V.
————;
More and more, as I study these institutions, am I reminded of the resemblance between these American socialists and the ancient Spartans. The Spartan was also a part of the State—had all things on a grand Communal scale—had public games, public theaters, baths, museums and festivals, was brought up by the state, his womenkind being considered as a part of it.
In this modern community, however, there are two important features which the simpler Spartans did not have to cope with. The Greeks stood at the dawn of civilization. The American finds himself at what he considers is the completion of it. Break away from his past as hard as ever he may try, he has still found himself heir to this past, and his heredity dominates him in spite of all his attempts to throw it off. The Greeks, also, were a warlike people, and the American is a peace lover, preferring the pipe to the sword. Perhaps above all else in the sum of these differences ought we to remember, the great factor of machinery as a substitute for manual labor. The sword raised man out of the dust. The piston has levelled him with it. I believe, my dear Hannevig, that if machinery had never been invented, socialism would never have been dreamed of. Machinery was the true cause of the conflict between capital and labor, and not the unequal distribution of land, as the great founder of this Communal Society, Henry George, asserted in this book, the bible of this people. Machinery needed capital to run it, and was more or less indifferent to labor. The laborer, with machinery as his rival, stood a far less possible chance of becoming a capitalist himself than he did when battling against men; his duties more and more closely resembling in their monotony and routine, the very machine that he was called on to feed, in turn re-acting on his natural aptitude.
However, to go into the depths of this knotty question involves too much space for a letter. Let me, instead recall to your mind, as I have recently done to my own, the chief features of importance in the history of this people which have placed them where they now are.
You recollect, of course, the terrible reign of blood that took place during the awful conflict between the republican Americans and the socialists and anarchists in 1900. The war began, nominally, as an act of resistance on the part of the Americans against the encroaching and insistent demands of the socialists, demands covering the abolishment of private ownership in land, of the division of property, both real and personal, and the overthrow, generally of all the then existing economic and social institutions. These socialists and anarchists represented the foreign element in the country, those who had imported their revolutionary doctrines with them. (If I remember rightly the early Americans had given all rights of citizenship to this foreign contingency, in a moment of mistaken Republican zeal, a political mistake they lived to rue bitterly later). Well, at first in this anarchist war, the Americans won, did they not? I find my memory tripping me at times—possibly would have continued to win had the war been conducted on strict military tactics. But the anarchists finding themselves unsuccessful as soldiers and warriors, resorted to the ingenious means of destroying their enemies by the use of explosives. Dynamite accomplished what the cannon and the bayonet were powerless to effect. Towns, cities and even the villages and hamlets, were lighted by the torch of electricity and seared level with the ground. Dynamite was reserved for the armies and for individual offenders. During that reign of destruction, it seemed as if not a man, woman or child would survive to carry even the memory of the great tragedy to their graves with them.
However, since the anarchist’s plan was to reconstruct the whole face of society on a new basis, it was to be expected, of course, that the revolution they undertook as the means of effecting this would be carried through at whatever cost.
There is one feature of this war which has always struck me as possessing a very humorous side. The anarchists, you remember, were foreigners, chiefly Germans, Irishmen and a few Russians. When the war was ended, by the destruction of very nearly all the Republican contingency, the anarchists broke out into dissension among themselves. The German element would not submit to Irish dictation—the latter leaders having, apparently, a great opinion of their own talent for political leadership—and the Irish in turn violently resisted the German dicta. A veritable anarchy ensued, a war so fierce that it looked at one time as if the whole continent might be left a howling wilderness, with neither conqueror nor conquered to enter and take possession of what was now, in truth, but a desert. Fortunately, however, a few of the Americans had survived. Among them were some of the descendants of the ancient New England statesmen. These men, although under sentence of death, were liberated, that they might act as peacemakers between the two factions. Americans, you see, had had so much experience in reconciling, conciliating and pacifying the difficulties between the Irish and German parties during the American Republican era, that these survivors were eminently fitted to adjust affairs at issue between them now. The American Council decided that the Irishmen should draw up the laws and regulations for the new Communal and Socialistic constitution, while the Germans should see that the new society was properly organized; a decision which proves the real genius for statescraft which these ingenious Americans possessed. For Irishmen are proverbially affluent of ideas and incapable of putting them into action, unless it be violent action, while the Germans have proved themselves practical organizers and ideal political policemen. The sagacity of the old American Republicans was shown in the manner in which they themselves, in their era of power, had made use of the distinguishing qualities of the two races, when such hordes overflowed the land during the great emigration period. The Irishmen were kept in the large cities, where they were allowed to misgovern the towns to their hearts’ desire, being thus given a vent for their turbulent political spirit; while the Germans, on the contrary, were sent into the still unconquered wilderness to turn it into a garden by their industry and thrift. The American having thus made use of the Irishmen to run his political machinery for him, and of the Germans to extend the territorial lines of order and civilization, secured unto himself all his own time for money making. Hence the colossal American fortunes, which, as we read of them now, seem to us like a tale of magicians. Such a policy must have seemed to a nineteenth-century American as a very shrewd and ingenious way of utilizing elements which otherwise might prove dangerous. The policy was, in truth, a fatally short-sighted one, as was proved later; since it was the enormous accumulation of fortunes in a few hands and the supposed tyranny of capital which wrought to a frenzy the envy and anger of the foreign poorer classes, then under the sway of the anarchist revolutionists.