Arthur M. Lewis

“ If the history of biological science for the last half a century were to be written by a Socialist, who had no scruples about wresting the record so as to support his Socialist theories, he would have nothing to gain by changing a single line.
There is nothing in that history to contradict us when we assert the probability or the certainty, of a social revolution. Who, that looks about him, can fail to see that death is plainly branded in the brow of the existing social order? Its legal, political, and financial institutions are tied together with rotten thread. ”

“ To make a good debate you must meet your opponent most fully on his strongest ground. Any tricky evasion of his strong points and enlarging of minor issues is disgraceful to you and insulting to the audience. It is this latter kind of debating which has prejudiced the public against debates.
A real debate should be a clear presentment of two opposing schools of thought by men who understand both, but basically disagree as to their truth. Such a debate has an educational value of the very highest order.
Every speech, as in lecturing, should have a strong close. ”

“ Individualism is dead.
As a theory, it has gone with Stahl’s “Phlogiston,” Cuvier’s “Cataclysms,” and Goethe’s “Theory of Colors” to the museum of history. The revolution in philosophy, which covers the nineteenth century and reaches back into the closing decades of the eighteenth, has met and overthrown it at every point. Today it lingers in the world of thought a reminiscence of a prior stage of social development, as the imperfect remnant of the “third eyelid” remains in our bodies a surviving rudiment, a legacy that links us with our extinct ancestors of the silurian age. ”

“ The street speaker should use short sentences of simple words. He should avoid oratory and talk as if he were telling something to another man and in dead earnest about it. I have watched a man talk to another man on the street forgetting the outside world completely and using forceful language and eloquent gestures. If such a man could only talk like that to an audience he would be surprised at his own success. Put him before an audience and his natural manner disappears, he shuffles his feet, does not know what to do with his hands, and brings forth a voice nobody ever heard him use before. ”

“ What the capitalist class wanted now was peace, and long life, and above all, no disturbances.
And it was just at this point that Darwin came forward with a theory that seemed made to order. True this theory spoke of evolution and change, but the change was so slow it was impossible to notice it. A million years was as ten minutes to this theory, and if it took as long for one class in society to displace another, or for one social regime to succeed another, as it does for one species to develop from another, the capitalists and their heirs had nothing to apprehend for a thousand generations. ”

“ Every musical comedy concludes with its full cast on the stage singing the most effective air. Every vaudeville performer strives to reach a climax and, where talent breaks down, refuge is sought in some such miserable subterfuge as waving the flag or presenting a picture of the bulldog countenance of Theodore Roosevelt.
The entertainer, however, appeals to prevailing opinions and prejudices; he gives the audience what they want. The lecturer should be an instructor and his theme may be a new and, as yet, unpopular truth, and it is his duty to give the audience what they should have. ”

“ And so death came into the world, not by sin, as the Genesis legend reports, but through sex; a most astonishing conclusion, it may be, but one from which there is apparently no escape. Immortality still remains, it is true, but it is not the immortality of the conscious self. Positive science, nothwithstanding all its glorious gifts, has dealt a terrible blow to those gorgeous dreams of primitive men and modern mystics; those hopes and longings which have sustained millions of our race in hours of supreme sorrow; a blow which not even the bravest has been able to receive without flinching. ”

“ Listeners who have the misfortune to be present at such a commencement and who do not wish to have their pity excited, had better retire at once, for when such a speaker has been at work fifteen minutes and should be gradually gathering strength like a broadening river, he is really beginning to decline. From then on the lecture dies a lingering death and the audience welcomes its demise with a sigh of relief. Such performances are not common, as no one can make that blunder twice before the same audience. ”

“ There is no hope in going back to the small production of sixty years ago as Hearst and Bryan desire. Increasing the number of bandits in any society is not the concern of their victims. The golden age of labor is not in the past but in the future. The labor problem cannot be solved by going back to the scramble of the hog-pen or the methods of the jungle. There is no succour in flying at each other’s throats in the name of business. ”

“ Of course, deliberation may be overdone, and if the audience once gets the impression that the speaker is slow and does not move along more quickly because he cannot, the effect is disastrous.
Deliberation is closely akin to seriousness and the lecturer who has no great and serious question to present should retire from the platform and try vaudeville.
It is just here that the Socialist has a great advantage, for his theme is the most serious and tremendous that ever occupied the mind of man. ”

“ For half a century this argument of slow evolution has done valiant service as an antidote for Socialism, and the present ruling class would like to retain it forever.
But no ruling class ever was or ever can be wholly omnipotent. The capitalists of to-day can no more hinder the process of social evolution, with its resulting march of ideas, than they can intercept gravitation or divert the tides. They are being driven blindly to their fate by social forces which are beyond their command. ”

“ For myself, if when I am announced to speak and I am not there and there is no message in the hands of the chairman reporting my death or some other almost equally good reason, it is almost safe to say my name has been used without my consent.
Any lecturer who treats his audience lightly has no reason to expect it will take him seriously. There is no lecturing future ahead of the man who says to some disappointed auditor he meets afterward on the street: “Well, the weather was so bad I didn’t think anybody would turn out.” ”

“ On the contrary, as Dietzgen says: “Philosophy is a subject which closely concerns the working class,” and he adds: “This, of course, does by no means imply that every workingman should try to become acquainted with philosophy and study the relation between the idea and matter. From the fact that we all eat bread does not follow that we must all understand milling and baking. But just as we need millers and bakers, so does the working class stand in need of keen scholars who can follow up the tortuous ways of the false priests and lay bare the inanity of their tricks.” ”

“ At the end of a good story the audience will laugh and take a moments rest. For about a minute your spell is broken and men whom you might of held the rest of the evening remember during that minute that they have stayed too long already. Of course this does not apply to a story of two or three sentences thrust into the middle of an argument without breaking or closing it. Longer stories may be used to advantage but they are not very useful to a speaker who has much to say and knows how to say it. Of course wit is a valuable factor but wit shows itself in a lightning dart, not in a long story. ”

“ This is precisely what Marx and Engels accomplished, and this why their work is so fundamentally opposed to the conventional theories and theological superstitious current in their time, and so fully in harmony with all the latest achievements in the scientific world. History ceases to be a meaningless mass of war and famine, bloodshed and cruelty. It becomes a panorama presenting the development of society according to laws which may be understood and with a future that may be measurably predicted.
It develops by the operation of forces that no man or class can wholly stay or hinder. ”

“ It is almost impossible to drive a nail properly if it was started wrong, and the skillful workman will draw it out and start it over again. But such a blunder in lecturing cannot be remedied—at least for that occasion. A stale or confused beginning haunts and depresses the mind of the speaker and makes his best work impossible. It also destroys the confidence of the audience, so that what comes later is likely to be underestimated. ”

“ CIVILIZATION—WARD AND DIETZGEN
One of the darkest curses that has fallen on the working class is its being shut out of the wondrous world of modern thought. The great gates of the Temple of Science are clanged in its face, and its mind is fed on the theological garbage of the Middle Ages. In the school, the press, and especially the pulpit, ideas are gravely presented as serious truths, which are known by all university men to be thoroughly exploded lies. ”

“ I never allow my audience to imagine for a moment that my book talk is a mere matter of selling something. There will always be one or two in the audience who will take that view—natural selection always overlooks a few chuckle-heads. ”

“ The cruel and pitiless ‘struggle for existence’ which rages everywhere through animated nature, and which in the nature of things must rage, this eternal and inexorable competition between all living beings is an undeniable fact. Only a small picked number of the strongest or fittest is able to come forth victoriously from this battle of competition. The great majority of their unfortunate competitors are inevitably destined to perish. ”

“ Street speaking is widely different from hall lecturing and this the reason so many speakers succeed at one and fail at the other. The hall lecturer opens easily and paves the way for the treatment of his theme, but the street speaker would get no crowd or a small one by such a method.
He must plunge at once into the heart of his talk and put as much energy into addressing the first dozen as when his crowd grows larger. As soon as he adapts his voice and manner to the size of his crowd the crowd will stop growing. The only way to add another hundred is to talk as if they were already there. ”

“ All that as well as the coin and bullion in the trunks and safes form but an appendix or, so to speak, the tassels and tufts, behind which is concealed that great and real wealth—the rock on which our hope is built.
“What authorizes the people to believe in the salvation from long ages of torture—nay, not only to believe in, but to see it, and actively strive for, is the fairy-like productive power, the prodigious fertility of human labor. ”

“ Remember that there must be listeners as well as lecturers, and you may make a good listener, a quality none too common, but, as for lecturing, you have about as much chance of success as a man who could not climb ten rungs of a ladder without going dizzy, would have as a steeplejack.
The speaker who writes out his speech and commits it to memory and then recites it, has at least, this in his favor: his performance represents great labor. An audience usually is, and should be, very lenient with anyone who has obviously labored hard for its benefit. ”

“ Today it reverses its attitude and would fain suppress science or at least prevent its reaching the proletarian brain. But alas, it is in the grip of evolutionary processes of which it is merely a part, and it is bound, more securely than Prometheus to the rock, to a mode of production which makes the education of the proletariat a relentless necessity. The nation which keeps its working class in semi-feudal darkness is ground to pieces by the industrial competition of its neighbors—it goes to the wall in the struggle for existence. ”

“ History itself is not a science but it is one of the chief parts of “the science of society”—sociology.
Historical movement like all movement proceeds by law. When Karl Marx discovered the central law of history he became the real founder of modern sociology. His discovery of this law of history ranks with Newton’s discovery of gravity or the Copernican revolution in astronomy. It ranks Marx as one of the men whose genius created a new epoch in human thinking. ”

“ Any philosophy which proposes to save the individual without transforming his social environment stands condemned by modern science.
If, with a society more highly organized than any known to history, we still have anarchy in the production and distribution of our wealth, the remedy is, not less social organization, but more. If with all our dental science toothache still exists, the cure is not fewer dentists, but more dentistry. The need of to-day is not less society, but more social organization. ”

“ A lecturer should realize his grave responsibility to his audience. Nothing but absolute physical impossibility is a sufficient excuse for disappointing an assembly. Have it thoroughly understood that when your name appears on a program, you will be at your post.
Never allow, if you can possibly prevent, anybody to announce you to speak without consulting you and getting your consent. In some cities the method of announcing a speaker, when it is not known whether or not he can be present and, in some cases, even when it is known he cannot, has prevailed in the Socialist party. ”

“ Now that a great body of workingmen are discarding these ancient lies, and groping for those great truths that contain the germs of their redemption, the official savants, true servants of the ruling class, twist and warp their own science in order to make it contradict every working class idea.
This attitude of the time serving intellectual lackeys of the professorial chairs has brought with it another blighting curse—it has made a considerable number of working men suspicious of modern science itself. ”

“ If you think you know the main outlines of the future society yet cannot find those outlines already developing in the society about you, you are nursing a delusion. You belong to the Socialism of Utopia—if your future society is not already here in part, it is “nowhere,” as Utopia means.
We know today that science does not consist of a mere collection of facts. The facts of course are necessary, but science comes only when we push through the facts and find the laws behind them. ”

“ Happily for us, society evolves independently of anybody’s opinion. Our opinions follow blindly and gropingly in the rear. The opinions of individualists do not manufacture social laws, according to certain ethical requirements; they interpret and explain those laws which they discover in operation. The fundamental question is not, “is Individualism better than Socialism?” but “Is society moving in the direction of the one or the other?” ”

“ On one occasion, when the subject of discussion was not of any such serious import as Socialism, but more a question of who could win a debate on a subject of small merit, I defeated my opponent by a trick that I am heartily ashamed of, even under those mitigating circumstances. ”

“ There will be no real airship until we master the laws of aerial flight. Socialism solves the social problem, not because it has, but because it is, an explanation of the laws of social development in general, and of existing society in particular. On these laws our faith is founded. By consciously arranging the social institutions which so profoundly affect our lives, in harmony with these laws, we shall cease to be the slaves of a blind necessity. ”

“ If he is talking to “bums” they will stay whether he talks or not, but if he has an audience of people who have other things awaiting their attention they will pass on the moment the speaker loses his grip.
This is why telling stories at street meetings is not so good a thing as some unobserving speakers suppose. No matter how good a story is, it has a tendency to break up a crowd. I noticed it often before I caught the reason. A story always carries its own conclusion and it thereby makes a sort of a breaking off place in a speech like the end of a chapter in a book. ”

“ These are facts so simple and so obvious that it seems to me every intelligent and enlightened statesman ought to be an advocate of the theory of descent and the general doctrine of evolution as the best antidote for the absurd equalitarian, utopian notions of the Socialists.
“And it was Darwinism, the theory of selection, that Virchow, in his denunciation, had in mind, rather than the mere metamorphic development, the theory of descent, with which it is always confused! Darwinism is anything rather than socialistic. ”

“ When persuasion becomes the object, deliberation is thrown aside and words begin to flow like a mountain freshet, and if the speaker has natural capacity he concludes his point with a grand rush that carries everything before it. ”

“ Darwin discovered the great principle which rules the evolution of organisms. It is the principle of natural selection. It is the sifting out of all organisms of minor worth through the struggle for life.”
The greater part of the adverse criticism, aimed at Darwinism applies only to the extravagant claims put forward by his overenthusiastic disciples; claims not to be found in the works of Darwin himself. As we shall see later, one of the greatest offenders in this respect was no less a person than the co-discoverer of the selection theory—Alfred Russell Wallace. ”