“I have no definite plan,” I said.
“Then come home with me,” he suggested, and I assented gladly.
We were a long time getting there, but when, at last, we reached his door, the journey was quickly forgotten.
As flat as the untroubled sea, the open prairie lay about us, browned and seared by frosts and gleaming faintly under the winter stars. Long parallels of street-lamps, cutting one another at right angles, marked the outlines of city “blocks,” and threw into stronger relief the deep black of clustered trees and the forms of lonely cottages with lights glancing dimly from their windows.
When my friend opened the door of his house, there was nothing in the domestic scene which met us to suggest the home of a revolutionary. It was the typical home, rather, of the prosperous American workman. The living-room, which we entered, was aglow with light, and redolent of dry, unwholesome, excessive heat from a closed iron stove, and it seemed at first to be already crowded by occupants. The wife was standing over a cradle, in which she softly rocked her baby, whose sleep was undisturbed by the conversation between two young men of the family. An old couple, seated in easy chairs, were reading to themselves, and formed a feature of the picture that fitted well with the books which stood ranged in swinging brackets on the wall. There was the usual floral paper, with a border sad enough to move one to tears, and the worsted tidies, and the prints wherein sentimentality has so long and so often posed as sentiment. But the plain, rough furniture was redeemed by the marks of long usefulness, and the room, as a whole, had all the cosey homeliness of fitness to those whom it served.
THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO SUGGEST THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY.
Soon we were seated at supper, and the family, accustomed, apparently, to the presence of a stranger brought home from the meeting, left my friend and me to our own discussion of Socialistic themes. I found this deeply interesting, for my host was finely representative of the views of the majority of the Socialists whom I saw at Waverley Hall. In the main he was a Social Democrat. His economic views were drawn, I found, entirely from Karl Marx. “Das Kapital” was his Bible, and he seemed to know it by heart. To question Marx’s theory of value or his treatment of labor in relation to production was blasphemy akin to casting doubt before a devout believer upon the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures.
He was a Socialist of serene temperament, with boundless faith in the silent processes of development. Propaganda was hysterical from his point of view.
“There could be no propaganda in behalf of Socialism,” he said to me, “one hundredth part so effective as the unchecked activity of men who imagine themselves the bulwarks of social order and the bitterest foes of Socialism. We have no quarrel with the increasing centralization of capital. The opposition to ‘trusts’ and the like comes mainly from the bourgeoisie, who feel themselves being forced out of independent business. We Socialists are already of the proletariat, and we see clearly that all trusts and syndicates are the inevitable forerunners of still greater centralization. The men who are employing their rare abilities in eliminating the useless wastes of competitive production, by unifying its administration and control, and so reducing greatly the cost of the finished article, and who are perfecting the machinery of transportation and distribution by like unity of administration, are doing far more in a year to bring about a co-operative organization of society than we could do, by preaching the theory of collectivism, in a hundred years.