The Passionate Friends
that other aspect of our relations in which Gidding becomes impulse and
urgency. "Seeing we have these ideas," said he,--"and mind you there
must be others who have them or are getting to them, for nobody thinks
all alone in this world,--seeing we have these ideas what are we going
to _do_?"
§ 10
That meeting was followed by another before I left New York, and
presently Gidding joined me at Denver, where I was trying to measure the
true significance of a labor paper called _The Appeal to Reason_ that,
in spite of a rigid boycott by the ordinary agencies for news
distribution went out in the middle west to nearly half a million
subscribers, and was filled with such a fierceness of insurrection
against labor conditions, such a hatred, blind and impassioned, as I had
never known before. Gidding remained with me there and came back with me
to Chicago, where I wanted to see something of the Americanization of
the immigrant, and my survey of America, the social and economic problem
of America, resolved itself more and more into a conference with him.
There is no more fruitless thing in the world than to speculate how life
would have gone if this thing or that had not happened. Yet I cannot
help but wonder how far I might have travelled along the lines of my
present work if I had gone to America and not met Gidding, or if I had
met him without visiting America. The man and his country are
inextricably interwoven in my mind. Yet I do think that his simplicity
and directness, his force of initiative that turned me from a mere
enquirer into an active writer and organizer, are qualities less his in
particular than America's in general. There is in America a splendid
crudity, a directness that cleared my spirit as a bracing wind will
sweep the clouds from mountain scenery. Compared with our older
continents America is mankind stripped for achievement. So many things
are not there at all, need not be considered; no institutional
aristocracy, no Kaisers, Czars, nor King-Emperors to maintain a
litigious sequel to the Empire of Rome; it has no uneducated immovable
peasantry rooted to the soil, indeed it has no rooting to the soil at
all; it is, from the Forty-ninth Parallel to the tip of Cape Horn, one
triumphant embodiment of freedom and deliberate agreement. For I mean
all America, Spanish-speaking as well as English-speaking; they have
this detachment from tradition in common. See how the United States, for
example, stands flatly on that bare piece of eighteenth-century
intellectualism the Constitution, and is by virtue of that a structure
either wilful and intellectual or absurd. That sense of incurable
servitude to fate and past traditions, that encumbrance with ruins,
pledges, laws and ancient institutions, that perpetual complication of
considerations and those haunting memories of preceding human failures
which dwarf the courage of destiny in Europe and Asia, vanish from the
mind within a week of one's arrival in the New World. Naturally one
begins to do things. One is inspired to do things. One feels that one
has escaped, one feels that the time is _now_. All America, North and
South alike, is one tremendous escape from ancient obsessions into
activity and making.
And by the time I had reached America I had already come to see that
just as the issues of party politics at home and international politics
abroad are mere superficialities above the greater struggle of an
energetic minority to organize and exploit the labor of the masses of
mankind, so that struggle also is only a huge incident in the still more
than half unconscious impulse to replace the ancient way of human living
by a more highly organized world-wide social order, by a world
civilization embodying itself in a World State. And I saw now how that
impulse could neither cease nor could it on the other hand realize
itself until it became conscious and deliberate and merciful, free from
haste and tyranny, persuasive and sustained by a nearly universal
sympathy and understanding. For until that arrives the creative forces
must inevitably spend themselves very largely in blind alleys, futile
rushes and destructive conflicts. Upon that our two minds were agreed.
"We have," said Gidding, "to understand and make understanding. That is
the real work for us to do, Stratton, that is our job. The world, as you
say, has been floundering about, half making civilization and never
achieving it. Now _we_, I don't mean just you and me, Stratton,
particularly, but every intelligent man among us, have got to set to and
make it thorough. There is no other sane policy for a man outside his
private passions but that. So let's get at it----"
I find it now impossible to trace the phases by which I reached these
broad ideas upon which I rest all my work, but certainly they were
present very early in my discussions with Gidding. We two men had been
thinking independently but very similarly, and it is hard to say just
what completing touches either of us gave to the other's propositions.
We found ourselves rather than arrived at the conception of ourselves
as the citizens neither of the United States nor of England but of a
state that had still to come into being, a World State, a great unity
behind and embracing the ostensible political fabrics of to-day--a unity
to be reached by weakening antagonisms, by developing understandings and
toleration, by fostering the sense of brotherhood across the ancient
bounds.
We believed and we believe that such a creative conception of a human
commonweal can be fostered in exactly the same way that the idea of
German unity was fostered behind the dukedoms, the free cities and
kingdoms of Germany, a conception so creative that it can dissolve
traditional hatreds, incorporate narrower loyalties and replace a
thousand suspicions and hostilities by a common passion for collective
achievement, so creative that at last the national boundaries of to-day
may become obstacles as trivial to the amplifying good-will of men as
the imaginary line that severs Normandy from Brittany, or Berwick from
Northumberland.
And it is not only a great peace about the earth that this idea of a
World State means for us, but social justice also. We are both convinced
altogether that there survives no reason for lives of toil, for
hardship, poverty, famine, infectious disease, for the continuing
cruelties of wild beasts and the greater multitude of crimes, but
mismanagement and waste, and that mismanagement and waste spring from no
other source than ignorance and from stupid divisions and jealousies,
base patriotisms, fanaticisms, prejudices and suspicions that are all no
more than ignorance a little mingled with viciousness. We have looked
closely into this servitude of modern labor, we have seen its injustice
fester towards syndicalism and revolutionary socialism, and we know
these things for the mere aimless, ignorant resentments they are;
punishments, not remedies. We have looked into the portentous threat of
modern war, and it is ignorant vanity and ignorant suspicion, the
bargaining aggression of the British prosperous and the swaggering
vulgarity of the German junker that make and sustain that monstrous
European devotion to arms. And we are convinced there is nothing in
these evils and conflicts that light may not dispel. We believe that
these things can be dispelled, that the great universals, Science which
has limitations neither of race nor class, Art which speaks to its own
in every rank and nation, Philosophy and Literature which broaden
sympathy and banish prejudice, can flood and submerge and will yet flow
over and submerge every one of these separations between man and man.
I will not say that this Great State, this World Republic of civilized
men, is our dream, because it is not a dream, it is a manifestly
reasonable possibility. It is our intention. It is what we are
deliberately making and what in a little while very many men and women
will be making. We are secessionists from all contemporary nationalities
and loyalties. We have set ourselves with all the capacity and energy at
our disposal to create a world-wide common fund of ideas and knowledge,
and to evoke a world-wide sense of human solidarity in which the
existing limitations of political structure must inevitably melt away.
It was Gidding and his Americanism, his inborn predisposition to
innovation and the large freedom of his wealth that turned these ideas
into immediate concrete undertakings. I see more and more that it is
here that we of the old European stocks, who still grow upon the old
wood, differ most from those vigorous grafts of our race in America and
Africa and Australia on the one hand and from the renascent peoples of
the East on the other: that we have lost the courage of youth and have
not yet gained the courage of desperate humiliations, in taking hold of
things. To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably
magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all
knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the
habitable globe. His mind began producing concrete projects as a
fire-work being lit produces sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the
most colossal of printing and publishing projects, as a man might work
out the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. It was so
entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to go on from
the proposition that understanding was the primary need of humanity to
the systematic organization of free publishing, exhaustive discussion,
intellectual stimulation. He set about it as a company of pharmacists
might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.
"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had seemed to me
half fantasy; "Let's _do_ it."
There are moments still when it seems to me that this life of mine has
become the most preposterous of adventures. We two absurd human beings
are spending our days and nights in a sustained and growing attempt to
do what? To destroy certain obsessions and to give the universal human
mind a form and a desire for expression. We have put into the shape of
one comprehensive project that force of released wealth that has already
dotted America with universities, libraries, institutions for research
and enquiry. Already there are others at work with us, and presently
there will be a great number. We have started an avalanche above the old
politics and it gathers mass and pace....
And there never was an impulse towards endeavor in a human heart that
wasn't preposterous. Man is a preposterous animal. Thereby he ceases to
be a creature and becomes a creator, he turns upon the powers that made
him and subdues them to his service; by his sheer impudence he
establishes his claim to possess a soul....
But I need not write at all fully of my work here. This book is not
about that but about my coming to that. Long before this manuscript
reaches your hands--if ultimately I decide that it shall reach your
hands--you will be taking your share, I hope, in this open conspiracy
against potentates and prejudices and all the separating powers of
darkness.
§ 11
I would if I could omit one thing that I must tell you here, because it
goes so close to the very core of all this book has to convey. I wish I
could leave it out altogether. I wish I could simplify my story by
smoothing out this wrinkle at least and obliterating a thing that was at
once very real and very ugly. You see I had at last struggled up to a
sustaining idea, to a conception of work and duty to which I could
surely give my life. I had escaped from my pit so far. And it was
natural that now with something to give I should turn not merely for
consolation and service but for help and fellowship to that dear human