From the archives of The Memory Hole |
Freethought in America was an anti-clerical, anti-Christian movement which sought to separate the church and state in order to leave religious matters to the conscience and reasoning ability of the individual involved. Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) was prominent both as a feminist and as a freethinker. The following article, reprinted from Benjamin Tucker's periodical Liberty, was originally delivered by de Cleyre as a lecture before the Boston Secular Society. It is an excellent example of the interrelationship between the individualist-feminist view of the church and of the state. In her essay "Sex Slavery," de Cleyre reiterated this two-pronged attack. She wrote: "Let every woman ask herself, 'Why am I the Slave of Man?' . . . There are two reasons why, and these are ultimately reducible to a single principle -- the authoritarian supreme power GOD-idea, and its two instruments: the Church -- that is, the priests -- and the State -- that is, the legislators."
Wendy McElroy
Freedom, Feminism and the State
by Voltairine de Cleyre
FRIENDS,--On page 286, Belford-Clarke edition, of the
"Rights of Man," the words which I propose as a text for this
discourse may be found. Alluding to the change in the condition
of France brought about by the Revolution of '93, Thomas Paine
says:
"The mind of the nation had changed beforehand, and a new
order of things had naturally followed a new order of thoughts."
Two hundred and eighty-nine years ago, a man, a student, a
scholar, a thinker, a philosopher, was roasted alive for the love
of God and the preservation of the authority of the Church; and
as the hungry flames curled round the crisping flesh of martyred
Bruno, licking his blood with their wolfish tongues, they
shadowed forth the immense vista of "a new order of things": they
lit the battle-ground where Freedom fought her first successful
revolt against authority.
That battle-ground was eminently one of thought. Religious
freedom was the rankling question of the day. "Liberty of
conscience! Liberty of conscience! Non-interference between
worshipper and worshipped!" That was the voice that cried out of
dungeons and dark places, from under the very foot of prince and
ecclesiastic. And why? Because the authoritative despotisms of
that day were universally ecclesiastic despotisms; because Church aggression was grinding every human right beneath its heel, and every other minor oppressor was but a tool in the hands of the priesthood; because Tyranny was growing towards its ideal and crushing out of existence the very citadel of Liberty,
-- individuality of thought; Ecclesiasticism had a corner on
ideas.
But individuality is a thing that cannot be killed. Quietly
it may be, but just as certainly, silently, perhaps, as the
growth of a blade of grass, it offers its perpetual and
unconquerable protest against the dictates of Authority. And
this silent, unconquerable, menacing thing, that balked God,
provoked him to the use of rack, thumb-screw, stock, hanging,
drowning, burning, and other instruments of "infinite mercy," in
the seventeenth century fought a successful battle against that
authority which sought to control this fortress of freedom. It
established its right to be. It overthrew that portion of
government which attempted to guide the brains of men. It "broke
the corner." It declared and maintained the anarchy, or
non-rulership, of thought.
Now you who so fear the word an-arche, remember! the whole
combat of the seventeenth century, of which you are justly proud,
and to which you never tire of referring, was waged for the sole
purpose of realizing anarchism in the realm of thought.
It was not an easy struggle,--this battle of the quiet
thinkers against those who held all the power, and all the force
of numbers, and all of the strength of tortures! It was not easy
for them to speak out of the midst of faggot flames, "We believe
differently, and we have the right". But on their side stood
Truth! And there lies more inequality between her and Error,
more strength for Truth, more weakness for Falsehood, than all
the fearful disparity of power that lies between the despot and
the victim. So theirs was the success. So they paved the way
for the grand political combat of the eighteenth century.
Mark you! The seventeenth century made the eighteenth
possible, for it was the "new order of thoughts," which gave
birth to a "new order of things". Only by deposing priests, only
by rooting out their authority, did it become logical to attack
the tyranny of kings: for, under the old regime, kingcraft had
ever been the tool of priestcraft, and in the order of things but
a secondary consideration. But with the downfall of the latter,
kingcraft rose into prominence as the pre-eminent despot, and
against the pre-eminent despot revolt always arises.
The leaders of that revolt were naturally those who carried
the logic of their freethought into the camp of the dominant
oppressor; who thought, spoke, wrote freely of the political
fetich, as their predecessors had of the religious mockery; who
did not waste their time hugging themselves in the camps of dead
enemies, but accepted the live issue of the day, pursued the
victories of Religion's martyrs, and carried on the war of
Liberty in those lines most necessary to the people at the time
and place. The result was the overthrow of the principle of
kingcraft. (Not that all kingdoms have been overthrown, but find
me one in a hundred of the inhabitants of a kingdom who will not
laugh at the farce of the "divine appointment" of monarchs.) So
wrought the new order of thoughts.
I do not suppose for a moment that Giordano Bruno or Martin
Luther foresaw the immense scope taken in by their doctrine of
individual judgment. From the experience of men up to that date
it was simply impossible that they could foresee its tremendous
influence upon the action of the eighteenth century, much less
upon the nineteenth. Neither was it possible that those bold
writers who attacked the folly of "hereditary government" should
calculate the effects which certainly followed as their thoughts
took form and shape in the social body. Neither do I believe it
possible that any brain that lives can detail the working of a
thought into the future, or push its logic to an ultimate. But
that many who think, or think they think, do not carry their
syllogisms even to the first general conclusion, I am also forced
to believe. If they did, the freethinkers of today would not be
digging, mole-like, through the substratum of dead issues; they
would not waste their energies gathering the ashes of fires burnt
out two centuries ago; they would not lance their shafts at that
which is already bleeding at the arteries; they would not range
battalions of brains against a crippled ghost that is "laying"
itself as fast as it decently can, while a monster neither
ghostly nor yet like the rugged Russian bear, the armed
rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger, but rather like a terrible
anaconda, steel-muscled and iron-jawed, is winding its horrible
folds around the human bodies of the world, and breathing its
devouring breath into the faces of children. If they did, they
would understand that the paramount question of the day is not
political, is not religious, but is economic. That the crying-out
demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever
make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling
the means of his existence. They would realize that, unless the
freethought movement has a practical utility in rendering the
life of man more bearable, unless it contains a principle which,
worked out, will free him from the all-oppressive tyrant, it is
just as complete and empty a mockery as the Christian miracle or
Pagan myth. Eminently is this the age of utility; and the
freethinker who goes to the Hovel of Poverty with metaphysical
speculations as to the continuity of life, the transformation of
matter, etc.; who should say, "My dear friend, your Christian
brother is mistaken; you are not doomed to an eternal hell; your
condition here is your misfortune and can't be helped, but when
you are dead, there's an end of it," is of as little use in the
world as the most irrational religionist. To him would the hovel
justly reply: "Unless you can show me something in freethought
which commends itself to the needs of the race, something which
will adjust my wrongs, 'put down the mighty from his seat,' then
go sit with priest and king, and wrangle out your metaphysical
opinions with those who mocked our misery before."
The question is, does freethought contain such a principle?
And right here permit me to introduce a sort of supplementary
text, taken, I think, from a recent letter of Cardinal Manning,
but if not Cardinal Manning, then some other of the various
dunce-capped gentlemen who recently "biled" over the Bruno
monument.
Says the Cardinal: "Freethought leads to Atheism, to the
destruction of social and civil order, and to the overthrow of
government." I accept the gentleman's statement; I credit him
with much intellectual acumen for perceiving that which many
freethinkers have failed to perceive: accepting it, I shall do my
best to prove it, and then endeavor to show that this very
iconoclastic principle is the salvation of the economic slave and
the destruction of the economic tyrant.
First: does freethought lead to Atheism?
Freethought, broadly defined, is the right to believe as the
evidence, coming in contact with the mind, forces it to believe.
This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon
any subject which may come up for discussion. Among the subjects that come up for discussion, the moment so much is admitted, is the existence of a God.
Now, the idea of God is, in the first place, an exceeding
contradiction. The sign God, so Deists tell us, was invented to
express the inexpressible, the incomprehensible and infinite!
Then they immediately set about defining it. These definitions
prove to be about as self-contradictory and generally conflicting
as the original absurdity. But there is a particular set of
attributes which form a sort of common ground for all these
definitions. They tell us that God is possessed of supreme
wisdom, supreme justice, and supreme power. In all the catalogue
of creeds, I never yet heard of one that had not for its nucleus
unlimited potency.
Now, let us take the deist upon his own ground and prove to
him either that his God is limited as to wisdom, or limited as to
justice, or limited as to power, or else there is no such thing
as justice.
First, then, God, being all-just, wishes to do justice;
being all-wise, knows what justice is; being all-powerful, can do
justice. Why then injustice? Either your God can do justice and
won't or doesn't know what justice is, or he can not do it. The
immediate reply is: "What appears to be injustice in our eyes, in
the sight of omniscience may be justice. God's ways are not our
ways."
Oh, but if he is the all-wise pattern, they should be; what
is good enough for God ought to be good enough for man; but what is too mean for man won't do in a God. Else there is no such
thing as justice or injustice, and every murder, every robbery,
every lie, every crime in the calendar is right and upon that one
premise of supreme authority you upset every fact in existence.
What right have you to condemn a murderer if you assume him
necessary to "God's plan"? What logic can command the return of stolen property, or the branding of a thief, if the Almighty
decreed it? Yet here, again, the Deist finds himself in a
dilemma, for to suppose crime necessary to God's purpose is to
impeach his wisdom or deny his omnipotence by limiting him as to
means. The whole matter, then, hinges upon the one attribute of
authority of the central idea of God.
But, you say, what has all this to do with the economic
tendency of freethought? Everything. For upon that one idea of
supreme authority is based every tyranny that was ever formulat-
ed. Why? Because, if God is, no human being no thing that
lives, ever had a right! He simply had a privilege, bestowed,
granted, conferred, gifted to him, for such a length of time as
God sees fit.
This is the logic of my textator, the logic of Catholicism,
the only logic of Authoritarianism. The Catholic Church says:
"You who are blind, be grateful that you can hear: God could have made you deaf as well. You who are starving, be thankful that you can breathe; God could deprive you of air as well as food.
You who are sick, be grateful that you are not dead: God is very
merciful to let you live at all. Under all times and
circumstances take what you can get, and be thankful." These are the beneficences, the privileges, given by Authority.
Note the difference between a right and a privilege. A
right, in the abstract, is a fact; it is not a thing to be given,
established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right
power may deprive me; of the right itself, never. Privilege, in
the abstract, does not exist; there is no such thing. Rights
recognized, privilege is destroyed.
But, in the practical, the moment you admit a supreme
authority, you have denied rights. Practically the supremacy has
all the rights, and no matter what the human race possesses, it
does so merely at the caprice of that authority. The exercise of
the respiratory function is not a right, but a privilege granted
by God; the use of the soil is not a right, but a gracious
allowance of Deity; the possession of product as the result of
labor is not a right, but a boon bestowed. And the thievery of
pure air, the withholding of land from use, the robbery of toil,
are not wrongs (for if you have no rights, you cannot be
wronged), but benign blessings bestowed by "the Giver of all
Good" upon the air-thief, the landlord, and the labor-robber.
Hence the freethinker who recognizes the science of
astronomy, the science of mathematics, and the equally positive
and exact science of justice, is logically forced to the denial
of supreme authority. For no human being who observes and
reflects can admit a supreme tyrant and preserve his
self-respect. No human mind can accept the dogma of divine
despotism and the doctrine of eternal justice at the same time;
they contradict each other, and it takes two brains to hold them.
The cardinal is right: freethought does logically lead to
atheism, if by atheism he means the denial of supreme authority.
I will now take his third statement, leaving the second for
the present; freethought, he says, leads to the overthrow of
government. I am sensible that the majority of you will be ready
to indignantly deny the cardinal's asseveration; I know that the
most of my professedly atheistic friends shrink sensitively from
the slightest allusion that sounds like an attack on government;
I am aware that there are many of you who could eagerly take this
platform to speak upon "the glorious rights and privileges of
American citizenship"; to expatiate upon that "noble bulwark of
our liberties--the constitution"; to defend "that peaceful weapon
of redress, the ballot"; to soar off rhapsodically about that
"starry banner that floats 'over the land of the free and the
home of the brave."' We are so free! and so brave! We don't hang Brunos at the stake any more for holding heretical opinions on religious subjects. No! But we imprison men for discussing the
social question, and we hang men for discussing the economic
question! We are so very free and so very brave in this country!
"Ah"! we say in our nineteenth century freedom (?) and bravery
(?), " it was a weak God, a poor God, a miserable, quaking God,
whose authority had to be preserved by the tortuous death of a
creature!" Aye! the religious question is dead, and the stake is
no longer fashionable. But is it a strong State, a brave State,
a conscience-proud State, whose authority demands the death of
five creatures? Is the scaffold better than the faggot? Is it a
very free mind which will read that infamous editorial in the
Chicago "Herald": "It is not necessary to hold that Parsons was
legally, rightfully, or wisely hanged: he was mightily hanged.
The State, the sovereign, need give no reasons; the State need
abide by no law; the State is the law!"--to read that and
applaud, and set the Cain-like curse upon your forehead and the
red "damned spot" upon your hand? Do you know what you
do?--Craven, you worship the fiend, Authority, again! True, you
have not the ghosts, the incantations, the paraphernalia and
mummery of the Church. No: but you have the "precedents," the
"be it enacteds," the red-tape, the official uniforms of the
State; and you are just as bad a slave to statecraft as your
Irish Catholic neighbor is to popecraft. Your Government becomes
your God, from whom you accept privileges, and in whose hands all rights are vested. Once more the individual has no rights; once
more intangible, irresponsible authority assumes the power of
deciding what is right and what is wrong. Once more the race
must labor under just such restricted conditions as the law--the
voice of the Authority, the governmentalist's bible-shall dictate.
Once more it says: "You who have not meat, be grateful that you
have bread; many are not allowed even so much. You who work
sixteen hours a day, be glad it is not twenty; many have not the
privilege to work. You who have not fuel, be thankful that you
have shelter; many walk the street! And you, street-walkers, be
grateful that there are well-lighted dens of the city; in the
country you might die upon the roadside. Goaded human race! Be thankful for your goad. Be submissive to the Lord, and kiss the
hand that lashes you!" Once more misery is the diet of the many,
while the few receive, in addition to their rights, those rights
of their fellows which government has wrested from them. Once
more the hypothesis is that the Government, or Authority, or God
in his other form, owns all the rights, and grants privileges
according to its sweet will.
The freethinker who should determine to question it would
naturally suppose that one difficulty in the old investigation
was removed. He would say, "at least this thing Government
possesses the advantage of being of the earth,--earthy. This is
something I can get hold of, argue, reason, discuss with. God
was an indefinable, arbitrary, irresponsible something in the
clouds, to whom I could not approach nearer than to his agent,
the priest. But this dictator surely I shall be able to meet it
on something like possible ground." Vain delusion! Government is
as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God. Try it, if
you don't believe it. Seek through the legislative halls of
America and find, if you can, the Government. In the end you
will be doomed to confer with the agent, as before. Why, you
have the statutes! Yes, but the statutes are not the government;
where is the power that made the statutes? Oh, the legislators!
Yes, but the legislator, per se, has no more power to make a law
for me than I for him. I want the power that gave him the power.
I shall talk with him; I go to the White House; I say: "Mr.
Harrison, are you the government?" "No, madam, I am its
representative." "Well, where is the principal?-Who is the
government?" "The people of the United States." "The whole
people?" "The whole people." "You, then, are the representative
of the people of the United States. May I see your certificate
of authorization?" "Well, no; I have none. I was elected."
"Elected by whom? the whole people?" "Oh, no. By some of the
people,--some of the voters." (Mr. Harrison being a pious
Presbyterian, he would probably add: "The majority vote of the
whole was for another man, but I had the largest electoral
vote.") "Then you are the representative of the electoral
college, not of the whole people, nor the majority of the people,
nor even a majority of the voters. But suppose the largest
number of ballots cast had been for you: you would represent the
majority of the voters, I suppose. But the majority, sir, is not
a tangible thing; it is an unknown quantity. An agent is usually
held accountable to his principals. If you do not know the
individuals who voted for you, then you do not know for whom you
are acting, nor to whom you are accountable. If any body of
persons has delegated to you any authority, the disposal of any
right or part of a right (supposing a right to be transferable),
you must have received it from the individuals composing that
body; and you must have some means of learning who those
individuals are, or you cannot know for whom you act, and you are utterly irresponsible as an agent.
"Furthermore, such a body of voters can not give into your
charge any rights but their own; by no possible jugglery of logic
can they delegate the exercise of any function which they
themselves do not control. If any individual on earth has a
right to delegate his powers to whomsoever he chooses, then every other individual has an equal right; and if each has an equal
right, then none can choose an agent for another, without that
other's consent. Therefore, if the power of government resides
in the whole people, and out of that whole all but one elected
you as their agent, you would still have no authority whatever to
act for the one. The individuals composing the minority who did
not appoint you have just the same rights and powers as those
composing the majority who did; and if they prefer not to
delegate them at all, then neither you, nor any one, has any
authority whatever to coerce them into accepting you, or any one,
as their agent--for upon your own basis the coercive authority
resides, not in the majority, not in any proportion of the
people, but in the whole people."
Hence "the overthrow of government" as a coercive power,
thereby denying God in another form.
Upon this overthrow follows, the Cardinal says, the
disruption of social and civil order!
Oh! it is amusing to hear those fellows rave about social
order! I could laugh to watch them as they repeat the cry,
"Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" "Down on your knees and adore this beautiful statue of Order," but that I see this hideous,
brainless, disproportion idol come rolled on the wheels of
Juggernaut over the weak and the helpless, the sorrowful and the
despairing. Hate burns, then, where laughter dies.
Social Order! Not long ago I saw a letter from a young girl
to a friend; a young girl whose health had been broken behind a
counter, where she stood eleven and twelve hours a day, six days
in the week, for the magnificent sum of $5. The letter said:
"Can't you help me to a position? My friends want me to marry a
man I do not like, because he has money. Can't you help me? I
can sew, or keep books. I will even try clerking again rather
than that!" Social Order! When the choice for a young girl lies
between living by inches and dying by yards at manual labor, or
becoming the legal property of a man she does not like because he has money!
Walk up Fifth Avenue in New York some hot summer day, among
the magnificent houses of the rich; hear your footsteps echo for
blocks with the emptiness of it! Look at places going to waste,
space, furniture, draperies, elegance,--all useless. Then take a
car down town; go among the homes of the producers of that idle
splendor; find six families living in a five-room house,--the
sixth dwelling in the cellar. Space is not wasted here,--these
human vermin rub each other's elbows in the stifling narrows;
furniture is not wasted,--these sit upon the floor; no echoing
emptiness, no idle glories! No--but wasting, strangling,
choking, vicious human life! Dearth of vitality there--dearth of
space for it here! This is social order!
Next winter, when the 'annual output' of coal has been mined,
when the workmen are clenching their hard fists with impotent
anger, when the coal in the ground lies useless, hark to the cry
that will rise form the freezing western prairies, while the
shortened commodity goes up, up, up, eight, nine, ten, eleven
dollars a ton; and while the syndicate's pockets are filing, the
grave-yards fill, and fill. Moralize on the preservation of
social order!
Go back to President Grant's administration,--that very
"pure republican" administration;--see the settlers of the Mussel
Slough compelled to pay thirty-five, forty dollars an acre for
the land reclaimed from almost worthlessness by hard labor,--and
to whom? To a corporation of men who never saw it! whose "grant" lay a hundred miles away, but who, for reasons of their own, saw fit to hire the "servants of the people" to change it so. See those who refused to pay it shot down by order of "the State";
watch their blood smoke upward to the heavens, sealing the red
seal of justice against their murderers; and then -- watch a
policeman arrest a shoeless tramp for stealing a pair of boots.
Say to your self, this is civil order and must be preserved. Go
talk with political leaders, big or little, on methods of "making
the slate," and "railroading" it through the ward caucus or the
national convention. Muse on that "peaceful weapon of redress,"
the ballot. Consider the condition of the average "American
sovereign" and of his "official servant," and prate then of civil
order.
Subvert the social and civil order! Aye, I would destroy,
to the last vestige, this mockery of order, this travesty upon
justice! Break up the home? Yes, every home that rests on
slavery! Every marriage that represents the sale and transfer of
the individuality of one of its parties to the other! Every
institution, social or civil, that stands between man and his
right; every tie that renders one a master, another a serf; every
law, every statute, every be-it-enacted that represents tyranny;
everything you call American privilege that can only exist at the
expense of international right. Now cry out,
"Nihilist--disintegrationist!" Say that I would isolate humanity,
reduce society to its elemental state, make men savage! It is
not true. But rather than see this devastating, cankering,
enslaving system you call social order go on, rather than help to
keep alive the accursed institutions of Authority, I would help
to reduce every fabric in the social structure to its native
element.
But is it true that freedom means disintegration? Only to
that which is bad. Only to that which ought to disintegrate.
What is the history of free thought?
Is it not so, that since we have Anarchy there, since all the
children of the brain are legitimate, that there has been less
waste of intellectual energy, more cooperation in the scientific
world, truer economy in utilizing the mentalities of men, than
there ever was, or ever could be, under authoritative dominion of
the church? Is it not true that with the liberty of thought,
Truth has been able to prove herself without the aid of force?
Does not error die from want of vitality when there is no force
to keep it alive? Is it not true that natural attractions have
led men into associative groups, who can best follow their chosen
paths of thought, and give the benefit of their studies to
mankind with better economy than if some coercive power had said, "You think in this line--you in that"; or what the majority had
by ballot decided it was best to think about?
I think it is true. Follow your logic out; can you not see
that true economy lies in Liberty,--whether it be in thought or action? It is not slavery that has made men unite for
cooperative effort. It is not slavery that produced the means of
transportation, communication, production, and exchange, and all
the thousand and one economic, or what ought to be economic,
contrivances of civilization. No--nor is it government. It is
Self-interest. And would not self-interest exist if that
institution which stands between man and his right to the free
use of the soil were annihilated? Could you not see the use of a
bank if the power which renders it possible for the national
banks to control land, production and everything else, were
broken down?
Do you suppose the producers of the east and west couldn't
see the advantage of a railroad, if the authority which makes a
systematizer like Gould or Vanderbilt a curse where swept away?
Do you imagine that government has a corner on ideas, now that
the Church is overthrown; and that the people could not learn the
principles of economy, if this intangible giant which has robbed
and slaughtered them, wasted their resources and distributed
opportunities so unjustly, were destroyed? I don't think so. I
believe that legislators as a rule have been monuments of asinine
stupidity, whose principal business has been to hinder those who
were not stupid, and get paid for doing it. I believe that the
so-called brainy financial men would rather buy the legislators
than be the legislators; and the real thinkers, the genuine
improvers of society, have as little to do with law and politics
as they conveniently can.
I believe that "Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of
Order."
"But," some one will say, "what of the criminals? Suppose a
man steals." In the first place, a man won't steal, ordinarily,
unless that which he steals is something he can not as easily get
without stealing; in liberty the cost of stealing would involve
greater difficulties than producing, and consequently he would
not be apt to steal. But suppose a man steals. Today you go to
a representative of that power which has robbed you of the earth,
of the right of free contract of the means of exchange, taxes you
for everything you eat or wear (the meanest form of
robbery),--you go to him for redress from a thief! It is about
as logical as the Christian lady whose husband had been "removed" by Divine Providence, and who thereupon prayed to said Providence to "comfort the widow and the fatherless." In freedom we would not institute a wholesale robber to protect us from petty larceny. Each associative group would probably adopt its own methods of resisting aggression, that being the only crime. For myself, I think criminals should be treated as sick people.
"But suppose you have murderers, brutes, all sorts of
criminals. Are you not afraid to lose the restraining influence
of the law?" First, I think it can be shown that the law makes
ten criminals where it restrains one. On that basis it would
not, as a matter of policy merely, be an economical institution.
Second, this is not a question of expediency, but of right. In
antebellum days the proposition was not, Are the blacks good
enough to be free? but, Have they the right? So today the
question is not, Will outrages result from freeing humanity? but,
Has it the right to life, the means of life, the opportunities of
happiness?
In the transition epoch, surely crimes will come. Did the
seed of tyranny ever bear good fruit? And can you expect Liberty
to undo in a moment what Oppression has been doing for ages?
Criminals are the crop of depots, as much a necessary expression
of the evil in society as an ulcer is of disease in the blood;
and so long as the taint of the poison remains, so long there
will be crimes.
"For it must needs that offences come, but woe to him
through whom the offence cometh." The crimes of the future are
the harvests sown of the ruling classes of the present. Woe to
the tyrant who shall cause the offense!
Sometimes I dream of this social change. I get a streak of
faith in Evolution, and the good in man. I paint a gradual
slipping out of the now, to that beautiful then, where there are
neither kings, presidents, landlords, national bankers,
stockbrokers, railroad magnates, patentright monopolists, or tax
and title collectors; where there are no over-stocked markets or
hungry children, idle counters and naked creatures, splendor and
misery, waste and need. I am told this is farfetched idealism,
to paint this happy, povertyless, crimeless, diseaseless world; I
have been told I "ought to be behind the bars" for it.
Remarks of that kind rather destroy the white streak of
faith. I lose confidence in the slipping process, and am forced
to believe that the rulers of the earth are sowing a fearful
wind, to reap a most terrible whirlwind. When I look at this
poor, bleeding, wounded World, this world that has suffered so
long, struggled so much, been scourged so fiercely, thorn-pierced
so deeply, crucified so cruelly, I can only shake my head and
remember:
The giant is blind, but he's thinking: and his locks are
growing, fast.
✳ ✳ ✳