FullReads

Or is it the capitalist? “I will add field to field,” he says, in despite of his own scripture; “I will join railway to railway. I will juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the production of wealth that I can lay hold of; and I will use them for myself against the producer and the consumer. I will enrich myself by ‘corners’ on the necessaries of life; I will make food dear for the poor, that I myself may roll in needless luxury. I will monopolise whatever I can seize, and the people may eat straw.” That temper, too, humanity must outlive. And those who can’t outlive it of themselves, or be warned in time, must be taught by stern lessons that their race has outstripped them.

As for slavery, ’tis now gone. That was the vilest of them all. It was the naked assertion of the Monopolist platform: “You live, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard your life entirely, and use you as my chattel.” It died at last of the moral indignation of humanity. It died when a Southern court of so-called justice formulated in plain words the underlying principle of its hateful creed: “A black man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.” That finally finished it. We no longer allow every man to “wallop his own nigger.” And though the last relics of it die hard in Queensland, South Africa, Demerara, we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that one Monopolist Instinct out of the group is pretty well bred out of us.

Except as regards women! There, it lingers still. The Man says even now to himself:–“This woman is mine. If she ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woe betide her! I have tabooed her for life; let any other man touch her, let her look at any other man–and–knife, revolver, or law court, they shall both of them answer for it!” There you have in all its natural ugliness another Monopolist Instinct–the deepest-seated of all, the vilest, the most barbaric. She is not yours: she is her own: unhand her! The Turk takes his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and flings her into the Bosphorus. The Christian Englishman drags her shame before an open court, and divorces her with contumely. Her shame, I say, in the common phrase, because though to me it is no shame that any human being should follow the dictates of his or her own heart, it is a shame to the woman in the eyes of the world, and a life of disgrace she must live thenceforward. All this is Monopoly and essentially slavery. As man lives down the Ape and Tiger stage, he will learn to say, rather: “Be mine while you can; but the day you cease to feel you can be mine willingly, don’t disgrace your own body by yielding it up where your soul feels loathing; don’t consent to be the mother of children by a father you despise or dislike or are tired of. Let us kiss and part. Go where you will; and my good will go with you!” Till the man can say that with a sincere heart, why, to borrow a phrase from George Meredith, he may have passed Seraglio Point, but he hasn’t rounded Cape Turk yet.

You find that a hard saying, do you? You kick against freedom for wife or daughter? Well, yes, no doubt; you are still a Monopolist. But, believe me, the earnest and solemn expression of a profound belief never yet did harm to any one. I look forward to the time when women shall be as free in every way as men, not by levelling down, but by levelling up; not, as some would have us think, by enslaving the men, but by elevating, emancipating, unshackling the women.

There is a charming little ditty in Louis Stevenson’s “Child’s Garden of Verse,” which always seems to me to sum up admirably the Monopolist attitude. Here it is. Look well at it:–

“When I am grown to man’s estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys,
Not to meddle with my toys.”

That is the way of the Monopolist. It catches him in the very act. He says to all the world: “Hands off! My property! Don’t walk on my grass! Don’t trespass in my park! Beware of my gunboats! No trifling with my women! I am the king of the castle. You meddle with me at your peril.”

“Ours!” not “Mine!” is the watchword of the future.