_ I was born in the working-class. Early I discovered enthusiasm,
ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became the problem of my
child-life. My environment was crude and rough and raw. I had no
outlook, but an uplook rather. My place in society was at the
bottom. Here life offered nothing but sordidness and wretchedness,
both of the flesh and the spirit; for here flesh and spirit were
alike starved and tormented.
Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to my mind the
only way out was up. Into this edifice I early resolved to climb.
Up above, men wore black clothes and boiled shirts, and women dressed
in beautiful gowns. Also, there were good things to eat, and there
was plenty to eat. This much for the flesh. Then there were the
things of the spirit. Up above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses of
the spirit, clean and noble thinking, keen intellectual living. I
knew all this because I read "Seaside Library" novels, in which, with
the exception of the villains and adventuresses, all men and women
thought beautiful thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed
glorious deeds. In short, as I accepted the rising of the sun, I
accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble and
gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that made
life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and
misery.
But it is not particularly easy for one to climb up out of the
working-class--especially if he is handicapped by the possession of
ideals and illusions. I lived on a ranch in California, and was hard
put to find the ladder whereby to climb. I early inquired the rate
of interest on invested money, and worried my child's brain into an
understanding of the virtues and excellences of that remarkable
invention of man, compound interest. Further, I ascertained the
current rates of wages for workers of all ages, and the cost of
living. From all this data I concluded that if I began immediately
and worked and saved until I was fifty years of age, I could then
stop working and enter into participation in a fair portion of the
delights and goodnesses that would then be open to me higher up in
society. Of course, I resolutely determined not to marry, while I
quite forgot to consider at all that great rock of disaster in the
working-class world--sickness.
But the life that was in me demanded more than a meagre existence of
scraping and scrimping. Also, at ten years of age, I became a
newsboy on the streets of a city, and found myself with a changed
uplook. All about me were still the same sordidness and
wretchedness, and up above me was still the same paradise waiting to
be gained; but the ladder whereby to climb was a different one. It
was now the ladder of business. Why save my earnings and invest in
government bonds, when, by buying two newspapers for five cents, with
a turn of the wrist I could sell them for ten cents and double my
capital? The business ladder was the ladder for me, and I had a
vision of myself becoming a bald-headed and successful merchant
prince.
Alas for visions! When I was sixteen I had already earned the title
of "prince." But this title was given me by a gang of cut-throats
and thieves, by whom I was called "The Prince of the Oyster Pirates."
And at that time I had climbed the first rung of the business ladder.
I was a capitalist. I owned a boat and a complete oyster-pirating
outfit. I had begun to exploit my fellow-creatures. I had a crew of
one man. As captain and owner I took two-thirds of the spoils, and
gave the crew one-third, though the crew worked just as hard as I did
and risked just as much his life and liberty.
This one rung was the height I climbed up the business ladder. One
night I went on a raid amongst the Chinese fishermen. Ropes and nets
were worth dollars and cents. It was robbery, I grant, but it was
precisely the spirit of capitalism. The capitalist takes away the
possessions of his fellow-creatures by means of a rebate, or of a
betrayal of trust, or by the purchase of senators and supreme-court
judges. I was merely crude. That was the only difference. I used a
gun.
But my crew that night was one of those inefficients against whom the
capitalist is wont to fulminate, because, forsooth, such inefficients
increase expenses and reduce dividends. My crew did both. What of
his carelessness he set fire to the big mainsail and totally
destroyed it. There weren't any dividends that night, and the
Chinese fishermen were richer by the nets and ropes we did not get.
I was bankrupt, unable just then to pay sixty-five dollars for a new
mainsail. I left my boat at anchor and went off on a bay-pirate boat
on a raid up the Sacramento River. While away on this trip, another
gang of bay pirates raided my boat. They stole everything, even the
anchors; and later on, when I recovered the drifting hulk, I sold it
for twenty dollars. I had slipped back the one rung I had climbed,
and never again did I attempt the business ladder.
From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other capitalists. I had
the muscle, and they made money out of it while I made but a very
indifferent living out of it. I was a sailor before the mast, a
longshoreman, a roustabout; I worked in canneries, and factories, and
laundries; I mowed lawns, and cleaned carpets, and washed windows.
And I never got the full product of my toil. I looked at the
daughter of the cannery owner, in her carriage, and knew that it was
my muscle, in part, that helped drag along that carriage on its
rubber tyres. I looked at the son of the factory owner, going to
college, and knew that it was my muscle that helped, in part, to pay
for the wine and good fellowship he enjoyed.
But I did not resent this. It was all in the game. They were the
strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve my way to a place
amongst them and make money out of the muscles of other men. I was
not afraid of work. I loved hard work. I would pitch in and work
harder than ever and eventually become a pillar of society.
And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that was of
the same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more than willing
that I should work. I thought I was learning a trade. In reality, I
had displaced two men. I thought he was making an electrician out of
me; as a matter of fact, he was making fifty dollars per month out of
me. The two men I had displaced had received forty dollars each per
month; I was doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month.
This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may love oysters, but
too many oysters will disincline him toward that particular diet.
And so with me. Too much work sickened me. I did not wish ever to
see work again. I fled from work. I became a tramp, begging my way
from door to door, wandering over the United States and sweating
bloody sweats in slums and prisons.
I had been born in the working-class, and I was now, at the age of
eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in
the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery
about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the
pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-
house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of
society that society chooses to ignore. Lack of space compels me
here to ignore it, and I shall say only that the things I there saw
gave me a terrible scare.
I was scared into thinking. I saw the naked simplicities of the
complicated civilization in which I lived. Life was a matter of food
and shelter. In order to get food and shelter men sold things. The
merchant sold shoes, the politician sold his manhood, and the
representative of the people, with exceptions, of course, sold his
trust; while nearly all sold their honour. Women, too, whether on
the street or in the holy bond of wedlock, were prone to sell their
flesh. All things were commodities, all people bought and sold. The
one commodity that labour had to sell was muscle. The honour of
labour had no price in the marketplace. Labour had muscle, and
muscle alone, to sell.
But there was a difference, a vital difference. Shoes and trust and
honour had a way of renewing themselves. They were imperishable
stocks. Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew. As the shoe
merchant sold shoes, he continued to replenish his stock. But there
was no way of replenishing the labourer's stock of muscle. The more
he sold of his muscle, the less of it remained to him. It was his
one commodity, and each day his stock of it diminished. In the end,
if he did not die before, he sold out and put up his shutters. He
was a muscle bankrupt, and nothing remained to him but to go down
into the cellar of society and perish miserably.
I learned, further, that brain was likewise a commodity. It, too,
was different from muscle. A brain seller was only at his prime when
he was fifty or sixty years old, and his wares were fetching higher
prices than ever. But a labourer was worked out or broken down at
forty-five or fifty. I had been in the cellar of society, and I did
not like the place as a habitation. The pipes and drains were
unsanitary, and the air was bad to breathe. If I could not live on
the parlour floor of society, I could, at any rate, have a try at the
attic. It was true, the diet there was slim, but the air at least
was pure. So I resolved to sell no more muscle, and to become a
vendor of brains.
Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge. I returned to California
and opened the books. While thus equipping myself to become a brain
merchant, it was inevitable that I should delve into sociology.
There I found, in a certain class of books, scientifically
formulated, the simple sociological concepts I had already worked out
for myself. Other and greater minds, before I was born, had worked
out all that I had thought and a vast deal more. I discovered that I
was a socialist.
The socialists were revolutionists, inasmuch as they struggled to
overthrow the society of the present, and out of the material to
build the society of the future. I, too, was a socialist and a
revolutionist. I joined the groups of working-class and intellectual
revolutionists, and for the first time came into intellectual living.
Here I found keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits; for here I
met strong and alert-brained, withal horny-handed, members of the
working-class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their Christianity for
any congregation of Mammon-worshippers; professors broken on the
wheel of university subservience to the ruling class and flung out
because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply to
the affairs of mankind.
Here I found, also, warm faith in the human, glowing idealism,
sweetnesses of unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom--all the
splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was clean, noble,
and alive. Here life rehabilitated itself, became wonderful and
glorious; and I was glad to be alive. I was in touch with great
souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to
whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the
pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire. All
about me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days
and nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with before
my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ's own
Grail, the warm human, long-suffering and maltreated, but to be
rescued and saved at the last.
And I, poor foolish I, deemed all this to be a mere foretaste of the
delights of living I should find higher above me in society. I had
lost many illusions since the day I read "Seaside Library" novels on
the California ranch. I was destined to lose many of the illusions I
still retained.
As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened its portals to
me. I entered right in on the parlour floor, and my disillusionment
proceeded rapidly. I sat down to dinner with the masters of society,
and with the wives and daughters of the masters of society. The
women were gowned beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I
discovered that they were of the same clay as all the rest of the
women I had known down below in the cellar. "The colonel's lady and
Judy O'Grady were sisters under their skins"--and gowns.
It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that shocked
me. It is true, these beautifully gowned, beautiful women prattled
sweet little ideals and dear little moralities; but in spite of their
prattle the dominant key of the life they lived was materialistic.
And they were so sentimentally selfish! They assisted in all kinds
of sweet little charities, and informed one of the fact, while all
the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were
bought out of dividends stained with the blood of child labour, and
sweated labour, and of prostitution itself. When I mentioned such
facts, expecting in my innocence that these sisters of Judy O'Grady
would at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and jewels, they
became excited and angry, and read me preachments about the lack of
thrift, the drink, and the innate depravity that caused all the
misery in society's cellar. When I mentioned that I couldn't quite
see that it was the lack of thrift, the intemperance, and the
depravity of a half-starved child of six that made it work twelve
hours every night in a Southern cotton mill, these sisters of Judy
O'Grady attacked my private life and called me an "agitator"--as
though that, forsooth, settled the argument.
Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. I had expected to
find men who were clean, noble, and alive, whose ideals were clean,
noble, and alive. I went about amongst the men who sat in the high
places--the preachers, the politicians, the business men, the
professors, and the editors. I ate meat with them, drank wine with
them, automobiled with them, and studied them. It is true, I found
many that were clean and noble; but with rare exceptions, they were
not ALIVE. I do verily believe I could count the exceptions on the
fingers of my two hands. Where they were not alive with rottenness,
quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead--clean
and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive. In this
connection I may especially mention the professors I met, the men who
live up to that decadent university ideal, "the passionless pursuit
of passionless intelligence."
I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in their
diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons
with which to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met men
incoherent with indignation at the brutality of prize-fighting, and
who, at the same time, were parties to the adulteration of food that
killed each year more babies than even red-handed Herod had killed.
I talked in hotels and clubs and homes and Pullmans, and steamer-
chairs with captains of industry, and marvelled at how little
travelled they were in the realm of intellect. On the other hand, I
discovered that their intellect, in the business sense, was
abnormally developed. Also, I discovered that their morality, where
business was concerned, was nil.
This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman, was a dummy director
and a tool of corporations that secretly robbed widows and orphans.
This gentleman, who collected fine editions and was an especial
patron of literature, paid blackmail to a heavy-jowled, black-browed
boss of a municipal machine. This editor, who published patent
medicine advertisements and did not dare print the truth in his paper
about said patent medicines for fear of losing the advertising,
called me a scoundrelly demagogue because I told him that his
political economy was antiquated and that his biology was
contemporaneous with Pliny.
This senator was the tool and the slave, the little puppet of a
gross, uneducated machine boss; so was this governor and this supreme
court judge; and all three rode on railroad passes. This man,
talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties of idealism and the
goodness of God, had just betrayed his comrades in a business deal.
This man, a pillar of the church and heavy contributor to foreign
missions, worked his shop girls ten hours a day on a starvation wage
and thereby directly encouraged prostitution. This man, who endowed
chairs in universities, perjured himself in courts of law over a
matter of dollars and cents. And this railroad magnate broke his
word as a gentleman and a Christian when he granted a secret rebate
to one of two captains of industry locked together in a struggle to
the death.
It was the same everywhere, crime and betrayal, betrayal and crime--
men who were alive, but who were neither clean nor noble, men who
were clean and noble, but who were not alive. Then there was a
great, hopeless mass, neither noble nor alive, but merely clean. It
did not sin positively nor deliberately; but it did sin passively and
ignorantly by acquiescing in the current immorality and profiting by
it. Had it been noble and alive it would not have been ignorant, and
it would have refused to share in the profits of betrayal and crime.
I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlour floor of
society. Intellectually I was as bored. Morally and spiritually I
was sickened. I remembered my intellectuals and idealists, my
unfrocked preachers, broken professors, and clean-minded, class-
conscious working-men. I remembered my days and nights of sunshine
and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual
paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. And I saw
before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.
So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born and
where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. The imposing edifice
of society above my head holds no delights for me. It is the
foundation of the edifice that interests me. There I am content to
labour, crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with intellectuals,
idealists, and class-conscious working-men, getting a solid pry now
and again and setting the whole edifice rocking. Some day, when we
get a few more hands and crowbars to work, we'll topple it over,
along with all its rotten life and unburied dead, its monstrous
selfishness and sodden materialism. Then we'll cleanse the cellar
and build a new habitation for mankind, in which there will be no
parlour floor, in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and
where the air that is breathed will be clean, noble, and alive.
Such is my outlook. I look forward to a time when man shall progress
upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will
be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-
day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in
the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual
sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-
day. And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some
Frenchman has said, "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the
wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending."
NEWTON, IOWA.
November 1905.
THE END.
Revolution and Other Essays, by Jack London. _