2 This breaking of wills was a peculiar feature of the period. With the accumulation of vast fortunes, the problem of disposing of these fortunes after death was a vexing one to the accumulators. Will-making and will-breaking became complementary trades, like armour-making and gun-making. The shrewdest will-making lawyers were called in to make wills that could not be broken. But these wills were always broken, and very often by the very lawyers that had drawn them up. Nevertheless the delusion persisted in the wealthy class that an absolutely unbreakable will could be cast; and so, through the generations, clients and lawyers pursued the illusion. It was a pursuit like unto that of the Universal Solvent of the medieval alchemists.
3 A curious and amazing literature that served to make the working class utterly misapprehend the nature of the leisure class.
4 The people of that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of their servitude is incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words greater than the conjurer’s art. So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the utterance of a single word could negative the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a word was the adjective Utopian. The mere utterance of it could damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of economic amelioration or regeneration. Vast populations grew frenzied over such phrases as ‘an honest dollar,’ and ‘a full dinner pail.’ The coinage of such phrases was considered strokes of genius.
5 Originally, they were private detectives; but they quickly became hired fighting men of the capitalists, and ultimately developed into the Mercenaries of the Oligarchy.
6 Patent medicines were patent lies, but, like the charms and indulgences of the Middle Ages, they deceived the people. The only difference lay in that the patent medicines were more harmful and more costly.
7 Even as late as A.D. 1912, the great mass of the people still persisted in the belief that they ruled the country by virtue of their ballots. In reality the country was ruled by what were called political machines. At first the machine bosses charged the master capitalists extortionate tolls for legislation; but in a short time the master capitalists found it cheaper to own the political machines themselves and to hire the machine bosses.
8 Robert Hunter, in 1906, in a book entitled “Poverty,” pointed out that at that time there were ten millions in the United States living in poverty.
9 In the United States Census of 1900 (the last census the figures of which were made public), the number of child labourers was placed at 1,752,187.
10 To show the tenor of thought, the following definition is quoted from ‘The Cynic’s Word Book’ (A.D. 1906), written by one Ambrose Bierce, an avowed and confirmed misanthrope of the period: ‘Grape-shot, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American socialism.’
Chapter 6
Adumbrations
IT WAS about this time that the warnings of coming events began to fall around us thick and fast.
Ernest had already questioned father’s policy of having socialists and labour leaders at his house, and of openly attending socialist meetings; and father had only laughed at him for his pains. As for myself, I was learning much from this contact with the working-class leaders and thinkers. I was seeing the other side of the shield. I was delighted with the unselfishness and high idealism I encountered, though I was appalled by the vast philosophic and scientific literature of socialism that was opened up to me. I was learning fast, but I learned not fast enough to realise then the peril of our position.
There were warnings, but I did not heed them. For instance, Mrs Pertonwaithe and Mrs Wickson exercised tremendous social power in the university town, and from them emanated the sentiment that I was a too-forward and self-assertive young woman, with a mischievous penchant for officiousness and interference in other persons’ affairs. This I thought no more than natural, considering the part I had played in investigating the case of Jackson’s arm. But the effect of such a sentiment, enunciated by two such powerful social arbiters, I underestimated.
True, I noticed a certain aloofness on the part of my general friends, but this I ascribed to the disapproval that was prevalent in my circles of my intended marriage with Ernest. It was not till some time afterward that Ernest pointed out to me clearly that this general attitude of my class was something more than spontaneous, that behind it were the hidden springs of an organised conduct. ‘You have given shelter to an enemy of your class,’ he said. ‘And not alone shelter, for you have given your love, yourself. This is treason to your class. Think not that you will escape being penalised.’
But it was before this that father returned one afternoon. Ernest was with me, and we could see that father was angry—philosophically angry. He was rarely really angry; but a certain measure of controlled anger he allowed himself. He called it a tonic. And we could see that he was tonic-angry when he entered the room.
‘What do you think?’ he demanded. ‘I had luncheon with Wilcox.’
Wilcox was the superannuated president of the university, whose withered mind was stored with generalisations that were young in 1870, and which he had since failed to revise.
‘I was invited,’ father announced. ‘I was sent for.’
He paused, and we waited.
‘Oh, it was done very nicely, I’ll allow; but I was reprimanded. I! And by that old fossil!’
‘I’ll wager I know what you were reprimanded for,’ Ernest said.
‘Not in three guesses,’ father laughed.
‘One guess will do,’ Ernest retorted. ‘And it won’t be a guess. It will be a deduction. You were reprimanded for your private life.’
‘The very thing!’ father cried. ‘How did you guess?’
‘I knew it was coming. I warned you before about it.’
‘Yes, you did,’ father meditated. ‘But I couldn’t believe it. At any rate, it is only so much more clinching evidence for my book.’
‘It is nothing to what will come,’ Ernest went on, ‘if you persist in your policy of having these socialists and Radicals of all sorts at your house, myself included.’
‘Just what old Wilcox said. And of all unwarranted things! He said it was in poor taste, utterly profitless, anyway, and not in harmony with university traditions and policy. He said much more of the same vague sort, and I couldn’t pin him down to anything specific. I made it pretty awkward for him, and he could only go on repeating himself and telling me how much he honoured me, and all the world honoured me, as a scientist. It wasn’t an agreeable task for him. I could see he didn’t like it.’
‘He was not a free agent,’ Ernest said. ‘The leg-bar1 is not always worn graciously.’
‘Yes. I got that much out of him. He said the university needed ever so much more money this year than the state was willing to furnish; and that it must come from wealthy personages who could not but be offended by the swerving of the university from its high ideal of the passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence. When I tried to pin him down to what my home life had to do with swerving the university from its high ideal, he offered me a two years’ vacation, on full pay, in Europe, for recreation and research. Of course, I couldn’t accept it under the circumstances.’
‘It would have been far better if you had,’ Ernest said gravely.
‘It was a bribe,’ father protested; and Ernest nodded.
‘Also, the beggar said that there was talk, tea-table gossip and so forth about my daughter being seen in public with so notorious a character as you, and that it was not in keeping with university tone and dignity. Not that he personally objected—oh, no; but that there was talk and that I would understand.’
Ernest considered this announcement for a moment, and then said, and his face was very grave, withal there was a sombre wrath in it:
‘There is more behind this than a mere university ideal. Somebody has put pressure on President Wilcox.’
‘Do you think so?’ father asked, and his face showed that he was interested rather than frightened.
‘I wish I could convey to you the conception that is dimly forming in my own mind,’ Ernest said. ‘Never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now. The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these things. But they are in the air, now, today. One can feel the loom of them—things vast, vague, and terrible. My mind recoils from contemplation of what they may crystallise into. You heard Wickson talk the other night. Behind what he said were the same nameless, formless things that I feel. He spoke out of a superconscious apprehension of them.’