“I see what you want,” he admitted, in his arguments with this editor; “and it’s the same thing as I want—every man with any sense must see that, in the ultimate outcome, all this capital will be owned by the public and not by private individuals. But what I object to is the way you go at it. The industrial process is a necessary thing; it is drilling and disciplining the workers. They are not yet fitted for the responsibility of managing the world.”
“But,” asked the editor, “what’s to be the sign when they are fitted?”
“When they have been educated,” Thyrsis answered.
To which the editor responded, “Who is to educate them, if we don’t?”
That was an interesting point; and Thyrsis found little by little that a new light was dawning upon him. He had somehow conceived of industrial evolution as something vast and intangible and mechanical, something that went on independent of men, and that could not be hurried or delayed. What this editor pointed out was that the process was a definite one, that it went on in the minds of men, and involved human effort—of which the publishing of Socialist literature was a most essential part.
“You ought to hear Darrell,” said the man; and a few days later he wrote Thyrsis a note, asking him to go to a hall over on the East Side that evening.
Thyrsis went, and found a working-men’s meeting-room, ill-lighted and ill-ventilated, with perhaps two hundred people in it. The chairman introduced the speaker of the evening; and so Thyrsis got his first glimpse of Henry Darrell.
He was something over forty years of age, slight of build; his face was pale to the point of ghostliness, and this impression was heightened by a jet black mustache and beard. One’s first thought was that this man was no stranger to suffering.
He was not a good speaker, in the conventional sense, he fumbled for words, and repeated himself—and yet from his first sentence Thyrsis found himself listening spellbound. The voice went through him like the toll of a bell; never in all his life had he heard a speaker who put such a burden of anguish into his words—who gave such a sense of gigantic issues, of age-long destinies hanging in the balance, of world-embracing hopes and powers struggling to be born. Here was a prophet who carried in his soul the future of the race; who in the sudden flashes of his vision, in the swift rushes of his passionate pleadings, evoked from the deeps of the consciousness forces that one contemplated with terror—confronted one with martyrdoms and agonies and despairs.
“Revolution” was his title; he pictured modern civilization as it presented itself to the proletarian man—a gigantic Moloch, to which human lives were fed, a monster from whose dominion there was no deliverance, even in the uttermost parts of the earth. He pictured accident, disease and death, unemployment and starvation, child-labor, prostitution, war; he was the voice of the dispossessed of the earth, the man beneath the machine, ground up body, mind and soul in this “world-wide mill of economic might”. And he showed how this man dragged down with him all society; how the chain that bound the slave was fastened also to the master—so that from the poverty and oppression and degradation of this “downmost man” came all the ulcers that festered in the social body. He saw the great economic machine grinding on day and night, the mighty forces rushing to their culmination. He saw the toiling millions pressed deeper and deeper into the mire; he saw their blind, convulsive struggles for deliverance; he saw over them the gigantic slave-driver with his thousand-lashed whip—the capitalist state, class-owned class-administered—backed by the capitalist church and the capitalist press and capitalist “public sentiment”. So the hopes of the people went down in blood and reaction sat enthroned. The nations, ridden by despotisms, and whirled into senseless wars, ran the old course of militarism, imperialism, barbarism; and so civilization slid back yet again into the melting-pot!