“We have come to bring brotherhood into this earth. For in the union every man sacrifices something to the common good; mutual help means mutual sacrifice, and self-denial is brotherly love. Fraternity and democracy are synonymous. We must rise together by self-help. I know how easy it is for the rich man to become poor. I know that often the poor man becomes rich. But when Esau throws off the yoke of Jacob, when the poor shall rise and come into their own, the rise shall not be as individuals, but as a class. The glass workers are better paid than the teamsters; but their interests are common, and the better paid workers cannot rise except their poorly paid fellow workmen rise with them. It is a class problem and it must have a class solution.”
Grant Adams stood staring at the crowd. Then he spread out his two gaunt arms and closed his eyes and cried: “Oh, Esau, Esau, you were faint and hungry in that elder day when you drank the red pottage and sold your birthright. But did you know when you bartered it away, that in that bargain went your children’s souls? Down here in the Valley, five babies die in infancy where one dies up there on the hill. Ninety per cent. of the boys in jail come from the homes in the Valley and ten per cent. from the homes on the hill. And the girls who go out in the night, never to come home–poor girls always. Crime and shame and death were in that red pottage, and its bitterness still burns our hearts. And why–why in the name of our loving Christ who knew the wicked bargain Jacob made–why is our birthright gone? Why does Esau still serve his brother unrequited?” Then he opened his eyes and cried stridently–“I’ll tell you why. The poor are poor because the rich are rich. We have been working a decade and a half in this Valley, and profits, not new capital, have developed it. Profits that should have been divided with labor in wages have gone to buy new machines–miles and miles of new machines have come here, bought and paid for with the money that labor earned, and because we have not the machines which our labor has bought, we are poor–we 440are working long hours amid squalor surrounded with death and crime and shame. Oh, Esau, Esau, what a pottage it was that you drank in the elder day! Oh, Jacob, Jacob, wrestle, wrestle with thy conscience; wrestle with thy accusing Lord; wrestle, Jacob, wrestle, for the day is breaking and we will not let thee go! How long, O Lord, how long will you hold us to that cruel bargain!”
He paused as one looking for an answer–hesitant, eager, expectant. Then he drew a long breath, turned slowly and sadly and walked away.
No cheer followed him. The crowd was stirred too deeply for cheers. But the seed he had sown quickened in a thousand hearts even if in some hearts it fell among thorns, even if in some it fell upon stony ground. The sower had gone forth to sow.
441CHAPTER XXXIX
BEING NO CHAPTER AT ALL BUT AN INTERMEZZO BEFORE THE LAST MOVEMENT
The stage is dark. In the dim distance something is moving. It is a world hurrying through space. Somewhat in the foreground but enveloped in the murk sit three figures. They are tending a vast loom. Its myriad threads run through illimitable space and the woof of the loom is time. The three figures weaving through the dark do not know whence comes the power that moves the loom eternally. They have not asked. They work in the pitch of night.
From afar in the earth comes a voice–high-keyed and gentle:
A Voice, pianissimo:
“This business of governing a sovereign people is losing its savor. I must be getting some kind of spiritual necrosis. Generally speaking, about all the real pleasure a grand llama of politics finds in life, is in counting his ingrates–his governors and senators and congressmen! Why, George, it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve cussed out a senator or a governor, yet I read Browning with joy and the last time I heard Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, I went stark mad. But woe is me, George! Woe is me. When the Judge and Dan Sands named the postmaster last month without consulting me, I didn’t care. I tell you, George, I must be getting old!”