The Iron Heel

J >> Jack London >> The Iron Heel


"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.



CHAPTER II

CHALLENGES.


After the guests had gone, father threw himself into a chair and gave
vent to roars of Gargantuan laughter. Not since the death of my mother
had I known him to laugh so heartily.

"I'll wager Dr. Hammerfield was never up against anything like it in his
life," he laughed. "'The courtesies of ecclesiastical controversy!' Did
you notice how he began like a lamb--Everhard, I mean, and how quickly
he became a roaring lion? He has a splendidly disciplined mind. He would
have made a good scientist if his energies had been directed that way."

I need scarcely say that I was deeply interested in Ernest Everhard. It
was not alone what he had said and how he had said it, but it was the
man himself. I had never met a man like him. I suppose that was why, in
spite of my twenty-four years, I had not married. I liked him; I had to
confess it to myself. And my like for him was founded on things
beyond intellect and argument. Regardless of his bulging muscles and
prize-fighter's throat, he impressed me as an ingenuous boy. I felt
that under the guise of an intellectual swashbuckler was a delicate and
sensitive spirit. I sensed this, in ways I knew not, save that they were
my woman's intuitions.

There was something in that clarion-call of his that went to my heart.
It still rang in my ears, and I felt that I should like to hear it
again--and to see again that glint of laughter in his eyes that belied
the impassioned seriousness of his face. And there were further reaches
of vague and indeterminate feelings that stirred in me. I almost loved
him then, though I am confident, had I never seen him again, that the
vague feelings would have passed away and that I should easily have
forgotten him.

But I was not destined never to see him again. My father's new-born
interest in sociology and the dinner parties he gave would not permit.
Father was not a sociologist. His marriage with my mother had been very
happy, and in the researches of his own science, physics, he had been
very happy. But when mother died, his own work could not fill the
emptiness. At first, in a mild way, he had dabbled in philosophy; then,
becoming interested, he had drifted on into economics and sociology. He
had a strong sense of justice, and he soon became fired with a passion
to redress wrong. It was with gratitude that I hailed these signs of a
new interest in life, though I little dreamed what the outcome would
be. With the enthusiasm of a boy he plunged excitedly into these new
pursuits, regardless of whither they led him.

He had been used always to the laboratory, and so it was that he turned
the dining room into a sociological laboratory. Here came to dinner
all sorts and conditions of men,--scientists, politicians, bankers,
merchants, professors, labor leaders, socialists, and anarchists. He
stirred them to discussion, and analyzed their thoughts of life and
society.

He had met Ernest shortly prior to the "preacher's night." And after the
guests were gone, I learned how he had met him, passing down a street at
night and stopping to listen to a man on a soap-box who was addressing
a crowd of workingmen. The man on the box was Ernest. Not that he was
a mere soap-box orator. He stood high in the councils of the socialist
party, was one of the leaders, and was the acknowledged leader in the
philosophy of socialism. But he had a certain clear way of stating the
abstruse in simple language, was a born expositor and teacher, and
was not above the soap-box as a means of interpreting economics to the
workingmen.

My father stopped to listen, became interested, effected a meeting, and,
after quite an acquaintance, invited him to the ministers' dinner. It
was after the dinner that father told me what little he knew about him.
He had been born in the working class, though he was a descendant of
the old line of Everhards that for over two hundred years had lived
in America.* At ten years of age he had gone to work in the mills,
and later he served his apprenticeship and became a horseshoer. He was
self-educated, had taught himself German and French, and at that time
was earning a meagre living by translating scientific and philosophical
works for a struggling socialist publishing house in Chicago. Also, his
earnings were added to by the royalties from the small sales of his own
economic and philosophic works.

* The distinction between being native born and foreign born
was sharp and invidious in those days.

This much I learned of him before I went to bed, and I lay long awake,
listening in memory to the sound of his voice. I grew frightened at
my thoughts. He was so unlike the men of my own class, so alien and so
strong. His masterfulness delighted me and terrified me, for my fancies
wantonly roved until I found myself considering him as a lover, as a
husband. I had always heard that the strength of men was an irresistible
attraction to women; but he was too strong. "No! no!" I cried out. "It
is impossible, absurd!" And on the morrow I awoke to find in myself
a longing to see him again. I wanted to see him mastering men in
discussion, the war-note in his voice; to see him, in all his certitude
and strength, shattering their complacency, shaking them out of their
ruts of thinking. What if he did swashbuckle? To use his own phrase, "it
worked," it produced effects. And, besides, his swashbuckling was a fine
thing to see. It stirred one like the onset of battle.

Several days passed during which I read Ernest's books, borrowed from my
father. His written word was as his spoken word, clear and convincing.
It was its absolute simplicity that convinced even while one continued
to doubt. He had the gift of lucidity. He was the perfect expositor.
Yet, in spite of his style, there was much that I did not like. He laid
too great stress on what he called the class struggle, the antagonism
between labor and capital, the conflict of interest.

Father reported with glee Dr. Hammerfield's judgment of Ernest, which
was to the effect that he was "an insolent young puppy, made bumptious
by a little and very inadequate learning." Also, Dr. Hammerfield
declined to meet Ernest again.

But Bishop Morehouse turned out to have become interested in Ernest,
and was anxious for another meeting. "A strong young man," he said; "and
very much alive, very much alive. But he is too sure, too sure."

Ernest came one afternoon with father. The Bishop had already arrived,
and we were having tea on the veranda. Ernest's continued presence in
Berkeley, by the way, was accounted for by the fact that he was taking
special courses in biology at the university, and also that he was hard
at work on a new book entitled "Philosophy and Revolution."*

* This book continued to be secretly printed throughout the
three centuries of the Iron Heel. There are several copies
of various editions in the National Library of Ardis.

The veranda seemed suddenly to have become small when Ernest arrived.
Not that he was so very large--he stood only five feet nine inches; but
that he seemed to radiate an atmosphere of largeness. As he stopped to
meet me, he betrayed a certain slight awkwardness that was strangely at
variance with his bold-looking eyes and his firm, sure hand that clasped
for a moment in greeting. And in that moment his eyes were just as
steady and sure. There seemed a question in them this time, and as
before he looked at me over long.

"I have been reading your 'Working-class Philosophy,'" I said, and his
eyes lighted in a pleased way.

"Of course," he answered, "you took into consideration the audience to
which it was addressed."

"I did, and it is because I did that I have a quarrel with you," I
challenged.

"I, too, have a quarrel with you, Mr. Everhard," Bishop Morehouse said.

Ernest shrugged his shoulders whimsically and accepted a cup of tea.

The Bishop bowed and gave me precedence.

"You foment class hatred," I said. "I consider it wrong and criminal
to appeal to all that is narrow and brutal in the working class. Class
hatred is anti-social, and, it seems to me, anti-socialistic."

"Not guilty," he answered. "Class hatred is neither in the text nor in
the spirit of anything I have every written."

"Oh!" I cried reproachfully, and reached for his book and opened it.

He sipped his tea and smiled at me while I ran over the pages.

"Page one hundred and thirty-two," I read aloud: "'The class struggle,
therefore, presents itself in the present stage of social development
between the wage-paying and the wage-paid classes.'"

I looked at him triumphantly.

"No mention there of class hatred," he smiled back.

"But," I answered, "you say 'class struggle.'"

"A different thing from class hatred," he replied. "And, believe me,
we foment no hatred. We say that the class struggle is a law of social
development. We are not responsible for it. We do not make the class
struggle. We merely explain it, as Newton explained gravitation. We
explain the nature of the conflict of interest that produces the class
struggle."

"But there should be no conflict of interest!" I cried.

"I agree with you heartily," he answered. "That is what we socialists
are trying to bring about,--the abolition of the conflict of interest.
Pardon me. Let me read an extract." He took his book and turned back
several pages. "Page one hundred and twenty-six: 'The cycle of class
struggles which began with the dissolution of rude, tribal communism
and the rise of private property will end with the passing of private
property in the means of social existence.'"

"But I disagree with you," the Bishop interposed, his pale, ascetic face
betraying by a faint glow the intensity of his feelings. "Your premise
is wrong. There is no such thing as a conflict of interest between labor
and capital--or, rather, there ought not to be."

"Thank you," Ernest said gravely. "By that last statement you have given
me back my premise."

"But why should there be a conflict?" the Bishop demanded warmly.

Ernest shrugged his shoulders. "Because we are so made, I guess."

"But we are not so made!" cried the other.

"Are you discussing the ideal man?" Ernest asked, "--unselfish and
godlike, and so few in numbers as to be practically non-existent, or are
you discussing the common and ordinary average man?"

"The common and ordinary man," was the answer.

"Who is weak and fallible, prone to error?"

Bishop Morehouse nodded.

"And petty and selfish?"

Again he nodded.

"Watch out!" Ernest warned. "I said 'selfish.'"

"The average man IS selfish," the Bishop affirmed valiantly.

"Wants all he can get?"

"Wants all he can get--true but deplorable."

"Then I've got you." Ernest's jaw snapped like a trap. "Let me show you.
Here is a man who works on the street railways."

"He couldn't work if it weren't for capital," the Bishop interrupted.

"True, and you will grant that capital would perish if there were no
labor to earn the dividends."

The Bishop was silent.

"Won't you?" Ernest insisted.

The Bishop nodded.

"Then our statements cancel each other," Ernest said in a matter-of-fact
tone, "and we are where we were. Now to begin again. The workingmen
on the street railway furnish the labor. The stockholders furnish the
capital. By the joint effort of the workingmen and the capital, money is
earned.* They divide between them this money that is earned. Capital's
share is called 'dividends.' Labor's share is called 'wages.'"

* In those days, groups of predatory individuals controlled
all the means of transportation, and for the use of same
levied toll upon the public.

"Very good," the Bishop interposed. "And there is no reason that the
division should not be amicable."

"You have already forgotten what we had agreed upon," Ernest replied.
"We agreed that the average man is selfish. He is the man that is. You
have gone up in the air and are arranging a division between the kind
of men that ought to be but are not. But to return to the earth, the
workingman, being selfish, wants all he can get in the division. The
capitalist, being selfish, wants all he can get in the division. When
there is only so much of the same thing, and when two men want all they
can get of the same thing, there is a conflict of interest between labor
and capital. And it is an irreconcilable conflict. As long as workingmen
and capitalists exist, they will continue to quarrel over the division.
If you were in San Francisco this afternoon, you'd have to walk. There
isn't a street car running."