Mother Earth No. 1, March 1906 Part 6

INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

+A painting+ from the "good old times" represents two peasants wrangling about a cow. One holds on to the horns of the animal, the other tightly clutches its tail, a third figure is in a crouched position underneath.

It is the lawyer milking the cow, while the other two are quarreling.

Here we have the beauty of the representative system. While groups are bargaining about their rights, their official advisers and lawmakers are skimming the cream off the milk. Not justice, but social injustice is the incentive of these worthy gentlemen.

Human justice, and legal representation thereof, are two different things. One who seeks for a representation places his rights in the hands of another. He does not struggle for them himself, he must wait for a decision thereupon from such quarters as are never inspired by love for justice, but by personal gain and profit.

The working people are beginning to recognize this. It is also beginning to dawn upon them that they will have to be their own liberators. They have the power to refuse their material support to a society that degrades them into a state of slavery. This power was already recognized in 1789, when, at the French National Convention, Mirabeau thundered: "Look out! Do not enrage the common people, who produce everything, who only need to fold their arms to terrify you!"

The General Strike is still at the beginning of its activity. It has gone through the fire in Russia. In Spain and Italy it has helped to demolish the belief in the sovereignity of Property and the State.

Altogether the General Strike idea, though relatively young, has made a deeper impression on friend and foe than several million votes of the working people could have achieved. Indeed, it is no joke for the pillars of society. What, if the workers, conscious of their economic power, cease to store up great wealth in the warehouses of the privileged? It was not difficult to get along with the would-be labor leaders in the legislative bodies, these worthy ones, experienced through the practice of manufacturing laws to maintain law and disorder, rapidly develop into good supporters of the existing conditions.

Now, however, the workingmen have entered upon the battlefield themselves, refusing their labor, which has always been the foundation of the golden existence of the haute volee. They demand the possibility to so organize production and distribution as to make it impossible for the minority to acc.u.mulate outrageous wealth, and to guarantee to each economic well-being.

The expropriateurs are in danger of expropriation. Capitalism has expropriated the human race, the General Strike aims to expropriate capitalism.

A new and invigorating breath of life is also felt in this country, through the formation of the "Industrial Workers of the World." It awakens the hope of a transformation of the present trade-union methods.

In their present form they serve the money powers more than the working cla.s.s.

+Robert Koch+, the world-renowned scientist, who was awarded the n.o.bel prize in recognition of his work in the direction of exterminating tuberculosis, delivered a lecture at Stockholm at the time of receiving the mark of distinction. In the course of his speech he said: "We may not conceal the fact, that the struggle against tuberculosis requires considerable sums of money. It is really only a question of money. The greater the number of free places for consumptives in well-equipped and well-conducted hospitals, the better the families of these are supported, so that the sick are not prevented from going to these hospitals on account of the care of their relations; and the oftener such places are established, the more rapidly tuberculosis will cease to be a common disease."

Where are the governments which are supposed to serve as benefactors of suffering mankind? They have milliards at their disposal, but use most of it for the maintenance of armies, bureaucracies, police forces. With these vast sums, which they extort from the people, they increase instead of diminish suffering.

+On the 27th of January+ it was 150 years since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born. A grandmaster of music, a magician who leads the soul from the depths of life to its sunary heights. Mozart transposed life into music, Wagner and his pupils transposed problems of life. Wagner questions and receives no answer. Mozart affirms life. His "Don Juan" liberates, "Tannhauser" leads into the labyrinth of bothersome renunciation.

The study of Mozart's biography may be recommended to those who believe that the artistic individuality has freer scope to-day than it would have with communism. Mozart was always forced to look about for patrons of his art, for he lacked the means to put his works before the public.

A biographer says of him: "Mozart's life makes us feel the tragedy of an artist's life most painfully. In his youth he was fondled and idealized as a wonder child, but his circ.u.mstances deteriorated as he matured in his art and the more accomplished the works of his fantasy grew. When he died he left a wife and children behind in great poverty. There was not enough money on hand to bury him. The corpse was placed in the potters'

field. When his wife, who had been sick at the time of the burial, wanted to look up the grave, it could not be exactly designated." The genius of the artist, however, permeates the world on waves of light.

+The Czar knows+ his mission. He addressed a deputation of peasants from the Province of Kursk thus:

"My brothers, I am most glad to see you. You must know very well that every right of property is sacred to the State. The owner has the same right to his land as you peasants have to yours. Communicate this to your fellows in the villages. In my solicitude for the country I do not forget the peasants, whose needs are dear to me, and I will look after them continually as did my late father. The National a.s.sembly will soon a.s.semble and in co-operation with me discuss the best measures for your relief. Have confidence in me, I will a.s.sist you. But I repeat, remember always that right of property is holy and inviolable."

The commentaries to this fatherly address are furnished by the czaristic Cossacks who hasten to the peasants' aid with the knout, sword and incendiarism.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

LITERARY NOTES

"Letters of Henrik Ibsen," published by Fox Duffield & Co., New York. Price, $2.50.

These letters do not belong among those of great men which prove to be disappointments. In reading them one is not inclined to ask as of Schopenhauer's letters, why a philosophic genius of such depth should be laden with thousands of philistine trivialities.

Ibsen reaches far beyond his surroundings in his letters. What he writes is a continual protest against shallowness and mediocrity. The misery of petty state affairs, of patriotism with a board on the forehead bothered him greatly. This is shown on every page. Whatever he expresses, he always aims at expanding the horizon; as he himself once remarked: the revolutionizing of brains. His sentiments are European, and he must often hear that even the wish for combining the Scandinavian countries borders on treason. Thus he becomes a "solitary soul." He has even nothing in common with the radicals; he not only hates the state, the enemy of individuality, but he is averse to all attempts which aim at the drilling of the ma.s.ses. He loves Bjornson as a poet, but he wants to have nothing to do with him as a politician. In a letter to Brandes he writes:

"Bjornson says: 'The majority is always right.' And as a practical politician he is bound, I suppose, to say so. I, on the contrary, must of necessity say: 'The minority is always right.' Naturally, I am not thinking of that minority of stagnationists who are left behind by the great middle party, but I mean that minority which leads the van, and urges on to points which the majority has not yet reached. I mean that man is right who has allied himself most closely with the future."

+"Under the Wheel"+ is the t.i.tle of a German story by Hermann Hesse, in which he severely criticizes the incompetency of the present school system to fully develop the youth. The characterization of the teachers'

profession as Hesse puts it, does not only serve for Germany, but for all modern states in which governments strive to train the young for the purpose of making patient subjects and hurrah-screaming patriots of them. The author says with fine irony of the teacher: "It is his duty and vocation, entrusted to him by the state, to hinder and exterminate the rough forces and pa.s.sions of nature in the young people and to put in place of them quiet moderation and ideals recognized by the state.

Many a one who at present is a contented citizen or an ambitious official, would have become without these endeavors of the school an unmanageable innovator or a hopeless dreamer. There was something in him, something wild, lawless, which first had to be broken, a flame which had to be extinguished. The school must break and forcibly restrict the natural being; it is its duty to make a useful member of society out of him, according to principles approved by the state's authority. The wonderful work is crowned with the careful training in the barracks."

We regret that several of the contributions, while having merits, were not of the form to be used for a magazine.