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A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE 
 
 IS IT RIGHT TO ROB ROBBERS? 
 
 rvlORRISON I. SWIFT. 
 
 PRICE FIFTY CENTS, 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 THE COMMONWEALTH SOCIETY 
 
 9 NASSAU STRKKT 
 1893 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. The League Gardening at the Roots of 
 
 the Social System ... i 
 
 II. Brains and Capitalists Fall Out . . 6 
 
 III. The Good Deeds of Some Curtailed . 14 
 
 IV. Organizing . . . . . 17 
 V. A Free Newspaper . . . . 19 
 
 VI. Lawyers No More .... 22 
 
 VII. Education, For the First Time . 28 
 
 VIII. The Invasion of Knowledge . . 33 
 
 IX. Transfiguration of the Churches . 40 
 
 X. The Waterloo of "Society" . . 42 
 
 XI. Political Parties Also ... 46 
 
 XII. Discovery on a Sufficient Scale . 53 
 
 XIII. The Trial 60 
 
 XIV. The Founder's Story ... 67 
 XV.. Sentence ...... 79 
 
 XVI. The People, at Last .... 82 
 
 364782 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE LEAGUE GARDENING THE ROOTS OF THE 
 SOCIAL SYSTEM. 
 
 Four men met together in the garret where one of 
 them lived. They were the trusted clerks of great 
 commercial houses. Through the hands of each 
 passed daily sums equal to fortunes. They were men 
 of devoted honesty; not one but would have died 
 rather than take for himself a penny of his employers' 
 funds. The salary of two of these men was nine hun- 
 dred dollars a year. The others received one thousand 
 each. They were also allowed a vacation of two weeks 
 in the summer. With families or friends to support, 
 their salaries did not take them far from the town 
 during this resting time. They were not old men, but 
 a look of age was upon each of their faces, and all 
 were prematurely gray. 
 
 They spoke with grave faces. Evidently they had 
 come too far in life to act from ill-balanced enthusiasm. 
 They took no oath of fidelity to one another, nor to the 
 cause they were undertaking. An oath would not 
 have deepened their loyalty. 
 
 One of them said: "If we are skillful and do not 
 take amounts too large, we may hope to escape detec- 
 tion five or even ten years. Soon or late each will be 
 
2 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 discovered, imprisoned and his family disgraced. Is 
 the cause worthy of this sacrifice?" 
 
 " It is," they responded in firm tones. 
 
 They remained in conference two hours arranging 
 the plans of their work. 
 
 A month later ten men assembled in the same gar- 
 ret. The society had grown through the admission 
 of six comrades. ' The four founders reported their 
 progress. 
 
 "I have taken one thousand dollars," "I eight 
 hundred," "I thirteen hundred," "I two thousand 
 dollars," they said in turns. 
 
 The first speaker continued : ' ' My most difficult part 
 has been to distribute what I took. I helped several 
 destitute families, but with inadequate sums, for fear 
 of the suspicions question, where I came by the money. 
 But through a friend who does not ask questions, I 
 saved a hard working market gardener from losing his 
 little plot of ground through mortgage. I have five 
 hundred dollars left." 
 
 The others made similar reports. 
 
 " This difficulty is already disposed of," the presi- 
 dent said. "One has joined us who is not a clerk, 
 and who can be our distributing agent, judiciously 
 applying what sums are needed without drawing sus- 
 picion to himself or us. He may pass as the repre- 
 sentative of philanthropic but modest persons who do 
 not wish their names known, dispersing his assistance 
 over the city to avoid suggestive comparisons." 
 
 New names were considered, and several were re- 
 jected, lacking the high reliability of character neces- 
 sary to sustain an arduous mission. Against the 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 3 
 
 emergency of general exposure from a member prov- 
 ing untrustworthy, it was resolved to develop the so- 
 ciety in separate and wholly independent groups of 
 ten, the four original organizers, only, being author- 
 ized to initiate groups, and they alone knowing the 
 entire membership. For the rest, each one's knowl- 
 edge was to be limited to his own group. Should a 
 member be false, his testimony could at worst convict 
 his nine 'associates only, and the progress of the society 
 would not be impaired. Each section was to have its 
 own distributor. 
 
 " If a group and its processes are discovered," said 
 one, "other groups are endangered, for detectives will 
 scent out recipients of aid and snare those who furnish 
 it." 
 
 "And if an agent was discovered, what then ? We 
 may be sure he would never betray his comrades. 
 But we can trust them to baffle detection : they can 
 disguise themselves, or invent a visit and leave money 
 unnoticed; a child met outside the door will never re- 
 fuse to carry a package to its parents ; and there is 
 the mail, too, which would hardly suspect a common 
 brown parcel of containing crisp bills ; and if these 
 strategies wear threadbare, think of the hundreds of 
 stores anxious to sell a yard of cloth and deliver it, 
 and quite obliging enough to wrap in another thing or 
 two if you please. That part is easy enough. f A 
 shrewd distributor is quite out of reach of discovery." 
 
 So answered another to this seeming obstacle. 
 
 To comprehend the beneficent successes of these 
 self-abegnating men, we must follow their agent in his 
 novel excursions. In many disguises he learned the 
 
4 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 true conditian of scores of poor families. He adopted 
 a special character for each district. Being a physi- 
 cian, he appeared, in one quarter of the city in this 
 guise ; in another he was an authorized sanitary in- 
 spector ; to a third he went as a student investigating ; 
 to another as an advising clergyman ; and one locality 
 knew him as a statistician for the labor union to which 
 he belonged. The sums that he disposed of in a sec- 
 tion were not large enough to arouse comment. He 
 found many families falling behind in rent, through 
 the sickness of their breadwinners, with the gray 
 prospect near of being forced to surrender bad quar- 
 ters for worse ones, and he banished that evil phan- 
 tom. There were wtdows in almost every tenement, 
 who left their colorless children daily to wear out their 
 fragile strength in factories for the comfort of their 
 landlords, . and to buy off death from the immediate 
 execution of their infants by the sufferings of miser- 
 able maturity. They were conveyed to country towns, 
 housed there and clothed, and a year's rent paid for 
 them. The number of half-clad children for whom 
 he provided warm flannels would not be credited by 
 the fabulously righteous slummers and charity super- 
 visors ; and where there were persons whose miniature 
 wages declined to pay for a nourishing dinner once a 
 week, he contrived to astonish them with immaculate 
 sections of beef on days that were not holidays. 
 
 Let not the generous reader imagine that this rising 
 and energetic providence fed all the needy people ; a 
 galaxy of unretired providences, giving their atten- 
 tion to business, was requisite for that, and it came in 
 good time. 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 5 
 
 For it was not many years before there were branches 
 of this beneficent institution in every prominent city 
 of the North, West, East and South, Chicago lead- 
 ing, as in all good things, with a full hundred ; and 
 the groups began to specialize their undertakings, 
 some of them being fond of presenting the tenement 
 artisans with snug farms in the west and seeing their 
 pioteges safely settled there, protected from the pirat- 
 ing land-speculators of that fringe of paradise, and 
 their intriguing colleagues in the banks. 
 
 But nothing told so powerfully and swiftly for the 
 amelioration of the laboring millions as the gold which 
 certain far-sighted groups knew ho.w to pour into the 
 treasuries of strikers ; and from that date an astonish- 
 ing success began to crown the participators in labor 
 wars. This invention in the mechanics of social pro- 
 gress rose to its legitimate importance through the 
 signal victory it enabled workingnien to win over one 
 Carnegie, now forgotten, but at that period of his life 
 a famous exploiter of labor and legislation. This am- 
 bitions person, who sought distinction as a patron sim- 
 ultaneously of statesmen, starvelings and an envious 
 rout of middle-minded people, cut from the Anglo- 
 Saxon pattern, whose genius lay in unsuccessfully 
 wishing to exploit contemporary mankind of millions 
 and loyally supporting those who successfully exploit- 
 ed them. This individual, blessed with an environ- 
 ment of propitious clay and the courage of his instinct 
 that thousands were born to minister to his gayety and 
 aggrandizement, determined, as Napoleon once detei- 
 mined to shatter Russia, to crush the labor organiza- 
 tions out of his pathway to democratic fraternity and 
 
6 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 sovereignty ; for he knew that if these thorny impedi- 
 ments in the mills which he was fond of considering his 
 own were brushed aside, he could manage the vulgar 
 rabble of wage-earners to his heart's desire, and gain- 
 ing ever more wealth from their unwilling contribu- 
 tions, and buying ever more honor and grandeur from 
 the world's grocery where these nourishing articles 
 are sold, and disbursing his eminent talents and profits 
 so far as business allowed, he would at length grow to 
 the size of the gods and live in men's memories with 
 Jesus and Plato and Gould. To enjoy the virtuous 
 consciousness of well-earned wealth and philosophic 
 freedom from the physical evils besetting the course 
 of one who heroically destroys the aspirations of ham- 
 lets of human beings, whose poetry is the blast fur- 
 nace and whose philosophic excursions are the peri- 
 patetic synthesis of broiling iron, he betook himself to 
 a fair castle in distant Scotland a house not made 
 with his own hands, but bought with the labor of his 
 hands at Homestead, whom now, teeming with thank- 
 ful devices, he was pondering keen-edged thoughts to 
 degrade. 
 
 It was just at this moment that certain ethical 
 groups, pursuing rectitude, became awake to their 
 opportunity and began to contribute to the strikers' 
 support. All non-union men who, being out of work, 
 came to fill the places of the old hands, were enrolled 
 upon the pay list of the others and refused to go to 
 work. The aid which was given sufficed to keep the 
 strikers from want, and perceiving that some power- 
 ful popular sentiment was back of them, they contin- 
 ued firm in their formerly unequal struggle with 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 7 
 
 sceptred capital. It was the turning point of that 
 struggle, for the most swollen potentates of finance 
 could not survive the losses which Carnegie suffered 
 for a protracted period. When at length he yielded, 
 to avoid ruin, the men were not content to resume 
 their posts with trifling concessions in wages and 
 acknowledgement of the right to combine. Their 
 compulsory idleness has educated them, and under- 
 standing for the first time their power, they nego- 
 tiated a partnership with their previous master. The 
 influence of this Waterloo to a shining knight of cap- 
 ital upon the country, was like the dazzling rise of a 
 competing sun in the horizon. 
 
 Strikers in other places were not neglected, and the 
 proportion of successful strikes rapidly swelled. It 
 broke upon the esoteric' inkiness of the employers' 
 brain that strikes were stunning their trade and 
 almost uniformly succeeding, and they grew very 
 chary of putting the vitals of the cumbersome beast, 
 capital, under the club of the executioner; wherefore, 
 strikes decreased with acceleration, the employers 
 preferring reasonable concessions to their own eco- 
 nomic extinction. These concessions in turn pro- 
 duced a notable improvement in the condition and 
 character of the employes. Seeing the unmistakable 
 success of the labor organizations, workmen who had 
 refused to join in earlier days, shrinking from the dis- 
 pleasure of their all-potent employing dictators, ral- 
 lied to the unions, augmenting still further their 
 vitality and beneficence. The capitalists sadly saw 
 that when the unions composed themselves for a 
 strike, they were predestined to win, and they shaped 
 
8 A I^KAGUK OF JUSTICE. 
 
 their shriveling course accordingly. On their part, 
 rejoicing in their April potency, and recognizing the 
 immense physical and moral dividends of each mate- 
 rial increment to their class, the unions began to pre- 
 pare themselves for more considerable alleviations 
 touching social and material equality. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 BRAINS AND CAPITALISTS FALL OUT. 
 
 In the meantime, production itself was feeling a 
 change. Demand, for the necessaries of life had 
 grown with the grown incomes of the poor, and 
 employment for a fresh army corps of working peo- 
 ple sprang up in these industries. Demand for 
 luxuries had declined, but not in proportion to the 
 increased demands for comforts and necessaries, and 
 the volume of business as a whole was greater by far 
 than ever before. Capitalists had discovered a shrink- 
 age in their incomes, and not being able to account 
 for it in any other way, had supposed it was because 
 the industrial share of labor had increased. The 
 wise had curtailed their superfluity expenses and 
 were healthier and happier ; the foolish, not being 
 able to curtail, failed, and their business passed to the 
 hands of men with less regal sentiments of their own 
 deserts and new ideas about the proportion labor 
 merits. The wisest -of all, finding society so much 
 more wholesome since the workers began to advance, 
 came out boldly as labor champions and made their 
 factories co-operative. 
 
 Nevertheless, despite the large deductions which 
 the members of the League of Justice were making 
 from the gross "earnings" of the capitalists, their 
 net incomes fell off in no very marked manner, for the 
 productive capacity and quality of the working popu- 
 
10 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 lation rose so steadily, in consequence of their better 
 material state, that they rendered to the employers in 
 return for wages, a larger product than ever before. 
 This tended to reconcile the masters to the laborers' 
 daily enlarging demands. And, moreover, if some 
 capital had been withdrawn from the manufacture o{ 
 luxuries, still more having been invested in the manu- 
 facture of necessaries and comforts, capital enjoyed 
 satisfying returns from this. 
 
 The entire bulk of capital was swelled in anothei 
 way undreamed of by the worthy wealthies of previ- 
 ous times. It had been a principle entirely undis- 
 puted by pi elates, professors and practical men, that 
 the cause of the poverty of the poor was their heedless 
 and immense expenditures upon frivolities and vices, 
 men receiving a dollar a day to nurture a family with 
 being supposed to spend four or five dollars of that 
 sum daily for beer and brawling, and the capitalists 
 suffered so terribly from this enormous waste that 
 they feared all the factories and savings of the coun- 
 try would be drunk up and production would cease 
 because the capital was gone, unless they cut down 
 the wages of the workers still more and applied the 
 saved surplus to their own scant domestic outlays and 
 recuperative investments in private wines and dia- 
 monds for the preservation of "capital. Now it was 
 ascertained, to the confusion of all the good and thrift} 7 , 
 that so soon as the working people found themselves 
 in fair health and comfort with their better food and 
 homes, they began to save, and had the good lords of 
 earth, the prelates of heaven, and the professors of 
 both, not been retarded in speaking by the emerald 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. II 
 
 scum of jealousy rising in their throats, they would 
 have admitted that a good lump of the savings, so- 
 called, which the rich had squandered . in fruitless 
 famous extravagances, became now an accumulation 
 among the workers, actually saved for the enhance- 
 ment of production. And ownership being distri- 
 buted among many, multiplied the benefits which it 
 bestowed. 
 
 Their new intelligence enabled them to shake the 
 citadel of the middle-man and the sweating boss-con- 
 tractor, for they found that they themselves could 
 take group contracts as in Australia, instead of letting 
 some ravenous overseer exploit them as hired work- 
 ers. And it soon came about that they could obtain 
 any contract for which they applied, since their supe- 
 rior ability and the excellence and reliability of their 
 work rendered all they did more profitable to employ- 
 ers than the slipshod profligate constructions of con- 
 tractors. They could underbid if they wished, saving 
 from the contractor's plutonic profits and stealings. 
 
 They began to invest their savings in manufac- 
 tories of their own, which they conducted without 
 sharing the profits with any idle club of capitalists, 
 stock-holders, or managers, with sky-reaching salar- 
 ies. Such enterprises grew apace, for they could 
 undersell the manufactories which had the terrible 
 corporation of .capitalists and ' managers ' on their 
 backs. Formerly the capitalists had all things their 
 own way, because they could buy every workingman 
 of executive ability out of his class and make him a 
 salaried manager for their own benefit and his, while 
 they capered about the continent and planet. But at 
 
12 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 this period a sentiment akin to patriotism made its 
 appearance in the breast of labor. They began to 
 love their cause and to be loyal to their fellow-labor- 
 ers ; there were some who declined to manage for the 
 traveling capitalists. The owners were stupefied by 
 this innovation. Was it possible that anyone existed 
 who would not sell himself for money, especially low- 
 born workingmen ? Was it conceivable that they 
 must now manage their shops themselves, they who 
 knew nothing whatever about shops or work, who 
 were born for junketing and joy ? 
 
 Some of the best managers replied to these lament- 
 ations and entreaties that they would assume the con- 
 duct of affairs if the workmen were taken into partner- 
 ship, while if not, they would organize partnership 
 shops independently. 
 
 "We always thought brains were with us," wailed 
 a capitalist, weeping tears of blood "not our brains, 
 god forbid ! but working-class brains, which saved 
 us the necessity of having any, which we could buy, 
 and we have made the world ring with our prog- 
 nosticating hosannas that brains would eternally come 
 to the top, to us. We thought ourselves safe from 
 co-operative aggression because the people's managers 
 rushed to us like insects to a lamp. Oh, w r oe ! Fidel- 
 ity is dead ! Brains desert the hand that has let its- 
 self be fed by them ! ' ' 
 
 ' ' Hold ! ' ' said a manager ; ' ' the hand that let us 
 feed it and ourselves that it might use us to take the 
 food out of the mouths of our comrades. If we chose 
 to continue the gormands your system has made us, 
 we might receive the same salaries as now, and 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 13 
 
 among the workers might be distributed your envia- 
 ble portion. We should be as well off, the workers 
 far better, and you who earn and deserve nothing, 
 would receive your share nothing. But we man- 
 agers do not intend to remain gormands." 
 
 So the partnership enterprises grew, taking in the 
 people who were thrown out by the failure of capital- 
 ist competitors, letting those who had not money to 
 buy stock earn it by their labor, over and above the 
 good support which they earned. 
 
 These successful partnerships had their inevitable 
 effect on the old-style capitalist employers. They saw 
 the field of production which they had owned entirely, 
 and cropped for themselves during an indefinite past, 
 slipping from their control. It was not, however, the 
 capitalist who had always been saying, "we should 
 like to make things better if we could, but we see no 
 way," who followed first in the line the working peo- 
 ple were going. 
 
 In consequence of their increasing property, the 
 workers now began to have a voice in judicial decis- 
 ions and legislation. A judge was offered a special 
 train by a great railway corporation to go and sit judi- 
 cially on one of their cases, but he refused it. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE GOOD DEEDS OF SOME CURTAILED. 
 
 Of course, long before this, discovery of what was 
 called embezzlement in divers business houses had 
 taken place, and the defaulting clerks had been sen- 
 tenced to various terms of hard labor in the peniten- 
 tial ies. They did not find the labor any harder than 
 they had been accustomed to, however, and all of them 
 began to improve in health and spirits from the physi- 
 cal exercise they were now enabled to enjoy. Their 
 minds were free from care and they felt that they were 
 having a vacation of life after the long hours and years of 
 dungeon counting-house death. Some of them knew 
 the little story of Maupassant's, of the old clerk who 
 one day went out into the sunlight and discovered 
 life, and hanged himself from the mortal sorrow he 
 felt that the years had gone, and all the joy of the 
 world had gone, and never had or could come to him. 
 But these disgraced clerks felt no inclination to hang 
 themselves. They knew that they had been great 
 world -forces, and thej^ watched with glad, half- real- 
 ized hope, the mighty work which their sacrifices \vere 
 sustaining, and their comrades found ways to keep 
 them informed of the progress going on outside. 
 
 They did not need to concern themselves for their 
 families, for the League attended to the support of 
 such as had been able to save nothing from the meagre 
 earnings of their bread-winner. But none of the em- 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 15 
 
 ployers* funds were used for this purpose. The com- 
 rades met such expenses from their own purses. The 
 wives of the criminals were assuaged of their grief and 
 chagrin by admission into the confidence of the 
 League, and they felt proud of the courageous men 
 
 had done these things, and happy in the social 
 degradation they endured. 
 
 The employers who brought these clerical appro- 
 priations to light, and their learned legal crutches, 
 were painfully puzzled to trace the squanderings of 
 the departed funds. Families of monastic frugality 
 in walk and conversation with their neighbors must 
 have been indeed clever rogues in spending never to 
 show a trace of it. It was surmised that the pecula- 
 tors had also been speculators, and some solved the 
 mystery by polygamic visions of various subsidiary 
 families who now would come to want. The capital- 
 ists who lost most, denounced the robbers as atheists, 
 and to make good the losses suffered, they increased 
 their customary stipends to the judges. 
 
 The repeated recurrence of this total disappearance 
 of the stolen moneys finally started one hyper-shrewd 
 fellow thinking, and made him divine the existence of 
 a secret embezzling philanthropic association of clerks. 
 He called a conclave of suffering capitalists and im- 
 parted his discovery, expecting to be richly rewarded. 
 He was astonished and mortified beyond recovery 
 when they assailed him with derision. They said it 
 
 contrary to human nature as well as preposter- 
 ously impossible to think that any man who could 
 steal for himself would steal for the benefit of anybody 
 else. They could speak from experience, which, tike 
 
1 6 A I.EAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 religious experience, could never be refuted. The 
 capitalists had never been strained so to comprehend 
 anything, and under the tension the meeting came 
 near ending in a riot. The shrewd man went away 
 feeling like Judas, but without the silver. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ORGANIZING. 
 
 In spite of these occasional digressions, the society 
 went on its way augmenting. The membership 
 reached thirty thousand. Many were clerks, many 
 were people with moderate private incomes who de- 
 voted their entire time to the diversified works of the 
 society. Every member pledged himself to the strict- 
 est economy in living, and to give all he could save to 
 the social object. Spartan simplicity and primitive 
 Christian devotion characterized all. 
 
 The form of organization underwent sundry adapta- 
 tions to the exigencies of growth and the ever more 
 complicated labors assumed. Each city had its chief 
 organizer, selected in every instance by the executive 
 committee of the league, its four founders, and these 
 chiefs chose organizers for each particular group. Se- 
 crecy pervaded like the ether. Only the high chief 
 knew the members in his city ; the group chiefs knew 
 only those of their group ; the members of a group knew 
 only one another. The city chief passed finally upon 
 every candidate proposed for admission. He also kept 
 a chart of the group enterprises to save them from 
 crossing in action. 
 
 To each high chief the under chiefs reported the 
 application of their funds, and the economic and moral 
 proceeds of their disbursement as far as they came in- 
 to the exchequer of observation. These reports found 
 
1 8 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 their way to the central executive committee of the in- 
 augurating four, who arranged, condensed and articu- 
 lated them, in so doing preparing the intestinal social 
 history of the period. 
 
 The original four still followed the arduous duties 
 of their clerkship, not deeming it expedient to resign, 
 because they were among the most brilliant abstrac- 
 tors. But the weighty work of conducting the great 
 league was heavy upon them, for some of the larger 
 projects, requiring general assistance, had to be cen- 
 trally conducted by them. Therefore several secreta- 
 ries, chosen with reference to their .stanch honor, were 
 trained for the service, and the private earnings of 
 their associates preserved them from want. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 A FREE NEWSPAPER. 
 
 When this degree of perfection was reached, it was 
 determined to take up the work of popular instruction. 
 It was begun with the newspaper. The poorer peo- 
 ple of the country, needing instruction nearly as much 
 as the rich, were unable to subscribe for enlightening 
 literature, and had nothing to read. There were also 
 people of the other classes, in handsome numbers, 
 who never read anything, and therefore did not know 
 anything progressive, taking only the literary emana- 
 tions from capital. The reform journal was there- 
 fore made like the starlight, free. Any one could 
 send his own name and the names of all his friends 
 and enemies, if he wished to enlighten them, and all 
 from that day received the publication without price. 
 The public was invited to meet the expenses of the 
 sheet by contributions, and what failed after that was 
 supplied by the league of embezzlers. 
 
 The plan proved an unspeakable achievement, and 
 the subscribers' list mounted to a million the first 
 month. Applications flooded in from every European 
 country, and editions were prepared in each leading 
 language. The edition, first monthly, was made 
 weekly, then came a daily, afterward a review, as well 
 as frequent books issued gratis. Having great wealth 
 behind it and no fear within it, the journal soon pos- 
 sessed the ear of the whole civilized world, being ter- 
 
20 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 rifically reliable and reliably terrific at the same time. 
 The other newspapers, appropriately called by one in 
 those times the 'daily sewers,' saw their subscription 
 lists shivered, and could not mend their fortunes even 
 after curtailing their emission of garbage. 
 
 The mighty reform press was a veritable treasury 
 of the keenest thought and fact, for now that rhere 
 was money on the side of progress, the best thinkers 
 changed their opinions very rapidly. Books and 
 chapters and pamphlets of germinant energy were 
 sown from this press among the people like wheat. 
 
 In less than a year the masses began to comprehend 
 the meaning of those whom they had previously seen 
 reviled as agitators and demagogues, and when they 
 understood them they recognized that these monsters 
 were the only wise people, and were right in saying 
 that a change in the social order amounting to an 
 absolute revolution was the only way to life. Many 
 of the rich caught glimpses of the corners of this fact 
 during dyspeptic retributions, but took more wine and 
 said, " after us the deluge." 
 
 It soured the capitalists when they found themselves 
 obliged to have the keen reform newspaper on their 
 tables or never to know any news, for the superceded 
 prevaricators of former days had been obliged by 
 poverty to whittle down their staff of news-gatherers, 
 and most of them had grown so sleepy that their 
 buildings were used for cheap lodging houses. Thus 
 the children of the capitalists were moulded little by 
 little on the reform pattern, and the capitalists, seeing 
 their own flesh and blood turning against them, felt 
 as if they belonged to an extinct age and race. 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 21 
 
 Psychologists and historians of the new school fre- 
 quently came to intereiew them to study their surviv- 
 ing mental processes for learned antiquarian treatises. 
 The great lying, gossiping, scandaling, advertising, 
 sycophant, commercial, capital-serving sheets, went 
 about now only as ghosts, through which their bones 
 could be seen. Their absorber printed no advertise- 
 ments for pay, its mission being to advertise the 
 truth. Deceitful puffs of quack objects, vegetable, 
 human and mineral, collapsed like a punctured bal- 
 loon, having no bellows to inflate them. But in the 
 League Journal appeared lists of all the new co-opera- 
 tive establishments, whether factories or stores, and 
 the working people were advised to buy of these only, 
 since their patronage would solidify such industries 
 and compel others to follow their example. Agents 
 of the capitalist producers offered fabulous bribes to 
 be admitted to these lists, but as the editors were 
 neither a legislative body nor traffickers in political, 
 religious, moral, social, or literary opinions, the 
 metallic persuasion had no gravitation in their scales. 
 In the second year every city came to have a branch 
 journal of its own, whose weekly issue penetrated 
 each glade and glen of agriculture, tapping the trade 
 of capitalists on that side. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 LAWYERS NO MORE. 
 
 A literary innovation in this journal which speedily 
 assumed consequence was the Department of Injus- 
 tice. All cases where the weak had been wronged by 
 the powerful, working people by their employers, the 
 poor by the rich, were impartially examined, and if 
 the charge proved true, the facfls and the names of the 
 oppressors were published. This let the offender 
 down farther in public estimation and caused him 
 more financial panic than a successful lawsuit at his 
 heels would have done, and the poor and weak who 
 never had seen an ounce of justice before, nor even 
 known the color of the stuff, nor had the ghostliest 
 chance of protection in the courts, now found redress 
 easy, swift, telescope-aimed and costless. 
 
 This new engine of virtue spread contagious terror 
 through the virtue-proof souls of those who had 
 always made laws and enjoyed enameled immunity 
 from them. Several such concocted mad slander 
 suits against the journal, but the land-slide of evidence 
 which the publishers had, compelled the capitalists 
 and judges to flee from the case to come for their very 
 lives. The infliction of wrong grew to be a precari- 
 ous thing for the inflicter, and evil encroachments 
 slunk away from the regions where this magical 
 defender came. Publication was so prostrating to 
 the delinquent that a mere private editorial notice to 
 correct the wrong led to restitution. 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 23 
 
 Here is a case selected at random from the files.- 
 Three men whose families relied upon the wages of each 
 day for bread, were hired by two wealthy land-owners 
 to dig a well. The owners agreed to have bricks there 
 for the walls at the proper time. The men cautioned 
 them that the earth might cave if this were neglected . 
 'Go on digging,' said the owners, 'the bricks shall be 
 there.' They dug as instructed, the bricks came not 
 as promised, the sides fell in as predicted. It was 
 Saturday night, they had dug two days, they asked 
 for two days' pay. Said the canny owners, 'The well 
 is not dug, and we cannot pay for its digging twice. 
 When you clear out the hole again we will pay you 
 the promised sum.' The men, fasted that Sunday. 
 They were workers of the lowest class and had no social 
 'pull.' The owners pulled the Sunday-school, the 
 church and the community, with piety and money. 
 But they received a note from the editorial Department 
 of Injustice a few days after, and as nothing had yet 
 been discovered which would pull that, the debt was 
 settled the same day. 
 
 People of all classes soon saw what an unerring 
 path to justice this department opened, and gradually 
 they deserted the tedious, trickish, costly, squirming, 
 capitalized courts of law. If the defrauders did not 
 recompense their victims, the notified public dreaded 
 to deal with them, and they found themselves in com- 
 mercial Coventry. To avoid the expensive loss of 
 business and personal confidence, the dishonorable 
 were often animated to reparation by a laconic notice 
 from the Department of Injustice that their rise was to 
 be inspected. Thus while the volume of justice in- 
 
24 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 creased, the labor required to earn it decreased. No 
 case ever arose where the impartiality of the depart- 
 ment was questioned, since they had neither fees nor 
 salaries nor railroad passes, nor any personal stake in 
 the decisions. 
 
 Reason and equity decided the disputes and techni- 
 cal figments, which in the hands of bar and bench 
 ' experts' always proved broad passages for Injustice 
 standing ere<5l to come in at and take possession, were 
 barred up to be kept for specimen judgment-day testi- 
 mony. It never took much time to settle claims on 
 rational grounds, and the department was therefore 
 never belated in its business. It protected itself and 
 its clients from those who would knowingly prefer 
 unjust charges, for those who were found guilty of 
 this wrong, from malice or hope of gain, were them- 
 selves published in place of their intended prey. So 
 only those who believed in their causes brought them, 
 and those who had mistaken their claims were en- 
 lightened by the editors, and their minds being re- 
 stored to equilibrium, and a cankering lawsuit of for- 
 mer days being averted, they adjusted their quarrel in- 
 telligently, and continued to enjoy life. On this side 
 of its work the Editorial Board of Justice finally be- 
 came a chamber of arbitration. 
 
 Naturally all this was a terrific catastrophe to the 
 legal profession. Lawyers starved until they were 
 obliged to work at something useful, and as some of 
 them would not do this, they starved to death. Judges 
 had nothing to do, and little by little nine-tenths of 
 them were discharged. It was noticed that many of 
 them became motor men on the street cars where their 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 25 
 
 . ermine was useful, or railroad ticket sellers where their 
 majesty lost none of its frown or shine. 
 
 People now spoke their minds and said what they 
 had previously thought, that the law was the most 
 disreputable profession on the list after that of the 
 hangman, and now they placed it ahead of the 
 hangman's in vileness, because no one brought any 
 cases to the lawyers which had the dimmest right in 
 them, but only those which could be shored up by 
 right-defying technical rascalities, calumniations, and 
 the consecrated process of methodical lawful frauds. 
 
 The f etchers of these cases were low persons, devoid 
 of the cranial elements of honor, and the attorneys 
 susceptible to the blandishments of such simian 
 scoundrels were obviously of the same family. The 
 lawyer class was, therefore, as much despised by all 
 as the prostitute class was by the women, and with 
 more reason. The judges, of course, fared no better in 
 public esteem, for every one saw that the lying tech- 
 nalists at the bar would have no chance if the judges 
 did not abet them in their conspiracies to assassinate 
 right by listening to their iniquitous verbal meta- 
 physics. Moreover, if the brainless judges thought it 
 their conscienceless duty to dip out what they labeled 
 justice from the refuse of blinding, complicated stat- 
 utes and precedents long dead and putrified, why did 
 they not move to simplify these statutes, filter and 
 boil the laws, and make the metaphysical legalities 
 coincide with the true and the just ? 
 
 The lawyers had always had unlimited chance to 
 reform law, being not only its familiars and spiritual 
 mediums, its vestals and pontiffs, and, therefore, the 
 
26 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 chosen ones to simplify and justify it; but they had . 
 been its manufacturers, very law-gods, out of con- 
 gressional paradise sending their singing bolts. And 
 what had they done with their super-terrestrial oppor- 
 tunities but build and dig a labyrinth in which to 
 mesh and mulct everybody? No one had the least 
 question why they had not been simplifying and dis- 
 infecting the laws for centuries instead of making the 
 world bear their abominable carcass of diseases up the 
 stony slope of time. L,ike every priesthood, the legal 
 priesthood wanted a theology it could operate to the 
 eternal salvation of itself from usefulness and the 
 eternal damnation of others to the toils of supporting 
 its uselessness. 
 
 Some of the law-moulding hypocrites who were 
 left, now bethought them of sweeping away the ridic- 
 ulous intricacies through which the people had always 
 been gamed, plotting thereby to bring back an occu- 
 pation for themselves which they could soon corrupt. 
 They found no difficulty in legal lucidification alle- 
 gorical way-faring . men could have done that ; but 
 when it was accomplished the courts of law had no 
 more cases of any kind, for the rascals could gain 
 nothing from a code of laws sound and sane, and 
 therefore offered no more sacrifices to them, while 
 the rest had no notion of putting themselves again 
 into the jaws of the many-stomached judicial devil- 
 fish. 
 
 Desperate at the alienation of even the miscreants, 
 the legal fog-makers made a final effort to reanimate 
 the defunct haze and fraud; but the revolutionary 
 journal followed each machination with such scorch- 
 
V*F 
 
 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. . 27 
 
 ing exposure that the judges, several of whom were 
 supreme bench fellows, they, the unfittest, having 
 survived longest, became the laughing stock of 
 children and everybody, surrendered to the inevitable, 
 and retired to farms to recuperate their seedy stock. 
 Then the courts were entirely empty and the profes- 
 sion of law became extinct. 
 
 A fabulous saving, both governmental and private, 
 had all this time been going on. ' What had pre- 
 viously .supported the creaking machinery of law was 
 saved, and what had been squandered upon lawyers 
 by litigants, was rescued to them. The legal maggot 
 which had been a fearful ravager of every limb of 
 industry, life and emotion, having its mouth every- 
 where, and being supported by the producers, was 
 now dead. It was as if the expense of the great 
 standing armies of the world were suddenly removed 
 from the groaning people at home, and all the officery 
 and soldiers of them began to produce. All the law- 
 yers, clerks and court indignitaries had actually to 
 do true labor. Production took an incredible bound, 
 while taxes fell out of sight. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 EDUCATION, FOR THE FIRST TIME. 
 
 Nobody will suppose that all this happened in a 
 week. Other things had been going on ill the mean- 
 time. This great free revolutionary journal had 
 unceasingly advocated a rational system of education 
 for the young. After the rays of the morning sun 
 tipped the east of their minds, deputations of people 
 from the masses, the middle class, and single individ- 
 uals (disguised) of the rich, were continually coming 
 to the editors imploring them to give their theories 
 form and flesh and establish actual education, if only 
 a little. At length they acceded. They did not hold 
 immortal and sterile discussions ruminating the advis- 
 ability, non-advisability, partial advisability, and 
 impartial advisability of atomic alterations in curric- 
 ula, goading their prodigious brains to invent surer 
 means of enticing or compelling or narcotizing the 
 youth to learn valueless things in a suicidal way, with 
 a view to the wonderful eventual perfecting of educa- 
 tional enginery so as in due passage of centuries to 
 have the steam up for the development of men and 
 women. These revolutionary educators jumped the 
 gutter of centuries, being of the mind that it was as 
 weighty to save the children of the present as to let 
 the race dwindle for the benefit of a dwindled poster- 
 ity in some ultimate era. When people saw this so 
 easily done for it was only a matter of making up 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 29 
 
 two or three minds to do it they were amazed and 
 wroth that the paid and provided educators had not 
 done it in their grandparents' time. 
 
 They made a clean sweep of whole continents of 
 educational rubbish, like Latin and Greek, and when 
 called upon by the kings and heirs apparent of these 
 extensive cemeteries, the professors, to defend their 
 extraordinary want of consideration for the defunct, 
 they replied by telling the very original ' savants ' 
 what they had never thought of before, that the 
 Greeks became the wonderful people they were with- 
 out the assistance of any language which was dead 
 and buried Greek to them and their time, to rub and 
 to ' sharpen ' their faculties over, and saturate them 
 with conceptions of a long out-grown period; while 
 had they applied their brains to such deadly routine, 
 they certainly would not have surpassed all other 
 races of the world in the splendor of their originations 
 on every subject they touched. 
 
 Their first care of all, beginning long before the 
 cradle, was the health of the child, and this continued 
 to be absolutely and unflinchingly first so long as edu- 
 cation had anything to do with it. The second unalter- 
 able law 7 was that the children should always be happy 
 and never know that they were being educated. Any- 
 thing and everything else might be sacrificed, but 
 these things under no circumstances. The days of 
 childhood are the time, they said, when one is mos-t 
 attuned to the pleasures of life and keenest to its 
 pains. Childhood is, therefore, the most valuable 
 and vital part of life, and other parts should be a 
 preparation for it quite as much as it for others. To 
 
30 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 look upon this period as a getting ready lime for 
 grown-up years is, then, the crudest malpractice ; 
 it is like hearing the finer music first to prepare one- 
 self to enjoy the poorer music more. Youth is 
 undoubtedly the grandest time of life, when the pow- 
 ers are complete and full, and yet youth is mostly sac- 
 rificed in plotting and striving to get in more joy later 
 on when the aptitude and faculty for joy have, like 
 the clock, run down. 
 
 And, without any comparison of periods, each 
 period has its own perfect rights if the full sum total 
 of life is to be reached. To-day is as important as 
 to-morrow; it must not be scrimped or scamped or 
 sacrificed for to-morrow. It may be the day of a five- 
 year old child, or that of a twenty-five or fifty-year 
 old man; each is a day, with all present and past eter- 
 nity, all possibility and reality crested in it. L,ife, 
 when it is a perfect art, will focus and culminate all 
 living in each day, as if it had been that toward which 
 the process and motive of creation moved. 
 
 The inaugurat.ion.of childhood and youth is the fair 
 ideal, since, when each day is perfect, there can be no 
 regrets and no additions, save the increment of a new 
 and perfecter day to-morrow, born of to-day's com- 
 pleteness. 
 
 Meditating in this manner, these true philosophers 
 asked if a lesson which spoiled to-day for the apparent 
 sake of to-morrow, could make good its title to the 
 desolation of to day. Sir, to-day is gone, one gem 
 out of life's coronet. Bring it back to me, the cor- 
 onet is ugly without it. Can you not do it ? Then 
 you have impiously wronged me! Take one tooth 
 
A IvEAGUK OF JUSTICE. 31 
 
 from the fabulous perfect row that smiles to you; 
 there are two eyes, beautiful in the vibrating light- 
 ning of their storied abysses. One will do ; put the 
 other or.': that it may be more beautiful. A ton of 
 learning gained at the loss of one ounce of health is a 
 dear purchase, did some one say ? A ton of learning 
 purchased by an ounce of sorrow is dear. Sorrow 
 is a canker. Don't imagine that when it is gone 
 it is gone. It scars and prostrates and haunts ; 
 it is a mutinous substance, unforgiving perpetu- 
 ally. For the benefit of a tree's beautiful to-mor- 
 row scrape the bark off on one side to-day. 
 
 No, children did not come into the world 10 learn 
 lessons. The object of childhood is not prepara- 
 tion. The object of childhood is itself. How immor- 
 tal the wisdom which beats the stars out of a child's 
 firmanent that he may be fitted to enjoy the dead 
 stars when he is a man ! Now for life ! When you 
 are a man you may be 'persecuted by thoughts of 
 death and separation. This generation's ancestry has 
 been bad ; we harbor evil forebodings and itch with 
 the measles of immortality. Keep that venom out of 
 children's ears. Death will overtake him all too soon, 
 and he can investigate his own immortality. Teach 
 him the wholeness and holiness of now, and discharge 
 destiny of its religious mission to worry him. L,et 
 there be a great silence about Jesus and god, until 
 he discovers that he himself is here in the universe 
 with no secondary destiny. He will chat with the 
 universe then on a fair footing. God is a great dis- 
 turber of the peace, intruding himself like a child out 
 
32 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 of humor unless he is noticed. Did god place us 
 here for the pleasure of nagging us ? 
 
 Similarly there was no noise about the achievement 
 expected of the chi4d, no examinations, grading nor 
 educational ceremonial of any description. The body 
 of officious people formerly called teachers, who had 
 soberly followed imparting and interference as a sepa- 
 rate profession, passed away entirely, for all contrib- 
 uted, each in a natural way, not only to the develop- 
 ment of the young, but of those less advanced than 
 themselves. It was observed that the teachers, those 
 high-tensioned hands of the educational factory, hav- 
 ing, altogether the most difficult, unappreciated and 
 monstrously unnatural part to play in the intellectual 
 industrialism of the time, were*very glad to disappear. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE INVASION OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 A group of young men and women, seeing how 
 things were going in society, organized a system of 
 their own to go about teaching the common-schooled 
 and untaught people. There were hardly any college 
 students among these, and such as were of the college 
 or university blue breed were those whom the profes- 
 sors loved least and pigeon-holed as educational vag- 
 rants. They were individuals with personality and a 
 will not servile to their monitors, whom they declined 
 to reflect. No professor was ever known to identify 
 himself with this movement, or to say a good word for 
 it, until the people were won over, when the profes- 
 sor class came into its arms stampeding. Nor was 
 their accession then of any consequence, for one of the 
 first things society did after the change was to dis- 
 patch that class. 
 
 No one thought of censuring the professors for 
 their tardiness, any more than he thought of blaming 
 miners for living in the dark. The professors' or- 
 dained duty was to drill the raw recruits for station in 
 life and to teach all whom god intended to enrich with 
 riches how to wring them dry into their private tubs. 
 When the professors met any student who was not on 
 a blind gallop after reputation, they were afraid of 
 him, for they saw that if all youths were like that the 
 moon of professoring would set. They said one to 
 
34 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 another that such an one's mind was out of joint, and 
 devoted all their sophistry to sprouting 'ambitions' in 
 him, whereupon, if these failed to root, they declared 
 he was not educab'le. 
 
 The uneducable, therefore, united to spread the 
 light they found burning in themselves and extin-' 
 guished in the university dark-lanterns, over the grop- 
 ing American continent. They went singly- from town 
 to town with no money in their purses and no purses 
 to make them think of money. When they came to a 
 town they sought the most enlightened spirits, and 
 found them always among the poor. To these they 
 said, ' Show us how we may work and earn our daily 
 bread give us not our daily bread, but let us earn 
 it and call together the souls of your community 
 who are loyal to light, and let us confer with one an- 
 ther.' And in the evening, when the salt of that town 
 was assembled, the wandering apostle of life said to 
 them : 
 
 ' The twilight of a new, miraculous day thrills the 
 East. The sun lingers in his luminous chamber 
 awaiting the order of ten thousand united wills 
 to come forth. These wills shall say, "The sun 
 shall rise now; by my soul it shall not wait 
 for the generation of to-morrow, it shall rise by 
 our compulsion. We will not live our lives in the 
 night." The stin longs to rise. But it must have 
 friends among mortals, and cowards are not friends. 
 Cowards wait for others to act, the brave and true act 
 themselves, to-day. What can the brave do? They 
 can say, life should be lived thus and thus, and they 
 can live it so. The apostles of the Nazarene working- 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 35 
 
 man said, by putting ourselves under the four corners 
 of earth and lifting, the earth will rise. They lifted 
 and the mighty foundations of the earth split. In each 
 village they gathered a few, and these in their tidal 
 confidence were an army. Do likewise. Set your 
 ideals as high as the stars; laugh compromise out of 
 your hearts into the sepulchred domiciles of capital. 
 Do all that thou canst for this mighty cause of life, 
 give all that thou hast for it. Can the world be 
 moved without power? Be yourselves that power. 
 Be architects of a new society. You cannot delegate 
 this task, you cannot pay men to change society for 
 you.' 
 
 These and other words spoke the preacher scientists 
 of a new order. And the people were stirred and met 
 often to plan. They abandoned their old ideals of 
 prosperity and lived in a simple manner. They 
 had a common treasury into which each gave all that 
 he could save from tl;e needs of life, and these funds 
 were used to spread the new conception of living. 
 
 Among the earliest of their acts was the building of 
 a plain hall, to which all contributed the labor of their 
 hands. This was always open and all speakers could 
 use it freely for whatever subject they chose. It be- 
 came a forum of intense intellectual and moral life. 
 Since there were no limitations to speech, and every 
 subject known to man could be sifted to its molecules, 
 the intellects of the many who had hitherto lain dor- 
 mant in churches and schools and shops began to 
 wake up. They caught a glimmer of the wonderful 
 world it was they lived in, and said to themselves, 
 ' What helpless, hapless fools we have indeed been to 
 
36 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 pass through this fragrant, unspeakable garden of 
 life as. a traveler in a railroad train with the blinds 
 down. The end of the journey is not our destination, 
 the garden is our destination.' 
 
 So they set about transforming all the dead accu- 
 mulations of science and experience into breathing life 
 material. It was a hard task at first, and for a time it 
 was feared that a civil war would be necessary to in- 
 duce the scientists to impart what they had moun- 
 tained up, for so insignificant a purpose as the im- 
 provment of human life. The object of science is to 
 furnish the materials for books, they objected, and 
 books enable teachers to have the appearance of wis- 
 dom and doctors to doctor. Science is not intended to 
 modify the life of the crowd, but to give preoccupa- 
 tion to scientific brains which have passed through 
 the transubstantiating mediations of learning. You 
 say the institutions should be freely open to everyone 
 to come and go as he pleases, without preparation, gra- 
 dation, limitation or sequestration, that would stand 
 education on its head, place the shined professors 
 under the inquisition of the swift, direct inquisitiveness 
 of the vulgar, and democratize the aristocracy of 
 knowledge in a shabby and indecorous manner. 
 
 When. the people signified their intention to read in 
 the libraries, and perform experiments in the labora- 
 tories, and watch the clinics, without certificates or 
 antecedents or recommendations from anybody, the 
 professors would have organized* the students into mil- 
 itary companies to protect their rights to these things 
 unshared ; but the students went home, not wishing to 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 37 
 
 associate with illiterate persons, even as enemies in 
 war. 
 
 Then a great raid was made on the locked-up liter- 
 ature, as western pioneers rush upon a gold field, each 
 man seeking the shining lumps. They were aston- 
 ished to find how much was insolvent dirt and rock, and 
 could not understand why men of monstrous and re- 
 nowned intelligence spent their whole lives picking 
 the particles of these substances, apparently thinking 
 that they were the gold; until they learned that it was 
 a profession, following which night and day from 
 adolescence on, the brains of these extraordinary dig- 
 gers became lead poisoned, and everything at length 
 looked precisely the same to them. 
 
 But the new 'prospectors refused to debauch their 
 brains with dirt, and took the gold only. They se- 
 lected what pertained to life in any manner, and es- 
 pecially the ingredients of physical and mental power 
 and durability, and whatever would add to the happi- 
 ness of any mortal while palaced on this planet, and 
 these they imparted to the people assembled in the 
 halls, showing them how to absorb into their lives the 
 magic essences, to make them chyle and nutriment, 
 driving out the depraved aborigines and making a 
 mighty and immortal flesh. The children deserted 
 the schools to come and hear, and as at all times 
 there was some one discoursing simply, and other 
 grown persons standing about eager to explain to the 
 children in little groups what they did not understand, 
 leaving them free to come and go as they pleased and 
 enticing them with every form of instructive activity, 
 they did not return to the schools afterwards. 
 
38 A I.EAGUK OF JUSTICE. 
 
 L,ife began immediately with these children. A 
 little useful niche was found for each, where he or she 
 performed some pleasant industrial service, and feeling 
 the responsibility of usefulness, his faculties grew 
 alert and enquiring. Everyone was led whithersoever 
 he desired to go, and beginning anywhere, around 
 that beginning was gradually clustered a whole sys- 
 tem of scientific knowledge and action. A child 
 chose its own path, instinctively displaying its apti- 
 tudes, and to that path was brought everything which 
 could further its progress and minister to its growth. 
 The custom had formerly been to take the child up 
 onto a mountain and point to a winding foot-way in 
 the blue distance. Between were forests and murk> 
 swamps, rivers black and foaming, sand plains and 
 rock-clad ridges, bottomless holes moss- veiled. Make 
 your way to that foot-path, the educator said, and it 
 will lead you somewhere. 
 
 Everybody now took a hand in educating, and their 
 greatest delight was to go among the young in their 
 games and lively studies, to learn from them and 
 teach them, and to hear the noble cavaliers of free- 
 dom who had broken down the university ramparts 
 for common occupancy, discourse. Love seemed to 
 spring up among the people, and each sought to 
 impait what he had to the rest, like a steadily burn- 
 ing star. Men and women forgot who were their own 
 children, so interested and delighted were they in all, 
 and the children ate and slept at the home where they 
 happened to be, feeling toward all as toward parents, 
 and receiving the tenderest care. 
 
 As there was no further u.se for the school buildings, 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 39 
 
 they were made annexes of the halls and used for edu- 
 cational purposes. In the summer time the halls and 
 annexes were almost entirely deserted, for everything 
 was done in the open air; and eve^one became so 
 strong and vital that a great deal of the working and 
 thinking which had previously smelt of coal and car- 
 bonic gas was now performed under the airy ceiling of 
 the sky and the thought-bearing smile of the juvenile, 
 soft-skinned sun. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 TRANSFIGURATION OF THE CHURCHES. 
 
 When the crusading lecturers on life returned from 
 their successful trip to the tombs of knowledge and 
 began their Sunday impartations to the thirsty few 
 who gathered about them, the churches were proceed- 
 ing along the unrippled float of their dormitory elo- 
 quence. On their way home, much rested, some of 
 the planks and beams of the ecclesiastical men-of- 
 war occasionally dropped in to hear the closing words 
 of a religion of life. They went home troubled in 
 spirit and impaired in appetites, and returned the suc- 
 ceeding Sunday to hear the whole gospel. They saw 
 how light of heart the new religionists were and what 
 impregnable health had already taken possession of 
 their bodies, and they said to their fellow planks and 
 spars, ' This is the true church ; knowledge adapted 
 to life is religion ; the enthusiasm to construe! a grand, 
 adorable earth is divine love ; ' and they joined the 
 church of science, whose soul was human humanity. 
 
 As plank after plank parted from the armored fleet 
 of theology, the cannons thundered terrific prognostica- 
 tions from the pulpits, pointing their muzzles straight 
 at the simple wooden shells where Truth had taken 
 up her abode. The next Sunday every lay timber in 
 the ships went to view the corpse of Truth, after the 
 sulphurous cannonade, expecting to see her perforated 
 and jellied ; but finding her alive and perfect, they 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 41 
 
 tarried and were captivated by her words. There was 
 left of the sacerdotal crafts nothing but the iron 
 aimor plating of creeds and the heavy-toned oracle 
 guns, and while it is difficult to say which sank the 
 other, both went down. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE WATERLOO OF "SOCIETY." 
 
 A curious change was meanwhile taking place in 
 what is nomenclaturally known as 'society.' The 
 rich had always found it simple to bow culture before 
 the shrines of their dinners, and the excellent Mr. 
 Emerson had said, ' To be rich is to have a ticket of 
 admission to the master-works and chief men of each 
 race.' Brains seemed to think that one of the rea- 
 sons why it existed was to win its way into the society 
 of the brainless. .The man of money winked at the 
 man of brains and the man of brains had an ecstacy. 
 The women of money * society ' made lions and calves 
 of the men of genius, and brought their friends 
 together to examine the wonder, to feel of his ears 
 and count his teeth, to adore and exclaim, ' Oh ! our 
 man of genius ! our menagerie ! our poodle dog ! 
 When the man of brains got as far as this, he thought 
 he had lived to some purpose. His gigantic cerebrum, 
 whirling with the joyous mesmerism of gleaming pot- 
 tery and gems, to which great god how wonder- 
 ful! he, only a man of mind and soul, was after 
 toilsome years allowed revering access, could not hear 
 the sardonic laugh of scornful condescension in the 
 vacuums of these creatures of money where the soul 
 of those soul-dowered is wont to sit. 
 
 The change originated when men of brains planted 
 their first crop of character. It originated with the 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 43 
 
 working people, where the soil was rich enough for 
 character to grow. The leaders of this exodus froni 
 sycophancy and snobbery were those burglers of sci- 
 ence, the outlaws who had broken into books and 
 were distributing their booty every Sunday in the 
 lecture halls. Seeing that they were ' extraordinary 
 persons,' the rich society sharks prepared to swallow 
 and digest them. They sent around to them those 
 beautiful little missives of corruption and missiles of 
 death invitations to eat and be merry with them 
 and marry. If they married the progeny of the rich 
 imbeciles the eating imbeciles knew that the children 
 of the combination would be bailed and neutered of 
 genius, and property and imbecility would be safe. 
 
 There was crape on all the rich men's doors the 
 next morning, for the extraordinary persons had 
 refused to come to be digested, and the rich were 
 mourning to think that they would have to intermarry 
 their sons and their daughters one with another, and 
 the descending crop would not stop on the perfectly 
 decorous stage of imbecility, but would dip down to its 
 legitimate levels of idiocy. 
 
 As feasts and bullion were substances which nearly 
 all the great and noble characters of history had 
 sought after as their befitting pay for being created 
 great, the benighted possessors of these things thought 
 that the extraordinary ones had perhaps not under- 
 stood what they were being invited to, having recently 
 sprung from the working classes, where nothing was 
 known straight. So they held a meeting among 
 themselves and appointed delegates composed of the 
 most money to go to the extraordinaries and explain* 
 
44 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 These bullion-ballasted tanks of expectation were 
 ushered into the ante-rooms of the halls where the 
 scientific highwaymen were beginning a wild joyous 
 hour of play and instruction with the children, and were 
 told to wait until the hour was over if they wished to 
 confer with the extraordinary. They felt as they had 
 always prided themselves on making delegations of 
 workingmen feel when these came to plead with them 
 for their underfed little ones. But they choked down 
 their pride, for they realized with terror that if they 
 could not prevail upon these vital men to come to 
 their houses to be effeminated and routed, it was all 
 up with their race and their uselessness. 
 
 When the hour was over and the religious bohe- 
 inians learned who were awaiting them, they declined 
 to confer with the petitioners, saying that the bright 
 life of the day called them, and while breath was in 
 them they could not think of dead thoughts or climb 
 down into reactionary catacombs. 
 
 The rich men then decided upon a dazzling opera- 
 tion of generalship. They would endow the halls, for 
 when the extraordinaries had salaries safe and perpet- 
 ual dangling before their jaws, they would come down 
 from the twig of principle like a shot bird. There- 
 fore they put what acumen and property they could 
 bring themselves to part with into an endowment, 
 making it enormous in their desperation ; but the lec- 
 turers refused to touch it, saying that the rich could 
 keep their stolen possessions until tomorrow, when the 
 people would take them all to endow the life of all. 
 Many of the rich then made over the whole of their 
 property to the common fund of the new movement, 
 
A I,KAGUE OF JUSTICE. 45 
 
 ceased bargaining for preference, and came as simple 
 men to partake of the incalculable joys and beauties of 
 true life. 
 
 When Homer and Buddha, the religion of Jesus 
 and the aristocracy of Shakespeare, were long forgot- 
 ten, the thrilling story of how a. handful of brave men 
 and women withstood the ever before conquering 
 bludgeoning blandishments of ' society ' on a high 
 mountain and delivered the human race, was told to the 
 marvelous magnificent children who sprang ages 
 after from this deed of superhuman heroism. 
 
 When 'society' dreadfully gasped its last, a great 
 miracle occurred, for the earth suddenly became four 
 times larger than it was before, to accomodate the tre- 
 mendous humanity which was about to be born. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 POLITICAL PARTIKS ALSO. 
 
 The most terrible affliction known to those days, 
 after the dead evils heretofore recounted, was political 
 parties. They were like a wild bull in a compart- 
 ment with men without trees to get behind, and they 
 were always doing something surprising and deadly. 
 An enormous sum of treasure and sacred time was 
 spent upon them, men voting and sweating and swear- 
 ing and voting, and so chivalrous as not to let the 
 women share the swear and vote with them. Every 
 man whom they elected disappointed them, having 
 hired his own election, so the rotatory multitude pre- 
 pared to sweat and vote another personally nominated 
 incumbent in. They kept this up like bats flying 
 back and forth through the twilight, just for the sake 
 of doing it, but mainly that they might sometime be 
 able to buy themselves in ; for those who turned the 
 windlass of the voting multitude were few in number 
 but mighty. 
 
 The first man who said it was not necessary to rule 
 by political parties was imprisoned by his compatriots 
 as a maniac, and many wanted to lynch him, for 
 without the excitement of voting and getting angry 
 and being disappointed and repenting, and doing it 
 all over again as often as possible, they did not see 
 how they could get their exceedingly vicious code of 
 laws made more vicious. Nobody but a self-elected 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 47 
 
 politician could come off more than conquerer in that 
 emergency, and the sparkling-minded crowd there- 
 fore clung to him like a life-preserver. But the soli- 
 tary man wrote books on the subject in his cell and 
 dropped the leaflets about it out of the barred window. 
 
 Just at this time the first band of crusaders were re- 
 turning from their pilgrimage to rescue knowledge 
 from the university infidels, and they passed under the 
 jail windows by accident. They saw the leaves flying 
 . there and carried them aw r ay to read. 
 
 ' O perverse ones of this purblind generation,' read 
 the book, 'do families manage themselves by political 
 parties, or churches, or universities, or any great and 
 prosperous societies? When you divide one of these 
 into opposing factions to rule it that way, you may be 
 sure its doom has been writ and undersigned by the 
 shadows in heaven. But when it is a country all is 
 different, and the littlest hamlets follow the national 
 example, doing everything through a fight and spend- 
 ing more money to beat each other than the things 
 would naturally cost which they beat each other 
 to do. And yet after all why do parties exist? Is it 
 not to get good and necessary things done in the best 
 possible way? And if parties get the good things not 
 done, and in the worst and evilest possible way, is it 
 not clear that parties are a nuisance and incumbrance ? 
 That is what they do. 
 
 'As soon as a party organization is formed, the 
 objects for which it was formed begin to be forgotten, 
 and the mere avarice of success animates it more and 
 more. Whatever originates from one party must be 
 decried by the other, lest the people should think that 
 
48 A I.KAGUK OF JUSTICE. 
 
 the first party was doing a good thing and vote with 
 it. Finally all the people are drawn into a barren 
 conflict on one side or the other, and all receive a 
 one-sided warp, being no longer capable of holding 
 the entire situation in mental 'solution. They get the 
 superstition that their particular party holds so much 
 of the truth in its little sack that they must always 
 keep their party in power, to prevent their dangerous 
 opponents from having a chance to destroy the coun- 
 try with their depraved policy and heinous political 
 machinations. While they are thus saving the coun- 
 try, all the good measures proposed by the other party 
 are shelved, and as they themselves have no energy 
 left after saving the country to propose good measures 
 of their own, the country is being ruined at down 
 grade speed by its magnanimous saviours. The other 
 party becomes the saviour when it gets in, and has no 
 time for profitable measures, and by and by they all 
 reach a complete state of fossilage, hateful in the 
 extreme to every honest and clear mind, and fatal 
 in the extreme to the nation's weal. 
 
 4 Then the good see that what parties started out to 
 do they absolutely fail to do ; starting to govern the 
 country well, they not only govern it ill, they do not 
 govern it at all, and they therefore decide to break up 
 political parties. How do they do it ? They first of 
 all' 
 
 At this point in the book the general of the jail 
 discovered through informers what this seditious per- 
 son was engaged in, and sent ten of his bravest assist- 
 ants to put an end to it by placing the prisoner in 
 chains. Thus it did not appear what they first of all 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 49 
 
 did to break up political parties, nor what they did 
 after that. 
 
 But the intellectual crusaders had learned enough. 
 They said among themselves, ' The United States has 
 now had the small-pox of political parties and seems 
 in no fair way to recover. But if we can pull her 
 through, she need never have that vile incrustation 
 again. No man should belong to any party, except 
 to a party pledged to act independently of every party 
 and each member in it to a<5l independently of every 
 other member. There should be great proselyting for 
 this Party of Political Freedom, which would end by 
 being simply a Party of Freedom, and the only party, 
 and then no party. For when they became numerous 
 they would totally break up all party lines and 
 machinery, for if no party could rally the people to it 
 and hold a powerful contingent through thick and 
 thin, good and bad, it would break up. Then instead 
 of political parties there would be a country, a people. 
 Their minds would be liberated from the overpower- 
 ing mechanism of politics, and could search and weigh 
 the reasons for each thing proposed ; and thus being 
 instructed and having no party hanging over them as 
 a higher motive than the public good, twisting their 
 judgment and will, they would unite to enact the 
 good as any group of intelligent persons or a family 
 does.' 
 
 There being no sentiment as yet in favor of such an 
 all-embracing party of intelligence and freedom, how- 
 ever, the discoverers of the hemisphere of life deter- 
 mined to try the experiment among themselves, and to 
 show in this winning and unanswerable manner what 
 
50 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 a round-about way society was traveling to reach no- 
 where, when a beautiful region lay near and straight 
 before it. They therefore formed an embryonic 
 state within the old state husk, the units of which were 
 a new community in each community. These commu- 
 nities consisted of a number of friendly persons who 
 agreed that politics was not a separate function of 
 life, and that it therefore needed no separate atten- 
 tion. Having a separate politics was as if a farmer 
 should call upon a neighbor to form his family and 
 hired help into committees and bureaus to lay out and 
 correspond and vote about his, the first farmer's, 
 work. While the second farmer and his secretaries 
 were doing this, the first one would be going on as 
 usual with the work which was being legislated about, 
 with the difference that now the farmer had to sup- 
 port not only his own farm group, but that which he 
 had appointed to build air-castles and cast votes con- 
 cerning it. 
 
 Abolishing all this pretty paraphernalia, they 
 adopted the new code of life in which they believed, 
 and began without preliminaries or authorization to 
 carry it out. For instance, without waiting for the 
 unsanitary officials to leave their duties unperformed 
 through all coming time, they voluntarily took the pro- 
 crastinated functions upon themselves as far as their 
 numbers permitted. They invited any who believed 
 in the usury of good health to join them, and this way 
 of putting it won the throng who were looking for a 
 good investment, and would have preferred typhus to 
 helping them if they had called it the socialism of 
 good health. In all things they were very sagacious 
 
A I^AGUE OF JUSTICE. 51 
 
 
 
 about the use of words, and they found they could 
 drag the public wherever they wanted to take it by 
 the tag of a syllable. 
 
 For example,- when they wanted to do anything 
 with the co-operation of all, they advertised that they 
 had a laissez faire plan on foot, and every business 
 man sent a thousand dollars to aid the individualistic 
 project. If they wanted to abolish a function of gov- 
 ernment they told the people it was paternal, with a 
 squint of Socialism in it, and everybody went into a 
 passion to abolish the function' before night. By 
 merely saying that it was anarchistic for the govern- 
 ment not to own land and everything by which any- 
 thing is produced, the people one day nationalized 
 everything, men as well as shops and railroads and 
 land, for they said men produced things and it was 
 worse to have men who were anarchists than shops 
 which were, so men must be socialized. The authors 
 of this experiment next day remarked that it was not 
 anarchistic but individualistic to have shops and land 
 private, and immediately everything was unnational- 
 ized. Thus they played on the intellectual American 
 middle and upper classes as on a piano out of tune. 
 
 The health of the community improved so rapidly 
 under their sanitary management, that the public 
 boards and departments, which had been drawing 
 salaries and neglecting their duties ever since sanita- 
 tion was discovered, resigned and left the field 
 entirely to them. So they took one department after 
 another out of the government or municipal control, 
 first carrying it on in a small way among themselves, 
 then having a great augmentation of numbers from 
 
52 A I Y KAGUK OF JUSTICE. 
 
 
 
 those admiring the way it was conducted and wishing 
 to enjoy the benefits of it. Government by that time 
 being in a minority, was compelled by the ballot to 
 turn the function over to them unreservedly. 
 
 Of course political parties had no part in this pro- 
 cess except to fight it, but after they had been worsted 
 in one thing after another and driven completety from 
 the field in every important government enterprise, 
 they gave up in disgust and their members turned 
 respedlable citizens. 
 
 They then built in every town and city a forum, or 
 several of them, commensurate with the needs of the 
 city, where the people could assemble and make one 
 another's acquaintance, where they could loaf and 
 enjoy themselves, each other, and the sun, where they 
 could discuss, hear addresses, debate, and project and 
 agree to public measures. The plain halls had grown 
 to these, and for the winter use there were covered 
 forums. Life became diversified and centralized ; 
 men's and women's eyes grew keen and beautiful ; 
 they were interested in life. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 DISCOVERY ON A SUFFICIENT SCALE. 
 
 But in carrying the reader forward over results 
 which occupied nearly a quarter of a century, I have 
 left him in suspense about the fate of the organiza- 
 tion of embezzlers to whose considerable exertions all 
 these splendid transformations were due. Going back 
 ten years events of a most portentous character trans- 
 pired. It was then that the entire league was 
 unearthed, fourteen years after its inception. 
 
 The discovery came through an accident of nature 
 which the wisdom of man could neither provide against 
 nor foresee. The private secretaries of the founders 
 were as noble, pure-minded, zealous and reliable as 
 the fathers of the league themselves. But their work 
 grew so heavy that from time to time it was necessary 
 to increase their number. So great was the caution 
 required for a suitable selection, that a considerable 
 period sometimes elapsed before the proper person was 
 found. During one of these periods, when the burden 
 upon the college of correspondents was uncommonly 
 great, one of the secretaries was suddenly taken with 
 an insanity which had slept in his family for two gen- 
 erations, and of which none of the guardians of the 
 league were cognizant, the parents and grand parents 
 of the capable and excellent man having appeared 
 sound in every respect. 
 
 This secretary disappeared, and a week later certain 
 
54 A I,KAGUK OF JUSTICE. 
 
 simultaneous arrests were made, two of whom were 
 tin- League's founders. It was rumored about the 
 country by telegraph that a stupendous organization 
 of employes existed for the purpose of robbing em- 
 ployers. Kverybody hastened to examine his books, 
 and so many discovered themselves victims that a 
 panic -, piead over the entire commercial population. 
 A IK stfl wen- made to the number of hundreds a day. 
 No man conld tell but all his clerks were in lea 
 against him, and many an employer had his whole 
 stall 'jailed. The officials and police lost their heads 
 dnriiii', that peiiod, and no evidence but the suspicion 
 oi a capitalist was ie<|iiiicd to throw a thousand men 
 into pi ison. 
 
 Tin- heii/.v reached itS lull Im v when the police, b. 
 multiplied to ninety seven times their usual numbci 
 which gave empluvmcnt to work iiivjneii having been 
 MTe8ting m : .;ht and day l.i a week, swept down upon 
 
 the lieu-. papel ollicc-, <il tile Icav'Ueaild ca 1 1 led c\ 'el V 
 
 cditni nil In irons, The total number of incarcerations 
 
 hovncd about .-.,'. thatdav. although the Society 
 
 all told had but 50, meinbeis. and most ot them 
 
 had been omitted in the arrests, because oi the conii 
 
 deuce Iheil elU].]o\ ( ; d ill then c \ t 1 aoi dilUl V 
 
 lidelit\. Some n| the aiicstcd OHCS \\lio \veie not 
 made D| leavllc Ult(;;llt\ had becll stealin;.; a little oil 
 then own account, and thinking the whole diMuib.iurc 
 w:is occasionc'd b\ that ( loi thc\ had seen that the 
 Hull ol a cent 01 .1 COtton haudkci chid \\ould thio\\ a 
 licli emploNci into Convulsions ol tempci loi hor. 
 th< \ beli-\cd that tin 11 <loom had couu . 'Pho-,c \\ho, 
 
 licni;; ( \tl<IMcl\ cn\\ed 1\ til*' 1 1 id 1 1 '-t 1 1 . 1 1 ,', 1 .1 lldcll 1 ol 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. >> 
 
 their employer and his divine power to make beggars 
 of them, feared that they might have stolen something 
 without knowing it, were in a state of heart-rending 
 grief and sent for their ministers, who, however, did 
 not dare to come lest they should be thought to con- 
 done the criminals, and should lose the support of 
 their employers. But there were several out of the 
 quarter million who declared in wrath that were it not 
 for the free food and the rest they were now having 
 for a few days, they would fight the unjust scoundrels 
 the employers and their system, when they got out, if 
 they ever did alive. 
 
 The prisons did not begin to be large enough and 
 the criminals were lodged in the school-houses, which 
 were easily convened into keeps for the parents of 
 those who were wont to be confined there. The chil- 
 dien, on their part, hailed their liberation witl^ eesv 
 tacy, cheering their ' >rs the police as tbe 
 
 school children ot Uud.ip, s before, freed by an 
 
 epidemic ot cholera, cried, long live the cholera* 
 
 The militia were called out. Init most ot them had 
 been arrested and could not come. The regular aum 
 and navy were put in motion, toi it was well kr., 
 that theii mummied minds were nntlecked 1>\ any 
 tiling relating to the process ot the times. 
 
 In the memory ot the living only the days when 
 Sumpter was tiled against and Lincoln O&SaSSinattd 
 bore the palest u-semMance to the lurid v;loom ot this 
 period, and in thesinistei annals ol luston tlu-te ate 
 tew spols wheu- sueh v;uashim; constei nat UMI is u --M-. 
 teu-d as settled do\\ n upon the Ameiiran -oi, linen! 
 through thai event. business la\ dead. I.M u, man. 
 
56 A IvKAGUK OF JUSTICE. 
 
 not even a business man, thought of buying, selling 
 or working in the silent but terrific excitement of the 
 time. 
 
 The capitalist dailies came out in fifty-page extras 
 each hour, spreading new particulars, most of them 
 false. Every man knew intuitively that he was 
 ruined and dared not face a microscopic examination 
 of his affairs. No one doubted that hundreds of thou- 
 sands of the plunderers were still at large, brushing 
 against them on the streets and preparing to complete 
 their annihilation of society. They expedled the 
 prisons to be stormed by these desperadoes, where- 
 upon they were assured a universal massacre of them- 
 selves would ensue, and with money in their eyes 
 they besought the authorities to execute the few cap- 
 tured culprits without delay or the formality of any- 
 thing but a presidential proclamation couched in 
 court-martial literature. They hoped that this sug- 
 gestive step would avert the perpendicular drop to 
 pre-adamite barbarism which would follow if the civil- 
 ized and humane capitalists bit the dust, and they 
 said the world might as well not be peopled at all as 
 not be peopled by them. 
 
 The self-control of the authorities, including the 
 president with his cabinet ills and chattels, was now 
 beyond resuscitation, and these executionary mea- 
 sures of slaughter would undoubtedly have super- 
 vened had not one of the league inventors interfered. 
 He sent word to the president of the Republic, 
 requesting to be allowed to confer with his three col- 
 leagues in originality, for the purpose of allaying 
 the crisis. The prayer was granted, under a strong 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 57 
 
 guard of armed men and a stenographer. He pro- 
 posed to inform the authorities of the existence of the 
 league's annals, in order to put them in possession of 
 the assuaging truth. He pointed out to his associates 
 that the league had now accomplished its mission, 
 and according to the solemn compact of each who had 
 joined, all were now bound to face with steady mind 
 the full consequences of their pioneering career. 
 Death was staring at them darkly from gas-posts, 
 but if they continued silent several times their num- 
 ber of innocent persons would perish also. He there- 
 fore advocated calling upon the chieftains of each city 
 to notify all the members, through their group chiefs 
 (where these had not been imprisoned), of their plan 
 of preserving the Republic and saving the innocent 
 from butchery, so that each might deliver himself up 
 to injustice voluntarily if his soul moved him 
 
 This was done. Up to that moment none of the 
 incarcerated leaguers, though pressed, prayed with, 
 threatened, bribed and tortured, had revealed a fact. 
 When the suggestion of the superior committee was 
 authenticated to them, all went to the astonished of- 
 ficers of their employers' law and gave themselves up. 
 The whole country tvas more paralyzed than before, 
 for if fifty thousand of the most invincibly true, pure 
 and beautiful characters alive had been chosen, these 
 would have been the ones. Black flags and crape 
 streamers were hoisted from the houses of all the capi- 
 talists to impress the populace with the sombre awful- 
 ness of this pulverizing collapse of human virtue, and 
 they felt secretly that with such a fifty thousand- 
 tongued example of clerical retribution it would never 
 
58 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 be possible for them to conduct their business of plun- 
 dering with security again. 
 
 The ancient rusty press of the country, now that 
 the great free popular press was silenced, had for 
 the first time in years an opportunity to make a few 
 coppers and be read, and was working day and night 
 to give voluminous extracts, digests and photographs 
 of the proceedings of the league, taken from the ten 
 bulky historical volumes which the secretaries had 
 compiled under the direction of the four patriarchs. 
 
 The law mercenaries and the capitalists now re- 
 gained the courage necessary to release the two hund- 
 red and forty-nine thousand persons who had been 
 wrongfully imprisoned, but when they saw the black 
 looks which these persons brought out of the school 
 houses in consequence of the sooty reputations they had 
 received there, the capitalists stood in greater fear than 
 before, and only saved their lives by having all these 
 menacing individuals put on the extra police force 
 where they could draw pay for doing nothing. This 
 gave healthy employment for working people, whose 
 support naturally had to come out of the private sub- 
 scriptions of the capitalists. T^ appease their wrath 
 and protect the capitalists, the clerk-police force was 
 armed with the usual club and a revolver, and they 
 went about drilling and showing great determination. 
 The fifty thousand actual offenders in prison were 
 entirely silent. 
 
 Of those released, a great many had been editors of 
 the People's Free Journal, for most of these editors 
 were entirely ignorant t of the incubating process by 
 which the grand news educators had been hatched. 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 59 
 
 These radiators of truth now began again their inter- 
 rupted publications. 
 
 The epileptic dread of the rich having somewhat 
 subsided again by the disposition of the reputation 
 ruined clerks in a standing- army of police two hund- 
 red and forty-nine thousand strong, and the tranquil- 
 izing discovery of limits to the dimensions of the 
 defaulters' organization, the clamor for instantaneous 
 death to the real criminals softened into a gurgling 
 determination to imprison them for life and confiscate 
 all the property of all as a slight reimbursement offer- 
 ing to the robbed, and to make their infamied "chil- 
 dren remember whose children they were. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THK TRIAL. 
 
 The customary formalities of law were entirely neu- 
 tralized in each mind by the aclinic rays of vengeance 
 which fulminated there, and the capitalists, who now 
 threw off all the amenities with which they usually 
 led the administrators of government and 'justice' 
 about, ordered the president of the self-governing 
 Republic to call his cabinet of executive tinkers and 
 the distinguished shavers of the supreme bench toge- 
 ther to settle the case as the capitalists required it 
 without delay. 
 
 The capitalists said that an extreme sentence must 
 be meted out to the astounding villains, and the boss 
 commercialist of the white house and his journeymen 
 said that it must. The capitalists said that the minds 
 of all future generations of employes could only be 
 rescued from fearful moral debauchery by the distri- 
 bution of summary retribution, and the presiding 
 executive mechanic said it was so. The capitalists 
 nudged the supreme benchmen and whispered that 
 the plebeian brains of their common servants the 
 dress-deifying clerks must be terrified against the 
 recurrence of such an unparalleled disaster, and the 
 viscous intellects of the rest of the common people 
 must be moulded into respect for law and the com- 
 mandments of revealed religion, which the shocking 
 magnitude and magnanimity of these atrocious crimes 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 6 1 
 
 had shaken, by a woe-creating realization of the pierc- 
 ing sorrows the squadron of justice was prepared to 
 saturate them with. The benchmen bowed assent in 
 respectful silence, holding their hats and wigs and 
 judicial scales in their adipose hands. 
 
 It was arranged for the trial to take place in the 
 metropolis, but from centre to ends of the country 
 none but indispensable activities were resumed and 
 hardly anybody ate. The steady stillness and order 
 of the common people was the subject of frequent 
 encomiastic salutatory cannonading from the capital- 
 ist press. 
 
 The trial opened with the examination of the four 
 founding patriarchs of the league, who were to repre- 
 sent the whole organization in trial but not in punish- 
 ment. 
 
 ' ' You may inform the Court of the grand aggregate 
 of your defalcations," said the president of the Repub- 
 lic, acting as supreme pontiff of the compound tri- 
 bunal, after having asked the capitalists if he might 
 do so. 
 
 The founder to whom this remark was addressed, 
 replied, speaking with a pivotal composure which 
 made his excellency tingle under his skin : ' ' Being 
 employed by a Trust I succeeded in extricating yearly 
 one million dollars." 
 
 Preside nt Extricated ! How long has this con- 
 tinued ? 
 
 The Founder Fourteen years. 
 
 President [with a deprecating gesture of conster- 
 nation in the direction of the capitalists] Do you 
 
62 A I.KAGUK OF JUSTICE. 
 
 mean to say you have robbed your employers of four- 
 teen million dollars ? 
 
 Founder I have taken fourteen million dollars of 
 the moneys that came into their hands. 
 
 [A murmur of astonishment runs through the court 
 room and is echoed outside where the streets are 
 blocked with people for miles away.] 
 
 The President [endeavoring to be satirical, but 
 trembling] Have others been as thrifty as you . in 
 unloading their employers' treasuries ? 
 
 Founder Those connected with Trusts have, in 
 most instances, appropriated one million dollars a 
 year. 
 
 President How many of your excellent associates 
 are ' connected with ' Trusts ? 
 
 Founder Not less than three hundred. 
 
 President Are we then to believe that not less than 
 three hundred millions yearly for fourteen years have 
 been stolen by your unprincipled imitators from Trusts 
 alone ? 
 
 Founder I did not say that. Many of the Trusts 
 have existed less than fourteen years, and the clerks 
 of others did not join us at first. Our books signify 
 the exact sum derived from each. The average 
 annual transactions of the I/eague have been one 
 hundred million dollars ; last year the income was 
 nearly three times that amount. 
 
 The President [drily] This is the story of a luna- 
 ti:, or of one who would buoy up his cause by fabu- 
 lous lying. You cannot impose on Us; industry would 
 not have survived this prodigious exhaustion a month. 
 
 The Founder [with the weary smile of one who 
 
A LKAGUK OF JUSTICE. 63 
 
 has shattered political economy against dull minds for 
 many a year.] The books of these firms, when inves- 
 tigated by experts instructed in our method, will 
 show. As to what trade or industry would bear, what 
 we have done is better proof than theories about it. 
 Society is in higher financial condition than it was 
 before this tax for the benefit of the common people 
 was levied. The more those .you call the ' lowest 
 ranks' receive, the better is the financial condition of 
 the whole. 
 
 President [growing red and frowning heavily] 
 You are not here to give lessons to the Executive and 
 the Bench in Political Economy. It is to be presumed 
 that Ourselves and this learned body of Judges can 
 speak on that subject with a little more wisdom than 
 an ordinary commercial clerk. 
 
 [Applause from the spectators' benches occupied by the 
 capitalists, and a sound of sibilant dissent from the 
 aisles back of the railing, where the working men and 
 women are packed, echoed again miles away. The 
 president being too angry to collect his economical 
 senses, the Chief Justice of the learned Bench takes up 
 the questioning.] 
 
 Chief Justice What is your salary ? 
 
 Founder One thousand a year. 
 
 C. Justice How long have you received so much ? 
 
 Founder Twenty years. 
 
 C. Justice And before that your salary was ? 
 
 Founder Twelve hundred dollars. 
 
 C. Justice [turning exultingly to the capitalists] 
 You see he was a second-rate man whose deficiencies 
 punished him with a reduction of wages. 
 
64 A I.KAGUK OF JUSTICE. 
 
 Founder All salaries and wages were cut when 
 mine was: 
 
 C. Justice [moving in his chair] How was that ? 
 
 Founder When the company consolidated with 
 others in a trust, the salaries of all who owned no 
 stock were reduced, as well as the wages of every 
 working man and woman in the entire system of 
 factories. The managers said there were plenty of 
 people who would work for less than we received 
 after the cut, and that their own profits must be in . 
 
 C. Justice [dejectedly interrupting] These details 
 do not bear on the point. Your previous salary, you 
 said, had been twelve hundred dollars for twenty 
 years. A very good salary, I should say. 
 
 Founder Allow me to correct you. I worked the 
 first ten years for five hundred dollars a year. My 
 pay was then raised to eight hundred. Five years 
 after it was raised to twelve hundred. With the trust 
 regime it was reduced to one thousand dollars, and no 
 proposition has since been made to raise it. 
 
 C. Justice That is a much larger sum than the great 
 majority of artisans receive, and appears to me ample 
 remuneration for mechanical clerical service. Capi- 
 tal deserves so much for the vast services she renders 
 to industry by existing, that the working people will 
 have to get along with less and less from this time on. 
 
 [Terrible groans lire heard in the streets as these words 
 are transmitted from mouth to mouth among 1 the peo- 
 ple. The Chief Justice continues:] 
 
 Will you now kindly tell us what part of the sums 
 you extricated from the firm you so faithfully served 
 you applied to the expansion of your private fortune ? 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 65 
 
 Founder No part. 
 
 C. Justice [putting on the well-known judicial 
 severity like an impressive ulster] You are speaking 
 under oath, and though an oath could mean but little* 
 to one of your deformity, try for the sake of your 
 country and the human race to speak the truth now. 
 
 Founder [laughing with fine enjoyment at the judi- 
 cial bombast] As every cent ever taken passed into the 
 hands of our agents who gave receipts, 
 
 C. Justice [interrupting] laying receipts! 
 
 Founder And as these distributors have kept the 
 strictest records of those to whom help was furnished, 
 the honesty of these accounts could be pretty correctly 
 tested. And what I say of myself is true of every 
 member of the association. 
 
 C. Justice [with a sneering smile] It is interesting 
 to hear one with your record telling of his honesty. 
 
 Founder But I will now say to you plainly, and 
 for the benefit of all the working people listening to 
 this trial throughout the world, that people who are 
 meagrely paid for their services to the rich would be 
 quite justified in 'stealing' from them on their own 
 account and for themselves. 
 
 [Prolonged and thundering- cheers follow this remark 
 and shake the building. The capitalists are frozen with 
 terror and the trial is delayed for some time.] 
 
 C. Justice [at length, turning to the president] Your 
 Sovereignty, I will relinquish to my colleagues the 
 pleasure of conversing with this singular individual. 
 
 Another Judge [levels his pertified eyes at the crimi- 
 nal and proceeds] Were you the originator of this 
 plan for the wholesale seduction of property? 
 
66 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 Founder I was. 
 
 Judge Inform the magistrates how, why, when, for 
 what, and to what purpose. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 THE FOUNDER'S STORY. 
 
 The Founder My father was a frugal, hard-work- 
 ing farmer, who finally underwent the fate so common 
 to that class, and lost his land after a succession of 
 mortgages. He had overworked for a long time to 
 avert the calamity, and died soon after it came. 
 I was then fifteen years old. A relative obtained a 
 position for me in a city store. My mother could not 
 see me go away alone at that age, breaking up the 
 family, and as her own home was gone she accompan- 
 ied me with the three younger children. She had 
 expected some rich town friends of her earlier years to 
 help make the way easier, but they forgot her. We 
 lived, as we had to, in poor quarters; my mother 
 sewed ; our joint wages barely kept us. Within three 
 years two of the younger children died. I had then 
 learned book-keeping and secured my present position. 
 We lived better upon my five hundred dollars a 
 year. My remaining brother entered a factory, but 
 never was strong enough to make the best wages, his 
 constitution having been impaired by the privations of 
 our first years in the city. Tenement house and fac- 
 tory life continued to bear unfavorably upon him, and 
 at the age of twenty-seven he died, leaving a broken- 
 down wife and two children, whom I sent to a coun- 
 try town and mainly supported until the children grew 
 
68 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 up. On account of these demands 011 my income I 
 never married. 
 
 I naturally asked myself if it was necessary for peo- 
 ple to be crushed and suffering burdened through 
 life as I and those near to me had been. My employ- 
 ers counted their .wealth in millions ; each owned sev- 
 eral sumptuous houses and lived in the tropics of 
 luxury. I knew of a great number of business and 
 idle men with similar possessions and similar habits of 
 life. Pondering these disturbing contrasts, I discov- 
 ered a clue. If these millionaires, greater and less, 
 would set aside annually in the ratio of their posses- 
 sions a sum for the simple, designed, chosen, express 
 purpose of altering the social foundation upon which 
 the poor stand, and would themselves, with the same 
 interest, energy and intelligence they display in com- 
 mercial affairs of their own, originate and carry for- 
 ward such an alteration, or would appoint intelligent 
 and capable agents to do it, as they choose agents in 
 their own business, there would soon be neither occa- 
 sion nor possibility of such a life as mine or of such 
 death as had pruned my family down. 
 
 I reasoned that the rich could spare enough for this 
 beautiful end without curtailing a comfort, and, 
 absorbed in my vision of the ineffable happiness and 
 power of life and character they would bestow upon 
 innumerable others by these slight sacrifices, I 
 dreamed that it was only necessary to reveal to them 
 the marvelous commission they held to lead the old 
 world many a day's journey toward paradise and per- 
 fection, to start in them an earnest and perpetual 
 fondness for this benign generalship. 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 69 
 
 I arranged a lucid plan, showing, ' with a little 
 money this can be done, with a little more that, and 
 with yet more these fifty excellent inventions can be 
 mobilized, and by the time they are in action half of 
 t\\e poverty and suffering will capitulate, and in less 
 than twenty-five years the whole face of the earth will 
 wear a renovated and unrecognizable aspect.' I set 
 forth in columnar demonstration being a man of fig- 
 ures and business the sums which could be spared 
 from domestic expenditures by the capitalists to meet 
 this outlay, and proved that there would be a surplus 
 for theatres left. 
 
 Having thus fastened the plan together with un- 
 breakable bands of fact and screws of reason, I ap- 
 proached the emotional side of the subject and wrote 
 a sagacious paragraph on the cogency of commencing 
 this grand sociological migration under the stimulat- 
 ing concluctorship of the great capitalists, for if they 
 initiated it, so commanding is the authority of true 
 worth, high character, bottomless brains and cyclo- 
 pean wealth, that the men of littler worth, character, 
 brains and property, would speedily get into the pro- 
 cession. This paragraph I reserved for the richest, 
 and it won me many warm admirers, offers of per- 
 sonal advancement, scholarships in the universities 
 which they had to dispose of, and the management of 
 newspapers, especially if I would write leading arti- 
 cles setting forth my opinions on this subject. 
 
 I managed to shut all these flattering openings with 
 my next sentence, which implied in the most etherial 
 language I knew, never an unambiguous word being 
 used throughout the whole, that a revolution was 
 
yo A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 walking the capitalist's way, which might reach and 
 destroy him before he heard of its existence if some 
 good-hearted person -like me did not a<5l as sentinel to 
 warn him. 
 
 I then came down to strict oratory and told the cap- 
 italists with impassioned utterance that they were the 
 ones and the only ones who could save us from the 
 danger of violence. ' Think of it ! ' I cried in mighty 
 wrath, ' The wealth of the country, the shops and rail- 
 roads and everything else are under your control and 
 owned by you. You are conducting these things in 
 a manner which brings absolute ruin upon a great 
 many, and wretchedness, disappointment and collapse 
 of hope upon a great many more. Can I change this ? 
 I do not own the things. Can the middle class change 
 it ? They again, are only small, uninfluential owners. 
 Can the working people, those who are suffering 
 most, change it ? No ; for you and not they own and 
 operate the causes of their sufferings. And you, yoii 
 could change it, can change it when you will ; you can 
 avert the violent rising of the masses which is possi- 
 ble. By applying the wealth which the masses have 
 made for you to placing industrialism on a different 
 basis and carrying society wisely through the transi- 
 tion it is about to make in some manner to a higher 
 plane, you could render some recompense for the pro- 
 digious wrongs you have done the poor in degrading 
 them by robbing them, some recompense to society for 
 bringing it to the edge of destruction. 
 
 ' You are responsible, you rich, you capitalists : not 
 you as a system, but you personally, each one of you. 
 You are public enemies. You can only redeem your- 
 
A I.KAGUE OF JUSTICE. 7 1 
 
 selves from this stain by acting soon and undoing the 
 infamous hurt you have done all. You, then, I brand 
 and attack. You, each ; not a shadowy impersonal 
 thing called the ' social system.' You board and bed 
 the social system, fire it up and run it, own, manage 
 and milk money out of it, and then you plead innocence 
 of its crimes ! Oh, blameless ones, you are the mur- 
 derers of everyone murdered by this system, the cause 
 of all the terrible ruin to human beings it accom- 
 plishes. You are the dire, callous, devilish cause. 
 Repent and turn your stolen riches to undo this, or the 
 down-trampled, infuriated people will find you out, 
 and then what ? ' 
 
 Armed with this subtle document I visited the cap- 
 italists, going first to those who employed me. The 
 great leading man in our concern, w y ho had worked 
 himself up to that summit by the death of his father, 
 was affable, listened to my sketch and then to what I 
 could say in its favor, restraining his deliberating 
 judgment until all was through. Then he spoke, and I 
 saw how it was that he was such a power in the world. 
 "You have excellent ideas," he said in measured, 
 anathematical tones, and the north star seemed to 
 revolve about him, " but they are not practical. In 
 two or three thousand years they may be practical. 
 As an irresponsible clerk everything looks extremely 
 simple to you. My great responsibility on your 
 shoulders for just one clay would crush you to atoms, 
 and you would understand why it is not practical. 
 Responsibility opens one's eyes and makes him practi- 
 cal. Now I am . practical ; and just in a practical, 
 friendly way I must advise you not to spend too much 
 
72 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 time flying your little theoretical kites and telling peo- 
 ple how to improve. We don't want people to 
 improve, we want tfrem to work, and you belong to 
 that number." 
 
 He had reached ground where he was at home, 
 beating the brains out of working people according 
 to the scriptures of industry ; his concentrated eyes 
 bulged, and lest they should split or fly out of his 
 head at me like bullets, I thought it was time to go. 
 .Where was his affability ? I had forgotten that I was 
 only his workingman. 
 
 I was not discouraged. For several months, after 
 hours, I wandered on my pilgrimage among the capi- 
 talists. Some refused to see me, saying their time was 
 too precious for the contemplation of charitable ob- 
 jects; some were wroth because they averred I threat- 
 ened them in saying that they and they alone held the 
 key to the situation and could avert violence, and 
 they declared I ought to be imprisoned to keep me 
 from spreading my ridiculous nonsense about them ; a 
 third lot took it as a good joke. " My good fellow," 
 said one, " these working people get all they deserve. 
 They would spend the rest in drink and idleness." 
 
 I replied I had never heard any one say that before, 
 and asked him if he thought that I, who had lived 
 long among the poorest and had been one of them, 
 ought to know. 
 
 "Ah, but you don't know as well as I do," he 
 responded." 
 
 "But how do you know? " I insisted. 
 
 " A member of my family who represents intellect, 
 
A I,E:AGUK OF JUSTICE. 73 
 
 and is in fact a trained intelligence, keeps an eye on 
 the slums," he said. 
 
 " Read this," I remarked, passing him an editorial 
 from the London Times on the subject of a new free 
 library in East London. 
 
 " It won't change my mind," he answered, but he 
 read it. 
 
 " In the first place," he read, " people whose earn- 
 ings are such as to make every six-pence spent a 
 serious matter, cannot buy books, even cheap ones. 
 In the second place and the consideration is still 
 more important if a whole family has to live in two 
 rooms, there is neither room for the reader nor 
 for his books ; nor is there likely to be much of the 
 necessary quiet." 
 
 ' The Times was never known to embellish the bar- 
 renness of the poor," I suggested. "There are 
 * whole families' that have to live in two rooms." 
 
 " I know how to answer that," said he. " I've 
 heard it answered before." 
 
 "How?" said I. 
 
 Said he, "That is in London, not in Americ^. 
 This is a free country and we do not have such things. 
 And if we have them it's the fault of the two-roomed 
 people, who have not brains to earn more than two 
 rooms. There's nothing bad about living in two 
 rooms either. The intelligent member of my family 
 has found plenty of families, children and all, liv- 
 ing in two rooms and perfectly happy, contented and 
 religious. Go to Europe with your plan, for it is not 
 needed here." 
 
 " Do the two-roomed people read ? " I interjected. 
 
74 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 "Read?" cried he, "why should they read? I 
 don't read ? " 
 
 " Break your rule and look at this," I said. 
 
 " Is it long ? " queried he. 
 
 " The words are not long," was my rejoinder, " but 
 perhaps I had better read it to you." 
 
 " Do so," he acquiesced. 
 
 I read : 
 
 " The testimony of Mr. George R. Humphery, who 
 has been in charge for twenty years of the books read 
 by factory people in England, in regard to their read- 
 ing habits and opportunities is worth something to the 
 thousands of persons in New England who are con- 
 nected with the factories as operatives, an.d who have 
 limited opportunities for reading. He well states the 
 difficulties under which any trustworthy and success- 
 ful work is accomplished by the industrial classes. In 
 the first place, very few of these people can afford a 
 separate room for study. Again, they are constantly 
 compelled to work overtime, and this interferes with a 
 regular course of study. It either prevents the 
 attending of classes at an evening school, or it renders 
 a man unfit to read at home. If the men are serious 
 to become masters of their trade, they must spend 
 some time in the evening in working out problems 
 that have perplexed them during the day. They aie 
 often without work, and the difficulty of obtaining 
 new positions interferes with their regular acquisition 
 of knowledge. All these drawbacks interfere with 
 the regular reading or study of the working classes. 
 They must be remembered when we consider what it 
 is possible for them to accomplish.' " 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 75 
 
 ' ' Would you like some more? " I asked. 
 
 ' 'I didn't ask for any of it," said he. 
 
 ''Take a little more, then, while you have the 
 chance," I remarked; and I recited a few more 
 extracts about " these people." 
 
 " ' It is only a limited degree of reading that is pos- 
 sible to our factory population. . . . The most that 
 can be done for the intellectual improvement of these 
 people is to supply them with such works of fiction or 
 biography or of popular scientific exposition as are 
 within their comprehension. . . . For the most part 
 the readers among the working classes are persons 
 who are not prepared by education to take up what is 
 profound and thorough.' ' 
 
 ' f What agitator wrote that incendiary stuff ? " he 
 questioned contemptuously. 
 
 "The Boston Herald,'* was my answer; "April 
 1 3th, 1893." 
 
 Said he, " It's terrible when a reliable capital sheet 
 prostitutes itself like that. If these silly newspapers 
 do not keep the truth out of sight a little more skil- 
 fully we shall take a header into chaos." 
 
 "So I said in my epistle to the capitalists," I 
 added. 
 
 "But not in your way, and not by our fault," 
 wailed he. It'll be because the common people do 
 not know anything and want to own everything. ' ' 
 
 " Give them a chance to read and learn," finished 
 I, quitting him. 
 
 By this time I thought it trying enough to visit 
 native capitalists without attempting European ones 
 as I had been bidden. 
 
76 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 The next one gave me a dissertation on my one-eyed 
 way of looking at things. " Open the other side of 
 your brain," quoth he, "and use that awhile. Go 
 and improve the people"; spend your energies that way ; 
 make them meek, teach them obedience to their em- 
 ployers ; don't be finding fault with us rich, world with- 
 out end. I'm tired of hearing it. Fault-finders never 
 accomplish anything. Tell the common people their 
 duties to us. They don't work half as much . as we 
 want them to ; they are not faithful. The trouble with 
 them is they need religion. I haven't any opinion of 
 your plan, but let me tell you you must be broad- 
 minded and all-sided or you can't get any influential 
 person interested in it." 
 
 After this I reflected a few days, having learned 
 something. I had been a child before. Now I was a 
 man. I had ascribed the conduct of the rich men's 
 lives to their ignorance, thinking that if they knew 
 the hell they create and keep in running order and 
 temporally eternalize for the working many of man- 
 kind, they would swiftly stop its mouth up, close its 
 furnaces, and fill up its lakes. Now I knew better. 
 I now saw that they were determined to live on as 
 they liked though hell ate up the poor here and 
 hereafter. Now I realized that their course of life 
 was deliberate, intentional, planned, and the cause of 
 it I realized impregnable .selfishness, irreducible 
 indifference and a petrifaction of soul not to be dis- 
 solved or granulated. 
 
 The winged truth sped through my mind that if I 
 went to the ocean and prayed and appealed to it, I 
 should accomplish more than by appealing and palter- 
 
A I.KAGUE OF JUSTICE. 77 
 
 ing to the rich for justice, humanity and restoration to 
 the poor. " Abandon our luxuries, abandon one lux- 
 ury to give those coarse, remote, servile animals, the 
 common people, food and decency and happiness and 
 life ? We the hyper-excellent, drawing-room distilled, 
 soul-washed-and-ironed, blood-desiccated, picked-over 
 and sieved for two generations like skimmed flour 
 bereft of its wheatfulness, we, the capitalists, aban- 
 don a privilege or luxury for the unsifted proletarian 
 slum-soiled millions living down in the bowels of 
 nowhere ? No ; the earth is ours and the fulness 
 thereof, ours shall it remain forever and ever." 
 
 "Yes," repeated I, without knowing what I said, 
 moved by some power in the elements about me. 
 ' ' Yours it shall remain while the clammy sky of the 
 slums coagulates the brains of the anthropoid fishes 
 who swim in those gases; but what if they should 
 rise to the light and read the sacred message of re- 
 sistance ? ' ' 
 
 I was very much disheartened. To confirm my 
 despondency came a notice from the shrine of the tab- 
 ernacle of the trust where I sacrificed myself, that my 
 place would be needed for someone else if I continued 
 to stir up the social sediment with the broken reed of 
 demagoguery . ' You have not neglected your duties, ' 
 oracled the note, ' but you are busying yourself with 
 things which not concern you and may make us 
 poor indeed ; you are making yourself a target of ridi- 
 cule in the decorating eyes of the financial archangels.' 
 
 It had already ceased. ' Go with your staff of 
 progress to stir up the capitalists to righteousness and 
 public salvation,' said I, 'and it will be with you as 
 
78 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 it was with the man who went to stir up the philan- 
 thropic sentiments of the surface of the sun.' 
 
 But they had vowed that nothing could be done, 
 not if they gave the money 'to the new laying of social 
 bed-rocks, not if they gave ten thousand times ten 
 thousand more than they had to give. I concluded to 
 show them what could be done. You know the 
 results. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 SENTENCE. 
 
 The Judge The results! Yes, you have corrupted 
 society, you have undermined respect for law, you 
 have struck a stunning blow at morality and religion.; 
 for you have robbed, defied the commandments, 
 trampled on sacred Trusts, and all the good you falsely 
 lay claim to springs from this million-fold greater 
 evil! 
 
 Founder What we have done was not robbery. 
 
 All the Judges [in great excitement] What is that 
 you say ? Have you not taken millions which did 
 not belong to you ? 
 
 Founder We made ourselves the agents of tho^e 
 who were robbed and overreached to restore to them 
 their property. If a man steals your pocket-book, 
 and I, without the knowledge of the thief, take it 
 away from him and return it to you, am I a thief? 
 
 Judge This is rank anarchist absurdity ! No one 
 has stolen but your precious crew. The rich whom 
 you call robbers have broken no law or they would 
 have been prosecuted and imprisoned. 
 
 Founder What if a party of thieves formed the 
 strongest element in a community and made a law 
 saying it was right and legal for them to take the pro- 
 perty of all men : would that make it right ? 
 
 Judge No. 
 
 Rounder And if some other men secretly took from 
 
80 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 the law-makers and robbers what they had legally 
 wrenched from other citizens and returned it to them, 
 that would be right ? 
 
 Judge It would. - 
 
 Founder That is what we have done. 
 
 Judge A fine argument so far, but I am waiting 
 to see how you make out that the rich are the robbers. 
 
 Founder Any man who takes and uses for himself 
 more than is necessary for his life and health and de- 
 velopment, or for the life, health and development of 
 those dependent on him, while others lack what is 
 necessary for their life, health and development, is a 
 robber. 
 
 Judge Ah, you say this, do you ! And these are 
 your fine principles ! 
 
 Founder Yes, and I will not be so vague either, 
 for the opportunities of all must be equal and he who 
 would make any of them private property while others 
 have less is a robber. 
 
 Judge Such doctrines -would destroy the founda- 
 tions of property and wreck society. People of your 
 depraved stamp are only fit for the mad house, the 
 prison or the gallows, and I think the prison will be 
 the place for you. 
 
 Founder I have done my life work and now it 
 matters little what comes to me. We have proved by 
 a right application of a portion of the surplus wealth 
 of society, that society can be radically transformed, 
 the individual members of it made infinitely more 
 virtuous and intelligent, and suffering and misery 
 caused almost to disappear in a few years. What 
 would the whole surplus luxury-wealth of the coiyitry 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 8 1 
 
 do if expended thus ? I now realize that a century of 
 such expenditure would do for society what it is 
 wholly impossible to imagine, for I apprehend it would 
 produce of mankind a race as far above us as we are 
 above the variegated African- Ethiopian in his primi- 
 tive jungle. What you do with us will only brace our 
 work ; the fruits of it will be ever greater, never 
 less. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE PEOPLE, AT LAST. 
 
 [It is the following day. The place is the same, and the 
 streets are more densely packed, for millions have been 
 arriving from every direction during the night. 
 The president of the Republic has recovered his sanity 
 and composure and opens the court.] 
 President We have conferred during the night and 
 discussed the uncontradicted testimony obtained as it 
 were from the very teeth of your conspiracy. We feel 
 our station somewhat elevated in life although 
 that could scarcely be unless crowns were placed upon 
 our heads elevated by the sublime destiny centripe- 
 talized in us as vindicators of God and Abraham and 
 Moses and all the owners of property since their time, 
 as well as of the divinely inspired writers 011 the sub- 
 ject of property. We seem to be chosen instruments 
 to pick the fragments of morality up out of the slime 
 into which you have cast them, and to write again the 
 ten commandments for the future on tables of immortal 
 gold. How great should be our reward in heaven for 
 this service ! greater still our reward on earth [the 
 capitalists applaud], and our names should be en- 
 scrolled with those of Lycurgus, Jeremiah, William 
 the Conqueror and other legal sages. [" They shall 
 be, we swear it," whispered the capitalists, "it won't 
 cost much."] 
 
 To tie down virtue on this planet, which was about 
 to fly away dismayed at your blaspheming, we consign 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 83 
 
 your fifty thousand bodies to fifty thousand dungeons 
 while they live and to fifty-thousand doctors when they 
 are dead, and we decree that your entire worldly pos- 
 sessions shall be turned over to the capitalists who 
 have suffered from your gigantic flintiness of heart. 
 
 One of the League They '11 not get much, we used 
 our property for the good of the race. 
 
 President And we further ordain that all proper- 
 ties such as printing presses, buildings, co-operative 
 factories and the like, which can be directly or indi- 
 rectly traced to funds taken from employers shall be 
 turned back to them. 
 
 A Man in the court room This will ruin the peo- 
 ple's journals ! 
 
 Another Man And keep us from knowing the 
 truth about anything, as it used to be. 
 
 [As the judgment makes its way outside, groans are 
 heard which finally become so terrible that the court 
 windows break. 
 
 President And finally be our will known, that 
 whosoever has received aught of these capitalists' 
 moneys, whether women, children or strikers, shall be 
 holden to reimburse these sums, and the titles of all 
 farms and houses which have been purchased for the 
 poor in any place shall be made over to those from 
 whom the money to buy them came. 
 
 A Woman - Now we are undone indeed. My house 
 will go. 
 
 An Old Man Oh this cruelty ! The capitalists 
 will own everything. 
 
 Capitalist Now that is justice. Our protectors 
 cannot be intimidated. 
 
84 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 Second Capitalist It serves them right and is none 
 too severe. I would have had the four ringleaders 
 strung up. It's worse than murder to attack property. 
 I shall be fifty million dollars richer after this. 
 
 A Voice [cries exultingly] How will it be known 
 whom the stolen money went to help ? 
 
 [The jaws of all the capitalists drop; the president, 
 cabinet and judges look as if they had lost a year's 
 salary.] 
 
 A Bright Man in the crowd The volumes of the 
 League's records will show that, at least the Founder 
 said so. 
 
 The Multitude Destroy the records ! Destroy the 
 records ! 
 
 [The capitalists gather round the records which are in 
 the court room in a body, and the president com- 
 mands the regular army to prepare to fire on the crowd. 
 Word is sent to the police, including the two hundred 
 and forty-nine thousand who had been unjustly jailed, 
 to prepare for a general slaughter.] 
 A Capitalist A lot of these people ought to be 
 killed. If we don't make an example of them now 
 they'll never give us peace and profits again. 
 
 A number of working women [jostling the capital- 
 ists] You are the ones who ought to go to prison. 
 
 A Woman [shrieking at the top of her voice to the 
 working men] Oh you cowards ! 
 
 Capitalists [in low tones among themselves] This 
 is pretty serious. It is time to shoot. 
 
 Another Yes, blood always brings the scum to its 
 senses. 
 
 A Workingman in the court room Think what these 
 men have done for us. 
 
A 1.3 AGUE OP JUSTICE. 85 
 
 Second Workingman I would rather go to prison 
 for life myself. 
 
 Another The capitalists will soon have us down 
 on the ground again and then under ground. This is 
 damnable ! I can't stand it. 
 
 Another [stamping] If American workingmen 
 only had some of the blood of the Belgians in them ! 
 
 A Foreign Workman [calmly looking on] Ameri- 
 ican workingmen are the most cowardly in the 
 world. 
 
 Several Women [forcing their way through the 
 crowd in a frenzy] It's a lie. Before to-day's over 
 you'll know whether they're cowards ! 
 
 The President [mounting a chair] I command 
 the crowd in My name to disperse on pain of death. 
 The officers will conduct the prisoners to their doom. 
 
 A Woman [in hysterics] That man saved my 
 children from starvation when my husband died. 
 
 One of the Regular Policemen Some of those fel- 
 lows looked after my sick father when he lost his job 
 and the landlord turned him on to the street. 
 
 Ten thousand men on the outskirts of the crowd 
 [from the West, armed with shot guns] Did they 
 say we were to give our farms to the capitalists ? 
 
 Another squad [approaching in the distance] Oh 
 no, not yet ! 
 
 The President [stepping on to the table] Take 
 them to jail, I say ! 
 
 249,000 arrested clerk-police [sullenly] If we go 
 back to clerk for these capitalist robbers we'll steal 
 everything they have. 
 
 The Croivd outside We'll not desert our friends. 
 
86 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 The Capitalists [to the policemen] Do your duty 
 and take these villains to jail. 
 
 A Policeman [throwing down his club] I'll have 
 nothing to do with it. 
 
 Other Policemen [following his example] Nor I, 
 nor I. We've served you rich swine long enough. 
 We'll be bull dogs for you no more. 
 
 Capitalists Swine ! Do you dare call us swine ? 
 Remember we can hang you. 
 
 Policemen Animals who take all they can get and 
 leave others who cannot crowd their way to the food 
 nothing, are swine. 
 
 Capitalists, president and judges [frantically] 
 We'll double your pay ! 
 
 Policemen It's too late. You can't hire us now. 
 We're done working for money bags. We'll work 
 hereafter for justice and the people. 
 
 Chief of the armed 249,000 And you've got to 
 settle with us yet ! 
 
 [The noise without increases. 
 
 Later in the day the capitalists, president and judges, 
 with a few militia-men composed of butlers and foot- 
 men, together with the regular army and navy, have 
 fled to the banks and newspaper buildings and barri- 
 caded themselves in as best they could. 
 Immense throngs of people surge through the streets, 
 cracking the walls of the buildings with their momen- 
 tum. Meetings of the multitude are being held in the 
 squares and over the country for fifty miles out.] 
 
 Speaker [to the people : ] 
 
 For twelve years we have been living in light and 
 hope. We knew not what was doing this for us, but 
 
A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 87 
 
 now we know. Shall we abandon those who made 
 the noble venture and mighty sacrifice for us, who 
 took freedom in their hands, scorned fate, and devoted 
 their lives to making human beings of us ? 
 
 A Thousand Voices No! No! We're not such 
 poltroons ! 
 
 Speaker Shall we allow ourselves to be forced 
 back to that degradation and slavery from which we 
 and our class have been lifted for the first time in this 
 earth's annals ? 
 
 The Crowd [in long resounding cries] Never, 
 while one of us lives. 
 
 Speaker Then we must put an end to capitalism 
 now. We must finish that old accursed system from 
 which we have so long suffered. There's no half way 
 work possible any longer. Our old masters will grind 
 us to powder if we give them the upper hand again. 
 
 The Crowd Down with the masters ! Down with 
 capitalism ! 
 
 Speaker Then let us send a deputation to them, 
 giving them their choice. Either they may yield 
 peaceably and unite with us to organize society on a 
 just basis, or we notify them that we, the irresistible 
 people, will proceed to that work without them. 
 
 Many Voices [amid earth-shaking cheers] That 
 we will ! That we will ! 
 
 [/Scene Before the Stock Exchange, wliich is the princi- 
 pal capitalist fort.] 
 
 Spokesman for the Capitalists [from an upper win- 
 dow. The president and the regular army stand be- 
 hind him for protection] What if we refuse your 
 demands ? 
 
SS A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 Working People Then we shall ignore you and 
 set about completing the transformation of industry 
 Avhicli the men you have sentenced to prison have 
 carried so far and taught us how to carry farther. 
 
 Capitalist Spokesman Will you confiscate our 
 property ? 
 
 Working People It is not yours. We shall take the 
 property you abominably call yours, which you have 
 accumulated from us and through our labor, and make 
 an equal partnership, where you will have a voice if 
 you choose, but no more influential voice than anyone 
 else. 
 
 ('. Spokesman We will prevent that with arms. 
 We will die sooner than give up what is ours and 
 make terms to ruffianly social dregs and marauders. 
 
 Working People To every hundred of you there 
 are a million dregs. You can do nothing. No one but 
 the automaton army will sell himself to shoot down the 
 people oi his own class and blood for your benefit 
 :igain, ana the people can destroy the army if neces- 
 sary in ten minutes. You had better think twice. 
 
 CafiJtaiists [quaking among themselves] It is 
 true, we had. We are lost. 
 
 C. Spokesman [to the multitudes] You have no 
 competent leaders without us. 
 
 Marking People We are all leaders now, since we 
 have had a little education. We'll have more educa- 
 tion. We'll never give our bodies and destinies again 
 to bosses in this world ! 
 
 C. S/>okeswa/i But how can industry be organi/.ed 
 on an equality ? It is impossible. It would lead to 
 
A LEAGUE OP JUSTICE. 89 
 
 chaos. No one would save. The idle would live on 
 the industrious. 
 
 Working People That is what your newspapers 
 have always been saying, but the hundreds of mills 
 which the working people have come to own on that 
 very principle of equality since the League of Justice 
 began to distribute wealth a little more fairly, prove 
 that it is a lie. Working people save if they have 
 anything to save for and anything to save from. The 
 idle who have not inherited too bad an organization as 
 a legacy of the capitalists' regime are put under special 
 conditions of labor, and the really and thoroughly bad 
 are soon singled out and treated like the sick which 
 they are. Then they are known and treated and can- 
 not impose on the rest of society, as they could under 
 the old social Disarrangement. 
 
 Capitalists | altogether ; their eyes suddenly filling 
 with beams of hope] You'll at least leave us our 
 land and railroads and such things ? 
 
 Working People [with .scorn] We'll at least 
 leave you nothing of the sort. This is not a play rev- 
 olution. We propose to have the sources of wealth on 
 this earth used for human good, hereafter, not for your 
 private amusement you, a little shiftless group of 
 enormous spendthrifts, bragging ever and ever more 
 of economy and abstinence. 
 
 Capitalists [after earnest and protracted consultation 
 in which the army chaplain is several times called 
 upon to offer prayer] It is clear that we are beaten, 
 and we might as well make the best of a situation fof 
 which there is no help. 
 
90 A LEAGUE OF JUSTICE. 
 
 [They come down into the streets and are greeted with 
 cordial hand shaking's and thundering cheers by the pro- 
 pie.] 
 
 A Former Capitalist I see how the factory that was 
 mine can be run in common, give the largest possibility 
 for the initiative of all and not for the manager only, and 
 have the proceeds shared for the best development and 
 happiness of all too. I knew how this could have 
 been done all the time. 
 
 Surrounding People [hilariously] Oh, we know 
 how that can be done ! But none of it to-day. Let 
 every man, woman and child work for the banquet to- 
 night ! There never was a day like this ! 
 
 Another Former Capitalist This is life ! I've been 
 a dog all my days. I'm glad the change has come. 
 I 'in tired of slave-driving the working people. I breathe 
 for the first time now, and so many good years gone ! 
 
 People There never was a day like this ! 
 
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