Revolution and Other Essays | Page 8

reason that we shall fail. Furthermore,
we are going to have a try at it, anyway. Seven millions of us say so.
And what have you to say to that?"
And what can the capitalist class say? Grant the incapacity of the
working-class. Grant that the indictment and the argument of the
revolutionists are all wrong. The 7,000,000 revolutionists remain. Their
existence is a fact. Their belief in their capacity, and in their indictment

and their argument, is a fact. Their constant growth is a fact. Their
intention to destroy present-day society is a fact, as is also their
intention to take possession of the world with all its wealth and
machinery and governments. Moreover, it is a fact that the
working-class is vastly larger than the capitalist class.
The revolution is a revolution of the working-class. How can the
capitalist class, in the minority, stem this tide of revolution? What has it
to offer? What does it offer? Employers' associations, injunctions, civil
suits for plundering of the treasuries of the labour-unions, clamour and
combination for the open shop, bitter and shameless opposition to the
eight-hour day, strong efforts to defeat all reform, child-labour bills,
graft in every municipal council, strong lobbies and bribery in every
legislature for the purchase of capitalist legislation, bayonets,
machine-guns, policemen's clubs, professional strike-breakers and
armed Pinkertons--these are the things the capitalist class is dumping in
front of the tide of revolution, as though, forsooth, to hold it back.
The capitalist class is as blind to-day to the menace of the revolution as
it was blind in the past to its own God-given opportunity. It cannot see
how precarious is its position, cannot comprehend the power and the
portent of the revolution. It goes on its placid way, prattling sweet
ideals and dear moralities, and scrambling sordidly for material
benefits.
No overthrown ruler or class in the past ever considered the revolution
that overthrew it, and so with the capitalist class of to- day. Instead of
compromising, instead of lengthening its lease of life by conciliation
and by removal of some of the harsher oppressions of the working-class,
it antagonizes the working-class, drives the working-class into
revolution. Every broken strike in recent years, every legally plundered
trades-union treasury, every closed shop made into an open shop, has
driven the members of the working-class directly hurt over to socialism
by hundreds and thousands. Show a working-man that his union fails,
and he becomes a revolutionist. Break a strike with an injunction or
bankrupt a union with a civil suit, and the working-men hurt thereby
listen to the siren song of the socialist and are lost for ever to the

POLITICAL CAPITALIST parties.
Antagonism never lulled revolution, and antagonism is about all the
capitalist class offers. It is true, it offers some few antiquated notions
which were very efficacious in the past, but which are no longer
efficacious. Fourth-of-July liberty in terms of the Declaration of
Independence and of the French Encyclopaedists is scarcely apposite
to-day. It does not appeal to the working-man who has had his head
broken by a policeman's club, his union treasury bankrupted by a court
decision, or his job taken away from him by a labour-saving invention.
Nor does the Constitution of the United States appear so glorious and
constitutional to the working-man who has experienced a bull-pen or
been unconstitutionally deported from Colorado. Nor are this particular
working-man's hurt feelings soothed by reading in the newspapers that
both the bull-pen and the deportation were pre-eminently just, legal,
and constitutional. "To hell, then, with the Constitution!" says he, and
another revolutionist has been made--by the capitalist class.
In short, so blind is the capitalist class that it does nothing to lengthen
its lease of life, while it does everything to shorten it. The capitalist
class offers nothing that is clean, noble, and alive. The revolutionists
offer everything that is clean, noble, and alive. They offer service,
unselfishness, sacrifice, martyrdom--the things that sting awake the
imagination of the people, touching their hearts with the fervour that
arises out of the impulse toward good and which is essentially religious
in its nature.
But the revolutionists blow hot and blow cold. They offer facts and
statistics, economics and scientific arguments. If the working-man be
merely selfish, the revolutionists show him, mathematically
demonstrate to him, that his condition will be bettered by the revolution.
If the working-man be the higher type, moved by impulses toward right
conduct, if he have soul and spirit, the revolutionists offer him the
things of the soul and the spirit, the tremendous things that cannot be
measured by dollars and cents, nor be held down by dollars and cents.
The revolutionist cries out upon wrong and injustice, and preaches
righteousness. And, most potent of all, he sings the eternal song of

human freedom--a song