CHAPTER IV.

SLAVES OF THE MACHINE

The more I thought of Jackson’s arm, the more shaken I was. I was

confronted by the concrete. For the first time I was seeing life. My

university life, and study and culture, had not been real. I had

learned nothing but theories of life and society that looked all very

well on the printed page, but now I had seen life itself. Jackson’s arm

was a fact of life. “The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!” of Ernest’s

was ringing in my consciousness.

It seemed monstrous, impossible, that our whole society was based upon

blood. And yet there was Jackson. I could not get away from him.

Constantly my thought swung back to him as the compass to the Pole. He

had been monstrously treated. His blood had not been paid for in order

that a larger dividend might be paid. And I knew a score of happy

complacent families that had received those dividends and by that much

had profited by Jackson’s blood. If one man could be so monstrously

treated and society move on its way unheeding, might not many men be so

monstrously treated? I remembered Ernest’s women of Chicago who toiled

for ninety cents a week, and the child slaves of the Southern cotton

mills he had described. And I could see their wan white hands, from

which the blood had been pressed, at work upon the cloth out of which

had been made my gown. And then I thought of the Sierra Mills and the

dividends that had been paid, and I saw the blood of Jackson upon my

gown as well. Jackson I could not escape. Always my meditations led me

back to him.

Down in the depths of me I had a feeling that I stood on the edge of a

precipice. It was as though I were about to see a new and awful

revelation of life. And not I alone. My whole world was turning over.

There was my father. I could see the effect Ernest was beginning to

have on him. And then there was the Bishop. When I had last seen him he

had looked a sick man. He was at high nervous tension, and in his eyes

there was unspeakable horror. From the little I learned I knew that

Ernest had been keeping his promise of taking him through hell. But

what scenes of hell the Bishop’s eyes had seen, I knew not, for he

seemed too stunned to speak about them.

Once, the feeling strong upon me that my little world and all the world

was turning over, I thought of Ernest as the cause of it; and also I

thought, “We were so happy and peaceful before he came!” And the next

moment I was aware that the thought was a treason against truth, and

Ernest rose before me transfigured, the apostle of truth, with shining

brows and the fearlessness of one of God’s own angels, battling for the

truth and the right, and battling for the succor of the poor and lonely

and oppressed. And then there arose before me another figure, the

Christ! He, too, had taken the part of the lowly and oppressed, and

against all the established power of priest and pharisee. And I

remembered his end upon the cross, and my heart contracted with a pang

as I thought of Ernest. Was he, too, destined for a cross?—he, with his

clarion call and war-noted voice, and all the fine man’s vigor of him!

And in that moment I knew that I loved him, and that I was melting with

desire to comfort him. I thought of his life. A sordid, harsh, and

meagre life it must have been. And I thought of his father, who had

lied and stolen for him and been worked to death. And he himself had

gone into the mills when he was ten! All my heart seemed bursting with

desire to fold my arms around him, and to rest his head on my

breast—his head that must be weary with so many thoughts; and to give

him rest—just rest—and easement and forgetfulness for a tender space.

I met Colonel Ingram at a church reception. Him I knew well and had

known well for many years. I trapped him behind large palms and rubber

plants, though he did not know he was trapped. He met me with the

conventional gayety and gallantry. He was ever a graceful man,

diplomatic, tactful, and considerate. And as for appearance, he was the

most distinguished-looking man in our society. Beside him even the

venerable head of the university looked tawdry and small.

And yet I found Colonel Ingram situated the same as the unlettered

mechanics. He was not a free agent. He, too, was bound upon the wheel.

I shall never forget the change in him when I mentioned Jackson’s case.

His smiling good nature vanished like a ghost. A sudden, frightful

expression distorted his well-bred face. I felt the same alarm that I

had felt when James Smith broke out. But Colonel Ingram did not curse.

That was the slight difference that was left between the workingman and

him. He was famed as a wit, but he had no wit now. And, unconsciously,

this way and that he glanced for avenues of escape. But he was trapped

amid the palms and rubber trees.

Oh, he was sick of the sound of Jackson’s name. Why had I brought the

matter up? He did not relish my joke. It was poor taste on my part, and

very inconsiderate. Did I not know that in his profession personal

feelings did not count? He left his personal feelings at home when he

went down to the office. At the office he had only professional

feelings.

“Should Jackson have received damages?” I asked.

“Certainly,” he answered. “That is, personally, I have a feeling that

he should. But that has nothing to do with the legal aspects of the

case.”

He was getting his scattered wits slightly in hand.

“Tell me, has right anything to do with the law?” I asked.

“You have used the wrong initial consonant,” he smiled in answer.

“Might?” I queried; and he nodded his head. “And yet we are supposed to

get justice by means of the law?”

“That is the paradox of it,” he countered. “We do get justice.”

“You are speaking professionally now, are you not?” I asked.

Colonel Ingram blushed, actually blushed, and again he looked anxiously

about him for a way of escape. But I blocked his path and did not offer

to move.

“Tell me,” I said, “when one surrenders his personal feelings to his

professional feelings, may not the action be defined as a sort of

spiritual mayhem?”

I did not get an answer. Colonel Ingram had ingloriously bolted,

overturning a palm in his flight.

Next I tried the newspapers. I wrote a quiet, restrained, dispassionate

account of Jackson’s case. I made no charges against the men with whom

I had talked, nor, for that matter, did I even mention them. I gave the

actual facts of the case, the long years Jackson had worked in the

mills, his effort to save the machinery from damage and the consequent

accident, and his own present wretched and starving condition. The

three local newspapers rejected my communication, likewise did the two

weeklies.

I got hold of Percy Layton. He was a graduate of the university, had

gone in for journalism, and was then serving his apprenticeship as

reporter on the most influential of the three newspapers. He smiled

when I asked him the reason the newspapers suppressed all mention of

Jackson or his case.

“Editorial policy,” he said. “We have nothing to do with that. It’s up

to the editors.”

“But why is it policy?” I asked.

“We’re all solid with the corporations,” he answered. “If you paid

advertising rates, you couldn’t get any such matter into the papers. A

man who tried to smuggle it in would lose his job. You couldn’t get it

in if you paid ten times the regular advertising rates.”

“How about your own policy?” I questioned. “It would seem your function

is to twist truth at the command of your employers, who, in turn, obey

the behests of the corporations.”

“I haven’t anything to do with that.” He looked uncomfortable for the

moment, then brightened as he saw his way out. “I, myself, do not write

untruthful things. I keep square all right with my own conscience. Of

course, there’s lots that’s repugnant in the course of the day’s work.

But then, you see, that’s all part of the day’s work,” he wound up

boyishly.

“Yet you expect to sit at an editor’s desk some day and conduct a

policy.”

“I’ll be case-hardened by that time,” was his reply.

“Since you are not yet case-hardened, tell me what you think right now

about the general editorial policy.”

“I don’t think,” he answered quickly. “One can’t kick over the ropes if

he’s going to succeed in journalism. I’ve learned that much, at any

rate.”

And he nodded his young head sagely.

“But the right?” I persisted.

“You don’t understand the game. Of course it’s all right, because it

comes out all right, don’t you see?”

“Delightfully vague,” I murmured; but my heart was aching for the youth

of him, and I felt that I must either scream or burst into tears.

I was beginning to see through the appearances of the society in which

I had always lived, and to find the frightful realities that were

beneath. There seemed a tacit conspiracy against Jackson, and I was

aware of a thrill of sympathy for the whining lawyer who had

ingloriously fought his case. But this tacit conspiracy grew large. Not

alone was it aimed against Jackson. It was aimed against every

workingman who was maimed in the mills. And if against every man in the

mills, why not against every man in all the other mills and factories?

In fact, was it not true of all the industries?

And if this was so, then society was a lie. I shrank back from my own

conclusions. It was too terrible and awful to be true. But there was

Jackson, and Jackson’s arm, and the blood that stained my gown and

dripped from my own roof-beams. And there were many Jacksons—hundreds

of them in the mills alone, as Jackson himself had said. Jackson I

could not escape.

I saw Mr. Wickson and Mr. Pertonwaithe, the two men who held most of

the stock in the Sierra Mills. But I could not shake them as I had

shaken the mechanics in their employ. I discovered that they had an

ethic superior to that of the rest of society. It was what I may call

the aristocratic ethic or the master ethic.[1] They talked in large

ways of policy, and they identified policy and right. And to me they

talked in fatherly ways, patronizing my youth and inexperience. They

were the most hopeless of all I had encountered in my quest. They

believed absolutely that their conduct was right. There was no question

about it, no discussion. They were convinced that they were the

saviours of society, and that it was they who made happiness for the

many. And they drew pathetic pictures of what would be the sufferings

of the working class were it not for the employment that they, and they

alone, by their wisdom, provided for it.

[1] Before Avis Everhard was born, John Stuart Mill, in his essay, _On

Liberty_, wrote: “Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large

portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its

class feelings of superiority.”

Fresh from these two masters, I met Ernest and related my experience.

He looked at me with a pleased expression, and said:

“Really, this is fine. You are beginning to dig truth for yourself. It

is your own empirical generalization, and it is correct. No man in the

industrial machine is a free-will agent, except the large capitalist,

and he isn’t, if you’ll pardon the Irishism.[2] You see, the masters

are quite sure that they are right in what they are doing. That is the

crowning absurdity of the whole situation. They are so tied by their

human nature that they can’t do a thing unless they think it is right.

They must have a sanction for their acts.

[2] Verbal contradictions, called _bulls_, were long an amiable

weakness of the ancient Irish.

“When they want to do a thing, in business of course, they must wait

till there arises in their brains, somehow, a religious, or ethical, or

scientific, or philosophic, concept that the thing is right. And then

they go ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses of the

human mind is that the wish is parent to the thought. No matter what

they want to do, the sanction always comes. They are superficial

casuists. They are Jesuitical. They even see their way to doing wrong

that right may come of it. One of the pleasant and axiomatic fictions

they have created is that they are superior to the rest of mankind in

wisdom and efficiency. Therefrom comes their sanction to manage the

bread and butter of the rest of mankind. They have even resurrected the

theory of the divine right of kings—commercial kings in their case.[3]

[3] The newspapers, in 1902 of that era, credited the president of the

Anthracite Coal Trust, George F. Baer, with the enunciation of the

following principle: “_The rights and interests of the laboring man

will be protected by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite

wisdom has given the property interests of the country._”

“The weakness in their position lies in that they are merely business

men. They are not philosophers. They are not biologists nor

sociologists. If they were, of course all would be well. A business man

who was also a biologist and a sociologist would know, approximately,

the right thing to do for humanity. But, outside the realm of business,

these men are stupid. They know only business. They do not know mankind

nor society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fates of

the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in. History, some

day, will have an excruciating laugh at their expense.”

I was not surprised when I had my talk out with Mrs. Wickson and Mrs.

Pertonwaithe. They were society women.[4] Their homes were palaces.

They had many homes scattered over the country, in the mountains, on

lakes, and by the sea. They were tended by armies of servants, and

their social activities were bewildering. They patronized the

university and the churches, and the pastors especially bowed at their

knees in meek subservience.[5] They were powers, these two women, what

of the money that was theirs. The power of subsidization of thought was

theirs to a remarkable degree, as I was soon to learn under Ernest’s

tuition.

[4] _Society_ is here used in a restricted sense, a common usage of

the times to denote the gilded drones that did no labor, but only

glutted themselves at the honey-vats of the workers. Neither the

business men nor the laborers had time or opportunity for _society_.

_Society_ was the creation of the idle rich who toiled not and who in

this way played.

[5] “Bring on your tainted money,” was the expressed sentiment of the

Church during this period.

They aped their husbands, and talked in the same large ways about

policy, and the duties and responsibilities of the rich. They were

swayed by the same ethic that dominated their husbands—the ethic of

their class; and they uttered glib phrases that their own ears did not

understand.

Also, they grew irritated when I told them of the deplorable condition

of Jackson’s family, and when I wondered that they had made no

voluntary provision for the man. I was told that they thanked no one

for instructing them in their social duties. When I asked them flatly

to assist Jackson, they as flatly refused. The astounding thing about

it was that they refused in almost identically the same language, and

this in face of the fact that I interviewed them separately and that

one did not know that I had seen or was going to see the other. Their

common reply was that they were glad of the opportunity to make it

perfectly plain that no premium would ever be put on carelessness by

them; nor would they, by paying for accident, tempt the poor to hurt

themselves in the machinery.[6]

[6] In the files of the _Outlook_, a critical weekly of the period, in

the number dated August 18, 1906, is related the circumstance of a

workingman losing his arm, the details of which are quite similar to

those of Jackson’s case as related by Avis Everhard.

And they were sincere, these two women. They were drunk with conviction

of the superiority of their class and of themselves. They had a

sanction, in their own class-ethic, for every act they performed. As I

drove away from Mrs. Pertonwaithe’s great house, I looked back at it,

and I remembered Ernest’s expression that they were bound to the

machine, but that they were so bound that they sat on top of it.