Rebecca Harding Davis
“Life in the Iron Mills”
“Is this the end?
O Life, as futile, then, as frail!
What hope of answer or redress?”
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank
down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the
breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking
out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer’s shop opposite, where a crowd
of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect
the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.
The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from
the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy
pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy
boats, on the yellow river,— clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the housefront, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of
mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor
hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel
pointing upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with
smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in
a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—
almost worn out, I think.
From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the
river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny-colored,
(la belle rivière!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of
boats and coal- barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a
look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly
bearing its burden day after day. Something of the same idle notion comes to
me to-day, when from the street-window I look on the slow stream of human
life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with
dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or
cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping
all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness
and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and
grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What do you make of a case like
that, amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive: to
these men it is a drunken jest, a joke, — horrible to angels perhaps, to them
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commonplace enough. My fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of
such a life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that beyond there
waits for it odorous sunlight, quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage
of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,—air, and fields, and mountains.
The future of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be
stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard,
and after that, not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.
Can you see how foggy the day is? As I stand here, idly tapping the
windowpane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back- yard and the
coalboats below, fragments of an old story float up before me,—a story of this
house into which I happened to come to-day. You may think it a tiresome story
enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or
pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with
thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of
them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant
water- butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who
study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. Stop a moment. I am going to be
honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no
heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the
thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story.
There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for
centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or
Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it
clearly,—this terrible question which men here have gone mad and died trying
to answer. I dare not put this secret into words. I told you it was dumb. These
men, going by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not
ask it of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no
reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be
tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not
the sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of its darkness,
the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to come. I
dare make my meaning no clearer, but will only tell my story. It will, perhaps,
seem to you as foul and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with
death; but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted
dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come.
My story is very simple,—Only what I remember of the life of one of these
men,—a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John’s rolling- mills,—Hugh Wolfe.
You know the mills? They took the great order for the lower Virginia railroads
there last winter; run usually with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I
choose the half-forgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of
these furnace-hands. Perhaps because there is a secret, underlying sympathy
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between that story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,—
or perhaps simply for the reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes
lived. There were the father and son,—both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby &
John’s mills for making railroad-iron,—and Deborah, their cousin, a picker in
some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented then to half a dozen families.
The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms. The old man, like many of the
puddlers and feeders of the mills, was Welsh,—had spent half of his life in the
Cornish tin-mines. You may pick the Welsh emigrants, Cornish miners, out of
the throng passing the windows, any day. They are a trifle more filthy; their
muscles are not so brawny; they stoop more. When they are drunk, they
neither yell, nor shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure,
unmixed blood, I fancy: shows itself in the slight angular bodies and sharply-cut
facial lines. It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived here. Their lives were
like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel- like rooms,
eating rank pork and molasses, drinking—God and the distillers only know
what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess. Is that
all of their lives?—of the portion given to them and these their duplicates
swarming the streets to-day?—nothing beneath?—all? So many a political
reformer will tell you,—and many a private reformer, too, who has gone among
them with a heart tender with Christ’s charity, and come out outraged,
hardened.
One rainy night, about eleven o’clock, a crowd of half-clothed women
stopped outside of the cellar-door. They were going home from the cotton-mill.
“Good-night, Deb,” said one, a mulatto, steadying herself against the gaspost. She needed the post to steady her. So did more than one of them.
“Dah’s a ball to Miss Potts’ to-night. Ye’d best come.”
“Inteet, Deb, if hur’ll come, hur’ll hef fun,” said a shrill Welsh voice in the
crowd.
Two or three dirty hands were thrust out to catch the gown of the woman,
who was groping for the latch of the door.
“No.”
“No? Where’s Kit Small, then?”
“Begorra! on the spools. Alleys behint, though we helped her, we dud. An
wid ye! Let Deb alone! It’s ondacent frettin’ a quite body. Be the powers, an
we’ll have a night of it! there’ll be lashin’s o’ drink,— the Vargent be blessed
and praised for’t!”
They went on, the mulatto inclining for a moment to show fight, and drag the
woman Wolfe off with them; but, being pacified, she staggered away.
Deborah groped her way into the cellar, and, after considerable stumbling,
kindled a match, and lighted a tallow dip, that sent a yellow glimmer over the
room. It was low, damp,—the earthen floor covered with a green, slimy moss,—
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a fetid air smothering the breath. Old Wolfe lay asleep on a heap of straw,
wrapped in a torn horse-blanket. He was a pale, meek little man, with a white
face and red rabbit-eyes. The woman Deborah was like him; only her face was
even more ghastly, her lips bluer, her eyes more watery. She wore a faded cotton
gown and a slouching bonnet. When she walked, one could see that she was
deformed, almost a hunchback. She trod softly, so as not to waken him, and
went through into the room beyond. There she found by the half-extinguished
fire an iron saucepan filled with cold boiled potatoes, which she put upon a
broken chair with a pint-cup of ale. Placing the old candlestick beside this
dainty repast, she untied her bonnet, which hung limp and wet over her face,
and prepared to eat her supper. It was the first food that had touched her lips
since morning. There was enough of it, however: there is not always. She was
hungry,—one could see that easily enough,—and not drunk, as most of her
companions would have been found at this hour. She did not drink, this
woman,—her face told that, too,—nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the
weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,—some
love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she
would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone. While she was skinning
the potatoes, and munching them, a noise behind her made her stop.
“Janey!” she called, lifting the candle and peering into the darkness. “Janey,
are you there?”
A heap of ragged coats was heaved up, and the face of a young,girl emerged,
staring sleepily at the woman.
“Deborah,” she said, at last, “I’m here the night.”
“Yes, child. Hur’s welcome,” she said, quietly eating on.
The girl’s face was haggard and sickly; her eyes were heavy with sleep and
hunger: real Milesian eyes they were, dark, delicate blue, glooming out from
black shadows with a pitiful fright.
“I was alone,” she said, timidly.
“Where’s the father?” asked Deborah, holding out a potato, which the girl
greedily seized.
“He’s beyant,—wid Haley,—in the stone house.” (Did you ever hear the
word jail from an Irish mouth?) “I came here. Hugh told me never to stay melone.”
“Hugh?” “Yes.”
A vexed frown crossed her face. The girl saw it, and added quickly,—
“I have not seen Hugh the day, Deb. The old man says his watch lasts till
the mornin’.”
The woman sprang up, and hastily began to arrange some bread and flitch in
a tin pail, and to pour her own measure of ale into a bottle. Tying on her
bonnet, she blew out the candle.
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“Lay ye down, Janey dear,” she said, gently, covering her with the old rags.
“Hur can eat the potatoes, if hur’s hungry.
“Where are ye goin’, Deb? The rain’s sharp.” “To the mill, with Hugh’s
supper.”
“Let him bide till th’ morn. Sit ye down.”
“No, no,”—sharply pushing her off. “The boy’ll starve.”
She hurried from the cellar, while the child wearily coiled herself up for
sleep. The rain was falling heavily, as the woman, pail in hand, emerged from
the mouth of the alley, and turned down the narrow street, that stretched out,
long and black, miles before her. Here and there a flicker of gas lighted an
uncertain space of muddy footwalk and gutter; the long rows of houses, except
an occasional lager-bier shop, were closed; now and then she met a band of
mill-hands skulking to or from their work.
Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast
machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that
goes on unceasingly from year to year. The hands of each mill are divided into
watches that relieve each other as regularly as the sentinels of an army. By
night and day the work goes on, the unsleeping engines groan and shriek, the
fiery pools of metal boil and surge. Only for a day in the week, in half-courtesy
to public censure, the fires are partially veiled; but as soon as the clock strikes
midnight, the great furnaces break forth with renewed fury, the clamor begins
with fresh, breathless vigor, the engines sob and shriek like “gods in pain.”
As Deborah hurried down through the heavy rain, the noise of these
thousand engines sounded through the sleep and shadow of the city like faroff thunder. The mill to which she was going lay on the river, a mile below the
city-limits. It was far, and she was weak, aching from standing twelve hours at
the spools. Yet it was her almost nightly walk to take this man his supper,
though at every square she sat down to rest, and she knew she should receive
small word of thanks.
Perhaps, if she had possessed an artist’s eye, the picturesque oddity of the
scene might have made her step stagger less, and the path seem shorter; but to
her the mills were only “summat deilish to look at by night.”
The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock, which
rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder- covered road, while the river,
sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills for rolling iron are
simply immense tent- like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every
side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned
hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving
in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the
sand; wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches
stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half- clad men, looking
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like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering
fire. It was like a street in Hell. Even Deborah muttered, as she crept through,
“looks like t’ Devil’s place!” It did,—in more ways than one.
She found the man she was looking for, at last, heaping coal on a furnace.
He had not time to eat his supper; so she went behind the furnace, and waited.
Only a few men were with him, and they noticed her only by a “Hyur comes
t’hunchback, Wolfe.”
Deborah was stupid with sleep; her back pained her sharply; and her teeth
chattered with cold, with the rain that soaked her clothes and dripped from
her at every step. She stood, however, patiently holding the pail, and waiting.
“Hout, woman! ye look like a drowned cat. Come near to the fire,”—
said one of the men, approaching to scrape away the ashes.
She shook her head. Wolfe had forgotten her. He turned, hearing the man,
and came closer.
“I did no’ think; gi’ me my supper, woman.”
She watched him eat with a painful eagerness. With a woman’s quick
instinct, she saw that he was not hungry,—was eating to please her. Her pale,
watery eyes began to gather a strange light.
“Is’t good, Hugh? T’ ale was a bit sour, I feared.”
“No, good enough.” He hesitated a moment. “Ye’re tired, poor lass! Bide
here till I go. Lay down there on that heap of ash, and go to sleep.”
He threw her an old coat for a pillow, and turned to his work. The heap
was the refuse of the burnt iron, and was not a hard bed; the half- smothered
warmth, too, penetrated her limbs, dulling their pain and cold shiver.
Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty
rag,—yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless discomfort
and veiled crime: more fitting, if one looked deeper into the heart of things, at
her thwarted woman’s form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that
smothered pain and hunger,—even more fit to be a type of her class. Deeper
yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing,
halfcovered with ashes? no story of a soul filled with groping passionate love,
heroic unselfishness, fierce jealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one
human being whom she loved, to gain one look of real heart- kindness from
him? If anything like this were hidden beneath the pale, bleared eyes, and dull,
washed-out-looking face, no one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint
signs: not the half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet he was kind to
her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats that swarmed in the
cellar: kind to her in just the same way. She knew that. And it might be that
very knowledge had given to her face its apathy and vacancy more than her
low, torpid life. One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the
rarest, finest of women’s faces,—in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest
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summer’s day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that
lies hid beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile. There was no warmth, no
brilliancy, no summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time
to gnaw into her face perpetually. She was young, too, though no one guessed
it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.
She lay quiet in the dark corner, listening, through the monotonous din and
uncertain glare of the works, to the dull plash of the rain in the far distance,
shrinking back whenever the man Wolfe happened to look towards her. She
knew, in spite of all his kindness, that there was that in her face and form which
made him loathe the sight of her. She felt by instinct, although she could not
comprehend it, the finer nature of the man, which made him among his fellowworkmen something unique, set apart. She knew, that, down under all the
vileness and coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever was
beautiful and pure, that his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity, even
when his words were kindest. Through this dull consciousness, which never left
her, came, like a sting, the recollection of the dark blue eyes and lithe figure of
the little Irish girl she had left in the cellar. The recollection struck through even
her stupid intellect with a vivid glow of beauty and of grace. Little Janey, timid,
helpless, clinging to Hugh as her only friend: that was the sharp thought, the
bitter thought, that drove into the glazed eyes a fierce light of pain. You laugh at
it? Are pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am taking
you to than in your own house or your own heart,—your heart, which they
clutch at sometimes? The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.
If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the
hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of
the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of
soul- starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted
faces on the street,—I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside
outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of
soul-history lies beneath you can read according to the eyes God has given you.
Wolfe, while Deborah watched him as a spaniel its master, bent over the
furnace with his iron pole, unconscious of her scrutiny, only stopping to receive
orders. Physically, Nature had promised the man but little. He had already lost
the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak,
his face ( a meek, woman’s face) haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill
he was known as one of the girl- men: “Molly Wolfe” was his sobriquet. He
was never seen in the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when
he did, desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed, pommelled
to a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood was up: but he was no
favorite in the mill; he had the taint of school- learning on him,—not to a
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dangerous extent, only a quarter or so in the free-school in fact, but enough to
ruin him as a good hand in a fight.
For other reasons, too, he was not popular. Not one of themselves, they felt
that, though outwardly as filthy and ash- covered; silent, with foreign thoughts
and longings breaking out through his quietness in innumerable curious ways:
this one, for instance. In the neighboring furnace-buildings lay great heaps of
the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run. Korl we call it here: a light,
porous substance, of a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks
of this korl, Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping
and moulding figures,—hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely
beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him. It was a curious
fancy in the man, almost a passion. The few hours for rest he spent hewing and
hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch came again,—
working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces
perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left
to feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among the
lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when
you hear the story of this night. I want you to look back, as he does every day, at
his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has groped
through as boy and man,—the slow, heavy years of constant, hot work. So long
ago he began, that he thinks sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no
hope that it will ever end. Think that God put into this man’s soul a fierce thirst
for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to be—something, he knows not what,—
other than he is. There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on
the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child’s face, will rouse him to a passion of
pain,—when his nature starts up with a mad cry of rage against God, man,
whoever it is that has forced this vile, slimy life upon him. With all this groping,
this mad desire, a great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet’s
heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer, familiar with sights
and words you would blush to name. Be just: when I tell you about this night,
see him as he is. Be just,—not like man’s law, which seizes on one isolated fact,
but like God’s judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless
cankering days of this man’s life, all the countless nights, when, sick with
starving, his soul fainted in him, before it judged him for this night, the saddest
of all.
I called this night the crisis of his life. If it was, it stole on him unawares.
These great turning-days of life cast no shadow before, slip by unconsciously.
Only a trifle, a little turn of the rudder, and the ship goes to heaven or hell.
Wolfe, while Deborah watched him, dug into the furnace of melting iron
with his pole, dully thinking only how many rails the lump would yield. It was
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late,—nearly Sunday morning; another hour, and the heavy work would be
done, only the furnaces to replenish and cover for the next day. The workmen
were growing more noisy, shouting, as they had to do, to be heard over the deep
clamor of the mills. Suddenly they grew less boisterous,—at the far end, entirely
silent. Something unusual had happened. After a moment, the silence came
nearer; the men stopped their jeers and drunken choruses. Deborah, stupidly
lifting up her head, saw the cause of the quiet. A group of five or six men were
slowly approaching, stopping to examine each furnace as they came. Visitors
often came to see the mills after night: except by growing less noisy, the men
took no notice of them. The furnace where Wolfe worked was near the bounds
of the works; they halted there hot and tired: a walk over one of these great
foundries is no trifling task. The woman, drawing out of sight, turned over to
sleep. Wolfe, seeing them stop, suddenly roused from his indifferent stupor, and
watched them keenly. He knew some of them: the overseer, Clarke,—a son of
Kirby, one of the mill-owners,—and a Doctor May, one of the town-physicians.
The other two were strangers. Wolfe came closer. He seized eagerly every
chance that brought him into contact with this mysterious class that shone
down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being. What
made the difference between them? That was the mystery of his life. He had a
vague notion that perhaps to-night he could find it out. One of the strangers sat
down on a pile of bricks, and beckoned young Kirby to his side.
“This is hot, with a vengeance. A match, please?”—lighting his cigar. “But
the walk is worth the trouble. If it were not that you must have heard it so
often, Kirby, I would tell you that your works look like Dante’s Inferno.”
Kirby laughed.
“Yes. Yonder is Farinata himself in the burning tomb,”— pointing to some
figure in the shimmering shadows.
“Judging from some of the faces of your men,” said the other, “they bid fair
to try the reality of Dante’s vision, some day.”
Young Kirby looked curiously around, as if seeing the faces of his hands for
the first time.
“They’re bad enough, that’s true. A desperate set, I fancy. Eh, Clarke?”
The overseer did not hear him. He was talking of net profits just then,—
giving, in fact, a schedule of the annual business of the firm to a sharp peering
little Yankee, who jotted down notes on a paper laid on the crown of his hat: a
reporter for one of the city-papers, getting up a series of reviews of the leading
manufactories. The other gentlemen had accompanied them merely for
amusement. They were silent until the notes were finished, drying their feet at
the furnaces, and sheltering their faces from the intolerable heat. At last the
overseer concluded with—
“I believe that is a pretty fair estimate, Captain.”
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“Here, some of you men!” said Kirby, “bring up those boards. We may as
well sit down, gentlemen, until the rain is over. It cannot last much longer at
this rate.”
“Pig-metal,”—mumbled the reporter,—”um! coal facilities,— um! hands
employed, twelve hundred,—bitumen,—um!—all right, I believe, Mr.
Clarke;—sinking-fund,—what did you say was your sinking-fund?”
“Twelve hundred hands?” said the stranger, the young man who had first
spoken. “Do you control their votes, Kirby?” “Control? No.” The young
man smiled complacently. “But my father brought seven hundred votes to the
polls for his candidate last November. No force-work, you understand,—only
a speech or two, a hint to form themselves into a society, and a bit of red and
blue bunting to make them a flag. The Invincible Roughs,—I believe that is
their name. I forget the motto: ‘Our country’s hope,’ I think.”
There was a laugh. The young man talking to Kirby sat with an amused
light in his cool gray eye, surveying critically the half-clothed figures of the
puddlers, and the slow swing of their brawny muscles. He was a stranger in the
city,—spending a couple of months in the borders of a Slave State, to study the
institutions of the South,—a brother-in- law of Kirby’s,— Mitchell. He was an
amateur gymnast,—hence his anatomical eye; a patron, in a blasé way, of the
prize-ring; a man who sucked the essence out of a science or philosophy in an
indifferent, gentlemanly way; who took Kant, Novalis, Humboldt, for what
they were worth in his own scales; accepting all, despising nothing, in heaven,
earth, or hell, but one-idead men; with a temper yielding and brilliant as
summer water, until his Self was touched, when it was ice, though brilliant still.
Such men are not rare in the States.
As he knocked the ashes from his cigar, Wolfe caught with a quick pleasure
the contour of the white hand, the blood-glow of a red ring he wore. His voice,
too, and that of Kirby’s, touched him like music,— low, even, with chording
cadences. About this man Mitchell hung the impalpable atmosphere belonging
to the thoroughbred gentleman, Wolfe, scraping away the ashes beside him,
was conscious of it, did obeisance to it with his artist sense, unconscious that
he did so.
The rain did not cease. Clarke and the reporter left the mills; the others,
comfortably seated near the furnace, lingered, smoking and talking in a
desultory way. Greek would not have been more unintelligible to the
furnace-tenders, whose presence they soon forgot entirely. Kirby drew out a
newspaper from his pocket and read aloud some article, which they discussed
eagerly. At every sentence, Wolfe listened more and more like a dumb,
hopeless animal, with a duller, more stolid look creeping over his face, glancing
now and then at Mitchell, marking acutely every smallest sign of refinement,
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then back to himself, seeing as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained
soul.
Never! He had no words for such a thought, but he knew now, in all the
sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great gulf
never to be passed. Never!
The bell of the mills rang for midnight. Sunday morning had dawned.
Whatever hidden message lay in the tolling bells floated past these men
unknown. Yet it was there. Veiled in the solemn music ushering the risen
Saviour was a key-note to solve the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong,—
even this social riddle which the brain of the grimy puddler grappled with
madly to-night.
The men began to withdraw the metal from the caldrons. The mills were
deserted on Sundays, except by the hands who fed the fires, and those who
had no lodgings and slept usually on the ash-heaps. The three strangers sat
still during the next hour, watching the men cover the furnaces, laughing now
and then at some jest of Kirby’s.
“Do you know,” said Mitchell, “I like this view of the works better than
when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of
smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering
lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their
victims in the den.”
Kirby laughed. “You are fanciful. Come, let us get out of the den. The
spectral figures, as you call them, are a little too real for me to fancy a close
proximity in the darkness,— unarmed, too.”
The others rose, buttoning their overcoats, and lighting cigars. “Raining,
still,” said Doctor May, “and hard. Where did we leave the coach, Mitchell?”
“At the other side of the works.—Kirby, what’s that?”
Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the
white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,— a woman, white, of giant
proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture
of warning.
“Stop! Make that fire burn there!” cried Kirby, stopping short. The flame
burst out, flashing the gaunt figure into bold relief. Mitchell drew a long
breath.
“I thought it was alive,” he said, going up curiously. The others followed.
“Not marble, eh?” asked Kirby, touching it. One of the lower overseers
stopped.
“Korl, Sir.” “Who did it?”
“Can’t say. Some of the hands; chipped it out in off-hours.” “Chipped to
some purpose, I should say. What a flesh-tint the stuff has! Do you see,
Mitchell?” “I see.”
12
He had stepped aside where the light fell boldest on the figure, looking at it
in silence. There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman’s
form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some
one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the
clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolf’s. Kirby and
Doctor May walked around it, critical, curious. Mitchell stood aloof, silent. The
figure touched him strangely.
“Not badly done,” said Doctor May, “Where did the fellow learn that
sweep of the muscles in the arm and hand? Look at them! They are groping,do
you see?—clutching: the peculiar action of a man dying of thirst.”
“They have ample facilities for studying anatomy,” sneered Kirby, glancing
at the half-naked figures.
“Look,” continued the Doctor, “at this bony wrist, and the strained sinews
of the instep! A working-woman,—the very type of her class.”
“God forbid!” muttered Mitchell.
“Why?” demanded May, “What does the fellow intend by the figure? I cannot
catch the meaning.”
“Ask him,” said the other, dryly, “There he stands,”—pointing to Wolfe,
who stood with a group of men, leaning on his ash- rake.
The Doctor beckoned him with the affable smile which kind- hearted men put
on, when talking to these people.
“Mr. Mitchell has picked you out as the man who did this,—I’m sure I don’t
know why. But what did you mean by it?” “She be hungry.”
Wolfe’s eyes answered Mitchell, not the Doctor.
“Oh-h! But what a mistake you have made, my fine fellow! You have given
no sign of starvation to the body. It is strong,— terribly strong. It has the mad,
half-despairing gesture of drowning.”
Wolfe stammered, glanced appealingly at Mitchell, who saw the soul of the
thing, he knew. But the cool, probing eyes were turned on himself now,—
mocking, cruel, relentless.
“Not hungry for meat,” the furnace-tender said at last. “What then?
Whiskey?” jeered Kirby, with a coarse laugh. Wolfe was silent a moment,
thinking.
“I dunno,” he said, with a bewildered look. “It mebbe. Summat to make her
live, I think,—like you. Whiskey ull do it, in a way.
The young man laughed again. Mitchell flashed a look of disgust
somewhere,—not at Wolfe.
“May,” he broke out impatiently, “are you blind? Look at that woman’s face!
It asks questions of God, and says, ‘I have a right to know,’ Good God, how
hungry it is!”
13
They looked a moment; then May turned to the mill-owner:— “Have you
many such hands as this? What are you going to do with them? Keep them at
puddling iron?”
Kirby shrugged his shoulders. Mitchell’s look had irritated him. “Ce n’est pas
mon affaire. I have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses. I suppose there are some
stray gleams of mind and soul among these wretches. The Lord will take care
of his own; or else they can work out their own salvation. I have heard you
call our American system a ladder which any man can scale. Do you doubt it?
Or perhaps you want to banish all social ladders, and put us all on a flat tableland,—eh, May?”
The Doctor looked vexed, puzzled. Some terrible problem lay hid in this
woman’s face, and troubled these men. Kirby waited for an answer, and,
receiving none, went on, warming with his subject.
“I tell you, there’s something wrong that no talk of ‘Liberté’ or ‘Egalité’ will
do away. If I had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of
the world’s work should be machines,—nothing more,—hands. It would be
kindness. God help them! What are taste, reason, to creatures who must live
such lives as that?” He pointed to Deborah, sleeping on the ash-heap. “So many
nerves to sting them to pain. What if God had put your brain, with all its agony
of touch, into your fingers, and bid you work and strike with that?”
“You think you could govern the world better?” laughed the Doctor. “I do
not think at all.”
“That is true philosophy. Drift with the stream, because you cannot dive
deep enough to find bottom, eh?”
“Exactly,” rejoined Kirby. “I do not think. I wash my hands of all social
problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a
narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut
korl, or cut each other’s throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I
am not responsible.”
The Doctor sighed,—a good honest sigh, from the depths of his stomach.
“God help us! Who is responsible?”
“Not I, I tell you,” said Kirby, testily. “What has the man who pays them
money to do with their souls’ concerns, more than the grocer or butcher who
takes it?”
“And yet,” said Mitchell’s cynical voice, “look at her! How hungry she is!”
Kirby tapped his boot with his cane. No one spoke. Only the dumb face of
the rough image looking into their faces with the awful question, “What shall we
do to be saved?” Only Wolfe’s face, with its heavy weight of brain, its weak,
uncertain mouth, its desperate eyes, out of which looked the soul of his
class,— only Wolfe’s face turned towards Kirby’s. Mitchell laughed,—a cool,
musical laugh.
14
“Money has spoken!” he said, seating himself lightly on a stone with the air
of an amused spectator at a play. “Are you answered?”—turning to Wolfe his
clear, magnetic face.
Bright and deep and cold as Arctic air, the soul of the man lay tranquil
beneath. He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in
the morning; only the man was the more amusing study of the two.
“Are you answered? Why, May, look at him! ‘De profundis clamavi.’ Or, to
quote in English, ‘Hungry and thirsty, his soul faints in him.’ And so Money
sends back its answer into the depths through you, Kirby! Very clear the
answer, too!—I think I remember reading the same words somewhere:
washing your hands in Eau de Cologne, and saying, ‘I am innocent of the
blood of this man. See ye to it!’”
Kirby flushed angrily.
“You quote Scripture freely.”
“Do I not quote correctly? I think I remember another line, which may
amend my meaning? ‘Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did
it unto me.’ Deist? Bless you, man, I was raised on the milk of the Word. Now,
Doctor, the pocket of the world having uttered its voice, what has the heart to
say? You are a philanthropist, in a small Way,—n’est ce pas? Here, boy, this
gentleman can show you how to cut korl better,— or your destiny. Go on,
May!”
“I think a mocking devil possesses you to-night,” rejoined the
Doctor, seriously.
He went to Wolfe and put his hand kindly on his arm. Something of a vague
idea possessed the Doctor’s brain that much good was to be done here by a
friendly word or two: a latent genius to be warmed into life by a waited-for
sunbeam. Here it was: he had brought it. So he went on complacently:
“Do you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man? do
you understand?” (talking down to the capacity of his hearer: it is a way people
have with children, and men like Wolfe,)—”to live a better, stronger life than I,
or Mr. Kirby here? A man may make himself anything he chooses. God has
given you stronger powers than many men,—me, for instance.”
May stopped, heated, glowing with his own magnanimity. And it was
magnanimous. The puddler had drunk in every word, looking through the
Doctor’s flurry, and generous heat, and self- approval, into his will, with those
slow, absorbing eyes of his.
“Make yourself what you will. It is your right. “I know,” quietly. “Will you
help me?”
Mitchell laughed again. The Doctor turned now, in a passion,— “You know,
Mitchell, I have not the means. You know, if I had, it is in my heart to take this
boy and educate him for”— “The glory of God, and the glory of John May.”
15
May did not speak for a moment; then, controlled, he said,—
“Why should one be raised, when myriads are left?—I have not the money,
boy,” to Wolfe, shortly.
“Money?” He said it over slowly, as one repeats the guessed answer to a
riddle, doubtfully. “That is it? Money?”
“Yes, money,—that is it,” said Mitchell, rising, and drawing his furred coat
about him. “You’ve found the cure for all the world’s diseases.— Come, May,
find your good-humor, and come home. This damp wind chills my very bones.
Come and preach your Saint-Simonian doctrines’ to-morrow to Kirby’s hands.
Let them have a clear idea of the rights of the soul, and I’ll venture next week
they’ll strike for higher wages. That will be the end of it.”
“Will you send the coach-driver to this side of the mills?” asked Kirby,
turning to Wolfe. He spoke kindly: it was his habit to do so. Deborah, seeing
the puddler go, crept after him. The three men waited outside. Doctor May
walked up and down, chafed. Suddenly he stopped.
“Go back, Mitchell! You say the pocket and the heart of the world speak
without meaning to these people. What has its head to say? Taste, culture,
refinement? Go!”
Mitchell was leaning against a brick wall. He turned his head indolently, and
looked into the mills. There hung about the place a thick, unclean odor. The
slightest motion of his hand marked that he perceived it, and his
insufferable disgust. That was all. May said nothing, only quickened his angry
tramp.
“Besides,” added Mitchell, giving a corollary to his answer, “it would be of
no use. I am not one of them.”
“You do not mean”—said May, facing him.
“Yes, I mean just that. Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement
of the people’s has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up
the heaving, cloggy mass. Think back through history, and you will know it.
What will this lowest deep—thieves, Magdalens, negroes—do with the light
filtered through ponderous Church creeds, Baconian theories, Goethe
schemes? Some day, out of their bitter need will be thrown up their own lightbringer,—their Jean Paul, their Cromwell, their Messiah.”
“Bah!” was the Doctor’s inward criticism. However, in practice, he adopted
the theory; for, when, night and morning, afterwards, he prayed that power
might be given these degraded souls to rise, he glowed at heart, recognizing an
accomplished duty.
Wolfe and the woman had stood in the shadow of the works as the coach
drove off. The Doctor had held out his hand in a frank, generous way, telling
him to “take care of himself, and to remember it was his right to rise.” Mitchell
had simply touched his hat, as to an equal, with a quiet look of thorough
16
recognition. Kirby had thrown Deborah some money, which she found, and
clutched eagerly enough. They were gone now, all of them. The man sat down
on the cinder-road, looking up into the murky sky.
“‘T be late, Hugh. Wunnot hur come?”
He shook his head doggedly, and the woman crouched out of his sight
against the wall. Do you remember rare moments when a sudden light flashed
over yourself, your world, God? when you stood on a mountain-peak, seeing
your life as it might have been, as it is? one quick instant, when custom lost its
force and every-day usage? when your friend, wife, brother, stood in a new
light? your soul was bared, and the grave,—a foretaste of the nakedness of
the Judgment-Day? So it came before him, his life, that night. The slow tides of
pain he had borne gathered themselves up and surged against his soul. His
squalid daily life, the brutal coarseness eating into his brain, as the ashes into his
skin: before, these things had been a dull aching into his consciousness; tonight, they were reality. He griped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiff with soot,
about him, and tore it savagely from his arm. The flesh beneath was muddy with
grease and ashes,—and the heart beneath that! And the soul? God knows.
Then flashed before his vivid poetic sense the man who had left him,—the
pure face, the delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with all he knew of beauty
or truth. In his cloudy fancy he had pictured a Something like this. He had
found it in this Mitchell, even when he idly scoffed at his pain: a Man allknowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning,—the keen glance of his eye
falling like a sceptre on other men. And yet his instinct taught him that he too—
He! He looked at himself with sudden loathing, sick, wrung his hands With a
cry, and then was silent. With all the phantoms of his heated, ignorant fancy,
Wolfe had not been vague in his ambitions. They were practical, slowly built up
before him out of his knowledge of what he could do. Through years he had day
by day made this hope a real thing to himself,—a clear, projected figure of
himself, as he might become.
Able to speak, to know what was best, to raise these men and women working
at his side up with him: sometimes he forgot this defined hope in the frantic
anguish to escape, only to escape,— out of the wet, the pain, the ashes,
somewhere, anywhere,—only for one moment of free air on a hill-side, to lie
down and let his sick soul throb itself out in the sunshine. But to-night he
panted for life. The savage strength of his nature was roused; his cry was fierce
to God for justice.
“Look at me!” he said to Deborah, with a low, bitter laugh, striking his puny
chest savagely. “What am I worth, Deb? Is it my fault that I am no better? My
fault? My fault?”
17
He stopped, stung with a sudden remorse, seeing her hunchback shape
writhing with sobs. For Deborah was crying thankless tears, according to the
fashion of women.
“God forgi’ me, woman! Things go harder Wi’ you nor me. It’s a worse
share.”
He got up and helped her to rise; and they went doggedly down the muddy
street, side by side.
“It’s all wrong,” he muttered, slowly,—”all wrong! I dunnot understan’.
But it’ll end some day.”
“Come home, Hugh!” she said, coaxingly; for he had stopped, looking
around bewildered.
“Home,—and back to the mill!” He went on saying this over to himself, as
if he would mutter down every pain in this dull despair.
She followed him through the fog, her blue lips chattering with cold. They
reached the cellar at last. Old Wolfe had been drinking since she went out, and
had crept nearer the door. The girl Janey slept heavily in the corner. He went
up to her, touching softly the worn white arm with his fingers. Some bitterer
thought stung him, as he stood there. He wiped the drops from his forehead,
and went into the room beyond, livid, trembling. A hope, trifling, perhaps,
but very dear, had died just then out of the poor puddler’s life, as he looked
at the sleeping, innocent girl,—some plan for the future, in which she had
borne a part. He gave it up that moment, then and forever. Only a trifle,
perhaps, to us: his face grew a shade paler,— that was all. But, somehow, the
man’s soul, as God and the angels looked down on it, never was the same
afterwards.
Deborah followed him into the inner room. She carried a candle, which she
placed on the floor, closing the door after her. She had seen the look on his
face, as he turned away: her own grew deadly. Yet, as she came up to him, her
eyes glowed. He was seated on an old chest, quiet, holding his face in his
hands.
“Hugh!” she said, softly. He did not speak.
“Hugh, did hur hear what the man said,—him with the clear voice? Did hur
hear? Money, money,—that it wud do all?”
He pushed her away,—gently, but he was worn out; her rasping tone fretted
him.
“Hugh!”
The candle flared a pale yellow light over the cobwebbed brick walls, and the
woman standing there. He looked at her. She was young, in deadly earnest; her
faded eyes, and wet, ragged figure caught from their frantic eagerness a power
akin to beauty.
18
“Hugh, it is true! Money ull do it! Oh, Hugh, boy, listen till me! He said it
true! It is money!”
“I know. Go back! I do not want you here.”
“Hugh, it is t’ last time. I’ll never worrit hur again.”
There were tears in her voice now, but she choked them back: “Hear till me
only to-night! If one of t’ witch people wud come, them we heard oft’ home,
and gif hur all hur wants, what then? Say, Hugh!”
“What do you mean?” “I mean money. Her whisper shrilled through his
brain.
“If one of t’ witch dwarfs wud come from t’ lane moors to-night, and gif hur
money, to go out,—out, I say,—out, lad, where t’ sun shines, and t’ heath grows,
and t’ ladies walk in silken gownds, and God stays all t’ time,—where t’man
lives that talked to us to-night, Hugh knows,— Hugh could walk there like a
king!”
He thought the woman mad, tried to check her, but she went on, fierce in
her eager haste. “If I were t’ witch dwarf, if I had t’ money, wud hur thank me?
Wud hur take me out o’ this place wid hur and Janey? I wud not come into the
gran’ house hur wud build, to vex hur wid t’ hunch,—only at night, when t’
shadows were dark, stand far off to see hur.”
Mad? Yes! Are many of us mad in this way? “Poor Deb! poor Deb!” he said,
soothingly.
“It is here,” she said, suddenly, jerking into his hand a small roll. “I took it! I
did it! Me, me!—not hur! I shall be hanged, I shall be burnt in hell, if anybody
knows I took it! Out of his pocket, as he leaned against t’ bricks. Hur knows?”
She thrust it into his hand, and then, her errand done, began to gather chips
together to make a fire, choking down hysteric sobs.
“Has it come to this?”
That was all he said. The Welsh Wolfe blood was honest. The roll was a
small green pocket-book containing one or two gold pieces, and a check for an
incredible amount, as it seemed to the poor puddler. He laid it down, hiding
his face again in his hands.
“Hugh, don’t be angry wud me! It’s only poor Deb,—hur knows?” He took
the long skinny fingers kindly in his.
“Angry? God help me, no! Let me sleep. I am tired.”
He threw himself heavily down on the wooden bench, stunned with pain
and weariness. She brought some old rags to cover him.
It was late on Sunday evening before he awoke. I tell God’s truth, when I
say he had then no thought of keeping this money. Deborah had hid it in his
pocket. He found it there. She watched him eagerly, as he took it out.
“I must gif it to him,” he said, reading her face.
19
“Hur knows,” she said with a bitter sigh of disappointment. “But it is hur
right to keep it.”
His right! The word struck him. Doctor May had used the same. He
washed himself, and went out to find this man Mitchell. His right! Why did
this chance word cling to him so obstinately? Do you hear the fierce devils
whisper in his ear, as he went slowly down the darkening street?
The evening came on, slow and calm. He seated himself at the end of an
alley leading into one of the larger streets. His brain was clear to-night, keen,
intent, mastering. It would not start back, cowardly, from any hellish
temptation, but meet it face to face. Therefore the great temptation of his
life came to him veiled by no sophistry, but bold, defiant, owning its own vile
name, trusting to one bold blow for victory.
He did not deceive himself. Theft! That was it. At first the word sickened
him; then he grappled with it. Sitting there on a broken cart- wheel, the fading
day, the noisy groups, the church-bells’ tolling passed before him like a
panorama, while the sharp struggle went on within. This money! He took it
out, and looked at it. If he gave it back, what then? He was going to be cool
about it.
People going by to church saw only a sickly mill-boy watching them quietly
at the alley’s mouth. They did not know that he was mad, or they would not
have gone by so quietly: mad with hunger; stretching out his hands to the
world, that had given so much to them, for leave to live the life God meant him
to live. His soul within him was smothering to death; he wanted so much,
thought so much, and knew—nothing. There was nothing of which he was
certain, except the mill and things there. Of God and heaven he had heard so
little, that they were to him what fairy- land is to a child: something real, but
not here; very far off. His brain, greedy, dwarfed, full of thwarted energy and
unused powers, questioned these men and women going by, coldly, bitterly,
that night. Was it not his right to live as they,—a pure life, a good, true-hearted
life, full of beauty and kind words? He only wanted to know how to use the
strength within him. His heart warmed, as he thought of it. He suffered
himself to think of it longer. If he took the money?
Then he saw himself as he might be, strong, helpful, kindly. The night crept
on, as this one image slowly evolved itself from the crowd of other thoughts
and stood triumphant. He looked at it. As he might be! What wonder, if it
blinded him to delirium,—the madness that underlies all revolution, all
progress, and all fall?
You laugh at the shallow temptation? You see the error underlying its
argument so clearly,—that to him a true life was one of full development
rather than self-restraint? that he was deaf to the higher tone in a cry of
voluntary suffering for truth’s sake than in the fullest flow of spontaneous
20
harmony? I do not plead his cause. I only want to show you the mote in my
brother’s eye: then you can see clearly to take it out.
The money,—there it lay on his knee, a little blotted slip of paper, nothing
in itself; used to raise him out of the pit, something straight from God’s hand.
A thief! Well, what was it to be a thief? He met the question at last, face to
face, wiping the clammy drops of sweat from his forehead. God made this
money—the fresh air, too—for his children’s use. He never made the
difference between poor and rich. The Something who looked down on him
that moment through the cool gray sky had a kindly face, he knew,—loved his
children alike. Oh, he knew that!
There were times when the soft floods of color in the crimson and purple
flames, or the clear depth of amber in the water below the bridge, had somehow
given him a glimpse of another world than this,—of an infinite depth of beauty
and of quiet somewhere,—somewhere, a depth of quiet and rest and love.
Looking up now, it became strangely real. The sun had sunk quite below the
hills, but his last rays struck upward, touching the zenith. The fog had risen,
and the town and river were steeped in its thick, gray damp; but overhead, the
sun-touched smoke- clouds opened like a cleft ocean,—shifting, rolling seas of
crimson mist, waves of billowy silver veined with blood- scarlet, inner depths
unfathomable of glancing light. Wolfe’s artist-eye grew drunk with color. The
gates of that other world! Fading, flashing before him now! What, in that world
of Beauty, Content, and Right, were the petty laws, the mine and thine, of millowners and mill hands?
A consciousness of power stirred within him. He stood up. A man,—he
thought, stretching out his hands,—free to work, to live, to love! Free! His
right! He folded the scrap of paper in his hand. As his nervous fingers took it
in, limp and blotted, so his soul took in the mean temptation, lapped it in
fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences, drifting and endless as the
cloud-seas of color. Clutching it, as if the tightness of his hold would
strengthen his sense of possession, he went aimlessly down the street. It was his
watch at the mill. He need not go, need never go again, thank God!—shaking
off the thought with unspeakable loathing.
Shall I go over the history of the hours of that night? how the man
wandered from one to another of his old haunts, with a half- consciousness of
bidding them farewell,—lanes and alleys and back- yards where the mill-hands
lodged,—noting, with a new eagerness, the filth and drunkenness, the pig-pens,
the ash- heaps covered with potato- skins, the bloated, pimpled women at the
doors, with a new disgust, a new sense of sudden triumph, and, under all, a
new, vague dread, unknown before, smothered down, kept under, but still
there? It left him but once during the night, when, for the second time in his
life, he entered a church. It was a sombre Gothic pile, where the stained light
21
lost itself in far-retreating arches; built to meet the requirements and
sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe’s. Yet it touched, moved him
uncontrollably. The distances, the shadows, the still, marble figures, the mass
of silent kneeling worshippers, the mysterious music, thrilled, lifted his soul
with a wonderful pain. Wolfe forgot himself, forgot the new life he was going
to live, the mean terror gnawing underneath. The voice of the speaker
strengthened the charm; it was clear, feeling, full, strong. An old man, who
had lived much, suffered much; whose brain was keenly alive, dominant;
whose heart was summer-warm with charity. He taught it to-night. He held up
Humanity in its grand total; showed the great world-cancer to his people. Who
could show it better? He was a Christian reformer; he had studied the age
thoroughly; his outlook at man had been free, world-wide, over all time. His
faith stood sublime upon the Rock of Ages; his fiery zeal guided vast schemes
by which the Gospel was to be preached to all nations. How did he preach it
to-night? In burning, light-laden words he painted Jesus, the incarnate Life,
Love, the universal Man: words that became reality in the lives of these
people,—that lived again in beautiful words and actions, trifling, but heroic.
Sin, as he defined it, was a real foe to them; their trials, temptations, were his.
His words passed far over the furnace-tender’s grasp, toned to suit another
class of culture; they sounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an unknown
tongue. He meant to cure this world- cancer with a steady eye that had never
glared with hunger, and a hand that neither poverty nor strychnine-whiskey had
taught to shake. In this morbid, distorted heart of the Welsh puddler he had
failed.
Eighteen centuries ago, the Master of this man tried reform in the streets of
a city as crowded and vile as this, and did not fail. His disciple, showing Him tonight to cultured hearers, showing the clearness of the God-power acting
through Him, shrank back from one coarse fact; that in birth and habit the man
Christ was thrown up from the lowest of the people: his flesh, their flesh; their
blood, his blood; tempted like them, to brutalize day by day; to lie, to steal: the
actual slime and want of their hourly life, and the wine-press he trod alone.
Yet, is there no meaning in this perpetually covered truth? If the son of the
carpenter had stood in the church that night, as he stood with the fishermen
and harlots by the sea of Galilee, before His Father and their Father, despised
and rejected of men, without a place to lay His head, wounded for their
iniquities, bruised for their transgressions, would not that hungry mill-boy at
least, in the back seat, have “known the man”? That Jesus did not stand there.
Wolfe rose at last, and turned from the church down the street. He looked
up; the night had come on foggy, damp; the golden mists had vanished, and
the sky lay dull and ash-colored. He wandered again aimlessly down the street,
idly wondering what had become of the cloud-sea of crimson and scarlet. The
22
trial- day of this man’s life was over, and he had lost the victory. What
followed was mere drifting circumstance,—a quicker walking over the path,—
that was all. Do you want to hear the end of it? You wish me to make a tragic
story out of it? Why, in the police-reports of the morning paper you can find a
dozen such tragedies: hints of shipwrecks unlike any that ever befell on the
high seas; hints that here a power was lost to heaven,—that there a soul went
down where no tide can ebb or flow. Commonplace enough the hints are,—
jocose sometimes, done up in rhyme.
Doctor May a month after the night I have told you of, was reading to his
wife at breakfast from this fourth column of the morning-paper: an unusual
thing,—these police-reports not being, in general, choice reading for ladies; but
it was only one item he read.
“Oh, my dear! You remember that man I told you of, that we saw at Kirby’s
mill?—that was arrested for robbing Mitchell? Here he is; just listen:—’Circuit
Court. Judge Day. Hugh Wolfe, operative in Kirby & John’s Loudon Mills.
Charge, grand larceny. Sentence, nineteen years hard labor in penitentiary.
Scoundrel! Serves him right! After all our kindness that night! Picking
Mitchell’s pocket at the very time!”
His wife said something about the ingratitude of that kind of people, and
then they began to talk of something else.
Nineteen years! How easy that was to read! What a simple word for Judge
Day to utter! Nineteen years! Half a lifetime!
Hugh Wolfe sat on the window-ledge of his cell, looking out. His ankles
Were ironed. Not usual in such cases; but he had made two desperate efforts
to escape. “Well,” as Haley, the jailer, said, “small blame to him! Nineteen
years’ imprisonment was not a pleasant thing to look forward to.” Haley was
very good-natured about it, though Wolfe had fought him savagely.
“When he was first caught,” the jailer said afterwards, in telling the story,
“before the trial, the fellow was cut down at once,—laid there on that pallet
like a dead man, with his hands over his eyes. Never saw a man so cut down in
my life. Time of the trial, too, came the queerest dodge of any customer I ever
had. Would choose no lawyer. Judge gave him one, of course. Gibson it Was.
He tried to prove the fellow crazy; but it wouldn’t go. Thing was plain as
daylight: money found on him. ‘T was a hard sentence,—all the law allows; but
it was for ‘xample’s sake. These mill-hands are gettin’ onbearable. When the
sentence was read, he just looked up, and said the money was his by rights, and
that all the world had gone wrong. That night, after the trial, a gentleman came
to see him here, name of Mitchell,—him as he stole from. Talked to him for
an hour. Thought he came for curiosity, like. After he was gone, thought
Wolfe was remarkable quiet, and went into his cell. Found him very low; bed all
bloody. Doctor said he had been bleeding at the lungs. He was as weak as a cat;
23
yet if ye’ll b’lieve me, he tried to get a-past me and get out. I just carried him
like a baby, and threw him on the pallet. Three days after, he tried it again:
that time reached the wall. Lord help you! he fought like a tiger,—giv’ some
terrible blows. Fightin’ for life, you see; for he can’t live long, shut up in the
stone crib down yonder. Got a death-cough now. ‘T took two of us to bring
him down that day; so I just put the irons on his feet. There he sits, in there.
Goin’ to-morrow, with a batch more of ‘em. That woman, hunchback, tried
with him,—you remember?—she’s only got three years. ‘Complice. But she’s
a woman, you know. He’s been quiet ever since I put on irons: giv’ up, I
suppose. Looks white, sick-lookin’. It acts different on ‘em, bein’ sentenced.
Most of ‘em gets reckless, devilish-like. Some prays awful, and sings them vile
songs of the mills, all in a breath. That woman, now, she’s desper’t’. Been
beggin’ to see Hugh, as she calls him, for three days. I’m a-goin’ to let her in.
She don’t go with him. Here she is in this next cell. I’m a-goin’ now to let her
in.”
He let her in. Wolfe did not see her. She crept into a corner of the cell,
and stood watching him. He was scratching the iron bars of the window with a
piece of tin which he had picked up, with an idle, uncertain, vacant stare, just
as a child or idiot would do.
“Tryin’ to get out, old boy?” laughed Haley. “Them irons will need a crowbar beside your tin, before you can open ‘em.”
Wolfe laughed, too, in a senseless way. “I think I’ll get out,” he said.
“I believe his brain’s touched,” said Haley, when he came out.
The puddler scraped away with the tin for half an hour. Still Deborah did not
speak. At last she ventured nearer, and touched his arm.
“Blood?” she said, looking at some spots on his coat with a shudder.
He looked up at her, “Why, Deb!” he said, smiling,—such a bright, boyish
smile, that it Went to poor Deborah’s heart directly, and she sobbed and
cried out loud.
“Oh, Hugh, lad! Hugh! dunnot look at me, when it wur my fault! To think I
brought hur to it! And I loved hur so! Oh lad, I dud!”
The confession, even In this wretch, came with the woman’s blush through
the sharp cry.
He did not seem to hear her,—scraping away diligently at the bars with the
bit of tin.
Was he going mad? She peered closely into his face. Something she saw
there made her draw suddenly back,—something which Haley had not seen,
that lay beneath the pinched, vacant look it had caught since the trial, or the
curious gray shadow that rested on it. That gray shadow,—yes, she knew what
that meant. She had often seen it creeping over women’s faces for months, who
died at last of slow hunger or consumption. That meant death, distant,
24
lingering: but this—Whatever it was the woman saw, or thought she saw, used
as she was to crime and misery, seemed to make her sick with a new horror.
Forgetting her fear of him, she caught his shoulders, and looked keenly,
steadily, into his eyes.
“Hugh!” she cried, in a desperate whisper,— “oh, boy, not that! for God’s
sake, not that!”
The vacant laugh went off his face, and he answered her in a muttered word
or two that drove her away. Yet the words were kindly enough. Sitting there
on his pallet, she cried silently a hopeless sort of tears, but did not speak
again. The man looked up furtively at her now and then. Whatever his own
trouble was, her distress vexed him with a momentary sting.
It was market-day. The narrow window of the jail looked down directly on
the carts and wagons drawn up in a long line, where they had unloaded. He
could see, too, and hear distinctly the clink of money as it changed hands, the
busy crowd of whites and blacks shoving, pushing one another, and the
chaffering and swearing at the stalls. Somehow, the sound, more than anything
else had done, wakened him up,—made the whole real to him. He was done
with the world and the business of it. He let the tin fall, and looked out,
pressing his face close to the rusty bars. How they crowded and pushed! And
he,—he should never walk that pavement again! There came Neff Sanders,
one of the feeders at the mill, with a basket on his arm. Sure enough, Nyeff
was married the other week. He whistled, hoping he would look up; but he did
not. He wondered if Neff remembered he was there,— if any of the boys
thought of him up there, and thought that he never was to go down that old
cinder-road again. Never again! He had not quite understood it before; but now
he did. Not for days or years, but never!—that was it.
How clear the light fell on that stall in front of the market! and how like a
picture it was, the dark-green heaps of corn, and the crimson beets, and golden
melons! There was another with game: how the light flickered on that
pheasant’s breast, with the purplish blood dripping over the brown feathers!
He could see the red shining of the drops, it was so near. In one minute he
could be down there. It was just a step. So easy, as it seemed, so natural to go!
Yet it could never be—not in all the thousands of years to come—that he
should put his foot on that street again! He thought of himself with a
sorrowful pity, as of some one else. There was a dog down in the market,
walking after his master with such a stately, grave look!—only a dog, yet he
could go backwards and forwards just as he pleased: he had good luck! Why,
the very vilest cur, yelping there in the gutter, had not lived his life, had been
free to act out whatever thought God had put into his brain; while he—No, he
would not think of that! He tried to put the thought away, and to listen to a
25
dispute between a countryman and a woman about some meat; but it would
come back. He, what had he done to bear this?
Then came the sudden picture of what might have been, and now. He knew
what it was to be in the penitentiary, how it went with men there. He knew
how in these long years he should slowly die, but not until soul and body had
become corrupt and rotten,—how, when he came out, if he lived to come,
even the lowest of the mill-hands would jeer him,—how his hands would be
weak, and his brain senseless and stupid. He believed he was almost that now.
He put his hand to his head, with a puzzled, weary look. It ached, his head,
with thinking. He tried to quiet himself. It was only right, perhaps; he had
done wrong. But was there right or wrong for such as he? What was right?
And who had ever taught him? He thrust the whole matter away. A dark, cold
quiet crept through his brain. It was all wrong; but let it be! It was nothing to
him more than the others. Let it be! The door grated, as Haley opened it.
“Come, my woman! Must lock up for t’ night. Come, stir yerself!” She went
up and took Hugh’s hand.
“Good-night, Deb,” he said, carelessly.
She had not hoped he would say more; but the tired pain on her mouth just
then was bitterer than death. She took his passive hand and kissed it.
“Hur’ll never see Deb again!” she ventured, her lips growing colder and more
bloodless.
What did she say that for? Did he not know it? Yet he would not be
impatient with poor old Deb. She had trouble of her own, as well as he.
“No, never again,” he said, trying to be cheerful.
She stood just a moment, looking at him. Do you laugh at her, standing
there, with her hunchback, her rags, her bleared, withered face, and the great
despised love tugging at her heart?
“Come, you!” called Haley, impatiently. She did not move.
“Hugh!” she whispered. It was to be her last word. What was it? “Hugh,
boy, not THAT!”
He did not answer. She wrung her hands, trying to be silent, looking in his
face in an agony of entreaty. He smiled again, kindly.
“It is best, Deb. I cannot bear to be hurted any more.” “Hur knows,” she
said, humbly.
“Tell my father good-bye; and—and kiss little Janey.”
She nodded, saying nothing, looked in his face again, and went out of the
door.
As she went, she staggered.
“Drinkin’ to-day?” broke out Haley, pushing her before him. “Where the
Devil did you get it? Here, in with ye!” and he shoved her into her cell, next to
Wolfe’s, and shut the door.
26
Along the wall of her cell there was a crack low down by the floor, through
which she could see the light from Wolfe’s. She had discovered it days before.
She hurried in now, and, kneeling down by it, listened, hoping to hear some
sound. Nothing but the rasping of the tin on the bars. He was at his old
amusement again. Something in the noise jarred on her ear, for she shivered as
she heard it. Hugh rasped away at the bars. A dull old bit of tin, not fit to cut
korl with.
He looked out of the window again. People were leaving the market now. A
tall mulatto girl, following her mistress, her basket on her head, crossed the
street just below, and looked up. She was laughing; but, when she caught sight
of the haggard face peering out through the bars, suddenly grew grave, and
hurried by. A free, firm step, a clear-cut olive face, with a scarlet turban tied on
one side, dark, shining eyes, and on the head the basket poised, filled with fruit
and flowers, under which the scarlet turban and bright eyes looked out halfshadowed. The picture caught his eye. It was good to see a face like that. He
would try to-morrow, and cut one like it. To-morrow! He threw down the tin,
trembling, and covered his face with his hands. When he looked up again, the
daylight was gone.
Deborah, crouching near by on the other side of the wall, heard no noise.
He sat on the side of the low pallet, thinking. Whatever was the mystery which
the woman had seen on his face, it came out now slowly, in the dark there, and
became fixed,—a something never seen on his face before. The evening was
darkening fast. The market had been over for an hour; the rumbling of the carts
over the pavement grew more infrequent: he listened to each, as it passed,
because he thought it was to be for the last time. For the same reason, it was, I
suppose, that he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of each passer-by,
wondering who they were, what kind of homes they were going to, if they
had children,—listening eagerly to every chance word in the street, as if—(God
be merciful to the man! what strange fancy was this?)—as if he never should
hear human voices again.
It was quite dark at last. The street was a lonely one. The last passenger,
he thought, was gone. No,—there was a quick step: Joe Hill, lighting the lamps.
Joe was a good old chap; never passed a fellow without some joke or other. He
remembered once seeing the place where he lived with his wife. “Granny Hill”
the boys called her. Bedridden she Was; but so kind as Joe was to her! kept the
room so clean!—and the old woman, when he was there, was laughing at some
of t’ lad’s foolishness.” The step was far down the street; but he could see him
place the ladder, run up, and light the gas. A longing seized him to be spoken to
once more.
“Joe!” he called, out of the grating. “Good-bye, Joe!”
27
The old man stopped a moment, listening uncertainly; then hurried on. The
prisoner thrust his hand out of the window, and called again, louder; but Joe
was too far down the street. It was a little thing; but it hurt him,—this
disappointment.
“Good-bye, Joe!” he called, sorrowfully enough.
“Be quiet!” said one of the jailers, passing the door, striking on it with his
club.
Oh, that was the last, was it?
There was an inexpressible bitterness on his face, as he lay down on the bed,
taking the bit of tin, which he had rasped to a tolerable degree of sharpness, in
his hand,—to play with, it may be. He bared his arms, looking intently at their
corded veins and sinews. Deborah, listening in the next cell, heard a slight
clicking sound, often repeated. She shut her lips tightly, that she might not
scream; the cold drops of sweat broke over her, in her dumb agony.
“Hur knows best,” she muttered at last, fiercely clutching the boards where
she lay.
If she could have seen Wolfe, there was nothing about him to frighten her.
He lay quite still, his arms outstretched, looking at the pearly stream of
moonlight coming into the window. I think in that one hour that came then
he lived back over all the years that had gone before. I think that all the low, vile
life, all his wrongs, all his starved hopes, came then, and stung him with a
farewell poison that made him sick unto death. He made neither moan nor cry,
only turned his worn face now and then to the pure light, that seemed so far
off, as one that said, “How long, O Lord? how long?”
The hour was over at last. The moon, passing over her nightly path, slowly
came nearer, and threw the light across his bed on his feet. He watched it
steadily, as it crept up, inch by inch, slowly. It seemed to him to carry with it a
great silence. He had been so hot and tired there always in the mills! The years
had been so fierce and cruel! There was coming now quiet and coolness and
sleep. His tense limbs relaxed, and settled in a calm languor. The blood ran
fainter and slow from his heart. He did not think now with a savage anger of
what might be and was not; he was conscious only of deep stillness creeping
over him.
At first he saw a sea of faces: the mill-men,—women he had known, drunken
and bloated,—Janey’s timid and pitiful-poor old Debs: then they floated
together like a mist, and faded away, leaving only the clear, pearly moonlight.
Whether, as the pure light crept up the stretched-out figure, it brought with It
calm and peace, who shall say? His dumb soul was alone with God in judgment.
A Voice may have spoken for it from far-off Calvary, “Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do!” Who dare say? Fainter and fainter the heart rose
and fell, slower and slower the moon floated from behind a cloud, until, when
28
at last its full tide of white splendor swept over the cell, it seemed to wrap and
fold into a deeper stillness the dead figure that never should move again. Silence
deeper than the Night! Nothing that moved, save the black, nauseous stream of
blood dripping slowly from the pallet to the floor!
There was outcry and crowd enough in the cell the next day. The coroner
and his jury, the local editors, Kirby himself, and boys with their hands thrust
knowingly into their pockets and heads on one side, jammed into the corners.
Coming and going all day. Only one woman. She came late, and outstayed them
all. A Quaker, or Friend, as they call themselves. I think this woman Was known
by that name in heaven. A homely body, coarsely dressed in gray and white.
Deborah (for Haley had let her in) took notice of her. She watched them all—
sitting on the end of the pallet, holding his head in her arms with the ferocity of
a watch-dog, if any of them touched the body. There was no meekness, no
sorrow, in her face; the stuff out of which murderers are made, instead. All the
time Haley and the woman were laying straight the limbs and cleaning the cell,
Deborah sat still, keenly watching the Quaker’s face. Of all the crowd there that
day, this woman alone had not spoken to her,—only once or twice had put
some cordial to her lips. After they all were gone, the woman, in the same still,
gentle way, brought a vase of wood-leaves and berries, and placed it by the
pallet, then opened the narrow window. The fresh air blew in, and swept the
woody fragrance over the dead face, Deborah looked up with a quick wonder.
“Did hur know my boy wud like it? Did hur know Hugh?” “I know Hugh
now.”
The white fingers passed in a slow, pitiful way over the dead, worn face.
There was a heavy shadow in the quiet eyes.
“Did hur know where they’ll bury Hugh?” said Deborah in a shrill tone,
catching her arm.
This had been the question hanging on her lips all day.
“In t’ town-yard? Under t’ mud and ash? T’ lad’ll smother, woman! He wur born
in t’ lane moor, where t’ air is frick and strong. Take hur out, for God’s sake,
take hur out where t’ air blows!”
The Quaker hesitated, but only for a moment. She put her strong arm around
Deborah and led her to the window.
“Thee sees the hills, friend, over the river? Thee sees how the light lies warm
there, and the winds of God blow all the day? I live there,—where the blue
smoke is, by the trees. Look at me,” She turned Deborah’s face to her own,
clear and earnest, “Thee will believe me? I will take Hugh and bury him there
to-morrow.”
Deborah did not doubt her. As the evening wore on, she leaned against the iron
bars, looking at the hills that rose far off, through the thick sodden clouds, like a
bright, unattainable calm. As she looked, a shadow of their solemn repose fell
on her face; its fierce discontent faded into a pitiful, humble quiet. Slow, solemn
tears gathered in her eyes: the poor weak eyes turned so hopelessly to the place
where Hugh was to rest, the grave heights looking higher and brighter and more
29
solemn than ever before. The Quaker watched her keenly. She came to her at
last, and touched her arm.
“When thee comes back,” she said, in a low, sorrowful tone, like one who
speaks from a strong heart deeply moved with remorse or pity, “thee shall begin
thy life again,—there on the hills. I came too late; but not for thee,—by God’s
help, it may be.”
Not too late. Three years after, the Quaker began her work. I end my story here.
At evening-time it was light. There is no need to tire you with the long years of
sunshine, and fresh air, and slow, patient Christ-love, needed to make healthy
and hopeful this impure body and soul. There is a homely pine house, on one of
these hills, whose windows overlook broad, wooded slopes and clovercrimsoned meadows,—niched into the very place where the light is warmest,
the air freest. It is the Friends’ meeting-house. Once a week they sit there, in
their grave, earnest way, waiting for the Spirit of Love to speak, opening their
simple hearts to receive His words. There is a woman, old, deformed, who takes
a humble place among them: waiting like them: in her gray dress, her worn face,
pure and meek, turned now and then to the sky. A woman much loved by these
silent, restful people; more silent than they, more humble, more loving. Waiting:
with her eyes turned to hills higher and purer than these on which she lives, dim
and far off now, but to be reached some day. There may be in her heart some
latent hope to meet there the love denied her here,—that she shall find him
whom she lost, and that then she will not be all-unworthy. Who blames her?
Something is lost in the passage of every soul from one eternity to the other,—
something pure and beautiful, which might have been and was not: a hope, a
talent, a love, over which the soul mourns, like Esau deprived of his birthright.
What blame to the meek Quaker, if she took her lost hope to make the hills of
heaven more fair?
Nothing remains to tell that the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this figure
of the mill-woman cut in korl. I have it here in a corner of my library. I keep it
hid behind a curtain,—it is such a rough, ungainly thing. Yet there are about it
touches, grand sweeps of outline, that show a master’s hand. Sometimes,—tonight, for instance,—the curtain is accidentally drawn back, and I see a bare arm
stretched out imploringly in the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching
mine: a wan, woful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter looks
out, with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work. Its pale, vague
lips seem to tremble with a terrible question. “Is this the End?” they say,—
“nothing beyond? no more?” Why, you tell me you have seen that look in the
eyes of dumb brutes,—horses dying under the lash. I know.
The deep of the night is passing while I write. The gas-light wakens from the
shadows here and there the objects which lie scattered through the room: only
faintly, though; for they belong to the open sunlight. As I glance at them, they
each recall some task or pleasure of the coming day. A half-moulded child’s
head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest-leaves; music; work; homely fragments, in
which lie the secrets of all eternal truth and beauty. Prophetic all! Only this
dumb, woful face seems to belong to and end with the night. I turn to look at it.
Has the power of its desperate need commanded the darkness away? While the
30
room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its
head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud
to the far East, where, in the flickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the
promise of the Dawn.
“On Resistance to Civil Government”
Henry David Thoreau
I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”;
and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.
Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe – “That
government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared
for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are
usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections
which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and
weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing
government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government.
The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have
chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before
the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of
comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their
tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this
measure.
This American government – what is it but a tradition, though a recent one,
endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing
some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for
a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people
themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have
some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of
government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men
can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is
excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any
enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep
the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character
inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and
it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got
in its way. For government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in
letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the
governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made
of india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which
legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these
men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their
intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those
mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.
2
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves
no –government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a
better government. Let every man make known what kind of government
would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of
the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is
not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems
fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a
government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice,
even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which
majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? – in which
majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is
applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his
conscience to the legislation? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think
that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to
cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation
which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly
enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of
conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a
whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are
daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue
respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal,
privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and
dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and
consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a
palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in
which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they?
Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some
unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a
man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with
its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out
alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral
accompaniments, though it may be,
“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.”
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines,
with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers,
3
constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise
whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a
level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be
manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more
respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth
only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good
citizens. Others – as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders – serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any
moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as
God. A very few – as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense,
and men – serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it
for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. A wise man
will only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole
to keep the wind away,” but leave that office to his dust at least:
“I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a secondary at control,
Or useful serving-man and instrument
To any sovereign state throughout the world.”
He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and
selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor
and philanthropist.
How does it become a man to behave toward this American government
today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot
for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is
the slave’s government also.
All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse
allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency
are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But
such was the case, they think, in the Revolution Of ‘75. If one were to tell me
that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities
brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it,
for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this
does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to
make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and
oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any
longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has
undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly
overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think
that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes
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this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own,
but ours is the invading army.
Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on
the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation
into expediency; and he proceeds to say that “so long as the interest of the
whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot
be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of God… that
the established government be obeyed – and no longer. This principle being
admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a
computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and
of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says,
every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have
contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in
which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I
have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him
though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But
he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease
to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence
as a people.
In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does any one think that
Massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present crisis?
“A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut,
To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.”
Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a
hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants
and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than
they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to
Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who,
near at home, cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and
without whom the latter would be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that the
mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not
materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so important that many
should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere;
for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinion
opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end
to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit
down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do,
and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of
free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from
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Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the
price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they
regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with
effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they
may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a
feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are
nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man. But it is
easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary
guardian of it.
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight
moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and
betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I
cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that
that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation,
therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing
nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should
prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it
to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the
action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the
abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because
there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the
only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his
own freedom by his vote.
I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the
selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men
who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent,
intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not
have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count
upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country
who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so
called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country,
when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one
of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is
himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more
worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have
been bought. O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone
in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault:
the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a
square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one. Does not America offer any
inducement for men to settle here? The American has dwindled into an Odd
Fellow –one who may be known by the development of his organ of
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gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance; whose
first and chief concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses
are in good repair; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to
collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be; who, in
short, ventures to live only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance company, which
has promised to bury him decently.
It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the
eradication of any, even the most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have
other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it,
and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I
devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least,
that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off
him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too. See what gross
inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should
like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves,
or to march to Mexico; – see if I would go”; and yet these very men have each,
directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished
a substitute. The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by
those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the
war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets
at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it differed one to
scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a
moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all
made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness. After the first
blush of sin comes its indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were,
unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue
to sustain it. The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly
liable, the noble are most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of
the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and
support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently
the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve
the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not
dissolve it themselves – the union between…
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