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Much more he said that would take too long to write, but I shall never forget
how he described the life among the revolutionists. All halting utterance
vanished. His voice grew strong and confident, and it glowed as he glowed, and
as the thoughts glowed that poured out from him. He said:
'Amongst the revolutionists I found, also, warm faith in the human, ardent
idealism, sweetnesses of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom all the
splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was clean, noble, and
alive. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over
dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant
more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world
empire. All about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my
days and nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before my
eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ's own Grail, the warm
human, longsuffering and maltreated but to be rescued and saved at the last.'
As before I had seen him transfigured, so now he stood transfigured before
me. His brows were bright with the divine that was in him, and brighter yet
shone his eyes from the midst of the radiance that seemed to envelop him as a
mantle. But the others did not see this radiance, and I assumed that it was
due to the tears of joy and love that dimmed my vision. At any rate, Mr
Wickson, who sat behind me, was unaffected, for I heard him sneer aloud,
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'Utopian'.4
Ernest went on to his rise in society, till at last he came in touch with
members of the upper classes and rubbed shoulders with the men who sat in the
high places. Then came his disillusionment, and this disillusionment he
described in terms that did not flatter his audience. He was surprised at the
commonness of the clay. Life proved not to be fine and gracious. He was
appalled by the selfishness he encountered, and what had surprised him even
more than that was the absence of intellectual life. Fresh from his
revolutionists, he was shocked by the intellectual stupidity of the master
class. And then, in spite of their magnificent churches and well-paid
preachers, he had found the masters, men and women, grossly material. It was
true that they prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities, but in
spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was
materialistic. And they were without real morality for instance, that which
Christ had preached but which was no longer preached.
'I met men,' he said, 'who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their
diatribes against war and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons5with which
to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men incoherent with
indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the same time,
were parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more babes than
even red-handed Herod had killed.
'This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman was a dummy director and a
tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans. This gentleman,
who collected fine editions and was a patron of literature, paid blackmail to
a heavy-jowled, black-browed boss of a municipal machine. This editor, who
published patent medicine advertisements, called me a scoundrelly demagogue
because I dared him to print in his papers the truth about patent
medicines.6This man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of
idealism and the goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business
deal. This man, a pillar of the church and heavy contributor to foreign
missions, worked his shop girls ten hours a day on a starvation wage and
thereby directly encouraged prostitution. This man, who endowed chairs in
universities and erected magnificent chapels, perjured himself in courts of
law over dollars and cents. This railroad magnate broke his word as a citizen,
as a gentleman, and as a Christian, when he granted a secret rebate, and he
granted many secret rebates. This senator was the tool and the slave, the
little puppet, of a brutal uneducated machine boss;7so was this governor and
this supreme court judge; and all three rode on railroad passes; and also,
this sleek capitalist owned the machine, the machine boss, and the railroads
that issued the passes.
'And so it was, instead of in paradise, that I found myself in the arid
desert of commercialism. I found nothing but stupidity, except for business. I
found none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who were alive with
rottenness. What I did find was monstrous selfishness and heartlessness, and a
gross, gluttonous, practised, and practical materialism.'
Much more Ernest told them of themselves and of his disillusionment.
Intellectually they had bored him; morally and spiritually they had sickened
him; so that he was glad to go back to his revolutionists, who were clean,
noble, and alive, and all that the capitalists were not.
'And now,' he said, 'let me tell you about that revolution.'
But first I must say that his terrible diatribe had not touched them. I
looked about me at their faces and saw that they remained complacently
superior to what he had charged. And I remembered what he had told me: that no
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indictment of their morality could shake them. However, I could see that the
boldness of his language had affected Miss Brentwood. She was looking worried
and apprehensive.
Ernest began by describing the army of revolution, and as he gave the figures
of its strength (the votes cast in the various countries), the assemblage
began to grow restless. Concern showed in their faces and I noticed a
tightening of lips. At last the gage of battle had been thrown down. He
described the international organisation of the socialists that united the
million and a half in the United States with the twenty-three millions and a
half in the rest of the world.
'Such an army of revolution,' he said, 'twenty-five millions strong, is a
thing to make rulers and ruling classes pause and consider. The cry of this
army is: "No quarter! We want all that you possess. We will be content with
nothing less than all that you possess. We want in our hands the reins of
power and the destiny of mankind. Here are our hands. They are strong hands.
We are going to take your government, your palaces, and all your purpled ease
away from you, and in that day you shall work for your bread even as the
peasant in the field or the starved and runty clerk in your metropolises. Here
are our hands. They are strong hands!"'
And as he spoke he extended from his splendid shoulders his two great arms,
and the horseshoer's hands were clutching the air like eagle's talons. He was
the spirit of regnant labour as he stood there, his hands outreaching to rend
and crush his audience. I was aware of a faintly perceptible shrinking on the
part of the listeners before this figure of revolution, concrete, potential,
and menacing. That is, the women shrank, and fear was in their faces. Not so
with the men. They were of the active rich, and not the idle, and they were
fighters. A low, throaty rumble arose, lingered on the air a moment, and
ceased. It was the forerunner of the snarl, and I was to hear it many times
that night the token of the brute in man, the earnest of his primitive
passions. And they were unconscious that they had made this sound. It was the
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