The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

These familiar feelings, roused, as always, by the common contrasts of life, which one follows in close study through the bewildering complexities of casual relations, were dominant, from the new point of view, as the outcome of patent facts. Superficial and undiscriminating, and yet most real and living, is the thought of the actual workman, as his mind responds to the obvious leading of the things he sees. I was glad at this point that Albert was not with me. A few minutes later I deeply regretted his absence.

The minister had begun his sermon. I scarcely heard the opening sentences, so oppressed was my mind with the workman’s sense of the ruthless Philistinism of this phase of modern Christianity. It was the preacher’s tone which first attracted me. There was quiet in it and a great reserve, and he spoke as a pastor who holds earnest conversation with his flock. I was all attention in a moment, and I saw that I listened to a man who knew his fellow-men, and whose words made strong appeal to their intelligence.

It was as though he spoke from a heart well-nigh broken with personal grief, but chastened to new love and truth, and tenderness, by the sorrow which it had borne.

He was speaking of the needs of men, and through his thoughts there breathed a knowledge of the Weltschmerz of to-day, and deep sympathy with it. There was no weak ignoring of the difficulties of honest doubt, and no false claims for the basis of belief; and, when he spoke of the awful suffering of our time, his words were true to the high dignity of man through the infinite consequences of free choice in his life upon the earth. His appeal was no emotional blending of the false and true, wherewith to blind men’s eyes to the eternal verities, and to cause to rest lightly upon comfortable consciences the sense of personal responsibility for one’s fellows, but rather the sure claim of clear conviction which comes from out the facts of daily life seen in the light of their true meaning.

The effect upon his hearers was unmistakable. I was unaware of it for a time, so engrossed was I in the speaker’s words, and in the strongly human personality of the man, but by degrees I awoke to the fact that all about me were listeners as eagerly intent as I. The sense of hardened, pampered, Philistinism gave way before the overwhelming consciousness of a sympathetic unity of thought and feeling. Indifferent to the vital needs of the world and to the pressing problems of its life? No emotion could have been farther from these men and women, the intensity of whose interest could be felt in almost an agony of breathless attention to the sober truthfulness of the minister. The very stillness was charged with mute appeal for guidance from hearts wrung with the hurt of the world and pleading for some useful outlet to the tide of generous feeling. It was as though distress had ceased to be for them the visible sufferings of the poor, and had grown, through the deepening sense of brotherhood, into an anguish of their own, which must find healing in forms of effective helpfulness. Very clearly dawned the conviction that, if one could but point out to the members of this waiting company some “way,” “something to do,” which would square well with their practical business sense of things, instant and unmeasured would be their response for the furthering of an end which would work them such glad relief!

From the church my destination was the meeting of the Socialists. But not immediately, for I stopped on the way at the well-known haunt in Madison Street for the usual Sunday dinner.

By this time I had attended several of the Socialists’ meetings, and had come to know personally a number of the members of the order, and I was not surprised, upon taking a seat in the restaurant, to catch sight of three Socialists who were nodding pleasantly to me from a neighboring table. One was the broad-minded Pedler, whose good impression made in the first speech of his which I had heard was heightened by all my later knowledge of him. Another I had learned to know as a near approach to my original preconception of a revolutionary. He was a Communistic Anarchist, and just what peculiar variation of individual belief it was which led him to ally himself with the Socialists I could never make clearly out.

It puzzled me not a little; for, by this time I had thoroughly in mind the fundamental fact that Socialism and Anarchy, as two schools of social doctrine, are at the very poles of hostile opposition to each other. And, if I may judge from the little that I have seen and heard between them, the vituperative heat of their controversies is equalled only by the warmth and malignancy which has marked the history of theological debate.

I soon learned that Socialist and Anarchist are not interchangeable terms, to be used with light indifference in describing the general advocate of revolution against established order. Indeed, to my great surprise, I found that a policy of active, aggressive revolution among these men had almost no adherents. Certainly none among the Socialists, for they repudiated the bare suggestion of violence as being wholly inadequate and absurd, and pinned their faith instead to what they called the “natural processes of evolution.” These, to their belief, would, in any case, work out the appointed ends with men, but their operation could be stimulated by education, they said, and helped on by organized effort toward the achievement of manifest destiny in the highly centralized and perfected order which is to result from the common ownership and administration by all the people of all land and capital used in production and distribution, for the common good of all.

And even among the Anarchists the upholders of a policy of bloody revolt against social order were rare. Most of those whom I came to know were distinctly of a metaphysical turn of mind. It was easy to trace their intellectual kinship with the Physiocrats of the last century, in their implicit confidence in the universal efficacy of laissez faire. Their views, reduced to simplest terms, seemed to take the form of the epigram—that “the cure for the evils of freedom is more freedom.” The removal of all artificial restraint in the form of man-made laws would result eventually, to their thinking, in a society as natural and as wholesome as is all physical order, which is the exact resultant of the free play of natural law.