A Message to the Middle Class

JULY; 1914

BY SEYMOUR DEMING

THE housemaid of a college president had been offered a situation in the family of a New York millionaire. As the wage promised her would have denuded the academic cupboard, she was asked — a shade respectfully — by the president, whether she intended to accept. ‘No,’ replied the girl primly, ‘I think I prefer to remain in a middleclass family.’

Let the reader hesitate, therefore, before deciding hastily that he is too wise or too foolish, too rich or too poor, to be within bowshot of the housemaid’s innocently poisoned arrow. For to be described as belonging to the American middle class to-day is something between a compliment and an insult. To disentangle the one from the other, let me invite you first to give ear to a parable which has the added virtue of having been snapshotted as it was happening.

THE PARABLE¹

Twelfth week of the strike in Elmport. It began in April. Until June, the strikers had managed to avoid that response to the incitements of a millsubservient constabulary which a nation, suckled in the creed that the natural rights of man are the commonlaw rights of eighteenth-century Englishmen, reproachfully terms ‘disorder.' Then befell the riot. A woman was killed outright by a revolver-shot fired, some say, by the police, some say by the strikers. Ten people, mostly mill-operatives, were carried to the hospital with cracked sconces or bullet wounds. Nineteen strikers were thrown into jail on charges of riot or murder. Parades were forbidden. The Poles were denied the use of their own society hall for strike meetings; and the town invoked an ordinance aimed at freedom of speech and public assemblage. A sympathetic clergyman offered his churchyard as a meetingplace. The town government retaliated with another ordinance, to prohibit any meeting on property abutting on a public highway, — this, somewhat on the principle of the French Assembly which decreed that no deputy should be a crown minister. ‘ Say, rather, gentlemen,’ replied that statesman sarcastically, ‘no deputy named Mirabeau!’ From the flat-topped tombstone of a soldier of the American Revolution, a strike-leader, haranguing his fellows, was dragged to arrest. The town later voted twelve thousand dollars for special police. These reserves, by an amazing blunder in tact, were recruited in part from the police of Lawrence, — the worst-hated by mill-workers of any constabulary in New England.

The theatre of this bitter warfare with its threatenings and slaughter is a sweet, gracious port-town, once a fishing village, quaintly nestled among great, dome-like glacial hills and majestic sweeps of salt marsh washed by a sounding surf among sand-dunes.

There are three towns in Elmport. One is a winding of elm-arched streets among the ample, gambrel-roofed homesteads of two centuries ago. Wide chimneys and peaked dormers shoulder among the boughs of sleek maples, shapely elms, and ancient oaks. Burnished colonial brasses gleam in the sunshine on front doors. Gardens, behind white fences and hedges of box, are gay with old-fashioned flowers. In the cool, dim parlors of these stately houses, amid ancestral mahoganies, dwell the children of the old settlers who keep the stores of the town (which are maintained by the wages of the operatives), or go to their daily tasks in the city, or live on the incomes of their investments (including stock in these strike-fettered mills).

Across a stone bridge of pre-revolutionary date, under the gaunt walls of the mill buildings, lies the second Elmport, — the new. Its streets shimmer in the blistering glare of sun on shadeless asphalt and brick walls; its dooryards are grassless; its wooden tenements stand bleak in winter, sweltering in summer. Here are no crimson rambler roses to sound their note of color against greenery; here is only hardeyed poverty intensified by the grim battle of strike-time, when wages have stopped and expenses are going on. Against the old Elmport of farmers and sea-captains is set the new, — a mill population of alien birth. These two are working out their destinies.

But aloof, on the eminences commanding views of the open downs and the illimitable sea-horizon, are the villas of the rich, — the third Elmport. So the three great classes are represented here: the rich, indifferent; the middle class, bewildered; the poor, in revolt.

When the trouble at Lawrence, the year previous, was ended, it was evident that something must be done to revindicate before the country the repute of that city. Not that Lawrence was worse governed than many another American city, but that the strike, applying the acid test to the efficacy of our institutions, revealed their defects in the worst possible light. Was there, then, a conscientious effort to remedy the conditions which had produced the strike? There was not. But a wealthy citizen, dying, left five thousand dollars to build a memorial flag-pole. Instead of removing the causes which created the protest of the foreign laborers in the mills, your sole idea was to rebuke the protest. This was the reply of the middle class. You substituted the symbol for the thing.

In Elmport it was the same. ‘As a rebuke to the methods of the I.W.W.’ and ‘to vindicate the loyalty of the town to our national institutions,’ Elmport resolved — to arbitrate the strike? No. The attempt at this was a failure because the mill management denied that there was ‘anything to arbitrate.’ To mitigate the discontent by scouring up the reeking tenements? No. A militant young clergyman had proposed this, to be promptly checked in his generous enthusiasm by the revelation that the rents from these tenements were sustaining his own parishioners, certain of whom, when he tried to put through a housing ordinance in spite of them, fought him tooth and nail and defeated the ordinance. No. To vindicate its reputation and prove its loyalty, Elmport resolved —to have a Fourth-of-July parade.

This was the answer of our old American middle class — the people who won our independence and freed the chattel slaves — to the wage-slave rebellion. They would bandage a poisoned wound with the national colors.

So Elmport was gay with flags. The July sun drenched yellow gold on the stately elms, the smooth lawns, the venerable houses. Bands crashed. The parade flowed past. Ten burly policemen in single rank; tall-hatted town dignitaries on horseback; Grand Army veterans in blue, and their wives in white; Boy Scouts in their pretty uniform of brown khaki; business men carrying an enormous flag, blanket-fashion (a hint to cartoonists), as if to toss the I. W. W. leaders as raw recruits are tossed in the army; a boy and two men impersonating son, sire, and grandsire, after Willard’s painting of the ‘Spirit of ’76’ that hangs under the town-hall tower which, a few miles down the coast, sits, like a horseman, bestriding the promontory of the ancient town of Marblehead; and brass bands variously discoursing ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ ‘Everybody’s Doing It,’ college football songs and other national anthems, at march time — this was the rebuke administered by the middle class to syndicalism.

Syndicalism, meanwhile, was sweating in the little back room of a Polish coffee-house, busily folding circulars to be mailed to the radical press of the country.

In the white-paneled parlor of one of those colonial houses which the architect Inigo Jones need not have been ashamed to acknowledge, among the marble-topped tables and Sheraton chairs of the old order, a Protestant minister is trying to formulate an answer to the question: ‘What shall Elmport do about it?’ a question equivalent to ‘What shall the Anglo-Saxon American middle class do about it?’ And this is his answer: —

‘If the Constitution of the United States did not forbid us to imprison men for their political beliefs, we ought to clap these I.W.W. leaders into jail and keep them there.’

‘But,’ interposes the questioner mildly, with a motion toward the parade which is passing the windows of the parsonage, ‘is n’t your celebration today in honor of a struggle to put an end to that kind of procedure?’

‘Perhaps,’ says the minister, ‘ but all the same, we shall have to come back to it.’

What he could not see was that in his resentment and impatience he was repudiating the principles for which his townsmen were theoretically honoring the ‘patriot’ dead, celebrated on the granite monument in the middle of the town-green in front of his house. He and they were honoring the symbol and ignoring the thing. ‘ Mouth honor, breath.’ Let the old issue appear in a new guise, and that new guise was, to them, a disguise.

A fortnight earlier, the town of Lexington, now a comfortable, middleclass suburb where there are no very rich and no very poor, was celebrating its two hundredth anniversary. The press of the following day duly recorded that the speakers ‘excoriated’ the I.W.W. Now, while it is possible to look on the I.W.W. without unqualified approval, it is also possible to understand its syndicalism as the symptom of a disease. Lexington was denouncing the symptom under the impression that this was to eradicate the disease. That the Spirit of ’76, which it had commemorated with a gallant bronze statue by Mr. Kitson on the town common, is in our midst again in the form of a labor revolt had not even remotely occurred to these ancestor-worshipers. They were Elmporting.

Certain enterprising students of history (who have suspected that there are some aspects which fail to get themselves written in books which publishers can afford to print) have made the enlightening discovery that the abolitionists in the ’50’s were saying things about the flag much more revolting, to people whose loyalty was more implicit than discriminating, than anything yet uttered by our Ettors and our Haywoods. They, too, were hated, feared, and ‘excoriated.’ They, too, were upbraided for assailing our ‘national institutions’ (among which was the institution of chattel slavery), by people whose intentions were of the best, whose business transactions were at least commercially honest, whose private lives were above reproach, and whose only error was the somewhat serious one of having got their patriotism wrong-side-up-withcare. A ship in distress sets its colors fluttering in the rigging in the reverse position. Let a middle class reflect that it is quite humanly possible to steer a ship of state into distress by too persistently honoring the flag — union down.

At Gettysburg, on the same day that Elmport was parading, the great American middle class held an anniversary observance which was full of heartache. Did it occur to any of them that, had the nation listened to the voice of its conscience, in the abolitionists of the thirties and forties, there might have been a way to avoid the tempest of death that swept that field of horror? Did it occur to them that for the want of that ear to hear they paid, as poor, heartsick Garrison said they would pay, in their blood, in their tears, and in the precious lives of their loved young men? Does it occur to their children, the American middle class of to-day, that we stand once more in the ’50’s, with the voices of the slavery abolitionists crying in the wilderness?

THE MESSAGE

I

Dear friends, let me beg you to hear me patiently. Let me beg you, most of all, to believe that I am not saying what I shall say for the fun of the thing. I would rather some one else said these things and said them better than I can; but I have waited for that some one to speak until I can wait no longer, for the time is growing short. You must let me do it as best I can, and make allowances for my bluntness, not for my sake but for your own; for there is no longer time to beat around the bush. And remember this: everything I shall say hurts my pride as much as it hurts yours, — or would, if I had not begun to see that in an hour like this, pride is a sorry guest. I, too, supposed that we were already doing all that could be expected of us, and found that we had shamefully betrayed our trust. And it stabbed me as shrewdly as it will stab you, if your consciences are what I think they are. For I am one of you. Your children have been my playmates, and your young men have been my loyal friends. I have buried my beloved dead with you, and with you I ask no greater honor than to be thought worthy to lie down to sleep when my work is done. I speak as a friend to friends, so let it be with the frankness which is the privilege of friendship.

II

Is it possible that you do not realize the jeopardy of your position? If your diplomats, under the flimsy pretext of national honor, are beguiled by wily financiers into a war for the pawing of investment chestnuts out of a foreign fire, you are the ones who must do their fighting,—and pay the taxes afterwards. If there is a panic, you pay the bills. Let an internal revolution come, and you are the ones who, unless you have the wit to see that your cause is one with the revolutionists’, will be called out to ‘put it down.’ You are, and you always have been — all honor to you for it — the burdenbearers. And in your ignorance you are needlessly making them heavier.

Heavier they will be, too, before they are lighter. The store that once kept your family in comfort is being elbowed by price-manipulation, restricted credit, and favoritism to the chains of big establishments. Your snug practice, legal or medical, is challenged by the hordes of fledgling professionals crowded out of the academic nest each June by the popular delusion that a laity can support a swarm of practitioners on its bodies and estates by whom it is well-nigh outnumbered.

The frontier has vanished. To ‘go west’ to-day is to exchange a battlefield where you can fight among friends for a battlefield exactly like it except that you must fight among strangers. The schooling which once equipped your children for their grapple with life now delivers them over to the mercy of any employer whom the fierce necessities of competition force to coin their youth and their ambition into his narrow margins of profit. Your reddest blood is steadily draining into the cities. There, if it escapes defilement, it is thinned by artificial standards of living which are fast reducing wives and children to the position of luxuries for the few. Your city children marry late, if at all; and the children they think they can afford are half the number they would normally desire.

Meanwhile, the manufacturers are bracing open the gates to Southern European immigration, partly because it is cheaper to produce wares with low-priced human machines than with higher-priced patented machines, — in many cases invented but uninstalled until an alarmed middle class, scenting the danger, shuts off the supply, — and partly in terror of the truth, that once this influx ceases, the now fluid racial and class alignments will solidify and gripe our national vitals with a class-struggle, within a generation. Rather than face the gale and live it out, they are willing to run before it at the cost of shattering the vessel on a lee shore.

The competitive tide of this lower standard of living is pitilessly creeping up your own shins. You feel the chill, mock yourselves with the vain assurance that it will crawl no higher, and protest desperately against a thing known to you as the high cost of living. And you lend a credulous ear to any politician with contempt enough for your intelligence to assure you that it can be mended by tariff-revision, currency reform, restriction of immigration, control of trusts, or any or all of these, including an underdone hash of economic compromises styled Progressivism.

Now it happens that the procession is already moving at a rate which leaves none too much time for a middle class to put itself at the head of it. Those who were complaining six years ago that it was moving at glacier speed are now complaining that it is moving like an avalanche. For every great revolution is preceded by a period of unrest which generates its own momentum. The symptoms of these birththroes are always the same: challenge of betrayed stewardships and a pitching of traditions into the dust-bin. Cromwell was a child of revolution, not a father. The skeptic philosophers had leveled the Bastille years before ‘wine-merchant Cholat turned impromptu cannoneer’; an academic discussion of the rights of man primed those muskets at Lexington; yet in this hour which makes the most supreme demand on your patriotism since those decades of anti-slavery agitation which kindled the fires of the sixties, you are braying yourselves hoarse over professional baseball.

It is cold comfort to be told by historians that ‘the middle class defied the Pope in the fifteenth century and won the greatest revolution in history; it cut off the head of Charles I in 1649 and of Louis XVI in 1793; it won the American War of Independence; finally, only a generation ago, it fought the Civil War’; for this may mean merely that disputes which might have been settled by your brains had to be settled by your blood; that an alert social conscience might have avoided that ghastly river of slaughter through which we have always been wading to justice and ‘peace.’ But even if no watching and working and praying in 1850 could have averted that crushing sacrifice of strong and beautiful young men, is it so certain that the wageslavery of 1914 is a responsibility less freighted with tragic possibilities? It is fifty years since Lord Macaulay wrote: —

‘Your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country and by your own institutions.’

Nor should this be construed to impugn the character and good intentions of our recent immigrants. For whatsoever vandalism they engender, we shall have the neglect and oppression of them, permitted by you under our own government in our own mill cities, to thank. It is twenty years since William Clarke concurred: —

‘ Had you predicted to a Roman senator that the splendid Græco-Roman cities would be given to the flames and that the Roman senate and legions would be trampled down by hordes of ignorant barbarians, he would have smiled, offered you another cup of Falernian wine, and changed the subject . . . But are there no barbarians? . . . They are in our midst.’

Who that has seen the streets of a city in strike-time patrolled like an armed camp, can rid his brain of that pestering image of society as the fool dancing on the crust? Also, it is one of history’s axioms that the social order which conceives change as least likely is the most liable to change.

The poor know what they want. The rich know what they do not want. You — hardly know that a dispute is going on. For while the poor, in the stress of a desperate strike, can rise to an incredible pitch of heroism for what they regard as a principle, and while the rich, stung by conscience, will do what they can under the circumstances of their false position, you have never even dreamed of the abysmal unimportance of practically everything that is thought about and talked about in the middle-class society to which you belong.

I know: it is not so long since you pulled your own feet out of that deadly mire of poverty. There it lurks, still, too close for comfort. The day’s routine fags you, soul and body. You come home, as I do or as anybody does, with a furrow between your eyebrows, asking nothing but to be allowed to forget for a few hours. But, — by the Eternal, brother! — I say to you that the way to escape your troubles is not to forget but to consider the troubles of the other fellow.

You who live in the small towns and in the country, — yes, even you of the city suburbs, reply: ‘How can we be expected to understand these things? We cannot understand what we do not see.’

From the windows of a train rolling through the steel-mill district of a Great Lakes port, you look on gaunt chimneys belching flame, a smokestained heaven and befouled tenements where the workers snatch their brief rest before hurrying back to the inferno which burns their lives away. The man in the seat ahead pulled down his window-shade. On an impulse, he was asked, ‘Why did you pull down your shade?’ ‘To shut out that dreadful sight,’ said he, quite simply, ‘it is too horrible to think of.’ ‘Too horrible for you to think of; yet not too horrible for some one else to live in?’ ‘But what can a man like me do?’

You can stop pulling down the shade.

III

But do not suppose that in your present uninstructed state you are any more fit to grapple with these duties than a flat-chested stripling is fit for a college football game. Mere good intentions will not suffice. The brabbles of these last six years have at least proved that society is in a predicament where the private conscience of the individual, which served well enough for half a generation ago, cannot undertake duties which must be discharged by a public conscience of the community which is yet to be created. In Elmport, where there was religious conscience enough to float off a revival in sinners’ tears, there was not enough social conscience to wet an eyelash. This elder conscience imagines that to avert revolution the one thing needful is to sit on the safety-valve. To ease an acute crisis it will cheerfully abrogate every civil right for which AngloSaxons have struggled since Magna Charta was wrested from slippery King John, all on the serene supposition that it is ‘master of the situation.’ Ministers, in moments of candor, have confessed their distress at having to recognize that parishioners who conform to every traditional test of righteousness, ‘people you can’t help loving,’ nevertheless stand in some public relation to the community in which they are not only obstructionists but actively mischievous. No amount of willingness to do the right, thing will get the right thing done, so long as the huge mass of these well-intentioned people is conscientiously bent on the wrong thing. You must first chew up the facts very fine—a tough mouthful; and you must next digest them well; it will need a strong stomach.

You protest that the gentlemen, who, to preserve incomes of five figures, persist in steering us into these deadly perils, are good husbands and kind fathers. I am forced to remind you that the political refugees in the Plymouth Colony, to whom you owe whatsoever free institutions have been spared to you by nineteenth-century industrialism, warmly applauded their English brethren for beheading a monarch on whose behalf a large slice of horrified middle class — your own prototypes — urged that identical plea. If a Stuart king’s was an acute case requiring a desperate remedy, what assurance have we that a powerful monarch, who had achieved the wedlock of the domestic virtues and the public vices, was any more menacing to the common weal in the seventeenth century than a powerful owning (and therefore governing) class, which has achieved the union of personal irreproachability and industrial tyranny, is in the twentieth? So shrewdly has this dual standard been thrust home to us that we are daily outfaced by the spectacle of men whose ‘fine personal characters’ we would all but gladly barter for a man who, though he might be a knave in his private life, would yet shape his public life to some sense of social decency — and those who ask why corrupt politicians are continually elected and make, on the whole, fairly acceptable administrators, are directed to re-peruse the first half of this sentence.

To particularize: a venerable physician, chairman of the board of health, had been, in the days when registration of contagious disease was a new idea, a valuable officer. In an age of preventive medicine he is an anachronism. But his salary is his sole income. As a good husband and kind father, his duty to his family forbids him to resign. His tenure of office postpones sanitary and housing reforms for the want of which scores of babies are, as a matter of record, annually dying. This innocent slaughterer of innocents would be outraged at a charge of murder. Yet, as between this good husband and kind father of unimpeachably ‘fine personal character,’ and an officer of possibly loose morals who would scientifically attack infant mortality, could any sane public policy pause a minute to choose?

I do not say that the domestic virtues on which a middle class in every age has justly prided itself are the less important (though I can see on every hand situations in which they are wholly irrelevant, not to say inadequate) ; what I do say is that they are not enough. And my protest rebounds from a besotted self-esteem (not incompatible with countenancing wages insufficient for decent living while practicing the domestic virtue of monogamy itself) which keeps shrieking that they are enough. Which has led an eminent sociologist to declare that we are in a situation where ‘the judgment of the conventionally “good” citizen may be unwittingly as evil as that of the worst criminal.’ What is more, the head-in-sand policy now in force is the very worst preparation for, as well as the surest guarantee of, a day of wrath to come. Your militia would not save you, not even if they mowed down strikers with Gatling guns, as they have done. Nor need you look to be rescued by your rich relations. And since you are the ones who must settle this muddle, if you are to save your institutions and your ideals, to say nothing of yourselves, why not be about it? Grow a new species of social responsibility on the healthy old stalk of your personal characters. For if we cannot shoulder new duties, life has a way of jostling us aside to make room for those who can.

But if your ignorance is more perilous to society than the righteous discontent of an idealistic working class, you have at least the excuse that the machinery which, if it is to go on, must keep you in the dark, has well-nigh perfected a process whereby you are automatically misinformed, or not informed at all. I use these impersonal terms to describe it because it is not, as syndicalists and other radicals believe, the conscious invention of knaves. That were too sweet a flattery. It grew. It was the line of least resistance. It was nourished by a cowards’ truce which offered every reward for compromise and every penalty for telling the truth. Thus it is that you are the victims of a vast social conspiracy of silence, quite as universal and far more effective than the conspiracy of silence which you delude yourselves into believing has concealed the facts of sex from your children. This conspiracy is involuntary. The minister who declares that he has always felt free to utter anything from his pulpit which he felt impelled to say has simply never been impelled to say anything which he did not feel free to utter.

IV

You would not expect the ticketseller at a baseball field to volunteer the private information to the crowd at his window that a thunderstorm was coming, even if he knew and had it on the authority of the weather bureau. In the first place, as the manager would point out as he kicked him off the field, the weather bureau might be wrong — as well it might. Besides, both ticket-seller and manager might, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, be able to persuade themselves that the storm would blow over. Do not suppose, therefore, that it will be easy to obtain the kind of information you need from the three great organs of public instruction — the colleges, the churches, and the newspapers. They are only vaguely aware that anything is afoot, and what they do know they call by false names, in the desperate superstition that the sun of that red dawn can be cheated out of rising by a common agreement to call it the moon. Do not be deceived by their vehement denials into believing that these charges are untrue in the main because they can, here and there, by the case-system of ‘I-know-of-an-instance’ disprove them in a few particulars. They are the ticket-sellers, and their every mental process is so colored by subserviency to a class view of affairs that they are honestly not aware of any constraint on their tongues, — which is quite the most hopeless part of it. A convenient formula for this fact is that people are not cussed: they are only blind.

When I speak of the churches, I speak not of the clergymen but of their congregations, — of you, to be explicit. In a time when prophets and righteous men have discovered that, rich and poor, scholar and deck-hand, we are all lost or all saved together, and that the surest path to salvation is to forget that you have a soul in making the lot of your fellow man such that he can seek salvation, — by the same path, — your doctrine is still insisting that the allimportant is to save your own souls. That we must all succeed or all fail together; that the boulevard is never safe until the slum is safe; that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all,’ is a new kind of gospel which you have hitherto supposed applied only to the party necessarily in the wrong of industrial squabbles, never guessing that it may be a perfectly obvious first axiom of our social order in which we are all so indissolubly knit together that a wound in any part bleeds the whole.

The ministers, poor fellows, are bursting with this message — if you would only untie the gag. To their everlasting honor be it acknowledged that they are, as it is, blowing up in their pulpits and resigning at the rate of about one a week. They see that the church has, in the moral life of the community, only a veto power. It can no longer enact, or enforce. As with the doctor, we have made the minister a tradesman. We hire the doctor to save our bodies by a particular method of homœopathy, allopathy, osteopathy. We hire the minister to save our souls on the same principle. The doctors have discovered that the way to eradicate disease is not to cure but to prevent it. The ministers have begun to take the hint from medicine. They have begun to suspect that the way to eradicate sin and suffering is not to wash souls for the next world but to provide tubs for the taking of a daily bath in this. Yet when our tradesman minister tries to substitute sin-prevention for the sin-cure which was generally fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century, we quite naturally complain that this is not the article we bargained for, and buy our wares of another tradesman who keeps the kind we use. The formula for this transaction is: ‘Stick to the gospel and let business alone.’ The pinch is that the extra bathtubs for souls in this world would have to be paid for out of the dividend checks of the congregation. In Elmport, you recall, it was the church people who defeated the housing ordinance. Besides, a congregation, well knowing that a business run on strictly Christian principles would, as things are, last about fifteen minutes, so resents the exposure of this connived-at imposture that a minister courageous enough to proclaim practical Christianity does so fully realizing that the consequence may be dismissal. The one thing middle-class Christians most resent is Christianity.

Nor need you expect to be told of t he thunderstorm by your colleges. To expect them to assume a moral leadership which would instantly pitch them into conflict with the rich testator whose favor they are obliged to woo is to expect fire to be wet. For them to plan on building them more stately mansions — dormitories, chapels, lecture halls — by attacking the methods whereby their donors accumulated the funds would be to suppose a testatorial magnanimity which the history of willmaking does not bear out. It is shrewd comment that the radical clubs in the colleges were started, not by the faculty, but by the students; which is to say, not by the employees of these knowledge factories, but by their customers, who created a demand for goods which had not been on sale. Within the year, the professors of political economy have taken steps to protect their freedom of speech — the first academic trade-union. Waste no reproaches on the presidents and faculties for having betrayed a stewardship. No more than you or I can they afford to quarrel with their bread-and-butter.

The greatest engine of all is the sorriest out of gear. It is not so much that the newspapers are edited from their business offices: it is not so much that they are directly edited by their advertisers. They are edited out of the timidities and prejudices of you, their middle-class readers. If your paper ventured to tell you the obvious truths, that for any able-bodied man or woman to live without working is a crime against society more grave than most of the offences which your judges punish with outrageously disproportionate sentences; that every penny of wealth is created by the community and rightly belongs to it; and that to take interest for money is probably wrong, you would stop a paper which printed such seditious blasphemies and buy one which told you what you wished to hear. A newspaper-owner is an ordinary man, counseled by the peculiarly public nature of his business to be extraordinarily cautious. It is easy for him to keep friendly with his advertisers since both realize in a tacit cordiality that their bread is buttered on the same side. The reporters are overworked, underpaid, and too blasé with the eternal excitements of their trade to consider what it all means, even if they had the wit to guess. The prophet Isaiah might speak to them with the tongues of men and of angels, and the morning papers would record that ‘the prophet Isaiah also spoke.’

Those editors who do guess what it all means are so embittered by the quantities of political and commercial scandal which they know ought to be printed and will not be, that disillusionment and cynicism have put them into moral bankruptcy,I speak of those who have the intelligence to realize their humiliating position. The others are not even aware of the fundamental fallacy,—that whereas we assume the newspaper—this tremendous organ of public thought — to be a public institution operated in the public interest, it is privately owned and operated for private profit. When the interests of the public clash with the interests of the owners, as they do hundreds of times a day, to suppose that the proprietors will espouse the public cause to the detriment of their own is to suppose that they will behave differently from all the other tradesmen into whose class we have thrust them.

The only two parties who know that the newspapers are not to be trusted are the radicals who maintain a none-too-trustworthy press of their own, and a small group of financiers who pay a statistician a high price for a weekly news-service on the understanding that they alone are to have the advantage of acting on the information it contains. Naturally, both these news-services, the radical press and the confidential letters, contain the same material — what is left out of the daily papers. You have yourselves to thank. Your editors, as tradesmen, do not keep goods for which they see no demand. They see no demand for news of the rumblings of industrial revolution; therefore it is not for sale. Yet it is not quite so innocent as that. The remark of the journalist in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm pretty well formulates the science of American journalism: ‘I shall omit nothing that the public need know.’

It is not that the press is a liar. The editor does not print it because you readers do not want it: you readers do not want it because the editor does not print it. The colleges do not teach it because educated people do not demand it: educated people do not demand it because the colleges have never taught them its importance. The clergymen do not preach it because their polite congregations dislike having their sensibilities harrowed — the wheel comes full circle. And so the vicious spiral winds snake-like, poisoning our free institutions with this vast unofficial censorship, infinitely more effective than any official censorship — the universal and truth-killing gospel of Hush!

From all of which this much is certain: you are not getting the news.

And justice requires that your excuse be added: you are not getting the news because you are not sufficiently aroused to demand it; and you are not sufficiently aroused to demand it because you are not getting the news.

v

Even if your schools and colleges, however, could afford to be honest tradesmen, the wares they are selling are rapidly becoming not worth your purchase. They belong to a time when education was for the few. When educated men were scarce they could sell their disciplined brains in a virgin market. Then the news went out that higher education meant good pay, and the past three decades have so glutted the market for these disciplined brains that we are now confronted with the incongruity of the trade-union-protected plumber in greasy overalls commanding better pay than the ‘professional’ in a white collar whose training involved an outlay of five thousand dollars. The spread of higher education has spoiled the market; and your mere college graduate, untrained to any special profession, is even more at the mercy of the employer, and lucky if the white collar which is his badge of respectability is not also the badge of his life-servitude. You have not heard the news, which is that the money is no longer in the white-collar job; it is in the greasy-overalls job. So, while the skilled artisan has a commodity always in demand and for which his union will enable him to exact a pretty good price, you are still pathetically forcing your sons’ necks into this yoke of respectability.

And what is this respectability for which you have always been such sticklers?

A hasty review of his personal acquaintance will satisfy any candid person that it is quite possible for a man to lie, cheat, steal, slander, and commit wholesale industrial murder, provided he does so respectably. This does not mean that he must not get caught. It means merely that he must not compromise himself legally. Respectability is the act of keeping friendly with the police. It might be forgiven the offense of putting crime on a genteel footing had it not also put all the mighty passions of generous enthusiasm under the social taboo of ‘ bad taste.’ Mrs. Pankhurst, of whom a modern poet has written,

And Jesus Christ has come again with whips, —

you respectables consider a wicked notoriety-seeker whose financial transactions, you would like to suspect, would not bear scrutiny. Tolstoï, if you knew more of him than that you have been told that he wrote indecent stories, you would consider a crank who made himself and everybody around him uncomfortable over the wrongs of the poor when he had enough himself. In short, a reformer (which is to say, a Christian) is, with you, a dangerous person who upsets families, — the tranquillity of your own being the supremest social millenium your imagination can envisage.

But is that domestic security of yours so certain? I speak now not of possible revolution, but of probable extinction. Brusquely as you are being elbowed out of business, you are being elbowed more brusquely still out of your very existence. The most deadly process of extermination known to history is at work decimating your numbers, — the voluntary restriction of birthrate under economic pressure. It is no mere coincidence that the only two classes which maintain their normal birthrate are those too ignorant to know the means and the economic advantages of reducing the fruitfulness of marriage, and those directly under the intimidation of the Roman priesthood, which combats this practice with the powerful instrument of the confessional. It is enough merely to name this grinning spectre which makes an unbidden third at the bridal breakfast, which stalks through silent rooms where troops of children should be romping at their play, which stands at the bedside even in the holy hour of childbirth. The suffering this has cost you would make my dwelling on it a needless cruelty except to ask whether you can now see whither this iniquitous social and economic system is forcing you — this system whereby the many work and the few batten on the profits. You probably know that your AngloSaxon blood has already ceased to predominate in this country. It is not alone that the oligarchy of money is fast reducing you industrially; but that this property-worship and dividendolatry are sucking the very blood from the veins of the nation, penalizing marriage, killing your children unborn, killing your very race.

Do not suppose that these words spring from hatred of the rich. And do not make the blunder of hating the rich. Lift not your hands to them for help, nor in hatred, for they as impotently move as you or I. Hate the order which made them rich to their poverty, and help them to make an end of it.

You have one refuge: to cast in your lot with the under-dog. Unless you accept the leadership, it will pass from you, as it has done before, to another class who are the idealists. Their need has made them so. They stretch hands to you for help.

Make no mistake about this. You will have to think hard and think twice. All your traditions, all your teaching, all your ambitions have bidden you aspire to the estate just above you. The only refuge from capitalism which the capitalist has offered you is to become a capitalist. The prize which has been dangled just beyond your list is the contemptible existence of living without working. You have always been taught that once you had scrambled through the doorway to the employing and owning class you would be safe. You have seen that doorway contract. You have seen it grow harder and harder for your sons to fight their way in; you have seen the sons of those already in thrust out. You have seen the struggle turn murderous.

They are still telling you that your only refuge from the mire of poverty lies in getting in. Does it ever occur to you that your only hope lies in exactly the opposite direction — in keeping out, in persuading others to keep out, and in joining forces with the plundered and the outcast? Does it ever occur to you that if your pity drew you to take sides with the oppressed, your unlooked-for reward would be a sudden and overwhelming power to end oppression? Does it ever occur to you that, once you joined forces with the poor (who, you have been told, cannot help you), together you would be suddenly invincible and need no longer dread each other, — nor the rich, nor poverty?

VI

Golden pour of summer sunshine over Elmport: churchbells booming their solemn noonday jubilation; sunlight and shadows of foliage flickering on the white walls of the ancient houses; blue-coated veterans marching with faces stern and set; ‘Lawrence Police’ on the badges of the constabulary; and, over the empty, silent mill, flowing gallantly to the noon breeze, in bitter mockery, — the national colors.

I had journeyed to Elmport to see an old New England town celebrate its great national holiday of political liberty during a struggle for industrial liberty. I had seen the foreign immigrants eager, interested, and respectful,—if a bit puzzled,—watching the American middle-class protest against syndicalism.

That protest was a bit absurd. But there was in it a deeper pang, an ache of pathos which struck to the heart. It was so well meant. It was so utterly beside the point. A town piteously bewildered. It knew that a justice of the superior court and a saintly bishop were stockholders in the Elmport mill, and that therefore the strikers must be in the wrong. The townspeople were saying to the I.W.W. (which had accepted the leadership which they themselves had rejected): ‘You challenge our institutions. We answer your challenge by pointing to our flag, — the flag for which, in tears and agony, we gave our young sons to death in battle half a century ago. Our eyes are full of angry tears, and our hearts are full of bitterness at your insult. For the future, affront this flag at your peril!’

Such was the reply at Elmport. Such is the reply of that old New England of which this little town of EImport is but the magnifying lens. Such is the reply of the American middle class from ocean to ocean. It does not understand. It will not sympathize. It can only intensely resent.

And now let me tell you the answer of radicalism to the middle class.

It is the basement of the Belgian hall in Lawrence. Overhead, a strike meeting is in progress. Except for its occasional thunders, down here all is order and quiet. At a long table, thirty children are eating their evening meal. They are saying nothing because most of them are too little to talk, and if they could, there are hardly any two who could understand each other’s tongues. Every morsel they are tucking into their tiny mouths is the gift of a family in some other New England mill city which has gone without in order to be able to send it.

A strike-leader, who had been haranguing the meeting, came downstairs from the hall above, flushed with denunciation. Something in the communal aspect of the table, some strange hush of sacramental quietude as these children sat in the deepening dusk eating the bread of sacrifice, brought a quick gush of tears to his eyelids. He turned away murmuring, ‘Is this as near to the brotherhood of man as we can come?’

Dear friends, would it not be better to stop calling this radicalism? Would it not be better to call it the good news of that kind elder brother of us all, the carpenter of Nazareth?