A Reply

I

MY FRIEND, —

Your words sink deep. They voice a human passion enduring through the generations, never absent but seldom articulate. They conjure up the ancient vision of comfort shared equally among all men,—an infinite inheritance, infinitely divided, a world where there shall be no more elder brothers sitting in the sun. You who write them reason from your longing and argue from your desire, and you ask an answer not from the head but from the heart. Argument will not give you peace, nor will logic curb your aspiration. You touch the hidden springs of feeling and loose emotions too dumbly held in check. Your letter, read and pondered, should make us better men and women, not from fear but from understanding and from love. And yet it is of fear that you bid us take counsel. Revolution, you say, presses at our heels; we cannot save ourselves. Then let us turn, as you have turned, and fling ourselves upon the mercy of those who pursue.

Who are these pursuers, these closelocked ranks of toilers who, you would have us believe, form the army of human brotherhood? As I look back and watch them, I see, not one crusading army of the masses advancing shoulder to shoulder, step for step, but host after host of classes sundered by gulfs deep as those which divide the middle class from the plutocracy. I see the trade-unions in their rigid ranks and the marauding bands of syndicalists hating them with a bitter hate. I see the socialists plotting a new world-despotism, the anarchists a new worldchaos, and behind them a multitude greater far than all of these, a mass of stragglers, the inefficient, the unfortunate, those who can be helped and those who must go down, each bound to his neighbor by no belief, no thought in common except the single hope of crawling up into the air and light; no outer union among them except the common support of the overwhelming burden of life. Is this the army you ask me to join? Will it profit these men if I eat their bread? Those who have will not welcome me. Those who have not will tear from me what little I still have. No; I reject your eloquent appeal. I will not trust my fears. Whether safety exists, I do not know. One thing I know: it cannot, lie behind.

Watch more closely still and see the discord among those who follow. See how the rank and file of socialists mistrust and hate and use the ‘intellectuals’ who sit at ease and spin their theoretic webs. Look at your practical leaders, your Haywoods, your Ettors, your Tannenbaums, and at those nearer friends of yours who affrighted the good citizens of Elmport. It is not new order they desire, but present disorder; not evolution, but flux. That was an instructive congress the other day in New York. The socialists were in conclave debating the ‘reorganization’ of society with completest forms of parliamentary procedure, when in trooped two-score sturdy representatives of Direct Action. In a trice the debate became a dispute, the dispute a struggle, the struggle a riot. Chairs were splintered, heads broken, before the police pacified as spirited a fracas as capital and labor can boast of on the most apposite occasion. The incident is typical. Discipline and order are not easily born among men.

II

Discipline and order! Think what they mean. This human race which you and your easy thinkers expect to remould in a generation has been to school for a thousand thousand years learning their rudiments. Think of the æons which elapsed from the time man first stood upright in the twilight of the woods to the age when he first struck fire and came dully to see in that kindled blaze the fixed centre of a little world made by the woman and their children. And then think of the ages which followed as the tiny groups began to cling to one another for protection and to buy order at the cost of restraint and self-denial. And so to the dawn of history, on and on, through the centuries when order is called by its historic name — civilization-and the wise learn to know that, in spite of all the sin and crimes it has answered for, order alone can give them the peace, the security, the happiness they crave.

You sappers and miners of the order we have built cry out against marriage and the hostages it gives to fortune. Without those hostages life itself is of little worth; yet who would wish for children left behind to chance it in a rocking world? Yours is a gambler’s stake, and, like the gambler, you would spin the earth round and round till it stops at your own number. We toil and skimp and save, buying with our own lives some leisure for our children, drawing hope from the past, living for the future. To you, those Elmporters who raised the flag in sign of discipline, of order, and of country were contemptible fools. Fools they may have been, but not contemptible.

Startled from the sleep of security, frightened, bursting with passionate thoughts they could not utter, they turned to the flag which to them meant all the glorious words they longed to say and all the splendid deeds they longed to do. Poor, incompetent people, brought face to face with a fearful crisis, holding up their starry symbol like priests holding a cross to shield them from a conflagration. Preposterous it was and futile and touching as human nature is apt to be, but it had in it something at least, of that symbolic consecration in which men kneel before the wafer and the wine.

Of the predicament of the middle class you speak full truth. We are brayed as in a mortar. Wages are submerging salaries. The clergyman must employ a plumber at twice his own salary. The clerk is helpless in the clutches of the carpenter. Our present is dark and our future dim enough, but we must remember that hitherto we have struggled unorganized against an organized world. The huge lever of collective bargaining has never even been set up for middle-class use, and it is quite possible that once in working order, this machine may be used as a powerful auxiliary in battling against extortion from below as well as against exaction from above. But — and this is a lesson neither you nor yours have ever learned —social machinery, though it may make the world a fairer place to live in, will never create new wealth. The prime reason that the cost of living mounts so inexorably is written in our statute books. Every law to help the poor, most laws to curb the rich, cost money. Better housing conditions, grade-crossings, municipal improvements, cost money. Sounder health, easier communication, happier environment, bring dividends in the end, but improvement spells expense, and I, for one, thank God that this is so. Things are precious as they are costly. When we make gifts we must pay for them and feel the pinching of our wallets. Straitened as it is, the middle class, by virtue of that very bookeducation which you deplore, holds the balance of power. It still makes public opinion, and at its command are inscribed upon the statute books laws which make the world a more equitable but a more expensive place. Let us recognize the full extent of this truth. These gifts freely given are costly to the givers. Sacrifice made them possible, and it is sacrifice which gives them worth.

History is already recording that this is the age of uniformity. There is but one general standard of a life well lived, and that is success. The standard is base enough, but it is not so base as the interpretation which, in this country at least, gives its significance a money value. We capitalize talent and ambition much as we capitalize pigiron. No real aristocracy exists which recognizes either responsibility or attainment as essential to its character. The riband and the laurel are prizes for boys but not for men. The rich and the well-to-do have set out for a single goal and the poor have locked step behind them, marching all of us to the devil’s tattoo of the dollars’ chink. Those who have money and those who have more seem to block the whole wide road, and every man behind in the race strains forward in anger and in desperation to clutch the single prize.

Give us neither poverty nor riches. Few there are who have uttered that wise petition, but those to whom it has been granted belong to the middle class. They it is whose lives have chiefly branched into many-sided usefulness and who have enriched the common store of beauty, of wisdom, and of knowledge. They it is who, like successful adventurers in the animal kingdom, differentiate the species and lead the march of life up the long spiral of evolution. And this variety, which is indeed the life-principle of progress, you ask us to relinquish. Your leaders hate it. Your masses fear it. They would destroy it root and branch, and at the price of its destruction you offer us safety.

III

You who ask us to give up our birthright, what do you know of our history? It was we, the middle class, who made Rome, pumping our redder blood into the slackened arteries of the aristocracy and refilling our emptying veins from the best that ran below. It was we who brought light to the Dark Ages; we who curbed first the nobles and then the kings of Europe. Spain despised us and lost the primacy of nations. Russia shut us out, and her penalty has been two hundred years of bitterness and blood. You cannot take our heroes from us. Cromwell, you say, was the child of Revolution, and academic discussion primed the muskets at Lexington. Yes; but it is Oliver’s glory that he turned rebellion into the law of democracy, and the Lexington minute-men rammed into their middle-class muskets the theories that middle-class genius gave them. We too, it is, who have brought education and industry into the modern world; and, please God, we shall bring peace.

And what have they brought, these friends of yours to whom you bid us turn? Theirs are the gifts which the hordes of Alaric brought to Rome, the Anabaptists to Germany, the Jacobins to France. Whatever their idealism, whatever their aspirations, they have never won a victory unmarked by stupidity and cruelty. The men whom they have chosen as leaders have ever guided them deeper into the morass. Cleon and Jack Cade and Marat have led them as Debs and Jim Larkin and Moyer are leading them now. Once, and once only, in modern times, have they been triumphant: the hideous excess, the ruinous reaction of the French Revolution are their enduring monument.

I have said that theirs have been the gifts of death, but they have brought us one gift of strength and life — their need. Their necessities have been our salvation. Their suffering has saved us from ourselves. Heaven knows we have not been unselfish. We have been hard enough and grinding enough and buried deep enough in plans for money and for comfort, but the sense that the poor are with us has never quite gone from our minds. We have trimmed the lamp of charity and kept it burning. Little by little, the flame has grown brighter and clearer until, in this century we have passed, we have begun to see how it may light the world. Here in America we have made education free to all. We have given homes to thirty million people. In countless ways we have alleviated suffering and extended opportunity. There’s a century’s work for you! And now we are creating parks and playgrounds, revolutionizing the living conditions of the poor in cities, banishing disease, organizing from the moneys of the rich, huge unselfish companies to aid in the emancipation of the poor, and gradually introducing into business life the honest principle of dividing profits with the workers. To the trite platitude that the world was never advancing so fast in material prosperity as it does to-day, it may truthfully be added that the vast increment in life’s satisfactions goes, in the main, not to the rich, or the middle class, but to the poor.

IV

You who labor with your hands, these things are yours — yours in increasing measure, largely through our efforts. Let us press the work on through another century and we will multiply them fourfold. Stand aside and let us keep our shoulders to the wheel. We do not ask your gratitude. We do not want it. But the justice which is ever on your lips and on your banners, that we ask in our turn. You do part of the work; you claim all the profit. You wish to direct our business; you decline to be responsible for our losses. You hate us because we are wiser and more prudent than you. We recognize merit and promote it from your ranks. The more successful of you slam the door of opportunity in the faces of those who follow. In spite of our own greed, we still think of others. You think only of yourselves. We are all of us the materialized children of a century of industrialism, but in you that materialism grows most rank. When you have bread, you cry for meat; when you have water, you cry for wine. Shorter hours, more money, better food, less work —these are ever your demands; never more learning, more beauty, more service.

It is hard, I know, to thirst for lovely things when the body’s needs press relentlessly upon you — yet the saints have bloomed from poverty as blossoms from the dirt. And if, as perhaps you believe, high desires arc the fruits of leisure, I ask you to look at those front ranks of labor which, as your spokesman truly says, are passing us in comfort. Can you see spirituality in their sleek content? Is there idealism there? Is there aspiration unmeasured by the yard-stick and the dollar ? I tell you that the very priest in his pulpit, who prays for things eternal, is distrusted by laboring men because his sermon is not for their physical comfort, nor his prayer for their advancement in the world.

And now we come to the pith and marrow of the matter. The age of faith is past. The manna which has fed the human spirit so long has been abandoned for grosser food. No longer do men seek re-creation and refreshment at those exhaustless springs whose waters heal with the gifts of patience, of confidence, and of love. Have you not seen how the socialists regard that starveling band of ‘sentimentalists’ who call themselves Christian Socialists? Verily, the Science of Marx has lost its science, but has not found its God. Have you not heard Giovannitti plead for the ’law’of beasts, as though heart and mind and spirit could batten at a trough? There is little enough religion in the world to-day, but among the forces which organize social discontent its absence is most utter. The heavy-laden turn from Him who alone has peace to offer, and seek to find it in sharing the loot of the world.

By bread alone we cannot live. In the dim haze of the future this truth stands boldly out. Either human society will fly apart in a myriad atoms, each impotently seeking its own safety and going singly to destruction as sparks go out in the dark; or else the cleavage between class and class, the gaps between man and man, will dwindle to insignificance in the faith that life is patterned on one limitless design whose tiniest figure soars beyond our knowledge and in whose ancient web our lives are stitches, false or true, marring or making the universal work. Only thus can man never be alien from man. Only thus can we enter upon that infinite inheritance of joy craved by every one alike. For as the saint saith, Never will you enjoy the world ‘till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold and kings in sceptres.’

E. S.