Crosby: Democracy

This is the first poem in "Broadcast" by Ernest H. Crosby, and it is entitled "Democracy."  It is quite long, and I'll include it all (on the jump), but on this front page, will share a few stanzas I particularly like.

IX

The common people,—why common people?
Does it not mean common life, common aspirations, community of interests, communion of man with man?
Does it not imply the spirit of communism, of fellowship, of brotherhood?
Does it not suggest that human life down at the bottom is more fluid and intermingled and social than up at the top?
Is not all this hidden away in the words "common people?"

X

Would you make brothers of the poor by giving to them?

Try it, and learn that in a world of injustice it is the most unbrotherly of acts.
There is no gulf between men so wide as the alms-gift.
There is no wall so impassable as money given and taken.
There is nothing so unfraternal as the dollar,—it is the very symbol of division and discord.
Make brothers of the poor if you will, but do it by ceasing to steal from them;
For charity separates and only justice unites.

XI

Peace between capital and labour, is that all that you ask?
Is peace then the only thing needful?
There was peace enough in southern slavery.
There is a peace of life and another peace of death.
It is well to rise above violence.
It is well to rise superior to anger.
But if peace means final acquiescence in wrong,—if your aim is less than justice and peace, forever one —then your peace is a crime.

XII

I am homesick,—
Homesick for the home that I never have seen,—

For the land where I shall look horizontally into the eyes of my fellows,—
The land where men rise only to lift,—
The land where equality leaves men free to differ as they will,—
The land where freedom is breathed in the air and courses in the blood,—
Where there is nothing over a man between him and the sky,—
Where the obligations of love are sought for as prizes and where they vary with the moon.

That land is my true country. I am here by some sad cosmic mistake,—and I am homesick.

And here is the entire poem:

Democracy

I

I SAW laws and customs and creeds and Bibles rising like emanations from men and women.
I saw the men and women bowing down and worshipping these cloudy shapes, and I saw the shapes turn upon them and rend them.
Nay, but men and women are the supreme facts!

II

How rarely have men revered the truly reverend, and respected the truly respectable!
How much of reverence has been, and still is, mere fetish-worship!
Reverence for Moloch and Juggernaut, who shall count its victims?
Respect for tyrants and despots, for lying priests and blind teachers, how it has darkened the pages of history!
There is only one true respect, the respect for the conscious life that fulfils its true function.
Revere humanity wherever you find it, in the judge or in the farm hand, but do not revere any institution or office or writing. As soon as anything outside of divine humanity is revered and respected, it becomes dangerous,—
And every step forward in the annals of man has been over the prostrate corpse of some ancient unmasked reverence.

III

And yet I am no abolitionist.
I would abolish nothing except by disuse.
Slavery is good for those who believe in slavery, for in a world of slaves there must be masters, and men with the hearts of slaves had better be slaves.
Government is good for those who believe in government, and punishment for those who believe in punishment, and war for those who believe in war.
Anything is good enough for the man who believes in it, and the first step upward is not abolition but disbelief.

IV

They write histories of the French Revolution as if it were over.
The French Revolution is not over; it never will be over.
That episode was a mere skirmish on the picket-line.
The duel between oppression and freedom is the very essence of life.
The French Revolution began ages before David gathered his Coxey army at the cave of Adullam,—ages before the great labour-leaders Moses and Aaron put themselves at the head of the Hebrew brickmakers' strike.

It will not end before the earth freezes into a Spitzbergen or is scorched into a Sahara.

V

The lists are open; the combat is on.
The brute-man of the past and the God-man of the future must fight it out while heaven and earth look on expectant.
You can easily distinguish them by their weapons.
The brute-man fights with claws and teeth, with spear and sword, with bayonet and cannon and bomb.
The God-man has for his artillery naught but the naked truth and undissembled love.
Yet the brute-man blanches with the sure presentiment of his speedy overthrow, and winces as the God-man gazes upon him with infinite compassion.

VI

A murder on behalf of the people?
That is no place for murders,—they belong on the other side.
Poor, brave, cowardly, cruel fool, who thought the people could be helped by murder, and, thinking to lay low oppression, well-nigh laid freedom low!

But there are other fools,—those who suppose that a foul deed can for long set back the hands of time.
Can a crime alter facts? Can any mad assassin kill the eternal truth?

VII

Clear the field for the grand tournament of the nations,—
The struggle to think the best thought and to express it best in tone and colour and form and word,—
The struggle to do the greatest deeds and lead the noblest and most useful lives,—
The struggle to see clearest and know truest and love strongest.
Your other blood and bludgeon contests but postpone the real fray.
The true knights are yearning to enter the lists, and you block the high festival with your brawling.
Is it possible that you mistake this horse-play for the real event of history?
Away with all your brutal disorder, and clear the field for the tournament of Man.

VIII

I do not wish to be above people; I wish to be with people.
The tiresome, hateful climb upward on their heads and shoulders,—

(It hurts their heads and shoulders, but it hurts my feet still more),—
The thin, empty air, thinner and emptier and less satisfying the higher I get,—
The platform of envious faces on which I stand,—
The continual scrambling and elbowing round me and over me,—
The aimlessness and cruelty of it all,—
I am sick to death of it.
The soles of my feet yearn for the feel of God's sod.
I do not wish to be above people.
I wish to be with people.

IX

The common people,—why common people?
Does it not mean common life, common aspirations, community of interests, communion of man with man?
Does it not imply the spirit of communism, of fellowship, of brotherhood?
Does it not suggest that human life down at the bottom is more fluid and intermingled and social than up at the top?
Is not all this hidden away in the words "common people?"

X

Would you make brothers of the poor by giving to them?

Try it, and learn that in a world of injustice it is the most unbrotherly of acts.
There is no gulf between men so wide as the alms-gift.
There is no wall so impassable as money given and taken.
There is nothing so unfraternal as the dollar,—it is the very symbol of division and discord.
Make brothers of the poor if you will, but do it by ceasing to steal from them;
For charity separates and only justice unites.

XI

Peace between capital and labour, is that all that you ask?
Is peace then the only thing needful?
There was peace enough in southern slavery.
There is a peace of life and another peace of death.
It is well to rise above violence.
It is well to rise superior to anger.
But if peace means final acquiescence in wrong,—if your aim is less than justice and peace, forever one —then your peace is a crime.

XII

I am homesick,—
Homesick for the home that I never have seen,—

For the land where I shall look horizontally into the eyes of my fellows,—
The land where men rise only to lift,—
The land where equality leaves men free to differ as they will,—
The land where freedom is breathed in the air and courses in the blood,—
Where there is nothing over a man between him and the sky,—
Where the obligations of love are sought for as prizes and where they vary with the moon.
That land is my true country. I am here by some sad cosmic mistake,—and I am homesick.

XIII

A strange lot this, to be dropped down in a world of barbarians,—
Men who see clearly enough the barbarity of all ages except their own,—
Who shudder at the thought of wheel and faggot, of putrid heads displayed not so long ago on Temple Bar,—of stinking corpses hanging in chains along the highways while vultures devoured them,—of mere boys put to death for stealing a shilling,—and who notwithstanding are snugly contented with the survival of gibbets and the happy invention of electrocution chairs,—
Who are outraged at the picture of black priests hovering about the flames of an auto-da-fe, but applaud their successors to-day as they encourage with their blessings the butchery of war,—

Who deplore the ancient miseries of the galleys, the torture of witnesses, the agonies of captives crucified or given to the lions, but see nothing wrong in our overcrowded prisons, our vice-breeding jails and our cold, relentless machine of justice,—
Who look down on the ages when there were no societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and yet are blind to the horrors of our abattoirs and laboratories, and take pleasure in killing and maiming helpless birds and harmless little brother beasts,—
Who condemn the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition, but sanction the writhing pains of the battle-field, the sabred face, the dynamite gun and the dum-dum bullet,—
Who abhor chattel slavery, but accept the dismal, hopeless enslavement of factory hands and the starvation of thousands out of work as heaven-born arrangements,—
Who sing paeans over the fall of political despotism, while they have scarcely a word of criticism for the industrial tyrants who tread us under foot,—
And who—strangest of all—are absolutely ignorant of the fact that future generations will consider them just as barbarous as their predecessors.
It is a curious destiny indeed to be planted in the midst of such a people.

XIV

And yet they boast of their high breeding and accuse us of despising it.
Despise high breeding? Nay, but we should be fools indeed to throw overboard such a treasure.
Good manners, the nice sense of what is fitting, the refinement which is so difficult to learn in a single lifetime,—far be it from us to risk these hard-earned possessions of the race in any social cataclysm.
But is it not you, rather, who put them in peril—
You who would monopolize these gifts and restrict them to your narrow circle; you, who hoard them like your gold and silver;— who find the chief value of them in the fact that others have them not?
"Noblesse oblige," fine thought,—fair flower of feudalism, foretelling a summer of even fairer bloom. But "Manhood obliges," is not that finer still?
What are good manners but the traditional expression of a good heart?
They are the small change of unselfishness, and if the heart is not pure metal, they ring false on the counter.
If you are selfish within—if you wish to keep these graces to yourselves,—by that very fact they become the cheap trimmings of hypocrisy.
As for us, we would make unselfishness common to all, and the natural expression of it in outward life would follow. We have nothing against aristocracy,—we wish to spread it abroad and its manners. We herald the advent of the true aristocracy, the rule of the best over the worst in every human soul. We would not for the world rob mankind of one gracious word or action; But our aim is to make of the treasures which you lock up in your palaces the common coin of the realm.

XV

The few, with their accumulation of money, shall not rule.
Have we rid ourselves of kings for nothing?
Is an exorbitant railway fare or telegraph charge less tyrannous taxation than ship-money or a duty on tea?
Charles the First and George the Third have risen from the dead, but industrial equality will come as political equality came.
Our fathers died for the shadow,—we demand the substance. The few shall not rule.

XVI

It was all so simple in the old days, when people saw, or thought they saw, tyranny and oppression centred in one person, and in attacking and destroying that person were sure they were saving mankind.

How easy it is to treat a boil just as a boil and to forget the corrupt blood that produced it, running into every nook and cranny of the body !
To-day, alas, the tyrant spreads like a vicious kind of nervous system throughout the entire frame of society.
I am part tyrant, part slave, as we all are in varying degree, and there seems to be no other alternative possible.
We are caught in the meshes of our own web.
We must disentangle the tyrant from us, and this new Gordian knot will not yield its secret to the sword.
We must thresh the chaff from the corn, and each grain has its separate outworn casing waiting to be winnowed away.
Alas, it is no simple rebellion on the old lines that calls for our adhesion and support;
It is rather a complicated labour of unravelling and extricating and liberating from the network of poisonous creepers of the ages, whose roots are in our own hearts.

XVII

Democracy, what called you into being?
What induced you to persist in struggling for centuries to tear off your chains, one after another?
It was the longing for freedom, the desire to grow and develop and thrive untrammelled and unrestrained, the determination to have no masters but your own wisdom and conscience and will.

Now that you have nearly reached the goal,— now that you have almost achieved the task,—how is it that you have forgotten your object and renounced the freedom for which you began the strife?
Instead of knocking off the last shackles you are busy patching and riveting your broken chains.
You are having recourse to restriction and interference, tying the hands of those who would aid you, hampering the free play of the nation's life.
Will you be your own Napoleon, bringing your own revolution to naught to usher in again the old regime?
Beware, beware of chains, though they be of your own making; they were ever your curse, and how can they become a blessing?
You have rid yourselves of your ancient tryants, but their death was in vain if you try to adopt their manner of reigning.
Stretch forth your free arms, breathe the unlimited air, and think no more of using force against your members.

XVIII

Liberty, sad, dethroned queen, though all the world turn against you, I will be true to you.

Dragged in triumph at the wheel of Coercion's chariot,—bowed down, dishevelled, footsore,—though you be,—

Though the fickle populace, which but yesterday hailed your accession with frantic joy, now hoot and hiss you and deride,—
Yet I still perceive the majesty of your mien and look and gait, and I acknowledge myself proudly to be your loyal subject.
Why have the people changed?
Do they say that you did not give them the prosperity that you promised?
Ah, but when did they ever trust you with even half the power?
When did they ever fairly wrest your realm from the sway of your victorious rival?
His acts of tyranny have ever afflicted the land.
He always held tight in his fetters the soil, the source of all, and trade, the distributor of all.
Were they so foolish as to charge these wrongs to you?
Because Coercion bore heavily upon the people, must they for this extend his rule so as to make, as it were, a balance of his misdeeds?
Shout for the usurper, you mad, incoherent throng!
Little reck you that he will add to your yoke, and, where there were whips, chastize you with scorpions,
Many a weary year may pass along, ere you bethink you again of your lawful queen.

XIX

Dear America!
Vast, vigorous, boastful, untidy mother!
I dwell upon your faults, not as an unfilial son, but as an anxious father,—for you are my daughter too. You have made me what I am, and now it is my turn to make you what I would have you be.
Let others toil to prepare you fitting millinery;
Let them seek to assure you health and strength of body;
My part will rather be to aid quietly in forming your soul.
If we can but succeed in creating for you a spirit commensurate with your greatness, the rest will take care of itself.
The folds of your garments, the lines of your face and figure, will surely take on the beauty of your soul.
What nobler task is there on earth than shaping the soul of a people?

XX

To make men pull together,—
That was the aim which civilization set before itself;
Men pulled together at the word of command;
The pyramids rose, Rome swallowed the earth, —men worked long and wearily and without a doubt that here was the finality of things.

Their dreamers and sages and saints could picture no golden age without slaves,
And the strong arm of the law made them toil.
But man grew, and looked, and asked why, and slavery shrivelled and died.
And still the object was to make men pull together.
And the wage-system showed the way.
One man grasped all the good things he could and hugged them, and said to those who had none, "Work for me and I will give you a little."
Men pulled together again with hunger in their eyes;
Factories sprang up, railways encircled the earth, —men laboured long and eagerly and without a doubt that here was the finality of things.
Their dreamers and sages and saints could picture no golden age without the wage-system.
And the strong arm of the law guarded the piles of good things and let the men go,
For now men strove to get work, and it was no one's interest to keep them through the winter, and the death of a man, such as once fetched his weight in coin, was no longer of consequence, for another would do as well.
But man grows and looks, and asks why, and the wage-system quivers with terror.

There is a new way to make men pull together. Love, free co-operation, equal service, true honour and honesty,—have you never thought of these things? Let us dream better than the old-dreamers,— and pull together.

XXI

Men's laws,—laws of tsars or of majorities counted by the nose—
Call them laws if you will, but they are no laws.
Enforce them; drag them after you like a corpse in a hearse.
No matter how long your procession, how grand your plumes and high-stepping horses,
You are advancing to the grave, and, go as slow as you please, before long you will get there.
God's laws are other than these.
They live and breathe and enforce themselves.
They lead the way onward with back turned to the cemetery.
If only one man feels the attraction and follows, he becomes by that alone the autocrat of the world.
When two or three join him, you have a divine aristocracy.
When the people are at last won over, there is democracy indeed.

God's laws are living germs and they quicken the blood in spite of votes and edicts.

XXII

Where are the leaders who will show us the way?
Where are the discoverers who will search out the secret of true living and then apply it in their lives?
We are ready to follow them.
When they discovered the uses of steam, we adopted their invention although we comprehended it not.
When they lassoed the lightning, and broke it in, and taught it to carry our words and voices and bodies, and steadily to illuminate the darkness, then we appropriated their inventions, though we did not understand them.
When men shall have discovered the proper functions of human energy and the way to apply it to free and social living, again we shall not be slow to adopt their invention, whether it passes our comprehension or not.
It is always enough that a few find the best path,—forthwith the world follows.
We do not want more education or books or legislation.
We have too much education, too many books, too many laws already.

We need only, here and there, a leader to discover and apply God's laws of social industry, and we will throng after them; not one of us will be left behind.

XXIII

And who will lead the way?
The good and wise must lead.
He that loves most is the best and wisest and he it is that leads already. Where the best lover sits is always the head of the table.
Tell the great secret to the people.
Let the people love and they will lead.
No cunning device of ballot-machinery can give them the power.
No system of common-schools, spending its energies on mind alone, can give them the power.
No campaign against monopoly and oppression, however it may promise to succeed, can give them the power.
Nay, but let the people love, and theirs is the power!