Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/159

 through it; he was like a man who having left the dusty highway and entered a wood which he thinks his journey's end, suddenly emerges and from a hill beholds the illimitable prospect that lies beyond. Of course he could never endure anything so doctrinaire as Socialism, in the form in which he was accustomed to see it exemplified in the Socialists about him. He could not endure their orthodoxy, any more than he could endure the orthodoxy they were contending against. Their sectarianism was to him quite as impossible as that sectarianism he had known in other fields. Their bigotry was as bad as any. He saw no good to come from a substitution of their tyranny for any other of the many old tyrannies in the world. And naturally to one of his spirit the class hatred they were always inciting under the name of class consciousness was as abhorrent to him as all hatred was.

Sometimes the Socialists, with their passion for generalization, for labeling and pigeonholing everything in the universe, said he was an anarchist. The more charitable of them, wishing to sterilize the term and rid it of its sinister implication, but still insistently scientific, said he was a "philosophic" anarchist. That is a term too vague to use, though in one sense, I suppose, all good men are anarchists, in that they would live their lives as well without laws as with them. Jones himself would have scorned those classifications as readily as he would had anyone said he was a duke or an earl. "No title is higher than Man," he wrote once in a little campaign song. And he was that—a Man.