"I must admit that I grow tired at times of the 'movement.' Kate says she has cut it out altogether, and Terry goes to the meetings very seldom. I dutifully attend the lectures, where they talk about the same old things in the same old way, and also the socials and visit the comrades once in a while. But they do get on my nerves sometimes. I prefer to stay at home, in the inner circle of the salon, reading and sucking at my cigarette when I have one. I scrub the floor once in a while, just because of sheer weariness from not doing anything.
"Terry has been writing an article on 'the general strike,' but did not finish it. He is like me in lacking energy enough to carry out any plan or purpose unless great pressure is brought to bear upon him either from within or without. I am sure that if he continued to feel strongly about the general strike he would go on to finish it. But he has a great distrust, really, of the 'labour' movement and of labour leaders. He believes that all social improvement must come from the workers, but how many difficulties there are! One of the greatest is the lack of good leaders. I myself have not much hope for the workers as long as they remain sheep who are lost without leaders, are dependent and led either by honest men who know not clearly how, where, or why, or by intelligent men, whose intelligence usually takes the form of trickery and self-interest. The intelligent honest ones seem not to be cut out to be leaders, or successful in any way. Sheep are led or driven most easily by those who can make the most noise, and they follow as readily over the precipice as over the road. The slightest thing serves to frighten and scatter them in all directions, in outward confusion and helplessness, unless the burly insistent watchers are for ever at their heels. Leaders of such a herd must often be unscrupulous to have any success, must use their intelligence for all sorts of devices, often cruel and unjust, to keep their flocks from wandering: any means justifies the end, which is the good of the cause.
"Perhaps it is a good sign that people from the higher walks of life are beginning to take notice of the workingman's problem, and maybe the ideal leader will come from above, but even so I doubt if that will help much. I have a feeling that all movements dependent on leaders must necessarily fail. Of course, I know that the people of the 'higher life' fear the stupidity and brutality of the mass of workers, and argue that leaders are necessary to guide and restrain them. This is only partly true; there is hardly any doubt about the stupidity of the mob, but they are not at all so brutal. True, during times of strike they will throw stones and slug strike-breakers, but they are not nearly as brutal as the 'scabs,' who are incited, aided, and protected by the employers and police, and who lack the emotional exaltation which often inspires the workers to this violence.
"During the teamsters' strike I witnessed a scene where the strikers hustled the scabs, overturned several huge wagons loaded with beef, in the centre of one of the poorest districts of Chicago, where the people were suffering from want of meat, but the wretches did not even have sense enough to help themselves from this plentiful store which was left on the street guarded only by one or two policemen. And there would have been no danger of arrest, for the policemen could easily have been swept aside by the rest of the mob. It made me mad. I felt like shouting at them, 'you fools, why don't you help yourselves?' How differently a hungry bunch of kids would have acted!"
Terry, in his very different way, wrote on the same subject:
"I never knew a sincere, not to say honest, labour leader, from business agent up. Poor proletaire! forever crucified between two sets of thieves—one rioting on his rights, the other carousing on his wrongs. Labour plods while plunder plays, thus runs the world away. But if he should take it into his thick head to be his own walking delegate some day!"
This strange master of the "salon," this poetic interpreter of the philosophy of the man who has nothing, has, in spite of his pessimisms, a profound mystic hope. He wrote:
"That toiling humanity—the labour movement—to me is a thing so vast, that whatever other movements try to exclude themselves from it, they must be swallowed up in it. All other things are but the shadows cast behind or before the ever-marching phalanx of the unconquerable, the imperishable proletaire. This is the hope which sends its thrill through us when nothing else can. At the bottom of my heart I know I am living but for one thing, and my life has been nothing but a preparation for this. Of and for myself I have accomplished nothing: for to be ever ready and alert is not accomplishment.... I see a profound hope in the proletaire, for to him is granted that intense, wistful awareness of his common lot and life with his fellows. His very crowding in factories and tenements, salons, unions, and brothels, brings it home to him. Yes, this very lack of space must remorselessly rub it in, even by dumb, physical close contact. The friction resulting from ten living in one room must make one of them phosphorescent—and capable of giving light to humanity. The tenement houses are harmless boxes of lucifers as long as none is ignited. The inhabitants are wofully benighted, but they possess wonderfully the quality of brotherhood, of oneness, hence arises their wonderful psychology and their æsthetics, so full and overflowing with pathos, so piercing, it carries one to that borderland where comic and tragic make marriage.
"This strange crowding in our consciousness of things that do not seem to come from us and yet are of us—this clamouring consciousness is what drives me to despair and makes me feel I have not the form or shadow of things, though I may have the substance. Yet I am determined to strain my self-consciousness even to the breaking point; for though I know madness lies that way, there stands my Ideal, beckoning. I must grasp this great common thing which comes from all of us, from us crowded proletarians, and yet is not in any one of us. Together we enjoy and suffer more than any one of us alone. There is, I believe, something deeper than the deepest woe: our racial consciousness is there and we must find it. At moments of great insight we are suddenly made aware of this, the mysterious unity of the Race, but it is flashed and gone and we must await another crisis. It is only in moments of sublime sorrow that the depths of the racial consciousness is heaved up to us. Joy cannot do this, for joy is narrow and wants us to do away with sorrow; but sorrow never wants us to do away with joy. Keats always beheld joy in an external attitude of farewell and this is profoundly and perfectly mystical and real: joy is swallowed up in something deeper, away down in the common racial consciousness. We must all strive to be men beyond essential harm; else, standing blindly before the meaning and destiny of the race, we should go mad. Most of us try to think, intellectuals; fear to abandon ourselves to alarming states of feeling where reason is crowded to the wall. And yet I feel that by abandoning ourselves completely to mere feeling lies our only hope to find the logic of the race that no individual reason can master.
"Let me tell you of something that recently happened to me which shows how strong this race feeling is, as opposed to merely individual or family feeling. I heard that my mother was dying. I had become reconciled long ago, had seen many things more clearly; for if joy is of the heart, sorrow is of the soul, by which we see. I wonder if woman has a 'lake' in her heart. I used to think my mother had, and when I called to see her once more, the old love-longing caught me by the throat. My presence seemed to help her some, but, though moved, I had passed beyond the family boundary-line, and was engaged in stripping myself of everything not belonging to the soul. If I wish to be something more than myself, I must be prepared to lose all, even myself. And what is my family and my mother?"