 The dominant idea. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Dominant Idea by Valterine DeClaire. On everything that lives, if one looks searchingly, is Lind the shadow line of an idea. An idea, dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead, with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment with the stern, immobile cast of the non-living. Daily we move among these unyielding shadows, less piercable, more enduring than granite, with the blackness of ages in them, dominating living, changing bodies with dead, unchanging souls. And we meet also living souls dominating dying bodies, living ideas regnant over decay and death. Do not imagine that I speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or of shifting will is visible in the grass blade rooted in its clod of earth, as in the Gossamer Web of Being that floats and swims far over our heads in the free world of air. Regnant ideas everywhere. Did you ever see a dead vine bloom? I have seen it. Last summer I trained some morning glory vines up over a second-story balcony, and every day they blew and curled in the wind, their white purple-dashed faces winking at the sun, radiant with climbing life. Higher every day the green heads crept, carrying their train of spreading fans waving before the sun-seeking blossoms. Then all at once some mischance happened. Some cut worm or some mischievous child tore one vine off below, the finest and most ambitious one, of course. In a few hours the leaves hung limp, the sappy stem wilted and began to wither. In a day it was dead. All but the top which still clung longingly to its support, with bright head, lifted. I mourned a little for the buds that could never open now, and tied that proud vine whose work in the world was lost. But the next night there was a storm, a driving storm with beating rain and blinding lightning. I rose to watch the flashes, and low the wonder of the world, in the blackness of the midnight, in the fury of wind and rain. The dead vine had flowered. Five white moon-faced blossoms blew gaily round the skeleton vine, shining back triumphant at the red lightning. I gazed at them in dumb wonder. Dear dead vine whose will had been so strong to bloom that in the hour of its sudden cut-off from the feeding earth it sent the last sap to its blossoms. And not waiting for the morning brought them forth in storm and flash as white night glories, which should have been the children of the sun. In the daylight we all came to look at the wonder, marveling much and saying, surely these must be the last. But every day for three days the dead vine bloomed, and even a week after, when every leaf was dry and brown and so thin you could see through it, one last bud, dwarfed, weak, a very baby of a blossom. But still, white and delicate, with five purple flecks, like those on the live vine beside it, opened and waved at the stars and waited for the early sun. Over death and decay the dominant idea smiled. The vine was in the world to bloom, to bear white trumpet blossoms dashed with purple, and it held its will beyond death. Our modern teaching is that ideas are but attendant phenomena, impotent to determine the actions or relations of life, as the image in the glass which should say to the body it reflects, why shall shape thee? In truth we know that directly the body goes from before the mirror the transit image is nothingness. But the real body has its being to live and will live it, heedless of vanished phantoms of itself in response to the ever-shifting pressure of things without it. It is thus that the so-called materialist conception of history, the modern socialists, and a positive majority of anarchists would have us look upon the world of ideas, shifting unreal reflections having not to do in the determination of man's life, but so many mirror appearances of certain material relations, wholly powerless to act upon the course of material things. Mine to them is in itself a blank mirror, though in fact never wholly blank, because always facing the reality of the material and bound to reflect some shadow. Today I am somebody, tomorrow somebody else, if the scenes have shifted. My ego is a gibbering phantom, pirouetting in the glass, gesticulating, transforming, hourly or momentarily, gleaming with the phosphor light of a deceptive unreality, melting like the mist upon the hills, rocks, fields, woods, streams, houses, goods, flesh, bone, sinew. These are realities with definite parts to play, with essential characters that abide under all changes. But my ego does not abide. It is manufactured afresh with every change of these. I think this unqualified determinism of the material is a great and lamentable error in our modern progressive movement. And while I believe it was a wholesome antidote to the long-continued blunder of middle-age theology, these that mind was an utterly irresponsible entity making laws of its own after the manner of an absolute emperor, without logic, sequence, or relation, ruler over matter, in its own supreme determinant, not accepting God, who was himself the same sort of a mind writ large. While I do believe that the modern reconception of materialism has done a wholesome thing in pricking the bubble of such conceit and restoring man and his soul to its place in nature, I nevertheless believe that to this also there is a limit, and that the absolute sway of matter is quite as mischievous an error as the unrelated nature of mind. Even that, in its direct action upon personal conduct, it has all the more ill-effect of the two. For if the doctrine of free will was raised up fanatics and persecutors, who, assuming that men may be good under all conditions if they merely wish to be so, have sought to persuade other men's wills with threats, fines, imprisonments, torture the spike, the wheel, the axe, the faggot in order to make them good and save them against their abdurate wills, if the doctrine of spiritualism, the sole supreme, has done this. The doctrine of materialistic determinism has produced shifting, self-excusing, worthless, parasitic characters who are this now and that at some other time and anything and nothing upon principle. My conditions have made me so. They cry, and there is no more to be said. Poor mirror ghosts. How could they help it? To be sure, the influence of such a character rarely reaches so far as that of the principled persecutor. But for every one of the latter, there are a hundred of these easy, doughy characters who will fit any baking tin to whom determinist, self-excusing appeals. So the balance of evil between the two doctrines is about maintained. What we need is a true appraisement of the power and role of the idea. I do not think I am able to give such a true appraisement. I do not think that anyone, even much greater intellects than mine, will be able to do it for a long time to come. But I am at least able to suggest it, to show its necessity, to give a rude approximation of it. And first, against the accepted formula of modern materialism. Men are what circumstances make them. I set the opposing declaration. Circumstances are what men make them. And I contend that both these things are true up to the point where the combating powers are equalized, or one is overthrown. In other words, my conception of mind or character is not that it is a powerless reflection of a momentary condition of stuff and form, but an active, modifying agent reacting on its environment and transforming circumstances. Sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly, sometimes, though not often, entirely. All over the kingdom of life, I have said, one may see dominant ideas working if one but trains his eye to look for them and recognize them. In the human world, there have been many dominant ideas. I cannot conceive that ever, at any time, the struggle of the body before dissolution can have been ought but agony. If the reasoning that insecurity of conditions, the expectation of suffering, are circumstances which make the soul of man uneasy, shrinking, timid, what answer will you give to the challenge of old Ragnar Ladbrug? To that triumphant death-song hurled out, not by one cast to his death in the heat of battle, but under slow prison torture, bitten by serpents and yet singing, the goddesses of death invite me away. Now end, I, my song. The hours of my life are run out. I shall smile when I die. Nor can it be said that this is an exceptional instance not to be accounted for by the usual operation of general law. For old King Ladbrug, the Scowlder, did only what his fathers did, and his sons, and his friends, and his enemies. Through long generations, they set the force of a dominant idea, the idea of the super-ascendant ego against the force of torture and of death, ending life as they wished to end it, with a smile on their lips. But a few years ago did we not read how the helpless kafers victimized by the English for the consummacy of the boars, having been forced to dig the trenches wherein for pleasant sport they were to be shot, were lined up on the edge and seeing death facing them, began to chant barbaric strains of triumph, smiling as they fell. Let us admit that such exultant defiance was owing to ignorance, to primitive beliefs in gods and hereafters. But let us admit also that it shows the power of an idea dominant. Everywhere in the shells of dead societies, as in the shells of the sea slime, we shall see the force of purposive action, of intent within holding its purpose against obstacles without. I think there is no one in the world who can look upon the steadfast, far-staring face of an Egyptian carving or read a description of Egypt's monuments or gaze upon the mummied clay of its old dead men without feeling that the dominant idea of that people in that age was to be enduring and to work enduring things with the immobility of their great still sky upon them and the stare of the desert in them. One must feel that whatever other ideas animated them and expressed themselves in their lives, this was the dominant idea. That which was must remain, no matter at what cost, even if it were to break the everlasting hills. An idea which made the live humanity beneath it born and nurtured in the corns of cast, grown and writhe and gnaw its bandages till in the fullness of time it passed away. And still the granite mould of it stares with empty eyes out across the world the stern old memory of the thing that was. I think no one can look upon the marbles wherein Greek genius wrought the figuring of its soul without feeling an apprehension that the things are going to leap and fly. That in a moment one is like to be set upon by heroes with spears in their hands by serpents that will coil around him to be trodden by horses that may trample and flee to be smitten by these gods that have as little of the idea of stone in them as a dragonfly. One instant poised upon a windswayed petal edge. I think no one can look upon them without realizing at once that those figures came out of the boil of life. They seem like rising bubbles about to float into the air. But beneath them other bubbles rising and others and others there will be no end of it. When one's eyes are upon one group one feels that behind one perhaps a figure is tiptoeing to seize the darts of the air and hurl them on one's head. One must keep whirling to face the miracle that appears about to be wrought, stone leaping. And this, though nearly everyone is minus some of the glory the old Greek wrought into it so long ago even the broken stumps of arms and legs live. And the dominant idea is activity and the beauty and strength of it. Change, swift ever-circling change. The making of things and the casting of them away as children cast away their toys not interested that these shall endure so that they themselves realize incessant activity. Full of creative power what matter if the creature perished? So there was an endless procession of changing shapes in their schools their philosophies, their dramas, their poems till at last it wore itself to death and the marvel passed away from the world but still their marvels lived to show what manner of thoughts dominated them. And if we wish to know what master thought ruled the lives of men when the medieval period had time to ripen it one has only at this day to stray into some quaint out of the way English village where a strong old towered church yet stands in the midst of little strawed thatch cottages like a brooding mother hen surrounded by her chickens everywhere the greatening of God and the lessening of man the church so looming the home so little the search for the spirit for the enduring thing not the poor endurance of granite which in the ages crumbles but the eternal the eternal and contempt for the body which perishes manifest in studied uncleanliness in mortifications of the flesh as if the spirit should have spat its scorn upon it. Such was the dominant idea of that middle age which has been too much cursed by modernists for the men who built the castles and the cathedrals were men of mighty works though they made no books and though their souls spread crippled wings because of their very endeavors to soar too high the spirit of voluntary subordination for the accomplishment of a great work which proclaimed the aspiration of the common soul that was the spirit wrought into the cathedral stones and it is not holy to be condemned in waking dream when the shadow shapes of world ideas swim before the vision one sees the middle age soul an ill-contorted half formless thing with dragon wings and a great dark tense face strained sunward with blind eyes if we now look around us to see what idea dominates our own civilization I do not know that it is even as attractive as this piteous monster of the old darkness the relativity of things has altered man has risen and God has descended the modern village has better homes and less pretentious churches also the conception of dirt and disease has much sought afflictions the patient's suffering of which is a meat offering to win God's pardon has given place to the emphatic promulgation of cleanliness we have public school nurses notifying parents that pediculosus copetus is a very contagious and unpleasant disease we have cancer associations gathering up such cancers as have attached themselves to impecunious persons carefully experimenting with a view to cleaning them out of the human race we have tuberculosis societies attempting the herculean labor of clearing the Aegean stables of our modern factories of the deadly vesilis and they have got as far as spittoons with water in them in some factories and others and others and others which while not yet overwhelmingly successful in their avowed purposes are evidence sufficient that humanity no longer seeks dirt as a means of grace we laugh at those old superstitions and talk much about exact experimental knowledge we endeavor to galvanize the Greek corpse and pretend that we enjoy physical culture we dabble in many things but the one great real idea of our age not copied from any other not pretended not raised to life by any conjuration is the much making of things not the making of beautiful things not the joy of spending living energy in creative work rather the shameless merciless driving and over driving wasting and draining of the last bit of energy only to produce heaps and heaps of things things ugly things harmful things useless and at best largely unnecessary to what end are they produced mostly the producer does not know still less does he care but he is possessed with the idea that he must do it everyone is doing it and every year the making of things goes on more and faster there are mountain ranges of things made and making and still men go about desperately seeking to increase the list of created things to start fresh heaps and to add to the existing heaps and with what agony of body under what stress and strain of danger and fear of danger with what mutilations and mamings and lamings they struggle on dashing themselves out against these rocks of wealth verily if the vision of the medieval soul is painful in its blind staring and pathetic striving grotesque in its senseless tortures the soul of the modern is most amazing with its restless nervous eyes ever searching the corners of the universe its restless nervous hands ever reaching and grasping for some useless toil and certainly the presence of things in abundance things empty and things vulgar and things absurd as well as things convenient and useful has produced the desire for the possession of things the exaltation of the possession of things go through the business street of any city where the tilted edges of the strata of things are exposed to gaze and look at the faces of the people as they pass not at the hungry and smitten ones who fringe the sidewalks and plain dolefully for alms but at the crowd and see what idea is written on their faces on those of the women from the ladies of the horse shows to the shop girls out of the factory there is a sickening vanity a consciousness of their clothes as of some jackdaw and borrowed feathers look for the pride and glory of the free strong beautiful body live moving and powerful you will not see it you will see mincing steps bodies tilted to show the cut of a skirt simpering smirking faces with eyes cast about seeking admiration for the gigantic bow of ribbon in the overdressed hair in the caustic words of an acquaintance to whom I once said as we walked look at the amount of vanity on all these women's faces no look at the little bit of womanhood showing out of all that vanity and on the faces of the men coarseness coarse desires for coarse things and lots of them the stamp is set so unmistakably that the wayfarer though a fool need not air therein even the frightful anxiety and restlessness begotten of the creation of all this is less distasteful than the abominable expression of lust for the things created such is the dominant idea of the western world at least in these our days you may see it wherever you look impressed plainly on things and on men very like if you look in the glass you will see it there and if some archaeologist of a long future shall someday unbury the bones of our civilization where ashes or flood shall have entombed it he will see this frightful idea stamped on the factory walls he shall uncover with their rows and rows of square light holes their tons upon tons of toothed steel grinning out of the skull of this our life its acres of silk and velvet its square miles of tinsel and shoddy no glorious marbles of nymphs and fawns whose dead images are yet so sweet that one might wish to kiss them still no majestic figures of winged horses with men's faces and lion's paws casting their colossal symbolism in a mighty spell fo'ered upon time as those old stone chimeras of Babylon yet do but meaningless iron giants of wheels and teeth whose secret is forgotten but whose business was to grind men tip and spit them out as housefuls of woven stuffs bazaars of trash where through other men might wade the statues he shall find will bear no trace of mythic dream or mystic symbol they will be statues of merchants and iron masters and militiamen entailered coats and pantaloons and proper hats and shoes but the dominant idea of the age and land does not necessarily mean the dominant idea of any single life I doubt not that in those long gone days far away by the banks of the still Nile in the abiding shadow of the pyramids under the heavy burden of other men's validity there went to and fro restless active rebel souls who hated all that the ancient society stood for and with burning hearts sought to overthrow it I am sure that in the midst of all the agile Greek intellect created there were those who went about with down-bent eyes caring nothing for it all seeking some higher revelation willing to abandon the joys of life so that they drew near to some distant unknown perfection their fellows knew not of I am certain that in the dark ages when most men prayed and cowered and beat and bruised themselves and sought afflictions like that Saint Teresa who still let me suffer or die there were some many who looked on the world as a chance jest who despised or pitied their ignorant comrades and tried to compel the answers of the universe to their questionings by the patient quiet searching which came to be modern science I am sure there were hundreds, thousands of them of whom we have never heard and now today though the society about us is dominated by thing worship and will stand so marked for all time that is no reason any single soul should be because the one thing seemingly worth doing to my neighbor to all my neighbors is to pursue dollars that is no reason I should pursue dollars because my neighbors conceive they need an inordinate heap of carpets furniture, clocks, china, glass, tapestries, mirrors, clothes jewels and servants to care for them and detectives to keep an eye on servants judges to try the thieves and politicians to appoint the judges jails to punish the culprits and wardens to watch in the jails and tax collectors to gather support for the wardens and fees for the tax collectors and strong houses to hold the fees so that none but the guardians thereof can make off with them and therefore to keep this host of parasites need other men to work for them and make the fees because my neighbors want all this is that any reason I should devote myself to such a barren folly and bow my neck to serve to keep up the gaudy show must we, because the middle age was dark and blind and brutal throw away the one good thing it wrought into the fiber of man that the inside of a human being was worth more than the outside that to conceive a higher thing than oneself and live towards that is the only way of living worthily the goal strived for should and must be a very different one from that which led the medieval fanatics to despise the body and belabor it with hourly crucifixions but one can recognize the claims and the importance of the body without therefore sacrificing truth, honor, simplicity, and faith to the vulgar gods of body service whose very decorations debase the thing they might be supposed to exalt I have said before that the doctrine that men are nothing and circumstances all has been and is the bane of our modern social reform movements our youth themselves animated by the spirit of the old teachers who believed in the supremacy of ideas even in the very hour of throwing away that teaching look with burning eyes to the social east and believe that wonders of revolution are soon to be accomplished in their enthusiasm they for read the gospel of circumstances to mean that very soon the pressure of material development must break down the social system they give the rotten thing but a few years to last and then they themselves shall witness the transformation partake in its joys the few years pass away and nothing happens enthusiasm cools behold these same idealists then successful businessmen, professionals property owners, money lenders creeping into the social ranks they once despised pitifully, contemptably at the skirts of some impecunious personage to whom they have lent money or done some professional service gratis behold them lying cheating, tricking, flattering buying and selling themselves for any frippery any cheap little pretense the dominant social idea has seized them their lives are swallowed up in it and when you ask the reason why they tell you that circumstances compel them so to do if you quote their lies to them they smile with calm complacency assure you that when circumstances demand lies lies are a great deal better than truth that tricks are sometimes more effective than honest dealing that flattering and duping do not matter if the end to be attained is desirable and that under existing circumstances it isn't possible without all this that it is going to be possible whenever circumstances have made truth telling easier than lying but till then a man must look out for himself by all means and so the cancer goes on rotting away the moral fiber and the man becomes a lump, a squash a piece of slippery slime taking all shapes and losing all shapes according to a particular hole or corner he wishes to glide into a disgusting embodiment of the moral bankruptcy begotten by thing worship had he been dominated by a less material conception of life had his will not been rotted by the intellectual reasoning of it out of its existence by its acceptance of its own nothingness the unselfish aspirations of his earlier years would have grown and strengthened by exercise and habit and his protest against the time might have been enduringly written and to some purpose will it be said that the pilgrim fathers did not hue out of the New England ice and granite the idea which gathered them together out of their scattered lower English villages and drove them in their frail ships over the Atlantic in midwinter to cut their way against all opposing forces were they not common men subject to the operation of common law will it be said that circumstances aided them when death disease hunger and cold had done their worst not one of those remaining was willing by an easy lie to return to material comfort and the possibility of long days had our modern social revolutionists the vigorous and undaunted conception of their own powers that these had our social movements would not be such pitiful abortions core rotten even before the outward flecks appear give a labor leader a political job and the system becomes all right laugh our enemies and they point mockingly to Terence Powderly acid his like and they quote John Burns who as soon as he went into parliament declared the time of the agitator is past the time of the legislator has come let an anarchist marry an heiress and the country is safe they sneer and they have the right to sneer but would they have that right could they have it if our lives were not in the first instance dominated by more insistent desires than those we would feign have others think we hold most dear it is the old story aim at the stars and you may hit the top of the gate post but aim at the ground and you will hit the ground it is not supposed that anyone will attain the full realization of what he purposes even when those purposes do not involve united action with others he will fall short he will in some measure be overcome by contending or inert opposition but something he will attain if he continues to aim high what then would I have you ask I would have men invest themselves with the dignity of an aim higher than the chase for wealth choose a thing to do in life outside the making of things and keep it in mind not for a day nor a year but for a lifetime and then keep faith with themselves not be a light of love today professing this and tomorrow that and easily reading oneself out of both whenever it becomes convenient not advocating a thing today and tomorrow kissing its enemies sleeve with that weak coward cry in the mouth circumstances make me take a good look into yourself and if you love things and the power and the plenitude of things better than you love your own dignity human dignity oh say so say so say it to yourself and abide by it but do not blow hot and cold in one breath do not try to be a social reformer and a respected possessor of things at the same time do not preach the straight and narrow way while going joyously upon the wide one preach the wide one or do not preach at all but do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free society but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it say honestly I love armchairs better than free men and pursue them because I choose not because circumstances make me I love hats large large hats with many feathers and great bows and I would rather have those hats than trouble myself about social dreams that will never be accomplished in my day the world worships hats and I wish to worship with them but if you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul and the free fraternization of men as the purpose which your life is to make manifest then do not sell it for tinsel think that your soul is strong and will hold its way and slowly through bitter struggle perhaps the strength will grow and the foregoing of possessions for which others barter the last possibility of freedom will become easy at the end of life you may close your eyes saying I have not been dominated by the dominant idea of my age I have chosen my own allegiance and served it I have proved by a lifetime that there is that in man which saves him from the absolute tyranny of circumstance which in the end conquers and remolds circumstance the immortal fire of individual will which is the salvation of the future let us have men men who will say a word to their souls and keep it keep it not when it is easy but keep it when it is hard keep it when the storm roars and there is a white streaked sky and blue thunder before and one's eyes are blinded and one's ears deafened with the war of opposing things and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray dreariness that never lifts hold unto the last that is what it means to have a dominant idea which circumstance cannot break and such men make and unmake circumstance end of the dominant idea Recording by Rhonda Fetterman Anarchism This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Anarchism by Valterine DeClaire There are two spirits abroad in the world The spirit of caution The spirit of dare The spirit of quiescence The spirit of unrest The spirit of immobility The spirit of change The spirit of hold fast to that which you have The spirit of let go and fly to that which you have not The spirit of the slow and steady builder Careful of its labors Loath to part with any of its achievements Wishful to keep And unable to discriminate between what is worth keeping and what is better cast aside And the spirit of the inspirational destroyer Fertile in creative fancies A little careless in its luxuriance of effort Incline to cast away the good together with the bad Society is a quivering balance Eternally struck afresh between these two Those who look upon man as most anarchists do As a link in the chain of evolution See in these two social tendencies The sum of the tendencies of individual men Which in common with the tendencies of all organic life Are the results of the action and counteraction Of inheritance and adaptation Inheritance continually tending to repeat what has been Long long after it has outgrown Adaptation continually tending to break down forms The same tendencies under other names are observed In the inorganic world as well And anyone who is possessed by the modern scientific mania For monism can easily follow out the line To the vanishing point of human knowledge There has been in fact a strong inclination To do this among a portion of the more educated anarchists Who have been working men first and anarchists By reason of their instinctive hatred to the boss Later became students and swept away by their undigested science Immediately conceived that it was necessary to fit their anarchism To the revelations of the microscope Else the theory might as well be given up I remember with considerable amusement A heated discussion some five or six years since Wherein doctors and embryo doctors Saw it for a justification of anarchism In the development of the amoeba While a fledgling engineer searched for it In mathematical quantities Myself at one time asserted very stoutly That no one could be an anarchist And believe in God at the same time Others assert as stoutly That one cannot accept this spiritualist philosophy And be an anarchist At present I hold with C.L. James The most learned of American anarchists That one's metaphysical system has very little to do with the matter The chain of reasoning which once appeared so conclusive to me Namely that anarchism being a denial of authority Over the individual could not coexist with a belief In a supreme ruler of the universe Is contradicted in the case of Leo Tolstoy Who comes to the conclusion that none has a right to rule another Just because of his belief in God Just because he believes that all are equal children of one father And therefore none has a right to rule the other I speak of him because he is a familiar and notable personage But there have frequently been instances Where the same idea has been worked out by a whole sect of believers Especially in the earlier and persecuted stages of their development It no longer seems necessary to me, therefore That one should base his anarchism upon any particular world conception It is a theory of the relations due to man And comes as an offered solution to the societal problems Arising from the existence of these two tendencies of which I have spoken No matter where those tendencies come from All alike recognize them as existent And however interesting the speculation However fascinating to lose oneself back Back in the molecular storm world Where in the figure of man is seen merely as a denser, fiercer group A livelier storm center Moving among others Impinging upon others But nowhere separate Nowhere exempt from the same necessity that acts upon all other centers of force It is by no means necessary in order to reason oneself into anarchism Sufficient are a good observant eye And a reasonably reflecting brain For anyone, lettered or unlettered To recognize the desirability of anarchistic aims This is not to say that increased knowledge will not confirm And expand one's application of this fundamental concept The beauty of truth is that at every new discovery of fact We find how much wider and deeper it is Than we at first thought it But it means that first of all Anarchism is concerned with present conditions And with the very plain and common people And is by no means a complex or difficult proposition Anarchism alone, apart from any proposed economic reform Is just the latest reply out of many the past has given To that daring, breakaway, volatile, changeful spirit Which is never content The society of which we are part Put certain oppressions upon us Oppressions which have arisen out of the very changes Accomplished by this same spirit Combined with the heart and fast lines of old habits acquired And fixed before the changes were thought of Machinery, which as our socialistic comrades continually emphasize Has wrought a revolution in industry Is the creation of the dare spirit It has fought its way against ancient customs, privilege And cowardice at every step As the history of any invention would show If traced backward through all its transformations And what is the result of it? That a system of working Altogether appropriate to hand production People of generating no great oppressions While industry remained in that state Has been stretched, strained To fit production in mass Till we are reaching the bursting point Once more the spirit of dare Must assert itself, claim new freedoms Since the old ones are rendered null and void By the present methods of production To speak in detail In the old days of master and man Not so old, but what many of the older working men Can recall the conditions The workshop was a fairly easy going place Where employer and employed worked together Knew no class feelings, chummed it out of hours As a rule were not obliged to rush And when they were Relyed upon the principle of common interest and friendship Not upon a slave owner's power For overtime assistance The proportional profit on each man's labor May even have been in general higher But the total amount possible to be undertaken By one employer was relatively so small That no tremendous aggregations of wealth could arise To be an employer gave no man power Over another's incomings and outgoings Neither upon his speech while at work Nor to force him beyond endurance when busy Nor to subject him to fines and tributes For undesired things such as ice water, dirty spittoons Cups of undrinkable tea and the like Nor to the unmentionable indecencies Of the large factory The individuality of the worker was a plainly quantity His life was his own He could not be locked in and driven to death Like a street car horse For the good of the general public And the paramount importance of society With the application of steam power And the development of machinery Came these large groupings of workers This subdivision of work Which has made of the employer a man apart Having interests hostile to those of his employees Living in another circle altogether Knowing nothing of them but as so many units of power To be reckoned with as he does his machines For the most part despising them at his very best Regarding them as dependents whom he has bound In some respects to care for As a humane man cares for an old horse he cannot use Such is his relation to his employees While to the general public He becomes simply an immense cuttlefish With tentacles reaching everywhere Each tiny profit-sucking mouth producing no great effect But an aggregate drawing up such a body of wealth As makes any declaration of equality Or freedom between him and the worker A thing to laugh at The time has come therefore When the spirit of dare calls loud Through every factory and workshop For a change in the relations of master and man There must be some arrangement possible Which will preserve the benefits of the new production And at the same time restore the individual dignity Of the worker Give back the bold independence of the old master Of his trade together with such added freedoms As may properly accrue to him As his special advantage from society's material developments This is the particular message of anarchism to the worker It is not an economic system It does not come to you with detailed plans of how you, the workers Are to conduct industry Nor systemized methods of exchange Nor careful paper organizations of the administration of things It simply calls upon the spirit of individuality To rise up from its abasement And hold itself paramount in no matter What economic reorganization shall come about? Be men, first of all Not held in slavery by things you make Let your gospel be things for men Not men for things Socialism, economically considered Is a positive proposition for such reorganization It is an attempt in the main To grasp at those great new material gains Which have been the special creation of the last 40 or 50 years It has not so much in view the reclamation And further assertion of the personality of the worker As it has a just distribution of products Now it is perfectly apparent that anarchy Having to do almost entirely with the relations of men In their thoughts and feelings And not with the positive organization of production and distribution An anarchist needs to supplement his anarchism By some economic propositions Which may enable him to put in practical shape to himself and others This possibility of independent manhood That will be his test in choosing any such proposition The measure in which individuality is secured It is not enough for him that a comfortable ease A pleasant and well-ordered routine Shall be secured Free play for the spirit of change That is his first demand Every anarchist has this in common With every other anarchist That the economic system must be subservient to this end No system recommends itself to him By the mere beauty and smoothness of its working Jealous of the encroachments of the machine He looks with fierce suspicion upon the arithmetic With men for units A society running in slots and grooves With the precision so beautiful to one in whom The love of order is first But which only makes him sniff, puff It smells of machine oil There are, accordingly, several economic schools among anarchists There are anarchist individualists Anarchist mutualists Anarchist communists and anarchist socialists In times past, these several schools have bitterly denounced each other And mutually refused to recognize each other as anarchists at all The more narrow-minded on both sides still do so True, they do not consider it is narrow-mindedness But simply a firm and solid grasp of the truth Which does not permit of tolerance towards error This has been the attitude of the bigot in all ages An anarchism no more than any other new doctrine Has escaped its bigots Each of these fanatical adherents Of either collectivism or individualism Believes that no anarchism is possible Without that particular economic system As its guarantee And is, of course, thoroughly justified from its own standpoint With the extension of what Comrade Brown calls the new spirit, however This old narrowness is yielding to the broader Kindlier and far more reasonable idea That all these economic conceptions may be experimented with And there is nothing unanarchistic about any of them Until the element of compulsion enters and obliges unwilling persons To remain in a community whose economic arrangements They do not agree to When I say, do not agree to I do not mean that they have a mere distaste for Or that they think might well be altered For some other preferable arrangement But with which nevertheless they quite easily put up As two persons each living in the same house And having different tastes and decoration Will submit to some color of window shade Or bit of bric-a-brac Which he does not like so well But which nevertheless He cheerfully puts up with For the satisfaction of being with his friend I mean serious differences Which in their opinion threaten their essential liberties I make this explanation about trifles Because the objections which are raised to the doctrine That men may live in society freely Almost always degenerate into trivialities Such as What would you do if two ladies wanted the same hat? Etc. We do not advocate the abolition of common sense And every person of sense is willing to surrender His preferences at times Provided he is not compelled to At all costs Therefore I say that each group of persons Acting socially in freedom may choose any of the proposed systems And be just as thoroughgoing anarchists As those who select another If the standpoint be accepted We are rid of those outrageous excommunications Which belong properly to the church of Rome And which serve no purpose but to bring us Into deserved contempt with outsiders Furthermore having accepted it From a purely theoretical process of reasoning I believe one is then in an attitude of mind To perceive certain material factors in the problem Which account for these differences in proposed systems In which even demand such differences So long as production is in its present state I shall now dwell briefly upon these various propositions And explain as I go along What the material factors are to which I have just alluded Taking the last first, namely anarchist socialism Its economic program is the same as that of political socialism In its entirety I mean before the working of practical politics Has frittered the socialism away into a mirror list Of governmental ameliorations Such anarchist socialists hold that the state The centralized government has been And ever will be the business agent of the property owning class That it is an expression of a certain material condition purely And with the passing of that condition The state must also pass Socialism, meaning the complete taking over of all forms of property From the hands of men as the indivisible possession of man Bring with it as a logical inevitable result The dissolution of the state They believe that every individual having an equal claim Upon the social production The incentive to grabbing and holding being gone Crimes, which are in nearly all cases The instinctive answer to some antecedent denial Of that claim to one's share will vanish And with them the last excuse for the existence of the state They do not, as a rule, look forward to any such transformations In the material aspect of society, as some of the rest of us do A Londoner once said to me that he believed London Would keep on growing The flux and reflux of nations keep on pouring Through its serpentine streets Its hundred thousand buses keep on jaunting just the same And all that tremendous traffic which fascinates and horrifies Continue rolling like a great flood up and down Up and down like the sea sweep After the realization of anarchism As it does now That Londoner's name was John Turner He said, on the same occasion That he believed thoroughly in the economics of socialism Now this branch of the anarchist party came out of the old socialist party And originally represented the revolutionary wing of that party As opposed to those who took up the notion of using politics And I believe the material reason which accounts for their acceptance Of that particular economic scheme is this Of course it applies to all European socialists That the social development of Europe is a thing of long-continued history That almost from time immemorial There has been a recognized class struggle That no work man living, nor yet his father Nor his grandfather Nor his great grandfather Has seen the land of Europe pass in vast blocks From an unclaimed public inheritance Into the hands of an ordinary individual like himself Without a title or any distinguishing mark above himself As we in America have seen The land and the landholder have been to him Always unapproachable quantities A recognized source of oppression, class and class possession Again the industrial development in town and city Coming as a means of escape from feudal oppression But again bringing with it its own oppressions Also with a long history of warfare behind it Has served to bind the sense of class fealty Upon the common people of the manufacturing towns So that blind, stupid and church-ridden as they no doubt are There is a vague, dull, but very certainly existing feeling That they must look for help in association together In regard with suspicion or indifference Any proposition which proposes to help them By helping their employers Moreover, socialism has been an ever-recurring dream Through the long story of revolt in Europe Anarchists, like others, are born into it It is not until they pass overseas And come in contact with other conditions Breathe the atmosphere of other thoughts That they are able to see other possibilities as well If I may venture at this point A criticism of this position of the anarchist socialist I would say that the great flaw in this conception of the state Is in supposing to be of simple origin The state is not merely the tool of the governing classes It has its root far down in the religious development of human nature It does not fall apart merely through the abolition of classes and property There is other work to be done As to the economic program I shall criticize that together with all the other propositions When I sum up Anarchist communism is a modification Rather than an evolution of anarchist socialism Most anarchist communists, I believe Great changes in the distribution of people upon the Earth's surface Through the realization of anarchism Most of them agree that the opening up of the land together With the free use of tools Would lead to a breaking up of these vast communities called cities And the formation of smaller groups or communes Which shall be held together by a free recognition of common interests only While socialism looks forward to a further extension of the modern triumph of commerce Which is that it has brought the products of the entire Earth to your doorstep Free communism looks upon such a fever of exportation and importation As an unhealthy development And expects rather a more self-reliant development of home resources Doing away with the mass of supervision required for the systematic conduct of such world exchange It appeals to the plain sense of the workers By proposing that they who now consider themselves helpless dependents Upon the boss's ability to give them a job Shall constitute themselves independent producing groups Take the materials, do the work, they do that now Deposit the products in the warehouses Taking what they want for themselves And letting others take the balance To do this, no government, no employer, no money system is necessary There is only necessary a decent regard for one's own and one's fellow workers' self-hood It is not likely, indeed it is devoutly to be hoped That no such large aggregations of men as now assembled daily in mills and factories Will ever come together by mutual desire A factory is a hotbed for all that is vicious in human nature And largely because of its crowding only The notion that men cannot work together unless they have a driving master to take a percentage of their product Is contrary both to good sense and observed fact As a rule, bosses simply make confusion worse confounded When they attempt to mix in a workman's snarls As every mechanic has had practical demonstration of And as to social effort, why men worked in common while they were monkeys yet If you don't believe it, go and watch the monkeys They don't surrender their individual freedom either In short, the real workmen will make their own regulations Decide when and where and how things shall be done It is not necessary that the projector of an anarchist communist society Shall say in what manner separate industries shall be conducted Nor do they presume to He simply conjures the spirit of dare and do in the plainest workmen Says to them, it is you who know how to mine, how to dig, how to cut You will know how to organize your work without a dictator We cannot tell you, but we have full faith that you will find the way yourselves You will never be free men until you acquire that same self-faith As to the problem of the exact exchange of equivalents Which so frets the reformers of other schools To him it does not exist So there is enough, who cares? The sources of wealth remain indivisible forever Who cares if one has a little more or less, so all have enough Who cares if something goes to waste? Let it waste The rotted apple fertilizes the ground as well as if it had comforted the animal economy first And indeed, you who worry so much about system and order And adjustment of production to consumption You waste more human energy in making your account than the precious calculation is worth Hence money with all its retinue of complications and trickery is abolished Small, independent, self-resourceful, freely cooperating communes This is the economic ideal which is accepted by most of the anarchists of the old world today As to the material factor which developed this ideal among Europeans It is the recollection and even some still remaining vestiges of the medieval village commune Those oases in the great Sahara of human degradation presented in the history of the Middle Ages When the Catholic Church stood triumphant upon man in the dust Such is the ideal glamored with the dead gold of a sun which has set Which gleams through the pages of Morris and Kropotkin We in America never knew the village commune White civilizations struck our shores in a broad tide sheet and swept over the country inclusively Among us was never seen the little commune growing up from a state of barbarism independently Out of primary industries and maintaining itself within itself There was no gradual change from the mode of life of the native people to our own There was a wiping out and a complete transplantation of the latest form of European civilization The idea of the little commune therefore comes instinctively to the anarchists of Europe Particularly the continental ones With them it is merely the conscious development of a submerged instinct With Americans it is an importation I believe that most anarchist communes avoid the blunder of the socialists In regarding the state as the offspring of material conditions purely Though they lay great stress upon its being the tool of property And contend that in one form or another the state will exist so long as there is property at all I pass to the extreme individualists Those who hold the tradition of political economy And are firm in the idea that the system of employer and employed Buying and selling Banking and all the other essential institutions of commercialism Centering upon private property Are in themselves good And are rendered vicious merely by the interference of the state Their chief economic propositions are Land to be held by individuals or companies for such time And in such allotments as they use only Redistribution to take place as often as the members of the community shall agree What constitutes use to be decided by each community Presumably in town meeting assembled Disputed cases to be settled by a so-called free jury To be chosen by lot out of the entire group Members not coinciding in the decisions of the group To be take themselves to outlying lands not occupied Without let or hindrance from anyone Money to represent all staple commodities To be issued by whomever pleases Naturally it would come to individuals depositing their securities with banks And accepting banknotes in return Such banknotes representing the labor expended in production And being issued in sufficient quantity There being no limit upon anyone starting in the business Whenever interest began to rise more banks would be organized And thus the rate per cent would be constantly checked by competition Exchange would take place freely Commodities would circulate Business of all kinds would be stimulated And the government privilege of being taken away from inventions Industries would spring up at every turn Bosses would be hunting men rather than men bosses Wages would rise to the full measure of the individual production And forever remain there Property, real property, would at last exist Which it does not at the present day Because no man gets what he makes The charm in this program is that it proposes No sweeping changes in our daily retinue It does not bewilder us as more revolutionary propositions do Its remedies are self-acting ones They do not depend upon conscious efforts of individuals to establish justice And build harmony Competition in freedom is the great automatic valve which opens And closes as demands increase or diminish And all that is necessary is to let well enough alone And not attempt to assist it It is sure that nine Americans in ten Who have never heard of any of these programs before Will listen with far more interest and approval to this than to the others The material reason which explains this attitude of mind is very evident In this country outside of the Negro question We have never had the historic division of classes We are just making that history now We have never felt the need of the associative spirit of workmen with workmen Because in our society it has been the individual that did things The workmen of today was the employer tomorrow Vast opportunities lying open to him in the undeveloped territory He shouldered his tools and struck out single handed for himself Even now, fiercer and fiercer through the struggle is growing Tighter and tighter, though the workmen is getting cornered The line of division between class and class is constantly being broken And the first motto of the American is The Lord helps him who helps himself Consequently, this economic program whose key note is, let alone Appeals strongly to the traditional sympathies and life habits of a people Who have themselves seen an almost unbounded patrimony swept up As a gambler sweeps his stakes by men who played with them at school Or worked with them in one shop a year or ten years before This particular branch of the anarchist party Does not accept the communist position that government arises from property On the contrary, they hold government responsible for the denial of real property These to the producer the exclusive possession of what he has produced They lay more stress upon the metaphysical origin In the authority creating fear in human nature Their attack is directed centrally upon the idea of authority Thus the material wrongs seem to flow from the spiritual error If I may venture the word without fear of misconstruction Which is precisely the reverse of the socialistic view Truth lies not between the two But in a synthesis of the two opinions Anarchist mutualism is a modification of the program of individualism Laying more emphasis upon organization, cooperation, and free federation of the workers To these the trade unions is the nucleus of the free cooperative group Which will obviate the necessity of an employer Issue time checks to its members, take charge of the finished product Exchange with different trade groups for their mutual advantage through the central federation Enable its members to utilize their credit And likewise ensure them against loss The mutualist position on the land question is identical with that of the individualists As well as their understanding of the state The material factor which accounts for such differences as there are between individualists and mutualists Is, I think, the fact that the first originated in the brains of those who, whether workmen or businessmen Lived by so-called independent exertion Josiah Warren, though a poor man, lived in an individualist way And made his free life social experiment in small country settlements Far removed from the great organized industries Tucker also, though a city man, has never had personal association with such industries They had never known directly the oppressions of the large factory Nor mingled with workers' associations The mutualists had Consequently they are leaning towards a greater communism Dyer D. Lum spent the greater part of his life in building up workmen's unions Himself being a hand worker, a book binder by trade I have now presented the rough skeleton of four different economic schemes entertained by anarchists Remember that the point of agreement in all is no compulsion Those who favor one method have no intention of forcing it upon those who favor another So long as equal tolerance is exercised towards themselves Remember also that none of these schemes is proposed for its own sake But because, through it, its projectors believe liberty may be best secured Every anarchist, as an anarchist, would be perfectly willing to surrender his own scheme directly If he saw that another worked better For myself, I believe that all these, and many more, could be advantageously tried in different localities I would see the instincts and habits of the people express themselves in a free choice in every community And I am sure that distinct environments would call out distinct adaptations Personally, while I recognize that liberty would be greatly extended under any of these economies I frankly confess that none of them satisfies me Socialism and communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration Which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal anarchism Individualism and mutualism, resting upon property, involve a development of the private policemen Not at all compatible with my notion of freedom My ideal would be a condition in which all natural resources would be forever free to all And the worker individually able to produce for himself sufficient for all his vital needs, if he so chose So that he need not govern his working or not working by the times and seasons of his fellows I think that time may come But it will only be through the development of the modes of production and the tastes of the people Meanwhile, we all cry with one voice for the freedom to try Are these all the aims of anarchism? They are just the beginning They are an outline of what is demanded for the material producer If as a worker you think no further than how to free yourself from the horrible bondage of capitalism Then that is the measure of anarchism for you But you yourself put the limit there, if there it is put Immeasurably deeper, immeasurably higher, dips and sores the soul which has come out of its casement of custom and cowardice And dared to claim itself Ah, once to stand unflinchingly on the brink of that dark gulf of passions and desires At last to send a bold, straight-driven gaze down into the volcanic me Once, and in that once, and in that once forever To throw off the command to cover and flee from the knowledge of that abyss Nay, to dare it to hiss and see if it will And make us writhe and shiver with its force Once, and forever to realize that one is not a bundle of well-regulated little reasons bound up in the front room of the brain To be sermonized and held in order with copybook maxims or moved and stopped by a syllogism But a bottomless, bottomless depth of all strange sensations A rocking sea of feeling wherever sweep strong storms of unaccountable hate and rage Invisible contortions of disappointment, low ebbs of meanness, quakings and shudderings of love That drives to madness and will not be controlled Hungerings and moanings and sobbing that smite upon the inner ear Now first bent to listen as if all the sadness of the sea and the wailing of the great pine forests of the north Had met to weep together there in that silence audible to you alone To look down into that, to know the blackness, the midnight, the dead ages in oneself To feel the jungle and the beast within And the swamp and the slime and the desolate desert of the heart's despair To see, to know, to feel to the uttermost And then to look at one's fellow sitting across from one in the streetcar So decorous, so well-got up, so nicely combed and brushed and oiled And to wonder what lies beneath that commonplace exterior To picture the cavern in him, which somewhere far below has a narrow gallery running into your own To imagine the pain that racks him to the fingertips, perhaps While he wears that placid iron shirt front countenance To conceive how he too shudders at himself And writhes and flees from the lava of his heart and aches in his prison-house Not daring to see himself To draw back respectfully from the self-gate of the plainest, most unpromising creature Even from the most debased criminal Because one knows the non-entity and the criminal in oneself To spare all condemnation, how much more trial and sentence Because one knows the stuff of which man is made and recoils at nothing since all is in himself This is what anarchism may mean to you It means that to me And then to turn cloudward, starward, skyward, and let the dreams rush over one No longer awed by outside powers of any order Recognizing nothing superior to oneself Painting, painting endless pictures, creating unheard symphonies that sing dream sounds to you alone Extending sympathies to the dumb brutes as equal brothers Kissing the flowers as one did when a child, letting oneself go free Go free beyond the bounds of what fear and custom call the possible This too anarchism may mean to you, if you dare to apply it so And if you do some day, if sitting at your workbench you see a vision of surpassing glory Some picture of that golden time when there shall be no prisons on the earth Nor hunger, nor houselessness, nor accusation, nor judgment And hearts open as printed leaves and candid as fearlessness If then you look across at your low-browed neighbor who sweats and smells and curses at his toil Remember that as you do not know his depth, neither do you know his height He too might dream if the yoke of custom and law and dogma were broken from him Even now you know not what blind, bound, motionless chrysalis is working there to prepare its winged thing Anarchism means freedom to the soul as to the body In every aspiration, every growth A few words as to the methods In times past anarchists have excluded each other on these grounds also Revolutionists contemptuously said Quaker of peacemen, savage communists, anathematized the Quakers in return This too is passing I say this, all methods are to the individual capacity and decision There is Tolstoy, Christian non-resistant artist His method is to paint pictures of society as it is To show the brutality of force and the uselessness of it To preach the end of government through the repudiation of all military force Good, I accept it in its entirety It fits his character, it fits his ability Let us be glad that he works so There is John Most, old work worn with the weight of prison years upon him Yet fiercer, fiercer, bitterer in his denunciations of the ruling class Than would require the energy of a dozen younger men to utter Going down to the last hills of life Rousing the consciousness of wrong among his fellows as he goes Good, that consciousness must be awakened Long may that fiery tongue yet speak There is Benjamin Tucker, cool, self-contained, critical Sending his fine hard shafts among foes and friends with icy impartiality Hitting swift and cutting keen and ever ready to nail a traitor Holding to passive resistance as most effective, ready to change it Whenever he deems it wise That suits him In his field he is alone Invaluable And there is Peter Kropotkin, appealing to the young and looking with Sweet, warm, eager eyes into every colonizing effort And hailing with a child's enthusiasm the uprisings of the workers And believing in revolution with his whole soul Him too, we thank And there is George Brown, preaching peaceable expropriation Through the federated union of the workers And this is good It is his best place he is at home there He can accomplish most in his own chosen field And over there in his coffin cell in Italy Lies the man whose method was to kill a king And shock the nations into a sudden consciousness Of the hollowness of their law and order Him too, him and his act without reserve I accept And bend in silent acknowledgement of the strength of the man For there are some whose nature it is to think and plead And yield and yet return to the address And so make headway in the minds of their fellow men And there are others who are stern and still Resolute, implacable as Judah's dream of God And those men strike, strike once and have ended But the blow resounds across the world And as on a night when the sky is heavy with storm Some sudden great white flare sheets across it And every object starts sharply out So in the flash of Bresci's pistol Shot the whole world for a moment saw the tragic figure of the Italian people Starved, stunted, crippled, huddled, degraded, murdered And at the same moment that their teeth chattered with fear They came and asked the anarchists to explain themselves And hundreds of thousands of people read more in those few days Than they had ever read of the idea before Ask a method? Do you ask Spring her method? Which is more necessary? The sunshine or the rain? They are contradictory, yes They destroy each other, yes But from this destruction the flowers result Each choose that method which expresses your selfhood best And condemn no other man because he expresses his self otherwise End of Anarchism Recording by Rhonda Federman