“Fellow citizens,” she began—“fellow-buccaneers of Wall Street.” And when the mild laughter had subsided: “What I have to say is going to be addressed to one individual among you—the American millionaire. I assume there is one present—if no actual millionaire, then surely several who are destined to be, and not less than a thousand who aspire to be. So hear me, Mr. Millionaire,” this with a smile, which gave you a sense of a reserve fund of energy and good humour. She had the crowd with her from the start—all but one. I stole a glance at the millionaire, and saw that he was not smiling.
“Won’t you get in?” asked his wife, and he answered coldly: “No, I’ll wait till you’ve had enough.”
“Last summer I had a curious experience,” said the speaker. “I was a guest at a tennis match, played upon the grounds of a State insane-asylum, the players being the doctors of the institution. Here, on a beautiful sunshiny afternoon, were ladies and gentlemen clad in festive white, enjoying a holiday, while in the background stood a frowning building with iron-barred gates and windows, from which one heard now and then the howlings of the maniacs. Some of the less fortunate of these victims of fate had been let loose, and while we played tennis, they chased the balls. All afternoon, while I sipped tea and chatted and watched the games, I said to myself: ‘Here is the most perfect simile of our civilization that has ever come to me. Some people wear white and play tennis all day, while other people chase the balls, or howl in dungeons in the background!’ And that is the problem I wish to put before my American millionaire—the problem of what I will call our lunatic-asylum stage of civilization. Mind you, this condition is all very well so long as we can say that the lunatics are incurable—that there is nothing we can do but shut our ears to their howling, and go ahead with our tennis. But suppose the idea were to dawn upon us that it is only because we played tennis all day that the lunatic-asylum is crowded, then might not the howls grow unendurable to us, and the game lose its charm?”
Stealing glances about me, I saw that several people were watching the forty-or-fifty-times-over millionaire; they had evidently recognised him, and were enjoying the joke. “Haven’t you had enough of this?” he suddenly demanded of his wife, and she answered, guilelessly: “No, let’s wait. I’m interested.”
“Now, listen to me, Mr. American Millionaire,” the speaker was continuing. “You are the one who plays tennis, and we, who chase the balls for you—we are the lunatics. And my purpose to-day is to prove to you that it is only because you play tennis all day that we have to chase balls all the day, and to tell you that some time soon we are going to cease to be lunatics, and that then you will have to chase your own balls! And don’t, in your amusement over this illustration, lose sight of the serious nature of what I am talking about—the horrible economic lunacy which is known as poverty, and which is responsible for most of the evils we have in this world to-day—for crime and prostitution, suicide, insanity and war. My purpose is to show you, not by any guess of mine, or any appeals to your faith, but by cold business facts which can be understood in Wall Street, that this economic lunacy is one which can be cured; that we have the remedy in our hands, and lack nothing but the intelligence to apply it.”
18. I do not want to bore you with a Socialist speech. I only want to give you an idea of the trap into which Mr. Douglas van Tuiver had been drawn. He stood there, rigidly aloof while the speaker went on to explain the basic facts of wealth-production in modern society. She quoted from Kropotkin: “‘Fields, Factories and Work-shops,’ on sale at this meeting for a quarter!”—showing how by modern intensive farming—no matter of theory, but methods which were in commercial use in hundreds of places—it would be possible to feed the entire population of the globe from the soil of the British Isles alone. She showed by the bulletins of the United States Government how the machine process had increased the productive power of the individual labourer ten, twenty, a hundred fold. So vast was man’s power of producing wealth today, and yet the labourer lived in dire want just as in the days of crude hand-industry!
So she came back to her millionaire, upon whom this evil rested. He was the master of the machine for whose profit the labourer had to produce. He could only employ the labourer to produce what could be sold at a profit; and so the stream of prosperity was choked at its source. “It is you, Mr. Millionaire, who are to blame for poverty; it is because so many millions of dollars must be paid to you in profits that so many millions of men must live in want. In other words, precisely as I declared at the outset, it is your playing tennis which is responsible for the lunatics chasing the balls!”
I wish that I might give some sense of the speaker’s mastery of this situation, the extent to which she had communicated her good-humour to the crowd. You heard ripple after ripple of laughter, you saw everywhere about you eager faces, following every turn of the argument. No one could resist the contagion of interest—save only the American millionaire! He stood impassive, never once smiling, never once betraying a trace of feeling. Venturing to watch him more closely, however, I could see the stern lines deepening about his mouth, and his long, lean face growing more set.
The speaker had outlined the remedy—a change from the system of production for profit to one of production for use. She went on to explain how the change was coming; the lunatic classes were beginning to doubt the divine nature of the rules of the asylum, and they were preparing to mutiny, and take possession of the place. And here I saw that Sylvia’s husband had reached his limit. He turned to her: “Haven’t you had enough of this?”
“Why, no,” she began. “If you don’t mind—”