Essays in Modernity: Criticisms and Dialogues/Democracy: a dialogue
DEMOCRACY
A DIALOGUE
DEMOCRACY: A DIALOGUE
I
He sat with his friend's letter in his hand, now looking at it and realising its phrases, now losing sight of the firm, clear, 'wingèd words,' in his dreamy and tender memories of their ancient friendship.
They had not met for seven years. And in those seven years it seemed that for both of them their souls had renewed themselves as completely as their bodies. Now they stood utterly apart. Once—then—they had stood so close. He had had but two intimate personal relationships with men in all his life, and they had both exerted great influence on him. One of them had passed almost away; the other still affected him powerfully. One was that of his old schoolfellow, Jack Daniel; the other was that of Charlie Goulburn, a young Irish-American 'Labour leader.' He had loved them both and admired them both, though in very different ways. He was not aware of it, but the lines on which he at last prepared to answer Daniel's cordial and even affectionate invitation to come and visit him were laid down more or less under the direct influence of the conscience of the other friend far away.
He wrote at first slowly and with effort, tearing up more than one false start, but at last his actual feeling became clear to him, and the pen raced.
'My dear Daniel,' he said, 'your letter gave me great pleasure. It brought back the full flood-tide of the memories of our boyhood and youth together. You cannot think how vividly some of our last nocturnal walks and talks still present themselves to me. I can still see us and hear us as we wandered about on that peerless summer's night through St. John's Wood (do you remember?), and stood and watched the dawn break from the upper ground by Primrose Hill. And again, that night down at Ventnor, when we went off for our winter holiday, how the downs were covered with a thin cloak of white snow, glistening faintly in the faint light of the crescent moon and the myriad stars; and then how we tramped all along the shore of the much-resounding sea to Luccombe Chine, and came back in the glorious dawn through the Landslip.
'Ah! those were careless and delightful days, such as neither you (I expect) nor I shall ever quite regain. We seemed to be very close together then, and yet I can see now how far away from one another we were in reality. When we parted that pouring rainy night in Edgware Road I could have cried. You meant very much to me then—I thought, everything. Brought up as I had been, a passionate believer in my caste, proud of my ancestral name, a ruthless young Tory, with no redeeming feature but his equally passionate belief in the creed of Noblesse oblige, you came to me as a sort of liberator from ideas, fine enough once perhaps, but now effete and harmful. You transformed my silly pride by teaching me the rights of others to work out their own salvation. You made me doubt and deny the heaven-born certainty of the mission of my caste to "lead." You showed me the physiological absurdity of "high birth," and the ridicule of taking mere social observances seriously. And all this (and how much more!) without a hard or cruel word, merely with gentleness, tact, and the indirect influence of your beautiful, kind, and serene personality. How was it, then, that, six months after my arrival in the States, I had ceased to write to you and you to me? that in twelve months we had lost all trace of one another? that in a few years I had grown to believe that all the actual product of our friendship was the sweetness of the intercourse of two young souls? Whether it was quite the same with you, I cannot, of course, be sure, but it seems likely enough. I had nothing to teach you—absolutely nothing. You never took Capital and its interests and obligations seriously. The fact of your father's immense wealth, and the little army of workpeople dependent on him, seemed to have little or no effect upon you. How disinterested you were in your philosophic consideration of everything! True, that in those days your elder brother was being trained for the management of the mills and factories, and you proposed to lead the life of the cultured dilettante; but your Liberalism—your Radicalism—I might almost say your Socialism (for as such I now recognise at least portions of your criticisms on the Fact Established)—often called in question the very existence of the whole thing; and so I received it.
'How is all this changed to-day! Four years ago, in the midst of desperate organising work in Chicago as a Labour agent—or, in your current parlance, I suppose, a "paid agitator"—I suddenly heard your name. The Christian name accompanying it could leave me in little doubt that it was my old friend who had stamped out, with an utterly ruthless energy, perhaps the most justifiable strike against the tyrannous iniquity of a capitalistic house (I mean your father and brother) that had occurred in England within the memory of man. By degrees I obtained more and more information on the subject, and it ended at last in convincing me of a horrible view of you. I remember well the evening when I first received the unescapable proof of this. Daniel, I went up into my wretched little bedroom in the icy loneliness of that cruel winter's night, with the blizzard lashing the rickety, trembling house, and lay on my face and sobbed (for I could not cry) over all that dear, sweet past of ours, and then rose, with my teeth clenched, and a murderous hatred and scorn of you burning like white-hot iron within me. It was long and long before that passed, and something like the kindly human tolerance we ultimately owe to all who are made of this frail flesh of ours came to me, for you. You see I am just the same vehement, passionate "partisan" that I always was, save, perhaps, that now I have lost the steady self-control which my training as an aristocrat gave me, and this I sometimes regret a little; for though it was based on the hateful sense of superiority over others, still, in this duel to the death of the possessors and the dispossessed, it is an instrument of very great value. Yes, I have grown to loathe and hate and despise my order; but believe me that, if it is possible, I despise and hate and loathe even more the order below it—the Middle class, the Shopkeepers; and this is the one ground of contact between my past and my present. Let me say at least this for my order. There are still men and women in it ready to admit the New Light, and to sacrifice themselves for it. Show to them the iniquity of their former privilege, and they will, many of them, voluntarily renounce it all, and throw in their lot with the exploited sufferers. Abuse the eighteenth-century French aristocrats as you please, but under Louis xvi. they were, many of them, noble and unselfish to a pitch unheard-of in any other dominant class in all history. But your Middle class—your Shopkeepers? Never, never! At all costs, save sheer "funk," they must have their pound (and somebody else's half-pound) of flesh. Oh, I have not lived seven years in the States without realising that the English landlord is an angel of reasonableness and mercy beside the American capitalist; and what is the American capitalist but the apotheosis of the Mercator Imperator? I have more hopes (small though they be) of our English gentlemen than of our English plutocrats, and of these last, you, my one time friend, have made yourself one of the most—famous. Do you know the reputation you have among the workmen of the period? For such reputations are international now, and the Labour leader of Chicago or Sydney listens to the story of the capitalistic leader of London, or Paris, or Berlin. You are more hated and more feared than any one employer in England; and this is the man without whose aid and guidance I should, in all human probability, to-day be the titled master of vast landed possessions, a waster of farms in the interests of game preserves, an expeller of men, women, and children for the sake of hares, partridges, and grouse.
'My friend (I still call you so, just as I still speak to you with absolute candour, for the sake of the memory of the old time), what should we gain by seeing one another now, and making, as perhaps we should make, the effort to renew the ancient intercourse? Let me recall to you the fact that the very palace (for so I am told it is) from which your letter came to me calls up the most hideous memories. Was it not at the courtyard gates of Felixstowe that a deputation of starving women, with starving children in their arms and at their milkless breasts, came to you at the bitter close of the strike, and told you that, if their husbands could not be taken on again, death stared them in the face? How could I approach those gates, and pass through them, and enter your house as your guest—as your friend?
'No, Daniel, no! Our paths lie in contrary directions, and must to the end. A chance gave you the means of writing to me. You took it, and for what you wrote I thank you. It was like a voice coming from the happiest period of my life. I answer you the only way that seems to me worthy of our old relationship, so true, so pure, so noble. Do not think me harsh and Pharisaical. I do not judge you—no, not for a minute. God knows I have had temptations enough in these years of dark and desperate combat, and there have been times when I came near to yielding. For to me, too, beauty and knowledge are very dear—art and music, literature and science. I too would "fain occupy myself with the abiding." But that, I think, can never be. That must be for our children's children, if even for them. But whenever it be, provided only that it be—not for a handful of them—not for a few—no, nor even for many of them, but for all—then I should indeed be content! Oh, it is worth fighting and dying a thousand times to possess such a hope!
'My friend, once more, your hand—for the last time. Good-bye.
II
Later in the next afternoon, sitting alone in the Russell Square boarding-house, in his bare and comfortless room, and thoroughly wearied out by a hard day's work, Hastings was suddenly aroused by a knock at the door, and informed by the servant-maid that a gentleman had come to see him, and was waiting downstairs. He followed her heedlessly to the drawing-room, where the gaunt and infrequent furniture looked more than ordinarily characterless and dingy in the one flaring gas-jet that she had evidently just lit. He expected some of his propagandist friends—he did not, in that dreary humour, care to guess which. He found himself face to face with Jack Daniel.
For some moments they stood and looked at one another, motionless and in silence, each recognising how much, and yet (in some way) how little, the other had changed; and then Hastings heaved a deep sigh, and turned his head away.
'Gerald, old man,' said the well-known voice, with just the old musical inflection, 'can't you trust me?'
Hastings looked at him quickly.
The soft, intensely black hair waved round the olive-hued face with its soft, intensely black eyes, full of a kindly, fearless, and simple sincerity, just as of old. The smiling self-security of the beautifully moulded lips and chin was not hid by the slight dark moustache. The physical charm of him, that something which had captivated the English pagan aristocrat schoolboy from the very moment when he first saw him—that something, too, of the picturesque and oriental element in the habitually calm, yet intensely resolute nature of the swarthy Northerner;—it was singular how at this moment 'the full flood-tide' (as he had said) of all these memories, the sweet and sane physical magnetism, with its spiritual counterpart of serene and perfect sincerity, touched with passion and mystery, caught and overwhelmed him, making him, despite himself, love and believe in his friend once more.
A minute later they were seated side by side on the faded and torturous sofa, talking like two schoolboys, Daniel's arm resting lightly on the other's shoulder.
'Now, Gerald,' he said, 'I want you to come right off with me. We will get down home in time for dinner, and then we will talk up in a starry turret till the dawn breaks, just as we used to do, and tell one another everything we have been doing and thinking and suffering all these seven years.'
After a short struggle with an already more than half-hearted reluctance, Daniel had his wish; led him down to the open carriage that was waiting at the door; put him into it; got in himself, and they drove off rapidly together.
'We have time,' said he, 'to drive all the way. We shall be in the fields and lanes in an hour, crossing over into the sunset, and we shall feel the purity and beauty of things breathe full in our faces again.'
'And so,' said Hastings a little dreamily, 'you are married. Have you any children?'
'Yes, three; two boys and a girl, though (happily) the girl comes in the middle in point of order.'
'Talk to me,' murmured Hastings; 'tell me about yourself. Do you know what I feel,' he added, with vague, sad eyes regarding the stream of foot-passengers, 'as I sit here in this luxurious carriage, and watch the pale and piteous faces? Oh, you will have much, very much, to explain to me!'
'Dear man, do you already repent that you trusted me?'
'No, no. I trust you; indeed I do. But it is hard. Perhaps some of those women in shawls there …' The vision of the lugubrious procession to the gate of Felixstowe rose before him.
'Oh, talk to me!' he said quickly. 'Tell me all about yourself! What did you do when I left England? Who is your wife? Is she beautiful? Was it she who made you believe in the Established Fact and fight for it? Weak women can do it to the strongest men, just as the fragile ground-creeper grows to strangle the giant tropical tree, and blooms in a wealth of poisonous honeyed blossom in its dying top before both fall in a common ruin.'
There was a pause.
Then Daniel said: 'I will try and tell you what you want to know, which seems to be the outline of my life since we parted. What underlies this—the spiritual struggle in the dark before I could win my way to any light—we can speak of another time; to-night, if you like, when we are alone.'
The carriage, drawn by its two thoroughbreds, passed swiftly along by unfrequented streets, and the roar of the London traffic died away into a continuous murmur, still loud, but not loud enough to muffle the clear, melodious voice of the speaker.
'You remember,' he said, 'that I wrote one or two letters to you at the ranche in Texas, telling you how Oxford impressed me, and I fancy that even then—that is, before I had been there more than a month—I felt I could not put up with much more of it. It was so obviously merely a continuation of Harrow, and I wanted something fresh and new. I wished to face life as a whole by touching it at many points, and Oxford to-day is at best the clever synopsis of academic futility. My father, chiefly owing to my mother, who had always a blind confidence in me, and to the lethargy consequent on growing ill-health, let me have my own way. I left at the end of the second term, and went to study in Paris. There, a few months later, I lost sight of you, A letter to you at the ranche was returned to me, with the intelligence that you had gone away and left no address; and it was, I see, just about that time that I discovered I was becoming as hopelessly restless and dissatisfied as I had been at Oxford. Renan was a great personal disappointment to me. A teacher of spirituality and an ideal philosophy was visibly ending an old age of universal disillusionment in gourmandise, and his ironically epicurean remorse (I mean his remorse for not having been an ironical epicure) was not to my taste. Thus, presently, I found myself in Jena, seeking out Ernst Häckel, as a sort of moral tonic for a relaxed soul. But there, too, I soon found the old disgust, the old unrest. Häckel's limitations are fearful. A scientific Philistine with genius, who speaks of France as a frivolous abode of barbarism, and is training up mobs of blatant young tow-heads in the full fervour of this outrageous creed of second-rate Teutonic Chauvinism, could not satisfy me long. Then I went off to Italy and Sicily with a dear little Jew antiquarian, a Herr Doctor of Jena, and helped him to get together materials for a monograph on the Saracens in Europe, till the old restlessness came upon me once again—not this time in the shape of a personal disgust (it was quite the contrary); but I felt as if I were somehow blindly and unconsciously wasting myself in side-issues, and that the one great subject of my time—the genuine Zeitgeist—was escaping me. This made me very discontented, and the more so as I for long and long utterly failed to diagnose my disease.'
He paused, and Hastings listened to him with growing interest.
'Suddenly I seemed for the first time in my life to adequately realise myself, and I cannot tell you what joy my discovery gave me. The social problem was the one great subject of my time. It was the one question that entirely deserved and imperiously claimed a solution. Literature, art, and science were all good and to be pursued with all our strength; but what, as it were, gave the keynote to them all was the social problem. Men are, and always must be, the one supremely important subject to man—men as they live and move and have their being in this actual earth of ours at any given moment. The old solutions were—as any clear-eyed and intelligent person could see—utterly inadequate. What was the new solution? Was there a new solution?'
Once more he paused.
'It is strange,' said Hastings, 'how closely, so far, we both developed together.'
'Before this, as you know, I had dabbled in Sociology, as I had dabbled in literature, art, and science, though without idea or method. Now I determined to set about it in earnest. And, as in all forms of the acquirement of knowledge two things are necessary—namely, thought and experience, and those come to mean good books and seeing things with your own eyes—I determined that I would go into the East End of London, and still more the South, to study my question on the spot. Well, I had soon the very best opportunities. The religious people—the Salvation Army, and our own Church of England mission workers—received me cordially; and so, after a little suspicion, did the more or less secularising Socialists and Labour propagandists. For I was ready with both hard work and hard cash (up to a reasonable extent), and the combination is too powerful an one to be long resisted. That was five years ago, and I stopped at it for a year without the break of a day, and should have stopped probably for twice as long but for a series of unexpected events.'
'Yes?' said Hastings.
'My father, mother, and brother all died within a few months. The first death I was prepared for; perhaps, even, for the second (for my mother had recently suffered from a severe illness, and she was deeply attached to my father); but my brother's death—and that means the manner and accompanying circumstances of it—administered to me what was in very reality a rude shock. I knew very little about him. We had seemed from our earliest childhood to have little or nothing in common, and each had gone his own way. Lately he had married, and his wife had died in childbed, the baby succumbing also. For the last five or six years he had practically managed the whole of the Daniel business, and I had not been a soldier, and perhaps I may say a captain, in the Labour army without being well aware how roughly and rigorously he had done it. A severe and neglected cold suddenly developed into violent congestion of the lungs, and a telegram under his name summoned me without delay to his bedside. What followed was beyond expression pitiful. The poor fellow, in his fear that he might be beyond words when I arrived, had dictated a letter to me. The moment I entered, the nurse, at his nervously eager command, read it aloud to me in his presence. It was a passionate appeal to my sense of duty as a man, and my sense of pride as a Daniel, to abjure my lazy and cowardly dilettantism—to take on the management of the business, and to preserve it to our name. I was the last of the Daniels. He could not believe I would let one of the first names in the commerce of England—a name known with honour wherever the English flag floated—be extinguished, or (what was as bad) pass into the use and abuse of strangers. Then he began to speak. Neither doctor nor nurse could stop him. He had only a few hours to live, and nothing but his terrific will-power kept him from lapsing into unconsciousness. Many thoughts passed through my mind. I had now arrived at certain distinct conclusions concerning the social problem—conclusions of which I was, however, still somewhat doubtful. Six months ago—three months ago—I should have called myself in practice an out-and-out Labour man, and in theory an out-and-out Socialist. Now I felt that I could not do so with any real sincerity. I still felt that I was both the one and the other, but I knew that my interpretation of the words would be very different from that of nine out of ten, of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand, of my comrades. Meantime, my brother's quavering, husky voice went on, abjuring and pleading to my ears, as the devouring seriousness of his death-struck gaze enthralled my eyes. His insensate pride in our name struck me, of course, as antiquated and absurd, but I felt the pathos of the man's agonising soul, and I am inclined to think that it was just this little extraneous human impulse which tilted the balance. All at once I lifted his hand and said to him, slowly and deliberately, that I would take the business and devote my life to the successful carrying of it on. He gripped me tight with his sharp and bony fingers, smiled, nodded, sighed heavily, half closing his eyes, and was gone!'
Once more he paused, and as they rolled on down the country road, their faces faintly lit with the red sunset, he seemed again to live in that singular and significant scene.
'Well?' said Hastings softly.
Daniel sighed.
'A fortnight later,' he said, 'I received intelligence from the manager of our largest mills of what he called an ultimatum from the men. It was equivalent to a demand for 10 per cent. rise in wages of the whole of the rank and file, a ten hours' day, and the reform of many abuses of "discipline." I had, indeed, no idea of what was really going on around me till next morning, when a Pall Mall Gazette interviewer waited on me with a copy of the last evening's paper, and a request to be permitted to ask a few questions. First, I read the paper. The personal remarks were all passably correct.—I learned subsequently who supplied them. It was one of my Labour friends, who owed me everything pretty well but his existence.'—(He smiled, amused.)—'And so, in the main, as far as I was aware, were the facts concerning the "abuses" in the Daniel mills. They were all admirably worked up on the usual sensational lines, and I realised like a flash that I was, indeed, as my friend the interviewer assured me, the "man of the moment!" "What will he do with it?—An East End Socialist Leader succeeds to the mastery of 15,000 workmen!—The Fortunes of the Daniels!"—and so on. It was very funny. Then the interviewer set on to me: Were the stories of the "abuses" in the Daniel mills true? I believed so. I was going to see.—What should I do? I could not tell. I was going to see.—Had I no definite plan? I had not. I was going to see. And nothing else did he get from me.'
Hastings nodded, his brows slightly contracted.
'Well?' he said.
'Of one thing I was resolved. I would do nothing off-hand or in haste. I went myself straight away to Morven, where the trouble had come to a head, and interviewed the manager at length. Then I interviewed a deputation of the men. Then I tried to interview some of the workmen and workwomen separately. The state of excitement in the mill—indeed, in all our mills—was (I saw at once) intense. I think the workpeople had a vague idea that there was about to be a scramble for the Daniel millions, and that they all had a right to be in it. In three days I was facing at first a suspicious and then a savage opposition. Suddenly I was given a week's notice to accede to the men's demands, or there would be a general strike. On the top of this, three of my old London friends—Labour leaders—came down, and at once sought me out. I put the matter clearly before them. They began by demurring a little, asking why I didn't accede to the men's demands before, instead of after, my investigation; but ultimately agreed to do their best to avoid the strike; and late the next night I was told I should be given a fortnight, but that, at the end of that time, I must meet the Union (it was an Union now) or take the consequences. One of the three ambassadors told me bluntly that there was nothing else to do but capitulate. He had never seen men more resolute and solid, and public opinion was steadily backing them. Meantime the Press had let me drop somewhat, stirring foreign events having happened unexpectedly; but Tory, Liberal, and Radical newspapers all alike took the same tone of cynical expectation, and in my inmost heart I felt that they would not, from their own point of view, be disappointed.'
'Ah?' said Hastings.
'I began my investigation,' proceeded Daniel calmly, 'and in the teeth of much opposition, working day and night, carried it through, my three Labour friends sardonically "assisting" me. At the end, I had three clear days in which to mature my proposals, and I insisted on being left absolutely alone. I knew what a momentous decision I was about to make. Several times, I will admit, I felt inclined to throw up my hands and let the men have their own way in everything. For it was utterly clear to me that they meant fight, and savage fight, on any other contingency. Might not these latest Socialistic conclusions of mine be wrong, and my old practical theory of letting the unions practically administer things in their own fashion be right? It was a long and severe struggle, and it might have ended either way. But a new event decided it beyond all question. A threatening deputation broke in on me. This was too much. I came down to the great meeting with my proposals, based absolutely on the new and not on the old conclusions. I had often spoken before in public during the last year in London, but this was obviously something quite beyond all that, and I was prepared for violence. Yet I felt strangely dreamy and lethargic. I suppose I was tired out with the storm and stress of the work. The silence when I rose was acute—almost painful. I could see nobody. It was not till I was well on in my speech, and the tempest was gathering, that I rapidly regained my self-mastery, and all the faces came out as clearly as in the noontide sun. I began by taking the abuses in "discipline"—chiefly fines for being late and talking and "fooling" during work-hours. Many I abolished; others I reduced to merely nominal sums, even for the old wages received. A low, strong buzzing, distinctly favourable in character, greeted me at the conclusion of the list. Then came the question of salaries. All the overseers leaped up 50 per cent., a few 70 or 80 per cent. All the skilled workmen, the industrial specialists, leaped up in the same way from 30 to 60 per cent. Everything that implied the higher type of work, brain-work, the exercise of thought, judgment, and originality, participated in the rapid rise. Then, without waiting, I took the unskilled, or almost unskilled, workmen and workwomen. I should pay men and women who did the same work precisely the same wages, I said, and I ranked off the divisions before I stated the rise I was prepared to give. At the most it was 7 or 8 per cent.; at the least it was 4 or 5. At this there was a terrible pause, and then the commotion began. I asked for silence, and began to speak of the improvements in the general conditions of the workpeople which I contemplated—houses, schools, libraries, a park, baths, and so on. The uproar kept growing and growing. I still persevered, at moments dominating it, and spoke of a system of pensions. A loud voice called; "Pensions be dd! We want higher wages." That finished it. In ten minutes yells for the strike arose. My London friends gathered round me, shouting and gesticulating their remonstrances. I merely shrugged my shoulders, folded up my papers, and went out. It was folly to stop.'
'And on that you fought?' asked Hastings.
'Well, not quite on that. There were many interviews, and I was ready night or day to listen and talk with any of them; but I knew quite well it was useless. The temper of the men was for war, and war they would have. To put it shortly, the Daniel workmen desired three things: the first was to have a grab at the Daniel millions; the second was, if possible, to turn themselves into permanent aristocrats of labour; the third was to pay the rank and file of labour 50 per cent. higher wages, in proportion to the value of the work done, than the captains and colonels. In other words, they intended to sacrifice skill to strength, brain to body, the higher type to the lower. To concede the first two things meant commercial collapse; to concede the last meant the denial of my conviction of what will prove the ruin, social as well as commercial, not only of England, but of all our civilisation—to pander to the fatal vice which seems to me to be inherent in all forms of practical Socialism. Wherefore, on this issue I was ready to fight them, if needs be, to the bitter end.'
'And you fought—and won?'
"And I fought—and won!'
Hastings dropped his face moodily.
'I do not understand your issue clearly,' he said. 'It seems to me pedantic, and to inflict all that suffering for pedantry was surely criminal.'
'Let us discuss the question in the abstract,' said Daniel, 'up in our starry turret after dinner. For here we are at the avenue, and the avenue, not being a "palatial" one, will lead us home in a minute or two.'
III
Some hours later, the two men were lying in easy wicker lounges before one of the bay-windows of the northern turret. The faint glimmer of a single shaded taper left visible the glory of the clear and star-studded night beyond, and, as Hastings said, gave faintly the suggestion of the huge, dark surface of the revolving earth-ball, which seemed to be dipping down over the far eastern horizon, while they followed it towards the line of the swiftly gliding dawnlight.
'You are happy here,' he said suddenly, after a long pause; 'or you seem so. With such a wife, such children, such a home, and a life-work which satisfies your conscience, I might think of you once more in the same cowardly spirit as I did as a lad, as of one to be envied. I have never seen another man or woman of whom I had anything approaching such a thought. I may have envied this or that possession of theirs, but themselves never, and it is only my cowardice that ever envied you. Jack,' he added, turning his head quickly, 'tell me truly and sincerely, as from man to man, from soul to soul, does your life-work satisfy your conscience? Do you in your clearest and serenest hours of insight and reason, the inspired moments when no self-deception stands erect and unabashed before one's conscious eyes, do you really believe in the social course you pursued and are, I suppose, pursuing?'
'Dear man,' said Daniel, softly stretching out and putting his hand on the arm of his friend, which rested on the arm of the chair, 'I can only answer you that four years' experience of the results of the social ideas which I have, either rightly or wrongly, conceived—four years' careful observation from within and without—(You would smile at my mysterious disguises and aliases. I have worked months on end in my own factories, and those of other employers, unknown to any one but my wife.)—have all the more and more convinced me that humanity at the present moment is menaced with a most terrible danger. It is not anarchy, it is not the "slavery" of which the Individualists are so afraid—at least it is not in the shape of which they conceive it—and their cure is worse than the disease. The instinct of self-preservation in humanity may be trusted to save us from the suicide of either a red-rampant State Socialism or unrestricted competition; but there is something, as I take it, in which this instinct cannot be trusted, and that is universal and triumphant ignorance, and after ignorance, corruption and sloth.'
He put down his cigarette in the little tray on the smoking-table at his side.
'I have told you,' he said, 'that when I had been six months in the London slums, I had become simply an out-and-out Socialist and Labour man. Socialism was the ideal; Labour organisation, first in unions and then as a political party, the practical means at hand with which to forward the realisation of this ideal. It was not pity alone for the suffering of those people that produced this in me. I knew that in some respects their life was little more piteous than that of the lower and even of the central middle-class above them. In other respects I knew that the masses were absolutely better off. Their existence, if they have health and strength, is often less hopelessly dull and soullessly corrupt. They have at least blood in their veins, not mud, and their life is the wild life of animals, with wild animal pleasures and pains; not the slow corroding cark and care and secret viciousness which so often reduce the struggling shopman below the level of even a healthy bestiality. Pity indeed played its part in me the more actively that I had no idea of another world than this in which these hapless ones should be compensated by a dispensation of the grim justice Jesus meted out in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. Dives in his lifetime receives his good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but by and by Lazarus is to be comforted, and Dives in anguish. If I could only have discovered pity,' proceeded Daniel, 'on which to found Socialism, then I should have regretfully realised that Socialism was a dream. But when justice showed me that it also, in its strictest shape, was an integral part of this basis, the matter entered a new phase. I need not, I expect, tell you about this in any detail,' he said; 'you know the scientific basis of Socialism as well as I do.'
'I am not sure of that,' said Hastings. 'Let us come to some agreement on that before you go further; for it is important. To me Capital is simply withheld wages—a formula as absolute in its way as the main formula of Evolution. More and more, as it seems to me, is it becoming clear to us all that, in the domain of social science, Karl Marx's definition of Capital holds precisely the same place as Darwin's definition of Natural Evolution in the domain of science. When well-known writers on social topics, following John Stuart Mill and the rococo political economists, discourse concerning the eternal divisibility of Capital and Labour, they talk as Cuvier did of the eternal immutability of species. One shrugs one's shoulders, and discusses something else. Is this what you mean by the scientific basis of Socialism?'
'Yes, though I should not put it quite in that way.'
'And you no longer cherish that amazing blunder of those from whom we should least expect it; of those who gravely assure us that civilisation does not, by the mere legal inheritance of wealth, paralyse the great law of natural and sexual selection. This was an obvious fact to the slow and sure biological intelligence of Darwin. The non-appreciation of it seems to me an amazing stultification in some of his fellows, who are indisputably dowered with far swifter and more abstract intellects. Science can find no excuse for civilisation in Nature, and surely Herbert Spencer's whole attack on State intervention, because it is based on opposing the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, is one of the funniest samples of a distressing mental obliquity.'
'Once more, yes,' said Daniel; 'though, once more, not quite as I should put it.'
'You would put it more politely for Spencer?'
Daniel smiled.
'Probably,' he said; 'but I should try to avoid some slight confusion of thought which seems to me either expressed or implied in your dogmatised polemic. However, that is unimportant. On the main point we are clearly at one, which is that Individualism has not a leg to stand upon when it defends civilisation, as we know it, against Socialism, as we prognosticate it, by alleging that the one is "natural" and contains the great natural force of evolution as the dominant factor; while the other is "artificial," and means the sway of dissolution, degradation, and final death. Thus far, we had apparently developed along pretty much the same lines, and I suppose the next question that presented itself to me was the next that presented itself to you too. Granted, the condition of the masses is pitiful; granted, it can be proved to be based on robbery and exploitation, and is therefore radically iniquitous, what can justify this hideous inhuman sacrifice? Clearly only one thing: the impossibility of abolishing it, except at the cost of the ruin of the whole community. If only 30 per cent., if only 20 per cent.—15, 10—nay, even 5 per cent.—can be lifted up to anything approaching a humanly worthy existence, then the 70, 80, 85, 90—nay, even the 95—must, more or less, continue to be virtually sacrificed.'
Hastings was looking at him askance.
'And so you persuaded yourself in favour of the virtual sacrifice? Oh!'—he burst out, laughing drily—'the modern Annas talks just the reverse of the old one. Culture has taught him that it is better a nation should perish than that one alleged great man should be brought to nought. It was some such rotten gospel of reaction that Thomas Carlyle, the Scots peasant, who ratted on his order like many another parvenu, commercial or philosophic, furbished up, here in England, in the interests of his aristocrat patrons, under the Brummagem shape of what he denominates hero-worship—damn him!'
Daniel laughed in turn, but almost to himself, at his friend's savage outburst.
'A devout person,' he said, 'was confidentially telling me the other day that he was quite sure Thomas was eternally damned already. However, you are mistaken as to my powers of self-persuasion in this matter. The great god Expediency did not win my worship on that point. I had the contrary idea. It seemed to me that the danger of the ruin of humanity lay far more clearly in the other direction. No, my friend, I concluded altogether in favour of the attempt to abolish the sacrifice. Moloch, even in his latest revised and amended shape, seems to me somewhat out of date.'
Hastings answered nothing, merely raising his eyebrows, and bending his head a little. He thought he had been trapped.
'This,' proceeded Daniel calmly, wishful to dispel his friend's annoyance, 'this was more or less my state of mind at the end of the first six months of my social "Lehrjahr," and there, owing to circumstances, my direct conscious and scientific pursuit of the subject (if I may so call it) suddenly ceased. The results of my "Wanderjahr," or rather "Wanderjahre," came pouring in upon me like a flood. It was not so much in the shape of the facts and experiences of my work, though these also played their part. It was rather as a sort of "Dichtung und Wahrheit" (since I am using Goethe's phraseology) of all my human dreams, my human hopes and aspirations during those ambiguous years. Socialism had become to me a practical creed, based on justice and to be erected with science. It now became to me a religion, with all the poetry of an incalculable future, which, as I take it, is the simple verifiable meaning of what the orthodox people call "heaven."'
He paused a moment.
'I am not,' he said, 'going to expatiate on this now, for it does not concern our subject. I merely mention the fact of this irruption of a portion of my life, the use and significance of which I had before then utterly failed to perceive, and which I had, indeed, come to look upon as a more or less unjustifiable waste of myself. I mention it now to account in a measure for the nebulous condition of what I have called my latest socialistic conclusions. If I had not been occupied with thought and dream and vision concerning the far future of the race, I should not have been distracted to the extent to which, as it seems to me now, I certainly was, with regard to the path the race must inevitably take if that far future is ever to be realised. Yes,' he went on, unconsciously failing in his purpose of speaking only of the actual subject, and undergoing the sweet, irresistible charm which we all find in our favourite day-dreams; 'yes, if that craving for an immortality of happiness, for a continuous existence of freedom from the cruel combat which Nature delights in, is ever to be satisfied, it can only be by the very best combinations of human intelligence and skill. All creatures own that craving. The birds that build their nests long dumbly, even as we weary humans long articulately, for a city that hath foundations. Watching under the microscope the lowest organisms known to us, I have felt the thrill of pity for these infinitesimal atoms of life which would fain, they too, live and move and have a being. In the chemist's bowls and crucibles I have recognised that the wrestlings of the warring elements prefigured, if they did not anticipate, the actual nisus of organic life. And how has Nature always achieved the death and destruction of all she creates? First and chiefly, by the needs of hunger, which inevitably make her children either preyers or prey, which make them all the enemies of other forms of life, and threefold the enemies of their own. Some have limited, or striven to limit, by their combinations the horrible ferocity of this. Men, for their part, starting from simple aggregations, have advanced to civilised cities, nations, races. But we have always failed, just as the others have always failed, in every grade of organic life and being, because we never could make our combination at once complete enough within, and powerful enough without. China alone, by a crude but resolute effort after an unscientific State Socialism, has shown the world something of what can be done in the way of racial perpetuity, which is the power of organised racial homogeneity. With us Assyria waxes and wanes before Babylon; Babylon is lost in Persia; Persia goes down before Greece; Greece before the conqueror of Carthage; Rome before the Goths. The weary, heart-sick tale of the ignorant human spider, continuously spinning his continuously ruined web, goes on from age to age, and sardonic and savage Nature, still unsated, contemplates our insane and fratricidal strife, never more fratricidal and insane than at this very hour. She ruins us through our stupidity. As the capitalistic monopolist, in this her true incarnation, exploits the masses of humanity by merely letting them compete among themselves; so Nature exploits cities, nations, and races. The ultimate crisis for humanity lies clearly in the hour when the globe shall become uninhabitable. As the moon is, so shall the earth be. Did the cities, nations, and races of the moon go on competing among themselves to the end? Did they see the beauty of Nature's delusive and fleshly smile on fecund land and sea slowly transform itself into the mocking grin of the hideous skeleton of dry, lightless, and heatless death? And did no suspicion of the trick that had been played on them ever cross their minds? Or did the intellectual élite of that hapless stock feel, or even realise and recognise it; but, powerless to control the ineptitude of their fellows, sigh over the "infinita vanità del tutto," and steal away to die? Does that same fate await us? Or may we some day discover not only the secret of life and of actual physical immortality, but learn how to arrest the cooling of the earth, or, if that be impossible (though to science all things are possible), migrate to another planet? Who can say?—who can say?'
He paused, looking out into the far and all but cloudless east, where the first glimmerings of the approaching dawn expanded imperceptibly.
'That,' he said, 'is one's thought—one's dream—one's vision; the ideal, the heaven of the race, and its realisation, is possible—possible through developments of ever-increasing beauty, and force, and wonder. Who shall say No? But one thing is certain: the human problem must be settled first. The danger of the ruined web must be permanently averted. Every faculty of man must be bent to the great work. We must have all mankind to choose from. Food and clothing and housing, refuge from sickness and old age, must be an axiom of human existence. The need for individual selfishness must disappear in that of the race. All energy must go out in the training of the spiritual and mental faculties. Only from a superb rank and file can we hope for a superb army from which we can choose our saviours. We have but one single foe—Nature—the deadliest foe of all, the foe which can be conquered only by intelligence, and enslaved only by comprehension, and which can hold no other place but that of either victor or vanquished, master or servant. Nothing that runs counter to the final settlement of this, the one vital problem of humanity, is to be tolerated. If we cannot read her riddle aright, our Sphinx will surely devour us, just as she has devoured all the others. Let us bring but one test to every question—to every effort after social progress and organisation—to every law, or would-be law, the blind-worm politicians and propagandists present to us: civilisation as a spiritual and mental unity in infinite variety, but ever as a unity, based on the scientific enslavement of Nature. Two things—the cult, at all costs and all hazards, of intelligence, and the cult, at all hazards and all costs, of the physical satisfaction of the individual; and of these two, if they clash, as ignorance and greed perpetually make them clash, then the first, first!'
'No,' said Hastings softly: 'the second—I still feel that. The second.'
Daniel smiled faintly, looking before him.
'The second,' he said, 'stands absolutely to win. Nothing in the long-run can stop it. But the first stands possibly, and even probably, to lose. The dominant forces are against it.'
Hastings was silent.
'Such, at least, were the results of my latest conclusions,' said Daniel, still looking before him. 'Labour is already for Labour alone, and it will be more and more so, I think—not less and less. Oh! we pity Labour—we pity the masses—we pity the rank and file. But what is that pitifulness of theirs beside the tragedy of the men of intelligence, the poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, the writers of talent and genius, the scientists, the inventors, the discoverers? Do you say Labour is exploited? Heavens! if Labour is exploited 5 per cent., talent and genius are exploited 50 and 500. It is brains we want—it is brains which alone can save us, which alone can help us to solve the deadly riddle of the Sphinx. With brains, I say, all things are possible; without them, little or nothing that is of permanent use. Suppose to-morrow every man was paid the just value of his work. Who, do you suppose, would gain? Whose would be the sudden rises of 100 and 1000 per cent.? Why, it is the story of the Morven strike again. Give the masses 7 or 8 per cent. increase of their present wage, and you do them utter and absolute justice. Give the men of talent and genius their increase of 50 and 500 per cent., and humanity is still their debtor. Labour already shows us, wherever it is yet powerful enough to have anything like a free hand, what it really desires; and the civilisation which it rules will be a hell of mediocrity, pullulating into corruption and decadence—at best a China, at worst an easy prey for the first incursion of a more vigorous stock. It will not advance us one step towards the true civilisation, not to say towards the resolution of the great human problem. Already the Labour men decree that none but a Labour man shall stand by them. Do you guess what that means? It means that the masses are to "exploit" talent and genius to-morrow, just as the classes "exploit" them to-day, for the profit and pleasure of the "exploiters"; and once more the weary, heart-sick web shall be spun by the stupid spider, and Nature shall sit, savage and sardonic, enthroned on our bones, and drinking our blood from her cups of gold, while Time in the grey depths of space waits in his lethargic stupor till she too falls prone in an everlasting oblivion.'
There was a long pause, that grew into a silence, before Hastings heaved a sigh and rose slowly to his feet.
'Jack,' he said sadly, standing gazing at the now ever-broadening and intensifying dawnlight, 'I asked you to tell me truly and sincerely, as from man to man, from soul to soul, whether your life-work satisfied your conscience. Let me speak to you now as I desired you to speak to me, and as I believe you did speak—as you have just spoken. Do I feel that the cause for which I have struggled and lived, and for which I shall, in all human probability, yet die—do I, any more than you, feel, in my heart of hearts and mind of minds, that it will equal our hope and faith in it? I cannot answer. Yes. That cause, I too feel sure, will win—it is bound to win— because it stands for a newer and truer social idea than that which combats it. Christianity, with all its faults, limitations, and even vices, conquered the Paganism of Greece and Rome, which was far from being without its goodnesses, splendours, and virtues, for just that reason; and thus Socialism will conquer Civilisation. Yes, I feel it—I know it. It may take a hundred years—two—three—four—five hundred years. It will conquer in the end. But that it will do all we—all even I—hope and trust for in it—ah! that is another thing. Jack, let me tell you all. I know, I think, the forces that are really driving us forward, as well as you do, perhaps better. I know which of them will become more and more the dominant forces that must mould and fashion the organised life of humanity in the near future. And there are moments—there have been, and doubtless there will be again—when I have been glad that I have lived now, in the dark and doubtful hours of the night, rather than in the full flood-tide of exultant day. That is all I have to tell you—only a bad dream, perhaps a nightmare. I am very thankful for death.'
Daniel's arm was round his shoulders.
'Dear man,' he murmured, 'be thankful also for love.'
Hastings flung up his face.
'Oh no!' he cried ; 'I don't falter; I don't repent—I, with the narrow ideals and the bewildered vision of a desperate hope and a despairing faith. Onward, onward, and upward! Who am I? What am I? What does it matter? The idea is the greatest of our time—the hope the most superb, the faith the most intense. That is enough for me.'
Then suddenly:
'Look!' he said, stretching out his hand, his eyes lit, his mouth smiling.
At one steady impulse the sun had surged above the clear horizon line, and soared, huge, round, blazing, and glorious, into the thrilling blue of the heavens.
They stood together in silence, regarding his splendour.