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4

"Where Angels Fear to Tread"

THE LIBERATOR

Vol. 1, No. 8   October, 1918

THE FARMERS" CRUSADE

Letters from George Cronyn, a Non-Partisan League Organizer

promise with the corrupt two-party system, upon which the League has built its rapid success. But do not the farmers demonstrate, by their skilful use, here of one party ma-chine and there the other, their complete cynicism as to democratic and republican professions of faith, and a healthy contempt for t (e whole political system? To " see through " political democracy and yet be keen enough to make immediate and effective use of its machinery for gaining economic ends, requires a high degree of economic-group intelligence.

The League's program, concerned as it is with the immediate interests of the farmers as producers, varies in different states. It is never very much occupied with the century-worn slogans of political democracy; perhaps its central features are government ownership of the " Channels of trade " (terminal elevators, warehouses, flour mills, stock yards, packing houses and cold storage plants), rural credit banks operated at cost, and the exemption of farm improvements from taxation. In North Dakota these measures are to a large extent already accomplished.

There is no hint of revolution in this program-nothing proposed here which has not already been tried in some part of the world, but, remember, this amazing class-conscious movement of farmers is already to a considerable extent officially allied with organized labor, its victories in the five states named have been won with the cooperation of labor in the cities. This, in America at least, is new-it chal-. lenges the attention of those who fear and of those who pray for the social revolution. At the League convention in Idaho last July, six organized labor delegates were admitted with full powers, and all Tabor's immediate legislative demands were endorsed. It was in effect a joint convention and two out of the twelve candidates nominated were labor men, placed there at the dictation of the State Federation.

The League farmer explains why he has made friends with labor by a simple bit of arithmetic: We grow wheat which we sell for 72 cents a bushel to the middleman who holds it in a privately owned grain elevator for four months after which he sells it for $1.46 a bushel. And it is labor in the city that pays that price-in the shape of 15 cent bread and thirteen dollar flour. Now if we farmers out here and those

Introduction

< VW HAT is the Non-Partisan League? " said a puzzled

1 V U. S. Secret Service man who came to THE LIBERATOR for advice one day in July-" I can't seem to find it in the telephone book." Perhaps it is significant that this organization of farmers, which has ruled the state of North Dakota for two years, which will probably gain control of the legislatures of South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana and Idaho in November, and, according to Wall Street fears, will place zoo candidates in the next Congress, has no office in New York City, or any other city east of Chicago. This is an organization built by middleawestern farmers for their own economic needs, independent of the East-financially, politically, intellectually. It will have a New York office when the New York State farmers are_organized, not before.

The political method of the Non-Partisan League is to select in each district its own candidate, pledged to its legislative program, then to go in force into the primary of which-ever party has the best chance of winning in that district, secure the regular nomination of this candidate on tla party ticket, and counting on the strength of the League pus the inertia of those who will vote the party ticket anyhow-to elect him. Thus in one state the League is " Republican," in another " Democratic "-and it varies in the same vay in different districts of the same state. Nor is this the extent of its political flexibility, for if a League candidate fails of a majority at the primaries, the League may still endorse the candidate of another party, or run its own candidate as an Independent. Thus the farmers have avoided the long slow, expensive process of building up a new political party with the inevitable combination of old parties against it as soon as it begins to look dangerous. Theirs is a shrewd practical method characteristic of the American farmer at his best, and it has already proved a short cut to political power. In North Dakota, for instance, where the Non-Partisan League secured its first member in February, 1915, it had won com

plete political control of the state 18 months Iaer.

An absolute idealist might regret this unholy

conl-

THE LIBERATOR

laborers in the city can get together, and take possession of the grain elevators, what's to prevent our getting $1.00 a bushel for our wheat? And, allowing a cent or two for the actual cost of handling, what's to prevent labor's buying it in the city for a fraction over $i.oo a bushel? Knowing all this, why on earth shouldn't we get together?

Strongest proof of our claim that this Non-Partisan League is, consciously or unconsciously, one of the vital forces in the growing social revolt, is furnished by the opposition. Terrorism, only a few degrees less brutal and shameless than that practised against the industrial unionists, has been adopted by the special interests in their efforts to overthrow these " embattled farmers." And, as in the case of labor, patriotism is the excuse. League meetings have been broken up, organizers have been beaten to unconsciousness, members forcibly deported, and one old farmer killed, by Horne Guards and Loyalty Leagues, for no crime except belonging to the League. The Bellingham Journal explains this vicious determined persecution of loyal American farmers in a word -" politics." " Back of the politics are the profiteers, alarmed nationally over the growth of the farmers' power in politics. They cannot handle the farmers' organizations ;as in the past they have handled the Republican and Democratic organizations, and the breaking away of the farmer vote from the old-line parties, in combination with the growing labor vote, threatens their control of national politics.

It will not be surprising if the organized farmers, finding that Big Business uses the same desperate and unscrupulous methods to destroy them that it has always used against organized labor, draw conclusions of some consequence to the future of America. The phrase " farmer-labor candidate" appears about half a dozen times in a typical editorial page of the Non-Partisan Leader. It has a powerful sound.

We are glad of the opportunity to publish this vivid personal account of his experiences by one of the League's young organizers. There is a buoyancy and faith in these letters which is rare to-day, even among the youngest of us.

C. E.

D EAR E.   

How very simple my life has grown all at once, a matter of corduroys and gray flannel shirts, of tin wash-pans, lumpy beds, fried potatoes and pork, and the Ford, my constant companion; of endless fields of young wheat, end-less miles of passable county roads, endless talks with keen-eyed, tanned countrymen. And always the League looms bigger and stronger, defying sheriffs, the miserable yelping press, the howling chorus of politicians and the subtle craftiriss of the Big Fellers, who work over-time through every organ they control, work desperately, insidiously, unscrupulously-and vainly! For they are already beaten. The farmer and organized labor are shoulder to shoulder for the first time in our political history-and they are going to do the job. This, my friends, is revolution in action, out here. Revolution of the kind that our slow-to-move, ponderous, and irresistible American farmer alone could produce.

As to organization, we have never seen its like before. Our campaign is as studiously and efficiently organized as a modern battle. In the home office a great map marked with thousands of pins, shows the daily gains. Each organizer sends in a daily report, and no incident of his local effort is too slight to escape the attention of the commanding officers. I think we will carry Idaho, Montana, So. Dakota and Minnesota, as well as No. Dakota, this election, and we have hundreds of letters begging us to enter other states.

April 29th.

N 0 lull in the fighting along the Western Front. Big Biz active with gas attacks and camouflage, but we're pushing 'em steadily back. In some counties the Farmers ticket is joined with that of Organized Labor and the candidate for Governor is a straight Labor man. We have 60,000 farmer members now and are putting them on at the rate of about a thousand a day. So I can't see how we can lose. Our last prominent court case, resulted in acquittal on first ballot. Our man, L. W. Martin, had as witnesses against him five officers of the peace, who swore that a speech he had delivered seven months ago was disloyal.

My job is a sort of First Steps in the Study of Human Psychology. We need heavy financial backing to carry on the campaign, run our newspapers and support a small army of lecturers and organizers. We have to collect that money by making members, at $16.oo per. But the farmer, as you might guess, is loth to part with that $16.00. He will buy $1oo.oo shares in a fake copper mine in Utah, or an " almost " Orange grove in California, but, no sir! he don't see why he should have to pay $i6.oo to vote.

Then we have to explain that the local grocers pay $32.00 per annum for the privilege of organizing to arrange his store bill, the lawyers $35.00 to empty his pockets in court, and the doctors $50.00, so that they can charge $1.oo a mile to visit him in sickness. And even the loathed I. W. W. pays (if a bonafide member) $3.00 initiation fee, and $8.00 annual dues.

Oh, it takes hours of talking and a good booster along to do the job. But we get him at last.

Once get him in and he will shout League propaganda from the housetop, he will pester his neighbors, jeer at the opposition, and get the vote to the polls. He will go out of his way to refute current lies about us. He will give his old League papers to the doubtful neighbors. And he will follow the light of that $16.00 into the jaws of hell itself.

May 3d.

I didn't think I was a conspirator until a couple of days after six of us organizers arrived in this county. We came in separately. We did not hang around together. The town we landed in, Mankato, is a hustling little city of 15,00o, the streets are full of strangers, farmers in cars, in wagons, afoot. The arrival of our party certainly was nut conspicuous

October, 1918   7

-but listen to this. I was eating breakfast one morning in the best cafe in town, alone, when two well-dressed men entered and sat down behind me. I could hear every word they said, and soon spotted one for the editor of a St. Paul paper, one of our bitterest enemies. I guessed the other to be a local editor. " What you here for, Bill? " said the local man.

" Important business," quoth Bill. Then came the revelation. " Do you know, they've just put six organizers into this county? " I kept right on eating.

" Yes, and those fellows are going around telling the farmers not to subscribe to the Liberty Loan."

I kept on eating, but kicked the table.

" Why, they're regular I. W. W.'s. They'll be burning haystacks and poisoning cattle soon."

I bit deeply into the imitation plated silverware. The Mankato editor shook his head and allowed that he had al-ways known that League organizers were desperate characters.

So here was a real live editor of a big paper eighty miles away, whose important business was to lie to a local editor about six scrubs who had just appeared in the vicinity. Thereafter we congregated even less, and our consultations were held in whispers behind locked doors! Gosh, talk about the Secret Police of old Russia, the Diplomatic Service and the sleuths of the Burns Agency-They've got nothing on Big Biz in Minnesota.

And the funny part is that the farmers enjoy it. They like being part of a great Conspiracy for Democracy.

_ *

The pleasantest side of Organization work is the contact it brings with these so-fundamentally American types of farmer. We get close to their lives, eat of their fried eggs and potatoes, sleep on their not too downy mattresses, take their families to town in our machines, haul their cream if it lies in our direction. 'We hear their slow, unimpassioned indignation at the constant outrages practiced against their pockets and their intelligence; we see their complete disillusionment regarding the promises of the old parties, the news in the papers, the righteous asseverations of their once respected " leading citizens." But most illuminating of all is the frequently-repeated pronouncement, " Without Labor behind us, we can do nothing."

The farmer has at last awakened here in the northwest to the fact (of such immense significance) that he is no longer g. unit, that he must become a part of his class, and help carry on the struggle for the rights of that class; and furthermore that his class is only a part of a still larger class---of Labor the world over.

I can tell you that as I feel the heart-beat of this movement in its individuals, at close range, and see the innumerable feelers darting out in every direction from these six states toward the others, I get a profound conviction of irresistible pressure, of something which will alter the whole face of our American economic structure. No wonder money is

piling up against us, as it never did before against any other party that proposed Democracy!

Here is one of my impressions: Inside the barn a lantern throws a quivering spread of light, falling sharply against the heavy timbers, and drifting over the piled hay. There my farmer friend stands grayly, fork in hand, and we discuss the Great Change coming. He takes in each idea, handles it, turns it about carefully, and stores it away, as conscientiously as he did the corn crop. I can hear him say, " I was raised poor as dirt. I love my wife and my kids, and I ain't agoin' to breed into poverty. No sired "

May 7th,,1918.

DURING this last week I have seen how our fighting farmers choose their candidates for the coming offensive. About 7 o'clock Friday night I got word to summon all the members in my district to a county caucus to be held secretly in the city of Mankato at noon of Saturday.

It was in the loft of the Equity House that about fifty-delegates met. 'We dropped in separately, casually, like conspirators, searching each new face for a possible spy or in-former. We climbed a ladder to a room dimly lighted, and totally devoid of ventilation (it was a fine broiling day) and there, among cultivators, corn planters, drills, hoes, and what-not machinery, held session for two mortal hours, talking in low tones while the sweat poured from our aggrieved brows. There was something immensely serious and deter-mined about that convocation. You felt the reservoirs of strength in these men. Not the " farmer " type as we imagine him. Mostly clean-shaven, cropped mustaches, alert and vigorous of mind; some young, others veterans of the plow who put in sixteen hours a day at an age when most men retire if they can.

There was no wrangling The meeting was informal, discussion open and general, and amazingly frank regarding the character of proposed candidates. These men didn't intend to be fooled ; they had had too many years of that.

Saturday night a committee of a dozen called on the man of our choice to persuade him to run. Imagine a barnyard with four cars lined up; the committee standing in a group. Henry comes slowly into the radius of the car lights, stoop-shouldered, gnarled and knotted with work, in old dirty jeans, and soiled shirt, and battered hat, a week's stubble on his chin-slow, deliberate, taciturn-a man with a county-wide reputation for uprightness and intelligence.

The neighbors do a little joshing first.

" Come on, you old I. W. W. We got a rope for you." " Make out your will, Henry," and so on.

Then they tell him that he is the unanimous choice of his neighbors. After a long pause, he says, " Sorry, gentlemen, but"   

Well, the battle raged. Henry didn't want to leave the place, two hundred acres and no help ! The boys all away to school or teaching or out in the professions. For two hours we argued. It seemed we were up against a stone

8   THE LIBERATOR

wall. Finally, an organizer from Dakota, a little middle-aged farmer, turned loose with a powerful plea, winding up:

" Henry, are you going to have your boys and their children be the slaves we've been? "

Henry said he'd have to ask the old woman. So he went in and woke her up, and three of the committee went in and talked to her. They told her that this thing was for the children, that it was safeguarding democracy for them. And she said Henry could do it.

When the news was brought out, we whooped and rushed in to shake Henry's hand. At the door we stopped. They were reading something to Henry, the declaration of principles that he had to affirm before accepting the endorsement of the League. I wish I had a copy of that document. It is a solemn pledge to support in its entirety the platform of labor, to work for those who produce.

*   *

When I think back over that moment I realize that this is not a campaign, it's a Crusade.

MY dear E.: May 15. The great winds of Spring do blow with much the same abandon that they did on the whistling plains of N. M. in our ranching days. And the sun hangs keen and bright as God's new-minted penny over fields almost pain-fully green-so green they seem to ache with eagerness of growth. But behind this lovely mask of spring, and within this extreme beauty of the world, the battle for future lives, hopes, and pleasures and loves is being fought to a finish, with ever increasing violence. The decisive moment, as momentous to my mind, as that election of 186o, lies only a month off. On June 17 come the Minnesota primaries and the fate of democracy at home hangs in the balance.

Yesterday I heard a long argument between the priest of this parish, a very important man, and G.-one of our very best organizers-who was taking him to task for preaching against the League.

" I have the greatest respect for the Law, and for the

Constitution," said the Reverend Father finally.

"Yes," said G., with a kind of a grim humor. " So have I. I have wished we had just a little more of it." And he. went on to describe what he had experienced in one county of South Dakota.

The town hall had been hired for a League lecture, and paid for. Five organizers entered the place with their cars and found a considerable crowd of farmers to hear the speaker. The door was locked. When they went to the house of the official who had the key, that gentleman was found to have left town, mysteriously. They were in-formed, however, that if they returned to the hall they would receive their money back.

On arriving, they discovered the Home Guard, flanked by patriotic citizens, some in masks, and otherwise garbed and armed as Defenders of the Constitution (and right of free assemblage) drawn up in order, facing infuriated farmers. The latter were for " putting it to 'em " then and there, but, acting under strict orders from headquarters, our men dissuaded them, and advised their retirement from town, until a more favorable opportunity for speech-making.

After the farmers had left, the organizers went to get their cars. That privilege of departure was denied them. At the point of the rifle they were driven out of town, on foot, through eight miles of winter mud and slush. Their suitcases were opened and rifled. They were relieved of their cash, without receiving receipts. They were clouted over the head with the butt end of guns, jeered at and vilified. After a time, one of them, a cripple, could go no further. A rig was hired to take them the remaining three miles, for which $18 was subtracted as payment.

Woodcut by J. J. Laaikes

i

4

October, 1918   9

They were lodged in the town jail, without warrant or complaint. Their captors graciously allowed them a few pieces of mouldy bread for supper, charging them only 75 cents a plate (or a handful) for the meal. In the morning rickets were bought for them into Nebraska, out of the funds erstwhile pooled! and some of the change was re-turned to these " bad citizens."

Then the Home Guard tried to put the cars up at auction for the Red Cross.

The League could get no complaints filed in that county, nor warrants sworn out against these " patriots," and it was weeks before the cars could be restored to their owners.

" Yes," said G., " I believe in Law and Order, too. And I'd like to see a little more of it."

MYDEAR E Do you remember the look of the average farmer at the stranger entering his gateway? Suspicion, distrust, hostility-a challenge, the look of one who had had to deal with many " a slippery customer," insurance agents, stock-investment solicitors, dealers in " good propositions," clever and oily talkers, sly inveiglers of the credulous. Well, the Organizer, if he travels alone, receives the same incurious, hard stare. He has to break the crust of old disillusionment, of bitter experience, paid for by hard-earned dollars and notes that fell due and mortgages called in. The Organizer has to restore some degree of faith to the Farmer.

The worst cases to tackle are those who no longer believe any good of their fellow-men, or even of their neighbors. They will tell me, with a sour smile :

" Oh, it won't make no difference who you send up there to St. Paul, they'll all be alike. Everybody's got his price, farmers same as the rest. They're after the office, that's all."

And I have to tell them of how we got the wife of our nominee for representative out of bed to get her consent to his running; and how, when she was finally won over, one of the committee said earnestly:

" Mrs. H., this here's going to be a great honor to your husband."

And " The Missus" answered, with a kind of strange, sharp candor:

" It ain't honor Henry's going up there for, it's to serve the people ! "

Henry came past our place yesterday with a load of wheat for the Farmer's Elevator in town, and stopped to pound the tire of his wagon wheel into place. I ran down to get the news about his recent trip to the convention of candidates at St. Paul. Henry stopped pounding, looked up out of breath, and shook hands. The man has knocked ten years off his age ! Yes, those years of taciturnity, stooping to the milk pail and bending to the plow, have dropped from his shoulders under the stimulus of this great new effort. He was full of lively enthusiasm. He beamed and twinkled with the zest of opposition and related campaign plans with gusto. We had heard that he was considering dropping out of the race,

because of the anti-league sermons of his pastor these last two weeks. No such thing!

"'Twould take more than that to change my mind," said Henry. " Guess I'll stick!"

We are all in to stick-candidates, members, organizers. They can employ violence, slander, press and pulpit, tar and feathers-we're in to stick.

" For the good of the farmers ! "

How often that phrase has been abused ! How many movements toward justice have stumbled and failed, or proved only partially successful. I see a generation or two struggling blindly and vainly to meet the changed conditions of modern organized life. There was the Populist Party. Very good-until the politician got aboard. And the Farmers' Alliance. The same story. And the Grange. Still going strong-here and there. And the Equity, successful-sometimes.

Always the endeavor on the part of the shrewd "leaders of the people " to prevent organization on a large scale.

For instance, after N. Dakota had carried the League, and S. Dakota started an affiliated organization, a banker from the latter state approached one of the state's committee men, and the following conversation took place.

Banker: " This movement is a good one, but why don't you fellows break away from N. Dakota? Don't let them dictate to you up there."

Corn. Man (innocently) : " That might be all right. Wouldn't it be even better if each county had its own separate organization? "

Banker: "Yes, that would be better."

Corn. Man (still grinless) : " And even each township? " Banker: " Yes, that's a good plan, too, but the unit's most too small."

Coln. Man : " And how about each farmer being his own organization, eh? That would be best of all. No, my friend, I reckon you can't swing us out of the National Nonpartisan."

This battle front in Minnesota has been extended, through the thousand ramifications of Big Biz, to every state in the union. Already, the state papers far away from the struggle are being coached and prodded, if they need it, to attack the League. Distorted and sensational stories are afloat concerning us, a thousand and more miles away. Bankers are warning their depositors, threatening them too, on occasion. " Loyal " citizens are preparing to organize mobs against us.

It looks like Someone was " kinda scairt! "

" We'll stick!"

Yours, to make America safe for democracy!

ST. CLAIR, June 3.

MY DEAR E A week of continuous rain and storms! Conceive the situation of the Organizer, who is paid to keep right an. Freshets, rivers, seas of mud, until the faithful Ford, ploughing along on low, resembles nothing more than a lumbering

10   THE LIBERATOR

mud turtle or some new variety of submersible just come to the surface for breath. Remember how the 'dobe used to cling lovingly to the soles of the rancher, wet days in old New Mex ? Well, Minnesota mud doth even likewise cling. And thro' it all, pushes, trudges, wriggles the Organizer, accompanied by his still more faithful Booster. Think of the man who will leave his warm seat by the fire where he has been toasting shoeless feet, and reading the Minnesota Leader, this man to whom the unwelcome rain has given brief vacation from 18 hr. days of labor; think, I say, of such a person accompanying the Organizer gratis and willingly, on his oozy rounds! Yet they do itl

That's what we call Putting-It-Over-in-Minnesota!

The worst night of all, when the rain beat on the front glass of the car until one had to guess the road, I saw my last man at g p. m. then -an hour into the little city for gas, and another sixteen miles out home again.

I reached the service station at to, and there spied another car, loaded with four passengers and four hundred pounds of mud. Wherewith, knowing that only dire necessity could induce the outgoing of travelers on such a night I hailed the occupants of the other Henry F. Out of the gloom came two pairs of hands, and two hearty voices shouted:

" Hello, old scout! "

" Where you bound ? •" quoth I to them.

" Twenty-eight miles out-to bed! Meet our Boosters! " Boosters and I fervently join hands. One Booster is at the wheel. Says he:

" I've been playing chauffeur to these cusses for a week. Some booster, eh ? Got any like me in your territory? " " No, wish I had! "

" Well, so long. Don't ditch yourself ! Stick to it! ", " We'll stick! "

" Bet your life-we'll stick! "

Off, into the night again with that watchword ringing in my ears. We'll stick!

The rain cleared Saturday, and Sunday was one of those days that make poets do their worst.

June burst suddenly upon us, still   and warm-and wonderfully clothed in fullness of growth. The low hills tucked away and folded in a blue haze, and even the nearer woods a deep blue green against the sun, with the inevitable red barn and straw piles, half eaten away as foils. Barley and Rye, coming to blossom, and across fields of them, continuous ripples of wind.

A kind of immense, singing quietness.

In my car I have my good friend and host, and my fellow organizer, G. G., with his ridiculously vast crumply hat, his 6-in. cigar projecting like a turret gun from one corner of his mouth, mud-spattered clothes that no amount of brushing can clean, and minus collar, but all his 5 ft. . in. one battery of grit and energy.

As Chairman of the Committee of South Dakota, he will affect to some extent the destiny of one great state. He is

worth some $25,000. He doesn't have to work if he don't want to. He can rent his farm and live on the income. Well, he rented it, and is giving a year to the League.

He looks thin and worn, and his eyes are feverishly bright, for it is only days now to Primaries, when the fate of the first great advance against our American Junkers will be decided. But G. has a new crop of stories. For instance:

" New arrival in heaven sees an angel with ball and chain on his Ieg.

" ` Hello, Saint Peter, what's this? I thought all angels were free to come and go.'

" That one's from North Dakota where they have the League. We got to put a ball and chain on him to keep him from going back.' " .

MY DEAR E.: I am back in St. Paul, my particular job finished. This has been one week of thrills. The farmers of this state have awakened. They have been beaten and prodded and hounded awake. I really believe that no such large class of peaceful and law-abiding citizens, men of such weight and measure in their own communities have been so conspicuously mauled and manhandled since the famous days when taxation without representation first became an issue on this continent.

We Organizers have always expected trouble and frequently got it. We have grown accustomed to warnings, dodgings, pursuits, narrow escapes, situations where only nerve carried us through. But the farmers. No. That sort of treatment was to be reserved for I. W. W. and Pro-Germans, not for men who had vastly oversubscribed all loans and money drives, who had planted wheat when other grains are bringing better money, who had given their sons to the struggle. . . . An orgy of violence, unchecked and in some cases openly encouraged by sheriffs and police officers. Let me tell my story.

Last week, the Iast before the Primaries, was given over to League picnics and auto parades. The moment was crucial, weather favorable; work in the fields so far under way that the corn cultivating could be safely let go a day or so. This is what happened.

On Wednesday a parade of over 200 cars from an adjoining county, having been given permission by the Mayor to pass through the streets of our county-seat, was promptly set upon, and its banners, including the American flags on each car, torn off while a free fight raged on the running boards of various machines. There were no serious casual-ties.

The next day our own county parade was scheduled to take place. Knowing the temper of the large-town folks we decided to avoid the county-seat, so as not to precipitate rash action on their part or ours. A file of some hundred cars, spread over two or three miles of roads. It was our first really hot day, and in spite of the driving, summer gusts rolled in across the wide steaming fields and beat against our burning faces.

October, 1918   11

We passed, without incident, through a number of villages and arrived greatly scattered, at the edge of a some-what larger town, suspected to be hostile. Sure enough, the usual kind of cheap badinage was passed by the town loafers as the first group of forty cars or so passed through. There were no signs of unusual trouble, however, and the cars in the lead, without halting to fill up the gap between them and the group following, sped on to. the next town some miles away where we were scheduled to stop. There we waited-and we waited. And after a time we got just a little uneasy. There happened to be a fork in the road several miles back and we feared the rest had gone astray. And as it was already late in the afternoon, most of our cars pulled out for home, where chores were still to do.

Then the rumor came that something had gone wrong. And pretty soon a car hove into sight, roared up the Toad and sputtered dead in front of us. There were women and children in the car, and the driver was a middle-aged farmer, a man of broad acres." His face was grim-and his shirt front was stained red all up and down. He had been hit

with a rock.

After a while a few more cars came in. And they were all. The rest didn't get through. And shortly the deputy's car roared past from the country-seat, bound toward the scene of the trouble.

It seems that the fire hose, in fact all available fire hoses had unlimbered immediately after our successful passage of the main street. The other cars had pulled in and their occupants were just preparing to buy a liberal amount of candy and soda water when the local patriots got busy, cheered on by the local preacher.

Do you know the pressure behind the nozzle of the usual fire hose? Do you know the iciness of that water after its deep caverns have been drawn upon by a little running? Do you conceive a group of men, armed with axes, shotguns and clubs, ramming those powerful streams of icy water into the faces of perspiring men and women and children, of women with babies in their arms, until they were fairly suffocated, drowned-while the women screamed vainly and children gasped and turned their heads down any place to escape the frightful deluge? That's what happened. And more.

An ex-constable, in the performance of his duty as representative of the law, attacked an old man, who was attempting to retreat into his car, attacked him with the butt end of an axe, until the old fellow was knocked almost senseless. Then our district manager, unarmed, jumped to the rescue, and the guardian and defender of the peace, went after him also bent on simple murder.

The district organizer's wife leaped from the car with a gun to protect her husband. And both of them were promptly arrested for carrying concealed weapons! Our local paper (servant of truth. that

it is) would have it that the lady was under the influence of drink, and threatening to blow up an innocent and harm-less town. Had not this man been removed from the local jail to the county prison he would undoubtedly have suffered the extreme penalty mobs inflict.

One woman was torn from a rapidly moving car and fell to the pavement on her knees before her husband could stop. And while she lay there helpless and faint the towns-men called her names unimaginably foul. Her husband went for the crowd with his tool hammer, and got her into the car again.

Another old man who was outside the protection of the cars was tortured by the water; they played it on him, like boys will do with some small beast, until he got behind a telegraph pole and could stand up again.

Fourteen or fifteen cars, in attempting to escape from town were purposely misdirected up a blind alley, and there besieged until rescued by the sheriff. The road was barricaded against their exit and an armed crowd taunted the weaponless farmers. The sheriff's only comment when he released the group was :

ea_

12   THE LIBERATOR

" Well, I'll get you out this time, but you should 'a all stayed to home and worked your corn." June 25.

GOSH you should have heard the tales our Minnesota organizers spun, when they returned to the home roost after two months of campaigning. Talcs of wide-spread, of protected violence everywhere prevalent, through-out the state. I believe that never was a state so completely at the mercy of mob rule as during the last two months of our campaign.

They beat us, oh, yes!

For three days we could get no returns from half the election districts. In the county where I worked we had over r,8oo members, and a sentiment of 3 to I in favor of the League outside of the members, and absolute assurance of the support of organized labor in the county-seat; all of which should have guaranteed us at least 3,000 votes. And the returns gave us 1,300!

Oh, they heat us !

But if the government of a state engages in the sort of campaign this one has engaged in, and encourages the sort of sabotage this has encouraged, do you think it would be squeamish about the handling of ballots?

Election night, with reports out that we had lost by 50,-000, we had a jollification banquet. I never attended a

. party where there was less of gloom and despondency.

The wife of a naval officer, who has been one of our stanchest supporters and strongest advocates, reminded us that primary day was the anniversary of another defeat, the Battle of Bunker Hill; and she reminded us that we also were organized in just thirteen states.

Well, we polled over 140,000 votes which ordinarily would have been ample to carry the Republican primaries, (the last Republican vote was only 179,000) but the two parties, the One Old Gang, combined against us. Nevertheless, we got a considerable number of legislators.

And we gave friend Big Biz the worst scare he ever experienced in the great state of Minnesota. But, above all, this campaign was the awakening of the farmers. They can't sleep again. They know now what the alignment of forces in our government is. They have felt the lash of the masters-and they won't Forget. I seem to hear a great silent cry from a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand farms:

We'll stick !

Now it's all peace and a cool wind and clear untroubled sunshine.

Thirteen states.. . .

The Original Thirteen.

Here We Are Alain

H AVING decided that Henry Ford is a first-rate Democrat and a second-rate Republican, Michigan will now take up the larger question : Is he a manufacturer or a politician?

A NEW bill prohibits child labor under the war power clause of the constitution and attempts to get around the Supreme Court veto. Yes, but suppose the Supreme Court declares the war unconstitutional?

E NGLAND'S law department has decided that women are not eligible to Parliament. Obviously the government was just having its little joke when it promised equal suffrage.

I T is fashionable these days to poke fun at German efficiency, but those fellows who write the official daily report are certainly masters of the art of changing the subject.

S PAIN is said to be asserting the right to seize interned ships to pay for those sunk by Getman submarines. Thereby raising the old question of the freedom of the seize.

W E do not claim to know anything about finance, but we have an idea that the incomes of everybody between

eighteen and forty-five should be drafted by the government.

JOHN SPARGO has discovered that the French and British radicals are not in favor of losing the war. Now Gom?ers has gone over and when he has time he will make the same discovery. These explorers have excellent precedent. Columbus discovered America, but there are reasons for suspecting that it was here all the time.

GERMAN junkers point to Henry Cabot Lodge's speech as a justification of their position. It is hard to explain to an ignorant foreigner that Lodge is not a representative American when Massachusetts, the Senate, and the news-papers keep acting as if he were.   .

SUNDAY motoring and Senator Vardaman have been abolished and Congress is thinking some of restricting its speeches in the Congressional Record.

OUR inefficiency has had an airing if our biplanes haven't. IT looks like business!   HOWARD BRUBAKER.

13

Less Than Equal

A Story by Elsa Unterman

TIMELINESS is the keynote of many a success and so it was in the wooing of Maria. There had been a strike in Lynn during which men, women and children stood together, at first exultantly, and later, as the strike fell lower and lower toward failure, all the more tenaciously to keep together the remnants of their hope. In the last days the old and unmarried had first gone hungry, offering their morsels to those who had little ones. Then it began to be whispered that the children were crying, and they knew the end was not far off. Just before the collapse Carlo, Maria's brother and only relative, had been killed by gunmen, and so she was left in the midst of the hunger and desolation of defeat with the greater desolation of her bereavement, the fever of an unaccustomed hate flaring in her who before had been only patient and mother-hearted. It was then that Louis came to her with his practised love-making and the lure of a bandit's life in the fastnesses of New York City. He could have found no moment more opportune.

A strange thing happened to Louis when he made the con-quest of Maria. He himself was conquered-by jealousy. Neither his days nor his nights knew a surcease from the plague of the conqueror. The Louis who had been a crude Don Juan, living on the assumption that women, like the world's goods, belong to him who is clever enough to take them, came to feel passionately that he alone had a right to Maria, and that any man who attempted to take her from him was a scoundrel.

And yet, perhaps it was not so strange after all. For she was seventeen and a fresh wildflower, while he was thirty-four and already frayed. He was keenly aware of the fact that love is not as easily suborned by a jaded man as by a heavy-haired young lance. He knew it was sheer luck that he had plucked a fresh young bloom and in possession of it suffered all the agonies of a miser who fears that thieves will rob him of his thievish hoard. All his life he had poached on other men's preserves and now he feared that in the New York he knew, someone would out-poach him.

Louis was nondescript. He had been of the police and had been hunted by the police. But he had too much heart to be a good detective and not enough nerve to be a good criminal. So, before he found Maria he had worked on the fringe of mediocrity and safety, content to be paramount in the con-quest of women, in which much heart was an asset and nerve needed only to be feigned.

But now his jealousy spurred him beyond the petty safe games he had played so long to others which were at once more lucrative and more dangerous. What he wanted now above all things was a house on some country hillside, with a hedge around it; and he wanted her within the house behind

the hedge, a baby in her arms so that she could not run away. But he wanted the baby for his own sake too. He felt him-self slipping to the end of his manhood, perhaps to oblivion, without a child to carry on the spark that was in him; and that thought was shriveling. Because he felt all this he was sure that he loved her as no man like him had ever loved be-fore: her dark, heavy hair, her solemn little face with the shy fawn's eyes that were his guarantee that he alone had loved her; her firm little body; her soul too, at least that part of it concerned with her chastity. But at best her soul was secondary. The wonder of courage and tenderness he took as a matter of course. It was the wonder of white arms that intoxicated him.

Of the house and the baby he had not yet spoken to her, again awaiting the opportune moment. And, hoping in the meantime to bind her to him doubly, by terror as well as by love, he pictured the streets and alleys surrounding the flat to which he took her as an inferno of ghoulish men and unchaste women. But in spite of his grim sketches, Maria was not afraid, only curious. At seventeen one is as curious about Hell as about Heaven. She met the glances of passers-by squarely, and when one smiled at her, smiled confidently in return, unconsciously keeping his jealousy in a ferment.

One evening as they dined in a squalid Third Avenue restaurant, a young man eyed her with admiration that was unmistakable and drew from her a smile of childlike friendliness. It was a spontaneous greeting from youth to youth that left Louis shivering beyond the pale of its warmth. He led her out with undisguised haste and a braggart, possessive air. Outside he drew her arm through his, saying peevishly :

" You want to take hold of my arm sometimes as if you were proud to walk with me." After walking a few blocks in morose silence, he came out with a dogged, " You've got to dress yourself to look older," and turned about to retrace their steps until they came to a little Jewish shop that was open at night, where he bought a stuffy black suit.

But it did not dim her youth in an altogether assuring manner, and as they walked along he decided that he would wait for the opportune moment no longer. When they reached home and he had lighted the grate, he seated him-self in the big hearth chair, drew her into his arms and told her about the house on the hill.

" There'll be just you and me, Maria; you and me and a baby," he said huskily, and stooped to kiss her fingers.

And Maria, still a thin-hipped maiden, but already mother-hearted, felt a great warm flood well up in her. Through misty eyes she saw a new Louis, bound inextricably with the future as with the present. For a rapt moment she looked at his head bowed over her hands, and then she bent and brushed the thinning hair with a timid caress.

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After that she entered into the bandit's career with new zest. It was no longer prompted only by the hatred which Carlo's murder had aroused. There was fine justice, thought Maria, in the fact that the diamonds of parasitic women would buy a garden where a little child might some day grow.

Within another week they "spotted " the next apartment they intended to loot. She secured employment there as a domestic, and on the first occasion when she was left alone, signalled to the waiting Louis that their chance had come. He came up slinking and furtive and began to work with feverish haste. The sudden ringing of the telephone bell brought a cold sweat of fear to his brow and his face became ghastly. Having recovered from that shock, he followed her into the dining room and began to pack the silverware, but his unsteady hands knocked down a cut-glass bowl, the crash startling him so that he leaned against the wall weak with terror. It was only the greater terror of remaining that roused him. And so they fled-he precipitately, she reluctantly-with only a third of the booty which might have been theirs. And Maria, who had slaved there and borne insults and nursed her hatred, mourned.

He seemed to forget the ignominy, and, when their booty had gone through the crucible of the murky pawnshop and been transformed into money, even made jokes at the expense of their victims. But she did not forget. Sometimes when he came near her the face of the lover seemed to fade into the haggard, twitching face of the craven, so that she shrank from him.

The next haul, which seemed an easy one, she attempted :alone, hoping to surprise Louis. She thought she had her opportunity when her mistress, a well-to-do Jewess, announced one day that she was going shopping for the after-noon. But having forgotten something, the woman re-turned before Maria was a block away with the cram-full suitcases. As she plodded along unmindful of her surroundings, secure in the belief that she had hours to spare, the apartment elevator man, silent leader of the hue and cry behind him, rushed up and pinioned her arms.

She was led back to the apartment, into which swarmed all the neighboring women; and detectives were summoned who held her in an unnecessarily fierce grip, while the woman unpacked the suitcases. In rummaging among them she came upon some silk shirts, which Maria had stuffed in, thinking that Louis would like them. She held them up with a cry of rage:

" My husband's shirts! She's been taking shirts! She's got a man! "

There was a curling of lips among the women spectators. One of the detectives shook her and snarled, " Of course. We'll get him too ! " The other wheedled with repulsive familiarity, " Tell us who he is and we'll let you off easy."

But Maria, remembering Louis's precautionary advice, stiffened herself against the shaking and replied, " There isn't any man. The shirts were just with the other things, and I took 'em." Inwardly she scored herself with the

thought that it served her right for being such a petty thief. " All right," the detectives assured her. " You'll get yours!"

They confined her in a district station for the night. After several hours, during which she sat on the edge. of her cot in a fruitless effort to escape the vermin and endeavored not to understand the ribald oaths or to hear the drunken maundering and laughter, which came to her from other cells, a colored girl " trusty " came with her supper, and while Maria ate, crouched outside the grating and tried to make conversation.

" Don't you all want to sen' a lettah to yuh man, Honey? she coaxed. " He'll be worryin' 'bout yuh. I'll git yuh a pencil and some papeh, an' won't nobody know nothin' 'bout

it.

" Got no man," Maria denied wearily, slipping the emptied plate below the grating. She had eaten everything that had been brought to her, saying to herself that to be strong, she would need to cat.

But the colored girl lingered, talking of her own man.

" Ah reckon he'll have anotha gal by the time Ah gits out," she opined. " A man jes natchally has to have a gal. Ah s'pose yoah man'll git anotha gal while yoh all's doin' time."

" Got no man," Maria reiterated with assumed simpleness, and the colored girl went away huffy. The " easy money " she had anticipated would not be forthcoming.

In the morning Maria was transferred to the Tombs, and there, among prisoners and officials alike, it was taken for granted that she " had a man." She soon perceived that this was not merely because of the shirts. The prison world seemed to consider it the natural order of things. And evidently the man was the arch-fiend at whom the police aimed their chief efforts. In the majority of cases the girl seemed to be merely a barricade between him and them-a barricade not to be beaten down by the same means as a barricade of stones; but there were means. . . .

During the day when the prisoners awaiting trial were taken from their individual cells and were allowed the freedom of the large common enclosure, Maria received much advice from other women. Most of them were young girls hardly out of their 'teens. There were few older women and they were close-mouthed. But the young girls were talkative and inquisitive. When Maria repeated to them her assertion that she was manless, they winked knowingly or said:

" We're on, Isid. When we get in front of the High Jinks, we ain't got no man either. We don't know no more about a man than if we'd been brought up in a Ladies' Seminary."

And then they went on with their sage advice.

There was frail little French Helene, who was like a transplanted wildrose, wearied by the dust of cities. With animation that revived her freshness, she boasted that on the night when the police came for her man, she flirted with them, showing how beautifully she could dance, and while she danced, kicked out the lights, so that her man escaped.

„

October,, 1918   15

" You stick by your man, little one," she urged Maria. " That's how a woman should do."

Louise, who was from an Ohio farm, and whose man was a 'Chinaman, echoed the sentiment, and immediately there-after told how he had twice broken her nose. She laughed as she said,." I wouldn't of minded it the second time if he'd broke it the other way. But both times he knocked it in the same direction."

Lithe Irish Katie dilated on the " fine education and swell manners " of her man. " To look at him you'd never guess he was a pimp," she said, preening herself. " He looks like a literary guy."

Then there was Anna from Philadelphia. In Katie's words, she had " a high school education, swell folks and everything." Her folks were pleading with her to give up her man and come home and be forgiven.

" Will I do it? " she exclaimed. " Not much! " And added a streak of profanity against persons who thought she had it in her to squeal on her man, and another against other girls who might squeal on theirs.

Maria was now aghast, now wondering at their tenacious loyalty.

The older women were terse in their advice. " You'd be a fool to let yourself be sent up to save his skin," was the substance of it. " Some women think they've got a soft heart when all they've got is a soft brain."

Between the two camps was Adelaide, who was neither old nor young, perhaps twenty-seven. Her man was alread$4 in the hands of the police, but they had little evidence against him and were bribing her with a promise of liberty if she would divulge more. She lurked in a corner apart from the others and wept and brooded, battling as ith her problem, and occasionally a priest came to assuage her tears and urge her, for the good of her soul, to confess her man's sins. Once, as Maria sat near her, she heard her mutter, " A skunk of a man that's never brought me anything but trouble.   ."

And that brooding figure, too, was woven into the skein of Maria's thoughts.

After two interminable weeks of waiting Maria was at last arraigned. She was hazily aware of her accuser in the background with her husband sitting beside her. The little blonde husband regarded Maria almost with pity, but the woman's eyes were hard and seemed to glare, " You would ,have put my husband's shirts on your man-Shiksah

The judge demanded sternly that Maria give up her accomplice. When she insisted that she had none, he made an impatient gesture and exclaimed testily to the bailiff:

" Take her back! We'll see what thinking it over a while longer will do for her."

it was such an old story to him, it was getting to be a bore. She didn't look like the kind who would hold out; why couldn't she give up in the first place and save time? He couldn't know, of course, that Maria's antecedents were not those of Louise and Adelaide. He had not seen Maria taking care of a whole brood of children while their mothers

worked in the mill, nor heard those mothers say gratefully, " Little Maria, she's got the heart of the Virgin Mother herself." The judge had never been in a strike, and knew nothing of the staying power one acquires from fighting with a group-nor the Honor that one learns from it. And the judge did not know of Carlo's death, nor the manner of it. He had only a faint idea of Louis.

But Maria " thought it over " back there in the women's section. She had never heard of Figaro, the canny barber of Seville, and his assertion that merely to live he required more knowledge and talent than were exercised by the nobility in governing Spain for a hundred years. But unconsciously she paraphrased him in the foreboding that merely to be honor-able she was going to need more courage and determination than were mustered on the whole police force of New York.

During the nights most of all she thought it over, as she turned sleeplessly on her cot, or lay still, staring at the blank ceiling, painting it with images. These girls-Helene and Louise and Katie and Anna-these girls whose youth, frail and eager, peered through their drabbled outer selves, were the unchaste women of whom Louis had spoken with a loathing that he had tried to rouse in her. The men they shielded were the ghouls against whom he had warned her. The girls were seemingly so like her, she wondered if the men were not like him, or rather, he like them.

And yet, she felt there was a difference between her and the others, They were holding out, with blind loyalty, for a man, But that was not why she was holding out. She reviewed all the memories of her man: the Louis who had come to her at first in the gloaming   wind and flame and the fragrance of lotus blooms; the Louis who had whispered to her of a baby and a house on a hill (and it troubled her in retrospect that he had been bowed over her hands when he spoke, so that she had not seen his face) ; the craven Louis with his sweaty brow, ashen lips and furtive rat's eyes; the Louis who came home in the evenings, eagerly bounding up the stairs, always bringing gifts for her-slippers, gloves, gorgeous kimonos, manicure sets, an endless array of things which would enhance the lure of her flesh for him, and some-times whimsical things like the big pincushion doll; the .ealous Louis who regarded her out of smouldering eyes.

And when the memories were summed up, there was still something aside from them, something stronger that made her hold out. It was right; that was all. One did not accept freedom that involved treachery. She knew that Carlo would have acted as she was acting. It was honorable.

But it was not easy. Once the cell walls and the ceiling seemed to crowd together in an attempt to smother her. And as she heat against the suffocation, there came a mocking vision of the craven Louis and the thought that Auburn prison would be like that, or the reformatory if they sent her there-black days of repression throttling her in an endless chain. Oh, it would be hard! And then came echoing the cynical advice of the older women. " You'd be a fool. . . . Not a soft heart but a soft brain! " She flung back the challenge, " Even if it was somebody I hated, I'd act the

I

16   THE LIBERATOR

same! " In the neighboring cell Adelaide was weeping loudly and lest she, too, should betray her shameful weakness, she stifled her face in the pillow and gripped hard the iron sides of the cot.

And then one day the matron sent the priest to Maria. The prison had not quite shriveled the matron's heart; she was still touched when young girls came through her gates. Though she flayed them with her Irish tongue as they passed before her, her Irish blue eyes dimmed, and she remembered them, and later sent the priest, for the door of the confessional often led into the anteroom of liberty. She did not fail to notice that Maria used no oaths; that she hung back timidly and listened to the other girls with the wonder of a novice.

" She's no bawd," she said to the priest, " but that scum'll make her one if they keep pourin' their vileness into her ears. You make her give up her man and the Judge'll let her out on probation."

But the priest came back sorrowfully and reported failure.

Then the matron ordered that Maria be brought before her and when she had been led in, barked at her angrily, " You little pig-head ! Don't ye know what's good for ye? " And then with sudden shrewdness, " Is it that ye don't want your folks to know the divilment ye've been into that makes ye sich a clam ! "

Maria shook her head in denial. " I've got no folks. I've got nobody."

" You're a liar! " fumed the matron. " Ye've got a beast of a man. Git out iv me sight! "

After another interval Maria was again arraigned. At her still earnest denial that she had an accomplice, the Judge said to the prosecutor standing near him:

" Look at her-not a sign of insincerity! You'd almost believe her if you didn't know it was impossible."

And then he sent her back again, less confidently.

When she was returned to the women's section, she was left for a while in the dining hall adjoining the matron's office, and as she sat there, waiting to be put into her cell, Adelaide was brought in, escorted by the matron, the priest and a young woman who was a charity worker. They were bringing her from the Court where she had just turned state's evidence against her man, and as they came in spoke of her approvingly among themselves.

She sat down dazedly, while the matron stood nearby holding her hat, which meant that she was ticketed for the out-side world again. The priest patted her shoulder and driveled, " God will reward you for this, my daughter. Be of good cheer." The charity worker stood behind him looking, in her own estimation, like Justice. Adelaide's dull eyes, wandering aimlessly, encountered Maria's, which were aglow with sympathy. Maria essayed a wan smile of fellow-ship and before that smile Adelaide's self-control went down and she burst into an agony of tears.

" The look he give me when they took him out! " she wailed. "What have I done! Oh God ! What have I clone ! "

Her lamentations echoed through the grim interlacings of

bars like the cries of a victim tortured on the rack, and they tore through Maria making grievous wounds. She knew what Adelaide was feeling. They had defeated her. So would she have felt if she had given in to the attacks. With an incoherent cry she flung herself on her knees beside the penitent, tears springing to her eyes and streaming down her cheeks unheeded as she enfolded her in an embrace. They clung together, the firm young face against the sallow, painted one, Maria pleading, " Don't Adelaide! Don't!" in a vain attempt to calm the racking sobs. Finding no words adequate to express her sympathy, she took up Adel-aide's hands, poured kisses upon them and bathed them with her tears-the first tears she had shed in prison-sacramental tears for a defeated one.

The charity worker, the priest and the matron looked on, awed, not by the abandonment of grief-that was a commonplace-but by the abandonment of sympathy. The Christ spirit was in their midst and it laid hands upon them. They huddled closer together, the better to endure the radiance.

When at last Adelaide's grief was exhausted and the matron led her away, the priest and the charity worker remained, uncertainly regarding the still weeping Maria from a distance. The woman first approached, diffidently offering her a handkerchief. And while Maria dried her eyes, assuming thereby a more earthly aspect, the other lost some of her awe, only to be charmed by the little wildflower figure and the soft fawn's eyes. The priest came nearer, and presentl? the three were regarding each other almost as equals.

In Maria's mind there echoed the clanging of the door that had announced Adelaide's release. She felt a breath as from things outside, and with a rush the desire was upon her to be free, by any means, except those Adelaide had used. Looking at the two who stood above her, momentarily friendly, the sixth sense of intuition glimpsed a way. Perhaps, if she made a confession of a sort . . .

She looked down again, waiting for them to address het, and while she subtlely enhanced the shy youthfulness of her mien, her heart beat in a wild tumult of daring.

" Maria," began the priest solemnly, " If you would only open your heart and let God help you. You are so young-Tell me, what made you do it."

" Hate," said Maria, looking up and forcing herself to weep again. " She was so hard on me-that woman. And she was rich, and I had nothing-and I wanted things too. I hated her. . . . That's why I did it. But it's come over me how wicked I've been    71

She broke off to choke down the sobs, and the priest patted her hand and agreed, " Yes, larceny is a serious crime."

" The hate, I mean," Maria went on, mastering herself. " It's terrible. It makes you all black inside and-and twisted. I've been thinking what the Bible says-to love everybody. And I want to. ( I don't want to hate-it hurts. I'm afraid God won't forgive me. And I want to feel g-good to everybody! "

So intensely did she throw herself into the role that she herself all but believed that she was what she pretended to

October., 1918

be. The tears flowed profusely and she looked up at him imploringly as though he could help her.

He seemed taken aback by her outburst and looked helplessly at the charity worker and then back at her, murmuring, " I-I should say-don't take it so hard, the hate. The larceny, now, that's more serious. . . ." And under his breath he muttered, " An unusual spirit, unusual   "

The charity worker, feeling her precise categories slipping into disarrangement, motioned to him anxiously.

" Come away," she said in an undertone, " We'll talk it over,"

As they went out he turned round to look again at Maria and continued to murmur, " Unusual, unusual   " As
he held open the door for the charity worker Maria heard

him say, " With the right environment now   " and then
it closed upon him and left her with suspense.

Three days later she found herself again before the Judge, while the priest and the charity worker hovered in the back-ground. And the Judge said to her with a sternness that was hardly maintained, " So-we're going to have to release you on probation! "

Her hopes and fears overcame her and she began to weep a little, silently, in earnest. And the bailiff who had grown friendly in escorting her back and forth, cautioned in alarm, " Sh !    can the weeps ! You'll spoil everything. He'll
think you're bluffing; they all do it."

So she straightened herself and with compressed lips stared ahead unblinkingly.

Her probation was consignment into the care of a for-bidding housewife who had no silverware or jewelry, but many floors to scrub. She was to keep Maria under lock and key until the authorities were convinced that she had no male accomplice. But it was an easy matter for Maria to elude the woman's vigilance. Within twenty-four hours she was on her way to the flat in the questionable street which for her and Louis was home; free again, with nothing to prove that the past weeks were not a nightmare except a bleeding hand and a gash in her leg which she had inflicted on herself in dropping from a window to the rough flagstones of the court below.

It was after ten o'clock at night, and a cold November rain fell in stringy currents, buffeted by conflicting winds. She had to change cars a number of times and between waits was drenched to the skin. When at last she reached home, Louis was not there, but the door was unlocked.

He had hoped, then, that she would come some time unexpectedly.   .   .   .

She limped into the room and even through the darkness its familiarity enveloped her in a grateful warmth. When she had fumbled for the matches and lighted the grate, she sank into the big chair, which stood on the hearth as al-ways. A stupor overcame her, compounded of the dampness in her clothing, sudden heat from the grate, and the playing of fantastic shadows in the semi-darkness. And presently through its mazes, she heard him coming up the stairs with laggard steps wholly unlike his usual eager home-coming.

-

17

He had missed her then. . . .

In another moment he had crossed the threshold, and after an unbelieving pause and a most believing cry, he held her again-the Louis of wind and flame and the fragrance of lotus blooms.

But when his first joy was a Iittle calmed and he had turned on the light and faced her in its glare, she saw with a faintness at her heart that his face was haggard and his eyes more than ever furtive.

In removing her wet wraps and shoes he discovered the torn, bloody stocking and the wounded leg and with solicitous haste brought hot water and bandages. He was al-ways solicitous about her flesh.

When he had dressed the wound, he kissed her foot, ex-claiming, " Maria, little doll, if I had lost you!" And then, half whimpering child, half passionate man, he flung his arms about her and cried, " You don't know how I've suffered ! Night after night, when I've dared, I've walked around the Tombs, wondering just where you were behind those many bars, wondering if they'd ever give you back to me. And once I cried, Maria, like a-kid, thinking of those bars holding you like vulture's claws; thinking maybe they were reaching out for me too. I didn't know whether you loved me enough not to tell. I thought you might give me away. I was living in your trust, Maria. I didn't want to stay here, and I just couldn't leave."

While he held her and talked on of his suffering, she mechanically soothed the child, and strove, against the touch of him, to think clearly of the man. So that was why his face was haggard and his eyes rat-like. He had been afraid that she would squeal! The faintness at her heart returned and the weight of his head on her breast seemed to stifle her. She struggled with sudden questions that came too jumbled to pass her lips.

When he had walked round and round those barred walls, holding her like vulture's claws, had he ever wished to release her at a cost to himself? Had that thought ever occurred to him? Not that she would have wished him to give himself up! But if the thought had never occurred to him. . . . Had he not known that it might have been possible for him to free her? But of course he knew. Had he not taught her all she knew! Until this moment she had not thought that there was a question of honor for him too. But now with her fingers in his hair, as he clung to her, his joy at her release perhaps not as great as his relief that she had not betrayed him, she thought of it. If he had not had that wish, if it had not occurred to him, he was

She shrank from thinking the word, and faltered aloud, " Louis! "

But the sound of some one coming up the stairs sent him to the door with a feline spring. When he had locked it and turned the inside catch, he crouched there, tense, nostrils aquiver, until the steps passed on to the flat across the hall. Then he slipped to the windows to make sure that the blinds were djwn.

I

18   THE LIBERATOR

" Nobody followed you? You're sure ! Anyhow, we'll move first thing to-morrow. We won't take any chances."

After that she could not ask him, and though when his composure returned he walled her about with attentions; prepared her bath, saying as he did so that she should take it hot because her soaking might give her a cold, and that would make her ugly; and though he delighted in bringing her things to her, even the silly Chinese slippers, which he had bought because he liked the colors, she was leaden against him. Long after he was asleep, she lay awake con-fronting those haunting questions. Had he been afraid? Or had it simply never occurred to him? If he had been afraid, that would be excusable. But if it had never even occurred to him. . . .

Fatigued by the ceaseless questioning, she slept late, and when she awoke he was already dressed for the street. He came to her, hat in hand, more easy and masterful than she had ever seen him.

"Well, Dolly! I'm going to look for a new place. We'll move when I get back. And then new days, eh? "

He looked so clear-eyed as he bent over her that she leaned to him with sudden courage and the question came.

"Louis, if I had been sent up    ))

" I'd have waited for you-years." A note of gratification crept into his voice. " I never was sure you loved me before. But since you've held out against the bulls for me -you wouldn't have done that if you didn't love me. I won't have to be afraid any more. And when we have that house, we'll only need to wait for the baby; then you'll be all mine."

He kissed her gaily, less hungrily, with more assurance. " I'm going now." At the door he turned round to shake a finger at her. " I know you love me now. You don't ever need to pretend you don't. I won't believe you ! " Then he was off, jauntily.

And Maria, staring unseeingly at the door through which he had just passed was suddenly overborne with a feeling that the sheets which covered her, the tawdry room, the grubby neighborhood with its many paths leading to the Tombs, were all part of a marshy wilderness in which this, her first love, was rooted, not a lotus but a weed. He had not wished it. It had not occurred to him. He said, " I would have waited for you    years." Said it smugly. He was more cowardly than she would have been if she had given in. She had been brow-beaten and verily tortured with uncertainty, to wean her from the honorable course. And to him the honorable course had not even suggested itself. He was not like Adelaide. She had gone down against heavy odds. But he had not even desired to give battle.

And such a one spoke to her of motherhood; one who was less than her equal. A weakling, to father her children! She felt an inward shrinking from him and from phantom children with eyes like his, rat-like and furtive. She seemed to hear the voices of the men and women who had been Carlo's comrades in the strike, cry in scorn, " A

weakling to father your children! " That would be the great dishonor.

Long before he returned to find the farewell note which she had made half apologetic in anticipation of the pain it would cause, she was wandering through a labyrinth of unfamiliar Brooklyn streets; a little form bowed under the weight of a suitcase, certain of nothing except that she must go on. . .

,Our Cover Design

OUR cover design for this month is a reproduction of a wood-cut by John Storrs, sent to us from Paris. It is an anticipation of a monument that he has been making in memory of Walt Whitman. " If it conveys to you," he writes, "some idea of the play of line and color and the firm balance of the large forward moving masses which, for me, the original composition contains-ca peat aller. The spirit I tried to give in this group is expressed by Walt in these lines:

" Of life immense in passion, pulse and power-The modern man, I sing."

X Rays

YOUR eyes were gem-like in that dim deep chamber Hushed and sombre with imprisoned fire, With yellow ghostly globes of intense a-ther

Potent as the rays of pure desire.

Your voice was startled into vivid wonder

When the winged wild whining mystic wheel Took flight, and shot the dark with frosty crashings Like an iceberg splitting to the keel.

Your flesh was never warmer to my passion

Than when, moving in that lumor green,

We saw with eyes our fragile bones enamoured

Clasping sadly on the pallid screen.

You seemed so virginal and so undreaming

Of the burning hunger in my eyes

To peer more fever-deeply in your being

Than the very death of passion lies.

The subtle-tuned shy motions of your spirit,

Fashioned through the ages for the sun, Were dumb in that green lustre-haunted cavern

Where you walked a naked skeleton---

Slim-hipped and fluent and of lovely motion,

Living to the tip of every bone,
And ah, too exquisitely vivid-moving
Ever to lie wanly down alone-

To lie forever down so still. and slender,

Tracing on the ancient screen of night This naked and pale writing of the wonder

Of your beauty breathing in the light.

Max Eastman.

19

A Suffrage Trial in

By Lucy Burns

Washington

F ORTY-EIGHT women were arrested in Washington for holding a suffrage meeting near the White House. They appeared in court, as ordered, at half-past nine the next day. Newspaper men, circling about the prosecuting attorney to learn the probable fate of the accused, brought us back his candid and bewildered comments :

" I ,can't go on with this case," he said. " I have had no orders. . . . " I can't find any precedent for a case like this. I have nothing to go on. So far I have only one precedent-the case of Coxey's Army."

"As I remember," said a reporter discreetly, his eyes dancing, "those people were arrested for walking on the grass."

"They were," said the Prosecutor. "It is not like this case; but it is the nearest I can find."

At eleven o'clock the judge, wrapping all his dignity about him, announced very seriously that he would have to continue the forty-eight cases for a week in order to determine "with what offence, if any, the defendants would be charged."

We, who constituted the forty-eight cases, swarmed out of court, half suffocated with bad air and gasping with surprise. We had come to Washington from all parts of the United States. We were to remain in town a week, after an ignominous public arrest, while the police determined what they had arrested us for!

That they had arrested us for no offence at all was very plain in our own minds. We had held a meeting from the base of the Lafayette statue, just opposite the east gate of the White House, to protest against the continued obstruction of the suffrage amendment in the Senate and to demand that the President and his party give it the support necessary for its passage. We had no permit for the meeting. This year all permits have been refused the Woman's Party -except at two remote points where no crowd could be assembled-on the ground that Washington was too "congested" for public meetings. Other meetings have gone on unchecked. A huge Liberty Loan meeting was held in Washington at the very corner we had chosen for our pro-test; and if it was proper, we reflected, for the government to ask women for their money there to carry on the war for democracy, it was proper for women to ask the government for democracy in the same place.

Before our trial was over, therefore, we endeavored again and again to continue our interrupted meeting. Four times our speakers assembled at the Lafayette monument; each time the' meeting was roughly broken up and all the participants-speakers and bystanders carrying suffrage banners-were arrested.

After the second arrest, we refused to give the bail demanded of us at the police headquarters. We did not wish to be held indefinitely in Washington by the surrender of

-AL- eaarliii.a. -1'a

large sums of our money, while the Court continued our cases until a charge could be drawn up.

The Chief CIerk at the Municipal Building, greatly nonplussed by this change of strategy and evidently terrified at the prospect of holding some forty determined women permanently in charge, capitulated.

" I will release you all on your own recognizance," he said; " you are ordered to appear in court on Wednesday morning."

" Please understand," said a civil spokesman from our group, " that we do NOT give our word to reappear. This arrest is unjustifiable, as the first was; and we will take no further notice of it."

" You are dismissed," said the Chief Clerk, shortly.

" Is it quite clear," said we, " that we will not appear in court on Wednesday morning?"

" It is," said the Chief Clerk, exploding. So we marched forth, free as air, in single formation, and proceeded instantly to the base of the Lafayette Statue, to continue the meeting so illegally interfered with. Again we were arrested, and again released, without giving bail, or leaving our addresses, or promising to appear in court ; and this solemn farce was four times enacted before the day of our trial. It was evident that the Court's search for an appropriate charge was not encouraging the police authorities to undertake further legal proceedings against us. Their plan evidently was to break up an orderly political meeting on the ground that it was illegal, hold us in a police court till the crowd was dispersed and then casually dismiss us from custody.

There is a simplicity and directness about police procedure in Washington rarely practiced with such frankness in other cities. " You obey the law, as we read it," the police seem to announce, " and we will do as we please."

On Tuesday, and again on Thursday, August 13 and 15, our case came before the court for settlement. The charges fixed against us by that time were, first, " climbing a statue in a public park," and secondly, assembling without a permit in a public park for the purpose of holding a meeting.

On Tuesday we defended ourselves singly against the charge of climbing a statue. Helena Hill Weed, of Connecticut, presented a grave and elaborate legal defense of our action; of which the essence was that we had not climbed the statue, but had stepped upon its base; that it was customary for citizens-usually workmen and small boys-to stand, sit, or lean on the base of the same statue without interference from the police or protest from the public, at all.hours of the day; and finally that there was no regulation in existence covering the use of the statue even for climbing purposes, since Congress gave the President control over the public parks, and he had never issued regulations for the District parks nor authorized any subordinate to do so.

1

i

20   THE LIBERATOR

The court reserved its decision on this matter until Thursday, when the collective charge of assembling in the park without a permit was to be brought against the entire group.

At this point the defendants took a sudden united stand and resolved to speak out the truth from their hearts. They could have brought up again the technical point that the President had not issued or authorized regulations forbidding meetings in a park without a permit. But they felt, more deeply, that their rights of free speech had been outrageously denied and their just protest against 'disfranchisement broken up by a police force appointed by and under the orders of the very political authority-the President of the United States-against whom their protest was directed. If the President had forbidden a meeting opposite the White House a thousand times to protest against his laxity in permitting the Senate to block a measure for the enfranchisement of the people, we should continue to hold such meetings so long as one free-spirited American woman was left out of jail... .

When our names were called on Thursday, we dutifully answered. It was necessary to answer in order to recover the large sum of money deposited by our lawyer as bail. That practical detail over, Alice Paul made an announcement for all : " As members of a disfranchised class," she said, " we do not recognize a court established by a political officer from whose election women were excluded. We do not admit the authority of the court, and we shall take no part in the court's proceedings."

Federal Judge McMahon heard this restatement of the Declaration of Independence with unaffected indifference. I have never seen a judge less moved. What we respected or what we admitted was evidently of no concern to him. He went on placidly with the morning's business. " The defendants will rise," he said. Not a defendant stirred.

It was a most curious illustration of the superior moving power of action over words, that the judge was utterly staggered. He commanded us to rise. We continued to sit. He pleaded with us, out of courtesy to him, to stand up. We sat quite still. Then the judge was wroth. " I will give you fifteen minutes to think over this position," said he, " while I look into the question of contempt."

He withdrew, leaving us marvelling.

We had complained to him of the deepest injustice a citizen can suffer. We had denied the authority of political officers, and the police and judges they appoint. We had cut ourselves off, as we felt ourselves cut off, from the political institutions of our country, and the Judge heard us with an eye of stone. But when we sat down where it was customary to stand up, he turned pale with agitation and left the room to consider penalties which would bring this disfranchised group to their feet before an autocratic court.

Milder counsel must have played upon him in his retirement., After fifteen minutes, he returned, still stern. " Will you stand?" said he. We remained seated. "The case will go on," said the judge. We thought it very evident that the government did not wish to throw the light of its angry attention upon a protest from a great disfranchised group, in the midst of a war for. democracy.

The case went on its absurd way. We did not answer again to our names, nor question the glib testimony of the police, nor make a plea in our defense. This had the unexpected result of throwing upon the police the task of identifying the accused, and it was an instructive picture to see policemen wandering up and down between rows of women, misidentifying us in a state of bewilderment.

One young girl was accused of " climbing a statue" as Miss Purcell, and of "holding a meeting" as Miss Purtell. The gravest confusion reigned while this problem was disentangled-everything being finally smoothed out by the sentencing of Miss Purtell and the honorable exoneration and dismissal of Miss Purcell. Seven women were not identified at all; one of them being closely acquainted with a number of the policemen who arrested us. Even a police-man has a heart.

The composure of the accused while the trial was proceeding was partly due, it must be admitted, to their tranquil belief that they would be all acquitted; the charges were so .frivolous, and the sections of the law authorizing arrest of such dubious validity. We believed that the court would find us guilty, to protect the White House from any further protest from suffragists; and would then dismiss us with a paternal warning. The women who had held the four meetings following us had been dismissed-somewhat informally, it is true-by the police. It was quite clear to us that we would be dismissed by the court.

To our intense astonishment, we were sentenced to fifteen days in jail. The federal court farce turned suddenly to bitter earnest. There was. mirth in the icy-cold cellar-like workhouse, abandoned for many years, where we were separately imprisoned, nor in the dark, foul-smelling cells, hardly touched by the air and never reached by the sub. Darker than all was the injustice of denying women the right of self-government and heaping prison punishment on them when they insisted upon free speech.

Our protest in jail, we were determined, should be as vivid, as vigorous, and as persistent as we could make it. We used the political prisoners' weapon of the hunger strike-the blessed hunger strike, which makes the prisoner stronger against his oppressors, the weaker his body grows. On our sixth day of imprisonment, when many of our number were already very ill, the warden affably informed us that we were free. " And I may tell you now," he said, " that a permit has been issued by the assistant chief of engineers for your next meeting in Lafayette Park."

In this bungling and cruel manner the United States government capitulated to a demand for justice. It re-treated from its second effort to suppress our protest against its failure to pass the federal suffrage amendment, We had to battle with the most powerful administration this country has ever known for the right of free speech; and we won. We will use this right, now copcedc-d, to keep up a storm of agitation under the very eyes of the Administration for the right it fights for abroad and denies at home-the right of the whole American people to a democratic form of government.

J J1►y,l_

October, 1918   21

W " e

"Say, Bill, whadd'ye know raise eight- billion dollars in

"RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT
INTERNAL LOAN COUPONS

With the shortly expected overthrow of Bolshevism and with the military and economic assistance of the Allies, law and order should again be established in Russia, resulting in the consequent appreciation in value here of RUSSIAN BONDS and CURRENCY of the old regime. Quotations on which we will be pleased to give upon application.

UNREGISTERED COUPONS OF RUSSIAN 51/z% INTERNAL LOAN BONDS OF 1916 due Aug. 14, 1918, will be cashed upon presentation at this office.

RUSSIAN AMERICAN LINE

55 Broadway, N. Y.

A. E. JOHNSON & CO."

-Reprinted from the New York papers, as a contribution to the
economic interpretation of history.

about this ?-we've got to the next Liberty Loan ! "

Innocent Peter

W E are giving a lunch for the Belgians," Said Mrs. Peter to Pete:

"How nice," said the innocent Peter, " And what will the Belgians eat? "

"Why we eat the lunch for the Belgians! Just salad and Liberty Bread

And fish and meat and coffee, And only a dollar a head! "

"Oh, my dear," said the innocent Peter,

" I've a plan that your dames would adore.

" They'd have jammed it through in a jiffy, If they only had thought it before.

" Let them take all their luncheon-money, (For this is a whale of a hunch:)

And send it straight to the Belgians,

So the Belgians can eat their own lunch! "

Helen A. SaIz_

22

B rest-Litovsk A Brigands' Peace

By Nikolai Lenin

Nikolai Lenin

T HE history of mankind is today recording one of the greatest and most difficult crises, a crisis which has an enormous-we can say without the least exaggeration a world-wide-liberating significance. It is not surprising that at the most difficult points of such a crisis, when every-where around us the old order is crumbling and falling apart with tumult and crash, and a new order is being born in indescribable torments-it is not surprising that some are becoming bewildered, some become victims of despair, and others, to escape from the bitter reality, are taking cover, behind beautiful and enchanting phrases.

We have been forced, however, to see things clearly, as we pass through the sharp and painful experience of this most difficult crisis of history which turns the world from imperialism towards communistic revolution. In a few days

* Translated from Pravda, official organ of the Bolshevik!.

we destroyed one of the oldest, most powerful, barbarous and cruel monarchies. In a few months we passed through a number of stages of compromise with the bourgeoisie and got over the petty bourgeois illusions, in the grip of which other countries have spent decades. In a few weeks we have overthrown the bourgeoisie and crushed her open resistance in civil war. We passed in a victorious and triumphant procession of Bolshevism from one end of an enormous country to the other. We aroused to freedom and independence the most humble sections of the toiling masses oppressed by czarism and the bourgeoisie. 'We introduced and firmly established the Soviet republic-a new type of state-infinitely higher and more democratic than the best of the bourgeois-parliamentary republics. We established the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the poorest peasantry, and have inaugurated a comprehensively planned system of Socialist reform. 'We awakened self-confidence and kindled the fires of enthusiasm in the hearts of millions upon millions of workers of all countries. We sent broad-cast the clarion call of the international working class revolution. We challenged the imperialistic plunderers of all countries.

And in a few days an imperialistic brigand knocked us down, attacking those who had no arms. f-Fe forced us to sign an incredibly oppressive and humiliating peace-a penalty for our daring to break away, even for as short a time as possible, from the iron grip of the imperialistic war. And the more threatening the spectre of a working class revolution in his own country rises before the brigand, the more furiously he oppresses and strangles and tears Russia to pieces.

We were compelled to sign a" Tilsit " peace. We must not deceive ourselves. We must have courage to face the unadorned bitter truth. We must realize in full to the very bottom, the abyss of defeat, partition, enslavement and humiliation into which we have been thrown. The clearer we understand this, the firmer, the more hardened and in-flexible will become our will for liberation, our desire to arise anew from enslavement to independence, our firm de-termination to see at all costs, that Russia shall cease to be poor and weak, that she may become truly powerful and prosperous.

She can become so, for we still have left sufficient expanse and natural resources to supply all and everyone, if not with abundance, at least with sufficient means of subsistence. 'We have the material in the natural resources, in the supply of human energy, and in the splendid impetus which the creative spirit of the people has received through the great revolution, to create a really mighty and abundant Russia.

October, 1918   23

Russia will become so, provided she frees herself of all dejection and phrase-mongering; provided she strains her every nerve and every muscle; provided she comes to under-stand that salvation is possible only on the road of the international Socialist revolution, which we have chosen. To move forward along this road, not becoming dejected in case of defeats, to lay, stone after stone, the firm foundation of a Socialist society, to work tirelessly to create discipline and self-discipline, to strengthen everywhere organization, order, efficiency, the harmonious cooperation of all the people's forces, universal accounting and control over production and distribution of products-such is the road towards the creation of military power and Socialist power.

It is unworthy of a true Socialist, if badly defeated, either to deny that fact or to become despondent. It is not true that we have no way out and that we can only choose between a " disgraceful " (from the standpoint of a feudal knight) death, which an oppressive peace is, and a " glorious " death in a hopeless battle. It is not true that we have betrayed our ideals or our friends when we signed the " Tilsit " peace. We have betrayed nothing and nobody, we have not sanctioned or covered any lie, we have not re-fused to aid any friend and comrade in misfortune in any way we could, or by any means at our disposal. A commander who leads into the interior the remnants of an army which is defeated or disorganized by a disorderly flight and who, if necessary, protects this retreat by a most humiliating and oppressive peace, is not betraying those parts of the army which he cannot help and which are cut off by the enemy. Such a commander is only doing his duty, he is choosing the only way to save what can still be saved, he is scorning adventures, telling the people the bitter truth, " yielding territory in order to win time," utilizing any, even the shortest respite in order to gather again his forces, and to give the army, which is affected by disintegration and demoralization, a chance to rest and recover.

We have signed a " Tilsit " peace. When Napoleon I. forced Prussia in 1807 to accept the Tilsit peace, the conqueror had defeated all the German armies, occupied the capital and all the large cities, established his police, compelled the conquered to give him auxiliary corps in order to wage new wars of plunder, dismembered Germany, forming an alliance with some of the German states against other German states. And nevertheless, even after such a' peace the German people were not subdued.

To any person able and willing to think, the example of the Tilsit peace (which was only one of the many oppressive and humiliating treaties forced upon the Germans in that epoch) shows clearly how childishly naive is the thought that an oppressive peace is, under all circumstances, ruinous, and war the road of valor and salvation. The war epochs teach us that peace has in many cases in history served as a respite to gather strength for new battles. The Peace of Tilsitz was the greatest humiliation of Germany and at the same time a turning point to the greatest national awakening. At that time the historical environment offered only one outlet for this awakening-a bourgeois state. At that time,

over a hundred years ago, history was made by a handful of noblemen and small groups of bourgeois intellectuals, while the mass of workers and peasants were inactive and inert. Owing to this history at that time could crawl only with awful slowness.

Now capitalism has considerably raised the level of culture in general and of the culture of the masses in particular. The war has aroused the masses, awakened them by the unheard of horrors and sufferings. The war has given impetus to history and now it is moving along with the speed of a locomotive. History is now being independently made by millions and ten of millions of people. Capitalism has now become ripe for Socialism.

Thus, if Russia now'moves-and it cannot be denied that she does move from the " Tilsit " peace to a national awakening, and to a great war for the fatherland-the issue of such an awakening is not the bourgeois state but the international Socialist revolution. We are " resistants " since November 7, 1917. We are for the " defense of our father-land," but the war for the fatherland towards which we are moving is a war for a Socialist fatherland, for Socialism, we being a part of the universal army of Socialism.

EDITORIALS

W E notice, to our disappointment, even in the New Republic, an allusion to " the pro-German leader-ship of the Socialist Party." The most powerful leaders of the Socialist Party in America are no more pro-German than Ramsay McDonald or Robert Smillie in England, or jean Longuet or Henri Barbusse in France. Both the leaders and the rank and file of American Socialists, so far as I know them, rejoice in the success of the Allied arms on the western front-as I believe Liehknecht and Haase and Ledebour and Rosa Luxembourg, and all true comrades of the new inter-national, rejoice-because it brings us forward toward that equilibration of national forces which will enable the peoples of Europe to win possession of their governments and establish a democratic peace.

The Campaign Issue

I T seemed two months ago as though the Socialists would
occupy a vague and weak position in the present political
campaign. Aside from their ultimate goal of social revo-
lution, and their appeal to working-class solidarity as the
power that can alone enact a " program of the world's peace,"
it promised to be hard to distinguish their attitude on the
day's problems from that of the President. Their strongest
demand, it seemed, would be for a right to say the same
things he says, and say them a little better, without being
arrested. So it seemed then. For, although the question of
the class to whose interest and power one appeals is in reality
the crucial question, and therefore the division between the
Socialists and the administration was absolutely vital, never-
theless the American mind thinks in terms of programs, and

24   THE LIBERATOR

it would be difficult to make that vital division clear, so long as the programs sounded so much alike.

The programs sounded alike so long as nothing happened to mar the effect of the President's offer of helpful friend-ship to the Soviet Government in Russia-so long as he stood alone among all the bourgeois powers, an eccentric, obdurate idealist, resisting their logical and entirely economical determination to crush the Socialist republic even if it cost them the hope of crushing Germany. So long as he stood there, the strategy of a campaign against him, before a constituency interested most deeply in that very problem, was difficult indeed. It seemed as though the Socialist Party would have to conduct a literary campaign again, with Economic Interpretation of History as the live issue, and Kart Marx as the candidate.

Now it seems different. The ineffectiveness of a detached idealism, which fails to appeal to the power of the only economic class which wants to give reality to that ideal, is re-waled in good season. The situation changed on August.3rd, with the announcement from the Department of State that this country would co-operate with japan in sending a force of " a few thousand men " to Vladivostok, with the purpose of " safeguarding, so far as it may, the country to the rear of the westward-moving Tchecho-Slovaks," and that the United States would interpose no objection to more ex-tended movements of a similar nature on the part of her other Allies.

These Tchecho-Slovaks are a band of fifty or sixty thou-sand soldiers who deserted from Austria at the beginning of the war, and fought with Russia on the side of the Allies. When the war between Russia and the Central Empires was declared at an end, they set out for Vladivostok with the admirable determination to sail around the world and join the Allies on the western front, where it was still possible to fight the battle of their own nationality against Austrian domination. The Bolshevik government gave them every assistance in this project, until they began to be so trouble-some as to compel an attempt to disarm them. The Tchecho-Slovaks are chauvinistic bourgeois nationalists, utterly out of sympathy with the new Bolshevist state in which they found themselves; and when the disorganization of the rail-way system and the food supply impeded their own nationalistic enterprise, they became marauders and pillagers upon a population which they despised.' The attempt to disarm them failed; and when their final departure from Vladivostok was further delayed by lack of tonnage, they formed a disaffected body of armed malcontents, who were promptly used by foreign imperialistic interests as the nucleus for a counter-revolutionary attempt against the life .of the Soviet Republic. Under such foreign encouragement they have now given up the attempt to reach Vladivostok and sail round the world to fight Germany, and are, as the President's an-

* The assertion that bands of armed German and Austrian prisoners are operating in this district was a fete months ago denied by our own American military commission to Russia, after a thorough personal investigation, in which the Bolsheviki assisted them. Their denial compels us to believe the renewed denial of such a state of affairs by the Bolshevik government.

nouncement declares, " westward moving "-that is, moving against the Soviet Government-with Vladivostok in their " rear." Or, in the more candid words of Lloyd-George, they " have become the center of activities hostile to the Bolshevik government."

The fact of intervention in their behalf, despite a reiteration of the idealistic phraseology of non-intervention, can hardly fail to impress upon the Socialist mind the view that the present administration has fatally yielded, in practice if not necessarily in theory, to the pressure of the reactionary forces among the Allies. It is well known that these reactionary forces, equally with those of Germany, are bent on taking full advantage of what appears to be their opportunity to crush Socialism out of the world. Whatever its declared intention and professed limitations, the present act of intervention necessarily marks the beginning of a new crisis in the world-war, and a correspondingly new and clear alignment of the forces of democracy and reaction in our own national politics.

The issue in the campaign of American Socialist candidates against the candidates of the administration for Congress this fall is, therefore, concrete, immediate and sharp. And it is an issue which the Socialists cannot be denied the right of presenting, under any quasi-patriotic censorship. For the Socialist demand for an immediate recognition of the Soviet government is manifestly consistent with the demand for a " more vigorous prosecution of the war." In attacking the experiment of economic democracy in Russia, the AIlied governments are not only weakening the morale of their cause against Germany, but they are weakening their military position. They are withdrawing their outposts. Every dictate of principle and expediency-even the dictate of purely military patriotism-is against an attack upon the Soviet Government.

President Wilson has used so generously the Ianguage of democracy and social freedom, and even of industrial freedom and democracy, that it may be difficult for the Socialists to persuade a growing body of voters that he is in act a representative of the bourgeoisie, and that the farmers' movement and the movement of the workers for control of industry, cannot look to him for anything more dynamic than this language. It will be difficult because this Russian situation, which is a very simple test of realistic democracy and faith in the self-determination of peoples, has been so colored and obscured by censors and press-agents the world over that it does not seem simple to people who learn about it from the newspapers. They are studiously induced to believe that the Bolsheviki signed the unfortunate peace of Brest-Litovsk because they were pro-German or craven, and not because, being denied the help and co-operation of the Allies, they were compelled to sign it. Lloyd-George, for instance, in his attempt to defend President Wilson against English critics of his action in support of the Tchecho-Slovaks, makes the assertion: " If the Tchecho-Slovaks now are the center of activities hostile to the Bolshevik government, the latter have only themselves to blame and nobody else."

_At   ehirssiLi_itt

I

October, 1918   25

But, as we now know, it was not the fault of the Bolsheviki that they were compelled to make peace with Germany and submit to her duress. It was the fault of the Allies-and primarily, it unfortunately appears, of America.

The fact has been published in the Manchester Guardian, and also more directly conveyed to Socialist leaders in the United States, that before the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk treaty Lenin and Trotsky and the other leaders of the Soviet Government made an official proposal to the United States Government, the substance of which was that if we would co-operate with them in supplying food, munitions, implements and some technical railroad assistance, the Soviets would refuse to ratify the Brest-Litovsk treaty and continue the war against Germany. They no doubt remembered our President's elevated and convincing assertion of January 8th, that " Whether their present leaders believe it or not, it is our heart-felt desire and hope that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace"; his solemn notification to the Allied governments that " The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of ,their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy "; his extraordinary declarations in favor of public diplomacy and " absolutely open " dealings of one government with an-other. And so they turned to us, as the most friendly and candid among all the nations that are fighting against German autocracy, and said in effect: " If you will give us the special economic and scientific assistance that we need, we will continue to hold the eastern line." This offer, which exists in writing in three languages with signatures, was cabled to Washington and received, but it was never made known to the American people and it was never answered.

Unless the President's message to the Congress of Soviets that did finally ratify the Brest-Litovsk peace, may be considered an answer. This is what he said:

" Although the Government of the United States is, unhappily, not now in a position to render the direct and effective aid it would wish to render, I beg to assure the people of Russia, through the Congress, that it will avail itself of every opportunity to secure for Russia once more complete sovereignty and independence in her own affairs, and full restoration to hei great role in the life of Europe and the modern world. The whole heart of the people of the United States is with the people of Russia in the attempt to free themselves forever from autocratic government and be-come the masters of their own life."

We thought that this message was a spontaneous utterance of sympathy from a student of politics toward that Soviet Government which is the greatest and most growing political thing mankind ever created. 'We must assume now that it was a belated and inconfident answer to a supreme opportunity-=both political and military-to serve and save the cause of democracy throughout the world. There is no doubt that Lenin and Trotsky and the people's commissaries could have swayed the Congress of Soviets against

a ratification of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and that if America and the Allied governments in their zeal for democracy could have forgotten for a moment the menace of Socialism, a battle-line of fervent and genuine freedom would now exist on the eastern front. But in obedience to economic forces little understood, and still less acknowledged or candidly dealt with among political men, they decided to ignore-or, as they would doubtless express it, distrust-the Bolsheviki, and treat their proposal of military co-operation as if it had not been. It seems to me that as the clouds clear away from the dark passage of these years, and acts that were important stand up against the horizon for those who look back, this act, blending as it does with the whole contemporary fortune of the war, will be one of the most definitely visible. It will have to be judged as to its specific causes and moral texture by every man who writes the history of these times.

It cannot be so judged now, and it need not be. But one fact is sufficiently plain, that another detached political idealist who undertook to utter great and terrible promises, was nevertheless compelled to act in accordance with the economic interests of those who possess the world. And this truth, expounded with temperate and sober and American language by the Socialist candidates for political power, must give a contemporary and practical weight to their campaign that will surprise the American bourgeoisie. It will bring new thousands of poor people to see the folly of allying themselves politically with any social or democratic idealism, however " sincere," which is not brave enough or hard-headed enough to declare in advance that it does oppose the economic interest of those who possess the world the essence of it being a determination to take the world away from those who possess it and make it the property of the whole people.

The Socialist Platform

T HE Socialist Congressional Platform is a blue-print of revolutionary reconstruction. It is the work of able and technically trained minds. It is a platform to stop the mouths of those who tell us we " have nothing constructive to offer." And at the same time it is a platform which clearly and cog,ently describes the alignment of economic interests which is the basis of the class-struggle in politics.

Even more important than the platform is the manifesto demanding recognition of the Soviet government of Russia. It is the single supreme duty of Socialists in this country, as in all countries, to declare their identity with that government. Such a declaration is the clearest and surest and most popular way to put before the " working people and poorer peasants " of other lands the clarified truth of what inter-national Socialism is. " Socialism, Utopian or Scientific "-the distinction has become a thousand times deeper and more fraught with meaning since put to the test of experiment, and there should be embodied in every declaration of our principles unmistakable evidence that our socialism is scientific and not Utopian.   MAX EASTMAN.

26

THE THIRD DEGREE
IN THE MIDDLE WEST

"Are you a Republican?" o.

"Are you a Democrat?"

N " o. "Then you'rea traitor!"

28

Lenin A Statesman of the New order

By Max Eastman II.

SOMETIMES it seems that all we are doing-we who call ourselves radical or revolutionary-is continually putting ourselves at the point of view of posterity. By some peculiar impulse of imagination we insist upon seeing the present as others will see it when it is past. I am moved to this reflection by the veering of newspaper opinion toward our view of Nicolai Lenin, even in the two days elapsing since the report that he was dead.

It was to us-and still is, as the news wavers- altogether too black to believe that, following Bebel and Jaures, this third leader-greater by far in that super-political strength and wisdom upon which our hopes rest-should be stolen from us at the very climax of capitalist history. We must believe that he will live, and that these agile news-papers, who, thinking he was safely gone into the past, had begun already to give grudging admission to some truth about his character and purposes, will be compelled to redouble their calumny in order to blot it all out, and make their readers ignore again what posterity will so easily know.

Meanwhile let us employ what they have given us. We can almost adopt as a preface to the continuation of our own praises of this statesman, a portion of the too eager obituary which appeared in the New York Times :

`By many he has been regarded as the mere paid agent of Germany. Of this no proof has ever been forthcoming.

"Paid agent, political tool or plain fanatic, there is no doubt of the man's ability or the strong impression he made upon those with whom he came in contact. An American, more or less in sympathy with his doctrines, who had rare opportunities of studying Lenin at close range in the midst of the Russian turmoil, described him on returning here as `The greatest living statesman in Europe.' It was a striking tribute to the personality of the man. Even his enemies admitted his ability. They spoke of him as clever-at worst as `slick.'

"With his death the doctrine of Bolshevism loses its strongest intellectual exponent. While most of the world has regarded him 'as working solely in the interest of his country's enemies, he undoubtedly during his brief tenure of power endeavored to put into practice theories which he had been preaching for many years before the Russian revolution came to pass."

We were discussing, as remarkable in a professional agitator and leader of armed rebellion, Lenin's freedom from fixations of mind and emotion, his ability to refocus his powerful will, and readjust his wealth of ideas, to new states of fact. Unlike most scholars, and most idealists, and above all perhaps, unlike most Marxian Socialists,

he knows how to think in a concrete situation. We find him, for instance, in the article which we are quoting from Pravda, singing the praises of " The Taylor System,", showing that from being an enemy under capitalism it has become a friend under Socialism-where an increase of the productivity of labor is, after the development of accounting and control, the leading problem. It is needless to say that a Socialist who was guided by dogmatic generalities or emotional prepossessions would not begin the millenium with kind words for the Taylor System!

" The Russian," says Lenin, " is a poor worker in comparison with the advanced nations, and this could not be otherwise under the regime of the Czar and the remnants of feudalism. To learn how to work-this problem the Soviet authority should present to the people in all its comprehensiveness. The last word of capitalism in this respect, the Taylor System, combines the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation with a number of most valuable scientific attainments in analyzing mechanical motions during work, in dismissing superfluous and useless motions, in determining the most correct methods of work, the best systems of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must adopt every valuable scientific and technical advance in this field. The possibility of Socialism will be decided by our success in combining the Soviet rule, and the Soviet organization of management, with the latest progressive measures of capitalism. We must introduce into Russia the study and the teaching of the Taylor system."

The next thing to be done after that-and here we see one of the ancient disputes between Socialists and anti-Socialists coming to the test of experiment-is to organize Emulation. Will Socialism destroy initiative? Is not capitalistic rivalry the motive that keeps up the forces of production and invention? We have not yet the answer of experiment, but we see in Lenin's discussion how this heretofore academic argument has shifted to the plane of facts and practical de-vices. I quote two paragraphs-inadequate except to give the flavor of his discussion:

" Among the absurdities which the bourgeoisie is fain to spread about socialism is the statement that Socialists deny the significance of emulation. In reality only socialism, destroying classes and hence the enslavement of people, opens the field for emulation on a really mass scale. And only the Soviet organization, passing from the formal democracy of a bourgeois republic to the actual participation of the laboring masses in management, puts emulation on a broad basis. It is much easier to organize emulation on the political than on the economic field, but for the success of socialism the latter is the important thing.

October., 1918   29

"Let us take publicity as a means for the organization of emulation. A bourgeois republic establishes this only as a matter of form, actually subjecting the press to capital, amusing the mob' with spicy political trifles, concealing the occurrences in the factories, commercial transactions, etc., as a ' business secret,' protecting ` sacred property.' The Soviets have abolished commercial secrecy and entered on a new road, but have done almost nothing to make use of publicity in the interests of economic emulation. We must systematically endeavor that-along with the merciless suppression of the thoroughly false and insolently calumnious bourgeois press-there shall be created a press which will not amuse and fool the masses with spicy political trifles, but will bring to their attention, and help them to study seriously, the questions of every-day economics. Every factory, every village, is a production and consumption commune, having the right and duty to apply the general Soviet regulations in its own way (not in the sense of violating the regulations, but in the sense of a diversity of forms in carrying them out) to solve in their own way the problem of ac-counting in production and distribution. Under capitalism this was the private affair' of the .individual capitalist or land owner. Under the Soviet this is not a private affair, but the most important national affair   

There is one thing that I miss in Lenin's discussion of means for increasing the productivity of labor-I miss a reference to the means of decreasing, and intelligently con-trolling, the production of people. " The pressure of population upon the means of subsistence " is an academic formulation of a natural danger that may, if it is not brought within the control of intelligence, render a free and happy society impossible through mere excess of numbers. Our capitalistic system discourages the fertility of people qnd kills off their children, but even under capitalism the birth-rate in Russia was enormous-higher than in any other great country of Europe-and under the revolution it will, if uncontrolled, almost certainly be higher. And this high birth-rate, just as it was a boon to capitalism, is a danger to socialism. The Socialist movement will surely, before long, awake to the enormity of the population problem, and the crucial importance of birth-control, and I cannot but wish the awakening might be now, and in Russia, where the tendencies of the movement in the immediate future are to be crystallized.

The Problem of Dictatorship

When the Constituent Assembly was dissolved and the government of the Soviets formally assumed the power, we published an editorial in THE LIBERATOR defending that act as in the interests of industrial democracy, a democracy far more democratic than that of the Constituent Assembly. We maintained that even if the working-class which had accomplished this conquest of power were in the minority, its dictatorship was justifiable. It is justifiable for a working-class assuming the reins of government to say to the people, " This is a government of the proletariat, by the proletariat and for the proletariat, and if you wish to participate in

the democracy of this government you will have to renounce your capitalistic privilege and become a member of the proletariat. And moreover if you do not renounce it, we will in the course of time relieve you of it. We intend to have a republic of workers, and we intend this really and truly, and as a matter of fact, and so seriously, indeed, that nothing can stop us, not even ` justice,' nor the ` principles of democracy,' nor the rule of the majority,' nor any other of those slogans of the ancient morality. Only when we have a republic of workers will justice be just; only then will democracy be democratic; only then will the rule of the majority cease to be the rule of the power and influence of capital." So we argued. But so far as Russia was concerned we proved more than was necessary, for the Bolsheviki, besides representing the proletariat, did have the mass of the peasants behind them, and spoke for the true majority of the Russian people. Russia was more alive than we realized.

Nevertheless, against the gentle prophets of evangelical Socialism, Lenin is compelled to defend a dictatorship even of the majority. He defends it as necessary for the purpose of transition to the proletarian state.

" The resolution," he says, " of the last Congress of Soviets advocates, as the most important problem at present, the creation of efficient organization and higher discipline. Such resolutions are now readily supported by everybody. But that their realization requires compulsion, and compulsion in the form of a dictatorship, is ordinarily not comprehended. And yet, it would be the greatest stupidity and the most absurd opportunism to suppose that the transition from capitalism to Socialism is possible without compulsion and dictatorship. The Marxian theory has long ago criticized beyond misunderstanding this petty bourgeois-democratic and anarchistic nonsense. And Russia of 1917-1918 confirms in this respect the Marxian theory so clearly, palpably and convincingly that only those who are hopelessly stupid, or who have firmly determined to ignore the truth, can still err in this respect. Either a Korniloff dictatorship or a dictatorship of the proletariat-no other alternative is possible for a country which is passing through an unusually swift development with unusually difficult transitions, and which suffers from desperate disorganization created by the most horrible war   

" In the first place, it is impossible to conquer and destroy capitalism without the merciless suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, who cannot be at once deprived of their wealth, of their advantages in organization and knowledge, and who will, therefore, during a quite long period, inevitably attempt to overthrow the hateful (to them) authority of the poor. In the second place, every great revolution, and especially a Socialist revolution, even if there were no external. war, is inconceivable without an internal war, i, e., a civil war-which means even greater disorganization than external war, thousands and millions of cases of wavering and of desertion from one side to the other, and a state of the greatest uncertainty, instability and chaos. And of course all elements of decay of the old order, inevitably

THE LIBERATOR

very numerous, especially among the petty bourgeoisie (for the petty bourgeoisie is the first victim of every war and every crisis) cannot fail to appear during such a profound transformation. And these elements of decay appear in the increase of crimes, hooliganism, bribery, speculation and other indecencies. It takes time and an iron hand to get rid of this   

" This historical experience of all revolutions, this universal economic and political lesson, was summed up by Marx in his brief, sharp, exact and vivid formula, the dictatorship of the proletariat. And that the Russian revolution did correctly approach this universal historical experience has been proven by the victorious march of the Soviet organization among all peoples and tongues of Russia. For the Soviet rule is nothing else than the organized form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the advanced class arousing to new democratism, to independent participation in the administration of the state, tens and tens of millions of exploited workers, who through their experience are discovering that the disciplined and class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat is their most reliable leader.

" But ` dictatorship ' is a great word. And great words must not be used in vain. A dictatorship is an iron rule, with revolutionary daring, swift and merciless in the suppression of the exploiters as well as of the hooligans. And our rule is too mild, quite frequently resembling jam rather than iron. 'We must not for a moment forget that the bourgeois and petty bourgeois environment is offering resistance to the Soviet rule in two ways: on the one hand by external pressure-by the methods of the Savinkoffs, Getz, Gegetckooris and Korniloffs, by conspiracies and insurrections, with their ugly `ideologic' reflection, by tor-rents of falsehood and calumny in the press of the Cadets, right Social-Revolutionists and Mensheviki; on the other hand, this environment exerts internal pressure, taking ad-vantage of every element of decay, of every weakness, to bribe, to increase the lack of discipline, dissoluteness, chaos. The nearer we get to the complete military suppression of the bourgeoisie the more dangerous become for us the petty bourgeois anarchic inclinations. And these inclinations can-not be combatted only by propaganda and agitation, by the organization of emulation, by the selection of organizers; they must also be combatted by compulsion.

" To the extent to which the principal problem of the Soviet rule changes from military suppression to administration-compulsion will, as a rule, be manifested in trials, and not in shooting on the spot. And in this respect the revolutionary masses have taken, since October 25, 1917, the right road, and have proven-the vitality of the revolution in that they organized their own-workmen's and peasants'-tribunals, before any decrees were issued dismissing the bourgeois-democratic judicial apparatus. But our revolutionary and popular tribunals are excessively and incredibly weak. It is apparent that the popular view .of courts-which was inherited from the regime of the land owners and the bourgeoisie-as not belonging to the people, has not yet been completely destroyed. It is not sufficiently ape

preciated that the courts serve to attract all the poor to the task of administration; that the court is an organ of the rule of the proletariat and of the poorest peasantry; that the court is a means of training in discipline.

" There is a lack of appreciation of the simple and obvious fact that, if the chief misfortunes of Russia are famine and unemployment, these misfortunes cannot be overcome by any outbursts of enthusiasm, but only by thorough and universal organization and discipline in order to increase the production of bread for men, and bread for industry (fuel), to transport it in time and to distribute it in the right way. That therefore responsibility for the tortures of famine and unemployment falls on everyone who violates the labor discipline in any enterprise and in any business. That those who are responsible should be discovered, tried and punished without mercy,"

Labor Discipline

And so the last problem, and perhaps the severest, that Lenin takes up with his people in this article is that of " Labor Discipline." It will be a hard lesson for revolutionists to learn that the productive labor of a free society must be strictly organized, and that strict organization re-quires subordination of individuals to authority during work; but it will have to be learned. Socialism is not a revolution backward to the age of the individual artisan; it is a revolution forward to the age of almost completely social production. And what we have to do is to organize social production so that it will produce all the individual liberty that is possible in a highly industrial life. That is what Lenin and his followers are setting out to do, and hence the powerful emphasis, and again the complete candor and absence of, sentimentality, observable in his discussion of the problem of discipline.

" The state," he says, " for centuries an organ of oppression and robbery of the people, has left us as a heritage the greatest hatred and distrust among the people for everything connected with it. To overcome this is a very difficult task, which only the Soviets can master, but which requires even with them considerable "time and tremendous perseverence.

"All the habits and traditions of the bourgeoisie, and especially of the petty bourgeoisie, are also opposed to state control, are for the inviolability of ` sacred ' private property and of 'sacred ' private enterprise.

" It is clear to us now how correct is the Marxian proposition that anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are bourgeois tendencies, irreconcilable with Socialism, with a proletarian dictatorship, and with communism. The struggle to in-still into the masses the idea of the Soviet, of state control and accounting; the struggle to break with the accursed past, which accustomed people to look upon the work of getting food and clothing as a private' affair, and on purchase and sale as something that ` concerns only myself '-this is the most momentous struggle, a struggle of Socialist consciousness against bourgeois-anarchistic ' freedom.' 'We have introduced labor control as a law, but it is barely be-ginning to penetrate the consciousness of the masses. ..

October, 1918   31

"That the dictatorship of individuals has very frequently in the history of revolutionary movements served as an expression and means of realization of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes, is confirmed by the undisputed experience of history. With bourgeois democratic principles, the dictatorship of individuals has undoubtedly been compatible. But this point is always treated adroitly by the bourgeois critics of the Soviet rule, and by their petty bourgeois aides. On one hand, they declare the Soviet rule simply something absurd and anarchically wild, carefully avoiding all our historical comparisons and theoretical proofs that the Soviets are a higher form of democracy; nay, more-the beginning of a Socialist form of democracy. On the other hand, they demand of us a higher-than-the-bourgeois democratism, and argue that with Bolshevist (i. e., Socialist and not bourgeois) democratic principles, individual dictatorship is absolutely incompatible.

" Extremely poor arguments, these. If we are not anarchists, we must admit the necessity of a state; that is, of compulsion for the transition from capitalism to Socialism. The form of compulsion is determined by the degree of development of the particular revolutionary class; then by such special circumstances as, for instance, the heritage of a long and reactionary war, and then by the forms of resistance of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. There is therefore absolutely no contradiction in principle between the Soviet (Socialist) democratism and the use of the dictatorial power of individuals. The distinction between a proletarian and a bourgeois dictatorship consists in this: that the first directs its attacks against the exploiting minority in the interests of the exploited majority and, further in this-that the first is accomplished (also through individuals) not only by the masses of the exploited toilers, but also by organizations (the Soviets) which are so constructed that they arouse these masses to historical creative work."

The translation from which I am quoting is so obscure at this point that I substitute in my own words what I judge to be the. transition here. Lenin has been talking about unlimited power or "individual dictatorship " in industry as essential to the period of transition from bourgeois to Socialist production; he now proceeds to discuss the amount and kind of such delegated authority which will be necessary to the continuance of Socialist production, and how far therefore the present state of affairs in Russia can be regarded as a " precedent."

. " Every large machine industry," he says, "-and ma-chine industry is the material productive source and basis of Socialism-requires an absolute and strict unity of the will which directs the joint work of hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people. This necessity is obvious from the technical economic and historical standpoints, and has always been recognized as its prerequisite by all those who have given any thought to Socialism. But how can we secure a strict unity of will? By subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one.

"This subjection, if the participants in the common work are ideally conscious and disciplined, may resemble the mild

leading of an orchestra conductor, but may take the acute form of a dictatorship if there is no ideal discipline and consciousness. But, at any rate, complete submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of the processes of work organized on the type of large machine industry. This is doubly true of the railways. And just this transition from one political problem to another, which in appearance has no resemblence to the first, constitutes the peculiarity of the present period. The revolution has just broken the oldest, the strongest, and the heaviest chains to which the masses were compelled to submit. So it was yesterday. And today the same revolution-and, indeed, in the interest of Socialism-demands the absolute sub-mission of the masses to the single will of those who direct the labor process. It is self-understood that such a transition cannot take place at once. It is self-understood that it can be realized only after great upheavals, crises, returns to the old, only through the greatest exertion of the energy of the proletarian vanguard which is leading the people to the new order."

A Conscious and Voluntary Discipline

Persons who have not seen enough to trust the ultimate purposes of this statesman might take alarm at so insistent a use of the word dictator, if it were not for what follows-an equally vigorous insistence (against equally scornful opposition from the Bourgeoisie and the half-heart Socialists) upon continual meetings of the workers as schools of self-defence and ultimate self-discipline. The warm sympathy, the fatherly, or teacherly, human understanding of Lenin's heart, is as distinguishing where it appears in this pamphlet, as the obdurate clarity and practical realism of his mind. He is a democrat by nature, and not by presbyterian reasoning. He speaks with a stern and lofty-certain mind of the absolute necessity of submission to authority during work, because he believes that the revolution will survive or perish according as it succeeds in producing goods beyond the amount that were produced under capitalism. But he speaks not condescendingly or tolerantly, but with affectionate appreciation, of these disorganized and disorderly assemblies of the masses, which are the beginnings of their whole and ultimate liberation.

" It is natural," he says, " that for a certain time all the attention [of the average worker], all his thoughts, all his energy are turned in one direction-to breathe freely, to straighten out, to expand, to take the immediate benefits of life which can be taken, and which were denied to him by the overthrown exploiters. It is natural that it must take some time before the ordinary representative of the masses will not only see and become convinced, but also come to feel that he must not just simply seize, grab, snatch-and that this leads to greater disorganization, to ruin, to the return of the Korniloffs. A corresponding change in the environment (and, hence, in the psychology) of the rank and file of the toiling masses, themselves, is barely beginning. And we, the Communist Party (the Bolsheviki), which gibes conscious expression to the aspiration of the ex-

32   THE LIBERATOR

ploited masses for emancipation, should fully comprehend this change and its necessity, should be in the front ranks of the weary masses which are seeking a way out and should lead them along the right road-the road of labor discipline, harmonizing the problem of holding meetings to discuss the conditions of work, with the problem of absolute submission to the will of the Soviet director, of the dictator, during work.

"The ' meeting holding ' is ridiculed, and more often wrathfully hissed at by bourgeois, Mensheviki, etc., who see only chaos, senseless bustle, and outbursts of petty bourgeois egoism. But without the `meeting holding' the oppressed masses could never pass from the discipline forced by the exploiters to a conscious and voluntary discipline. ' Meeting holding ' is the real democratism of the toilers, their . straightening out, their awakening to a new life, their first steps on the field which they themselves have cleared of rep-tiles (exploiters, imperialists, landed proprietors, capitalists) and which they want to learn to put in order themselves in their own way, for themselves, in accord with the principles of their ' Soviet ' rule, and not the rule of the nobility and bourgeoisie. The October victory of the toilers against the exploiters, was necessary, and it is necessary to have a whole historical period of elementary discussion by the toilers them-selves of the new condition of life and of the new problems, to make possible a secure transition to higher forms of labor discipline. . . . "

Not only, however, must this " absolute submission " to authority during the hours of work be offset by the encouragement of meetings of the masses, but it must be offset by an absolute and continual control by the masses of the persons in whom that authority is vested. It is significant that Lenin concludes his chapter about Labor Discipline upon this note, and to me it was the highest of all the joyful surprises that this great document contains to see combined with that, a prompt and instinctive recognition of the necessity of fluidity and of provisions even in the socialist commonwealth for continual future change.

We must work unceasingly to develop the organization of the Soviets and the Soviet rule. There is a petty bourgeois tendency to turn the members of the Soviets into ' parliamentarians ' or, on the other hand, into bureaucrats. This should be combated by attracting all members of the Soviets to practical participation in management. The departments of the Soviets are turning in many places into organs which gradually merge with the commissariats. Our aim is to attract every member of the poor classes to practical participation in the management, and the different steps leading toward this end (the more diverse the better), should be carefully registered, studied, systematized, verified on broader experience, and legalized. It is our object to obtain the free performance of state obligations by every toiler after he is through with his eight hour ' lesson ' of productive work. The transition will secure the definite realization of socialism. The novelty and the difficulty of the change naturally causes an abundance of steps which are made, so to speak, in the dark, an abundance of mistakes and hesita-

tion. Without this, no sudden movement forward is possible. The perplexity of the present situation consists, from the standpoint of many who consider themselves Socialists, in this-that people have been used theoretically to contrast capitalism and socialism, and between one and the other they have profoundly put the word 'leap ' (some, recalling Engels, quote even more profoundly his phrase, ` a leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.') That the word ' leap ' was used by the Socialist teachers to denote the crisis of a historical transformation, and that leaps of this kind comprise periods of ten or more years-this can-not be understood by most of the so-called Socialists, who study Socialism from hooks, but have never given serious thought to the reality. It is natural that the so-called ' intelligentzia ' furnishes during such times an infinite number of criers after the dead; one bewails the Constituent Assembly, another the bourgeois discipline, a third the capitalist order, a fourth the cultural aristocrat, a fifth the imperialistic ' greater Russia,' and so on and so forth. . . .

" It is not enough to be a revolutionist and an adherent of socialism, or in general, a communist. One must be able to find at any moment the particular link in the chain of development which must be grasped with all strength in order to hold the whole chain and to assure the passage to the next link. And the order of the links, their form, their connections, their distinction from one another, in the historical chain of events is not as simple and obvious as in an ordinary chain which is made by a blacksmith.

" The struggle with the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet organizations is assured of success by the firm bond between the Soviets and the ' people' (in the sense of the exploited toilers) by the flexibility and elasticity of this bond. The bourgeois parliaments even in the most democratic capitalist republic are never looked upon by the poor as ' their ' institutions. But the Soviets are for the masses of the workers and peasants, ' their own,' and not alien institutions. The modern ' social democrats ' of the Scheidemann kind, or, what is almost identical, of the Martoff kind, are just as averse to the Soviets, are just as attracted to the well-behaving bourgeois parliament, or to the Constituent Assembly, as Turgeneff was attracted sixty years ago to a moderate monarchist and aristocratic constitution, as he was averse to the peasant democracy of Dovrulucoff and Chernvshevsky.

" This proximity of the Soviets to the toiling ' people ' creates special forms of recall and other methods of control by the masses which should now be developed with special diligence. For instance the councils of popular education, as periodical conferences of the Soviet workers and their delegates to discuss and to control the activity of the Soviet authorities of the particular region, deserve the fullest sympathy and support. Nothing could be more foolish than turning the Soviets into something settled and self-sufficient. The more we now have to advocate a merciless and firm rule and dictatorship of individuals for definite processes of work during certain periods of purely executive functions, the more diverse should be the forms and means of mass con-

October, 1918   33

trol, in order to paralyze every possibility of distorting the Soviet rule, in order to repeatedly and tirelessly remove the wild grass of bureaucratism."

Lenin understands his followers, the toiling people of Russia. And he also understands his enemies, the evangelical reformers and the soft-headed Socialists who would again lead the workers of the world off on the emotional chase after vapors attending the political apparition of democracy. He understands them so well that his triumph over them in the heart and mind of the majorities is not difficult to understand. I quote his " Conclusion " in full:

Conclusion

" An unusually grave, difficult and dangerous international situation: the necessity to be cautious and to retreat, a period of waiting for new outbursts of revolution on the West, which are painfully slow in ripening; within the country, a period of slow constructive work and of merciless rigor; of long and persistent struggle of the proletarian disciple with the threatening elemental petty bourgeois dissoluteness and anarchy; such, in brief, are distinctive features of the special stage in the Socialist revolution that we are passing through. Such is the link in the historical chain of events which we must now grasp with all our strength, and come out with honor before we pass to the next ring-which draws us by a particular glow, the glow of the victory of international proletarian revolution.

" Compare with the ordinary, popular idea of a ` revolutionist,' the slogans which are dictated by the peculiarities of this present situation : to be cautious, to retreat, to wait, to build slowly, to be mercilessly rigorous, to discipline sternly, to attack dissoluteness. Is it surprising that some ` revolutionists,' hearing this, become full of noble indignation and begin to attack us for forgetting the traditions of the October revolution, for compromising with bourgeois specialists, for compromising with the bourgeoisie, for petty bourgeois tendencies, for reformism, etc., etc.

" The trouble with these woe-revolutionists is this-that even those of them who are actuated by the best motives in the world, and are absolutely loyal to the cause of Socialism, fail to comprehend the particular and `particularly unpleasant ' stage that must inevitably be passed by a back-ward country which has been shattered by a reactionary and ill-fated war and which has started the Socialist revolution long before the more advanced countries. They lack firmness in difficult moments of a difficult transition.

" It is natural that this kind of ` official' opposition to our party comes from the left Socialist-Revolutionists. Of course there are, and always will be, individual exceptions to group and class types. But social types remain. And in a country where the petty bourgeois population is vastly pre-dominant in comparison with the purely proletarian, the difference between the proletarian and the petty bourgeois revolutionist will inevitably appear, and from time to time very sharply. The petty bourgeois revolutionist hesitates and wavers at every turn of events, passes from a violently revolutionary position in March 1917, to a lauding of

' coalition ' in May, to hatred against the Bolsheviki (or to bewailing their ' adventurousness') in July, to cautiously drawing away from them in the end of October, to supporting them in December; and lastly, in March and April 1918, such types most of them turn up their noses scornfully and say, ' I am not of those who sing hymns to organic work, to practicalism and gradualism.'

" The social source of such types is the small proprietor who has been maddened by the horrors of the war, by sudden ruin, by the unheard of torments of starvation and disorganization; who is tossing hysterically, seeking a way out, seeking salvation, hesitating between confidence and support to the proletariat on the one hand, and fits of despair on the other. We must clearly comprehend and firmly remember that Socialism cannot be built on such a social base. Only a class that marches along the road without hesitation, that does not become dejected and does not despair on the most difficult and dangerous crossings, can lead the toiling and exploited masses. We do not need hysterical outbursts.. We need the regular march of the iron battalions of the proletariat."

Moscow, April, 1918.

A Message from Chicago

WE, the undersigned committee, are instructed by the too Industrial Workers of the World now in the Cook county jail at Chicago, where we have today been returned following an adverse verdict, to send to The Call an expression of our deep appreciation for the fairness which that paper has shown in its columns during the long months of trial. We wish especially to express our thanks for the kind and sympathetic understanding exhibited by The Call correspondent, David Karsner, through the columns of The Call.

We send to those organizations and individuals who have given time and funds to our defense our grateful thanks for their efforts.

Through the columns of The Call we also extend to the Liberator, the New Age, the Public, the New Republic, Truth and to the other papers which have shown a spirit of fairness in the face of unbridled reaction our thanks for their efforts in our behalf.

Although in this dark hour injustice seems triumphant, we of the Industrial Workers of the World are exalted in the dignity which knows no defeat, and we pledge to the working class of America and of the world our efforts in jail and out of jail and our undying allegiance to the cause of their emancipation from the system of wage slavery.

We send to Tom Mooney and to other prisoners of the class struggle our greetings and fraternal good wishes.

THE COMMITTEE OF FIVE. John J. Walsh, Chairman.

34 MODERN LOVE

Spring

P AIN hung on me like a thick, wet robe And dragged me down, And sickened me with cold and numbness

When I longed for the poignant-health of spring.

Then fever came,

Fever that drove me from room to room, That turned me restlessly from books to music, Away from music to the open window, But always back again to cankering doubt. Till I could no longer fail to understand Your wistful and unwilling step

That seemed to cross our threshold, looking back; Nor evade the wounds of your empty caresses, Rituals without faith.

Your sudden kindnesses and sudden angers Crumpled the hope in my heart,

And were confessions reflecting my fear: "Who was she? What was her bearing? Was she unlike me? Was she golden, tall? " Half-adoration filled me for her unknown graces, A trembling exaltation that is beauty's due. And then rage, mounting cruel, revengeful, Shook me with its fierce hunger.

Till my flayed soul fell,

Gasping and scarred,

After imagined tortures.

And fear again-cold fear.

That night came-and I has sensed the moment,

And something in me dramatized my pain,

For I had dressed in black.

And you came in, blind to my trembling,

And shuffled, halting to my arms;

Blurting out your story, half thrilled, half shamed; At once thankful for the safety of my sure love,

Yet clutching, childishly, the frayed ends of your

shoddy romance. Till I had soothed you,

And rewarded your belated loyalty

With tenderness, until you slept.

And I fought hotly through the night_

With my cold pain.

The days of healing carne

And you gathered renewed ecstasy with each hour, And clothed me with your dreams again,

And shook off our tears with a careless gesture, And walked about with the face of a child.

And I went lamely through twelve questioning months, Answering you with uncertain smiles,

And wept in secret hours

Till I could test our happiness with Spring.

Then Spring came

And you made the season my mirror,

Confidence came back,

And my wild love!

But when I grow most insolent with joy

An old fear mocks me. A cold fear:

Spring.

O NE thing I may not give you; two I must-And these you have, and that you'll not be wanting: So bright this beauty moulded from the dust, So careless-trampled in the high God's hunting-Trampled so cruelly back into the sod, Broken at last as beauty must be, yet So bright that even the careless-trampling God Shall lift and cherish, having broken it!

Two things I give you, one I dare not. Why, In this sweet, terrible interlude that is

Between what was and shall be, why should I Proffer a third thing you will never miss,

Two being pity and wonder: these I'm granting, And these you have, and that you'll not be wanting.

II.

C AN you not let me sleep? Why for your sake, Who neither wake nor weep, must 1 still lift Wet eyelids over aching eves, awake

And watching the wrecked fantasies that drift Down the slow dark? Will you not let me be?

I have kept watch through a long night of years, And still keep watch. Why do you claim of me This vigil and this foolish gift of tears?

You sleep, I know, soft-smiling, lulled deep-In a kind darkness. Why torment me so?

You that are free, that neither wake nor weep, Give ine back sleep. Let me go.

Let me shut eyes against this dreadful stream

Of drifting sticks that were brave ships of dream.

Floyd Dell.

Jean Starr Unter. •ever.

Two Sonnets

October, 1918   35

Unity

POUR love is terrible. 0 do not love me so much! Sometimes there are moments

Fear comes to me because of our love; That it is a prison about me,