Chapter XV: Book X: Mammon (2)

I sat in this room and heard a great philanthropist read the list of activities of his Foundation "to promote the well-being of mankind." An international health commission to extend to foreign countries and peoples the work of eradicating the hookworm; the promotion of medical education and health in China; the investigations of vice conditions in Europe; one hundred thousand dollars for the American Academy in Rome, twenty thousand a year for widows' pensions in New York, one million for the relief of Belgians, thirty-four millions for the University of Chicago, thirty-four millions for a General Education Board. A wave of horror swept over me during that reading, and I say to you that that same wave is now rushing over the entire working-class of the United States. Health for China, a refuge for birds in Louisiana, food for the Belgians, pensions for New York widows, university training for the elect--and never a thought or a dollar for the many thousands of men, women and children who starved in Colorado, for the widows robbed of husbands and children of their fathers, by law-violating conditions in the mines. There are thousands of this great philanthropist's former employees in Colorado today who wish to God that they were in Belgium to be fed, or birds to be cared for tenderly.

Crowds

BY GERALD STANLEY LEE

(Contemporary American author and lecturer, formerly a clergyman)

As I have watched my fellow human beings, what I have come to want most of all in this world is the inspired employer--or what I have called the inspired millionaire or organizer; the man who can take the machines off the backs of the people, and take the machines out of their wits, and make the machines free their bodies and serve their souls.

If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be made by the social imagination of the people, by creating the spirit of expectation and challenge toward the rich among the masses of the people....

Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without dreams, especially an economic world. It is because even bad dreams are better in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so-called are so largely allowed to run it.

In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics to be reckoned with is Desire.

The Dying Boss

BY LINCOLN STEFFENS

(American writer upon social problems, born 1866. A story of the political leader of a corrupt city, who lies upon his death-bed, and has asked to have the meaning of his own career made plain to him)

"What kind of a kid were you, Boss?" I began.

"Pretty tough, I guess," he answered.

"Born here?"

"Yes; in the Third Ward."

"Tough then as it is now?"

"Tougher," he said.

"Produces toughness the way Kansas produces corn," I remarked. "Father?" I asked.

"Kept a saloon; a driver before that."

"Mother a girl of the ward?"

"Yes," he said. "She was brought up there; but she came to this country with her father from England, as a baby."

"What sort of woman was she?"

"Quiet," he said; "always still; silent-like; a worker. Kept the old man straight--some; and me too--'s well as she could. She's th' one that got him off th' wagon and started in th' liquor business."

"You were poor people?"

"Yes."

"And common?"

"Y-yes-s."

"A child of the people," I commented: "the common people."

He nodded, wondering.

"One of the great, friendless mass of helpless humanity?"

He nodded.

"That wasn't your fault, was it?" I said. "Not to blame for that? That's not your sin, is it?"

He shook his head, staring, and he was so mystified that I said that most people were "pretty terribly punished for being born poor and common." He nodded, but he wasn't interested or enlightened, apparently. "And you learned, somehow, that the thing to do was to get yourself on, get up out of it, make a success of your life?"

"Yes," he said slowly. "I don't know how, but I did get that, somehow."

"That was the ideal they taught you," I said. "Never heard of getting everybody on and making a success of society; of the city and State?"

But this line of questioning was beyond him. I changed my tack....

"In that first interview we had," I said, "you insisted that, while the business boss was the real boss, the sovereign, you had some power of your own. And you described it today as the backing of your own ward, which, you said, you had in your pocket. When you became boss, you got the backing, the personal support, of other wards, didn't you?"

"Seven of 'em," he counted. "Made th' leaders myself."

"And you developed a big personal following in other wards, too?"

"Sure," he said; "in every one of them. I was a popular leader; not only a boss, but a friend with friends, lots of 'em. The people liked me."

"That's the point," I said. "The people liked you."

He nodded warmly.

"The common people," I went on, and he was about to nod, but he didn't. And his fingers became still. "Your own people--the great helpless mass of the friendless mob--liked you." His eyes were fixed on mine. "They followed you; they trusted you."

I paused a moment, then I asked: "Didn't they, Boss?"

"Yes," he said with his lips alone.

"They didn't set a watch on you, did they?" I continued. "They voted as you bade them vote, elected the fellows you put on the tickets of their party for them. And, after they elected them, they left it to them, and to you, to be true to them; to stick to them; to be loyal."

His eyes fell to his fingers, and his fingers began again to pick.

"And when your enemies got after you and accused you," I said, "the people stuck by you?"

No answer; only the fingers picked.

"The great, friendless mass--the hopeful, hopeless majority--they were true to you and the party, and they re-elected you."

His eyes were on mine again, and there was light in them; but it was the reflected light of fire, and it burned.

"And you--you betrayed them," I said; and I hurried on, piling on the fuel, all I had. "They have power, the people have, and they have needs, great common needs; and they have great common wealth. All your fat, rich franchises, all your great social values, the values added to land and franchise by the presence of the great, common, numerous mass, all the city's public property--all are theirs, their common property. They own enough in common to meet all their great common needs, and they have an organization to keep for them and to develop for their use and profit all these great needed social values. It is the city; the city government; city, State, and national. And they have, they breed in their own ranks, men like you, natural political leaders, to go into public life and lead them, teach them, represent them. And they leave it all to you, trusting you. And you, all of you--not you alone, Boss, but all of you: ward leaders; State leaders; all the national political bosses--you all betray them. You receive from them their votes, so faithfully given, and you transform them into office-holders whom you teach or corrupt and compel to obey you. So you reorganize the city government. You, not the Mayor, are the head of it; you, not the council, are its legislature; you, not the heads of departments, are the administrators of the property and the powers of the people of your city; the common, helpless, friendless people. And, having thus organized and taken over all this power and property and--this beautiful faith, you do not protect their rights and their property. What do you do with it, Boss?"

He started. He could not answer. I answered for him:

"You sell 'em out; you turn over the whole thing--the city, its property, and its people--to Business, to the big fellows; to the business leaders of the people. You deliver, not only franchises, privileges, private rights and public properties, and values, Boss: you--all of you together--have delivered the government itself to these men, so that today this city, this State, and the national government represent, normally, not the people, not the great mass of common folk, who need protection, but--Business; preferably bad business; privileged business; a class; a privileged class."

He had sunk back among the pillows, his eyes closed, his fingers still. I sounded him.

"That's the system," I repeated. "It's an organization of social treason, and the political boss is the chief traitor. It couldn't stand without the submission of the people; the real bosses have to get that. They can't buy the people--too many of them; so they buy the people's leaders, and the disloyalty of the political boss is the key to the whole thing."

These was no response. I plumbed him again.

"And you--you believe in loyalty, Boss," I said--"in being true to your own." His eyes opened. "That's your virtue, you say, and you said, too, that you have practiced it."

"Don't," he murmured.

A Ballad of Dead Girls

BY DANA BURNET

(American poet, born 1888)

Scarce had they brought the bodies down
Across the withered floor,
Than Max Rogosky thundered at
The District Leader's door.

Scarce had the white-lipped mothers come
To search the fearful noon,
Than little Max stood shivering
In Tom McTodd's saloon!

In Tom McTodd's saloon he stood,
Beside the silver bar,
Where any honest lad may stand,
And sell his vote at par.

"Ten years I've paid the System's tax,"
The words fell, quivering, raw;
"And now I want the thing I bought--
Protection from the law!"

The Leader smiled a twisted smile:
"Your doors were locked," he said.
"You've overstepped the limit, Max--
A hundred women ... dead!"

Then Max Rogosky gripped the bar
And shivered where he stood.
"You listen now to me," he cried,
"Like business fellers should!

"I've paid for all my hundred dead,
I've paid, I've paid, I've paid."
His ragged laughter rang, and died--
For he was sore afraid.

"I've paid for wooden hall and stair,
I've paid to strain my floors,
I've paid for rotten fire-escapes,
For all my bolted doors.

"Your fat inspectors came and came--
I crossed their hands with gold.
And now I want the thing I bought,
The thing the System sold."

The District Leader filled a glass
With whiskey from the bar,
(The little silver counter where
He bought men's souls at par.)

And well he knew that he must give
The thing that he had sold,
Else men should doubt the System's word,
Keep back the System's gold.

The whiskey burned beneath his tongue:
"A hundred women dead!
I guess the Boss can fix it up,
Go home--and hide," he said.

* * * * *

All day they brought the bodies down
From Max Rogosky's place--
And oh, the fearful touch of flame
On hand and breast and face!

All day the white-lipped mothers came
To search the sheeted dead;
And Horror strode the blackened walls.
Where Death had walked in red.

But Max Rogosky did not weep.
(He knew that tears were vain.)
He paid the System's price, and lived
To lock his doors again.

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

(See pages 181, 492, 507)

The strongest castle, tower and town,
The golden bullet beats it down.

The Miner's Tale

BY MAY BEALS

(A tragedy at Coal Creek, Tennessee, May 19, 1902)

The lord of us he lay in his bed--
Good right had he, good right!
But we were up before night had fled,
Out to the mine in the dawning red;
Slaves were we all, by hunger led
Into the land of night.

The master knew of our danger well,
We also knew--we knew.
His greed for profits had served him well,
But he over-reached him, as fate befell,
And I alone am left to tell,
Death's horrors I lived through

The master dreamed, mayhap, of his gold,
But we were awake--awake,
Buried alive in the black earth's mold;
And some who yet could a pencil hold,
Wrote till their hands in death grew cold,
For wife or sweetheart's sake.

Letters they wrote of farewell--farewell,
To mother, sweetheart, wife:
What words of comfort could they tell--
Comfort for those who loved them well,
Up from the jaws of the earth's black hell
That was crushing out their life.

The master cursed, as masters do--
Good right had he, good right!
But the fear of our vengeance stirred him, too;
He sailed, with some of his pirate crew,
To Europe, and reveled a year or two;
Great might has he--great might!

Romance

BY SEYMOUR DEMING

(Contemporary American writer)

The old idea of romance: The country boy goes to the city, marries his employer's daughter, enslaves some hundreds of his fellow humans, gets rich, and leaves a public library to his home town.

The new idea of romance: To undo some of the mischief done by the old idea of romance.

The Soul's Errand

BY SIR WALTER RALEIGH

(Written by the English soldier and statesman, 1552-1618, just before his execution)

Go, Soul, the body's guest,
Upon a thankless errand;
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant:
Go, since I needs must die,
And give them all the lie.

Go tell the Court it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Go tell the Church it shows
What's good, but does no good:
If Court and Church reply
Give Court and Church the lie.

Tell Potentates they live
Acting, but oh! their actions;
Not loved, unless they give,
Nor strong but by their factions:
If Potentates reply,
Give Potentates the lie.

Tell men of high condition,
That rule affairs of state,
Their purpose is ambition;
Their practice only hate:
And if they do reply,
Then give them all the lie....

Tell Physic of her boldness;
Tell Skill it is pretension;
Tell Charity of coldness;
Tell Law it is contention:
And if they yield reply,
Then give them all the lie....

So when thou hast, as I
Commanded thee, done blabbing;
Although to give the lie
Deserves no less than stabbing:
Yet stab at thee who will,
No stab the Soul can kill.

December 31st

BY LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE

(Contemporary English poet)

What is he hammering there,
That devil swinking in Hell?
Oh, he forges a cunning New Year,
God knows he does it well.

Mill and harrow and rake,
A restless enginery
Of men and women to make
Cruelty, Harlotry.

Sisters of the Cross of Shame

BY DANA BURNET

(See page 531)

The Sisters of the Cross of Shame,
They smile along the night;
Their houses stand with shuttered souls
And painted eyes of light.

Their houses look with scarlet eyes
Upon a world of sin;
And every man cries, "Woe, alas!"
And every man goes in.

The sober Senate meets at noon,
To pass the Woman's Law,
The portly Churchmen vote to stem
The torrent with a straw.

The Sister of the Cross of Shame,
She smiles beneath her cloud--
(She does not laugh till ten o'clock,
And then she laughs too loud.)

And still she hears the throb of feet
Upon the scarlet stair,
And still she dons the cloak of shame
That is not hers to wear.

The sons of saintly women come
To kiss the Cross of Shame;
Before them, in another time,
Their worthy fathers came....

And no man tells his son the truth,
Lest he should speak of sin;
And every man cries, "Woe, alas!"
And every man goes in.

Bringing the Light

(_From "A Bed of Roses"_)

BY W. L. GEORGE

(Contemporary English novelist. The life-story of a woman wage-earner who is driven by the pressure of want to a career of shame. In the following scene she argues with a suffrage-worker, who has called upon her, in ignorance of her true character)

The woman's eyes were rapt, her hands tightly clenched, her lips parted, her cheeks a little flushed. But Victoria's face had hardened suddenly.

"Miss Welkin," she said quietly, "has anything struck you about this house, about me?"

The suffragist looked at her uneasily.

"You ought to know whom you are talking to," Victoria went on, "I am a.... I am a what you would probably call ... well, not respectable."

A dull red flush spread over Miss Welkin's face, from the line of her tightly pulled hair to her stiff white collar; even her ears went red. She looked away into a corner.

"You see," said Victoria, "it's a shock, isn't it? I ought not to have let you in. It wasn't quite fair, was it?"

"Oh, it isn't that, Mrs. Ferris," burst out the suffragist, "I'm not thinking of myself.... Our cause is not the cause of rich women or poor women, of good women or bad; it's the cause of woman. Thus, it doesn't matter who she is, so long as there is a woman who stands aloof from us there is still work to do. I know that yours is not a happy life; and we are bringing the light."

"The light!" echoed Victoria bitterly. "You have no idea, I see, of how many people there are who are bringing the light to women like me. There are various religious organizations who wish to rescue us and house us comfortably under the patronage of the police, to keep us nicely and feed us on what is suitable for the fallen; they expect us to sew ten hours a day for these privileges, but that is by the way. There are also many kindly souls who offer little jobs as charwomen to those of us who are too worn out to pursue our calling; we are offered emigration as servants in exchange for the power of commanding a household; we are offered poverty for luxury, service for domination, slavery to women instead of slavery to men. How tempting it is!" ...

The suffragist said nothing for a second. She felt shaken by Victoria's bitterness.... "The vote does not mean everything," she said reluctantly. "It will merely ensure that we rise like the men when we are fit."

"Well, Miss Welkin, I won't press that. But now, tell me, if women got the vote to-morrow, what would it do for my class?"

"It would be raised...."

"No, no, we can't wait to be raised. We've got to live, and if you 'raise' us we lose our means of livelihood. How are you going to get to the root cause and lift us, not the next generation, at once out of the lower depths?"

The suffragist's face contracted.

"Everything takes time," she faltered. "Just as I couldn't promise a charwoman that her hours would go down and her wages go up the next day, I can't say that ... of course your case is more difficult than any other, because ... because...."

"Because," said Victoria coldly, "I represent a social necessity. So long as your economic system is such that there is not work for the asking for every human being--work, mark you, fitted to strength and ability--so long on the other hand as there is such uncertainty as prevents men from marrying, so long as there is a leisure class who draw luxury from the labor of other men; so long will my class endure as it endured in Athens, in Rome, in Alexandria, as it does now from St. John's Wood to Pekin."

The Selling of Love

(_From "Love's Coming of Age"_)

BY EDWARD CARPENTER

(See page 186)

The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony, it eats in actual physical disease and death right through our midst; it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing--even the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters?

The Butcher's Stall

(_From "Les Villes Tentaculaires:" The Octopus Cities_)

BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN

(Belgian poet, born 1855. When Maurice Maeterlinck was suggested as a member of the French Academy, he recommended that the honor should be conferred upon Verhaeren instead. Beginning his career as a decadent and victim of disease, Verhaeren evolved into a rhapsodist of modern civilization. No poet has ever approached him in the portrayal and interpretation of factories, forges, railroads, and all the phenomena of industrialism. Of late he has become an ardent Socialist. The poem here quoted is from a book portraying the sins and agonies of great cities. Only portions of the poem could be printed in a work intended for general circulation in English; but even of these passages the editor will venture the assertion that never before has the horror of prostitution been so packed into human speech)

Hard by the docks, soon as the shadows fold
The dizzy mansion-fronts that soar aloft,
When eyes of lamps are burning soft,
The shy, dark quarter lights again its old
Allurement of red vice and gold.

Women, blocks of heaped, blown meat,
Stand on low thresholds down the narrow street,
Calling to every man that passes;
Behind them, at the end of corridors,
Shine fires, a curtain stirs
And gives a glimpse of masses
Of mad and naked flesh in looking-glasses.
Hard by the docks
The street upon the left is ended by
A tangle of high masts and shrouds that blocks
A sheet of sky;
Upon the right a net of grovelling alleys
Falls from the town--and here the black crowd rallies
And reels to rotten revelry.

It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.

Far-sailing melancholy mariners
Who, wet with spray, thru grey mists peer,
Cabin-boys cradled among the rigging, and they who steer
Hallucinated by the blue eyes of the vast sea-spaces,
All dream of it, evoke it when the evening falls;
Their raw desire to madness galls;
The wind's soft kisses hover on their faces;
The wave awakens rolling images of soft embraces;
And their two arms implore
Stretched in a frantic cry towards the shore.

And they of offices and shops, the city tribes,
Merchants precise, keen reckoners, haggard scribes,
Who sell their brains for hire, and tame their brows,
When the keys of desks are hanging on the wall,
Feel the same galling rut at even-fall,
And run like hunted dogs to the carouse.
Out of the depths of dusk come their dark flocks,
And in their hearts debauch so rudely shocks
Their ingrained greed and old accustomed care,
That they are racked and ruined by despair.

It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.

Come from what far sea-isles or pestilent parts?
Come from what feverish or methodic marts?
Their eyes are filled with bitter, cunning hate,
They fight their instincts that they cannot sate;
Around red females who befool them, they
Herd frenzied till the dawn of sober day.
The panelling is fiery with lewd art;
Out of the wall nitescent knick-knacks dart;
Fat Bacchuses and leaping satyrs in
Wan mirrors freeze an unremitting grin....

And women with spent loins and sleeping croups
Are piled on sofas and arm-chairs in groups,
With sodden flesh grown vague, and black and blue
With the first trampling of the evening's crew.
One of them slides a gold coin in her stocking;
Another yawns, and some their knees are rocking;
Others by bacchanalia worn out,
Feeling old age, and, sniffing them, Death's snout,
Stare with wide-open eyes, torches extinct,
And smooth their legs with hands together linked....

It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed,
Where lightning madness stains
Foreheads with rotting pains,
Time out of mind erected on frontiers that feed
The city and the sea.

Fomá Gordyéeff

BY MAXIM GORKY

(Perhaps the most famous novel of the Russian writer, the life-story of the son of a prosperous merchant, a youth who wrecks himself in a vain search for some outlet for his energies, and at the end commits suicide)

"Where is the merchant to spend his energy? He cannot spend much of it on the Exchange, so he squanders the excess of his muscular capital in drinking-bouts in _kabaky_; for he has no conception of other applications of his strength, which are more productive, more valuable to life. He is still a beast, and life has already become to him a cage, and it is too narrow for him with his splendid health and predilection for licentiousness. Hampered by culture, he at once starts to lead a dissolute life. The debauch of a merchant is always the revolt of a captive beast. Of course this is bad. But, ah! it will be worse yet, when this beast shall have gathered some sense and shall have disciplined it. Believe me, even then he will not cease to create scandals, but they will be historical events. For they will emanate from the merchant's thirst for power; their aim will be the omnipotence of one class, and the merchant will not be particular about the means toward the attainment of this aim.

"Where am I to make use of my strength, since there is no demand for it? I ought to fight with robbers, or turn a robber myself. In general I ought to do something big. And that would be done, not with the head, but with the arms and breast. While here we have to go to the Exchange and try to aim well to make a rouble. What do we need it for? And what is it, anyway? Has life been arranged in this form forever? What sort of life is it, if everyone finds it too narrow for him? Life ought to be according to the taste of man. If it is narrow for me; I must move it asunder that I may have more room. I must break it and reconstruct it. But how? That's where the trouble lies! What ought to be done that life may be freer? That I don't understand, and that's all there is to it!"

Venus Pandemos

BY RICHARD DEHMEL

(Contemporary German poet, born 1863)

This was the last time. I was lounging in
The night-café that lights the suburb gloom,
Tired with the reek of sultry sofa plush,
And with my glowing toddy, and the steam
Of women sweating in their gowns: tired, lustful.

Clouds of tobacco smoke were wavering through
The laughter and the haggling cries and shrieks
Of painted women and the men they drew.
The rattling at the sideboard of the spoons
Cheered on the hubbub of the mart of love
Uninterrupted like a tambourine....

I was about to choose, when, where I sate,
The crimson curtain of the door was split,
And a fresh couple entered. A cold draught
Cut through the heated room, and some one swore;
But through the crowd the pair stepped noiselessly.
Over against me at the transverse end
Of the corridor, whence they could sweep the room,
They took their seats. The chandelier of bronze
Hung o'er them like an awning heavy, old.
And no one seemed to know the couple, but
At my right hand I heard a hoarse voice pipe:
"I must have come across that pair before."

He sat quite still. The loud gray of the air
Almost recoiled before his callous brow,
Which wan as wax rose into his sparse hair.
His great pale eye-lids hung down deep and shut,
On both sides lay around his sunken nose
Their shadows, and through his thin beard shone the skin.
And only when the woman at his side,
Less tall than he, and of a lissom shape,
Hissed, giggling, in his ear some obscene word,
Half rose of one black eye the heavy lid,
And slowly round he turned his long, thin neck,
As when a vulture lunges at a corpse.

And silent and more silent grew the room;
All eyes were fixed upon the silent guest,
And on the woman squatted, strange to see.
"She is quite young"--a whispering round me went;
And with a child's greed she was drinking milk.
Yet almost old she seemed to me, whenever
Her tongue shot through a gap in her black teeth,
Her pointed tongue out of her hissing mouth,
While her gray, eager glance took in the room;
The gaslight in it shone like poisonous green.

And now she rose. He had not touched his glass;
A great coin lit the table. She went out;
He automatically followed her.
The crimson curtain round the door fell to,
Once more the cold draught shivered through the heat,
But no one cursed. Through me a shiver ran.

I did not choose a partner--suddenly
I knew them: it was Syphilis and Death.