‘You mean…?’ father began, then paused.
‘I mean that there is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine.2 But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position—a peril that my own fear enhances because I am not able even to measure it. Take my advice and accept the vacation.’
‘But it would be cowardly,’ was the protest.
‘Not at all. You are an old man. You have done your work in the world, and a great work. Leave the present battle to youth and strength. We young fellows have our work yet to do. Avis will stand by my side in what is to come. She will be your representative in the battle front.’
‘But they can’t hurt me,’ father objected. ‘Thank God I am independent. Oh, I assure you, I know the frightful persecution they can wage on a professor who is economically dependent on his university. But I am independent. I have not been a professor for the sake of my salary. I can get along very comfortably on my own income, and the salary is all they can take away from me.’
‘But you do not realise,’ Ernest answered. ‘If all that I fear be so, your private income, your principal itself, can be taken from you just as easily as your salary.’
Father was silent for a few minutes. He was thinking deeply, and I could see the lines of decision forming in his face. At last he spoke.
‘I shall not take the vacation.’ He paused again. ‘I shall go on with my book.3 You may be wrong, but whether you are wrong or right, I shall stand by my guns.’
‘All right,’ Ernest said. ‘You are travelling the same path that Bishop Morehouse is, and towards a similar smash-up. You’ll both be proletarians before you’re done with it.’
The conversation turned upon the Bishop, and we got Ernest to explain what he had been doing with him.
‘He is soul-sick from the journey through hell I have given him. I took him through the homes of a few of our factory workers. I showed him the human wrecks cast aside by the industrial machine, and he listened to their life stories. I took him through the slums of San Francisco, and in drunkenness, prostitution, and criminality he learned a deeper cause than innate depravity. He is very sick, and, worse than that, he has got out of hand. He is too ethical. He has been too severely touched. And, as usual, he is unpractical. He is up in the air with all kinds of ethical delusions and plans for mission work among the cultured. He feels it is his bounden duty to resurrect the ancient spirit of the Church and to deliver its message to the masters. He is overwrought. Sooner or later he is going to break out, and then there’s going to be a smash-up. What form it will take I can’t even guess. He is a pure, exalted soul, but he is so unpractical. He’s beyond me. I can’t keep his feet on the earth. And through the air he is rushing on to his Gethsemane. And after this his crucifixion. Such high souls are made for crucifixion.’
‘And you?’ I asked; and beneath my smile was the seriousness of the anxiety of love.
‘Not I,’ he laughed back. ‘I may be executed or assassinated, but I shall never be crucified. I am planted too solidly and stolidly upon the earth.’
‘But why should you bring about the crucifixion of the Bishop?’ I asked. ‘You will not deny that you are the cause of it.’
‘Why should I leave one comfortable soul in comfort when there are millions in travail and misery?’ he demanded back.
‘Then why did you advise father to accept the vacation?’
‘Because I am not a pure, exalted soul,’ was the answer. ‘Because I am solid and stolid and selfish. Because I love you and, like Ruth of old, thy people are my people. As for the Bishop, he has no daughter. Besides, no matter how small the good, nevertheless his little inadequate wail will be productive of some good in the revolution, and every little bit counts.’
I could not agree with Ernest. I knew well the noble nature of Bishop Morehouse, and I could not conceive that his voice raised for righteousness would be no more than a little inadequate wail. But I did not yet have the harsh facts of life at my fingers’ ends as Ernest had. He saw clearly the futility of the Bishop’s great soul, as coming events were soon to show as clearly to me.
It was shortly after this day that Ernest told me, as a good story, the offer he had received from the Government, namely, an appointment as United States Commissioner of Labour. I was overjoyed. The salary was comparatively large, and would make safe our marriage. And then it surely was congenial work for Ernest, and, furthermore, my jealous pride in him made me hail the proffered appointment as a recognition of his abilities.
Then I noticed the twinkle in his eyes. He was laughing at me.
‘You are not going to…to decline?’ I quavered.
‘It is a bribe,’ he said. ‘Behind it is the fine hand of Wickson, and behind him the hands of greater men than he. It is an old trick, old as the class struggle is old—stealing the captains from the army of labour. Poor betrayed labour! If you but knew how many of its leaders have been bought out in similar ways in the past. It is cheaper, so much cheaper, to buy a general than to fight him and his whole army. There was—but I’ll not call any names. I’m bitter enough over it as it is. Dear heart, I am a captain of labour. I could not sell out. If for no other reason, the memory of my poor old father and the way he was worked to death would prevent.’
The tears were in his eyes, this great, strong hero of mine. He never could forgive the way his father had been malformed—the sordid lies and the petty thefts he had been compelled to, in order to put food in his children’s mouths.
‘My father was a good man,’ Ernest once said to me. ‘The soul of him was good, and yet it was twisted, and maimed, and blunted by the savagery of his life. He was made into a broken-down beast by his masters, the arch-beasts. He should be alive today, like your father. He had a strong constitution. But he was caught in the machine and worked to death for profit. Think of it. For profit—his life-blood transmuted into a wine-supper, or a jewelled gewgaw, or some similar sense-orgy of the parasitic and idle rich, his masters, the archbeasts.’
1 Leg-bar—the African slaves were so manacled; also criminals. It was not until the coming of the Brotherhood of Man that the leg-bar passed out of use.
2 Though, like Everhard, they did not Dream of the nature of it, there were men, even before his time, who caught glimpses of the shadow. John C. Calhoun said: ‘A power has risen up in the Government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.’ And that great humanist, Abraham Lincoln, said, just before his assassination: ‘I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country…Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.’
3 This book, ‘Economics and Education,’ was published in that year. Three copies of it are extant; two at Ardis, and one at Asgard. It dealt, in elaborate detail, with one factor in the persistence of the established, namely, the capitalistic bias of the universities and common schools. It was a logical and crushing indictment of the whole system of education that developed in the minds of the students only such ideas as were favourable to the capitalistic régime, to the exclusion of all ideas that were inimical and subversive. This book created a furore, and was promptly suppressed by the Oligarchy.
Chapter 7
The Bishop’s Vision
‘THE BISHOP is out of hand,’ Ernest wrote me. ‘He is clear up in the air. Tonight he is going to begin putting to rights this very miserable world of ours. He is going to deliver his message. He has told me so, and I cannot dissuade him. Tonight he is chairman of the I.P.H., and he will embody his message in his introductory remarks.