Chương Chương 38 · Chapter XXXVIII

. Chapter XXXVIII

“Come on, let’s go down to the local.”

So spoke Brissenden, faint from a hemorrhage of half an hour before—the

second hemorrhage in three days. The perennial whiskey glass was in his

hands, and he drained it with shaking fingers.

“What do I want with socialism?” Martin demanded.

“Outsiders are allowed five-minute speeches,” the sick man urged. “Get

up and spout. Tell them why you don’t want socialism. Tell them what

you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them

and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them

good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see,

I’d like to see you a socialist before I’m gone. It will give you a

sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in

the time of disappointment that is coming to you.”

“I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist,” Martin

pondered. “You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the

canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul.” He pointed an

accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling.

“Socialism doesn’t seem to save you.”

“I’m very sick,” was the answer. “With you it is different. You have

health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life

somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I’ll tell you. It

is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and

irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man

on horseback. The slaves won’t stand for it. They are too many, and

willy-nilly they’ll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he

gets astride. You can’t get away from them, and you’ll have to swallow

the whole slave-morality. It’s not a nice mess, I’ll allow. But it’s

been a-brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway,

with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says

history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don’t like the crowd, but

what’s a poor chap to do? We can’t have the man on horseback, and

anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on,

anyway. I’m loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer,

I’ll get drunk. And you know the doctor says—damn the doctor! I’ll fool

him yet.”

It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the

Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker,

a clever Jew, won Martin’s admiration at the same time that he aroused

his antagonism. The man’s stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened

chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong

on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves

against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would

rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a

creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth

representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and

inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged

confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning

philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for coöperation, Nature

rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of

life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It

was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race-horses and

cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better

method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this

particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as

the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the

perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together

for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and

outwit the Cosmos.

So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give

them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was

the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice,

haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain

while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time

allotted to each speaker; but when Martin’s five minutes were up, he

was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed.

He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by

acclamation to extend Martin’s time. They appreciated him as a foeman

worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every

word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack

upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to

his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus,

and enunciated the biological law of development.

“And so,” he concluded, in a swift résumé, “no state composed of the

slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the

struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of

the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak

are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the

progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains,

the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you

slaves—it is too bad to be slaves, I grant—but you slaves dream of a

society where the law of development will be annulled, where no

weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will

have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and

where all will marry and have progeny—the weak as well as the strong.

What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of

each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is

the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves—of, by,

and for, slaves—must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life

which composes it weakens and goes to pieces.

“Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No

state of slaves can stand—”

“How about the United States?” a man yelled from the audience.

“And how about it?” Martin retorted. “The thirteen colonies threw off

their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their

own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn’t

get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of

masters—not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery

traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again—but not

frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right

arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and

cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have

debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse

horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of

your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United

States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor

properly fed.

“But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure,

because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of

development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than

deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law

of development, but where is the new law of development that will

maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then

state it.”

Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on

their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one,

encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm

and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild

night—but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed

from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin.

They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him

insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of

the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than

once the chairman rapped and pounded for order.

It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a

day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for

sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and

glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a

comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs

of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in

the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers.

Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the

perfect reporter who is able to make something—even a great deal—out of

nothing.

He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary.

Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able

to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to

reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it

that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest

stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the

show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid,

red-shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it

was a large brush with which he laid on the local color—wild-eyed

long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices

shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected

against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry

men.