that meeting was followed by another before i left new york, and presently gidding joined me at denver, where i was trying to measure the true significance of a labor paper called the appeal to reason that, in spite of a rigid boycott by the ordinary agencies for news distribution went out in the middle west to nearly half a million subscribers, and was filled with such a fierceness of insurrection against labor conditions, such a hatred, blind and impassioned, as i had never known before. gidding remained with me there and came back with me to chicago, where i wanted to see something of the americanization of the immigrant, and my survey of america, the social and economic problem of america, resolved itself more and more into a conference with him.
there is no more fruitless thing in the world than to speculate how life would have gone if this thing or that had not happened. yet i cannot help but wonder how far i might have travelled along the lines of my present work if i had gone to america and not met gidding, or if i had met him without visiting america. the man and his country are inextricably interwoven in my mind. yet i do think that his simplicity and directness, his force of initiative that turned me from a mere enquirer into an active writer and organizer, are qualities less his in particular than america's in general. there is in america a splendid crudity, a directness that cleared my spirit as a bracing wind will sweep the clouds from mountain scenery. compared with our older continents america is mankind stripped for achievement. so many things are not there at all, need not be considered; no institutional aristocracy, no kaisers, czars, nor king-emperors to maintain a litigious sequel to the empire of rome; it has no uneducated immovable peasantry rooted to the soil, indeed it has no rooting to the soil at all; it is, from the forty-ninth parallel to the tip of cape horn, one triumphant embodiment of freedom and deliberate agreement. for i mean all america, spanish-speaking as well as english-speaking; they have this detachment from tradition in common. see how the united states, for example, stands flatly on that bare piece of eighteenth-century intellectualism the constitution, and is by virtue of that a structure either wilful and intellectual or absurd. that sense of incurable servitude to fate and past traditions, that encumbrance with ruins, pledges, laws and ancient institutions, that perpetual complication of considerations and those haunting memories of preceding human failures which dwarf the courage of destiny in europe and asia, vanish from the mind within a week of one's arrival in the new world. naturally one begins to do things. one is inspired to do things. one feels that one has escaped, one feels that the time is now. all america, north and south alike, is one tremendous escape from ancient obsessions into activity and making.
and by the time i had reached america i had already come to see that just as the issues of party politics at home and international politics abroad are mere superficialities above the greater struggle of an energetic minority to organize and exploit the labor of the masses of mankind, so that struggle also is only a huge incident in the still more than half unconscious impulse to replace the ancient way of human living by a more highly organized world-wide social order, by a world civilization embodying itself in a world state. and i saw now how that impulse could neither cease nor could it on the other hand realize itself until it became conscious and deliberate and merciful, free from haste and tyranny, persuasive and sustained by a nearly universal sympathy and understanding. for until that arrives the creative forces must inevitably spend themselves very largely in blind alleys, futile rushes and destructive conflicts. upon that our two minds were agreed.
"we have," said gidding, "to understand and make understanding. that is the real work for us to do, stratton, that is our job. the world, as you say, has been floundering about, half making civilization and never achieving it. now we, i don't mean just you and me, stratton, particularly, but every intelligent man among us, have got to set to and make it thorough. there is no other sane policy for a man outside his private passions but that. so let's get at it——"
i find it now impossible to trace the phases by which i reached these broad ideas upon which i rest all my work, but certainly they were present very early in my discussions with gidding. we two men had been thinking independently but very similarly, and it is hard to say just what completing touches either of us gave to the other's propositions. we found ourselves rather than arrived at the conception of ourselves as the citizens neither of the united states nor of england but of a state that had still to come into being, a world state, a great unity behind and embracing the ostensible political fabrics of to-day—a unity to be reached by weakening antagonisms, by developing understandings and toleration, by fostering the sense of brotherhood across the ancient bounds.
we believed and we believe that such a creative conception of a human commonweal can be fostered in exactly the same way that the idea of german unity was fostered behind the dukedoms, the free cities and kingdoms of germany, a conception so creative that it can dissolve traditional hatreds, incorporate narrower loyalties and replace a thousand suspicions and hostilities by a common passion for collective achievement, so creative that at last the national boundaries of to-day may become obstacles as trivial to the amplifying good-will of men as the imaginary line that severs normandy from brittany, or berwick from northumberland.
and it is not only a great peace about the earth that this idea of a world state means for us, but social justice also. we are both convinced altogether that there survives no reason for lives of toil, for hardship, poverty, famine, infectious disease, for the continuing cruelties of wild beasts and the greater multitude of crimes, but mismanagement and waste, and that mismanagement and waste spring from no other source than ignorance and from stupid divisions and jealousies, base patriotisms, fanaticisms, prejudices and suspicions that are all no more than ignorance a little mingled with viciousness. we have looked closely into this servitude of modern labor, we have seen its injustice fester towards syndicalism and revolutionary socialism, and we know these things for the mere aimless, ignorant resentments they are; punishments, not remedies. we have looked into the portentous threat of modern war, and it is ignorant vanity and ignorant suspicion, the bargaining aggression of the british prosperous and the swaggering vulgarity of the german junker that make and sustain that monstrous european devotion to arms. and we are convinced there is nothing in these evils and conflicts that light may not dispel. we believe that these things can be dispelled, that the great universals, science which has limitations neither of race nor class, art which speaks to its own in every rank and nation, philosophy and literature which broaden sympathy and banish prejudice, can flood and submerge and will yet flow over and submerge every one of these separations between man and man.
i will not say that this great state, this world republic of civilized men, is our dream, because it is not a dream, it is a manifestly reasonable possibility. it is our intention. it is what we are deliberately making and what in a little while very many men and women will be making. we are secessionists from all contemporary nationalities and loyalties. we have set ourselves with all the capacity and energy at our disposal to create a world-wide common fund of ideas and knowledge, and to evoke a world-wide sense of human solidarity in which the existing limitations of political structure must inevitably melt away.
it was gidding and his americanism, his inborn predisposition to innovation and the large freedom of his wealth that turned these ideas into immediate concrete undertakings. i see more and more that it is here that we of the old european stocks, who still grow upon the old wood, differ most from those vigorous grafts of our race in america and africa and australia on the one hand and from the renascent peoples of the east on the other: that we have lost the courage of youth and have not yet gained the courage of desperate humiliations, in taking hold of things. to gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the habitable globe. his mind began producing concrete projects as a fire-work being lit produces sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the most colossal of printing and publishing projects, as a man might work out the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. it was so entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to go on from the proposition that understanding was the primary need of humanity to the systematic organization of free publishing, exhaustive discussion, intellectual stimulation. he set about it as a company of pharmacists might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.
"say, stratton," he said, after a conversation that had seemed to me half fantasy; "let's do it."
there are moments still when it seems to me that this life of mine has become the most preposterous of adventures. we two absurd human beings are spending our days and nights in a sustained and growing attempt to do what? to destroy certain obsessions and to give the universal human mind a form and a desire for expression. we have put into the shape of one comprehensive project that force of released wealth that has already dotted america with universities, libraries, institutions for research and enquiry. already there are others at work with us, and presently there will be a great number. we have started an avalanche above the old politics and it gathers mass and pace....
and there never was an impulse towards endeavor in a human heart that wasn't preposterous. man is a preposterous animal. thereby he ceases to be a creature and becomes a creator, he turns upon the powers that made him and subdues them to his service; by his sheer impudence he establishes his claim to possess a soul....
but i need not write at all fully of my work here. this book is not about that but about my coming to that. long before this manuscript reaches your hands—if ultimately i decide that it shall reach your hands—you will be taking your share, i hope, in this open conspiracy against potentates and prejudices and all the separating powers of darkness.
