“You and I believe it, dear, because we believe in God, and because we believe that this is God’s world and not the devil’s,” Mildred replied.
“Half the women whom we saw parading their fine toilets this afternoon believe it too, not because they know enough about history to see in it the unfolding of the divine idea, but because they like to believe it; because it makes them very comfortable to believe that by taking money which some one else has earned and paying an annual fee out of it to orphan asylums and hospitals, or to any outcome of our modern altruism, they are thereby relieved from all further responsibility.
“But here is an intelligent man,—an English university man, who has read history as well as you and I, and he says it is false. This is what he writes,” said Mildred, taking a thick letter from her writing-desk. She held it unopened for a moment and continued: “I met him when I was in England. We had many a talk in our rambles together at Kew and Hampstead Heath. He is a friend of William Morris and like him a socialist of the deepest dye. I don’t half accept the accuracy of all his statements, but he is an honest man and a gentleman. I am glad to know him, for I cannot afford to be ignorant of such a man’s views on our social problems, however much I may dissent from them. Now let me read you his letter.
... “You ask me to give you suggestions for the expenditure of your wealth in benefiting humanity. This I must decline to do, my dear friend. If I had your wealth I know what I should do, or, at least, what I ought to do, but I am a socialist, and you are not. I do not believe in laissez-faire as you do, and as a socialist I should use my wealth and influence for a reorganization of society, not for a patching up of what is at bottom false and rotten. Things are getting worse and worse, and must continue to do so under the present social system. My hope is that they will get so bad, so unutterably vile, that the people will be compelled to throw aside their apathy and make a clean sweep. I take no part in any of the hundred little schemes for ‘improving’ the present system. I don’t want to improve the present system as you do. I want to destroy it.
“We improve things that are already fairly good and can be made better, but we destroy whatever is thoroughly rotten; at least I think all rational people do so. So far as the present order is at all bearable, it is due to certain socialist innovations, such as interference with the capitalist, trade unions, movements like that of the Irish against the particular class of thieves called landlords, etc.
“The people, the common people, who for centuries have silently suffered and abjectly kissed the foot that kicked them and trod upon them, the people, I say, are beginning to wake up. They are beginning to ask questions, and they are questions which will have to be solved erelong, even if it take another bloody French revolution to do it. I see no way in which bloodshed is to be avoided. I look forward confidently to what will seem to you very like a reign of terror ere this century closes. Things must grow worse before they can get better. The crisis has not come, but it is coming. Money has done much, but it cannot do everything; the press will not always be bribed and muzzled as it is to-day, nor Levi’s and Mulhall’s and Giffen’s statistics be doctored to suit the capitalists who pay for them. The time is coming, Miss Brewster, when the people will be heard; and they will be heeded, for their words will be as short and sharp as fire and dynamite can make them.
“Do not think I am telling you of what I wish to see. I am telling you of what I know will come.
“The rich are not voluntarily going to heed the bitter cry of the famishing, except in one way, the only way they have ever known, namely, almsgiving. They will give alms because it is noble to be a benefactor, because it appeases their consciences, because it might be made extremely inconvenient for them if they did not. But they will not give justice. Justice! they never learned the meaning of the word.
“But some day these landed aristocrats ‘whose thin bloods crawl down from some robber in a border brawl,’ who have never lifted their finger to earn a penny in their lives, and who owe all that they have to these same robber ancestors,—these people, I say, will some day be taught the meaning of that same word ‘justice’ by some of the forty-five millions of landless people in our little island. I shall not soon forget how quickly the subscriptions for the poor went up a year or two ago, after the riots.
“You have no conception, Miss Brewster, you can have no conception, of the state of things here at present. Six millions of our people are living on the brink of pauperism. I tell you, when I sit down to my omelette and toast in the morning and reflect that there are two hundred thousand human beings within two miles of me who don’t know where they are going to get their next meal, when I read of the hundreds of children who habitually go to school without any breakfast, and who not unfrequently faint dead away over their books, I tell you it doesn’t make my own breakfast relish any better.