Nineteen hundred years ago a revolutionary economist remarked, "To him that hath shall be given; while from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." And this economic process is one which tends continually to accelerate, multiplying itself by geometrical progression. In present-day society, the sellers are nearly all organized, while labor is only ten per cent organized, and the ultimate consumer is not organized at all. We have thus the combination of a monopoly price with a competitive wage, and the surplus wealth of the world is drawn by automatic process into the hands of a small class. The world's selling power is now vested in combinations of capital, called "trusts," which present themselves in the aspect of enormous fortresses of lies. Merely to give a catalogue of the various trade-lies embodied in the daily operations of such a "trust" would require a volume. There are so many kinds of lies that no one man can know them all. There are lies carried in the heads and embodied in the practice of petty chiefs of departments. There are lies so generally accepted and conventionalized that the very liars do not know them as such, and are amazed and wounded in the feelings when their attention is called to the truth. There are lies so complicated that highly trained. lawyers have been paid millions of dollars to contrive them. There are lies so cleverly hidden that it would take the restoring of tons of burned account-books to prove them. There are lies so blazoned forth on billboards and in newspapers that they have become part of the daily thought of the people, and have given new words and phrases to the language. So comes the next stage in the evolution of the tradelie. The owners of trusts and combinations unite into parties, classes and governments for the defense of their gains. They combine and endow and perpetuate their trade-lies, making them into systems and institutions; and so we have the Lie Wholesale, the Lie Sublimated, the Lie Traditional, the Lie Classical; we have the Lie become Religion, Philosophy, History, Literature, and Art. Turn back to Chapter II, and read the list of the six great art lies; you may now understand who made them and why. Lie Number One, the Art for Art's Sake lie, the notion that the end of art is in the art work, is a trade lie of the art specialist, the effort of a sacred caste to main tain its prestige and selling price. Lie Number Two, the lie of Art Snobbery, the notion that art is for the chosen few, and outside the grasp of the masses, is the same. Lie Number Three, the lie of Art Tradition, the notion that new artists must follow old models, is a self-protective device of those in power. Lie Number Four, the lie of Art Dilettantism, the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment and diversion, is a device of the culturally powerful to weaken and degrade those upon whom they prey; just as the creatures of the underworld get their victims drunk before they rob them. Lie Number Five, the lie of the Art Pervert, the notion that art has nothing to do with moral questions, is the same. Lie Number Six, the lie of Vested Interest, is the sum of all the other lies, of all the infinite cruelties of predatory, class-controlled culture. The sarcastic critic will say that I make the artist an extremely knavish and dangerous person. My answer is that he may be, and frequently is, an amiable and guileless child. His knaveries are class knaveries, collective cruelties, conventions and attitudes to life which have been produced as automatic reactions to economic forces; the individual acquires them with no more conscious thought than is involved in the assimilation of his food. Ogi lies and pretends, he cheats, robs and murders, imaginatively speaking, by the same instincts that cause him to blink his eyes in a bright light. CHAPTER X MRS. OGI ORDERS JAZZ Says Mrs. Ogi: way." "Well, I see you are having your Now this is a sore subject in the cave. Each of the residents is absolutely certain that it is always the other who has his or her way; and each is able to cite chapter and verse, and frequently does so. However, at present Ogi has a guilty conscience, so he speaks softly. "I am almost through with my explanation of industrial evolution." "Almost!" sniffs Mrs. Ogi. "How much more?" "Well, I have to show how successive classes emerge and acquire power "Until at last we see the inevitable triumph of the proletariat and the establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth! That will be so new to your readers, and so delightfully exciting! And meantime they sit and wonder when the scandals begin." "Scandals?" says Ogi. "Have I said anything about scandals?" "You tell your readers you're going to turn the artists' pockets inside out and show what is in them! If you don't do it, they'll say, "This show is a frost!"'" I mention that Mrs. Ogi was brought up in exclusive social circles, where never a breath of slang could pass her lips without some female relative raising a finger and whispering: "Hush!" But times are changing, and marriage becomes more and more a lottery. Says Mrs. Ogi's husband: "Of course I intend to muck-rake individual artists-" "Which artists ?" "Well, I have to begin at the beginning "But you've already begun with the beginning of the world!" "I have to begin now with the first significant art." Mrs. Ogi's snort reminds her husband of the old days of the aurochs hunt. "What the American people want to know is how many thousand dollars a week Gloria Swanson is really getting, and what was Rupert Hughes' total income from "The Sins of Hollywood.' Is all that to be put off to the end of your book?" "But how can I deal with present-day art ahead of ancient art?" "You make me think of those interminable English novels, which begin with the infancy of the hero, and get through public school at page three hundred and something!" "But, my dear, there is some old literature that people are really interested in. The Bible for example-" "The Hundred Best Books! Number two, Homer; number three, Shakespeare; Number four, Paradise Lost-" "But you overlook the fact-the Bible is a best-seller!" "The people who buy it are not people who read about art, or would ever hear of a book on art theories. They are people like Mamma! Once upon a time a book-agent offered her a set of the World's Great Orations, and she decided the dark red leather binding would go well with the draperies in the drawing-room. Then a couple of weeks later came another man, selling a set of books in dark green cloth. She decided these would match the decorations in the billiard-room, so she bought them also, and it wasn't until afterwards that somebody noticed the family had two sets of the same World's Great Orations !" "But, my dear, there really is literature in the Bible." "People have been told about literature in the Bible since they were children in Sunday school, and there's no idea in the whole world that bores them quite so much." "But that's exactly the point! That's what this book is for-to show how real literature was alive in its own day, and is just as much alive in the present day. Don't you see what a fascinating theme: they had in Judea the very same class struggle There has come that fanatical light into his eyes which Mrs. Ogi knows so well; he means to make her sit and listen to a whole chapter-and when she has the laundry to count, and the apples to boil for his supper! "Go ahead and write it," she says, in a weary voice. "But take my advice and jazz it up!" So Ogi goes away and postpones his exposition of the successive emergence of social classes; and instead of an impressive title such as "Agrarian Revolt in Ancient Judea," he begins CHAPTER XI THE POPULIST CONVENTION From the New York "Sun," July 4, the early 1890s: Cranks' Convention in Tumult at Topeka Millennium by Majority Vote Scheduled for Next Topeka, Kan., July 3. (Special to the "Sun.") The open season for devil-hunting is on in Topeka today. From Nemaha County on the North to Comanche on the South, from Cherokee County on the East to Cheyenne on the West, the hunters are pouring into their state capital; money-devil hunters and speculator-devil hunters, railroad-devil hunters and rum-devil hunters. The streets of the city swarm with them, the lobbies of the hotels are packed with them, spell-binders and oratorical wizards, political quack-doctors and prohibitionist cranks, longhaired men and short-haired women, partisans of free money, free land and free love. For months they have been looking forward to this convention, which is to wrest the powers of government from the hands of a predatory plutocracy; today, if there is a lunatic in Kansas who is not in Topeka, it is only because the Wall Street devil has got him behind bars in one of the asylums. The lobby of the American House this evening is more like the menagerie tent of a circus than like anything else ever seen in the effete East. The convention opens at ten o'clock tomorrow morning, and tonight every orator has a last chance to save the nation before the platform is made up. Audiences are not necessary, everybody talks at once, and there are a dozen men delivering exhortations, standing on the leather seats of hotel-lobby chairs. Here is "Sockless" Jeremiah Simpson, expecting to be nominated for Congress tomorrow. Coatless and tieless, his collar wilted flat, he shouts to the corn-field cohorts his denunciations of the blood-sucking leeches which have picked the bones of the farmers of Kansas. Here is Isaiah Woe, weird figure having whiskers almost to his belt and pants almost to his shoe-tops, waving his skinny arms and justifying his surname "Woe, woe, woe-woe unto this and woe unto that-woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the rights from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!" Isaiah is known as a "prophet" among this prairie population; he roars the grievances of the dear peepul of the prairie-country, and shakes the hayseeds and corn-dust out of his white whiskers until his audience really believes it sees a halo about his head. He does not hesitate to claim divine inspiration, declaring to the mob: "The Lord |