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 coцperation, 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 rйsumй, "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?