“Hold on! Let us avoid that subject as long as possible.”
“But tell me.”
“Well, here is the way I am fixed: I am for reform, my father is not. I am a full partner in the firm, but I can’t use the firm’s money for an object to which my father is bitterly opposed. But I have been making money on the outside, investing and reinvesting, and, in two years at most, I shall have an independent fortune, irrespective of my father’s large estate. Then I intend to go in for politics, doing all I can meanwhile to educate the people in the precepts of the true democracy and to keep the Reform party on top. I intend to hold conspicuous office in California, then go to Congress. You can call this ambition, if you like; no doubt ambition is mixed up with all deep sense of personal usefulness. It takes a good-sized ego to permit you to fancy yourself able to reform long-existing conditions; and egoism and ambition are good working partners. I shall work for my own state first, and then for the country at large. That is the way for Americans to begin, or, at all events, the way we do begin, our country being what it is. State pride is almost as strong as national. Moreover, a man must prove himself in his own state before he can get a chance to command the attention of the nation. If a man happens to belong to a notoriously corrupt state like California, and manages to shine by contrast, his opportunities are so much the greater! But the nation is the thing. Every Union man during the Civil War fought for his flag, not for his section. But our country is now a republic only in name. We are piling up problems our founders could not anticipate, and if they go on unchecked, they will land us either in an autocracy, or in the worst form of tyranny known to history,—mob rule. It is the business of a few of us to avert a French Revolution. Just at present we are between two camps, Monopoly and Labor-Unionism, and have almost forgotten that we are citizens of a free country. Our skins have been safe so far, owing to the lack of brains and initiative in the masses; also, because they are far from starvation. But let that condition arise—before the Money Power has been made to open its eyes, or has been controlled by legislation—then horrors beside which the French Revolution will be mere picturesque material for novelists. A few thinking men with money enough to give them weight with the solid moneyed class at the top—where the reform must begin—as well as to place them above suspicion, and who have cultivated common-sense and patriotism instead of greed, must do the business. Let’s get out of this.”
XIII
When they were walking over the crisp snow in the woods—now deserted, for hotel guests and peasants alike were at the long midday meal—he resumed the subject. Her vivid sympathy and interest had brought back the bitter struggle of the past two years with a rush.
“How I wish you had been with me when we made our graft fight,” he said, looking at her with fond eager eyes. “What a mate you would have been. When the whole town is howling at a man because he is trying to do the right thing, he needs just such a woman as you to keep the courage in him. The concerted opinion of the majority has an insidious power! Sometimes we wondered if we could be right, if we were not all dreamers, unpractical, doing our city more harm than good. The whole country was aghast at our exposures, business was almost dead, capital refused to come our way; the poor old city that had been wrecked by the most fearful natural calamity of modern times—$500,000,000 went up in smoke—seemed to cry out against us for holding her down, to beg for a chance to limp out of her bog. But we looked ahead, convinced that there could be no permanent prosperity for San Francisco until the sore was scraped to the bone and sterilized; in other words, until the political scoundrels and the get-rich-quick element, that obtained their crushing franchises by corrupting a packed Board of Supervisors, and bought everybody, from the boss and the mayor down to the man in the street with a vote to sell, were either gaoled or so discredited that they would be forced into private life or out of the state. We unseated the boss and the mayor, the supervisors having come through, and we were able to indict several of what we call the higher-ups—the men that had done the buying. I never had much hope of convicting these men, for in California, in its present state of moral development, it is next to impossible to convict a rich man. If you get an honest judge, there are always men in the jury that have got in for no purpose but to be bribed. But we won out in another way. The long trial aired the abominable practices of these corporations, and, together with the many sensational episodes—the shooting of the prosecuting attorney in court, and the suicide of the would-be murderer in prison before he could be put on the stand, the kidnapping of the only editor that fought with us,—woke up the state; it talked of little else, and talking, thought, and was ashamed. The city machine got ahead of us, for the mayor we had managed to seat was too virtuous to build up a machine of his own; but we hope for great things in the state itself when our Reform candidate runs for the office of governor this year. Perhaps it was unreasonable to hope for more at the beginning, and it was a tough fight to get that much.
“Oh, God!” he cried bitterly, “the rottenness of young communities with potentialities of wealth. Human nature in the raw, when it is still in the ingenuous stage of greed, is a damnable thing. It has never shown any originality since the world began. Socialism may clip its wings, if it ever gets control, but—here is the cursed anomaly: you can’t hope for Socialism until a miracle eliminates greed from the nature of man; for it is men that must grant Socialism, and Socialism means the balking of greed. Even if some unforeseen set of circumstances forced it upon us, I doubt if it would last. You can no more eliminate greed from men than you could eliminate sex by forcing men and women to dress alike, shave their heads, and say their prayers three times a day. But the world is better in some respects than it was a century ago, and this is primarily due to the untiring efforts of the minority. But, again, the work must be done by a few men—the few that are awake and can see farther than their noses. Well, my dear, I hope and pray that I am one of those men. There you have my program, so far as a mere finite mind can project it.”
“Now I know why I have been permitted to love you,” said Julia, softly, and looking at him with glowing eyes. “Hadji Sadrä told me that he should watch over me, and that if I dared love a man who would pull me down, instead of being far greater than I could ever hope to be, he would blast me, transform me into a mere commonplace female, but haunted by the memory of what I had been —”
“How much of all that do you believe?”
“Ah! I saw marvellous exhibitions of power. They are common enough in the East, but one would hardly dare relate them in this part of the world. If I longed with all the concentrated powers of my mind for Hadji Sadrä, he would come to me in a flash—with that secondary material body they call the astral, and we call the ghost. If I were terribly perplexed, I should send for him —”