IRLF 
 
 FORCINGS 
 
 of &he NEW 
 
 STUDIES IN 
 SOCIALISM 
 
 Franklin H. WentwortK 
 
 >- 
 
Oirr 
 
 Estate of 
 
 Thomas J. Mooney 
 
(A) 
 
Forgings 
 of the 
 
 New 
 
 Studies in Socialism 
 
 By 
 Franklin H. Wentworth 
 
 h 
 Author of "Wendell Phillip?," "The Pride of Intellect," etc. 
 
 New York 
 
 The Socialist Literature' Co. 
 15 Spruce St. 
 
Copyright 1907 
 by Franklin H. Went worth 
 
 AKIKL PRESS 
 
 MASS. 
 
 **<1. ~t+~ r ' f ~"L 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 The price of cleanliness .... Page i 
 
 Consider the lilies u J 5 
 
 As the wheels turn " 22 
 
 The dragon's teeth " 26 
 
 Tom's a' cold "34 
 
 Does it seem fair to you? . . . . " 45 
 
 Jimmie, the weaver "53 
 
 The creeping dark ** 65 
 
 How far the little candle . . . . " 71 
 
 Renunciation "75 
 
 Manhood's crucible "85 
 
 The hero " 90 
 
 The philanthropist "95 
 
 The flowers of a grant of land . . " 101 
 
 Imagination "112 
 
 The long procession "117 
 
 The love that is to come . . . . " 131 
 
 Good and evil " J 35 
 
 The higher struggle "140 
 
 She who is to come u 144 
 
 When the earth trembles . . . " 152 
 
 M30101 8 
 
TO THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN THE POTENCY 
 OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT 
 
THE PRICE OF CLEANLINESS 
 
 It is beautiful to be clean. 
 
 Isn't it? 
 
 Isn't it, you sweet young girl ? 
 
 Clean bodies in clean linen are almost a 
 fleshly deity, aren't they ? 
 
 After being down in the city's grime and 
 soot, isn't a clean waist a luxury ? 
 
 To come out of your bath and clothe your- 
 self in clean linen ; that makes even one's 
 enemies seem far away and unimportant, 
 doesn't it? 
 
 But if the clean waists are not home from 
 the laundry, and you have to slip your clean 
 body into the soiled one again, how it changes 
 things ; your enemies seem near and exas- 
 perating then, don't they, sweet young girl ? 
 
 But now comes the laundry-wagon, bright- 
 ly painted and clean ; the sprightly driver 
 bounds up the steps and rings the bell, and 
 in a moment Mary hangs the bundle on 
 your chamber door, gives a light tap, and 
 goes away. 
 
 You take in the bundle, and your enemies 
 sink away again into obscurity. You forget 
 about 'em. 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 You open the bundle with a yank at the 
 string. 
 
 There are the clean waists, and the clean 
 other things. 
 
 What have they cost ; what is the price of 
 all this cleanliness, sweet young girl ? 
 
 Eighty-seven cents the laundry-list says. 
 That's all it costs you. 
 
 Cheap enough ; isn't it ? 
 
 Thats all it costs you. 
 
 But that isn't all it costs. 
 
 Oh dear, no, sweet young girl ; it costs 
 much more than that. 
 
 Go home with the bright wagon after it 
 completes its rounds ; turn into the alley 
 with it, and stop where it stops. 
 
 There is a square building of rough brick, 
 fronting the alley. 
 
 It has two little windows, close to the 
 ground. 
 
 One of them is closed ; you cannot see 
 through it. 
 
 The other is open, so we may see what's 
 going on inside. 
 
 Let us stop and peep. 
 
 Ugh ! what a foul, wet odor ! It's worse 
 than the alley smells. 
 2 
 
The price of cleanliness 
 
 The clothes are being washed. Out of 
 them are being steamed the muck and soot 
 and grime that are absorbed from the outside, 
 and the humors of the body that are absorbed 
 from the inside. 
 
 It is nasty breathing, this effluvium. You 
 notice it from the outside. When it is 
 breathed all the time, though, one gets accus- 
 tomed to it. 
 
 There are girls down there in the steam ; 
 you can see them moving about. How they 
 are hustling ! One would think a demon 
 was driving them. 
 
 They have been hard at it since seven 
 o'clock. 
 
 In Winter they quit at six ; in the Summer 
 they work till ten or eleven, sometimes till 
 midnight, without extra pay. Shirtwaists 
 come in the summer. 
 
 And on their feet, too. They only sit 
 down during their half hour at noon. 
 
 Think of that, sweet young girl. 
 
 Ten hours on their feet ; in the summer, 
 fifteen ; working their arms and backs in 
 that foul atmosphere. 
 
 If you did that for one day, you'd want 
 to rest for a week, wouldn't you ? 
 
 3 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 But these girls must be there promptly at 
 seven the next morning ; and every morning. 
 
 Suppose there should be a day or so in a 
 month when they are not well ; days on which 
 you may lie in bed, or take your ease about 
 the house ? Do you suppose personal indis- 
 position is considered in their case ? 
 
 No. 
 
 Back-breaking labor during the ten or fif- 
 teen hours, just the same, for them. 
 
 You never thought of that, did you, dear ? 
 You don't think much of anything ; do you ? 
 Your mother did not think much of any- 
 thing before you, unless she were a working- 
 woman ; and if you have daughters they 
 won't think much of anything. 
 
 And yet the suffering of these girls is the 
 price paid for your cleanliness. 
 
 Not the price you pay. The price they pay. 
 
 Look at them through the window. 
 
 Wan, tired, desolate, God-forsaken look- 
 ing slatterns. 
 
 Why should they care about their appear- 
 ance if no one else cares ? Drudge, drudge, 
 drudge from daylight till dark, and on into 
 the night. 
 
 For what ? 
 
The price of cleanliness 
 
 From $1.50 to $9 per week. 
 
 Two or three out of the eighteen or twenty 
 girls get seven, eight, and nine dollars. 
 
 All the rest get less than six. 
 
 There is one with a gap in her mouth 
 where two teeth ought to be. That's hor- 
 rible ; a toothless young woman. She ought 
 to go to the dentist. 
 
 But where is she to get time to go the 
 dentist ; and where will she get the money 
 to pay him ? 
 
 You never thought of that, did you, dear? 
 Mother has always looked so carefully after 
 your teeth. You had no responsibility about 
 it, except the bore of going to the dentist. 
 
 There is another ; pale, morose, shuffling 
 about. 
 
 " She's been here a year," the driver whis- 
 pers. 
 
 " She is only seventeen. You'd think she's 
 thirty, wouldn't you ? " 
 
 The driver says she came last spring ; bux- 
 om, sprightly, gay ; off a farm somewhere. 
 
 The end of the summer finished her. 
 
 She was used to the sunshine. 
 
 " It's so blamed hot down there in the 
 summer. They don't get no air. That lays 
 
 5 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 the best of 'em out," says the driver. " I'm 
 all right on the wagon, but I couldn't stand 
 that. It 'ud kill me ; but women seem to 
 stand it, somehow." 
 
 Yes, they seem to stand it, somehow. 
 
 They stand it about three years. 
 
 Then what becomes of them ? 
 
 What are you going to be, sweet young girl? 
 
 A wife, you hope, perhaps a mother? 
 You need not blush. That's your training. 
 It's no shame to be a mother. You used to 
 love to play with dolls. That's the mother 
 instinct. 
 
 What are these girls going to be ? These 
 physical wrecks ? These broken and wheez- 
 ing hacks ? 
 
 Does any man want such a girl for a wife ? 
 
 No one wants her for a wife. 
 
 Does any one want her for a mother ? 
 
 No one would say she was fit for mother- 
 hood. 
 
 They would not have her even in a house 
 of prostitution. 
 
 I am sorry to say this, dear. I know it 
 shocks you. I only say it because it's true. 
 
 I want you to realize what it costs to keep 
 you clean. 
 6 
 
The price of cleanliness 
 
 To make prostitutes of women is an un- 
 speakable crime ; but to make of women 
 creatures not even fit to be prostitutes, what 
 is that ? 
 
 What do you say ? The laundryman ? 
 
 Oh, no. It isn't his fault. He lives upon 
 less than you do. He works harder and 
 does not consume so much as your father 
 does. 
 
 He has to compete with other laundry- 
 men. 
 
 Do you see? That's where we touch 
 something vital. That's where the system 
 has to be considered. 
 
 Not the laundry system . The social system . 
 
 The main stay of the laundry business is 
 the apprentice. The apprentice is taken on 
 at $1.50 per week. A girl is an apprentice 
 until she insists on more pay. She may 
 have worked a year. If she is still vigorous 
 and able she may get another dollar a week. 
 If not, she can go and apply to some other 
 laundry for a job. It depends on the " labor 
 market." If there is a lot of homeless, six- 
 teen-year-old girls, they keep the wage down 
 to $1.50 a week by bidding against one an- 
 other for the chance to work. 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 The laundryman must have prompt and 
 reliable service. 
 
 If after working from seven in the morn- 
 ing until midnight in the summer heat a girl 
 should over-sleep and come late the next 
 morning, she can go. 
 
 Sickly women are a nuisance in any busi- 
 ness. 
 
 But when they go, where do they go ? 
 
 It is because we ask the question only 
 and do not seek an answer to it that we can 
 sleep at night. 
 
 Let us go round and peep into the iron- 
 ing room. Both windows are open here. 
 Hot, isn't it ? 
 
 See those girls who are operating the iron- 
 ing machines. To work those foot-levers 
 they have to stand for ten hours practically 
 on one foot. 
 
 The weight of the body all day long is on 
 that one leg. 
 
 It would kill anyone but a stork; or a 
 woman ; a woman who has to do it or starve. 
 
 See the hot, tired look of that one. The 
 sweat is running down her face and neck. 
 Her rag of a waist is open at the throat ; her 
 bosom is half uncovered. It's so hot she 
 
The price of cleanliness 
 
 does not care. The less clothing the better. 
 She would stifle in your collar. 
 
 She does not mean to be indelicate. She 
 has not thought about it. Working-women 
 don't. 
 
 She is thinking only of getting your waist 
 ironed. 
 
 Don't you know, dear, how your little 
 slipper taps your chamber floor in impatience 
 if the laundry is late. That miserable laundry. 
 
 Now you see the girls are doing the best 
 they can. 
 
 They are giving their lives to keep you 
 clean. 
 
 They haven't any other thing to give. 
 
 No relaxation ; no pleasure ; their Sundays 
 spent in limp collapse, dreading the morrow's 
 coming. 
 
 But you have your clean linen. 
 
 And you have your clean conscience : so 
 long as you do not know the infamy of which 
 you are a part. 
 
 When you know this, sweet young girl, 
 you will look out upon life with different 
 eyes. 
 
 When you know this, you will see the 
 blood of these girls who are unfit to be 
 
 9 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 wives ; who are unfit to be mothers ; who 
 are unfit even to be, you know what I said ; 
 you will see their blood on everything that 
 comes from a laundry. 
 
 When you go into your bathroom, you 
 will see their bathroom. 
 
 Did you ever see a bathroom in a cheap 
 boarding-house ? ( Think of the boarding- 
 house you must live at when you are get- 
 ting $1.50 to $6 a week and buy your own 
 clothes ! ) 
 
 The bathroom in a cheap boarding-house 
 would make you shudder, dear. 
 
 You would be afraid of leprosy; to go 
 into it. 
 
 No one ever cleans it* The plaster is 
 broken in the walls. The tub is discolored 
 tin. 
 
 And there is no hot water. 
 
 Only a cold-water faucet. 
 
 A worn, bloodless girl cannot get into ice- 
 water. 
 
 You see it does cost something to be clean, 
 after all. 
 
 Your nice, tiled bathroom, with its im- 
 maculate porcelain tub ; soft rug to step out 
 upon ; and all the hot water, and soap, and 
 
 10 
 
The price of cleanliness 
 
 towels, do not come with the mere desire for 
 them. 
 
 You never think of that when you see an 
 unclean person, do you, dear? 
 
 You never think of the price of cleanliness. 
 
 Because it is easy for you to be clean you 
 have been assuming that it is just as easy for 
 everyone to be clean. 
 
 You have heard your mother say : " Well, 
 I sympathize with the poor as much as any- 
 body, but there is no excuse for a man or 
 woman not being clean." You see mothers 
 can be ignorant even when they are good to 
 us and tender. 
 
 Linen costs money, too. 
 
 If the laundry girl has any to change after 
 buying food she feels lucky. 
 
 There are lots who don't. 
 
 Your mother does not tell you these things, 
 even when she knows them. 
 
 She says you have only one girlhood ; and 
 that you will collide with the grave things of 
 life soon enough. 
 
 She thinks that ignorance is innocence. 
 
 But we have been to the laundry today, 
 you and I. 
 
 We know better now, don't we ? 
 
 11 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 We know that ignorance which dulls us 
 into content, and makes the world seem 
 beautiful, while all the time we are blindly 
 stamping out the lives of other human be- 
 ings, cannot be innocence : it can only be in- 
 famy. 
 
 When we looked into that laundry window 
 today, we realized that the price we are pay- 
 ing for cleanliness of body is stultification of 
 soul. 
 
 To keep clean at the cost of others' toil is 
 to bathe the soul in slime. 
 
 Some day, dear, you will look into your 
 mother's eyes, and she will quail before you ; 
 for she will see that in her foolish hope to 
 save you pain she has helped to stain your 
 soul. 
 
 She will see that a pure girlhood is not 
 possible for you until it is possible for every 
 mother's child. Ignorance does not save. 
 
 Did I not see the tears in your eyes as we 
 turned from the window of that damp base- 
 ment? 
 
 Your sweet face paled. It was like a lily. 
 
 It was as if the lily should realize for an 
 instant that the sources of its beautiful life 
 are deep down in the sub-aqueous soil of the 
 12 
 
The price of cleanliness 
 
 pond ; down in the ooze and slime: and feel 
 sorry. 
 
 You were the lily blossom. 
 
 Those girls were the ooze and slime. 
 
 It is not with human life as it is with the 
 lily. 
 
 Human life might all be blossom. 
 
 But first we must want it to be all blossom. 
 Desire precedes functioning the scientists 
 tell us. 
 
 1 want to see the light of high desire in 
 your eyes, dear. It makes a woman so beau- 
 tiful. 
 
 Did you ever see the pictured eyes of Joan 
 of Arc ? 
 
 That is the light I mean. 
 
 It makes an angel of a woman. 
 
 Little, graceful pettinesses; little conven- 
 tional accomplishments ; plaything prettiness : 
 all seem very insignificant in the light of that 
 high glance. 
 
 And cleanliness of body, alone, does not 
 bring that, dear. 
 
 Cleanliness of soul brings that. The price 
 of that cleanliness is truth. 
 
 Yes : I see you understand. 
 
 You see that life is one. 
 
 13 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 You must help to free those girls in the 
 laundry. 
 
 You must strive to get off their weary 
 backs ; and to teach and compel other people 
 to get off their backs, and the backs of all 
 who toil. 
 
 We must find how to do our share now, 
 must we not ? 
 
 You cannot find comfort in the old way, 
 now. 
 
 You are sad ; but yet you are happy. 
 
 That is the power of truth it expands the 
 soul. 
 
 And that light is coming in your face ; you 
 are rising to consciousness race-conscious- 
 ness, life-consciousness ; the birth of pur- 
 pose. 
 
 Your mother would smile if I were to tell 
 her that I love you more than she does ; 
 would she not ? 
 
 Yet I believe I do. 
 
 She would say that if I loved you, I would 
 take you to pleasant places. 
 
 And I took you to a laundry. 
 
 But your mother does not understand, dear. 
 
 She is the mother of your body. 
 
 I am the mother of your soul. 
 
 14 
 
CONSIDER THE LILIES 
 
 A walk in the spring woods revives the 
 wearied spirit. Nature blossoms in infinite 
 variety. The sun, the great Compeller, as he 
 warms the earth, brings from her ample bosom 
 a varied brood. 
 
 The majestic march of the seasons showers 
 new forms, new births, new radiance before 
 the wondering eyes of him who has eyes to 
 see, and warms the awakened soul into vague, 
 haunting dreams of life's great possibilities. 
 
 If humanity, too, could but blossom into 
 as varied individuality ; how the world would 
 fill with interest. 
 
 There is but scanty inspiration in a hundred 
 thousand men in derby hats. 
 
 Every plant in nature finds a dress which 
 expresses its individuality, and it does not 
 change it at a Paris cablegram. It has its 
 this year's gown made like its last year's 
 gown, and one learns to look for it and to 
 love it, because it fits it so. 
 
 Where Individuality is o'ercrowed by Style 
 the field is left to dull Monotony. 
 
 Who decrees that we shall all follow a bell- 
 wether in our dressing ? 
 
 15 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 Fashion. 
 
 And who is the parent of this arbitrary 
 leveler ? 
 
 Commercialism ! The styles must change 
 to keep trade going. By producing things for 
 profit and not for use we pay the price in medi- 
 ocrity. The tall man must dress like the short 
 man and the thin woman like the fat woman. 
 
 Under the spur of the thing called Style 
 the obligation is, not to be like ourselves, but 
 like somebody else, and this is the death- 
 knell of the individual. 
 
 It is as if the violet, and the primrose, and 
 the honeysuckle should follow the fashion in 
 cabbages, intensely flattering to the cabbage, 
 but the diversity which makes the world in- 
 teresting would go glimmering. 
 
 If the outside world were but a cabbage- 
 patch we'd stay in town for our vacations. 
 
 Change, variety, is not the spice of life, it 
 is life itself. 
 
 Where you find a man or woman who 
 wears clothes for comfort, you are likely to 
 discover at the same time an individual. 
 
 Those who aspire to dress alike will aspire 
 to think alike, and conventionality in thought 
 is always the mark of arrested development. 
 
 16 
 
Consider the lilies 
 
 A wise look often hides an empty brain 
 and those who love accuracy of expression 
 will not fall into the error of calling every 
 human being who wears pants a man. 
 
 A college education can never make a dull 
 man think, and a tailor can only cover up 
 physical deformity in some by concealing 
 the beautiful outlines of others. 
 
 In rhinoceros -skin trousers bow-legged 
 men shine ; but the emancipated are in no 
 wise deceived. 
 
 In woman, every season brings some new 
 atrocity ; padded hips, " military fronts/' or 
 other profit - mongering device to disturb 
 purse and comfort; only one principle, ob- 
 viously, imperative; the desecration of the 
 human form. 
 
 Until the day of the Individual it is well 
 that changes come and go with but short in- 
 termissions. 
 
 If any of the deforming aberrations lasted 
 long enough for hereditary bias to get in its 
 work the human form might vanish into the 
 camel-shape, or the giraffe, or the kangaroo. 
 
 The dressing of human beings is an affront 
 to the universe whose law is variety. A man 
 in pants is an absurdity. 
 
 17 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 Golf stockings and knickerbockers must 
 force their way among men who get into the 
 woods and meadows ; they cannot stand the 
 silent derision of Nature. 
 
 A pair of pants in the presence of a tree 
 is an abomination, and convicts us of silli- 
 ness. 
 
 The Greeks knew how to dress and there 
 are yet races and tribes on the earth whose 
 costume admits of individual expression ; but 
 in those parts of civilization where Commer- 
 cialism is a god, Individuality is dead and 
 buried, awaiting the social touch that shall 
 resurrect it. 
 
 Individuality can flourish only in a free 
 common life. The economic basis of life 
 must be secure ; wrinkles of haunting care 
 must be smoothed off the brow of humanity 
 before those native graces which slumber in 
 every soul may shine through the physical 
 instrument and shed their varied beauty on 
 mankind. 
 
 A flower never can blossom before its roots 
 are secure. Its source of life must be un- 
 questionable before it can give its fragrance 
 to the world. 
 
 Humanity is a flower. 
 
 18 
 
Consider the lilies 
 
 It has been striving for centuries to get its 
 roots in the soil. 
 
 Its bread has never been secure. 
 
 The individual is the human blossom. 
 
 How we run about after the man who pos- 
 sesses Individuality ! He always has a crowd 
 of lovers about him ; he can scarcely get 
 time for his own dreaming, time to watch a 
 blade of grass grow. 
 
 The human being who is an individual is 
 the most glorious offering of the universe. 
 
 Jesus, Socrates, Mazzini, Marx, George, 
 do not come by the dozen. All nipped by 
 the cruel frost before their time they yet have 
 shed an imperishable glory on the world. 
 
 We can produce radiant souls as easily as 
 we produce violets. 
 
 All we have to do is to use the same 
 intelligence in preparing the soil for the 
 man that we do in preparing the soil for the 
 violet. 
 
 The soul, Individuality, will flower in as 
 infinite variety as Nature herself if we look 
 after its roots. 
 
 A world in which every man is an indi- 
 vidual, shedding the light of his singular 
 presence upon the common life, would be 
 
 19 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 paradise enough. No man would wish to 
 leave so beautiful a world. 
 
 We can have such a world if we want it. 
 
 But more than a few of us must want it. 
 
 Individuality achieved in a world of me- 
 diocrity is but to freeze in loneliness upon the 
 heights. This is why the lives of the great 
 conquerors have ended in disappointment. 
 
 Nothing is worth while but human life. 
 
 If we strive against other lives to build our 
 own life, we fail at the end. 
 
 Our success marks the measure of our 
 failure. As Triumph comes in Love goes out. 
 
 Love is the law. 
 
 The flowers strike their roots into the 
 common earth ; the rain falls on them all ; 
 they nod to the cleansing wind ; the sun 
 kisses one and the other ; there is no favor- 
 itism in nature. 
 
 To make the human garden as beautiful as 
 the garden of nature we have only to learn 
 the lesson of the sun and rain ; we have only 
 to make the collective purpose and effort of 
 society the fitting of every human plant to 
 nobly fulfill its individual destiny. 
 
 We cannot enjoy each other if we are all 
 crushed into the same mold. By collectively 
 20 
 
Consider the lilies 
 
 making every man's bread secure, we set 
 men free to nobly serve. No lazy man 
 would then be known ; for each could find 
 the work he loved to do ; work would be a 
 joy and a song; work would express coopera- 
 tion with Creative Nature. 
 
 When the sources of human life are owned 
 in common ; when out of the bounteous 
 granaries of the world the humblest child 
 shall draw his sustenance ; when want and 
 hunger and profits and exploitation have be- 
 come but dreams of distorted fancy ; when 
 competition shall have given place to emula- 
 tion ; when all the world holds no thought so 
 sacred as that of human life ; when I would 
 have you be what you yourself would be and 
 aid you to become it ; then mediocrity will 
 forever vanish from the haunts of men, the 
 human violet will meet the human primrose 
 upon Life's highway, and from their kiss of 
 joy a pearl will spring so rich, so pure, so 
 rainbow-hued that in it men shall look with 
 seeing eyes and read the riddle of the Uni- 
 verse. 
 
 21 
 
AS THE WHEELS TURN 
 
 " Human nature cannot be trusted." 
 
 On the limited train of the Lake Shore 
 railroad running between Chicago and New 
 York, these words were uttered by one sleek, 
 prosperous-looking person to another sleek, 
 prosperous-looking person sitting in the seat 
 beside him. Only this one sentence of their 
 conversation was distinguishable above the 
 roar of the train and the night rain beating 
 against the sleeper windows. 
 
 The Lake Shore Limited was running sixty 
 miles an hour. 
 
 All day long human nature had patrolled 
 the dreary length of track searching with faith- 
 ful eyes for a loose spike, a started nut, or a 
 springing coupling-plate that might prove a 
 menace to the safety of the two sleek persons. 
 All day long human nature had been cleaning 
 switch and signal lamps, tramping in the 
 evening storm to place them where the sig- 
 nals would be true, and the switch-lights ac- 
 curate and reliable. All day long human 
 nature had bent over the click of the tele- 
 graph transmitters and receivers, that the 
 freight trains and the local trains might be 
 22 
 
As the wheels turn 
 
 well out of the way of the train which was to 
 bear the two sleek persons. Every car-wheel, 
 every axle, every bolt, pin, coupler, buffer, 
 angle-iron, driving-rod, cylinder, brake, every 
 detail of this wonderfully equipped rolling 
 palace, from the locomotive headlight to the 
 rear platform lantern, was sound, stable and 
 in its place because human nature had in- 
 spected it and pronounced it safe to carry 
 and adequate to serve. And at the very 
 moment of its revilement, human nature, with 
 flannel streaked with grime, hand upon throt- 
 tle, with cap pulled tight across forehead, was 
 leaning far out of the rocking, swaying cab, 
 peering into the blackness and the pelting rain, 
 along the path of the monster locomotive, 
 tirelessly alert, that no harm might come. 
 
 In what tJien, or in whom were the two sleek 
 persons trusting ? 
 
 A flaw in the steel of the great locomotive 
 drive wheels, inspected by human nature 
 months before ; a single loose rail in all those 
 miles of track ; a misplaced signal lantern or 
 an open switch might have hurled the two 
 sleek persons into eternity. 
 
 How was it possible for the two sleek per- 
 sons to voice this calumny regarding human 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 nature when every reposeful, confident breath 
 they drew on this lightning -running train 
 should have proved to them the falsity of 
 their assertions and overwhelmed them with 
 honest shame ? 
 
 It is because, in ceasing to be truly human 
 themselves, they had lost the faculty of recog- 
 nizing true humanity. 
 
 They believed they had been dealing with 
 human nature in the gambling pit of the 
 stock exchange ; in the wolfish and pitiless 
 economic warfare called business ; in those 
 walks of life where human nature is deformed 
 and twisted by a false environment of wrong 
 living, until it no longer is human nature, 
 until it shames even brute nature. 
 
 And all the time, before their very eyes, 
 patient, faithful, gentle human nature is grow- 
 ing bread for the two sleek persons ; making 
 their clothes ; building their houses ; serving, 
 serving, serving ; day and night ; week and 
 week; year and year; while the two sleek 
 persons and all their class are living as drones 
 and parasites and blood-suckers ; too atro- 
 phied and dulled by their false relations to 
 humanity to see or recognize what ghastly 
 spectacles they are. 
 
 24 
 
As the wheels turn 
 
 Whenever a life ceases to be a life of service, 
 it ceases to be a human life. When we grow 
 away from the downmost being and lose sight 
 of the godhood in him, we lose sight of the 
 indwelling Force called God. For in the 
 spiritual possibilities of true human nature 
 resides all there is of God. 
 
THE DRAGON'S TEETH 
 
 " For the dragon's teeth are the little letters of the 
 alphabet, sown by Cadmus to breed dissension upon 
 earth." 
 
 There are few things so beautiful as a 
 printed page. See the little hieroglyphs 
 dragon's teeth sowed in rows with such 
 nice precision. Can a printer be criticised, 
 can a maker of books be criticised, for loving 
 his work ? 
 
 And what a growth may spring from a 
 page's sowing, nay, a word's. The hiero- 
 glyphs may be so set in a single word that 
 they will tear your heart out. 
 
 A man may read a word and sink to the 
 earth in a swoon ; he may read another and 
 leap with shouts of victory. 
 
 Sharp teeth indeed are these little char- 
 acters of Cadmus'; sharp to gnaw at our 
 vitals. 
 
 A single line of type may change the cur- 
 rent of a life-stream, a tiny dyke to deflect 
 the pent-up waters. 
 
 There once was a man who went about 
 with dull eyes, hating the world as a place of 
 infamy. He saw gaunt women working late 
 
The dragon's teeth 
 
 into the night, blear-eyed and worn with 
 sleepless, hopeless toil. He looked into the 
 factories ; into the rag-rooms of paper mills, 
 and there he saw little children working be- 
 side grandmothers ; little children who ought 
 to be playing in the sunshine ; grandmothers 
 who by a life of toil had earned a quiet place 
 in the chimney corner. His soul rebelled at 
 what he saw, for on the street in which he 
 lived was a family which sent its pug dogs 
 out for an airing in a victoria phaeton drawn 
 by horses in silver-mounted harness. There 
 were two men up behind in brass buttons. 
 They were the dogs' lackeys. 
 
 The man was so sorry the good, common 
 things of life food and clothing and shelter 
 were so scarce that little children and grand- 
 mothers had to toil for them, and strong men 
 had to degrade themselves to the level of 
 dog-lackeys. But there seemed no help for 
 it. If there wasn't enough there wasn't. 
 
 This man had a friend who was unworried, 
 who went about smiling and happy, unmoved 
 by the things he saw. When he spoke to 
 this friend the friend replied that he needed 
 the consolation of religion. He would then 
 see that everything was all right. Providence 
 
 27 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 moved in too mysterious ways for men to 
 understand. His friend told him to go and 
 see the minister. 
 
 He had never gone to church much, but 
 he went to see the preacher, because his heart 
 was heavy and he wanted to see things hap- 
 pily as his friend did. 
 
 The preacher was a good man, kindly and 
 honest, helping whom he could, following 
 the light he had. 
 
 When he told the preacher about the little 
 children, and the grandmothers, and the gaunt, 
 blear-eyed women, the preacher wept honest 
 tears. He was truly sorry. The man could 
 see that the preacher was sincere. 
 
 The preacher said that we were here to re- 
 lieve such suffering all we could ; it was all in 
 the inscrutable Divine plan ; God had given us 
 the poor ; why, we know not ; we must make 
 their lives as bearable as possible by charitable 
 works and acts of kindly service. We must 
 trust God and have faith ; faith in His infinite 
 goodness ; faith that all would come right, for 
 He is all-powerful and beneficent. 
 
 Then the man saw why his friend could 
 be so happy ; it was because he blamed it all 
 on God. God was all-powerful, God was 
 
 28 
 
The dragon's teeth 
 
 responsible ; for him to interfere or to worry 
 was to doubt God. 
 
 The man thought of the grandmothers and 
 the little children and the gaunt, blear-eyed 
 women, and the pug dogs and the lackeys, 
 and he felt that he would like to catch the 
 Responsible One and kick him good. He 
 could have made a better world himself; any 
 just man could. It seemed to him that his 
 friend and the preacher were bowing to a 
 being who was inferior to a common gentle- 
 man. Their god was not as good as they 
 were if he was all-powerful as they said and 
 ordained the things he did. 
 
 The preacher had not given the man much 
 comfort, so he went among the philosophers, 
 and got none from them either, except one 
 conclusion, that of Professor Huxley. The 
 sum of Professor Huxley's great researches 
 was the declaration that if human society had 
 reached its ultimate in the class system of the 
 very rich and the very poor then the best 
 thing which could happen to the world would 
 be for a comet to come along and bump it 
 into the demnition bow-wows. 
 
 This is not a very happy philosophy. It 
 is a better philosophy to die in than to live 
 
 29 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 in. Huxley died in it ; but the man we are 
 talking about after reaching the same conclu- 
 sion had to go on living. That was harder. 
 
 One day he picked up a discarded news- 
 paper in a railroad train and read a long col- 
 umn of short paragraphs. 
 
 This was one of them : " Few people real- 
 ize the great resources of the state of Texas. 
 Enough grain could be grown in Texas by 
 ordinary cultivation to feed the present popu- 
 lation of the world." 
 
 He read the paragraph again. Then he 
 read it again. Then he read it once more. 
 Then his eyes wandered on to the fleeting 
 landscape as the train sped on, and his im- 
 agination conjured up the thousands and 
 thousands of wretched homes in America in 
 which, every night, little children went crying 
 supperless to bed ; little children went crying 
 supperless to bed in a country of which a single 
 state could feed the world! 
 
 He felt a fierce contraction of the heart. 
 
 The dragon's teeth had bitten him and he 
 was thenceforth fated to sow dissension upon 
 the earth. 
 
 Cadmus, back in the twilight of history, 
 had with patient fingers framed the little 
 
 30 
 
The dragon's teeth 
 
 hieroglyphs which this day were to picture 
 forth to one man a revelation. Cadmus had 
 sown the dragon's teeth which, replanted in- 
 nocently by some printer in praise of Texas, 
 had reached out subtly from a printed page 
 and fastened upon a good man's heart. 
 
 Oh, subtle little letters ! Between thy very 
 lines the quickened soul may glean oftimes a 
 meaning. 
 
 A great manful wratn rose in this man's 
 heart ; wrath at his training ; at that base, 
 lying education which turns with folded hands 
 to a god ; laying upon him the blame for hu- 
 man stupidity. 
 
 Religion ? Nay, devil worship ! The good 
 preacher was bowing in his ignorance to a 
 devil, not a god. Did his god make the 
 world ? Then he made the state of Texas 
 and its fertility. What would the generous 
 giver of such a state, nay, of forty states, 
 think of men who would allow little children 
 to starve in these states and then blame the 
 giver for their starvation ? 
 
 In his ignorance the preacner was blas- 
 pheming. Good, well-meaning man that he 
 was, yet, in his ignorance he insulted grossly 
 the being he professed to worship. 
 
 31 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 These are the thoughts which came to the 
 man after the dragon's teeth had bitten him. 
 
 And with these thoughts came also a great 
 joy ; the realization that now he had a work 
 to do. The universe after all was sincere. 
 The faith that was dead revived. He would 
 take men by the shoulders and shake them 
 into life ; he would sow dragon's teeth, he 
 himself would carry on the work which Cad- 
 mus had begun ! 
 
 He would sow the teeth of the dragon on 
 highway and byway until they should rend 
 the heart of the stupid world, until crime, pov- 
 erty, wretchedness and devil-worship should 
 vanish from an earth of plenty. 
 
 And so now he goes his way with joy in 
 his heart at last. Not the irresponsible, fatu- 
 ous, shallow joy of his friend ; but the deep 
 holy joy of a purposeful man whose soul is 
 in tune with that Infinite whose love for men 
 is so great that it is unmoved to wrath even 
 by their malignings. 
 
 And wherever the art of printing has modi- 
 fied the ignorance of the savage the dragon's 
 teeth are sprouting. Wherever there is a 
 man who reads with open mind, there is there 
 bred dissension. Wherever an earnest man 
 32 
 
The dragon's teeth 
 
 sits with a pen, wherever a race-lover bends 
 at the printer's case for the Cause's sake, 
 there the dragon's teeth are planting. 
 
 You, who are reading this now : there is here 
 some word or some sentence which you will never 
 forget. For the little letters of Cadmus upon 
 this page are breeding dissension, and they will 
 go on breeding dissension until wrong and injus- 
 tice shall be banished from the earth. 
 
TOM'S A'COLD 
 
 With the advent of the months ushering in 
 the winter the owners of anthracite coal raise 
 the price from twenty-five to fifty cents a ton 
 every thirty days. 
 
 The addition of every twenty-five cents 
 means an increased profit of one million dol- 
 lars on every four million tons sold. Four 
 million tons are burned in one week of severe 
 weather. 
 
 In the United States are nearly 80,000,000 
 people. Not all of them use coal, but most 
 of them do. 
 
 Some of them burn the soap-boxes which 
 they have been using for furniture before the 
 winter is over. Many of them do without 
 fire altogether, and here and there a man or 
 woman, or a family, freezes to death after a 
 few weeks of underfeeding. 
 
 Food, making blood, heats the body from 
 the inside. When the inside heater and the 
 outside heater both get low and the ther- 
 mometer is around the zero point, then you 
 die. Nature has her laws. 
 
 Nature furnishes grain, the elevators to- 
 day are full. 
 
Tom's a'cold 
 
 Thousands of people today have not had 
 enough to eat. 
 
 Nature furnishes coal. We could not ex- 
 haust the coal supply if we would. 
 
 Thousands of people suffer all winter with 
 the cold ; buying their coal by the basket at 
 the rate of $15 a ton, or not buying it at all. 
 
 Nature has her laws. 
 
 She makes men ; but she cannot prevent 
 their being wolves. 
 
 She makes men ; but she cannot prevent 
 their being fools. 
 
 Until the people use the reason with which 
 they have been gifted, for them there is no 
 special providence. The wolves will get the 
 fleece. 
 
 It is not kings, nor landlords, nor capital- 
 ists who anywhere really enslave the people. 
 
 It is their own ignorance. 
 
 Eighty million people allow a few hundred 
 men to own the coal by which they may be 
 warmed. Why ? 
 
 Did they make the coal, these men ? 
 
 No ; they did not make it ; they did not 
 bring it into the world with them when they 
 came ; they will not take it with them when 
 they go. 
 
 35 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 Yet they own it. It is a curious mystery. 
 
 Do they dig the coal, these men ? 
 
 No ; other men dig it ; poor men ; men 
 with grimy faces and aching backs ; for a few 
 cents a ton. 
 
 Do they take it from the mines, these men ? 
 
 No ; children do it ; little dwarfed and 
 cheerless boys, who have never learned how 
 to play, drive the stubborn mules on the sub- 
 terranean tramways. Children do it. 
 
 Do they transport the coal, these men ? 
 
 No ; other men couple and uncouple and 
 switch and haul the cars, clamber over the 
 snow-covered lumps and set the brakes of 
 freight trains with their chapped and bleed- 
 ing hands. They get a bare living for it. 
 
 What, then, do these men do ? 
 
 Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Not a 
 single thing! They only own the coal ! 
 
 They seldom ever see the coal ; they never 
 lift a shovel nor twist a brake. They spend 
 their time in idling at the clubs, in driving, 
 wrapped up in protecting furs, upon the speed- 
 ways of the parks ; in spending in foreign 
 travel, for costly pictures and futile amuse- 
 ments, the money taken from the pockets of 
 the poor. 
 
 36 
 
Tom's a'cold 
 
 You wise persons who are always saying 
 that every man gets what he earns ! 
 
 What do these men earn ? 
 
 You wise persons who are always asking 
 what we are going to do with the men who 
 won't work ! 
 
 What are you going to do with these men 
 who won't work ? These men who revel in 
 the luxuries of millions without doing a single 
 solitary act of human service to those who 
 support them in their idleness. 
 
 Is it a crime to hate to work ? 
 
 Then why do you not put your leisure 
 class in jail ? 
 
 If idleness itself is a crime, what is the 
 crime of the man who not only does no work 
 himself, but prevents other men from work- 
 ing? 
 
 That is what the owner of a coal mine 
 does. The private ownership of a coal mine 
 is simply the power to prevent other people 
 from using it. 
 
 If you were to advertise in a Chicago paper 
 today for a thousand men wanted to dig coal, 
 they would be at the railroad station tomor- 
 row morning ; there might be two thousand 
 there. 
 
 57 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 If you were to advertise for trainmen, you 
 would be sure to get replies from twice as 
 many as you wanted. 
 
 Here, then, are thousands of men willing 
 to serve with their labor the other thousands 
 who are freezing for the need of it. 
 
 Who stands in the way then of those who 
 would work and those who need the coal ? 
 
 The men who own the coal! 
 
 So long as the people allow a few men to 
 own what belongs to all the people, these few 
 men will traffic in the people's necessities. 
 
 The supply of coal is carefully limited. 
 Vast coal acreages are held out of use ; locked 
 up from the people. The price is thus kept 
 up to enrich the idle owners. They profit 
 by all the improvements in production. The 
 people don't. 
 
 It is easy to be a millionaire when the peo- 
 ple acknowledge your ownership of things 
 upon which their lives depend ; things which 
 you do not have to produce but which you 
 can charge for the use of. 
 
 When you want a million dollars for a 
 winter home in Florida you raise coal 25 cents. 
 That is, you reach into the pockets of several 
 .million people and take a quarter out of each 
 38 
 
Tom's a'cold 
 
 of them ; 25 cents they had been counting on 
 spending for something else. You change 
 their minds for them. The cold must be 
 kept out. Coal will do it. 
 
 The Fall increase of 50 cents a ton means 
 two million dollars every four million tons. 
 
 The January increase of 25 cents a ton, 
 added to the Fall increase of 50 cents, means 
 three million dollars every four million tons. 
 
 The coal owners are reaping millions be- 
 fore these arbitrary raises begin. The coal 
 costs them no more to produce in winter 
 than in summer ; but the people need it worse 
 in winter. 
 
 It is very easy. 
 
 These millions of dollars will buy food and 
 clothing and shelter that human toil is pro- 
 ducing. 
 
 The people give up the millions in order 
 to keep warm, and then give up the things 
 their labor produces in order to get the mil- 
 lions back again. 
 
 Here is matter for the Devil's laughter. 
 
 There are 80,000,000 of the people and 
 there are only a few hundred of the coal 
 mine owners. 
 
 There is coal enough for all. 
 
 39 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 Ignorance alone enslaves. 
 
 The middle class, that fatuous, self-satis- 
 fied number of men who are getting a few 
 paltry thousands a year, think it is a huge 
 joke. You hear them talking about it to 
 one another on the street cars or on the sub- 
 urban trains. 
 
 One will say : " This is great weather for 
 the Coal Barons, eh ? " 
 
 One will reply : " Yes, this is the weather 
 that makes us shovel the dollars into the 
 furnace." 
 
 And then they laugh ; and all the men on 
 adjacent seats who overhear, they laugh too. 
 
 It is the sport of fools. 
 
 In the river wards of Chicago are ten 
 thousand families who never know what it is 
 to be warm in winter. Flat-breasted mothers 
 lay their little babes against their bare skin 
 and shiveringly hold them there all night, 
 encircled in their arms to keep the babes 
 from freezing. Little children lie upon the 
 floors beside the wretched stove in their day 
 clothing, wrapped in a bit of sacking. Their 
 day clothing is their night clothing. Every 
 night they cry themselves to sleep, it is so 
 cold. 
 
 40 
 
Tom's a'cold 
 
 Alas, how pitiful it is. There is so much 
 coal ; and there is so much grain. 
 
 Sometimes the good wives of the coal 
 owners come in their furs to see the poor 
 people. They feel very sorry for them. 
 
 They generally ask if the habits of the 
 father are temperate and if the children go 
 to Sunday-school. Then, if they think the 
 poor people really need it, they send around 
 half a ton of coal. 
 
 Then they feel very happy as we always 
 do when we think we have done a good 
 thing. 
 
 The next day they kneel in a cushioned 
 pew in a nice warm church and say : " Lord, 
 have mercy upon us miserable offenders ! " 
 They say the same thing to God every Sun- 
 day. Perhaps God does not hear them. He 
 may be listening to the cry of the cold little 
 children. 
 
 The men who own the coal are not un- 
 kindly men. Why should they think it is 
 wrong to own the coal when the people them- 
 selves think it is right? That's the point! 
 Stupid, patient beasts. The people them- 
 selves think it is right. Most of them will 
 vote and fight for those who exploit them. 
 
 41 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 Human life is cheap. They have been trained 
 to bow to property as a god. Habits of mind 
 enslave men infinitely more than habits of 
 body. 
 
 If you, among well-to-do people, dare to 
 point out the fact that by every principle of 
 justice the coal is for the common use of all, 
 you are looked upon as a social leper. These 
 well-to-do ones are mentally so enslaved by 
 the common thought of the defensibility of 
 private exploitation that laws are now being 
 talked of to suppress criticism. They are 
 now legislating to stop the mouth of the 
 hungry man by banishment or legal murder. 
 
 Ignorance has so atrophied their minds and 
 souls that their marks of mental and moral deg- 
 radation have become the recognized patents of 
 respectability ! 
 
 To think you are living under just institu- 
 tions when every institution at some point of 
 contact reeks with infamy ; to think that laws 
 are fair when before your very eyes men who 
 do no work revel in luxury, and men whose 
 lives are all work freeze and starve ; to be- 
 lieve that a civilization is good which dwarfs 
 and blights the highest instincts of the soul 
 from the hour of its birth ; in short, to be in 
 42 
 
Tom's a'cold 
 
 Hell and not to know that you are in Hell is 
 human degradation to the depths of which 
 even the imagination of a Dante could not 
 reach. 
 
 If the people willed it so this earth might 
 be a paradise. 
 
 Coal might be distributed as postage stamps 
 are distributed ; not for profit but for the hap- 
 piness and the comfort of us all. 
 
 Why not ? 
 
 Would the world be worse to live in be- 
 cause no one was cold ? 
 
 Back of the men who own the coal, bul- 
 warking them in their wrong, looms the stu- 
 pendous stupidity of the people expressed in 
 the laws of private property. 
 
 A few men may enslave a million, helped 
 by the million's ignorance. 
 
 Private ownership of the coal is a mon- 
 strous crime. The coal has been in the 
 earth since the creation of the world. No 
 man made it and no man owns it. 
 
 To hold it from those who need it is to 
 commit murder. 
 
 Man's life is but a brief four-score years, 
 shortened to three-score, for the most, by 
 worry. 
 
 43 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 To enable one man to come upon the 
 earth and charge another man for the coal of 
 the earth, so that one may loaf and one must 
 work for two, society must be organized on 
 a basis of human slavery. 
 
 In spite of our blatant boasting and igno- 
 rant pretense of free institutions the Ameri- 
 can civilization of today is a slave civilization. 
 The men of this glorious republic are hard- 
 driven slaves of fear. Look into the faces in 
 the city streets and see what is written there ! 
 
 Who owns your bread his song you sing. 
 
 Who owns your coal owns you. 
 
 No one made the coal. 
 
 The coal cannot be owned by a few unless 
 the people wish it to be owned by a few. 
 
 The people are millions ; the owners are 
 a handful. 
 
 Ignorance alone enslaves 1 
 
DOES IT SEEM FAIR TO YOU? 
 
 The Stock yards at Chicago is not a pleas- 
 ant place to work. The odors are very foul 
 there and the streets reek with filth. One 
 can seldom get a breath of untainted air. 
 Yet there are in Chicago ten thousand more 
 men than are employed at the packing-houses 
 already, who would gladly work all day with 
 that vile stench in their nostrils if they could 
 get bread enough for their children to eat, 
 and coal enough to keep them warm. 
 
 The hunger-whip can make men work al- 
 most anywhere. 
 
 It is hard to get employment at the stock 
 yards. There are always so many men wait- 
 ing around for every job. A man will suffer 
 almost any indignity from the boss before he 
 will complain. 
 
 It is strange that it is so hard for a man 
 to get work. There is so much useful and 
 necessary work to be done. Something seems 
 to stand in the way of doing it. Nobody in 
 particular seems to blame. 
 
 Perhaps it is the system. 
 
 The big packing companies don't seem to 
 care much about a man. Perhaps they have 
 
 45 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 no children of their own. Or perhaps they 
 have plenty of shoes and stockings and other 
 things to keep out the cold. 
 
 If you go to work for them you have to 
 put up ten dollars. The company keeps it 
 to keep you straight. 
 
 If you have been out of work for a while 
 and are in debt at the grocer's, and there is 
 no bread or coal in the house, you have not 
 the ten dollars to put up. 
 
 Then you sign a contract to let the com- 
 pany keep back some of your wages every 
 week until the ten dollars belonging to you 
 is in their bank. 
 
 You sign a contract anyhow. You cannot 
 get the job if you don't. Other men are 
 glad to sign it. 
 
 When you are behind in your rent and 
 the landlord and the grocer are pressing you, 
 it is hard not to get your full pay ; but if you 
 don't like the job you can leave it. 
 
 And then there is your contract. 
 
 If you quit your job without giving the 
 company two week's notice, the company 
 keeps your money. 
 
 Sometimes your wife or your little boy gets 
 so sick you can't go to work. If you did 
 46 
 
Does it seem fair to you ? 
 
 they might die while you were gone. You 
 cannot give the two weeks' notice then. 
 Sickness does not tell you when it is coming. 
 
 So you lose the ten dollars. 
 
 The company would refund the money if 
 they really knew how much you needed it. 
 But working men are so unreliable. They 
 drink and they lie. The company cannot go 
 about all the time verifying their stories. 
 
 So you lose it. 
 
 You might get a lawyer to see about it, as 
 the company has no right to your money. 
 But lawyers have to be paid. 
 
 And there is your contract. That settles 
 it. You cannot go back of that. You signed 
 it of your own free will. You had to sign it 
 to get the job. So the law would not help you. 
 
 You seldom know there is a law until you 
 get arrested for something. It seems as if 
 the law helped some people to take advantage 
 of others. Perhaps it's the system. 
 
 Ten dollars is not much. But the big 
 packers have several plants. Ten thousand 
 men at ten dollars each is one hundred 
 thousand dollars. At six per cent that is six 
 thousand dollars a year, interest on your 
 money. 
 
 47 
 
Forcings of the new 
 
 Your little girl may need shoes. It does 
 not seem right. 
 
 If the men should strike, the company 
 might make one hundred thousand dollars, 
 unless the men won. If they lost the strike 
 they might lose the money. 
 
 There are always so many hungry scabs to 
 take your place. You cannot prevent them 
 from working. There is no excuse for vio- 
 lence in a free country. 
 
 Then there is the military. 
 
 You might complain often if you could get 
 another job. The managers of the depart- 
 ments do not like you to complain. The 
 man who runs his department for the least 
 money gets the most pay. 
 
 If you are two minutes late you are docked 
 half an hour, an hour in some places. That's 
 a good deal. 
 
 Then if the killing is late you run over the 
 closing hour. But you do not get an extra 
 cent for that. 
 
 Ten or fifteen minutes three or four days 
 in the week is not much for one man. But 
 for ten thousand it is much. It makes a 
 good showing for the boss. He gets that 
 labor free. 
 
 48 
 
Does it seem fair to you ? 
 
 In one of the houses one winter some of 
 the men spoke about it to one another. It 
 was happening so regularly. One of them 
 agreed to keep tab on the overtime. The 
 boss saw him marking in a little book. The 
 next day the office sent for him and told him 
 they did not need him any longer. He was 
 a good man and had worked faithfully ; but 
 the boss wanted to make a good showing. 
 He did not want any dissatisfaction among 
 the men. 
 
 The office did not give the two weeks' 
 notice. 
 
 It was not in the contract. 
 
 It is better not to find fault with anything 
 if you expect to stay. 
 
 One day a yard man was sent out with the 
 State inspector. The inspector turned down 
 forty cattle. He said they had a disease 
 called lumpy jaw. Such beef is not good to 
 eat. 
 
 In the afternoon the yard man saw the 
 forty cattle with a lot of others in the killing 
 pen. The inspector had gone on to one of 
 the other packing-houses. 
 
 The yard man knew that people have died 
 of eating diseased meat, so he slipped over 
 
 49 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 to where the inspector was and told him the 
 lumpy-jawed cattle had got into the killing 
 pen by mistake. So the inspector went and 
 ordered them out again ; which prevented 
 their being killed until the following day. 
 
 The yard man had gone then. They told 
 him at the office he should learn to keep his 
 mouth shut. He was not paid for sneaking 
 about, they said. 
 
 It is hard to get another job when they let 
 you go that way. You always have to tell 
 where you worked before. And then they 
 tell you to come around next week. Mean- 
 while they look you up. When you come 
 around the next week they say they guess 
 they don't need any more men just now. 
 
 In one house a man worked for twelve 
 years at one job. He was so good that he 
 got more pay than the others. The work 
 was important. He had not missed a day in 
 ten years. They could not give him a vaca- 
 tion the boss said. There was no one to 
 take his place. But one day his brother 
 came to see him from England and he said 
 he wanted to lay off for two weeks. 
 
 The boss said he could not spare him ; but 
 as he had worked there for twelve years and 
 50 
 
Does it seem fair to you ? 
 
 knew the manager he went to the office and 
 got permission. When he came back in two 
 weeks the boss said he was sorry, but the 
 place was filled. 
 
 So he went to look for a job at one of the 
 other houses. He was too good a man to 
 remain long idle. 
 
 But they all turned him down so persist- 
 ently that he became discouraged. 
 
 Finally one of the clerks in a big plant, 
 who used to work where he did, took him 
 quietly aside and told him his name was on 
 the " blue book " and it was no good trying. 
 
 He wondered what his family would do. 
 
 You can't learn a new trade right away after 
 you have worked for twelve years at one job. 
 
 None of the packing-houses would have 
 him. 
 
 Finally he went back to the old house and 
 pleaded with tears in his eyes to be taken. 
 He could not see his family starve. 
 
 The hunger-whip sort of cowes men. 
 
 So they said he might go to work, but they 
 could not pay him so much as before. 
 
 They wanted him back all the time, but 
 they wanted to teach him a lesson. They 
 fixed him on the blue book so they could be 
 
 51 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 sure he would come back to them. It does 
 not pay to be too independent. 
 
 Jobs are not so plenty as all that. 
 
 Then, too, the companies give everyone a 
 chance to get on. They encourage you to 
 buy stock. 
 
 Employees who own stock take a greater 
 interest in the plant. They look out for 
 waste and that sort of thing. The more 
 stock you own the faster you get on. They 
 don't make you buy stock but they show 
 you it's to your advantage. Not many of 
 the workmen own any. It takes all their 
 wages to buy groceries and fuel and occa- 
 sionally a little clothing. 
 
 One man bought a share and when his 
 family got sick he wanted to sell it. The 
 company sent him to their broker in La Salle 
 street. He had bought it of the company at 
 par, but he sold it to their broker for what 
 he could get. 
 
 If he had been more industrious and saved 
 more of his wages he would not have had to 
 sell it. The company did not make him buy 
 it. It was not anybody's fault. 
 
 Yet it seemed too bad somehow. 
 
 Perhaps it is the system. 
 52 
 
JIMMIE, THE WEAVER 
 
 " The entire force of weavers in the Fitchburg worst- 
 ed mills and the Beoli mills of the American Woolen 
 company struck today in sympathy with the Rhode 
 Island employees of the combine in the struggle 
 against the two-loom system in that state." 
 
 Boston Herald. 
 
 Jimmie, the weaver, isn't a weaver ; he is 
 a sweeper. 
 
 Jimmie used to be a weaver, but now he 
 sweeps out the factory and does odd jobs 
 around ; jobs an old man can do. That's 
 what they call him : " the old man." He is 
 forty-five years old. Nearly all the men in 
 factory towns in New England are " old " 
 when they are forty-five. As soon as they 
 lose their nimbleness they are cashiered ; or 
 the fining system drives them out. Men's 
 fingers are less nimble than women's any- 
 how ; particularly young girls'. 
 
 As Jimmie isn't under the strain of watch- 
 ing the looms for a break he is always ready 
 to talk ; particularly if he can get off in a 
 corner with you, where the superintendent 
 doesn't see him. Jimmie is faithful enough 
 about the jobs he does ; as faithful as you can 
 expect an old man of forty-five to be ; but he 
 
 53 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 has been quaking at the thought of the super- 
 intendent for so many years ; he has been 
 afraid of losing his job for so long, that a 
 furtive, hunted manner has become a sort 
 of second nature to him, and he peers about 
 between the looms as if he expected to be 
 caught and kicked for something. 
 
 You can't expect Jimmie to be a man when 
 he has lived a cowering slave since he was 
 thirteen. That is not the way men are made. 
 
 ft Look at that line," said Jimmie. He 
 pointed over the high window ledge. It was 
 nearly noon and a dozen men with full dinner 
 pails were filing into the factory yard. 
 
 " Late, aren't they ? " I said. He read my 
 lips and understood. 
 
 " Devil a bit," he screeched, above the roar 
 of the looms, " On time ! the whistle will 
 blow in a minute." 
 
 The whistle blew and then he told me. 
 
 The men were bringing the dinners to 
 their wives and daughters who worked at the 
 looms. They were all old men ; all of them 
 over forty ; too old to work. 
 
 In the New England factory towns the 
 women earn the living and the men wash and 
 cook and look after the neighbor's children. 
 
 54 
 
Jimmie, the weaver 
 
 While they are both young enough the moth- 
 ers and fathers work in the factories together. 
 
 This is a fine thing for conjugal felicity, 
 this working together of husband and wife. 
 Of course they get no chance to speak to one 
 another at the factory ; and there are so many 
 things to do around " home " that they don't 
 get much chance there either, until the sup- 
 per dishes are washed up at eight or nine 
 o'clock. Then, if they are not tired, and 
 the baby is asleep so they cannot get acquainted 
 with it, is when they have their conversa- 
 tions about art, and literature, and the merits 
 of the latest opera. As they are seldom tired, 
 this is the pleasantest time of the day. The 
 strain of watching the looms all day on their 
 feet is removed and they thoroughly enjoy 
 the relaxation. 
 
 Of course they cannot go about much. If 
 they should be out two or three nights a week 
 at the opera it might impair their health. 
 
 Daylight comes quickly when you're out till 
 twelve or one. Then, too, there's no one to 
 leave the baby with. It has been tended all 
 day by someone else. 
 
 When both mother and father, all winter 
 long, go into the factory at day-break and 
 
 55 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 don't come out till nightfall, there are a few 
 things about " home " to be done, both be- 
 fore they go, and after they return. 
 
 For example, there is the washing. By 
 getting up before five o'clock two or three 
 hours before daylight and working together 
 by the light of a kerosene lamp, they can get 
 that done. Then comes the ironing ; they 
 handle that the same way. The baby makes 
 washing and ironing before daylight a pretty 
 steady job. 
 
 Then there is the breakfast, scanty enough ; 
 they have to hurry so. Seven o'clock comes 
 so soon in the winter, and they cannot afford 
 to be docked ; they run that risk all day. 
 
 Then there is the baby. If the baby had 
 any sense it wouldn't expect attention from a 
 mother who worked all day in the factory and 
 had to do the cooking and dishwashing and 
 marketing and sewing and washing and iron- 
 ing before daylight and after dark. But ba- 
 bies haven't any sense. If they had they 
 might blow up the universe, or refuse to be 
 born ; but they haven't. 
 
 The mothers who work all the week in the 
 factories for six or seven dollars pay some 
 young girl ( under thirteen ) or some old man 
 56 
 
Jimmie, the weaver 
 
 ( over forty ) two or three dollars a week for 
 looking after their babies. 
 
 The babies' idea of a mother is a man with 
 a bottle of thin milk. 
 
 The mothers' net compensation for a week's 
 work is three or four dollars and the pleas- 
 ure of hearing their babies cry for someone 
 else, the one they are used to, who feeds 
 them. 
 
 On Sunday, if the washing and sewing are 
 caught up and the house doesn't need clean- 
 ing ( no nice person can bear to see a work- 
 ing man's house that is not clean ), perhaps 
 the mother and father may have an hour or 
 two to play with the baby, or get a breath of 
 sun and air. 
 
 It is a great life, this life of a man and a 
 woman together, sharing their common tasks, 
 the poets say so. They haven't, of course, 
 much to occupy them except work, but they 
 have plenty of that, and that is the only thing 
 the weavers are afraid of losing. 
 
 At least Jimmie says so. 
 
 Why they should be afraid of losing work 
 is a mystery. The nice people surely don't 
 want to do it. But Jimmie says when work 
 is slack " the kids goes hungry." 
 
 57 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 Doubtless they cannot save very much on 
 six or seven dollars a week and the rent to 
 
 Pay- 
 As soon as the babies grow up and look 
 large enough not to make their " age : thir- 
 teen " certificate a lie on its face, it will be 
 easier ; their wages will then help out. 
 
 Jimmie says, " you always think good times 
 is coming but they always beats you some- 
 how. When the kids grows up it don't seem 
 to make no difference. The more comes in 
 the more goes out, it seems like." 
 
 The double-loom is a threatening monster. 
 Jimmie doesn't know much about capital- 
 ism, but you can't fool him about the double- 
 loom. The double-loom always brings a 
 strike at first. The man fights the machine. 
 The double-loom system was developed 
 some years ago. It was born in the textile 
 mills of Philadelphia ; that's why people were 
 so slow in hearing about it. 
 
 In Philadelphia the double-loom system is 
 employed in the weaving of all woolens, ex- 
 cept the heaviest fabrics and those most dif- 
 ficult to weave. In the light fabrics for sum- 
 mer wear one weaver frequently operates four 
 looms. The Philadelphia weaver receives 
 
 58 
 
Jimmie, the weaver 
 
 no greater pay now for the operation of four 
 looms than was received five years ago for the 
 operation of one. The pay of many weavers 
 is less than eight dollars per week. Women 
 are preferred as weavers in many mills be- 
 cause of their expertness and " tractability." 
 
 Even if extra compensation were allowed, 
 the double-loom system would be murderous. 
 
 " Look," said Jimmie, at the top of his 
 voice, after the nooning was over and the 
 crashing had begun again, " you wouldn't 
 think that they was doin' anything, would 
 you ? " 
 
 Here the girls had but one loom. They 
 could look after their neighbor's for a few 
 minutes if brief absence were necessary. They 
 stood about, quiet, unmoved, reposeful in the 
 deafening din. 
 
 I looked at the nearest girl. Her face was 
 pale and she was as reposeful as the others ; 
 but her repose, as that of the others, was the 
 repose of nervous tension. Her eyes, ap- 
 parently roving, were keenly watchful, and 
 her ears were acock for the slightest noise 
 which would indicate a break, or a float or 
 other fault in the swiftly running threads. 
 Even as I looked, she sprang like a cat to 
 
 59 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 her loom, her nimble fingers flew for an in- 
 stant so rapidly I could not follow them, and 
 then she relapsed quietly into the old attitude 
 of repose. 
 
 " The nervous strain of this work is devil- 
 ish!" I hissed into Jimmie's ear; and I 
 thought of the nice people running about the 
 city shops and buying the lives of these girls 
 in their bargains in dimities, challies, mulles 
 and organdies. 
 
 " I bet you," grinned Jimmie, roaring and 
 screeching alternately, " but s'pose they was 
 tendin' three or four of 'em ! That 'ud lay 
 'em out in a few years. Then they'd have to 
 have their hands and eyes in several places at 
 onct. They gets docked if they spoils a 
 piece ; it's took out o' their wages. That's 
 why I quit runnin' a loom. My fines was so 
 big I owed the company money every pay 
 day. If I'd a' been runnin' more'n one loom 
 I'd be owin* 'em money yet." 
 
 Jimmie laughed a loud, mirthless laugh 
 above the crash of the machinery, " the loud 
 laugh that speaks the vacant mind." 
 
 The double-loom system originated with 
 the weavers themselves. When a weaver was 
 not at work, the one whose loom was next in 
 
 60 
 
Jimmie, the weaver 
 
 line asked to be allowed to run the two looms. 
 This request was frequently granted, and the 
 operative made double wages. Mill owners, 
 observing that one weaver could, in an emer- 
 gency, do what until then was considered the 
 work of two, made it a rule that two looms 
 should be run, instead of one. This aroused 
 a storm of protest at the time, but it has 
 since been generally enforced in Philadelphia. 
 
 A single-loom system cannot compete with 
 a double-loom system. 
 
 When one factory grinds up more human 
 life than another factory, competition does 
 the rest. 
 
 :t The rest o* 'em has got to come to it," 
 says Jimmie. 
 
 Jimmie lives in one of the company's houses 
 built all in a row. There are no fences and 
 no gardens. The grass is trampled flat. 
 
 " Do they make you live there, in their 
 houses ? " 
 
 Jimmie cocked an eye and looked about ; 
 then he came close up to me. " No, they 
 don't say nothin' about it ; but when they has 
 to let a feller go, it's generally the feller that 
 lives in the houses the company don't own. 
 / lives in a company house. I got one boy 
 
 61 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 and two girls here in the factory and I don't 
 take no chances." 
 
 : ' What a splendid encouragement for the 
 workers to own their own homes ! " I thought. 
 
 If a whole family, like Jimmie's, works 
 and saves and buys a little hut of their own, 
 it is used against them. They'll work cheaper 
 before they'll leave it; and workmen's houses 
 are built by the company to rent for profit, 
 not to stand empty at a loss. 
 
 Jimmie is a politician. 
 
 He does not wait for a house to fall on 
 him before he catches on ; that is certain. 
 
 He evidently hates to be everlastingly 
 under the eye of the company ; he would at 
 least like to shake off the incubus in his home 
 life and have another landlord, but he has 
 been crushed too long ; his manhood has 
 long since dwindled into mere transparent 
 craft. 
 
 Jimmie is the product of the system. 
 
 Competition to make goods at a profit 
 made Jimmie ; and it is making his children 
 on the same model. It is a wonderful sys- 
 tem for preserving and dignifying human life. 
 Jimmie's children's children are not yet in 
 the mills; they look under " age : thirteen." 
 62 
 
Jimmie, the weaver 
 
 Good people are saying in the newspapers 
 that " childhood shall be sacredly preserved 
 for the playground, the school-room, and the 
 home." 
 
 " The home ": that is deeply moving ! 
 
 A home which, instead of a mother and 
 father, has a tired man and woman who 
 go away at daylight and return after dark; 
 that is a home to "sacredly preserve," in- 
 deed. 
 
 In 1875 or thereabout weavers made fifty 
 to sixty dollars a month running one loom. 
 Now they have to run three or four looms 
 and drop out, nervous wrecks, at forty-five, 
 to earn thirty to thirty-five dollars. 
 
 Miserable discontented strikers ! What 
 country could be prosperous with such a 
 greedy working class ? Are they never satis- 
 fied ? Do they expect to live as people live 
 who have an " independent income " ? 
 
 This is the greatest nation in the world, 
 and the most prosperous. We are produc- 
 ing $2,000,000,000 worth of goods more than 
 we can consume. The statistics prove it. 
 
 " Do you think you could consume an- 
 other shirt, Jimmie, out of the $2,000,000,000 
 if you had wages enough to buy it ? " 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 But Jimmie shook his head ; he doesn't 
 understand politics ; and he has learned by a 
 long and successful career that if you expect 
 to keep your job there is only one way to 
 vote. 
 
 Jimmie never takes any chances. 
 
THE CREEPING DARK 
 
 "Students of the University of Chicago were in- 
 structed yesterday in the management and operation 
 of great railroads. In the address by the Assistant 
 Second Vice-President of the Illinois Central, the 
 statement which apparently impressed the students 
 most was that the age limit at which men were 
 taken into railroad employ was 35 years." 
 
 Chicago Tribune. 
 
 It is an interesting commentary on modern 
 business life that there is no place in it for 
 the old. Life-wisdom, mature judgment, 
 soul poise, are not of commercial value. 
 The intangibles are below par in a profit- 
 seeking world. 
 
 In the current industrial organizations, at 
 the moment at which it would seem that a 
 man is best equipped for efficient service he 
 ceases to be of use. 
 
 This is because to keep the present social 
 order going, physical intelligence is alone re- 
 quired of the mass, muscle intelligence, as 
 it were. Men are available only as they 
 are human machines ; unthinking, plodding 
 creatures of routine. 
 
 Among railroad employees there survives 
 a fragment of a traditional dialogue between 
 
 65 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 the general manager of a great western rail- 
 road and an employee whom he was repri- 
 manding : 
 
 The Employee : " But sir, I thought" 
 
 The General Manager : " Damn you, sir. 
 You are not paid for thinking." 
 
 Under a military despotism the soldier is 
 not paid for thinking. He murders without 
 compunction men who never did him any 
 harm at his superior's command and gives 
 his life in battles not his own. 
 
 Under an industrial despotism the worker 
 is not paid for thinking. 
 
 He, too, gives his life in battles not his 
 own. 
 
 Despotism has many forms. 
 
 For Profit's sake the workers produce, and 
 produce and produce ; and when they are 
 old they are cashiered. 
 
 When they have given their lives in service 
 to society, society confronts them with a shut 
 door for their pains. 
 
 Society has no place today for the old. 
 
 The great wholesale houses of Chicago 
 take boys at sixteen years of age. 
 
 Inside of a year they are doing a man's 
 work, at a boy's pay. 
 
 66 
 
The creeping dark 
 
 This is the young and ambitious period of 
 their lives. They have hope in their hearts ; 
 the inevitable has not yet bulked against their 
 horizon. 
 
 From sixteen to thirty-five they work hard 
 and faithfully. A few out of the hundred 
 thousands become department managers or 
 get similar positions of service that involve a 
 petty authority and a little judgment in mat- 
 ters of no particular importance. 
 
 The vast majority reach thirty-five before 
 their reason awakens with the judgment of 
 manhood and they realize that they have 
 given the best part of their lives to a cease- 
 less grind for other men's profits, and that 
 it is now too late to do anything for them- 
 selves. 
 
 If before hope expires they look about for 
 new relations of service they are confronted 
 by such interesting rules as are operative in 
 the Illinois Central. 
 
 At the moment when, under a rational 
 social order, a man's years would best qualify 
 him for mature judgment and sound and in- 
 telligent decisions, the present social order 
 meets his application to serve it with the curt 
 and positive assurance that he is too old. 
 
 67 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 This base nay, infamous humiliation is 
 constantly suffered today by men who are 
 robust, strong and able. 
 
 What, then, are they to do ? 
 
 Stay in the rut ; die in the rut ; or starve. 
 
 From the moment that an intelligent man 
 awakes to the realization that he has no future 
 save one of routine, treadmill plodding, he 
 gets his bread at the price of his manhood. 
 The life-flame flickers and goes out. His 
 eyes no longer shine. His tale is told. He 
 then begins a long period of waiting ; wait- 
 ing for death. He may indulge himself with 
 a few creature - comforts ; but he has no 
 longer to be reckoned with. He may go or 
 stay. 
 
 So he continues at his boyhood's employ- 
 ment ; at his boyhood's wages, or very little 
 more ; until he gets in the way of some short- 
 tempered manager. 
 
 Then his store coat, worn at the elbows, is 
 gone from the hook. He doesn't come any 
 more. His floor-mates forget about him. 
 
 During the ambitious period of a man's 
 life today his energies are sapped by a system 
 which throws him away like a limp rag as 
 soon as the sap is wrung out of him, or 
 
 68 
 
The creeping dark 
 
 awakening intelligence provokes a normal 
 dissatisfaction. 
 
 Thousands and thousands and thousands 
 are thus ground through this frightful, imper- 
 sonal mill, the mere dry grist of a profit- 
 making civilization which has no use for the 
 thing that life is meant for the human soul. 
 
 Life is a progression ; an unfoldment ; a 
 spiritual development. 
 
 When your soul stops reaching out for 
 higher things ; when your hope is gone, and 
 your ambition is gone ; you may be walking 
 about the streets, and riding on trains, but 
 you are a dead man. Your life is behind you. 
 
 A society which reduces human beings to 
 the dead level of a machine-like routine; 
 which smothers the creative instinct ; which 
 extinguishes hope before mid-life is reached, 
 is only a form of organized death. 
 
 And yet it is this vast horde of patient, 
 plodding slaves, dulled by routine and soul- 
 quenched by years of exploitation, who are 
 keeping their fellows in slavery. They look 
 with dull eyes upon ideals for a ransomed 
 society. They do not think they can be 
 benefited. They do not think at all. Dead 
 men do not think. 
 
 69 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 A clerk who has worked ten hours a day 
 for twenty years without a day's vacation 
 looks at a caged canary and exclaims : " Poor 
 imprisoned little thing." 
 
 There is never so sorry a slave as the slave 
 who imagines he is free. 
 
 And day by day, step by step, age is creep- 
 ing on. 
 
 It is a sad thing, this realization that the 
 world has no place for the old. 
 
 The little children still love grandfather 
 and grandmother. 
 
 But their place by the fireside is gone. 
 
 The fireside itself is gone. 
 
 Hurry into your grave old man. You 
 have worked hard it is true. You have been 
 making things for others' comfort all your 
 life. 
 
 But this is a busy world. There are profits 
 to make. 
 
 And you are in the way. 
 
 70 
 
HOW FAR THE LITTLE 
 CANDLE 
 
 Once at a meeting at which John S. Crosby had 
 been explaining the iniquity of private ownership 
 of land, a man approached him and said : " Mr. 
 Crosby, I realize that what you say is true, but 
 what can a man do single-handed in a community 
 like this? I'm only one." "Well," replied Mr. 
 Crosby, " be one, most men are nothing." 
 
 Out in Colorado, an hour's ride up beauti- 
 ful Boulder canon, one comes upon a place 
 where the crystal stream divides, and while 
 half of it pursues its natural stony path, the 
 other half runs for a dozen yards quietly along 
 a sedgy bank and then suddenly flings it- 
 self back into the embrace of its mate, from 
 whence the single stream flows onward to 
 the plain. 
 
 At the point where the stream divides there 
 once stood a mill. This was in the seventies, 
 when the grizzlies would poke their heads 
 out of a clump of cedars and look at you 
 with their little, cunning eyes ; the rattle- 
 snakes coiled themselves upon the warm 
 rocks, and the beavers sought out the still 
 water in which to indulge their taste in archi- 
 tecture. 
 
 71 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 The animals are gone now all but the 
 chipmunk ; he remains to chatter his derision. 
 His minuteness has saved him. 
 
 In the mill race the beavers found an ideal 
 place for their building. 
 
 When the sun sank behind the peaks of the 
 Great Divide and darkness fell upon the can- 
 on the little architects would begin. They 
 would build and build. Two or three nights 
 would do the business. The race would be so 
 choked with beaver huts that enough water 
 would not come through to grind a hickory- 
 nut. It looked as though the men would have 
 to quit trying to crush ore and go to killing 
 beavers. But a mountaineer who dropped 
 in had an idea. 
 
 He told them if they would hang out a 
 lantern the beavers would stop bothering. 
 
 So they stripped a young pine and hung a 
 lamp on it. 
 
 After that at night the beavers would slide 
 into the race, blink up at the light and then 
 slide back into the rapids again, seeking new 
 foundations. 
 
 Night after night through long years the 
 lantern hung there, until " the light at Coan's 
 mill " was as a star to steer by. 
 
 72 
 
How far the little candle 
 
 It cheered the lonely mountaineer as he 
 climbed the long reaches in the darkness 
 to his hillside cabin ; and the driver of 
 the belated stage looked for its cheerful 
 ray again and again as the canon widened 
 and narrowed above the sharply declining 
 road, anon disclosing, anon obscuring with 
 its craggy steeps, the mill far down the 
 gorge. 
 
 Men in the mass are very much like beav- 
 ers ; their activity is as ceaseless, oftentimes 
 as instinctive and unreasoning, sometimes as 
 collectively destructive. 
 
 They do not mean to overthrow the things 
 that wiser men have builded ; they do not 
 mean to discard the principles that make for 
 race progress ; but they, like the beavers, 
 work mostly in the dark. 
 
 They do not understand. 
 
 In building their petty fortunes they choke 
 the life stream. 
 
 They do not see there is a mill to run 
 unless there is a light to show them. 
 
 In almost every town there is some one 
 personally akin to this light in Boulder canon; 
 some one soul which shines steadily on amid 
 
 73 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 the petty scandals, the gossip, and the empty 
 sound and fury of provincial life. 
 
 Such a soul may possess none of the quali- 
 ties of leadership ; no power of individual 
 initiative, no equipment for what men call 
 martyrdom. 
 
 Yet it is a light a mind still open to new 
 thoughts and new disclosures of eternal truth. 
 
 Only so it burns steadily, steadily. 
 
 You, brother, may be that light. You 
 need not always speak ; only now and then 
 a quiet word when a principle is in the bal- 
 ance. 
 
 For it is not what you say that moves men ; 
 it is what you are. They look behind your 
 words at you. 
 
 You may be alone; you may be "only 
 one ; " but in that day when your little com- 
 munity shall be swept off its feet by unreason- 
 ing passion, or false enthusiasm, then trim 
 your lamp ; its light is needed then. 
 
 Some will be deterred by it ; some will be 
 guided by it ; and a few will look for it and 
 rely upon it. 
 
 Thus shall you help the Plan. 
 
 Nor knowest thou what argument 
 
 Thy life to thy neighbor's creed hath lent. 
 
 74 
 
RENUNCIATION 
 
 "Tolstoy seems to have carried his theories into 
 practice even in the smallest details of life. On one 
 occasion he mounted a bicycle belonging to his aris- 
 tocratic son. He soon mastered the art of balance, 
 and was delighted by the swift, smooth motion. 
 His wife noticed his enjoyment and immediately 
 offered to give him a machine. Tolstoy at first ac- 
 cepted, but on reconsidering the matter he decided 
 that as other less favored mortals could not afford 
 to possess bicycles he had no right to one either." 
 
 London News. 
 
 Leo Tolstoy has probably done as much 
 to stir the conscience and arouse a hatred 
 and disgust of the world's injustice as any 
 living person. 
 
 To paint human society as it is, in all its 
 hideous hypocrisy, seems to be his mission ; 
 and he does it well. His indictment is scath- 
 ing, and he hits the mark. There is no 
 escaping him. 
 
 But when the unattractive social edifice has 
 been leveled there must begin the process 
 of construction ; and negation is not a sta- 
 ble superstructure. To renounce is not to 
 build. 
 
 It is Tolstoy's remedy, so far as he offers 
 one, that does not satisfy. 
 
 75 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 No one can fail to respect the man who 
 voluntarily denies himself comforts and satis- 
 factions that other men do not have ; but we 
 may admire a chivalrous action even when 
 we are convinced of its social futility. 
 
 To deny oneself a bicycle because all men 
 do not have bicycles does not help other 
 men to have bicycles. 
 
 If bicycles grew like North Poles or Equa- 
 tors, only one in the world ; not enough 
 under any circumstances to go round, Tol- 
 stoy's generous renunciation might minister 
 to human need. Bicycles, however, can be 
 duplicated ; as many can be produced as 
 there are human bipeds to bestride them. 
 
 By the same token, if Tolstoy were to stop 
 eating there would be no lessening of the 
 number of Russian children who go to bed 
 hungry. 
 
 It is better for one to eat his fill that he 
 may have the strength to strive that all others 
 may be fed. 
 
 In a world in which there is enough for 
 all, he who denies himself his needed share 
 may unwittingly force a like denial upon 
 others, and encourage, in the thoughtless 
 strong, a grasping spirit. 
 7* 
 
Renunciation 
 
 The principle of renunciation is not a true 
 principle. It may have its roots in pride. 
 
 I will someday refuse to allow you to gain 
 for yourself a fancied nobility by my ignoble 
 acceptance of the thing you renounce. 
 
 You shall serve me if you like, and I will 
 love you for it, and serve you in return ; but 
 you shall sacrifice for me not a bit. 
 
 The free spirit hates a debt. 
 
 Renunciation is a cardinal principle of a 
 ruling-class religion ; for-us-to-preach and 
 you-to-practice kind. It has been taught the 
 workers ever since wages were a reality, 
 and before. 
 
 The people have grown accustomed to the 
 idea that it is a virtue to " give up " ; a very 
 agreeable philosophy in the eyes of the idlers ; 
 it makes the workers submissive. 
 
 The ruling class furnishes the teachers. 
 When a working class teacher arises he is 
 put to death or otherwise discredited as a 
 disturber of " order." A Carpenter tried it 
 once. 
 
 Into this teaching of the virtues of renun- 
 ciation has been subtly woven a covert bribe. 
 " Give up in this world and heaven is for 
 you," is the refrain of it. And the poor 
 
 77 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 people like the idea of getting something 
 sometime. 
 
 They've gone without so very, very long. 
 
 " Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven," 
 sings the priest as his fingers clutch the col- 
 lection box. 
 
 It is a pretty song. 
 
 It seems to the people as if they were 
 putting money out at interest. They deny 
 themselves the fun of spending it now, to 
 enjoy the fun of spending it, with the in- 
 crease, later on. 
 
 Middle Ages literature is full of examples 
 of spectacular renunciation. Men used to 
 go out of the towns and live in caves in the 
 hills ; and never wash, nor comb their hair. 
 
 They were called " holy " men. 
 
 They renounced everything except rags, 
 and lice, and the crusts of bread the "sin- 
 ners " brought them. 
 
 Some of these men were fakirs, but most 
 of them were sincere ; they voluntarily suf- 
 fered cold and hunger in the belief that the 
 world was to be " saved " that way. 
 
 But they did not make the world a whit 
 easier to live in. Down in the towns other 
 men and women, and little children, were 
 78 
 
Renunciation 
 
 fasting too, and not taking any holy credit 
 for it. They were working and producing 
 clothing and shelter and food that the ruling 
 class was taking from them, just as it is do- 
 ing in the towns today. And when a mem- 
 ber of the ruling class would do some thing 
 which he ought not to have done or leave 
 undone some thing which he ought to have 
 done and there was no health in him, he 
 would take a little of the food which the 
 hungry men and women and little children 
 of the town were producing and carry it up 
 and feed the holy man with it, and the holy 
 man would howl and sing and do things with 
 his hands, just as the holy men do today, for 
 provender. 
 
 The only difference is, that today the cave 
 of the holy man is better than it was in the 
 Middle Ages and it has a bathroom in it. 
 
 But the truth to be gleaned is that the re- 
 nunciations of the holy men then served no 
 more to abolish social injustice than do the 
 annunciations of the holy men now. 
 
 To renounce is not to solve the problem. 
 It is to run away from it. 
 
 That Tolstoy believes the world may be 
 saved by renunciation is not to be doubted ; 
 
 79 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 but he has had his fling. He lived a fast and 
 luxurious life : he practically exhausted mod- 
 ern social possibilities. He was driven out 
 into the air by satiety. He is tired of it all. 
 
 To do what he is doing may be best, for 
 him. 
 
 Life is the arena in which experience is to 
 be gained. Tolstoy is gaining his. 
 
 But noble and sincere soul that he is, his 
 principles of renunciation are abnormal and 
 out of harmony with life. 
 
 The pleasures which surfeited Tolstoy, and 
 disgusted him with social life, are but normal 
 pleasures twisted out of focus by an evil so- 
 cial system. 
 
 Tolstoy sees that no one can be happy in 
 such an evil state and so calls upon all true 
 souls to renounce and leave the state. 
 
 But there is another thing to do. 
 
 Stay in the state and change it ; make it the 
 instrument of happiness instead of the instru- 
 ment of tyranny and injustice. 
 
 The state is but a tool ; the people can 
 make of it what they will. It is like a ship ; 
 it can be steered in pleasant places ; and it 
 can drift upon the rocks ; there must always 
 be enough true men to navigate it. 
 80 
 
Renunciation 
 
 To a man who stands heartsick and weary, 
 contemplating the hypocrisy, the shameless 
 greed, the fathomless injustice of human so- 
 ciety, the easiest solution which presents it- 
 self is to go away from it all ; to fly to some 
 quiet spot and live out his individual life in 
 purity alone, earning his bread with his hands 
 and eating it in peace. 
 
 But this is not to solve the problem ; it is 
 to seek refuge from it. 
 
 No man is to be blamed for doing this ; it is 
 surely something, at least, to get off the back 
 of labor ; his own life sources will be purer. 
 
 Many a man strives greatly in the cause of 
 justice and retires, beaten, at the end. An 
 overcome hero is a hero still. A man can do 
 only what he may and no single blow for 
 liberty is struck in vain. Because we may 
 not strive through to the end should ne'er 
 persuade us not to strive at all. 
 
 But the greatest soul is yet he who, heart- 
 sick, weary as his fellow, hating strife, loving 
 peace, and yearning, too, to fly and leave it 
 all, yet stays in the heat and dust and strug- 
 gle of the world-old conflict; striving on, 
 hoping against hope ; believing it is the high- 
 est because it is the hardest test of manhood ; 
 
 81 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 whose love for the poor tired toilers of the 
 world is so great, whose human sympathies 
 are so wide that he will not leave his brothers 
 in their long strife so long as he has strength 
 to stand. 
 
 This is a higher than renunciation, for it 
 solves the individual problem in the social 
 problem. Until the social whole has been 
 perfected we have reached the summit of the 
 individual ; strife for individual supremacy 
 now ends in a circle. 
 
 Individual men are no better or no worse 
 than they were two thousand years ago. The 
 Nazarene has not yet been surpassed for man- 
 hood ; Plato for philosophy ; Phidias for art ; 
 Pericles for oratory; and Judas Iscariot 
 goes about today in a frock coat. 
 
 The progress the world has made has been 
 social progress. We moderns have improved 
 the uses of the state a trifle ; that is all. 
 
 To see this truth is to make another truth 
 more clear : 
 
 We may deny ourselves, and sacrifice, and 
 choke back our natural desires ; and this 
 discipline is good ; it may refine us and pur- 
 ify us, but it is not all : it leaves our great- 
 est duty unfulfilled. 
 
 82 
 
Renunciation 
 
 To serve the social whole : to try to under- 
 stand its needs and its crises ; to do the thing 
 from day to day which will most make for 
 the uplifting of the entire race ; that is the 
 problem of the individual life, than which there 
 is no greater. 
 
 For the foremost man is held back by the 
 hindmost man ; the universe is run by block- 
 signals ; any human wreck, anywhere, closes 
 the line. 
 
 Individual salvation is a lie born of a selfish 
 heart, and when we most think we are out of 
 the mire, the arm of the Most Neglected 
 reaches up from the abyss and drags us back 
 into the dark. 
 
 Individual growth can only be attained by 
 striving to perfect the social whole. When 
 we address ourselves collectively to perfecting 
 the lowliest life ; when equality of oppor- 
 tunity shall at last allow one man to attain 
 to what he would be without crushing another 
 in the process ; then and then only will latent 
 individual powers become manifest ; powers 
 with which, who knows ? we may read the 
 story of the stars. 
 
 We can never really build ourselves at an- 
 other's cost. This is the Law. 
 
 83 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 We cannot evade the duty of the individual 
 to the mass ; nor the duty of the mass to the 
 individual. Life is one. 
 
 To renounce life is to betray life. 
 
 We shall stay with our fellow ; and struggle 
 beside him ; and suffer with him ; and, if need 
 be, die with him, until at last the Dawn shall 
 come. 
 
MANHOOD'S CRUCIBLE 
 
 " Like as a goldsmith bcateth out his gold 
 To other fashions fairer than the old, 
 So may the spirit, learning ever more, 
 In ever nobler forms its life enfold." 
 
 Sanskrit (Bhartrihari). 
 
 One of the gladdest experiences that can 
 come to the finite mind is the realization that 
 there is no stage in human progression that 
 is final. 
 
 It may be set down as self-evident that the 
 man who thinks he has attained has not yet 
 touched the skirts of attainment. Dogmatism 
 is the mark of arrested development. It 
 registers the restriction of the mental and 
 spiritual horizon. Light cannot reach the 
 soul except through the open mind, and to 
 seize upon one truth to the exclusion of other 
 truths is to hitch your wagon to a fragment. 
 Truth is one. We must not mistake a seg- 
 ment of the circle for a straight line because 
 we happen to stand too near to see the curve 
 of it. 
 
 There are those who will tell you that if it 
 were not for the competitive struggle man- 
 kind would never amount to anything ; that 
 strife develops character. These are the 
 
 tt 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 ones who have mistaken the segment for a 
 straight line and have traveled off at a tan- 
 gent. They have confused the idea of man's 
 necessity of overcoming Nature with the idea 
 of man's fighting his fellow, until one idea 
 has been lost in the other. 
 
 The competitive struggle never yet pro- 
 duced a noble man. All the real benefactors 
 of the race have either been raised above it, 
 pursuing their investigations in economic se- 
 curity, or they have ignored it altogether by 
 deliberately choosing poverty as the price of 
 their integrity of spirit. That the competi- 
 tive struggle could produce a man like Jesus, 
 or Socrates, or Galileo, or Newton is un- 
 thinkable. Strife of man against man works 
 moral disintegration ; the only thing to be 
 won by it is a soiled plume. 
 
 If any of the Successful Ones has still a 
 streak of nobility in him, it is because he has 
 secretly kept some little corner of his life 
 sacred, free from the defilement of the arena 
 in which he has won his fancied supremacy. 
 
 The competitive struggle develops the wolf- 
 instincts ; you have only to read the face of 
 the Successful One to see how far he has fallen 
 short of nobility of character. 
 
 86 
 
Manhood's crucible 
 
 Character is a subtile painter, but the images 
 she limns are unmistakable. 
 
 It is true that we must put forth our powers 
 in order to grow. We must live either at the 
 expense of work or at the expense of faculty. 
 Inaction rots the body and dulls and degrades 
 the soul. 
 
 But the field of man's striving must be other 
 than his fellow. To exploit one another in 
 competitive warfare is the surest method of 
 stifling race progress. He who advocates the 
 competitive struggle as beneficent has a wolf- 
 philosophy of life ; his idea of human society 
 is not yet born. By his belief that aquisitive- 
 ness and combativeness are marks of supe- 
 riority of character he deceives himself and de- 
 ceives his neighbor and unconsciously helps to 
 keep the world in an atmosphere of animalism. 
 
 Animal ethics need not dominate human 
 society, for man can deliberately increase his 
 food supply. All nature waits to help him. 
 We are meant to overcome our physical en- 
 vironment, not each other. Nature is the 
 field-of-the-cloth-of-gold in which alone fair 
 honor is to be gained. 
 
 And if you would see Character, look into 
 the eyes of an old navigator; one who has 
 
 87 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 struggled with the winds and the waves and 
 mastered them. In him you will see none of 
 those peculiar little wrinkles about the brow 
 and eyes that mark the countenances of the 
 Successful Ones ; all is frank, open integrity. 
 The stars and wide expanses have somehow 
 gotten into his soul and look calmly out at you. 
 
 We have not yet really comprehended our 
 intimate physical environment. A few of us 
 have been reaching out, and so we have dis- 
 covered rudimentary principles of steam and 
 electricity and pneumatics and hydraulics; 
 but so many of us have been fighting one 
 another, and for so long, that we still are liv- 
 ing in an unfamiliar universe. 
 
 It is hope, alone, that makes life possible 
 to some ; hope that men may yet so grow in 
 spiritual perception that they may see what 
 character really is and how it may be devel- 
 oped ; what we are here for and how beauti- 
 ful life might be. For until we recognize the 
 truths which lie at our feet the gates of uni- 
 versal truth will be closed against us. Once 
 we get upon the hills our yearning for wide 
 horizons is awakened. 
 
 Surely we must some day see the absurdity 
 of our economic fear, here in a world where 
 
 88 
 
Manhood's crucible 
 
 fruit trees might thrive along every highway 
 if we only cared to plant them. 
 
 And when we see this truth, which ought 
 to be so plain, we will see other truths which 
 are now obscured ; truths which will revive 
 dead faiths in the beneficence of the Plan, 
 and lead us grandly up to heights of being 
 of whose clear altitudes the race has not yet 
 dreamed. 
 
 " Man is not Man as yet. 
 
 Nor shall I deem his object served, his end 
 
 Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth, 
 
 While only here and there a star dispels 
 
 The darkness, here and there a towering mind 
 
 O'erlooks its prostrate fellows ; when the host 
 
 Is out at once to the despair of night, 
 
 When all mankind alike is perfected, 
 
 Equal in full-blown powers then, not till then, 
 
 I say, begins man's general infancy." 
 
 19 
 
THE HERO 
 
 " Oh, how well I know this. Hero phrases, hero 
 actions. Always ready to stick your hand into the 
 fire, Gosta ; always ready to throw yourself away. 
 How great I once thought this. . . . But now 
 I tell you . . . that you shall quite simply go 
 and do your duty. You shall not dream of hero- 
 ism, you shall not dazzle and surprise, you shall 
 look to it that your name is not too often on the 
 lips of the people." 
 
 Selma Lagerlof . 
 
 In every human being, however privileged 
 his advantages, however independent his po- 
 sition, there lurks a desire for approbation ; 
 the approbation of his fellows ; not for what 
 he has but for what he is. To be loved for 
 one's self is man's nearest approach to hap- 
 piness. He who is valued for what he has 
 knows not the joy of friendship, of comrade- 
 love. What one is alone brings nectar-sweets 
 like these. 
 
 If you are poor and a single hand reaches 
 out to you in greeting, then you may know 
 you are worth while. 
 
 If you are rich and a great crowd strains to 
 grasp your palm, somewhere in the shadows 
 of your consciousness the mocking imp of 
 Doubt sits grinning at you. 
 
 90 
 
The hero 
 
 You will never know what you are really 
 worth, what men really care for you, until 
 you stand alone. Your helps will always hide 
 you. 
 
 Resplendent among the glittering gods of 
 your possession you will sit disconcerted and 
 ashamed when the philosopher goes by ; for 
 the philosopher gazes with calm eyes at the 
 man instead of at the things which bolster 
 him. 
 
 The world looks at the things ; our educa- 
 tion, our wealth, our social position ; but that 
 is because to the vulgar mind things are easily 
 to be understood, but men not at all. 
 
 It is awful when out of unwavering eyes a 
 calm soul looks at us. 
 
 We cannot take refuge then in a Greek 
 sonnet we have scanned nor a couplet we 
 have wrought out of Sanskrit. We cannot 
 hide behind the things we own, nor the visit- 
 ing cards of amiable imbeciles on our dress- 
 ing-table. 
 
 These things are then inconsequent and 
 impertinent and we know it and shrivel, hu- 
 miliated. 
 
 We are ashamed for what we are not in 
 the presence of the paltry things that are. 
 
 91 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 Being something is greater than having 
 something; this we know, if ever into our 
 shadow comes a ray shot from a soul that is. 
 
 The soul may pass in a man's shape, or a 
 woman's, or reach out and touch us from a 
 printed page ; but when it is encountered if 
 we be not dead of convention or respecta- 
 bility we are in that moment born again. 
 
 Thenceforward we know that our peace 
 can be won only by that soul's approbation, 
 even if it be gone from its earthly body. If 
 we do not strive for it the black dog haunts 
 us and visits derisive yelpings upon the things 
 we gain. The applause of the multitude then 
 wells up not to sustain but to stifle. 
 
 Then it is that The Heroic beckons. 
 "Hero phrases , hero actions. Always ready to 
 stick our hands into the fire, always ready to 
 throw ourselves away." 
 
 But the calm eyes turn from our petty blus- 
 ter ; unblaming, unpraising, they turn away. 
 Far down in the darkness the black dog is 
 still barking. We are not yet ; we may have 
 cleared the ground of weeds, but the crust 
 is hard, the soil is yet to turn. 
 
 To be is to become ; being is a process, it 
 is not a completed fact. 
 
 92 
 
The hero 
 
 The soul is not a mushroom. 
 
 That calm look in the eyes is not born of a 
 single night nor of a single act, and to act be- 
 fore that look is gained is often but to act the 
 fool. 
 
 Heroism is still and calm ; it stands some- 
 times in the shadow of the wall, alone, while 
 the multitude surges by in acclamation of The 
 Little. When true heroism acts the act is a 
 consequence ; the logic of the universe speaks 
 in it. It springs out of soul poise, not out of 
 the hurrying moments of uncertainty. 
 
 Soul poise is life wisdom ; it is of more than 
 a season's planting. It does not put out its 
 shoots until the chilling snows of selfishness 
 and vanity and the tyranny of things have been 
 forever melted by the sun of a great love for 
 humanity. 
 
 Life wisdom is the realization that life is 
 one. 
 
 That calm look will come into our eyes 
 someday, if we will it so ; and when it comes 
 it will be its own proof of our conquering. 
 To those who can understand it will be the 
 unfailing sign that through the long dark 
 night of life experience, far from the world's 
 dull ken we have been patiently, silently, 
 
 93 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 steadily scaling the baffling ramparts of Self, 
 and may even yet plant the standards of vic- 
 tory against the soul's sunrise. For victory 
 comes of Truth, and that calm look sees 
 things as they are, sees men as they are ; it is 
 not disconcerted by things, nor the clashing 
 of cymbals, nor the shouts of the mock-he- 
 roic. 
 
 Beneath the measureless confusion and the 
 chaos of the world's great strife it notes the 
 infallible under-weave connecting man and ev- 
 ents, and it understands the eternal mystic 
 sympathy between Nature and her wayward 
 children ; it knows that a greater victory may 
 be won in watching the growing grass, than 
 in the storming of a walled city. 
 
 94 
 
THE PHILANTHROPIST 
 
 " Hobson : Have you a dollar about you, Dobson ? 
 I want to give it to that poor beggar. 
 " Dobson ( handing him the dollar ) : Your generos- 
 ity will get you into trouble some day, Hobson." 
 
 Life. 
 
 Has it ever occurred to you that the great 
 philanthropists of the world have acquired 
 their claim to that title by giving away other 
 people's money ? 
 
 Here is a millionaire. 
 
 You hear people say he is worth a million 
 dollars. Don't believe it. No one would 
 give a million dollars for him. The people 
 mean he has a million dollars. 
 
 How did he come by it ? Can one man 
 earn a million dollars ? 
 
 Yes, if he works every day in the year, 
 week-days and Sundays, at ten dollars a day 
 for nearly three hundred years and never 
 spends a cent of it to live, he can. It takes a 
 strong man to do it. 
 
 There is scarcely a productive occupation 
 in the world at present at which a man can 
 earn more than ten dollars a day. 
 
 It is not as producers but as exploiters 
 that men receive a larger daily wage than this. 
 
 95 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 If you possess some legal privilege, or if 
 your talent for organization is so pronounced 
 as to enable you to exploit a large number of 
 men to advantage, then you may finally be- 
 come a millionaire. 
 
 One thousand workmen each earning five 
 dollars a day and getting two dollars a day, 
 the unpaid three dollars remaining with you, 
 may, after your business gets to running, 
 make you a million in two or three years. 
 
 But you will not have earned the million. 
 
 Other men will have earned it and you will 
 have taken it from them. 
 
 Once you get the business well organized 
 you can go off and leave it. You can hire 
 men of executive ability to keep it running 
 while you travel or indulge in yacht-racing ; 
 particularly if you have a legal monopoly. If 
 you have not, you will have to stay around 
 more or less. But you will be getting your 
 hundreds of thousands a year, while you 
 are idle. This makes it clear that you are 
 not earning it. The other men, the working 
 men, are earning it. 
 
 You have used the ability Nature has be- 
 stowed upon you for helping other men, to 
 take advantage of other men. 
 
The philanthropist 
 
 What was intended as a race obligation, 
 your small soul construes a personal privilege. 
 
 While these hundreds of thousands are 
 coming in every year, you may occasionally 
 give some of them to a library or a college. 
 
 But it is not your money you are giving. 
 
 It is no denial nor sacrifice of yours. 
 
 It is other men who are earning it. 
 
 You are taking other people's money and 
 giving it away for the sake of your private 
 reputation. 
 
 You are called a charitable person. 
 
 But you yourself know yourself. 
 
 Charity is service. 
 
 You can give only yourself in loving ser- 
 vice to your kind ; or give the results of your 
 own personal toil. 
 
 That is charity. 
 
 It is not charity for you to give away that 
 which other men earn. 
 
 If you were a charitable man you would 
 wish to use your same organizing ability for 
 the good of all, instead of for yourself alone. 
 You would wish to be a real philanthropist 
 instead of a sham philanthropist. 
 
 You would wish to give to the world, not 
 to take from it. This is real philanthropy. 
 
 97 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 We cannot see this very plainly now, be- 
 cause our training has obscured our vision. 
 
 We think our share means all that we can 
 get, and when we have grabbed it we try to 
 steal a virtue by giving back the portion we 
 don't want. 
 
 But purity of soul has gone from us in the 
 grabbing. In plunging for a diamond we 
 have lost a star. 
 
 There is a psychological significance in the 
 phrase, " He is worth a million." 
 
 It indicates diseased judgment. 
 
 We have come to assume that the man 
 who takes the most is worth the most. 
 
 We commonly look upon the richest man 
 in a town as logically of the greatest value to 
 the town. 
 
 He may have established an industry. 
 
 The industry may have increased the pop- 
 ulation. 
 
 But mere bigness is not virtue. 
 
 Unless the efforts of a man make the peo- 
 ple of a town a happier people he has done 
 them no service in enlarging it. He may 
 have increased their burdens. 
 
 The happiest cities are usually the smallest 
 cities. 
 
 98 
 
The philanthropist 
 
 Chicago's human misery is unutterable. 
 
 The "men who made Chicago" have, for 
 the most, only made the distance from the 
 home to the workshop or office a little great- 
 er. They have only added a weary tramp 
 or a dreary hour in a crowded car to the day's 
 toil. 
 
 They have neither lightened human toil 
 nor lessened human misery. 
 
 Some day we will come to see how the 
 philanthropist is made, and we will recognize 
 his real value to society. 
 
 Then there will be no philanthropists. 
 
 Every man will be his own philanthropist. 
 
 Instead of permitting another to spend 
 their earnings for them, men will spend 
 them for themselves. 
 
 Then if they had rather have a bucket of 
 coal or a pair of shoes than a university or an 
 art gallery, they can have it. 
 
 When growing spiritual discernment final- 
 ly shows men that a millionaire is and must 
 be a man who makes grist of other men's 
 lives, men will not wish to be millionaires. 
 
 And they cannot be if they would be. 
 
 The extra three dollars will that day remain 
 in the pocket of the earner. 
 
 99 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 In that day either to keep or to bestow the 
 earnings of other men will be seen for what 
 it is, and what it has always been, a moral 
 leprosy born of the vanishing dark. 
 
 In that day to grow a flower for a little 
 crippled child will in men's eyes exalt you 
 higher than to build a university. 
 
 100 
 
THE FLOWERS OF A GRANT 
 OF LAND 
 
 w To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to 
 him belong the fruits of it. White parasols and 
 elephants mad with pride are the flowers of a grant 
 of land." Sir William Jones' translation of an old 
 Indian grant of land, found at Tanna. 
 
 In India there are 300,000,000 people. 
 
 The great native states of Indore, Gwalior, 
 Hyderabad, Travancore and Mysore, aggre- 
 gating 50,000,000 people, govern themselves, 
 under light British supervision. 
 
 The rest of the territory, with its popula- 
 tion of 250,000,000 souls, is governed by the 
 English capitalists. 
 
 The self-governing states are surrounded 
 by the British territory. Their drawbacks of 
 climate are identical. 
 
 Yet the self-governing states are flourishing 
 and prosperous. 
 
 In the British-governed states the people 
 die off like rats : starved into skeletons. 
 
 The Indian peoples, who had a literature 
 and an art and an architecture while our an- 
 cestors were half-naked savages gnawing raw 
 flesh, no longer own their own country. 
 
 Their land is no longer theirs. 
 
 101 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 They sow it, and till it, and reap it ; but 
 the harvest is taken from them. 
 
 Every year the English capitalists, through 
 their plundering organization called the Brit- 
 ish government, extort from India over $150,- 
 000,000 in gold value. 
 
 What do the Indian people get in return 
 for this ? 
 
 White parasols and elephants mad with 
 pride ; English soldiers to feed ; and Secre- 
 taries and Viceroys in gold lace and jewel- 
 hiked swords ; and pestilence and famine. 
 
 Every week, while the ryots of India are 
 dying of sheer starvation, the wheat ships are 
 clearing from the ports of Calcutta and Bom- 
 bay. 
 
 The food the ryots have grown is taken 
 from them. 
 
 The wheat ships are sailing for England, 
 to make bread for the English people. 
 
 England is a civilized country. 
 
 The ryots do not understand it all. They 
 do not know what civilization is. They sim- 
 ply know that if they do not till the soil they 
 die. 
 
 If they do till the soil they must give up the 
 fruits of it. For there are the English guns. 
 
 102 
 
The flowers of a grant of land 
 
 When five or six millions of the Indian 
 people starve to death in a single year it 
 occasions remark ; " famine years ", such 
 years are called. 
 
 When one or two millions die it is an ordi- 
 nary year. No one pays much attention. 
 
 In "famine" years the English herd the 
 starving people together by the hundred thou- 
 sands in what are called "relief works." 
 
 This is where the ryots get the food bought 
 by the pennies of the American Sunday-school 
 children. 
 
 If the American Sunday-school children's 
 donation happens to be a trifle shy, the Eng- 
 lish hold back one or two of the wheat ships 
 and allow the ryots to eat a little of their own 
 grain. 
 
 This is not to save the lives of the ryots. 
 
 It is to save the lives of the English. 
 
 If the ryots get to dying faster than they 
 can be buried, pestilence breaks out. The 
 English people do not like that. English 
 children die of it. 
 
 The sanitary arrangements for herding peo- 
 ple together by the hundred thousand are nev- 
 er very good. Plague and cholera invariably 
 appear. 
 
 103 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 Most of the ryots prefer to perish misera- 
 bly in their own little huts. 
 
 This is better ; the vultures pick their bones 
 speedily and there is an end. No one's sym- 
 pathies need be taxed. 
 
 No one hears the cries of the famished 
 babes, save the Indian mother. 
 
 They suck the dry breasts and wither and 
 die in their mothers' arms. 
 
 It would be pitiful if the women were hu- 
 man ; that is to say, English. 
 
 There is enough wheat grown in India to 
 feed the people of India. The prosperity of 
 the native-governed states proves it. 
 
 Their resources are identical with those of 
 the British-governed states. 
 
 The difference is this : in the native-gov- 
 erned states they eat the wheat they grow ; 
 in the British-governed states the English eat 
 it. The English take it in taxation. 
 
 In years of drought the taxes are the same 
 as in years of plenty. In years of good crops 
 the ryots can just barely pay their taxes and 
 live until the next season. If the next sea- 
 son there is a drought, that settles them ; they 
 have saved up nothing and they die. The 
 English must have their taxes. 
 
 104 
 
The flowers of a grant of land 
 
 In Mysore and the other native-governed 
 states they fill the granaries in good seasons 
 to feed over the years of drought. 
 
 In the English-governed states the English 
 take it all. 
 
 When the year of drought comes the ryots 
 in the British states are destitute. They die 
 like flies. 
 
 These are the years in which the missionary 
 journals appeal for help. It quickens the 
 imagination to see pictures of vast multitudes 
 starving. 
 
 Good people go about the churches telling 
 how terrible it is. They get a living by it 
 
 They say the awful drought does it. They 
 don't seem to notice the awful English. 
 
 If goodness is blindness, they are very 
 good people, very good indeed. 
 
 They do not understand taxation. About 
 one man in ten thousand does. 
 
 Taxation is the strongest weapon of capi- 
 talism. Also the subtlest. 
 
 It strikes quietly, in the dark ; while men 
 are thinking of something else. 
 
 But in India it is plain enough. 
 
 For fear lest the hunger - stricken ryots 
 should eat their crops before paying what 
 
 105 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 they " owe/' the English extort the payment 
 of the excessive taxes, in cash, before the 
 crops are grown ! 
 
 This drives the cultivators into the hands 
 of the local capitalists, the native money- 
 lenders. The money-lenders advance the 
 cash at about 60 per cent, and take a mort- 
 gage on the crops. 
 
 The ryot takes the risk. 
 
 It is a great system. 
 
 Without it British India would go bank- 
 rupt tomorrow. She could not support the 
 vast horde of English parasites which has 
 been fastened on her. 
 
 By owning India the English can suck her 
 dry. 
 
 To whomsoever at any time the soil be- 
 longs, to him belong the fruits of it. 
 
 In India men and cattle must have salt. 
 
 If men and women do not eat as much 
 salt as they ought to eat they contract loath- 
 some diseases. 
 
 If the cattle don't get enough of it they per- 
 ish, and that settles the tillage. The bullocks 
 do the plowing. 
 
 The English tax the salt as a government 
 monopoly 1,000 per cent on its value ! 
 
 106 
 
The flowers of a grant of land 
 
 One thousand per cent ; that is a good tax. 
 
 Of course the ryots use as little salt as they 
 can ; but one never can be quite sure of the 
 danger-line. 
 
 In " famine " years human beings are more 
 important than cattle. The ryots then buy 
 food for the babies instead of salt for the 
 cattle. The bullocks die. Then the next 
 year there are but few bullocks to plow with. 
 
 The ryots are between the devil and the 
 deep sea. 
 
 The clergy of the English churches offer 
 prayers to God for the welfare of " His 
 Majesty's subjects in India." 
 
 The salt tax helps to keep the church go- 
 ing. 
 
 The ryots might thrive better on the salt 
 than on the prayers. 
 
 But the priests wouldn't. 
 
 England's zeal in Christianizing India is 
 bringing flattering results. 
 
 A study of official statistics for the century 
 just ended shows : 
 
 From 1825 to 1850 there were two famines 
 and 500,000 deaths from famine. 
 
 From 1850 to 1875 there were six famines 
 and 5,000,000 deaths from famine. 
 
 107 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 From 1875 to 1900 there were eighteen 
 famines and 26,000,000 deaths from famine. 
 
 Quite an interesting progression ! 
 
 Within the ten years from 1891 to 1900, 
 nineteen millions died of starvation, nearly 
 four times as many as the war-deaths of the 
 world for the entire century. 
 
 William Digby, in a book published in 
 1901 ( Prosperous " British India ; a Rev- 
 elation from Official Records. London. T. 
 Fisher Unwin), says that in the absence of 
 special seasons of famine there are 70,000,000 
 hungry people in the country; about the 
 population of the United States. 
 
 As the English from year to year during 
 the past century have gradually obtained com- 
 plete control over India, saddling more and 
 more of parasitical unproductive officialdom 
 upon her, taking more and more of her 
 product away every year to England ; they 
 have, at the same time, by salt taxes and other 
 similar exactions, exterminated her cattle and 
 otherwise reduced the productive resources 
 of the ryots, until famine has now become a 
 chronic state from which so long as the En- 
 glish are in India no number of favorable 
 seasons can extricate her. 
 loe 
 
The flowers of a grant of land 
 
 It should be remembered that during this 
 same century the native-governed states be- 
 fore mentioned, having the same climate and 
 similar soil, have been uniformly prosperous 
 and flourishing, only suffering slightly when 
 two seasons of severe drought came consecu- 
 tively. 
 
 Twenty -six million lives in twenty -five 
 years : this is England's record at the close 
 of nineteen hundred years of what she calls 
 Christianity. 
 
 In India twenty-three years is the average 
 of life : in Great Britain it is forty. 
 
 " India must be bled," playfully said Lord 
 Salisbury. 
 
 India is a long way off. 
 
 Blood spilled in India does not bespatter 
 English teacups. 
 
 No such awful crime has ever been com- 
 mitted in the history of the human race as 
 that which England is committing in India. 
 
 Multiply English crime in South Africa a 
 thousand times, it yet pales before the peren- 
 nial, incalculable infamy of India. 
 
 Lord Curzon, Viceroy, and Lord George 
 Hamilton, Secretary, assert that India is pros- 
 perous. She is, for the English leech. 
 
 109 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 The official returns for 1898-1899, (the 
 latest available ! ) show government salaries 
 of $52,440,000 paid by British India. 
 
 This is equivalent to paying every resident 
 of a city of 52,440 inhabitants one thousand 
 dollars a year. 
 
 " Where there is one idle man," says Tol- 
 stoy, "there is always another somewhere 
 who is starving." 
 
 After the English officials finish their years 
 of " service " in India they go home to loaf 
 the rest of their lives on a pension, also 
 paid by India. 
 
 Forty-five or fifty is the " retiring " age. 
 
 The starving ryots of India are to-day 
 yielding up their product to support eleven 
 hundred retired Colonels in England, who di- 
 vide among themselves $5,000,000' a year in 
 pensions. 
 
 Most of these Colonels " have seen active 
 service " in India ; that is to say, they are the 
 men who helped to murder all the Indian 
 people who dared to fight, trying to keep 
 their own land for themselves. 
 
 When Lord George Hamilton says that 
 British India is thriving, he means the English 
 quarters of British India. 
 110 
 
The flowers of a grant of land 
 
 The ordinary traveler who runs through 
 India does not see the squalor and misery 
 that fester under the near horizon. 
 
 Anglo-stan is fat: bloated from the blood- 
 sucking of the vast empire. 
 
 #/W#-stan rattles her dry bones in her dry 
 skin a few miles beyond the railroad. 
 
 On the one hand white parasols and ele- 
 phants mad with pride ; on the other the dy- 
 ing gasps of those who are paying for it all. 
 
 Ill 
 
IMAGINATION 
 
 w I saw that corpses might be multiplied, as on the 
 field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any 
 degree as exceptions to the common lot of humanity. 
 If I had found one body cast upon the beach in 
 some lonely place it would have affected me more." 
 H. D. Thoreau : The Shipwreck. 
 
 Why is it that it is so difficult for us to con- 
 template things in their proportion ? It is so 
 seldom other than the individual who either 
 excites sympathy or calls down anathema. 
 
 If a man steals a loaf of bread he is promptly 
 and summarily imprisoned : if he steals a 
 railroad the people meet him at the station 
 with a band and flying colors. 
 
 You can be a scoundrel if you will only be 
 a big scoundrel and succeed at it. 
 
 There is something about bigness which 
 oppresses the imagination and distorts the 
 basis of judgment. 
 
 Great truths are elusive ; this is why they 
 are so easily obscured. 
 
 If a man kills another with a pistol the 
 world is horrified and puts him to death ; if 
 he kills ten thousand with a piece of parch- 
 ment he is hailed as a financier and becomes 
 the patron of a church. 
 112 
 
Imagination 
 
 Imagination is an exceptional quality. 
 
 Most of us have only senses and passions ; 
 objective things, only, impress us, and even 
 these must be unique or unusual. 
 
 We are as indifferent to the crimes of a 
 system of which we are a part, as we are to 
 the glories and wonders of a familiar uni- 
 verse. 
 
 We look at the sunshine unmoved; but 
 let there be an eclipse and we run hither and 
 thither with smoked glass as if there were 
 something important toward. Yet to the 
 imagination the sunshine is more wonderful 
 than the passing of two bodies in space. 
 
 Discontent is called the mother of progress, 
 but progress does not spring from discontent; 
 mere reaction springs from discontent. Dis- 
 content serves only as the sombre background 
 upon which the imagination flashes its ideal. 
 
 Progress rises through illumination : the 
 imagination is the real lever of advance. 
 
 Jules Verne paints a ship swinging down 
 amid the quiet foliage of the deep sea. Then 
 comes the inventor the mechanic lit by Jules 
 Verne's flame, and the Nautilus becomes 
 a submarine reality. Again, he sees in his 
 mind's eye a moon-voyage ; and Santos Du- 
 ns 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 mont sails round the Eiffel tower. The 
 imagination speaks the doom-word of effete 
 civilization when it lifts into view the vision 
 of the better day. 
 
 We will never realize a better order of so- 
 ciety until our imagination is kindled by the 
 vision of it. 
 
 " Let well enough alone " ; that is the creed 
 of the unimaginative, and he it is whose dull, 
 deadening incubus has made the world's tyr- 
 anny of such long life. It is he who, when 
 his front door is. closed, believes that the 
 whole world is warm ; it is he who, when his 
 own trencher is full of meat, can see no vision 
 of a hungry man. 
 
 With what grace or satisfaction might a 
 dinner party of the smart set eat its terrapin 
 and its truffles at the Waldorf while a row of 
 hungry men and women from the East side 
 stood with gaunt looks ranged along the wall ? 
 
 Just what emotions would an analysis of 
 their feelings disclose ? 
 
 But what matters it if the row of hungry 
 ones be inside or outside, so long as they be 
 anywhere ? 
 
 Ah, outside they cannot be a rebuke to the 
 senses or passions ; the eye cannot reach 
 114 
 
Imagination 
 
 them there, and the dull mind sees them not. 
 When the hungry ones are invisible ; when 
 they are back in their East side kennels and 
 there hang only the tapestries of the banquet 
 room where loomed the accusing spectres, 
 then he with the imagination, alone, can see 
 them. He with the imagination sees the 
 spectres still, shaming him from the sheen of 
 the shaded lights, and his food dries in his 
 throat and chokes him. 
 
 Imagination ; torch of celestial fire ! 
 
 If you have it at the flood you must be- 
 come an artist ; or you must become the 
 only other alternative a revolutionist. 
 
 If your intellect outweighs your heart you 
 may become a painter, a poet, or a musician ; 
 but if your greatness of mind is at equipoise 
 with your greatness of heart and your imag- 
 ination is at the flood ; then you will do 
 naught but illumine the future to the people. 
 
 Mazzini was an artist soul, a poet and a 
 musician ; but his great heart drew him away 
 from those esthetic, beautiful, selfish avenues 
 of creation. He could not write music while 
 his fellows were breaking on the wheel of 
 tyranny, so he turned the strong flame of his 
 great manhood to sear away the hideous in- 
 
 115 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 stitutions which manacled Italy on her knees 
 in darkness. 
 
 One man, strive how he may, can hope in 
 his life to do but little. Judged by the things 
 he does, it is a petty strife, late begun and 
 ended all too soon. 
 
 But he who treasures this divinest spark, 
 imagination ; this greatest gift of the gods ; 
 who fans it into the flame it ought to be, can 
 fire the torch in the souls of other men, turn- 
 ing their lives into radiance, as a sulphur 
 match may start a forest fire. 
 
 Thus the divinest thing in us lives on in 
 other lives, in ever-widening circles ever pro- 
 ducing its kind ; ever moving the race on- 
 ward ; " onward and upward ; upward toward 
 the peaks, and toward the Great Silence." 
 
 " Beginnings are alike : it is the ends which differ. 
 One drop falls, lasts, and dries up but a drop ; 
 Another begins a river : and one thought 
 Settles a life, an immortality." 
 
 116 
 
THE LONG PROCESSION 
 
 " How can one help loving this people ! Must not 
 the one who has stood by the roadside and watched 
 them pass feel the tears in his eyes when he recalls 
 them men with sharp features and hard hands, 
 women with early lined foreheads, and the tired 
 little children?" 
 
 Selma Lagerlof . 
 
 It is sad, sad reading, this struggle of the 
 working class to lift its head above the mire. 
 
 Men with sharp features and hard hands, 
 women with early lined foreheads, and tired 
 little children ; see the long procession ! 
 
 Far, far has this long procession marched, 
 far has it marched in vain. 
 
 Since the days of feudalism, since the days 
 when private ownership of the sources of life 
 turned humanity upon the highway to starve 
 or to sell itself for wages, the working class 
 has been seeking a liberator. 
 
 It has held out its worn hands of hope, 
 first to this one, then to that, believing that 
 the high-sounding phrases echoing in its ears 
 were inspired by a love for the lowliest, as 
 they always pretended to be. 
 
 Oh, poor, tired brother ! Greatly thou 
 hast trusted, and most basely hast thou been 
 
 117 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 deceived. Thou hast fought the battles of 
 the liberator, but thou hast not found libera- 
 tion. The Cromwells have succeeded ; the 
 John Balls have died the death. 
 
 Working-class revolutions have never found 
 the doorstep of liberty ; they have builded 
 the highroad in the sweat of their faces and 
 the blood of their hearts, but they have not 
 traveled thereupon to the land of heart's de- 
 sire. 
 
 Others have gleaned of their sweat ; others 
 have voyaged in the stream of their blood. 
 All of their brave battles for the Fatherland 
 have but riveted anew their shackles. Quick 
 to respond in their simplicity of heart to roll 
 of drum, the flag of victory has bestowed 
 ever but a crutch or an age of toil. They 
 build and they build, and they enter not in. 
 
 Today, as in the Nazarene's day, the work- 
 er's lot crushes hope and stifles aspiration. 
 He may look at an art gallery, perhaps, in 
 place of a barren rock ; but he is driven by 
 the same fear, and his dinner table still stands 
 at the deadline of mere subsistence. 
 
 Civilization has brought him everything 
 except liberty, without which all the splen- 
 dors of the world's achievement are but bar- 
 ns 
 
The long procession 
 
 ren nothings. The wireless telegraph is no 
 food for crying babes to live on. Where the 
 base of the social structure is awry, poverty 
 is the running mate of progress ; every labor 
 saving machine means only that more people 
 shall go hungry. 
 
 The world has always looked with compla- 
 cency upon a class ordained to do the drudg- 
 ery, and the glorified national liberators in the 
 world's history have always taken this class 
 for granted. National liberation has always 
 been capitalistic liberation ; it has never once 
 reached down to the working class. The real 
 liberators, those who stood not for national 
 liberty, but for universal liberty, have died 
 ignominious deaths. 
 
 To the working class national independence 
 has so far meant only that they should be ex- 
 ploited by the capitalists of their own country 
 called "their own" country for the pur- 
 pose of advised self-deception. 
 
 It is natural for a man to fight for his own. 
 But to fight for phantasms of things ; to fight 
 battles in which one has only a fancied inter- 
 est ; this is only possible to the deceived. 
 
 The working class has been eternally de- 
 ceived by the idea that it has a country, where- 
 
 119 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 as it has been as homeless as the prairie wolf. 
 The world is the country of the working class, 
 and it will some day come into full possession. 
 It will come into possession when it sees the 
 motive for arbitrary geographical and political 
 divisions and abolishes the conditions which 
 make these divisions profitable to the few. 
 
 Capitalism, working through sentiment, 
 maintains arbitrary divisions of people by 
 fostering the idea of nationality, and the idea 
 of the natural opposition of national interests. 
 The " protective " tariff is a species of silent 
 murder ; it enables local capitalists to pick 
 the pockets of the working class by centering 
 their attention upon absurd national hatreds. 
 Capitalism can prevent me from exchanging 
 things with my neighbor to our mutual ad- 
 vantage only by making me think my neigh- 
 bor is my natural enemy. 
 
 Exploiting capitalists called by courtesy 
 " the commercial classes " are the ones who 
 precipitate war, and who sometimes cover up 
 their economic plundering by effusive dem- 
 onstrations of their regard. The Czar of 
 Russia visits France, and the President of 
 the French Republic visits the Czar: they 
 weep on one another's shoulders. 
 
 120 
 
The long procession 
 
 When there are peaceful functions going 
 forward, the potentates dress up and wine 
 and dine and caress one another ; and make 
 very dull and uninteresting speeches. This 
 is the dress parade of capitalism. Royalty 
 is its puppet. 
 
 When however the exploiting classes of 
 the different political divisions called nations 
 come into collision over a division of the pro- 
 duct of the working classes, and war becomes 
 menacing, then these interesting personages 
 miraculously disappear. It is then time for 
 the working classes to come on the stage and 
 do the fighting. For a fancied "country" 
 the poor, deluded workers of one, go to fight 
 the poor, deluded workers of the other poli- 
 tical division. All wars are fought by the 
 common people, by the people who have 
 nothing to gain by war. Your capitalist is 
 your true " patriot." He has something to 
 fight for. The soldier is only a dupe. 
 
 It is fine to have all your fighting done for 
 you by the very people who support you dur- 
 ing peace. 
 
 The workingman is the true philanthro- 
 pist ; it is too bad he is such from necessity, 
 through ignorance. 
 
 121 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 We must be trained in the hatred of the 
 "foreigner/' for without an occasional war, 
 capitalism could not live. The throne of 
 capitalism is " patriotism," and war lays and 
 maintains its foundation. 
 
 All ancient literature, and the great bulk of 
 modern literature, unconsciously accentuates 
 the principle (or lack of it) that the interests 
 of nations are antagonistic. This makes pa- 
 triotism consist, not so much in the love of 
 yourself and your own, as in the hatred of 
 your neighbor. 
 
 This quiet, persistent, false educational 
 force operates continuously from childhood 
 to age, and forges the " national spirit " of a 
 country. It is expressed in the common 
 mental attitudes of the plain people, and ren- 
 ders them pliable to flag raising. 
 
 The capitalist is somewhat more emanci- 
 pated. His country is wherever his invest- 
 ments are. But he sees the value of incul- 
 cating patriotism in the plain people, and may 
 always be counted upon to say the right word 
 at the right time. 
 
 When the commercial classes of two na- 
 tions clash, the newspapers blaze with manu- 
 factured indignation, rousing the latent fire 
 122 
 
The long procession 
 
 long kindled by customary opinion, until the 
 poor, common hind believes the honor of his 
 country rests upon his shoulders. The poor 
 and v/retched of the other country, subjected 
 to the same education, believe the same thing. 
 The peasants and the artisans of both na- 
 tions forsake their plows and tools and go and 
 shoot one another ; not because they hate one 
 another, but because they have been trained 
 to believe that "their" country must be de- 
 fended. The men who do the dying and the 
 righting seldom know what the quarrel is 
 about, and if they come home they frequent- 
 ly find that it is harder to make a living in 
 " their " country after the war than before it. 
 
 When the surplus population has been so 
 nearly killed off that it looks as if the remain- 
 der of the common people can scarcely bear 
 the burden of taxation that is to pay for the 
 war, peace is declared, and there is great re- 
 joicing. 
 
 Then the peasants and artisans ( those who 
 are not buried in trenches ) go back to work. 
 
 The precious lives of those who brought 
 on the war have never been endangered. It 
 was not necessary. There are always enough 
 " patriots " among the working classes to do 
 
 123 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 the fighting ; and no doubt there will contin- 
 ue to be so as long as a man on one side of 
 an imaginary line can be trained to the con- 
 viction that the man on the other side of the 
 line is his natural enemy. 
 
 Here are two adjoining fields of grain. 
 
 In one there is a peasant, a Frenchman. 
 
 In the other, another peasant, a German. 
 
 The same sun shines on both ; their backs 
 are wet by the same passing shower. They 
 confer over their growing crops, and they 
 share their bread and wine and tobacco. No 
 thing in nature divides them. 
 
 Now comes word that one " nation " has 
 insulted the other " nation " and these poor 
 toiling wretches and their tired wives and chil- 
 dred feel it imperative upon them to burn 
 each other's crops and shoot each other full 
 of lead. This is patriotism. It has never 
 yet failed ; but it may. 
 
 The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 was the 
 first milestone of doubt ; for the first time in 
 human history the voice of humanity then 
 rose from the ranks against the voice of 
 " patriotism." 
 
 Six years before, the International Work- 
 ingmen's Association was founded. 
 124 
 
The long procession 
 
 The purpose of this organization, as given 
 by its founders, was to weld into one body 
 the whole militant proletariat of Europe and 
 America. 
 
 It was a bugle note ; a promise of the 
 dawn. 
 
 The Franco- Prussian war was brought on, 
 as every other war is brought on, not by the 
 people, but by the exploiters of the people. 
 The fatuous Louis Napoleon aspired to im- 
 itate the first distinguished member of his 
 family. 
 
 Gigantic schemes of fraudulent speculation 
 countenanced and fostered by those in high 
 places, absorbed the earnings of the French 
 people and involved thousands in ruin. Ju- 
 dicial tribunals were debauched and the pub- 
 lic officials rioted in corruption and extrava- 
 gance. 
 
 It became clear that only a war could divert 
 the public mind from the rottenness of the 
 government; and a war with Germany was 
 deliberately decided upon. 
 
 A shallow pretext was found in the claim 
 of a Prussian prince to the Spanish succes- 
 sion ; and after fanning the flame of French 
 " patriotism " the poor, foolish French people 
 
 125 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 became eager for hostilities. War was then 
 declared and the public murder began. 
 
 In the face of this infamous proceeding 
 the International Workingmen's Association 
 flung its clear and noble protest. 
 
 In the Reviel (Paris) of July 12th, 1870, 
 was published a manifesto " to the working- 
 men of all nations " of which the following is 
 an extract : 
 
 Once more on the pretext of European 
 equilibrium, of national honor, the peace of 
 the world is menaced by political ambitions. 
 French, German, Spanish workmen ! Let 
 our voices unite in one cry of reprobation 
 against war ! War for a question of prepon- 
 derance of dynasty can, in the eyes of work- 
 men, be nothing but a criminal absurdity. 
 In answer to the warlike proclamations of 
 those who exempt themselves from the blood 
 tax, and find in public misfortunes a source 
 of fresh speculations, we protest, we who 
 want peace, labor and liberty ! 
 
 Brothers of Germany ! our division would 
 only result in the complete triumph of des- 
 potism on both sides of the Rhine. Work- 
 men of all countries ! Whatever may for the 
 present become of our common efforts, we 
 the members of the International Working- 
 men^ Association, who know of no frontiers, 
 
 126 
 
The long procession 
 
 we send you as a pledge of indissoluble sol- 
 idarity, the good wishes and salutations of the 
 Workingmen of France. 
 
 The German workingmen in many cities 
 replied in similar manifestos. 
 
 A mass meeting of workingmen held at 
 Brunswick on July 16th expressed its full 
 agreement with the Paris manifesto, spurned 
 the idea of national antagonism to France and 
 concluded its resolutions with these words : 
 
 We are enemies of all wars, but above all 
 of dynastic wars. With deep sorrow and 
 grief we are forced to undergo a defensive 
 war as an unavoidable evil ; but we call at the 
 same time upon the whole German working 
 class to render the recurrence of such an im- 
 mense social misfortune impossible by vindi- 
 cating for the people themselves, the power 
 to decide on peace and war, and making them 
 masters of their own destinies. 
 
 At Chemintz, a meeting of delegates repre- 
 senting 50,000 Saxon workingmen, adopted 
 unanimously a resolution to this effect : 
 
 In the name of the German Democracy, 
 and especially of the workingmen forming 
 the Socialist Party, we declare the present 
 
 127 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 war to be exclusively dynastic. We are hap- 
 py to grasp the fraternal hand stretched out 
 to us by the workingmen of France. Mind- 
 ful of the watchword of the International 
 Workingmen's Association, ! < Proletarians 
 of all countries unite," we shall never forget 
 that the workingmen of all countries are our 
 friends and the despots of all countries our 
 enemies. 
 
 The Berlin branch of the International also 
 replied to the Paris manifesto : 
 
 We join with heart and hand your protesta- 
 tion. Solemnly we promise that neither the 
 sound of the trumpet, nor the roar of the 
 cannon, neither victory nor defeat, shall di- 
 vert us from our common work for the union 
 of the children of toil of all countries. 
 
 Great sentiments are these. History has 
 not recorded words that have in them a greater 
 promise for the race. 
 
 In these manifestos the inarticulate first 
 became articulate. 
 
 The Word came forth ; the word that no 
 longer is the workingman to look for a liber- 
 ator ; he is now to begin the long task of 
 liberating himself. In these days of war went 
 forth that word which one ,day shall mean no 
 128 
 
The long procession 
 
 war ; the word that shall some day blossom 
 into this manifesto : 
 
 We the United Workingmen and women 
 of the world, refuse to go forth to kill one 
 another, for we have no differences ; if you 
 gentlemen who are in the business of exploita- 
 tion, or land gambling, or the king business, 
 have a difference and wish to fight it out, go 
 forth and do it to your heart's content ; fignt 
 till you are all exterminated if you like ; the 
 world will be all the better for honest men to 
 live in ! 
 
 When such a manifesto can go forth ; when 
 the workers of the world are so unified as to 
 be no longer the dupes of capitalism, every 
 throne in Europe will crumble into dust. 
 For without an obedient common people to 
 do his will, a king is a sorry spectacle. When 
 the German " war-lord " shall issue an order, 
 and the German people, no longer his " sub- 
 jects," but their own masters, shall laugh at 
 his presumption ; the war-lord will be a sight 
 for derisive contemplation ; a useless outworn 
 bauble which a free people will not suffer. 
 The German throne is propped by German 
 ignorance and fatuous "love of country." 
 And yet in German hearts the echo of the 
 
 129 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 manifesto of the International is still ringing. 
 The lesson of the various despotic govern- 
 ments, forgetting their hatred of each other 
 and uniting to stamp out this organization of 
 workingmen, has not been read in vain. 
 For every brave member of the International 
 who has suffered persecution, imprisonment 
 or exile a thousand of his working country- 
 men have risen up to bless his name. 
 
 For with the inception of the International, 
 the long procession of the workers, the men 
 with sharp features and hard hands, the wom- 
 en with early lined foreheads, and the tired 
 little children, took its first great stride 
 along the highway of liberty. 
 
 In the breasts of the workers of every na- 
 tion has been implanted an abounding faith, 
 not in the outside liberator, but in themselves, 
 their power and their possibilities. 
 
 Slowly, slowly this faith is growing ; slowly 
 but surely, until the ultimate goal is as inevi- 
 table as day succeeding night. Slowly, link by 
 link, the drag-chain forges about the wheels of 
 international war, until the great black chariot 
 of capitalism shall lie helpless and abandoned 
 before the will of the marching peoples; march- 
 ing, marching to the land of heart's desire. 
 
 130 
 
THE LOVE THAT IS TO COME 
 
 " Whenever wounded have been found they have 
 received all the care that our own soldiers have, 
 and our men have carried them on their backs for 
 miles to save the lives of these unfortunates, often 
 risking their own by so doing." Extract from offi- 
 cer's letter from the Philippines. 
 
 When the Colon went down at Santiago a 
 sailor on an American battleship cried out: 
 " Don't cheer fellows ; the poor devils are 
 dying." 
 
 Is it not a singular thing that after going to 
 such infinite trouble and expense to kill men 
 we should be at such pains to save their lives 
 as soon as we shall not quite succeed in killing 
 them ? 
 
 What is the secret of this instinctive prompt- 
 ing which, in the presence of a fallen enemy, 
 mixes a feeling of awe, ay, of pity, with our 
 victorious rejoicings ; which makes us some- 
 how humble and ashamed of all that con- 
 quering which means another's undoing ? 
 
 It is that at the center of things, deep 
 down under all our ignorance and vanity and 
 dull, gross selfishness, there dwells a spirit of 
 infinite love, patient, untiring, all-enduring ; 
 biding its moment of apparition. 
 
 131 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 This love is not a philosophical conception 
 of the intellect child of Platonic dreaming ; 
 it is a natural passion. Its quality is singu- 
 larly that of a love not of individual for indi- 
 vidual, nor of individual for community or 
 country, but a love infinitely greater, more 
 profound, than either of these ; a love which, 
 finding its full expression, shall one day make 
 the world a beautiful place to live in a love 
 for humanity as humanity. 
 
 There is in us a fellow feeling, a yearning 
 of kindness toward other human beings as 
 human beings, which is not related to the 
 character of those who excite it. It exhibits 
 itself unmistakably in the fireman, with blis- 
 tered flesh, hair and eyebrows burned to 
 crisp, saving the child from the fire ; in the 
 stripling youth leaping into the waves to suc- 
 cor a drowning man, and in the simplest act 
 of courtesy we render to a stranger. 
 
 The habitual expression of this love would 
 long since have become universal if all society 
 were not so organized as to extinguish it. 
 
 Society as it now exists is unconscious- 
 ly an organized conspiracy against the sane 
 and logical development of every human soul 
 in it. 
 132 
 
The love that is to come 
 
 It places all the temptations on the side of 
 inhumanity. Society makes it vastly easier 
 today to do wrong than to do right. 
 
 Most human beings, even soldiers and 
 priests, are doing the best they think they 
 can. And out of the blighting, calculating 
 intellectual darkness in which they serve as 
 consenting instruments of killing or defense 
 of killing, there sometimes shoots a gleam of 
 their higher selves ; their broader humanity ; 
 the undiscovered, unrecognized thing they 
 are yet to be. 
 
 Hence these relentings ; this carrying of 
 wounded brown men on backs through impas- 
 sible morasses ; and the hush-word breathed 
 from powder-grimed lips at warship's sinking. 
 
 These singular relentings are but glimpses 
 of this indwelling love, yearning to express 
 itself in an exalted human life ; they testify 
 to the existence of the Higher Law cease- 
 lessly at work, slowly, patiently forming from 
 the casual the habitual ; they prove the pres- 
 ence, the involuntary recognition and worship, 
 of the Ideal of Man in each man, the flower 
 of which is Brotherhood. 
 
 And some day this love for humanity, this 
 spirit of love in us, will find national expres- 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 sion before the murderous act of war instead 
 of after. It is even now coming to flood in 
 individuals, in peace societies, and in certain 
 brave resistants to enforced military service. 
 And when at last we come to realize that 
 the command "Thou shalt not kill" means 
 actually that we stop killing, this upspringing 
 godhood in us will impel us to obey it. And 
 in our obeying it a new day will dawn, a 
 glorious day of strifeless progress ; and a 
 great all-embracing Peace will breathe upon 
 the world, deep, pure, satisfying to the long- 
 yearning human soul. 
 
 134 
 
GOOD AND EVIL 
 
 " Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the 
 
 twain shall meet, 
 Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great 
 
 Judgment Seat ; 
 But there is neither East nor West, Border nor 
 
 Breed nor Birth 
 When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they 
 
 come from the ends of the earth." 
 
 Rudyard Kipling. 
 
 DeSegurs, in his memoirs, says that when 
 the First Consul reached the Isle of Poplars 
 he stopped at Rousseau's grave. 
 
 " It would have been better for the repose 
 of France if that man had never lived/' said he. 
 
 " And why, Citizen Consul ? " 
 
 " Because he is the man who made the 
 French Revolution." 
 
 " It seems to me that you, Citizen Consul, 
 cannot complain of the French Revolution." 
 
 "Well," replied Napoleon, "the future 
 must decide whether it would not have been 
 better for the repose of the world if neither 
 myself nor Rousseau had ever lived." 
 
 The controversy as to whether there is an 
 Absolute Good and an Absolute Evil has en- 
 
 135 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 gaged the speculation of philosophers and 
 dialecticians ever since the human mind be- 
 gan to dabble in abstractions. 
 
 So far as concrete illustrations have ever 
 been available these elements have been em- 
 bodied only in the comparative degree. 
 
 In every man, however ignoble, there is 
 something which may be classed as good ; 
 and in every man, however exalted, there is 
 something which may be classed as evil. 
 
 Good and evil are purely relative, and one 
 could never have been discerned or recognized 
 without the presence of the other. 
 
 If there had never been what we call a bad 
 man we would not yet know what a good man 
 is. We comprehend clearly one principle 
 only as the opposite principle is made mani- 
 fest. 
 
 Caiaphas thus helps us to understand Jesus ; 
 and Napoleon helps us to understand Rous- 
 seau. 
 
 Sycophancy is never so transparent as when 
 confronted by honesty. Light banishes dark- 
 ness ; heat banishes cold. 
 
 It would not have been better for the re* 
 pose of the world if neither Rousseau nor 
 Napoleon had lived. 
 136 
 
Good and evil 
 
 Repose is not slothful unprogression, the 
 dull incomprehension of the mollusk. Re- 
 pose is the fine balance and harmony of high- 
 ly sensitive organisms. 
 
 The writings of Jean Jacques stirred the 
 masses from their dull submission to tyranny. 
 The burning of his books in the market- 
 place kindled a fire which illuminated all 
 Europe and lighted up the fens and. morasses 
 of kingcraft. 
 
 Then followed the French Revolution. 
 
 The French Revolution was a blow in the 
 dark, struck by discontent. It destroyed in 
 its rage the only men qualified to serve it 
 the Physiocrats : Quesnay, Turgot, Condor- 
 cet, Mirabeau. 
 
 Napoleon stopped the blind slaughter by 
 substituting slaughter with a purpose. He 
 had a program ; and he understood the peo- 
 ple. He knew the mind darkened by tyran- 
 ny. He knew that as soon as quiet was re- 
 stored the people would yearn for some ty- 
 rant to rule them. Habits of mind are very 
 strong. The Americans once invited George 
 Washington to become king. 
 
 Napoleon rode to power on the rebound. 
 He dramatized the principle opposite to that 
 
 137 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 of Rousseau. These two men gave to the 
 world a standard of judgment. Both lives 
 served. 
 
 Through the study of Rousseau's writings 
 and Napoleon's acts the world climbed to an 
 intelligence which renders another Napoleon 
 on the same plane impossible. 
 
 Napoleon was made possible by a single 
 fact : he found people willing to obey. 
 
 In the absence of public ignorance Napo- 
 leon could have been no more destructive 
 than an ordinary thug. 
 
 He showed to the world the awful price of 
 ignorance when paid in blood. 
 
 Napoleon's organizing ability finds its mod- 
 ern counterpart in those shrewd entrepreneurs 
 who are doing on the plane of industry what 
 Napoleon did on the plane of mortality. 
 
 The price of ignorance which the world 
 paid to Napoleon in blood it is paying today 
 to these gentlemen ; in worry, physical and 
 spiritual starvation, and degrading economic 
 fear. 
 
 The principle known as- good can make 
 headway against the principle called evil only 
 as the intelligence of humanity rises to the 
 height from which these principles can be dis- 
 
 138 
 
Good and evil 
 
 cerned under the various shifting forms in 
 which they are constantly finding residence. 
 
 Every soul seeks what it believes to be 
 good for itself. Napoleon believed it to be 
 good to conquer Europe. The burglar be- 
 lieves it is for his good to rob your house. 
 
 There are really no good men and no bad 
 men ; there are only intelligence and ignor- 
 ance. 
 
 The military genius can express itself only 
 as it finds absurd individuals who will wear 
 cheap buttons of brass, walk together in the 
 mud and fight for they do not know whom 
 for they do not know what. 
 
 The genius of exploitation can express it- 
 self only as it finds equally absurd individu- 
 als who are content to starve in a world of 
 plenty, and give up the needed things they 
 create to those who do not know what to do 
 with them after they receive them. 
 
 As we banish ignorance, Napoleons and 
 exploiters and burglars, finding no opportun- 
 ities for their talents in the direction of what 
 is called evil, must perforce become expres- 
 sions of the opposite principle, which is called 
 good. 
 
 139 
 
THE HIGHER STRUGGLE 
 
 " One who never turned his back but marched breast 
 
 forward, 
 
 Never doubted clouds would break, 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong 
 
 would triumph, 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep 
 
 to wake." 
 
 Browning. 
 
 Just before his death-illness, Robert Brown- 
 ing wrote four verses as an epilogue to his 
 poems. The verse here quoted is the third. 
 
 One evening he was reading this verse 
 from a proof to his daughter-in-law and his 
 sister. 
 
 ft It almost looks like bragging to say this," 
 he said, " and as if I ought to cancel it ; but 
 it's the simple truth ; and as it's true, it shall 
 stand." 
 
 Few of us can sing such a swan-song as 
 that. 
 
 It is the song of a soul whose battles have 
 been fought in an arena of the higher ether. 
 
 Life has such struggles ; struggles apart 
 from considerations of the material ; strug- 
 gles of the soul alone, free from the gross 
 demands or impositions of the body. 
 
 140 
 
The higher struggle 
 
 It is from such a struggle that the soul can 
 rise serene. Nothing of the sordid pulls it 
 from its pedestal. 
 
 Such strife is epic in its character. 
 
 Failure even, in such an atmosphere, takes 
 on a certain dignity. 
 
 But there is a kind of struggle which by its 
 very nature stultifies, degrades and dishonors ; 
 and into this loathsome contest are driven the 
 great masses of our common humanity. To 
 lose at it is to be contemptible ; to win at it 
 is to be infamous. 
 
 No one who is raised above the necessity 
 of fighting his fellows for his bread can esti- 
 mate or understand the effect of such warfare 
 upon individual character. 
 
 There is something so utterly false and 
 degrading in one man striving against another 
 man for bread in a land of limitless plenty 
 that no one can emerge from such a strife 
 with dignity. For such a one the epic life is 
 an impossibility. 
 
 There is no power in the universe, god, 
 man, or devil, that can raise the competitive 
 struggle above the plane of vulgarity. 
 
 By refusing to abolish this struggle we keep 
 the noblest attributes of the human soul in 
 
 141 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 abeyance ; for it is not until the bodily wants 
 are satisfied that the spirit rises to aspiration. 
 
 We do not yet know human nature ; its 
 beauty and its divine possibilities. When it 
 shines in a personality like Browning or Plato 
 we scarcely understand it. 
 
 Yet the intellectual eminence of Browning 
 and Plato is our true estate. 
 
 That we are still grovelling on all fours is 
 our own doing. No natural law keeps the 
 soul in the stomach. 
 
 Browning's note is the true human note ; 
 but would it have been sounded so positively 
 nay, would it have been sounded perhaps 
 at all had his struggles been dragged down 
 to the plane of the economic ? 
 
 Would his stupendous contribution to the 
 world's literature ever have been made had 
 he worked ten hours a day at an uncongenial 
 task to support the woman he loved ? 
 
 Leisure for research and for writing enabled 
 him to do the world a priceless service. His 
 life and his message refute utterly the stupid 
 cry of the schoolmen for the spur of neces- 
 sity ; that outworn creed which any faith in 
 life or spiritual discernment would long since 
 have left in the shadows. It is a shallow 
 142 
 
The higher struggle 
 
 vision which does not see that there will be 
 struggles enough struggles which will test 
 all the faith and the strength and the man- 
 hood which Browning pictures after we 
 have raised ourselves above the plane of the 
 brute. 
 
 143 
 
SHE WHO IS TO COME 
 
 " The National Congress of Mothers will convene 
 in Washington on the 25th and last three days. 
 The physical and mental welfare of children will 
 be the subject of the Congress." 
 
 N. Y. Sun. 
 
 Madame De Stael once asked Napoleon 
 Bonaparte, " General, what woman in France 
 do you the most admire ? " " The one who 
 has the most children," replied that dis- 
 tinguished homicide. 
 
 Napoleon harped on this string a good 
 deal. " What France needs is mothers," he 
 kept saying. 
 
 What he meant was : " What I need is 
 soldiers." 
 
 The French women did the best they 
 could. One would have thought that child- 
 birth was a pleasant pastime from the way in 
 which they furnished food for European can- 
 non. 
 
 Perhaps, here and there, a woman whose 
 soul had been born, recoiled at being a breed- 
 ing creature for a man's ambition. Most of 
 them, however, accepted the situation and 
 strove to please the emperor. 
 
 We are the creatures of our environment. 
 
 144 
 
She who is to come 
 
 Mother-love is the symbol of the Divine 
 love. Even when it is bound by four walls 
 there is something godlike about it. 
 
 But when it lifts itself above its own do- 
 mesticity and shines out upon the whole 
 world, it takes on the radiance of a Sun : all 
 life is warmed by it. 
 
 Mother-love extended to all the race is the 
 ideal of the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 Only here and there a woman dimly sees 
 this truth and gives her sons and daughters a 
 sense of race-obligation, teaches them that 
 unless they hold all life in their conscious- 
 ness they will but swing round in a petty 
 circle, their lives useless to the race. 
 
 Most women ( even working women im- 
 itatively ) teach their daughters little graceful 
 arts and things. They play a little, paint a 
 little, and know a superficial bit of the con- 
 tinental languages. This makes them "at- 
 tractive." If they are made sufficiently at- 
 tractive they may get a husband well-to-do 
 enough to continue their amiable mediocrity ; 
 until the children begin to come ; then 
 their pretty accomplishments fall into disuse. 
 
 When girlhood is given up to petty things 
 there can be no fit preparation for mother- 
 
 145 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 hood. Bearing a child is but the beginning 
 of motherhood. Motherhood is spiritual, 
 not physical. 
 
 What Napoleon wanted of the French 
 women was reproduction, not motherhood. 
 Motherhood would have baffled him. 
 
 Motherhood produces men like Jesus and 
 Mazzini and Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 It is mere fecundity that produces a Nero, 
 or a Napoleon, or a Charles I. 
 
 Motherhood produces spirituality. 
 
 Fecundity produces human animals. 
 
 Josephine was a woman who had risen to 
 consciousness. She was a widow. She had 
 a son by a former husband. Napoleon loved 
 her as much as he could love any woman. 
 We can appreciate high qualities in others 
 only when we ourselves have spirituality 
 enough to discern them. Josephine's wit 
 and wisdom brought out all the good that 
 was resident in Bonaparte's nature. But he 
 put her away for Marie Louise. Why ? 
 
 Because he wanted another kind of woman. 
 
 He wanted a brood-mare. That was his 
 polite word : pouliniere. 
 
 It is this idea, what we may term the 
 Napoleonic idea that woman should be a 
 
 146 
 
She who is to come 
 
 
 
 breeding hack, that has kept womankind in 
 slavery. 
 
 Woman has always been a greater slave to 
 conventionality than man, because she has 
 always been man's property. 
 
 In the mid-century past she did not dare 
 even to have a brain. It was unwomanly. 
 
 Aurore Dupin had to call herself George 
 Sand. 
 
 Mary Ann Evans had to call herself George 
 Eliot. 
 
 These great women, towering above the 
 petty masculine intellects of their age, did not 
 dare to let the public know they were not 
 men. Why ? 
 
 Because everybody believed that women 
 should be breeding ; not writing books. 
 
 Women themselves believed this ; they 
 thought Sand and Eliot must have horns and 
 a tail when it began to be whispered about 
 that they were women. 
 
 They could not conceive the idea of wom- 
 an apart from her functions as a female ani- 
 mal. 
 
 They never dreamed that women could 
 own their own bodies and yet be mothers, 
 spiritual mothers. 
 
 147 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 Susan B. Anthony has never married ; yet 
 her children are among the finest women in 
 America today the fittest to be mothers. 
 
 She has fitted more daughters for mother- 
 hood than any ten thousand women taken at 
 random in the United States. 
 
 Her daughters are fittest to be mothers 
 because they have been lifted into conscious- 
 ness ; they are fittest to be mothers because 
 they are getting a glimpse of what real moth- 
 erhood spiritual motherhood is. 
 
 Because Susan B. Anthony cared more for 
 spiritual children than for physical children 
 she was blacklisted. Hotels would not ac- 
 cept her as a guest. 
 
 Once at a public meeting someone threw 
 a rose at her. It confused and embarrassed 
 her, she said. If it had been a carrot or a 
 rotten egg she would have known how to re- 
 ceive it. 
 
 For over fifty years she was hooted and 
 hissed and insulted by the brood-mares and 
 their squires, because she had dared to think 
 more nobly of womanhood than they did. 
 
 The other women believed that the only 
 respectable service their sex could render the 
 world was to breed ; and they bit and scratched 
 
 148 
 
She who is to come 
 
 and spat at the noble hand which reached to 
 lead them out of the dark. 
 
 They liked the Napoleonic idea best. It 
 was the idea they were used to. 
 
 It had been taught them by their mothers, 
 and they themselves were busy teaching it to 
 their daughters. 
 
 And the lesson was well learned. 
 
 That is why the present industrial system 
 is possible. 
 
 The Napoleons of industry need soldiers 
 in their battles, too. 
 
 The brood-mares are furnishing the labor 
 market. 
 
 A nation or a race will never rise higher 
 than its mothers. 
 
 If women willed it so, they could stop the 
 slaughter of human beings in war ; they could 
 stop the grinding up of human life in our bar- 
 barous industrial system. 
 
 It needs but for them to say : We will not 
 bear children for your cannons, nor for your 
 hideous industrial treadmills ; life is too sa- 
 cred and the agony of childbirth is too great. 
 
 Why, then, do they not say it ? 
 
 Because they do not think of it. They 
 have been trained the other way. They see 
 
 149 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 only their own children, and hope that they, 
 somehow, may escape the common lot. Their 
 sense of maternity is limited as an animal's 
 is limited, to their own young. 
 
 Motherhood is spiritual, not physical. 
 
 No woman is a mother until every life is 
 as sacred to her as that which comes from 
 her own birth-agony. 
 
 When she rises to this consciousness she 
 never can be proud of a soldier son, nor a son 
 who wins success by exploiting other lives. 
 
 If she cares for a child because it is hers, 
 and fits and educates it only to " succeed in 
 life," ignoring the common life in which 
 " success " must be won, then she is on the 
 plane of the jungle-folk ; and the tiger-cub 
 will show in her offspring. 
 
 Until a woman is spiritually fit for mother- 
 hood she does the world scant service by 
 bringing children into it. 
 
 We have had somewhat too much of the 
 Napoleonic idea. 
 
 When motherhood comes, manhood will 
 come ; race-consciousness will come ; peace 
 and love and fellowship will come. 
 
 When upon the stepping stones of a few 
 more Anthonies women shall rise to self- 
 ISO 
 
She who is to come 
 
 ownership, rise to recognize themselves as 
 human beings, not chattel property, when 
 woman once shall be free to get her bread 
 without selling her body either in the mar- 
 riage state or out of it, motherhood will be- 
 gin, and the birth-era of a race will dawn 
 more noble, chaste, more goodly great, than 
 all the past has known. 
 
 151 
 
WHEN THE EARTH TREMBLES 
 
 It is strange that only in the presence of a 
 catastrophe it should become clear that there 
 is nothing in the world worth preserving ex- 
 cept human life. 
 
 When the earth trembles, soldiers forget 
 that their mission is to kill ; policemen pay 
 little attention to the property they are hired 
 to protect, and the transient and worthless 
 character of things, valued beside life, forces 
 itself abruptly upon the common comprehen- 
 sion. 
 
 This great truth, now obscured by almost 
 every convention of human society, and col- 
 lectively recognized only in moments of cos- 
 mic threatening, must eventually be wrought 
 into the fibre of all human thought if organic 
 life is finally to escape annihilation. 
 
 Mont Pelee has given its warning to this 
 generation, and Vesuvius smokes his pipe 
 grimly above Nature's powder-magazine. 
 
 Slowly the great crust of the earth con- 
 tracts, forcing to the surface its liquid interior 
 fires ; slowly at the poles the ice-caps thicken 
 storing up the destruction of another glacial 
 slide. All this bespeaks the inevitable : that 
 
 U2 
 
When the earth trembles 
 
 the earth will some day be like the moon, 
 dragging around her orbit, a barren waste, 
 where once was warmth and plenty. 
 
 And what of the life for which the un- 
 counted ages seem but a preparation ? 
 
 When the hour of extinction comes is hu- 
 manity to be exterminated like rats in a trap? 
 When that awful hour at last arrives is it to 
 behold human beings still fighting one another 
 in vulgar economic strife like swine scram- 
 bling for food, treading the bounty of the 
 earth in the mire while the very Cosmos 
 calls for a rescuing hand ? 
 
 In the face of all terrifying visitations of 
 inorganic might there is one power in the 
 universe that can cope with it and overcome 
 it : intelligence. Man possesses it and it is am- 
 plified in direct proportion to his use of it. 
 
 If the race is finally to endure, we must 
 learn how to use this great power in the pres- 
 ervation of life, and we must begin thus to 
 use it very soon. 
 
 The desire to preserve life does not now 
 animate human society. In the United States 
 alone, every year, more human beings die of 
 diseases induced by underfeeding than were 
 destroyed by the eruption at Martinique. 
 
 153 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 In a land of plenty one thing only is re- 
 sponsible for this iniquity : disregard for hu- 
 man life. 
 
 The Mont Pelee of our maladjusted society 
 is always in eruption ; the lava of a purblind 
 social selfishness is always smothering the 
 one thing society ever can look to for its 
 preservation. 
 
 Nothing can preserve life except life itself. 
 
 A prayer to god or devil has never yet 
 made it rain or stopped a flow of lava. 
 
 If the race of men is ever yet to fulfill a 
 noble destiny, man himself must be the in- 
 strument ; in him are all the possibilities of 
 the force he calls God. 
 
 If we are careless of life, who is to work 
 out life's final preservation ? A moment of 
 cosmic terror is not the time to pray ; it is 
 the time to do. 
 
 There may be born tonight in the squalor 
 of a New York tenement, reared upon alley 
 refuse and turned out to tramp, a man who 
 has in his brain if developed the power to 
 save the race from extinction. By destroying 
 any life we may destroy the life. 
 
 It is foolish for us to wait for a cataclysm 
 to rouse our intelligence to action. If we 
 154 
 
When the earth trembles 
 
 only will it so we can perceive elemental 
 truths without earthquakes to stimulate their 
 perception. 
 
 If the collective will of the world today 
 would even follow the truth it already per- 
 ceives, it could atone for the past ages of 
 bloodshed and brutality and waste of life by 
 making the next thousand years ring through- 
 out the universe. 
 
 Is it nothing that a hundred tons may be 
 moved like a feather by the power transmitted 
 through a copper thread plus intelligence ? 
 
 Is it nothing that by the pulsations in a 
 medium so subtile that the senses of man 
 cannot perceive it, Marconi signals across the 
 ocean waste ? 
 
 Intelligence knows the force, and the me- 
 dia through which force must act. 
 
 Who then shall say we may not yet signal ; 
 nay, travel from planet to planet ? 
 
 Who shall say that when the hour of earth- 
 extinction comes man may not have foretold 
 its coming and prepared his flight to Jupiter, 
 whose crust has been hardening through the 
 centuries in preparation for organic life ? 
 
 Who knows how many worlds in all the 
 vast universe flung from the blistering suns 
 
 155 
 
Forgings of the new 
 
 have been prepared for organic life, and have 
 whirled their way through the ages to extinc- 
 tion without producing anything so great as 
 man? 
 
 Who knows but on some distant planet 
 swinging around some splendid sun, a race 
 of beings like to us has grown out of the vul- 
 gar mire of competitive warfare and is work- 
 ing all its units together in a godlike har- 
 mony, flinging electric signals at our earth ; 
 signals which our undeveloped intelligence 
 cannot yet recognize ? 
 
 The race cannot fathom cosmic depths in a 
 moment or in a generation. The earth may 
 yet endure for many thousands of years ; but 
 to save life at the end we must begin to value 
 life now. The great forces which today turn 
 the wheels of industry : steam, electricity, are 
 the fruitition of ages and ages of collective 
 intelligence acting cumulatively. A century 
 is but a day of cosmic life ; but every genera- 
 tion of men, living its little span, may serve 
 in making life better and brighter ; in lifting 
 the race onward and upward toward its now 
 obscure but someday manifest destiny. 
 
 And now, more than in any other period 
 of recorded history, dimly, but hopefully, the 
 156 
 
When the earth trembles 
 
 dream of a noble race life is possessing the 
 hearts of the people. 
 
 In the last fifty years there has been born, 
 here upon the earth, an ideal of a harmonious 
 society ; a society that shall re-coup the age- 
 long waste of human life ; a society that shall 
 produce a thousand Marconis in a single gen- 
 eration, when once its beneficent influence 
 shall have shone upon the race ; a society 
 that at last shall lift man out of the mire and 
 fit the humblest child to contribute all the 
 intelligence in the inmost recesses of his 
 brain to the uplifting and glorifying of the 
 race ; a society in which the collective will 
 shall leave the Mont Pelees of the globe to 
 belch in gloomy grandeur over barren wastes, 
 while in the pleasant places of the earth men 
 and women and children live comrade-lives 
 among the birds and flowers, sending love- 
 beckonings to the friendly stars. 
 
 157 
 
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