CHAPTER XXIV.
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 thecourse of my wanderings I visited the underground chamber, and satdown there to rest. Upon the reading table in the chamber severalperiodicals and newspapers lay, and thinking that Dr. Leete might beinterested in glancing over a Boston daily of 1887, I brought one ofthe papers with me 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 labortroubles, strikes, lockouts, boycotts, the programmes of laborparties, and the wild 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 makingconsiderable noise 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 redflag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order,by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms. What astonishesme most is that you should have fallen into the trap sounsuspectingly."
"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 tosuppose that they were hired for the work is to credit them with aninconceivable folly.[4] 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 myday. 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 efficientproduction of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of oneclass, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured andignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that therewas any prospect that it would be achieved. Then the national partyarose to carry it out by political methods. It probably took that namebecause its aim was to nationalize the functions of production anddistribution. Indeed, it could not well have had any other name, forits purpose was to realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur andcompleteness never before conceived, not as an association of men forcertain merely political functions affecting their happiness onlyremotely and superficially, but as a family, a vital union, a commonlife, a mighty heaven-touching tree whose leaves are its people, fedfrom its veins, and feeding it in turn. The most patriotic of allpossible parties, it sought to justify patriotism and raise it froman instinct to a rational devotion, by making the native land truly afather land, a father who kept the people alive and was not merely anidol for which they were expected to die."
[Footnote 4: I fully admit the difficulty of accounting for the courseof the anarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidizedby the capitalists, but, at the same time, there is no doubt that thetheory is wholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at the time byany one, though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect.]