilization the limit has in them been reached. The means have overcome and smothered the man, and while the revulsion of the slave is from wrongs, the revulsion of the master is from evils. The two utter- most men are the moving men in the counter-revolution, 128 Revolutionary Essays which shall rise to offset the catastrophe of private prop- erty. I am calling this catastrophe of capitalism a revo- lution. It is the greatest and most ethically pregnant for race culture the world ever experienced. I am calling the reaction from the abuses of the private-property ex- perience Socialism, proletarian, experiential, revolution- ary Socialism, but only proletarian in its first resurgency. The other waves that are breaking themselves against the barren rocks of private property will soon join the grand recession. For their ability to discover their evils and their will to turn back from them, the property classes have been greatly assisted by their own long-maintained hypocrisy. The God whom the master praised and held up assiduously for the worship of the slave has done his work. The habit of referring to him and of singing and paying tribute to a power deemed greater than any or all of us, has at last really made such a power over him. The selfishness and cunning that kept the capitalist going to church has borne a fruit, the very opposite of his inten- tion; for instead of inducing the laborers wholly to sur- render themselves to the hands of the confiscator for the love of a common God, the confiscator has himself played with the divine fire so long that it has burnt him and given him another selfishness, and that selfishness re- pudiates life on lines of rebellion against a God who is so mighty to harm him. He sinned as a coward and he repents as a coward, but he repents. The high people have acquired the habit of praying socially in congregations as well as the low, and they like it so well, that a desire for living otherwise, socially or congregationally, is begotten in them. It is not the creed of religion nor its otherworldli- ness, so-called, but its gregariousness that has been spiritual. The gregariousness of the slaves for other- worldliness, which was always fostered by the master class, has itself become the habit that shall conquer the individualism of both master and man, and finally wipe out all classes. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 129 The clergy, therefore, have been benefactors to the race, inasmuch as they have kept the most dangerous class, that is the master class, going to church in crowds, to superintend the praying of the slaves. Even though their going there was a deception, they are the men who must first really surrender to the spirit of the race, for their wrongs are not physical. The master class, the originators of all class dis- tinctions among men, will thus, mentally, unclass them- selves. They have been accustomed to hear of wrongs rather than to feel them. Wrongs have been to them matters of reflection, mind matters rather than experi- ences; that is, they have been evils and have produced the full-grown revolutionary man, the man of victory — the Idealist. While making wrong a question for the perpetual prayer and sermon, they unavoidably made it a perpetual question. Though the mind of the master entered the battlefield when it knew, and had no hurts, and could heal none, it nevertheless went there — went, if you please, to lie. Yet by that great regenerative role assigned throughout all history to the hypocrite, the hypocrite again does nobly and cants himself into sincerity. Assailing evil theoretically and before the altar, the mind grows strong enough to hate the evil, and then the hypocrite grows real faith and begins to trust his own thought. What a nemesis is here! Evils have become to him in- tellectual entities; the race is uplifted for its plane of battle. Conscience has become a tenacity, evils are real as wrongs, and Judas hates the property that hurts his better self, and the idealist leads the revolt of the laborers against himself. Then come thinkers, bred in the legal details of labor confiscation, men who will be as strenuous in repulsing property evils as the laborers must now be in revolution- izing wrongs. They have fooled, for fees, with law and justice, until they, too, believe. The mal-experience of private-property wrong thus passes out of the stomachs of the laborers into the brains of 130 Revolutionary Essays the leisurers, and there the mental conflict shall be contin- ued in future times, until there is no more private property. In all this revulsion the middle-class profiteer lies between two mill stones, morally dead. The middle-class man is the negative, empty space between two facts, he is nothing — not even a hypocrite. He has no role to play anywhere in any great world. No great social move- ment is for him who is but a soaker, maintaining himself by keeping on the moister side of everything. In verity, a middle class does not and could not exist. The utter- most men alone are vital realities. The middle-class man never goes, he does not recede or advance. Yet he is continually passing through the motions of recession in his own vicious circle. To-day it is his doom, as never it was before, to be doubly damned in his prosperity. His interest is against, both classes. Towards capital and labor he is in property repulsion, and every day's profit put into his pocket is a day stolen from both, from the race, and an arrest of evo- lution. How paltry the gain, how grea:t the cost, that gives us him. Oh, such a man! On the other hand, every accession to the day's wages gained by the laborer through union organization or Socialist politics is a cent for himself and a golden eagle for mankind. ' If another gets ahead of him who is a Christian, he hates all Christians and makes a bad class out of his bad man. He classifies upside down. If a man deprives him of an advantage who happens to be a Jew, he, therefore, ever after attacks the Jews. He ckssifies his aversions from one to all, and as a human soul among human souls iS} therefore, greatly damaged and damned. Not from one to one other does he hate, but he hates from a single focus to a whole quadrant or hemisphere of men. Not so the revulsions of the laborer. The man who is funda- mentally classed in his warfare, whether he hates or loves, is saved by the fundamental Tightness of his cause, because when he smites it is from the right place. To study and know the quality of these recessions is to study all that we have of morality as a topic of the mind. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 131 XXVI. WHICH IS YOUR PUMP? There are no other moral questions but those of property, open or disguised, mediate or immediate, near or remote. No matter how the moralists darken counsel through volumes of verbal tangles for the examination of the private conscience and the cleansing of the private heart, there is no examination but of title deeds and re- ceipts, nothing to cleanse but the way of property; it is all on the surface of this bar sinister. Under this bar sinister there is the bar of gold, and it is no more personal than the sinister bar. The bar of gold is the public subway, it is of exactly the same extent and of the same inevitability to the private life, being of it, and for it, and yet of the same dominant independence as the bar sinister. It is the average perception, the aver- age conscience and manhood of time; it is, if you will suffer this change of metaphor, the main artery or the spine of the democracy moral — that is, of the de- mocracy tbinking; it is the subconscious man of society, of whose opinions, and desires, and foresights the private person sometimes has glintings; say, when he perceives that one of his fellows has something to say to the world, and when he waits patienty to hear what he has to say, even through his hesitations and stutterings, his blushes and his blunders. I have not known, and not even yet do know, what my message to the world may wholly be ; I do not falter, therefore; for knowing is a poor weapon for a man to discover himself with, and poorer yet for him who seeks to find the world. That I may, by firmly holding with mind, will and hand, doing the behests of the property relation, find myself at last beneath it, in the sub-con- scious moral manhood of society, is my good wish and yours; this, not by virtuous choice, it comes to us from the past. To do this, I am resolved to know no persons henceforth after the flesh. To know that the individuals around me are but the dust atoms of this great fray of property, I am resolved that there is no adjustment for 132 Revolutionary Essays the private, no relation towards any one other person, or other persons, however affectionate, or deep, or true, we may call them, which has any moral significance at all for me and thee. No more moral virtue or power is there in the heroics of love and friendship of Dante and his Beatrice, of David and his Jonathan, than there might be in the affections of two rats making love in the hold of a sinking ship. All morality, all decent, manly, wholesome, neces- sary thinking must be a reference of the mind to the pub- lic outside, that is — a reference to the bar sinister of property, in which all public activity and private duty are enclosed — that is, a reference to the peculiar property phase of our generation, which in our time happens to be the labor question. As we linger, doing or thinking; as we linger, wish- ing we knew how to do or think, or willing; or culti- vating habits to do or to think with the world life on this great, dark highway of its tramping, we get the motions of our life in correspondencies to the movements of the golden ■ greatness beneath — ^the subconscious man of society. Thus it may happen that while we, singly, never can be great, nor whole, nor knowing, we may yet be moving, by the unconsciously acquired habit of the larger man, in harmony with the infinitely intricate motions which God has at last reduced to the order of rest, the motion of rest organized back to motion; and thus have such glintings as enables one's friends to perceive that this man has something to say to the world, and which enables this man, at some period of his life, at last, like the ass of Balaam, to take up and deliver the protest which has come to him from the subconscious man of society. The perceivers of the messenger, the hearers of the messenger, the messenger himself being at no time capable of knowing the why and wherefore of these words as a whole, because each man is but a dust atom in the great sunbeam, not one, therefore, knowing the sunbeam. But the sunbeam, though so little to us each and so incomprehensible, is all to all of us ; it is the whole In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 133 spiritual life of the manhood of which you and I are dust atoms, trembling about and giving out our shining thoughts. Not with this man beside me is my conscience to be kept in exercise ; that is the way the world has hitherto been cheated, broken and cast into the ruinous anarchy of single lives by the falsities of the property relation, not with one person or any persons that I can touch with my single power, but with the community is my moral life. Henceforth, I know no man after the flesh; mine is a social relation with my race. Private morality is but the butterfly hunting of the child who is going the wrong way to school. So long as the masterhood of the world can, by the affections, and wills, and habits of persons, keep them tied together in love or in hatred, in admiration or contempt, in dependence or mastery ; keep them thinking about each other, as friends, heroes, sinners, enemies, or lovers; so long will the masters of mankind have a broken and easy humanity to master. So long as we are kept fooling after the individual vice or virtue, beauty or deformity, we are kept away from the path of revelation in duty, from the bar sinister and its public disclosures, and from the contactual power it brings us into with the subcon- scious man. The world is waiting for water. Here are a hundred pump handles, every one yields water, any one of them is for you to work upon. One is marked, " For mother" ; another, " For my first-born" ; another, " For her I love," and so on. At last you are in front of a tag which says, " For some one." Brother, as sure as light leads, this is your pump. Do not think that this will betray into laxity your true, personal duty. Do not fear that you will love your wife, your children or your friend less by hearkening to, and pumping for, this social subconscious man. He is, besides the need of all men and the good of all men, the experience of all men. If you tried to relax your love or duty as fitting to those near, on his account, you could not. The subconscious-man man has grown up 134 Revolutionary Essays through ages a lover, a friend, a personal relator. He has checked none of these relations, but he has deepened and sweetened them all. Fear not. Be a true public man, and you cannot be false in private life. XXVII. RELIGION. Religion is no message, no mandate from without, it is no personal thing, it is no infallibility, it is not a dealer nor a gambler in futures. Religion is not a fear, nor a hope, nor a faith, nor a love ; it is not a divider, a discriminator, or a perfector among persons. Religion is without creed, or prayer ; it is that which the race always has carried and always will carry in its womb ; it is the . undelivered life, the son of man, and money is its one sacrament. Before thinking more directly of this central innate race energy which holds us together and keeps us sweet in . spite of property and churches, let us have a glance at our present substitutes for religion. There is no vision that ever came to man so uncon- querably true as the Socialist perception that the church in every nation is but the voice of the economic ascend- ant. In America, many are puzzled to see mercantile Protestantism and mercantile infidelity flirting so incon- tinently with Rome. The daily press, which is indubit- ably run and written by trade and for trade only, cannot, nevertheless, conceal, and cannot hold back the daily in- terest of its proprietors in the prosperity and doings of that venerable hypnotist, the approved handmaiden and willing paramour of all despotism, the Roman Catho- lic Church. And let it be known that she deserves their confidence and affection, for she has never yet officially betrayed any property class, and indeed cannot, for every cell and tissue of her canons, doctrines and practices was formed in the bowels of riches for its own defense and comfort against the sinners that must work, but do not work enough. Of course, this old school dame of false righteous-, In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 135 ness could not have been in the world all these centuries without stepping occasionally upon some of the live wires of religion, which persisted in running under her feet while she was spooning with the stars. Of course, human beings were often to be found on her altars, but more frequently in her monasteries, who carried the race throb, for it is the peculiar peril of the priest as a pro- fessional man that he is always in danger of becoming religious, a fact which has given them an honorable place numerically in the roll of martyrs. It is almost a discourtesy to the intelligence of the reader that I should remind you that I do not single out Rome by name, in order to separate her dishonorably from the other churches of the world. Her own claim that in Western lands she is the mother church is sound ; she is older and wiser in the police business than her Protestant progeny, who, though a bit naughty in the past, are filially imitative. It was but a minor property quarrel that separated them, the major property interest of uniting against Socialism will soon bring them all together again. Hence the billing and cooing between their eminencies in the press and the priesthood. Who are these Italians that our economic print bids us to think of as desperate Mafias, shining all over with murderous cutlery, and whom the patients of the daily press are diligently spoonfed to hate? They are labor, that's all; an increasing aspect and characteristic of local labor, which we are under the economic neces- sity of robbing and, therefore, hating. The labor of New York for some time to come is to be of that stripe called Italian. We would like to scold it as labor, but we use the I. A generation ago the prevailing stripe of labor in this State was Irish, and as far as the development of capitalism and its press called for, they were as bit- terly reviled by the gentlemen of the press then, as their more limited vocabulary and artifices of word murder permitted. The ferocious, bullet-laden words of the railroad and coal editors concerning the " hideous Pollaks " 136 Revolutionary Essays during the strikes of Pennsylvania miners are of the same cloth. Now, it happens in all these cases that the most unlovely beings depicted for our scorn, and for our hoofs to trample, are all of the good old church. Yet no persons in high places think of rebuking her or demand- ing her resignation as a character former from her place behind the thrones of the world. Neither a strenuous President nor a Kaiser indignantly points to her product and calls her a quack. Why ? Because she made Italians just that way in her capacity of grand ecclesiastic cobbler to all royal families for the easy feet of property. The Italian shoe is only a temporary misfit, the old cobbler is here and will make it bigger, or he will pare down the American foot to fit. But why, in the name of all that is Jefifersonian and Saint Peterly, do not American bishops and priests resent the slurs cast upon their fellow-religious Italians? It is not as Catholics (though they are almost nothing else) that the press finds fault with them, but as laborers. Why should the bishops and priests find fault with this fault-finding of ours, since they at home or abroad are themselves always in that business, and they are here as candidates for governmental favor, to be continued in it under Uncle Sam's new shingle of " Dollar & Co." And why is it that the Irishman is no longer so repulsively portrayed by "our" press? The majority of him has picked up a little property, he has risen above the line of subpelsion, he is himself a banker or editor, and he is himself throwing dirt at the laborer without reference to their common church maternity. If there are yet some differences between our Protes- tant churches and the older Roman institution, they are the immaturities only of the younger churchlings. Give these more time, more authority, more State patronage, and more property, and the unity of the churches would prove to be more exact and extensive than the present Roman monopolists would, good-naturedly, accept. Not to devote too much space to this scare subject from In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 137 which American citizens of the last two generations have been diHgently taught an insincere political silence, let me summarize my objections to all the existing churches as they do or must all ultimately develop in the type "Roman." Though resting on the congregating habits of human- ity for her very existence, her constant care is to destroy the socially vital element of that habit by turning each person into an acutely individualized and lonely wicked- ness. She thus revolves each one upon himself, turning the sin-searching eyes from outside to the vacuum within, and thus slaying him socially into that most barren of all states of mind — introspection. Having perverted the personal sense of wrong into an instrument for its own non-assertion and humiliation, rather than of resistance, she turns the ensuing desire of rightness into an unsociality, a soUtary sanctified heroism. The man whose face she held in the sin gutter yesterday, she lifts up and coronates to-morrow, and separates him from his former naughty associate mob; or permits him to go among them only to show how much he differs from them and how well he can de- nounce them from his new heaven to their hell. Thus, in virtues as in vices, her sin process among laymen is a fanatical self-righteous anarchy or a fear-contributing money — ^the very antithesis of God's broad, natural, gen- erous democracy of earth fellowship, of moral equality; of strong, good faith in humanity; of that warm human hope, that broad, luminous charity, which we call Social- ism. The Christian Church is now, as from the days of her first prostitution to the Roman Empire, institution- ally the uttermost stranger to rehgion and its bitterest enemy. The Church must always be, in the very nature of her profession, the foster-mother of inequality and the nurse of pessimism. This statement is one of the few theological questions which stands self-evident from his- tory. Here we laymen are, with personal souls to be saved, with hell as hospitably inexorable as ever, with 138 Revolutionary Essays only a few old laws of keeping out of it, and a thousand new ways of breaking them. Have our opportunities of going to heaven been multiplied by the ministry of this long-nourished, costly Church? Nay, a thousand doors have been closed to self-initiated rightness for the one that has opened. The Church, as an opener of broader common ways to heaven, has done nothing; she has been a dead block in the path to paradise. She is the greatest failure on earth, and one whose business is wholly to fail, and always. As a machinery for salva- tion she stands worse than two thousand years ago. And this, her failure, is in proportion to her grand success in the business of getting and keeping other men's property. As spiritual spy over the slave's property conscience, the Church in most countries completes herself; she is content with the menial role of ordained policeman over the vulgar adults, or as teacher of mutual naughtiness and property catechisms among the children. She has no common virtue, no prophecy of common hope for all in the nation; she has no denunciation of national sin in the property life. She has no modern vision, because she admits of no modern revelation. She is creed- crushed because she does not believe in her own creed. She is in her own sanctuary a blighted impostress, a terrible insincerity, because there is nothing true in heaven ; because that kingdom is here in the decencies of this earth, which she alone denies. In the well-known insincerity of the clergy, their necessary and unavoidable insincerity as mental persons, the Church has become the shrine of a false "life, of a smiling, affable, superficial conformity to old times, toy ing in mass music, church art, eloquence, and prayer, be- cause it is so far away from the sordid, cruel life of now, and is so useful to property despotism. By this criminal acceptance of unchallenged and unsatisfying creeds and practices, the Church has become the parent and guardian of her own membership atheism, and she has herself become the public executioner of all vital, real, human religion within her borders. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 139 She is a secret society of salaried or supported per- sons, having practically no lay membership ; a solidarity of ecclesiastic or otherwise officially religious persons, hav- ing_ no program in any age or country but her own enrichment and ascendancy. She has, therefore, stud- ied the weaknesses of mankind, personally and in its larger groups, against which she plays off her ancient skill in finesse, diplomacy and organization. In most countries she stands for mediaeval feudal politics, the period and type of her greatest ascendancy. In all coun- tries she stands for popular degradation. She cannot let the people rise. She has no place whatsoever in a democ- racy. She lingers in such a form of government only to enrich herself and to restore aristocracy. She has no lay members. Her laymen are but church visitors, who pay taxes without representation — ^poor stufif for any de- mocracy. She uses the womanhood and childhood of each gen- eration as the buttresses of her power against the pos- sible intelligence of a generation to come, Woman she deliberately sacrifices to the multiplication of the species without regard to race stirpiculture or any human reason- ing, under pretense of believing that God gave a blind, general order in Eden for mankind to increase and mul- tiply the species. Such blindness is, however, her peculiar self-interest only, for no other institution but the Church can grow strong on a generation of imbeciles. She uses the wrongs and afflictions of men as the advertising pedes- tals of her own sweetness and light. She takes probably the finest men and women out of the world to do the scavenger work after the juggernaut of property has rolled over its quota of wounded and slain. She takes tribute of cradle, bridal bed and graveyard. She turns poor orphanhood into material for future servility to her- self and scabbery in the markets of labor. She plays eunuch in all sex disputes. She plays politics in most nations as on a great race course, so that she stands to win as the greatest of all bookmakers, against the whole field of national or of international movements. She has 140 Revolutionary Essays taken her place in the labor movement with her usual keenness. She plays arbitration, she seeks to win golden opinions from both sides. And as she has as many pre- cedents as there are countries, she can be quoted any way on all subjects. She is alien from all things but opinions that are golden. The Protestant clergy of America, unlike their prede- cessors of fifty years ago, know their business and, there- fore, no longer denounce Romanism. Then plutocracy was not developed; now it has grown class-conscious of its requirements and of its power as universal paymaster. That requirement mainly is that a large and fixed pro- portion of the population shall be retained in some form of definite time slavery. Whether through the ownership of their lands, houses, clothes, tools, or money, such a portion must be held to perform so many hours of toil under the initiative and direction of capitalism, call it free compulsory contract, or compulsory free contract, or what you will. And to gild that pill and keep the proletariat quiet in its peculiar slavery, every church in America is a candidate. But Rome, as the oldest practitioner, is mis- tress of the situation. Hence the assiduous respect paid to her in the great capitalist newspapers of the country. Now, the price we pay her for this holding down of the workers is far in excess of the value she is really able or intends to render. Nothing she can ever do for trade will balance the injury her rehabilitation will involve to the politics of the nation. The Church always divides the obligation of citizen- ship into two parts, keeping the larger obligation for her- self, and this she reserves by non-committal to any fixed law but her own benefit. By the living voice, by current decree and by current interpretation, she holds all her adherents under the unknown floating obligation of an obedience to whatsoever she may utter last in any national crisis, and this is a condition of loyalty incompatible with the security of any commonwealth. Church citizens can- not be reckoned upon, because, having no mind of their own, they do not themselves know what they should be In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 141 satisfied with until they know what the Church for the last time has to say about it, and because she never says for the last time. If churchmen's positions were in fact what they are in theory, the church tie would be incom- patible with any citizenship. Fortunately the bonds which hold the people to her communion are growing weaker every day, fortunately the subjects concerning which both priests and people find themselves to be truly in earnest are subjects outside of the Church and its theology. It is only by her power of harassing, men through the women and children that her oppression is really a serious factor now, outside of occasional epidemics of fanaticism, which are at any time possible and always fierce in proportion to the absence of any genuine faith in God. It is frankly to be conceded that we have no more religion in America than in Rome. It is frankly to be conceded that in no strongly developed property country will the churches have any religion but such as takes them by surprise, and as sure as it takes them that way, they will become church exiles. Let us have done then with the black solidarity of church and property, and turn for one paragraph to religion. I being a man without fame or fear, without covet- ousness or ambition, am one to whom it falls to tell these church truths to the people of America. Religion is th6 yeast, the word and the money sac- rament of humanity. It is that which comes from the whole to each, and is then uttered by each in social thought, or will, or fellowship, or deed, and the habit of them, and so passed on by its sacrament, and then passed in liice the blood that has performed its course in the body, to be again charged and sent out with the oxygen of the race, a part for every man as he uses it. " What," you say, " pass a chalice full of gold coins around this congregation for each to take that he list! Why, we would be all reduced to beggary." If you had discerned the " Lord's undelivered body " in the Christian chalice. 142 Revolutionary Essays if you had known how to eat for the flesh and drink for the blood of humanity only, this new chalice would not be a fear to you, nor this word of mankind's Newer Testament so hard a saying. Had you known that religion is the social life only, and that property is its nourishment, its true sacrament would manifestly appear to you to be the mutual property of the world. Take, take. Look into the face of humanity and take what you need of this new cup given to you. With a mighty faith on both sides, take, fearing nothing, and all will be well! XXVIII. LAW OF LAWS. The next stage of Socialist thought will be as definite a separation from nature-ism as has already taken place from theology and metaphysics, and in its more pronounced rejection of metaphysics, there will be in- cluded a long, strong and altogether rejection of private psychology, until social conditions prepare the way for its study by aggregates. No mind study can ever lay any respectable claim to being a science that is built upon personal analysis and comparison. This anthropomor- phism expressed the forces of nature in terms of personal wilfulness, while Spencerism gives us all cosmos in terms of personal consciousness. To subjectively reduce the number of persons in the world, while the population of the world increases, is undoubtedly the administrator's practical problem, the science of civilization. Whether it be aristocrat with his theory of civilization by property groups, or the demo- crat Socialist with his theory by industrial groups, or the parliamentarian with his theory of opinion groups, they all, in obedience to the law of laws, aim at reducing the potential number of small persons by turning them into large persons. The trades-union and the trust are our most familiar examples of this naturally social process, and our most inevitable examples. Our most inevitable, because of the master play of economics in all human In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 143 affairs. When we, in Socialism, say that the economic is the ascendant fact which determines, that statement should be preceded by this : "The law of laws is the organization of many into few, of the heterogeneous to the homogeneous, and in accomplishing this for humanity it is found that the economic is the collective plane of practical Socializing. The philosophers do not say that there is one law governing their mental operations, but tacitly this surely is understood, or why should we reason? There has never been a man yet who undertook to rethink old thought who was not supported, in every step of his effort, by a faith in the validity of the mental process itself; a mysterious faith in the mind has ruled all sceptics. It is with a faith in the verity and findableness of a mental process which in itself settles all, the master process of all thinkers; for human thinking is a mere farce, if there be not a universal process or law of thought. The Spencerite, in order to get at that law, or tO' make one that will do as well, starts in with an "ogeny," which he puts behind each science. He tells you how astronomy grew psychologically in words that seem to grow, and you think it is cosmos or one of its departments. Having safely planted this genesis of human consciousness behind each science, that same consciousness, of course, experi- ences little difficulty in gathering itself together and call- ing the collection cosmos, or the law of evolution. This process is the necessary and proper course of a merely private thinker. And some very proper results follow from it. He finds that the sciences by being differentiated mutually spur, polish and finish each other off, and this seems very reasonable. You then let the word astronomy and its idea, the heavenly bodies, slip by through this sentence without asking yourself just how bacteriology has been helping the stars or whether the stars have cleared our telescopes or our telescopes the stars. Things are becoming words, and nature is becoming volumes. The next proper result is this. If you have really placed your consciousness aback of every- 144 Revolutionary Essays thing in giving the genesis and process of the things themselves in the form of a history called science, it remains to be decided whether the history given is the mystery of your own mind or really the history of cosmos, and then, so mechanical is the mind, you do not know which it is, you or cosmos. And so, before you have completed the task of getting your mind aback of every- thing, with a differentiation, and expatiated on the numer- ous benefits enjoyed by each of the sciences, through being thus run on its own hook, when in pops subjectivism on the front door saying : "If all this that you have given us be the law of the mind's observation, then your nature history or cosmic evolution is but a tale of the develop- ment of psychology. If the mind's creation be itself the process of your experiential history, what have you given us altogether as cosmic evolution? You only give us yourself, in terms of cosmos? Then comes this choice of consequences, inevitable and perfectly proper to private thinking. Is cosmos a creature of the mind, or is the mind a creature of cosmos? Idealism ensues in the one case, arid flatfooted, raw materialism in the other. These two schools of thinking being necessary prod- ucts and subordinate by-plays of the vast conceit of the private mind, and an ever present phenomena of all thinking. I want not to reject, but to know where and how to use them. I must not repudiate these two, ideal- ism and objectivism, as foreign driftwood, for they are the mechanics of thinking. In the attempt to differ- entiate, when we set up many separate entities among the contents of cosmos or of the mind (whichever it happens to be), we, while looking for the law, are found by the law and used by it, the law of laws, that groups all things. Every attempt made to differentiate among the sciences, even though it be in the interests of an individualistic civilization, is a compulsion to generalize. We must generalize to differ- entiate. And thus the individualistic thought and the collectivist thought are both products of a vital balancing force, a mechanism of the tiniverge, which, though it In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 145 does not call for excesses, balances them as they arise, and uses them as they arise. This is the remote law of thought — making for contiguous collectivism in our activities, that is for Socialism. Considering our planet and our race as but a small part of the thinking realm of this universal balancer, we thus find that our thought collectivism and our anarch psychol- ogy are alike subordinate to the larger brain power, both also mechanically obedient to the task of destiny and thinking like a mill. I am collating the finely worded anarchies of Spencer, while he is driving men back from the edge of that precipice over which he fears they con- template thinking together, and so destroying private property, while he assumes differentials in Socialism and collates them. The collectivist process of the universe has no enemies; it is only its friends and advocates that have them. Differentiation before the mind is as neces- sary for reasoning out collectivism, as collectivism is necessary for individualism. This is not establishing another psychology, especially adapted to the use of Socialists, as Spencer has done with evolution for his property clients. The claim is much less pretentious than that of the cosmos creator. I claim that the personal mind is a wing of the cosmic mind movement, a small bit of a universal army of niindings moving together, under a balancing law of collectivism. I presume that there are some generic patterns ac- cording to which the private mind movements which are phenomenalized in logic adapt themselves. Our minds are adapted by a mind mover to its ideals of universal organization, and we are of that process; it is not outside of us nor inside of us. It is not subjective nor objective, for it is we, and we are it; it is our adjectiveness. Now a part of our functioning, as a wing of the universal mind process, is to differentiate, not in order to destroy the difference, but to strengthen the elemental unity function. And in every step of live collectivist thinking this dififerentiation is present to be organized. 146 Revolutionary Essays On the other hand the ego evolutionist, finding homo- geneity, proceeds to differentiate it or, finding differ- ences, proceeds to group them to build up a science of multiplied separate entities in human society called gentle- men of property, for the personal mind grows out of our property relations. Socialism is only making the con- tiguous and remote to be like each other. My contention is that private' thinkers must come consciously under the domain of the universal thinkei: when they use the proper finger for differentiating. In some things people may agree only to necessarily differ soon after, and in other things they differ to agree speedily as a consequence of that difference, and there are many subjects upon which the same people may differ with no following agreement, and vice versa. This is because the subjects are not of a socially germain sort. For there is no law that all agreements lead to differences, and differences to agrements per se, but there is a law that some differences do so lead, and some agreements. Fundamentally cosmic subjects are settled to stay settled. When, therefore, Mr. Fiske attempts a philosophy for the federation of the sciences, no matter whether the motive ultimately be integration or disintegration of men, the attempt is a right attempt and cannot fail of cosmic force in mental federation. If, however, the subject put upon the dissecting table be a mouse, the results will not be practically cosmic in contiguous affairs. If one doc- tor puts the other there, it will be a professional process, with professional results only. But if I want to differ- entiate for a general human philosophy, I must choose an elemental and not a secondary or artificial plan; that is, if I want a plane of experience on which to build a comprehensive human science, I must find at once the most elemental, vital and comprehensive plane. And that plane, I say, the psychology of personal experience is not. I am not opposing anything that can be named by so clear and sane a word as evolution, for evolution cannot be denied of anything, and nothing can be driven from evolution externally. I am opposed only to that In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 147 evolution which places too long an interval between the disintegrant and the integrant act. Suppose there were two schools of evolutionists, one of which claimed that, through a long suspended process of differentiation maintained by force, riches and poverty, there would at last be produced the sort of a man who is ready for integration, and who therefore says that disintegration is the thing that produces the finally in- tegrating man and invokes us to disintegrate for more disintegration until we get the most of it, which will give us the integrator. I answer that we have him with us always ; he is the beginning and not the end. If another school should claim that evolution is not a process sus- pended for the "finally" to tie up a number of disin- tegrated strings into one social agreement, but that it is daily completeness in itself. That the balance is made immediately between the excess of disintegration and in- tegration in all of us, and is called life ; that there is no suspended conclusion in evolution, but a daily realiza- tion; that the mind never does anything else but this swift adjustment to the collective, and knows no collect- ivism in to-morrow, and that it is only a question of whether you will waste this invariable process on peanuts or Socialism. If you use the mental process on economics, you will have my evolution, if you use the process on private property and its psychology, or upon trimming bonnets, you will have the other fellow's evolution. Evolution is the hourly passing of the differential into mental life, and that itself is a daily gathering into cosmos of things perceived to be out of order. This evolution considers the whole of mankind as growing together by virtue of intercourse. It would be mankind considered as having grown out mentally, mor- ally, spiritually from a center, a growing circular mass of experiences called history — everything spiritual or alive diffused through all; not handed down here and there from one dot to another, as in the case of evolution by personalisms. It would consider the man of all history 148 Revolutionary Essays as one man ; and we who are the men on the outer rim of present-day history as recipients of all that this ideal contains of transmission by the self-realizations by hu- manity of its own good and evil. In this conception there is no escape for saint or sinner. What has happened has happened, and happened for all of us, to all of us. No man can be rewarded for what he has not done, nor punished ; and if we sin at all we suffer together. There are no scapegoats; it is an altogether life for good and evil, from the beginning up to now, from now back. It is an altogether life of ours with all the lives that have ever been lived. It is the immortality life of the human family, with the absurdities of private returns and separated personalisms left out, a human family that has never died and never will die, but is now living here altogether. I am in touch with the man of the middle ages as I stand on the outer edge of this great fold of humanity. Verily, every age is in my veins and mind. I am feeding the men who come out of the ark, and they are feeding me. XXIX.— THE REVOLUTIONARY MESSAGE. Men who bring to you a message from the dead, that is the majority of professional public speech-makers, must go to the colleges of the gold masters and there memorize the structure of unvitalized and rootless words with which they are charged to keep you slumbering while the special corps of pedagogues bring your chil- dren, the people for the next generation, through the dangerous period of youthful courage. Thus the present and the future are bound by messengers from the dead. The entire blood-stained structure of modern capitalistic society stands only by its power to conceal, adulterate or suppress the message of Socialism. When the head is sick and the heart faint and the whole body is covered with wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, know you not that the hand of the healer is spurned as the hand of the revolutionist? In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 149 Some moralizing speakers are addressing the public ear and keeping up the eternal concert of sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, who are mere voluptuaries in words; men who think only by the friction of their own sentences ; mere ear ticklers, whose only good in the world is that they are not worse than their surroundings, but idealistically just enough better to give moral energy to their speech. With them goes the band of practical speech-makers, whose whole realm of aim, of thought and of fact lies within the circle of bad accidents created by themselves. The congressmen who know every wire that may be pulled, who know the precedents of the house, and who are quite up to it when questions of procedure or par- liamentary law are on; these men, constituting as they do the successful talkers of the world, have of course no message of revolution for you who are workers; they have no message for you at all but the one of voting for them and the rights of property, and the dominion of the property man over the life of the world. And lastly comes the Socialist with his message of revolution. Now let us see what this message of revolu- tion has to say to the plain underfoot people of the world. Just a preliminary here concerning the messenger before he delivers us his message. He has become a Socialist by a hard struggle with deeply seated false habits of thought forced into his life by hireling teachers and perverse surroundings. Many a long day has he tunneled his dark way to the north and the south and the east and the west before he broke through, and the great sunlight, reached at last, proclaimed the scientific accu- racy of the proletarian line along which he had wrought so wearily and sometimes with so little hope. The "lo, heres" and the "lo, theres" with which his mental life was long bewildered are forever hushed; he has struck the line of human evolution, his feet are planted on the scientific highway, the line of his own and all the world's progress; his single life is now at one with history, his 150 Revolutionary Essays single interest is hai-monized with the interest of ever^? man on earth. The human mind can have no higher function than that of preserving, enriching and prolonging human life. Economic pressure, that is, the need and the way of getting our bread, is the dynamic force in history; the efficient cause of evolution and the sufficient explanation of our morals, ideals and religions. Human progress is an intellectual and industrial movement from the life of the individual to the com- munity life. ' Human progress is a movement by social classes; a gathering of individuals into groups around the eco- nomic sources or instruments by which they get their living. The dominant economic class, having obtained pos- session of other people's' mode of living, must clothe itself in the powers of the State. The dominant economic class, or State, when it has outlived its usefulness, must die, leaving its best-fitted elements to survive it, and its approaching dissolution is announced by its failures. ' All dominant classes prefer to die by rottenness, and therefore never consent to the surrender of their privi- leges by appeals to reason. The pressure which calls the dominant class down must come from the class whose economic interests are most directly in antagonism. All other classes between the economic have-noth- ings and the economic have-alls will favor the have-alls and go where their interest leads them. There is an ethical perception in the human race which grows out of association and leisure now constrain- ing many middle-class people to think of Socialism. The intellectual battle of the classes in this period of transition is fought by persons of leisure, and is mainly a debate on the value of a human life in dollars, the human subject being concealed by the word product. The capitalist claims most of the product by law. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 1 51 and on account of his personal superiority as a joint producer with labor. The worker denounces the law, denies the superior- ity, and claims that it is social needs, social experience, and the necessary amount of socially balanced work that gives commodity value to the product. All this preliminary skirmishing of the intellectuals is, however, fruitless until the slave and his master face each other as economic foes whose interests are irrecon- cilable and who enter the class conflict knowing that only one can survive. If the capitalist survives, then this conflict of classes will also survive, and the decisive battle of history is only postponed to another day; as the world is outgrow- ing growth by class conflict. If the working element of society survives it can make room within its fold for all humanity; whereas there cannot be room within the borders of a slave- owning class for the slaves as men. The objective point of attack upon which all the intellectual, ethical, evolutionary voting force of the time must converge is the wage system. Who in our day, but men in despair, consciously use their minds for their own destruction? What sin- cere man believes that there is a more honorable use to be found for the mind than self-preservation? If it be our misfortune to live under conditions which call for things not honorable to be done, that a man, the offspring and heir of God, may be preserved in the world, is it not more honorable and religious to destroy those conditions than to submit to them? The transportation of God, by the churches, to some other world than this, and the corresponding transportation of the slaves' inter- est and hopes to that world, to the neglect of their own economic security in this, is so evidently to the advan- tage of the robber class that we are not surprised to find that class to be the chief supporters of the instituted churches which teach the other worldliness; yet we are surprised at the clumsiness with which they conceal their 152 Revolutionary Essays own preference for this. By far the greatest honor that we can pay to God and the human mind is to use the latter upon things that hurt us. Let us press the capitaHsts away from their economic supremacy and ourselves from wage-slavery by the law of our need against their paralyzing dominion. None of the great thoughts that move the souls of men comes so often or lingers so long with us now as the truth that man's development is away from ego and into society. This is the essence of all righteousness, the surviving element of all old-world religion and new- world evolution. There can be no selfishness in any sense unworthy, which is chastened by this master ethic of Socialism. If the word, by meretricious usage, has contracted some indefinable wrongness lingering about it, the wrong is surely not in that phase of selfishness which seeks itself in the interests of its class ; the selfish- ness that places itself under universal law. The selfish- ness which casts itself upon the stream leading to the universal equality of men can afford to have stones thrown at it by the unselfish men who lead the solitary life of self-culture and personal emolument here, and of private salvation in the world to come. It is necessary to touch upon these things in a revo- lutionary message since we must all know that the false- hoods which are in the world have, to say the least of it, affected us as mvich as the truths, and therefore the agitator dealing with the realities of his comrades' expe- rience cannot be approved a good workman should he fail to note the errors that have hitherto, as with bands of iron, bound the brains of men. That man moves in, and more in, to the community who is growing conscious of his class, of its mission and of his privilege to fight through that class the battles of the race. He moves, not by choice at first, but by neces- sity, around the economic factor of his time, around some private, then some tribal, then some class, then some public utility, around the instruments of production — the In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 153 machinery of our time. Necessity leads the way, and we are not ashamed to own her as mother of all the virtue we claim. It is a sacred necessity charged with the ethical training of the race which leads us, simply selfish people, into the class struggle for more leisure and a better life for everybody, in order that our lives may not be sucked out of us by a parasite class which is stronger than any multitudes of men divided against themselves. This parasite class, according to the observed law prevailing in all ages, having obtained control of the economic needs and forces of their time, clothe them- selves with authority, and girt themselves with the arms of the State. They therefore can supplement the priva- tion by exclusion from the means of living. They can also add positive suffering to the negative misery; they can beat you by all the rods of law into their laboratories ; they can entangle your feet in every step you make for freedom; they can not only use the guns of the State against you, but they can force you to use them against yourself; they can, by possessing all the archives, know how much it is costing you to live, and can, as private employers, cut your wages down to that. From the sig- nal boxes of the State they know your incoming and outgoing. If with one hand they increase you as a pro- ducer with the other they know just when and where to take the increase back from you as a consumer. They can control your mind; they can go behind you and before, and float over you, and build military tunnels under your feet with your own hands. You cannot be emancipated while that class is in control, and they can afford to let you play at all kinds of radical discontent as long as you leave them where they are. But you are under the law of necessity; and the capitalist class, under the same law, is falling to pieces. What is your necessity? It is to call them down. Make no mistake about it, this calling down will not be done by any class, whatsoever, along the grade that stands be- tween you and capitalism. This calling down will never 1 54 Revolutionary Essays be done by a sentiment, it will only be done by necessity. The pains and penalties of ineffectual organization and the numerous mistakes of your comrades and all the hindrances of your masters will prove too much for mere sentiment. No half-hearted, half-headed, half-interested allies will carry this fight to the ramparts. The economic pressure which finally calls the capitalist down must come from the working class alone. It must come from wage slaves, conscious. of their slavery and of their strength, conscious of their economic power, their social necessity and their historic mission. XXX. THE WEAVER WOVEN. Weaving immortal thoughts into a taf)estry, as it were, that tapestry being a vast canvas, vast as life itself, with all its threads and atoms of threads moving, and that tapestry to remain for ever moving, because it is of immortal thoughts, weaving into themselves. While this to me is a pleasing simile, it proves also by its defects to me a very helpful simile. I note its defectiveness, in this that it is a weaving without accounting for the weaver. If all this life thought be a weaving, who directs it ? What is it for? Is the result a fore-designed pattern, or an accident, which, because of being our own product, is necessarily a pattern, being contemplated by us as our own continuous doing; and because it is, when finished and looked at, the subject, if not the result, of one glance. It is comprehended in a view thought, and because so comprehended in the brevity and unity of a glancing, it is bound to have a togetherness to meet the glance of an eye, or of a mind, whose quality it is to get things under its comprehension curtly. If they were not comprehensible in themselves, if they had no togetherness in fact, they would be still this to us, or not at all to us. And if after we have gathered them on the unity plate of our experience, under our microscopic contemplation, which sees only to join, or joins only, there be alleged to remain something more In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 155 that is not yet seen by us of this united pattern, called cosmos, something beyond all that has been kenned of us, we may say of such a universe: What care we; it is a vagrant universe, and to us nothing at all. But let it come our way, and it shall be brought under the sub- jective dominion of our -God's drder. This is the very na- ture of man. He is a motograph for reducing accidents and motions unrelated to order ; he is a socialist. Nay, man is not a weaver seeing because he has woven; he is not the art eye of weaving that sees the design of unity, be- cause it is an eye of art. Here is no weaver, here is no fixed beam or shuttle, here is no material, passive to the hand ; here is no hand holding, no weaver standing off from his materials and the movements that weave them. The human weaver is being himself woven into a fabric of movements. I have no nirvana of rest nor of character 'in view at any part of life's weaving in the years before me but this, the nirvana of an orderly habit of going. No other character than the pattern of life's movements given in the mount; the high mount, the place with a universal horizon. It is from thence I know the char- acter of my motions to be directed, though I cannot see. Such a thing lying inside of me, imbedded into me, planted in me, built in me, woven into me, as per- sonal character I repudiate. I know it to be the old trump card of the world's deceivers, the master trick- sters of property. The human character is not to be found as a spot always at the root of a house lease, or a dint or a tint on a dot of a man like me. The human character is all that motion of all of us which fills the realm and constitutes the single engagement of God uniting in man, to be seen only by that great outer life as yet unseen of single man, but shall be seen when men can see together. The weaver is not that circle I have called God. But if there be any pattern of the life that ever shall be seen, it is on that enclosing vital circle which is the sum of all of us. If there be any pattern of the whole visible at any 156 Revolutionary Essays time in the coming for-evers, it shall be seen from some great unity thought of the future around which man, the motograph, now is moving; some point that will be the social psychologic central point of view for the weavers and the woven. When photography is able to give us a picture of the clustering bees, of the clouds of flies, with their mil- lions of wings- vibrating with their billions of vibrations ; when the picture gives you these, not only all these, as seen at a second's flash, but also gives you them going on, gives you the tremor of the trillion wings, and the gorgeous prism flashings of every little wing; when it gives you that and the tremendous orchestra of sounds proceeding from them, that our ears are too dull to hear, then you will have a little section of that sort of pattern which my weavers are weaving. Take now away the camera and the observer and all that was engaged in the getting of that picture, and you will understand that there remains behind forever a living pattern of life. This is something of what I mean by a motograph, a picture in motion, together with the motion that is making the picture. There is a life pattern made up by the movers and the movements of life; a pattern whose points, threads and lines are thoughts, wills, desires, affections, and habits of doing; a pattern which is preserved only by all the parts remaining in motion ; just as the pattern of an art tapestry is preserved only by all the parts remaining still. And the movement which preserves that harmony and correlation of moving parts is the moral movement, the god-weaving movement, the movement of which man i« a motograph, with his thousands of congenial and god- favoring surfaces. What is he, this weaver, if he be not outside his beam and shuttle holding threads in his hands and tying or breaking them off? He is a weaver who is in the thing that is being woven. He is a guiding movement among movements, a congerie of movements among movements. As the point of a needle traveling is followed by the In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 157 eye and by the thread, so this moving weaver goes in and out and up and down among the movements of his own and Hke his own, and so together with him and he to- gether with them are a Uve pattern. The keenest point of thought leads, the eye of the understanding follows, and the long threads of habit, will and obedience move after. They know not what this pattern is which they are weaving of the subconscious life of social man. No one of the weavers is big enough, great enough to know it; but that it is a pattern, a beautiful, harmonious and true pattern, they know by the joy and deep satisfaction which comes into them from the subconscious life as they go. Let us get out of our minds the poor old slave world's thought of the blessing of rest, and let us get well moving in our minds the strong pulse-thought of life and all things, as everywhere and for ever an orderly motion. When this weaver moves in the midst of our thoughts we cannot be disconcerted by any sceptic who discovers that there is no cause and effect in nature, and therefore that we have lost the manufacturing or creating God, and must become atheists; and all our faith must fall down. Whether the cause and effect about which we have been gravely mouthing so scientifically for centuries be denied to nature and ascribed to the mind of the observer as merely one of its habits of seeing things one after an- other, and by seeing things that way concluding that they are in themselves stuck together that way; or that they grow that way, or come that way. What care we? We have been delivered from the fixed fallacy. There is no immobile thing in this world of ours creating but the lie of ego at its property stump creating despotism. There is nothing at rest ; all is divine motion ; all is God and man in one action. The thoughts of a man as a cloud of dust or aura proceeding out of his activities and inter- estednesses; they, thrown off from him and lingering about him as thoughts, active little crystals, with mirror faces always turning in, looking at him to whom they are 158 Revolutionary Essays t the psychaura, and from whom they have been emitted, ever moving and reflecting him as he is of the environ- ment. These are the artists of their man, as he is the art of his surroundings. If this be a property man, his aura will stay with him all his life. These little particles of thought will always continue to reflect him and only him ; they will cling to him in the midst of his life, the grave- clothes of his self-contemplation, the tomb of the man thinking only for himself, who in the midst of life and his own thoughts is in death. If, on the other hand, this man gradually comes into quickening touch with the subconscious life, doing and thinking for the social world, his psychaura clears. It is no longer darkling bituminous smoke, but a bright, clear releasement for all good thoughts. He shakes them off as they rise. "Go, little bird," saith he, "the world is my cage and thine." XXXI. SELFISHNESS. Except for their desire to look out for themselves (I do not say their ability), we may frankly and without slander admit that the majority of the working people are fools. This might also be the experience of an observer as well acquainted with the masters' world as we are with our own. The people who really do seem to keep their heads above water by the buoyancy of their brains are the vanishing parasites of the middle class, whose fundamental creed has ever been that it is more blessed to receive than to give, and who have, therefore, appointed themselves the official receivers from both pockets of society, capital and labor. The middle-class experience of sharp-wittedness is a precious one to us, and, being all that that class can ever be expected to bequeath to evolution, let us try to make better use of it. The principals in a robbery being in- capable of reasonable speech on that subject while the robbery is taking place, the middle men have kindly reasoned out for us the science of the operation performed In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 159 by capital on labor, as political economy; but they left a very decided streak of their own indispensable lean running through the whole flitch. Good political econ- omy, as well as good law, must remain undiscovered until the race is no longer afraid of its own selfishness. Difference of intellect and of temperament are every- where around us, but there is no difference anywhere among people in the matter of wanting to take care of themselves. Surely, no one thing in human nature is therefore more worthy and fit to be the Socialist's founda- tion of society, for that which is common to all can be a prejudice, normally, to none. But, after some radically criminal upsetting of life which has already disturbed the balances of life, the disturbance being condoned, truth itself becomes a falsehood. But with the balance of right, opportunity and equal law once restored, no doctrine can be more surely sound than every man's selfishness or desire to preserve himself. When the balance, being awry, and the presumption started with, that it shall remain so, to preserve yourself cannot but make you somebody's thief and robber. When society is restored to its true basis of out- spoken, frankly accepted selfishness, and starts from an adjusted economic balance, then selfishness at once mani- fests itself to be the most conservative and sanitary of virtues, whereas in a society of achieved robbery it can only be the conservatism of crime. When we speak of selfishness philosophically as the dynamic of public and private life, let it be understood that we propose to start with a morally clean house as the basis of clean selfishness. Not as the law-giver of Sinai, who, first ad- mitting over-work and weariness, commands a rest; who, admitting achieved property conquest, sex-hunger, jealousy, rage, and the conditions that breed falsehood, simply fortifies conditions themselves by a string of "Thou shalt not touch thems." In a society of economically balanced and decently ordered property relation, the will of a good vigorous selfishness everywhere could dispense with those ten pyrotechnically delivered police command- i6o Revolutionary Essays ments, and so would we all be able to give more honor to God. For no law can have much moral stamina in it which leaves unrebuked and unremoved the wrong opposed behind it. The prospective moral force to be exerted cannot be greater than the retrospective will of the law-giver concerning the immorality forbidden. How can a law be absolute which begins conditionally? How can that be a permanent moralism which begins on the shady side of its own immoral? That law is bom indeed under the necessity of being repealed which leaves its own violation an unrepealed precedent behind it. And they are in the last analysis the worst of atheists who com- mit the integrity of their God to a law of their own private convenience, which in the nature of human things must be repealed. That is no god-law which makes its own antithesis lawful. Thus it appears that, within the whole range of history, revolution was ever the needed antece- dent of a worthy permanent system of moral laws; and thus also it appears that the revolutionary message of Socialism is that alone which proposes to give God or law an opportunity to survive on the basis of self-preser- vation. . Unrepealable law, or law which is associated with the name and sanctity attaching to divinity, to save it from repeal, will always prove to be a property law, with a landlord or dollar deity behind it, and such a law, with or without the deity, is alien to our concept of society as a flowing life. There is nothing so truly divine in any law as the provisions which it makes for its succes- sor, and nothing so divinely right in any statement con- veyed by words as the right of revision it leaves; no relation so humanly and thorovighly right and commend- able altogether, between thinker and thinker, as the rights of mutual and self-challenge — the divinely affirmed right, let us say, of to-morrow's denial; the sacred right of thinking again, and growing wise by calliiig that alone wise which is alive and current enough to be, perhaps, otherwise to-morrow. To prevent that growth, to turn the darkness on my to-morrow, that I may not change my opinion after your i ' In Socialist Faith and Fancy. i6i ring is in my nose, 'M,v. Plutocrat, constitutes the business of our country. "My brother laborer," he whispers, "I beg you, in the interests of himianity, to pause on the awful threshold of Socialism. You know that we are all too selfish. Everybody is selfish, selfish. Oh, fie, we cannot have Socialism." Are we all really so very selfish, good master ? " Yes, my poor afiflicted brother; we share and share alike as to this evil propensity." Then, how comes it that you, by an equal share of it, have got everything and I have nothing? How comes it that I let you do it? Now, let me ask you what was the matter with my selfishness while you were taking me in. It must have lost time; it must have gone very wrong, or ran down, or there is something out of gear in the works of it. Selfishness could not have gotten you all at the cost of nine other men as selfish as you. Such a nine would not have allowed, you to take nine eggs out of the social nest and divide the remaining one between themselves for a living. Nine to one, and just as selfish as you, and yet not even take their share. Surely, no! Selfishness is not in this proposition at all. It must be something else. " What, then, is in it, my evidently dangerous bro- ther?" It is merely a matter of opinion on both sides, my lord Piute. You have derived the opinion from your class that it, your property, and yourself constitute the state and nation; and so you proceed to take care of the nation by taking everything away from me and my eight selfish brothers, who have not yet been so fortunate as to arrive at that opinion. It is not your property we are after, Mr. Piute, nor your selfishness; but an exchange of opinions. We want to get your way of thinking. You don't want us to get it, and that is why you have ordered your editorial departments to turn on the dark. 1 62 Revolutionary Essays The opinion that we are the nation is a sound adult selfishness. It is the selfishness that leads to the study and reverence of law and organization. It is a selfishness that never can be hurtful save only when it is the opinion of the blind, property-idle minority mind. The working forces behind selfishness are our opinions, for which we are not responsible; they come to us from you. Thank you. You have taught us the opinion that it is time for us to load up with a little nine to one selfishness. If selfishness is a universally possessed thing, com- mon to all of US; it is not a thing to be counted in socio- logy, but a thing to count or balance with. Evidently it is the virtue of a discovered need of balancing things after some great maladjustment has taken place. In such a case, if we can imagine an unselfish man (and he can never be more than a creature of the imagination), we have imagined a moral degenerate. The altruist who does not first propose to square things is non-truest. XXXII. THE ANARCH AND SOCIAL GERMS. Whatever form the thoughts of a faithful philosopher ultimately assumes, he is sure to be an atomist at some stage of his speculations. If he be merely a materialist philosopher, so-called (a name by which he dishonors himself), he will find his atom in a protoplasm, or in his utmost point of differentiation. I find it in the thoughts themselves. The thoughts of men are the ultimate atomic forces of society, and they are dual in their nature; they are material atoms, non-inorganie, but having an affinity with the organic life of the world, which can pass into them, and into which they pass. The history and mystery of the world is the known and unknown intermovements of these all-controlling, all-containing atoms. It appears that there is a flowing life, which, though I be not consciously on it, nevertheless flows on; aye, though I resist it all my life, it nevertheless flows me with it. Our subjective experiences as persons are the intimations to us that we are not w?Il rrioving, and are In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 163 the invitations to move more efficiently with- the Hfe of man. The private life says: "Nay, I will move rather in my home circle," and so, like the dog pursuing its own tail, it moves. Yet as the orbit of that dog so moves as a whole, that while going around itself the creature also may go from one room to another, the private life is moved by larger law to Socialism, however self-centered. If the dog does not go himself, the dog's orbit goes, just as the stars in their orbits go round the sun ; the satellites traveling more than the planets because they maintain their own orbit while also orbitally moving. There is a will tenacious for the home circle in proportion to the littleness of its mind. That will is a motive energy charged from without. The forces which feed it are germs of thought of two sorts, organic and inorganic thoughts, the social and anarch, the centripetal and centri- fugal. If the organic germ predominates, it seeks the center; if the other prevails, it flies around itself, though yet the human god-centre patiently holds it and draws it in. The devil, poor wretch, must find company and an orbit to match his isolate proclivities, if it were only to preach isolation in. So that which wills not to move in company nevertheless so moves; perhaps a devil when he finds his orbit will be as loyal to that company as the saints to theirs. Singly we all resist the universal motograph until we are truly classed and have finished our private evolution. The speedier this evolution is the better for all, for it must be gone through before we are ready to respond to the racial voice which calls us to return. There is no element which takes a more im- portant part in hastening the time of return as that which for the preservation of its selfness first most fer- vently resists ; for there is no crime so unnatural, so full of despair, so charged with hell's resistance to the divine balancer as Non-Resistance. With the primitive germs, centripetal and centrifugal, in our brains, and having the right of way to war with eafth other, whence comes the third thought which cog- 164 Revolutionary Essays nizes them? The thoughts themselves are only strivers, blind strivers; and in their striving and through their striving, all would have been well but that a disease fell upon their striving, the disease of self-centering, which is the guilty motion, the sin against the universe. And the universe has risen to resist it with its own thought — the long-sceptre thought which reaches over all. The cosmic or collective mind smites no resister or non-re- sister, it changes nothing, for it is not a creator nor a ruler, but an experience, and its scope of experience, as it passes over our contendings, finds some thoughts in that warmth of will by which they are drawn into com- panies, which as companies are therefore ready for holier conflicts. This is the third mind which is now regulat- ing our resistances, not by ending them, but by grouping and placing them. The human brain doubtless has not one germ of fighting thought taken out of it, for that would be the slaying of the brain. Not one living soul ceases to fight until the transformation of death. No placid meekness you ever looked upon has any fewer germs of striving than your Bowery tough. We are all strenuous in precisely the same degree; for this alone is balanced life, only some are under the sceptre of regu- lated social striving. We are not all aristocrats striving for ourselves only, with our roots struck deep in property deceit. We are striving with centripetal thoughts against the self-waste of uninstructed selfishness. We are op- posing those who whirl around in the home circle and thus whirl away from the home of the race. Assuming that the eternal inherent law of all thoughts and things is that nothing can cease to move without producing the catastrophe of universal death, what is that which^ though still moving, approaches in the character of its motion nearest to rest? It is that which in narrower orbits seeks to escape the law of obedience to and concert with the movement of the larger life. But by its own smallest proclivity it is incorporated into the largest groups. Thus its minuteness of tendency completes itself by con- tributing to and entering that very wideness it had cen- In Socialist Faith and Pancy. 165 tested. It draws nearer and nearer to some smallest local planet or local group of interest in trade or trust, and is last absorbed in the mass it seeks. Then that mass by its now increased bulk and power of attraction, quickly dom- inates its other little satellites, so that having no more satellites to take in, it is itself forced to march out into the broader ethereal sweeps of a larger orbit — a satellite in turn to some bigger power, and therefore moving over vastly wider circles. The law of the smaller and larger thus leads them alike beneath the sway of the largest motograph. And I suppose the power of attraction or domination over the isolate germs thus gained by the enlarged body to be a power of the surface. I suppose the numerical superiority of the social organic germs on the surfaces of men and things to be increased with the bulk surface of the larger body, the isolate germs having gone to move inside the closer form. On the other hand, the utmost differentiating germs producing many separated bodies, linger away farthest and longest from all the others, and by their very levity, like pioneers strike the wider boundaries of the enlarged harmonies yet to be therefore established. So among the human family I see the organically strong grouping the scattered populations by their affinity making control. I see them not only drawing to themselves the congenial germs in men, but in plants and animals. Every brain a magnet drawing the elect atoms of nature into the human circle, until the human circle with enlarged power begins more mightily to do the like over the whole domain. XXXIII. FINALITIES. The business of the slave maker is the resolution of human thoughts, relations and demands into finalities, whatever is to be done with the so-called final thing afterwards they will do it. If it is liberty, they will make it documentary and will interpret it. If an organization, they will make its rules. If a property relation, they i66 Revolutionary Essays will hold the deed. If it is a religious relation, they give the doctrine; or if an ethical relation, they define it. And if it is a social relation, they will prepare its "ology." But from the outset the process is invasive as to the subsequent liberty of the democratic mind. If I might dare reduce the art of intellectual self- defense to anything resembling a formula, I would say: "In all matters pertaining to human affairs, a truth declared to be final is therefore premature. When men are no longer able or permitted to think for themselves, let us hope that the race may receive due warning of that coming calamity, and then we will call in the formu- lators. But till then, let us do our own thinking. Only one thing our masters hold back from the finalities, it is the struggle for individual superiority over others — the competitive struggle of ego evolutionists. Yet in such a struggle, the whole question of the relative value of this, or that, depends upon some foreseen or assumed finality, or it must be a gain diffused all over the process, which to the evolutionist of individualism is the supremacy of one individual over some or all others, and the growth of a character in the fight. To me it seems that neither of these things is final. Even this egoist himself apologizes for its obvious inadequacy as a final consideration by asserting that his advantage tends in a cosmic sort of way, at last, to bring the best groups to. the top; to bring the best to all, by the smaller and earlier process of bringing the best out of all. Hence even the Spencerians abandon the theory of individual supremacy as the final good, by justifying it as only lead- ing to the larger good of all ; which is therefore itself the thing that is final. "Necessity is the mother of invention," says the cap- italist. "We find invention profitable; we must have invention. Therefore also we must have necessity." But invention -is not final, nor profits; neither is necessity the final condition for the inventive mind to work its best works. "How to get the best of life for all of us," is the In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 167 true mother of invention, and this alone justifies, as it mathematically includes all other good. The greatest perplexity of life to-day is to ascertain relative values. And it is a perplexity, because it is considered within the bounds of minor relations, and not from the one final absolute view point — the good of all. Truth now is a matter of habit and training; of struggle toward this final view point, and no more. When the mind is habituated to that one point of view, all the perplexities of relative values will pass away. The parasite, which is justly deemed an odious similitude as applied to the capitalist for his living upon labor, is the correct and honorable relationship of the individual to the State. It is nature's order, throughout her vast realms. The individual cannot live oil the back of society. There is as little opening for freedom or independence of life for the individual man as there is for the vermin which your beggar is casting off. On the city, on society, on his fellows, every in- dividual must live. The only other thing manly (if he must needs have some other sort of manly) for him to do in the premises is to make his mind up, since he must live on society, to also live in it. When this step is taken, the mere parasite becomes a partner with the life he feeds upon ; he preserves its health and vigor, and identifies his own life with social human life. He is living in society, not on it alone. He is an associationist. The merging of the individual interest into the collective interest is the first real step toward a moral manhood, as it is towards an intellectual and spiritual manhood, and this is a step which can at least be mentally taken by any man any hour of his life. In the light of these truths it appears that there can be none but social crimes, and none but a social religion, and nothing can be called good from the benefit of which any one human being is knowingly and wilfully excluded. I admit the present impossibility of opening a spir- i68 Revolutionary Essays itual truth like this to all men alike. But with time and equality of condition all men will see alike, for all the practical; that is, all the benevolent purposes of life. And while the objection of the individualist that individuals by heredity and other causes are not equal and are not alike, seems plausible, it must be remembered that the plausibility of that objection depends upon the point of contention being, equality for contention. Now the equality that I am considering is not the equality for contention, but an equality for living together agreeably and hopefully, and for this kind of equality the most downtrodden and unfortunate often prove to be most agreeable surprises — all is experiment. In the log house, by the camp-fire, crossing the desert, or on the ice floe, the cultured selfish has found a strong rock and a resting place in the calm enduring trapper, the plain soldier, the camel driver, the Es- quimaux.. In the hospital, lazaretto or the prison — a working man. That men can have, and can choose, their own ideals is a fact. There is that much of a floor, therefore,- left in human nature for God to build upon, and I take it that the Divine Power cannot find any dry footing on the floor of a nature that is only conscious of itself. This philosophy is the philosophy of the contiguous, the nearest thing, the nearest man, the present moment; and though to the mind of egoism, which through in- tellectual blight sees all phenomena perverted, it appears altogether impracticable, it is on the contrary altogether practicable and real, because ego cannot see it. Since we have the choice of our ideals, what good- natured man would not in the end choose that which certainly makes for a better life for all, as well as ul- timately and immediately the best for self? That self I mean which is sufficiently enlightened to make choice of its ideal on the basis of good cause shown and good reason given. I offer no science but the science of known duty. I have discovered no truth but the truth discovered by every In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 169 babe in its cradle, restfulness and confidence in those about me. I give you only one thought and say, "Make it into a manhood for the world." Of itself it is but a thought; worked out in the warp and woof of even one day's doing, it will speak for itself. That it requires my pen to utter it to-day, is because of the plague of darkness that falls upon egoism in all ages. It is not contended here that this one great thought of fellowship is wholly absent from the world. On the contrary, its presence to some extent is essential to the very rudest society. No vestige of civilization could manifest itself without. It is the salt of all cities and all States, and in proportion as it is entertained in any nation, it saves that nation, and holds it from anarchy. And as it enters into the life of any individual, that in- dividual is known and felt to be strong and noble. And as it is absent, so dwindles the man. XXXIV. SOCIALIST MIND. Socialism is something that you cannot entirely convey by chunks out of books into a human brain; it must have had a genesis and a germing in the man, and in him it must be duly evoluted into a way of viewing things, a settled conviction of unity, which constitutes the Socialist mind. The working man with a Socialist mind is a class- conscious fellow who feels every day's labor that he gives to the capitalist to be a day of wrongful restraint; a robber's day; he resents the initiative of the capitalist over his labor; he rebels against the rightness or ex- pediency of being sent to work by any private money; he denies any form of equitable relation, or any spirit of partnership between labor and private capital. He feels" that he is only held down, overcome and robbed through- out every day of labor that he gives to his economic conqueror, called, so euphoniously, his employer. The whole arrangement of wage slavery he rises against with 170 Revolutionary Essays all his human soul; he hates it, he curses it, and he enters the election only to destroy it and to bring the men who fatten upon it everywhere to bankruptcy. The man with 'the Socialist mind is only weak when he is not intensely class conscious as his republican and democratic exploiters are at the time of the election ; he must be as openly as they are secretly, definite for self only. Single eyed, with a well-knit will, as the result of study and experience, having parted with all patriotic delusions, we stand before the ballot boxes to smite cap- italism into bankruptcy by all that we electorally can say and do, as well as by the vote. We stand to smite capital- ism or to be smitten down by it into deeper slavery — and that slavery shall surely grow deeper and darker until the economic victims of false democracy know and be- come conscious of themselves as the class that is doomed to be perpetually sacrificed for the profit of the republican and democratic parties. During the days of election the man with the Social- ist mind ceases to be a sentimentalist; he is out like his masters for scalps, and the scalps he is out for are the scalps of his masters. Capitalists are making no mistakes in these days. They know that by maintaining the present system of economic slavery, they can leave all they steal during their own lifetime to their children, with the powers to steal more for ever and ever. In our cause, when it comes to the ballot box, the capitalist not only sees an immediate resistance to the strides of his own grand avarice, but a menace to his children's enjoyment of the well-banked economic plun- der. The old parties have something very really present and urgently concrete to keep them hustling their class interests at the ballot boxes, while we poor emptinesses have to fight that strong property realism at present with only our class sense of wrong, our unsatisfaction and our Socialist mind; we are at a great disadvantage. Any savage can fight well behind a chunk of real estate, it is tn Socialist Faith and Fancy. lyi a finer and less palpable thing that arms the Socialist. Though ours is a material goal, a battle for the sub- stantials of civilization, yet at this stage, with all the odds of the world's armed powers against us, our entire strength is of the mind. No political cause was ever set so completely back upon the consciousness and convictions of the men in the party ; no army of warriors ever so drew their strength from a point of view, from a deep convic- tion, from one thought as we do, the thought of our economic subjection — ^the fighting thought of the Socialist mind. And there is a social God behind us. With this, almost alone, for our weapon, there is all the greater need for the weapon to be keen and bright. Let us go to the ballot boxes bitterly, vigorously and intelligently class conscious ; and then the rhetoric of the money kings will avail them nothing. Let us go there nursing our unsatisfaction, urgently thrusting the chains of wage slavery from ourselves and the children, culti- vating resentment, repudiation and resistance every hour, as the virtues alone proper to our bondage, seeking within our own labor associations the entire range of our satis- faction, finding our pleasure as well as our duty in its struggle. Let us, as we are a doomed people, become an intensely separate people; resolved to make our true value felt in every state, resolved to make every ballot cast by us tell but this one firm resolve of ours, to be free from the paralyzing rule of the profit mongers. This, to us, is the plain and narrow way; there is no other way to freedom and equity, and the narrower we are to-day the broader we shall make the life of the future. The Socialist mind will nevermore be in so straight a place as this. It is, after all, a mean battle for it to be engaged in — is this battle of a class. But class struggle was never chosen of it. The Socialist mind has this thrust upon it; because that mind is the savior of the race. A forced battle with a discovered condition; but, nevertheless, there shall we stand until the last of the class makers falls; until perpetual bankruptcy has overtaken the capitalistic system, and the governments of the world 172 Revolutionary Essays settle down upon their everlastingly true foundations of industrial democracy. XXXV. THE SOCIALIST. PASSION. Socialism will not be brought about by the mere orderly dissolution of capitalism on behalf of an inert mass of proletarians who wait impassionately for the law of economic successions, but by a multitude of working- men with the passion of contemporary evolution in their hearts and brains. I deliberately choose this word "passion" as the watchword of the new, more vigorous, devoted and neces- sary propaganda. Upon the men who work for the cause during that time, and upon their intensity in it, depends whether Socialism shall be the tritimphant fact of the present century or only one of the departed hopes of the race. Socialism is a moral passion born of a sense of a manhood outraged, robbed, and degraded, a passion that resents the interception of history's natural progress to- wards the collective life. The Socialist agitator is not a man to whom Social- ism is a subject external to himself, to be spoken of in a public utterance consisting of an hour's duration, a lecture, delivered from notes or memorized. No, no! He must be in it, wholly in it; he must not only be a scholastic believer in the necessary analysis and array of facts which constitute Socialism as a subject, but he should be in the new intellectual and divine will-passion of the thing, a Socialist who talks, as the phrase has it, not only from the head but from the heart. The disaster of poverty, the horrible, untimely fraud of poverty — what a theme for the social passion is here ! Whether you regard yourself as wronged and outraged in society, or society as wronged and outraged in that unsatisfied and pitiful epitome of it that you find in yourself, what matters? The material for the social passion is here, if you look well at the facts and let them In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 173 blush themselves upon your cheeks, and break and bruise and thrust themselves into your whole life. Think again of this disaster of poverty! Look at the tragedy of unrequited toil written on the haggard faces of the laborers, and of those who cannot get work and may not live without it ! Look at the innocent (perhaps stupid) and pathetic groping of them through the world for the right to live! See the forbearance, patience, and innocency of the toiling centuries, carry- ing their burdens and their wrongs and, as the sheep before the shearers are dumb, opening not their mouths — very sheepish, if you like, but this is also part of their social calamity and of the burning fuel of your indignant social passion — your passion for justice, for the restora- tion of bread and leisure and all the preliminaries of the intellectual life, your passion for civilization. The disaster of poverty. The crime of chance, the social menagery of competition, the brazen lie of the in- dividual life which says it has grown character and righteousness by outwitting and subjugating others; the cynical satisfaction with which the successful man feels the bodies of the fallen between himself and the cold earth, the interminable cant of righteousness and religion in the commercial life, with only the morals of the jungle at the heart of it. Oh, the disaster of poverty, the horrible, untimely fraud of poverty! 'Tis a whole century ago since the machines of the modern world began to palpitate and revolve their mighty force for the redemption of all laborers from the battle for bread. _ Why is it that we are still battling and still without bread? A whole century ago, during which hundreds of millions of iron laborers, with pulse of steam and nerves of steel, have wrought to redeem mis- taken man from the childish bondage of individual con- flict with nature for bread; hundreds of millions of laborers' working force have toiled these past hundred years to save us from the waste of life involved in solitary efifort, to give us back the time which old slave owners and aristocracies of the past stole from us ; and here we 174 Revolutionary Essays are still outside the granaries of the world, still outside its realized cultures and leisures, still strangers to the refinement and dignity which of right belongs to a nine- teenth century manhood, carrying a new and greater burden than ever of unnecessary, vicious, and misdirected labor, imposed upon us by the insane greed of the profit mongers, who, under the flag of a false freedom, have bound Labor with chains that seem too subtle to be broken. Who that believes in any manhood can deny that here is material for the new passion that will make a crusaders' propaganda against capitalism in the century that is now opened? Not a jot or tittle of the profoundly wise analysis of Marx need to be lost out of our equipment for this new evangel. The class struggle, the class struggle! Emerge from the wilderness, ye Baptists of the new century, and with strident voices declare it! Make no compromise upon this. This struggle must take place at the threshold of the new age, and where it is not fearlessly avowed and fought out, there can be no new age.. No capitalist sympathizer, no Fabian, can come with us but through this narrow door. To them, one and all, we have no other word but this : "Repent," and to the proletarians, "Resist." Karl Marx was a Socialist because he was so much more than, a political economist. It was his social in- sight, sympathies, and passion that chose for him the path of the economist-philosopher of our cause; and I only wish that those who intellectually accept his analysis had added to their acceptance his passion. It was this his social instinct that gave fibre to his finer mental work in the cause. By a few well established and splendidly expressed generalizations this man of social genius saves men of action and coarser minds a life of thinking out the way to liberty. So far as the work of excavation is concerned, we need burn no more midnight oil ; we know where to bid~ the laborers strike for the foundational lie of capitalism — that profit is wealth. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 175 In the Marxian concept of social labor we have the germ of all that is truly revolutionary in Socialism. Follow it to its legitimate conclusion, and seek to find what room remains in the world for the individualist. There remains no private work, no solitary mechanic, no separate achievement, no single crown. This ex- perience should have made the individual millionaire an impossibility, for in blotting out the individual industrian it dethroned his exploiter. It is the keynote of the modern collective life and social economics. The mind at once recognizes that it stands before the century law and the century thought in this term, "social labor," and out of it grows all that shall be embodied in that social passion which must prevail in our propaganda. XXXVI. SOUL MAKERS. The social thinker constitutes himself the brain of the world, the brain of the silent, sightless people. That brain does not think for itself. It thinks for everybody else, and this it has not chosen to do of itself; for it has been chosen by the race to do this thing. Circum- stances, the common wrong, and its own love of thinking constitute its ordination and credential. The social thinker is an instrument who must. He is wielded by the community conscience. He is commanded by the special direction given to his thoughts from the economic pressure of his time. He is urged by the universal passion of the race to give pleasure to otiiers — to please, and through pleasing others to receive and purstie pleas- ure for himself; he is the prophet of to-day. As the particles of matter which make up the phys- ical, have a habit of coming to, gathering and staying 'around, a point which we call the center of gravity, so the thoughts of men do cluster to the collective thought, and men themselves have ever been gravitating to the social man. The habit when acquired by matter is called a law. That law is the habit of matter, and this habit is the law of man. The social thinking of to-day is an energy, coming- 176 Revolutionary Essays from within the race, begotten during the age clashings of matter, even as electron, that spark indomitable was first born. In this way, mankind flashing back upon each other each one's sense of each, and in the mighty human effort of everybody to help himself by giving pleasure to others, a reciprocity of need, of intent, of effort and will at last produced a common potency — a potency produced first between two and depending altogether upon them at one time ; then continued 'by many, and depending less upon anyone or any few, and then exercised by very many, and depending little, depending less, depending least, and finally not at all depending upon persons, it became an independent social force, peculiar to mankind. An original force, though it be increasable, and is still the product of reciprocity as to its intenseness and power — the social urge, which will in time give place to the im- mense tranquility of the social habit. This great collective psycho fulfills all the essen- tials of a universal human soul or law, because it is itself at once a product and a producer. The product of being together, it is also the producer of more togetherness. The product of early physical association, it was stricken forth of human brains; the spark of mental association, the light and heat of social habitarianism, it passed from brain to brain. Like the electric spark, it could not dwell in any single brain. It runs and lives. It must have a circuit through many ; it must have no isolate lives in its circuit; it abhors insulation. The product of organ- ization, it has in turn an action like that of a certain window-catch I have seen, which not only holds together but draws together as it is closed. The product of the organization habit, it becomes itself in turn an organizing power, and thus reciprocates until the redemption of man from egoism and private mastership. The product of a physical necessity out of some tremendous physical peril that once struck a few of the early men, was this power to put two brain-impressions on one vital cord, on one common interest, and froRi tbat day forth it was created the creator. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 177 The hufiian mind is approaching its rest. It has been perplexed with this problem for many ages. "Ad- mitting a moulding potency," said the poor victims, into our affairs, shall we deem it to be independent of us and omnipotent over us, our creator and our king, or shall we deem it our own creation, the mere product and puppet of our will?" Between these two horns, the faith and fear of men have been tossed for ages in futile agony; and in futile agony will they continue to be tossed between sacerdotalism and the various forms of spiritual individual dominionism, until the dissolution of faith and fear into living powers of associate thinking : of mental and habit- ual organization. The law that obtains among us does not think by itself nor do by itself. It is our product. Yet not pro- duced by us with any consciousness of a deliberate pur- pose. It is not a thought nor a thinker ; it is not a deed nor a doer, but of colleictive thoughts and thinkers, deeds and doers it is the sum. It has its being in a warm vital reflex that draws and keeps in strong arms of fellow- ship without love. If, as individuals, we should ever try to produce it, we shall be producing something else. When we begin to organize for it, it will be cold. When we talk or think of ourselves as following after or seizing it, or admiring it, worshipping it, or calling ourselves fond of it, it is going away from us. It is a mirror that reflects and yet suffers you not to see yourself in it, It is not a direct product, nor a direct producer for the single life; it, therefore, calls for no loyalty from you to itself. It could not be worshipped by you, it can be understood only by mankind together. When we are thinking in the mass, when we have superseded all ownerships leading to one or other of the elementary excesses of privation and surplus; when we have substituted the thought and practice of use for the laws of private ownership, and have substituted in all possible ways the public habit for the private dictum, basing the whole life of the intellect on that social intelli- gence which has succeeded blind nature in human affairs. 178 Revolutionary Essays — the human environment developing through recipro- cated experiences in trying to please one another, of growing into each other by the desire to please, by the consequent thought and habit for organization, and by practising that continuity of thought and expression which make thoughts become as the atoms in one great organism, denying every part for the whole, — we are socially saved. Whatever faults we may find with modern capitalism, we can take no exception to its organizations. Every gain made by capitalism as a maker of international grooves along which the habitual activities of nations have ben taught to move is a definite gain to the race salvation. Capitalism gives us everything of Socialism but the mind and life of it. It gives us an industrial activity instead of the old church, diplomatic and military activity. At the end of the capitalistic evolution, it will leave us in possession of that flower of all human wisdom and experience, social, economic activity and interna- tional intercourse ; but with petals bloodless and colorless. It remains for Socialism to tip those petals, to impregna.te with the life color and fragrance those ghostly flowers, as yet only outlines, mere forms, waiting for the flush of life. Or rather, let me bring back these flowers to the buds. Capitalism has no more energy to spare, she has brought them thus far and can go no farther. If you nip off all these buds but one, or two, mayhap it would yet yield one little flower of true social activity. But no, there shall no social energy be thus destroyed. The foregoing conditions which prepared these buds and left them in our age for us to make them bloom demand that we shall breathe from the roots up into them the revolutionary energy that bids the little folded bud-babes to break through their cerements, which, without more Socialism in the life energy, are likely to be, instead of cradle wraps, their shrouds. All is ready for evolution to bring forth its fruitful bud. Experience has brought us up to this point, now let the man of action come — the man of action socially inspired to destroy no buds, but In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 179 to save all that is, the conservative evolutional, and there- fore revolutionary Socialist. XXXVII. WHAT IS THE MIND? The mind is a man standing at the doors of the universe looking out upon it with the universe's own eyes, to balance things amenable to man and to be bal- anced. The mind is a balance, abhorring things out of adjustment and attempting to set them right. It is there- fore negative and affirmative. The negative is the single private mind, it is the primary possibility. In an un- hypnotized condition it must disapprove of that which is unbalanced. It may, however, end its energies in the ac- complishment of nothing, but play true balancing or rogue balancing. By living as a mere child or a mere critic of the sinister property school it may cheat itself and its fellows out of all the service due from it by choosing to itself false subjects, either at so much per speech or book, or on a regular salary. While the troops are crying for equitable weight of bread and meat, it may slip out to the lines to amuse itself in comfortable individual seclusion, weighing the running sand. And it may prove itself to be as greatly cheated or as great a cheat by following any of the innumerable avenues of indirection opened to it so invitingly from childhood by the former and present nurses of aristocracy. It may fritter away its balancing power by weighing and analyzing the chunks of clouds known as the characters in our great novels. It may defraud its age by becoming an admirable literary critic of first editions and all subsequent editions of great men. It may waste itself upon any of the themes innumerable which are nowise unworthy in themselves, but are rela- tively unserious at a time when we have a band of burglars prying in the door. It is the profession of the property-hired dominie while this is going on to lead the childhood of the world out into the fields to consider the lilies, or up into the clouds to be amazed with astronomy, or back into hoary i8o Revolutionary Essays time to be dumb among its glacial periods, or away and away over the hedges and ditches of declensions, con- jugations and all the rest of it to be found in any old foreign languages that will keep you away from home while the bosses are cutting your fathers' throats. Any subject that keeps you too long away from the considera- tion of morals, sociology and politics, is an unserious subject for the mind's balance, and in all probability there is an acquired, though not conscious sinisterness of pur- pose in the school curriculum and the daily time wasters of the press, to place such things ever before us ; to build up the aristocracy out of our moral ignorance, our want of public conscience and courage, so that while we are look- ing away at such subjects as they throw upon our canvas they are looting the home of the human family. The mind is at once the master and the agent of actualities. It must balance human relations or rust away into in- capacity. It is therefore first and above all other things an active morality — a social relater, and wheresoever it is found not to be so engaged in the midst of things inequitable, it is a deserter from humanity. And when- soever you find it in such renegade disloyalty, you may soon and easily discover that the cause of its unfaithful- ness is "the cause of private property." On its affirmative side the mind is linked with the master workmanship of the universe — it is part of the vital effective force of cosmic organization. On its single negative side it may become a mere private property inorganic, an alien to the commonwealth of our one Israel; but it may also become a revolutionary protestor, refusing to be reconciled to evil ; even though you put your God upon a hill to ful- minate "Thou shalt nots" against this inalienable principle and energy of adjustments, it will still go on ; it will still say : " I will, I must ; for there can be no God at all, if I am unfaithful and fail as an adjuster." In this stage the mind is revolutionary; and if in this stage it suffers not itself to be drawn away into mere anti- theologies, or into the tangled thickets of the meta- physical world, but will stick sturdily to the adjustments In Socialist Faith and Fancy. i8i of property and social relations, it .will soon enter into its rest. The rest of the single mind will be found in the great faith and tranquility which comes to it as a result of its partnership with the soul energy of the race. It ceases to be very busy and very resentful; it lifts its quiet eyes and looks out from the doors of its universe and peace- fully, but full of tremendous faith, orders or joins the revolution. When the mind begins to become racial, it perceives the necessity of balancing its own balancings; it calls in its scalers and weighters from the sand lunes and keeps all its faculties within call and concert of the property question, of which question all others are but minor tones, still lowly audible after the facts. The mind may, there- fore, be described as a major and minor balancing until the minor is lost in the major, or tintil the major is so morally supreme that no number of minors can any more disturb its great commanding of faith. The little balance lying loosely on the "old grocery" counter weighed every- thing, alike indifferent, from morn till night. As the old man snatched it up, you could hear the dishonest pre- cipitancy with which it fell from his hasty hand, and by its bang and clash on the counter you were rattled into not noting what your pound of meal was short of. The mind may be the very same chain-chattering pair of scales, but its iron beam has something plus iron in it. It has the maxelar current; it is thereby become a part of the longest live line, the biggest live swing in the universe. It is no longer held up by the shaky dis- honest hand of the single miser against all the world ; it is held up by the Master Factor of all facts, THE MIND of the universe^-itself. And it is so held in eternal faithfulness since it began by plain property revolt to see that it is not only possible, but it is necessary for every man on earth to* be Atlas, for every single life to be the sole supporter of the universe. Should we ask the Spencerites who are engaged in building up a psychology to suit what has happened, or what they choose to select out of what has happened for 1 82 Revolutionary Essays the benefit of an eternally decreed aristocracy, these gentlemen will tell you a lot about the experiential pro- cess, the purport of which will be to give some eternal sanction to what has happened, or rather what the gentle- men happen to select out of what has happened, as favorable to the nurture of aristocracies, which is the program, ne plus ultra, of Spencerian psychology. The sum, therefore, of their exposition is this: The mind is a chapter of accidents. The psychology of the private mind, as devised by itself and for itself by the private experience building school, cannot be anything else. It is the psychology of anarchy, and Spencer is its prophet. The mind is not a separation from the race, there- fore it is not a chapter of accidents. It is not one chapter of anything, it is the whole volume of lived history as culminated in the averageable opinion, will and habit of the whole race. No single chapter contains it. No single chapter can see or record it. The whole experience of the world is the created and creative mind. No single psychologist out of his own experience can do any more than accident it. No group of persons can come near to apprehending it save by subjection of the opinion, will and habit to equity. The human mind is outside of every per- son, of every nation, and of every class, and can only be discovered and realized by them as a power when all the nations of the earth are one. I, therefore, no longer wonder at the avidity with which well-nigh all our respectable churches have swal- lowed the doctrines of modern evolution. By differ- entiating everything down to anything that has happened, and bowing to the process of differentiation, we invent a law by which we leave the universe lawless until we are ready to get a togetherness of our own upon it, of such a sort as will suit the comfort of ourselves and our ac- quaintances. Evolution by differentiation is the most daring mode of moral assassination ever attempted on the life of the soul in the house of his friends. If the aristocracies of the churches and exchanges could con- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 183 ceive of the rabble taking this evokition by disintegration and dififerentiation seriously to itself, and making it a phil- osophy of epidemic bloodshed, what could they say ? The so-called law of evolution by differentiation is morally, ferociously vile, for it knows no greater law than the will of the strenuous adjuster, who makes things happen and who differentiates, himself, perhaps, an infernal acci- dent and difference to be handed down to posterity. XXXVIII. THE BROKEN LIFE. We cannot think of power apart from continuity. A giant may fall, and by his weight carry the old floor with him, but we would never think of calling it a power- ful fall; because it lacks premeditation; because it is not the product of continuity and control. We might loosely call the drug which brought him down a powerful, drug, but it would be only a figure of speech, substituting the drug for the druggist, his experiments and his prescrip- tions. Power is unbrokenness; it is speedier motion; it is continuity in itself. Catastrophe is not power, for the life-mind is captain of catastrophe. The life- mind is continuous — the life mind is the power of organization — the life of man socially con- sidered is EGO organized into the habits and flowings of national or international life. It is the individual flown into the Socialist mind. Poets of the courts and sports have dangled before the people's minds their little wooden doll-thoughts in rhyme and stanza. Preachers have similarly nourished it back to atoms by centuries of expositions of their little wooden verses — little corks that tipple-topple on the flowing river. Tlie greater part of the provisions made for the mind in our age are specifics only. And be you convinced, comrade, an age of specifics is not an age of power. We contemplate human life in fragments called bi- ographies, our libraries and leisure are overburdened with their barren woodennesses; they can drive nothing. 184 Revolutionary Essays for they do not flow; they are not organic, they are not power. Yet our miserable mind lords throw single lives at us, and the most singularly insignificant lives of kings, soldiers and pirate merchants to boot, and tell us each and all to accept these, the saints, or some other impossible lives as our examples. Be you convinced, comrade, an age of biographies, or any other specifics, is not an age of power; power is the flowing life; it is organization. And what is the matter with that vast bewilderment of the human mind and conscience which we call law? What is the matter with the lawyers, that they should have the most unreliable minds on earth? Law has be- come a menagerie of "cases" that have been decided by the courts. The memory of the profession is pitted all over with "case pox," and trials are settled not by any flowing, continuous principle of ethic, but in accordance with some one of these blotches which happens to be nearest the judge's eye when the other case comes up. Philosophy is a movement rather than a statement. The reason I prefer using such a phrase as "the conduct of truth" to such another phrase as "the creed of truth," while quite aware that the credal character cannot be alto- gether out of any ordering of words, is that even in the ordering of words used for truthing, I see an approach to the currency nature of truth by the practice of revision and restatement. I see in the threatened dethronement of the book by the serial pubUcation some relief from the fixed authority of the bound volume, some approach to the movableness of live truth. Just as I see in the recurrence of initiative, referendum and all suggestions of and approaches to a continuous system of voting in, or out, of our public officers an approach to living pol- itics; and just as I see in a constitution of written words for a nation's fixity a lawyer's way of restoring the essentials of monarchy or aristocracy.. The system of living on the current labors of the people by the exercise of our wits or privileges has, among other undesigned blessings, given us the daily In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 185 newspaper, with its daily servility to the money class and its daily impudence. Yet there is a vital thing about it; it is daily, and that is truth. This, against all kinds of fixed statement, is the vital principle of truth. If the daily papers and all other printed matter could be an- nually destroyed, we would be that much nearer actual truthing. The so-called stabilities of social life are mostly the monuments of its unfaith. The tear that knows it will not continue to flow for the just departed loved one hastens to put itself on record in the permanent stone monument, with its unrevisable tribute of admiration in epitaph. The heavy, imperishable art of Egypt and Greece have immortalized nothing but the numerousness and slavery of the common people and the control of them for service held by their aristocracies. The only thing not there is art. In societies of faith-stability and true beauty loving, our temples and public buildings would be constructed of plastic and revisable material, so that current concepts of beauty might ever come to the surface in the loveliness of contemporary form. Tim- ber and composites would be the materials out of which a society which knew itself imperishable would choose to express its sense of the beautiful. When case practice hurts a rich man, practice by cases hurts a few rich men, it is discovered that instead of a collection of settled cases — corpse law — we ought to have a life of law, and then they hie them back to the constitution. But, lo ! they find that already mangled into more cases, which have been decided by the supreme court, and so diversely that there is no evidence of continuous power in them, save the general intent to enthrone property above the life of man. But because there is that general and continuous intent every- where among the property classes, from the five-dollar lot to the supreme bench; the property class, though a mean minority in the land, really possesses all the power that our age is acquainted with. Their interest, thought and activity are continuous, and if it be not the flowing life, if it be only the flowing of disease, nevertheless the i86 Revolutionary Essays property men are so far organized, and are, therefore, stronger than the real Ufe of the world in its congestions, and broken periods, and patches of activity. This is the great hurt to the laborers of having allowed their life to be broken into earthly and celestid parts, into cris cross, into American and foreign, into democrat and republican. While thus broken, the race life flows by you and, smiting, says to you, "Move in from your specific fakirism to the connective life which joins Sunday to Sunday." The wit of the world is engaged against the wisdom of it in substituting apparent for real connexions. The trick of the world's letter-learned men is to substitute a word hook for nature's nexus. The king's scholars allure the life of labor along false moto- graphs, through forms of words, symbols, rituals, or codes, and thus has our vitality been led out into barren deserts, that of it which remained, after pillowing them upon their thrones. But because this thing in us is vital and continuous it will not down. So it flows beneath one surface and breaks up into new river fountains in a new part of the world. They led our flowing life out into arid theologies and priestisms of the East, and there it vanished out of sight. Yet now it breaks up as fountains of the great deep in this Western land. Individualism and all the arts by which property men sought to bury it in the sands of the East, have come to naught, for here it is in the W^est upbubbling as the power of labor organizations; as the politics of Socialism; as the new thought of col- lectivism. When labor learns to join its political cam- paigns by and with the continuous flowing life of the daily trade-union meetings, so that there shall be no break in its doings; so that the lodge, the union, the primary, and the Sunday life, shall be all one, with the labor purpose and power flowing through it, then we shall experience and have the power of labor organ- ization. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 187 XXXIX. CONTROL VALUE. Socialism is not something beyond and away towards which we are wending; it is an acctimulated, unconscious race energy, which catches persons and communities in certain experiences or points of social quickening, and from thence returns them through race habit, race will, race mind, and race courage, called social faith, along certain lines towards necessary state formations. These experiences may in themselves be vastly dissimilar and terribly unlike to Socialism; they may be military, they may be ecclesiastic, they may be predatory, aggressive, commercial, competitive, but they roll us back never- theless along lines of harmony through our enforced leanings upon each other, through compelled co-opera- tion, connectivism and association, into conscious posses- sion of continuity, the organic of human life. Continuity as it is lived and conceived is the whole of social life; it is the God in man; it is the soul of society; it is Socialism inside, and money and the mill are to-day our outer points of quickening and return to its appropriate state- hood. Let us bear this in mind and become great- hearted with the faith, that is, the courage, of having a racial energy collectively within us. We are not aiming at a thing or law program called Socialism, but we are moved by Socialism as a revulsion, a race will, a silent command, a powerful dynamic, a tide of subconscious anger and resentment which, having touched given points of false personal exaltation and depression, will no more of them, but begins to return resentfully and divinely to its own mighty self-reservations; provoking the pro- letarian man to class formation and revolution, and through him steadily making its way back to the forma- tion of a new state which shall reconcile the limits of the man with the right and might of the race. There_ is, never forget it, an energy self-sustained and sovereign which, in the speech of the single human life, may be called socially omniscient and eternal, and yet it is only our growth, the product of our sufifering and knowing. 1 88 Revolutionary Essays It is the experiential spirit of history; it is the master- moving mind of all humanity. I know there is a workman with capitalistic mind, but there is one worse than he; it is the So- cialist with an individualist mind; the superior one who looks upon co-operation only as a means of giving him, the artist, the scholar, the skilled mechanic, and the generally fine fellow, the long with- held biggest share of the social wealth. These men are still contending over what they shall have when Socialism comes; they are without the Socialist mind. After years of proletarian pleading for equity they still repudiate with anger the thought of a laborer receiving as much as they, forgetting that, if they be truly artists, they have already received, and do and will receive, rewards in this character by which the poor laborer who physically serves, must forever go unrewarded. It is the laborer's sorrow to be paid with money only; it is the joy of the artist that his art rewards him. We have reached a quickening point of social return from such unholiness in the wrongs now inflicted upon labor. We have struck, whether by accident or deep law, the outer garment of a fundamental and eternal thing in money and in the modern machine. Money is a live musical string, along which men are moved by the power of continuity into a governmental formation of industrial democracy. From control to association, from the ec- centric to the concentric, from touch to continuity, from solitude to multitude, from private waste to public re- serve, from stroke to connectiveness, from effort to power, from singleness to correlation; this is the royal. march of duty and labor. To blot out of human thought the thing that is called initiative, and the thing that is called finis, this is the royal march of philosophy. The system of control which we call capitalism is mighty because it is based upon that which is in itself true and fundamental. If it were not a private control, it would stand for everything else that human society is in need of. Let us remember that value has no ex- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 189 istence as a force, or as a want in any single life; there is no intrinsic value in any person or thing, save as it stands upon one of the concentric lines radiating from the social center to individuals on the circumference. Value is a principle arising out of the relation between a person and the State. The State is the master dealer, and the merchant is its agent. Mercantilism is mighty just because in every one of its groups it holds more or less of the fundamental state energy in solution. Once es- caped from the fallacy of intrinsic thing values, once we realize the process of depersonalization which constitutes both civilization and value, it will not be diflBcult for us to get at a true concept of the nature of money currency and exchange ; the words, concentricity, reserve and con- tinuity, embrace the whole of the money process, and in the movements of the pieces of metal or paper, the crystals of human performances, we may instructively study the actual place and program laid down for the personal life in society. Let us forget the men, and let us conceive of ourselves as having passed socially, that is valueably, into those pieces of currency, and we have at once the philosophy and modus operandi of society. We socially consider man only as a performer; we do not consider him sleeping, eating, gazing, suffering, or en- joying, for these are private functions only until they are passed as performance on to one of the concentric public lines. It Is possible to find men not very far from our cities even to-day whose lives are full of active perform- ance, but who rarely enter into value relations with the rest of society; they work hard, but there is no value in their work, because it is self-consumed. They fail and fall out of wealth because they do not work for the State, that big employer which in the last analysis stands behind every one who valueably employs labor. It is not the case that Socialists are seeking to estab- lish a terrible new experiment in setting up the economic commonwealth; we are in fact only seeking to pull down an interference with the free flowing of state life from center to circumference and back. We are seeking only 190 Revolutionary Essays to liberate that which is always with us — Socialism; we are removing the interceptors who absorb the oxygen of society into their own cancerous alienism ; we are setting up free intercourse and solidarity; and as the keys of a piano have in the development of human skill and experi- ence been constructed into receptives of the elements of harmony, so are pieces of money in the great social instrument of mercantilism. The harmonic genius at the piano is touch, relation, continuity — the social genius at the instrument of money is touch, continuity, con- centric relation. From loneliness to Socialism is at present a journey along the golden highway of money. There is no other thing so nearly human; so quickened with the pulses of man past and present, as money; no other thing so charged with the dynamic of oppression or of revolution as money. As an objective weapon in politics the ballot box is sporadic, a thing of spots; but this money comes nearest of all things materialistic to the flov/ing life. While it is therefore good war to say, "Let us get down to the ballot boxes," it is only so on the way to the better battle-cry, "Let us get into the money." The money of society is the achieved epitome of all its transferable powers; it is, therefore, the simplest and truest objective of the proletarian struggle. How long ago it may be, I cannot tell, but very long ago it was when the embryo State became the chief dealer in that commodity best fitted to convey the principle of social continuity from man to man. The merchants love to call it stability and basis, but its strength lies in this, that it is the perpetually fluent life, upon which if any man launches his career of personal performances, he will be carried nine strokes along the stream of social value for every one stroke of his little oar. Why gold has become money is a question to which many ingenious but barren answers may be given. The answer that is truest and means most to us is this: Among many candidates, so to speak, for election to the office of a universal intercourse commodity, gold, silver and copper have been running first, second and third, for In Socialist Faith and Fancy. igi many ages, and in the course of experience they remain all of them, because we have and can use them all on our way to the true basis of money — credit. Though now we make money the basis of credit. No free State, no naturally influenced governments would have chosen the least of the metals, for this the ultimate use of money, had not the usurers been stronger than the States. The past and present powers of society have ordained the grace of exchange and currency into money. It repre- sents ages of socially and organically directed perform- ance, not labor alone, as we so ambiguously say, but social performance; socially concentric, socially invited and directed continuous performance. Out from and opposed to this concentric invitation and direction of labor and work, there is the eccentric doing of self-attending individualists; between these two lies the whole surge and resurge of civilization. In whatever proportion the eccentric man has placed his performances upon the golden threads of con- centric society, he is in that ratio a part of the nation; to that extent he has passed into the realm of social con- tinuous value. It may be said that he has only made a commodity for consumption, but his social value has not perished in that consumption; it remains as an addition to the accumulated and continuous power of society. He has passed his performance in as a demand for other per- formance, and it will return to him as a redemand from that other performer upon himself. He has entered the great circulatory system of social labor reciprocity; he is a value. Now, what shall be the initiative of his next response? Shall it be an appeal to his physical want as an animal only? Shall he be called upon to make a picture to last forever in return for bread that he must eat to-day? If this happens, he remains as much of an eccentric as the worthless millionaire ; he is not valueably in society. His existence is a public calamity, for he is lingering in the animal kingdom, and yet working with others in the social kingdom that makes the millionaire, giving him the initiation of control over the world's work 192 Revolutionary Essays in return for a dole of bread, which should never have been his to give or to withhold. It is here the voice of socially directed labor may best be heard ; it is here that exchange of work manifests itself as value apart from the products. The dealings of this eccentric man with the concentric merchant or capitalist, who has contrived to make the State a hybrid of himself, results in what we call surplus value, that is, waste labor. The eccentric laborer keeps a penny bread account only with the man, let us call him the padrone, who stands between him and the State. He lays himself on the social machine and contributes socially to continuity or exchange value, in return for which he receives a ter- minable commodity, a loaf, let us say, which, consumed, passes into himself, leaving him only the same unit wait- ing to be" ostracized again to-morrow by spot wages from among the vitally circulating men values of societies. What is it that he has passed in to the padrone? A con- trol called commodity. What can that commodity con- trol? Other labor. What, then, is he doing by dealing with the padrone instead of the State ? He is substituting the private control of labor for its social balance. This proletarianism is the enemy of society. The great desideratum in human advance is to be able to resume to-morrow where we leave off to-day. If only my father could expire his wisdom to me. If only the hand that faltered to the grave yesterday in the midst of its task could with that last friendly grasp have im- parted to me all the cunning and skill of its unfinished art, the flowing or continuous life would be realized in personal experience. It is this continuity of himself into society of the private performer that constitutes the social immortality, the coronation of value. Now, what has the eccentric laborer left of himself to pass into society, who consumes all of himself, his doings, from day to day? Evidently, if this is always to be, the proletarian is something very much worse than a worthless fellow. But fortunately for the rest of society, however stupid he may be, he cannot be lost to society In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 193 who works on any of the golden concentric wires of the state, even though the padrone for the present taps the wires and pockets the power, not the product, as we imagine, but the power. The thing accomplished by the machine is this: It is the commg together of labor power; that is, the Socializ- ing of it, in such a manner that the spot upon which the machine stands becomes a miscrocosmic State center. Around it immediate labor correlates, towards it distant labor is focussed, and as raw material radiates require- ment and direction between labor and labor. It em- bodies the principle of balancing and relating distant labor, and it gives the eureka after which the toil of all ages was groping; it gives pulse and beat to the human laborer's heretofore eccentric blows; it gives them more, it gives them conscious continuity. At the machine, if he rightly understands, every working man is baptized into Socialism. But the chief achievement of the machine is its power of reserve and resumption. The eccentric laborer could reserve nothing; he was all self-consumed, from day to day. This throbbing, continuously pulsing thing is not only a continuous motor, but it is a reservoir of social value and a storage of energy for more social value. Just everything that the eccentric laborer lays down and for- feits, the machine takes up. It has all the qualities of money except its power of going about and fitting into pockets; it is in all other respects true live capital, and though it is the youngest son of gold, it has subjugated and transformed its parent. Money is capital only in its subordination to the machine and its resemblances. The true State has in fact carried the capitalist, his machine and his money so long at her maternal breasts, that her virtue, her exchanging power of value giving, and her statehood, have passed into them, leaving her an old palsied dowager, waiting for her grand funeral. But these things are the true state now, and they are good enough for Socialism to begin again with. When two men play at chess or card? or pool over 194 Revolutionary Essays night, but leave off ere the game is finished, how many of the elements of continuity are lacking in the hard grey morning as they enter the play room? How hard it is to resume, lacking the temperature of the night before. When contending armies, exhausted as the undeciding night comes, pitch their tents upon the battlefield, how hard it is next day to pick up the continuity of the tumultuous evening before. Even in the days of post horses, when a man bore some great national message that filled his heart and made almost a man of his horse, how hard it was when that horse was exhausted just to get the continuity of his last stride even upon the finer animal awaiting him 1 But all this and more the modern machine supplies. When the steam is turned on in the morning, and the pallid men are standing in their places, not ten revohttions of the wheel are gone when the temperature, intensity, pressure and continuity of yester- day are passed from the wheels to the men, and they are all in the white heat throb of the money maker. At night the man of the loaf goes home and consumes it, but he leaves behind him all the plus value of himself. He breaks off there like a branch, no longer vitally con- nected with social value, but the machine is the stem itself into which, like a helpful leaf, he has been gathering dew, rain and sunshine all day ; then himself dies or terminates in his own physical needs to resume the same service and the same suicide to-morrow. But the machine has not followed his example; it has reserved him. The pack of commercial gamblers' cards, the battlefield of the state class will be found just as they were left when to-morrow the slaves return; the battle of the concentric against the eccentric man is a sure victory; the game is a dead beat. They were beaten at about the third hour in their day's work of yesterday. At that time they had rendered control value of themselves, which was the equivalent of their loaf. They lost while they were eating by what they were eating, while their continuous value still lay on the spindles, losing nothing, only waiting fully reserved for In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 195 to-morrow. Between the third hour of yesterday and the first hour of to-day is the master's accumulation of surplus value, which in line with this thought may be here more properly called control value. It is not as a surplus, nor as an accumulation, but as a controlling initiator of more men's activities, that capitalism grows terrible by the machine. The private controller has taken the place of the state balancer of humanity's active relations to one another. Value is not the blows of the sledge upon the anvil, but is the rhythm of those blows in obedience to social impulse and towards social requirement. Under the alienism of private capital there is a bastard value called price, which nobody can foresee. True value can be expressed in money only when society is organized, and it will not be the com- modity measure of one man's work, but the legal acknow- ledgment of its social concurrency. The law of fiscal gravitation has ■ entered into the affairs of men — a law which is as absolute as the law that holds and moves the stars, and yet absolutely in the hands of a few persons. It acts as through a world-extended network of nerves, having its many sensitive centers in the banks and exchanges. Towards the will, the wish and interests of these centers of private will all other human beings are captive drawn, and the free, personal relations between individual men have ceased to be oper- ative. So overshadowing all other facts of history is this, that we must truly be a generation of pigmy thinkers if we pass into our graves without discovering that the sun of individualism has been monetarily blotted out forever and a new series of comets has succeeded. An internationally accepted object which contains within it,^n fact or by proxy, the values produced by the, world's energy for exchange, if once admitted and used in a number of cases successfully for large exchanges, must eventually be submitted to in all cases of exchange, and there and then all other social and personal things held in esteem, as well as commodities, must follow and bow to that standard; for that which measures the value 196 Revolutionary Essays of the commodity measures the man. In vain the hero, the poet, the painter, the preacher protests — he is on the wires with the rest of us, his strenuousness, his fine frenzy, his art, his prayer must go — to the center of gravity after that money which is at once the measure and the crystallization of all human useful exertion, and its master. Money is said to be the crystallization of labor. Gold having become in the course of human history, by a constant adjustment and consent, an actual equivalent of labor, so much socially produced commodity expresses itself now always in so many particles of gold, even though the laborer or producer has not touched the gold. The history of the process by which this wonderful unanimity of value production finds for itself a common equivalent in so much gold is the history of human organ- ization. The fact aback of the gold and aback of the commodity is human co-operation. The secret of the power of money is not that so much of the labor force of a man here and a man there has been exerted, but that so many laboring men have been socially controlled and directed. Not a millionth part of the world's labor has been sicially directed or expressed in money yet. But as labor becomes more and better organized — as the laborers' of the world become centrally directed more and more, and as the centers of direction diminish in number — ^more and more of the world's labor will be afifiUated and expressed in the money of organized society. Money, now used to curse and oppress mankind because of representing only bastard organizations of capitalists, will, when it appears as the emblematic offspring of entire, social or- ganization (the machinery of intercourse between each life and all), become the chief sacrament of the race. These threads of gold and silver, when Socialism comes, will prove to be at once the symbol and the vehicle of collective human power, its will, its fatherhood and its fellowship. As the representative of organized will, intellect and In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 197 effort, employed to summon the workers of all lands to produce; and to place at their disposal the world's equi- valent — other work for their work — the money of the world to-day is greatly increased in efficiency. But its power for evil grows with its alienism. It is produced at the bidding of private profit hunters and only now represents slave organization, alien and hostile to the heart of society. Under isolate control every dollar in existence represents how much of its own native power to serve itself the race has lost. While its power to control is greater than it will ever be, it is an erratic power; all-controlling, but ever capable of changing its center of gravity, it has become a giant of anarchy instead of the center of social order. The men, the unhappy men who are struck hardest by this change of gravity are the plain working folk who are engaged in producing the world's wealth. To them, as compulsory producers, it has been a violent and cruel revolution. Their personal relation to their place on earth and work and the thing they labored upon was once a peculiar and pleasant relation; a relation of vital nature, an art affection, which relieved their work of its drudgery and gave a meaning and a palpable pleasure to their day's industry. They once bore the relation of paternity to the thing they produced. They thought of it while yet its sub- stance lay in the earth or the forest, they formed and molded it in fancy before its parts were dug or hewn, they initiated their work themselves, they consecrated the finished thing from the first to a known purpose, they knew why they were doing it as well as what they were doing it for and whither it was to go, for the natural system as contrasted with the capitahstic system and pur- pose of production left them this interesting knowledge. There was a personal relation between the producer, the thing produced, and the consumer. Their product was as a child of the brain and hand.' This is all vanished now; the mechanic of to-day does not know and therefore cannot love his work; it is 198 Revolutionary Essays the child of a stranger, a great monster child which he, with many others, must nourish. Neither does the man who pays him know. Both work at the initiative and bidding of the distant dollar; both are working because a dollar has been laid down capitalistically for its' own fructification; both are working towards their one com- mon end of the process, namely, to take up dollar ; one in fractional parts, the other in whole numbers; and the dignity of labor has miserably vanished, and the dignity of capital has gone out with it. Am I mourning over this? No! Now that it has happened, certainly, no. For never did an heir come in for a better thing through the death of a relation than mankind will eventually inherit through the demise of the personal relation — hard now it is, but brighter farther on. The worker of to-day never sees, as a whole, the form of that thing which he contributes his days to make ; to see himself in the glass, as it were, of his finished {)roduct is never his privilege. Has he not received his daily dollar? Then away with defunct rights, senti- ments and dignities. Is he not free? Free! Yes, on the waves of a blind, soulless competition he is a free derelict, a rudderless creature, abandoned by all respect- able people to the chances of finding an employer who may find some profit in working him, and therefore letting him live. The laborer, moreover, has been externalized and remoted from himself. First, he passed into the machin- ery of his owner's mill. Had it gone no further than this he might have hovered around the factory like a corpse hunting its own ghost. But the machine is by no means the last abiding place of that subtle thing — the labor force we sell. These mills are but great cream- eries from which daily the golden butter of profit is taken ; and wherever that .goes, thither, and with it, the laborer has been carried away from himself. It is now gold, an ambulatory monarchy; it rolls over the world and grows as it rolls. As to the pole the needle turns. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 199 so to this labor now stolen from the laborer and stamped "a dollar" turn all the elements of civilization, among them the disenspirited laborer himself. Labor has been ground by the machines into a class pulp, the work of each indistinguishable from each, and a new thing has appeared under the sun. With the magic wand of a perfected money — a new phase in the calendar, greater than all the magic seers and astrono- mers of the past ever knew — the social labor day follows the impersonalization of labor ; and then is born the new mind, the generalizing mind, the comprehensive, col- lective thinker, the social man who is now leading us through this present wilderness of transition to an entire- ly new philosophy of life which we shall reach at no very distant day. To gold, the omnipotent, all inclusive, all pricing power; to gold, the crystalizer of labor, we owe this our introduction to the new civilization. What- ever we may determine to do with our yellow friend here- after we cannot do better now than follow where it leads. The despotism of gold over every step of the process of production, its prohibitory power over every instinct of the art mind, its interdict against the exercise of con- science or justice upon any part of the work, the veil which it casts over the eyes of every and all the pro- ducers by the division of production into the production of parts of things only has not only destroyed the per- sonal relation of the worker to his work, but it has alien- ated the manhood of the better sort of individuals from their work and made of it all, to them, a hateful neces- sity. The honest workingman which the capitalist some- times calls for in the Sunday schools, would now be alike useless, improfitable and impossible. Like other of the greater things which have hap- pened, this passing away of the personal relation had been felt and realized at both ends of the relation long before it was understood or reasoned out at either end. Through economic conditions the change has come, and economics do forever, and in all things, lead the way. The great business man, for his own private gain 200 Revolutionary Essays only, is now wielding the world's revolutionary economic changes, all of which are of an anti-private nature and all of which are ready to fall upon and bury the private property man who sets them going. Upon his strong individuality is grafted the new life. Upon the prema- ture and cold-blooded impersonalisros of the competitive system rises the new civilization. The human cord has been broken by capitalism; it can bring forth nothing but a hybrid, untimely impersonalism, to your appeals, oh, laborers! or your silent but visible needs. It is untimely in this, that it tries to live in the impersonal life before the impersonal life has truly come, and to believe exclusively in law before law reigns. The capitalist still thinks that competition is, that it is a law, and that it is the law of all cosmos, and that it is accurately reproduced in the Wall street process. He thinks that the law which made and moves Mercury and the law which discovered him in his little store in Beaver street, some years ago, and gradually revealed him to Wall street, is one and the same law ; and he has such perfect confidence in the identity of the democratic competitive process with it, that he could stand blind- folded all day long on the edge of a commercial precipice and, without ruth or question, thrust every passing man over the brink, assured that, from the time he fell, shrieking, until he reached a fatal somewhere, he is eco- nomically in the hands of the same law that piade his murderer a millionaire. This faith in law, now so prema- ture and fraught with cruelty, is, nevertheless, the stem of the world's truest thought, philosophy and religion. The hurtian element is, nevertheless, not dead yet; that persistent human element continues to be a disturb- ing factor in the best prepared calculations of capitalisfti. Strikers will strike, and brains will think, and eyes will see, and all men will not down as they should, to enable the dollar to keep its books correctly. There appears to be something in the spirit of man, even in these days when cowardice has become our solitary virtue, that prompts us to think at least resistingly. I beseech you In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 20i to think firmly in a collective way, think with the social manhood of your time, think with it often and think with it long, and then the phantom of a vanishing loaf will not be able to frighten you ; and we will in time get back the courage of the race, that pubUc spirit which made the revolutions of the past. The capitalist cannot forever get all he wants; he needs intelligence among the workers, yet he needs not much of it; a human nature he needs that he can play upon, and yet a human nature that will not learn to play upon him ; he wants to employ the smallest possible part of humanity at the smallest possible price, and yet he wants to exclude all others from employing humanity. And yet again he wants that part of humanity which he cannot and will not suffer to be employed to remain idle and on friendly terms with him, and to come to his rescue against itself in times of strike and panic. He wants to reduce the cost of every laborer's life and living ; he wants to reduce the wage fund, as he calls it, to a famine fund ; yet he wants famine to purchase his luxur- ies. He is playing, therefore, for an impossible victory ; he plays on the chances of men being always insane. The laws under which he produces would perhaps have destroyed humanity before now but for that crooked little streak in us poor thinkers which he longs to sup- press, but cannot. The strikers and the Socialists and the radical thinkers are postponing his collapse, not for love of him, but until the race is ready for the funeral. XL. THE SOCIAL SACRAMENT. Although organization constitutes, phenomenally, and is itself the divine life in the world, yet this spirit of God has been so long dallied with and detained at the doors of the private life that the letter, which must always precede the spirit, entered fundamentally into social human affairs only about a century ago. But frorti the time it so entered, the development of social organization has been going forward speedily, so that already it is 202 Revolutionary Essays lifting the veil upon that near day of Socialism when in, and by, and through the organized human, God shall be finally manifested in the flesh, and society shall prove to be the mode of man's redemption. The letter of the spirit, without which God cannot be manifested in human organization, was required at first to be in the nature of a universal language; but the strifes and isolations of private property struggles had for the first part of its evil strenuousness a general order against men understanding each other, and against whatsoever would conduce to such an understanding. Many were the efforts made, even in the most noble and strenuous days of individualism, to establish a common understanding between us, and many a time by ciphers, emblems, phonetics, and other universal articulates, it seemed for a season as if in this respect the very wrath of man would be contrained into common sense and speech. But Babels generally overtook these efforts, Sanscrits were lost, emblems misunderstood, and hiero- glyphics faded until they contained only a royal, a local, or a temporal communication. War for a long time monopolized all that Egypt had imparted to the world of imperishable expression. The geometry and mathematics which the annual Nile floods called for, as they wiped out the frail boundaries of dried earth that separated one corvee of public labor from another, at last struck root in social vitality. And it was then that the spirit of God, for organization, might have entered the race, and would have entered had not the war lords appropriated the speech of mathematics and geometry to themselves from peace to war, to their uses as a body of marauders and conquerors. The generals were the only men in the world for centuries who had swallowed their yard-stick, but they did so only for the purposes of building for.ts, massing troops, timing marches, causing armies from far, from various distances, to cross given points on one point of time, measuring the velocity of missiles, the speed of the wind and the ships it drove; and all this for murder. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 203 Mathematics, the speech absolute for builders, meas- urers, movers, doers, thus got the start of other possible modes of divine expression and so became the letter by which the divine energy entered the social man as an organization, truth and power, so that the divine in man thus first manifested itself in the arts. A complete universal conquest, with one speech, might have given the social man birth, or it seemed for a time as if a universal church, with one speech, would have done it. Dante thought that was the appointed way, as Mazzini tells concerning the poet's prose work, " La Monarchic." Music also, because of its beats and measures, might have led us much nearer, but as in its other universal language the church was never able to rise above the priest, and the church, though it could never dominate art used, so she continued to be a noisy mute, thinking that her divine part was her altar and her Sabbath and her set pieces of harmony and sermon. She never found out that the only religious part of her whole ecclesiastical arrangement was her people's assembling of themselves together in one place, with one accord, waiting for one thing; which (though the waiting were a delusion), being a "one mind" in a multitude, it was always divine; yea, though a mistake in divinity, it was still divine. Something was needed to make the week-day life of man metrical, to give it rhythm. Wherever that appeared, men affectionately took it, even though it were the tramp of armies that led them to the awful desolations of war and the destruction of life itself. Some regulating pulse, some sure pendulum to swing across the human Ufe; some strong orderly and ordering throb to come into our life in a large, large measure, man hungered for this to save him from the endless vagaries of the strenuous and armed private life. All men everywhere developed a longing for time order as well as the space order of cities, until even the most pronounced egoists found rest only in self-imposed schedules; but only so long as they were of their own 204 Revolutionary Essays adoption. The world of manhood was always crying for order. The seasons admonished man that this alone was the gate of the true life. The heavenly bodies whispered it in the glintings of the night, the animals, the plants, the tides; all delivered the same message, that God would finally enter man's estate through the gates of order. But in the merely private life there was neither genius, space, nor power for such an order as might in- vite him to such an entrance. The necessities of the subject masses gradually re- vealed populations everywhere submitting to some com- mon order. The work people of all nations were found upon the fields doing the same things from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same. Here was an unbroken line of humanity, a vital chain of brains and hearts and hands, all doing a similar thing, along which the Lord's might moved. And so, in time, it came to pass that this part, rather than that of the occasional thinkers and irregular aristocracies, became God's normal side of humanity. Whatever divine thing was going to happen to the race, or in it, was to be looked for henceforth in the regulated rhythm of a working democracy. There, and there alone, out of that dry ground, the social man should spring. Laboring populations everywhere had become or- dered in days of work, generally of a given duration, and the very physical constitution of the world's toilers had' acquired the regular paces of social habitarianism, though it was, alas, too often only the habitarianism imposed upon slaves. Then there came a day when the measure, instead of being an outside law to the labor life, was let down as a force into the daily life of labor, so that, instead of measuring it by steps or beats on the figure periods of arithmetic, after the fact and from without, it began to impel it; the beat was also the power. Labor labored with a regular beat or pulse from within, and itself became metrical. The letter of the spiritual life, the letter of organization, was thus In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 205 sown by machinery in the productive force of labor, and a rhythmic science was planted in the very vitals of society, that is in its day's work — the true political science of social and personal relations along the lines of necessary labor was in the pulse of the piston. To clearly, now, define and adjust, for the purposes of equity, the relations between a day's work of the social man, as a worker, and the single worker, was all that remained for society to do. With the birth of the machine, however, there came into the world another birth, a calamity, its owner, an abortion," a thing that looked like the social man or State, and seemed to perform his functions, a shadow or ghost of the social man ; this thing was capitalism, which, with its dark, baneful presence, has continued to shut out each worker separately from the redemptive blessings made possible by the new State, and has shut out from the new State, as yet but feebly feeling the new pulse of a new order, the new, warm, red blood of the democracy, of the personal laborers. It is the work of Socialism to remove this false man of the State, this strenuous hybrid lie of capitalism, and let the divine life of organization flow, unimpeded by private isolates and false statehoods, from the heart, the brain and soul of society out to the very uttermost of God's unfit. It made little matter what was the measure, so that the measure came. At one time it made little matter what class activity became the objective of the measurer, so that that class was sufficiently potent and representative to have its measure obtain in all the world. But there came a time, as has been just noted, when there was no longer a choice for this purpose among the several classes; when the evolution of events laid its ordaining hand upon the head of labor, anointing it the savior class, the vicarious class, the substitute class in which henceforth all history should come to flower. Before labor had found and established its "beat" within itself, in the piston of the machine, as the beat of many, as well as of every and each one, the spiritual 2o6 Revolutionary Essays re-integration of mankind had been like a great blindness going up and down the mountains of history, dwelling among tombs, wounding and cutting itself madly for the measured rest of man moving. But an external measurer was also now required. As in the case of the internal industrial measure, it mat- tered little from whence or what the general external measurer might be, so that it was something that all men agreed to want, and something for which a majority of mankind, through a considerable recent range of un- broken history and over the major spaces of earth, had consented to labor. If such a thing there were besides food itself in the world, a thing so generally desired and wrought for, what- ever may have been the primitive cause of the desire for it, a thing being generally internationally and continu- ously pursued and sparsely obtained, had, in the process of its getting, given to man a social character of more importance than its immediate use. Gold represented human effort from the circumfer- ence of man's societies, and now offered a measure for it, as the piston beat, the value measures human effort from personal centers and factory locations. Whatever intrinsic and physical unfitness there was in it; what- ever of human shame and tragedy there is upon it; whether it represents a mistake or a million of mistakes, or whether Socialism will find a way of casting it to Gehenna soon after our emancipation, matters not. Here it is, the object of centuries of international desire, the prize of holocausts of human life, the embodiment of centuries of the labor of many nations, it stands for that labor, answers to it, and thus gives embodied expression to -the labor of many centuries in metrical pieces. In addition to its being the product of labor in the last stage of its uncovering and possession, it is the product of a painfully achieved incoming and outgoing between themselves. Among many otherwise reserved nations, it embodies labor in its best form and man in his best mood, an intercourse that was internationally In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 207 social ; it represents an intercourse, friendly or otherwise, actually achieved and maintained among the peoples of the earth, othertimes at war. Manifestly, blind history had provided a great social international measurer for the industrial beat of its work- men, as they stood by their pistons. Gold, guilty, cursed gold, is history's provision for measuring in a common denominator the food, shelter and raiment of a man and his family in their account with society. The crimes that placed gold in such a peculiar posi- tion that it was found at the time of man's greatest crisis, at the introduction of machinery, to be, to the whole of society, what bread was to a person, have indeed been blessings in disguise. As bread, clothing, shelter brought the individual man from house to house, and city to city, so gold could bring, and brought throughout the ages, all that had been formed of the social man — the discoverer, the explorer, the conqueror, the representa- tive, the ambassador, the international messengers be- tween the few social men, or nations, which constituted the world's family of nations. Gold and silver, the money metals, coined or uncoined, had become, by right of history,, criminal or otherwise, the social standards which measure the value of a person's working life, dividing it into days as compared with a natioli's working life of a day ; a common mirror for both. In the exigencies of demonstration, it has been found necessary by the greatest exponents of Socialism to speak of labor as a quality passing into commodities, which thereby become, as it were, its crystals. This is very difficult for any but persons of a special type, training or habit of mind to understand, nor do I think that it is a way of saying it, so essential to the doctrine of labor being the producer of all wealth; as many comrades believe. Anyway, my thought is that value is an exfernalism to labor, the shadow of it. Labor calls it into being, but does not pass into it. The labor and its value are products of social continuance. As an expression of 2o8 Revolutionary Essays labor, a value measure in money may be said to be the product of labor — plus organization — that is, of social labor, the money metal being the international com- modity, having all the qualities of other commodities, but being unconsumable by common consent. The majority of persons will better understand the transmission of labor force to commodities by separating them, making value subsequential to labor, an observed result of laboring, a measure applied, and a ratio ascer- tained afterwards. There being nothing of ■ value to measure except where labor and the social spirit and habit of organization have united together for production, even though there be plenty of labor otherwise in action. The major factor in the creation of value is the social factor, the organization of society. The minor factor is the labor force summoned into actuality by the social man, who, like a great bell-ringer, makes one labor ring out response to the While the human race continues to have the greater part of its concern exercised in the matter of obtaining bread, shelter and clothing, the economic way of getting it; if there be men at whose permission only you may get it (if you are to get it at all), their will and their money must continue to mould and determine our ethics, religion and manners. But economic deter- minism is itself only an incident of social immaturity. Bread want was never the true father of labor. Labor was never, under such direction, the true determiner of value, but was always its most essential, though sub- ordinate, element. Organization cannot be secondary in any value relation between men, and when organiza- tion entered, labor for bread became an anachronism. Organization, in one of its value-adjusting qualities, prevents questions of relative worth from being sum- marily settled among persons by force. The strongest man always buying in the cheapest market, and the weakest man in the dearest, but for organization. It is this value-adjusting power of State organiza- tion, in conjunction and co-operatioti with labor, that In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 209 capitalism is now preventing. Capitalism is an aggre- gation of strong men, stronger than any other aggrega- tion of men; stronger than the aggregation of labor, which, in this century, has become, and forevermore shall be, the natural aggregate. This aggregation of capitalistic men, being only a little less strong than the State itself, have now the power to compel others to buy in their dearest and sell in their cheapest market. Capitalism is now the great crime which prevents the social action of the world, from relating values truly, from bringing the personal need into friendly conta;ct with the public power. , But society will triumph, casting out all force and pressure now obtaining between man and man, by re- moving the private despot from every possible point of control over another private life, forbidding it to create or appropriate surplus exchange, social values; forbid- ding it to prevent the production of sufficient use or private values; and from doing any other thing that will retard the time when, by perfect State and inter- state organization, social and personal values shall be brought near enough to understand each other and to be harmonized, when every man shall get the whole worth of himself out of the nation, and the nation alone shall get the whole social worth out of every man. In money we thus possess the sacrament of society, the letter of the social and, therefore, of the spiritual life of our collective manhood. It had but a very rudi- mentary existence, even at its maximum, in the exchanges, of merchants. Sometime in earlier days it paid ransoms for whole cities or peoples ; sometimes it was, and is sometimes still, the sacrament of great afterthoughts in the way of public legacies; which would have been holier as forethoughts. But never could money have evoluted to its social pos- sibility as the external, alienable and portable symbol of man's power organized until contemporary labor as a force had found its pulse; until the single life of the world's business could participate and step out with 2IO Revolutionary Essays the rest of the army of mankind. The machine lifted ego into society and rallied the money experience of ages to keep tally between the person and the State. And now let us get rid of the man between — ^the capitalist. XLI. THE BALANCE OF LABOR. As an intellectual perception, an achieved positive power of seeing things collectivistly, Socialism is still in its infancy, and in this childhood it might long remain but that man's ability to see things that ai-e wrong is so much greater than his conception of right. This is the resurrection point which prevents the economic de- terminism of environment from setting eternal limit to the rising man. Long before we are capable of appre- ciating the prophecy and hope of Socialism, we know and condemn the hideous criminality of our private cor- porations of capital. Bribery, fraud, public theft and moral corruption are becoming dangerously familiar, it is true, but still we hate them. The Socialist mind is itself the collective hypothesis ; it starts with Socialism as its intellection ; .in this its intel- lection it sees, and to it, it assists society, approaching thereto through and by all -its economic and political facts. The Socialist mind knows that mankind is now engaged over the world in working its way through the hindrances and besetments which private propertyism (privation) has cast before its way to the moral destiny of Socialism. We know that a man must develop into mankind. We know that the race is intrisically one. We do not look to history or evolution as the cause of this, but the corroboration of it. Give human nature but half a chance, and it will quickly assert this social propensity. Capitalism is no more than an illustration, a fateful fact that man at work has manifested himself to be what he really is in all things — a Socialism. The force of the mind does not present itself just as_ the facts of matter do. Induction from point to point, and piece to piece, this is the method of the hand,- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 211 and so private mind must travel. Facts stitched to- gether are its historical surface of social force ; its evolu- tion is but the garment of man. Evolution is not inside the egg of history. I cannot look upon capitalism as the organized egg of the ages, out of which alone Socialism was-jilways to have been ulti- mately hatched, but I can and do look upon Socialism as having always been the inevitable, ultimate life of man after the first coming together of persons was effected, a conclusion which would have necessarily been hatched out of any form whatsoever which history might have taken. It seems to me that the mind in coming to any conclu- sion, always begins with its conclusion; and this con- stitutional habit of the mind is necessarily present throughout the science of social evolution. However thinly or thickly veiled, the evolutionist always has be- fore him a to-something ; for without a goal implied, or stated, evolution falls to pieces. Now, taking man as a worker, the most salient concept of him in the present age, let us ask ourselves why he works, and how. The master class finds its interest in maintaining the delusion that we work under the eternal necessity of making a living, each for himself. Although no such compulsion now remains in our history, we work to-day for the maintenance of society, and as a society organism we do that work. It is too freely conceded, even by Socialists, that each man within the social organism is still pottering on for self-support. Therefore, it is that our theory of exchange values is still a theory of private measurements, instead of being the theory of a public balance. Our concept of social labor has been clouded by the effort to reduce and apply it in concrete terms of the private life, in terms of days and hours and separate pieces of money commodity; the underlying isolism of this idea is in the measure thought, a measure of capacity, not of continuance — a pint measure let us say, instead of a yard measure. The latter, as an embryo, is the more 212 Revolutionary Essays social, having the element of continuance in it; the for- mer ends in itself or its consumption. A quart is not the continuation of a pint as a yard may be of an inch. The one is much more of a finality, with its consumption implied, than the other; and, therefore, it accommodates itself more satisfactorily to the requirements of the individualistic mind. But neither is it on the embryonic emblem of lineal measure that the Socialist mind will most restfully find its value concept. It will be better shown as a social balance. Our business in life as working individuals was first to find industrial correspondents to balance our social labor. Exchange began with a private surplus, and not a necessity. First, balance came by report from two extremities, and then it developed into a continuity all along the social beam. Surplus value arises through the diflference between our continuity of power as pro- ducers, compared with our cessations as consumers. When our theory of money and exchange values is translated from the terms of private measurement and separate pieces to terms of the social continuance, we shall have the basic concept that will endure for Social- ist thinking and Socialist use. Some themes there are which men must think out in their togetherness, themes which have to wait for explicit treatment on subjective, illustrative and support- ing conditions. In fact, there is a very extended realm of human perception for the right sweep of which the prepared and enlarged Socialist mind of a great multi- tude must be formed, subjects towards which thought must be as completely a big unit as society is now a big organism. But, though I may not formulate, I venture to indicate this line of balance along which, I think, our final theory of value shall be adjusted. AH despotisms aim at the institution of finalities for others, at the power of barring, the ability of others to go beyond the point of the master's requirement. It is the war of the fixed upon what may be called the fluent life — upon the freedom of another. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 213 Let us think of the work ability of men in society as an ability exercised solely to call forth the work ability of other men. The surplus things made by us are our work ability gone into forms to prompt the work ability of others. Social industry is, therefore, responsive; it is a provocation of the balance of labor. To find that bal- ance is the real goal of industrial political economy. But since money was forced before it as its blind finality, the labor of the world has lost its balance. In order that the work ability expressed in one labor form may not overdo itself by producing more of itself than there are overtures to be called into response on the other side of the individual circle, a travelling intel- ligence must be established, by which to invite diversi- ties of production. To produce something that will set another worker to produce another something in response, the mind of the first producer must be externalized from himself, his ability and his location. It is in this outlooking and externalizing of itself by labor that the sources of inter- national life were first revealed, and out of it came value and money. But because labor must be always a stay-at-home, the chances of the international life, being promoted by small labor, were always very much retarded. Roaming children, hunters, war prisoners, refugees and various nomads might casually inform small labor where to find balance; but nothing short of a direct and sustained in- telligence with many distant groups could secure the uniform and continuous balance which must finally succeed spot balance. Continuity of energy, time, quan- tity and quality must find an exponent between small labors, so that there should be no futile exertion, no want, no waste, and no contrast. This hypothesis assumes, so far, only one condition in the world — the condition of producing something for a balance. As the region of balancing widens the per- ception of one, social balance for all becomes human property. This sense of social balance becomes an im- 214 Revolutionary Essays perative demand for wideness. The beam is short which does not extend over all the world. On the path of its mission to discover the great balance of the race, labor must have either dropped its work and taken to roaming periodically, or some must become wanderers for more light on production. They must constitute themselves walking telegraphs between work and work. Perhaps it was not a heroic element that stepped into this telegraphy. But whatever they were, from the time they stepped into it, they became the embryonic State, which in itself never has been and never will be any other than what Socialists declare it to be, the intelligence of the nation's work and what I now call the balancer of labor. Without State knowledge, I may produce an impo- tency or surplus commodity. With such intelligence, it would not be possible for men to keep each other slaving, seeing that the line of desire limits both the initiative power of the commodity and the response to it. Since the pressure must be friendly among the free, there would be an entire absence of motive for continuing it beyond the point of liberty and comfort, after the work required becomes less desirable than the thing. One worker could have no motive for ' extending, by artificial means, the circle of another worker's wants, since he must either extend his own labor-time- or inten- sify it to supply those wants," or merely create to leave them unsatisfied. And there is no motive for him doing that. The end of the forced reactivity of another's work would be a man wanting more than he has the ability to create for, and here would end the incentive and the response. Bearing in mind, then, that the dynamic of indus- trial and, therefore, of all society, is the reactiveness of labor ability upon labor ability, through the power of the product and by social intelligence, we see at once the true finality to economic despotism. Desire limits labor, satisfaction bars out despotism, and the .balance of work stands true. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 215 Whatsoever it was that put the reactivenesses of laborers en rapport with each other, and kept them in it, had all the qualities of money in it, so that the man who travelled from point to point on the- industrial compass with intelligence for labor, was himself the first dollar. Money of the State has all the qualities of live labor ; it produces itself, it maintains itself, and it is the only defense on earth against itself. By its mobility it holds in solution the power of organization. It is the ability of reducing to one the differentiated and uninformed work of the world. It is, therefore, by far the greatest of human achieve- ments; it is truly the sacrament of social power. This conjecture as to the nature of money divides the nation into three zones, occupied respectively by the money-holding class and the mobile or money-passing people, and the people who must sell labor for money. Two fixed classes and one falsely fluid crowd. " Suppose," says the strong man lazy of the twen- tieth century, "that, instead of catching labor directly for my exploitation, I catch this pedestrian telegraph fellow, with his credit and his information. Suppose, instead of exploiting the workers directly, I exploit the lesser degen- erates who, like myself, are looking for a job of being out of work, but have not so well succeeded. I need not run about with them, but can run them about. Sup- pose I organize them for myself, and make a partnership of State power out of them, for since the intellectual " promoters " were organized, they showed symptoms always of becoming the State, through their credibility ^mong the workers, they have been a traveling State. They are the State because they are the travel ability of labor. This crowd confiscates labor on the one side and defrauds the government on the other — they have com- mitted themselves almost entirely to the cause of the true exploiters of labor, the fixed aristocracy ; yet the ex- ploitation of themselves constitutes the principle and 2i6 Revolutionary Essays direct activity of the aristocratic State. It is through their pockets that labor pays the State. Human society cannot be considered by nations. There is a whole fixed aristocracy in the world, and it runs America's middle class as a go-between for the con- fiscation of the world's other whole fixed class, labor. Aristocracies are not attacking labor. The workability of the world is supposed to have been securely conquered long ago by the fluid nature of money as manipulated by the middle people. A very early result of the advent of an increasing multitude of second-rate, lazy intellectuals developing into the foragers of the trading State was the separation and alienation of labor from labor by the very instru- ment that had achieved its balance. This is the paradox of money evolution. Work no longer by its reactiveness within the circle of its desires gives mutual incentive to its scattered self through the monistic man. The monism which money promised to scattered workers concentrates in its symbol, it is hermaphrodite. Workability is now dislocated, it passes, indeed, into commodity power, but not directly to the other worker as his incentive, it passes into an expression of a part of itself; the remainder dies into capitalism. Broken pieces of money are now the sole incentives and direction of labor into broken pieces for labor, but into solidarity for capital ; and in proportion as it is thus developed the trade State becomes more and more solid, until free labor is resolved into slavery and until at last slavery becomes conscious of it. Then labor begins to scourge the middle exploiters with many strikes, and the State begins to scourge them also, and scourged they will be until they vanish into one class or the other. At present our "politic" is versus our "economic" ; the latter is repelled to and kept on the outer circle neglected, or only touched to be deprived, wherefore that outer circle of the world's labor, lacking touch with the circulatory In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 2iy vigor of the national life, begins to feel its isolation. Like the hand or foot of a body in which the temperature has fallen through imperfect circulation, labor begins to feel the cold hand and the cold foot ; it senses itself as a separate part, it feels atrophy, it is class-conscious. Now the duty of the moving life, the mind, the money and the State, is to so balance the work of diverse laborers throughout the nation and world, that labor and labor alone shall be recognized as the incentive and pro- moter of labor. Understanding that the State has no care but this over its own health, and that the science of State-health preserving consists in especially maintaining such care over the slower motions of the body — ^the laborers ; the art of national living is a devotion to the interests of the slow man, he who is fixed to his work for tne good of all ; it shall care for labor primarily, and the rest will take care of themselves. So to balance the ability of work on one part of the circle as that it shall materialize itself in a commodity or power sufficient to stimulate and reward without con- trolling a corresponding work on the other, I take to be true political economy, and, therefore, I regard the entire limit of that science to be the subject of money as the balance of labor. And among the workers themselves the desideratum is to have labor and desire so balanced, one by the other, that want shall never make too much labor nor labor make too many wants ; when the laborer rests in the satisfaction his labor brings, and satis- faction rests, urging no more until the physical life and the life mind of the State calls us again to the balance of duty. I cannot understand money as an accumulation of any reality but metal, nor as true capital. I can only see in it the evidence of accumulative power and the sign of that organic ability which sets men to work — ^the eco- nomic State. I accept gold for the value that labor puts into the metal; under social direction for monetary pur- poses, it has become precious because of the social quest 2i8 Revolutionary Essays for it. The State has become a dealer in this metal com- modity, and I am forced to buy it from the big dealer. This metal in the hands of the money man stands between me and everything else oa earth, in society or elsewhere. It is his finality to me; it is the metal of interception, the non-conductor that shuts me off from the true State. With money I have to do all the time, and with nothing else. It does not stand for the social directive ability, guiding labor to satisfaction or equity; it is the abortion of what the money of a true State should be to me ; it is everywhere the handcuff of the working class. Money could have no power of itself to help or to hurt labor, for money is dead; it is with the class behind it after all, that labor has a reckoning. If I am struck with a dollar, it was surely some human life behind the dead coin that dealt the blow, or some human disease ; it was the class man in the State. The State is now diseased with this alienism from me and my welfare. It has withdrawn its interest therefore from its true self and given it to an aristocracy, to which has been entrusted the use of that sharp goad- money for the laboring oxen, and so the natural bal- ance and incentive to labor has been taken away. The State is no longer true to the manhood it should alone think for ; it has lost itself in the same sign as the laborer has been lost in. There is a stable element constituting the value of a thing, and an unstable, constituting its price. If the stable quality is what we call natural, the other is anti- natural. If the second were forced into conformity with the first, there would be an end to private profit. If the discrepancy between them arises out of the abnormal abil- ity of the private owner of the priced article to have and to hold it, as I assume, then these contras stand for two forms of compulsion, the public and the private. The urgency of my, need of the thing privately held and of the owner's ability to withhold it, is the pricing power. What, then, is the stable value, around which fluctuating price margins contend? I hold it to be inarticulate so- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 219 ciety. Society has given a value but has not determined it. To translate" its own undetermined values into prices seems, therefore, to be the science of social money. And upon what basis shall society arrive at this determination ? For things essentia:l to life, society should be the guardian of values, and social labor should be devoted only to the production of use values. And within this limit, to each according to his need from all, according to the common ability, would be the valuing process. This involves a corresponding limitation of money current. Currency should relate only to use values. In all other forms of industry the private person should have art liberty, and the products . of this liberty should be transferred by barter. This involves the dissolution of all merchandise in the necessities of life between man and man, and calls for the State's assuming the role of chief distributor in the commodities of daily consumption, and organizer in chief of all necessary social labor. And the present shopkeeper would be succeeded by the salaried distributor of community supplies. There would be a money of in- tercourse, or traveling money; and outside of these arterial fundamental services and privileges of man and man, there would lie the entire free realm of art and handicraft carried on in the unfettered right of indi- vidual barter. Social service would buy the private requirements. And only one universal stable element could enter into the price paid — that element could not be any other than so many hours of life labor to the dollar performed under public direction. XLII. PILLARS OF TRUTH. An unrebukable, an invincible outlooking of man- kind to some eternal ought-to-be, that is faith. Nature, experience, the constitution of the mind, or whatever other name may be given to the thing upon which man rests for his ought-to-bes, has given sanction and assur- 220 Revolutionary Essays ance that after certain antecedents certain consequences will follow; and the mind that unflinchingly looks for this, through the mists of delay or interception, is the mind of faith. I will call it nature's contract with labor, that if a man casts his exertions into the earth at springtime, sowing seed and tending, with the diligence of his brain and hand, the thing that he has sown, there shall come up out of the hidden resources of the soil unto his bosom a harvest, and his fearless onlooking to the later months for payment of nature's old, old custom is the faith of labor. And it is this faith of labor which all the other faiths of the world have grown from; it is this faith they follow but invert. In the simple demand of the proletariat that the wealth it produces is due to the proletariat we are thus on the foundational verity of human faith. It was out of this first doing in the dark, and nature's invariable endorse- ment of the doer and his work, that the first moral prin- ciple sprung. It is upon this first moral principle that Socialism now reasserts mankind's right to faith built upon work, and the credibility of nature as the source of law and consistency; and whatsoever disrupts this rela- tion between labor and its reward is as fundamentally the falsehood as the faith it repudiates is eternally the truth. 1 Self-extension appears to be the most invariably present effort manifested by humanity in progress. Look at childhood and tell me what so satisfactorily covers its restless efforts as this description—" the strug- gle for self-extension," its effort to be with, to be in, to be of its vast environing. Behold the rest of the human mind on laws outside of itself which is at once the beginning of science and of social obedience, as opposed to the unlimited inventions of dreamers, or the impositions of arbitrary powers un- explained, it is that which in our day is most characteris- tic of the man called Socialist. By whatever name we may finally designate our largest conception of this sure order- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 221 liness, whether it be evolution or involution, the recog- nition of an order outside is the Socialistic mental tem- perament; and this constitutes the greatest of all human guarantees for social obedience, for continuous study and for never-faltering progress. It is only out of an immensity of non-consenting, reluctant struggling centuries that there has come to us a will of the mind. Without some of it no society were possible; with it there is no limit to human progress. You who are Socialists in the service of the class and race know something of this sweetly sacred despotism of the mind once convinced. Without it the mind starving for will expression and the blossom of its energies to outer deeds wotild recall its saps and retire into the deep darkness of an eternal divorce from sunlight. For it, though so shamelessly defrauded by generation after generation of professional bud-nippers (legal, scholastic and ecclesias- tic); she still comes to our brains and urges herself out upon our will to do, and though it were but the consent of one little child in one century on a whole continent, that precious little consentor saves her patient rising for all the rest of us in the world until reason grows at last strong enough to bind the whole human will. Every man will not always be separately called upon to start again for himself along the whole of the billion- trodden pathway of the mind. The connection of all things now with all things that have been and that will be, is an assurance deeply planted in the program and well seen of the Socialist vision. How firm for hope, how strong for courage and inspiration is this knowledge that we are in and of the achieved past still achieving, and not as vain adventurous new thinkers. The solidarity of the world's labor is but a wooden footbridge, though of good oak, between the mighty organizing unit and directorate which we call the past, and its other, the future life of the race on earth, which -Socialists are to-day for the first time consciously beginning to organize and direct as a whole. In all its vast potentialities how it will dawn and blaze 222 Revolutionary Essays upon you who have already acknowledged society to be an organism and a continuity out of the past. And now, what is that strenuous-bearded fellow who follows after carnal love. He who in many ways acts so unlovingly? What is he but the tragic pathos of our blindly necessary fatherhood. The women of the Sabines shriek in his clutches. And you, who know history better than I, may easily fill up the dismal shriekings of af- frighted women, the discord of violence and foul ravish- m.ent and the mighty muddle of marriages by folly and gamble and might, marriage of rickety nobilities with rackety incomes having women tacked on to them. Mar- riage by lots, city lots, and what-nots, marriages by everything but that which truly has to do with mar- riage. Terribly befouled and battered though it be on the surface, it is of truest virgin granite, is this father hungering for children, this fatherhood that fights. The fatherhood that sufifers, that overcomes, and loves, labors and leaves to the world, not always overthankful to him, nor over appreciative, another victim, another slave, another master, master again by the love that fights and wins. Badly battered my poor lusting brother, sadly wronged and belied, thou hast fought thy hard fight for us and left us here, a few of us only wakening up to do thee a fraction of thine honor due. The pioneer and defender, and of late the enslaved sup- porter, of the material man, we take thy courage, thy per- severing, thy patient long labor in the intervals of pleasure and know thee to be greater than lute string poets sing thee. The strenuousness of this persistent mate hunter, his patience and his providing, his hod-carrying, his shield and his sword carrying above the cradle of the race, his plough, or his bow, his bench at the mill, his old bullet, his new ballot, his brawn. The strenuous vigor of the prole- tariat is in this fatherhood ; upon it, rightly instructed, the Socialism of to-day stands for its outleading from wage- slavery to the days of fearless marriage and faithful father- hood. By what he is and is not, by all the lessons of his wrongs and rights, by the pressure of him for a true set- In Socitlist Faith and Fancy. 223 tlement of clean and wholesome marriages, undefiled by dollars, we assign to his need, his grit, his fight and all his attributes of experience our gratitude. And you motherhood, you the perfector, who holds and hallows his strength; you who keep and bless, for peace and posterity, his conflicts and his stormy inex- perience, who give the family and the world its eco- nomics; the saver, but alas the yet unsaved one, thou art the spirit of Socialism ; thou, and thy cares. In all past times, howsoever fierce in its exactions, and unrelenting it willed to be, the property despotisms of the world were compelled to let thee go to cover there, away from the battle of bread that bread-eaters there might be, if for nothing more than more battle — even so ; if slaves they must have, thee they must release to the care of childhood. And in this release time was given for thee, and us through thee, to learn the sacred human art of caring for that which was artless and impotent, the apprenticeship and binding of strength unto the wail and want of the little one was the primer of thy hand, out of which the human race so slowly hath learned its alphabet of moral life — ^the life that leans down to, the life that lifts up and will not forget, and will not defraud the unarmed littleness of the world. XLIII. THE ELEMENTS OF REVOLUTION. The revolution is with us, it is a fact accomplished, the new doers and the new thinkers of it are next in order for a counter revolution. Not in the course of many centuries before have original philosophers been so com- pletely overtaken and left in their true and proper place amidst the economic facts, to explain and fertilize them; never before did they find themselves in conditions en- tirely revolutionized and prepared as a whole for one all- inclusive monopsychic philosophy. The conditions have become one condition, and that one condition, pressing severely and severally upon every individual life, gives the dynamic forces of discontent necessary to construct 224 Revolutionary Essays governments and theories of life befitting the revolution that has occurred in the economic world. Individualism and the competitive life are dead; capitalism has swept over them like a flood, leaving all crying for the new philosophy. The same philosophy could not always be true; or, to say it otherwise, that which may have been true before the development of capitalism cannot be true after it. While we are capable of perceiving that a few eternal ought-to-bes are dominating all philosophic thought and social relations as containers of the whole, the contained must change. The wise proverbs of man's former per- sonal striving for the excellent life, which were thoroughly true a few centuries ago, are nonsense now, for there is no more any personal life worthy of, or capable of follow- ing a wise aphorism. Truth is a product of the way we handle our conditions, and the way we handle them to- day is a product of yesterday's new wrongs and its new reasoning. The social order has been entirely subverted, one class dominates the race's skill and its way of living. Mankind's hands have been economically tied, and the whole world produces its living only by permission of one of its parts, which owns the machinery of skill and power peculiar to the age. It combines in itself the func- tions of work giver, rent taker, usurer, tax gatherer, lawmaker, and owner of the nation's forces for punish- ment and for war. Never was there a royal dynasty more utterly hurled from the right and ability of ruling than all the rest of the world has been deposed by capital- ism ; never did revolution so comprehensively call for new deeds. The most evil thing that has been achieved in the capitalistic revolution of DoUars-on-Top is the loss of conservatism for the life of the nation's working men. He feeds and saves all others; himself he cannot save. His life has become a crime of chance, imposed upon him against himself. The time is not far when men will look back with incredulous amazement at our crime and folly of com- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 225 pelling and being compelled to work for bread in the twentieth century of human history. Mankind, still trembling under the whip of money-kind, still crouching, whining for bread. It will seem to be a folly too vast, too incomprehensible for the new time to realize it. In an empire of immoral chance, what shall we call failure ? What can 'you fathers tell the children to do in order to insure bread and the dignity and the delight of right living through the coming years? If any moral order prevailed in our civilization, we could give tiie child a chart as accurate as the shipmaster's. It is said that it takes a wise child to know its own father. Yours, not knowing your moral bankruptcy, may think that you can tell him how to live. With your knowledge of life, he thinks you can tell how honor and comfort may certainly be attained. Now, what will you say to him? Will you tell him about this competitive, cut-throat, devil-take-the-hindmost philosophy of ours and recommend it as a sure moral foundation for honor and competence? None of us would want to deceive the child that way. If we were to tell the truth, a generous- natured child would shrink from us disgusted. Until we have a social morality that we are not ashamed of, we had better own up that we are living in a morally anarchist era ; and that he must e'en do as others do and drop with them into the muck swirl. Bid him find something to buy at one price and someone to buy it from him at another. He will find it necessary, no doubt, to be a liar; but he wont mind that after a little while, for competition is a great moral transformationist as it swings us into the crime of chance. What has become of righteousness, what of the better man? That man lies down, slumbers and dies among us for want of higher air, and higher food, and higher light. Men were never made to be mere organized nerve expresses rushing under pick-pocket pressure from the beginning to the end of life. Look at that train load of brokers getting home! As far as any kindly human 226 Revolutionary Essays light of interest in their fellow passengers is concerned they might be blind. Their eyes are only painted eyes, their heads are stuffed with paper bonds ; and parchment charters are their brains, they are only palpitating money- tellers — not men. Is this living? No, it is swilling, voraciously swilling out of moral hog troughs. These are the men who run that modern machine, the crime of chance, for our side of the street; and the crime of certainty, as they fondly beUeve, for their own. Will they ever call time ; will they ever pause and breathe and live? No. And herein is their condition worse than that of the laborers, for we shall be liberated. We are living in the crime of chance, the disease of competition, though no one competes but the poor wage earners. With us it is the single, mission of every in- dividual to get somebody else's money or his life. Food is raised not to feed, but to sell. Hunger, instead of being scientifically and humanely driven away from earth, is retained as a chief factor in the promotion of culture and the elegancies of life, that is for the upper stratum, the happy stratum, on whom the sun of profit shines until their souls are shriveled. Hunger, strange paradox, feeds hungry ai'mies — of self-advertising news monkeys, of fat philanthropists who live upon the profits of wage slavery, psalms, sub- scriptions and their pity for the poor. But it is too loath- some to follow the slimy crew through their crooked ways, to hear them libel the wretches whom they pretend to pity, to hear the city missionaries spread out their slanders at the tables of rich subscribers; to hear them plead against giving an3^hing away save through them, for "Indiscriminate giving lowers the self-respect of the poor." The self-respect, mark you! of those whom they have buried in the slime of the wage system. These men for dollars are playing at bowls with human skulls, and so the dollar has been legislated into a fearful thing for us in the hands of capitalists. Money means life, so many hours, days, years of other men's labors. If it were the gambler's own labor it meant, we In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 227 should say, "gamble away, and the world be well rid of ye." , But alas! it is with our sweat and that of our families that the man who corners wheat and gets cor- nered by another bigger gambler than himself, who cor- ners the cornerers. Whoever may lose in all this deviltry of organized syndicates, out of the life of the laboring man comes the pay. So this civilization of ours is not after all such a game of chance as on first sight it appears. Our social organization is sure and perfect for its two purpqses, which are these : To organize chance, and nothing but chance into tlie life of the laborer, and to organize certainty for the capitalist and his family for ever. So they sing: " To others the plague' a foe may be. To us 'tis a friend, not an enemy. On coffins and coffers alike it fills. And the richer we grow, the more it kills, Drink the plague! Drink the plague! " For months, for years may it spend its rage On lusty manhood and trembling age; Though half mankind of the scourge should die. My coffins will sell, so what care I, Drink the plague! Drink the plague!" I am not looking to history for the materials of this counter revolution. I am not demonstrating it out of a science of economic values ; I am placing it where to me it is most vital and sure, on human contemporary ex- perience, on the outraged life of the individual man who in his extremity repulses wrong; and in that extremity, finding that he cannot repulse it alone, repulses it with the others ; and so turning in with his revolt he becomes gregarious of soul. This new spirit of his is the be- ginning of the world's mental redemption, and towards this redemption, and for its returning, the criminals of capitalism had prepared a collectivist, material, economic highway. While slaying the helpless individual they were giving him a social soul and preparing for it a body 228 Revolutionary Essays and new thinking as radical and comprehensive as the crisis calls for. Never did a usurpation so perfectly pre- pare the forces and lay them in train for its own dethrone- ment as capitalism has done. What are the elements of revolution? The man who lives from week to week with the contingency of being evicted and so becoming shelterless ever im- pending over him. He who, being physically com- pleted, finds that his ability to marry is no longer a matter of personal fitness and comeliness, but one of money earning ; and that that is an ability over which he has no control, being in the hands of a class which has no compulsion to employ at all corresponding to the fundamental need of employment. The worker torn away out of his old relations to land and nature, and who has lost his earthhood among a mob of uprooted men like himself, walled up within the bounds and tenement cells of a modern city; where, though a prisoner at large, he has not even the security of bondage as to place or duty, but is a free slave of daily chance, and of expectation ; the man who knows not why he expects nor by what law, if any, his expectations of living are to be realized. An unhinged and altogether uncared for being familiar with uncertainty who, surrounded by the most perfect organic social forces the world has ever seen, is still a pensioner on manna which falls he knows not whence nor why. Who, when it falls, knows that he must toil so much to gather it or die, and then surrender so much of what he gathers or die. In the midst of amazing splendor, which he knows he has created, the man who must take grime and rags only for his share; who while permitted to live in the midst of all this profusion of things he wants, may gaze at them only under the shadow of a policeman's club — who must live among the foremost, latest life of the world's material abundance afflicted .by the ancient un- mitigated privations of the primitive savages, plain un- qualified animal hunger, the modem wage slave in a rag In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 229 world of his own. Every day the splendors of his age's achievement are clamoring about him for his admiration, while within himself still clamor the wants of the poor old animal man unsatisfied. A tremendous orgie of successful gambling flashes around him, producing a deep, silent, resentful discontent. Everywhere he sees another standard of life, power and enjoyment, which only crushes him with a sense of how short he has fallen of the age and city into which he has been cast. When this fellow was a man of nature, her flowers, her fruits, her perfumes, and her exhilarations were not thus so far away from him. Never before was he so insulated from participation in the things around him. He may touch the city, which has taken the place of nature to him, with his foot only. He is free, but only in the sense that he may move anywhere, though he must move somewhere, and yet he knows not where to move. Through the city the whole world comes in upon the proletarian. Europe, Asia, Africa are here with him; but all presenting the same unsympathetic staring splendor to the man who owns nothing and has no right of place or doing amidst this ingathering of achievers and achievements. Every day brings him news and evi- dence of teeming life varieties; all is vigorous change; revolution rings around him in strident notes, while he, nervously and mentally vibrating in the same pitch, be- cause he is the product and breather of it, must not quicken, lest he overstep the rights of property. His children he cannot teach; that is the duty of others; neither can he feed them, that is a chance from others. If he could see far enough and had power to match his vision, he would apprentice them to a trade, and inform them of principles to live by. But sad ex- perience tells him that his children, like himself, must endure to live tossed on the billows of industrial change. The mechanic of many years' apprenticeship may be swept away by a revolutionary machine into a useless- ness. And as for principles, there remains not one of 230 Revolutionary Essays general application, because that in a competitive life the success of one is the disaster of another, no one preliminary principle can apply to all. Business has swallowed up law, order and religion, and being itself only a new snap by which some swallow much (who knows why?) and others swallow none (who knows why?), and leaves the majority of all others the victims of a perpetual crime of chance, with the inside gamblers controlling our destinies at the dice box. Intellect has been dethroned in this vast immoral confusion. Phil- osophers, priests, reformers, all babble forth the uni- versal imbecility of the times. There is no light or lead- ing, no nobility of the mind, no heroic spirits capable of controlling the boundless confusion. The candlesticks are removed. The only thing positive and clear amidst it all is the physical factor, the depressed, unsatisfied ut- termost man, the element of the revolution. When this man is permitted to work, however, he becomes at once a participant in the full throbbing of the potential revolutionary life around us. . As a railroad hand, as a weaver of textiles, mark, what a transformation he is. In the former case he is part of an international network of communication with all human life. There is no single railroad, all are linked together — ^he is touch- ing and working and running upon the veins and nerves which run through the whole social family of man. Along his lines run the electric nerves by which he may make instant contact with the remotest points of the world's social being. As a weaver of textile, behold, he has himself become a textile, a warp and woof of human fingers and brains, extending through field, factory and mart, a broad, world-wide tissue of weavers weaving an organism, a solidarity of the loom. What has all this connectiveness brought to the worker? Impotency. It has all passed away from him and is against him. He touches the world market only to increase the power that is against him. The wires which flash messages of wealth and fulness under his In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 231 fingers to others, bid him away from them. His entire inheritance out of this whole triumph of modern civiliza- tion is a knowledge of power as weakness, the know- ledge of good as evil. A naked man, he looks upon the imperial robes of Csesars many multiplying around him — a hungry man, he perceives fiercely the fulness and delicacies of all the rest of the world's well-spread tables. He is a separation — ^he is an outsider, he is one of a class always deprived, he is the element of revolution. But he is something more urgent than this reflec- tion; he is an animal man, wounded and hungry. All other experiences fail to produce the rebound, but at this uttermost experience the basic physical man reaches his point of repulsion, and from here the counter revolution of proletarian Socialism sets in. In the individual man the germ is, from this physical creature (the individual never being other than the physical life), the natal re- sentment comes. Out of it is to flow henceforth all that is truly good and human through the revolution. The first experience of repulsion and return is not on property lines, for it was the evolution and maturity of property which drove them to that dark point of strenuousness that was almost despair. The return is marked by the first ihstinct of the utterly weakened, that is, the instinct to lean upon another. It begins with that, and by that it shall reach its millenial triumph. It is an affiliation of myself with the next man, and this affiliation, when formed and assailed as a group, unfolds the group consciousness. It is never as an assailant, but as a defendant, that class-consciousness is formed. Had the uttermost men been left to themselves to worry their way in unhindered, they would have remained individualistic, reserved for another experience. But the property class assails and pre- vents them, and thus in its own blindness prepares the new spirit and the new habit of men affiliating for human po- tency, forming themselves into groups and classes against the property crush developing in themselves and through themselves, out of their naked human helplessness, the 232 Revolutionary Essays power of that naked giant of co-operation, fellowship and organization, the working class conscious and in conflict. Nature and business, after long years of fulness, have not reached him with any more than the bare necessaries of surviving life, yet because of the interceptors, when nature remits her superfluous bounty, lo! famine smites in his home first of all, and multitudes of him must die, poor, utmost extremity, before the fortified interceptors begin even to admit that there is famine in the land. When business superfluously fails, on account of this man having made altogether too much of everything under business direction, which its ability for further direction is unable to dispose of at a profit, why, then, this poor uttermost extremity man must die in great multitudes while waiting for his masters to dispose of, by tricks of trade and stupidity, the superfluities he has created, and for lack of which he now must die or dwindle close to the bone until the crisis is over. When plague and pestilence come in the ships of the traders from foreign parts through the filth of un- savory greed, the reckless activity of profit hunting, the merchants themselves with audacious promptness declare that the infection comes to their ships in spite of their scientific and moral precautions, because of contact with some nasty people who are not rich and, therefore, looking for work, came on board. But no matter whence it comes, the whither of this devastating power makes fatal speed for the homes of the half-fed, overworked man. The wails of the widows and orphans are heard therefore in his slums first, and the faces of the escaped, yet lamented dead, look upwards out of his dark tenement chambers always first; nor ceases the wrong there to smite these elements of the revolution. Because through the long years of his struggle for a loaf this man did not buy a lot of land from the profit- mongers, in which some one might hide his body when dead, the moral etiquette of society is to cover his dead body with what odium remains of all that was heaped upon it when alive. His carcass is delivered to the In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 233 surgeons to be mutilated for the further enlightenment of the doctors, who thus are highly educated for the surer medical health treatment of the property men. What remains of the cadaver is then unceremoniously thrown into the Potter's field. The class that potted all human life into profitable sweat broth now pots the old bones there. And that place is haunted with social reproaches coined against poverty by the hired prophets of the master class, and the graves of it bear no record of who is the slain beneath. Chiefly because in a few years they must be all mixed up in a cheap compo, for burial ground is now worth more money than human bones. If, while yet in his normal life, he was so hurt as to ask for human help, an army of official hunger harpies of the moral per- suasion are set upon him to accuse him, that the eyes of the better minds may be turned away from the profit criminals themselves, who alone have brought about this need. "Oh!" cry the harpies of charityless organizations, "what a bad man you must have been to become poor! What is the innate vice of you that has led to your^ lacking a coat? Come hither, improvident wretch, and let us probe your miserable carcass' career. Ha, ha! Rheumatism here, the well-known result of beer drink- ing. Go hence, you seedy varlet; you ought to be ashamed of yours'elf. Go hence, or we shall find stones for you to crack at nothing per ton, for the reduction of our taxes." In vain he cries out that they have mis- diagnosed his case, and shows that it was no coat first and then rheumatism. But what knows he about him- self compared with the world's official scientificness and charity, which are interested in maintainiiig that it is beer first, then rheumatism, and then no coat, and that it is vicious improvidence all the way along with this element of revolution. Yet, again, reverting to his normal days, what has he known concerning his children. The church tenderly prepared his soul for heaven while co-operating with the profit-mongers ' in the preparation of an infallibly 234 Revolutionary Essays working machinery system of production which could act only as an inclined plane to the nadir of mansions above. How diligently the schoolmasters taught his boys to coimt figures of money and manipulations of things pertain- ing altogether now to the business of the master class. Bookkeeping to save the master's brains, typewriting to save his time and hide his hand caligraphy. How diligently out of the whole school were the near servilities separated from the uttermost workers and sent to tech- nical schools and stuffed with class animosities and con- tempt for the physical worker, whom it will be their commission later on to drive with the scorpion whips of freedom, those sharpest whips which whip a man to the heart for not running away while he has the constitu- tional right to do so, but which right, because of profit economics constitutionally won't let him, and therefore he stays, and therefore, by interpretation, he whips him- self of his own volition, and in the exercise of his political right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, he sur- renders all of them. What of the baby worker? While it is being raised up into an exploitable maturity of muscle, how many mischances menace it, and how many of them are the direct mischance imposed by the evil genius of the profit- mongerers' civilization? Does it nourish at the breast of mother ? Then is it a dear baby indeed ; for the milk she gives is the milk of reluctance and impatient need of getting back to the factory. Does the babe nourish at the fount of patent infant foods ? Then, tell it not where there are cheeks_^ to blush, and hide it from us, ye public analysts, the adulteration and commercial infanticide that takes place by the cradle of the working woman's child. In sickness how forlorn is this mite? The medical man of the times we live in is a business man ; he has invested many years of study for profitable money returns. His father invested in him the family dollars in preference to investing it in stocks and shares ; he must fructcify the thing committed to him in dollars. Interest and divi- dends must now come as medical fees. And what can In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 235 the poor sick toiler do to yield that usury out of the sick child's cradle? He can not satisfy the professional ne plus ultra fee man. Time is money. No, gentleman in good practice can afford to give the child careful diag- nosis or the father; they must be content with a touch and a glance, all they can pay for. Treatment comes forth at the bidding of dollars only. "Get more money. Get well quick or quickly die," they say to this element of revolution. The child is young; suffering, privation, and the dull-eyed anxiety which surround him at home have not yet altogether killed the play out of him. He pleads with mamma to let him go out on the street and play. He goes, and her heart and her fears go with him ; while he plays, she suffers. She has been taught that all the evils she sees about her are the results of bad personal influence, and that all the good she longs for flows from good people, rich people, of course. So she suspects and hates the neighbor's children; everybody's child is bad. Oh, if she could only let her dear one play up on Fifth Avenue, where all the children are nice. Ah indeed, if she could, this would not have happened; for up there there are no trolley cars. What is that dreadful shriek? Oh, her poor foreboding heart! What is that great shouting down there, and the thumping of many feet on the stairs? Oh, her poor foreboding heart! Yes, they bring the mangled form of that which had alone been the light of her life and lay it at her feet — another victim of the trolley. And now I remember, when the other boys grew up, with what diligence the profiting class made them imbe- ciles by strenuous rough-rider literature, the foul fizz of cheap theatres, and by inoculating them with false princ- ciples of false and unfructifiable ambitions or the big brutahties of competition, assorted to keep all the boys in a normal condition of play rivalry until they are ready to fly at each other's throats in the poor bread-winner's real economic competition, for the benefit of their masters. Neither can I forget how many were the traps, 236 Revolutionary Essays how many the must-be's by which the youth was almost invited or quite fated to fall, upon slight indiscretion, into the hands of the jailer ; and never can I forget with what relentlessness tlie unemployed young men were hunted into criminology by the brutal immorals of police and magisterial practice. Labor has been entangled in the collectivism of the profit-mongers' net of criminology and degeneration. He feels society at every call of nature, and feels it only, oh, infinite shame! to be his pursuer. He is over-shad- owed and perplexed by the power of association, but it never breathed the spirit of any fellowship with him; it is all an otherism to him ; he belongs to the disinherited and helpless class. He is one of the elements of revo- lution. When the boys were in work and made a move on behalf of a better manhood, a move in line with all the achieving intelligence of the time, the priests and philo- sophers arose to smite them. They must not organize, that should be left to everybody else ; labor must be what profit wants it to be, a perpetual weakness; therefore, labor must not organize; to organize is unchristian and un-American. When the strike came on, then appeared the meaning of the special selection process that formerly took place in the schools. The clever boys who had taken most readily to the class pap, the class clothes, class sports, race track, horse show, automobile ambitions, turned their backs on the striking laborers, put on the garments of soldiers, and, with the guns of the sacred nation, shot the people down. That otherism of the profit-mongers had set up so many arbitrary little artificial classes within the great natural classes that the boys who had work in them were surely thrust out to the deadly side of the barricades, on the uttermost circles of wrong, while the boys who had words in them, and pen and ink, and dandyism; who wanted money and had supple knees, were promoted to the buttoned ranks of one of the circles of servility. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 237 When greater war came on, how was it that the otherism of capital called not upon their shadows in buttons to go forth to death? Why is it that on the labor other- hood ever falls this last most wicked blow of all the real wrong of life, the battlefield?' Why must this essence of all real calamity, this evil of evils, be pressed only to the lips of the workers, while the men who concocted and brewed the hell are at home praying for their own vic- tory? Why? Because war is a racially fundamental effort, and only the fundamental man can fight it. The arbitrary, artificial men, who have seized all the funda- mental realities of life, are not able to wield them when it comes to war — they call in the true men, the workers. The men who command them are, it is true, the owners of banks and factories in many cases. They can see them now every day and feel them. But, oh, what im- personal not come-at-ables these same officers used to be in the little skirmishes for extra cents. When the workers strove then, which of them could see Mr. Penny- picker? He refused to recognize them; he had nothing to arbitrate. He dwelt behind cordons of red official tape and belts of unpierceable business partitions. Oh, this class, class, class, how it repulsed and thrust the worker back with its gold-tipped staves, its sneer, its scorn, its morality, its frown, its heavy, sharp force, until the iron entered his soul and he, repulsing, became a class, the element of revolution. And what may be said of the aged proletaire? Alas, let it only be sighed as we see his bent and withered form limping to his grave, which we are all interested in seeing him speedily enter. And of the woman, what? Why, this. She is the parasite of a parasite's dependent. She is the very outer- most wrong of us all, and that proletarian movement wherein she does not move is, therefore, no proletarian movement at all. But there is that very hope coming to us out of the final crime of capitalism. The women are being driven to the factories, and, therefore, the true counter 238 Revolutionary Essays revolution, the naturally uttermost-wrong begotten revul- sion will come from her against capitalism, and then be- gins the end, when women join the elements of revolution. XLIV. THE GOSPEL OF ORGANIZATION. It is one affair for a thing to be moving ; it is another affair for that movement and thing to be directed into universal relation. Life gets a move upon matter and keeps it going; but organization gets a direction upon that union which keeps them on the world's grand tableau of all things moving together; which keeps the universe balanced, without any other foundations or pillars than the sustaining energy of harmonious motion itself. That mobilization of motion, in its sustaining power, in all its intelligence, is the nerve which will at last hold every particle of matter, now the universe, in solution. We are not writing laws for motion; let us relieve ourselves of any such delusions. We are not discovering some laws by which motion is to be directed ; we are sim- ply liberating matter motion and our own minds on to the world's movement, which is the ultimate in itself, and which will look after its own laws and us. That the movement of the world started with any other law than the necessity laid on when it took hold of the first anarch moments of catastrophic falling away, I cannot see; I am content to believe that there is no other, and can be no better reason given or required for them, than that law of predestination which descends out of the first thing done, and the first habits formed by creation's earliest movements with one another. With nothing else in all imaginable creation have we any vital, that is, real interest but with its collective movements. There may be facts, infinity may be full of them ; but no fact is a truth until it moves ; therefore, no fact is real to us until we get a hold on it and it gets hold of us, and we move each other with a whole world move, and go together marching out through human life and its relations. Things that are not so moving nor In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 239 so movable, though not necessarily out of the human world, are at present, to our intellects, only unavailables ; they are out of our interest ; they are lay-by's. The urge of human society is the same as the urge of the universe, to get all its life detentions loosened into the liberty of organization — ^the liberty of organization, mark you! not the liberalism of mere caution nor the liberty of fear, running away, such as we give to our workmen, but the liberty of the whole race's organized together movement. The intelligence of the social mind, which will grow as any habit of the body does, with a free and courageous belief in the divinity of all thought, and a free and coura- geous use of it, can, in time, enable any man to see the mind detentions by which he is surrounded and by which the ruling classes are still, in the interests of pri- vate property, entangling his feet, his feet which eventu- ally and in the last analysis, are the feet of his mind, his hands, which still, I say again, are the hands of his mind ; and he will discern that, as in the universal space, there be bodies of fire or of half-fused matter, or of loosely co- hering vapors, or of firmer-bound substances. So his mind masters are holding energies of his, detained from co-operation, rolled up as it were on reels and held away from the movements of life. The social thinker will hear, with a sorrowing heart, the secret sigh of the century's statesmen about what they shall do with the world's human ena-gy; when he knows that the tragedy and crime of statesmanship consists mainly in having this sigh to make, by their willing only, to keep that energy away out of the blessed life of labor's organ- ization. He will mourn the paradox that resorted to a vast institution of machinery in the last century to mul- tiply the productive power of human energy, long before the resources of organization had been applied, or at- tempted to be applied, socially, to the fields and raw material of the world, by man as he was. To call forth stored energy from the heart of the world before the time of its natural birth, before the social man was born, be- 240 Revolutionary Essays fore the race had passed through its period of moral gestation, to hasten its birth pangs and bring forth the giants of steam and electricity, to hasten this catastrophe of a vast mob of liberated wealth-producing forces ere man had been taught to lay hold upon any existing great thing for humanity's use; to send them like avalanch showers down the valleys,, crashing out decent life and work from the cities — to send these monsters of econo- mic productive energy hurtling down upon defenseless labor, and then, to cry, in sight of the wild immoral energies of their own releasing. What shall we do with the world's surplus energy? — this to hear and see is to sigh. The social man knows of an evolution which, though this catastrophe has retarded it for a season, will soon make its footsteps heard upon the streets ; he knows an evolution of motion. The working man knows of a direction, a power that controls descending catastrophes — he knows of the gospel of organization, which gives social direction to all personal and private energies; and there finds he room and use enough for all. The matter of the universe shall yet be held out, even as a woman spreads a fluttering silk, and every atom of it shall be supported by an energy just equal to itself in poise ability, and the whole supported together in one vast scroll of connected sensitive life, the stored story of ages, of things, and of mortals, now immortal who had felt and known in the lives of long ago. The transient shall become master of the fixed; mo- tion and organization shall have entered matter, and matter and motion shall have entered organization. Even so shall also human life be knit together in society by the gospel of organization. The social man shall no more mourn the mishaps of a great private selfism, launching upon the race its age of machinery and un- paralleled wealth production — before the moral time, a millionaireism of weapons for destruction in the midst of a morally pauperous generation. He will mourn it no longer, because the working cks? by then shall have In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 241 pulled itself together and laid hold of this volcanic sur- prise; the working class shall be organized just to give an answer to that cry of the statesmen, concerning what the world shall do with its surplus energy. It shall not be ruled off in gold pieces and detained for private reveling from public expression. That gold piece, the sacrament of society, shall no longer represent only half the divinity of social organization; it shall no more represent merely a State's organized control over the production of wealth; but the whole blessing shall be pictured there, extended to the distribution of wealth to the utmost of public need and comfort. Money will not be a half sacrament any more, wine for the idle and gall and vinegar for the worker. It shall mean life equally organized into action and work for all. Organization in every city and village will have found its own accord- ant motograph with all the nation, with all humanity, and, I believe, with all the universe. The social man will no longer say of a thing: "Is this a universal fact which you are teaching me?" He will know that organization is the fact of facts, the truth of truths; that it is not a statement on organization nor an organizer's statement that is true only; but the thing that goes — that is truth. The truth is not at the end of a journey nor in the words prompting it ; the truth is in the journey itself ; the truthing is the moving together. We shall some time shake off from us this delusion of objective fact, miscalled truth, either as being a thing in itself or as a true statement, in any other sense than as it is a mobilization of thoughts and men ; and we shall know all truth to be our getting-a-move-on-us with the rest of living humanity. We shall know the truth and the truth shall make us go freely. Only that much of the universe, therefore, and only that much of mind to me is true, which pictures, corre- lates, or is passing with me through organization. I know that I am not the truth. I know that I do not know the truth. I know that the truth is not a great big 242 Revolutionary Essays man or a great big God; but I know that it is the very great big organizing movement common to man and the universe, and whatsoever picture, talk or book has this organic life-urge in it is a motograph of truth. The social man will see society no more confronted with this unnatural problem: "How shall we bury hu- manity's surplus energy so, as to keep it from being mobilized into the common march of living?" He will see himself and his Socialist comrades at last awakening to the true problem: "How shall we learn to defer and temporarily reject all other interests out of our minds than those that are movable, upon the living issues of life and labor, and live in a world of such thoughts and deeds only as are vitally moving the great present-day motograph of Socialism. It is not needful that I should pause here to tell thee by name, comrade, some of these things which will not so move ; some of the things which, though they may be facts, are as good as no facts to us ; some of the things that are not motographic for living men; things that you cannot get a move on in a property ethic or in a problem of labor organization. John Bunyan wrote a book called "The Pilgrim's Progress," every line of which is dead; it is absolutely devoid of the organic elements of thought or deed. If there be dead parts in the Bible, this book of Bunyan's is a plaster mask taken from that dead face; yet, all over the Christian world, men, women and children, having acquired the habit, because they are men, women and children, of assembling together (the one habit which has kept religion religious throughout the ages), are detained to this very hour in thousands of places taking pictures of, and giving lessons and addresses on, that dead plaster face. The few hours of the human race's most tremendously important and potential time, the time of sacred childhood and leisure given to the learning of why we are here, are devoted to the study of this or some other plaster mask. In the schools you will see the art of the plaster-maskers reduced to a fine In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 243 art. I beseech you look at them, and tell me if you can imagine any other reason behind the contents of the monthly magazines b^it this same one of plaster. How can you get a move on the contents of a modern novel? What elements of world-marching are there in a Sunday newspaper. Take any religious magazine and tell me what evidence you have that the editor does not live in Mars, save for his familiarity with such cant phrases of successful property as are now playing the ghost dances of ego morality over the grave of vital religion in the Christian churches? The idealist of Socialism is no longer the idealist of olden times. The idealist of the Berkley type, and the crude, raw materialist who had a law of nature fixed for everything, were practically so very much alike that if the world of captive mankind was ever to get a move on it, we were compelled to get something more than Berkley's picture gallery of a universe outside, kindly held up by God before men for their wonder and admiration, and something more than evolutionary laws of nature, working us into something with a sort of cold, capricious turning of a handle to let us out, at one period monkeys, and then capitalists, and then divine egos. Leaving, in fact, nothing alive, save a few cold gazers, scientific professors, who are so imperturbably serene in their knowledge of how things are hitched under the reign of law, and turned by the handle of evo- lution that they look to me always like a baby with a quizzing glass, smiling cynically at its little doll, saying: "I know what's inside of you — sawdust; psha!" The real vital world of captive humanity will get no move laid on it by these superlatively wise people or their wisdom. The idealism of Socialism must be a vital- ism ; it must stand between dead pictures and dead laws, and be itself the move that is to be got on. Not the move of the individualist, who breaks the gods up into pieces to make middle-class British tradesmen and Ameri- can ballot gamblers out of them. Not the move of the ego character evolutionist, which sends every human 244 Revolutionary Essays being in the family of man out, each on a separate hunt after a character of his own, the in-itselfness of which none of them can know till the hunt is over and the last gasp of the hunter has been surrendered into the air. Not the move of the biographists, who imagine them- selves to be scientifically writing out the biography of the universe from an ethical point of view, and with privately property ethical intent, and calling the product evolution, binding it into a volume, and sending it to some other universe for guidance in the way that universe should walk in the light of the experience of the universe, whose evolution has thus been so wisely prepared and presented. No; the idealist of Socialism will not be an idealist of pictures, or of laws, or of biographies. He will not be a man accustomed only to look upon life as a meditation, and upon its factors as thoughts noted down and hurried off to the printer. He will not be a man standing up teaching things. He will not be a man of formal logic, who would think it a disaster to let his thought run away with his private interests. Through him the world of men will be taught to gather out of books and all other sources such organic thoughts as are germinal, and these truths shall be drawn to the brain of the organizer as to a magnet. XLV. COLLECTIVE DETERMINISM. Whether one happens to like it or not, organization at the cost of, and yet to the enrichment of the individual, is the gospel of the age. At the cost of the present ridiculously maintained individualism Socialism must surely win out. To organization it is our doom as persons either to be subjects or auxiliaries. Whether more or less isolation will suit us as well is no longer a question in order. We are simply in organization, and he alone is wise who gets him ready as a personality to make terms with the victor. My lord ego has lost his coronet and is at his best but a parasite on organization — on money, called society. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 245 or on labor, called money. Let us who are thinkers recognize this spiritual mastery of the age and be re- solved to be saved by it. Thinkers from all quarters of the world, like the scouts of a menaced army, are running in towards the So- cialist concept from their posts on the bleak watch points of individualism. Ultra metaphysical individualists have burned the ego nest out in search of material for their thinking, and not being able to find twigs enough, they are beginning to explore the roots of the tree on which the nest lay for the subconsciousness of themselves. These are unconscious submissions to the advancing gospel behind whose golden trumpeters the race is march- ing out of individualism to the collective life and the gos- pel of organization for its own sake. Now, there are two sides to this mightily real move- ment. First, the proletarian movement, to get the bodies of the industrial class from under the ruins where the golden gods of society require to have us kept forever in living tombs of labor for the production of respectable people; and second, the mental inside of this great awakening, the collective clustering of the world's best minds around Socialism. It is only among the moral invertebrates of our second and third-rate thinkers, and the hired writers who do not think at all, that the labored efiforts of Spencer to form a federation of the sciences into one philosophy for the cultivation of an aristocracy are seriously trotted out as the age's gospel or its philosophy. Darwin as a naturalist is accepted, but Spencer has not by a long way succeeded in wedding the- faith and atheism of the age together in the interests of property, as he, for so many years, labored to do. For it seems to me that the master thought of that brilliant man from the first collection of his essays has been the evolution of mankind through private property and on into such governmental and per- sonal qualities as its getting and its keeping might develop. The whole country outside of labor is dotted with 246 Revolutionary Essays societies, meeting together for the study of what they feel can be no longer intellectually averted — the collectivist life. If some of them are cautious and pass the subject around the drawing-room table at the end of a golden tongs, we should not be too censorious. The workman has nothing to lose but his chains by the fretting of this leaven of socially organic thought, while the men and women referred to have to lose apparently all that has been heretofore deemed valuable. Organization as a class conflict will have its roll of martyrs among the laborers, no doubt; but as a gospel for all, organization calls for a peculiarly noble army of thinkers among the other class. It has been slowly percolating through the thickest of self-conceits that, economically, the sufficient-in-him- self person is following the dodo. To practical men it is more than an apprehension, it is a fact that, unaided, a man can do little for himself. Untaught, unprovided, unarmed of society there is no man; and it is only in the insincere professional cant of persons looking for flattery or looking for slaves that the world is still said to be, to every man, what he makes it. The Bounderbys still groom themselves down with a glow of self-admiration, but " the self-made man," if you put a light to him, proves to be a man of straw. " What do you know ? " was the scoflf and sneer with which the college prig once knocked down the son of labor. "What does anyone know," is now the laborer's answer. Until I need to know, how can I tell how much we know. But my knowledge is in the social trust. So- ciety is my cyclopaedia. This society of mine is a teeming brain; it has my special knowledge in scores of care- fully kept bureaus. I am not so eager to sharpen my private sword, or load my mouth gun with this special knowing as you in your poor savage days of competition were. Society is my organism. I seek to do well my part ; there all the honor lies. Yours was a society of pri- vate money, private cunning and private power; mine is In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 247 only an organized morality. I know as a mass, I do as a man. Society now is maintained on its moral side by re- wards and punishments for the person; a most ridicu- lous society, for we retain the same rewards and punish- ments long after the personal responsibility has mani- festly faded away. For that which a man could do, or could leave undone in one age, was fixed a punishment in that age, but we continue to inflict that same punish- ment long after the power of doing or leaving undone the thing we therefore sinfully call sin has passed away. After the offender's will has been taken by society, and his mind, and his opportunity, and his ability have passed out of him, we still send him to hell to roast in the same old temperature for the same eternity. That monstrosity is new calmly unthinkable. Man is part of a social organ- i;5m, and you cannot roast one without roasting us all. The very success of our present property indi- vidualism casts out the slave classes required for wealth- making from the realm of respectable knowing ; it takes as much time to be a good wage slave as to be a millionaire, and a great deal more temperance. The cost and difficulty of specialization establishes ignorance as the permanent normal condition of all men considered and compared as individuals. Thus, at last knowing itself, which hereto- fore was all that philosophy aimed at, becomes discred- ited; philosophy on the sea shore still gathers its baby pebbles, and so it must until the sea shore itself is our philosophy. Knowing is no longer the urgency of man ; we .ire being slowly but surely driven into the ideals of doing together, of collective man-building, of inter-mor- ality, and, therefore, the ideal of organization is the gospel of the race. From the heterogeneous to the homogeneous, directly inverting Spencer's persistent formula, is the march of humanity to its best futurity. Socialism, as a mode of administration set over against individualism, is surely to be the outcome of this gospel, but the gospel of organization is greater than any of its results. It now precedes Socialism, it shall hold 248 Revolutionary Essays Socialism together when capitalism has fallen; and if in the far future Socialism itself shall make way for any further development of practical public life, the principle of organization shall declare the old Socialist forms to be void and then shall call the new forms in. Organization being the social moral life principle, itself reinains through all vicissitudes the one gospel of religious and social life, it contemplates itself only ; it is at once the subject and the object of all men's private and collective activity. Let us not forget that the necessity for the collective life, the call for this gospel of organization, has not been a proposition worked out in somebodies' minds and put into " Whereases " and " Be it resolveds." Among the realities of the human race, scarcely second to the moun- tains and rivers around us, there is our history, whatever that history was — ^whether it was as our verbal history tells, or was unverbal, it is the main reservoir of man's life. Our opinions, our wills, our habits, our likes, and dislikes come, like our industries, from a whole human past to a whole human present. Man to-day is a child, led by the past to the future. The inner side of our movement, which is as potent as environment itself, is the soul of society organized against its own bad habits by its own experiences, its own single fighters and collective fighters; by its own com- munity conscience. The hand that leads the child to-day from the past to the future is the spiritual sum of history, the subconscious whole product of the past. It would indeed be a terribly isolate and hopeless thing, this life of ours, if the past were dead. But look around you and see if the past be dead. Nay, it appears to you in every atom of your experience that you are the past. In the past there have been good and evil, things that should have perished but survived for lack of revolution, things that survived which rather should have perished for lack of revolution. Because the race is so very much older than capi- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 249 talism and draws its mind and conscience from a very much wider circle than that which supplies railroad presi- dents, we have a big injunction for the railroad president. The intellect and the conscience of the race organ- ized against its own bad habits is a warfare only against anarchy. Thoughts, more volatile than habit, and con- science long buffeted and tempered through human his- tory, are united in this new gospel which raises the protest of smitten labor for a share in the age's conquests, which should have been victories over toil and poverty. Whose missionary footsteps are those upon the mountains? The racially inspired conscience of unsatis- faction they are. The racially maintained manhood of strenuous unrest which forbids us accepting the reign of wrong without protest, this is that which organizes men to-day against unrighteousness. In other ages, conscience had not the present-day necessity laid upon it of being an organization. In days when teally so much world work could be intelligently done by every man, private conscience was a positive private monitor, but in our time it is only a protest. Wrong having become altogether a social and economic hurt, the conscience passes otit of the private life and becomes resistant against the new forms of contempo- rary evils; it is an organization, it is man's moral unrest, which has never yet found its final statement, and it is ours to follow. It is the soul of history now proclaiming the gospel of organization. No decent civilization, nor great combination of men, can be maintained on a philosophy of accidents. A philosophy, though born of accident, is nevertheless no philosophy at all, save in so far as it antagonizes its natal accident. " War," we may say, " in human experience, is to be the cradle of peace." That much concerning the past, and by way of conjecturing how the future peace of the world will be confirmed out of man's long tragic ex- perience. But the philosophy of it all is neither the thought of it, nor the conscience of it, nor the war, nor the peace of it, but the overcoming. 250 Revolutionary Essays No philosophy of human life can be a reconciliation to the accident. Non-resistance is truly the gospel of despair. We come into our century as chariot drivers, holding in our hand the reins of many horses, and the strength of the driver is to hold them together. The horses may be as old as the century, but the holding hand is older than the century; it is order, it is organization, it is the way of Socialism. It is the way all vagrant life must go — it is, if you will, the despotism of harmony, it endures no discords — it is the law of least variation, the final law of humanity. The historic process by which we have come to the conclusion that war was the cradle of peace should have led us to see that war on our wrongs is a preparation for war on our evils, the physical for the intellectual struggle, the survival of the fittest kind of struggle rather than a surviving from struggle, a moral and intellectual evolu- tion by the rejection of ill-proffered varieties of con- flict. By rejecting the accidental wars and selecting or fighting for the establishment of those -that are funda- mental. , It was quite in order for the early Socialists to em- phasize the economic ascendant over laws, morals and religion. Such indeed had been our actual experience during a civilization which laid itself so low down as to be only a conflict for bread. But the very conditions which had provoked the indignant cry of the critics, " Be- hold, the whole spiritual, moral and political life of the race has fallen into the hands of those who have the economic control," revealed that this was rather a con- dition discovered and an explanation thereupon than a permanent philosophy. For what will there be master- fully permanent in the bread-and-butter supply of Social- ist times that the economic shall be more than a passing determination? What can it do then so potently to deter- mine mankind's" thoughts more than to supply one topic in preference to all others for him to determine what things shall be rejected and what preferred as proper for the activities of public life? Greater than the things to In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 251 be determined is the determiner. The intelUgence that fifty years ago discovered itself to be entirely the creature of economic conditions and not of an arbitrary God, is the same mind which to-day recognizes that former discovery of its own, to be part of its evolution along a broader line, it finds that and the discoverer himself to be mentally part of our greater human intellect, which when indi- viduals are organized shall determine its own economics. The elasticity of thought above physical environment, together with a cohesiveness of conscience and morals, coming out of the whole past, which is a greater thing than any single part of human history, whether it be known as the middle ages or as the present time, is assumed by every protesting agitator. In the single life the affirmative may be sometimes true, but the negative to felt wrong is always true and almighty. It was quite in order for that generation of thinkers struggling out of the grave clothes of church institution- alism half a century ago, while in the act of rejecting these cerements, to reject the old doctrines that put them there, in favor of the practical doctrine of economic law, which visibly and audibly called them out. But it is in the nature of all quick flittings either to leave too many things behind or take too many things with them. Socialists, in their first rapid packing up, took too much economic determinism and too much heterogene- ous evolution with them, but I think the gospel of organ- ization calls for a halt here. We are neither running back to individualism through old theology nor forward to it by an evolution of favored types of persons, deter- , mined by the improved conditions of property under Socialism'. We have found the fulcrum and the faith of the race in the organization of human fellowship. Is it true that there is a community conscience, mor- ality and intellect? I answer: It is not true that there is any other conscience, any other morality, or any other intellect. You may pervert individuals, groups, classes, or whole countries as to the local administration of the intellect, conscience and morality, but you cannot make 252 Revolutionary Essays them do even this wrong but by appealing to what was fomierly labeled either the law of God or the law of the king, but which, because it was law, was always a protest against the sufficiency of private life. This was one evo- lution, whatever may have been natural evolution, the maturing of the mind, conscience and morals of the world, a progression ever onwards, towards one point of truth, to which, only by relation, all other truths exist, the unit of common interest. And it is from this standpoint that philosophy views the world. She stood there in all ages. In all old and rejected religions she tried to stand so. In obsolete governments, in all the institutions that ever endured for a generation she tried to hold this ground; and never did, does not now, and never shall, hold any other. The monster developments of private property and power through modem capitalism has produced only a crop of monster thinkers, but they cannot think at all without pitching their tents near this point. I say not that they do it consciously to deceive, I assert only that collec- tive determinism forces them to think near this center. There is a greater law, therefore, than economic de- terminism. It is the law planted in the center of the material universe, which draws and holds all motions to itself, including the motions of the human mind, and to this law the philosophy of Socialism is a passive obedi- ence, and the gospel of organization is an active response. XLVI. THE ART OF KICKING. A Rousseau, a Voltaire never made a revolution. At its best, the philosopher's revolt can be no more than a storm in an ink pot, for there is but one natural revo- lutionist. The worker alone needs revolution, and he alone can bring it about. Labor is the object, and more of it for less money is the program of commercial oppres- sion; and from labor's resistance only can the life of liberty be wrought out. The world's continuance in bonds is due to his indi- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 253 vidualism and weariness. There are those whom nature forces into discontent, and others who reach it by intellect and sense of shame. Some who kick alone, some who kick in classes, and some who do not kick at all. The man who kicks alone may be merely an unhappy nuisance, but he may also be of some use in his time, for the dis- comfort he gives to those who have no right to be com- fortable at his expense. By clamoring about his require- ments, he may agitate more than temper; he may rouse the ethical reasoning of those about him and force the brain in the too easy chair to stop rocking. The man who kicks with a group is evolutionally a greater person, no matter what group he kicks for. But the man who kicks with a fundamental group, such as labor, and with the most constant, common and wide- spread human wrong, is vitally in line as a kicker with the racial movement, for salvation of every other sort. He who casts in his intellect with the revolt of labor is moving with the stars. The respectable old American document which kind- ly gave us, besides our anti-British freedom, a reason for our being alive, said that all men were born equal, and that they were engaged in the pursuit of happiness. I have no quarrel with the workingman who is so occupied, mainly because I do not know where to find him; he is nowhere. Never have I pursued that phantom, happi- ness, never have you. We are pursued, but not pursuers, and our pursuer is mastership, misery, and the economic whip. The liberty of pursuing anything but a job of work has passed out of our lives. Our utmost now is to turn and save ourselves from economic destruction; and this is the program of the Socialist movement. The pursuit of happiness! Let us abandon this hoary impertinence, we have not yet bread, and there is also no happiness for humanity in bread alone, we need more as refugees from the animal kingdom. Our escape is from loneliness to other people, our physical and spiritual redemption is Socialism. What then is happi- ness? It is society. How shall we pursue it? By pur- 254 Revolutionary Essays suing its antithesis, social wrongs. Negatively only canst thou contribute to it, for it is a sum around thee, the out- emptied multiple of thyself. Complaint is made that there is an old Yankee called Eastern who is a degenerate Yankee. His ears, they say, are long, his head is small, his hands prodigious, he works like a beaver (forgive me, oh Beaver), and he fas- tens like a barnacle to property. Loyalty in his life has become a holy cowardice. He is capable of doing any- thing that any man on earth can, except kicking in com- pany. Scarcely will his left foot agree to kick with his right, scarcely to walk with it. He is a full-blown individ- ualist, run to seed, at the point of general disagreement with everything outside the constitution. He has wit- nessed, in his own opinion, the final political revolution of the human race, so that there remains nothing on earth political to do, for him, but to vote again for the constitu- tion and present it unimpaired to his gentlemen friends to gamble with. He is not even a trades-unionist. He is a strenuous non-resistant, armed to the teeth against his own advantage for love of respectable native America. It is by resistance that a man in this century moves on, and the worker being the man who is nearest to, who bears and pays for all that really calls for public outcry, alone is the man to whom the better moral life and the better hope of the race must look for its real revolutions. The Yankee won't; therefore his ears grow and his head diminishes. So long as the master class can keep the world divided into lugs and slugs, the revolutionary and moral force of the world is wanted. To correct the faults or improve the characters of persons by direct treatment is the toil of Tantalus. One fault will only succeed another, and poorer characters continually take the place of those which you have ex- pelled. Three other sinners in the course of nature will be born for the one you have washed, and you may your- self be finally infected with all the diseases of those you Jiave been handling. Learn then to treat all the faults In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 255 of your friends and enemies at the root. The art of kick- ing, therefore, is a social and not a private art, and he who kicks any other way kicks but his own toes. Where the workman's resentment, his outcry, his brain, his interest and his arm are not, there then is no curative, no revolutionary kiclcing. We are but an army, marching through the posses- sions of hostile owners; we are each but sentinels, doing watch duty for our marching class, using the trade strike and the ballot box for our class deliverance. Complaint and resistance may be all that you can now do, but we all can complain and resist; and it is our peculiar sorrow that we all have good, sufficient and ex- clusive daily material for so doing. It cost the race many a crown of thorns to produce that cry: " My God, why hast thou forsaken me? " But the cry is worth the crown, if we have really discovered why the old gods forsook us and left us to take care of ourselves, and so to find our better God. Have we the crown without the cry, then are we crucified indeed! The rest of the world has become too comfortable to complain, or too fiercely predatory in pursuit of labor's products. They, but not we, may be silent. If there be any moral voice in the world to-day protesting, it is to be heard where the workers are outcrying against their wrongs. The uttermost moral vitality of racial life is the self- preservation of the person; the next within that uttermost is his self-preservation by whatsoever he may find more competent than himself, and the third is the preservation of the State. Personal wrongs may be physically inflicted, self- inflicted or socially inflicted. Socialism has to do much with the first, more with the second, but most with the third. Pain, cold, hunger, heat, weakness, sickness and premature death; ignorance, isolation, laziness, coward- ice, content and suicide; oppression, inequity, restraint, privation, overwork, misdirection and waste of labor; these three groups indicate so many circles of resistance 256 Revolutionary Essays wliereon the person who makes for a true manhood — that is, the true self-preservation of him in identity with the State — must take his stand. It is the question now up to every workingman whether he will live a life of non-resistance on all these three spheres of challenge and so perish with physical death as a unit that was and is not, or whether he will accept the call of his wrongs, manfully fight his part, and so enter into the race that never dies. Our wrongs are our opportunity for something infinitely greater than their own correction. In uttermost simple wrong lies the germ of moral involution when we repudiate and resist it, it is the index finger, pointing to us the way by which we can work in our great salvation. It is in the nature of this genuine kick that we must be wholly, purely selfish, and just as we get down to this unmixed mind is our kick true and fun- damental for the life that shall endure. No other senti- ment but that of self-preservation can be imagined or admitted at its outset. Are you kicking? XLVII. THE WRONG OF REVOLUTION. Revolution is a word by which those who affect to be timid seek to frighten those whom they know to be timid, or desire to make so. It is at once the glory word and the scare word of the American trickster in patriotism. Whatever " revolution " may mean in the disguised thought of this professional fool-killer, it never has nor can mean the freedom of labor naturally gotten. The great bulwark of the true world against the schemes of revolutionists, as all students know, has been the patient working, believing, trusting democracy of labor, the victim of all former revolutions and the foe of all that are threatened. By a strangely complete fraud, however, this very democracy has been revolutionized into a revolutionary party. Through a clever use of its own name and power, the manipulation of what seemed to In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 257 be its own machinery in property politics and its own opportunity in economics, it finds itself now bound in golden bonds, knocking at the door of revolution. There is nothing for the patience and labor of the world to do but to condone the crime and to permit all the coming wrong of it to mankind; or else, to openly denounce the revolution under which it has thus been drawn through trustfulness and slavery; to declare capitalism to be the revolutionary wrong and itself the anti-revolutionary right; until that day, when the democ- racy of America will better know how to defend itself from the wiles of all future property, private revolutionists. In its very essence, the Socialist thought is hostile to all that the word revolution ever stood for in history. With the necessary limitations of the individual mind (the source of all old revolutionary effort), every step out of experience is a step into the dark. No leader of such revolution could say that the past world history gave him any lamp for the future. To him everything beyond his yesterday was experiment. But where his knowledge ends, the larger wisdom of the social mind begins, that mind which our movement cultivates, and makes collec- tive in its utterance and complete in its democracy. Such a democracy cannot revolute, and no individual agitator the world ever saw could move it that way. But there are two minds, the personal mind and the other mind. The first mind is nimble, it is at its best verbally, always plunged in its revolutions. It is, as the hands of many time-pieces, all over the world, but the collective mind runs not after those. You cannot say of the first mind that it is the time, you cannot say of it that it is not, for it is a time relation. iSTeither, indeed, can you say of the Greenwich record that it is the world's time of itself, for it has only become world- time as a net relation or adjustment among all the times of the world. The beat, therefore, of this second time is the very antithesis of what is called by the name of revo- lution; that is, a violent, radical, unprevisioned change. Yet it demands such a social time change as a robber few, 2S8 Revolutionary Essays long errant in sinful alienism, may be pardoned for calling out of their declension revolutionary. And we, that there may remain nothing dubious about our claim on behalf of the slave working class, ac- cept their appUcation of the word revolutionary to us, and say, " By all means, let us be called revolutionary, if our insistence upon dethroning private money enterprise from its present dominion over the power of mankind to work be revolutionary." It is, however, the first time in human history that revolution has taken on so strange an aspect as that which is proposed by ours. Bom generally in the stews and brothels of the courts, revolutions came out of the passions engendered by private ambition and lust for more property, from whence, and whither, ours is not moving. In this way the men whose eyes are in their backs have a perfect right to call us revolutionary among revo- lutionists. But not having a word to fit a demand arising out of a crime so strange, we are at a loss for a name. What if the infants of some class should arise, demanding human milk because their unnatural parents had been reserving the mother milk for sale? For lack of a word more in line with the novelty and surprise of it, we might pardon the ladies if they called it a revolution, and called out the military. In view of the entire novelty, yet deep-laid wrong, that makes Socialism God's necessity and our oppor- tunity, we who say that no less demand than this is that for the abolition of wage slavery, and that no political system which has in view anything less than the restora- tion of social motherhood, is worthy the name of Ameri- can politics. In view of the completeness, novelty and revolutionary nature of the great crime of capitalism, of its immoral and absurd upheaval of insignificant persons to the thrones of social power, we are compelled, as the victims of the monstrous revolution, to confront it with a firm denial of, and assault wpon, itself. As revolution- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 259 ists we send out capitalism, as patriots and thinkers we bring in Socialism. In this adverse sense only we are revolutionists. Less than a Greek can never meet this Greek. Capital- ism is a property crime, committed on the surfaces of affairs by a minority of individuals against the great majority. The majority are defending their lives. The criminals have called it a moral question, they have ap- pealed not only to the swords of the militant, but to the words of the priestly. Conscious of the rectitude of our cause, we fearlessly follow and force them to the higher courts of God, and here, in the philosophy of a united human race, which joins God and man together, we indict and convict them of attempting the life of man- kind, having first almost murdered democracy. In this pursuit we come up to the church doors, only to find the guns ecclesiastic loaded against us, but we believe the light will yet reveal to them the balance of the sanctuary. In this discussion we have learned the gospel of weights and measures. We have learned of a way to the spiritual life, which for a time may be an offense to many good preachers of the present, that never a spiritual truth came into the world without its own balance, its own ma- terial measuring stick. And whatsoever message, soul message, cannot be weighed and measured by solid sub- stitute and solid deed into the life of man is a spiritual lie. This is the main discovery of revolutionary Socialism, not that there is no God (I would mourn, indeed, our loss by such discovery), but that there is not one God for the rich and one for the poor. That there is no God for the rich and no God for the poor, that God is simply under the necessity of having none such. And until we know how to become one family of man, he can only be the God of that side in this conflict which stands for the world's majority as such, or for its representative class^-the workers. God manifests which side of this battle he is on, by unfolding to its warriors even while yet on the field of 26o Revolutionary Essays battle such visions of a vastly splendid spiritual life to follow as have not been given to the little gilded triflers in pretty texts, which constitute the sere and yellow leaf of religious capitalism. By a stoney, fearless unfaith they appealed to God for their right to all they could get, and more, and to the cheque book as his approved way of declaring the morally fit to survive, and to their amazement there is a God, and he answers, " NO ! " to their demand of en- dorsement. They verily thought and believed they could go on, as of yore, proposing questions to the oracle and answer- ing for him out of their own mouth. But lo, he has appeared, and, lifting the veil, reveals what is deemed only an incident of the conflict, but which is in reality the whole of it, viz.: That there is one universal philosophy of life for all men, and the way to it is through the ma- terialistic straight gate, the camel's eye of all religions, property; that there is no sanctuary without its material balances, and no morality outside of the property rela- tion, and, finally, that there is no religion at all which has any other duty than measuring of material equities among men and fortifying the organizations of the laborers. No further spiritual manifestations will be given to this age until the struggle and message of economic Socialism has been accepted. This great materialistic stone, so rugged, so un- ethereal, this big boulder torn out of the side of your iron mountain, this chunk of anthracite tumbled at your church door out of your labor question, is a thing over which you must fall and be somewhat broken, should you persist in going to see God, or else if it fall upon you, repudiating it, it shall grind you to powder as a spiritual vessel. Yes it is a revolution, but only as the spiritual life, . whenever it made demand upon private property world- lings, always uttered revolution. Just as Christ uttered it to his time, so utter we, and with the whip given to us by our century's affairs, we drive the money changers, who In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 261 should have been only money reformers, out of the temple. It is indeed a revolution which is now commenced on these great rough stepping stones to God. Where we shall find our Lord is no longer an honest seeker's question. You who have lost him and who go out to find him in mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas, never before visited by you, shall you find him there? If others had buried your Lord, you might say with Mary, " I know not where to find him." But you have buried him, and you know where. Go to no other place. He is not in that sweet volume of poetry, nor in that gallery of art. He is just where your hand trembled in that opportunity of yours when you stood before Mammon and held not firmly between life and life the scales of the sanctuary. This Socialist revolution produces, even before it comes, so many strange things. What a revelation it promises to be! Yet in its > strangest doings it will only be the good undoing of that which is most evilly done. To obtain the means of lazy or any other kind of self-indulgent living out of the powerlessness of other lives, the young men of to-day have lost the characteris- tics of youth. Among no ancient company of baldheads and beard-waggers have you ever heard so much pitiless, cynical, reactionary conservatism as you can hear to-day from young America, as he sneers over his banqueting table and sweeps away sentimentalism on behalf of the poor, with diamond-flashing hands. To-day, strange to say, in history the radical thinkers of the country are its old men. This is a strange and terrible judgment on America. To-day we all are crying for business administrations, for administrations sterilized of what might bear the unbusinesslike name of human. When one Christian man says to another, " Remember, this is business," it is understood that there is to be remembered between them no good-relationship, no pity, no compunction. Busi- ness, even among hypocrites, has come to mean all the 262 Revolutionary Essays way opposite to prayers and faith. Nevertheless, it is the main boast of the majority of Christian ministers that they are running tlieir churches on business principles. Just how much more than book-keeping does this mean, only starving souls can tell. Since by the new birth some Christians have formed God inside of them, it seems they have become greatly blind to the existence of any God outside. Externally, a rnighty, bloodless irreligion has fallen upon Protestant- ism, formerly the religion of revolution. Now Socialism answers back to that loss, and gives it for that dot of God under the waistcoat a whole race charged with the pres- ence of divinity, the conservatism which never needs a revolution. XLVIII. THE SOCIAL CONCEPT OF HISTORY. To disarm mankind without removing at all our need of being armed is the device of those who have added the success and strength of the public life to their own wickedness of overcoming others; it is the way of the private aggressor upon the public domain. But to remove all occasion for being so armed is the ideal of the man who realizes that we may be eternalized as we fall. Philosophers laboring to stand up Socialism on what is called the materialist conception of history only, are following in the footsteps of men who had many justifi- cations for that sweeping revolt against the church. The modern preachers and all their people are to be congratulated, nevertheless, on the advent among them of this materialistic philosopher, who, boldly grasp- ing his nettle Of church, as well as social phenomena, infers by induction that there is no God but the belly, and that the interior life of mankind, from that of the Pope down to the last Salvationist who has donned a red ribbon, presents no other motive so well attested as self-interest. This materialist philosopher is a stern, but true sur- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 263 geon. It is the novel and unexpected guise in which the Christ visits our generation. And so truly as a thief's surprise is it, that among all the adventists looking for millennium, there is not any expecting him in this materialist philosophy. There is a health behind this plain-spoken, every- day and most secular Christ of materialism, which the soul of the church was sorely in need of, not because it is material, but because it gives weights and measures to cur spiritual pretenses. Justice stands behind these scales of his, most truly to condemn. No man weighs or measures his own to himself, for, like the human eyes, all weights and measures are made to look out upon others, and that spirituality of the world is spurious which is not standing upon a tangible measurement of our alleged love for one another and the alleged lovableness of God. And pitiable indeed is that wretch who, having found salvation, goes aside from mankind and fattens upon it alone. It is this fattening of the spiritual ego by both its own prayers and its own properties which has made the advent of the Marxian Socialist into the world to be so stern, so necessary and so great a salvation. The salvation brought to Christianity by materialism is, salvation by suggestion. Nothing but the materialist conception of the supremacy of self-interest over all human affairs, inside and outside the church, could give any explanation at all of the past, for that simply has been man's history, expressing and explaining itself. It is not, however, the churchman only whose unfit- ness to survive into a new moral world is revealed by the materialist advocate of Socialism. As they stand, face to face, each mirroring the other, the same glance reveals them both to be unfit as philosophers of So- cialism, for in all social respects their philosophy is the same; they are both one generation, the product of ancient famine and of ancient war, and the materialist is but the eye of the churchman, just opening oti things out- side himself. The selfishness of the disarmed and socially un- 264 Revolutionary Essays equipped millions, whose agonies for bread and slielter constitute human history, is rightly pronounced by the materialist not to be wrong or sinful, any more than ex- panding the chest is in breathing. As a law of the past, it is undeniable that self-preservation was man's chief virtue. As a creature, socially unarmed and unorgan- ized, to whom, nevertheless, the preservation of the race was left in trust, such selfishness was righteousness. It was man's war with famine and death, and to ease famine and to postpone death was the limit of his then commission. The pity is that there should have been so long a time subsequent to necessity in human history, which has also no other explanation, and whose doings can have no other philosophy. That time is nowj and it is now up to the Christians and their teachers to decide how much longer Marx and Engels shall continue to be the only satisfactory explain- ers of history. Shall their explanation close with the past, or shall it continue to explain? Let a new and mighty host of Socialists reply " NO." The age of single production and consequent single struggle for life has passed away. Modern industrial development, international social intercourse and organ- ization have rendered the lifelong struggle of human beings for bread and shelter as great an anachronism now, as would be the reappearance of native red Indians at Washington to rule over us. The actual achievement of this age is that life is no longer a famine and, therefore, should no longer be a struggle for its own physical main- tenance. As a matter of fact, neither the churchman on behalf of his spirituality, nor the materialist on behalf of him- self, are at all prepared with a successor of the private king. Neither of them are ready to part with the invasive rights of " the man who can," neither will surrender the power nor chances of appropriation. Materialism has not materialized anywhere that I know of as the antithesis of Christianity on this plane of social Justice. That it should be allied with justice for a season is the crime of In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 265 Christianity, rather than the virtue of anything else. The exaggerated supremacy of the single life, a natural re- action against its former and present degradation, seems to be still the creed of both, and the fortification of pri- vate property, by which that dominion is entrenched and maintained, neither of them are prepared to mar by public vote and public offices, because neither of them have yet eiidorsed that greatest truth of the past and the future — the social philosophy of human life. Upon this philosophy as the human side of evolution in the past, and our standpoint for the future, mankind's greatest spiritual and physical achievements will be ac- complished. Upon this eternal doctrine of progress, according to the square of our approach to the social center, the master workman in Socialism may plant his feet against all pugnacious comers, whether they be blind Christians or other blind men. The fight now on is between Socialism and that great federation of all sorts, known as commercialism. And pity the man who claims that atheism is an integral part of Socialism just as much as you pity him who claims the church to be a part of it, while neither of them endorse the social conception nor the collectivist goal of history. As yet there is no atheistic Socialism and there is no Christian Socialism. Members of both persuasions have yet to qualify for Socialism in this distinctly social school, "the social progression and interpretation of history; neither of them are disqualified by their present creed from becoming sincere believers in this greater creed than theirs, since they have already proved their ability to believe together so basely and to practise together the crime of capitalism on the helpless masses of toiling humanity. It is only as an incident in a greater crime that sel- fishness is come to be so generally odious and practically wicked. To preserve one's self can only be a crime when it is confronted by another crime of a projected fatal in- 266 Revolutionary Essays vasion upon it, the crime which assails it always under competitive private property. Suppose no life, no health, no decency, no culture is in peril. Suppose it to be nobody's interest to assail the interest of any other. Men would still be aliye, would they not? The men living- in such a regime of fearless- ness would have a life of their own to live, a self to live for and with, would they not? Can we think of the exercises of a ship's crew bathing in mid-ocean, each using his own energy and skill to maintain and enjoy himself in the water as selfish in any censurable sense? Yet in what respects do their actions dififer from those called and condemned as selfish in a small city bath? There is no difference, only that of place and space between the selfish bathing in the latter, where many are waiting to come, too many being already in, and the un- selfish swimming of those men on the ocean. It is only as parts of ancient crime, grown strong and remorseless, that Socialism to-day stands at all con- fronting and arraigning private property and the indi- vidual life, confronting them for their baseness and bas- tardy, for their childish and incorrigible naughtiness, and offering them for the dangerous toys of this domineering property and private life (which, bye and bye, they must all lay down at the grave), the more real estate of the commonwealth, and the life of humanity together owning all, together working, together growing and together being glorified by the same common spirit of him whom we sometimes thoughtlessly address as "Our Father in Heaven." The individual man is no longer fitted to dominate the world's worker; the materialist has shown us that. It is a crime for one man to set the modem worker to work out of his own mere personal motion or notion, and for his own mere personal profit, because the modern worker is no longer like his old master, he is no longer one person. The modern worker has become a factory, thousands of human creatures constitute him, every one of whom may have the peril of a soul to keep and of a In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 267 life to be realized into all its possibilities here and here- after. It is a fearful presumption, therefore, and a fear- ful possibility of damning and being damned for one man to set the modern worker to work for his private profit alone. If this capitalist, not yet taught by God or society to shrink from the awful responsibility of setting the modern worker to work, has still a desire for more fac- tories, and more desire for more, and desires them all only for more profit, what is his private life and his pri- vate gain out of such mountainous means but a hideous madness? The lack of any properly balanced human relation between the man who directs his factory of five thousand men to do this, and they do it, or to stop work- ing, and they must stop and starve, only means that he has lost his own personality as a natural ratio in this business of his, just as completely as the men have lost theirs — altogether, while the clear sense and meaning of private property has simply been blurred and dazed out of his mind by the millions which the madness of per- mitting the private man to rule the modern worker has cursed him with. Private ownership and control of the public working implements in our time, and they are all public now, is a strain that is proving altogether too great, even for the ferocious credulity of the private owner. And those who persist in keeping that strain upon it for the sake of vanity and dominion are to-day the greatest enemies of the individual life; they are reducing individualism to a fierce, monstrous, blood-stained absurdity. The disproportion between the merits of the private life and its tremendous rewards in the way of profit and power in the world market, the disproportion between the merit of the gambler and his prize, the power which that lottery ticket gives his unworthiness to rule over the necessaries and the souls of his fellow-mortals, is so ap- pallingly absurd that the sanity- of the race itself is at last become the chief peril of capitalism. But Socialism, calm and refreshing, comes to the 268 Revolutionary Essays world, in this the hour of its delirium. It takes the economic sceptre of the race out of the hands of a few and puts it into the public custody. It says, " Let not your blessings curse you. The era of individualism is passed forever; let us now cultivate the social conception of history." This social conception of society is a subjective product in the minds of single persons of a socializing force, which manifests itself, whether we will or not, in our affairs and in our brains; it is the energetic soul of the race drawing us into it, and whose one hindrance throughout all ages was ever the same — ^private property of the masterful kind. Read your history henceforth in the light of this ever self-asserting force, and history will become more than literature. Read as the record of how racialisms have been multiplied in the formation of gregarious interests, political, religious and social groups, more or less funda- mental, but all indrawings of that coUectivist energy, the soul of the race, which for so many years we have mis- understood and misused under the name of God, and the story of every nation will become an exhibit of the social force which now gives us this social conception of itself. It is not my interpretation of this law that makes it, it makes my interpretation; we are ruled by the law and not by its exposition. My faith is in an organization power as the forma- tive and preserving force in cosmos, and which works through economic class formations in our race section of the universe. I believe that it is where theology began that science shall sociologically end; that is, in supreme law. The benefit derived to mankind through the former conceptions of God has been this: A training of the mind from explanation to a recognition of the law ex- plained. If a personal God could have been described in sat- isfactory words, explanation would have ended in him- self; there would have been a personal God realized, and In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 269 man would have gone from theoretit faith to a faith which would be its own active and its own passive, the law and the deed of all. But instead of that vitalized and vitalizing law of rest and action, the race has been detained, for all these ages, under a rule of quasi-faith in explanations, only alleging 'God and law, or a lower faith in the dead letter of the explanation itself, credology, or by a psychologic faith of the ego in faith itself, which was the reformers' substitute for Romanism. These all were educative, and have taught the thought of the race how to analyze its self-conceit, so that to-day we begin to feel the difference between the real reign over us of a universal law and the authority exer- cised over us by those who wield its similitudes^ whether such similitudes be our so-called scientific demonstrations of nature's procedure or our church declarations of God's will. -From the nature of Spencerian evolution, it appears to me impossible that it can ever introduce mankind to the reign of the law, save when, during its own process of dififerentiation, it refutes itself, and we are forced to reject it, as it very properly rejects the personal and explainable deity. In other words, evolution can only introduce us to the reign of law by teaching us to perceive the obvious inadequacy of heterogeneous deviation, to explain an}'- thing until it becomes itself a law, which it does as soon as it explains, when it is lost in its own opposite — unity; lost in the organic power behind the intellect of the evolu- tionist, the collective determinism which holds the stars together, and the mind. Thus, when the ego evolutionist has exhausted him- self in differentiating to establish his theory, it is not his theory he has established, but the completeness over his mind of that collectivist law, the formative force, the homogeneous activity, organization, which he vainly fancies he has been diminishing in favor of something stronger. There cannot, in the nature of the doctrine, be any 270 Revolutionary Essays other law revealed by the Spencerian evolution of indi- viduals but that which its demonstrator unconsciously evinces of the ascendance and persistence of that forma- tive force over all things — the reign of social determinism. This evolution of Spencer's has one great charm, the charm by which it has laid hold of so many minds, it is a concurrency it displays to the human mind that which was always sought, and which alone can satisfy us, a live law, something which decrees and executes itself. But this presentation to mankind of the satisfaction of his greatest need has been only apparent, not real. It is a currency, a concurrency, if you will, but only in the sense that the electric force is current through the wires overhead; it has no ticker in to-day; it is dumb con- cerning now, though eloquent concerning yesterday; not silent concerning a remote future, but in to-day it has no register. It is surely a very learned and charming history of nature, whether the synthesis be worthless or not, that Spencer presents us with, the facts beaded upon it are beautiful, and beautifully brought together. It is itself, in the exercise of its differentiating genius, a most beauti- ful example of the synthetic power, although in this case smiting itself for the production of an exquisite ego. Every straight-off run made by Spencer and Fisk for psychologic individualism closes a curve for mono- psychic collectivism. And the whole magnificent process and panorama of Spencer's fertile genius is conducted under the law for which he is seeking to substitute an explanation and a goal in himself. Knowing, organization to be the formative master motion of the universe, and knowing all the rest to be subordinate motions only, though mistaken for energetic and persisting diflferences, we are not afraid of Socialism being refuted by the philosophers, since every strong in- tellectual effort, whatever may be its conscious purpose, is but a part and an illustration of that sublime formative force, the universal law of collectivism. This is social faith, and in this faith nothing perishes. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 271 When we reach this point, after the experience of organizing, and of social power, and of fellowship, through which it must have drawn the generations doing it, for this law is a doing of itself, through us, we being its active fractions, we find the great God, because we have found, for the first time, a faith large enough to see him, a mirror, to face the universe as one law — the law which is itself God. XLIX. OUR DEMOCRACY. Through its idealization, the realization of democ- racy, other things may develop themselves independent of, or in spite of us, while including us in their process ; but this evolution of democracy is mankind's own and his most excellent achievement. The deliberate evolution of democracy as our ideal for the vindication and glory of God's mob — the poor people of the world, and its. evolution by means of our idealization of it, is the religion of the future and the science of the political life. This is spiritual law, the law of the larger and wiser adjustment; this social idealism is the energy which recalls and restores refractory units into new and larger orbital relations. In celestial physics it is called attractive gravity; and in this process of democratizing man, it is Socialism, the law and power of collectiveness. A co-operative, industrial commonwealth, naturally enough, appears the grand goal out of this anarch and waste-afflicted age of competition; it is the goal truly; but it is not the grand goal. There are vaster circles of achievement, joy and triumph awaiting mankind than his victory over the present waste of time and this bond- age of ours to bread-getting: Democracy achieved, in the spirit and scope of Socialism; Socialism achieved in the spirit and energy of cosmos. An industrial commonwealth by no means includes all that I desire to convey by the word Socialism. The goal towards which we aim is not born of one— 272 Revolutionary Essays a manufactured ideal of our own. The ideal is itself a part of our great human evolution; it is implicit in almost every one of our governmental institutions. Every con- sultive legislature upon earth is one of mankind's efforts towards this democracy of Socialism. Socialism is no more a self-initiated ideal of ours, projected upon the canvas of the future from the fancy of the agitator of the present day, than the manhood which the power that forms the foetus, and is indicated by special cells, is a manhood existing only in the fancy of the foetus-former ; it is a manhood that has been designed and is coming surely to the earth, if the motherhood of society be not murdered by private property. While it is almost the genius itself of Socialist thought to recognize no such thing as human division, nor to see man in broken pieces, and while we hold that everything in history is saved by holding together, yet to-day's Socialism is a class conflict. It seems that chaos has been the cradle of order to the mind which has been only itself forming; for the chaos has been ours only; it has been one of the stages in historic psychology of the Socialist mind, now at last approaching the maturity which demands for its right growth and security the congeniality of Socialist condi- tions. The victory which a growing God has already won in the physical world we are called upon to achieve in our own spiritual and social world. The phenomena of multiplied divisions has given an insight of division to the observers. The mental power of re-integration has widened with its wilderness. Even as the eagle, having scattered her young in the air, spreads her spacious wings wider and wider and flies in larger circles to catch the falling fledglings, so runs the social mind under the differences. Science itself, by more investigation and the discov- ery of more differences, creates the necessity for more and larger harmonic human powers; until that which threatens to break up the mind and world into infinitesimal specialisms proves to be its salvation. To get wider vision In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 273 in economics, we are drawing closer together, we are get- ting better classed and grouped; we form in larger masses; we see and think as nations. The homogenous side of science always equals and must soon excel the other. Thus, while the individual differentiates and compares, the organic mind, viewing from the mountain top, comprehends and unites. It is by a very great incongruity, therefore, that a school having this cosmopolitan horizon, should come before the age bearing the word "Class" upon its ban- ners and with the cry of a militant army, declaring that strict partizanship and non-compromise shall be the right and left step of its marching. It is an incongruity surely ; but not one created by the genius of collectivism. After certain great catastrophes, the disastrous wreckage consists of the incongruous, and they who are to restore order to the scene are themselves, for a season, compelled to be incongruities to those who have just arrived from the normal, and to themselves as compared with their own normal. It is in the sewers you begin who desire to restore sanitary conditions to a defiled city ; to secure the entire city from a return of plague, you devote your energies to the slums. Now, after a century's dominion of capitalism — a sys- tem which sprung up almost in the cradle of modern de- mocracy, like the serpent upon which the infant Hercules proved his high and strong descent, it has come to pass that the world's greatest thing — the State — has its vital- ity oppressed and congested almost to death by the pres- ence, in all the national populations of the world, of a new, vastly numerous and singularly helpless class, a class whose existence is the peculiar cause and the peculiar product of capitalism. This new and monstrous social product is the proletariat. It is new as a product within democracy, and monstrous as the alleged product of one of democracy's decent principles, "freedom of contract." As the product of an absolute monarchy or an aristocracy of vain and cruel mandarins, the reduction of three- quarters of our own men, women and children to a state 274 Revolutionary Essays of industrial imbecility might not seem monstrous, but as our product ; white men of culture, Christians, and Ameri- cans if you please, the existence in our nation (and acting as its mainspring) of a vast proletarian class. Their masters, poor, blind gentlemen, are themselves a class to the same extent, and for the same reason, as the class they have made to stand upon. As necessary to each other as the shell is to its clam, and both as foreign to democracy as the pot that boils it is to the clam, or the stomach for which it is destined; capitalism and prole- tarianism must go out of civilization together. Of course, this dual plague of greed and slavery, so utterly foreign to democracy, is not a plague of bad men; but a bad plague upon good men. We want to save the man capitalist from his plague of greed and the man proletarian from his plague of slavery, and this we want to do because, primarily and above all other things, America wants its democracy, and all the world wants America. To destroy the evil which these two important classes are to the democracy of the nation, the State or nation itself has no power. So long as these evils choose to remain, separately or together, the evils they are, they have as much right in our democracy as men who pray or who paint pictures. And though any philosopher can see that they must be fatal to our democracy if they con- tinue to grow in it; yet no thing in the nation has any political right to raise the necessary hand to smite them out. Only to the event of these two quarreling among themselves can the democracy of the world look for its deliverance. Nature, however, comes to the aid of democracy at last and supplies the motive which wisdom or benevo- lence never could supply. The economic perversion of capitalism is not only unbalancing to its fall, the world's democracy, but the very physical existence of its counter- part, the proletariat, is menaced. Here then comes the opportunity and the efficient motive for expelling one of them, and therefore both of them, from society — the physi- ' In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 275 cal peril of one part of the evil arms it against the other, and through this peril, this strife,- ensuing upon the awakened consciousness of the proletariat concerning its own calamitous condition (its class-consciousness as we say), the Socialism of to-day appears before the world fathering a militant and class-conscious movement. Acknowledging its incongruity, but shouldering its neces- sity, we cannot help it. Here we stand amidst the debris of an economic calamity. This strength does not fall to the agricultural classes by the same necessity as to the city proletarian, save as that necessity comes to them on a higher plane, and as the result of reasoning and the finer life. The agricultural is an ancient condition of all socie- ties, and while men's habits were simple, the agriculturist almost filled the economic bill. But the agriculturist has only to make note of what things enter into his own fixed life as a consumer and user of necessary and pleasant things to realize how completely the center of economic- gravity has gone to the cities. The farmer himself no longer lives by farming. Capitalism has implanted wants and habits in all of our lives which we cannot and do not ask to get rid of. Yet if we do not want to get rid of our democracy, we must henceforth consider it very much in the light of these recent industrial developments which have made us what we are and what we propose to remain, as consumers and users of things necessary and pleasant. Socialism, therefore, rightly interprets the exi- gency of the world when it demands that all voters in and for the State, for the sake of our own democracy, consider how large a portion of political business shall henceforth be demanded by, and directed towards, the industrial pe- culiarities originated in the world by capitalism, and now become so vastly advantageous to our comforts and to the extension of the possibilities of democracy itself, by the improved intercourse of nations, and yet so perilous even to its own achievements by its class creation, as well as to the very life and essence of democracy. These considerations shall call the interested far- 276 Revolutionary Essays mers and middle-class people to the side of the militant proletariat, as thoughtful auxiliaries; and it is to their presence we look for the peaceful salvation of democracy. L. SPIRITUAL ENLARGEMENT. A man should be acting in obedience to some greatly realized urgency, and have a very overwhelming sense of the wrong, and he should feel in his bones which side God stands upon, who undertakes to denounce the entire governmental and commercial machinery of his time, for government is the most sacred thing on earth, being the bequest to us of the greatest part of all that has been most sacred upon this earth, that is, the social life and effort of our ancestors. By law the men of all ages live together. In the face of this self-admonition, I do not hesitate to denounce our present age civilization as wicked, because it is based upon competition — ^the captivity of labor, and offers us for a sufficiency a few shining individual lives as the fruits of one human generation of toil and hope. I denounce the savage morality of capitalism in its own factories, in the legislature, on the bench, and wherever it has crept into the churches; and in doing this, I feel my soul's feet to be standing upon the rock immutable , and with the moral pulse of the whole race urging me on. Life has become a struggle, not because of any man- making virtue in struggle; life has become a struggle simply through the crimes of the property classes. If any man desires to live well, he will find, now as ever, so many obstructions placed in his way, that he must struggle or abandon his good desire for a larger life. Private property monopolists have so arranged it, that to live at all we must struggle; and therefore it is that in these guilty days individual struggle, not with natural difficulties, but with one another, is the law of life. When this struggle to overcome the property-placed obstacles to life is finished, there shall come to mankind In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 277 another and more sacred activity, to take the place forever of the present base conflict — ^that struggle will be the moral struggle of life — the struggle for spiritual en- largement. The struggle for enlargement is the spiritual struggle covering the whole intellectual and moral effort of the Socialists. It is not a wonderful thing that philosophy now dis- covers this law; but it is truly wonderful that all nature should have discovered and made this law its program before the philosopher began to have a glimmering of the truth that nothing is enlarged by mere self-intensifi- cation ; although intensity itself may be enlarged by cov- ering with its glowing life of love a larger area. The function of the humanitarian is not to invent humanity, nor to store it in a beautified soul of his own, nor of his son's; nor to invest it in a future salvation in heaven ; but to utter it and to make it poetically, legally, politically, • economically concrete as his response to the cry of the universe, "ENLARGE." There is a mechanical enlargement and an organic enlargement, each the answer to the other. One cannot tell, wisely, whether the increase by so many cubic feet of timber in yonder tree depends upon an increase of organic energy having first taken place, or whether the inches grew a little, and then a little new energy came out of that addition to bring out more timber in obedience to the economy and command of the universe : "Increase and multiply." It seems as if in nature, without emulation, as with us, the best moments are creative. There is a reciprocity between effort and achievement, each only just equal to the other at first, through a series of successions. But between each alternate effort and its material equivalent there arises a third force, the child of mutualism, which belongs to neither, and yet springs from and mightily enlarges the power of both; it is an increasing glow, a heat, an acquired fervor of force greater than the mathe- matical sum of both together, considered on paper; like the stored power of the great wheel in a pump, and yet 278 Revolutionary Essays not stored ; it is an extra possibility acquired in the habit or the enthusiasm going around or working together; it is in man the spiritual element of enlargement, acquired in fellowship, by which, after following a line of right- ness, he reaches a moment when he excels the whole of hirnself, however you may choose to calculate him; a moment in which he enters the treasure house of the di- vine, and from thence reciprocated, he lifts his own record above the former liotch, and so, also, lifts the first of the next possible experience of another man a step higher than his own normal first would have been. This is not a process of competing with another; it is not even the conscious raising of his own record, for he is generally unconscious of these best moments; it is a subjective zeal for enlargement, obtained by the growing habit of remov- ing congestive and inorganic things out of my smaller self to make way for my larger self, the human race. In competition, on the other hand, there is only to be found sickness, disease and death for the spiritual life. It is only in Socialism, in. the social redemption of ego by enlargement that the spiritual life shall at last attain to its liberty and happiness. Nature's enlargements are visible — the grown tree makes no demand upon your faith; it has no secret growth, like the aristocrat ego in the human family. When nature grows, everybody knows. The enlargement of life is always a manifestation; it is always an expression of surplus energy giving itself away. Whatever more it may be we know not, but an expression and a self-evidence it always is — ^it becomes an enlargement by diffusion through contact, assimila- tion and self-loss. I use the phrase "self-loss" in deference to our still abiding and most barren way of self-thinking. The self, redeemed from fear, which knows itself only as one with all the others, knows nothing of self-loss or self-denial as the wretched saint of old knew them for his soul's gain sake. The selves of the new era are exhalations from one single human floral stem of the whole social life of In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 279 humanity; and the whole human life is uttered by every such flower, just in proportion as he has acquired that deep enlargement of an unconscious going with and for the others. The gospel of humanity is not my conscious fitting of myself for humanity, but my unconscious growth into humanity by the sanctification of common habit, the habitarianism of humanity. It is not cultivated in the gloomy cell of the ascetic, that essentially conceited self- tormentor who is grinding his soul into a fitness of its own for the society of God, but it is a preparation in which I am wholly the subject of larger forces that bring me into the spiritual life (not the spiritual life into me), by the mere process of doing things known and obeyed as parts of the life of self-enlargement — ^the I. O. U. life of humanitarianism. Intercourse idealized — ^the goal of democracy. Organization idealized — the ethical energy of de- mocracy. Usefulness idealized — the personal salvation into democracy. I know the weakness of that philosophy which keeps men waiting upon their ideals to lift them up. When we consider the domination over all our ideals which the prevailing mode of bread-getting ever must exercise, we might be led to despair of being able to grow minds of such independent moral energy of vision as even to see the wrongs around us. The Socialist doctrine of the economic ascendant would prove indeed the death knell of individual moral proclamation and enthusiasm, had thinkers not begun to see that the sources of moral energy are in the collective rather than the private life, and we are looking there for it. Our working ideals, whatever our words- may sound like, are always behind the best experiences of the race. Somewhere there is or has been mercy in the world, and freedom from care and strife above anything that I have ever known or seen. But that sweet free experience, wherever it was or is, was part of the race experience. It has become a race property, and thus has morally and 28o Revolutionary Essays potently enriched me as a recipient of the average spiritual temperature, a thinker and a doer. Perhaps these experiences were had in the palaces or mansions of men whose original wealth of leisure and culture was brought about by robbery of the poor. Well, they cannot rob me. Through the race experience, their tranquil lives have become my desire for more of that best experience. Ultimately the race is not robbed of anything, and Nero's fiddling at last becomes every- body's music. Thus our strongest efforts for moral up- lifting consists in producing the best possible experience for one another, out of which comes an average of best desire from the whole family of man to each. So that our reforms need not wait upon our ideals, but may be commenced with simple social deeds and habits until we get into such organic contact with the race that we shall experience that enlargement of life we call humanity, where our thoughts as individuals are stepping close upon the average of the race. Whatever may be our concept of God, a consistent working humanitarianism will place the human family between ego and that God, in this great living human circle of mediation, and there only ego and God can meet. It is in vain for ego to go into the business of architecting God. Centuries of such god tinkering have brought us only idolatry and shame and folly. Let us rather wait until we know humanity better, and have served him to our uttermost, then we shall be able to see, to know, what is God; then he will tell us. But for the present God stands upon the opposite outer side of this great human circle, unrevealed, and through that circle alone, holds intercourse and meets us in the larger life. This city of ours is the spiritual highway between God and each. God cannot come into one man; one man cannot go into God; but both have this everlasting trysting place at Bethesda where the forgotten last man lies. We meet each other where the mob meets, in the teeming, multi- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 281 tudinous lives of the needy ; on the crowded highways of toil and sorrow, where the most hearts are throbbing and longing; where most hands do their work; there it is that human experience nourishes ideals, and there man and God grow acquainted with each other. The ideals of the race are rooted in its achievements and experiences; they do not lift our doings nearer to God, but the doings of each clarify the mind and give us all power to see farther on. When, in the course of human events, it becomes plain that certain familiar words, like certain familiar men, have outlived their usefulness, then the right thing to do is to look out for their successors. Liberty being a dismally overdone word in this community, and the pursuit of happiness, as bequeathed to us by Jefferson, having reached us only in the form that he left it, viz., as a phrase; we are looking for some words to succeed "Hberty" and "slavery." They have come to us out of an individualistic experience in the past, wherein, doubt- less, they had quite a meaning; but they have as little semblance to what they once meant, in this day, as the fading light of even' has to the events of the day closing. The personal era having perished with the surface collectivism of capitalist value making, we should con- sider what stands now for the old things that "liberty" and "slavery" once stood for. There is a liberty which may be enjoyed to-day by some persons in society, because it is based upon the use of power ; and there is a slavery which must to the same extent be endured by other persons, because it is the loss of that same power. When captives of another race, having had an en- tirely other history, and 'who were assumed to have another destiny, were brought in by our greed to serve among us and to serve us, we covered our sin by a phrase as cowardly as the deed, and spoke of our victims and their wrongs under the explanatory name of "an inferior race." We took from them the right of space and time, the personal initiative over their own labor, and thought 282 Revolutionary Essays them not wronged if they had, by our measurement, better victuals and more years than in Africa. By trans- porting them to a new world, we destroyed the relativity which gives a meaning to all words. As a negro in America, you could not rob him of his liberty, because here he must lack everything that constitutes what you mean by the word. When you rise in the morning you are free to choose whether you will go to Washington or New York, whether you will read, drive, or play music. In the whole range of things that constitutes your day's liberty he has no part, and, relatively to him, your liberty means no more than it does to the cow on your field, but that does not make him a slave. The one crime by which he was kidnapped submerged all human rela- tions between you ; you can now do him no injustice and no justice. You may set up a new scale of minor rights and wrongs, feed him more or less, work him more or less, but just or unjust you cannot be to him; you have been put out of all such moral relations, and it is now only a question of how decently you can sustain a criminal relation which may not be revoked, and must be endured. Suppose I desire to drop the thought of the inferior race, and that I own a lot of slaves. Suppose there are no other people around me but these colored people ; how can I get into my life the experience of the thing and the meaning of the word "liberty"? Am I so groveling as to be content with it by contrast with these helpless wretches' bonds? Suppose I have had a touch of the world spirit we call God, and I want to taste the blessing of liberty which the fathers mouthed about. I will surely learn that the work of my qwn liberation must be com- menced in other lives ; that the work of my own enlarge- ment must commence there; that my liberty can only grow with the enlargement of life about me ; that I never can be free and keep slaves or be the warden of a prison. Liberty is not a qualitative nor a quantitative in me ; it is the breadth of social enlargement attained to by my environment, and in which I am moving. If everybody In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 283 around me must work ten hours a day and must be confined within a certain radius of land, and must eat and drink by regulated table; my liberty, according to present notions, would have to come in somewhere be- tween work quitting and bed time. This, however, is not so. Your liberty must be found within the period and on the lines of common obligation. You have liberty to use the chisel or the brush thus or so, to smile upon and help, to frown upon or hinder the man beside you. Liberty is not' relaxation ; it is not escape ; it is not vaca- tion. It is to be found in the ranks only, in what you can do plus the marching. It is the surplus of your life over and above and exercised amidst your obligations. The individualistic conception of liberty is the jail bird's and the deserter's conception of it. Ours is an- other conception. I have heard men of culture in the city, clergymen and others, long for a week of liberty with God in the mountains. Thoreau libertines. But this is not the concept of liberty that shall be found to come out of the deeper spiritual sources of Socialism. The fine mind running away to commune with itself on the mountain tops, amidst crags and pines, and the mystic whisperings of solitude, is not yet free from its individu- alistic delusions concerning liberty and self-conceit. When the race lives, and it may live sooner than we now expect, men will find their freedom, not in the enlarged spaces and altitudes of still nature only; but mainly in the enlarged life and moral sufficiency — the vast spiritual amplitudes of the collective life. To find freedom, to find liberty within the bound- aries or in the relative powers of my single life as com- pared with, or as purchased out of the freedom or liberty of other lives, is a base conceit and will have no place in the thoughts of social men ; to find it in the moments of my release from that which is common to all will be deemed equally base. Spirituality is not an egoistic experience. In every effort of the great mystics after the divine life which we have the record of, it is this identical movement of 284 Revolutionary Essays Socialism, only they commenced at God's end to draw God into them by aspiration, whereas we commence at our end with the things which we know to be wrong, which any moral bat can know to be wrong, and proceed to take them out of God's way, not that he may come in and abide with one of us as his private host, but that he may come into the whole of society, where I also may remain as an essential part of the reception. LI. MIND AND CONSCIENCE. There is no sin; you and I are not lepers, we are as clean as we can think clean to be ; as clean as Christ's infancy. Sin as an essential or spirit thing has no place in God's — in our universe. It was invented by those who were interested in making us feel worse than our environment, lest we should resent those foul environ- ments; lest the royal Christliness of human life should resent the dunghill bed on which the lords of property laid it. They have ascribed sinfulness to this Christ; it seems to justify the dunghill. "Ah, but," it may be said, " is not the desire, the malevolent invention and desire for sin, of those who wa;nt to keep your Christ on the dunghill this very sin that you deny? Is not this sinister obsession that gave the dung- hill and would keep us on it, the sin?" Nay, it is not the original sin. The original sin is the fear of being breadless, and this dunghill depravity is one of its devices ; it is the form their great bread fear has taken beside your weaker bread fear. The tyrant feared first and most ; you feared second to him ; he feared ahead of you ; therefore, you are his slave and his sinner. Only one law and one eternal obligation has been laid upon man, and that law was to preserve himself. Whatever maladjustments of necessary things for the carrying out of that eternal law may have happened, is, by a figure of speech, called sins, and their removal, virtue. The metaphysical has one place to stop at, where the yeast of thought must finally operate, if it will not forever In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 285 consume itself. Now, I tell you, the mind is not so fated to consume itself. Thought has its objective always set before it, and that objective are the things necessary for the carrying out of man's one law — ^the preservation of his own life, with its implied corollary, the life of all others. For there never was and cannot be a law of one. Law and nature are synonyms, and there is no law, no nature of one. Law and nature stand for all, and social psychology is the growth of the single mind into that perception. There is no sin in itself. Transgression cannot be a permanent fact. Sin is no entity, only the mono- psychic of God, and man is self-existing. Sin can be directly destroyed, because it is only a shadow. There are adulterated forms of some of the things necessary to the preservation of life, which are, of course, non- essential, concrete falsehoods. And when you thus know it, a most excellent concrete thing it is, this visible adul- terate, for by my assault upon it every day, I fulfil the law of my nature. I discover my hurts, wrongs, evils, sins, and so preserve myself into the collectivist necessity laid upon all men to live without fear, by first overcoming it, to go from the preservation of the physical to the experience of the spiritual life, and so enter upon the immortality of the race. By simply, faithfully, and in an objective way, re- moving the impediments placed before the physical man, by attacking the hurts that hurt me, I pass from sensa- tion and self-consciousness into social consciousness and the whole experience of human and cosmic life — I grow into God. The mystery of sin! Let us laugh at the mystery of sin. To jump over the property fences ; to take or get, somehow the things necessary for my own life, and, therefore, necessary for the public life ; to just lay practi- cal hands on the machinery and instruments of public necessity, this at once is the A B C of Socialism and the pin that pricks the inflated mystery of private human sin. Get bread and butter for everybody, and sin will 286 Revolutionary Essays drop from the clean human race Hke a foul cast-off garment; for it is a cowardice. If you are yet afflicted with sin, it is because there is something of yours still kept away from you. It is the shadow of your privation. It is the loss of manhood's temporary needs. But, then, needs are only temporary, and the loss is but apparent. The supply of man's necessities is a perpetual excess. The isolates may steal to-day's fruit, but they cannot steal to-morrow's fertility of the fields. And they will not seek to do it. Your isolate oppressor only waits for you to teach him how to be free of the bread fear that made him an isolate. He waits for your hand of faith and courage to Uberate you both back to one another, so that, in the last analysis, if we will retain the words sin and sinner in our speech, they can only stand for the fear that separates men and the men separated. But this fear shall not stand, and these men shall not be sep- arated. Socialism will slay sin. Let us take in a full, free breath of gladness. Sin is only a question of bread, and bread is no question at all to the man of the twentieth century. We are in the business of fear killing, fool killing, and sin killing, who have taken up the practical issues of modern Socialism. Away with the sin makers, let us clear the highway for Messiah ; let us remove the dams, the false isolate fears, the faithlessness and cowardice of private law; and so the sparkling waters of free, great, faithful life shall flow in upon us. But first we break the chains of bread bondage ; be- fore all other things, if you please, we sever them, that we may begin with manhood. Then, ho, for after that ! Are you big enough to see the "after that" for mankind ? It is a limitless life of strength, dignity and beauty. Let us on! The mind of man has been for most of its centuries a trifler, a mechanism moving among its toys, swinging back and forth among its irrelevancies, like the tick-tack pendulum of a bustling little clock. An infinite variety of verbalisms, a world of anagrams and word tricks the In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 287 single mind has played in, because alone it is but a little chattering mechanic until it senses the warmth and bal- ance of morality. Then out of the juggle of alphabets, called private thoughts, it begins to feel its half-blinded way, gently led out by the hand of the otherhood. Thoughts now must have some useful public import; those lower-case letter thoughts must be capitaUzed into moralities. Upon the accidental combinations of little thinking, which for centuries ended in nothing, now falls the glow and warmth of public conscience. Mind is re- deemed from mere self-conscious exercise to public mor- ality and connectiveness. I doubt not that the single brain will soon recognize its only place in creation to be the place of a door-keeper to the public conscience, whose principal work all the day long shall be the rejection of the morally obstructive, the turning up only of such organic combinations as may have a meaning in them for use or beauty in public life. The evolution of the human mind is to be completed by its transformation into public conscience. The mind shall be nothing but the mechanism of moral law. The mind of man was born in a moralism. When there was but self-sensation, with the old law of self-preservation still laid upon it, to get and to hold was all it knew. But with this little in the presence of another getter and holder, there was enough to start the mind on its moral career. With only the instinct to get and to hold, it found itself pressed with the compulsion of adjusting one to the other, and in this compulsion, though destined for monistic morals, the infant mind began its long march towards the monopsychic life as a distressed duality — a materialistic perplexity over a piece or two pieces of food. At first an instinct only, it had no complex powers to resolve between the private good and the socially surer good. In this dilemma, the eye of the other being yet upon it, and its own needs behind it, mind was morally born. Here is a heap of apples, one for you, one for me; a hand for you, a hand for me. In this simple original. 288 Revolutionary Essays the perplexity of an instinct that would give nothing, and of a public will and eye and power which had been proving itself a better provider than instinct, man was half-born out of instinct and half-born into a sense of the social efficiency. But it was a duality, and this duality of the mind is, in truth, but the wail of our moral infancy, and is still with us because we are not yet born into social faith, not yet possessed of organization mor- ality, and as yet only entering the public conscience, until they are one. A mind without this social conscience for its whole purpose is like unto a pair of wings flying in the air without a bird. It is a materialistic history, this history of the mind, whose effects are as a thousand to one in propor- tion to its causes. One ounce pressure of privation or sur- feit in the material conditions of ancient and baby history are now telling, like hydraulic pressures a thousand times repeated, on the moral competency of our own time. Remembering, together with that, how every to-day is the babyhood of some years that are coming, and the ancient history of some periods as yet, by us, unthought of, we shall no longer superciliously talk or think of the materialistic conditions of this present time as unworthy of our highly refined consideration; we shall know that, potentially, it is about the only field in which the mind has power. In getting and holding material property, the single mind does know what it is about, though in handling and using that property there seems to have been yet little learned. Upon this basis of acquired getting and keeping life's necessaries, as upon the blind industry of the bees, we may base the material habits of Socialism, its providence, its grip, its thrift, its enterprise ; in all things but its lack of intelligence in use of property, the private mind has been the blind guide, but still the guide, leading us to altruism. This mere instinct of getting and having, the parent of the human mind, fell into a time of great perplexity, when, in order to get or have anything, it found itself In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 289 compelled to become the economic consort of others. Out of that perplexity and pressure it grew the social will. We know how the adult human being carries the history of his few pre-natal months through a life of decades of years, and what trifling incidents in fore- birth days mark themselves on the body of the man for a century, as if they had been mightily great events. They were mightily great, because they were in the strictly material days of the man's history, and from the privations or surfeits of that time the man suffered all the days of his life. In this respect the infant history of one person resembles the ancient history of all society. Just a little easing off of the pressure of private property insanity irom the average mind; just a few more congenial inconsistencies and crimes of wealth egoism ; a few more great failures of the masses of labor in their appeals for justice, to the broken, warped, and varying judgments of our very best men, and then a dawning of the truth shall be, that the public conscience and the private property intellect are divorced; and be- ware ye, when this disclosure comes upon the people. One such vital generalization will be worth a library of economics. A great generalization like this, once expe- rienced, will never down. If as yet it is not coherent enough to make a public conscience, it will be urgent enough to make a public will. Oh, that it may not come thus, that a great will demanding change may not come before a great conscience feeling wisely the need of it ! LII. PASS IT ON. There is a progression between and from all local life and the central universe, and that progression is a passing in and out of surplus power. The story of cosmos is the story of movements ever adjusting them- selves to the law of the common balance, and this adjust- ment is maintained by forever passing on the surplus which is created by the constant reclamation of matter into life. 290 Revolutionary Essays It is our part on this outlying colony of earth to recognize our affiliation with all other, movings. It is our life's experiment, our faith and duty to maintain the relation ; and that relation can only be maintained through the contiguous. We may be brothers of the sun, but only by being brother of the nearest man. To us the whole universe is earth's epitome of it, and man is our epitome of earth, and property is our epitome of man. The universe is being copied by the social system of our day and nation. Whatever there is of evolution in the world, is this out of our uncorrelated movement, out of our unbalanced (surplus or defective) forces, into a controlling, ever inviting cosmic model, which it is our privilege not to know, and yet by its constraint it is our lot, either as carcasses to die out of it or to enter and become itself by our good willing. The Masterfact of the universe is a motograph, a self-sustained pattern moving, and all subordinate facts are the experiments, attempts, or obediencies of the uni- verse's details to find that way of going, to originate a copy of it for new experiences, or to obey, by will and deed, such, general laws of economic harmony in our own places as shall result in the cosmic habit of every man. Each man is minutely free until he has formed his habits, and all men are free until their various habits have adjusted themselves to each ^ other. But when every habit is in the combination, and they have found their motograph, their way of going together, there comes another freedom. If in the evolutions of the ages we are ever called upon to give up that darling inheritance of the modern monkey egoist which he calls his liberty, we shall probably have found the new reality more desirable than the 6M word. If, like flowers, we must needs blossom in due season, instead of blossoming when we want to, and then only according to our own law of one liberty, why we will gladly step out upon the larger motographs of the world, and look back to laugh at the liberty that bound In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 291 itself in fetters of local whim and local habit; we shall rejoice in having entered upon the liberty of one law. The experience business of the moving of all things together upon local forms and towards a primitive modelar way of all-going will consist mainly of negative doing. The model we seek is also our traction. And as we reduce physical things to one physical ourself by rejecting the undesirable, so the surpluses of self are cast out by the great balancing of forces which calls and draws us to itself. It is the economy of the athlete — not an ounce too much, not a throb too many — pass it on. The universe alive is, then, a reproduction of moto- rics, each a copy of that which went before, but each within an inner succeeding circle of more subtile matter and finer surfaces, through which mode of involution man, the redeemer of matter, moves in. Whatever may be the system of the motal universe, we are voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or un- consciously, obeying it in the processes of our minds, and we will finally obey it in our habits of human economy, and the practical ethic of it all to each man is to know and pass on his surplus to the next organized or unorgan- ized motograph. When the private surplus force, thus passed on, reaches the center, it is balanced and returned to all. Man does not find out his motograph as a program of so many words. He thinks, works, wills, habituates, and lives himself into it, just as all unmental nature is living and working it out. When a new-balanced system of activity is made up, as in the socialism of human life, the philosopher's expression of it is but the flowering of its evolution, but each on a plane of more subtile material and finer surfaces, into which all grosser matter is being redeemed and vitalized. The solar system of our schools of science, or whatever system of balanced motion is actually the system of the universe, gives the points, lines and balances for all its progeny to follow. And along and after those motional pointers, which, together considered, would be 292 Revolutionary Essays a model or cliart, all activity proceeds, upon whichever of the four phases of nature they may be going, — that is, whether it be upon the material attached, the super- ficial attached, the major motions detached, or the minor motions detached. Philosophy does not find its motograph out and state it in words; but works into it,. just as all creation is living and moving it out; and the completed evolution of a new, balanced system of activity is made up when, in the case of human life, the phildsophers find expres- sion for it in words. They have not led us ; they tell us we have arrived. When the paternal movement or pattern of order for the whole necessary motion is reached, that seven days' work has been completed ; the pattern given in the mount has been attained, and there is a returning, a re- gathering, a resuming for more atoms, and another pro- cess of progression towards another completed system, which, though it be only a factory for making shoes, must be, to be complete, one of the star systems of the universe in miniature, its completeness being declared only by its discovery of the efficient. The philosophers, the law-givers, and the priests must co-operate with all, if they have the genius of philosophy, law and priesthood. If they have not, they will not even know when an aeon is completed, but will remain behind among the unsocialized and unwilling activities, waiting to be returned for and picked up some milljon years hence, as parts of a new duplicate. For as sure as now is, there shall be nothing of all this universe lost out of its life. Even the most inveterate of the priesthood and the innermost atom of granite cannot go to the hell of being unrelated to our life. Intelligent direction aims at the exclusion of all surplusage — ^its intellect is the conservatism of motion. Not a working finger should be raised unnecessarily in this world of divinely ordered action. In this conservatism or economy of effort consists the social intellect, and it is on this line of morality in In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 293 motion that the future shall conceive of God, to be an operator; and as anything else but an operator we shall not conceive him, for there is no other virtue but united operation for mutualism. This is the Socialist revela- tion of the force of life, the organic thought and deed that leads us to each other. Men have no higher func- tion now than that of dropping such thoughts and doings as are socially unneeded. To h,ave lost the leadership will at first be resented by the captains of the mind. But to be thus cosmically, divinely, led at last, each into his own moral , systematic relation with all time and space, will be gloriously better and simpler for every living man. The organic mind and habit which, if a man, wills, he may cultivate, is a. great faith that shows itself by works — a faith that delights in works and thoughts, upon the actual duties and the problems of its time. It is to be a faith which regulates itself upon this very same prin- ciple of force conservatism. It will not choose, it must not choose at random the topics for its exercise or the lines for its doing ; it must conserve itself for the sacred use of all men. And now what is IT that must do thus and so with itself? This man behind the man; this thought behind the thought. This always receding, this last, but one to the surface life thought. What is it ? What is he ? It is the subconscious man, the man of history. He is tradi- tion, will and habit ; he is the man at the door who steps in at all your great crises. An organizer, makes plans, and if. he is a rational and practical organizer, he will probably tear them up many times, because the true organizer is an experimenter in human activities. Woe to the people who are led by an organizer who finally knows; but to the man who knows not, save that he is experimenting, together with • his fellows, for a moving togefher by the aid of experi- ence, give your faith. He is looking for your motograph, and he is the man that will place you upon it. And when you have found it, you will need no man's "lo here," or "lo there," for we shall one day know all together that 294 Revolutionary Essays we have found it. In the meantime, Socialism is not to be regarded as a definite system ; it is the casting out of dead heads and dead hands. When the social life circu- lates through every man alike, we will have the HUMAN SYSTEM; and when we have that, we will know it right joyously and triumphantly. SociaKsts will have many joys and many triumphs during our involution. The gospel of organization will bring us delightfully near, in our personal experience, to the subconscious man. The strong delight of reclama- tion, of casting out death and disease from the social organism, with the full conviction that, ultimately, even they shall not be left out. By seeking through the self- steering social habit, our place, our deed, and our thought- links with the men about us, and, therefore, with the universe — feeling, by social faith, our way to that moto- graph is a life of gladness on the way to universal joy. LIII. THAT LITTLE WRETCH. The greatest affliction of the human race has been the sin consciousness and sensibility of failure, which come out of the false importance and responsibility assigned to the private life. A poor Httle atom, a mere corpuscle in the organic race life of the world, as every man really is, ^ how cruelly, how agonizingly false has been the dignity put upon ego sins, how diabolically strained has been the morality and religion that brought him into angry conflict with forces such as these described by the words society and God. How can society become other than a hateful thing to the individualist who is taught to believe that outside of society lies that incarnation of his self-conceit known as personal immortality. How can he do other than hatefully turn upon social institutions which refuse to be controlled by him, or refuse to subsidize him for imparting to them some of his immortal sweetness. The small self-life put on an equal footing with all the rest of creation as summed up in the terms infinite, abso- lute, innate, independent, indestructible, self-supporting. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 295 self-cultivating, self-sufficient, is necessarily dazed and made silly in its egoistic extravagance; just as we know it to be everywhere about us among pietists and aristo- crats. This preposterous unbalancing of unit relations by mixing them in with absolutes, this confusion between the king and his louse, while it can never make a king of the little parasite can only take it away from its meat, if it insists upon nothing less than the royal diadem. The responsibility of this little creature in playing the role of private aspirant for that public crown has not changed his nature, but only starved him in his nature. It has not shifted him up, no not by one notch from the insignificancy of the single life. The exaggerated respon- sibility of being himself the grand climax of all social evolution has resulted only in a climax of anarchy and absurdity, with no particle of the grand about either of them. He remains just one man, a very wrong man and a very much wronged man, who has been led away by disloyalty from the collective life, from that which alone confers stability or decency upon ego. When the final social life is established, ego will be for evermore redeemed from the agony and barrenness of a false and impotent moral responsibility which, while it has always failed to make him worse, never could do other than make the private life a blind and ignoble quarrel with itself and all the social life. Whatever is possible to be made of the single life, will become possible only when it descends from its preposterous perch among the stars, when it gets down upon mother earth and mingles and loses itself in mother society. Then it will lose a lot of things that must be let go before it can partake of the potentialities of the public life. Then men will escape from sin consciousness in the knowledge that the whole can never err ; that there can be no such thing as a wrong selfishness when it is the final substitute class by which the whole race lives and moves and has its being that is selfish for itself; for itself, that is for all. There can be no unrighteousness in the whole, but only in the parts, and he, therefore, who seeks his substitute 296 Revolutionary Essays interest in the interest of that class, which is vital to and inclusive of the whole race, is all right. So also, he that seeks the peace that is permanent, the joy that is ever- lasting, seeks and finds it in the substitute for the whole. It appears that, whereas the society life of the world has found its development in the struggle of classes, the salvation of the private life has consisted of the struggle for a class, the struggle for a substitute, the mere physical man first seeking preservation in a class, any class being greater and more secure than ^himself , the intellectual man struggling for that extension of himself which has been called everlasting, and which I am now calling the substitute for the whole, seeks a true class, a class whose heart and hand and brain are the heart, hand and brain of the entire race— the working class. And until the time comes when the veritable final society is established, he finds the substitute for himself in the class that feeds, clothes, builds, labors, and sweats for all, has for the present, even in this day, anchored himself in the road- stead outside the harbor of the everlasting life. When this discovery has been finally chosen, then the private man is armed for the first time with the powers of the boundless life. In the meantime it is possible to cultivate, gradually, much of this boundless power by moving outside of our- selves into the class life, or whatever commends itself to us as being the greater visible interest. To find its words and energies thus, to acquire its will and use it on everything, to harness the whole experience to its will ; with a specially acquired energy to give speech and to give it persistently, to substitute for the whole the man outside of me — ^the proletarian ; even as the priests of the world, by externalizing themselves into the church, have become the giants of history, with fictions for their speech, we may become truly with all fact for our propaganda. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 297 LIV. OUTGOING THOUGHTS. There is nothing to protest against the activity of Americans, nothing but its disorderliness, its narrowness and its tendency to run around spots to terminate in waterspouts and whirlpools, and such like phenomena of motions come up suddenly against their " no farthers," and from thence, because opposite to equal forces meeting each other so, they must end in velocity madness and go skying. When a man complains of the activity of those about him, I think he speaks as an old man rather than as an old reasoner. Surely it is more, and yet again immensely more, activity the human race requires. Although, on behalf of the sons and daughters of economic captivity, as well as of the world's innumerable victims of the mere labor habit, I atn still crying out for more leisure to breed workmanlike thinkers in, yet I know the world is not doing half enough of work, and that the people of the underfoot class are doing entirely too much. Relatively, men are overworked; positively, men are not working enough. The leisure and the work I call for can only come to us by working with, or clear of each other's activities, by avoiding the ludicrous disaster of competition, which, be- cause it sometimes sends a column of spray up glistening in the sunshine with a multi-millionaire on top of it, we silly spectators think the race is rising. Oh, rather say you, who feel the spray upon your faces, that the tears are falling. If the gospel of organization, which is above all things the gospel of the twentieth century, and of many more centuries to come, needed a sub-title, that sub-title should be, " The Gospel Right of Activity." And what is this activity to be for ? Is it to be more or only better? There is one fertile belt crossing the plane of human life; it is the moral exercise ground of the race, it is social labor and the labor question. Labor expended upon that belt brings forth food, raiment and security for 298 Revolutionary Essays the people. He who ploughs on that belt, ploughs seed into the earth, and free, human, out-traveling thought from it for all mankind. But he who ploughs off that belt ploughs good thoughts into the dead earth and seed to wither into the air. Upon this belt of active engagement whatsoever is done in a four and twenty hours becomes a portion of the social working day, that day now known to us by name only, or seen in fragments of miserably unworthy and unmanly product, made for exclusive sale at more than cost price by the profit mongers. The utter will-immorality and mental ignorance of the private person as to what constitutes the labors proper to a social day of humanity is that gulf of darkness and death which the lords of property will never allow our minds to pass over. If we had but a glimpse of the gold- masters' conspiracies for our mental dissipation, our false laboring and the waste of our lives, we would speedily cry out for the social organization of labor as the first essential demanded by a sane, or a longing-to-be-sane, people. Out of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the past year, during which thou hast lived and labored, how much of thy labor power in mind and body has passed into the social day? To know this is moral intelligence of the very first order, and as an intelligence the human mind has no other function in fact. This to know, alone is manhood, and this alone is morality. On account of the entanglements woven about our feet by those privately interested in the tremendous pres- ent-day subjection of the world's activity, we are, one and all, as separate knowers, become foreigners to our own work. Who knows how much of his day's life has been woven into the public of the day or into any day of public life? — Who cares? Now, I care. This is the subject of my daily care, to know the life outside of me and to become a part of its satisfied organized activity. The thing which the individual of to-day is almost In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 299 unconscious of, and which multitudes of so-called busi- ness people care not to know, is the very thing which an- nounces and constitutes the redemption of man. When the race is by this consciousness redeemed from egoism we shall know, personally and together, what the public life is doing to-day, and shall know just where I stand upon the social ship. I shall not be led, blindfolded, to my day's work. I shall no longer be a foreigner to it, in its initiation, progress, or accomplish- ment. There will be grown in me as part of the brain of a united organic society a perception of the social character of everything, and what is now to me the sub- conscious social man I shall myself be. I shall labor with it, and with it I shall think. The mental salvation of the private life consists of a releasement of thoughts. He that detains his thoughts about him, encouraging by his peculiar activities only the presence of such thoughts as look upon himself, is ma- king a winding sheet of his mental life, and in due time he will be found a dead worm m his own cocoon, with no heirship to social immortality.- The capitalist may not, as a person, at any time with evil prepense determine to be an unsocial and unspiritual man. He may not, to his own knowingj voluntarily have excluded the world from him. He has simply not known how to grow social sal- vation; and he, therefore, wraps himself up in the death thoughts of private property and withers out of the pviblic life. When he became personally duty conscious, he found himself with some private property of his own to hold on to, or property belonging to others, or somewhat, not yet property, to lay hold upon. Nobody taught him that this is the thinking and industry of the private tomb. Had he known, as you know now, that to get redemptive thought from the personal life one must get it as a product of work, that the actual engagement of the interest, the will, and the hand in public work, work consciously at- tempted for the public must precede, and is the source of such salvation thought — the thought that goes out. 300 Revolutionary Essays You have found a well in the wilderjiess. Some few miles on either side of this never-before-discovered well the pilgrim path is strewn with the bleached bones of those who for ages had fallen down of thirst. No man sees you. You are alone. But you wait for weary days and work hard to bring a clear trail of that well to view on the old bone-strewn path of the pilgrims. While doing this your aura has been cleared — your thoughts have not lingered around you, but have gone out. You have been in touch with the subconscious manhood of society. It may be that you have seen the bones and found the well, but also you have learned that this was an old path of slave dealers, or of foolish pilgrims who wasted themselves on Mecca, and because of the lack of water &nd of the many bones,. the slave traffic and the fanatic traffic have fallen away. Shall you tell? Ah, how much harder it is not to tell ! Because all our joys, and thoughts, and discoveries are really given to be shared with the pub- lic, how much harder it is not to tell. Yet, while the discoverer is laboring over this perplexity, his aura is being clarified — his thoughts are going out. My thoughts that are thine ; these are the redeeming elements so far as I may be a contributor to the world's salvation. Not because I have thought them, for indeed this will of mine has no direct control over what I think, but because with my will and my pleasure I went forth to the public belt and wrought there with that force which constitutes my operative personality for the public, with a fiddle, with a shovel, with a pen. I then dug them up into the air and held them not, but let them go out to the social man. I cannot tell what were the precise thoughts produced by my public doing in the public highway of duty, but I can tell that they brought the whole of man- kind nearer to me. I am now writing mine on paper. Are these the thoughts that are going out? Nay, this is my corner of the public field. This paper is the material plain into which I am digging. These characters will not mean to any other what they mean to me. I do not know you, nor In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 301 myself; I do not persuade by knowing either; I do not overcome by knowing; but I dig for use in this corner of the public field and not for profit, and from my digging they arise — ^the thoughts that go out. I know them not, they are thoughts of a larger and for a larger brain than mine. They are thoughts of, and for, the subconscious man. And all of them make for his life — Socialism. To be sure, as I catch them in their passing from the pen, they are pleasant to me in their present form, pleas- ant and joyous as the soap bubbles of a child. To be sure, the flowers on this paper garden are many hued and fra- grant, and it seems that as they are to me they will be to all the world. Ah, no; they are indeed pleasant flowers to me, kind compensation they are to me, as if the lonely thinker was thus to be encouraged by the passing fra- grance of the honey thought ere it enters the social hive, a food and a sweetness. I accept the blest donation. I bury my face in this bunch of flowers and say, " God give ye speed in whatever way it may be yours to enter the public life." When he who inquires how motion passes into spir- itual life is able to perceive that spiritual life is on the surfaces of all the things about us, that his spiritual life is neither walled in by the bones of his skull, nor yet clinging to his surface nerves like a suit of clothes or a suit of sweat, but that it is a one life glistening there on the rippling waters of the river, there in the glance of maternity bending over the cradle of a first-born, and there in a bunch of grapes, or fluttering among the wings of words, or breathing fragrance among the rose leaves, or staring at the sun from the sunflower, all one great big superficial life, not sensitive in the vacant space be- tween this and the flower, but sensitive along one un- broken cuticle, which, like a mantle, is spread with unde- finable lightness upon all things in sight. Moving along this (so much of him made by it, and himself making so much of it) is the spiritual vessel man, a creature now consisting of a billion links, every link one human body 302 Revolutionary Essays life, and every life waiting to be attached to every other in the great old family. Every one of them, consciously or otherwise, doing something in that relation, the rela- tion that gives morality to motion, the relation of inter- course. There is no thing which this man can do or undo but he does in reference to others. Even though I have designated some men isolates, it is a loose term that stands good to me only by after- consideration of the social value of what they do, or the social value of the thought or will, or habit of their doing ; but never at any moment of their isolation has the rela- tivity of themselves to others been consciously or actually absent. , Even isolation is thought of only in contrast with that something by which all single human life is ruled together — ^the surrounding man. If the single, i.=olate man is a pimple, he is a pimple on the surrounding man like the capitalist — a parasite or a tyrant of the surround- ing man. Environment only does not make the man con- sidered apart, as some say, for it is man that environs man. It is impossible for actions to be taking place on this man which are not all that he is, for environment does not consist of stones and other earth furnishings or their still shadows. Environment consists of humanics ; it is these alone that touch humanity; and motion so touching him becomes first sensation, then thought, now a remotion, now a rethought, going on into willing, or doing, or repeating, or continuing, and finally into habiting. If these hillside echoes of the actions around us be all, what is there of us that remains for any more native spiritual force ? What more is to be reached if we are the echo life of one another ? Whatever we may choose to imagine the spiritual agent to be, how can the agency reach us but by the things herein described as environment activity? that is, the whole tp-us-effective outside. And what more can be set in motion than all that chain, beginning with sensation to thought, to reminiscence, to will, to prolonged will, to deed, to habit; which, being lifted on to the altruistic, democratic, collective enthusiasm is the spiritual In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 303. life? What^ descended angel can charge you with holier fire than this? What host of them can move any chain more vital, for man and God potential, than these links and this chain of them ? Every affair, every action, yvhicli makes up the his- tory of a day in our environments, either touches us to a mere passing thought or to a thought of more permanence. So long, then, as a sensation and its ensuing thought are recognized by the common thinker to be the resultants of environmental contacts, it is evident that environ- mental contacts, even to the present way of think- ing, were always immediately translateable into the inside life ; that is, to what was so-called spiritual. How very much easier it is to simply recognize that a man surrounded by events is either moralizing those events into social relations, or trying to dodge them alto- gether, or to use them for himself alone if possible ; that is, immorally. By moral I mean the reference and rule of things towards the many; the interest of the many in me; the thought of the many — the otherhood consid- eration. If spiritual means anything else than this, it matters little whether you have it inside or outside, it is no good. The moralization of chances, accidents, happenings, and all the unencircled and unreclaimed activities of life, by placing them upon the social machinery of the State or other humanity organization is the spiritual life of the future. By this process everything that happens on or about a man becomes a thought and is passed on, if suit- able, to the life of the whole; it is the hourly transmuta- tion by which right under our eyes the mere movements in spa:ce of unborn matter are turned into thoughts and passed on through the single and collective experience to the all-encircling God to be returned again. Whence, then, came that hindrance which has caused so many impressions to wait just at the threshold of the human life, to be challenged, that thought back out from that life again ? Whence comes this long thought parley and .debate between impression claiming transmutation 304 Revolutionary Essays to manhood with the enormous percentage of loss to man- hood by sweeping rejection ? This debate between me and you, the Jekyl and Hyde controversy, and commenced in the very womb, from whence has it come? It is the struggle of that which, having no faith in the tides returning, will take a bond of him who, though the world has not fallen down through space for any years knowable to man, would yet hitch that world, for precaution's sake, to the post of his own door. It is the will of the man who, having come into the world yesterday, demands a reckoning with it and gives laws to it to keep it going away for all years to come. It is at once the strength and the weakness of unfaith, which invests all its own life, and would so use the lives of all others, if he might, to build a wall merely around him- self — it is the essential atheism and inhumanity of the man of private property alone. If you ask me when it commenced, and how, and where, I can only answer that it commenced where the first group of men consented to one of their numbers having too much of life's material requirements, while thereby leaving the others with too little. It commenced when the first man, whoever he was, stood up before his fellows in this remarkable relation. Then was born the private-property thought, the spirit of domination and all the brood of soul serpents known, to the unutterable woe of mankind, as sin and private selfishness. The crimes of all the thrones, principalities and powers, the blood and shame of all the battlefields and the tears of all the bond labor that have soaked with barrenness the soil of history. It is as a thought, an in,tellection, that this thing of property has kept the life chiefly from flowing. Through many ages it has been a philosophy, it has talked of thoughts and their relations, and endless books has it given us on thoughts and words. It is as a false hireling thinker that the property despot reigns; he is the parent of isolation and all false religions. But in the time coming men will fully realize that such thoughts, as summer flies. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 305 are fleeting ; that man's glory as a thinker is as a moraHst, an organizer for social life, that he thus first steps out a spiritual being, the comrade, the father and the child of God. To find out of the cloud of thoughts besetting us some which are organic, and to bring them out to him, and near to him, to drive them into his life, to make hitch- ing posts out of them for God's horses. The day's goal of a human being's life now becomes chartable, as never it was before, as a part of the universe, good and true. It is no longer my doom to be directed and sacrificed to that indefinite and most delusive of human possessions — a private character. For the first time in human history, it is now possible for one man to be moral without compelling immorality into other lives as a background to the gentleman's goodness. For the first time mankind has within his grasp to-day all the ap- pliances and experience for complete and uninterrupted human sufficiency for all; therefore, the opportunity to be moral and to know what morality means, has for the first time come within human ken and human reach, in Socialism. Very soon the world shall live and grow spiritually strong on the knowledge of what to do and its doing. Men will soon be no longer living under false laws, think- ing themselves better for obeying a thing written or spoken to them from beneath a crown or mitre. In the social democracy every man will know how valueless and foolish was the cant about the motives and intentions which went before his deeds. There shall be no such things to think of, or to look for in vain, as these. Public life shall be the open motive written on the forehead of every deed, all men knowing what all men are doing, and what they are doing it for. There shall be no blundering failing saints getting excused for an in- definable or non-existent thing called good intention, and no sinners shall be blundering into virtue and wondering how they came there, hastening to the door. People will simply do what everybody wants to do. All thoughts, all talk, all law, all piety, terminating in the 3o6 Revolutionary Essays plain social deed, easy to be seen, and settling at last into the plain social will and habit, easy to be understood and easy to go. Instead of the spiritual life going into the air in prayers, it will be found every evening in brick walls or some part of the material, comfortable and beautiful city. All the imaginary laws of nature will be pulled up by their roots, and all the other laws by which authority and property were designed to supersede man and the human life shall be laid as highways for the feet of a triumphant moral democracy. When the moral life shall be seen and known plainly to consist of the doings, skill and mental qualities that organize men together, that keep them organized, and preserve to all the fruits of it ; when the plain evidence of power will not be in the spurts of the heroic, but in the unbroken daily continuance of duty; when the law by which we measure the power of a poem in its self-sus- tained thought along a line definite to its own ending shall be also the very rule applied as the test of moral power in its loyalty to the cause and purposes of the social life which knows no ending; when man shall have an empire of mercy and fellowship over all adjacent nature; that is, when he has acquired faith in his own great mis- sion to unify and vitalize a larger region than has yet been dreamed of for life and its auxiliaries. After man has learned to stand up in his own high dignity, having broken to pieces first the chains of private property and sin, and then its frowning, foreign, almighty gods, before which we have so abjectly fallen, the creation of our own hands; when man, thus redeemed, has faith in his own glory, and having this faith in himself, has it, therefore, in God, for which the heart of the race has been crying out its famine wail for all the centuries. By such a faith, undivided from anything, the days of a new glory are coming. In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 307 LV. THE SOCIALISM OUTSIDE. There is an important difference between the man who has made Socialism his own and the man who has been made its own of by SociaHsm. The first makes the social problem to be a thing undertaken deliberately in the leisure and liberty of his own mind; and the other believes in society as a veritable entity — a great big slow life having its own experience, its own problems, and its own movements, with which the true Socialist, half con- sciously and half unconsciously, is slowly developing into conformity. The human race is thus to him The Socialist to which he mentally bears the relation of a gradually developing miniature photograph. The development of the individual into the Socialist thinker is the most interesting, the most spiritual, and the most humanely practical process in man's experience. On the mental side it is a struggle of the self out of itself into its containing class of other selves, commencing, however, in this paradox — to learn to live without you that I may thereby best learn how to live with you. In competitive economics it has been this very same paradox ; all the time trading myself away from you into a corpora- tion, a trust, or syndicate of you and me. And the political history of all nations has told forever the same story of small striving nations fighting themselves into great politi- cal wedlocks or federations and empires. Thus the slave class of modern times has been kept on the broken billows as competing persons fighting with each other for bread, in order that they may learn how to fight with each other for all of life in the political struggles of the Socialist movement. There is some anxiety in the minds of many truly devoted Socialist comrades as to the possibility of ever making the entire proletariat class-conscious and having a social, political and economic intelligence such as you and I have now. And so their anxiety is thus expressed : Will the dead weighted slavery of the workers, as we know them, ever be able to struggle into an intelligent 3o8 Revolutionary Essays revolution against the numerically growing physical horde of ignorance now issuing from the cradles, the schools and the churches into his class ? Must we look to educa- tion or provocation as the ante-ultimate, the immediate cause of the revolution? With this difi&culty in mind, one set of comrades calls for reforms by which to improve the condition of the workers, and thus by turkey diet to prepare them for the revolution, while another maintains that the slaves' extremity is Socialism's opportunity. I hold to the latter opinion, though I might dearly love a revolution by culture. I hold that the Socialist movement, like the waters of a draining lake, consists of some few that move first and the many who move after. Just as in the trade-unions, the majority of the sure mem- bers have little other intelligent relation to their unions than confidence and the will always to support a strike which has been deliberately and democratically ordered, so the vast majority of workers trained into an abiding infidelity in capitalism by a century's outrages, will have grown into them a corresponding faith in Socialism which shall be altogether in excess of their academic knowledge of its science, its philosophy, or its prophecy ; and having no other outlook, as the intellectuals may have, they are not only as sure, but surer Socialists than many of their leaders. These multitudes furnish us, by their faith, their necessities, their extremity and their habits of trade- unionism, with all the class-consciousness that is needed. Thus it is a revolution impelled from outside, and if in- telligently directed from within, a revolution that is nearly inevitable. The Socialism outside, the glacial movement which I am thinking of in this paper, consists of that multitude and their wrongs. The movement is not an event, but a long, long series of events. Just moving. And no agita- tor can tell, and no philosopher can see it all. But what we know of it, that we can report, and what we may there- from anticipate, that we may hopefully declare. It is the duty of every Socialist voter to learn more of Socialism and of the agitator, to help him on. The In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 309 work of the Socialist agitator is to make people socially intelligent and conscious of the Socialist movement as it is developing outside of organized Socialism as well as within; and to persuade them to join that organization of conscious Socialism to meet the unconscious Socialism of current events and of history. In the doing of this work the first of all, and the best of all, the agitator's efforts must be directed to the work of making the pro- letariat class-conscious of the most important part they are to play in hastening the Socialist civilization. The second thing to be done is to facilitate such reforms as will keep the proletariat in fighting order, so to speak, for the ac- complishment of their now necessary role of revolutionary impetus out to the new civilization, but ever bearing this in mind that reform is either palliative or progressive leg- islation ; the former merely aiming at keeping the work- man alive, and the latter being such only in the degree to which it is a move towards or with the Socialism outside. The two poles from which proceed all social action and reaction for progress or destruction are the man who is willing to let us take the place of ownership as the element of civilization and the man who demands posses- sion as the element of civilization — that is, the Socialist and the private owner. All social movements are cur- rents from one or other of these two fundamental forces of present society. Now, from the moment mankind entered into any form of even crudest society the Socialist movement began, the movement towards collectivism, and from that same moment the antagonistic movement towards anarchy in the name of private property commenced. Socialism, though it was always the foregone conclusion of any entrance into society by men, was nevertheless only the unconsciously trodden path of history up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. From thence on it has become, and shall increasingly become, the conscious intention of all intelligent public life. That intention has now to be cultivated in that suffering class for whose salvation it is 3IO Revolutionary Essays the all-absorbing need. It is theirs to be the custodian of the intention that shall save the world. Human wisdom may thus be said to consist of a man's ability to separate biography from history; while human virtue is the will, based upon such ability, to choose the larger social interest; and Socialism is the sum, in practice, of such ability and such will-of-the-larger-life in national and world administration. The life of man since it passed from biography to history has been such an external movement around two poles ; and, internally, one against each other, an antithesis of the classes of property and labor. To keep labor in its own class, and to keep it there by means of its own labor and vigor, yet so that it willingly should serve the purposes of destructive property, is the program of the property state ; while the program of the ideal Socialist labor state is to end that class struggle and unite the antithesis into a new state without slaves called Socialism. Underneath this antithesis between the property and the labor man is the growing of the single personal mind into group mind, and from thence to the last time- when all mankind shall have but one general interest and but one opinion in economics. This evolution of the mind is not a conscious or voluntary effort.' It is a something that is taking place within men in consequence of that which is outside. The outside is the real and causal life; the inside is the ideal consequent. The race will be complete when all the real of the one is all the vision of the other. Misunderstanding between the realist and idealist in Socialism takes place when the idealist attempts to take the initiative. The idealist Socialist, trusting to his own impressions and thinking they are his own home-born products instead of what they truly are, only his broken images of the real Socialism then actually outside, at- tempts to adjust it to his imperfect picture. The horizon of this single mind never being identical with available fields and powers of practice, he is a light, but not a leader In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 311 of men out to the real Socialism which is taking place around us and inviting our minds and wills towards it. When the idealist learns that the Socialism of man is all outside of him, hidden in the big affair of the multitude, he will press outward to leadership, and this he will do only when he ceases to feel his parentage and ownership of his idealisms and realizes them by attributing them to the Socialism outside. The realist differs very little in the nature of his error and its consequent limitations from the idealist. The latter mistakes the impression for the seal that stamped it, and thinks somehow that it is his impression that stamps the seal, while the realist mistakes his knowl- edge of the real world without for that real world itself. While he scourges the idealist with his knowledge, calling it law, the idealist scourges him with his impression, call- ing it truth. Yet the law and the truth are one, and is at an equal distance outside of them both ; it is a social move- ment, imperatively calling upon both of us to move with it. When the realist clears his mind of the cant which con- founds cosmic and evolutionary laws with the statement of them, and the idealist clears his mind of the cant which confounds impressions of Socialism with the substance of it, and they both go forth to greet and utter the Socialism outside, we shall all have won the victory of victories. LVI. IMMORTALITY. Immortality is at once the contents and the con- tainer of all history. It makes, it does nothing; it has no foresight of, and no control over, human affairs, for it is human affairs. It has that control only over them which they have over themselves. It is a very true, a very present and illuminating spirit, lit up out of our own oil — the collective light. I can have no quarrel with this God save what quar- rel I have with myself and my generation; and even this, though I perish in my wroth, passes into the human experience as a part of its immortality, of my God — to- morrow. 312 Revolutionary Essays " God is the best of all " of us, and the whole of us ; he is our ancient summary, our whole united history in one will, the vital sentiment and world experience of all human time. The goal of a remote immortality, of an after-life reward longer than life, has been offered to persons by the world's priesthoods. They have commenced with an immortal person preceding and creating all others, who offers, under certain conditions, to share his immor- tality with us. But the majority of men, for various causes, could not meet his conditions, and so they cannot enter in, or they only enter to be immortally tortured. This immoral immortality and cruel paradox was placed before the mind by alleging of man two natures ever at war, which at the time of death were resolved into one nature. If that were the good one, the man became immortally good ; if the bad one, the man became immortally bad; in the one case going to heaven, in the other to hell. The defect in this most unsatisfactory statement is the assumption of priority and fore creation by the God person. That God made all things, and then stopped, is a most valueless, confusing, and morally non-significant notion. He cannot stop nor make anything, but is still going and still being made by all things. Immortality is the forever unlosing and consenting life; giving on the left, getting on the right; seeming to give little and getting much; seeming to give much, and getting little ; but in fact giving all and getting all. It will not do to blame the bad nor praise the good, as the invader or the blesser, for it is most sure and true that they constitute that which has been life. Never- theless they are not the YOU, who is ever arbitrating, and' adjusting between them; no more you than the sharp stones you trod upon yesterday; no more you than the soft grass you are treading to-day. When we refer to the dual nature of man, we are thinking of his accidents. The nature of man is to be In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 313 found at the point of cleavage; the energy which separ- ates them is the immortal of man. The victor loses his nature to the defeated, the defeated wins into his nature the victor ; the result is the end of both in a new experience. It is not either of the things that fight which wins ; for of the two combatants, when the battle is over, neither survive. The former experience has passed into the outer whole, and imme- diately returns upon another. I have been a saint, and I have been a sinner ; many, many saints and sinners have I been from time to time, and what shall become of all these saints and sinners? Shall some |)arts of me go to hell and others go to heaven ? In truth, there shall no part of me go either to hell or heaven. I shall all stay here upon this earth. The experience and reminiscence of the Pharaohs are here still in my habits and my ways of thinking. The race is an indivisible mass of personal atoms, the product of the past, yet not in any way separated from the past which produced it. By and by the surfaces of this, my body, will be too broken for immortality to flow upon, and other men will then say of me that I am dead, and they will gather up the dust and put it away. Where, then, is my im- mortality ? Where was my Uf e when first that body was quickened? It was in the other life which yet enclosed me after the quickening. It was a surrender from that larger life to me. Whence did she receive it? From the yet larger life around her. In every step it mani- fests itself as a donation from a larger circle, until we come up against the great circular wall of life, the enclosure of the whole to which all are giving, which I call God. All that moves is immortal. That of me which had in it no power at all to move has been laid away. That in me which set it in motion and gave it so numerous aspects of being itself alive, remains alive; but the bone that only seemed alive remains what it was before I immortally picked it up to make a railroad of it. 314 Revolutionary Essays To be immortal now is to be in that State or city whose ports speak invitations and peace to all men ; whose parks bid all to sit and discourse together; whose doors are open to every human leaf the winds of time may, from anywhere, send rustling in, to live in a nation where the inalienable right to life, communion, and or- ganization is everywhere recognized and enjoyed. To put on immortality is to assume the habits and thoughts of humanity. "How shall I know them?" Ask not, but answer. Promote human intercourse, make companionship good and pleasant, and become an adept in all that promotes and facilitates fellowship. Whatsoever enlarges our thoughts of life, decentralizes our ambitions and finds our pleasures and our powers in the streams of open communion, is immortality. Man has been resolutely resisting and refusing im- mortality, and no wonder. The offer of it was practi- cally our first notification that we had it not. The man who makes me a special offer of my own clothes, stolen while I slept, robs me of my clothes by notification. The whole thing of preached immortality has been scaled down to such ignoble conditions that the re-offer first informs us of our loss and tends only to disgust us. If this be what is lost, I am as immortal as I care to be. On such terms, I do not want to go on. You have so inverted and based it upon such unworthiness, I will none of it. Behold what wealth they have invested of time,' and crave, and tear, and prayer; and for how small a return, vipon that most barren patch of all the earth, the grave. Who cares for any immortality to which the grave can be the only doorman. The world's immortality must be such as goes wider than the sick man's resting place. I have seen history written in deep ridges on sturdy pieces of timber in the old sea-going ships, where a stout rope had eaten into the seasoned oak and left there the immortalized history of a great strain. Jack remembers when he looks there; so does Bill. "Ah! that was a In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 315 night! We were on the rocks and all hands lost but for that hitch. My, it was like a heart breaking. How the ship staggered, and every plank trembled for fear! I tell you, the timbers, like flesh and blood, in that ship knew that hitch that saved us, and looked to the spot." Here the oak stands, like an old mariner, all storm seamed ; the hitch of an honest rope has passed deep into the timber and into the minds of those who survived by it, as a life preserving hour, an immortality. Can they forget the honest rope and the strong oak heart that sobbed? That moment of resistance ha's entered the immortal life. And this ship, what is she? A creation of surfaces, so presented to motion that she shall move; an arrange- ment of curves and angles, made to woo motion away to a mass otherwise afflicted with immobility. Every line of that ship has been discovered by stress, storm, and shipwrecks; this ship which moves so triumphantly over danger, is an acquired experience; a thousand personal knowledges, trials and sufferings are immortalized in this combination of sagaciously arranged surfaces. The ship, indeed, represented the organized blows of many hammers. She was labor, and she was a thought for motion, for many motions correlated. She represented, if you could count her up, quite a great surplus over and, above the thought-time and muscle- thrust that went into her. Let us think about this ship, for illustration, a little longer. When one motion awoke its sense or god, it was the sense of one motion only, the god of one motion. And had there been no other sense awakened by another crisic slip, that one sense would have gone on a lineal journey of transmitted activity, all down along one path of time, perhaps to an egoism. Now, let us have a new hull of a ship, with men in her; all new, for there never was a ship before (let us think), and spars and ropes and canvas, and all things as we know them to be now in their places in the beauteous, 3i6 Revolutionary Essays majestic, white queen of the sea, were never before. This new hull awakes, it gives its first roll, it is smitten by its first wave; and all the men awake, and all the loose things wildly roll about the deck. The sense awakened here is "common sense," the sense of many motions and forces of various velocities and directions. This is the difference between the social and personal intellect; it is also the difference between the spiritual and the private mind, and its centralization of interest upon the preservation of all is the difference between immortality and private ambition. What looks it for? For collective points where motions and forces may be hitched up to some old stump of sturdiness, to find the congregation point, the ship intelligence of relating and correlating force. For though bound, these strains move, and with a group power exceeding the sum of the caches by some x, say the square of the whole. The good mind of the ship finds a central point of balance for the whole at rest, as for the whole in motion, and the ship is under full sail with the sum of immortality at the helm, the preserving intellect of it all. But we are only in a ship, and she is only a moto- graph whereon the wind may play in co-operation with organized intellect, and so move a number of men and goods from one continent to another. The immortal Ufe seeks economy of friction, not too many hitches, no dead breaks and shocks meaning noth- ing, no provocations to strike and riot, fewer masters, fewer slaves; less and less care for the subordinate per- sonal; more and more care for the superessential, the requirement, protest, and satisfaction of all, and the organization of these three into one. We know many motographs immortal. We know how small a thing a breath of wind is. What can you do with the motion of blowing out from your lips for an hour? This breath of yours is such a little thing, such a little labor force, a paltry thing is this lip pouting and hard breathing of yoursi In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 317 Call up old Pan! Call up the melodious shepherds of ancient humanity's long pastoral days of peace upon the plains. This one and that, each through the retro- spectively impenetrable depths of time, have given to us themselves in the immortal wholeness of music. How many tributaries from field and brook, from plain and nook, from all times, all families have sent their single brain drops of melody, their united life drops of har- mony, into that cheap oratario of last night, an immortal motograph of sound, along which hearts so many glided towards God. This music is our sound heart of a thousand strings; that concert was the immortality of many hearts, each of which has throbbed thereinto its note of life. The birds of the field have found no Handel that we know of, yet surely their music has also been gathered and given back to them; and surely the birds sing better under the wings of God to-day than a thousand years ago. They, too, are within the enclosing circle of immortality. Sounds of strange agony and of strange joy have been laid away in little angles, unconsciously sleeping through generations, until, one day, some new peril or great joy arrived, and then out of the quivering throat of the hundredth great grandfather of the jungles, the grandson shrieks a new sound. But, oh, so old ! Who first heard the strange cry of the one thrown out of his new grave back into the sunlight? It was a peerless cry of joy. Yet it was not new, it was composite ; he borrowed it. All dead, they say. Oh, no ; not one ; but here still are they all in our simple melodies and in our oaths, and in our foolish prayers and other sounds of fear. As the step of an anny marching, with banners, to the measure of the glorious trumpets and the throbbing drums, as that embracing rhythm is to the wandering steps of the love-sick boy, so is harmony to the wayward piping of pastoral days; so is the potent voice of a king to the wail of a pauper babe ; so is Socialism to the single 3i8 Revolutionary Essays life. It is not things multiplied which constitute the eternal life, but survivings, and the things in those sur- vivings are all immortalized. This progression, enlarge- ment, and continuance to the life of one out of the life of all and one is immortality. I am only accommodating myself to the innate atheism that offers or calls for an everlasting life which was never absent. I offer everlast- ing life to no man. Why should I assume against any man so great a privation, that the last and most terrible of all pauperisms is his ? Whenever a man cries out that he has obtained the gift of everlasting life, obtained it ONE DAY, by one means, and that he has evidential cred- entials of his own that he has so obtained it, in a private, personal way, as a possession to be carried from hence with him into that post-mortality where all others will not have it, though some may; be sure the claimant suffers from aggravated symptoms of inflated ego. No man that ever breathed the breath of life is immortal, if all are not immortal with him. But, indeed, all are immortal with him, with all, not because they can think or believe themselves into it, but because they can neither think nor believe themselves out of it. The eternal life that now is, is not conscious of itself, just as the normal health that now is would long remain uncon- scious of itself but for the sorrows and complaints of others. I am but carrying the cross of the infidel now in being obliged to write about this. I am not peddling out immortality to mankind. Instead of aiming at immor- tality, I go back to it. Instead of offering it to the people as a gift, I say that you and I are IT. It was to be expected, after the various crimes com- mitted against the race by the private proprietarians, that the need of self- justification would bring hell with it, or some form of dissolution in men's old partnership of immortality. It was a dissolution of partnership, then a confiscation, then a sale, and the sale is still on, under the name of higher education, ethical culture, business success, repentance, good works, holiness, etc. The per- In Socialist Faith and Fancy. 319 sonal life whose separate interest lay at the root of the whole wrong, could no longer in this alien state retain a consciousness of immortality, and that which it lost seemed, therefore, lost to all. We are not to "wonder that the offending ego, with a gilt ^tassel on his monkey tail, found it so difficult to realize immortality. He could realize nothing that was not alienably personal; he could realize no immortality that did not include that tassel on his tail, and the price of it. Socialism proposes to cut that tassel and that tail off, and turn the property monkey into a man. This immortality comes not out of our own effort; it comes into our efforts ; it is the soul of the race. When you and I have fallen down as physical units, there re- mains of us in this good immortality whatever was outlooking of ours — all our "othering" thoughts, whether we will it or not, have become part of immortality. And now what shall I do as a worker to become man- fully immortal ? Fear alone is death; therefore, cast out fear. Feat is a private phantom, a tremor, a sickness, a disease of the solitary life ; therefore, cast away from you the props of the solitary life, and, even though you be yet blind- folded, take social faith, the conqueror of fear, and step out boldly with it upon the waters of the hitherto untried, untrusted, but all-sustaining motherhood of the human soul. Fear for your bread, fear of your master, physical fear are the forms of it which, if you keep your eyes firmly upon plain questions of work and wages, will surely kill themselves by driving the timid slaves into community strongholds. Let no man cheat your thoughts away to heaven, but keep them for your labor organizations, and you will find that in co-operation there is no space for private fear. Fear mistakes some- thing else for death, and, therefore, shrinks from physical pain. Do you believe yourself to be the race? What a small thing then your pain is ! How little a matter is the fall of one leaf! Arise. Conquer fear and you cannot die. And then who can be your master? *••• TO HER. One of the hands which bore the world's torch of hope and guidance has relaxed its long sustained fidelity to duty-^ One of the hearts through which was pulsing the new blood of a race's vitality, having pillowed many another's sor- row, and given warmth to many a social hope, has lingered into our common life, called Death — One of the brains which began to know Socialism has given forth its last fragrance and blossomed into our common life, called Death — She will be seen no more among us; her fair and gracidiiJ! personification of womanhood, her wise and courageous right- eousness, her strong and uncompromising truthfulness, her illuminated motherhood for the greater humanity, shall no more be presented to me in her own words. But she has not wholly gone away; all that constituted the life of her life re- mains in me — she has planted herself, a living flower in many memories. She has not gone out, she has not gone before; she has only retired behind my curtain . called Death — retired out of my sight into all of us, to be remembered and lived through a purified memory and life. She is still a faithful worker, a member of the Socialist Solidarity of the world; of the comradeship in this city, and the companionship of this home. Her death helps me into a fresh realization of the meaning given by Socialism to mankind's ancient longing for immortality. Even in retiring behind that curtain she has let some of the larger race light fall upon me. When she died, something only fell oflf from her. Now she is her great self, spread out with a mighty restful active- ness on the whole of the universe. She is saved from that which grows, from that which doubts, and from that which fears. MOVE ON. Cornell University Library HX S6.B97 Revolutionary essays in socialist faith 3 1924 002 311 086 li ■i