From the Bottom Up Part 26

During the first year we had a tremendous stimulus in the meetings from the active partic.i.p.ation of four of the most prominent theosophists in the country--two of whom are members of the vestry.

They sharpened the line between spiritual and material things. They brought to the notice of working-cla.s.s Socialists the essential things of the soul. They made the meetings a melting-pot in which the finest, best and most permanent things were made to stand out distinctly. The world affords not a better field either for the testing or propagating of their philosophy, but they did not come the second year and we missed them very much.

There was a good deal of misunderstanding about the meetings, arising from garbled newspaper reports. The newspaper reporter has a bias for things off colour--buzzard-like, he sees only the carrion--at least he is trained to report only the carrion--this always against his will.

So we were kept explaining to men and women of the church who had not been able to attend and see for themselves. There was not only misunderstanding but prejudice. I came in contact with it in quarters the most unlikely. The people of independent means in the Church of the Ascension have social ideals, those of the working cla.s.s who are in the church have none--none whatever, and what prejudice I found came from those who had never contributed anything to the church but their presence, and to whom the church from their childhood had been an almshouse, a hospital, and a place of amus.e.m.e.nt.

These were the people, baptized and confirmed Christians, who spoke with bitterness and a sneer of the evening meetings because the majority of the attendants were Jews. The other phase of their prejudice was against Socialism--which they supposed to be a process of "dividing up." My chief encouragement came from the richest people in the church, the sneer came from the poorest.

The range of topics was as wide as the interests of human life. The speakers were the leading men of New York and distinguished visitors from other lands. One of the earliest speakers was Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, the daughter of Richard Cobden and the intimate friend of William Morris. Capitalism was represented by Professor J.B. Clark, Dr. Thomas R. Slicer and Herman Robinson of the American Federation of Labour. There were many others, of course, but these were the best known. The Socialist leaders were W.J. Ghent, Rufus Weeks, g.a.y.l.o.r.d Wilshire and R.W. Bruere. Exponents of individualism were many, and most of them were brilliant. The most powerful address on behalf of labour was made by R. Fulton Cutting. There has been no attempt to bait an ecclesiastical hook to catch the ma.s.ses. We have tried to make men think and to act on their best thought.

This venture in ecclesiology is not the democratization of a church.

It is the leadership of a rector--Mr. Grant is an ecclesiastical statesman--he has a strong cabinet in his vestry. Men who, having made big ventures in the business world, are not averse to an occasional venture in matters not directly in their line. He has enough reaction among them to keep the balance level.

The Church of the Ascension is the real Cathedral of New York. What matters it about Canon, Chapter, Dean and Prebend? A cathedral is a church of the people--all the people!

CHAPTER XXII

MY SOCIALISM, MY RELIGION AND MY HOME

My vision spiritual came to me out of the unknown. The facts and experiences of life led me to Socialism. In each case it was a rebirth.

"The Way" of Jesus was at first a state of mind; it had no relation to a book; it had no connection with a church. Socialism is a pa.s.sion for the regeneration of society, it is a state of mind, a point of view.

The religion of the peasant Saviour and the movement for industrial democracy expand as they are understood. Both thrive under opposition and are r.e.t.a.r.ded only by unfaithful friends. I caught the spirit, then studied the forms. I got tired of doling out alms. It became degrading to me either to take them from the rich or to give them to the poor.

Almsgiving deludes the one and demoralizes the other. I had distributed the crumbs that fall from rich men's tables until my soul became sick. I expected Lazarus the legion to be grateful; I expected him to become pious, to attend church, to number himself with the saved, and he didn't.

Almsgiving not only degrades the recipient but the medium also. The average minister or missionary is looked upon by the middle and upper cla.s.ses as a sort of refined pauper himself. So, like a mendicant he goes to the merchant and trades his piety for a rebate of ten per cent.; or he travels on a child's fare on the railroads. I have scores of times given away my own clothes and have gone to the missionary "Dorcas Room" and fitted myself out with somebody's worn-out garments; and I, too, was expected to be grateful and to write of my grat.i.tude to the person who, "for Jesus' sake," had cleaned out his cellar or garret. In the West I have been the recipient of Home Missionary barrels packed in some rich church in New York or New England--annual barrels in which there is usually a ten-dollar suit for the missionary, bought by some dear old lady to whom all men were alike--in size. This whole process is h.o.a.ry, antiquated, stupid and degrading.

My Socialism is the outcome of my desire to make real the dreams I have dreamed of G.o.d. It came to me, not through Marx or La.s.salle, but by the way of Moses and Jesus. Twenty years' experience in reform movements taught me the hopelessness of reformation from without. It was like soldering up a thousand little holes in the bottom of a kettle.

For a hundred years men and women have been begging the industrial lords to spare the little children of the poor. Have they? Ask the census taker. Millions of them are the victims of the sweater--the dealer in human endurance. The cure for child labour is justice to the father, and justice to the father is his full share of the good things of life. As long as he has to pay tribute to a horde of non-producers, who have merely invested in his endurance, so long will he be unable to keep his child at school.

It is the daughters of the poor that become the victims of middle-cla.s.s l.u.s.t--Fantine is the daughter of a working man. She is multiplied by tens of thousands on the streets of great cities, selling her soul for a morsel of bread. We are hardened to that and we think we are meriting the approbation of angels when we start a rescue mission for her special cla.s.s.

How pure in the sight of G.o.d is poor Fantine when compared with the cowards who will not smash the mill of which she is the mere grist.

Just so long as there is a cash consideration in her life must capitalism bear the burden of her sin!

There were millions of men out of work last winter. The political parties took no notice. The leaders knew the minds of the electors.

They knew that those millions of unemployed were too stupid to see any connection between government and work.

Mr. Taft was asked in the campaign what a workless, homeless man could do to find employment.

"G.o.d knows!" was his reply.

Out of this army of the unemployed the ranks of the criminals are reinforced, and the search for creature comforts recruits the ranks of women who are not fallen, but knocked down. The supreme function of the state is to make it easy for citizens to live in harmony with one another and hard to be out of joint.

Poverty is the mother curse of the ages. No man suffering from her withering, blighting touch can be in harmony with the best. Socialism tackles the master job of abolishing it. Not by any fantastic plan of redistribution but by giving to the creator all that he creates and to the social charges, pensioners and cripples an a.s.surance of life without the stigma of pauperism.

Socialism asks for the application of science to the disease of poverty. Science has chained the lightning and harnessed the ether waves, it has filled the world with horseless carriages and is now filling the air with machines that fly like birds. The inventions of the last twenty years are modern miracles but the sunken millions of our fellowmen never speak through a telephone, never ride in an automobile, never send a telegram, never read good books, or see good plays! They make all these things. They make them all possible for others, but the enjoyment of them is beyond their wildest dreams!

The strength of the social chain cannot be greater than its weakest link.

Socialists are grouped around the thin places, the leakages, the weaknesses of democracy, and engross themselves in making them strong. The propaganda in times past wielded only a sword; now it has a trowel. Socialism is a positive force; it is leaven in the lump.

The party has a discipline which often hampers its own progress, but in the regimentation of an idea discipline can not be dispensed with.

There are Socialists who see only the goal--are not willing to see anything else or less. There are others who see every step of the way and emphasize each step.

"What kind of a Socialist are you?" a rich man asked me the other day.

"Catalogue me with the worst!" I said, "for he who numbers himself with the transgressors is in direct apostolic succession."

The Socialists are the only people who seem to have the Bible idea of work. The scriptures make no provision for parasites. In the commonwealth of Israel everybody worked. When there was a departure from this ideal, came the prophet to speak for G.o.d and the divine order.

Socialists are doing for America what the prophets did for Israel thousands of years ago: we are pointing the way to simple and right living, to justice, brotherhood and religion. Socialism is not an ultimate conception of society: it only paves the way for a divine individualism. When the fear of hunger is vanished men will have a chance to be individuals.

Men striving all their lives to live--to merely live--have no time, no opportunity for a career.

Opposition to the democratic ideal of Socialism is based on ignorance.

Opponents ask for a mechanical contrivance that will wind up and go like a clock. We are asked questions that only our great-grandchildren can answer. We are told by the good people that the ideal leaves out G.o.d. The British Parliament proclaimed that bloodhounds and scalping were "means that G.o.d and nature had given into its hand." A coal baron of Pennsylvania declares that G.o.d has entrusted a few men with untold wealth and consigned a mult.i.tude to degrading poverty--that kind of a G.o.d the democratic ideal does leave out. He is a G.o.d spun out of the fertile brain of the materialist. Critics of Socialism a.s.sume and herald their own patriotism, their devotion to law and order, but they are usually men who distrust any extension of the functions of the state not directly beneficial to their personal interests.

The Socialists of to-day know that their ideal can not be realized during their lifetime; they are people of vision; they are not saying, "Lord, Lord," but they are bringing in His Kingdom.

The early Socialists met their worst opposition in a corrupt church and their writings were coloured by the conflict. We are asked to stand sponsor for all they said. One might as well charge 20th century Christians with the horrors of the Inquisition!

We are not even willing to stand sponsor for their economics. Many of their prophecies are yet unfulfilled, the currents of thought and action are not flowing in the direction they antic.i.p.ated, but the facts they faced have altered little and we moderns have made our own diagnosis, and we have decided on a remedy. The remedy is not revolution in the historic sense; it is not a cataclysm, it has no room for hatred. Its method is evolutionary; its watch-word is solidarity, its hope is regeneration.

The process levels up, not down. It has an upward look. It will abolish cla.s.s struggles and divisions. It will usher in a reign of peace. Just at present it is a cla.s.s struggle, a struggle on behalf of that social group of labourers on whose back are borne the world's heaviest burdens, but it is no more a labour movement than the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves was a Negro movement.

The man who enunciated the doctrine of the cla.s.s struggle belonged only by soul contact to the struggling cla.s.s. The Socialist appeal is made directly to that cla.s.s, for until it is awakened to its own peril and its own need little progress can be made.

Changes in society are like changes in human character: they must have their origin in the heart and work outward. It is at the heart of things we place our hope and the secret of the social pa.s.sion to me is the knowledge that I am a cooperator with G.o.d.

There comes over me occasionally an idea, as I look into the future, that the fact may become the mockery of the dream. Our temples are built with hands, they are fair to look upon even in the dream, but other builders will come and build on other foundations temples of the soul more fair, more enduring. Socialism the fact will have the higher individualism as the dream; but the conflict will be lifted from the sordid plane of the stomach to the realm of mind, heart, and soul.

The apologist of the _status quo_ is of all things the most pitiful.

If a politician, he has no dream; if a business man, he has no vision; if a preacher, he lives in a mausoleum of dead hopes. To these the ten commandments sum up the moral order of the universe. The eleventh commandment shares the fate of the seed that fell on stony ground.

The worst that a man can do against the democratic ideal is not to work for it. He might as well fight against the stars in their courses. What does it matter who brings it to pa.s.s or how it comes?

To work for it is the thing. To feel the thrill of a world-comradeship, a world-endeavour, to be in line with the workers and touch hands with men of all creeds, all cla.s.ses, this is social joy, this is incentive for life!

"Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand, Nor yet come home in the even, too faint and weary to stand.

Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf a-near.

Oh, strange, new wonderful justice! But for whom shall we gather the gain?

For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labour in vain.

Then all mine and all thine shall be ours and no more shall any man crave For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.

And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather gold To buy his friend in the market and pinch and pine the sold?