Chapter 4

By what extraordinary process does Comstockery conjure decency into the stomach and indecency into the bowels? But how rejoiced we should be that it is no worse than indecent to speak of the receptacle of the intestines by its common name. By some hocus pocus of which Comstockery is easily capable it might have been obscene to speak of the digestive process or of any of the digestive organs. We might easily have been taught that digestion was a moral matter, not to be talked of, not to be studied; ignorance of which was a virtue, knowledge of which a crime. And then, under those conditions, if a person, possessed of a little knowledge such as might have crept stealthily down the ages, were in a fine humanitarian spirit to dare to publish some of the things he knew in order to help dyspeptic humanity, he would have been robbed of his worldly goods and clapped forthwith into jail. Fancy that under such circumstances a man who had lived his three score and ten years and had learned something from his own suffering and experience, something from the secretly imparted information of others, might not say a word to help his fellows. Is it not too absurd to contemplate without both tears and laughter that that man who should plead with his fellow men to abstain from habitually living on butter cakes and coffee, should be charged with obscenity and imprisoned in consequence? And imagine some sapient postoffice official solemnly declaring that any discussion of digestion is obscene! Consider how the land would be flooded with literature describing the pleasures of gluttony and depicting impossible gastronomic feats! Consider, too, trying to cure indigestion and to suppress the orgies of our children in pies, crullers, fritters and butter cakes by the naive device of forbidding all knowledge of the digestive function and making the utterance of the name of a digestive organ an obscenity punishable by fine and imprisonment!

Digestion is a matter to be considered in the light of hygiene. So is sex. Digestion is not in itself either moral or immoral. Neither is sex. But there is the most hideous immorality in the ascription of obscenity to sex, sex function or any phase of sex life. And this is the crime of Comstockery. It has reared an awful idol to which have been sacrificed the best of our youth; with hypocrisy the high-priest, ignorance the creed, and pruriency the detective.

Comstockery strikes at the very root of life. It forbids that we shall know how to live our best; it forbids that we shall know how to save our children from the perils we have so discreditably passed through; it raises barriers of false modesty between parents and children by branding the very science of life an obscenity. Owing to the shocking suggestions of Comstockery all that relates to life is degraded into the gutter; and that which would be pure and sweet and wholesome in the home or in the school, becomes filthy Comstockery on the snickering lips of ignorant play-fellows.

The wonder is that we have endured the nasty thing for so long a time. We have been boys and girls and have gone from our parents to our school-mates and play-fellows for the information to which we are entitled by very reason of living, but, more than all; because of our need to live right. We all know the hideous untruths we were told because of Comstockery; we all know how much we had to unlearn, and how great the suffering mentally, how great the deterioration physically in the unlearning; we all know our unfitness for parentage at the time we entered it; every man knows how the brothels kept open doors and beckoning inmates by the thousand for his undoing. And yet we endure it--Comstockery.

It is such a subtly pervasive thing, this Comstockery, it steals in wherever it can and puts the taint of its own uncleanness on whatever it touches. Clothing becomes a matter of Comstockery. We do not always see it, but such is the fact. We do not wear clothing for convenience, but to cover our nakedness. You see nakedness is obscene. Not in itself, but only in man. You may take a naked dog on the street, but not a naked human being. The summer previous to the last one was a very hot one in New York, and a poor wretch of a boy of fourteen years of age, being on the top floor of a crowded tenement was half crazed by the heat and the lack of fresh air, of which there was absolutely none in the closet in which he was trying to sleep. He ran down into the street nude at two o'clock in the morning in the hope of finding a surcease of his distress. A policeman saw him, remembered his blushing Comstockery in time and haled the poor lad off to a cell. The next morning the magistrate in tones of grimmest virtue sent the boy to the reformatory, remarking with appropriate jest that the young scoundrel might have seven years in which to learn to keep his clothes on.

Theodore Roosevelt, who is at once the greatest President and the wisest man of whom we have any record, tells us that we must breed more children. But how shall our women bear more children, or presently bear any, if they are to be continually made more and more unfit for motherhood by the pitfalls into which their ignorance of the science of life leads them? Because of the Comstockery which has its felt grip upon our throats we may not instruct the little child in the way of health; or if it be said that there is nothing to prevent the parent from instructing the child, yet it must be insisted that the parent has no means of knowing since Comstockery prescribes ignorance as the only way to innocence; and innocent our girls must be at any cost. Besides, the average mother, if she will but admit the truth, is ashamed to talk with her daughter about Comstockery things. We all know that this is so. Our parents treated us in such fashion, and we are so treating our children.

The knowledge which each generation acquires at the cost of health, yes, at the cost of life even, dies with it, for the most part. The one thing we most need to know is how to live; the science of life begins with sex, goes on with sex, ends with sex; but sex we may not discuss; thus we go on in ignorance of life. Shall it remain so? Is Comstockery to be our best expression of the most vital matter of existence? Life, sex, should be and is when we recognize it, the purest, sweetest, simplest subject of discussion; and we make of it a filthy jest. We will not tell our sons the things we have learned through bitter experience, because we cannot bear the shame of discussing sex subjects with them, because of the accursed Comstockery that is within us; but we will go to the club and the bar room, or anywhere behind locked doors in the select company of our fellows, and there pour out the real essence of our Comstockery in stories which make a filthy jest of sex. Every man knows this is the truth. Perhaps women, in their Comstockery, know it too. As has been already said, treat digestion as sex is treated, and it will be sniggered over behind locked doors in precisely the same way.

Let us rid ourselves of the fatal, prurient restrictions on sex discussion and in a marvellously short time we shall have a store of sweet knowledge on the subject that will enable us to live well ourselves and fit us to bring into the world such children as will amaze us with their health of body and purity of mind. No alteration of the facts of life is necessary, but only a change of attitude. Why, when Trilby brought the bare foot into prominence, it was gravely debated whether or not such an indecency should be permitted. It was assumed that a naked foot was indecent. Why a foot more than a hand? Why any one part of the body more than another? Comstockery! Comstockery!

DON QUIXOTE AND HAMLET

In Peter Kropotkin's Book: "Russian Literature" (published by McClure, Phillips & Company), there is a quotation from Turgenieff's works, which shows the Russian poet's genius and psychological insight in all its wonderful depth. Here it is:

"Don Quixote is imbued with devotion towards his ideal, for which he is ready to suffer all possible privations, to sacrifice his life; life itself he values only so far as it can serve for the incarnation of the ideal, for the promotion of truth, of justice on earth.... He lives for his brothers, for opposing the forces hostile to mankind: the witches, the giants--that is, the oppressors.... Therefore he is fearless, patient; he is satisfied with the most modest food, the poorest cloth: he has other things to think of. Humble in his heart, he is great and daring in his mind.... And who is Hamlet? Analysis, first of all, and egotism, and therefore no faith. He lives entirely for himself, he is an egotist; but to believe in one' self--even an egotist cannot do that: we can believe only in something which is outside us and above us.... As he has doubts of everything, Hamlet evidently does not spare himself; his intellect is too developed to remain satisfied with what he finds in himself; he feels his weakness, but each self-consciousness is a force where-from results his irony, the opposite of the enthusiasm of Don Quixote.... Don Quixote, a poor man, almost a beggar, without means and relations, old, isolated--undertakes to redress all the evils and to protect oppressed strangers over the whole world. What does it matter to him that his first attempt at freeing the innocent from his oppressor falls twice as heavy upon the head of the innocent himself?... What does it matter that, thinking that he has to deal with noxious giants, Don Quixote attacks useful windmills?... Nothing of the sort can ever happen with Hamlet: how could he, with his perspicacious, refined, sceptical mind, ever commit such a mistake! No, he will not fight with windmills, he does not believe in giants ... but he would not have attacked them even if they did exist.... And he does not believe in evil. Evil and deceit are his inveterate enemies. His scepticism is not indifferentism.... But in negation, as in fire, there is a destructive power, and how to keep it in bounds, how to tell it where to stop, when that which it must destroy, and that which it must spare are often inseparably welded together? Here it is that the often-noticed tragical aspect of human life comes in: for action we require will, and for action we require thought; but thought and will have parted from each other, and separate every day more and more....

"And thus the native hue of resolution Is sickled o'er by the pale cast of thought...."

ON THE BANKS OF ACHERON

By EDWIN BJORKMAN

The air was still and full of a gray melancholy light, yet the waters of the river boiled angrily as if touched by a raging tempest. The billows rose foaming above its surface, all white with the whiteness of fear. When they sank back again, they were black--black as despair that knows of no hope.

Steep hills mounted abruptly on either side of the river until they touched the sullen, colorless cloud-banks overhead. Their sides were seamed with numberless paths, running on narrow ledges, one above the other, from the river's edge to the crest of the hill. Men were moving along those paths: they swarmed like ants across the hillside, but I could not see whence they were coming nor whither they were going. All were pushing and jostling and scratching and howling and fighting. Every one's object seemed to be to raise himself to the path above his own and to prevent all others from doing the same.

Down at the water's edge, they moved in a solid mass, arms pinned down, shoulder to shoulder and chest to back. At times a man got an arm out of the press and began to claw the up-turned, tear-stained faces of his neighbors in wild endeavors to lift his whole body. But soon his madness subsided, the writhing arm sank back, and the man vanished out of sight. The mass once more moved stolidly, solidly onward. Once in a great while its surface of heads would begin to boil like the waters of the river near by, and a man would be spouted into the air, landing on one of the paths above. Then each face would be turned toward him for a breathless moment, at the end of which the mass glided slowly onward as before.

The crush on the paths higher up on the hillside was not so great, but the fighting of man against man was incessant and bitter. I could see them clambering up the steep sides of the ledges, with bleeding nails, distorted features and locked teeth. Waving arms and clutching fingers pursued them from below; ironshod heels trampled them from above. Ninety-nine out of the hundred ended their struggles with a fall, and in their rapid descent they swept others with them. But rising or falling, they all pushed onward, onward--from nowhere to nowhere, as it seemed to me. I watched them for hours, for days, for years--always the same wandering, the same scrambling, the same tumbling, without apparent purpose or result. Then my blood rose hotly to my heart and head. A scarlet mist floated before my eyes and my soul swelled within me almost unto bursting.

"Why?" I cried, and the word rolled back and forth between the hillsides until its last echo was swallowed by the murmur that hovered over the wrathful river. The strugglers on the hillside paths, each and all, turned toward me. On every face I read astonishment.

"Why?" I yelled at them again, and the sound of my voice lingered above the waters like a distant thunder. Gradually the expression on all those staring faces changed from wonder to scorn. A man on one of the paths near the crest of the hill laughed aloud. Two more joined him. It became contagious and spread like wildfire. All those millions were laughing into my face, laughing like demons rather than men.

My frown only increased the mirth of that grinning multitude. I shook my clenched, up-stretched fists against them. And when at last their ghastly merriment ceased, I raised my voice once more in defiance.

"Why?"

As when on a bleak winter day the black snow clouds suddenly begin to darken the sky, so hatred and rage spread over their faces. Crooked, bony fingers were pointed at me. Men leaned recklessly from their narrow ledges to shout abuse at me. Stones and mud were flung at me. A hundred arms seized me and tossed my body in a wide curve from the hillside out over the river. For one long minute I struggled to keep myself above the yawning waters. Then I sank. All grew dark about me. A strange fullness in my chest seemed to rise up toward my head. There was a last moment of consciousness in which I heard a single word uttered by a ringing, bell-like voice that came from within myself. That last word was:

"Why?"

The British Elections and the Labor Parties

By H. KELLY

"We are a left-center country; we live by compromise."

The above statement was made by an aged member of Parliament to Kropotkin some years ago, and the present elections testify strongly to the truth of that remark. For a country which produced the father of political economy, Adam Smith--for Scotland is included in our generalization--Robert Owen, the father of libertarian Socialism, which in the forties stood almost at the head of the Socialist movement in Europe, which has been the scene of so many Socialist and workingmen's congresses and has furnished a refuge for so many distinguished exiles, it is passing strange, to say the least, that up to the present no one has been elected to Parliament on a purely Socialist platform; this notwithstanding that, in the elections just past, of forty-three labor members elected nineteen are members of the Independent Labor Party and one of the Social Democratic Federation. John Burns was elected to Parliament just after the great Dock Strike on his trade-union record and has been elected regularly ever since, although he has long since ceased to be a Socialist. Keir Hardie was elected for West Ham as a Radical, and when he stood for re-election as a Socialist was defeated. In 1900 he was elected again as member for Merthyr Tydfill, a radical mining district in Wales, on a trade union-Socialist platform, and undoubtedly received a large number of votes on the ground of having been a miner once himself. R. B. Cunningham-Graham, probably the ablest Socialist who has yet sat in the British Parliament, was elected as a Radical, announcing himself a Socialist some time after his election.

The British workman, true to his traditions, has consistently demanded compromise before electing anyone, and where that has been refused, the candidates have gone down to defeat. Hyndman, founder of the Social Democratic Federation and the ablest Socialist in public life; Quelch, editor of "Justice," the official organ of that party, for more than a decade, and Geo. Lansbury, one of their oldest, ablest and most respected members, refused to compromise in the recent election, and paid the inevitable penalty. Hyndman's case was really remarkable, he is a man of exceptional ability, has devoted himself for twenty-five years to the Socialist and labor movement, was endorsed by all the labor bodies of Burnley, and Mr. Phillip Stanhope, recently created a lord and one of the ablest Liberal politicians in the country, did him the honor of declining to stand against him. Still he was defeated--while politicians of an inferior stamp like John Burns, Keir Hardie, J. R. MacDonald and two score of others were triumphantly elected on a labor platform. Therein lies the secret, they were elected on a "Labor Platform!" Eight-hour day, trade-union rate of wages, better factory legislation, secular education, annual sessions of Parliament, paid members, one man, one vote, etc. All excellent things in themselves, but not Socialism and in no way disputing the right of one man to exploit another and leaving untouched the basic principle of Socialism, real Socialism, the right of labor to the fruits of its toil.

Under conditions such as those described, is it to be wondered at that many Anarchists are frankly cynical as to the benefits labor will derive from the labor parties? There will be at least two, that have suddenly forced the gilded doors of the "Mother of Parliaments" and about which the guilty middle class grew nervous. We know that men like T. Burt, H. Broadhurst, W. Abraham, F. Madison and a score of others are but nominal labor men not having worked at their various trades for years and are middle class by training and income, that others like Keir Hardie, J. R. MacDonald, John Ward and many more are at best labor politicians so steeped in political bargaining and compromising that the net results to labor from them will be very small indeed. It is not necessary nor would it be just to question the honesty or well-meaning of many of the forty-three labor members, to prove that a distinct disappointment awaits those who elected them. Past history foretells the future clearly enough. We have seen John Burns, hero of the Dock Strike, who entered Parliament as a Revolutionary Socialist, becoming in a few short years as docile as a lamb to those above him in power and as autocratic as a Russian provincial governor to those who needed his assistance, finally enter a Liberal Cabinet with the "hero of Featherstone," H. H. Asquith, by whose orders striking miners were shot down in real American fashion, Sir Edward Grey, and other Jingo Imperialists--and the end is not yet. There are our other friends (?). H. Broadhurst, special favorite of the King; W. Abraham, ex-coal miner, who so endeared himself to the coal operators of Wales in his capacity as official of the Miners' Union and Scale Committee that when his daughter was married several years ago she received a cheque for L100 from one of the aforesaid operators, and others whom space forbids mentioning. Such is the material of which the labor parties now in the House of Commons is formed, and it requires a violent stretch of imagination to see any real, lasting benefit can accrue from the forty-three men now sitting there as representatives of the oppressed masses. An inability to see this, however, by no means implies a lack of inherent good in the formation of the Labor Representation Committee and the Miners' Federation, their fraternization with the Socialists and the forces which impelled that organization and fraternization. It is the agitation which preceded it, and we hope will continue, and the growing desire on the part of the workers for a larger share of the product of their toil and a part in the management of industry that we see hope. The form that movement has taken or the beneficial results from the efforts of the elected are details. It is scarcely five years since the Labor Representation Committee sprang into existence, and it says much for the solidarity of labor that over a million trade unionists, thirteen thousand members of the Independent Labor Party and eight hundred Fabians could be got together on a political program in so short a time.

For good or ill the British workingman has gone in for political action and will have a try at that before he listens to the Anarchists. Slow of thought and used to compromise, he is a stern taskmaker and will exact a rigid account of the stewardship entrusted to those who sought his suffrage. When the disillusionment comes, as it surely will, real progress may come. The process of disillusionment does not come with geometrical precision. To some it comes over night, to others it is a process of years, and to some it is denied altogether. For years the Anarchists have been scoffed at as impossible dreamers for advocating the General Strike as the only effective means of overthrowing the present system. The glorious fight of the Russian people for freedom has changed all this, and we find even Bebel threatening the German Government with a general strike if they attempt to withdraw the franchise; and Hyndman, who opposed it for years, has finally admitted its effectiveness. The effect has been felt in Great Britain in the shape of the unemployed agitations and demonstrations, and although temporarily allayed by the elections, it will blossom forth again.

If the advent of the Liberal party to power, backed by the Home Rule and Labor parties, causes an undoing of the harm of the Balfour-Chamberlain government, it will be more than can reasonably be expected. The trade unions can never be restored to quite the same legal immunity they had previously. The forty thousand Chinese imported into South Africa to take the places of white miners will remain even if no more are brought in. The Education Act, passed with the assistance of the Irish Archbishops and attacking secular education, will be amended and not repealed. The endowment of the brewers will continue, and my Lords Bass, Burton and the rest will merely await future opportunities to plunder the British public. In short, little constructive legislation, even of that mild and tentative character one might expect from a Liberal party, made up of capitalistic units can be expected after the ten years of corrupt and extravagant rule of this band of modern pirates.

They who advocate the complete reconstruction of society are under no illusions as to the time and trouble required to overcome the superstitions of the past. Being imbued, however, with the belief in what Christians call "the eternal righteousness of their cause," they meet the future with smiling face; and far from being downcast over the turn of events in Great Britain, see hope in the formation of the Labor Parties.

AND YOU?

BOLTON HALL

"What would you do," asked the Idealist, "if you were Czar of Russia?"

"I would first abolish monopoly of land, for that is fundamental," said the Reformer, "and then resign. What would you do?"