My Eagle
:
The Iron Heel
The soft summer wind stirs the redwoods, and Wild-Water ripples sweet
cadences over its mossy stones. There are butterflies in the sunshine,
and from everywhere arises the drowsy hum of bees. It is so quiet and
peaceful, and I sit here, and ponder, and am restless. It is the quiet
that makes me restless. It seems unreal. All the world is quiet, but it
is the quiet before the storm. I strain my ears, and all my senses, for
/>
some betrayal of that impending storm. Oh, that it may not be premature!
That it may not be premature!*
* The Second Revolt was largely the work of Ernest Everhard,
though he cooperated, of course, with the European leaders.
The capture and secret execution of Everhard was the great
event of the spring of 1932 A.D. Yet so thoroughly had he
prepared for the revolt, that his fellow-conspirators were
able, with little confusion or delay, to carry out his
plans. It was after Everhard's execution that his wife went
to Wake Robin Lodge, a small bungalow in the Sonoma Hills of
California.
Small wonder that I am restless. I think, and think, and I cannot
cease from thinking. I have been in the thick of life so long that I
am oppressed by the peace and quiet, and I cannot forbear from dwelling
upon that mad maelstrom of death and destruction so soon to burst forth.
In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can see, as I have
seen in the past,* all the marring and mangling of the sweet, beautiful
flesh, and the souls torn with violence from proud bodies and hurled to
God. Thus do we poor humans attain our ends, striving through carnage
and destruction to bring lasting peace and happiness upon the earth.
* Without doubt she here refers to the Chicago Commune.
And then I am lonely. When I do not think of what is to come, I think of
what has been and is no more--my Eagle, beating with tireless wings the
void, soaring toward what was ever his sun, the flaming ideal of human
freedom. I cannot sit idly by and wait the great event that is his
making, though he is not here to see. He devoted all the years of his
manhood to it, and for it he gave his life. It is his handiwork. He made
it.*
* With all respect to Avis Everhard, it must be pointed out
that Everhard was but one of many able leaders who planned
the Second Revolt. And we to-day, looking back across the
centuries, can safely say that even had he lived, the Second
Revolt would not have been less calamitous in its outcome
than it was.
And so it is, in this anxious time of waiting, that I shall write of
my husband. There is much light that I alone of all persons living can
throw upon his character, and so noble a character cannot be blazoned
forth too brightly. His was a great soul, and, when my love grows
unselfish, my chiefest regret is that he is not here to witness
to-morrow's dawn. We cannot fail. He has built too stoutly and too
surely for that. Woe to the Iron Heel! Soon shall it be thrust back from
off prostrate humanity. When the word goes forth, the labor hosts of all
the world shall rise. There has been nothing like it in the history of
the world. The solidarity of labor is assured, and for the first time
will there be an international revolution wide as the world is wide.*
* The Second Revolt was truly international. It was a
colossal plan--too colossal to be wrought by the genius of
one man alone. Labor, in all the oligarchies of the world,
was prepared to rise at the signal. Germany, Italy, France,
and all Australasia were labor countries--socialist states.
They were ready to lend aid to the revolution. Gallantly
they did; and it was for this reason, when the Second Revolt
was crushed, that they, too, were crushed by the united
oligarchies of the world, their socialist governments being
replaced by oligarchical governments.
You see, I am full of what is impending. I have lived it day and night
utterly and for so long that it is ever present in my mind. For that
matter, I cannot think of my husband without thinking of it. He was the
soul of it, and how can I possibly separate the two in thought?
As I have said, there is much light that I alone can throw upon his
character. It is well known that he toiled hard for liberty and suffered
sore. How hard he toiled and how greatly he suffered, I well know; for
I have been with him during these twenty anxious years and I know his
patience, his untiring effort, his infinite devotion to the Cause for
which, only two months gone, he laid down his life.
I shall try to write simply and to tell here how Ernest Everhard entered
my life--how I first met him, how he grew until I became a part of him,
and the tremendous changes he wrought in my life. In this way may you
look at him through my eyes and learn him as I learned him--in all save
the things too secret and sweet for me to tell.
It was in February, 1912, that I first met him, when, as a guest of my
father's* at dinner, he came to our house in Berkeley. I cannot say that
my very first impression of him was favorable. He was one of many at
dinner, and in the drawing-room where we gathered and waited for all
to arrive, he made a rather incongruous appearance. It was "preacher's
night," as my father privately called it, and Ernest was certainly out
of place in the midst of the churchmen.
* John Cunningham, Avis Everhard's father, was a professor
at the State University at Berkeley, California. His chosen
field was physics, and in addition he did much original
research and was greatly distinguished as a scientist. His
chief contribution to science was his studies of the
electron and his monumental work on the "Identification of
Matter and Energy," wherein he established, beyond cavil and
for all time, that the ultimate unit of matter and the
ultimate unit of force were identical. This idea had been
earlier advanced, but not demonstrated, by Sir Oliver Lodge
and other students in the new field of radio-activity.
In the first place, his clothes did not fit him. He wore a ready-made
suit of dark cloth that was ill adjusted to his body. In fact, no
ready-made suit of clothes ever could fit his body. And on this night,
as always, the cloth bulged with his muscles, while the coat between
the shoulders, what of the heavy shoulder-development, was a maze of
wrinkles. His neck was the neck of a prize-fighter,* thick and strong.
So this was the social philosopher and ex-horseshoer my father had
discovered, was my thought. And he certainly looked it with those
bulging muscles and that bull-throat. Immediately I classified him--a
sort of prodigy, I thought, a Blind Tom** of the working class.
* In that day it was the custom of men to compete for purses
of money. They fought with their hands. When one was
beaten into insensibility or killed, the survivor took the
money.
** This obscure reference applies to a blind negro musician
who took the world by storm in the latter half of the
nineteenth century of the Christian Era.
And then, when he shook hands with me! His handshake was firm and
strong, but he looked at me boldly with his black eyes--too boldly, I
thought. You see, I was a creature of environment, and at that time had
strong class instincts. Such boldness on the part of a man of my own
class would have been almost unforgivable. I know that I could not avoid
dropping my eyes, and I was quite relieved when I passed him on and
turned to greet Bishop Morehouse--a favorite of mine, a sweet and
serious man of middle age, Christ-like in appearance and goodness, and a
scholar as well.
But this boldness that I took to be presumption was a vital clew to the
nature of Ernest Everhard. He was simple, direct, afraid of nothing, and
he refused to waste time on conventional mannerisms. "You pleased me,"
he explained long afterward; "and why should I not fill my eyes with
that which pleases me?" I have said that he was afraid of nothing. He
was a natural aristocrat--and this in spite of the fact that he was in
the camp of the non-aristocrats. He was a superman, a blond beast
such as Nietzsche* has described, and in addition he was aflame with
democracy.
* Friederich Nietzsche, the mad philosopher of the
nineteenth century of the Christian Era, who caught wild
glimpses of truth, but who, before he was done, reasoned
himself around the great circle of human thought and off
into madness.
In the interest of meeting the other guests, and what of my unfavorable
impression, I forgot all about the working-class philosopher, though
once or twice at table I noticed him--especially the twinkle in his eye
as he listened to the talk first of one minister and then of another. He
has humor, I thought, and I almost forgave him his clothes. But the time
went by, and the dinner went by, and he never opened his mouth to speak,
while the ministers talked interminably about the working class and its
relation to the church, and what the church had done and was doing for
it. I noticed that my father was annoyed because Ernest did not talk.
Once father took advantage of a lull and asked him to say something; but
Ernest shrugged his shoulders and with an "I have nothing to say" went
on eating salted almonds.
But father was not to be denied. After a while he said:
"We have with us a member of the working class. I am sure that he can
present things from a new point of view that will be interesting and
refreshing. I refer to Mr. Everhard."
The others betrayed a well-mannered interest, and urged Ernest for
a statement of his views. Their attitude toward him was so broadly
tolerant and kindly that it was really patronizing. And I saw that
Ernest noted it and was amused. He looked slowly about him, and I saw
the glint of laughter in his eyes.
"I am not versed in the courtesies of ecclesiastical controversy," he
began, and then hesitated with modesty and indecision.
"Go on," they urged, and Dr. Hammerfield said: "We do not mind the truth
that is in any man. If it is sincere," he amended.
"Then you separate sincerity from truth?" Ernest laughed quickly.
Dr. Hammerfield gasped, and managed to answer, "The best of us may be
mistaken, young man, the best of us."
Ernest's manner changed on the instant. He became another man.
"All right, then," he answered; "and let me begin by saying that you
are all mistaken. You know nothing, and worse than nothing, about the
working class. Your sociology is as vicious and worthless as is your
method of thinking."
It was not so much what he said as how he said it. I roused at the first
sound of his voice. It was as bold as his eyes. It was a clarion-call
that thrilled me. And the whole table was aroused, shaken alive from
monotony and drowsiness.
"What is so dreadfully vicious and worthless in our method of thinking,
young man?" Dr. Hammerfield demanded, and already there was something
unpleasant in his voice and manner of utterance.
"You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and
having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician
wrong--to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of
thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos
of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do
not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no
place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental
aberration.
"Do you know what I was reminded of as I sat at table and listened to
you talk and talk? You reminded me for all the world of the scholastics
of the Middle Ages who gravely and learnedly debated the absorbing
question of how many angels could dance on the point of a needle.
Why, my dear sirs, you are as remote from the intellectual life of the
twentieth century as an Indian medicine-man making incantation in the
primeval forest ten thousand years ago."
As Ernest talked he seemed in a fine passion; his face glowed, his
eyes snapped and flashed, and his chin and jaw were eloquent with
aggressiveness. But it was only a way he had. It always aroused people.
His smashing, sledge-hammer manner of attack invariably made them forget
themselves. And they were forgetting themselves now. Bishop Morehouse
was leaning forward and listening intently. Exasperation and anger were
flushing the face of Dr. Hammerfield. And others were exasperated, too,
and some were smiling in an amused and superior way. As for myself, I
found it most enjoyable. I glanced at father, and I was afraid he was
going to giggle at the effect of this human bombshell he had been guilty
of launching amongst us.
"Your terms are rather vague," Dr. Hammerfield interrupted. "Just
precisely what do you mean when you call us metaphysicians?"
"I call you metaphysicians because you reason metaphysically," Ernest
went on. "Your method of reasoning is the opposite to that of science.
There is no validity to your conclusions. You can prove everything and
nothing, and no two of you can agree upon anything. Each of you goes
into his own consciousness to explain himself and the universe. As
well may you lift yourselves by your own bootstraps as to explain
consciousness by consciousness."
"I do not understand," Bishop Morehouse said. "It seems to me that all
things of the mind are metaphysical. That most exact and convincing
of all sciences, mathematics, is sheerly metaphysical. Each and every
thought-process of the scientific reasoner is metaphysical. Surely you
will agree with me?"
"As you say, you do not understand," Ernest replied. "The metaphysician
reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons
inductively from the facts of experience. The metaphysician reasons
from theory to facts, the scientist reasons from facts to theory. The
metaphysician explains the universe by himself, the scientist explains
himself by the universe."
"Thank God we are not scientists," Dr. Hammerfield murmured
complacently.
"What are you then?" Ernest demanded.
"Philosophers."
"There you go," Ernest laughed. "You have left the real and solid earth
and are up in the air with a word for a flying machine. Pray come down
to earth and tell me precisely what you do mean by philosophy."
"Philosophy is--" (Dr. Hammerfield paused and cleared his
throat)--"something that cannot be defined comprehensively except to
such minds and temperaments as are philosophical. The narrow scientist
with his nose in a test-tube cannot understand philosophy."
Ernest ignored the thrust. It was always his way to turn the point back
upon an opponent, and he did it now, with a beaming brotherliness of
face and utterance.
"Then you will undoubtedly understand the definition I shall now make
of philosophy. But before I make it, I shall challenge you to point out
error in it or to remain a silent metaphysician. Philosophy is merely
the widest science of all. Its reasoning method is the same as that of
any particular science and of all particular sciences. And by that
same method of reasoning, the inductive method, philosophy fuses all
particular sciences into one great science. As Spencer says, the data
of any particular science are partially unified knowledge. Philosophy
unifies the knowledge that is contributed by all the sciences.
Philosophy is the science of science, the master science, if you please.
How do you like my definition?"
"Very creditable, very creditable," Dr. Hammerfield muttered lamely.
But Ernest was merciless.
"Remember," he warned, "my definition is fatal to metaphysics. If you do
not now point out a flaw in my definition, you are disqualified later on
from advancing metaphysical arguments. You must go through life seeking
that flaw and remaining metaphysically silent until you have found it."
Ernest waited. The silence was painful. Dr. Hammerfield was pained. He
was also puzzled. Ernest's sledge-hammer attack disconcerted him. He
was not used to the simple and direct method of controversy. He looked
appealingly around the table, but no one answered for him. I caught
father grinning into his napkin.
"There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians," Ernest said,
when he had rendered Dr. Hammerfield's discomfiture complete. "Judge
them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning
of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods? They
have added to the gayety of mankind, I grant; but what tangible good
have they wrought for mankind? They philosophized, if you will pardon my
misuse of the word, about the heart as the seat of the emotions, while
the scientists were formulating the circulation of the blood. They
declaimed about famine and pestilence as being scourges of God, while
the scientists were building granaries and draining cities. They
builded gods in their own shapes and out of their own desires, while
the scientists were building roads and bridges. They were describing
the earth as the centre of the universe, while the scientists were
discovering America and probing space for the stars and the laws of
the stars. In short, the metaphysicians have done nothing, absolutely
nothing, for mankind. Step by step, before the advance of science, they
have been driven back. As fast as the ascertained facts of science have
overthrown their subjective explanations of things, they have made new
subjective explanations of things, including explanations of the latest
ascertained facts. And this, I doubt not, they will go on doing to
the end of time. Gentlemen, a metaphysician is a medicine man.
The difference between you and the Eskimo who makes a fur-clad
blubber-eating god is merely a difference of several thousand years of
ascertained facts. That is all."
"Yet the thought of Aristotle ruled Europe for twelve centuries," Dr.
Ballingford announced pompously. "And Aristotle was a metaphysician."
Dr. Ballingford glanced around the table and was rewarded by nods and
smiles of approval.
"Your illustration is most unfortunate," Ernest replied. "You refer to a
very dark period in human history. In fact, we call that period the Dark
Ages. A period wherein science was raped by the metaphysicians, wherein
physics became a search for the Philosopher's Stone, wherein chemistry
became alchemy, and astronomy became astrology. Sorry the domination of
Aristotle's thought!"
Dr. Ballingford looked pained, then he brightened up and said:
"Granted this horrible picture you have drawn, yet you must confess that
metaphysics was inherently potent in so far as it drew humanity out
of this dark period and on into the illumination of the succeeding
centuries."
"Metaphysics had nothing to do with it," Ernest retorted.
"What?" Dr. Hammerfield cried. "It was not the thinking and the
speculation that led to the voyages of discovery?"
"Ah, my dear sir," Ernest smiled, "I thought you were disqualified. You
have not yet picked out the flaw in my definition of philosophy. You are
now on an unsubstantial basis. But it is the way of the metaphysicians,
and I forgive you. No, I repeat, metaphysics had nothing to do with
it. Bread and butter, silks and jewels, dollars and cents, and,
incidentally, the closing up of the overland trade-routes to India,
were the things that caused the voyages of discovery. With the fall of
Constantinople, in 1453, the Turks blocked the way of the caravans to
India. The traders of Europe had to find another route. Here was the
original cause for the voyages of discovery. Columbus sailed to find
a new route to the Indies. It is so stated in all the history books.
Incidentally, new facts were learned about the nature, size, and form of
the earth, and the Ptolemaic system went glimmering."
Dr. Hammerfield snorted.
"You do not agree with me?" Ernest queried. "Then wherein am I wrong?"
"I can only reaffirm my position," Dr. Hammerfield retorted tartly. "It
is too long a story to enter into now."
"No story is too long for the scientist," Ernest said sweetly. "That is
why the scientist gets to places. That is why he got to America."
I shall not describe the whole evening, though it is a joy to me to
recall every moment, every detail, of those first hours of my coming to
know Ernest Everhard.
Battle royal raged, and the ministers grew red-faced and excited,
especially at the moments when Ernest called them romantic philosophers,
shadow-projectors, and similar things. And always he checked them back
to facts. "The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!" he would proclaim
triumphantly, when he had brought one of them a cropper. He bristled
with facts. He tripped them up with facts, ambuscaded them with facts,
bombarded them with broadsides of facts.
"You seem to worship at the shrine of fact," Dr. Hammerfield taunted
him.
"There is no God but Fact, and Mr. Everhard is its prophet," Dr.
Ballingford paraphrased.
Ernest smilingly acquiesced.
"I'm like the man from Texas," he said. And, on being solicited, he
explained. "You see, the man from Missouri always says, 'You've got
to show me.' But the man from Texas says, 'You've got to put it in my
hand.' From which it is apparent that he is no metaphysician."
Another time, when Ernest had just said that the metaphysical
philosophers could never stand the test of truth, Dr. Hammerfield
suddenly demanded:
"What is the test of truth, young man? Will you kindly explain what has
so long puzzled wiser heads than yours?"
"Certainly," Ernest answered. His cocksureness irritated them. "The wise
heads have puzzled so sorely over truth because they went up into the
air after it. Had they remained on the solid earth, they would have
found it easily enough--ay, they would have found that they themselves
were precisely testing truth with every practical act and thought of
their lives."
"The test, the test," Dr. Hammerfield repeated impatiently. "Never mind
the preamble. Give us that which we have sought so long--the test of
truth. Give it us, and we will be as gods."
There was an impolite and sneering scepticism in his words and manner
that secretly pleased most of them at the table, though it seemed to
bother Bishop Morehouse.
"Dr. Jordan* has stated it very clearly," Ernest said. "His test of
truth is: 'Will it work? Will you trust your life to it?'"
* A noted educator of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries of the Christian Era. He was president
of the Stanford University, a private benefaction of the
times.
"Pish!" Dr. Hammerfield sneered. "You have not taken Bishop Berkeley*
into account. He has never been answered."
* An idealistic monist who long puzzled the philosophers of
that time with his denial of the existence of matter, but
whose clever argument was finally demolished when the new
empiric facts of science were philosophically generalized.
"The noblest metaphysician of them all," Ernest laughed. "But your
example is unfortunate. As Berkeley himself attested, his metaphysics
didn't work."
Dr. Hammerfield was angry, righteously angry. It was as though he had
caught Ernest in a theft or a lie.
"Young man," he trumpeted, "that statement is on a par with all you have
uttered to-night. It is a base and unwarranted assumption."
"I am quite crushed," Ernest murmured meekly. "Only I don't know what
hit me. You'll have to put it in my hand, Doctor."
"I will, I will," Dr. Hammerfield spluttered. "How do you know? You
do not know that Bishop Berkeley attested that his metaphysics did not
work. You have no proof. Young man, they have always worked."
"I take it as proof that Berkeley's metaphysics did not work, because--"
Ernest paused calmly for a moment. "Because Berkeley made an invariable
practice of going through doors instead of walls. Because he trusted his
life to solid bread and butter and roast beef. Because he shaved himself
with a razor that worked when it removed the hair from his face."
"But those are actual things!" Dr. Hammerfield cried. "Metaphysics is of
the mind."
"And they work--in the mind?" Ernest queried softly.
The other nodded.
"And even a multitude of angels can dance on the point of a needle--in
the mind," Ernest went on reflectively. "And a blubber-eating, fur-clad
god can exist and work--in the mind; and there are no proofs to the
contrary--in the mind. I suppose, Doctor, you live in the mind?"
"My mind to me a kingdom is," was the answer.
"That's another way of saying that you live up in the air. But you come
back to earth at meal-time, I am sure, or when an earthquake happens
along. Or, tell me, Doctor, do you have no apprehension in an earthquake
that that incorporeal body of yours will be hit by an immaterial brick?"
Instantly, and quite unconsciously, Dr. Hammerfield's hand shot up to
his head, where a scar disappeared under the hair. It happened that
Ernest had blundered on an apposite illustration. Dr. Hammerfield
had been nearly killed in the Great Earthquake* by a falling chimney.
Everybody broke out into roars of laughter.
* The Great Earthquake of 1906 A.D. that destroyed San
Francisco.
"Well?" Ernest asked, when the merriment had subsided. "Proofs to the
contrary?"
And in the silence he asked again, "Well?" Then he added, "Still well,
but not so well, that argument of yours."
But Dr. Hammerfield was temporarily crushed, and the battle raged on in
new directions. On point after point, Ernest challenged the ministers.
When they affirmed that they knew the working class, he told them
fundamental truths about the working class that they did not know, and
challenged them for disproofs. He gave them facts, always facts, checked
their excursions into the air, and brought them back to the solid earth
and its facts.
How the scene comes back to me! I can hear him now, with that war-note
in his voice, flaying them with his facts, each fact a lash that stung
and stung again. And he was merciless. He took no quarter,* and gave
none. I can never forget the flaying he gave them at the end:
* This figure arises from the customs of the times. When,
among men fighting to the death in their wild-animal way, a
beaten man threw down his weapons, it was at the option of
the victor to slay him or spare him.
"You have repeatedly confessed to-night, by direct avowal or ignorant
statement, that you do not know the working class. But you are not to be
blamed for this. How can you know anything about the working class? You
do not live in the same locality with the working class. You herd
with the capitalist class in another locality. And why not? It is the
capitalist class that pays you, that feeds you, that puts the very
clothes on your backs that you are wearing to-night. And in return you
preach to your employers the brands of metaphysics that are especially
acceptable to them; and the especially acceptable brands are acceptable
because they do not menace the established order of society."
Here there was a stir of dissent around the table.
"Oh, I am not challenging your sincerity," Ernest continued. "You are
sincere. You preach what you believe. There lies your strength and your
value--to the capitalist class. But should you change your belief to
something that menaces the established order, your preaching would
be unacceptable to your employers, and you would be discharged. Every
little while some one or another of you is so discharged.* Am I not
right?"
* During this period there were many ministers cast out of
the church for preaching unacceptable doctrine. Especially
were they cast out when their preaching became tainted with
socialism.
This time there was no dissent. They sat dumbly acquiescent, with the
exception of Dr. Hammerfield, who said:
"It is when their thinking is wrong that they are asked to resign."
"Which is another way of saying when their thinking is unacceptable,"
Ernest answered, and then went on. "So I say to you, go ahead and preach
and earn your pay, but for goodness' sake leave the working class alone.
You belong in the enemy's camp. You have nothing in common with the
working class. Your hands are soft with the work others have performed
for you. Your stomachs are round with the plenitude of eating." (Here
Dr. Ballingford winced, and every eye glanced at his prodigious girth.
It was said he had not seen his own feet in years.) "And your minds are
filled with doctrines that are buttresses of the established order. You
are as much mercenaries (sincere mercenaries, I grant) as were the men
of the Swiss Guard.* Be true to your salt and your hire; guard, with
your preaching, the interests of your employers; but do not come down to
the working class and serve as false leaders. You cannot honestly be in
the two camps at once. The working class has done without you. Believe
me, the working class will continue to do without you. And, furthermore,
the working class can do better without you than with you."
* The hired foreign palace guards of Louis XVI, a king of
France that was beheaded by his people.