BICYCLES AND DEMOCRACY.
Where a man doesn't care to walk, and where it is inconvenient or distasteful to travel by means of the "Bryan wagon," that most modern and popular conveyance, the bicycle, should not be despised as a means of disseminating truth. The bicycle is one of the revolutionary factors of our age. It is the enemy of tobacco, liquor and all other vices that arise from abnormal desires created by a sedentary life. It is the friend of health, strength, red cheeks and clear heads. Where there are good roads it is an excellent means of travel, and a strong wheelman can easily speak every night at a different town by using the wheel, and still have plenty of time to advertise each outdoor meeting.
A bicycle, too, is an excellent companion to a Bryan wagon, because while the wagon is slowly moving from one village to another, the wheelman can be scouring along the side roads distributing small circulars to the scattered countrymen, telling them of the meeting in the next town the coming day or night. In fact, one of the most important truths for every friend of the New Democracy to learn while very young, is that our enemy, plutocracy, utilizes every invention and element of civilization for the perpetuation of its power. In opposing plutocracy we cannot be narrow, prejudiced, superstitious, nor allow preconceived ideas as to dignity, custom, personal appearance or respectability, to interfere with our free motion and our energetic conflict.
We fight with every weapon that by any honorable means can be secured. We travel by every means that will emancipate us from the limitations of time, space and poverty. We accept as allies every friend who will aid in impressing upon our fellow mortals the solemnity of the opportunity that confronts them and the malignity of the enemy that is destroying our common race and country.
Grasp every force in earth, in sea, in air, which by ingenuity, wisdom, persistence, or heroism can be utilized in lessening human pain or adding to human joy; which can be of service in forwarding these grand principles that will, by one social and political transition, abolish the primary sources of human misery.
CHAPTER V.
SALOON MEETINGS.
A young man, of splendid physique, of bright and formidable eye, the very picture of strength and courage, who became an admirer of Mr. Bryan during the late campaign, and, after careful and extensive reading forsook the Republican party, embraced the New Democracy and enlisted the week following the election as a Volunteer Speaker and worker. He is an active member of the Young Men's Christian Association and of the Christian Endeavor Society.
The first meeting he was asked to attend was held over a saloon. This image of youthful power and courage walked through the bar-room of the saloon with a disparaging air, sat down at a table beside the writer, answered a few questions in a gloomy and dissatisfied manner and said diplomatically that he had an engagement at another end of the city and could not remain. He had promised to help arrange another meeting a few blocks away and the next day partly fulfilled that promise by carrying a bundle of circulars from the printing office to two men who were to distribute them. He then suddenly dropped out of sight and has never, so far as the movement is concerned, shown up since.
It has been learned that to a fellow churchman he remarked that he had been attracted by the high and noble ideals of Mr. Bryan, had expected to work for the cause, but that his attendance at a meeting in a saloon was so offensive to him that he lost all heart and had given up participation in the movement in consequence.
This man is only the type of a considerable class who would like to have their fellow beings clean but would never help wash them, who would dearly love to have them good but are too narrow to help save them; who admire the poetry of patriotism but who cowardly shrink from those sterner duties of which patriotism consists.
Think of a follower of Jesus Christ refusing to preach patriotism to men because they are gathered in or over a saloon, after having been denied the opportunity of meeting in a church or even a church yard. If Jesus Christ had been so squeamish and "gentlemanly" as to have confined his services to the respectable people, the early church would have died before it was born. In no age has there been sufficient vitality in the classes that call themselves respectable to give permanent form to any social or religious movement. Those who wish to do great things only in a respectable manner never do great things. A man cannot at the same time be both great and respectable.
In order to be respectable, he must stifle genius and cover with the ashes of artificiality all the deepest passions of the soul. He must destroy his individuality and trim his sympathies as he does his beard, like the barbarous Northmen when they entered Rome.
Love for humanity that can be checked or dissipated by inartistic surroundings, contact with vice or the coarse companionship of intemperate men is not love at all, it is a mere fad, a fitful remnant of a religious instinct long since eaten out from within.
Imagine a mother talking about how she loves to have her baby clean and sweet and wholesome, and then picture her refusing to undergo the hardship required in making her child sweet and clean and wholesome. Such a mother would be no mother at all, unless, perchance, a stepmother or mother-in-law.
The young man referred to is a typical specimen of a sniveling, impracticable and worthless counterfeit of religion, the only function of which is to emasculate and weaken our youth. It serves to ease their consciences and displace the instincts that prompt to goodness. For courageous self-sacrifice, it substitutes the mumbling of prayers; instead of active, righteous contact with the world it demands the attendance at meetings in which love is expressed toward a phantasy millions of miles up into the stars, while the Living God of Heaven and earth is forgotten, and where imprecation, denunciation and charges of wickedness are dealt out to those manly and courageous persons who lift out a helping hand to the poor instead of praying for them and who fight to make this world and this life heavenly instead of paying their debts to their fellow creatures with mansions in the skies.
The refusal of this young man who, according to his own statement, believed that the future welfare of the Nation depended upon the triumph of the principles represented by Mr. Bryan, to assist in spreading those principles in saloon meetings, means that his religious and social training had unfitted him to do any great or noble thing, unless in conformity with his Sunday-school manufactured tastes as to nicety and elegance.
The young man sees the giant tree, injustice, and offers to assist in cutting it down but, when we hand him an ax, refuses to take off his coat and returns it saying that his little hatchet at home has a blue ribbon around it and that he won't cut with any other.
He sings "Rescue the Perishing" at the Christian Endeavor meeting, a pretty girl with pink cheeks and cherry lips on each side. The cheeks and lips and song are so pleasing, he thinks he will go further and help rescue the perishing. After careful study he is satisfied that people are perishing for want of his friendly services and the services of others like himself. Yet, when he is assigned a place to work, he abruptly leaves his post of duty and goes back to prayer meeting, because, poor boy, no carpet is on the floor, no angel pictures grace the wall, and the tobacco smoke about him is offensive.
Innocent creature! Let him continue to sing his hymns and say his prayers surrounded by pretty girls In the Christian Endeavor meeting and pretty boys who should have been born girls, while the great forces of reform fight the battles of the living God, conquer evil, destroy injustice and lift up the fallen. We can do without him and without his kind.
Not that we want to. We do not. We need all possible help. We will not judge harshly all those who now are given over to such innocent amusements. For the delicate white hand, the girlish student face, the timid mamma's boy, taken from the prayer meeting and the Christian Endeavor Society, once taught to see the great truths of social salvation and human progress, does not always retreat in holy horror when confronted with conflict and the smoke of battle. On the other hand, such timid, singing, praying boys often become National heroes. Before manhood is discovered by the growth of hair on the face, manly character sometimes reaches maturity, with qualities developed, not only superior to tobacco smoke at a saloon meeting, and the naughty cuss words of the fellows who drink there, but to the smoke of powder and the thunder of cannon.
Do not overlook nor belittle soft men, but ignore only those who stay soft after you have tried the hardening process. For where one heart may be formed of milk and water, the liquid state of another may be that of molten steel, and may only require the cooling process of an outdoor breeze to make it withstand the continuous persecution and conflict of years.
There is no unholy place where men should not go who are fired by a passion for justice. It is a fact that one of the centers of the social life of the great cities of America and of Europe is the liquor saloon. How much we may deplore this fact or the evil results that we see flowing from it, is entirely another question. The fact remains in spite of our deploring, our shocked ideals or our sympathies wrung by the desolation and death caused by it, that the center of the social life of our great cities, the place where society meets, (not that floating, top-heavy buoy that calls itself society, but real society, the people) is the liquor saloon.
At present it is managed in America, not with any reference whatever to its social function, but merely for the private profit of individuals. In order to increase their private profits and to defend their special interests, the men who manage these saloons, as a general rule, abuse their powers and add inconceivably to the horrors of the vice of intemperence trying, by unnatural and vicious methods, to increase their gain.
Not only this, but as the saloon is the center of the social life of our American cities, the proprietors of saloons and the manufacturers of liquors, who have associated their interests, have a terrible and unnatural advantage in controlling the political power of the people with whom they come in contact. They do not have to go where the people are because the saloon keeper, in the natural and usual performance of his business, is already in the midst of the people. He always has a crowd. He is the greatest preacher of modern times. He does not have to invent new methods for REACHING THE MASSES. He does not have to scratch his bald head and say, "O, Lord! why are my sheep deserting me?" The saloon keeper always has a congregation, always a choir, is always surrounded by men in need of a friend, and, like other members of the human family having a strange mixture of greed and sympathy, cruelty and fellow-feeling, he exercises his charitable instincts and lends a material helping hand to the members of his congregation quite as often as do the five thousand and twenty thousand dollar a year ministers who preach not to men drinking, but often to men who have already drunk their fill.
The saloon keeper preacher, however, lacks one advantage possessed by his more fortunate compeer of the church pulpit, for, where a member of the saloon congregation has a perfect right to answer back and correct misstatements, slanders and unjust vituperation, the friend of the common people who happens into the fashionable city church service must bite his lips and remain silent while the name of Jesus, the revolutionist, the poor man's friend, is used to strengthen vile calumny against His brave modern apostles who are fighting to realize practically in government the principles represented by the cross.
Therefore, one of the most promising fields for the social reformer, for the man who drinks beer and the man who drinks water, for the man who smokes cigars and the man who washes his teeth before every meal with charcoal powder and lives on vegetables, is the liquor saloon. It is always open and you can go in without buying. You can take a seat free of charge and you can talk. You have as much right to talk as the bartender, and even if opposed to your principles, good business judgment, if no other motive, prompts the average saloon keeper to be tolerant. He cannot afford to drive away any large percentage of his customers. You have a right, and even in the Republican saloons you can get permission to declare the gospel of monopoly's downfall in the back room, in the hall upstairs or in the main saloon, once a week, without paying anything for heat, light or hall rent. These are already furnished for the people who now go there. You do not need to advertise the meeting, for there is always a crowd about the saloon. After you have held two or three meetings they will grow in size and draw the frequenters from other resorts.
The average saloon crowd is as open to conviction and as ready to be taught concerning the moralizing of government and the establishment of justice in the world as the average church congregation, and they will treat you as civilly and listen as attentively even though every man present disagrees with you.
Let the hundreds of saloons throughout our great cities be selected as a mission field for the new gospel of manliness and brotherhood. Christ went among publicans and wine-bibbers. We can afford to go among wine-bibbers, even when they are Republicans. Our crowd may be small at times but the kind of work that moves the world and builds up civilization is work that is regular and continuous.
Let the Volunteers organize by twos, and the one, two or three evenings a week that they can give to the cause, let those who choose this work go to a saloon and tell the fellows there that under a proper social system, each one of them can afford to have a home as sociable and homelike and comfortable as a saloon; that, after they declare their independence of the party whip, and, instead of obeying parties, command them to do their bidding, they can soon have such opportunities that they won't have to drink to forget their troubles, because they will have no troubles; that they won't have to drink in order to imagine that they are happy, because they will have real happiness; that after the gold standard and monopoly are overthrown, there will be a hundred different pleasures and opportunities opened to them, that these will produce intoxication just as delicious as that produced by wine and beer, and that every poor man who wants to drink will be allowed to drink, not slops and refuse, but the same fluids that now give the gout and dropsy to die millionaire.
The way to get up a saloon meeting is to see the proprietor, tell him you are a Democrat, not a fraudulent, makebelieve hypocrite, using the Democratic name to defeat Democratic principles, not an agent of the gold bugs trying to corrupt the Democratic party, not an attorney for monopoly attempting to pervert the Democratic organization to help millionaires rob Democratic voters, but that you are a real dyed-in-the-wool, anti-monopoly, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Bryan Democrat, standing with all fours on the Chicago platform, the enemy of its enemies, the foe of its traducers, and the opponent, uncompromising and implacable of every man who upholds the infamous British Rothschild gold standard of money. Tell him that you would like to talk to his customers and a few others in his place every week, and show them how, by united political action in the Democratic party, they can be made just as happy as if they were drunk seven days each week.
He will let you come, and if you talk straight from the shoulder, you will have a larger crowd at the second meeting than at the first. If you keep the work up a year continuously, you will not only have your name enrolled in the book of heroes, kept by the Democratic leaders, but also in the book kept by the Divinity who guides the Nations. You will be rewarded in this world for your sacrificing labor if you live until the people crush monopoly, and if not, you will at least have that consciousness of duty done which knows no time nor space.
CHAPTER VI.
THE HEROIC AND PROSAIC.
Heroism and the spirit of martyrdom and of self-sacrifice are historical factors as real, as tangible and as much a part of human nature as greed or hunger. The young Volunteers who forsake home, business and personal ambition to help save our Nation from the money power, starting in the name of humanity astride bicycles, horseback, afoot and in Bryan wagons, preaching the new gospel of glad tidings without money and without price, eating whole wheat, dry bread and apples, with a square meal only now and then to remind them of the good times coming, are not impelled by any strange or new force in society. They are not the disciples of a new cult or ism, the latest off-shot from the great tree of life. They are not a new product of civilization but on the other hand they are the real conservative and belong to the true nobility of the human race, that brotherhood of heroes, patriots and martyrs of all ages and nations, as old as the human family itself.
On the other hand, the essentially NEW PRODUCT of our civilization is the man who does not believe in heroism, who has stifled the nobler instincts with which nature originally endowed him, and fills his whole mind's horizon with the one image of gold. Those in whose minds avarice has devoured all other instincts and desires to the point of moral insanity, are the only strange or new off-shoots. They alone are the special and characteristic product of our particular period, distinguished above all else by its complete surrender to the one passion—greed. The real cranks and monstrosities are not those who are in line with historic humanity, but rather those who have crucified their humanity on "a cross of gold" in accord with a temporary social perversion.