but drew some valuable moral sanctions from it; he was a teetotaler and didn't smoke; a Nazarene, too, determined to keep chaste, as he called a state of abstinence from women; and weekly indulgence in self-abuse which he tried to justify as inevitable.
The teaching of Jesus himself had little or no practical effect on him; he classed it all together as counsels of an impossible perfection and, like the vast majority of Americans, he accepted a childish Pauline-German morality, while despising the duty of forgiveness and scorning the Gospel of Love. A few days after our first meeting, Willie proposed to me that I should lend him a thousand dollars and he would give me twenty-five per cent for the use of the money. When I exclaimed against the usurious rate, twelve per cent being the state limit, he told me he could lend a million dollars, if he had it, at from three to five per cent a month on perfect security.
«So you see,» he wound up, «that I can easily afford to give you two hundred and fifty dollars a year for the use of your thousand: one can buy real estate here to pay fifty per cent a year; the country is only just beginning to be developed,» and so forth and so on in the wildest optimism: the end of it being that he got my thousand dollars, leaving me with barely five hundred. But as I could five in a good boarding house for four dollars a week, I reckoned that at the worst I had one carefree year before me, and if Willie kept his promise, I would be free to do whatever I wanted to do for years to come. It was written that I was to have another experience in Lawrence much more important than anything to do with my brother. «Coming events cast their shadows before,» is a poetic proverb, singularly inept; great events arrive unheralded, were truer. One evening I went to a political meeting at Liberty Hall near my hotel. Senator Ingalls was going to speak, and a Congressman on the Granger movement, the first attempt of the western farmers to react politically against the exploitation of Wall Street. The hall was packed: just behind me sat a man between two pretty grey-eyed girls. The man's face attracted me at first sight: I should be able to picture him, for even as I write his face comes before me as vividly as if the many long years that separate us were but the momentary closing of my eyes. Mentally, I can, even today, reproduce a perfect portrait of him and need only add the coloring and expression. The large eyes were hazel and set far apart under the white, overhanging brow; the hair and whiskers were chestnut-brown, tinged with auburn; but it was the eyes that drew and fascinated me, for they were luminous as no other eyes that I have ever seen; frank too, and kind, kind always. But his dress, a black frock coat, with low stand-up white collar and a narrow black silk tie, excited my snobbish English contempt. Both the girls, sisters evidently, were making up to him for all they were worth, or so it seemed to my jaundiced, envious eyes. Senator Ingalls made the usual kind of speech: the farmers were right to combine, but the money lords were powerful, and after all farmers and bankers alike were Americans-Americans first and last and all the time! (Great cheering!) The Congressman followed with the same brand of patriotic piffle and then cries arose from all parts of the hall for Professor Smith! I heard eager whispering behind me, and turning half-round, guessed that the good looking young man was Professor Smith, for his two girl admirers were persuading him to go on the platform and fascinate the audience. In a little while he went up amid great applause; a good figure of a man, rather tall, about five feet ten, slight with broad shoulders. He began to speak in a thin tenor voice:
«There is a manifest conflict of Interests,» he said, «between the manufacturing eastern states that demanded a high tariff on all imports and the farming west that wants cheap goods and cheap rates of transport. «In essence, it's a mere matter of arithmetic, a mathematical problem, demanding a compromise; for every country should establish its own manufacturing industries and be self-supporting. The obvious reform is indicated; the Federal government should take over the railways and run them for the farmers, while competition among American manufacturers would ultimately reduce prices.» No one in the hall seemed to understand this «obvious reform,» but the speech called forth a hurricane of cheers, and I concluded that there was a great many students from the state university in the audience. I don't know what possessed me, but when Smith returned to his seat behind me between the two girls and they praised him to the skies, I got up and walked to the platform. I was greeted with a tempest of laughter and must have cut a ludicrous figure. I was in cow-puncher's dress as modified by Reece and Dell; I wore loose Bedford cord breeches, knee-high brown boots and a sort of buckskin shirt and jacket combined that tucked into my breeches. But rains and sun had worked their will on the buckskin, which had shrunk down my neck and up my arms. Spurred on by the laughter, I went up the four steps on the platform and walked over to the mayor, who was chairman. «May I speak?» I asked. «Sure,» he replied; «your name?» «My name is Harris,» I answered, and the mayor manifestly regarding me as a great joke, announced that a Mr. Harris wished to address the meeting, and he hoped the audience would give him a fair hearing, even if his doctrines happened to be peculiar. As I faced him, the spectators shrieked with laughter: the house fairly rocked. I waited a full minute and then began. «How like Americans and Democrats,» I said, «to judge a man by the clothes he wears and the amount of hair he has on his face or the dollars in his jeans!» There was instantaneous silence, the silence of surprise, at least, and I went on to show what I had learned from Mill, that open competition was the law of life, another name for the struggle for existence; that each country should concentrate its energies on producing the things it was best fitted to produce and trade these off against the products of other nations; this was the great economic law, the law of the territorial division of labor. «Americans should produce corn and wheat and meat for the world,» I said, «and exchange these products for the cheapest English woolen goods and French silks and Irish linen. This would enrich the American farmer, develop all the waste American land, and be a thousand tunes better for the whole country than taxing all consumers with high import duties to enrich a few eastern manufacturers who were too inefficient to face the open competition of Europe. The American farmers,» I went on, «should organize with the laborers, for their interests are identical, and fight the eastern manufacturer, who is nothing but a parasite living on the brains and work of better men.» And then, I wound up: «This common sense program won't please your Senators or your Congressmen, who prefer cheap claptrap to thought, or your super-fine Professors, who believe the war of classes is 'a mere arithmetical problem' (and I imitated the professor's thin voice), but it may nevertheless be accepted by the American farmer tired of being milked by the Yankee manufacturer, and it should stand as the first chapter in the new Granger gospel.»
I bowed to the mayor and turned away, but the audience broke into cheers, and Senator Ingalls came over and shook my hand, saying he hoped to know me better, and the cheering went on till I had gotten back to my place and resumed my seat. A few minutes later and I was touched on the back by Professor Smith. As I turned round, he said smiling, «You gave me a good lesson: I'll never make a public speaker and what I said doubtless sounded inconsequent and absurd; but if you'd have a talk with me, I think I could convince you that my theory will hold water.» «I've no doubt you could,» I broke in, heartily ashamed of having made fun of a man I didn't know; «I didn't grasp your meaning, but I'd be glad to have a talk with you.» «Are you free tonight?» he went on; I nodded. «Then come with me to my rooms.
These ladies live out of town and we'll put them in their buggy and then be free. This is Mrs…» he added, presenting me to the stouter lady, «and this, her sister, Miss Stephens.» I bowed and out we went, I keeping myself resolutely in the background till the sisters had driven away: then we set off together to Professor Smith's rooms for our talk. If I could give you a complete account of that talk, this poor page would glow with wonder and admiration, all merged in loving reverence. We talked, or rather Smith talked, for I soon found he knew infinitely more than I did, was able indeed to label my creed as that of Mill, «a bourgeois English economist,» he called him with smiling disdain. Ever memorable to me, sacred indeed, that first talk with the man who was destined to reshape my life and inspire it with some of his own high purpose. He Introduced me to the communism of Marx and Engels and easily convinced me that land and its products, coal and oil, should belong to the whole community, which should also manage all industries for the public benefit. My breath was taken away by his mere statement of the case and I thrilled to the passion in his voice and manner, though even then I wasn't wholly convinced.
Whatever topic we touched on, he illumined; he knew everything, it seemed to me, German and French and could talk Latin and classic Greek as fluently as English. I had never imagined such scholarship, and when I recited some verses of Swinburne as expressing my creed, he knew them too, and his pantheistic hymn to Hertha as well. And he wore his knowledge lightly as the mere garment of his shining spirit! And how handsome he was, like a sun-god! I had never seen anyone who could at all compare with him. Day had dawned before we had done talking: he told me he was the professor of Greek in the state university and hoped I would come and study with him when the schools opened again in October. «To think of you as a cowboy,» he said, «is impossible. Fancy a cowboy knowing books of Vergil and poems of Swinburne by heart; it's absurd: you must give your brains a chance and study.» «I've top little money,» I said, beginning to regret my loan to my brother. «I told you I am a Socialist,» Smith retorted smiling. «I have three or four thousand dollars in the bank; take half of it and come to study,» and his luminous eyes held me: it was true, after all; my heart swelled, jubilant there were noble souls In
