Would You Want To Live Edward Bellamy’s Utopia?

Two books you need to use for this paper. Don’t forget to do the intext citation and work cited.

https://www.academia.edu/39537876/Give_Me_Liberty_An_American_History_Seagull_Fifth_Edition_Vol._1_by_Eric_Foner

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy
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Title: Looking Backward
2000-1887
Author: Edward Bellamy
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Language: English
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THE
Looking Backward
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2000—1887
By
EDWARD BELLAMY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY TICKNOR AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1889, BY EDWARD BELLAMY
COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1915, AND 1917, BY EMMA A. BELLAMY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
INTRODUCTION i
THE AUTHOR OF “LOOKING BACKWARD” v
AUTHOR’S PREFACE xix
CHAPTER I 7
CHAPTER II 20
CHAPTER III 27
CHAPTER IV 39
CHAPTER V 47
CHAPTER VI 59
CHAPTER VII 63
CHAPTER VIII 76
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CHAPTER IX 85
CHAPTER X 100
CHAPTER XI 110
CHAPTER XII 123
CHAPTER XIII 138
CHAPTER XIV 151
CHAPTER XV 160
CHAPTER XVI 172
CHAPTER XVII 180
CHAPTER XVIII 195
CHAPTER XIX 199
CHAPTER XX 210
CHAPTER XXI 216
CHAPTER XXII 225
CHAPTER XXIII 245
CHAPTER XXIV 251
CHAPTER XXV 255
CHAPTER XXVI 271
CHAPTER XXVII 293
CHAPTER XXVIII 307
POSTSCRIPT 333
INTRODUCTION
BY HEYWOOD BROUN
A good many of my radical friends express a certain kindly condescension when they
speak of Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.”
“Of course you know,” they say, “that it really isn’t first-rate economics.”
And yet in further conversation I have known a very large number of these same
somewhat scornful Socialists to admit, “You know, the first thing that got me started to
thinking about Socialism was Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward.'”
From the beginning it has been a highly provocative book. It is now. Many of the
questions both of mood and technique are even more pertinent in the year 1931 than they
were in 1887. A critic of the Boston Transcript said, when the novel first appeared, that
the new State imagined by Bellamy was all very well, but that the author lost much of his
effectiveness by putting his Utopia a scant fifty years ahead, and that he might much
better have made it seventy-five centuries.
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It is true that the fifty years assigned for changing the world utterly are almost gone by
now. Not everything which was predicted in “Looking Backward” has come to pass. But
the laugh is not against Bellamy, but against his critic. Some of the things which must
have seemed most improbable of all to the Transcript man of 1887 are now actually in
being.
In one respect Edward Bellamy set down a picture of modern American life which is
almost a hundred per cent realized. It startled me to read the passage in which Edith
shows the musical schedule to Julian West, and tells him to choose which selection he
wishes to have brought through the air into the music room. It is true that Bellamy
imagined this broadcasting to be done over telephone wires, as is indeed the case to-day
in some phases of national hook-ups. But consider this quotation:
“He [Dr. Leete] showed how, by turning a screw, the volume of the music could be made
to fill the room, or die away to an echo so faint and far that one could scarcely be sure
whether he heard or imagined it.”
That might almost have been lifted bodily from an article in some newspaper radio
column.
But Bellamy did see with clear vision things and factors much more important than the
possibility of hearing a sermon without going to church. Much which is now established
in Soviet Russia bears at least a likeness to the industrial army visioned in this prophetic
book. However, Communism can scarcely claim Bellamy as its own, for he emphasizes
repeatedly the non-violent features of the revolution which he imagined. Indeed, at one
point he argues that the left-wingers of his own day impeded change by the very excesses
of their technical philosophy.
There is in his book no acceptance of a transitional stage of class dictatorship. He sees the
change coming through a general recognition of the failings of the capitalist system.
Indeed, he sees a point in economic development where capitalism may not even be good
enough for the capitalist.
To the strict Marxian Socialist this is profound and ridiculous heresy. To me it does not
seem fantastic. And things have happened in the world already which were not dreamt of
in Karl Marx’s philosophy.
The point I wish to stress is the prevalent notion that all radical movements in America
stem from the writings of foreign authors. Now, Bellamy, of course, was familiar with the
pioneer work of Marx. And that part of it which he liked he took over. Nevertheless, he
developed a contribution which was entirely his own. It is irrelevant to say that, after all,
the two men differed largely in their view of the technique by which the new world was
to be accomplished. A difference in technique, as Trotzky knows to his sorrow, may be as
profound as a difference in principle.
Bellamy was essentially a New-Englander. His background was that of Boston and its
remote suburbs. And when he preaches the necessity of the coöperative commonwealth,
he does it with a Yankee twang. In fact, he is as essentially native American as Norman
Thomas, the present leader of the Socialist Party in this country.
I cannot confess any vast interest in the love story which serves as a thread for Bellamy’s
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vision of a reconstructed society. But it can be said that it is so palpably a thread of sugar
crystal that it need not get in the way of any reader.
I am among those who first became interested in Socialism through reading “Looking
Backward” when I was a freshman in college. It came in the first half-year of a course
which was designed to prove that all radical panaceas were fundamentally unsound in
their conception. The professor played fair. He gave us the arguments for the radical
cause in the fall and winter, and proceeded to demolish them in spring and early summer.
But what one learns in the winter sticks more than words uttered in the warmth of drowsy
May and June. Possibly I took more cuts toward the end of the lecture course. All I can
remember is the arguments in favor of the radical plans. Their fallacies I have forgotten.
I differ from Bellamy’s condescending converts because I feel that he is close to an
entirely practical and possible scheme of life. Since much of the fantastic quality of his
vision has been rubbed down into reality within half a century, I think there is at least a
fair chance that another fifty years will confirm Edward Bellamy’s position as one of the
most authentic prophets of our age.
THE AUTHOR OF “LOOKING BACKWARD”
“We ask
To put forth just our strength, our human strength,
All starting fairly, all equipped alike.”
“But when full roused, each giant limb awake,
Each sinew strung, the great heart pulsing fast,
He shall start up and stand on his own earth,
Then shall his long, triumphant march begin,
Thence shall his being date.”
BROWNING.
The great poet’s lines express Edward Bellamy’s aim in writing his famous book. That
aim would realize in our country’s daily being the Great Declaration that gave us national
existence; would, in equality of opportunity, give man his own earth to stand on, and
thereby—the race for the first time enabled to enter unhampered upon the use of its
God-given possibilities—achieve a progress unexampled and marvelous.
It is now twelve years since the writing of ‘Looking Backward’ changed one of the most
brilliant of the younger American authors into an impassioned social reformer whose
work was destined to have momentous effect upon the movement of his age. His quality
had hitherto been manifest in romances like ‘Doctor Heidenhof’s Process’ and ‘Miss
Ludington’s Sister,’ and in many short stories exquisite in their imaginative texture and
largely distinguished by a strikingly original development of psychical themes. Tales like
‘The Blindman’s World’ and ‘To Whom This May Come’ will long linger in the memory
of magazine readers of the past twenty years.
‘Doctor Heidenhof’ was at once recognized as a psychological study of uncommon power.
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“Its writer,” said an English review, “is the lineal intellectual descendant of Hawthorne.”
Nor was there in America any lack of appreciation of that originality and that distinction
of style which mark Edward Bellamy’s early work. In all this there was a strong dominant
note prophetic of the author’s future activity. That note was a steadfast faith in the
intrinsic goodness of human nature, a sense of the meaning of love in its true and
universal sense. ‘Looking Backward,’ though ostensibly a romance, is universally
recognized as a great economic treatise in a framework of fiction. Without this guise it
could not have obtained the foothold that it did; there is just enough of the skillful
novelist’s touch in its composition to give plausibility to the book and exert a powerful
influence upon the popular imagination. The ingenious device by which a man of the
nineteenth century is transferred to the end of the twentieth, and the vivid dramatic
quality of the dream at the end of the book, are instances of the art of the trained novelist
which make the work unique of its kind. Neither could the book have been a success had
not the world been ripe for its reception. The materials were ready and waiting; the spark
struck fire in the midst of them. Little more than a decade has followed its publication,
and the world is filled with the agitation that it helped kindle. It has given direction to
economic thought and shape to political action.
Edward Bellamy was born in 1850,—almost exactly in the middle of the century whose
closing years he was destined so notably to affect. His home has always been in his
native village of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, now a portion of the city of Chicopee,
one of the group of municipalities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He lived on
Church Street in a house long the home of his father, a beloved Baptist clergyman of the
town. His clerical ancestry is perhaps responsible for his essentially religious nature. His
maternal grandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one of the early pastors of
Springfield, and among his paternal ancestors was Dr. Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem,
Connecticut, a distinguished theologian of revolutionary days, a friend of Jonathan
Edwards, and the preceptor of Aaron Burr. He, however, outgrew with his boyhood all
trammels of sect. But this inherited trait marked his social views with a strongly
anti-materialistic and spiritual cast; an ethical purpose dominated his ideas, and he held
that a merely material prosperity would not be worth the working for as a social ideal. An
equality in material well-being, however, he regarded as the soil essential for the true
spiritual development of the race.
Young Bellamy entered Union College at Schenectady, but was not graduated. After a
year in Germany he studied law and entered the bar, but never practiced. A literary career
appealed to him more strongly, and journalism seemed the more available gateway
thereto. His first newspaper experience was on the staff of the New York ‘Evening Post,’
and from that journal he went to the Springfield ‘Union.’ Besides his European trip, a
journey to Hawaii by way of Panama and a return across the continent gave a
considerable geographical range to his knowledge of the world at large.
It is notable that his first public utterance, made before a local lyceum when a youth in
his teens, was devoted to sentiments of social reform that foreshadowed his future work.
When ‘Looking Backward’ was the sensation of the year, a newspaper charge brought
against Mr. Bellamy was that he was “posing for notoriety.” To those who know the
retiring, modest, and almost diffident personality of the author, nothing could have been
more absurd. All opportunities to make money upon the magnificent advertising given by
a phenomenal literary success were disregarded. There were offers of lecture
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engagements that would have brought quick fortune, requests from magazine editors for
articles and stories on any terms that he might name, proffered inducements from
publishers to write a new book and to take advantage of the occasion to make a volume
of his short stories with the assurance of a magnificent sale,—to all this he was strikingly
indifferent. Two or three public addresses, a few articles in the reviews, and for a while
the editorship of ‘The New Nation,’ a weekly periodical which he established in
Boston,—this was the sum of his public activity until he should have made himself ready
for a second sustained effort. To all sordid incentives he was as indifferent as if he had
been a child of his new order, a century later. The hosts of personal friends whom his
work made for him knew him as a winsome personality; and really to know him was to
love him. His nature was keenly sympathetic; his conversation ready and charming,
quickly responsive to suggestion, illuminated by gentle humor and occasionally a flash of
playful satire. He disliked controversy, with its waste of energy in profitless discussion,
and jestingly averred that if there were any reformers living in his neighborhood he
should move away.
The cardinal features of ‘Looking Backward,’ that distinguish it from the generality of
Utopian literature, lie in its definite scheme of industrial organization on a national basis,
and the equal share allotted to all persons in the products of industry, or the public
income, on the same ground that men share equally in the free gifts of nature, like air to
breathe and water to drink; it being absolutely impossible to determine any equitable ratio
between individual industrial effort and individual share in industrial product on a graded
basis. The book, however, was little more than an outline of the system, and, after an
interval devoted to continuous thought and study, many points called for elaboration. Mr.
Bellamy gave his last years and his ripest efforts to an exposition of the economical and
ethical basis of the new order which he held that the natural course of social evolution
would establish.
‘Equality’ is the title of his last book. It is a more elaborate work than ‘Looking
Backward,’ and in fact is a comprehensive economic treatise upon the subject that gives it
its name. It is a sequel to its famous predecessor, and its keynote is given in the remark
that the immortal preamble of the American Declaration of Independence (characterized
as the true constitution of the United States), logically contained the entire statement of
universal economic equality guaranteed by the nation collectively to its members
individually. “The corner-stone of our state is economic equality, and is not that the
obvious, necessary, and only adequate pledge of these three rights,—life, liberty, and
happiness? What is life without its material basis, and what is an equal right to life but a
right to an equal material basis for it? What is liberty? How can men be free who must
ask the right to labor and to live from their fellow-men and seek their bread from the
hands of others? How else can any government guarantee liberty to men save by
providing them a means of labor and of life coupled with independence; and how could
that be done unless the government conducted the economic system upon which
employment and maintenance depend? Finally, what is implied in the equal right of all to
the pursuit of happiness? What form of happiness, so far as it depends at all upon
material facts, is not bound up with economic conditions; and how shall an equal
opportunity for the pursuit of happiness be guaranteed to all save by a guarantee of
economic equality?”
The book is so full of ideas, so replete with suggestive aspects, so rich in quotable parts,
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as to form an arsenal of argument for apostles of the new democracy. As with ‘Looking
Backward,’ the humane and thoughtful reader will lay down ‘Equality’ and regard the
world about him with a feeling akin to that with which the child of the tenement returns
from his “country week” to the foul smells, the discordant noises, the incessant strife of
the wonted environment.
But the writing of ‘Equality’ was a task too great for the physical strength and vitality of
its author. His health, never robust, gave way completely, and the book was finished by
an indomitable and inflexible dominion of the powerful mind over the failing body which
was nothing short of heroic. Consumption, that common New England inheritance,
developed suddenly, and in September of 1897 Mr. Bellamy went with his family to
Denver, willing to seek the cure which he scarcely hoped to find.
The welcome accorded to him in the West, where his work had met with widespread and
profound attention, was one of his latest and greatest pleasures. Letters came from mining
camps, from farms and villages, the writers all longing to do something for him to show
their love.
The singular modesty already spoken of as characterizing Mr. Bellamy, and an entire
unwillingness to accept any personal and public recognition, had perhaps kept him from a
realization of the fact that his fame was international. But the author of a book which in
ten years had sold nearly a million of copies in England and America, and which had
been translated into German, French, Russian, Italian, Arabic, Bulgarian, and several
other languages and dialects, found himself not among strangers, although two thousand
miles from the home of his lifetime.
He greatly appreciated and gratefully acknowledged his welcome to Colorado, which he
left in April, 1898, when he realized that his life was rapidly drawing to a close.
He died on Sunday morning, May 22, after a month in the old home which he had eagerly
desired to see again, leaving a widow and two young children.
At the simple service held there, with his kindred and the friends of a lifetime about him,
the following passages from ‘Looking Backward’ and ‘Equality’ were read as a fitting
expression, in his own words, of that hope for the bettering and uplifting of Humanity,
which was the real passion of his noble life.
“Said not the serpent in the old story, ‘If you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge you
shall be as gods?’ The promise was true in words, but apparently there was some mistake
about the tree. Perhaps it was the tree of selfish knowledge, or else the fruit was not ripe.
The story is obscure. Christ later said the same thing when he told men that they might be
the sons of God. But he made no mistake as to the tree he showed them, and the fruit was
ripe. It was the fruit of love, for universal love is at once the seed and fruit, cause and
effect, of the highest and completest knowledge. Through boundless love man becomes a
god, for thereby is he made conscious of his oneness with God, and all things are put
under his feet. ‘If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.’
‘He that loveth his brother dwelleth in the light.’ ‘If any man say, I love God, and hateth
his brother, he is a liar.’ ‘He that loveth not his brother abideth in death.’ ‘God is love, and
he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God.’ ‘Every one that loveth knoweth God.’ ‘He that
loveth not knoweth not God.’
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“Here is the very distillation of Christ’s teaching as to the conditions of entering on the
divine life. In this we find the sufficient explanation why the revelation which came to
Christ so long ago and to other illumined souls could not possibly be received by
mankind in general so long as an inhuman social order made a wall between man and
God, and why, the moment that wall was cast down, the revelation flooded the earth like
a sunburst.
“‘If we love one another, God dwelleth in us,’ and mark how the words were made good
in the way by which at last the race found God! It was not, remember, by directly,
purposely, or consciously seeking God. The great enthusiasm of humanity which
overthrew the older and brought in the fraternal society was not primarily or consciously
a Godward aspiration at all. It was essentially a humane movement. It was a melting and
flowing forth of men’s hearts toward one another; a rush of contrite, repentant tenderness;
an impassioned impulse of mutual love and self-devotion to the common weal. But ‘if we
love one another, God dwelleth in us,’ and so man found it. It appears that there came a
moment, the most transcendent moment in the history of the race of man, when with the
fraternal glow of this world of new-found embracing brothers there seems to have
mingled the ineffable thrill of a divine participation, as if the hand of God were clasped
over the joined hands of men. And so it has continued to this day and shall for evermore.
“Your seers and poets in exalted moments had seen that death was but a step in life, but
this seemed to most of you to have been a hard saying. Nowadays, as life advances
toward its close, instead of being shadowed by gloom, it is marked by an access of
impassioned expectancy which would cause the young to envy the old, but for the
knowledge that in a little while the same door will be opened to them. In your day the
undertone of life seems to have been one of unutterable sadness, which, like the moaning
of the sea to those who live near the ocean, made itself audible whenever for a moment
the noise and bustle of petty engrossments ceased. Now this undertone is so exultant that
we are still to hear it.
“Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall have passed away? I
answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end is lost in light. For twofold is the
return of man to God, ‘who is our home,’ the return of the individual by the way of death,
and the return of the race by the fulfillment of its evolution, when the divine secret
hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a tear for the dark past, turn we then
to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of
the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens
are before it.”
There are those who have made strenuous objections to the ideals of Edward Bellamy on
the ground that they are based on nothing better than purely material well-being. In the
presence of the foregoing utterance can they maintain that attitude?
SYLVESTER BAXTER.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
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HISTORICAL SECTION SHAWMUT COLLEGE, BOSTON,
DECEMBER 26, 2000.
Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a
social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense,
it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize
that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old. No
historical fact is, however, better established than that till nearly the end of the nineteenth
century it was the general belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking
social consequences, was destined to last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of
time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does it seem that so prodigious a moral and
material transformation as has taken place since then could have been accomplished in so
brief an interval? The readiness with which men accustom themselves, as matters of
course, to improvements in their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed to leave
nothing more to be desired, could not be more strikingly illustrated. What reflection
could be better calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for their
reward on the lively gratitude of future ages!
The object of this volume is to assist persons who, while desiring to gain a more definite
idea of the social contrasts between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are daunted by
the formal aspect of the histories which treat the subject. Warned by a teacher’s
experience that learning is accounted a weariness to the flesh, the author has sought to
alleviate the instructive quality of the book by casting it in the form of a romantic
narrative, which he would be glad to fancy not wholly devoid of interest on its own
account.
The reader, to whom modern social institutions and their underlying principles are
matters of course, may at times find Dr. Leete’s explanations of them rather trite,—but it
must be remembered that to Dr. Leete’s guest they were not matters of course, and that
this book is written for the express purpose of inducing the reader to forget for the nonce
that they are so to him. One word more. The almost universal theme of the writers and
orators who have celebrated this bi-millennial epoch has been the future rather than the
past, not the advance that has been made, but the progress that shall be made, ever
onward and upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable destiny. This is well, wholly
well, but it seems to me that nowhere can we find more solid ground for daring
anticipations of human development during the next one thousand years, than by
“Looking Backward” upon the progress of the last one hundred.
That this volume may be so fortunate as to find readers whose interest in the subject shall
incline them to overlook the deficiencies of the treatment is the hope in which the author
steps aside and leaves Mr. Julian West to speak for himself.
LOOKING BACKWARD.
CHAPTER I.
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I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. “What!” you say, “eighteen
fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course.” I beg pardon,
but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day
after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston,
which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating
quality characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000.
These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add that I am a young
man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person can be blamed for refusing to
read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.
Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will
undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may,
then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that I know
better than the reader when I was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every
schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day, or
anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were
already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify the immemorial division
of society into the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the
differences between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of
the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was rich and also educated,
and possessed, therefore, all the elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in
that age. Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and
refinements of life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering
no sort of service in return. My parents and grandparents had lived in the same way, and I
expected that my descendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like easy existence.
But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should the world have
supported in utter idleness one who was able to render service? The answer is that my
great-grandfather had accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever
since lived. The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been
exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however, was not the fact.
The sum had been originally by no means large. It was, in fact, much larger now that
three generations had been supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery
of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was
merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection
by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one’s support on the shoulders of others. The
man who had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live on the
income of his investments. To explain at this point how the ancient methods of industry
made this possible would delay us too much. I shall only stop now to say that interest on
investments was a species of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in
industry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able to levy. It must not be
supposed that an arrangement which seems so unnatural and preposterous according to
modern notions was never criticised by your ancestors. It had been the effort of
law-givers and prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least to limit it to
the smallest possible rate. All these efforts had, however, failed, as they necessarily must
so long as the ancient social organizations prevailed. At the time of which I write, the
latter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally given up trying to
regulate the subject at all.
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By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived
together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another,
perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach
which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very
hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace
was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard
a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest
ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust,
their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of
the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for
them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for
himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave
his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it
might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very
insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and
falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and
help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally
regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might
happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who
rode.
But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very luxury rendered
intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in the harness,
and the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion for
fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes; commiseration was
frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially
when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a
particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized
leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the
rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called
forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the
passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to
patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the
hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled
and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull,
and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten
over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always
some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats.
It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the misery of the
toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers’ sense of the value of their seats upon
the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before. If the
passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever fall
from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and
bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged
the coach.
I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the twentieth century an
incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both very curious, which partly explain it.
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In the first place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in
which Society could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and the few rode, and
not only this, but that no very radical improvement even was possible, either in the
harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always been as it
was, and it always would be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy
forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.
The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular hallucination which those on
the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and
sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order
of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once
rode on this very coach and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The
strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from
the ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to
fall under its influence. As for those whose parents and grandparents before them had
been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the
essential difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute.
The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass
of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only
extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my
own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.
In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried, I was engaged to wed Edith
Bartlett. She, like myself, rode on the top of the coach. That is to say, not to encumber
ourselves further with an illustration which has, I hope, served its purpose of giving the
reader some general impression of how we lived then, her family was wealthy. In that
age, when money alone commanded all that was agreeable and refined in life, it was
enough for a woman to be rich to have suitors; but Edith Bartlett was beautiful and
graceful also.
My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. “Handsome she might have been,” I hear
them saying, “but graceful never, in the costumes which were the fashion at that period,
when the head covering was a dizzy structure a foot tall, and the almost incredible
extension of the skirt behind by means of artificial contrivances more thoroughly
dehumanized the form than any former device of dressmakers. Fancy any one graceful in
such a costume!” The point is certainly well taken, and I can only reply that while the
ladies of the twentieth century are lovely demonstrations of the effect of appropriate
drapery in accenting feminine graces, my recollection of their great-grandmothers
enables me to maintain that no deformity of costume can wholly disguise them.
Our marriage only waited on the completion of the house which I was building for our
occupancy in one of the most desirable parts of the city, that is to say, a part chiefly
inhabited by the rich. For it must be understood that the comparative desirability of
different parts of Boston for residence depended then, not on natural features, but on the
character of the neighboring population. Each class or nation lived by itself, in quarters of
its own. A rich man living among the poor, an educated man among the uneducated, was
like one living in isolation among a jealous and alien race. When the house had been
begun, its completion by the winter of 1886 had been expected. The spring of the
following year found it, however, yet incomplete, and my marriage still a thing of the
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future. The cause of a delay calculated to be particularly exasperating to an ardent lover
was a series of strikes, that is to say, concerted refusals to work on the part of the brick-
layers, masons, carpenters, painters, plumbers, and other trades concerned in house
building. What the specific causes of these strikes were I do not remember. Strikes had
become so common at that period that people had ceased to inquire into their particular
grounds. In one department of industry or another, they had been nearly incessant ever
since the great business crisis of 1873. In fact it had come to be the exceptional thing to
see any class of laborers pursue their avocation steadily for more than a few months at a
time.
The reader who observes the dates alluded to will of course recognize in these
disturbances of industry the first and incoherent phase of the great movement which
ended in the establishment of the modern industrial system with all its social
consequences. This is all so plain in the retrospect that a child can understand it, but not
being prophets, we of that day had no clear idea what was happening to us. What we did
see was that industrially the country was in a very queer way. The relation between the
workingman and the employer, between labor and capital, appeared in some
unaccountable manner to have become dislocated. The working classes had quite
suddenly and very generally become infected with a profound discontent with their
condition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only knew how to go about
it. On every side, with one accord, they preferred demands for higher pay, shorter hours,
better dwellings, better educational advantages, and a share in the refinements and
luxuries of life, demands which it was impossible to see the way to granting unless the
world were to become a great deal richer than it then was. Though they knew something
of what they wanted, they knew nothing of how to accomplish it, and the eager
enthusiasm with which they thronged about any one who seemed likely to give them any
light on the subject lent sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, some of whom had
little enough light to give. However chimerical the aspirations of the laboring classes
might be deemed, the devotion with which they supported one another in the strikes,
which were their chief weapon, and the sacrifices which they underwent to carry them
out left no doubt of their dead earnestness.
As to the final outcome of the labor troubles, which was the phrase by which the
movement I have described was most commonly referred to, the opinions of the people of
my class differed according to individual temperament. The sanguine argued very
forcibly that it was in the very nature of things impossible that the new hopes of the
workingmen could be satisfied, simply because the world had not the wherewithal to
satisfy them. It was only because the masses worked very hard and lived on short
commons that the race did not starve outright, and no considerable improvement in their
condition was possible while the world, as a whole, remained so poor. It was not the
capitalists whom the laboring men were contending with, these maintained, but the
iron-bound environment of humanity, and it was merely a question of the thickness of
their skulls when they would discover the fact and make up their minds to endure what
they could not cure.
The less sanguine admitted all this. Of course the workingmen’s aspirations were
impossible of fulfillment for natural reasons, but there were grounds to fear that they
would not discover this fact until they had made a sad mess of society They had the votes
and the power to do so if they pleased, and their leaders meant they should. Some of
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these desponding observers went so far as to predict an impending social cataclysm.
Humanity, they argued, having climbed to the top round of the ladder of civilization, was
about to take a header into chaos, after which it would doubtless pick itself up, turn
round, and begin to climb again. Repeated experiences of this sort in historic and
prehistoric times possibly accounted for the puzzling bumps on the human cranium.
Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of
beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the
imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet
better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the
aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge
downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.
This, of course, was an extreme opinion, but I remember serious men among my
acquaintances who, in discussing the signs of the times, adopted a very similar tone. It
was no doubt the common opinion of thoughtful men that society was approaching a
critical period which might result in great changes. The labor troubles, their causes,
course, and cure, took lead of all other topics in the public prints, and in serious
conversation.
The nervous tension of the public mind could not have been more strikingly illustrated
than it was by the alarm resulting from the talk of a small band of men who called
themselves anarchists, and proposed to terrify the American people into adopting their
ideas by threats of violence, as if a mighty nation which had but just put down a rebellion
of half its own numbers, in order to maintain its political system, were likely to adopt a
new social system out of fear.
As one of the wealthy, with a large stake in the existing order of things, I naturally shared
the apprehensions of my class. The particular grievance I had against the working classes
at the time of which I write, on account of the effect of their strikes in postponing my
wedded bliss, no doubt lent a special animosity to my feeling toward them.
CHAPTER II.
The thirtieth day of May, 1887, fell on a Monday. It was one of the annual holidays of the
nation in the latter third of the nineteenth century, being set apart under the name of
Decoration Day, for doing honor to the memory of the soldiers of the North who took
part in the war for the preservation of the union of the States. The survivors of the war,
escorted by military and civic processions and bands of music, were wont on this
occasion to visit the cemeteries and lay wreaths of flowers upon the graves of their dead
comrades, the ceremony being a very solemn and touching one. The eldest brother of
Edith Bartlett had fallen in the war, and on Decoration Day the family was in the habit of
making a visit to Mount Auburn, where he lay.
I had asked permission to make one of the party, and, on our return to the city at nightfall,
remained to dine with the family of my betrothed. In the drawing-room, after dinner, I
picked up an evening paper and read of a fresh strike in the building trades, which would
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probably still further delay the completion of my unlucky house. I remember distinctly
how exasperated I was at this, and the objurgations, as forcible as the presence of the
ladies permitted, which I lavished upon workmen in general, and these strikers in
particular. I had abundant sympathy from those about me, and the remarks made in the
desultory conversation which followed, upon the unprincipled conduct of the labor
agitators, were calculated to make those gentlemen’s ears tingle. It was agreed that affairs
were going from bad to worse very fast, and that there was no telling what we should
come to soon. “The worst of it,” I remember Mrs. Bartlett’s saying, “is that the working
classes all over the world seem to be going crazy at once. In Europe it is far worse even
than here. I’m sure I should not dare to live there at all. I asked Mr. Bartlett the other day
where we should emigrate to if all the terrible things took place which those socialists
threaten. He said he did not know any place now where society could be called stable
except Greenland, Patagonia, and the Chinese Empire.” “Those Chinamen knew what
they were about,” somebody added, “when they refused to let in our western civilization.
They knew what it would lead to better than we did. They saw it was nothing but
dynamite in disguise.”
After this, I remember drawing Edith apart and trying to persuade her that it would be
better to be married at once without waiting for the completion of the house, spending the
time in travel till our home was ready for us. She was remarkably handsome that evening,
the mourning costume that she wore in recognition of the day setting off to great
advantage the purity of her complexion. I can see her even now with my mind’s eye just
as she looked that night. When I took my leave she followed me into the hall and I kissed
her good-by as usual. There was no circumstance out of the common to distinguish this
parting from previous occasions when we had bade each other good-by for a night or a
day. There was absolutely no premonition in my mind, or I am sure in hers, that this was
more than an ordinary separation.
Ah, well!
The hour at which I had left my betrothed was a rather early one for a lover, but the fact
was no reflection on my devotion. I was a confirmed sufferer from insomnia, and
although otherwise perfectly well had been completely fagged out that day, from having
slept scarcely at all the two previous nights. Edith knew this and had insisted on sending
me home by nine o’clock, with strict orders to go to bed at once.
The house in which I lived had been occupied by three generations of the family of which
I was the only living representative in the direct line. It was a large, ancient wooden
mansion, very elegant in an old-fashioned way within, but situated in a quarter that had
long since become undesirable for residence, from its invasion by tenement houses and
manufactories. It was not a house to which I could think of bringing a bride, much less so
dainty a one as Edith Bartlett. I had advertised it for sale, and meanwhile merely used it
for sleeping purposes, dining at my club. One servant, a faithful colored man by the name
of Sawyer, lived with me and attended to my few wants. One feature of the house I
expected to miss greatly when I should leave it, and this was the sleeping chamber which
I had built under the foundations. I could not have slept in the city at all, with its never
ceasing nightly noises, if I had been obliged to use an upstairs chamber. But to this
subterranean room no murmur from the upper world ever penetrated. When I had entered
it and closed the door, I was surrounded by the silence of the tomb. In order to prevent
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the dampness of the subsoil from penetrating the chamber, the walls had been laid in
hydraulic cement and were very thick, and the floor was likewise protected. In order that
the room might serve also as a vault equally proof against violence and flames, for the
storage of valuables, I had roofed it with stone slabs hermetically sealed, and the outer
door was of iron with a thick coating of asbestos. A small pipe, communicating with a
wind-mill on the top of the house, insured the renewal of air.
It might seem that the tenant of such a chamber ought to be able to command slumber,
but it was rare that I slept well, even there, two nights in succession. So accustomed was I
to wakefulness that I minded little the loss of one night’s rest. A second night, however,
spent in my reading chair instead of my bed, tired me out, and I never allowed myself to
go longer than that without slumber, from fear of nervous disorder. From this statement it
will be inferred that I had at my command some artificial means for inducing sleep in the
last resort, and so in fact I had. If after two sleepless nights I found myself on the
approach of the third without sensations of drowsiness, I called in Dr. Pillsbury.
He was a doctor by courtesy only, what was called in those days an “irregular” or “quack”
doctor. He called himself a “Professor of Animal Magnetism.” I had come across him in
the course of some amateur investigations into the phenomena of animal magnetism. I
don’t think he knew anything about medicine, but he was certainly a remarkable
mesmerist. It was for the purpose of being put to sleep by his manipulations that I used to
send for him when I found a third night of sleeplessness impending. Let my nervous
excitement or mental preoccupation be however great, Dr. Pillsbury never failed, after a
short time, to leave me in a deep slumber, which continued till I was aroused by a
reversal of the mesmerizing process. The process for awaking the sleeper was much
simpler than that for putting him to sleep, and for convenience I had made Dr. Pillsbury
teach Sawyer how to do it.
My faithful servant alone knew for what purpose Dr. Pillsbury visited me, or that he did
so at all. Of course, when Edith became my wife I should have to tell her my secrets. I
had not hitherto told her this, because there was unquestionably a slight risk in the
mesmeric sleep, and I knew she would set her face against my practice. The risk, of
course, was that it might become too profound and pass into a trance beyond the
mesmerizer’s power to break, ending in death. Repeated experiments had fully convinced
me that the risk was next to nothing if reasonable precautions were exercised, and of this
I hoped, though doubtingly, to convince Edith. I went directly home after leaving her, and
at once sent Sawyer to fetch Dr. Pillsbury. Meanwhile I sought my subterranean sleeping
chamber, and exchanging my costume for a comfortable dressing-gown, sat down to read
the letters by the evening mail which Sawyer had laid on my reading table.
One of them was from the builder of my new house, and confirmed what I had inferred
from the newspaper item. The new strikes, he said, had postponed indefinitely the
completion of the contract, as neither masters nor workmen would concede the point at
issue without a long struggle. Caligula wished that the Roman people had but one neck
that he might cut it off, and as I read this letter I am afraid that for a moment I was
capable of wishing the same thing concerning the laboring classes of America. The return
of Sawyer with the doctor interrupted my gloomy meditations.
It appeared that he had with difficulty been able to secure his services, as he was
preparing to leave the city that very night. The doctor explained that since he had seen me
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last he had learned of a fine professional opening in a distant city, and decided to take
prompt advantage of it. On my asking, in some panic, what I was to do for some one to
put me to sleep, he gave me the names of several mesmerizers in Boston who, he averred,
had quite as great powers as he.
Somewhat relieved on this point, I instructed Sawyer to rouse me at nine o’clock next
morning, and, lying down on the bed in my dressing-gown, assumed a comfortable
attitude, and surrendered myself to the manipulations of the mesmerizer. Owing, perhaps,
to my unusually nervous state, I was slower than common in losing consciousness, but at
length a delicious drowsiness stole over me.
CHAPTER III.
“He is going to open his eyes. He had better see but one of us at first.”
“Promise me, then, that you will not tell him.”
The first voice was a man’s, the second a woman’s, and both spoke in whispers.
“I will see how he seems,” replied the man.
“No, no, promise me,” persisted the other.
“Let her have her way,” whispered a third voice, also a woman.
“Well, well, I promise, then,” answered the man. “Quick, go! He is coming out of it.”
There was a rustle of garments and I opened my eyes. A fine looking man of perhaps
sixty was bending over me, an expression of much benevolence mingled with great
curiosity upon his features. He was an utter stranger. I raised myself on an elbow and
looked around. The room was empty. I certainly had never been in it before, or one
furnished like it. I looked back at my companion. He smiled.
“How do you feel?” he inquired.
“Where am I?” I demanded.
“You are in my house,” was the reply.
“How came I here?”
“We will talk about that when you are stronger. Meanwhile, I beg you will feel no
anxiety. You are among friends and in good hands. How do you feel?”
“A bit queerly,” I replied, “but I am well, I suppose. Will you tell me how I came to be
indebted to your hospitality? What has happened to me? How came I here? It was in my
own house that I went to sleep.”
“There will be time enough for explanations later,” my unknown host replied, with a
reassuring smile. “It will be better to avoid agitating talk until you are a little more
yourself. Will you oblige me by taking a couple of swallows of this mixture? It will do
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you good. I am a physician.”
I repelled the glass with my hand and sat up on the couch, although with an effort, for my
head was strangely light.
“I insist upon knowing at once where I am and what you have been doing with me,” I
said.
“My dear sir,” responded my companion, “let me beg that you will not agitate yourself. I
would rather you did not insist upon explanations so soon, but if you do, I will try to
satisfy you, provided you will first take this draught, which will strengthen you
somewhat.”
I thereupon drank what he offered me. Then he said, “It is not so simple a matter as you
evidently suppose to tell you how you came here. You can tell me quite as much on that
point as I can tell you. You have just been roused from a deep sleep, or, more properly,
trance. So much I can tell you. You say you were in your own house when you fell into
that sleep. May I ask you when that was?”
“When?” I replied, “when? Why, last evening, of course, at about ten o’clock. I left my
man Sawyer orders to call me at nine o’clock. What has become of Sawyer?”
“I can’t precisely tell you that,” replied my companion, regarding me with a curious
expression, “but I am sure that he is excusable for not being here. And now can you tell
me a little more explicitly when it was that you fell into that sleep, the date, I mean?”
“Why, last night, of course; I said so, didn’t I? that is, unless I have overslept an entire
day. Great heavens! that cannot be possible; and yet I have an odd sensation of having
slept a long time. It was Decoration Day that I went to sleep.”
“Decoration Day?”
“Yes, Monday, the 30th.”
“Pardon me, the 30th of what?”
“Why, of this month, of course, unless I have slept into June, but that can’t be.”
“This month is September.”
“September! You don’t mean that I’ve slept since May! God in heaven! Why, it is
incredible.”
“We shall see,” replied my companion; “you say that it was May 30th when you went to
sleep?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask of what year?”
I stared blankly at him, incapable of speech, for some moments.
“Of what year?” I feebly echoed at last.
“Yes, of what year, if you please? After you have told me that I shall be able to tell you
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how long you have slept.”
“It was the year 1887,” I said.
My companion insisted that I should take another draught from the glass, and felt my
pulse.
“My dear sir,” he said, “your manner indicates that you are a man of culture, which I am
aware was by no means the matter of course in your day it now is. No doubt, then, you
have yourself made the observation that nothing in this world can be truly said to be more
wonderful than anything else. The causes of all phenomena are equally adequate, and the
results equally matters of course. That you should be startled by what I shall tell you is to
be expected; but I am confident that you will not permit it to affect your equanimity
unduly. Your appearance is that of a young man of barely thirty, and your bodily
condition seems not greatly different from that of one just roused from a somewhat too
long and profound sleep, and yet this is the tenth day of September in the year 2000, and
you have slept exactly one hundred and thirteen years, three months, and eleven days.”
Feeling partially dazed, I drank a cup of some sort of broth at my companion’s
suggestion, and, immediately afterward becoming very drowsy, went off into a deep
sleep.
When I awoke it was broad daylight in the room, which had been lighted artificially when
I was awake before. My mysterious host was sitting near. He was not looking at me when
I opened my eyes, and I had a good opportunity to study him and meditate upon my
extraordinary situation, before he observed that I was awake. My giddiness was all gone,
and my mind perfectly clear. The story that I had been asleep one hundred and thirteen
years, which, in my former weak and bewildered condition, I had accepted without
question, recurred to me now only to be rejected as a preposterous attempt at an
imposture, the motive of which it was impossible remotely to surmise.
Something extraordinary had certainly happened to account for my waking up in this
strange house with this unknown companion, but my fancy was utterly impotent to
suggest more than the wildest guess as to what that something might have been. Could it
be that I was the victim of some sort of conspiracy? It looked so, certainly; and yet, if
human lineaments ever gave true evidence, it was certain that this man by my side, with a
face so refined and ingenuous, was no party to any scheme of crime or outrage. Then it
occurred to me to question if I might not be the butt of some elaborate practical joke on
the part of friends who had somehow learned the secret of my underground chamber and
taken this means of impressing me with the peril of mesmeric experiments. There were
great difficulties in the way of this theory; Sawyer would never have betrayed me, nor
had I any friends at all likely to undertake such an enterprise; nevertheless the supposition
that I was the victim of a practical joke seemed on the whole the only one tenable. Half
expecting to catch a glimpse of some familiar face grinning from behind a chair or
curtain, I looked carefully about the room. When my eyes next rested on my companion,
he was looking at me.
“You have had a fine nap of twelve hours,” he said briskly, “and I can see that it has done
you good. You look much better. Your color is good and your eyes are bright. How do
you feel?”
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“I never felt better,” I said, sitting up.
“You remember your first waking, no doubt,” he pursued, “and your surprise when I told
you how long you had been asleep?”
“You said, I believe, that I had slept one hundred and thirteen years.”
“Exactly.”
“You will admit,” I said, with an ironical smile, “that the story was rather an improbable
one.”
“Extraordinary, I admit,” he responded, “but given the proper conditions, not improbable
nor inconsistent with what we know of the trance state. When complete, as in your case,
the vital functions are absolutely suspended, and there is no waste of the tissues. No limit
can be set to the possible duration of a trance when the external conditions protect the
body from physical injury. This trance of yours is indeed the longest of which there is any
positive record, but there is no known reason wherefore, had you not been discovered and
had the chamber in which we found you continued intact, you might not have remained in
a state of suspended animation till, at the end of indefinite ages, the gradual refrigeration
of the earth had destroyed the bodily tissues and set the spirit free.”
I had to admit that, if I were indeed the victim of a practical joke, its authors had chosen
an admirable agent for carrying out their imposition. The impressive and even eloquent
manner of this man would have lent dignity to an argument that the moon was made of
cheese. The smile with which I had regarded him as he advanced his trance hypothesis
did not appear to confuse him in the slightest degree.
“Perhaps,” I said, “you will go on and favor me with some particulars as to the
circumstances under which you discovered this chamber of which you speak, and its
contents. I enjoy good fiction.”
“In this case,” was the grave reply, “no fiction could be so strange as the truth. You must
know that these many years I have been cherishing the idea of building a laboratory in the
large garden beside this house, for the purpose of chemical experiments for which I have
a taste. Last Thursday the excavation for the cellar was at last begun. It was completed by
that night, and Friday the masons were to have come. Thursday night we had a
tremendous deluge of rain, and Friday morning I found my cellar a frog-pond and the
walls quite washed down. My daughter, who had come out to view the disaster with me,
called my attention to a corner of masonry laid bare by the crumbling away of one of the
walls. I cleared a little earth from it, and, finding that it seemed part of a large mass,
determined to investigate it. The workmen I sent for unearthed an oblong vault some
eight feet below the surface, and set in the corner of what had evidently been the
foundation walls of an ancient house. A layer of ashes and charcoal on the top of the vault
showed that the house above had perished by fire. The vault itself was perfectly intact,
the cement being as good as when first applied. It had a door, but this we could not force,
and found entrance by removing one of the flagstones which formed the roof. The air
which came up was stagnant but pure, dry and not cold. Descending with a lantern, I
found myself in an apartment fitted up as a bedroom in the style of the nineteenth
century. On the bed lay a young man. That he was dead and must have been dead a
century was of course to be taken for granted; but the extraordinary state of preservation
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of the body struck me and the medical colleagues whom I had summoned with
amazement. That the art of such embalming as this had ever been known we should not
have believed, yet here seemed conclusive testimony that our immediate ancestors had
possessed it. My medical colleagues, whose curiosity was highly excited, were at once
for undertaking experiments to test the nature of the process employed, but I withheld
them. My motive in so doing, at least the only motive I now need speak of, was the
recollection of something I once had read about the extent to which your contemporaries
had cultivated the subject of animal magnetism. It had occurred to me as just conceivable
that you might be in a trance, and that the secret of your bodily integrity after so long a
time was not the craft of an embalmer, but life. So extremely fanciful did this idea seem,
even to me, that I did not risk the ridicule of my fellow physicians by mentioning it, but
gave some other reason for postponing their experiments. No sooner, however, had they
left me, than I set on foot a systematic attempt at resuscitation, of which you know the
result.”
Had its theme been yet more incredible, the circumstantiality of this narrative, as well as
the impressive manner and personality of the narrator, might have staggered a listener,
and I had begun to feel very strangely, when, as he closed, I chanced to catch a glimpse
of my reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall of the room. I rose and went up to it. The
face I saw was the face to a hair and a line and not a day older than the one I had looked
at as I tied my cravat before going to Edith that Decoration Day, which, as this man
would have me believe, was celebrated one hundred and thirteen years before. At this, the
colossal character of the fraud which was being attempted on me, came over me afresh.
Indignation mastered my mind as I realized the outrageous liberty that had been taken.
“You are probably surprised,” said my companion, “to see that, although you are a
century older than when you lay down to sleep in that underground chamber, your
appearance is unchanged. That should not amaze you. It is by virtue of the total arrest of
the vital functions that you have survived this great period of time. If your body could
have undergone any change during your trance, it would long ago have suffered
dissolution.”
“Sir,” I replied, turning to him, “what your motive can be in reciting to me with a serious
face this remarkable farrago, I am utterly unable to guess; but you are surely yourself too
intelligent to suppose that anybody but an imbecile could be deceived by it. Spare me any
more of this elaborate nonsense and once for all tell me whether you refuse to give me an
intelligible account of where I am and how I came here. If so, I shall proceed to ascertain
my whereabouts for myself, whoever may hinder.”
“You do not, then, believe that this is the year 2000?”
“Do you really think it necessary to ask me that?” I returned.
“Very well,” replied my extraordinary host. “Since I cannot convince you, you shall
convince yourself. Are you strong enough to follow me upstairs?”
“I am as strong as I ever was,” I replied angrily, “as I may have to prove if this jest is
carried much farther.”
“I beg, sir,” was my companion’s response, “that you will not allow yourself to be too
fully persuaded that you are the victim of a trick, lest the reaction, when you are
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convinced of the truth of my statements, should be too great.”
The tone of concern, mingled with commiseration, with which he said this, and the entire
absence of any sign of resentment at my hot words, strangely daunted me, and I followed
him from the room with an extraordinary mixture of emotions. He led the way up two
flights of stairs and then up a shorter one, which landed us upon a belvedere on the
house-top. “Be pleased to look around you,” he said, as we reached the platform, “and tell
me if this is the Boston of the nineteenth century.”
At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine
buildings, for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller
inclosures, stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled
with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun.
Public buildings of a colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day
raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one
comparable to it before. Raising my eyes at last towards the horizon, I looked westward.
That blue ribbon winding away to the sunset, was it not the sinuous Charles? I looked
east; Boston harbor stretched before me within its headlands, not one of its green islets
missing.
I knew then that I had been told the truth concerning the prodigious thing which had
befallen me.
CHAPTER IV.
I did not faint, but the effort to realize my position made me very giddy, and I remember
that my companion had to give me a strong arm as he conducted me from the roof to a
roomy apartment on the upper floor of the house, where he insisted on my drinking a
glass or two of good wine and partaking of a light repast.
“I think you are going to be all right now,” he said cheerily. “I should not have taken so
abrupt a means to convince you of your position if your course, while perfectly excusable
under the circumstances, had not rather obliged me to do so. I confess,” he added
laughing, “I was a little apprehensive at one time that I should undergo what I believe you
used to call a knockdown in the nineteenth century, if I did not act rather promptly. I
remembered that the Bostonians of your day were famous pugilists, and thought best to
lose no time. I take it you are now ready to acquit me of the charge of hoaxing you.”
“If you had told me,” I replied, profoundly awed, “that a thousand years instead of a
hundred had elapsed since I last looked on this city, I should now believe you.”
“Only a century has passed,” he answered, “but many a millennium in the world’s history
has seen changes less extraordinary.”
“And now,” he added, extending his hand with an air of irresistible cordiality, “let me
give you a hearty welcome to the Boston of the twentieth century and to this house. My
name is Leete, Dr. Leete they call me.”
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“My name,” I said as I shook his hand, “is Julian West.”
“I am most happy in making your acquaintance, Mr. West,” he responded. “Seeing that
this house is built on the site of your own, I hope you will find it easy to make yourself at
home in it.”
After my refreshment Dr. Leete offered me a bath and a change of clothing, of which I
gladly availed myself.
It did not appear that any very startling revolution in men’s attire had been among the
great changes my host had spoken of, for, barring a few details, my new habiliments did
not puzzle me at all.
Physically, I was now myself again. But mentally, how was it with me, the reader will
doubtless wonder. What were my intellectual sensations, he may wish to know, on
finding myself so suddenly dropped as it were into a new world. In reply let me ask him
to suppose himself suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, transported from earth, say, to
Paradise or Hades. What does he fancy would be his own experience? Would his thoughts
return at once to the earth he had just left, or would he, after the first shock, wellnigh
forget his former life for a while, albeit to be remembered later, in the interest excited by
his new surroundings? All I can say is, that if his experience were at all like mine in the
transition I am describing, the latter hypothesis would prove the correct one. The
impressions of amazement and curiosity which my new surroundings produced occupied
my mind, after the first shock, to the exclusion of all other thoughts. For the time the
memory of my former life was, as it were, in abeyance.
No sooner did I find myself physically rehabilitated through the kind offices of my host,
than I became eager to return to the house-top; and presently we were comfortably
established there in easy-chairs, with the city beneath and around us. After Dr. Leete had
responded to numerous questions on my part, as to the ancient landmarks I missed and
the new ones which had replaced them, he asked me what point of the contrast between
the new and the old city struck me most forcibly.
“To speak of small things before great,” I responded, “I really think that the complete
absence of chimneys and their smoke is the detail that first impressed me.”
“Ah!” ejaculated my companion with an air of much interest, “I had forgotten the
chimneys, it is so long since they went out of use. It is nearly a century since the crude
method of combustion on which you depended for heat became obsolete.”
“In general,” I said, “what impresses me most about the city is the material prosperity on
the part of the people which its magnificence implies.”
“I would give a great deal for just one glimpse of the Boston of your day,” replied Dr.
Leete. “No doubt, as you imply, the cities of that period were rather shabby affairs. If you
had the taste to make them splendid, which I would not be so rude as to question, the
general poverty resulting from your extraordinary industrial system would not have given
you the means. Moreover, the excessive individualism which then prevailed was
inconsistent with much public spirit. What little wealth you had seems almost wholly to
have been lavished in private luxury. Nowadays, on the contrary, there is no destination
of the surplus wealth so popular as the adornment of the city, which all enjoy in equal
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degree.”
The sun had been setting as we returned to the house-top, and as we talked night
descended upon the city.
“It is growing dark,” said Dr. Leete. “Let us descend into the house; I want to introduce
my wife and daughter to you.”
His words recalled to me the feminine voices which I had heard whispering about me as I
was coming back to conscious life; and, most curious to learn what the ladies of the year
2000 were like, I assented with alacrity to the proposition. The apartment in which we
found the wife and daughter of my host, as well as the entire interior of the house, was
filled with a mellow light, which I knew must be artificial, although I could not discover
the source from which it was diffused. Mrs. Leete was an exceptionally fine looking and
well preserved woman of about her husband’s age, while the daughter, who was in the
first blush of womanhood, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her face was as
bewitching as deep blue eyes, delicately tinted complexion, and perfect features could
make it, but even had her countenance lacked special charms, the faultless luxuriance of
her figure would have given her place as a beauty among the women of the nineteenth
century. Feminine softness and delicacy were in this lovely creature deliciously combined
with an appearance of health and abounding physical vitality too often lacking in the
maidens with whom alone I could compare her. It was a coincidence trifling in
comparison with the general strangeness of the situation, but still striking, that her name
should be Edith.
The evening that followed was certainly unique in the history of social intercourse, but to
suppose that our conversation was peculiarly strained or difficult would be a great
mistake. I believe indeed that it is under what may be called unnatural, in the sense of
extraordinary, circumstances that people behave most naturally, for the reason, no doubt,
that such circumstances banish artificiality. I know at any rate that my intercourse that
evening with these representatives of another age and world was marked by an ingenuous
sincerity and frankness such as but rarely crown long acquaintance. No doubt the
exquisite tact of my entertainers had much to do with this. Of course there was nothing
we could talk of but the strange experience by virtue of which I was there, but they talked
of it with an interest so naive and direct in its expression as to relieve the subject to a
great degree of the element of the weird and the uncanny which might so easily have
been overpowering. One would have supposed that they were quite in the habit of
entertaining waifs from another century, so perfect was their tact.
For my own part, never do I remember the operations of my mind to have been more alert
and acute than that evening, or my intellectual sensibilities more keen. Of course I do not
mean that the consciousness of my amazing situation was for a moment out of mind, but
its chief effect thus far was to produce a feverish elation, a sort of mental intoxication.[1]
Edith Leete took little part in the conversation, but when several times the magnetism of
her beauty drew my glance to her face, I found her eyes fixed on me with an absorbed
intensity, almost like fascination. It was evident that I had excited her interest to an
extraordinary degree, as was not astonishing, supposing her to be a girl of imagination.
Though I supposed curiosity was the chief motive of her interest, it could but affect me as
it would not have done had she been less beautiful.
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Dr. Leete, as well as the ladies, seemed greatly interested in my account of the
circumstances under which I had gone to sleep in the underground chamber. All had
suggestions to offer to account for my having been forgotten there, and the theory which
we finally agreed on offers at least a plausible explanation, although whether it be in its
details the true one, nobody, of course, will ever know. The layer of ashes found above
the chamber indicated that the house had been burned down. Let it be supposed that the
conflagration had taken place the night I fell asleep. It only remains to assume that
Sawyer lost his life in the fire or by some accident connected with it, and the rest follows
naturally enough. No one but he and Dr. Pillsbury either knew of the existence of the
chamber or that I was in it, and Dr. Pillsbury, who had gone that night to New Orleans,
had probably never heard of the fire at all. The conclusion of my friends, and of the
public, must have been that I had perished in the flames. An excavation of the ruins,
unless thorough, would not have disclosed the recess in the foundation walls connecting
with my chamber. To be sure, if the site had been again built upon, at least immediately,
such an excavation would have been necessary, but the troublous times and the
undesirable character of the locality might well have prevented rebuilding. The size of the
trees in the garden now occupying the site indicated, Dr. Leete said, that for more than
half a century at least it had been open ground.
CHAPTER V.
When, in the course of the evening the ladies retired, leaving Dr. Leete and myself alone,
he sounded me as to my disposition for sleep, saying that if I felt like it my bed was ready
for me; but if I was inclined to wakefulness nothing would please him better than to bear
me company. “I am a late bird, myself,” he said, “and, without suspicion of flattery, I may
say that a companion more interesting than yourself could scarcely be imagined. It is
decidedly not often that one has a chance to converse with a man of the nineteenth
century.”
Now I had been looking forward all the evening with some dread to the time when I
should be alone, on retiring for the night. Surrounded by these most friendly strangers,
stimulated and supported by their sympathetic interest, I had been able to keep my mental
balance. Even then, however, in pauses of the conversation I had had glimpses, vivid as
lightning flashes, of the horror of strangeness that was waiting to be faced when I could
no longer command diversion. I knew I could not sleep that night, and as for lying awake
and thinking, it argues no cowardice, I am sure, to confess that I was afraid of it. When,
in reply to my host’s question, I frankly told him this, he replied that it would be strange
if I did not feel just so, but that I need have no anxiety about sleeping; whenever I wanted
to go to bed, he would give me a dose which would insure me a sound night’s sleep
without fail. Next morning, no doubt, I would awake with the feeling of an old citizen.
“Before I acquire that,” I replied, “I must know a little more about the sort of Boston I
have come back to. You told me when we were upon the house-top that though a century
only had elapsed since I fell asleep, it had been marked by greater changes in the
conditions of humanity than many a previous millennium. With the city before me I could
well believe that, but I am very curious to know what some of the changes have been. To
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make a beginning somewhere, for the subject is doubtless a large one, what solution, if
any, have you found for the labor question? It was the Sphinx’s riddle of the nineteenth
century, and when I dropped out the Sphinx was threatening to devour society, because
the answer was not forthcoming. It is well worth sleeping a hundred years to learn what
the right answer was, if, indeed, you have found it yet.”
“As no such thing as the labor question is known nowadays,” replied Dr. Leete, “and
there is no way in which it could arise, I suppose we may claim to have solved it. Society
would indeed have fully deserved being devoured if it had failed to answer a riddle so
entirely simple. In fact, to speak by the book, it was not necessary for society to solve the
riddle at all. It may be said to have solved itself. The solution came as the result of a
process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise. All that
society had to do was to recognize and coöperate with that evolution, when its tendency
had become unmistakable.”
“I can only say,” I answered, “that at the time I fell asleep no such evolution had been
recognized.”
“It was in 1887 that you fell into this sleep, I think you said.”
“Yes, May 30th, 1887.”
My companion regarded me musingly for some moments. Then he observed, “And you
tell me that even then there was no general recognition of the nature of the crisis which
society was nearing? Of course, I fully credit your statement. The singular blindness of
your contemporaries to the signs of the times is a phenomenon commented on by many
of our historians, but few facts of history are more difficult for us to realize, so obvious
and unmistakable as we look back seem the indications, which must also have come
under your eyes, of the transformation about to come to pass. I should be interested, Mr.
West, if you would give me a little more definite idea of the view which you and men of
your grade of intellect took of the state and prospects of society in 1887. You must, at
least, have realized that the widespread industrial and social troubles, and the underlying
dissatisfaction of all classes with the inequalities of society, and the general misery of
mankind, were portents of great changes of some sort.”
“We did, indeed, fully realize that,” I replied. “We felt that society was dragging anchor
and in danger of going adrift. Whither it would drift nobody could say, but all feared the
rocks.”
“Nevertheless,” said Dr. Leete, “the set of the current was perfectly perceptible if you had
but taken pains to observe it, and it was not toward the rocks, but toward a deeper
channel.”
“We had a popular proverb,” I replied, “that ‘hindsight is better than foresight,’ the force
of which I shall now, no doubt, appreciate more fully than ever. All I can say is, that the
prospect was such when I went into that long sleep that I should not have been surprised
had I looked down from your house-top to-day on a heap of charred and moss-grown
ruins instead of this glorious city.”
Dr. Leete had listened to me with close attention and nodded thoughtfully as I finished
speaking. “What you have said,” he observed, “will be regarded as a most valuable
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vindication of Storiot, whose account of your era has been generally thought exaggerated
in its picture of the gloom and confusion of men’s minds. That a period of transition like
that should be full of excitement and agitation was indeed to be looked for; but seeing
how plain was the tendency of the forces in operation, it was natural to believe that hope
rather than fear would have been the prevailing temper of the popular mind.”
“You have not yet told me what was the answer to the riddle which you found,” I said. “I
am impatient to know by what contradiction of natural sequence the peace and prosperity
which you now seem to enjoy could have been the outcome of an era like my own.”
“Excuse me,” replied my host, “but do you smoke?” It was not till our cigars were lighted
and drawing well that he resumed. “Since you are in the humor to talk rather than to
sleep, as I certainly am, perhaps I cannot do better than to try to give you enough idea of
our modern industrial system to dissipate at least the impression that there is any mystery
about the process of its evolution. The Bostonians of your day had the reputation of being
great askers of questions, and I am going to show my descent by asking you one to begin
with. What should you name as the most prominent feature of the labor troubles of your
day?”
“Why, the strikes, of course,” I replied.
“Exactly; but what made the strikes so formidable?”
“The great labor organizations.”
“And what was the motive of these great organizations?”
“The workmen claimed they had to organize to get their rights from the big corporations,”
I replied.
“That is just it,” said Dr. Leete; “the organization of labor and the strikes were an effect,
merely, of the concentration of capital in greater masses than had ever been known
before. Before this concentration began, while as yet commerce and industry were
conducted by innumerable petty concerns with small capital, instead of a small number of
great concerns with vast capital, the individual workman was relatively important and
independent in his relations to the employer. Moreover, when a little capital or a new idea
was enough to start a man in business for himself, workingmen were constantly
becoming employers and there was no hard and fast line between the two classes. Labor
unions were needless then, and general strikes out of the question. But when the era of
small concerns with small capital was succeeded by that of the great aggregations of
capital, all this was changed. The individual laborer, who had been relatively important to
the small employer, was reduced to insignificance and powerlessness over against the
great corporation, while at the same time the way upward to the grade of employer was
closed to him. Self-defense drove him to union with his fellows.
“The records of the period show that the outcry against the concentration of capital was
furious. Men believed that it threatened society with a form of tyranny more abhorrent
than it had ever endured. They believed that the great corporations were preparing for
them the yoke of a baser servitude than had ever been imposed on the race, servitude not
to men but to soulless machines incapable of any motive but insatiable greed. Looking
back, we cannot wonder at their desperation, for certainly humanity was never confronted
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with a fate more sordid and hideous than would have been the era of corporate tyranny
which they anticipated.
“Meanwhile, without being in the smallest degree checked by the clamor against it, the
absorption of business by ever larger monopolies continued. In the United States there
was not, after the beginning of the last quarter of the century, any opportunity whatever
for individual enterprise in any important field of industry, unless backed by a great
capital. During the last decade of the century, such small businesses as still remained
were fast-failing survivals of a past epoch, or mere parasites on the great corporations, or
else existed in fields too small to attract the great capitalists. Small businesses, as far as
they still remained, were reduced to the condition of rats and mice, living in holes and
corners, and counting on evading notice for the enjoyment of existence. The railroads had
gone on combining till a few great syndicates controlled every rail in the land. In
manufactories, every important staple was controlled by a syndicate. These syndicates,
pools, trusts, or whatever their name, fixed prices and crushed all competition except
when combinations as vast as themselves arose. Then a struggle, resulting in a still
greater consolidation, ensued. The great city bazar crushed its country rivals with branch
stores, and in the city itself absorbed its smaller rivals till the business of a whole quarter
was concentrated under one roof, with a hundred former proprietors of shops serving as
clerks. Having no business of his own to put his money in, the small capitalist, at the
same time that he took service under the corporation, found no other investment for his
money but its stocks and bonds, thus becoming doubly dependent upon it.
“The fact that the desperate popular opposition to the consolidation of business in a few
powerful hands had no effect to check it proves that there must have been a strong
economical reason for it. The small capitalists, with their innumerable petty concerns,
had in fact yielded the field to the great aggregations of capital, because they belonged to
a day of small things and were totally incompetent to the demands of an age of steam and
telegraphs and the gigantic scale of its enterprises. To restore the former order of things,
even if possible, would have involved returning to the day of stage-coaches. Oppressive
and intolerable as was the régime of the great consolidations of capital, even its victims,
while they cursed it, were forced to admit the prodigious increase of efficiency which had
been imparted to the national industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of
management and unity of organization, and to confess that since the new system had
taken the place of the old the wealth of the world had increased at a rate before
undreamed of. To be sure this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer,
increasing the gap between them and the poor; but the fact remained that, as a means
merely of producing wealth, capital had been proved efficient in proportion to its
consolidation. The restoration of the old system with the subdivision of capital, if it were
possible, might indeed bring back a greater equality of conditions, with more individual
dignity and freedom, but it would be at the price of general poverty and the arrest of
material progress.
“Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the mighty wealth-producing
principle of consolidated capital without bowing down to a plutocracy like that of
Carthage? As soon as men began to ask themselves these questions, they found the
answer ready for them. The movement toward the conduct of business by larger and
larger aggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which had been so
desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its true significance, as a
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process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to open a golden future to
humanity.
“Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the final consolidation of the
entire capital of the nation. The industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be
conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their
caprice and for their profit, were intrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to
be conducted in the common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to say,
organized as the one great business corporation in which all other corporations were
absorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the sole
employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were
swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared. The
epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust. In a word, the people of the United States
concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred odd years
before they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing now for
industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they had then organized for
political purposes. At last, strangely late in the world’s history, the obvious fact was
perceived that no business is so essentially the public business as the industry and
commerce on which the people’s livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private
persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly greater in
magnitude, to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and
nobles to be conducted for their personal glorification.”
“Such a stupendous change as you describe,” said I, “did not, of course, take place
without great bloodshed and terrible convulsions.”
“On the contrary,” replied Dr. Leete, “there was absolutely no violence. The change had
been long foreseen. Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of
the people was behind it. There was no more possibility of opposing it by force than by
argument. On the other hand the popular sentiment toward the great corporations and
those identified with them had ceased to be one of bitterness, as they came to realize their
necessity as a link, a transition phase, in the evolution of the true industrial system. The
most violent foes of the great private monopolies were now forced to recognize how
invaluable and indispensable had been their office in educating the people up to the point
of assuming control of their own business. Fifty years before, the consolidation of the
industries of the country under national control would have seemed a very daring
experiment to the most sanguine. But by a series of object lessons, seen and studied by all
men, the great corporations had taught the people an entirely new set of ideas on this
subject. They had seen for many years syndicates handling revenues greater than those of
states, and directing the labors of hundreds of thousands of men with an efficiency and
economy unattainable in smaller operations. It had come to be recognized as an axiom
that the larger the business the simpler the principles that can be applied to it; that, as the
machine is truer than the hand, so the system, which in a great concern does the work of
the master’s eye in a small business, turns out more accurate results. Thus it came about
that, thanks to the corporations themselves, when it was proposed that the nation should
assume their functions, the suggestion implied nothing which seemed impracticable even
to the timid. To be sure it was a step beyond any yet taken, a broader generalization, but
the very fact that the nation would be the sole corporation in the field would, it was seen,
relieve the undertaking of many difficulties with which the partial monopolies had
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contended.”
CHAPTER VI.
Dr. Leete ceased speaking, and I remained silent, endeavoring to form some general
conception of the changes in the arrangements of society implied in the tremendous
revolution which he had described.
Finally I said, “The idea of such an extension of the functions of government is, to say the
least, rather overwhelming.”
“Extension!” he repeated, “where is the extension?”
“In my day,” I replied, “it was considered that the proper functions of government, strictly
speaking, were limited to keeping the peace and defending the people against the public
enemy, that is, to the military and police powers.”
“And, in heaven’s name, who are the public enemies?” exclaimed Dr. Leete. “Are they
France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and nakedness? In your day governments
were accustomed, on the slightest international misunderstanding, to seize upon the
bodies of citizens and deliver them over by hundreds of thousands to death and
mutilation, wasting their treasures the while like water; and all this oftenest for no im
aginable profit to the victims. We have no wars now, and our governments no war
powers, but in order to protect every citizen against hunger, cold, and nakedness, and
provide for all his physical and mental needs, the function is assumed of directing his
industry for a term of years. No, Mr. West, I am sure on reflection you will perceive that
it was in your age, not in ours, that the extension of the functions of governments was
extraordinary. Not even for the best ends would men now allow their governments such
powers as were then used for the most maleficent.”
“Leaving comparisons aside,” I said, “the demagoguery and corruption of our public men
would have been considered, in my day, insuperable objections to any assumption by
government of the charge of the national industries. We should have thought that no
arrangement could be worse than to entrust the politicians with control of the wealth-
producing machinery of the country. Its material interests were quite too much the
football of parties as it was.”
“No doubt you were right,” rejoined Dr. Leete, “but all that is changed now. We have no
parties or politicians, and as for demagoguery and corruption, they are words having only
an historical significance.”
“Human nature itself must have changed very much,” I said.
“Not at all,” was Dr. Leete’s reply, “but the conditions of human life have changed, and
with them the motives of human action. The organization of society with you was such
that officials were under a constant temptation to misuse their power for the private profit
of themselves or others. Under such circumstances it seems almost strange that you dared
entrust them with any of your affairs. Nowadays, on the contrary, society is so constituted
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that there is absolutely no way in which an official, however ill-disposed, could possibly
make any profit for himself or any one else by a misuse of his power. Let him be as bad
an official as you please, he cannot be a corrupt one. There is no motive to be. The social
system no longer offers a premium on dishonesty. But these are matters which you can
only understand as you come, with time, to know us better.”
“But you have not yet told me how you have settled the labor problem. It is the problem
of capital which we have been discussing,” I said. “After the nation had assumed conduct
of the mills, machinery, railroads, farms, mines, and capital in general of the country, the
labor question still remained. In assuming the responsibilities of capital the nation had
assumed the difficulties of the capitalist’s position.”
“The moment the nation assumed the responsibilities of capital those difficulties
vanished,” replied Dr. Leete. “The national organization of labor under one direction was
the complete solution of what was, in your day and under your system, justly regarded as
the insoluble labor problem. When the nation became the sole employer, all the citizens,
by virtue of their citizenship, became employees, to be distributed according to the needs
of industry.”
“That is,” I suggested, “you have simply applied the principle of universal military
service, as it was understood in our day, to the labor question.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Leete, “that was something which followed as a matter of course as soon
as the nation had become the sole capitalist. The people were already accustomed to the
idea that the obligation of every citizen, not physically disabled, to contribute his military
services to the defense of the nation was equal and absolute. That it was equally the duty
of every citizen to contribute his quota of industrial or intellectual services to the
maintenance of the nation was equally evident, though it was not until the nation became
the employer of labor that citizens were able to render this sort of service with any
pretense either of universality or equity. No organization of labor was possible when the
employing power was divided among hundreds or thousands of individuals and
corporations, between which concert of any kind was neither desired, nor indeed feasible.
It constantly happened then that vast numbers who desired to labor could find no opportu
nity, and on the other hand, those who desired to evade a part or all of their debt could
easily do so.”
“Service, now, I suppose, is compulsory upon all,” I suggested.
“It is rather a matter of course than of compulsion,” replied Dr. Leete. “It is regarded as so
absolutely natural and reasonable that the idea of its being compulsory has ceased to be
thought of. He would be thought to be an incredibly contemptible person who should
need compulsion in such a case. Nevertheless, to speak of service being compulsory
would be a weak way to state its absolute inevitableness. Our entire social order is so
wholly based upon and deduced from it that if it were conceivable that a man could
escape it, he would be left with no possible way to provide for his existence. He would
have excluded himself from the world, cut himself off from his kind, in a word,
committed suicide.”
“Is the term of service in this industrial army for life?”
“Oh, no; it both begins later and ends earlier than the average working period in your day.
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Your workshops were filled with children and old men, but we hold the period of youth
sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag,
equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation. The period of industrial service is
twenty-four years, beginning at the close of the course of education at twenty-one and
terminating at forty-five. After forty-five, while discharged from labor, the citizen still
remains liable to special calls, in case of emergencies causing a sudden great increase in
the demand for labor, till he reaches the age of fifty-five, but such calls are rarely, in fact
almost never, made. The fifteenth day of October of every year is what we call Muster
Day, because those who have reached the age of twenty-one are then mustered into the
industrial service, and at the same time those who, after twenty-four years’ service, have
reached the age of forty-five, are honorably mustered out. It is the great day of the year
with us, whence we reckon all other events, our Olympiad, save that it is annual.”
CHAPTER VII.
“It is after you have mustered your industrial army into service,” I said, “that I should
expect the chief difficulty to arise, for there its analogy with a military army must cease.
Soldiers have all the same thing, and a very simple thing, to do, namely, to practice the
manual of arms, to march and stand guard. But the industrial army must learn and follow
two or three hundred diverse trades and avocations. What administrative talent can be
equal to determining wisely what trade or business every individual in a great nation shall
pursue?”
“The administration has nothing to do with determining that point.”
“Who does determine it, then?” I asked.
“Every man for himself in accordance with his natural aptitude, the utmost pains being
taken to enable him to find out what his natural aptitude really is. The principle on which
our industrial army is organized is that a man’s natural endowments, mental and physical,
determine what he can work at most profitably to the nation and most satisfactorily to
himself. While the obligation of service in some form is not to be evaded, voluntary
election, subject only to necessary regulation, is depended on to determine the particular
sort of service every man is to render. As an individual’s satisfaction during his term of
service depends on his having an occupation to his taste, parents and teachers watch from
early years for indications of special aptitudes in children. A thorough study of the
National industrial system, with the history and rudiments of all the great trades, is an
essential part of our educational system. While manual training is not allowed to
encroach on the general intellectual culture to which our schools are devoted, it is carried
far enough to give our youth, in addition to their theoretical knowledge of the national
industries, mechanical and agricultural, a certain familiarity with their tools and methods.
Our schools are constantly visiting our workshops, and often are taken on long excursions
to inspect particular industrial enterprises. In your day a man was not ashamed to be
grossly ignorant of all trades except his own, but such ignorance would not be consistent
with our idea of placing every one in a position to select intelligently the occupation for
which he has most taste. Usually long before he is mustered into service a young man has
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found out the pursuit he wants to follow, has acquired a great deal of knowledge about it,
and is waiting impatiently the time when he can enlist in its ranks.”
“Surely,” I said, “it can hardly be that the number of volunteers for any trade is exactly
the number needed in that trade. It must be generally either under or over the demand.”
“The supply of volunteers is always expected to fully equal the demand,” replied Dr.
Leete. “It is the business of the administration to see that this is the case. The rate of
volunteering for each trade is closely watched. If there be a noticeably greater excess of
volunteers over men needed in any trade, it is inferred that the trade offers greater
attractions than others. On the other hand, if the number of volunteers for a trade tends to
drop below the demand, it is inferred that it is thought more arduous. It is the business of
the administration to seek constantly to equalize the attractions of the trades, so far as the
conditions of labor in them are concerned, so that all trades shall be equally attractive to
persons having natural tastes for them. This is done by making the hours of labor in
different trades to differ according to their arduousness. The lighter trades, prosecuted
under the most agreeable circumstances, have in this way the longest hours, while an
arduous trade, such as mining, has very short hours. There is no theory, no a priori rule,
by which the respective attractiveness of industries is determined. The administration, in
taking burdens off one class of workers and adding them to other classes, simply follows
the fluctuations of opinion among the workers themselves as indicated by the rate of
volunteering. The principle is that no man’s work ought to be, on the whole, harder for
him than any other man’s for him, the workers themselves to be the judges. There are no
limits to the application of this rule. If any particular occupation is in itself so arduous or
so oppressive that, in order to induce volunteers, the day’s work in it had to be reduced to
ten minutes, it would be done. If, even then, no man was willing to do it, it would remain
undone. But of course, in point of fact, a moderate reduction in the hours of labor, or
addition of other privileges, suffices to secure all needed volunteers for any occupation
necessary to men. If, indeed, the unavoidable difficulties and dangers of such a necessary
pursuit were so great that no inducement of compensating advantages would overcome
men’s repugnance to it, the administration would only need to take it out of the common
order of occupations by declaring it ‘extra hazardous,’ and those who pursued it especially
worthy of the national gratitude, to be overrun with volunteers. Our young men are very
greedy of honor, and do not let slip such opportunities. Of course you will see that
dependence on the purely voluntary choice of avocations involves the abolition in all of
anything like unhygienic conditions or special peril to life and limb. Health and safety are
conditions common to all industries. The nation does not maim and slaughter its
workmen by thousands, as did the private capitalists and corporations of your day.”
“When there are more who want to enter a particular trade than there is room for, how do
you decide between the applicants?” I inquired.
“Preference is given to those who have acquired the most knowledge of the trade they
wish to follow. No man, however, who through successive years remains persistent in his
desire to show what he can do at any particular trade, is in the end denied an opportunity.
Meanwhile, if a man cannot at first win entrance into the business he prefers, he has
usually one or more alternative preferences, pursuits for which he has some degree of
aptitude, although not the highest. Every one, indeed, is expected to study his aptitudes so
as to have not only a first choice as to occupation, but a second or third, so that if, either
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at the outset of his career or subsequently, owing to the progress of invention or changes
in demand, he is unable to follow his first vocation, he can still find reasonably congenial
employment. This principle of secondary choices as to occupation is quite important in
our system. I should add, in reference to the counter-possibility of some sudden failure of
volunteers in a particular trade, or some sudden necessity of an increased force, that the
administration, while depending on the voluntary system for filling up the trades as a
rule, holds always in reserve the power to call for special volunteers, or draft any force
needed from any quarter. Generally, however, all needs of this sort can be met by details
from the class of unskilled or common laborers.”
“How is this class of common laborers recruited?” I asked. “Surely nobody voluntarily
enters that.”
“It is the grade to which all new recruits belong for the first three years of their service. It
is not till after this period, during which he is assignable to any work at the discretion of
his superiors, that the young man is allowed to elect a special avocation. These three
years of stringent discipline none are exempt from, and very glad our young men are to
pass from this severe school into the comparative liberty of the trades. If a man were so
stupid as to have no choice as to occupation, he would simply remain a common laborer;
but such cases, as you may suppose, are not common.”
“Having once elected and entered on a trade or occupation,” I remarked, “I suppose he
has to stick to it the rest of his life.”
“Not necessarily,” replied Dr. Leete; “while frequent and merely capricious changes of
occupation are not encouraged or even permitted, every worker is allowed, of course,
under certain regulations and in accordance with the exigencies of the service, to
volunteer for another industry which he thinks would suit him better than his first choice.
In this case his application is received just as if he were volunteering for the first time,
and on the same terms. Not only this, but a worker may likewise, under suitable
regulations and not too frequently, obtain a transfer to an establishment of the same
industry in another part of the country which for any reason he may prefer. Under your
system a discontented man could indeed leave his work at will, but he left his means of
support at the same time, and took his chances as to future livelihood. We find that the
number of men who wish to abandon an accustomed occupation for a new one, and old
friends and associations for strange ones, is small. It is only the poorer sort of workmen
who desire to change even as frequently as our regulations permit. Of course transfers or
discharges, when health demands them, are always given.”
“As an industrial system, I should think this might be extremely efficient,” I said, “but I
don’t see that it makes any provision for the professional classes, the men who serve the
nation with brains instead of hands. Of course you can’t get along without the brain-
workers. How, then, are they selected from those who are to serve as farmers and
mechanics? That must require a very delicate sort of sifting process, I should say.”
“So it does,” replied Dr. Leete; “the most delicate possible test is needed here, and so we
leave the question whether a man shall be a brain or hand worker entirely to him to settle.
At the end of the term of three years as a common laborer, which every man must serve,
it is for him to choose, in accordance to his natural tastes, whether he will fit himself for
an art or profession, or be a farmer or mechanic. If he feels that he can do better work
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with his brains than his muscles, he finds every facility provided for testing the reality of
his supposed bent, of cultivating it, and if fit of pursuing it as his avocation. The schools
of technology, of medicine, of art, of music, of histrionics, and of higher liberal learning
are always open to aspirants without condition.”
“Are not the schools flooded with young men whose only motive is to avoid work?”
Dr. Leete smiled a little grimly.
“No one is at all likely to enter the professional schools for the purpose of avoiding work,
I assure you,” he said. “They are intended for those with special aptitude for the branches
they teach, and any one without it would find it easier to do double hours at his trade than
try to keep up with the classes. Of course many honestly mistake their vocation, and,
finding themselves unequal to the requirements of the schools, drop out and return to the
industrial service; no discredit attaches to such persons, for the public policy is to
encourage all to develop suspected talents which only actual tests can prove the reality of.
The professional and scientific schools of your day depended on the patronage of their
pupils for support, and the practice appears to have been common of giving diplomas to
unfit persons, who afterwards found their way into the professions. Our schools are
national institutions, and to have passed their tests is a proof of special abilities not to be
questioned.
“This opportunity for a professional training,” the doctor continued, “remains open to
every man till the age of thirty is reached, after which students are not received, as there
would remain too brief a period before the age of discharge in which to serve the nation
in their professions. In your day young men had to choose their professions very young,
and therefore, in a large proportion of instances, wholly mistook their vocations. It is
recognized nowadays that the natural aptitudes of some are later than those of others in
developing, and therefore, while the choice of profession may be made as early as
twenty-four, it remains open for six years longer.”
A question which had a dozen times before been on my lips now found utterance, a
question which touched upon what, in my time, had been regarded the most vital
difficulty in the way of any final settlement of the industrial problem. “It is an
extraordinary thing,” I said, “that you should not yet have said a word about the method
of adjusting wages. Since the nation is the sole employer, the government must fix the
rate of wages and determine just how much everybody shall earn, from the doctors to the
diggers. All I can say is, that this plan would never have worked with us, and I don’t see
how it can now unless human nature has changed. In my day, nobody was satisfied with
his wages or salary. Even if he felt he received enough, he was sure his neighbor had too
much, which was as bad. If the universal discontent on this subject, instead of being
dissipated in curses and strikes directed against innumerable employers, could have been
concentrated upon one, and that the government, the strongest ever devised would not
have seen two pay days.”
Dr. Leete laughed heartily.
“Very true, very true,” he said, “a general strike would most probably have followed the
first pay day, and a strike directed against a government is a revolution.”
“How, then, do you avoid a revolution every pay day?” I demanded. “Has some
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prodigious philosopher devised a new system of calculus satisfactory to all for
determining the exact and comparative value of all sorts of service, whether by brawn or
brain, by hand or voice, by ear or eye? Or has human nature itself changed, so that no
man looks upon his own things but ‘every man on the things of his neighbor?’ One or the
other of these events must be the explanation.”
“Neither one nor the other, however, is,” was my host’s laughing response. “And now, Mr.
West,” he continued, “you must remember that you are my patient as well as my guest,
and permit me to prescribe sleep for you before we have any more conversation. It is
after three o’clock.”
“The prescription is, no doubt, a wise one,” I said; “I only hope it can be filled.”
“I will see to that,” the doctor replied, and he did, for he gave me a wineglass of
something or other which sent me to sleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.
CHAPTER VIII.
When I awoke I felt greatly refreshed, and lay a considerable time in a dozing state,
enjoying the sensation of bodily comfort. The experiences of the day previous, my
waking to find myself in the year 2000, the sight of the new Boston, my host and his
family, and the wonderful things I had heard, were a blank in my memory. I thought I was
in my bed-chamber at home, and the half-dreaming, half-waking fancies which passed
before my mind related to the incidents and experiences of my former life. Dreamily I
reviewed the incidents of Decoration Day, my trip in company with Edith and her parents
to Mount Auburn, and my dining with them on our return to the city. I recalled how
extremely well Edith had looked, and from that fell to thinking of our marriage; but
scarcely had my imagination begun to develop this delightful theme than my waking
dream was cut short by the recollection of the letter I had received the night before from
the builder announcing that the new strikes might postpone indefinitely the completion of
the new house. The chagrin which this recollection brought with it effectually roused me.
I remembered that I had an appointment with the builder at eleven o’clock, to discuss the
strike, and opening my eyes, looked up at the clock at the foot of my bed to see what time
it was. But no clock met my glance, and what was more, I instantly perceived that I was
not in my room. Starting up on my couch, I stared wildly round the strange apartment.
I think it must have been many seconds that I sat up thus in bed staring about, without
being able to regain the clew to my personal identity. I was no more able to distinguish
myself from pure being during those moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough
to be before it has received the ear-marks, the individualizing touches which make it a
person. Strange that the sense of this inability should be such anguish! but so we are
constituted. There are no words for the mental torture I endured during this helpless,
eyeless groping for myself in a boundless void. No other experience of the mind gives
probably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from the loss of a mental
fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes during such a momentary obscuration
of the sense of one’s identity. I trust I may never know what it is again.
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I do not know how long this condition had lasted,—it seemed an interminable
time,—when, like a flash, the recollection of everything came back to me. I remembered
who and where I was, and how I had come here, and that these scenes as of the life of
yesterday which had been passing before my mind concerned a generation long, long ago
mouldered to dust. Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the room clasping my
temples with all my might between my hands to keep them from bursting. Then I fell
prone on the couch, and, burying my face in the pillow, lay with out motion. The reaction
which was inevitable, from the mental elation, the fever of the intellect that had been the
first effect of my tremendous experience, had arrived. The emotional crisis which had
awaited the full realization of my actual position, and all that it implied, was upon me,
and with set teeth and laboring chest, gripping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay
there and fought for my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling,
associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved and lost coherence
and were seething together in apparently irretrievable chaos. There were no rallying
points, nothing was left stable. There only remained the will, and was any human will
strong enough to say to such a weltering sea “Peace, be still”? I dared not think. Every
effort to reason upon what had befallen me, and realize what it implied, set up an
intolerable swimming of the brain. The idea that I was two persons, that my identity was
double, began to fascinate me with its simple solution of my experience.
I knew that I was on the verge of losing my mental balance. If I lay there thinking, I was
doomed. Diversion of some sort I must have, at least the diversion of physical exertion. I
sprang up, and, hastily dressing, opened the door of my room and went down-stairs. The
hour was very early, it being not yet fairly light, and I found no one in the lower part of
the house. There was a hat in the hall, and, opening the front door, which was fastened
with a slightness indicating that burglary was not among the perils of the modern Boston,
I found myself on the street. For two hours I walked or ran through the streets of the city,
visiting most quarters of the peninsular part of the town. None but an antiquarian who
knows something of the contrast which the Boston of to-day offers to the Boston of the
nineteenth century can begin to appreciate what a series of bewildering surprises I
underwent during that time. Viewed from the house-top the day before, the city had
indeed appeared strange to me, but that was only in its general aspect. How complete the
change had been I first realized now that I walked the streets. The few old landmarks
which still remained only intensified this effect, for without them I might have imagined
myself in a foreign town. A man may leave his native city in childhood, and return fifty
years later, perhaps, to find it transformed in many features. He is astonished, but he is
not bewildered. He is aware of a great lapse of time, and of changes likewise occurring in
himself meanwhile. He but dimly recalls the city as he knew it when a child. But
remember that there was no sense of any lapse of time with me. So far as my
consciousness was concerned, it was but yesterday, but a few hours, since I had walked
these streets in which scarcely a feature had escaped a complete metamorphosis. The
mental image of the old city was so fresh and strong that it did not yield to the impression
of the actual city, but contended with it, so that it was first one and then the other which
seemed the more unreal. There was nothing I saw which was not blurred in this way, like
the faces of a composite photograph.
Finally, I stood again at the door of the house from which I had come out. My feet must
have instinctively brought me back to the site of my old home, for I had no clear idea of
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returning thither. It was no more homelike to me than any other spot in this city of a
strange generation, nor were its inmates less utterly and necessarily strangers than all the
other men and women now on the earth. Had the door of the house been locked, I should
have been reminded by its resistance that I had no object in entering, and turned away,
but it yielded to my hand, and advancing with uncertain steps through the hall, I entered
one of the apartments opening from it. Throwing myself into a chair, I covered my
burning eyeballs with my hands to shut out the horror of strangeness. My mental
confusion was so intense as to produce actual nausea. The anguish of those moments,
during which my brain seemed melting, or the abjectness of my sense of helplessness,
how can I describe? In my despair I groaned aloud. I began to feel that unless some help
should come I was about to lose my mind. And just then it did come. I heard the rustle of
drapery, and looked up. Edith Leete was standing before me. Her beautiful face was full
of the most poignant sympathy.
“Oh, what is the matter, Mr. West?” she said. “I was here when you came in. I saw how
dreadfully distressed you looked, and when I heard you groan, I could not keep silent.
What has happened to you? Where have you been? Can’t I do something for you?”
Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands in a gesture of compassion as she spoke. At
any rate I had caught them in my own and was clinging to them with an impulse as
instinctive as that which prompts the drowning man to seize upon and cling to the rope
which is thrown him as he sinks for the last time. As I looked up into her compassionate
face and her eyes moist with pity, my brain ceased to whirl. The tender human sympathy
which thrilled in the soft pressure of her fingers had brought me the support I needed. Its
effect to calm and soothe was like that of some wonder-working elixir.
“God bless you,” I said, after a few moments. “He must have sent you to me just now. I
think I was in danger of going crazy if you had not come.” At this the tears came into her
eyes.
“Oh, Mr. West!” she cried. “How heartless you must have thought us! How could we
leave you to yourself so long! But it is over now, is it not? You are better, surely.”
“Yes,” I said, “thanks to you. If you will not go away quite yet, I shall be myself soon.”
“Indeed I will not go away,” she said, with a little quiver of her face, more expressive of
her sympathy than a volume of words. “You must not think us so heartless as we seemed
in leaving you so by yourself. I scarcely slept last night, for thinking how strange your
waking would be this morning; but father said you would sleep till late. He said that it
would be better not to show too much sympathy with you at first, but to try to divert your
thoughts and make you feel that you were among friends.”
“You have indeed made me feel that,” I answered. “But you see it is a good deal of a jolt
to drop a hundred years, and although I did not seem to feel it so much last night, I have
had very odd sensations this morning.” While I held her hands and kept my eyes on her
face, I could already even jest a little at my plight.
“No one thought of such a thing as your going out in the city alone so early in the
morning,” she went on. “Oh, Mr. West, where have you been?”
Then I told her of my morning’s experience, from my first waking till the moment I had
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looked up to see her before me, just as I have told it here. She was overcome by
distressful pity during the recital, and, though I had released one of her hands, did not try
to take from me the other, seeing, no doubt, how much good it did me to hold it. “I can
think a little what this feeling must been like,” she said. “It must have been terrible. And
to think you were left alone to struggle with it! Can you ever forgive us?”
“But it is gone now. You have driven it quite away for the present,” I said.
“You will not let it return again,” she queried anxiously.
“I can’t quite say that,” I replied. “It might be too early to say that, considering how
strange everything will still be to me.”
“But you will not try to contend with it alone again, at least,” she persisted. “Promise that
you will come to us, and let us sympathize with you, and try to help you. Perhaps we
can’t do much, but it will surely be better than to try to bear such feelings alone.”
“I will come to you if you will let me,” I said.
“Oh yes, yes, I beg you will,” she said eagerly. “I would do anything to help you that I
could.”
“All you need do is to be sorry for me, as you seem to be now,” I replied.
“It is understood, then,” she said, smiling with wet eyes, “that you are to come and tell me
next time, and not run all over Boston among strangers.”
This assumption that we were not strangers seemed scarcely strange, so near within these
few minutes had my trouble and her sympathetic tears brought us.
“I will promise, when you come to me,” she added, with an expression of charming
archness, passing, as she continued, into one of enthusiasm, “to seem as sorry for you as
you wish, but you must not for a moment suppose that I am really sorry for you at all, or
that I think you will long be sorry for yourself. I know, as well as I know that the world
now is heaven compared with what it was in your day, that the only feeling you will have
after a little while will be one of thankfulness to God that your life in that age was so
strangely cut off, to be returned to you in this.”
CHAPTER IX.
Dr. and Mrs. Leete were evidently not a little startled to learn, when they presently
appeared, that I had been all over the city alone that morning, and it was apparent that
they were agreeably surprised to see that I seemed so little agitated after the experience.
“Your stroll could scarcely have failed to be a very interesting one,” said Mrs. Leete, as
we sat down to table soon after. “You must have seen a good many new things.”
“I saw very little that was not new,” I replied. “But I think what surprised me as much as
anything was not to find any stores on Washington Street, or any banks on State. What
have you done with the merchants and bankers? Hung them all, perhaps, as the anarchists
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wanted to do in my day?”
“Not so bad as that,” replied Dr. Leete. “We have simply dispensed with them. Their
functions are obsolete in the modern world.”
“Who sells you things when you want to buy them?” I inquired.
“There is neither selling nor buying nowadays; the distribution of goods is effected in
another way. As to the bankers, having no money we have no use for those gentry.”
“Miss Leete,” said I, turning to Edith, “I am afraid that your father is making sport of me.
I don’t blame him, for the temptation my innocence offers must be extraordinary. But,
really, there are limits to my credulity as to possible alterations in the social system.”
“Father has no idea of jesting, I am sure,” she replied, with a reassuring smile.
The conversation took another turn then, the point of ladies’ fashions in the nineteenth
century being raised, if I remember rightly, by Mrs. Leete, and it was not till after
breakfast, when the doctor had invited me up to the house-top, which appeared to be a
favorite resort of his, that he recurred to the subject.
“You were surprised,” he said, “at my saying that we got along without money or trade,
but a moment’s reflection will show that trade existed and money was needed in your day
simply because the business of production was left in private hands, and that,
consequently, they are superfluous now.”
“I do not at once see how that follows,” I replied.
“It is very simple,” said Dr. Leete. “When innumerable different and independent persons
produced the various things needful to life and comfort, endless exchanges between
individuals were requisite in order that they might supply themselves with what they
desired. These exchanges constituted trade, and money was essential as their medium.
But as soon as the nation became the sole producer of all sorts of commodities, there was
no need of exchanges between individuals that they might get what they required.
Everything was procurable from one source, and nothing could be procured anywhere
else. A system of direct distribution from the national storehouses took the place of trade,
and for this money was unnecessary.”
“How is this distribution managed?” I asked.
“On the simplest possible plan,” replied Dr. Leete. “A credit corresponding to his share of
the annual product of the nation is given to every citizen on the public books at the
beginning of each year, and a credit card issued him with which he procures at the public
storehouses, found in every community, whatever he desires whenever he desires it. This
arrangement, you will see, totally obviates the necessity for business transactions of any
sort between individuals and consumers. Perhaps you would like to see what our
credit-cards are like.
“You observe,” he pursued as I was curiously examining the piece of pasteboard he gave
me, “that this card is issued for a certain number of dollars. We have kept the old word,
but not the substance. The term, as we use it, answers to no real thing, but merely serves
as an algebraical symbol for comparing the values of products with one another. For this
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purpose they are all priced in dollars and cents, just as in your day. The value of what I
procure on this card is checked off by the clerk, who pricks out of these tiers of squares
the price of what I order.”
“If you wanted to buy something of your neighbor, could you transfer part of your credit
to him as consideration?” I inquired.
“In the first place,” replied Dr. Leete, “our neighbors have nothing to sell us, but in any
event our credit would not be transferable, being strictly personal. Before the nation
could even think of honoring any such transfer as you speak of, it would be bound to
inquire into all the circumstances of the transaction, so as to be able to guarantee its
absolute equity. It would have been reason enough, had there been no other, for
abolishing money, that its possession was no indication of rightful title to it. In the hands
of the man who had stolen it or murdered for it, it was as good as in those which had
earned it by industry. People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but
buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence and
disinterestedness which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of
interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is
essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense
of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise
above a very low grade of civilization.”
“What if you have to spend more than your card in any one year?” I asked.
“The provision is so ample that we are more likely not to spend it all,” replied Dr. Leete.
“But if extraordinary expenses should exhaust it, we can obtain a limited advance on the
next year’s credit, though this practice is not encouraged, and a heavy discount is charged
to check it. Of course if a man showed himself a reckless spendthrift he would receive his
allowance monthly or weekly instead of yearly, or if necessary not be permitted to handle
it all.”
“If you don’t spend your allowance, I suppose it accumulates?”
“That is also permitted to a certain extent when a special outlay is anticipated. But unless
notice to the contrary is given, it is presumed that the citizen who does not fully expend
his credit did not have occasion to do so, and the balance is turned into the general
surplus.”
“Such a system does not encourage saving habits on the part of citizens,” I said.
“It is not intended to,” was the reply. “The nation is rich, and does not wish the people to
deprive themselves of any good thing. In your day, men were bound to lay up goods and
money against coming failure of the means of support and for their children. This
necessity made parsimony a virtue. But now it would have no such laudable object, and,
having lost its utility, it has ceased to be regarded as a virtue. No man any more has any
care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the
nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the
grave.”
“That is a sweeping guarantee!” I said. “What certainty can there be that the value of a
man’s labor will recompense the nation for its outlay on him? On the whole, society may
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be able to support all its members, but some must earn less than enough for their support,
and others more; and that brings us back once more to the wages question, on which you
have hitherto said nothing. It was at just this point, if you remember, that our talk ended
last evening; and I say again, as I did then, that here I should suppose a national industrial
system like yours would find its main difficulty. How, I ask once more, can you adjust
satisfactorily the comparative wages or remuneration of the multitude of avocations, so
unlike and so incommensurable, which are necessary for the service of society? In our
day the market rate determined the price of labor of all sorts, as well as of goods. The
employer paid as little as he could, and the worker got as much. It was not a pretty system
ethically, I admit; but it did, at least, furnish us a rough and ready formula for settling a
question which must be settled ten thousand times a day if the world was ever going to
get forward. There seemed to us no other practicable way of doing it.”
“Yes,” replied Dr. Leete, “it was the only practicable way under a system which made the
interests of every individual antagonistic to those of every other; but it would have been a
pity if humanity could never have devised a better plan, for yours was simply the
application to the mutual relations of men of the devil’s maxim, ‘Your necessity is my
opportunity.’ The reward of any service depended not upon its difficulty, danger, or
hardship, for throughout the world it seems that the most perilous, severe, and repulsive
labor was done by the worst paid classes; but solely upon the strait of those who needed
the service.”
“All that is conceded,” I said. “But, with all its defects, the plan of settling prices by the
market rate was a practical plan; and I cannot conceive what satisfactory substitute you
can have devised for it. The government being the only possible employer, there is of
course no labor market or market rate. Wages of all sorts must be arbitrarily fixed by the
government. I cannot imagine a more complex and delicate function than that must be, or
one, however performed, more certain to breed universal dissatisfaction.”
“I beg your pardon,” replied Dr. Leete, “but I think you exaggerate the difficulty. Suppose
a board of fairly sensible men were charged with settling the wages for all sorts of trades
under a system which, like ours, guaranteed employment to all, while permitting the
choice of avocations. Don’t you see that, however unsatisfactory the first adjustment
might be, the mistakes would soon correct themselves? The favored trades would have
too many volunteers, and those discriminated against would lack them till the errors were
set right. But this is aside from the purpose, for, though this plan would, I fancy, be
practicable enough, it is no part of our system.”
“How, then, do you regulate wages?” I once more asked.
Dr. Leete did not reply till after several moments of meditative silence. “I know, of
course,” he finally said, “enough of the old order of things to understand just what you
mean by that question; and yet the present order is so utterly different at this point that I
am a little at loss how to answer you best. You ask me how we regulate wages; I can only
reply that there is no idea in the modern social economy which at all corresponds with
what was meant by wages in your day.”
“I suppose you mean that you have no money to pay wages in,” said I. “But the credit
given the worker at the government storehouse answers to his wages with us. How is the
amount of the credit given respectively to the workers in different lines determined? By
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what title does the individual claim his particular share? What is the basis of allotment?”
“His title,” replied Dr. Leete, “is his humanity. The basis of his claim is the fact that he is
a man.”
“The fact that he is a man!” I repeated, incredulously. “Do you possibly mean that all
have the same share?”
“Most assuredly.”
The readers of this book never having practically known any other arrangement, or
perhaps very carefully considered the historical accounts of former epochs in which a
very different system prevailed, cannot be expected to appreciate the stupor of
amazement into which Dr. Leete’s simple statement plunged me.
“You see,” he said, smiling, “that it is not merely that we have no money to pay wages in,
but, as I said, we have nothing at all answering to your idea of wages.”
By this time I had pulled myself together sufficiently to voice some of the criticisms
which, man of the nineteenth century as I was, came uppermost in my mind, upon this to
me astounding arrangement. “Some men do twice the work of others!” I exclaimed. “Are
the clever workmen content with a plan that ranks them with the indifferent?”
“We leave no possible ground for any complaint of injustice,” replied Dr. Leete, “by
requiring precisely the same measure of service from all.”
“How can you do that, I should like to know, when no two men’s powers are the same?”
“Nothing could be simpler,” was Dr. Leete’s reply. “We require of each that he shall make
the same effort; that is, we demand of him the best service it is in his power to give.”
“And supposing all do the best they can,” I answered, “the amount of the product
resulting is twice greater from one man than from another.”
“Very true,” replied Dr. Leete; “but the amount of the resulting product has nothing
whatever to do with the question, which is one of desert. Desert is a moral question, and
the amount of the product a material quantity. It would be an extraordinary sort of logic
which should try to determine a moral question by a material standard. The amount of the
effort alone is pertinent to the question of desert. All men who do their best, do the same.
A man’s endowments, however godlike, merely fix the measure of his duty. The man of
great endowments who does not do all he might, though he may do more than a man of
small endowments who does his best, is deemed a less deserving worker than the latter,
and dies a debtor to his fellows. The Creator sets men’s tasks for them by the faculties he
gives them; we simply exact their fulfillment.”
“No doubt that is very fine philosophy,” I said; “nevertheless it seems hard that the man
who produces twice as much as another, even if both do their best, should have only the
same share.”
“Does it, indeed, seem so to you?” responded Dr. Leete. “Now, do you know, that seems
very curious to me? The way it strikes people nowadays is, that a man who can produce
twice as much as another with the same effort, instead of being rewarded for doing so,
ought to be punished if he does not do so. In the nineteenth century, when a horse pulled
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a heavier load than a goat, I suppose you rewarded him. Now, we should have whipped
him soundly if he had not, on the ground that, being much stronger, he ought to. It is
singular how ethical standards change.” The doctor said this with such a twinkle in his
eye that I was obliged to laugh.
“I suppose,” I said, “that the real reason that we rewarded men for their endowments,
while we considered those of horses and goats merely as fixing the service to be severally
required of them, was that the animals, not being reasoning beings, naturally did the best
they could, whereas men could only be induced to do so by rewarding them according to
the amount of their product. That brings me to ask why, unless human nature has mightily
changed in a hundred years, you are not under the same necessity.”
“We are,” replied Dr. Leete. “I don’t think there has been any change in human nature in
that respect since your day. It is still so constituted that special incentives in the form of
prizes, and advantages to be gained, are requisite to call out the best endeavors of the
average man in any direction.”
“But what inducement,” I asked, “can a man have to put forth his best endeavors when,
however much or little he accomplishes, his income remains the same? High characters
may be moved by devotion to the common welfare under such a system, but does not the
average man tend to rest back on his oar, reasoning that it is of no use to make a special
effort, since the effort will not increase his income, nor its withholding diminish it?”
“Does it then really seem to you,” answered my companion, “that human nature is
insensible to any motives save fear of want and love of luxury, that you should expect
security and equality of livelihood to leave them without possible incentives to effort?
Your contemporaries did not really think so, though they might fancy they did. When it
was a question of the grandest class of efforts, the most absolute self-devotion, they
depended on quite other incentives. Not higher wages, but honor and the hope of men’s
gratitude, patriotism and the inspiration of duty, were the motives which they set before
their soldiers when it was a question of dying for the nation, and never was there an age
of the world when those motives did not call out what is best and noblest in men. And not
only this, but when you come to analyze the love of money which was the general
impulse to effort in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but
one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the others, and with
many the more influential, being desire of power, of social position, and reputation for
ability and success. So you see that though we have abolished poverty and the fear of it,
and inordinate luxury with the hope of it, we have not touched the greater part of the
motives which underlay the love of money in former times, or any of those which
prompted the supremer sorts of effort. The coarser motives, which no longer move us,
have been replaced by higher motives wholly unknown to the mere wage earners of your
age. Now that industry of whatever sort is no longer self-service, but service of the
nation, patriotism, passion for humanity, impel the worker as in your day they did the
soldier. The army of industry is an army, not alone by virtue of its perfect organization,
but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion which animates its members.
“But as you used to supplement the motives of patriotism with the love of glory, in order
to stimulate the valor of your soldiers, so do we. Based as our industrial system is on the
principle of requiring the same unit of effort from every man, that is, the best he can do,
you will see that the means by which we spur the workers to do their best must be a very
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essential part of our scheme. With us, diligence in the national service is the sole and
certain way to public repute, social distinction, and official power. The value of a man’s
services to society fixes his rank in it. Compared with the effect of our social
arrangements in impelling men to be zealous in business, we deem the object-lessons of
biting poverty and wanton luxury on which you depended a device as weak and uncertain
as it was barbaric. The lust of honor even in your sordid day notoriously impelled men to
more desperate effort than the love of money could.”
“I should be extremely interested,” I said, “to learn something of what these social
arrangements are.”
“The scheme in its details,” replied the doctor, “is of course very elaborate, for it
underlies the entire organization of our industrial army; but a few words will give you a
general idea of it.”
At this moment our talk was charmingly interrupted by the emergence upon the aerial
platform where we sat of Edith Leete. She was dressed for the street, and had come to
speak to her father about some commission she was to do for him.
“By the way, Edith,” he exclaimed, as she was about to leave us to ourselves, “I wonder if
Mr. West would not be interested in visiting the store with you? I have been telling him
something about our system of distribution, and perhaps he might like to see it in
practical operation.”
“My daughter,” he added, turning to me, “is an indefatigable shopper, and can tell you
more about the stores than I can.”
The proposition was naturally very agreeable to me, and Edith being good enough to say
that she should be glad to have my company, we left the house together.
CHAPTER X.
“If I am going to explain our way of shopping to you,” said my companion, as we walked
along the street, “you must explain your way to me. I have never been able to understand
it from all I have read on the subject. For example, when you had such a vast number of
shops, each with its different assortment, how could a lady ever settle upon any purchase
till she had visited all the shops? for, until she had, she could not know what there was to
choose from.”
“It was as you suppose; that was the only way she could know,” I replied.
“Father calls me an indefatigable shopper, but I should soon be a very fatigued one if I
had to do as they did,” was Edith’s laughing comment.
“The loss of time in going from shop to shop was indeed a waste which the busy bitterly
complained of,” I said; “but as for the ladies of the idle class, though they complained
also, I think the system was really a godsend by furnishing a device to kill time.”
“But say there were a thousand shops in a city, hundreds, perhaps, of the same sort, how
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could even the idlest find time to make their rounds?”
“They really could not visit all, of course,” I replied. “Those who did a great deal of
buying, learned in time where they might expect to find what they wanted. This class had
made a science of the specialties of the shops, and bought at advantage, always getting
the most and best for the least money. It required, however, long experience to acquire
this knowledge. Those who were too busy, or bought too little to gain it, took their
chances and were generally unfortunate, getting the least and worst for the most money. It
was the merest chance if persons not experienced in shopping received the value of their
money.”
“But why did you put up with such a shockingly inconvenient arrangement when you saw
its faults so plainly?” Edith asked me.
“It was like all our social arrangements,” I replied. “You can see their faults scarcely more
plainly than we did, but we saw no remedy for them.”
“Here we are at the store of our ward,” said Edith, as we turned in at the great portal of
one of the magnificent public buildings I had observed in my morning walk. There was
nothing in the exterior aspect of the edifice to suggest a store to a representative of the
nineteenth century. There was no display of goods in the great windows, or any device to
advertise wares, or attract custom. Nor was there any sort of sign or legend on the front of
the building to indicate the character of the business carried on there; but instead, above
the portal, standing out from the front of the building, a majestic life-size group of
statuary, the central figure of which was a female ideal of Plenty, with her cornucopia.
Judging from the composition of the throng passing in and out, about the same proportion
of the sexes among shoppers obtained as in the nineteenth century. As we entered, Edith
said that there was one of these great distributing establishments in each ward of the city,
so that no residence was more than five or ten minutes’ walk from one of them. It was the
first interior of a twentieth-century public building that I had ever beheld, and the
spectacle naturally impressed me deeply. I was in a vast hall full of light, received not
alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a
hundred feet above. Beneath it, in the centre of the hall, a magnificent fountain played,
cooling the atmosphere to a delicious freshness with its spray. The walls and ceiling were
frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to soften without absorbing the light which flooded
the interior. Around the fountain was a space occupied with chairs and sofas, on which
many persons were seated conversing. Legends on the walls all about the hall indicated to
what classes of commodities the counters below were devoted. Edith directed her steps
towards one of these, where samples of muslin of a bewildering variety were displayed,
and proceeded to inspect them.
“Where is the clerk?” I asked, for there was no one behind the counter, and no one
seemed coming to attend to the customer.
“I have no need of the clerk yet,” said Edith; “I have not made my selection.”
“It was the principal business of clerks to help people to make their selections in my day,”
I replied.
“What! To tell people what they wanted?”
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“Yes; and oftener to induce them to buy what they didn’t want.”
“But did not ladies find that very impertinent?” Edith asked, wonderingly. “What concern
could it possibly be to the clerks whether people bought or not?”
“It was their sole concern,” I answered. “They were hired for the purpose of getting rid of
the goods, and were expected to do their utmost, short of the use of force, to compass that
end.”
“Ah, yes! How stupid I am to forget!” said Edith. “The storekeeper and his clerks
depended for their livelihood on selling the goods in your day. Of course that is all
different now. The goods are the nation’s. They are here for those who want them, and it
is the business of the clerks to wait on people and take their orders; but it is not the
interest of the clerk or the nation to dispose of a yard or a pound of anything to anybody
who does not want it.” She smiled as she added, “How exceedingly odd it must have
seemed to have clerks trying to induce one to take what one did not want, or was doubtful
about!”
“But even a twentieth-century clerk might make himself useful in giving you information
about the goods, though he did not tease you to buy them,” I suggested.
“No,” said Edith, “that is not the business of the clerk. These printed cards, for which the
government authorities are responsible, give us all the information we can possibly
need.”
I saw then that there was fastened to each sample a card containing in succinct form a
complete statement of the make and materials of the goods and all its qualities, as well as
price, leaving absolutely no point to hang a question on.
“The clerk has, then, nothing to say about the goods he sells?” I said.
“Nothing at all. It is not necessary that he should know or profess to know anything about
them. Courtesy and accuracy in taking orders are all that are required of him.”
“What a prodigious amount of lying that simple arrangement saves!” I ejaculated.
“Do you mean that all the clerks misrepresented their goods in your day?” Edith asked.
“God forbid that I should say so!” I replied, “for there were many who did not, and they
were entitled to especial credit, for when one’s livelihood and that of his wife and babies
depended on the amount of goods he could dispose of, the temptation to deceive the
customer—or let him deceive himself—was wellnigh overwhelming. But, Miss Leete, I
am distracting you from your task with my talk.”
“Not at all. I have made my selections.” With that she touched a button, and in a moment
a clerk appeared. He took down her order on a tablet with a pencil which made two
copies, of which he gave one to her, and enclosing the counterpart in a small receptacle,
dropped it into a transmitting tube.
“The duplicate of the order,” said Edith as she turned away from the counter, after the
clerk had punched the value of her purchase out of the credit card she gave him, “is given
to the purchaser, so that any mistakes in filling it can be easily traced and rectified.”
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“You were very quick about your selections,” I said. “May I ask how you knew that you
might not have found something to suit you better in some of the other stores? But
probably you are required to buy in your own district.”
“Oh, no,” she replied. “We buy where we please, though naturally most often near home.
But I should have gained nothing by visiting other stores. The assortment in all is exactly
the same, representing as it does in each case samples of all the varieties produced or
imported by the United States. That is why one can decide quickly, and never need visit
two stores.”
“And is this merely a sample store? I see no clerks cutting off goods or marking bundles.”
“All our stores are sample stores, except as to a few classes of articles. The goods, with
these exceptions, are all at the great central warehouse of the city, to which they are
shipped directly from the producers. We order from the sample and the printed statement
of texture, make, and qualities. The orders are sent to the warehouse, and the goods
distributed from there.”
“That must be a tremendous saving of handling,” I said. “By our system, the
manufacturer sold to the wholesaler, the wholesaler to the retailer, and the retailer to the
consumer, and the goods had to be handled each time. You avoid one handling of the
goods, and eliminate the retailer altogether, with his big profit and the army of clerks it
goes to support. Why, Miss Leete, this store is merely the order department of a
wholesale house, with no more than a wholesaler’s complement of clerks. Under our
system of handling the goods, persuading the customer to buy them, cutting them off, and
packing them, ten clerks would not do what one does here. The saving must be
enormous.”
“I suppose so,” said Edith, “but of course we have never known any other way. But, Mr.
West, you must not fail to ask father to take you to the central warehouse some day,
where they receive the orders from the different sample houses all over the city and
parcel out and send the goods to their destinations. He took me there not long ago, and it
was a wonderful sight. The system is certainly perfect; for example, over yonder in that
sort of cage is the dispatching clerk. The orders, as they are taken by the different
departments in the store, are sent by transmitters to him. His assistants sort them and
enclose each class in a carrier-box by itself. The dispatching clerk has a dozen pneumatic
transmitters before him answering to the general classes of goods, each communicating
with the corresponding department at the warehouse. He drops the box of orders into the
tube it calls for, and in a few moments later it drops on the proper desk in the warehouse,
together with all the orders of the same sort from the other sample stores. The orders are
read off, recorded, and sent to be filled, like lightning. The filling I thought the most
interesting part. Bales of cloth are placed on spindles and turned by machinery, and the
cutter, who also has a machine, works right through one bale after another till exhausted,
when another man takes his place; and it is the same with those who fill the orders in any
other staple. The packages are then delivered by larger tubes to the city districts, and
thence distributed to the houses. You may understand how quickly it is all done when I
tell you that my order will probably be at home sooner than I could have carried it from
here.”
“How do you manage in the thinly settled rural districts?” I asked.
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“The system is the same,” Edith explained; “the village sample shops are connected by
transmitters with the central county warehouse, which may be twenty miles away. The
transmission is so swift, though, that the time lost on the way is trifling. But, to save
expense, in many counties one set of tubes connect several villages with the warehouse,
and then there is time lost waiting for one another. Sometimes it is two or three hours
before goods ordered are received. It was so where I was staying last summer, and I
found it quite inconvenient”.[2]
“There must be many other respects also, no doubt, in which the country stores are
inferior to the city stores,” I suggested.
“No,” Edith answered, “they are otherwise precisely as good. The sample shop of the
smallest village, just like this one, gives you your choice of all the varieties of goods the
nation has, for the county warehouse draws on the same source as the city warehouse.”
As we walked home I commented on the great variety in the size and cost of the houses.
“How is it,” I asked, “that this difference is consistent with the fact that all citizens have
the same income?”
“Because,” Edith explained, “although the income is the same, personal taste determines
how the individual shall spend it. Some like fine horses; others, like myself, prefer pretty
clothes; and still others want an elaborate table. The rents which the nation receives for
these houses vary, according to size, elegance, and location, so that everybody can find
something to suit. The larger houses are usually occupied by large families, in which
there are several to contribute to the rent; while small families, like ours, find smaller
houses more convenient and economical. It is a matter of taste and convenience wholly. I
have read that in old times people often kept up establishments and did other things
which they could not afford for ostentation, to make people think them richer than they
were. Was it really so, Mr. West?”
“I shall have to admit that it was,” I replied.
“Well, you see, it could not be so nowadays; for everybody’s income is known, and it is
known that what is spent one way must be saved another.”
CHAPTER XI.
When we arrived home, Dr. Leete had not yet returned, and Mrs. Leete was not visible.
“Are you fond of music, Mr. West?” Edith asked.
I assured her that it was half of life, according to my notion.
“I ought to apologize for inquiring,” she said. “It is not a question that we ask one another
nowadays; but I have read that in your day, even among the cultured class, there were
some who did not care for music.”
“You must remember, in excuse,” I said, “that we had some rather absurd kinds of
music.”
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“Yes,” she said, “I know that; I am afraid I should not have fancied it all myself. Would
you like to hear some of ours now, Mr. West?”
“Nothing would delight me so much as to listen to you,” I said.
“To me!” she exclaimed, laughing. “Did you think I was going to play or sing to you?”
“I hoped so, certainly,” I replied.
Seeing that I was a little abashed, she subdued her merriment and explained. “Of course,
we all sing nowadays as a matter of course in the training of the voice, and some learn to
play instruments for their private amusement; but the professional music is so much
grander and more perfect than any performance of ours, and so easily commanded when
we wish to hear it, that we don’t think of calling our singing or playing music at all. All
the really fine singers and players are in the musical service, and the rest of us hold our
peace for the main part. But would you really like to hear some music?”
I assured her once more that I would.
“Come, then, into the music room,” she said, and I followed her into an apartment
finished, without hangings, in wood, with a floor of polished wood. I was prepared for
new devices in musical instruments, but I saw nothing in the room which by any stretch
of imagination could be conceived as such. It was evident that my puzzled appearance
was affording intense amusement to Edith.
“Please look at to-day’s music,” she said, handing me a card, “and tell me what you would
prefer. It is now five o’clock, you will remember.”
The card bore the date “September 12, 2000,” and contained the longest programme of
music I had ever seen. It was as various as it was long, including a most extraordinary
range of vocal and instrumental solos, duets, quartettes, and various orchestral
combinations. I remained bewildered by the prodigious list until Edith’s pink finger-tip
indicated a particular section of it, where several selections were bracketed, with the
words “5 P.M.” against them; then I observed that this prodigious programme was an
all-day one, divided into twenty-four sections answering to the hours. There were but a
few pieces of music in the “5 P.M.” section, and I indicated an organ piece as my
preference.
“I am so glad you like the organ,” said she. “I think there is scarcely any music that suits
my mood oftener.”
She made me sit down comfortably, and, crossing the room, so far as I could see, merely
touched one or two screws, and at once the room was filled with the music of a grand
organ anthem; filled, not flooded, for, by some means, the volume of melody had been
perfectly graduated to the size of the apartment. I listened, scarcely breathing, to the
close. Such music, so perfectly rendered, I had never expected to hear.
“Grand!” I cried, as the last great wave of sound broke and ebbed away into silence.
“Bach must be at the keys of that organ; but where is the organ?”
“Wait a moment, please,” said Edith; “I want to have you listen to this waltz before you
ask any questions. I think it is perfectly charming;” and as she spoke the sound of violins
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filled the room with the witchery of a summer night. When this had also ceased, she said:
“There is nothing in the least mysterious about the music, as you seem to imagine. It is
not made by fairies or genii, but by good, honest, and exceedingly clever human hands.
We have simply carried the idea of labor saving by coöperation into our musical service
as into everything else. There are a number of music rooms in the city, perfectly adapted
acoustically to the different sorts of music. These halls are connected by telephone with
all the houses of the city whose people care to pay the small fee, and there are none, you
may be sure, who do not. The corps of musicians attached to each hall is so large that,
although no individual performer, or group of performers, has more than a brief part, each
day’s programme lasts through the twenty-four hours. There are on that card for to-day, as
you will see if you observe closely, distinct programmes of four of these concerts, each of
a different order of music from the others, being now simultaneously performed, and any
one of the four pieces now going on that you prefer, you can hear by merely pressing the
button which will connect your house-wire with the hall where it is being rendered. The
programmes are so coördinated that the pieces at any one time simultaneously proceeding
in the different halls usually offer a choice, not only between instrumental and vocal, and
between different sorts of instruments; but also between different motives from grave to
gay, so that all tastes and moods can be suited.”
“It appears to me, Miss Leete,” I said, “that if we could have devised an arrangement for
providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity,
suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the
limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.”
“I am sure I never could imagine how those among you who depended at all on music
managed to endure the old-fashioned system for providing it,” replied Edith. “Music
really worth hearing must have been, I suppose, wholly out of the reach of the masses,
and attainable by the most favored only occasionally, at great trouble, prodigious
expense, and then for brief periods, arbitrarily fixed by somebody else, and in connection
with all sorts of undesirable circumstances. Your concerts, for instance, and operas! How
perfectly exasperating it must have been, for the sake of a piece or two of music that
suited you, to have to sit for hours listening to what you did not care for! Now, at a dinner
one can skip the courses one does not care for. Who would ever dine, however hungry, if
required to eat everything brought on the table? and I am sure one’s hearing is quite as
sensitive as one’s taste. I suppose it was these difficulties in the way of commanding
really good music which made you endure so much playing and singing in your homes by
people who had only the rudiments of the art.”
“Yes,” I replied, “it was that sort of music or none for most of us.”
“Ah, well,” Edith sighed, “when one really considers, it is not so strange that people in
those days so often did not care for music. I dare say I should have detested it, too.”
“Did I understand you rightly,” I inquired, “that this musical programme covers the entire
twenty-four hours? It seems to on this card, certainly; but who is there to listen to music
between say midnight and morning?”
“Oh, many,” Edith replied. “Our people keep all hours; but if the music were provided
from midnight to morning for no others, it still would be for the sleepless, the sick, and
the dying. All our bedchambers have a telephone attachment at the head of the bed by
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which any person who may be sleepless can command music at pleasure, of the sort
suited to the mood.”
“Is there such an arrangement in the room assigned to me?”
“Why, certainly; and how stupid, how very stupid, of me not to think to tell you of that
last night! Father will show you about the adjustment before you go to bed to-night,
however; and with the receiver at your ear, I am quite sure you will be able to snap your
fingers at all sorts of uncanny feelings if they trouble you again.”
That evening Dr. Leete asked us about our visit to the store, and in the course of the
desultory comparison of the ways of the nineteenth century and the twentieth, which
followed, something raised the question of inheritance. “I suppose,” I said, “the
inheritance of property is not now allowed.”
“On the contrary,” replied Dr. Leete, “there is no interference with it. In fact, you will
find, Mr. West, as you come to know us, that there is far less interference of any sort with
personal liberty nowadays than you were accustomed to. We require, indeed, by law that
every man shall serve the nation for a fixed period, instead of leaving him his choice, as
you did, between working, stealing, or starving. With the exception of this fundamental
law, which is, indeed, merely a codification of the law of nature—the edict of Eden—by
which it is made equal in its pressure on men, our system depends in no particular upon
legislation, but is entirely voluntary, the logical outcome of the operation of human nature
under rational conditions. This question of inheritance illustrates just that point. The fact
that the nation is the sole capitalist and land-owner of course restricts the individual’s
possessions to his annual credit, and what personal and household belongings he may
have procured with it. His credit, like an annuity in your day, ceases on his death, with
the allowance of a fixed sum for funeral expenses. His other possessions he leaves as he
pleases.”
“What is to prevent, in course of time, such accumulations of valuable goods and chattels
in the hands of individuals as might seriously interfere with equality in the circumstances
of citizens?” I asked.
“That matter arranges itself very simply,” was the reply. “Under the present organization
of society, accumulations of personal property are merely burdensome the moment they
exceed what adds to the real comfort. In your day, if a man had a house crammed full
with gold and silver plate, rare china, expensive furniture, and such things, he was
considered rich, for these things represented money, and could at any time be turned into
it. Nowadays a man whom the legacies of a hundred relatives, simultaneously dying,
should place in a similar position, would be considered very unlucky. The articles, not
being salable, would be of no value to him except for their actual use or the enjoyment of
their beauty. On the other hand, his income remaining the same, he would have to deplete
his credit to hire houses to store the goods in, and still further to pay for the service of
those who took care of them. You may be very sure that such a man would lose no time
in scattering among his friends possessions which only made him the poorer, and that
none of those friends would accept more of them than they could easily spare room for
and time to attend to. You see, then, that to prohibit the inheritance of personal property
with a view to prevent great accumulations would be a superfluous precaution for the
nation. The individual citizen can be trusted to see that he is not overburdened. So careful
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is he in this respect, that the relatives usually waive claim to most of the effects of
deceased friends, reserving only particular objects. The nation takes charge of the
resigned chattels, and turns such as are of value into the common stock once more.”
“You spoke of paying for service to take care of your houses,” said I; “that suggests a
question I have several times been on the point of asking. How have you disposed of the
problem of domestic service? Who are willing to be domestic servants in a community
where all are social equals? Our ladies found it hard enough to find such even when there
was little pretense of social equality.”
“It is precisely because we are all social equals whose equality nothing can compromise,
and because service is honorable, in a society whose fundamental principle is that all in
turn shall serve the rest, that we could easily provide a corps of domestic servants such as
you never dreamed of, if we needed them,” replied Dr. Leete. “But we do not need them.”
“Who does your housework, then?” I asked.
“There is none to do,” said Mrs. Leete, to whom I had addressed this question. “Our
washing is all done at public laundries at excessively cheap rates, and our cooking at
public kitchens The making and repairing of all we wear are done outside in public shops.
Electricity, of course, takes the place of all fires and lighting. We choose houses no larger
than we need, and furnish them so as to involve the minimum of trouble to keep them in
order. We have no use for domestic servants.”
“The fact,” said Dr. Leete, “that you had in the poorer classes a boundless supply of serfs
on whom you could impose all sorts of painful and disagreeable tasks, made you
indifferent to devices to avoid the necessity for them. But now that we all have to do in
turn whatever work is done for society, every individual in the nation has the same
interest, and a personal one, in devices for lightening the burden. This fact has given a
prodigious impulse to labor-saving inventions in all sorts of industry, of which the
combination of the maximum of comfort and minimum of trouble in household
arrangements was one of the earliest results.
“In case of special emergencies in the household,” pursued Dr. Leete, “such as extensive
cleaning or renovation, or sickness in the family, we can always secure assistance from
the industrial force.”
“But how do you recompense these assistants, since you have no money?”
“We do not pay them, of course, but the nation for them. Their services can be obtained
by application at the proper bureau, and their value is pricked off the credit card of the
applicant.”
“What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!” I exclaimed. “In my day, even
wealth and unlimited servants did not enfranchise their possessors from household cares,
while the women of the merely well-to-do and poorer classes lived and died martyrs to
them.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Leete, “I have read something of that; enough to convince me that, badly
off as the men, too, were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and
wives.”
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“The broad shoulders of the nation,” said Dr. Leete, “bear now like a feather the burden
that broke the backs of the women of your day. Their misery came, with all your other
miseries, from that incapacity for coöperation which followed from the individualism on
which your social system was founded, from your inability to perceive that you could
make ten times more profit out of your fellow men by uniting with them than by
contending with them. The wonder is, not that you did not live more comfortably, but that
you were able to live together at all, who were all confessedly bent on making one
another your servants, and securing possession of one another’s goods.”
“There, there, father, if you are so vehement, Mr. West will think you are scolding him,”
laughingly interposed Edith.
“When you want a doctor,” I asked, “do you simply apply to the proper bureau and take
any one that may be sent?”
“That rule would not work well in the case of physicians,” replied Dr. Leete. “The good a
physician can do a patient depends largely on his acquaintance with his constitutional
tendencies and condition. The patient must be able, therefore, to call in a particular
doctor, and he does so just as patients did in your day. The only difference is that, instead
of collecting his fee for himself, the doctor collects it for the nation by pricking off the
amount, according to a regular scale for medical attendance, from the patient’s credit
card.”
“I can imagine,” I said, “that if the fee is always the same, and a doctor may not turn
away patients, as I suppose he may not, the good doctors are called constantly and the
poor doctors left in idleness.”
“In the first place, if you will overlook the apparent conceit of the remark from a retired
physician,” replied Dr. Leete, with a smile, “we have no poor doctors. Anybody who
pleases to get a little smattering of medical terms is not now at liberty to practice on the
bodies of citizens, as in your day. None but students who have passed the severe tests of
the schools, and clearly proved their vocation, are permitted to practice. Then, too, you
will observe that there is nowadays no attempt of doctors to build up their practice at the
expense of other doctors. There would be no motive for that. For the rest, the doctor has
to render regular reports of his work to the medical bureau, and if he is not reasonably
well employed, work is found for him.”
CHAPTER XII.
The questions which I needed to ask before I could acquire even an outline acquaintance
with the institutions of the twentieth century being endless, and Dr. Leete’s good-nature
appearing equally so, we sat up talking for several hours after the ladies left us.
Reminding my host of the point at which our talk had broken off that morning, I
expressed my curiosity to learn how the organization of the industrial army was made to
afford a sufficient stimulus to diligence in the lack of any anxiety on the worker’s part as
to his livelihood.
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“You must understand in the first place,” replied the doctor, “that the supply of incentives
to effort is but one of the objects sought in the organization we have adopted for the
army. The other, and equally important, is to secure for the file-leaders and captains of the
force, and the great officers of the nation, men of proven abilities, who are pledged by
their own careers to hold their followers up to their highest standard of performance and
permit no lagging. With a view to these two ends the industrial army is organized. First
comes the unclassified grade of common laborers, men of all work, to which all recruits
during their first three years belong. This grade is a sort of school, and a very strict one,
in which the young men are taught habits of obedience, subordination, and devotion to
duty. While the miscellaneous nature of the work done by this force prevents the
systematic grading of the workers which is afterwards possible, yet individual records are
kept, and excellence receives distinction corresponding with the penalties that negligence
incurs. It is not, however, policy with us to permit youthful recklessness or indiscretion,
when not deeply culpable, to handicap the future careers of young men, and all who have
passed through the unclassified grade without serious disgrace have an equal opportunity
to choose the life employment they have most liking for. Having selected this, they enter
upon it as apprentices. The length of the apprenticeship naturally differs in different
occupations. At the end of it the apprentice becomes a full workman, and a member of his
trade or guild. Now not only are the individual records of the apprentices for ability and
industry strictly kept, and excellence distinguished by suitable distinctions, but upon the
average of his record during apprenticeship the standing given the apprentice among the
full workmen depends.
“While the internal organizations of different industries, mechanical and agricultural,
differ according to their peculiar conditions, they agree in a general division of their
workers into first, second, and third grades, according to ability, and these grades are in
many cases subdivided into first and second classes. According to his standing as an
apprentice a young man is assigned his place as a first, second, or third grade worker. Of
course only young men of unusual ability pass directly from apprenticeship into the first
grade of the workers. The most fall into the lower grades, working up as they grow more
experienced, at the periodical regradings. These regradings take place in each industry at
intervals corresponding with the length of the apprenticeship to that industry, so that
merit never need wait long to rise, nor can any rest on past achievements unless they
would drop into a lower rank. One of the notable advantages of a high grading is the
privilege it gives the worker in electing which of the various branches or processes of his
industry he will follow as his specialty. Of course it is not intended that any of these
processes shall be disproportionately arduous, but there is often much difference between
them, and the privilege of election is accordingly highly prized. So far as possible,
indeed, the preferences even of the poorest workmen are considered in assigning them
their line of work, because not only their happiness but their usefulness is thus enhanced.
While, however, the wish of the lower grade man is consulted so far as the exigencies of
the service permit, he is considered only after the upper grade men have been provided
for, and often he has to put up with second or third choice, or even with an arbitrary
assignment when help is needed. This privilege of election attends every regrading, and
when a man loses his grade he also risks having to exchange the sort of work he likes for
some other less to his taste. The results of each regrading, giving the standing of every
man in his industry, are gazetted in the public prints, and those who have won promotion
since the last regrading receive the nation’s thanks and are publicly invested with the
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badge of their new rank.”
“What may this badge be?” I asked.
“Every industry has its emblematic device,” replied Dr. Leete, “and this, in the shape of a
metallic badge so small that you might not see it unless you knew where to look, is all the
insignia which the men of the army wear, except where public convenience demands a
distinctive uniform. This badge is the same in form for all grades of industry, but while
the badge of the third grade is iron, that of the second grade is silver, and that of the first
is gilt.
“Apart from the grand incentive to endeavor afforded by the fact that the high places in
the nation are open only to the highest class men, and that rank in the army constitutes the
only mode of social distinction for the vast majority who are not aspirants in art,
literature, and the professions, various incitements of a minor, but perhaps equally
effective, sort are provided in the form of special privileges and immunities in the way of
discipline, which the superior class men enjoy. These, while intended to be as little as
possible invidious to the less successful, have the effect of keeping constantly before
every man’s mind the great desirability of attaining the grade next above his own.
“It is obviously important that not only the good but also the indifferent and poor
workmen should be able to cherish the ambition of rising. Indeed, the number of the latter
being so much greater, it is even more essential that the ranking system should not
operate to discourage them than that it should stimulate the others. It is to this end that
the grades are divided into classes. The grades as well as the classes being made
numerically equal at each regrading, there is not at any time, counting out the officers and
the unclassified and apprentice grades, over one-ninth of the industrial army in the lowest
class, and most of this number are recent apprentices, all of whom expect to rise. Those
who remain during the entire term of service in the lowest class are but a trifling fraction
of the industrial army, and likely to be as deficient in sensibility to their position as in
ability to better it.
“It is not even necessary that a worker should win promotion to a higher grade to have at
least a taste of glory. While promotion requires a general excellence of record as a
worker, honorable mention and various sorts of prizes are awarded for excellence less
than sufficient for promotion, and also for special feats and single performances in the
various industries. There are many minor distinctions of standing, not only within the
grades but within the classes, each of which acts as a spur to the efforts of a group. It is
intended that no form of merit shall wholly fail of recognition.
“As for actual neglect of work, positively bad work, or other overt remissness on the part
of men incapable of generous motives, the discipline of the industrial army is far too
strict to allow anything whatever of the sort. A man able to do duty, and persistently
refusing, is sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread and water till he consents.
“The lowest grade of the officers of the industrial army, that of assistant foremen or
lieutenants, is appointed out of men who have held their place for two years in the first
class of the first grade. Where this leaves too large a range of choice, only the first group
of this class are eligible. No one thus comes to the point of commanding men until he is
about thirty years old. After a man becomes an officer, his rating of course no longer
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depends on the efficiency of his own work, but on that of his men. The foremen are
appointed from among the assistant foremen, by the same exercise of discretion limited to
a small eligible class. In the appointments to the still higher grades another principle is
introduced, which it would take too much time to explain now.
“Of course such a system of grading as I have described would have been impracticable
applied to the small industrial concerns of your day, in some of which there were hardly
enough employees to have left one apiece for the classes. You must remember that, under
the national organization of labor, all industries are carried on by great bodies of men,
many of your farms or shops being combined as one. It is also owing solely to the vast
scale on which each industry is organized, with coördinate establishments in every part of
the country, that we are able by exchanges and transfers to fit every man so nearly with
the sort of work he can do best.
“And now, Mr. West, I will leave it to you, on the bare outline of its features which I have
given, if those who need special incentives to do their best are likely to lack them under
our system. Does it not seem to you that men who found themselves obliged, whether
they wished or not, to work, would under such a system be strongly impelled to do their
best?”
I replied that it seemed to me the incentives offered were, if any objection were to be
made, too strong; that the pace set for the young men was too hot; and such, indeed, I
would add with deference, still remains my opinion, now that by longer residence among
you I have become better acquainted with the whole subject.
Dr. Leete, however, desired me to reflect, and I am ready to say that it is perhaps a
sufficient reply to my objection, that the worker’s livelihood is in no way dependent on
his ranking, and anxiety for that never embitters his disappointments; that the working
hours are short, the vacations regular, and that all emulation ceases at forty-five, with the
attainment of middle life.
“There are two or three other points I ought to refer to,” he added, “to prevent your
getting mistaken impressions. In the first place, you must understand that this system of
preferment given the more efficient workers over the less so, in no way contravenes the
fundamental idea of our social system, that all who do their best are equally deserving,
whether that best be great or small. I have shown that the system is arranged to encourage
the weaker as well as the stronger with the hope of rising, while the fact that the stronger
are selected for the leaders is in no way a reflection upon the weaker, but in the interest of
the common weal.
“Do not imagine, either, because emulation is given free play as an incentive under our
system, that we deem it a motive likely to appeal to the nobler sort of men, or worthy of
them. Such as these find their motives within, not without, and measure their duty by
their own endowments, not by those of others. So long as their achievement is
proportioned to their powers, they would consider it preposterous to expect praise or
blame because it chanced to be great or small. To such natures emulation appears
philosophically absurd, and despicable in a moral aspect by its substitution of envy for
admiration, and exultation for regret, in one’s attitude toward the successes and the
failures of others.
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“But all men, even in the last year of the twentieth century, are not of this high order, and
the incentives to endeavor requisite for those who are not must be of a sort adapted to
their inferior natures. For these, then, emulation of the keenest edge is provided as a
constant spur. Those who need this motive will feel it. Those who are above its influence
do not need it.
“I should not fail to mention,” resumed the doctor, “that for those too deficient in mental
or bodily strength to be fairly graded with the main body of workers, we have a separate
grade, unconnected with the others,—a sort of invalid corps, the members of which are
provided with a light class of tasks fitted to their strength. All our sick in mind and body,
all our deaf and dumb, and lame and blind and crippled, and even our insane, belong to
this invalid corps, and bear its insignia. The strongest often do nearly a man’s work, the
feeblest, of course, nothing; but none who can do anything are willing quite to give up. In
their lucid intervals, even our insane are eager to do what they can.”
“That is a pretty idea of the invalid corps,” I said. “Even a barbarian from the nineteenth
century can appreciate that. It is a very graceful way of disguising charity, and must be
grateful to the feelings of its recipients.”
“Charity!” repeated Dr. Leete. “Did you suppose that we consider the incapable class we
are talking of objects of charity?”
“Why, naturally,” I said, “inasmuch as they are incapable of self-support.”
But here the doctor took me up quickly.
“Who is capable of self-support?” he demanded. “There is no such thing in a civilized
society as self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as not even to know family
coöperation, each individual may possibly support himself, though even then for a part of
his life only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and constitute even the
rudest sort of society, self-support becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized, and
the subdivision of occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence
becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his occupation, is a
member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity. The
necessity of mutual dependence should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support;
and that it did not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your
system.”
“That may all be so,” I replied, “but it does not touch the case of those who are unable to
contribute anything to the product of industry.”
“Surely I told you this morning, at least I thought I did,” replied Dr. Leete, “that the right
of a man to maintenance at the nation’s table depends on the fact that he is a man, and not
on the amount of health and strength he may have, so long as he does his best.”
“You said so,” I answered, “but I supposed the rule applied only to the workers of
different ability. Does it also hold of those who can do nothing at all?”
“Are they not also men?”
“I am to understand, then, that the lame, the blind, the sick, and the impotent, are as well
off as the most efficient, and have the same income?”
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“Certainly,” was the reply.
“The idea of charity on such a scale,” I answered, “would have made our most
enthusiastic philanthropists gasp.”
“If you had a sick brother at home,” replied Dr. Leete, “unable to work, would you feed
him on less dainty food, and lodge and clothe him more poorly, than yourself? More
likely far, you would give him the preference; nor would you think of calling it charity.
Would not the word, in that connection, fill you with indignation?”
“Of course,” I replied; “but the cases are not parallel. There is a sense, no doubt, in which
all men are brothers; but this general sort of brotherhood is not to be compared, except
for rhetorical purposes, to the brotherhood of blood, either as to its sentiment or its
obligations.”
“There speaks the nineteenth century!” exclaimed Dr. Leete. “Ah, Mr. West, there is no
doubt as to the length of time that you slept. If I were to give you, in one sentence, a key
to what may seem the mysteries of our civilization as compared with that of your age, I
should say that it is the fact that the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man,
which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as real and as
vital as physical fraternity.
“But even setting that consideration aside, I do not see why it so surprises you that those
who cannot work are conceded the full right to live on the produce of those who can.
Even in your day, the duty of military service for the protection of the nation, to which
our industrial service corresponds, while obligatory on those able to discharge it, did not
operate to deprive of the privileges of citizenship those who were unable. They stayed at
home, and were protected by those who fought, and nobody questioned their right to be,
or thought less of them. So, now, the requirement of industrial service from those able to
render it does not operate to deprive of the privileges of citizenship, which now implies
the citizen’s maintenance, him who cannot work. The worker is not a citizen because he
works, but works because he is a citizen. As you recognize the duty of the strong to fight
for the weak, we, now that fighting is gone by, recognize his duty to work for him.
“A solution which leaves an unaccounted-for residuum is no solution at all; and our
solution of the problem of human society would have been none at all had it left the lame,
the sick, and the blind outside with the beasts, to fare as they might. Better far have left
the strong and well unprovided for than these burdened ones, toward whom every heart
must yearn, and for whom ease of mind and body should be provided, if for no others.
Therefore it is, as I told you this morning, that the title of every man, woman, and child to
the means of existence rests on no basis less plain, broad, and simple than the fact that
they are fellows of one race—members of one human family. The only coin current is the
image of God, and that is good for all we have.
“I think there is no feature of the civilization of your epoch so repugnant to modern ideas
as the neglect with which you treated your dependent classes. Even if you had no pity, no
feeling of brotherhood, how was it that you did not see that you were robbing the
incapable class of their plain right in leaving them unprovided for?”
“I don’t quite follow you there,” I said. “I admit the claim of this class to our pity, but how
could they who produced nothing claim a share of the product as a right?”
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“How happened it,” was Dr. Leete’s reply, “that your workers were able to produce more
than so many savages would have done? Was it not wholly on account of the heritage of
the past knowledge and achievements of the race, the machinery of society, thousands of
years in contriving, found by you ready-made to your hand? How did you come to be
possessors of this knowledge and this machinery, which represent nine parts to one
contributed by yourself in the value of your product? You inherited it, did you not? And
were not these others, these unfortunate and crippled brothers whom you cast out, joint
inheritors, co-heirs with you? What did you do with their share? Did you not rob them
when you put them off with crusts, who were entitled to sit with the heirs, and did you
not add insult to robbery when you called the crusts charity?
“Ah, Mr. West,” Dr. Leete continued, as I did not respond, “what I do not understand is,
setting aside all considerations either of justice or brotherly feeling toward the crippled
and defective, how the workers of your day could have had any heart for their work,
knowing that their children, or grand-children, if unfortunate, would be deprived of the
comforts and even necessities of life. It is a mystery how men with children could favor a
system under which they were rewarded beyond those less endowed with bodily strength
or mental power. For, by the same discrimination by which the father profited, the son,
for whom he would give his life, being perchance weaker than others, might be reduced
to crusts and beggary. How men dared leave children behind them, I have never been able
to understand.”
NOTE.—Although in his talk on the previous evening Dr. Leete
had emphasized the pains taken to enable every man to
ascertain and follow his natural bent in choosing an
occupation, it was not till I learned that the worker’s
income is the same in all occupations that I realized how
absolutely he may be counted on to do so, and thus, by
selecting the harness which sets most lightly on himself,
find that in which he can pull best. The failure of my age in
any systematic or effective way to develop and utilize the
natural aptitudes of men for the industries and intellectual
avocations was one of the great wastes, as well as one of the
most common causes of unhappiness in that time. The vast
majority of my contemporaries, though nominally free to do
so, never really chose their occupations at all, but were
forced by circumstances into work for which they were
relatively inefficient, because not naturally fitted for it.
The rich, in this respect, had little advantage over the
poor. The latter, indeed, being generally deprived of
education, had no opportunity even to ascertain the natural
aptitudes they might have, and on account of their poverty
were unable to develop them by cultivation even when
ascertained. The liberal and technical professions, except by
favorable accident, were shut to them, to their own great
loss and that of the nation. On the other hand, the
well-to-do, although they could command education and
opportunity, were scarcely less hampered by social prejudice,
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which forbade them to pursue manual avocations, even when
adapted to them, and destined them, whether fit or unfit, to
the professions, thus wasting many an excellent
handicraftsman. Mercenary considerations, tempting men to
pursue money-making occupations for which they were unfit,
instead of less remunerative employments for which they were
fit, were responsible for another vast perversion of talent.
All these things now are changed. Equal education and
opportunity must needs bring to light whatever aptitudes a
man has, and neither social prejudices nor mercenary
considerations hamper him in the choice of his life work.
CHAPTER XIII.
As Edith had promised he should do, Dr. Leete accompanied me to my bedroom when I
retired, to instruct me as to the adjustment of the musical telephone. He showed how, by
turning a screw, the volume of the music could be made to fill the room, or die away to
an echo so faint and far that one could scarcely be sure whether he heard or imagined it.
If, of two persons side by side, one desired to listen to music and the other to sleep, it
could be made audible to one and inaudible to another.
“I should strongly advise you to sleep if you can to-night, Mr. West, in preference to
listening to the finest tunes in the world,” the doctor said, after explaining these points.
“In the trying experience you are just now passing through, sleep is a nerve tonic for
which there is no substitute.”
Mindful of what had happened to me that very morning, I promised to heed his counsel.
“Very well,” he said, “then I will set the telephone at eight o’clock.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He explained that, by a clock-work combination, a person could arrange to be awakened
at any hour by the music.
It began to appear, as has since fully proved to be the case, that I had left my tendency to
insomnia behind me with the other discomforts of existence in the nineteenth century; for
though I took no sleeping draught this time, yet, as the night before, I had no sooner
touched the pillow than I was asleep.
I dreamed that I sat on the throne of the Abencerrages in the banqueting hall of the
Alhambra, feasting my lords and generals, who next day were to follow the crescent
against the Christian dogs of Spain. The air, cooled by the spray of fountains, was heavy
with the scent of flowers. A band of Nautch girls, round-limbed and luscious-lipped,
danced with voluptuous grace to the music of brazen and stringed instruments. Looking
up to the latticed galleries, one caught a gleam now and then from the eye of some beauty
of the royal harem, looking down upon the assembled flower of Moorish chivalry. Louder
and louder clashed the cymbals, wilder and wilder grew the strain, till the blood of the
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desert race could no longer resist the martial delirium, and the swart nobles leaped to
their feet; a thousand scimitars were bared, and the cry, “Allah il Allah!” shook the hall
and awoke me, to find it broad daylight, and the room tingling with the electric music of
the “Turkish Reveille.”
At the breakfast-table, when I told my host of my morning’s experience, I learned that it
was not a mere chance that the piece of music which awakened me was a reveille. The
airs played at one of the halls during the waking hours of the morning were always of an
inspiring type.
“By the way,” I said, “I have not thought to ask you anything about the state of Europe.
Have the societies of the Old World also been remodeled?”
“Yes,” replied Dr. Leete, “the great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and
parts of South America, are now organized industrially like the United States, which was
the pioneer of the evolution. The peaceful relations of these nations are assured by a loose
form of federal union of world-wide extent. An international council regulates the mutual
intercourse and commerce of the members of the union and their joint policy toward the
more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions.
Complete autonomy within its own limits is enjoyed by every nation.”
“How do you carry on commerce without money?” I said. “In trading with other nations,
you must use some sort of money, although you dispense with it in the internal affairs of
the nation.”
“Oh, no; money is as superfluous in our foreign as in our internal relations. When foreign
commerce was conducted by private enterprise, money was necessary to adjust it on
account of the multifarious complexity of the transactions; but nowadays it is a function
of the nations as units. There are thus only a dozen or so merchants in the world, and their
business being supervised by the international council, a simple system of book accounts
serves perfectly to regulate their dealings. Customs duties of every sort are of course
superfluous. A nation simply does not import what its government does not think
requisite for the general interest. Each nation has a bureau of foreign exchange, which
manages its trading. For example, the American bureau, estimating such and such
quantities of French goods necessary to America for a given year, sends the order to the
French bureau, which in turn sends its order to our bureau. The same is done mutually by
all the nations.”
“But how are the prices of foreign goods settled, since there is no competition?”
“The price at which one nation supplies another with goods,” replied Dr. Leete, “must be
that at which it supplies its own citizens. So you see there is no danger of
misunderstanding. Of course no nation is theoretically bound to supply another with the
product of its own labor, but it is for the interest of all to exchange some commodities. If
a nation is regularly supplying another with certain goods, notice is required from either
side of any important change in the relation.”
“But what if a nation, having a monopoly of some natural product, should refuse to
supply it to the others, or to one of them?”
“Such a case has never occurred, and could not without doing the refusing party vastly
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more harm than the others,” replied Dr. Leete. “In the first place, no favoritism could be
legally shown. The law requires that each nation shall deal with the others, in all respects,
on exactly the same footing. Such a course as you suggest would cut off the nation
adopting it from the remainder of the earth for all purposes whatever. The contingency is
one that need not give us much anxiety.”
“But,” said I, “supposing a nation, having a natural monopoly in some product of which it
exports more than it consumes, should put the price away up, and thus, without cutting
off the supply, make a profit out of its neighbors’ necessities? Its own citizens would of
course have to pay the higher price on that commodity, but as a body would make more
out of foreigners than they would be out of pocket themselves.”
“When you come to know how prices of all commodities are determined nowadays, you
will perceive how impossible it is that they could be altered, except with reference to the
amount or arduousness of the work required respectively to produce them,” was Dr.
Leete’s reply. “This principle is an international as well as a national guarantee; but even
without it the sense of community of interest, international as well as national, and the
conviction of the folly of selfishness, are too deep nowadays to render possible such a
piece of sharp practice as you apprehend. You must understand that we all look forward
to an eventual unification of the world as one nation. That, no doubt, will be the ultimate
form of society, and will realize certain economic advantages over the present federal
system of autonomous nations. Meanwhile, however, the present system works so nearly
perfectly that we are quite content to leave to posterity the completion of the scheme.
There are, indeed, some who hold that it never will be completed, on the ground that the
federal plan is not merely a provisional solution of the problem of human society, but the
best ultimate solution.”
“How do you manage,” I asked, “when the books of any two nations do not balance?
Supposing we import more from France than we export to her.”
“At the end of each year,” replied the doctor, “the books of every nation are examined. If
France is found in our debt, probably we are in the debt of some nation which owes
France, and so on with all the nations. The balances that remain after the accounts have
been cleared by the international council should not be large under our system. Whatever
they may be, the council requires them to be settled every few years, and may require
their settlement at any time if they are getting too large; for it is not intended that any
nation shall run largely in debt to another, lest feelings unfavorable to amity should be
engendered. To guard further against this, the international council inspects the
commodities interchanged by the nations, to see that they are of perfect quality.”
“But what are the balances finally settled with, seeing that you have no money?”
“In national staples; a basis of agreement as to what staples shall be accepted, and in what
proportions, for settlement of accounts, being a preliminary to trade relations.”
“Emigration is another point I want to ask you about,” said I. “With every nation
organized as a close industrial partnership, monopolizing all means of production in the
country, the emigrant, even if he were permitted to land, would starve. I suppose there is
no emigration nowadays.”
“On the contrary, there is constant emigration, by which I suppose you mean removal to
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foreign countries for permanent residence,” replied Dr. Leete. “It is arranged on a simple
international arrangement of indemnities. For example, if a man at twenty-one emigrates
from England to America, England loses all the expense of his maintenance and
education, and America gets a workman for nothing. America accordingly makes
England an allowance. The same principle, varied to suit the case, applies generally. If
the man is near the term of his labor when he emigrates, the country receiving him has
the allowance. As to imbecile persons, it is deemed best that each nation should be
responsible for its own, and the emigration of such must be under full guarantees of
support by his own nation. Subject to these regulations, the right of any man to emigrate
at any time is unrestricted.”
“But how about mere pleasure trips; tours of observation? How can a stranger travel in a
country whose people do not receive money, and are themselves supplied with the means
of life on a basis not extended to him? His own credit card cannot, of course, be good in
other lands. How does he pay his way?”
“An American credit card,” replied Dr. Leete, “is just as good in Europe as American
gold used to be, and on precisely the same condition, namely, that it be exchanged into
the currency of the country you are traveling in. An American in Berlin takes his credit
card to the local office of the international council, and receives in exchange for the
whole or part of it a German credit card, the amount being charged against the United
States in favor of Germany on the international account.”
“Perhaps Mr. West would like to dine at the Elephant to-day,” said Edith, as we left the
table.
“That is the name we give to the general dining-house of our ward,” explained her father.
“Not only is our cooking done at the public kitchens, as I told you last night, but the
service and quality of the meals are much more satisfactory if taken at the dining-house.
The two minor meals of the day are usually taken at home, as not worth the trouble of
going out; but it is general to go out to dine. We have not done so since you have been
with us, from a notion that it would be better to wait till you had become a little more
familiar with our ways. What do you think? Shall we take dinner at the dining-house
to-day?”
I said that I should be very much pleased to do so.
Not long after, Edith came to me, smiling, and said:—
“Last night, as I was thinking what I could do to make you feel at home until you came to
be a little more used to us and our ways, an idea occurred to me. What would you say if I
were to introduce you to some very nice people of your own times, whom I am sure you
used to be well acquainted with?”
I replied, rather vaguely, that it would certainly be very agreeable, but I did not see how
she was going to manage it.
“Come with me,” was her smiling reply, “and see if I am not as good as my word.”
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My susceptibility to surprise had been pretty well exhausted by the numerous shocks it
had received, but it was with some wonderment that I followed her into a room which I
had not before entered. It was a small, cosy apartment, walled with cases filled with
books.
“Here are your friends,” said Edith, indicating one of the cases, and as my eye glanced
over the names on the backs of the volumes, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley,
Tennyson, Defoe, Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, Irving, and a score of other
great writers of my time and all time, I understood her meaning. She had indeed made
good her promise in a sense compared with which its literal fulfillment would have been
a disappointment. She had introduced me to a circle of friends whom the century that had
elapsed since last I communed with them had aged as little as it had myself. Their spirit
was as high, their wit as keen, their laughter and their tears as contagious, as when their
speech had whiled away the hours of a former century. Lonely I was not and could not be
more, with this goodly companionship, however wide the gulf of years that gaped
between me and my old life.
“You are glad I brought you here,” exclaimed Edith, radiant, as she read in my face the
success of her experiment. “It was a good idea, was it not, Mr. West? How stupid in me
not to think of it before! I will leave you now with your old friends, for I know there will
be no company for you like them just now; but remember you must not let old friends
make you quite forget new ones!” and with that smiling caution she left me.
Attracted by the most familiar of the names before me, I laid my hand on a volume of
Dickens, and sat down to read. He had been my prime favorite among the book-writers of
the century,—I mean the nineteenth century,—and a week had rarely passed in my old
life during which I had not taken up some volume of his works to while away an idle
hour. Any volume with which I had been familiar would have produced an extraordinary
impression, read under my present circumstances, but my exceptional familiarity with
Dickens, and his consequent power to call up the associations of my former life, gave to
his writings an effect no others could have had, to intensify, by force of contrast, my
appreciation of the strangeness of my present environment. However new and astonishing
one’s surroundings, the tendency is to become a part of them so soon that almost from the
first the power to see them objectively and fully measure their strangeness, is lost. That
power, already dulled in my case, the pages of Dickens restored by carrying me back
through their associations to the standpoint of my former life. With a clearness which I
had not been able before to attain, I saw now the past and present, like contrasting
pictures, side by side.
The genius of the great novelist of the nineteenth century, like that of Homer, might
indeed defy time; but the setting of his pathetic tales, the misery of the poor, the wrongs
of power, the pitiless cruelty of the system of society, had passed away as utterly as Circe
and the sirens, Charybdis and Cyclops.
During the hour or two that I sat there with Dickens open before me, I did not actually
read more than a couple of pages. Every paragraph, every phrase, brought up some new
aspect of the world-transformation which had taken place, and led my thoughts on long
and widely ramifying excursions. As meditating thus in Dr. Leete’s library I gradually
attained a more clear and coherent idea of the prodigious spectacle which I had been so
strangely enabled to view, I was filled with a deepening wonder at the seeming
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capriciousness of the fate that had given to one who so little deserved it, or seemed in any
way set apart for it, the power alone among his contemporaries to stand upon the earth in
this latter day. I had neither foreseen the new world nor toiled for it, as many about me
had done regardless of the scorn of fools or the misconstruction of the good. Surely it
would have been more in accordance with the fitness of things had one of those prophetic
and strenuous souls been enabled to see the travail of his soul and be satisfied; he, for
example, a thousand times rather than I, who, having beheld in a vision the world I
looked on, sang of it in words that again and again, during these last wondrous days, had
rung in my mind:—
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see.
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled.
In the Parliament of man, the federation of the world.
Then the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.
What though, in his old age, he momentarily lost faith in his own prediction, as prophets
in their hours of depression and doubt generally do; the words had remained eternal
testimony to the seership of a poet’s heart, the insight that is given to faith.
I was still in the library when some hours later Dr. Leete sought me there. “Edith told me
of her idea,” he said, “and I thought it an excellent one. I had a little curiosity what writer
you would first turn to. Ah, Dickens! You admired him, then! That is where we moderns
agree with you. Judged by our standards, he overtops all the writers of his age, not
because his literary genius was highest, but because his great heart beat for the poor,
because he made the cause of the victims of society his own, and devoted his pen to
exposing its cruelties and shams. No man of his time did so much as he to turn men’s
minds to the wrong and wretchedness of the old order of things, and open their eyes to
the necessity of the great change that was coming, although he himself did not clearly
foresee it.”
CHAPTER XIV.
A heavy rainstorm came up during the day, and I had concluded that the condition of the
streets would be such that my hosts would have to give up the idea of going out to dinner,
although the dining-hall I had understood to be quite near. I was much surprised when at
the dinner hour the ladies appeared prepared to go out, but without either rubbers or
umbrellas.
The mystery was explained when we found ourselves on the street, for a continuous
waterproof covering had been let down so as to inclose the sidewalk and turn it into a
well lighted and perfectly dry corridor, which was filled with a stream of ladies and
gentlemen dressed for dinner. At the corners the entire open space was similarly roofed
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in. Edith Leete, with whom I walked, seemed much interested in learning what appeared
to be entirely new to her, that in the stormy weather the streets of the Boston of my day
had been impassable, except to persons protected by umbrellas, boots, and heavy
clothing. “Were sidewalk coverings not used at all?” she asked. They were used, I
explained, but in a scattered and utterly unsystematic way, being private enterprises. She
said to me that at the present time all the streets were provided against inclement weather
in the manner I saw, the apparatus being rolled out of the way when it was unnecessary.
She intimated that it would be considered an extraordinary imbecility to permit the
weather to have any effect on the social movements of the people.
Dr. Leete, who was walking ahead, overhearing something of our talk, turned to say that
the difference between the age of individualism and that of concert was well
characterized by the fact that, in the nineteenth century, when it rained, the people of
Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth
century they put up one umbrella over all the heads.
As we walked on, Edith said, “The private umbrella is father’s favorite figure to illustrate
the old way when everybody lived for himself and his family. There is a nineteenth
century painting at the Art Gallery representing a crowd of people in the rain, each one
holding his umbrella over himself and his wife, and giving his neighbors the drippings,
which he claims must have been meant by the artist as a satire on his times.”
We now entered a large building into which a stream of people was pouring. I could not
see the front, owing to the awning, but, if in correspondence with the interior, which was
even finer than the store I visited the day before, it would have been magnificent. My
companion said that the sculptured group over the entrance was especially admired.
Going up a grand staircase we walked some distance along a broad corridor with many
doors opening upon it. At one of these, which bore my host’s name, we turned in, and I
found myself in an elegant dining-room containing a table for four. Windows opened on a
courtyard where a fountain played to a great height and music made the air electric.
“You seem at home here,” I said, as we seated ourselves at table, and Dr. Leete touched
an annunciator.
“This is, in fact, a part of our house, slightly detached from the rest,” he replied. “Every
family in the ward has a room set apart in this great building for its permanent and
exclusive use for a small annual rental. For transient guests and individuals there is
accommodation on another floor. If we expect to dine here, we put in our orders the night
before, selecting anything in market, according to the daily reports in the papers. The
meal is as expensive or as simple as we please, though of course everything is vastly
cheaper as well as better than it would be if prepared at home. There is actually nothing
which our people take more interest in than the perfection of the catering and cooking
done for them, and I admit that we are a little vain of the success that has been attained by
this branch of the service. Ah, my dear Mr. West, though other aspects of your
civilization were more tragical, I can imagine that none could have been more depressing
than the poor dinners you had to eat, that is, all of you who had not great wealth.”
“You would have found none of us disposed to disagree with you on that point,” I said.
The waiter, a fine-looking young fellow, wearing a slightly distinctive uniform, now
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made his appearance. I observed him closely, as it was the first time I had been able to
study particularly the bearing of one of the enlisted members of the industrial army. This
young man, I knew from what I had been told, must be highly educated, and the equal,
socially and in all respects, of those he served. But it was perfectly evident that to neither
side was the situation in the slightest degree embarrassing. Dr. Leete addressed the young
man in a tone devoid, of course, as any gentleman’s would be, of superciliousness, but at
the same time not in any way deprecatory, while the manner of the young man was
simply that of a person intent on discharging correctly the task he was engaged in,
equally without familiarity or obsequiousness. It was, in fact, the manner of a soldier on
duty, but without the military stiffness. As the youth left the room, I said, “I cannot get
over my wonder at seeing a young man like that serving so contentedly in a menial
position.”
“What is that word ‘menial’? I never heard it,” said Edith.
“It is obsolete now,” remarked her father. “If I understand it rightly, it applied to persons
who performed particularly disagreeable and unpleasant tasks for others, and carried with
it an implication of contempt. Was it not so, Mr. West?”
“That is about it,” I said. “Personal service, such as waiting on tables, was considered
menial, and held in such contempt, in my day, that persons of culture and refinement
would suffer hardship before condescending to it.”
“What a strangely artificial idea,” exclaimed Mrs. Leete, wonderingly.
“And yet these services had to be rendered,” said Edith.
“Of course,” I replied. “But we imposed them on the poor, and those who had no
alternative but starvation.”
“And increased the burden you imposed on them by adding your contempt,” remarked
Dr. Leete.
“I don’t think I clearly understand,” said Edith. “Do you mean that you permitted people
to do things for you which you despised them for doing, or that you accepted services
from them which you would have been unwilling to render them? You can’t surely mean
that, Mr. West?”
I was obliged to tell her that the fact was just as she had stated. Dr. Leete, however, came
to my relief.
“To understand why Edith is surprised,” he said, “you must know that nowadays it is an
axiom of ethics that to accept a service from another which we would be unwilling to
return in kind, if need were, is like borrowing with the intention of not repaying, while to
enforce such a service by taking advantage of the poverty or necessity of a person would
be an outrage like forcible robbery. It is the worst thing about any system which divides
men, or allows them to be divided, into classes and castes, that it weakens the sense of a
common humanity. Unequal distribution of wealth, and, still more effectually, unequal
opportunities of education and culture, divided society in your day into classes which in
many respects regarded each other as distinct races. There is not, after all, such a
difference as might appear between our ways of looking at this question of service.
Ladies and gentlemen of the cultured class in your day would no more have permitted
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persons of their own class to render them services they would scorn to return than we
would permit anybody to do so. The poor and the uncultured, however, they looked upon
as of another kind from themselves. The equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture
which all persons now enjoy have simply made us all members of one class, which
corresponds to the most fortunate class with you. Until this equality of condition had
come to pass, the idea of the solidarity of humanity, the brother hood of all men, could
never have become the real conviction and practical principle of action it is nowadays. In
your day the same phrases were indeed used, but they were phrases merely.”
“Do the waiters, also, volunteer?”
“No,” replied Dr. Leete. “The waiters are young men in the unclassified grade of the
industrial army who are assignable to all sorts of miscellaneous occupations not requiring
special skill. Waiting on table is one of these, and every young recruit is given a taste of
it. I myself served as a waiter for several months in this very dining-house some forty
years ago. Once more you must remember that there is recognized no sort of difference
between the dignity of the different sorts of work required by the nation. The individual is
never regarded, nor regards himself, as the servant of those he serves, nor is he in any
way dependent upon them. It is always the nation which he is serving. No difference is
recognized between a waiter’s functions and those of any other worker. The fact that his
is a personal service is indifferent from our point of view. So is a doctor’s. I should as
soon expect our waiter to-day to look down on me because I served him as a doctor, as
think of looking down on him because he serves me as a waiter.”
After dinner my entertainers conducted me about the building, of which the extent, the
magnificent architecture and richness of embellishment, astonished me. It seemed that it
was not merely a dining-hall, but likewise a great pleasure-house and social rendezvous
of the quarter, and no appliance of entertainment or recreation seemed lacking.
“You find illustrated here,” said Dr. Leete, when I had expressed my admiration, “what I
said to you in our first conversation, when you were looking out over the city, as to the
splendor of our public and common life as compared with the simplicity of our private
and home life, and the contrast which, in this respect, the twentieth bears to the
nineteenth century. To save ourselves useless burdens, we have as little gear about us at
home as is consistent with comfort, but the social side of our life is ornate and luxurious
beyond anything the world ever knew before. All the industrial and professional guilds
have clubhouses as extensive as this, as well as country, mountain, and seaside houses for
sport and rest in vacations.”
NOTE. In the latter part of the nineteenth century it became
a practice of needy young men at some of the colleges of the
country to earn a little money for their term bills by
serving as waiters on tables at hotels during the long summer
vacation. It was claimed, in reply to critics who expressed
the prejudices of the time in asserting that persons
voluntarily following such an occupation could not be
gentlemen, that they were entitled to praise for vindicating,
by their example, the dignity of all honest and necessary
labor. The use of this argument illustrates a common
confusion in thought on the part of my former contemporaries.
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The business of waiting on tables was in no more need of
defense than most of the other ways of getting a living in
that day, but to talk of dignity attaching to labor of any
sort under the system then prevailing was absurd. There is no
way in which selling labor for the highest price it will
fetch is more dignified than selling goods for what can be
got. Both were commercial transactions to be judged by the
commercial standard. By setting a price in money on his
service, the worker accepted the money measure for it, and
renounced all clear claim to be judged by any other. The
sordid taint which this necessity imparted to the noblest and
the highest sorts of service was bitterly resented by
generous souls, but there was no evading it. There was no
exemption, however transcendent the quality of one’s service,
from the necessity of haggling for its price in the
market-place. The physician must sell his healing and the
apostle his preaching like the rest. The prophet, who had
guessed the meaning of God, must dicker for the price of the
revelation, and the poet hawk his visions in printers’ row.
If I were asked to name the most distinguishing felicity of
this age, as compared to that in which I first saw the light,
I should say that to me it seems to consist in the dignity
you have given to labor by refusing to set a price upon it
and abolishing the market-place forever. By requiring of
every man his best you have made God his task-master, and by
making honor the sole reward of achievement you have imparted
to all service the distinction peculiar in my day to the
soldier’s.
CHAPTER XV.
When, in the course of our tour of inspection, we came to the library, we succumbed to
the temptation of the luxurious leather chairs with which it was furnished, and sat down
in one of the book-lined alcoves to rest and chat awhile.[3]
“Edith tells me that you have been in the library all the morning,” said Mrs. Leete. “Do
you know, it seems to me, Mr. West, that you are the most enviable of mortals.”
“I should like to know just why,” I replied.
“Because the books of the last hundred years will be new to you,” she answered. “You
will have so much of the most absorbing literature to read as to leave you scarcely time
for meals these five years to come. Ah, what would I give if I had not already read
Berrian’s novels.”
“Or Nesmyth’s, mamma,” added Edith.
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“Yes, or Oates’ poems, or ‘Past and Present,’ or, ‘In the Beginning,’ or,—oh, I could name
a dozen books, each worth a year of one’s life,” declared Mrs. Leete, enthusiastically.
“I judge, then, that there has been some notable literature produced in this century.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Leete. “It has been an era of unexampled intellectual splendor. Probably
humanity never before passed through a moral and material evolution, at once so vast in
its scope and brief in its time of accomplishment, as that from the old order to the new in
the early part of this century. When men came to realize the greatness of the felicity
which had befallen them, and that the change through which they had passed was not
merely an improvement in details of their condition, but the rise of the race to a new
plane of existence with an illimitable vista of progress, their minds were affected in all
their faculties with a stimulus, of which the outburst of the mediæval renaissance offers a
suggestion but faint indeed. There ensued an era of mechanical invention, scientific
discovery, art, musical and literary productiveness to which no previous age of the world
offers anything comparable.”
“By the way,” said I, “talking of literature, how are books published now? Is that also
done by the nation?”
“Certainly.”
“But how do you manage it? Does the government publish everything that is brought it as
a matter of course, at the public expense, or does it exercise a censorship and print only
what it approves?”
“Neither way. The printing department has no censorial powers. It is bound to print all
that is offered it, but prints it only on condition that the author defray the first cost out of
his credit. He must pay for the privilege of the public ear, and if he has any message
worth hearing we consider that he will be glad to do it. Of course, if incomes were
unequal, as in the old times, this rule would enable only the rich to be authors, but the
resources of citizens being equal, it merely measures the strength of the author’s motive.
The cost of an edition of an average book can be saved out of a year’s credit by the
practice of economy and some sacrifices. The book, on being published, is placed on sale
by the nation.”
“The author receiving a royalty on the sales as with us, I suppose,” I suggested.
“Not as with you, certainly,” replied Dr. Leete, “but nevertheless in one way. The price of
every book is made up of the cost of its publication with a royalty for the author. The
author fixes this royalty at any figure he pleases. Of course if he puts it unreasonably high
it is his own loss, for the book will not sell. The amount of this royalty is set to his credit
and he is discharged from other service to the nation for so long a period as this credit at
the rate of allowance for the support of citizens shall suffice to support him. If his book
be moderately successful, he has thus a furlough for several months, a year, two or three
years, and if he in the mean time produces other successful work, the remission of service
is extended so far as the sale of that may justify. An author of much acceptance succeeds
in supporting himself by his pen during the entire period of service, and the degree of any
writer’s literary ability, as determined by the popular voice, is thus the measure of the
opportunity given him to devote his time to literature. In this respect the outcome of our
system is not very dissimilar to that of yours, but there are two notable differences. In the
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first place, the universally high level of education nowadays gives the popular verdict a
conclusiveness on the real merit of literary work which in your day it was as far as
possible from having. In the second place, there is no such thing now as favoritism of any
sort to interfere with the recognition of true merit. Every author has precisely the same
facilities for bringing his work before the popular tribunal. To judge from the complaints
of the writers of your day, this absolute equality of opportunity would have been greatly
prized.”
“In the recognition of merit in other fields of original genius, such as music, art,
invention, design,” I said, “I suppose you follow a similar principle.”
“Yes,” he replied, “although the details differ. In art, for example, as in literature, the
people are the sole judges. They vote upon the acceptance of statues and paintings for the
public buildings, and their favorable verdict carries with it the artist’s remission from
other tasks to devote himself to his vocation. On copies of his work disposed of, he also
derives the same advantage as the author on sales of his books. In all these lines of
original genius the plan pursued is the same,—to offer a free field to aspirants, and as
soon as exceptional talent is recognized to release it from all trammels and let it have free
course. The remission of other service in these cases is not intended as a gift or reward,
but as the means of obtaining more and higher service. Of course there are various
literary, art, and scientific institutes to which membership comes to the famous and is
greatly prized. The highest of all honors in the nation, higher than the presidency, which
calls merely for good sense and devotion to duty, is the red ribbon awarded by the vote of
the people to the great authors, artists, engineers, physicians, and inventors of the
generation. Not over a certain number wear it at any one time, though every bright young
fellow in the country loses innumerable nights’ sleep dreaming of it. I even did myself.”
“Just as if mamma and I would have thought any more of you with it,” exclaimed Edith;
“not that it isn’t, of course, a very fine thing to have.”
“You had no choice, my dear, but to take your father as you found him and make the best
of him,” Dr. Leete replied; “but as for your mother, there, she would never have had me if
I had not assured her that I was bound to get the red ribbon or at least the blue.”
On this extravagance Mrs. Leete’s only comment was a smile.
“How about periodicals and newspapers?” I said. “I won’t deny that your book publishing
system is a considerable improvement on ours, both as to its tendency to encourage a real
literary vocation, and, quite as important, to discourage mere scribblers; but I don’t see
how it can be made to apply to magazines and newspapers. It is very well to make a man
pay for publishing a book, because the expense will be only occasional; but no man could
afford the expense of publishing a newspaper every day in the year. It took the deep
pockets of our private capitalists to do that, and often exhausted even them before the
returns came in. If you have newspapers at all, they must, I fancy, be published by the
government at the public expense, with government editors, reflecting government
opinions. Now, if your system is so perfect that there is never anything to criticise in the
conduct of affairs, this arrangement may answer. Otherwise I should think the lack of an
independent unofficial medium for the expression of public opinion would have most
unfortunate results. Confess, Dr. Leete, that a free newspaper press, with all that it
implies, was a redeeming incident of the old system when capital was in private hands,
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and that you have to set off the loss of that against your gains in other respects.”
“I am afraid I can’t give you even that consolation,” replied Dr. Leete, laughing. “In the
first place, Mr. West, the newspaper press is by no means the only or, as we look at it, the
best vehicle for serious criticism of public affairs. To us, the judgments of your
newspapers on such themes seem generally to have been crude and flippant, as well as
deeply tinctured with prejudice and bitterness. In so far as they may be taken as
expressing public opinion, they give an unfavorable impression of the popular
intelligence, while so far as they may have formed public opinion, the nation was not to
be felicitated. Nowadays, when a citizen desires to make a serious impression upon the
public mind as to any aspect of public affairs, he comes out with a book or pamphlet,
published as other books are. But this is not because we lack newspapers and magazines,
or that they lack the most absolute freedom. The newspaper press is organized so as to be
a more perfect expression of public opinion than it possibly could be in your day, when
private capital controlled and managed it primarily as a money-making business, and
secondarily only as a mouthpiece for the people.”
“But,” said I, “if the government prints the papers at the public expense, how can it fail to
control their policy? Who appoints the editors, if not the government?”
“The government does not pay the expense of the papers, nor appoint their editors, nor in
any way exert the slightest influence on their policy,” replied Dr. Leete. “The people who
take the paper pay the expense of its publication, choose its editor, and remove him when
unsatisfactory. You will scarcely say, I think, that such a newspaper press is not a free
organ of popular opinion.”
“Decidedly I shall not,” I replied, “but how is it practicable?”
“Nothing could be simpler. Supposing some of my neighbors or myself think we ought to
have a newspaper reflecting our opinions, and devoted especially to our locality, trade, or
profession. We go about among the people till we get the names of such a number that
their annual subscriptions will meet the cost of the paper, which is little or big according
to the largeness of its constituency. The amount of the subscriptions marked off the
credits of the citizens guarantees the nation against loss in publishing the paper, its
business, you understand, being that of a publisher purely, with no option to refuse the
duty required. The subscribers to the paper now elect somebody as editor, who, if he
accepts the office, is discharged from other service during his incumbency. Instead of
paying a salary to him, as in your day, the subscribers pay the nation an indemnity equal
to the cost of his support for taking him away from the general service. He manages the
paper just as one of your editors did, except that he has no counting-room to obey, or
interests of private capital as against the public good to defend. At the end of the first
year, the subscribers for the next either reëlect the former editor or choose any one else to
his place. An able editor, of course, keeps his place indefinitely. As the subscription list
enlarges, the funds of the paper increase, and it is improved by the securing of more and
better contributors, just as your papers were.”
“How is the staff of contributors recompensed, since they cannot be paid in money.”
“The editor settles with them the price of their wares. The amount is transferred to their
individual credit from the guarantee credit of the paper, and a remission of service is
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granted the contributor for a length of time corresponding to the amount credited him,
just as to other authors. As to magazines, the system is the same. Those interested in the
prospectus of a new periodical pledge enough subscriptions to run it for a year; select
their editor, who recompenses his contributors just as in the other case, the printing
bureau furnishing the necessary force and material for publication, as a matter of course.
When an editor’s services are no longer desired, if he cannot earn the right to his time by
other literary work, he simply resumes his place in the industrial army. I should add that,
though ordinarily the editor is elected only at the end of the year, and as a rule is
continued in office for a term of years, in case of any sudden change he should give to the
tone of the paper, provision is made for taking the sense of the subscribers as to his
removal at any time.”
“However earnestly a man may long for leisure for purposes of study or meditation,” I
remarked, “he cannot get out of the harness, if I understand you rightly, except in these
two ways you have mentioned. He must either by literary, artistic, or inventive
productiveness indemnify the nation for the loss of his services, or must get a sufficient
number of other people to contribute to such an indemnity.”
“It is most certain,” replied Dr. Leete, “that no able-bodied man nowadays can evade his
share of work and live on the toil of others, whether he calls himself by the fine name of
student or confesses to being simply lazy. At the same time our system is elastic enough
to give free play to every instinct of human nature which does not aim at dominating
others or living on the fruit of others’ labor. There is not only the remission by
indemnification but the remission by abnegation. Any man in his thirty-third year, his
term of service being then half done, can obtain an honorable discharge from the army,
provided he accepts for the rest of his life one half the rate of maintenance other citizens
receive. It is quite possible to live on this amount, though one must forego the luxuries
and elegancies of life, with some, perhaps, of its comforts.”
When the ladies retired that evening, Edith brought me a book and said:—
“If you should be wakeful to-night, Mr. West, you might be interested in looking over this
story by Berrian. It is considered his masterpiece, and will at least give you an idea what
the stories nowadays are like.”
I sat up in my room that night reading “Penthesilia” till it grew gray in the east, and did
not lay it down till I had finished it. And yet let no admirer of the great romancer of the
twentieth century resent my saying that at the first reading what most impressed me was
not so much what was in the book as what was left out of it. The story-writers of my day
would have deemed the making of bricks without straw a light task compared with the
construction of a romance from which should be excluded all effects drawn from the
contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement,
high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer
or the fear of being poorer, together with sordid anxieties of any sort for one’s self or
others; a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfretted by
artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law
but that of the heart. The reading of “Penthesilia” was of more value than almost any
amount of explanation would have been in giving me something like a general
impression of the social aspect of the twentieth century. The information Dr. Leete had
imparted was indeed extensive as to facts, but they had affected my mind as so many
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separate impressions, which I had as yet succeeded but imperfectly in making cohere.
Berrian put them together for me in a picture.
CHAPTER XVI.
Next morning I rose somewhat before the breakfast hour. As I descended the stairs, Edith
stepped into the hall from the room which had been the scene of the morning interview
between us described some chapters back.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, with a charmingly arch expression, “you thought to slip out
unbeknown for another of those solitary morning rambles which have such nice effects
on you. But you see I am up too early for you this time. You are fairly caught.”
“You discredit the efficacy of your own cure,” I said, “by supposing that such a ramble
would now be attended with bad consequences.”
“I am very glad to hear that,” she said. “I was in here arranging some flowers for the
breakfast table when I heard you come down, and fancied I detected something
surreptitious in your step on the stairs.”
“You did me injustice,” I replied. “I had no idea of going out at all.”
Despite her effort to convey an impression that my interception was purely accidental, I
had at the time a dim suspicion of what I afterwards learned to be the fact, namely, that
this sweet creature, in pursuance of her self-assumed guardianship over me, had risen for
the last two or three mornings at an unheard-of hour, to insure against the possibility of
my wandering off alone in case I should be affected as on the former occasion. Receiving
permission to assist her in making up the breakfast bouquet, I followed her into the room
from which she had emerged.
“Are you sure,” she asked, “that you are quite done with those terrible sensations you had
that morning?”
“I can’t say that I do not have times of feeling decidedly queer,” I replied, “moments
when my personal identity seems an open question. It would be too much to expect after
my experience that I should not have such sensations occasionally, but as for being
carried entirely off my feet, as I was on the point of being that morning, I think the
danger is past.”
“I shall never forget how you looked that morning,” she said.
“If you had merely saved my life,” I continued, “I might, perhaps, find words to express
my gratitude, but it was my reason you saved, and there are no words that would not
belittle my debt to you.” I spoke with emotion, and her eyes grew suddenly moist.
“It is too much to believe all this,” she said, “but it is very delightful to hear you say it.
What I did was very little. I was very much distressed for you, I know. Father never
thinks anything ought to astonish us when it can be explained scientifically, as I suppose
this long sleep of yours can be, but even to fancy myself in your place makes my head
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swim. I know that I could not have borne it at all.”
“That would depend,” I replied, “on whether an angel came to support you with her
sympathy in the crisis of your condition, as one came to me.” If my face at all expressed
the feelings I had a right to have toward this sweet and lovely young girl, who had played
so angelic a rôle toward me, its expression must have been very worshipful just then. The
expression or the words, or both together, caused her now to drop her eyes with a
charming blush.
“For the matter of that,” I said, “if your experience has not been as startling as mine, it
must have been rather overwhelming to see a man belonging to a strange century, and
apparently a hundred years dead, raised to life.”
“It seemed indeed strange beyond any describing at first,” she said, “but when we began
to put ourselves in your place, and realize how much stranger it must seem to you, I fancy
we forgot our own feelings a good deal, at least I know I did. It seemed then not so much
astounding as interesting and touching beyond anything ever heard of before.”
“But does it not come over you as astounding to sit at table with me, seeing who I am?”
“You must remember that you do not seem so strange to us as we must to you,” she
answered. “We belong to a future of which you could not form an idea, a generation of
which you knew nothing until you saw us. But you belong to a generation of which our
forefathers were a part. We know all about it; the names of many of its members are
household words with us. We have made a study of your ways of living and thinking;
nothing you say or do surprises us, while we say and do nothing which does not seem
strange to you. So you see, Mr. West, that if you feel that you can, in time, get
accustomed to us, you must not be surprised that from the first we have scarcely found
you strange at all.”
“I had not thought of it in that way,” I replied. “There is indeed much in what you say.
One can look back a thousand years easier than forward fifty. A century is not so very
long a retrospect. I might have known your great-grand-parents. Possibly I did. Did they
live in Boston?”
“I believe so.”
“You are not sure, then?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Now I think, they did.”
“I had a very large circle of acquaintances in the city,” I said. “It is not unlikely that I
knew or knew of some of them. Perhaps I may have known them well. Wouldn’t it be
interesting if I should chance to be able to tell you all about your great-grandfather, for
instance?”
“Very interesting.”
“Do you know your genealogy well enough to tell me who your forbears were in the
Boston of my day?”
“Oh, yes.”
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“Perhaps, then, you will some time tell me what some of their names were.”
She was engrossed in arranging a troublesome spray of green, and did not reply at once.
Steps upon the stairway indicated that the other members of the family were descending.
“Perhaps, some time,” she said.
After breakfast, Dr. Leete suggested taking me to inspect the central warehouse and
observe actually in operation the machinery of distribution, which Edith had described to
me. As we walked away from the house I said, “It is now several days that I have been
living in your household on a most extraordinary footing, or rather on none at all. I have
not spoken of this aspect of my position before because there were so many other aspects
yet more extraordinary. But now that I am beginning a little to feel my feet under me, and
to realize that, however I came here, I am here, and must make the best of it, I must speak
to you on this point.”
“As for your being a guest in my house,” replied Dr. Leete, “I pray you not to begin to be
uneasy on that point, for I mean to keep you a long time yet. With all your modesty, you
can but realize that such a guest as yourself is an acquisition not willingly to be parted
with.”
“Thanks, doctor,” I said. “It would be absurd, certainly, for me to affect any
oversensitiveness about accepting the temporary hospitality of one to whom I owe it that
I am not still awaiting the end of the world in a living tomb. But if I am to be a permanent
citizen of this century I must have some standing in it. Now, in my time a person more or
less entering the world, however he got in, would not be noticed in the unorganized
throng of men, and might make a place for himself anywhere he chose if he were strong
enough. But nowadays everybody is a part of a system with a distinct place and function.
I am outside the system, and don’t see how I can get in; there seems no way to get in,
except to be born in or to come in as an emigrant from some other system.”
Dr. Leete laughed heartily.
“I admit,” he said, “that our system is defective in lacking provision for cases like yours,
but you see nobody anticipated additions to the world except by the usual process. You
need, however, have no fear that we shall be unable to provide both a place and
occupation for you in due time. You have as yet been brought in contact only with the
members of my family, but you must not suppose that I have kept your secret. On the con
trary, your case, even before your resuscitation, and vastly more since, has excited the
profoundest interest in the nation. In view of your precarious nervous condition, it was
thought best that I should take exclusive charge of you at first, and that you should,
through me and my family, receive some general idea of the sort of world you had come
back to before you began to make the acquaintance generally of its inhabitants. As to
finding a function for you in society, there was no hesitation as to what that would be.
Few of us have it in our power to confer so great a service on the nation as you will be
able to when you leave my roof, which, however, you must not think of doing for a good
time yet.”
“What can I possibly do?” I asked. “Perhaps you imagine I have some trade, or art, or
special skill. I assure you I have none whatever. I never earned a dollar in my life, or did
an hour’s work. I am strong, and might be a common laborer, but nothing more.”
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“If that were the most efficient service you were able to render the nation, you would find
that avocation considered quite as respectable as any other,” replied Dr. Leete; “but you
can do something else better. You are easily the master of all our historians on questions
relating to the social condition of the latter part of the nineteenth century, to us one of the
most absorbingly interesting periods of history; and whenever in due time you have
sufficiently familiarized yourself with our institutions, and are willing to teach us
something concerning those of your day, you will find an historical lectureship in one of
our colleges awaiting you.”
“Very good! very good indeed,” I said, much relieved by so practical a suggestion on a
point which had begun to trouble me. “If your people are really so much interested in the
nineteenth century, there will indeed be an occupation ready-made for me. I don’t think
there is anything else that I could possibly earn my salt at, but I certainly may claim
without conceit to have some special qualifications for such a post as you describe.”
CHAPTER XVII.
I found the processes at the warehouse quite as interesting as Edith had described them,
and became even enthusiastic over the truly remarkable illustration which is seen there of
the prodigiously multiplied efficiency which perfect organization can give to labor. It is
like a gigantic mill, into the hopper of which goods are being constantly poured by the
train-load and ship-load, to issue at the other end in packages of pounds and ounces,
yards and inches, pints and gallons, corresponding to the infinitely complex personal
needs of half a million people. Dr. Leete, with the assistance of data furnished by me as to
the way goods were sold in my day, figured out some astounding results in the way of the
economies effected by the modern system.
As we set out homeward, I said: “After what I have seen to-day, together with what you
have told me, and what I learned under Miss Leete’s tutelage at the sample store, I have a
tolerably clear idea of your system of distribution, and how it enables you to dispense
with a circulating medium. But I should like very much to know something more about
your system of production. You have told me in general how your industrial army is
levied and organized, but who directs its efforts? What supreme authority determines
what shall be done in every department, so that enough of everything is produced and yet
no labor wasted? It seems to me that this must be a wonderfully complex and difficult
function, requiring very unusual endowments.”
“Does it indeed seem so to you?” responded Dr. Leete. “I assure you that it is nothing of
the kind, but on the other hand so simple, and depending on principles so obvious and
easily applied, that the functionaries at Washington to whom it is trusted require to be
nothing more than men of fair abilities to discharge it to the entire satisfaction of the
nation. The machine which they direct is indeed a vast one, but so logical in its principles
and direct and simple in its workings, that it all but runs itself; and nobody but a fool
could derange it, as I think you will agree after a few words of explanation. Since you
already have a pretty good idea of the working of the distributive system, let us begin at
that end. Even in your day statisticians were able to tell you the number of yards of
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cotton, velvet, woolen, the number of barrels of flour, potatoes, butter, number of pairs of
shoes, hats, and umbrellas annually consumed by the nation. Owing to the fact that
production was in private hands, and that there was no way of getting statistics of actual
distribution, these figures were not exact, but they were nearly so. Now that every pin
which is given out from a national warehouse is recorded, of course the figures of
consumption for any week, month, or year, in the possession of the department of
distribution at the end of that period, are precise. On these figures, allowing for
tendencies to increase or decrease and for any special causes likely to affect demand, the
estimates, say for a year ahead, are based. These estimates, with a proper margin for
security, having been accepted by the general administration, the responsibility of the
distributive department ceases until the goods are delivered to it. I speak of the estimates
being furnished for an entire year ahead, but in reality they cover that much time only in
case of the great staples for which the demand can be calculated on as steady. In the great
majority of smaller industries for the product of which popular taste fluctuates, and
novelty is frequently required, production is kept barely ahead of consumption, the
distributive department furnishing frequent estimates based on the weekly state of
demand.
“Now the entire field of productive and constructive industry is divided into ten great
departments, each representing a group of allied industries, each particular industry being
in turn represented by a subordinate bureau, which has a complete record of the plant and
force under its control, of the present product, and means of increasing it. The estimates
of the distributive department, after adoption by the administration, are sent as mandates
to the ten great departments, which allot them to the subordinate bureaus representing the
particular industries, and these set the men at work. Each bureau is responsible for the
task given it, and this responsibility is enforced by departmental oversight and that of the
administration; nor does the distributive department accept the product without its own
inspection; while even if in the hands of the consumer an article turns out unfit, the
system enables the fault to be traced back to the original workman. The production of the
commodities for actual public consumption does not, of course, require by any means all
the national force of workers. After the necessary contingents have been detailed for the
various industries, the amount of labor left for other employment is expended in creating
fixed capital, such as buildings, machinery, engineering works, and so forth.”
“One point occurs to me,” I said, “on which I should think there might be dissatisfaction.
Where there is no opportunity for private enterprise, how is there any assurance that the
claims of small minorities of the people to have articles produced, for which there is no
wide demand, will be respected? An official decree at any moment may deprive them of
the means of gratifying some special taste, merely because the majority does not share
it.”
“That would be tyranny indeed,” replied Dr. Leete, “and you may be very sure that it does
not happen with us, to whom liberty is as dear as equality or fraternity. As you come to
know our system better, you will see that our officials are in fact, and not merely in name,
the agents and servants of the people. The administration has no power to stop the
production of any commodity for which there continues to be a demand. Suppose the
demand for any article declines to such a point that its production becomes very costly.
The price has to be raised in proportion, of course, but as long as the consumer cares to
pay it, the production goes on. Again, suppose an article not before produced is
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demanded. If the administration doubts the reality of the demand, a popular petition
guaranteeing a certain basis of consumption compels it to produce the desired article. A
government, or a majority, which should undertake to tell the people, or a minority, what
they were to eat, drink, or wear, as I believe governments in America did in your day,
would be regarded as a curious anachronism indeed. Possibly you had reasons for
tolerating these infringements of personal independence, but we should not think them
endurable. I am glad you raised this point, for it has given me a chance to show you how
much more direct and efficient is the control over production exercised by the individual
citizen now than it was in your day, when what you called private initiative prevailed,
though it should have been called capitalist initiative, for the average private citizen had
little enough share in it.”
“You speak of raising the price of costly articles,” I said. “How can prices be regulated in
a country where there is no competition between buyers or sellers?”
“Just as they were with you,” replied Dr. Leete. “You think that needs explaining,” he
added, as I looked incredulous, “but the explanation need not be long; the cost of the
labor which produced it was recognized as the legitimate basis of the price of an article in
your day, and so it is in ours. In your day, it was the difference in wages that made the
difference in the cost of labor; now it is the relative number of hours constituting a day’s
work in different trades, the maintenance of the worker being equal in all cases. The cost
of a man’s work in a trade so difficult that in order to attract volunteers the hours have to
be fixed at four a day is twice as great as that in a trade where the men work eight hours.
The result as to the cost of labor, you see, is just the same as if the man working four
hours were paid, under your system, twice the wages the other gets. This calculation
applied to the labor employed in the various processes of a manufactured article gives its
price relatively to other articles. Besides the cost of production and transportation, the
factor of scarcity affects the prices of some commodities. As regards the great staples of
life, of which an abundance can always be secured, scarcity is eliminated as a factor.
There is always a large surplus kept on hand from which any fluctuations of demand or
supply can be corrected, even in most cases of bad crops. The prices of the staples grow
less year by year, but rarely, if ever, rise. There are, however, certain classes of articles
permanently, and others temporarily, unequal to the demand, as, for example, fresh fish or
dairy products in the latter category, and the products of high skill and rare materials in
the other. All that can be done here is to equalize the inconvenience of the scarcity. This
is done by temporarily raising the price if the scarcity be temporary, or fixing it high if it
be permanent. High prices in your day meant restriction of the articles affected to the
rich, but nowadays, when the means of all are the same, the effect is only that those to
whom the articles seem most desirable are the ones who purchase them. Of course the
nation, as any other caterer for the public needs must be, is frequently left with small lots
of goods on its hands by changes in taste, unseasonable weather, and various other
causes. These it has to dispose of at a sacrifice just as merchants often did in your day,
charging up the loss to the expenses of the business. Owing, however, to the vast body of
consumers to which such lots can be simultaneously offered, there is rarely any difficulty
in getting rid of them at trifling loss. I have given you now some general notion of our
system of production, as well as distribution. Do you find it as complex as you
expected?”
I admitted that nothing could be much simpler.
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“I am sure,” said Dr. Leete, “that it is within the truth to say that the head of one of the
myriad private businesses of your day, who had to maintain sleepless vigilance against
the fluctuations of the market, the machinations of his rivals, and the failure of his
debtors, had a far more trying task than the group of men at Washington who nowadays
direct the industries of the entire nation. All this merely shows, my dear fellow, how
much easier it is to do things the right way than the wrong. It is easier for a general up in
a balloon, with perfect survey of the field, to manœuvre a million men to victory than for
a sergeant to manage a platoon in a thicket.”
“The general of this army, including the flower of the manhood of the nation, must be the
foremost man in the country, really greater even than the President of the United States,”
I said.
“He is the President of the United States,” replied Dr. Leete, “or rather the most important
function of the presidency is the headship of the industrial army.”
“How is he chosen?” I asked.
“I explained to you before,” replied Dr. Leete, “when I was describing the force of the
motive of emulation among all grades of the industrial army, that the line of promotion
for the meritorious lies through three grades to the officer’s grade, and thence up through
the lieutenancies to the captaincy or foremanship, and superintendency or colonel’s rank.
Next, with an intervening grade in some of the larger trades, come the general of the
guild, under whose immediate control all the operations of the trade are conducted. This
officer is at the head of the national bureau representing his trade, and is responsible for
its work to the administration. The general of his guild holds a splendid position, and one
which amply satisfies the ambition of most men, but above his rank, which may be
compared—to follow the military analogies familiar to you—to that of a general of
division or major-general, is that of the chiefs of the ten great departments, or groups of
allied trades. The chiefs of these ten grand divisions of the industrial army may be
compared to your commanders of army corps, or lieutenant-generals, each having from a
dozen to a score of generals of separate guilds reporting to him. Above these ten great
officers, who form his council, is the general-in-chief, who is the President of the United
States.
“The general-in-chief of the industrial army must have passed through all the grades
below him, from the common laborers up. Let us see how he rises. As I have told you, it
is simply by the excellence of his record as a worker that one rises through the grades of
the privates and becomes a candidate for a lieutenancy. Through the lieutenancies he rises
to the colonelcy, or superintendent’s position, by appointment from above, strictly limited
to the candidates of the best records. The general of the guild appoints to the ranks under
him, but he himself is not appointed, but chosen by suffrage.”
“By suffrage!” I exclaimed. “Is not that ruinous to the discipline of the guild, by tempting
the candidates to intrigue for the support of the workers under them?”
“So it would be, no doubt,” replied Dr. Leete, “if the workers had any suffrage to
exercise, or anything to say about the choice. But they have nothing. Just here comes in a
peculiarity of our system. The general of the guild is chosen from among the
superintendents by vote of the honorary members of the guild, that is, of those who have
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served their time in the guild and received their discharge. As you know, at the age of
forty-five we are mustered out of the army of industry, and have the residue of life for the
pursuit of our own improvement or recreation. Of course, however, the associations of
our active lifetime retain a powerful hold on us. The companionships we formed then
remain our companionships till the end of life. We always continue honorary members of
our former guilds, and retain the keenest and most jealous interest in their welfare and
repute in the hands of the following generation. In the clubs maintained by the honorary
members of the several guilds, in which we meet socially, there are no topics of
conversation so common as those which relate to these matters, and the young aspirants
for guild leadership who can pass the criticism of us old fellows are likely to be pretty
well equipped. Recognizing this fact, the nation entrusts to the honorary members of each
guild the election of its general, and I venture to claim that no previous form of society
could have developed a body of electors so ideally adapted to their office, as regards
absolute impartiality, knowledge of the special qualifications and record of candidates,
solicitude for the best result, and complete absence of self-interest.
“Each of the ten lieutenant-generals or heads of departments is himself elected from
among the generals of the guilds grouped as a department, by vote of the honorary
members of the guilds thus grouped. Of course there is a tendency on the part of each
guild to vote for its own general, but no guild of any group has nearly enough votes to
elect a man not supported by most of the others. I assure you that these elections are
exceedingly lively.”
“The President, I suppose, is selected from among the ten heads of the great
departments,” I suggested.
“Precisely, but the heads of departments are not eligible to the presidency till they have
been a certain number of years out of office. It is rarely that a man passes through all the
grades to the headship of a department much before he is forty, and at the end of a five
years’ term he is usually forty-five. If more, he still serves through his term, and if less, he
is nevertheless discharged from the industrial army at its termination. It would not do for
him to return to the ranks. The interval before he is a candidate for the presidency is
intended to give time for him to recognize fully that he has returned into the general mass
of the nation, and is identified with it rather than with the industrial army. Moreover, it is
expected that he will employ this period in studying the general condition of the army,
instead of that of the special group of guilds of which he was the head. From among the
former heads of departments who may be eligible at the time, the President is elected by
vote of all the men of the nation who are not connected with the industrial army.”
“The army is not allowed to vote for President?”
“Certainly not. That would be perilous to its discipline, which it is the business of the
President to maintain as the representative of the nation at large. His right hand for this
purpose is the inspectorate, a highly important department of our system; to the
inspectorate come all complaints or information as to defects in goods, insolence or
inefficiency of officials, or dereliction of any sort in the public service. The inspectorate,
however, does not wait for complaints. Not only is it on the alert to catch and sift every
rumor of a fault in the service, but it is its business, by systematic and constant oversight
and inspection of every branch of the army, to find out what is going wrong before
anybody else does. The President is usually not far from fifty when elected, and serves
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five years, forming an honorable exception to the rule of retirement at forty-five. At the
end of his term of office, a national Congress is called to receive his report and approve
or condemn it. If it is approved, Congress usually elects him to represent the nation for
five years more in the international council. Congress, I should also say, passes on the
reports of the outgoing heads of departments, and a disapproval renders any one of them
ineligible for President. But it is rare, indeed, that the nation has occasion for other
sentiments than those of gratitude toward its high officers. As to their ability, to have
risen from the ranks, by tests so various and severe, to their positions, is proof in itself of
extraordinary qualities, while as to faithfulness, our social system leaves them absolutely
without any other motive than that of winning the esteem of their fellow citizens.
Corruption is impossible in a society where there is neither poverty to be bribed nor
wealth to bribe, while as to demagoguery or intrigue for office, the conditions of
promotion render them out of the question.”
“One point I do not quite understand,” I said. “Are the members of the liberal professions
eligible to the presidency? and if so, how are they ranked with those who pursue the
industries proper?”
“They have no ranking with them,” replied Dr. Leete. “The members of the technical
professions, such as engineers and architects, have a ranking with the constructive guilds;
but the members of the liberal professions, the doctors and teachers, as well as the artists
and men of letters who obtain remissions of industrial service, do not belong to the
industrial army. On this ground they vote for the President, but are not eligible to his
office. One of its main duties being the control and discipline of the industrial army, it is
essential that the President should have passed through all its grades to understand his
business.”
“That is reasonable,” I said; “but if the doctors and teachers do not know enough of
industry to be President, neither, I should think, can the President know enough of
medicine and education to control those departments.”
“No more does he,” was the reply. “Except in the general way that he is responsible for
the enforcement of the laws as to all classes, the President has nothing to do with the
faculties of medicine and education, which are controlled by boards of regents of their
own, in which the President is ex-officio chairman, and has the casting vote. These
regents, who, of course, are responsible to Congress, are chosen by the honorary
members of the guilds of education and medicine, the retired teachers and doctors of the
country.”
“Do you know,” I said, “the method of electing officials by votes of the retired members
of the guilds is nothing more than the application on a national scale of the plan of
government by alumni, which we used to a slight extent occasionally in the management
of our higher educational institutions.”
“Did you, indeed?” exclaimed Dr. Leete, with animation. “That is quite new to me, and I
fancy will be to most of us, and of much interest as well. There has been great discussion
as to the germ of the idea, and we fancied that there was for once something new under
the sun. Well! well! In your higher educational institutions! that is interesting indeed. You
must tell me more of that.”
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“Truly, there is very little more to tell than I have told already,” I replied. “If we had the
germ of your idea, it was but as a germ.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
That evening I sat up for some time after the ladies had retired, talking with Dr. Leete
about the effect of the plan of exempting men from further service to the nation after the
age of forty-five, a point brought up by his account of the part taken by the retired
citizens in the government.
“At forty-five,” said I, “a man still has ten years of good manual labor in him, and twice
ten years of good intellectual service. To be superannuated at that age and laid on the
shelf must be regarded rather as a hardship than a favor by men of energetic
dispositions.”
“My dear Mr. West,” exclaimed Dr. Leete, beaming upon me, “you cannot have any idea
of the piquancy your nineteenth century ideas have for us of this day, the rare quaintness
of their effect. Know, O child of another race and yet the same, that the labor we have to
render as our part in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physical
existence is by no means regarded as the most important, the most interesting, or the most
dignified employment of our powers. We look upon it as a necessary duty to be
discharged before we can fully devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties,
the intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life. Everything
possible is indeed done by the just distribution of burdens, and by all manner of special
attractions and incentives to relieve our labor of irksomeness, and, except in a
comparative sense, it is not usually irksome, and is often inspiring. But it is not our labor,
but the higher and larger activities which the performance of our task will leave us free to
enter upon, that are considered the main business of existence.
“Of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic, literary, or scholarly
interests which make leisure the one thing valuable to their possessors. Many look upon
the last half of life chiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts; for travel, for social
relaxation in the company of their lifetime friends; a time for the cultivation of all manner
of personal idiosyncrasies and special tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of
recreation; in a word, a time for the leisurely and unperturbed appreciation of the good
things of the world which they have helped to create. But whatever the differences
between our individual tastes as to the use we shall put our leisure to, we all agree in
looking forward to the date of our discharge as the time when we shall first enter upon
the full enjoyment of our birthright, the period when we shall first really attain our
majority and become enfranchised from discipline and control, with the fee of our lives
vested in ourselves. As eager boys in your day anticipated twenty-one, so men nowadays
look forward to forty-five. At twenty-one we become men, but at forty-five we renew
youth. Middle age and what you would have called old age are considered, rather than
youth, the enviable time of life. Thanks to the better conditions of existence nowadays,
and above all the freedom of every one from care, old age approaches many years later
and has an aspect far more benign than in past times. Persons of average constitution
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usually live to eighty-five or ninety, and at forty-five we are physically and mentally
younger, I fancy, than you were at thirty-five. It is a strange reflection that at forty-five,
when we are just entering upon the most enjoyable period of life, you already began to
think of growing old and to look backward. With you it was the forenoon, with us it is the
afternoon, which is the brighter half of life.”
After this I remember that our talk branched into the subject of popular sports and
recreations at the present time as compared with those of the nineteenth century.
“In one respect,” said Dr. Leete, “there is a marked difference. The professional
sportsmen, which were such a curious feature of your day, we have nothing answering to,
nor are the prizes for which our athletes contend money prizes, as with you. Our contests
are always for glory only. The generous rivalry existing between the various guilds, and
the loyalty of each worker to his own, afford a constant stimulation to all sorts of games
and matches by sea and land, in which the young men take scarcely more interest than the
honorary guildsmen who have served their time. The guild yacht races off Marblehead
take place next week, and you will be able to judge for yourself of the popular
enthusiasm which such events nowadays call out as compared with your day. The
demand for ‘panem et circenses’ preferred by the Roman populace is recognized
nowadays as a wholly reasonable one. If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a
close second, and the nation caters for both. Americans of the nineteenth century were as
unfortunate in lacking an adequate provision for the one sort of need as for the other.
Even if the people of that period had enjoyed larger leisure they would, I fancy, have
often been at a loss how to pass it agreeably. We are never in that predicament.”
CHAPTER XIX.
In the course of an early morning constitutional I visited Charlestown. Among the
changes, too numerous to attempt to indicate, which mark the lapse of a century in that
quarter, I particularly noted the total disappearance of the old state prison.
“That went before my day, but I remember hearing about it,” said Dr. Leete, when I
alluded to the fact at the breakfast table. “We have no jails nowadays. All cases of
atavism are treated in the hospitals.”
“Of atavism!” I exclaimed, staring.
“Why, yes,” replied Dr. Leete. “The idea of dealing punitively with those unfortunates
was given up at least fifty years ago, and I think more.”
“I don’t quite understand you,” I said. “Atavism in my day was a word applied to the
cases of persons in whom some trait of a remote ancestor recurred in a noticeable manner.
Am I to understand that crime is nowadays looked upon as the recurrence of an ancestral
trait?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Dr. Leete with a smile half humorous, half deprecating, “but
since you have so explicitly asked the question, I am forced to say that the fact is
precisely that.”
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After what I had already learned of the moral contrasts between the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries, it was doubtless absurd in me to begin to develop sensitiveness on
the subject, and probably if Dr. Leete had not spoken with that apologetic air and Mrs.
Leete and Edith shown a corresponding embarrassment, I should not have flushed, as I
was conscious I did.
“I was not in much danger of being vain of my generation before,” I said; “but, really”—
“This is your generation, Mr. West,” interposed Edith. “It is the one in which you are
living, you know, and it is only because we are alive now that we call it ours.”
“Thank you. I will try to think of it so,” I said, and as my eyes met hers their expression
quite cured my senseless sensitiveness. “After all,” I said, with a laugh, “I was brought up
a Calvinist, and ought not to be startled to hear crime spoken of as an ancestral trait.”
“In point of fact,” said Dr. Leete, “our use of the word is no reflection at all on your
generation, if, begging Edith’s pardon, we may call it yours, so far as seeming to imply
that we think ourselves, apart from our circumstances, better than you were. In your day
fully nineteen twentieths of the crime, using the word broadly to include all sorts of
misdemeanors, resulted from the inequality in the possessions of individuals; want
tempted the poor, lust of greater gains, or the desire to preserve former gains, tempted the
well-to-do. Directly or indirectly, the desire for money, which then meant every good
thing, was the motive of all this crime, the taproot of a vast poison growth, which the
machinery of law, courts, and police could barely prevent from choking your civilization
outright. When we made the nation the sole trustee of the wealth of the people, and
guaranteed to all abundant maintenance, on the one hand abolishing want, and on the
other checking the accumulation of riches, we cut this root, and the poison tree that
overshadowed your society withered, like Jonah’s gourd, in a day. As for the
comparatively small class of violent crimes against persons, unconnected with any idea
of gain, they were almost wholly confined, even in your day, to the ignorant and bestial;
and in these days, when education and good manners are not the monopoly of a few, but
universal, such atrocities are scarcely ever heard of. You now see why the word “atavism”
is used for crime. It is because nearly all forms of crime known to you are motiveless
now, and when they appear can only be explained as the outcropping of ancestral traits.
You used to call persons who stole, evidently without any rational motive, kleptomaniacs,
and when the case was clear deemed it absurd to punish them as thieves. Your attitude
toward the genuine kleptomaniac is precisely ours toward the victim of atavism, an
attitude of compassion and firm but gentle restraint.
“Your courts must have an easy time of it,” I observed. “With no private property to speak
of, no disputes between citizens over business relations, no real estate to divide or debts
to collect, there must be absolutely no civil business at all for them; and with no offenses
against property, and mighty few of any sort to provide criminal cases, I should think you
might almost do without judges and lawyers altogether.”
“We do without the lawyers, certainly,” was Dr. Leete’s reply. “It would not seem
reasonable to us, in a case where the only interest of the nation is to find out the truth,
that persons should take part in the proceedings who had an acknowledged motive to
color it.”
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“But who defends the accused?”
“If he is a criminal he needs no defense, for he pleads guilty in most instances,” replied
Dr. Leete. “The plea of the accused is not a mere formality with us, as with you. It is
usually the end of the case.”
“You don’t mean that the man who pleads not guilty is thereupon discharged?”
“No, I do not mean that. He is not accused on light grounds, and if he denies his guilt,
must still be tried. But trials are few, for in most cases the guilty man pleads guilty. When
he makes a false plea and is clearly proved guilty, his penalty is doubled. Falsehood is,
however, so despised among us that few offenders would lie to save themselves.”
“That is the most astounding thing you have yet told me,” I exclaimed. “If lying has gone
out of fashion, this is indeed the ‘new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness,’ which the prophet foretold.”
“Such is, in fact, the belief of some persons nowadays,” was the doctor’s answer. “They
hold that we have entered upon the millennium, and the theory from their point of view
does not lack plausibility. But as to your astonishment at finding that the world has
outgrown lying, there is really no ground for it. Falsehood, even in your day, was not
common between gentlemen and ladies, social equals. The lie of fear was the refuge of
cowardice, and the lie of fraud the device of the cheat. The inequalities of men and the
lust of acquisition offered a constant premium on lying at that time. Yet even then, the
man who neither feared another nor desired to defraud him scorned falsehood. Because
we are now all social equals, and no man either has anything to fear from another or can
gain anything by deceiving him, the contempt of falsehood is so universal that it is rarely,
as I told you, that even a criminal in other respects will be found willing to lie. When,
however, a plea of not guilty is returned, the judge appoints two colleagues to state the
opposite sides of the case. How far these men are from being like your hired advocates
and prosecutors, determined to acquit or convict, may appear from the fact that unless
both agree that the verdict found is just, the case is tried over, while anything like bias in
the tone of either of the judges stating the case would be a shocking scandal.”
“Do I understand,” I said, “that it is a judge who states each side of the case as well as a
judge who hears it?”
“Certainly. The judges take turns in serving on the bench and at the bar, and are expected
to maintain the judicial temper equally whether in stating or deciding a case. The system
is indeed in effect that of trial by three judges occupying different points of view as to the
case. When they agree upon a verdict, we believe it to be as near to absolute truth as men
well can come.”
“You have given up the jury system, then?”
“It was well enough as a corrective in the days of hired advocates, and a bench sometimes
venal, and often with a tenure that made it dependent, but is needless now. No
conceivable motive but justice could actuate our judges.”
“How are these magistrates selected?”
“They are an honorable exception to the rule which discharges all men from service at the
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age of forty-five. The President of the nation appoints the necessary judges year by year
from the class reaching that age. The number appointed is, of course, exceedingly few,
and the honor so high that it is held an offset to the additional term of service which
follows, and though a judge’s appointment may be declined, it rarely is. The term is five
years, without eligibility to reappointment. The members of the Supreme Court, which is
the guardian of the constitution, are selected from among the lower judges. When a
vacancy in that court occurs, those of the lower judges, whose terms expire that year,
select, as their last official act, the one of their colleagues left on the bench whom they
deem fittest to fill it.”
“There being no legal profession to serve as a school for judges,” I said, “they must, of
course, come directly from the law school to the bench.”
“We have no such things as law schools,” replied the doctor, smiling. “The law as a
special science is obsolete. It was a system of casuistry which the elaborate artificiality of
the old order of society absolutely required to interpret it, but only a few of the plainest
and simplest legal maxims have any application to the existing state of the world.
Everything touching the relations of men to one another is now simpler, beyond any
comparison, than in your day. We should have no sort of use for the hair-splitting experts
who presided and argued in your courts. You must not imagine, however, that we have
any disrespect for those ancient worthies because we have no use for them. On the
contrary, we entertain an unfeigned respect, amounting almost to awe, for the men who
alone understood and were able to expound the interminable complexity of the rights of
property, and the relations of commercial and personal dependence involved in your
system. What, indeed, could possibly give a more powerful impression of the intricacy
and artificiality of that system than the fact that it was necessary to set apart from other
pursuits the cream of the intellect of every generation, in order to provide a body of
pundits able to make it even vaguely intelligible to those whose fates it determined. The
treatises of your great lawyers, the works of Blackstone and Chitty, of Story and Parsons,
stand in our museums, side by side with the tomes of Duns Scotus and his fellow
scholastics, as curious monuments of intellectual subtlety devoted to subjects equally
remote from the interests of modern men. Our judges are simply widely informed,
judicious, and discreet men of ripe years.
“I should not fail to speak of one important function of the minor judges,” added Dr.
Leete. “This is to adjudicate all cases where a private of the industrial army makes a
complaint of unfairness against an officer. All such questions are heard and settled
without appeal by a single judge, three judges being required only in graver cases. The
efficiency of industry requires the strictest discipline in the army of labor, but the claim of
the workman to just and considerate treatment is backed by the whole power of the
nation. The officer commands and the private obeys, but no officer is so high that he
would dare display an overbearing manner toward a workman of the lowest class. As for
churlishness or rudeness by an official of any sort, in his relations to the public, not one
among minor offenses is more sure of a prompt penalty than this. Not only justice but
civility is enforced by our judges in all sorts of intercourse. No value of service is
accepted as a set-off to boorish or offensive manners.”
It occurred to me, as Dr. Leete was speaking, that in all his talk I had heard much of the
nation and nothing of the state governments. Had the organization of the nation as an
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industrial unit done away with the states? I asked.
“Necessarily,” he replied. “The state governments would have interfered with the control
and discipline of the industrial army, which, of course, required to be central and uniform.
Even if the state governments had not become inconvenient for other reasons, they were
rendered superfluous by the prodigious simplification in the task of government since
your day. Almost the sole function of the administration now is that of directing the
industries of the country. Most of the purposes for which governments formerly existed
no longer remain to be subserved. We have no army or navy, and no military
organization. We have no departments of state or treasury, no excise or revenue services,
no taxes or tax collectors. The only function proper of government, as known to you,
which still remains, is the judiciary and police system. I have already explained to you
how simple is our judicial system as compared with your huge and complex machine. Of
course the same absence of crime and temptation to it, which make the duties of judges
so light, reduces the number and duties of the police to a minimum.”
“But with no state legislatures, and Congress meeting only once in five years, how do you
get your legislation done?”
“We have no legislation,” replied Dr. Leete, “that is, next to none. It is rarely that
Congress, even when it meets, considers any new laws of consequence, and then it only
has power to commend them to the following Congress, lest anything be done hastily. If
you will consider a moment, Mr. West, you will see that we have nothing to make laws
about. The fundamental principles on which our society is founded settle for all time the
strifes and misunderstandings which in your day called for legislation.
“Fully ninety-nine hundredths of the laws of that time concerned the definition and
protection of private property and the relations of buyers and sellers. There is neither
private property, beyond personal belongings, now, nor buying and selling, and therefore
the occasion of nearly all the legislation formerly necessary has passed away. Formerly,
society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were
constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong
(if you will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed
props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. A central Congress and forty state
legislatures, turning out some twenty thousand laws a year, could not make new props
fast enough to take the place of those which were constantly breaking down or becoming
ineffectual through some shifting of the strain. Now society rests on its base, and is in as
little need of artificial supports as the everlasting hills.”
“But you have at least municipal governments besides the one central authority?”
“Certainly, and they have important and extensive functions in looking out for the public
comfort and recreation, and the improvement and embellishment of the villages and
cities.”
“But having no control over the labor of their people, or means of hiring it, how can they
do anything?”
“Every town or city is conceded the right to retain, for its own public works, a certain
proportion of the quota of labor its citizens contribute to the nation. This proportion,
being assigned it as so much credit, can be applied in any way desired.”
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CHAPTER XX.
That afternoon Edith casually inquired if I had yet revisited the underground chamber in
the garden in which I had been found.
“Not yet,” I replied. “To be frank, I have shrunk thus far from doing so, lest the visit
might revive old associations rather too strongly for my mental equilibrium.”
“Ah, yes!” she said, “I can imagine that you have done well to stay away. I ought to have
thought of that.”
“No,” I said, “I am glad you spoke of it. The danger, if there was any, existed only during
the first day or two. Thanks to you, chiefly and always, I feel my footing now so firm in
this new world, that if you will go with me to keep the ghosts off, I should really like to
visit the place this afternoon.”
Edith demurred at first, but, finding that I was in earnest, consented to accompany me.
The rampart of earth thrown up from the excavation was visible among the trees from the
house, and a few steps brought us to the spot. All remained as it was at the point when
work was interrupted by the discovery of the tenant of the chamber, save that the door
had been opened and the slab from the roof replaced. Descending the sloping sides of the
excavation, we went in at the door and stood within the dimly-lighted room.
Everything was just as I had beheld it last on that evening one hundred and thirteen years
previous, just before closing my eyes for that long sleep. I stood for some time silently
looking about me. I saw that my companion was furtively regarding me with an
expression of awed and sympathetic curiosity. I put out my hand to her and she placed
hers in it, the soft fingers responding with a reassuring pressure to my clasp. Finally she
whispered, “Had we not better go out now? You must not try yourself too far. Oh, how
strange it must be to you!”
“On the contrary,” I replied, “it does not seem strange; that is the strangest part of it.”
“Not strange?” she echoed.
“Even so,” I replied. “The emotions with which you evidently credit me, and which I
anticipated would attend this visit, I simply do not feel. I realize all that these
surroundings suggest, but without the agitation I expected. You can’t be nearly as much
surprised at this as I am myself. Ever since that terrible morning when you came to my
help, I have tried to avoid thinking of my former life, just as I have avoided coming here,
for fear of the agitating effects. I am for all the world like a man who has permitted an
injured limb to lie motionless under the impression that it is exquisitely sensitive, and on
trying to move it finds that it is paralyzed.”
“Do you mean your memory is gone?”
“Not at all. I remember everything connected with my former life, but with a total lack of
keen sensation. I remember it for clearness as if it had been but a day since then, but my
feelings about what I remember are as faint as if to my consciousness, as well as in fact, a
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hundred years had intervened. Perhaps it is possible to explain this, too. The effect of
change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.
When I first woke from that trance, my former life appeared as yesterday, but now, since
I have learned to know my new surroundings, and to realize the prodigious changes that
have transformed the world, I no longer find it hard, but very easy, to realize that I have
slept a century. Can you conceive of such a thing as living a hundred years in four days?
It really seems to me that I have done just that, and that it is this experience which has
given so remote and unreal an appearance to my former life. Can you see how such a
thing might be?”
“I can conceive it,” replied Edith, meditatively, “and I think we ought all to be thankful
that it is so, for it will save you much suffering, I am sure.”
“Imagine,” I said, in an effort to explain, as much to myself as to her, the strangeness of
my mental condition, “that a man first heard of a bereavement many, many years, half a
lifetime perhaps, after the event occurred. I fancy his feeling would be perhaps something
as mine is. When I think of my friends in the world of that former day, and the sorrow
they must have felt for me, it is with a pensive pity, rather than keen anguish, as of a
sorrow long, long ago ended.”
“You have told us nothing yet of your friends,” said Edith. “Had you many to mourn
you?”
“Thank God, I had very few relatives, none nearer than cousins,” I replied. “But there was
one, not a relative, but dearer to me than any kin of blood. She had your name. She was
to have been my wife soon. Ah me!”
“Ah me!” sighed the Edith by my side. “Think of the heartache she must have had.”
Something in the deep feeling of this gentle girl touched a chord in my benumbed heart.
My eyes, before so dry, were flooded with the tears that had till now refused to come.
When I had regained my composure, I saw that she too had been weeping freely.
“God bless your tender heart,” I said. “Would you like to see her picture?”
A small locket with Edith Bartlett’s picture, secured about my neck with a gold chain, had
lain upon my breast all through that long sleep, and removing this I opened and gave it to
my companion. She took it with eagerness, and after poring long over the sweet face,
touched the picture with her lips.
“I know that she was good and lovely enough to well deserve your tears,” she said; “but
remember her heartache was over long ago, and she has been in heaven for nearly a
century.”
It was indeed so. Whatever her sorrow had once been, for nearly a century she had ceased
to weep, and, my sudden passion spent, my own tears dried away. I had loved her very
dearly in my other life, but it was a hundred years ago! I do not know but some may find
in this confession evidence of lack of feeling, but I think, perhaps, that none can have had
an experience sufficiently like mine to enable them to judge me. As we were about to
leave the chamber, my eye rested upon the great iron safe which stood in one corner.
Calling my companion’s attention to it, I said:—
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“This was my strong room as well as my sleeping room. In the safe yonder are several
thousand dollars in gold, and any amount of securities. If I had known when I went to
sleep that night just how long my nap would be, I should still have thought that the gold
was a safe provision for my needs in any country or any century, however distant. That a
time would ever come when it would lose its purchasing power, I should have considered
the wildest of fancies. Nevertheless, here I wake up to find myself among a people of
whom a cartload of gold will not procure a loaf of bread.”
As might be expected, I did not succeed in impressing Edith that there was anything
remarkable in this fact. “Why in the world should it?” she merely asked.
CHAPTER XXI.
It had been suggested by Dr. Leete that we should devote the next morning to an
inspection of the schools and colleges of the city, with some attempt on his own part at an
explanation of the educational system of the twentieth century.
“You will see,” said he, as we set out after breakfast, “many very important differences
between our methods of education and yours, but the main difference is that nowadays all
persons equally have those opportunities of higher education which in your day only an
infinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed. We should think we had gained nothing
worth speaking of, in equalizing the physical comfort of men, without this educational
equality.”
“The cost must be very great,” I said.
“If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it,” replied Dr. Leete, “nor
even if it took it all save a bare pittance. But in truth the expense of educating ten
thousand youth is not ten nor five times that of educating one thousand. The principle
which makes all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a small scale
holds as to education also.”
“College education was terribly expensive in my day,” said I.
“If I have not been misinformed by our historians,” Dr. Leete answered, “it was not
college education but college dissipation and extravagance which cost so highly. The
actual expense of your colleges appears to have been very low, and would have been far
lower if their patronage had been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheap as
the lower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers, receive the same support. We
have simply added to the common school system of compulsory education, in vogue in
Massachusetts a hundred years ago, a half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the
age of twenty-one and giving him what you used to call the education of a gentleman,
instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no mental equipment beyond
reading, writing, and the multiplication table.”
“Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years of education,” I replied, “we should
not have thought we could afford the loss of time from industrial pursuits. Boys of the
poorer classes usually went to work at sixteen or younger, and knew their trade at
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twenty.”
“We should not concede you any gain even in material product by that plan,” Dr. Leete
replied. “The greater efficiency which education gives to all sorts of labor, except the
rudest, makes up in a short period for the time lost in acquiring it.”
“We should also have been afraid,” said I, “that a high education, while it adapted men to
the professions, would set them against manual labor of all sorts.”
“That was the effect of high education in your day, I have read,” replied the doctor; “and
it was no wonder, for manual labor meant association with a rude, coarse, and ignorant
class of people. There is no such class now. It was inevitable that such a feeling should
exist then, for the further reason that all men receiving a high education were understood
to be destined for the professions or for wealthy leisure, and such an education in one
neither rich nor professional was a proof of disappointed aspirations, an evidence of
failure, a badge of inferiority rather than superiority. Nowadays, of course, when the
highest education is deemed necessary to fit a man merely to live, without any reference
to the sort of work he may do, its possession conveys no such implication.”
“After all,” I remarked, “no amount of education can cure natural dullness or make up for
original mental deficiencies. Unless the average natural mental capacity of men is much
above its level in my day, a high education must be pretty nearly thrown away on a large
element of the population. We used to hold that a certain amount of susceptibility to
educational influences is required to make a mind worth cultivating, just as a certain
natural fertility in soil is required if it is to repay tilling.”
“Ah,” said Dr. Leete, “I am glad you used that illustration, for it is just the one I would
have chosen to set forth the modern view of education. You say that land so poor that the
product will not repay the labor of tilling is not cultivated. Nevertheless, much land that
does not begin to repay tilling by its product was cultivated in your day and is in ours. I
refer to gardens, parks, lawns, and, in general, to pieces of land so situated that, were they
left to grow up to weeds and briers, they would be eyesores and inconveniences to all
about. They are therefore tilled, and though their product is little, there is yet no land that,
in a wider sense, better repays cultivation. So it is with the men and women with whom
we mingle in the relations of society, whose voices are always in our ears, whose
behavior in innumerable ways affects our enjoyment,—who are, in fact, as much
conditions of our lives as the air we breathe, or any of the physical elements on which we
depend. If, indeed, we could not afford to educate everybody, we should choose the
coarsest and dullest by nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we
could give. The naturally refined and intellectual can better dispense with aids to culture
than those less fortunate in natural endowments.
“To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we should not consider life worth
living if we had to be surrounded by a population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly
uncultivated men and women, as was the plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man
satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?
Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a palatial apartment, if the
windows on all four sides opened into stable yards? And yet just that was the situation of
those considered most fortunate as to culture and refinement in your day. I know that the
poor and ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the latter, living as they did,
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surrounded by squalor and brutishness, seem little better off than the former. The cultured
man in your age was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a
smelling bottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this question of universal high
education. No single thing is so important to every man as to have for neighbors
intelligent, companionable persons. There is nothing, therefore, which the nation can do
for him that will enhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors. When it
fails to do so, the value of his own education to him is reduced by half, and many of the
tastes he has cultivated are made positive sources of pain.
“To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you
did, made the gap between them almost like that between different natural species, which
have no means of communication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of
a partial enjoyment of education! Its universal and equal enjoyment leaves, indeed, the
differences between men as to natural endowments as marked as in a state of nature, but
the level of the lowest is vastly raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have some inkling
of the humanities, some appreciation of the things of the mind, and an admiration for the
still higher culture they have fallen short of. They have become capable of receiving and
imparting, in various degrees, but all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a
refined social life. The cultured society of the nineteenth century,—what did it consist of
but here and there a few microscopic oases in a vast, unbroken wilderness? The
proportion of individuals capable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the
mass of their contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any broad view of
humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One generation of the world to-day represents a
greater volume of intellectual life than any five centuries ever did before.
“There is still another point I should mention in stating the grounds on which nothing less
than the universality of the best education could now be tolerated,” continued Dr. Leete,
“and that is, the interest of the coming generation in having educated parents. To put the
matter in a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our educational system rests:
first, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his
own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-
citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the
right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.”
I shall not describe in detail what I saw in the schools that day. Having taken but slight
interest in educational matters in my former life, I could offer few comparisons of
interest. Next to the fact of the universality of the higher as well as the lower education, I
was most struck with the prominence given to physical culture, and the fact that
proficiency in athletic feats and games as well as in scholarship had a place in the rating
of the youth.
“The faculty of education,” Dr. Leete explained, “is held to the same responsibility for the
bodies as for the minds of its charges. The highest possible physical, as well as mental,
development of every one is the double object of a curriculum which lasts from the age of
six to that of twenty-one.”
The magnificent health of the young people in the schools impressed me strongly. My
previous observations, not only of the notable personal endowments of the family of my
host, but of the people I had seen in my walks abroad, had already suggested the idea that
there must have been something like a general improvement in the physical standard of
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the race since my day, and now, as I compared these stalwart young men and fresh,
vigorous maidens with the young people I had seen in the schools of the nineteenth
century, I was moved to impart my thought to Dr. Leete. He listened with great interest to
what I said.
“Your testimony on this point,” he declared, “is invaluable. We believe that there has been
such an improvement as you speak of, but of course it could only be a matter of theory
with us. It is an incident of your unique position that you alone in the world of to-day can
speak with authority on this point. Your opinion, when you state it publicly, will, I assure
you, make a profound sensation. For the rest it would be strange, certainly, if the race did
not show an improvement. In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind
and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and
pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on women,
enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now
enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and
studiously cared for; the labor which is required of all is limited to the period of greatest
bodily vigor, and is never excessive; care for one’s self and one’s family, anxiety as to
livelihood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life—all these influences, which once did so
much to wreck the minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more. Certainly,
an improvement of the species ought to follow such a change. In certain specific respects
we know, indeed, that the improvement has taken place. Insanity, for instance, which in
the nineteenth century was so terribly common a product of your insane mode of life, has
almost disappeared, with its alternative, suicide.”
CHAPTER XXII.
We had made an appointment to meet the ladies at the dining-hall for dinner, after which,
having some engagement, they left us sitting at table there, discussing our wine and
cigars with a multitude of other matters.
“Doctor,” said I, in the course of our talk, “morally speaking, your social system is one
which I should be insensate not to admire in comparison with any previously in vogue in
the world, and especially with that of my own most unhappy century. If I were to fall into
a mesmeric sleep to-night as lasting as that other, and meanwhile the course of time were
to take a turn backward instead of forward, and I were to wake up again in the nineteenth
century, when I had told my friends what I had seen, they would every one admit that
your world was a paradise of order, equity, and felicity. But they were a very practical
people, my contemporaries, and after expressing their admiration for the moral beauty
and material splendor of the system, they would presently begin to cipher and ask how
you got the money to make everybody so happy; for certainly, to support the whole
nation at a rate of comfort, and even luxury, such as I see around me, must involve vastly
greater wealth than the nation produced in my day. Now, while I could explain to them
pretty nearly everything else of the main features of your system, I should quite fail to
answer this question, and failing there, they would tell me, for they were very close
cipherers, that I had been dreaming; nor would they ever believe anything else. In my
day, I know that the total annual product of the nation, although it might have been
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divided with absolute equality, would not have come to more than three or four hundred
dollars per head, not very much more than enough to supply the necessities of life with
few or any of its comforts. How is it that you have so much more?”
“That is a very pertinent question, Mr. West,” replied Dr. Leete, “and I should not blame
your friends, in the case you supposed, if they declared your story all moonshine, failing
a satisfactory reply to it. It is a question which I cannot answer exhaustively at any one
sitting, and as for the exact statistics to bear out my general statements, I shall have to
refer you for them to books in my library, but it would certainly be a pity to leave you to
be put to confusion by your old acquaintances, in case of the contingency you speak of,
for lack of a few suggestions.
“Let us begin with a number of small items wherein we economize wealth as compared
with you. We have no national, state, county, or municipal debts, or payments on their
account. We have no sort of military or naval expenditures for men or materials, no army,
navy, or militia. We have no revenue service, no swarm of tax assessors and collectors.
As regards our judiciary, police, sheriffs, and jailers, the force which Massachusetts alone
kept on foot in your day far more than suffices for the nation now. We have no criminal
class preying upon the wealth of society as you had. The number of persons, more or less
absolutely lost to the working force through physical disability, of the lame, sick, and
debilitated, which constituted such a burden on the able-bodied in your day, now that all
live under conditions of health and comfort, has shrunk to scarcely perceptible
proportions, and with every generation is becoming more completely eliminated.
“Another item wherein we save is the disuse of money and the thousand occupations
connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an army of men was formerly
taken away from useful employments. Also consider that the waste of the very rich in
your day on inordinate personal luxury has ceased, though, indeed, this item might easily
be over-estimated. Again, consider that there are no idlers now, rich or poor,—no drones.
“A very important cause of former poverty was the vast waste of labor and materials
which resulted from domestic washing and cooking, and the performing separately of
innumerable other tasks to which we apply the coöperative plan.
“A larger economy than any of these—yes, of all together—is effected by the
organization of our distributing system, by which the work done once by the merchants,
traders, storekeepers, with their various grades of jobbers, wholesalers, retailers, agents,
commercial travelers, and middlemen of all sorts, with an excessive waste of energy in
needless transportation and interminable handlings, is performed by one-tenth the number
of hands and an unnecessary turn of not one wheel. Something of what our distributing
system is like you know. Our statisticians calculate that one eightieth part of our workers
suffices for all the processes of distribution which in your day required one eighth of the
population, so much being withdrawn from the force engaged in productive labor.”
“I begin to see,” I said, “where you get your greater wealth.”
“I beg your pardon,” replied Dr. Leete, “but you scarcely do as yet. The economies I have
mentioned thus far, in the aggregate, considering the labor they would save directly and
indirectly through saving of material, might possibly be equivalent to the addition to your
annual production of wealth of one-half its former total. These items are, however,
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scarcely worth mentioning in comparison with other prodigious wastes, now saved,
which resulted inevitably from leaving the industries of the nation to private enterprise.
However great the economies your contemporaries might have devised in the
consumption of products, and however marvelous the progress of mechanical invention,
they could never have raised themselves out of the slough of poverty so long as they held
to that system.
“No mode more wasteful for utilizing human energy could be devised, and for the credit
of the human intellect it should be remembered that the system never was devised, but
was merely a survival from the rude ages when the lack of social organization made any
sort of coöperation impossible.”
“I will readily admit,” I said, “that our industrial system was ethically very bad, but as a
mere wealth-making machine, apart from moral aspects, it seemed to us admirable.”
“As I said,” responded the doctor, “the subject is too large to discuss at length now, but if
you are really interested to know the main criticisms which we moderns make on your
industrial system as compared with our own, I can touch briefly on some of them.
“The wastes which resulted from leaving the conduct of industry to irresponsible
individuals, wholly without mutual understanding or concert, were mainly four: first, the
waste by mistaken undertakings; second, the waste from the competition and mutual
hostility of those engaged in industry; third, the waste by periodical gluts and crises, with
the consequent interruptions of industry; fourth, the waste from idle capital and labor, at
all times. Any one of these four great leaks, were all the others stopped, would suffice to
make the difference between wealth and poverty on the part of a nation.
“Take the waste by mistaken undertakings, to begin with. In your day the production and
distribution of commodities being without concert or organization, there was no means of
knowing just what demand there was for any class of products, or what was the rate of
supply. Therefore, any enterprise by a private capitalist was always a doubtful
experiment. The projector having no general view of the field of industry and
consumption, such as our government has, could never be sure either what the people
wanted, or what arrangements other capitalists were making to supply them. In view of
this, we are not surprised to learn that the chances were considered several to one in favor
of the failure of any given business enterprise, and that it was common for persons who at
last succeeded in making a hit to have failed repeatedly. If a shoemaker, for every pair of
shoes he succeeded in completing, spoiled the leather of four or five pair, besides losing
the time spent on them, he would stand about the same chance of getting rich as your
contemporaries did with their system of private enterprise, and its average of four or five
failures to one success.
“The next of the great wastes was that from competition. The field of industry was a
battlefield as wide as the world, in which the workers wasted, in assailing one another,
energies which, if expended in concerted effort, as to-day, would have enriched all. As for
mercy or quarter in this warfare, there was absolutely no suggestion of it. To deliberately
enter a field of business and destroy the enterprises of those who had occupied it
previously, in order to plant one’s own enterprise on their ruins, was an achievement
which never failed to command popular admiration. Nor is there any stretch of fancy in
comparing this sort of struggle with actual warfare, so far as concerns the mental agony
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and physical suffering which attended the struggle, and the misery which overwhelmed
the defeated and those dependent on them. Now nothing about your age is, at first sight,
more astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in the same
industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to a common end, should
have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be throttled and overthrown. This
certainly seems like sheer madness, a scene from bedlam. But more closely regarded, it is
seen to be no such thing. Your contemporaries, with their mutual throat-cutting, knew
very well what they were at. The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours,
working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own
maintenance at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, he at the same
time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental. It was just as feasible
and as common to increase one’s private hoard by practices injurious to the general
welfare. One’s worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your
plan of making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the article he
produced was what each particular producer desired. It was for his interest that no more
of it should be produced than he himself could produce. To secure this consummation as
far as circumstances permitted, by killing off and discouraging those engaged in his line
of industry, was his constant effort. When he had billed off all he could, his policy was to
combine with those he could not kill, and convert their mutual warfare into a warfare
upon the public at large by cornering the market, as I believe you used to call it, and
putting up prices to the highest point people would stand before going without the goods.
The day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of the
supply of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the verge of
starvation, and always command famine prices for what he supplied. This, Mr. West, is
what was called in the nineteenth century a system of production. I will leave it to you if
it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a great deal more like a system for preventing
production. Some time when we have plenty of leisure I am going to ask you to sit down
with me and try to make me comprehend, as I never yet could, though I have studied the
matter a great deal, how such shrewd fellows as your contemporaries appear to have been
in many respects ever came to entrust the business of providing for the community to a
class whose interest it was to starve it. I assure you that the wonder with us is, not that the
world did not get rich under such a system, but that it did not perish outright from want.
This wonder increases as we go on to consider some of the other prodigious wastes that
characterized it.
“Apart from the waste of labor and capital by misdirected industry, and that from the
constant bloodletting of your industrial warfare, your system was liable to periodical
convulsions, overwhelming alike the wise and unwise, the successful cut-throat as well as
his victim. I refer to the business crises at intervals of five to ten years, which wrecked
the industries of the nation, prostrating all weak enterprises and crippling the strongest,
and were followed by long periods, often of many years, of so-called dull times, during
which the capitalists slowly regathered their dissipated strength while the laboring classes
starved and rioted. Then would ensue another brief season of prosperity, followed in turn
by another crisis and the ensuing years of exhaustion. As commerce developed, making
the nations mutually dependent, these arises became world-wide, while the obstinacy of
the ensuing state of collapse increased with the area affected by the convulsions, and the
consequent lack of rallying centres. In proportion as the industries of the world multiplied
and became complex, and the volume of capital involved was increased, these business
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cataclysms became more frequent, till, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, there
were two years of bad times to one of good, and the system of industry, never before so
extended or so imposing, seemed in danger of collapsing by its own weight. After endless
discussions, your economists appear by that time to have settled down to the despairing
conclusion that there was no more possibility of preventing or controlling these crises
than if they had been drouths or hurricanes. It only remained to endure them as necessary
evils, and when they had passed over to build up again the shattered structure of industry,
as dwellers in an earthquake country keep on rebuilding their cities on the same site.
“So far as considering the causes of the trouble inherent in their industrial system, your
contemporaries were certainly correct. They were in its very basis, and must needs
become more and more maleficent as the business fabric grew in size and complexity.
One of these causes was the lack of any common control of the different industries, and
the consequent impossibility of their orderly and coördinate development. It inevitably
resulted from this lack that they were continually getting out of step with one another and
out of relation with the demand.
“Of the latter there was no criterion such as organized distribution gives us, and the first
notice that it had been exceeded in any group of industries was a crash of prices,
bankruptcy of producers, stoppage of production, reduction of wages, or discharge of
workmen. This process was constantly going on in many industries, even in what were
called good times, but a crisis took place only when the industries affected were
extensive. The markets then were glutted with goods, of which nobody wanted beyond a
sufficiency at any price. The wages and profits of those making the glutted classes of
goods being reduced or wholly stopped, their purchasing power as consumers of other
classes of goods, of which there was no natural glut, was taken away, and, as a
consequence, goods of which there was no natural glut became artificially glutted, till
their prices also were broken down, and their makers thrown out of work and deprived of
income. The crisis was by this time fairly under way, and nothing could check it till a
nation’s ransom had been wasted.
“A cause, also inherent in your system, which often produced and always terribly
aggravated crises, was the machinery of money and credit. Money was essential when
production was in many private hands, and buying and selling was necessary to secure
what one wanted. It was, however, open to the obvious objection of substituting for food,
clothing, and other things a merely conventional representative of them. The confusion of
mind which this favored, between goods and their representative, led the way to the credit
system and its prodigious illusions. Already accustomed to accept money for
commodities, the people next accepted promises for money, and ceased to look at all
behind the representative for the thing represented. Money was a sign of real
commodities, but credit was but the sign of a sign. There was a natural limit to gold and
silver, that is, money proper, but none to credit, and the result was that the volume of
credit, that is, the promises of money, ceased to bear any ascertainable proportion to the
money, still less to the commodities, actually in existence. Under such a system, frequent
and periodical crises were necessitated by a law as absolute as that which brings to the
ground a structure overhanging its centre of gravity. It was one of your fictions that the
government and the banks authorized by it alone issued money; but everybody who gave
a dollar’s credit issued money to that extent, which was as good as any to swell the
circulation till the next crises. The great extension of the credit system was a
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characteristic of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and accounts largely for the
almost incessant business crises which marked that period. Perilous as credit was, you
could not dispense with its use, for, lacking any national or other public organization of
the capital of the country, it was the only means you had for concentrating and directing it
upon industrial enterprises. It was in this way a most potent means for exaggerating the
chief peril of the private enterprise system of industry by enabling particular industries to
absorb disproportionate amounts of the disposable capital of the country, and thus prepare
disaster. Business enterprises were always vastly in debt for advances of credit, both to
one another and to the banks and capitalists, and the prompt withdrawal of this credit at
the first sign of a crisis was generally the precipitating cause of it.
“It was the misfortune of your contemporaries that they had to cement their business
fabric with a material which an accident might at any moment turn into an explosive.
They were in the plight of a man building a house with dynamite for mortar, for credit
can be compared with nothing else.
“If you would see how needless were these convulsions of business which I have been
speaking of, and how entirely they resulted from leaving industry to private and
unorganized management, just consider the working of our system. Overproduction in
special lines, which was the great hobgoblin of your day, is impossible now, for by the
connection between distribution and production supply is geared to demand like an
engine to the governor which regulates its speed. Even suppose by an error of judgment
an excessive production of some commodity. The consequent slackening or cessation of
production in that line throws nobody out of employment. The suspended workers are at
once found occupation in some other department of the vast workshop and lose only the
time spent in changing, while, as for the glut, the business of the nation is large enough to
carry any amount of product manufactured in excess of demand till the latter overtakes it.
In such a case of over-production, as I have supposed, there is not with us, as with you,
any complex machinery to get out of order and magnify a thousand times the original
mistake. Of course, having not even money, we still less have credit. All estimates deal
directly with the real things, the flour, iron, wood, wool, and labor, of which money and
credit were for you the very misleading representatives. In our calculations of cost there
can be no mistakes. Out of the annual product the amount necessary for the support of the
people is taken, and the requisite labor to produce the next year’s consumption provided
for. The residue of the material and labor represents what can be safely expended in
improvements. If the crops are bad, the surplus for that year is less than usual, that is all.
Except for slight occasional effects of such natural causes, there are no fluctuations of
business; the material prosperity of the nation flows on uninterruptedly from generation
to generation, like an ever broadening and deepening river.
“Your business crises, Mr. West,” continued the doctor, “like either of the great wastes I
mentioned before, were enough, alone, to have kept your noses to the grindstone forever;
but I have still to speak of one other great cause of your poverty, and that was the idleness
of a great part of your capital and labor. With us it is the business of the administration to
keep in constant employment every ounce of available capital and labor in the country. In
your day there was no general control of either capital or labor, and a large part of both
failed to find employment. ‘Capital,’ you used to say, ‘is naturally timid,’ and it would
certainly have been reckless if it had not been timid in an epoch when there was a large
preponderance of probability that any particular business venture would end in failure.
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There was no time when, if security could have been guaranteed it, the amount of capital
devoted to productive industry could not have been greatly increased. The proportion of it
so employed underwent constant extraordinary fluctuations, according to the greater or
less feeling of uncertainty as to the stability of the industrial situation, so that the output
of the national industries greatly varied in different years. But for the same reason that the
amount of capital employed at times of special insecurity was far less than at times of
somewhat greater security, a very large proportion was never employed at all, because the
hazard of business was always very great in the best of times.
“It should be also noted that the great amount of capital always seeking employment
where tolerable safety could be insured terribly embittered the competition between
capitalists when a promising opening presented itself. The idleness of capital, the result
of its timidity, of course meant the idleness of labor in corresponding degree. Moreover,
every change in the adjustments of business, every slightest alteration in the condition of
commerce or manufactures, not to speak of the innumerable business failures that took
place yearly, even in the best of times, were constantly throwing a multitude of men out
of employment for periods of weeks or months, or even years. A great number of these
seekers after employment were constantly traversing the country, becoming in time
professional vagabonds, then criminals. ‘Give us work!’ was the cry of an army of the
unemployed at nearly all seasons, and in seasons of dullness in business this army
swelled to a host so vast and desperate as to threaten the stability of the government.
Could there conceivably be a more conclusive demonstration of the imbecility of the
system of private enterprise as a method for enriching a nation than the fact that, in an
age of such general poverty and want of everything, capitalists had to throttle one another
to find a safe chance to invest their capital and workmen rioted and burned because they
could find no work to do?
“Now, Mr. West,” continued Dr. Leete, “I want you to bear in mind that these points of
which I have been speaking indicate only negatively the advantages of the national
organization of industry by showing certain fatal defects and prodigious imbecilities of
the systems of private enterprise which are not found in it. These alone, you must admit,
would pretty well explain why the nation is so much richer than in your day. But the
larger half of our advantage over you, the positive side of it, I have yet barely spoken of.
Supposing the system of private enterprise in industry were without any of the great leaks
I have mentioned; that there were no waste on account of misdirected effort growing out
of mistakes as to the demand, and inability to command a general view of the industrial
field. Suppose, also, there were no neutralizing and duplicating of effort from
competition. Suppose, also, there were no waste from business panics and crises through
bankruptcy and long interruptions of industry, and also none from the idleness of capital
and labor. Supposing these evils, which are essential to the conduct of industry by capital
in private hands, could all be miraculously prevented, and the system yet retained; even
then the superiority of the results attained by the modern industrial system of national
control would remain overwhelming.
“You used to have some pretty large textile manufacturing establishments, even in your
day, although not comparable with ours. No doubt you have visited these great mills in
your time, covering acres of ground, employing thousands of hands, and combining
under one roof, under one control, the hundred distinct processes between, say, the cotton
bale and the bale of glossy calicoes. You have admired the vast economy of labor as of
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mechanical force resulting from the perfect interworking with the rest of every wheel and
every hand. No doubt you have reflected how much less the same force of workers
employed in that factory would accomplish if they were scattered, each man working
independently. Would you think it an exaggeration to say that the utmost product of those
workers, working thus apart, however amicable their relations might be, was increased
not merely by a percentage, but many fold, when their efforts were organized under one
control? Well now, Mr. West, the organization of the industry of the nation under a single
control, so that all its processes interlock, has multiplied the total product over the utmost
that could be done under the former system, even leaving out of account the four great
wastes mentioned, in the same proportion that the product of those millworkers was
increased by coöperation. The effectiveness of the working force of a nation, under the
myriad-headed leadership of private capital, even if the leaders were not mutual enemies,
as compared with that which it attains under a single head, may be likened to the military
efficiency of a mob, or a horde of barbarians with a thousand petty chiefs, as compared
with that of a disciplined army under one general—such a fighting machine, for example,
as the German army in the time of Von Moltke.”
“After what you have told me,” I said, “I do not so much wonder that the nation is richer
now than then, but that you are not all Crœsuses.”
“Well,” replied Dr. Leete, “we are pretty well off. The rate at which we live is as
luxurious as we could wish. The rivalry of ostentation, which in your day led to
extravagance in no way conducive to comfort, finds no place, of course, in a society of
people absolutely equal in resources, and our ambition stops at the surroundings which
minister to the enjoyment of life. We might, indeed, have much larger incomes,
individually, if we chose so to use the surplus of our product, but we prefer to expend it
upon public works and pleasures in which all share, upon public halls and buildings, art
galleries, bridges, statuary, means or transit, and the conveniences of our cities, great
musical and theatrical exhibitions, and in providing on a vast scale for the recreations of
the people. You have not begun to see how we live yet, Mr. West. At home we have
comfort, but the splendor of our life is, on its social side, that which we share with our
fellows. When you know more of it you will see where the money goes, as you used to
say, and I think you will agree that we do well so to expend it.”
“I suppose,” observed Dr. Leete, as we strolled homeward from the dining hall, “that no
reflection would have cut the men of your wealth-worshiping century more keenly than
the suggestion that they did not know how to make money. Nevertheless, that is just the
verdict history has passed on them. Their system of unorganized and antagonistic
industries was as absurd economically as it was morally abominable. Selfishness was
their only science, and in industrial production selfishness is suicide. Competition, which
is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination
is the secret of efficient production; and not till the idea of increasing the individual hoard
gives place to the idea of increasing the common stock can industrial combination be
realized, and the acquisition of wealth really begin. Even if the principle of share and
share alike for all men were not the only humane and rational basis for a society, we
should still enforce it as economically expedient, seeing that until the disintegrating
influence of self-seeking is suppressed no true concert of industry is possible.”
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CHAPTER XXIII.
That evening, as I sat with Edith in the music room, listening to some pieces in the
programme of that day which had attracted my notice, I took advantage of an interval in
the music to say, “I have a question to ask you which I fear is rather indiscreet.”
“I am quite sure it is not that,” she replied, encouragingly.
“I am in the position of an eavesdropper,” I continued, “who, having overheard a little of
a matter not intended for him, though seeming to concern him, has the impudence to
come to the speaker for the rest.”
“An eavesdropper!” she repeated, looking puzzled.
“Yes,” I said, “but an excusable one, as I think you will admit.”
“This is very mysterious,” she replied.
“Yes,” said I, “so mysterious that often I have doubted whether I really overheard at all
what I am going to ask you about, or only dreamed it. I want you to tell me. The matter is
this: When I was coming out of that sleep of a century, the first impression of which I
was conscious was of voices talking around me, voices that afterwards I recognized as
your father’s, your mother’s, and your own. First, I remember your father’s voice saying,
‘He is going to open his eyes. He had better see but one person at first.’ Then you said, if I
did not dream it all, ‘Promise me, then, that you will not tell him.’ Your father seemed to
hesitate about promising, but you insisted, and your mother interposing, he finally
promised, and when I opened my eyes I saw only him.”
I had been quite serious when I said that I was not sure that I had not dreamed the
conversation I fancied I had overheard, so incomprehensible was it that these people
should know anything of me, a contemporary of their great-grandparents, which I did not
know myself. But when I saw the effect of my words upon Edith, I knew that it was no
dream, but another mystery, and a more puzzling one than any I had before encountered.
For from the moment that the drift of my question became apparent, she showed
indications of the most acute embarrassment. Her eyes, always so frank and direct in
expression, had dropped in a panic before mine, while her face crimsoned from neck to
forehead.
“Pardon me,” I said, as soon as I had recovered from bewilderment at the extraordinary
effect of my words. “It seems, then, that I was not dreaming. There is some secret,
something about me, which you are withholding from me. Really, doesn’t it seem a little
hard that a person in my position should not be given all the information possible
concerning himself?”
“It does not concern you—that is, not directly. It is not about you—exactly,” she replied,
scarcely audibly.
“But it concerns me in some way,” I persisted. “It must be something that would interest
me.”
“I don’t know even that,” she replied, venturing a momentary glance at my face, furiously
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blushing, and yet with a quaint smile flickering about her lips which betrayed a certain
perception of humor in the situation despite its embarrassment,—”I am not sure that it
would even interest you.”
“Your father would have told me,” I insisted, with an accent of reproach. “It was you who
forbade him. He thought I ought to know.”
She did not reply. She was so entirely charming in her confusion that I was now
prompted, as much by the desire to prolong the situation as by my original curiosity, to
importune her further.
“Am I never to know? Will you never tell me?” I said.
“It depends,” she answered, after a long pause.
“On what?” I persisted.
“Ah, you ask too much,” she replied. Then, raising to mine a face which inscrutable eyes,
flushed cheeks, and smiling lips combined to render perfectly bewitching, she added,
“What should you think if I said that it depended on—yourself?”
“On myself?” I echoed. “How can that possibly be?”
“Mr. West, we are losing some charming music,” was her only reply to this, and turning
to the telephone, at a touch of her finger she set the air to swaying to the rhythm of an
adagio. After that she took good care that the music should leave no opportunity for
conversation. She kept her face averted from me, and pretended to be absorbed in the
airs, but that it was a mere pretense the crimson tide standing at flood in her cheeks
sufficiently betrayed.
When at length she suggested that I might have heard all I cared to, for that time, and we
rose to leave the room, she came straight up to me and said, without raising her eyes,
“Mr. West, you say I have been good to you. I have not been particularly so, but if you
think I have, I want you to promise me that you will not try again to make me tell you
this thing you have asked to-night, and that you will not try to find it out from any one
else,—my father or mother, for instance.”
To such an appeal there was but one reply possible. “Forgive me for distressing you. Of
course I will promise,” I said. “I would never have asked you if I had fancied it could
distress you. But do you blame me for being curious?”
“I do not blame you at all.”
“And some time,” I added, “if I do not tease you, you may tell me of your own accord.
May I not hope so?”
“Perhaps,” she murmured.
“Only perhaps?”
Looking up, she read my face with a quick, deep glance. “Yes,” she said, “I think I may
tell you—some time;” and so our conversation ended, for she gave me no chance to say
anything more.
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That night I don’t think even Dr. Pillsbury could have put me to sleep, till toward morning
at least. Mysteries had been my accustomed food for days now, but none had before
confronted me at once so mysterious and so fascinating as this, the solution of which
Edith Leete had forbidden me even to seek. It was a double mystery. How, in the first
place, was it conceivable that she should know any secret about me, a stranger from a
strange age? In the second place, even if she should know such a secret, how account for
the agitating effect which the knowledge of it seemed to have upon her? There are
puzzles so difficult that one cannot even get so far as a conjecture as to the solution, and
this seemed one of them. I am usually of too practical a turn to waste time on such
conundrums; but the difficulty of a riddle embodied in a beautiful young girl does not
detract from its fascination. In general, no doubt, maidens’ blushes may be safely
assumed to tell the same tale to young men in all ages and races, but to give that
interpretation to Edith’s crimson cheeks would, considering my position and the length of
time I had known her, and still more the fact that this mystery dated from before I had
known her at all, be a piece of utter fatuity. And yet she was an angel, and I should not
have been a young man if reason and common sense had been able quite to banish a
roseate tinge from my dreams that night.
CHAPTER XXIV.
In the morning I went down stairs early in the hope of seeing Edith alone. In this,
however, I was disappointed. Not finding her in the house, I sought her in the garden, but
she was not there. In the course of my wanderings I visited the underground chamber, and
sat down there to rest. Upon the reading table in the chamber several periodicals and
newspapers lay, and thinking that Dr. Leete might be interested in glancing over a Boston
daily of 1887, I brought one of the papers with me into the house when I came.
At breakfast I met Edith. She blushed as she greeted me, but was perfectly self-possessed.
As we sat at table, Dr. Leete amused himself with looking over the paper I had brought
in. There was in it, as in all the newspapers of that date, a great deal about the labor
troubles, strikes, lockouts, boycotts, the programmes of labor parties, and the wild threats
of the anarchists.
“By the way,” said I, as the doctor read aloud to us some of these items, “what part did
the followers of the red flag take in the establishment of the new order of things? They
were making considerable noise the last thing that I knew.”
“They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of course,” replied Dr. Leete. “They
did that very effectually while they lasted, for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive
the best considered projects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of those
fellows was one of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform.”
“Subsidizing them!” I exclaimed in astonishment.
“Certainly,” replied Dr. Leete. “No historical authority nowadays doubts that they were
paid by the great monopolies to wave the red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and
blowing people up, in order, by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms. What
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astonishes me most is that you should have fallen into the trap so unsuspectingly.”
“What are your grounds for believing that the red flag party was subsidized?” I inquired.
“Why simply because they must have seen that their course made a thousand enemies of
their professed cause to one friend. Not to suppose that they were hired for the work is to
credit them with an inconceivable folly.[4] In the United States, of all countries, no party
could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a
majority of the nation, as the national party eventually did.”
“The national party!” I exclaimed. “That must have arisen after my day. I suppose it was
one of the labor parties.”
“Oh no!” replied the doctor. “The labor parties, as such, never could have accomplished
anything on a large or permanent scale. For purposes of national scope, their basis as
merely class organizations was too narrow. It was not till a rearrangement of the
industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient
production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but equally of all
classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and
women, that there was any prospect that it would be achieved. Then the national party
arose to carry it out by political methods. It probably took that name because its aim was
to nationalize the functions of production and distribution. Indeed, it could not well have
had any other name, for its purpose was to realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur
and completeness never before conceived, not as an association of men for certain merely
political functions affecting their happiness only remotely and superficially, but as a
family, a vital union, a common life, a mighty heaven-touching tree whose leaves are its
people, fed from its veins, and feeding it in turn. The most patriotic of all possible parties,
it sought to justify patriotism and raise it from an instinct to a rational devotion, by
making the native land truly a father land, a father who kept the people alive and was not
merely an idol for which they were expected to die.”
CHAPTER XXV.
The personality of Edith Leete had naturally impressed me strongly ever since I had
come, in so strange a manner, to be an inmate of her father’s house, and it was to be
expected that after what had happened the night previous, I should be more than ever
preoccupied with thoughts of her. From the first I had been struck with the air of serene
frankness and ingenuous directness, more like that of a noble and innocent boy than any
girl I had ever known, which characterized her. I was curious to know how far this
charming quality might be peculiar to herself, and how far possibly a result of alterations
in the social position of women which might have taken place since my time. Finding an
opportunity that day, when alone with Dr. Leete, I turned the conversation in that
direction.
“I suppose,” I said, “that women nowadays, having been relieved of the burden of
housework, have no employment but the cultivation of their charms and graces.”
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“So far as we men are concerned,” replied Dr. Leete, “we should consider that they amply
paid their way, to use one of your forms of expression, if they confined themselves to that
occupation, but you may be very sure that they have quite too much spirit to consent to be
mere beneficiaries of society, even as a return for ornamenting it. They did, indeed,
welcome their riddance from housework, because that was not only exceptionally
wearing in itself, but also wasteful, in the extreme, of energy, as compared with the
coöperative plan; but they accepted relief from that sort of work only that they might
contribute in other and more effectual, as well as more agreeable, ways to the common
weal. Our women, as well as our men, are members of the industrial army, and leave it
only when maternal duties claim them. The result is that most women, at one time or
another of their lives, serve industrially some five or ten or fifteen years, while those who
have no children fill out the full term.”
“A woman does not, then, necessarily leave the industrial service on marriage?” I queried.
“No more than a man,” replied the doctor. “Why on earth should she? Married women
have no housekeeping responsibilities now, you know, and a husband is not a baby that
he should be cared for.”
“It was thought one of the most grievous features of our civilization that we required so
much toil from women,” I said; “but it seems to me you get more out of them than we
did.”
Dr. Leete laughed. “Indeed we do, just as we do out of our men. Yet the women of this
age are very happy, and those of the nineteenth century, unless contemporary references
greatly mislead us, were very miserable. The reason that women nowadays are so much
more efficient co-laborers with the men, and at the same time are so happy, is that, in
regard to their work as well as men’s, we follow the principle of providing every one the
kind of occupation he or she is best adapted to. Women being inferior in strength to men,
and further disqualified industrially in special ways, the kinds of occupation reserved for
them, and the conditions under which they pursue them, have reference to these facts.
The heavier sorts of work are everywhere reserved for men, the lighter occupations for
women. Under no circumstances is a woman permitted to follow any employment not
perfectly adapted, both as to kind and degree of labor, to her sex. Moreover, the hours of
women’s work are considerably shorter than those of men’s, more frequent vacations are
granted, and the most careful provision is made for rest when needed. The men of this
day so well appreciate that they owe to the beauty and grace of women the chief zest of
their lives and their main incentive to effort, that they permit them to work at all only
because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement of labor, of a sort adapted
to their powers, is well for body and mind, during the period of maximum physical vigor.
We believe that the magnificent health which distinguishes our women from those of
your day, who seem to have been so generally sickly, is owing largely to the fact that all
alike are furnished with healthful and inspiriting occupation.”
“I understood you,” I said, “that the women-workers belong to the army of industry, but
how can they be under the same system of ranking and discipline with the men, when the
conditions of their labor are so different.”
“They are under an entirely different discipline,” replied Dr. Leete, “and constitute rather
an allied force than an integral part of the army of the men. They have a woman general-
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in-chief and are under exclusively feminine régime. This general, as also the higher
officers, is chosen by the body of women who have passed the time of service, in
correspondence with the manner in which the chiefs of the masculine army and the
President of the nation are elected. The general of the women’s army sits in the cabinet of
the President and has a veto on measures respecting women’s work, pending appeals to
Congress. I should have said, in speaking of the judiciary, that we have women on the
bench, appointed by the general of the women, as well as men. Causes in which both
parties are women are determined by women judges, and where a man and a woman are
parties to a case, a judge of either sex must consent to the verdict.”
“Womanhood seems to be organized as a sort of imperium in imperio in your system,” I
said.
“To some extent,” Dr. Leete replied; “but the inner imperium is one from which you will
admit there is not likely to be much danger to the nation. The lack of some such
recognition of the distinct individuality of the sexes was one of the innumerable defects
of your society. The passional attraction between men and women has too often
prevented a perception of the profound differences which make the members of each sex
in many things strange to the other, and capable of sympathy only with their own. It is in
giving full play to the differences of sex rather than in seeking to obliterate them, as was
apparently the effort of some reformers in your day, that the enjoyment of each by itself
and the piquancy which each has for the other, are alike enhanced. In your day there was
no career for women except in an unnatural rivalry with men. We have given them a
world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I assure you they are
very happy in it. It seems to us that women were more than any other class the victims of
your civilization. There is something which, even at this distance of time, penetrates one
with pathos in the spectacle of their ennuied, undeveloped lives, stunted at marriage, their
narrow horizon, bounded so often, physically, by the four walls of home, and morally by
a petty circle of personal interests. I speak now, not of the poorer classes, who were
generally worked to death, but also of the well-to-do and rich. From the great sorrows, as
well as the petty frets of life, they had no refuge in the breezy outdoor world of human
affairs, nor any interests save those of the family. Such an existence would have softened
men’s brains or driven them mad. All that is changed to-day. No woman is heard
nowadays wishing she were a man, nor parents desiring boy rather than girl children. Our
girls are as full of ambition for their careers as our boys. Marriage, when it comes, does
not mean incarceration for them, nor does it separate them in any way from the larger
interests of society, the bustling life of the world. Only when maternity fills a woman’s
mind with new interests does she withdraw from the world for a time. Afterwards, and at
any time, she may return to her place among her comrades, nor need she ever lose touch
with them. Women are a very happy race nowadays, as compared with what they ever
were before in the world’s history, and their power of giving happiness to men has been
of course increased in proportion.”
“I should imagine it possible,” I said, “that the interest which girls take in their careers as
members of the industrial army and candidates for its distinctions might have an effect to
deter them from marriage.”
Dr. Leete smiled. “Have no anxiety on that score, Mr. West,” he replied. “The Creator
took very good care that whatever other modifications the dispositions of men and
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women might with time take on, their attraction for each other should remain constant.
The mere fact that in an age like yours, when the struggle for existence must have left
people little time for other thoughts, and the future was so uncertain that to assume
parental responsibilities must have often seemed like a criminal risk, there was even then
marrying and giving in marriage, should be conclusive on this point. As for love
nowadays, one of our authors says that the vacuum left in the minds of men and women
by the absence of care for one’s livelihood has been entirely taken up by the tender
passion. That, however, I beg you to believe, is something of an exaggeration. For the
rest, so far is marriage from being an interference with a woman’s career, that the higher
positions in the feminine army of industry are intrusted only to women who have been
both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex.”
“Are credit cards issued to the women just as to the men?”
“Certainly.”
“The credits of the women, I suppose, are for smaller sums, owing to the frequent
suspension of their labor on account of family responsibilities.”
“Smaller!” exclaimed Dr. Leete, “oh, no! The maintenance of all our people is the same.
There are no exceptions to that rule, but if any difference were made on account of the
interruptions you speak of, it would be by making the woman’s credit larger, not smaller.
Can you think of any service constituting a stronger claim on the nation’s gratitude than
bearing and nursing the nation’s children? According to our view, none deserve so well of
the world as good parents. There is no task so unselfish, so necessarily without return,
though the heart is well rewarded, as the nurture of the children who are to make the
world for one another when we are gone.”
“It would seem to follow, from what you have said, that wives are in no way dependent
on their husbands for maintenance.”
“Of course they are not,” replied Dr. Leete, “nor children on their parents either, that is,
for means of support, though of course they are for the offices of affection. The child’s
labor, when he grows up, will go to increase the common stock, not his parents’, who will
be dead, and therefore he is properly nurtured out of the common stock. The account of
every person, man, woman, and child, you must understand, is always with the nation
directly, and never through any intermediary, except, of course, that parents, to a certain
extent, act for children as their guardians. You see that it is by virtue of the relation of
individuals to the nation, of their membership in it, that they are entitled to support; and
this title is in no way connected with or affected by their relations to other individuals
who are fellow members of the nation with them. That any person should be dependent
for the means of support upon another would be shocking to the moral sense as well as
indefensible on any rational social theory. What would become of personal liberty and
dignity under such an arrangement? I am aware that you called yourselves free in the
nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then, however, have been at all
what it is at present, or you certainly would not have applied it to a society of which
nearly every member was in a position of galling personal dependence upon others as to
the very means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer, women upon
men, children upon parents. Instead of distributing the product of the nation directly to its
members, which would seem the most natural and obvious method, it would actually
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appear that you had given your minds to devising a plan of hand to hand distribution,
involving the maximum of personal humiliation to all classes of recipients.
“As regards the dependence of women upon men for support, which then was usual, of
course, natural attraction in case of marriages of love must often have made it endurable,
though for spirited women I should fancy it must always have remained humiliating.
What, then, must it have been in the innumerable cases where women, with or without
the form of marriage, had to sell themselves to men to get their living? Even your
contemporaries, callous as they were to most of the revolting aspects of their society,
seem to have had an idea that this was not quite as it should be; but, it was still only for
pity’s sake that they deplored the lot of the women. It did not occur to them that it was
robbery as well as cruelty when men seized for themselves the whole product of the
world and left women to beg and wheedle for their share. Why—but bless me, Mr. West,
I am really running on at a remarkable rate, just as if the robbery, the sorrow, and the
shame which those poor women endured were not over a century since, or as if you were
responsible for what you no doubt deplored as much as I do.”
“I must bear my share of responsibility for the world as it then was,” I replied. “All I can
say in extenuation is that until the nation was ripe for the present system of organized
production and distribution, no radical improvement in the position of woman was
possible. The root of her disability, as you say, was her personal dependence upon man
for her livelihood, and I can imagine no other mode of social organization than that you
have adopted, which would have set woman free of man at the same time that it set men
free of one another. I suppose, by the way, that so entire a change in the position of
women cannot have taken place without affecting in marked ways the social relations of
the sexes. That will be a very interesting study for me.”
“The change you will observe,” said Dr. Leete, “will chiefly be, I think, the entire
frankness and unconstraint which now characterizes those relations, as compared with the
artificiality which seems to have marked them in your time. The sexes now meet with the
ease of perfect equals, suitors to each other for nothing but love. In your time the fact that
women were dependent for support on men made the woman in reality the one chiefly
benefited by marriage. This fact, so far as we can judge from contemporary records,
appears to have been coarsely enough recognized among the lower classes, while among
the more polished it was glossed over by a system of elaborate conventionalities which
aimed to carry the precisely opposite meaning, namely, that the man was the party chiefly
benefited. To keep up this convention it was essential that he should always seem the
suitor. Nothing was therefore considered more shocking to the proprieties than that a
woman should betray a fondness for a man before he had indicated a desire to marry her.
Why, we actually have in our libraries books, by authors of your day, written for no other
purpose than to discuss the question whether, under any conceivable circumstances, a
woman might, without discredit to her sex, reveal an unsolicited love. All this seems
exquisitely absurd to us, and yet we know that, given your circumstances, the problem
might have a serious side. When for a woman to proffer her love to a man was in effect to
invite him to assume the burden of her support, it is easy to see that pride and delicacy
might well have checked the promptings of the heart. When you go out into our society,
Mr. West, you must be prepared to be often cross-questioned on this point by our young
people, who are naturally much interested in this aspect of old-fashioned manners”.[5]
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“And so the girls of the twentieth century tell their love.”
“If they choose,” replied Dr. Leete. “There is no more pretense of a concealment of
feeling on their part than on the part of their lovers. Coquetry would be as much despised
in a girl as in a man. Affected coldness, which in your day rarely deceived a lover, would
deceive him wholly now, for no one thinks of practicing it.”
“One result which must follow from the independence of women I can see for myself,” I
said. “There can be no marriages now except those of inclination.”
“That is a matter of course,” replied Dr. Leete.
“Think of a world in which there are nothing but matches of pure love! Ah me, Dr. Leete,
how far you are from being able to understand what an astonishing phenomenon such a
world seems to a man of the nineteenth century!”
“I can, however, to some extent, imagine it,” replied the doctor. “But the fact you
celebrate, that there are nothing but love matches, means even more, perhaps, than you
probably at first realize. It means that for the first time in human history the principle of
sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race,
and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation. The necessities of poverty,
the need of having a home, no longer tempt women to accept as the fathers of their
children men whom they neither can love nor respect. Wealth and rank no longer divert
attention from personal qualities. Gold no longer ‘gilds the straitened forehead of the
fool.’ The gifts of person, mind, and disposition; beauty, wit, eloquence, kindness,
generosity, geniality, courage, are sure of transmission to posterity. Every generation is
sifted through a little finer mesh than the last. The attributes that human nature admires
are preserved, those that repel it are left behind. There are, of course, a great many
women who with love must mingle admiration, and seek to wed greatly, but these not the
less obey the same law, for to wed greatly now is not to marry men of fortune or title, but
those who have risen above their fellows by the solidity or brilliance of their services to
humanity. These form nowadays the only aristocracy with which alliance is distinction.
“You were speaking, a day or two ago, of the physical superiority of our people to your
contemporaries. Perhaps more important than any of the causes I mentioned then as
tending to race purification has been the effect of untrammeled sexual selection upon the
quality of two or three successive generations. I believe that when you have made a fuller
study of our people you will find in them not only a physical, but a mental and moral
improvement. It would be strange if it were not so, for not only is one of the great laws of
nature now freely working out the salvation of the race, but a profound moral sentiment
has come to its support. Individualism, which in your day was the animating idea of
society, not only was fatal to any vital sentiment of brotherhood and common interest
among living men, but equally to any realization of the responsibility of the living for the
generation to follow. To-day this sense of responsibility, practically unrecognized in all
previous ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of the race, reinforcing, with an
intense conviction of duty, the natural impulse to seek in marriage the best and noblest of
the other sex. The result is, that not all the encouragements and incentives of every sort
which we have provided to develop industry, talent, genius, excellence of whatever kind,
are comparable in their effect on our young men with the fact that our women sit aloft as
judges of the race and reserve themselves to reward the winners. Of all the whips, and
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spurs, and baits, and prizes, there is none like the thought of the radiant faces which the
laggards will find averted.
“Celibates nowadays are almost invariably men who have failed to acquit themselves
creditably in the work of life. The woman must be a courageous one, with a very evil sort
of courage, too, whom pity for one of these unfortunates should lead to defy the opinion
of her generation—for otherwise she is free—so far as to accept him for a husband. I
should add that, more exacting and difficult to resist than any other element in that
opinion, she would find the sentiment of her own sex. Our women have risen to the full
height of their responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the
keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts to a sense of
religious consecration. It is a cult in which they educate their daughters from childhood.”
After going to my room that night, I sat up late to read a romance of Berrian, handed me
by Dr. Leete, the plot of which turned on a situation suggested by his last words,
concerning the modern view of parental responsibility. A similar situation would almost
certainly have been treated by a nineteenth century romancist so as to excite the morbid
sympathy of the reader with the sentimental selfishness of the lovers, and his resentment
toward the unwritten law which they outraged. I need not describe—for who has not read
“Ruth Elton?”—how different is the course which Berrian takes, and with what
tremendous effect he enforces the principle which he states: “Over the unborn our power
is that of God, and our responsibility like His toward us. As we acquit ourselves toward
them, so let Him deal with us.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
I think if a person were ever excusable for losing track of the days of the week, the
circumstances excused me. Indeed, if I had been told that the method of reckoning time
had been wholly changed and the days were now counted in lots of five, ten, or fifteen
instead of seven, I should have been in no way surprised after what I had already heard
and seen of the twentieth century. The first time that any inquiry as to the days of the
week occurred to me was the morning following the conversation related in the last
chapter. At the breakfast table Dr. Leete asked me if I would care to hear a sermon.
“Is it Sunday, then?” I exclaimed.
“Yes,” he replied. “It was on Friday, you see, when we made the lucky discovery of the
buried chamber to which we owe your society this morning. It was on Saturday morning,
soon after midnight, that you first awoke, and Sunday afternoon when you awoke the
second time with faculties fully regained.”
“So you still have Sundays and sermons,” I said. “We had prophets who foretold that long
before this time the world would have dispensed with both. I am very curious to know
how the ecclesiastical systems fit in with the rest of your social arrangements. I suppose
you have a sort of national church with official clergymen.”
Dr. Leete laughed, and Mrs. Leete and Edith seemed greatly amused.
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“Why, Mr. West,” Edith said, “what odd people you must think us. You were quite done
with national religious establishments in the nineteenth century, and did you fancy we
had gone back to them?”
“But how can voluntary churches and an unofficial clerical profession be reconciled with
national ownership of all buildings, and the industrial service required of all men?” I
answered.
“The religious practices of the people have naturally changed considerably in a century,”
replied Dr. Leete; “but supposing them to have remained unchanged, our social system
would accommodate them perfectly. The nation supplies any person or number of
persons with buildings on guarantee of the rent, and they remain tenants while they pay
it. As for the clergymen, if a number of persons wish the services of an individual for any
particular end of their own, apart from the general service of the nation, they can always
secure it, with that individual’s own consent, of course, just as we secure the service of
our editors, by contributing from their credit-cards an indemnity to the nation for the loss
of his services in general industry. This indemnity paid the nation for the individual
answers to the salary in your day paid to the individual himself; and the various
applications of this principle leave private initiative full play in all details to which
national control is not applicable. Now, as to hearing a sermon to-day, if you wish to do
so, you can either go to a church to hear it or stay at home.”
“How am I to hear it if I stay at home?”
“Simply by accompanying us to the music room at the proper hour and selecting an easy
chair. There are some who still prefer to hear sermons in church, but most of our
preaching, like our musical performances, is not in public, but delivered in acoustically
prepared chambers, connected by wire with subscribers’ houses. If you prefer to go to a
church I shall be glad to accompany you, but I really don’t believe you are likely to hear
anywhere a better discourse than you will at home. I see by the paper that Mr. Barton is to
preach this morning, and he preaches only by telephone, and to audiences often reaching
150,000.”
“The novelty of the experience of hearing a sermon under such circumstances would
incline me to be one of Mr. Barton’s hearers, if for no other reason,” I said.
An hour or two later, as I sat reading in the library, Edith came for me, and I followed her
to the music room, where Dr. and Mrs. Leete were waiting. We had not more than seated
ourselves comfortably when the tinkle of a bell was heard, and a few moments after the
voice of a man, at the pitch of ordinary conversation, addressed us, with an effect of
proceeding from an invisible person in the room. This was what the voice said:—
MR. BARTON’S SERMON.
“We have had among us, during the past week, a critic from the nineteenth century, a
living representative of the epoch of our great-grandparents. It would be strange if a fact
so extraordinary had not somewhat strongly affected our imaginations. Perhaps most of
us have been stimulated to some effort to realize the society of a century ago, and figure
to ourselves what it must have been like to live then. In inviting you now to consider
certain reflections upon this subject which have occurred to me, I presume that I shall
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rather follow than divert the course of your own thoughts.”
Edith whispered something to her father at this point, to which he nodded assent and
turned to me.
“Mr. West,” he said, “Edith suggests that you may find it slightly embarrassing to listen to
a discourse on the lines Mr. Barton is laying down, and if so, you need not be cheated out
of a sermon. She will connect us with Mr. Sweetser’s speaking room if you say so, and I
can still promise you a very good discourse.”
“No, no,” I said. “Believe me, I would much rather hear what Mr. Barton has to say.”
“As you please,” replied my host.
When her father spoke to me Edith had touched a screw, and the voice of Mr. Barton had
ceased abruptly. Now at another touch the room was once more filled with the earnest
sympathetic tones which had already impressed me most favorably.
“I venture to assume that one effect has been common with us as a result of this effort at
retrospection, and that it has been to leave us more than ever amazed at the stupendous
change which one brief century has made in the material and moral conditions of
humanity.
“Still, as regards the contrast between the poverty of the nation and the world in the
nineteenth century and their wealth now, it is not greater, possibly, than had been before
seen in human history, perhaps not greater, for example, than that between the poverty of
this country during the earliest colonial period of the seventeenth century and the
relatively great wealth it had attained at the close of the nineteenth, or between the
England of William the Conqueror and that of Victoria. Although the aggregate riches of
a nation did not then, as now, afford any accurate criterion of the masses of its people, yet
instances like these afford partial parallels for the merely material side of the contrast
between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It is when we contemplate the moral
aspect of that contrast that we find ourselves in the presence of a phenomenon for which
history offers no precedent, however far back we may cast our eye. One might almost be
excused who should exclaim, ‘Here, surely, is something like a miracle!’ Nevertheless,
when we give over idle wonder, and begin to examine the seeming prodigy critically, we
find it no prodigy at all, much less a miracle. It is not necessary to suppose a moral new
birth of humanity, or a wholesale destruction of the wicked and survival of the good, to
account for the fact before us. It finds its simple and obvious explanation in the reaction
of a changed environment upon human nature. It means merely that a form of society
which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness, and appealed solely to the
anti-social and brutal side of human nature, has been replaced by institutions based on the
true self-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealing to the social and generous
instincts of men.
“My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemed in the nineteenth
century, all you have to do is to restore the old social and industrial system, which taught
them to view their natural prey in their fellow-men, and find their gain in the loss of
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others. No doubt it seems to you that no necessity, however dire, would have tempted you
to subsist on what superior skill or strength enabled you to wrest from others equally
needy. But suppose it were not merely your own life that you were responsible for. I
know well that there must have been many a man among our ancestors who, if it had
been merely a question of his own life, would sooner have given it up than nourished it
by bread snatched from others. But this he was not permitted to do. He had dear lives
dependent on him. Men loved women in those days, as now. God knows how they dared
be fathers, but they had babies as sweet, no doubt, to them as ours to us, whom they must
feed, clothe, educate. The gentlest creatures are fierce when they have young to provide
for, and in that wolfish society the struggle for bread borrowed a peculiar desperation
from the tenderest sentiments. For the sake of those dependent on him, a man might not
choose, but must plunge into the foul fight,—cheat, overreach, supplant, defraud, buy
below worth and sell above, break down the business by which his neighbor fed his
young ones, tempt men to buy what they ought not and to sell what they should not, grind
his laborers, sweat his debtors, cozen his creditors. Though a man sought it carefully with
tears, it was hard to find a way in which he could earn a living and provide for his family
except by pressing in before some weaker rival and taking the food from his mouth. Even
the ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel necessity. While they warned
their flocks against the love of money, regard for their families compelled them to keep
an outlook for the pecuniary prizes of their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed a
trying business, preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness which they and
everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to poverty those who
should practice them, laying down laws of conduct which the law of self-preservation
compelled men to break. Looking on the inhuman spectacle of society, these worthy men
bitterly bemoaned the depravity of human nature; as if angelic nature would not have
been debauched in such a devil’s school! Ah, my friends, believe me, it is not now in this
happy age that humanity is proving the divinity within it. It was rather in those evil days
when not even the fight for life with one another, the struggle for mere existence, in
which mercy was folly, could wholly banish generosity and kindness from the earth.
“It is not hard to understand the desperation with which men and women, who under
other conditions would have been full of gentleness and ruth, fought and tore each other
in the scramble for gold, when we realize what it meant to miss it, what poverty was in
that day. For the body it was hunger and thirst, torment by heat and frost, in sickness
neglect, in health unremitting toil; for the moral nature it meant oppression, contempt,
and the patient endurance of indignity, brutish associations from infancy, the loss of all
the innocence of childhood, the grace of womanhood, the dignity of manhood; for the
mind it meant the death of ignorance, the torpor of all those faculties which distinguish us
from brutes, the reduction of life to a round of bodily functions.
“Ah, my friends, if such a fate as this were offered you and your children as the only
alternative of success in the accumulation of wealth, how long do you fancy would you
be in sinking to the moral level of your ancestors?
“Some two or three centuries ago an act of barbarity was committed in India, which,
though the number of lives destroyed was but a few score, was attended by such peculiar
horrors that its memory is likely to be perpetual. A number of English prisoners were shut
up in a room containing not enough air to supply one-tenth their number. The
unfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but, as the agonies of
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suffocation began to take hold on them, they forgot all else, and became involved in a
hideous struggle, each one for himself, and against all others, to force a way to one of the
small apertures of the prison at which alone it was possible to get a breath of air. It was a
struggle in which men became beasts, and the recital of its horrors by the few survivors
so shocked our forefathers that for a century later we find it a stock reference in their
literature as a typical illustration of the extreme possibilities of human misery, as
shocking in its moral as its physical aspect. They could scarcely have anticipated that to
us the Black Hole of Calcutta, with its press of maddened men tearing and trampling one
another in the struggle to win a place at the breathing holes, would seem a striking type of
the society of their age. It lacked something of being a complete type, however, for in the
Calcutta Black Hole there were no tender women, no little children and old men and
women, no cripples. They were at least all men, strong to bear, who suffered.
“When we reflect that the ancient order of which I have been speaking was prevalent up
to the end of the nineteenth century, while to us the new order which succeeded it already
seems antique, even our parents having known no other, we cannot fail to be astounded at
the suddenness with which a transition so profound beyond all previous experience of the
race must have been effected. Some observation of the state of men’s minds during the
last quarter of the nineteenth century will, however, in great measure, dissipate this
astonishment. Though general intelligence in the modern sense could not be said to exist
in any community at that time, yet, as compared with previous generations, the one then
on the stage was intelligent. The inevitable consequence of even this comparative degree
of intelligence had been a perception of the evils of society, such as had never before
been general. It is quite true that these evils had been even worse, much worse, in
previous ages. It was the increased intelligence of the masses which made the difference,
as the dawn reveals the squalor of surroundings which in the darkness may have seemed
tolerable. The keynote of the literature of the period was one of compassion for the poor
and unfortunate, and indignant outcry against the failure of the social machinery to
ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain from these outbursts that the moral hideousness
of the spectacle about them was, at least by flashes, fully realized by the best of the men
of that time, and that the lives of some of the more sensitive and generous hearted of
them were rendered wellnigh unendurable by the intensity of their sympathies.
“Although the idea of the vital unity of the family of mankind, the reality of human
brotherhood, was very far from being apprehended by them as the moral axiom it seems
to us, yet it is a mistake to suppose that there was no feeling at all corresponding to it. I
could read you passages of great beauty from some of their writers which show that the
conception was clearly attained by a few, and no doubt vaguely by many more.
Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the nineteenth century was in name Christian, and
the fact that the entire commercial and industrial frame of society was the embodiment of
the anti-Christian spirit must have had some weight, though I admit it was strangely little,
with the nominal followers of Jesus Christ.
“When we inquire why it did not have more, why, in general, long after a vast majority of
men had agreed as to the crying abuses of the existing social arrangement, they still
tolerated it, or contented themselves with talking of petty reforms in it, we come upon an
extraordinary fact. It was the sincere belief of even the best of men at that epoch that the
only stable elements in human nature, on which a social system could be safely founded,
were its worst propensities. They had been taught and believed that greed and
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self-seeking were all that held mankind together, and that all human associations would
fall to pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives or curb their
operation. In a word, they believed—even those who longed to believe otherwise—the
exact reverse of what seems to us self-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social
qualities of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the cohesive force of
society. It seemed reasonable to them that men lived together solely for the purpose of
overreaching and oppressing one another, and of being overreached and oppressed, and
that while a society that gave full scope to these propensities could stand, there would be
little chance for one based on the idea of coöperation for the benefit of all. It seems
absurd to expect any one to believe that convictions like these were ever seriously
entertained by men; but that they were not only entertained by our great-grandfathers, but
were responsible for the long delay in doing away with the ancient order, after a
conviction of its intolerable abuses had become general, is as well established as any fact
in history can be. Just here you will find the explanation of the profound pessimism of the
literature of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the note of melancholy in its poetry,
and the cynicism of its humor.
“Feeling that the condition of the race was unendurable, they had no clear hope of
anything better. They believed that the evolution of humanity had resulted in leading it
into a cul de sac, and that there was no way of getting forward. The frame of men’s minds
at this time is strikingly illustrated by treatises which have come down to us, and may
even now be consulted in our libraries by the curious, in which laborious arguments are
pursued to prove that despite the evil plight of men, life was still, by some slight
preponderance of considerations, probably better worth living than leaving. Despising
themselves, they despised their Creator. There was a general decay of religious belief.
Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly veiled by doubt and dread, alone lighted up
the chaos of earth. That men should doubt Him whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread
the hands that moulded them, seems to us indeed a pitiable insanity; but we must
remember that children who are brave by day have sometimes foolish fears at night. The
dawn has come since then. It is very easy to believe in the fatherhood of God in the
twentieth century.
“Briefly, as must needs be in a discourse of this character, I have adverted to some of the
causes which had prepared men’s minds for the change from the old to the new order, as
well as some causes of the conservatism of despair which for a while held it back after
the time was ripe. To wonder at the rapidity with which the change was completed after
its possibility was first entertained is to forget the intoxicating effect of hope upon minds
long accustomed to despair. The sunburst, after so long and dark a night, must needs have
had a dazzling effect. From the moment men allowed themselves to believe that humanity
after all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squat stature was not the measure of its
possible growth, but that it stood upon the verge of an avatar of limitless development,
the reaction must needs have been overwhelming. It is evident that nothing was able to
stand against the enthusiasm which the new faith inspired.
“Here, at last, men must have felt, was a cause compared with which the grandest of
historic causes had been trivial. It was doubtless because it could have commanded
millions of martyrs, that none were needed. The change of a dynasty in a petty kingdom
of the old world often cost more lives than did the revolution which set the feet of the
human race at last in the right way.
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“Doubtless it ill beseems one to whom the boon of life in our resplendent age has been
vouchsafed to wish his destiny other, and yet I have often thought that I would fain
exchange my share in this serene and golden day for a place in that stormy epoch of
transition, when heroes burst the barred gate of the future and revealed to the kindling
gaze of a hopeless race, in place of the blank wall that had closed its path, a vista of
progress whose end, for very excess of light, still dazzles us. Ah, my friends! who will
say that to have lived then, when the weakest influence was a lever to whose touch the
centuries trembled, was not worth a share even in this era of fruition?
“You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless of revolutions. In the time
of one generation men laid aside the social traditions and practices of barbarians, and
assumed a social order worthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in
their habits, they became co-workers, and found in fraternity, at once, the science of
wealth and happiness. ‘What shall I eat and drink, and wherewithal shall I be clothed?’
stated as a problem beginning and ending in self, had been an anxious and an endless one.
But when once it was conceived, not from the individual, but the fraternal standpoint,
‘What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed?’—its difficulties
vanished.
“Poverty with servitude had been the result, for the mass of humanity, of attempting to
solve the problem of maintenance from the individual standpoint, but no sooner had the
nation become the sole capitalist and employer than not alone did plenty replace poverty,
but the last vestige of the serfdom of man to man disappeared from earth. Human slavery,
so often vainly scotched, at last was killed. The means of subsistence no longer doled out
by men to women, by employer to employed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a
common stock as among children at the father’s table. It was impossible for a man any
longer to use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His esteem was the only sort of
gain he could thenceforth make out of him. There was no more either arrogance or
servility in the relations of human beings to one another. For the first time since the
creation every man stood up straight before God. The fear of want and the lust of gain
became extinct motives when abundance was assured to all and immoderate possessions
made impossible of attainment. There were no more beggars nor almoners. Equity left
charity without an occupation. The ten commandments became wellnigh obsolete in a
world where there was no temptation to theft, no occasion to lie either for fear or favor,
no room for envy where all were equal, and little provocation to violence where men
were disarmed of power to injure one another. Humanity’s ancient dream of liberty,
equality, fraternity, mocked by so many ages, at last was realized.
“As in the old society the generous, the just, the tender-hearted had been placed at a
disadvantage by the possession of those qualities, so in the new society the cold-hearted,
the greedy, and self-seeking found themselves out of joint with the world. Now that the
conditions of life for the first time ceased to operate as a forcing process to develop the
brutal qualities of human nature, and the premium which had heretofore encouraged
selfishness was not only removed, but placed upon unselfishness, it was for the first time
possible to see what unperverted human nature really was like. The depraved tendencies,
which had previously overgrown and obscured the better to so large an extent, now
withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the nobler qualities showed a sudden
luxuriance which turned cynics into panegyrists and for the first time in human history
tempted mankind to fall in love with itself. Soon was fully revealed, what the divines and
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philosophers of the old world never would have believed, that human nature in its
essential qualities is good, not bad, that men by their natural intention and structure are
generous, not selfish, pitiful, not cruel, sympathetic, not arrogant, godlike in aspirations,
instinct with divinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice, images of God indeed, not
the travesties upon Him they had seemed. The constant pressure, through numberless
generations, of conditions of life which might have perverted angels, had not been able to
essentially alter the natural nobility of the stock, and these conditions once removed, like
a bent tree, it had sprung back to its normal uprightness.
“To put the whole matter in the nutshell of a parable, let me compare humanity in the
olden time to a rosebush planted in a swamp, watered with black bog-water, breathing
miasmatic fogs by day, and chilled with poison dews at night. Innumerable generations of
gardeners had done their best to make it bloom, but beyond an occasional half-opened
bud with a worm at the heart, their efforts had been unsuccessful. Many, indeed, claimed
that the bush was no rosebush at all, but a noxious shrub, fit only to be uprooted and
burned. The gardeners, for the most part, however, held that the bush belonged to the rose
family, but had some ineradicable taint about it, which prevented the buds from coming
out, and accounted for its generally sickly condition. There were a few, indeed, who
maintained that the stock was good enough, that the trouble was in the bog, and that
under more favorable conditions the plant might be expected to do better. But these
persons were not regular gardeners, and being condemned by the latter as mere theorists
and day dreamers, were for the most part, so regarded by the people. Moreover, urged
some eminent moral philosophers, even conceding for the sake of the argument that the
bush might possibly do better elsewhere, it was a more valuable discipline for the buds to
try to bloom in a bog than it would be under more favorable conditions. The buds that
succeeded in opening might indeed be very rare, and the flowers pale and scentless, but
they represented far more moral effort than if they had bloomed spontaneously in a
garden.
“The regular gardeners and the moral philosophers had their way. The bush remained
rooted in the bog, and the old course of treatment went on. Continually new varieties of
forcing mixtures were applied to the roots, and more recipes than could be numbered,
each declared by its advocates the best and only suitable preparation, were used to kill the
vermin and remove the mildew. This went on a very long time. Occasionally some one
claimed to observe a slight improvement in the appearance of the bush, but there were
quite as many who declared that it did not look so well as it used to. On the whole there
could not be said to be any marked change. Finally, during a period of general
despondency as to the prospects of the bush where it was, the idea of transplanting it was
again mooted, and this time found favor. ‘Let us try it,’ was the general voice. ‘Perhaps it
may thrive better elsewhere, and here it is certainly doubtful if it be worth cultivating
longer.’ So it came about that the rosebush of humanity was transplanted, and set in
sweet, warm, dry earth, where the sun bathed it, the stars wooed it, and the south wind
caressed it. Then it appeared that it was indeed a rosebush. The vermin and the mildew
disappeared, and the bush was covered with most beautiful red roses, whose fragrance
filled the world.
“It is a pledge of the destiny appointed for us that the Creator has set in our hearts an
infinite standard of achievement, judged by which our past attainments seem always
insignificant, and the goal never nearer. Had our forefathers conceived a state of society
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in which men should live together like brethren dwelling in unity, without strifes or
envying, violence or overreaching, and where, at the price of a degree of labor not greater
than health demands, in their chosen occupations, they should be wholly freed from care
for the morrow and left with no more concern for their livelihood than trees which are
watered by unfailing streams,—had they conceived such a condition, I say, it would have
seemed to them nothing less than paradise. They would have confounded it with their
idea of heaven, nor dreamed that there could possibly lie further beyond anything to be
desired or striven for.
“But how is it with us who stand on this height which they gazed up to? Already we have
wellnigh forgotten, except when it is especially called to our minds by some occasion like
the present, that it was not always with men as it is now. It is a strain on our imaginations
to conceive the social arrangements of our immediate ancestors. We find them grotesque.
The solution of the problem of physical maintenance so as to banish care and crime, so
far from seeming to us an ultimate attainment, appears but as a preliminary to anything
like real human progress. We have but relieved ourselves of an impertinent and needless
harassment which hindered our ancestors from undertaking the real ends of existence. We
are merely stripped for the race; no more. We are like a child which has just learned to
stand upright and to walk. It is a great event, from the child’s point of view, when he first
walks. Perhaps he fancies that there can be little beyond that achievement, but a year later
he has forgotten that he could not always walk. His horizon did but widen when he rose,
and enlarge as he moved. A great event indeed, in one sense, was his first step, but only
as a beginning, not as the end. His true career was but then first entered on. The
enfranchisement of humanity in the last century, from mental and physical absorption in
working and scheming for the mere bodily necessities, may be regarded as a species of
second birth of the race, without which its first birth to an existence that was but a burden
would forever have remained unjustified, but whereby it is now abundantly vindicated.
Since then, humanity has entered on a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution
of higher faculties, the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely
suspected. In place of the dreary hopelessness of the nineteenth century, its profound
pessimism as to the future of humanity, the animating idea of the present age is an
enthusiastic conception of the opportunities of our earthly existence, and the unbounded
possibilities of human nature. The betterment of mankind from generation to generation,
physically, mentally, morally, is recognized as the one great object supremely worthy of
effort and of sacrifice. We believe the race for the first time to have entered on the
realization of God’s ideal of it, and each generation must now be a step upward.
“Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall have passed away? I
answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end is lost in light. For twofold is the
return of man to God ‘who is our home,’ the return of the individual by the way of death,
and the return of the race by the fulfilment of the evolution, when the divine secret
hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a tear for the dark past, turn we then
to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of
the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens
are before it.”
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CHAPTER XXVII.
I never could tell just why, but Sunday afternoon during my old life had been a time when
I was peculiarly subject to melancholy, when the color unaccountably faded out of all the
aspects of life, and everything appeared pathetically uninteresting. The hours, which in
general were wont to bear me easily on their wings, lost the power of flight, and toward
the close of the day, drooping quite to earth, had fairly to be dragged along by main
strength. Perhaps it was partly owing to the established association of ideas that, despite
the utter change in my circumstances, I fell into a state of profound depression on the
afternoon of this my first Sunday in the twentieth century.
It was not, however, on the present occasion a depression without specific cause, the
mere vague melancholy I have spoken of, but a sentiment suggested and certainly quite
justified by my position. The sermon of Mr. Barton, with its constant implication of the
vast moral gap between the century to which I belonged and that in which I found myself,
had had an effect strongly to accentuate my sense of loneliness in it. Considerately and
philosophically as he had spoken, his words could scarcely have failed to leave upon my
mind a strong impression of the mingled pity, curiosity, and aversion which I, as a
representative of an abhorred epoch, must excite in all around me.
The extraordinary kindness with which I had been treated by Dr. Leete and his family,
and especially the goodness of Edith, had hitherto prevented my fully realizing that their
real sentiment toward me must necessarily be that of the whole generation to which they
belonged. The recognition of this, as regarded Dr. Leete and his amiable wife, however
painful, I might have endured, but the conviction that Edith must share their feeling was
more than I could bear.
The crushing effect with which this belated perception of a fact so obvious came to me
opened my eyes fully to something which perhaps the reader has already suspected,—I
loved Edith.
Was it strange that I did? The affecting occasion on which our intimacy had begun, when
her hands had drawn me out of the whirlpool of madness; the fact that her sympathy was
the vital breath which had set me up in this new life and enabled me to support it; my
habit of looking to her as the mediator between me and the world around in a sense that
even her father was not,—these were circumstances that had predetermined a result
which her remarkable loveliness of person and disposition would alone have accounted
for. It was quite inevitable that she should have come to seem to me, in a sense quite
different from the usual experience of lovers, the only woman in this world. Now that I
had become suddenly sensible of the fatuity of the hopes I had begun to cherish, I
suffered not merely what another lover might, but in addition a desolate loneliness, an
utter forlornness, such as no other lover, however unhappy, could have felt.
My hosts evidently saw that I was depressed in spirits, and did their best to divert me.
Edith especially, I could see, was distressed for me, but according to the usual perversity
of lovers, having once been so mad as to dream of receiving something more from her,
there was no longer any virtue for me in a kindness that I knew was only sympathy.
Toward nightfall, after secluding myself in my room most of the afternoon, I went into
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the garden to walk about. The day was overcast, with an autumnal flavor in the warm,
still air. Finding myself near the excavation, I entered the subterranean chamber and sat
down there. “This,” I muttered to myself, “is the only home I have. Let me stay here, and
not go forth any more.” Seeking aid from the familiar surroundings, I endeavored to find
a sad sort of consolation in reviving the past and summoning up the forms and faces that
were about me in my former life. It was in vain. There was no longer any life in them.
For nearly one hundred years the stars had been looking down on Edith Bartlett’s grave,
and the graves of all my generation.
The past was dead, crushed beneath a century’s weight, and from the present I was shut
out. There was no place for me anywhere. I was neither dead nor properly alive.
“Forgive me for following you.”
I looked up. Edith stood in the door of the subterranean room, regarding me smilingly,
but with eyes full of sympathetic distress.
“Send me away if I am intruding on you,” she said; “but we saw that you were out of
spirits, and you know you promised to let me know if that were so. You have not kept
your word.”
I rose and came to the door, trying to smile, but making, I fancy, rather sorry work of it,
for the sight of her loveliness brought home to me the more poignantly the cause of my
wretchedness.
“I was feeling a little lonely, that is all,” I said. “Has it never occurred to you that my
position is so much more utterly alone than any human being’s ever was before that a new
word is really needed to describe it?”
“Oh, you must not talk that way,—you must not let yourself feel that way,—you must
not!” she exclaimed, with moistened eyes. “Are we not your friends? It is your own fault
if you will not let us be. You need not be lonely.”
“You are good to me beyond my power of understanding,” I said, “but don’t you suppose
that I know it is pity merely, sweet pity, but pity only. I should be a fool not to know that I
cannot seem to you as other men of your own generation do, but as some strange uncanny
being, a stranded creature of an unknown sea, whose forlornness touches your
compassion despite its grotesqueness. I have been so foolish, you were so kind, as to
almost forget that this must needs be so, and to fancy I might in time become naturalized,
as we used to say, in this age, so as to feel like one of you and to seem to you like the
other men about you. But Mr. Barton’s sermon taught me how vain such a fancy is, how
great the gulf between us must seem to you.”
“Oh that miserable sermon!” she exclaimed, fairly crying now in her sympathy, “I wanted
you not to hear it. What does he know of you? He has read in old musty books about your
times, that is all. What do you care about him, to let yourself be vexed by anything he
said? Isn’t it anything to you, that we who know you feel differently? Don’t you care more
about what we think of you than what he does who never saw you? Oh, Mr. West! you
don’t know, you can’t think, how it makes me feel to see you so forlorn. I can’t have it so.
What can I say to you? How can I convince you how different our feeling for you is from
what you think?”
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As before, in that other crisis of my fate when she had come to me, she extended her
hands towards me in a gesture of helpfulness, and, as then, I caught and held them in my
own; her bosom heaved with strong emotion, and little tremors in the fingers which I
clasped emphasized the depth of her feeling. In her face, pity contended in a sort of
divine spite against the obstacles which reduced it to impotence. Womanly compassion
surely never wore a guise more lovely.
Such beauty and such goodness quite melted me, and it seemed that the only fitting
response I could make was to tell her just the truth. Of course I had not a spark of hope,
but on the other hand I had no fear that she would be angry. She was too pitiful for that.
So I said presently, “It is very ungrateful in me not to be satisfied with such kindness as
you have shown me, and are showing me now. But are you so blind as not to see why
they are not enough to make me happy? Don’t you see that it is because I have been mad
enough to love you?”
At my last words she blushed deeply and her eyes fell before mine, but she made no
effort to withdraw her hands from my clasp. For some moments she stood so, panting a
little. Then blushing deeper than ever, but with a dazzling smile, she looked up.
“Are you sure it is not you who are blind?” she said.
That was all, but it was enough, for it told me that, unaccountable, incredible as it was,
this radiant daughter of a golden age had bestowed upon me not alone her pity, but her
love. Still, I half believed I must be under some blissful hallucination even as I clasped
her in my arms. “If I am beside myself,” I cried, “let me remain so.”
“It is I whom you must think beside myself,” she panted, escaping from my arms when I
had barely tasted the sweetness of her lips. “Oh! oh! what must you think of me almost to
throw myself in the arms of one I have known but a week? I did not mean that you should
find it out so soon, but I was so sorry for you I forgot what I was saying. No, no; you
must not touch me again till you know who I am. After that, sir, you shall apologize to
me very humbly for thinking, as I know you do, that I have been over quick to fall in love
with you. After you know who I am, you will be bound to confess that it was nothing less
than my duty to fall in love with you at first sight, and that no girl of proper feeling in my
place could do otherwise.”
As may be supposed, I would have been quite content to waive explanations, but Edith
was resolute that there should be no more kisses until she had been vindicated from all
suspicion of precipitancy in the bestowal of her affections, and I was fain to follow the
lovely enigma into the house. Having come where her mother was, she blushingly
whispered something in her ear and ran away, leaving us together. It then appeared that,
strange as my experience had been, I was now first to know what was perhaps its
strangest feature. From Mrs. Leete I learned that Edith was the great-granddaughter of no
other than my lost love, Edith Bartlett. After mourning me for fourteen years, she had
made a marriage of esteem, and left a son who had been Mrs. Leete’s father. Mrs. Leete
had never seen her grandmother, but had heard much of her, and, when her daughter was
born, gave her the name of Edith. This fact might have tended to increase the interest
which the girl took, as she grew up, in all that concerned her ancestress, and especially
the tragic story of the supposed death of the lover, whose wife she expected to be, in the
conflagration of his house. It was a tale well calculated to touch the sympathy of a
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romantic girl, and the fact that the blood of the unfortunate heroine was in her own veins
naturally heightened Edith’s interest in it. A portrait of Edith Bartlett and some of her
papers, including a packet of my own letters, were among the family heirlooms. The
picture represented a very beautiful young woman about whom it was easy to imagine all
manner of tender and romantic things. My letters gave Edith some material for forming a
distinct idea of my personality, and both together sufficed to make the sad old story very
real to her. She used to tell her parents, half jestingly, that she would never marry till she
found a lover like Julian West, and there were none such nowadays.
Now all this, of course, was merely the daydreaming of a girl whose mind had never been
taken up by a love affair of her own, and would have had no serious consequence but for
the discovery that morning of the buried vault in her father’s garden and the revelation of
the identity of its inmate. For when the apparently lifeless form had been borne into the
house, the face in the locket found upon the breast was instantly recognized as that of
Edith Bartlett, and by that fact, taken in connection with the other circumstances, they
knew that I was no other than Julian West. Even had there been no thought, as at first
there was not, of my resuscitation, Mrs. Leete said she believed that this event would
have affected her daughter in a critical and life-long manner. The presumption of some
subtle ordering of destiny, involving her fate with mine, would under all circumstances
have possessed an irresistible fascination for almost any woman.
Whether when I came back to life a few hours afterward, and from the first seemed to
turn to her with a peculiar dependence and to find a special solace in her company, she
had been too quick in giving her love at the first sign of mine, I could now, her mother
said, judge for myself. If I thought so, I must remember that this, after all, was the
twentieth and not the nineteenth century, and love was, no doubt, now quicker in growth,
as well as franker in utterance than then.
From Mrs. Leete I went to Edith. When I found her, it was first of all to take her by both
hands and stand a long time in rapt contemplation of her face. As I gazed, the memory of
that other Edith, which had been affected as with a benumbing shock by the tremendous
experience that had parted us, revived, and my heart was dissolved with tender and pitiful
emotions, but also very blissful ones. For she who brought to me so poignantly the sense
of my loss was to make that loss good. It was as if from her eyes Edith Bartlett looked
into mine, and smiled consolation to me. My fate was not alone the strangest, but the
most fortunate that ever befell a man. A double miracle had been wrought for me. I had
not been stranded upon the shore of this strange world to find myself alone and
companionless. My love, whom I had dreamed lost, had been reëmbodied for my
consolation. When at last, in an ecstasy of gratitude and tenderness, I folded the lovely
girl in my arms, the two Ediths were blended in my thought, nor have they ever since
been clearly distinguished. I was not long in finding that on Edith’s part there was a
corresponding confusion of identities. Never, surely, was there between freshly united
lovers a stranger talk than ours that afternoon. She seemed more anxious to have me
speak of Edith Bartlett than of herself, of how I had loved her than how I loved herself,
rewarding my fond words concerning another woman with tears and tender smiles and
pressures of the hand.
“You must not love me too much for myself,” she said. “I shall be very jealous for her. I
shall not let you forget her. I am going to tell you something which you may think
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strange. Do you not believe that spirits sometimes come back to the world to fulfill some
work that lay near their hearts? What if I were to tell you that I have sometimes thought
that her spirit lives in me,—that Edith Bartlett, not Edith Leete, is my real name. I cannot
know it; of course none of us can know who we really are; but I can feel it. Can you
wonder that I have such a feeling, seeing how my life was affected by her and by you,
even before you came. So you see you need not trouble to love me at all, if only you are
true to her. I shall not be likely to be jealous.”
Dr. Leete had gone out that afternoon, and I did not have an interview with him till later.
He was not, apparently, wholly unprepared for the intelligence I conveyed, and shook my
hand heartily.
“Under any ordinary circumstances, Mr. West, I should say that this step had been taken
on rather short acquaintance; but these are decidedly not ordinary circumstances. In
fairness, perhaps I ought to tell you,” he added, smilingly, “that while I cheerfully consent
to the proposed arrangement, you must not feel too much indebted to me, as I judge my
consent is a mere formality. From the moment the secret of the locket was out, it had to
be, I fancy. Why, bless me, if Edith had not been there to redeem her great-grandmother’s
pledge, I really apprehend that Mrs. Leete’s loyalty to me would have suffered a severe
strain.”
That evening the garden was bathed in moonlight, and till midnight Edith and I wandered
to and fro there, trying to grow accustomed to our happiness.
“What should I have done if you had not cared for me?” she exclaimed. “I was afraid you
were not going to. What should I have done then, when I felt I was consecrated to you!
As soon as you came back to life, I was as sure as if she had told me that I was to be to
you what she could not be, but that could only be if you would let me. Oh, how I wanted
to tell you that morning, when you felt so terribly strange among us, who I was, but dared
not open my lips about that, or let father or mother”—
“That must have been what you would not let your father tell me!” I exclaimed, referring
to the conversation I had overheard as I came out of my trance.
“Of course it was,” Edith laughed. “Did you only just guess that? Father being only a
man, thought that it would make you feel among friends to tell you who we were. He did
not think of me at all. But mother knew what I meant, and so I had my way. I could never
have looked you in the face if you had known who I was. It would have been forcing
myself on you quite too boldly. I am afraid you think I did that to-day, as it was. I am sure
I did not mean to, for I know girls were expected to hide their feelings in your day, and I
was dreadfully afraid of shocking you. Ah me, how hard it must have been for them to
have always had to conceal their love like a fault. Why did they think it such a shame to
love any one till they had been given permission? It is so odd to think of waiting for
permission to fall in love. Was it because men in those days were angry when girls loved
them? That is not the way women would feel, I am sure, or men either, I think, now. I
don’t understand it at all. That will be one of the curious things about the women of those
days that you will have to explain to me. I don’t believe Edith Bartlett was so foolish as
the others.”
After sundry ineffectual attempts at parting, she finally insisted that we must say good
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night. I was about to imprint upon her lips the positively last kiss, when she said, with an
indescribable archness:—
“One thing troubles me. Are you sure that you quite forgive Edith Bartlett for marrying
any one else? The books that have come down to us make out lovers of your time more
jealous than fond, and that is what makes me ask. It would be a great relief to me if I
could feel sure that you were not in the least jealous of my great-grandfather for marrying
your sweetheart. May I tell my great-grandmother’s picture when I go to my room that
you quite forgive her for proving false to you?”
Will the reader believe it, this coquettish quip, whether the speaker herself had any idea
of it or not, actually touched and with the touching cured a preposterous ache of
something like jealousy which I had been vaguely conscious of ever since Mrs. Leete had
told me of Edith Bartlett’s marriage. Even while I had been holding Edith Bartlett’s great-
granddaughter in my arms, I had not, till this moment, so illogical are some of our
feelings, distinctly realized that but for that marriage I could not have done so. The
absurdity of this frame of mind could only be equalled by the abruptness with which it
dissolved as Edith’s roguish query cleared the fog from my perceptions. I laughed as I
kissed her.
“You may assure her of my entire forgiveness,” I said, “although if it had been any man
but your great-grandfather whom she married, it would have been a very different
matter.”
On reaching my chamber that night I did not open the musical telephone that I might be
lulled to sleep with soothing tunes, as had become my habit. For once my thoughts made
better music than even twentieth century orchestras discourse, and it held me enchanted
till well toward morning, when I fell asleep.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
“It’s a little after the time you told me to wake you, sir. You did not come out of it as
quick as common, sir.”
The voice was the voice of my man Sawyer. I started bolt upright in bed and stared
around. I was in my underground chamber. The mellow light of the lamp which always
burned in the room when I occupied it illumined the familiar walls and furnishings. By
my bedside, with the glass of sherry in his hand which Dr. Pillsbury prescribed on first
rousing from a mesmeric sleep, by way of awakening the torpid physical functions, stood
Sawyer.
“Better take this right off, sir,” he said, as I stared blankly at him. “You look kind of
flushed like, sir, and you need it.”
I tossed off the liquor and began to realize what had happened to me. It was, of course,
very plain. All that about the twentieth century had been a dream. I had but dreamed of
that enlightened and care-free race of men and their ingeniously simple institutions, of the
glorious new Boston with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains, and its
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universal reign of comfort. The amiable family which I had learned to know so well, my
genial host and Mentor, Dr. Leete, his wife, and their daughter, the second and more
beauteous Edith, my betrothed,—these, too, had been but figments of a vision.
For a considerable time I remained in the attitude in which this conviction had come over
me, sitting up in bed gazing at vacancy, absorbed in recalling the scenes and incidents of
my fantastic experience. Sawyer, alarmed at my looks, was meanwhile anxiously
inquiring what was the matter with me. Roused at length by his importunities to a
recognition of my surroundings, I pulled myself together with an effort and assured the
faithful fellow that I was all right. “I have had an extraordinary dream, that’s all, Sawyer,”
I said, “a most-ex-traor-dinary-dream.”
I dressed in a mechanical way, feeling lightheaded and oddly uncertain of myself, and sat
down to the coffee and rolls which Sawyer was in the habit of providing for my
refreshment before I left the house. The morning newspaper lay by the plate. I took it up,
and my eye fell on the date, May 31, 1887. I had known, of course, from the moment I
opened my eyes that my long and detailed experience in another century had been a
dream, and yet it was startling to have it so conclusively demonstrated that the world was
but a few hours older than when I had lain down to sleep.
Glancing at the table of contents at the head of the paper, which reviewed the news of the
morning, I read the following summary:—
“FOREIGN AFFAIRS.—The impending war between France and Germany. The French
Chambers asked for new military credits to meet Germany’s increase of her army.
Probability that all Europe will be involved in case of war.—Great suffering among the
unemployed in London. They demand work. Monster demonstration to be made. The
authorities uneasy.—Great strikes in Belgium. The government preparing to repress
outbreaks. Shocking facts in regard to the employment of girls in Belgium coal mines.
—Wholesale evictions in Ireland.
“HOME AFFAIRS.—The epidemic of fraud unchecked. Embezzlement of half a million in
New York.—Misappropriation of a trust fund by executors. Orphans left penniless.
—Clever system of thefts by a bank teller; $50,000 gone.—The coal barons decide to
advance the price of coal and reduce production.—Speculators engineering a great wheat
corner at Chicago.—A clique forcing up the price of coffee.—Enormous land-grabs of
Western syndicates.—Revelations of shocking corruption among Chicago officials.
Systematic bribery.—The trials of the Boodle aldermen to go on at New York.—Large
failures of business houses. Fears of a business crisis.—A large grist of burglaries and
larcenies.—A woman murdered in cold blood for her money at New Haven.—A
householder shot by a burglar in this city last night.—A man shoots himself in Worcester
because he could not get work. A large family left destitute.—An aged couple in New
Jersey commit suicide rather than go to the poor-house.—Pitiable destitution among the
women wage-workers in the great cities.—Startling growth of illiteracy in
Massachusetts.—More insane asylums wanted.—Decoration Day addresses. Professor
Brown’s oration on the moral grandeur of nineteenth century civilization.”
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It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked; there could be no kind of
doubt about that. Its complete microcosm this summary of the day’s news had presented,
even to that last unmistakable touch of fatuous self-complacency. Coming after such a
damning indictment of the age as that one day’s chronicle of world-wide bloodshed,
greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy of Mephistopheles, and yet of all whose
eyes it had met this morning I was, perhaps, the only one who perceived the cynicism,
and but yesterday I should have perceived it no more than the others. That strange dream
it was which had made all the difference. For I know not how long, I forgot my
surroundings after this, and was again in fancy moving in that vivid dream-world, in that
glorious city, with its homes of simple comfort and its gorgeous public palaces. Around
me were again faces unmarred by arrogance or servility, by envy or greed, by anxious
care or feverish ambition, and stately forms of men and women who had never known
fear of a fellow man or depended on his favor, but always, in the words of that sermon
which still rang in my ears, had “stood up straight before God.”
With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable loss, not the less poignant that it was a
loss of what had never really been, I roused at last from my reverie, and soon after left the
house.
A dozen times between my door and Washington Street I had to stop and pull myself
together, such power had been in that vision of the Boston of the future to make the real
Boston strange. The squalor and malodorousness of the town struck me, from the
moment I stood upon the street, as facts I had never before observed. But yesterday,
moreover, it had seemed quite a matter of course that some of my fellow-citizens should
wear silks, and others rags, that some should look well fed, and others hungry. Now on
the contrary the glaring disparities in the dress and condition of the men and women who
brushed each other on the sidewalks shocked me at every step, and yet more the entire
indifference which the prosperous showed to the plight of the unfortunate. Were these
human beings, who could behold the wretchedness of their fellows without so much as a
change of countenance? And yet, all the while, I knew well that it was I who had
changed, and not my contemporaries. I had dreamed of a city whose people fared all alike
as children of one family and were one another’s keepers in all things.
Another feature of the real Boston, which assumed the extraordinary effect of strangeness
that marks familiar things seen in a new light, was the prevalence of advertising. There
had been no personal advertising in the Boston of the twentieth century, because there
was no need of any, but here the walls of the buildings, the windows, the broadsides of
the newspapers in every hand, the very pavements, everything in fact in sight, save the
sky, were covered with the appeals of individuals who sought, under innumerable
pretexts, to attract the contributions of others to their support. However the wording
might vary, the tenor of all these appeals was the same:—
“Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones, am the right one.
Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones. Look at me. Make no mistake,
John Jones is the man and nobody else. Let the rest starve, but for God’s sake remember
John Jones!”
Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness of the spectacle most impressed me, so
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suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I know not. Wretched men, I was moved to
cry, who, because they will not learn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be
beggars of one another from the least to the greatest! This horrible babel of shameless
self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamor of conflicting boasts,
appeals, and adjurations, this stupendous system of brazen beggary, what was it all but
the necessity of a society in which the opportunity to serve the world according to his
gifts, instead of being secured to every man as the first object of social organization, had
to be fought for!
I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood and laughed aloud, to
the scandal of the passers-by. For my life I could not have helped it, with such a mad
humor was I moved at sight of the interminable rows of stores on either side, up and
down the street so far as I could see,—scores of them, to make the spectacle more utterly
preposterous, within a stone’s throw devoted to selling the same sort of goods. Stores!
stores! stores! miles of stores! ten thousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this
one city, which in my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse,
as they were ordered through one great store in every quarter, where the buyer, without
waste of time or labor, found under one roof the world’s assortment in whatever line he
desired. There the labor of distribution had been so slight as to add but a scarcely
perceptible fraction to the cost of commodities to the user. The cost of production was
virtually all he paid. But here the mere distribution of the goods, their handling alone,
added a fourth, a third, a half and more, to the cost. All these ten thousand plants must be
paid for, their rent, their staffs of superintendence, their platoons of salesmen, their ten
thousand sets of accountants, jobbers, and business dependents, with all they spent in
advertising themselves and fighting one another, and the consumers must do the paying.
What a famous process for beggaring a nation!
Were these serious men I saw about me, or children, who did their business on such a
plan? Could they be reasoning beings, who did not see the folly which, when the product
is made and ready for use, wastes so much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with
a spoon that leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they not likely to go
hungry?
I had passed through Washington Street thousands of times before and viewed the ways
of those who sold merchandise, but my curiosity concerning them was as if I had never
gone by their way before. I took wondering note of the show windows of the stores, filled
with goods arranged with a wealth of pains and artistic device to attract the eye. I saw the
throngs of ladies looking in, and the proprietors eagerly watching the effect of the bait. I
went within and noted the hawk-eyed floor-walker watching for business, overlooking
the clerks, keeping them up to their task of inducing the customers to buy, buy, buy, for
money if they had it, for credit if they had it not, to buy what they wanted not, more than
they wanted, what they could not afford. At times I momentarily lost the clue and was
confused by the sight. Why this effort to induce people to buy? Surely that had nothing to
do with the legitimate business of distributing products to those who needed them. Surely
it was the sheerest waste to force upon people what they did not want, but what might be
useful to another. The nation was so much the poorer for every such achievement. What
were these clerks thinking of? Then I would remember that they were not acting as
distributors like those in the store I had visited in the dream Boston. They were not
serving the public interest, but their immediate personal interest, and it was nothing to
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them what the ultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, if but
they increased their own hoard, for these goods were their own, and the more they sold
and the more they got for them, the greater their gain. The more wasteful the people
were, the more articles they did not want which they could be induced to buy, the better
for these sellers. To encourage prodigality was the express aim of the ten thousand stores
of Boston.
Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a whit worse men than any others in Boston. They
must earn a living and support their families, and how were they to find a trade to do it by
which did not necessitate placing their individual interests before those of others and that
of all? They could not be asked to starve while they waited for an order of things such as
I had seen in my dream, in which the interest of each and that of all were identical. But,
God in heaven! what wonder, under such a system as this about me—what wonder that
the city was so shabby, and the people so meanly dressed, and so many of them ragged
and hungry!
Some time after this it was that I drifted over into South Boston and found myself among
the manufacturing establishments. I had been in this quarter of the city a hundred times
before, just as I had been on Washington Street, but here, as well as there, I now first
perceived the true significance of what I witnessed. Formerly I had taken pride in the fact
that, by actual count, Boston had some four thousand independent manufacturing
establishments; but in this very multiplicity and independence I recognized now the
secret of the insignificant total product of their industry.
If Washington Street had been like a lane in Bedlam, this was a spectacle as much more
melancholy as production is a more vital function, than distribution. For not only were
these four thousand establishments not working in concert, and for that reason alone
operating at prodigious disadvantage, but, as if this did not involve a sufficiently
disastrous loss of power, they were using their utmost skill to frustrate one another’s
effort, praying by night and working by day for the destruction of one another’s
enterprises.
The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers resounding from every side was not the hum
of a peaceful industry, but the clangor of swords wielded by foemen. These mills and
shops were so many forts, each under its own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops
about it, and its sappers busy below, undermining them.
Within each one of these forts the strictest organization of industry was insisted on; the
separate gangs worked under a single central authority. No interference and no
duplicating of work were permitted. Each had his allotted task, and none were idle. By
what hiatus in the logical faculty, by what lost link of reasoning, account, then, for the
failure to recognize the necessity of applying the same principle to the organization of the
national industries as a whole, to see that if lack of organization could impair the
efficiency of a shop, it must have effects as much more disastrous in disabling the
industries of the nation at large as the latter are vaster in volume and more complex in the
relationship of their parts.
People would be prompt enough to ridicule an army in which there were neither
companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, or army corps,—no unit of
organization, in fact, larger than the corporal’s squad, with no officer higher than a
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corporal, and all the corporals equal in authority. And yet just such an army were the
manufacturing industries of nineteenth century Boston, an army of four thousand
independent squads led by four thousand independent corporals, each with a separate
plan of campaign.
Knots of idle men were to be seen here and there on every side, some idle because they
could find no work at any price, others because they could not get what they thought a
fair price.
I accosted some of the latter, and they told me their grievances. It was very little comfort
I could give them. “I am sorry for you,” I said. “You get little enough, certainly, and yet
the wonder to me is, not that industries conducted as these are do not pay you living
wages, but that they are able to pay you any wages at all.”
Making my way back again after this to the peninsular city, toward three o’clock I stood
on State Street, staring, as if I had never seen them before, at the banks and brokers’
offices, and other financial institutions, of which there had been in the State Street of my
vision no vestige. Business men, confidential clerks, and errand boys were thronging in
and out of the banks, for it wanted but a few minutes of the closing hour. Opposite me
was the bank where I did business, and presently I crossed the street, and, going in with
the crowd, stood in a recess of the wall looking on at the army of clerks handling money,
and the cues of depositors at the tellers’ windows. An old gentleman whom I knew, a
director of the bank, passing me and observing my contemplative attitude, stopped a
moment.
“Interesting sight, isn’t it, Mr. West,” he said. “Wonderful piece of mechanism; I find it so
myself. I like sometimes to stand and look on at it just as you are doing. It’s a poem, sir, a
poem, that’s what I call it. Did you ever think, Mr. West, that the bank is the heart of the
business system? From it and to it, in endless flux and reflux, the life blood goes. It is
flowing in now. It will flow out again in the morning;” and pleased with his little conceit,
the old man passed on smiling.
Yesterday I should have considered the simile apt enough, but since then I had visited a
world incomparably more affluent than this, in which money was unknown and without
conceivable use. I had learned that it had a use in the world around me only because the
work of producing the nation’s livelihood, instead of being regarded as the most strictly
public and common of all concerns, and as such conducted by the nation, was abandoned
to the hap-hazard efforts of individuals. This original mistake necessitated endless
exchanges to bring about any sort of general distribution of products. These exchanges
money effected—how equitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenement house
districts to the Back Bay—at the cost of an army of men taken from productive labor to
manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns of its machinery, and a generally
debauching influence on mankind which had justified its description, from ancient time,
as the “root of all evil.”
Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken the throbbing of an
abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called “a wonderful piece of mechanism”
was an imperfect device to remedy an unnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a
self-made cripple.
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After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the business quarter for an hour or
two, and later sat a while on one of the benches of the Common, finding an interest
merely in watching the throngs that passed, such as one has in studying the populace of a
foreign city, so strange since yesterday had my fellow citizens and their ways become to
me. For thirty years I had lived among them, and yet I seemed to have never noted before
how drawn and anxious were their faces, of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute
faces of the educated as well as the dull masks of the ignorant. And well it might be so,
for I saw now, as never before I had seen so plainly, that each as he walked constantly
turned to catch the whispers of a spectre at his ear, the spectre of Uncertainty. “Do your
work never so well,” the spectre was whispering,—”rise early and toil till late, rob
cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never know security. Rich you may be now and
still come to poverty at last. Leave never so much wealth to your children, you cannot
buy the assurance that your son may not be the servant of your servant, or that your
daughter will not have to sell herself for bread.”
A man passing by thrust an advertising card in my hand, which set forth the merits of
some new scheme of life insurance. The incident reminded me of the only device,
pathetic in its admission of the universal need it so poorly supplied, which offered these
tired and hunted men and women even a partial protection from uncertainty. By this
means, those already well-to-do, I remembered, might purchase a precarious confidence
that after their death their loved ones would not, for a while at least, be trampled under
the feet of men. But this was all, and this was only for those who could pay well for it.
What idea was possible to these wretched dwellers in the land of Ishmael, where every
man’s hand was against each and the hand of each against every other, of true life
insurance as I had seen it among the people of that dream land, each of whom, by virtue
merely of his membership in the national family, was guaranteed against need of any sort,
by a policy underwritten by one hundred million fellow countrymen.
Some time after this it was that I recall a glimpse of myself standing on the steps of a
building on Tremont Street, looking at a military parade. A regiment was passing. It was
the first sight in that dreary day which had inspired me with any other emotions than
wondering pity and amazement. Here at last were order and reason, an exhibition of what
intelligent coöperation can accomplish. The people who stood looking on with kindling
faces,—could it be that the sight had for them no more than but a spectacular interest?
Could they fail to see that it was their perfect concert of action, their organization under
one control, which made these men the tremendous engine they were, able to vanquish a
mob ten times as numerous? Seeing this so plainly, could they fail to compare the
scientific manner in which the nation went to war with the unscientific manner in which
it went to work? Would they not query since what time the killing of men had been a task
so much more important than feeding and clothing them, that a trained army should be
deemed alone adequate to the former, while the latter was left to a mob?
It was now toward nightfall, and the streets were thronged with the workers from the
stores, the shops, and mills. Carried along with the stronger part of the current, I found
myself, as it began to grow dark, in the midst of a scene of squalor and human
degradation such as only the South Cove tenement district could present. I had seen the
mad wasting of human labor; here I saw in direst shape the want that waste had bred.
From the black doorways and windows of the rookeries on every side came gusts of fetid
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air. The streets and alleys reeked with the effluvia of a slave ship’s between-decks. As I
passed I had glimpses within of pale babies gasping out their lives amid sultry stenches,
of hopeless-faced women deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood no trait save
weakness, while from the windows leered girls with brows of brass. Like the starving
bands of mongrel curs that infest the streets of Moslem towns, swarms of half-clad
brutalized children filled the air with shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled
among the garbage that littered the court-yards.
There was nothing in all this that was new to me. Often had I passed through this part of
the city and witnessed its sights with feelings of disgust mingled with a certain
philosophical wonder at the extremities mortals will endure and still cling to life. But not
alone as regarded the economical follies of this age, but equally as touched its moral
abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since that vision of another century. No
more did I look upon the woful dwellers in this Inferno with a callous curiosity as
creatures scarcely human. I saw in them my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children,
flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of human wretchedness about
me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced my heart like a knife, so that I could
not repress sighs and groans. I not only saw but felt in my body all that I saw.
Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more closely, I perceived that
they were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many living sepulchres. On each brutal
brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a soul dead within.
As I looked, horror struck, from one death’s head to another, I was affected by a singular
hallucination. Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed upon each of these
brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind
and soul had lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly faces, and of the reproach
that could not be gainsaid which was in their eyes, that the full piteousness of the ruin
that had been wrought was revealed to me. I was moved with contrition as with a strong
agony, for I had been one of those who had endured that these things should be. I had
been one of those who, well knowing that they were, had not desired to hear or be
compelled to think much of them, but had gone on as if they were not, seeking my own
pleasure and profit. Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great
multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me
from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential
rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy
brother Abel?
I have no clear recollection of anything after this till I found myself standing on the
carved stone steps of the magnificent home of my betrothed in Commonwealth avenue.
Amid the tumult of my thoughts that day, I had scarcely once thought of her, but now
obeying some unconscious impulse my feet had found the familiar way to her door. I was
told that the family were at dinner, but word was sent out that I should join them at table.
Besides the family, I found several guests present, all known to me. The table glittered
with plate and costly china. The ladies were sumptuously dressed and wore the jewels of
queens. The scene was one of costly elegance and lavish luxury. The company was in
excellent spirits, and there was plentiful laughter and a running fire of jests.
To me it was as if, in wandering through the place of doom, my blood turned to tears by
its sights, and my spirit attuned to sorrow, pity, and despair, I had happened in some glade
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upon a merry party of roisterers. I sat in silence until Edith began to rally me upon my
sombre looks, What ailed me? The others presently joined in the playful assault, and I
became a target for quips and jests. Where had I been, and what had I seen to make such
a dull fellow of me?
“I have been in Golgotha,” at last I answered. “I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross!
Do none of you know what sights the sun and stars look down on in this city, that you can
think and talk of anything else? Do you not know that close to your doors a great
multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth
to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hush your laughter you will hear
their grievous voices, the piteous crying of the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse
curses of men sodden in misery, turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an army
of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped your ears that you
do not hear these doleful sounds? For me, I can hear nothing else.”
Silence followed my words. A passion of pity had shaken me as I spoke, but when I
looked around upon the company, I saw that, far from being stirred as I was, their faces
expressed a cold and hard astonishment, mingled in Edith’s with extreme mortification, in
her father’s with anger. The ladies were exchanging scandalized looks, while one of the
gentlemen had put up his eyeglass and was studying me with an air of scientific curiosity,
When I saw that things which were to me so intolerable moved them not at all, that words
that melted my heart to speak had only offended them with the speaker, I was at first
stunned and then overcome with a desperate sickness and faintness at the heart. What
hope was there for the wretched, for the world, if thoughtful men and tender women were
not moved by things like these! Then I bethought myself that it must be because I had not
spoken aright. No doubt I had put the case badly. They were angry because they thought I
was berating them, when God knew I was merely thinking of the horror of the fact
without any attempt to assign the responsibility for it.
I restrained my passion, and tried to speak calmly and logically that I might correct this
impression. I told them that I had not meant to accuse them, as if they, or the rich in
general, were responsible for the misery of the world. True indeed it was, that the
superfluity which they wasted would, otherwise bestowed, relieve much bitter suffering.
These costly viands, these rich wines, these gorgeous fabrics and glistening jewels
represented the ransom of many lives. They were verily not without the guiltiness of
those who waste in a land stricken with famine. Nevertheless, all the waste of all the rich,
were it saved, would go but a little way to cure the poverty of the world. There was so
little to divide that even if the rich went share and share with the poor, there would be but
a common fare of crusts, albeit made very sweet then by brotherly love.
The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world’s poverty. It
was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men, that made the race so miserable, but a
hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal world-darkening blunder. And then I showed them
how four fifths of the labor of men was utterly wasted by the mutual warfare, the lack of
organization and concert among the workers. Seeking to make the matter very plain, I
instanced the case of arid lands where the soil yielded the means of life only by careful
use of the watercourses for irrigation. I showed how in such countries it was counted the
most important function of the government to see that the water was not wasted by the
selfishness or ignorance of individuals, since otherwise there would be famine. To this
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end its use was strictly regulated and systematized, and individuals of their mere caprice
were not permitted to dam it or divert it, or in any way to tamper with it.
The labor of men, I explained, was the fertilizing stream which alone rendered earth
habitable. It was but a scanty stream at best, and its use required to be regulated by a
system which expended every drop to the best advantage, if the world were to be
supported in abundance. But how far from any system was the actual practice! Every man
wasted the precious fluid as he wished, animated only by the equal motives of saving his
own crop and spoiling his neighbor’s, that his might sell the better. What with greed and
what with spite some fields were flooded while others were parched, and half the water
ran wholly to waste. In such a land, though a few by strength or cunning might win the
means of luxury, the lot of the great mass must be poverty, and of the weak and ignorant
bitter want and perennial famine.
Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it had neglected, and regulate for
the common good the course of the life-giving stream, and the earth would bloom like
one garden, and none of its children lack any good thing. I described the physical felicity,
mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would then attend the lives of all men.
With fervency I spoke of that new world, blessed with plenty, purified by justice and
sweetened by brotherly kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed, but
which might so easily be made real. But when I had expected now surely the faces
around me to light up with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more dark, angry, and
scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showed only aversion and dread, while the
men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation and contempt. “Madman!” “Pestilent
fellow!” “Fanatic!” “Enemy of society!” were some of their cries, and the one who had
before taken his eyeglass to me exclaimed, “He says we are to have no more poor. Ha!
ha!”
“Put the fellow out!” exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and at the signal the men
sprang from their chairs and advanced upon me.
It seemed to me that my heart would burst with the anguish of finding that what was to
me so plain and so all-important was to them meaningless, and that I was powerless to
make it other. So hot had been my heart that I had thought to melt an iceberg with its
glow, only to find at last the overmastering chill seizing my own vitals. It was not enmity
that I felt toward them as they thronged me, but pity only, for them and for the world.
Although despairing, I could not give over. Still I strove with them. Tears poured from
my eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate. I panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and
immediately afterward found myself sitting upright in bed in my room in Dr. Leete’s
house, and the morning sun shining through the open window into my eyes. I was
gasping. The tears were streaming down my face, and I quivered in every nerve.
As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and brought back to
his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to see the heaven’s vault spread above
him, so it was with me, as I realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the
dream, and my presence in the twentieth was the reality.
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The cruel sights which I had witnessed in my vision, and could so well confirm from the
experience of my former life, though they had, alas! once been, and must in the retrospect
to the end of time move the compassionate to tears, were, God be thanked, forever gone
by. Long ago oppressor and oppressed, prophet and scorner, had been dust. For
generations, rich and poor had been forgotten words.
But in that moment, while yet I mused with unspeakable thankfulness upon the greatness
of the world’s salvation and my privilege in beholding it, there suddenly pierced me like a
knife a pang of shame, remorse, and wondering self-reproach, that bowed my head upon
my breast and made me wish the grave had hid me with my fellows from the sun. For I
had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help on the deliverance whereat I
now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived in those cruel, insensate days, what had I done
to bring them to an end? I had been every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my
brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a worshipper of Chaos and
Old Night, as any of my fellows. So far as my personal influence went, it had been
exerted rather to hinder than to help forward the enfranchisement of the race which was
even then preparing. What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me, to rejoice
in a day whose dawning I had mocked?
“Better for you, better for you,” a voice within me rang, “had this evil dream been the
reality, and this fair reality the dream; better your part pleading for crucified humanity
with a scoffing generation, than here, drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of
trees whose husbandmen you stoned;” and my spirit answered, “Better, truly.”
When at length I raised my bowed head and looked forth from the window, Edith, fresh
as the morning, had come into the garden and was gathering flowers. I hastened to
descend to her. Kneeling before her, with my face in the dust, I confessed with tears how
little was my worth to breathe the air of this golden century, and how infinitely less to
wear upon my breast its consummate flower. Fortunate is he who, with a case so
desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful.
POSTSCRIPT.
THE RATE OF THE WORLD’S PROGRESS.
To the Editor of the Boston Transcript: The Transcript of March 30, 1888, contained a
review of Looking Backward, in response to which I beg to be allowed a word. The
description to which the book is devoted, of the radically new social and industrial
institutions and arrangements supposed to be enjoyed by the people of the United States
in the twentieth century, is not objected to as depicting a degree of human felicity and
moral development necessarily unattainable by the race, provided time enough had been
allowed for its evolution from the present chaotic state of society. In failing to allow this,
the reviewer thinks that the author has made an absurd mistake, which seriously detracts
from the value of the book as a work of realistic imagination. Instead of placing the
realization of the ideal social state a scant fifty years ahead, it is suggested that he should
have made his figure seventy-five centuries. There is certainly a large discrepancy
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between seventy-five centuries and fifty years, and if the reviewer is correct in his
estimate of the probable rate of human progress, the outlook of the world is decidedly
discouraging. But is he right? I think not.
Looking Backward, although in form a fanciful romance, is intended, in all seriousness,
as a forecast, in accordance with the principles of evolution, of the next stage in the
industrial and social development of humanity, especially in this country; and no part of it
is believed by the author to be better supported by the indications of probability than the
implied prediction that the dawn of the new era is already near at hand, and that the full
day will swiftly follow. Does this seem at first thought incredible, in view of the vastness
of the changes presupposed? What is the teaching of history, but that great national
transformations, while ages in unnoticed preparation, when once inaugurated, are
accomplished with a rapidity and resistless momentum proportioned to their magnitude,
not limited by it?
In 1759, when Quebec fell, the might of England in America seemed irresistible, and the
vassalage of the colonies assured. Nevertheless, thirty years later, the first President of
the American Republic was inaugurated. In 1849, after Novara, Italian prospects
appeared as hopeless as at any time since the Middle Ages; yet only fifteen years after,
Victor Emmanuel was crowned King of United Italy. In 1864, the fulfillment of the
thousand-year dream of German unity was apparently as far off as ever. Seven years later
it had been realized, and William had assumed at Versailles the Crown of Barbarossa. In
1832, the original Anti-slavery Society was formed in Boston by a few so-called
visionaries. Thirty-eight years later, in 1870, the society disbanded, its programme fully
carried out.
These precedents do not, of course, prove that any such industrial and social
transformation as is outlined in Looking Backward is impending; but they do show that,
when the moral and economical conditions for it are ripe, it may be expected to go
forward with great rapidity. On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so
like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes. The question is
not, then, how extensive the scene-shifting must be to set the stage for the new fraternal
civilization, but whether there are any special indications that a social transformation is at
hand. The causes that have been bringing it ever nearer have been at work from
immemorial time. To the stream of tendency setting toward an ultimate realization of a
form of society which, while vastly more efficient for material prosperity, should also
satisfy and not outrage the moral instincts, every sigh of poverty, every tear of pity, every
humane impulse, every generous enthusiasm, every true religious feeling, every act by
which men have given effect to their mutual sympathy by drawing more closely together
for any purpose, have contributed from the beginnings of civilization. That this long
stream of influence, ever widening and deepening, is at last about to sweep away the
barriers it has so long sapped, is at least one obvious interpretation of the present
universal ferment of men’s minds as to the imperfections of present social arrangements.
Not only are the toilers of the world engaged in something like a world-wide insurrection,
but true and humane men and women, of every degree, are in a mood of exasperation,
verging on absolute revolt, against social conditions that reduce life to a brutal struggle
for existence, mock every dictate of ethics and religion, and render wellnigh futile the
efforts of philanthropy.
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[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
As an iceberg, floating southward from the frozen North, is gradually undermined by
warmer seas, and, become at last unstable, churns the sea to yeast for miles around by the
mighty rockings that portend its overturn, so the barbaric industrial and social system,
which has come down to us from savage antiquity, undermined by the modern humane
spirit, riddled by the criticism of economic science, is shaking the world with convulsions
that presage its collapse.
All thoughtful men agree that the present aspect of society is portentous of great changes.
The only question is, whether they will be for the better or the worse. Those who believe
in man’s essential nobleness lean to the former view, those who believe in his essential
baseness to the latter. For my part, I hold to the former opinion. Looking Backward was
written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not far
away. Our children will surely see it, and we, too, who are already men and women, if we
deserve it by our faith and by our works.
EDWARD BELLAMY
FOOTNOTES:
In accounting for this state of mind it must be remembered that,
except for the topic of our conversations, there was in my
surroundings next to nothing to suggest what had befallen me. Within
a block of my home in the old Boston I could have found social circles
vastly more foreign to me. The speech of the Bostonians of the
twentieth century differs even less from that of their cultured ancestors
of the nineteenth than did that of the latter from the language of
Washington and Franklin, while the differences between the style of
dress and furniture of the two epochs are not more marked than I have
known fashion to make in the time of one generation.
I am informed since the above is in type that this lack of perfection
in the distributing service of some of the country districts is to be
remedied, and that soon every village will have its own set of tubes.
I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the
public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the
intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which
the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable
only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage
any ordinary taste for literature.
I fully admit the difficulty of accounting for the course of the
anarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidized by the
capitalists, but, at the same time, there is no doubt that the theory is
wholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at the time by any one,
though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect.
I may say that Dr. Leete’s warning has been fully justified by my
experience. The amount and intensity of amusement which the young
people of this day, and the young women especially, are able to extract
from what they are pleased to call the oddities of courtship in the
nineteenth century, appear unlimited.
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