"Billy Rand and I perfectly illustrate the equality of dependence,
sir," returned the Interpreter. "Billy is as much my superior
physically as I am his superior mentally. Without my thinking and
planning he would be as helpless as I would be without his good bodily
strength. We are each equally dependent upon the other, and from that
mutual dependence comes our comradeship in the industry which alone
secures for us the necessities of life. I could not make baskets
without Billy's labor--Billy could not make baskets without my planning
and directing. And yet, sir, you and McIver would set us to fighting
each other. You would have Billy deny his dependence upon me and use
his strength to destroy me, thus depriving himself of the help he must
have if he would live. McIver would have me deny my dependence upon
Billy and by antagonizing him with my assumed superiority turn his
strength to the destruction of our comradeship by which I also live.
Your teaching of class loyalty and class hatred applied to Billy and me
would result in the ruin of our basket making and in our consequent
starvation."
Again the Interpreter, from his wheel chair, pointed with outstretched
arm to the scene that lay with all its varied grades of life--social
levels and individual interests--before them. "Look," he said, "to the
inequality that is there--inequalities that are as great as the
difference between Billy Rand and myself. And yet, every individual
life is dependent upon all the other individual lives. The Mill yonder
is the basket making of the people. All alike must look to it for life
itself. The industries, without which the people cannot exist, can be
carried on only by the comradeship of those who labor with their hands
and those who work with their brains. In the common dependence all are
equal.
"The only equality that your leadership, with its progress of
destruction, can insure to American employers and employees is an
equality of indescribable suffering and death."
The old basket maker paused a moment before he added, solemnly, "I
wonder that you dare assume the responsibility for such a catastrophe.
Have you no God, sir, to whom you must eventually account?"
The man's teeth gleamed in a grin of malicious sarcasm. "I should know
that you believed in God. Bah! An old woman myth to scare fools and
children. I suppose you believe in miracles also?"
"I believe in the miracle of life," the Interpreter answered; "and in
the great laws of life--the law of inequality and dependence, that in
its operation insures the oneness of all things."
The agitator rose to his feet, and with a shrug of contempt, said,
"Very pretty, Mr. Interpreter, very pretty. You watch now from your hut
here and you shall see what men who are not crippled old basket makers
will do with that little bit of your America out there. It is I who
will teach Peter Martin and his comrades in the Mill how to deal with
your friend Adam Ward and his class."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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