Chapter CLIX: Section 9: Thyrsis utilized this summer of leisure to begin a course of

reading in Socialism--a subject which had been stretching out its arms to him ever since he had made the acquaintance of Henry Darrell. He had held away from it on purpose, not wishing to complicate his mind with too many problems. But now he had finished with history, and was free to come back to the world of the present.

There were the pamphlets that Darrell had given him, and there was Paret’s magazine. Strange to say, the latter’s reckless jesting with the philanthropists and reformers no longer offended Thyrsis--he had been travelling fast along the road of disillusionment. Also, there was a Socialist paper in New York--“The Worker”; and more important still, there was the “Appeal to Reason”. Thyrsis came upon a chance reference to this paper, which was published in a little town in Kansas, and he was astonished to learn that it claimed a circulation of two hundred thousand copies a week. He became a subscriber, and after that the process of his “conversion” was rapid.

The Appeal was an “agitation-paper”. Its business was to show that side of the capitalist process which other publications tried to conceal, or at any rate to gild and dress up and make presentable. Each week came four closely-printed newspaper-pages, picturing horrors in mills and mines, telling of oppression and injustice, of unemployment and misery, accident, disease and death. There would be accounts of political corruption--of the buying of legislatures and courts, of the rule of “machines” of graft in city and state and nation. There would be tales of the manners and morals of the idle rich, set against others of the sufferings of the poor. And week by week, as he read and pondered, Thyrsis began to realize the absurd inadequacy of the placid statement which he had made to his first Socialist acquaintance--that the solution of such problems was to be left to “evolution”. It became only too clear to him that here was another war--the class-war; and that it was being fought by the masters with every weapon that cunning and greed could lay hands upon or contrive. In that struggle Thyrsis saw clearly that his place was in the ranks of the disinherited and dispossessed.

This was not a difficult decision; for in the first place he was one of the disinherited and dispossessed himself; and in the next place, even before the “economic screw” had penetrated his consciousness, he had been a rebel in his sympathies and tastes. Jesus, Isaiah, Milton, Shelley--such men as these had been the friends of his soul; and he had sought in vain for their spirit in modern society--he had thought that it was dead, and that he, and a few other lonely dreamers in garrets, were the only ones who knew or cared about it. But now he came upon the amazing discovery that this spirit, driven from legislative-halls and courts of justice, from churches and schools and editorial sanctums, had flamed into life in the hearts of the working class, and was represented in a political party which numbered some thirty millions of adherents and cast some seven million votes!

Beginning nearly a century ago, these workmgmen had taken the spirit of Jesus and Isaiah and Milton and Shelley, and had worked out a scientific basis for it, and a method whereby it could be made to count in the world of affairs. They had analyzed all the evils of modern society--poverty and luxury, social and political corruption, prostitution, crime and war; they had not only discovered the causes of them, but had laid down with mathematical precision the remedies, and had gone on to carry the remedies into effect. In every civilized land upon the globe they were at work as a political party of protest; they were holding conventions and adopting programs; they had an enormous literature, they were publishing newspapers and magazines, many of them having circulations of hundreds of thousands of copies.

The strangest thing of all was this. Thyrsis was an educated man--or was supposed to be. He had spent five years in schools, and nine years in colleges and universities; he had given the scholars of the world full opportunity to guide him to whatever was of importance. Also, he had been an omnivorous reader upon his own impulse; and here he was, at the end of it all--practically ignorant that this enormous movement existed!

In economic classes in college there had, of course, been some mention of Socialism; but this had been of the utopian variety, the dreams of Plato and St. Simon and Fourier. There had been some account of the innumerable communities which had sprung up in America--with careful explanation, however, that they had all proven failures. Also one heard vaguely of Marx and Lassalle, two violent men, whose ideas were still popular among the ignorant masses of Europe, but could be of no concern to the fortunate inhabitants of a free Republic.

And then, after this, to come upon some piece of writing--such as, for instance, the “Communist Manifesto”! To read this mile-stone in the progress of civilization, this marvellous exposition of the development of human societies, and of the forces which drive and control them; and to realize that two lonely students, who had cast in their lot with the exploited toilers, had been able to predict the whole course of political and industrial evolution for sixty years, and to foresee and expound with precision the ultimate outcome of the whole process--matters of which the orthodox economists were still as ignorant as babes unborn!

Or to discover the writings of such a man as Karl Kautsky, the intellectual leader of the modern movement in Germany; such books as “The Social Revolution”, and “The Road to Power”--in which one seemed to see a giant of the mind, standing in a death-duel with those forces of night and destruction that still made of the fair earth a hell! With what accuracy he was able to measure the strength of these powers of evil, to anticipate their every move, to plan the exact parry with which to meet them! To Thyrsis he seemed like some general commanding an army in battle, with the hopes of future ages hanging upon his skill. But this was a general who fought, not with sword and fire, but with ideas; a conqueror in the cause of “right reason and the will of God”. He wrote simply, as a scientist; and yet one could feel the passion behind the quiet words--the hourly shock of the incessant conflict, the grim persistence which pressed on in the face of obloquy and persecution, the courage which had been tested through generations of anguish and toil.

Thyrsis’ mind rushed through these things like prairie-fire; and all the time that he read, his wonder grew upon him. How _could_ he have been kept ignorant of them? He was quick to pounce upon the essential fact, that this was no accident; it was something that must have been planned and brought about deliberately. He had thought that he was being educated, when in reality he was being held back and fenced off from truth. It was a world-wide conspiracy--it was that very class-war which the established order was waging upon these men and their ideas!