CHAPTER XXV.
THE STRIKERS.
Presently, as we were crossing Boston Common, absorbed in conversation, ashadow fell athwart the way, and looking up, I saw towering above us asculptured group of heroic size.
"Who are these?" I exclaimed.
"You ought to know if any one," said the doctor. "They are contemporariesof yours who were making a good deal of disturbance in your day."
But, indeed, it had only been as an involuntary expression of surprisethat I had questioned what the figures stood for.
Let me tell you, readers of the twentieth century, what I saw up there onthe pedestal, and you will recognize the world-famous group. Shoulder toshoulder, as if rallied to resist assault, were three figures of men inthe garb of the laboring class of my time. They were bareheaded, andtheir coarse-textured shirts, rolled above the elbow and open at thebreast, showed the sinewy arms and chest. Before them, on the ground, laya pair of shovels and a pickaxe. The central figure, with the right handextended, palm outward, was pointing to the discarded tools. The arms ofthe other two were folded on their breasts. The faces were coarse andhard in outline and bristled with unkempt beards. Their expression wasone of dogged defiance, and their gaze was fixed with such scowlingintensity upon the void space before them that I involuntarily glancedbehind me to see what they were looking at. There were two women also inthe group, as coarse of dress and features as the men. One was kneelingbefore the figure on the right, holding up to him with one arm anemaciated, half-clad infant, while with the other she indicated theimplements at his feet with an imploring gesture. The second of the womenwas plucking by the sleeve the man on the left as if to draw him back,while with the other hand she covered her eyes. But the men heeded thewomen not at all, or seemed, in their bitter wrath, to know that theywere there.
"Why," I exclaimed, "these are strikers!"
"Yes," said the doctor, "this is The Strikers, Huntington's masterpiece,considered the greatest group of statuary in the city and one of thegreatest in the country."
"Those people are alive!" I said.
"That is expert testimony," replied the doctor. "It is a pity Huntingtondied too soon to hear it. He would have been pleased."
Now, I, in common with the wealthy and cultured class generally, of myday, had always held strikers in contempt and abhorrence, as blundering,dangerous marplots, as ignorant of their own best interests as they werereckless of other people's, and generally as pestilent fellows, whosedemonstrations, so long as they were not violent, could not unfortunatelybe repressed by force, but ought always to be condemned, and promptly putdown with an iron hand the moment there was an excuse for policeinterference. There was more or less tolerance among the well-to-do, forsocial reformers, who, by book or voice, advocated even very radicaleconomic changes so long as they observed the conventionalities ofspeech, but for the striker there were few apologists. Of course, thecapitalists emptied on him the vials of their wrath and contempt, andeven people who thought they sympathized with the working class shooktheir heads at the mention of strikes, regarding them as calculatedrather to hinder than help the emancipation of labor. Bred as I was inthese prejudices, it may not seem strange that I was taken aback atfinding such unpromising subjects selected for the highest place in thecity.
"There is no doubt as to the excellence of the artist's work," I said,"but what was there about the strikers that has made you pick them out ofour generation as objects of veneration?"
"We see in them," replied the doctor, "the pioneers in the revolt againstprivate capitalism which brought in the present civilization. We honorthem as those who, like Winkelried, 'made way for liberty, and died.' Werevere in them the protomartyrs of co-operative industry and economicequality."
"But I can assure you, doctor, that these fellows, at least in my day,had not the slightest idea of revolting against private capitalism as asystem. They were very ignorant and quite incapable of grasping so largea conception. They had no notion of getting along without capitalists.All they imagined as possible or desirable was a little better treatmentby their employers, a few cents more an hour, a few minutes less workingtime a day, or maybe merely the discharge of an unpopular foreman. Themost they aimed at was some petty improvement in their condition, toattain which they did not hesitate to throw the whole industrial machineinto disorder."
"All which we moderns know quite well," replied the doctor. "Look atthose faces. Has the sculptor idealized them? Are they the faces ofphilosophers? Do they not bear out your statement that the strikers, likethe working-men generally, were, as a rule, ignorant, narrow-minded men,with no grasp of large questions, and incapable of so great an idea asthe overthrow of an immemorial economic order? It is quite true thatuntil some years after you fell asleep they did not realize that theirquarrel was with private capitalism and not with individual capitalists.In this slowness of awakening to the full meaning of their revolt theywere precisely on a par with the pioneers of all the great libertyrevolutions. The minutemen at Concord and Lexington, in 1775, did notrealize that they were pointing their guns at the monarchical idea. Aslittle did the third estate of France, when it entered the Convention in1789, realize that its road lay over the ruins of the throne. As littledid the pioneers of English freedom, when they began to resist the willof Charles I, foresee that they would be compelled, before they gotthrough, to take his head. In none of these instances, however, hasposterity considered that the limited foresight of the pioneers as to thefull consequences of their action lessened the world's debt to the crudeinitiative, without which the fuller triumph would never have come. Thelogic of the strike meant the overthrow of the irresponsible conduct ofindustry, whether the strikers knew it or not, and we can not rejoice inthe consequences of that overthrow without honoring them in a way whichvery likely, as you intimate, would surprise them, could they know of it,as much as it does you. Let me try to give you the modern point of viewas to the part played by their originals." We sat down upon one of thebenches before the statue, and the doctor went on:
"My dear Julian, who was it, pray, that first roused the world of yourday to the fact that there was an industrial question, and by theirpathetic demonstrations of passive resistance to wrong for fifty yearskept the public attention fixed on that question till it was settled? Wasit your statesmen, perchance your economists, your scholars, or any otherof your so-called wise men? No. It was just those despised, ridiculed,cursed, and hooted fellows up there on that pedestal who with theirperpetual strikes would not let the world rest till their wrong, whichwas also the whole world's wrong, was righted. Once more had God chosenthe foolish things of this world to confound the wise, the weak things toconfound the mighty.
"In order to realize how powerfully these strikes operated to impressupon the people the intolerable wickedness and folly of privatecapitalism, you must remember that events are what teach men, that deedshave a far more potent educating influence than any amount of doctrine,and especially so in an age like yours, when the masses had almost noculture or ability to reason. There were not lacking in the revolutionaryperiod many cultured men and women, who, with voice and pen, espoused theworkers' cause, and showed them the way out; but their words might wellhave availed little but for the tremendous emphasis with which they wereconfirmed by the men up there, who starved to prove them true. Thoserough-looking fellows, who probably could not have constructed agrammatical sentence, by their combined efforts, were demonstrating thenecessity of a radically new industrial system by a more convincingargument than any rhetorician's skill could frame. When men take theirlives in their hands to resist oppression, as those men did, other menare compelled to give heed to them. We have inscribed on the pedestalyonder, where you see the lettering, the words, which the action of thegroup above seems to voice:
"'We can bear no more. It is better to starve than live on the terms yougive us. Our lives, the lives of our wives and of our children, we setagainst your gains. If you put your foot upon our neck, we will bite yourheel!'
"In your age, I know, Julian," the doctor went on in a gentler tone, "itwas customary to associate valor with the clang of arms and the pomp andcircumstance of war. But the echo of the fife and drum comes very faintlyup to us, and moves us not at all. The soldier has had his day, andpassed away forever with the ideal of manhood which he illustrated. Butthat group yonder stands for a type of self-devotion that appeals to usprofoundly. Those men risked their lives when they flung down the toolsof their trade, as truly as any soldiers going into battle, and took oddsas desperate, and not only for themselves, but for their families, whichno grateful country would care for in case of casualty to them. Thesoldier went forth cheered with music, and supported by the enthusiasm ofthe country, but these others were covered with ignominy and publiccontempt, and their failures and defeats were hailed with generalacclamation. And yet they sought not the lives of others, but only thatthey might barely live; and though they had first thought of the welfareof themselves, and those nearest them, yet not the less were theyfighting the fight of humanity and posterity in striking in the only waythey could, and while yet no one else dared strike at all, against theeconomic system that had the world by the throat, and would never relaxits grip by dint of soft words, or anything less than disabling blows.The clergy, the economists and the pedagogues, having left these ignorantmen to seek as they might the solution of the social problem, while theythemselves sat at ease and denied that there was any problem, were veryvoluble in their criticisms of the mistakes of the workingmen, as if itwere possible to make any mistake in seeking a way out of the socialchaos, which could be so fatuous or so criminal as the mistake of nottrying to seek any. No doubt, Julian, I have put finer words in themouths of those men up there than their originals might have evenunderstood, but if the meaning was not in their words it was in theirdeeds. And it is for what they did, not for what they said, that we honorthem as protomartyrs of the industrial republic of to-day, and bring ourchildren, that they may kiss in gratitude the rough-shod feet of thosewho made the way for us."
My experiences since I waked up in this year 2000 might be said to haveconsisted of a succession of instantaneous mental readjustments of arevolutionary character, in which what had formerly seemed evil to me hadbecome good, and what had seemed wisdom had become foolishness. Had thisconversation about the strikers taken place anywhere else, the entirelynew impression I had received of the part played by them in the greatsocial revolution of which I shared the benefit would simply have beenone more of these readjustments, and the process entirely a mental one.But the presence of this wondrous group, the lifelikeness of the figuresgrowing on my gaze as I listened to the doctor's words, imparted apeculiar personal quality--if I may use the term--to the revulsion offeeling that I experienced. Moved by an irresistible impulse, I rose tomy feet, and, removing my hat, saluted the grim forms whose livingoriginals I had joined my contemporaries in reviling.
The doctor smiled gravely.
"Do you know, my boy," he said, "it is not often that the whirligig ofTime brings round his revenges in quite so dramatic a way as this?"
Equality Page 25