Martin Eden: Chapter 38

作者: Jack London

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Author: Jack London

"Come on, let's go down to the local."

So spoke Brissenden, faint from a hemorrhage of half an hour before
- the second hemorrhage in three days. The perennial whiskey glass
was in his hands, and he drained it with shaking fingers.

"What do I want with socialism?" Martin demanded.

"Outsiders are allowed five-minute speeches," the sick man urged.
"Get up and spout.  Tell them why you don't want socialism.  Tell
them what you think about them and their ghetto ethics.  Slam
Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains.  Make a scrap
of it.  It will do them good.  Discussion is what they want, and
what you want, too.  You see, I'd like to see you a socialist
before I'm gone.  It will give you a sanction for your existence.
It is the one thing that will save you in the time of
disappointment that is coming to you."

"I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist,"
Martin pondered. "You detest the crowd so. Surely there is
nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul."
He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other
was refilling. "Socialism doesn't seem to save you."

"I'm very sick," was the answer.  "With you it is different.  You
have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to
life somehow.  As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist.  I'll
tell you.  It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the
present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day
is past for your man on horseback.  The slaves won't stand for it.
They are too many, and willy-nilly they'll drag down the would-be
equestrian before ever he gets astride.  You can't get away from
them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality.  It's
not a nice mess, I'll allow.  But it's been a-brewing and swallow
it you must.  You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche
ideas.  The past is past, and the man who says history repeats
itself is a liar.  Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a
poor chap to do?  We can't have the man on horseback, and anything
is preferable to the timid swine that now rule.  But come on,
anyway.  I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any
longer, I'll get drunk.  And you know the doctor says - damn the
doctor!  I'll fool him yet."

It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the
Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class.  The
speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time
that he aroused his antagonism.  The man's stooped and narrow
shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the
crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of
the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who
had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time.
To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol.  He was
the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable
mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to
biological law on the ragged confines of life.  They were the
unfit.  In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike
proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the
exceptional man.  Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from
her prolific hand she selected only the best.  It was by the same
method that men, aping her, bred race-horses and cucumbers.
Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better
method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with
this particular method.  Of course, they could squirm as they
perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the
platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they
counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the
penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos.

So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to
give them hell.  He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform,
as was the custom, and addressing the chairman.  He began in a low
voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in
his brain while the Jew was speaking.  In such meetings five
minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's
five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their
doctrines but half completed.  He had caught their interest, and
the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's
time.  They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect,
and they listened intently, following every word.  He spoke with
fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves
and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers
as the slaves in question.  He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and
enunciated the biological law of development.

"And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of
the slave-types can endure.  The old law of development still
holds.  In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong
and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and
the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish.  The result
is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so
long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation
increases.  That is development.  But you slaves - it is too bad to
be slaves, I grant - but you slaves dream of a society where the
law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and
inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much
as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all
will marry and have progeny - the weak as well as the strong.  What
will be the result?  No longer will the strength and life-value of
each generation increase.  On the contrary, it will diminish.
There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy.  Your society of
slaves - of, by, and for, slaves - must inevitably weaken and go to
pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces.

"Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No
state of slaves can stand - "

"How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience.

"And how about it?" Martin retorted.  "The thirteen colonies threw
off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called.  The slaves
were their own masters.  There were no more masters of the sword.
But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there
arose a new set of masters - not the great, virile, noble men, but
the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders.  And they
enslaved you over again - but not frankly, as the true, noble men
would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by
spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies.  They
have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave
legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel
slavery your slave boys and girls.  Two million of your children
are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States.
Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly
fed."

"But to return.  I have shown that no society of slaves can endure,
because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of
development.  No sooner can a slave society be organized than
deterioration sets in.  It is easy for you to talk of annulling the
law of development, but where is the new law of development that
will maintain your strength?  Formulate it.  Is it already
formulated?  Then state it."

Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices.  A score of men
were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair.  And
one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire
and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack.
It was a wild night - but it was wild intellectually, a battle of
ideas.  Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers
replied directly to Martin.  They shook him with lines of thought
that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new
biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws.  They
were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the
chairman rapped and pounded for order.

It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there
on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of
journalism for sensation.  He was not a bright cub reporter.  He
was merely facile and glib.  He was too dense to follow the
discussion.  In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was
vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class.  Also,
he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and
dictated the policies of nations and newspapers.  Further, he had
an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect
reporter who is able to make something - even a great deal - out of
nothing.

He did not know what all the talk was about.  It was not necessary.
Words like REVOLUTION gave him his cue.  Like a paleontologist,
able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was
able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word REVOLUTION.
He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made
the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the
arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism
into the most lurid, red-shirt socialist utterance.  The cub
reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid
on the local color - wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and
degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists
raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths,
yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men.