"It's quite a problem," said Keidansky, suddenly, after a pensive pause, as he watched the glimmering lights of the Cambridge bridge across the gloomy Charles.
"What is?" I asked.
"How to abolish the social reformers," he answered in a tone of determination.
It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when we left the little cafÉ where we spent part of the evening, and he said it was too early to go home, which in any case was the last resort. It was so roasting hot up in his attic, that no matter what time he climbed up there, he would be "well done" by the time he rose in the morning. But the place he told me of had this advantage: it was delightfully cool in the winter. Keidansky was physically exhausted and mentally lazy, and would say but little at first. He had spent the day in preparing an article for one of the Jewish papers, and during the evening gave two lessons in English, visiting his pupils at their homes; for it was thus, he once informed me, that he learned what English he knew—by teaching it to others. Incidentally these lessons he gave and his journalistic efforts helped to pay for the necessities of life, such as rent, laundry, lunches, symphony concerts ("on the rush"), admissions to picture exhibitions, books, gallery tickets to the best plays that came to town, etc. He had worked very hard that day, he said, which was a direct violation of his principle. He did what he could to keep his ideas out of his article, and he hoped it would be published. He felt tired, did not want to go home, and proposed that we walk over to the Charlesbank Park where, on a night like this, we could at least in imagination conjure up a breeze.
"Your whim is law," I said, and we set off for the park. I had been speaking of a Yiddish melodrama which had been produced in Boston a few days before. Keidansky had not seen the play, but he intended to write a review of it for one of the New York papers. He knew all about it and the species to which it belonged. When capital punishment was abolished, sitting through one of these plays would be an all-sufficient penalty for murder, he said. Then this subject gave out and there was a pause, after which Keidansky made the startling remark concerning social reformers.
"Abolish them? Do you really mean it?" I asked.
"Yes, though I do say it," he replied.
"What for?" I, being puzzled, queried again, and he answered:
"For the welfare of society, and perhaps also the sure approach of the millennium." He continued: "The social reformers, as a rule, are a most unsocial job lot of people. As I have known them, their business has been to frighten, to scowl, to scare, and to make a mountain of evil out of a mole-hill that did not exist. They are often the most blinded zealots, the narrowest-minded, one-sided partisans, with tremendous, almost Dante-like propensities to conjure up hair-raising horribles, but with the genius and the poetry of a Dante left out. Their method is to cut life up piecemeal, pepper it good and heavy, and send you to bed with a few bitter morsels. After a night of the most excruciating nightmares, you wake up with a nauseous taste in your mouth, and a pronounced case of reformania. It is not so much what they say, as how they emphasize it; the very dictionary groans beneath the weight of their abuse of adjectives, and after a time they convince you that you don't know your own address, that you have not, as you imagined, been living on the planet earth, but in the most devilish, hellish purgatory.
"In order to convert this earth into a heaven, they must needs make it appear to be the blackest hell. In order to abolish evil, they must prove that nothing else exists. To convince you of the infinite possibilities in the development of men, they must prove to you that they have ever been divided between parasitic capitalists and starving slaves. Evolution, as they concoct it for you, has been a process of going from bad to worse, from a mild form of slavery to a more abject one.
"You see, they are in for effect, and with the aid of the most bombastic language and turgid phraseology they are bound to make it, no matter how many people they dishearten, discourage and dismay. To damn humanity, they think, is but a trifle when their supreme end is to save the world. Hope is not in heaven, earth sees no gentler star; earth is hell and hell bows down before the social reformer. The reformer that I mean is a man ever wandering about with a pail of black paint in one hand, a brush in the other, and with an expression of heartrending sorrow in his face because he cannot find a ladder high enough to enable him to put a few coats of his paint on the skies. The world must be saved at any cost, say these reformers, and if the world is the cost, why it is dead cheap at that, when they can become saviors of society and possibly sainted martyrs. And so they proceed to exaggerate the evils that exist in the most brazen-faced manner and to magnify the evils they imagine to the utmost extent. They generously enlarge every iniquity that is and fully describe those that have never been; they complicate every simple problem in order to puzzle mankind and to be misunderstood and to appear great. The world has become so civilized, the reformers reason, or rather think, that it is hard to find its monstrous wrongs and social reform are being forgotten, and so out with our telescopes, magnifying glasses and alarm clocks. The capitalists must be dethroned, the down-trodden wage-slave must be enthroned, and then our saviors riot and revel in their never-ending disquisitions. Yes, when there are many reformers in the world, the world is in sore need of reform.
"These people are pitifully short-sighted and can barely see one side of life at a time; they dissect life and remove it from reality. Their solutions are so fine that they have nothing to do with the real problems. They detach humanity from the world. They abolish the concrete (for convenience) and get lost in their abstractions like the detective who disguised himself so much that he could not discover his own identity. They conceive more evil than exists because they rarely know the difference between right and wrong. They are visionaries without breadth of visions; theorists, not knowing the uselessness of all theories; people who would save the world because they do not know it; builders without a foundation; saviors without the saving graces of truth and beauty. They embitter humanity, they darken the world, painting it blacker than it ever was in the barbaric past and—they make me weary, the more so because they constantly remind me how foolish I once was myself.
"I tell you, the world is better to-day than it ever was before, and it would become still better if we could abolish these disparaging, discouraging, slanderous social reformers. The true reformers are those who make us see how good and great the old world is. As you said the other day, the greatest explorers were those who discovered heaven on earth. And after we have abolished the reformers we could gradually also abolish the other evils which afflict our civilization and mar existence. They would no longer impede our progress and we could little by little wipe out the wrongs that oppress us and institute more just conditions for all members of society. These things could be done gradually, reasonably, with good cheer, and with the best results. For another trouble with the vaudeville social reformers that I did not mention is their overweening, overwhelming conceit, which makes them so ludicrously unreasonable and prevents them from seeing that the world is just a trifle bigger than one of their numbers."
It was nearing dawn, and I asked him how he was going to do away with the reformers.
"Well, there's the rub," he said. "I do not know exactly, but I've been thinking that perhaps the only and best way of abolishing the social reformers would be by finding the true solution of the social problem and abolishing all the wrongs and iniquities of our civilization. Let us destroy, annihilate the evils of unjust laws, governments and monopolies, and institute a just system of society and the social reformers will disappear.
"Let us have a society wherein all will share equally in all the joys and sorrows of life, wherein none shall be starved and none shall be pampered to death, wherein none shall have too much of the goods of the world and all shall have enough, wherein no hungry babes will wallow in the gutters to become candidates for the prisons and insane asylums, and no children shall be ruined by riches; a world wherein there will be no temperance movements to drive men to drink, no trust to destroy men's souls, and no churches to harbor infidels; a world without the constant clouds of harrowing, sad thoughts, without the rains of tears, and with more and more of sunshine. Let us do that and we will abolish the obnoxious reformers. Let us abolish the monstrous crime of poverty, which has not the shadow of a reason for existence in a world that is overwhelmed with wealth, and the occupation of the reformers will be gone, and they will vanish. Really, we ought to be willing and ready to do anything for their abolition."
