‘He seems to have been badly treated,’ I confessed. ‘I—I—think some of his blood is dripping from our roof-beams.’
‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘If Jackson and all his fellows were treated mercifully the dividends would not be so large.’
‘I shall never be able to take pleasure in pretty gowns again,’ I added.
I felt humble and contrite, and was aware of a sweet feeling that Ernest was a sort of father confessor. Then, as ever after, his strength appealed to me. It seemed to radiate a promise of peace and protection.
‘Nor will you be able to take pleasure in sackcloth,’ he said gravely. ‘There are the jute mills, you know, and the same thing goes on there. It goes on everywhere. Our boasted civilisation is based upon blood, soaked in blood, and neither you nor I nor any of us can escape the scarlet stain. The men you talked with—who were they?’
I told him all that had taken place.
‘And not one of them was a free agent,’ he said. ‘They were all tied to the merciless industrial machine. And the pathos of it and the tragedy is that they are tied by their heart-strings. Their children—always the young life that it is their instinct to protect. This instinct is stronger than any ethic they possess. My father! He lied, he stole, he did all sorts of dishonourable things to put bread into my mouth and into the mouths of my brothers and sisters. He was a slave to the industrial machine, and it stamped his life out, worked him to death.’
‘But you,’ I interjected. ‘You are surely a free agent.’
‘Not wholly,’ he replied. ‘I am not tied by my heartstrings. I am often thankful that I have no children, and I dearly love children. Yet if I married I should not dare to have any.’
‘That surely is bad doctrine,’ I cried.
‘I know it is,’ he said sadly. ‘But it is expedient doctrine. I am a revolutionist, and it is a perilous vocation.’
I laughed incredulously.
‘If I tried to enter your father’s house at night to steal his dividends from the Sierra Mills, what would he do?’
‘He sleeps with a revolver on the stand by the bed,’ I answered. ‘He would most probably shoot you.’
‘And if I and a few others should lead a million and a half of men7 into the houses of all the well-to-do, there would be a great deal of shooting, wouldn’t there?’
‘Yes, but you are not doing that,’ I objected.
‘It is precisely what I am doing. And we intend to take, not the mere wealth in the houses, but all the sources of that wealth, all the mines, and railroads, and factories, and banks and stores. That is the revolution. It is truly perilous. There will be more shooting, I am afraid, than even I dream of. But as I was saying, no one today is a free agent. We are all caught up in the wheels and cogs of the industrial machine. You found that you were, and that the men you talked with were. Talk with more of them. Go and see Colonel Ingram. Look up the reporters that kept Jackson’s case out of the papers, and the editors that run the papers. You will find them all slaves of the machine.’
A little later in our conversation I asked him a simple little question about the liability of working men to accidents, and received a statistical lecture in return.
‘It is all in the books,’ he said. ‘The figures have been gathered, and it has been proved conclusively that accidents rarely occur in the first hours of the morning work, but that they increase rapidly in the succeeding hours as the workers grow tired and slower in both their muscular and mental processes.
‘Why, do you know that your father has three times as many chances for safety of life and limb as has a working man? He has. The insurance8 companies know. They will charge him four dollars and twenty cents a year on a thousand-dollar accident policy, and for the same policy they will charge a labourer fifteen dollars.’
‘And you?’ I asked; and in the moment of asking I was aware of a solicitude that was something more than slight.
‘Oh, as a revolutionist, I have about eight chances to the working man’s one of being injured or killed,’ he answered carelessly. ‘The insurance companies charge the highly trained chemists that handle explosives eight times what they charge the working men. I don’t think they’d insure me at all. Why did you ask?’
My eyes fluttered, and I could feel the blood warm in my face. It was not that he had caught me in my solicitude, but that I had caught myself, and in his presence.
Just then my father came in and began making preparations to depart with me. Ernest returned some books he had borrowed, and went away first. But just as he was going, he turned and said:
‘Oh, by the way, while you are ruining your own peace of mind and I am ruining the Bishop’s, you’d better look up Mrs Wickson and Mrs Pertonwaithe. Their husbands, you know, are the two principal stockholders in the Mills. Like all the rest of humanity, those two women are tied to the machine, but they are so tied that they sit on top of it.’
1 An adjective descriptive of ruined and dilapidated houses in which great numbers of the working people found shelter in those days. They invariably paid rent, and, considering the value of such houses, enormous rent, to the landlords.
2 In those days thievery was incredibly prevalent. Everybody stole property from everybody else. The lords of society stole legally or else legalised their stealing, while the poorer classes stole illegally. Nothing was safe unless guarded. Enormous numbers of men were employed as watchmen to protect property. The houses of the well-to-do were a combination of safe deposit, vault, and fortress. The appropriation of the personal belongings of others by our own children of today is looked upon as a rudimentary survival of the theft-characteristic that in those early times was universal.
3 The labourers were called to work and dismissed by savage, screaming, nerve-racking steam-whistles.
4 The function of the corporation lawyer was to serve, by corrupt methods, the money-grabbing propensities of the corporations. It is on record that Theodore Roosevelt, at that time President of the United States, said in A.D. 1905, in his address at Harvard Commencement: ‘We all know that, as things actually are, many of the most influential and most highly remunerated members of the Bar in every centre of wealth, make it their special task to work out bold and ingenious schemes by which their wealthy clients, individual or corporate, can evade the laws which were made to regulate, in the interests of the public, the uses of great wealth.’
5 A typical illustration of the internecine strife that permeated all society. Men preyed upon one another like ravening wolves. The big wolves ate the little wolves, and in the social pack Jackson was one of the least of the little wolves.
6 It is interesting to note the virilities of language that were common speech in that day, as indicative of the life, ‘red of claw and fang,’ that was then lived. Reference is here made, of course, not to the oath of Smith, but to the verb ripped used by Avis Everhard.
7 This reference is to the socialist vote cast in the United States in 1910. The rise of this vote clearly indicates the swift growth of the party of revolution. Its voting strength in the United States in 1888 was 2,068; in 1902, 127, 713; in 1904, 435,040; in 1908, 1,108,427; and in 1910, 1,688,211.
8 In the terrible wolf-struggle of those centuries, no man was permanently safe, no matter how much wealth he amassed. Out of fear for the welfare of their families men devised the scheme of insurance. To us, in this intelligent age, such a device is laughably absurd and primitive. But in that age insurance was a very serious matter. The amusing part of it is that the funds of the insurance companies were frequently plundered and wasted by the very officials who were entrusted with the management of them.
Chapter 4
Slaves of the Machine
THE MORE I thought of Jackson’s arm, the more shaken I was. I was confronted by the concrete. For the first time I was seeing life. My university life, and study and culture, had not been real. I had learned nothing but theories of life and society that looked all very well on the printed page, but now I had seen life itself. Jackson’s arm was a fact of life. ‘The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!’ of Ernest’s was ringing in my consciousness.
It seemed monstrous, impossible, that our whole society was based upon blood. And yet there was Jackson. I could not get away from him. Constantly my thought swung back to him as the compass to the Pole. He had been monstrously treated. His blood had not been paid for, in order that a larger dividend might be paid. And I knew a score of happy, complacent families that had received those dividends, and by that much had profited by Jackson’s blood. If one man could be so monstrously treated and society move on its way unheeding, might not many men be so monstrously treated? I remembered Ernest’s women of Chicago who toiled for ninety cents a week, and the child slaves of the Southern cotton mills he had described. And I could see their wan white hands, from which the blood had been pressed, at work upon the cloth out of which had been made my gown. And then I thought of the Sierra Mills and the dividends that had been paid, and I saw the blood of Jackson upon my gown as well. Jackson I could not escape. Always my meditations led me back to him.