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Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887

by Edward Bellamy · English · Gutenberg #624 · 458,812 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887

Author: Edward Bellamy


        
Release date: August 1, 1996 [eBook #624]
                Most recently updated: October 12, 2022

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOOKING BACKWARD, 2000 TO 1887 ***




Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.









LOOKING BACKWARD

From 2000 to 1887


by

Edward Bellamy






AUTHOR'S PREFACE

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 bimillennial
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.

JTABLE 5 28 1

Chapter 1

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 grand-parents
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 criticized by your ancestors. It
had been the effort of lawgivers 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.

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. 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 grand-parents 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 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
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 2

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
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 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 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 3

"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 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 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?"

"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 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 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 4

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."

"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 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.

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.


[1] 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.



Chapter 5

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 acquired 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 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 cooperate 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 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 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 it 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 stagecoaches. Oppressive
and intolerable as was the regime 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 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 contended."



Chapter 6

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 imaginable 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 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 opportunity,
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. 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 7

"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 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 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 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?" if demanded. "Has
some 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 8

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.

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 without 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 today 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 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 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 have 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 9

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 10

"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 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?"

"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."

"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.

"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."[1]

"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."


[1] 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.



Chapter 11

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."

"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 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 cooperation 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 coordinated
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 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 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 house-work, 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."

"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
cooperation 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 12

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.

"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 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 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 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 co-ordinate 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 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.

"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 cooperation, 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?"

"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?"

"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, 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 13

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 desert race could no longer resist the
martial delirium, and the swart nobles leaped to their feet; a thousand
scimetars 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 more harm than the others," replied Dr. Leete.
"In the fist 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 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 in 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."

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 bookwriters 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 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 14

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 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 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 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 bee

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