Chapter 24
In the morning I went down stairs early in the hope of seeing Edithalone. In this, however, I was disappointed. Not finding her in thehouse, I sought her in the garden, but she was not there. In the courseof my wanderings I visited the underground chamber, and sat down thereto rest. Upon the reading table in the chamber several periodicals andnewspapers lay, and thinking that Dr. Leete might be interested inglancing over a Boston daily of 1887, I brought one of the papers withme into the house when I came.
At breakfast I met Edith. She blushed as she greeted me, but wasperfectly self-possessed. As we sat at table, Dr. Leete amused himselfwith looking over the paper I had brought in. There was in it, as inall the newspapers of that date, a great deal about the labor troubles,strikes, lockouts, boycotts, the programmes of labor parties, and thewild threats of the anarchists.
"By the way," said I, as the doctor read aloud to us some of theseitems, "what part did the followers of the red flag take in theestablishment of the new order of things? They were making considerablenoise the last thing that I knew."
"They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of course,"replied Dr. Leete. "They did that very effectually while they lasted,for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best consideredprojects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of thosefellows was one of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform."
"Subsidizing them!" I exclaimed in astonishment.
"Certainly," replied Dr. Leete. "No historical authority nowadaysdoubts that they were paid by the great monopolies to wave the red flagand talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order, byalarming the timid, to head off any real reforms. What astonishes memost is that you should have fallen into the trap so unsuspectingly."
"What are your grounds for believing that the red flag party wassubsidized?" I inquired.
"Why simply because they must have seen that their course made athousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend. Not to supposethat they were hired for the work is to credit them with aninconceivable folly.[1] In the United States, of all countries, noparty could intelligently expect to carry its point without firstwinning over to its ideas a majority of the nation, as the nationalparty eventually did."
"The national party!" I exclaimed. "That must have arisen after my day.I suppose it was one of the labor parties."
"Oh no!" replied the doctor. "The labor parties, as such, never couldhave accomplished anything on a large or permanent scale. For purposesof national scope, their basis as merely class organizations was toonarrow. It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and socialsystem on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient productionof wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, butequally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, oldand young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any prospectthat it would be achieved. Then the national party arose to carry itout by political methods. It probably took that name because its aimwas to nationalize the functions of production and distribution.Indeed, it could not well have had any other name, for its purpose wasto realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur and completenessnever before conceived, not as an association of men for certain merelypolitical functions affecting their happiness only remotely andsuperficially, but as a family, a vital union, a common life, a mightyheaven-touching tree whose leaves are its people, fed from its veins,and feeding it in turn. The most patriotic of all possible parties, itsought to justify patriotism and raise it from an instinct to arational devotion, by making the native land truly a father land, afather who kept the people alive and was not merely an idol for whichthey were expected to die."
[1] I fully admit the difficulty of accounting for the course of theanarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidized by thecapitalists, but at the same time, there is no doubt that the theory iswholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at the time by any one,though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect.