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Equality

by Edward Bellamy · English · Gutenberg #7303 · 916,498 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Equality

Author: Edward Bellamy


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7303]
                Most recently updated: February 7, 2015

Language: English

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Produced by Thomas Berger, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks and
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[Illustration: EDWARD BELLAMY.]


EQUALITY


by

EDWARD BELLAMY


Author of
Looking Backward, Dr. Heidenhoff's Process, Miss Ludington's Sister, etc.

       *       *       *       *       *

Second Edition

       *       *       *       *       *

PREFACE.

Looking Backward was a small book, and I was not able to get into it all
I wished to say on the subject. Since it was published what was left out
of it has loomed up as so much more important than what it contained that
I have been constrained to write another book. I have taken the date of
Looking Backward, the year 2000, as that of Equality, and have utilized
the framework of the former story as a starting point for this which I
now offer. In order that those who have not read Looking Backward may be
at no disadvantage, an outline of the essential features of that story is
subjoined:

In the year 1887 Julian West was a rich young man living in Boston. He
was soon to be married to a young lady of wealthy family named Edith
Bartlett, and meanwhile lived alone with his man-servant Sawyer in the
family mansion. Being a sufferer from insomnia, he had caused a chamber
to be built of stone beneath the foundation of the house, which he used
for a sleeping room. When even the silence and seclusion of this retreat
failed to bring slumber, he sometimes called in a professional mesmerizer
to put him into a hypnotic sleep, from which Sawyer knew how to arouse
him at a fixed time. This habit, as well as the existence of the
underground chamber, were secrets known only to Sawyer and the hypnotist
who rendered his services. On the night of May 30, 1887, West sent for
the latter, and was put to sleep as usual. The hypnotist had previously
informed his patron that he was intending to leave the city permanently
the same evening, and referred him to other practitioners. That night the
house of Julian West took fire and was wholly destroyed. Remains
identified as those of Sawyer were found and, though no vestige of West
appeared, it was assumed that he of course had also perished.

One hundred and thirteen years later, in September, A. D. 2000, Dr.
Leete, a physician of Boston, on the retired list, was conducting
excavations in his garden for the foundations of a private laboratory,
when the workers came on a mass of masonry covered with ashes and
charcoal. On opening it, a vault, luxuriously fitted up in the style of a
nineteenth-century bedchamber, was found, and on the bed the body of a
young man looking as if he had just lain down to sleep. Although great
trees had been growing above the vault, the unaccountable preservation of
the youth's body tempted Dr. Leete to attempt resuscitation, and to his
own astonishment his efforts proved successful. The sleeper returned to
life, and after a short time to the full vigor of youth which his
appearance had indicated. His shock on learning what had befallen him was
so great as to have endangered his sanity but for the medical skill of
Dr. Leete, and the not less sympathetic ministrations of the other
members of the household, the doctor's wife, and Edith the beautiful
daughter. Presently, however, the young man forgot to wonder at what had
happened to himself in his astonishment on learning of the social
transformation through which the world had passed while he lay sleeping.
Step by step, almost as to a child, his hosts explained to him, who had
known no other way of living except the struggle for existence, what were
the simple principles of national co-operation for the promotion of the
general welfare on which the new civilization rested. He learned that
there were no longer any who were or could be richer or poorer than
others, but that all were economic equals. He learned that no one any
longer worked for another, either by compulsion or for hire, but that all
alike were in the service of the nation working for the common fund,
which all equally shared, and that even necessary personal attendance, as
of the physician, was rendered as to the state like that of the military
surgeon. All these wonders, it was explained, had very simply come about
as the results of replacing private capitalism by public capitalism, and
organizing the machinery of production and distribution, like the
political government, as business of general concern to be carried on for
the public benefit instead of private gain.

But, though it was not long before the young stranger's first
astonishment at the institutions of the new world had passed into
enthusiastic admiration and he was ready to admit that the race had for
the first time learned how to live, he presently began to repine at a
fate which had introduced him to the new world, only to leave him
oppressed by a sense of hopeless loneliness which all the kindness of his
new friends could not relieve, feeling, as he must, that it was dictated
by pity only. Then it was that he first learned that his experience had
been a yet more marvelous one than he had supposed. Edith Leete was no
other than the great-granddaughter of Edith Bartlett, his betrothed, who,
after long mourning her lost lover, had at last allowed herself to be
consoled. The story of the tragical bereavement which had shadowed her
early life was a family tradition, and among the family heirlooms were
letters from Julian West, together with a photograph which represented so
handsome a youth that Edith was illogically inclined to quarrel with her
great-grandmother for ever marrying anybody else. As for the young man's
picture, she kept it on her dressing table. Of course, it followed that
the identity of the tenant of the subterranean chamber had been fully
known to his rescuers from the moment of the discovery; but Edith, for
reasons of her own, had insisted that he should not know who she was till
she saw fit to tell him. When, at the proper time, she had seen fit to do
this, there was no further question of loneliness for the young man, for
how could destiny more unmistakably have indicated that two persons were
meant for each other?

His cup of happiness now being full, he had an experience in which it
seemed to be dashed from his lips. As he lay on his bed in Dr. Leete's
house he was oppressed by a hideous nightmare. It seemed to him that he
opened his eyes to find himself on his bed in the underground chamber
where the mesmerizer had put him to sleep. Sawyer was just completing the
passes used to break the hypnotic influence. He called for the morning
paper, and read on the date line May 31, 1887. Then he knew that all this
wonderful matter about the year 2000, its happy, care-free world of
brothers and the fair girl he had met there were but fragments of a
dream. His brain in a whirl, he went forth into the city. He saw
everything with new eyes, contrasting it with what he had seen in the
Boston of the year 2000. The frenzied folly of the competitive industrial
system, the inhuman contrasts of luxury and woe--pride and
abjectness--the boundless squalor, wretchedness, and madness of the whole
scheme of things which met his eye at every turn, outraged his reason and
made his heart sick. He felt like a sane man shut up by accident in a
madhouse. After a day of this wandering he found himself at nightfall in
a company of his former companions, who rallied him on his distraught
appearance. He told them of his dream and what it had taught him of the
possibilities of a juster, nobler, wiser social system. He reasoned with
them, showing how easy it would be, laying aside the suicidal folly of
competition, by means of fraternal co-operation, to make the actual world
as blessed as that he had dreamed of. At first they derided him, but,
seeing his earnestness, grew angry, and denounced him as a pestilent
fellow, an anarchist, an enemy of society, and drove him from them. Then
it was that, in an agony of weeping, he awoke, this time awaking really,
not falsely, and found himself in his bed in Dr. Leete's house, with the
morning sun of the twentieth century shining in his eyes. Looking from
the window of his room, he saw Edith in the garden gathering flowers for
the breakfast table, and hastened to descend to her and relate his
experience. At this point we will leave him to continue the narrative for
himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I.--A SHARP CROSS-EXAMINER

II.--WHY THE REVOLUTION DID NOT COME EARLIER

III.--I ACQUIRE A STAKE IN THE COUNTRY

IV.--A TWENTIETH-CENTURY BANK PARLOR

V.--I EXPERIENCE A NEW SENSATION

VI.--HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE

VII.--A STRING OF SURPRISES

VIII.--THE GREATEST WONDER YET--FASHION DETHRONED

IX.--SOMETHING THAT HAD NOT CHANGED

X.--A MIDNIGHT PLUNGE

XI.--LIFE THE BASIS OF THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY

XII.--HOW INEQUALITY OF WEALTH DESTROYS LIBERTY

XIII.--PRIVATE CAPITAL STOLEN FROM THE SOCIAL FUND

XIV.--WE LOOK OVER MY COLLECTION OF HARNESSES

XV.--WHAT WE WERE COMING TO BUT FOR THE REVOLUTION

XVI.--AN EXCUSE THAT CONDEMNED

XVII.--THE REVOLUTION SAVES PRIVATE PROPERTY FROM MONOPOLY

XVIII.--AN ECHO OF THE PAST

XIX.--"CAN A MAID FORGET HER ORNAMENTS?"

XX.--WHAT THE REVOLUTION DID FOR WOMEN

XXI.--AT THE GYMNASIUM

XXII.--ECONOMIC SUICIDE OF THE PROFIT SYSTEM

XXIII.--"THE PARABLE OF THE WATER TANK"

XXIV.--I AM SHOWN ALL THE KINGDOMS OF THE EARTH

XXV.--THE STRIKERS

XXVI.--FOREIGN COMMERCE UNDER PROFITS; PROTECTION AND FREE TRADE, OR
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA

XXVII.--HOSTILITY OF A SYSTEM OF VESTED INTERESTS TO IMPROVEMENT

XXVIII.--HOW THE PROFIT SYSTEM NULLIFIED THE BENEFIT OF INVENTIONS

XXIX.--I RECEIVE AN OVATION

XXX.--WHAT UNIVERSAL CULTURE MEANS

XXXI.--"NEITHER IN THIS MOUNTAIN NOR AT JERUSALEM"

XXXII.--ERITIS SICUT DEUS

XXXIII.--SEVERAL IMPORTANT MATTERS OVERLOOKED

XXXIV.--WHAT STARTED THE REVOLUTION

XXXV.--WHY THE REVOLUTION WENT SLOW AT FIRST BUT FAST AT LAST

XXXVI.--THEATER-GOING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

XXXVII.--THE TRANSITION PERIOD

XXXVIII.--THE BOOK OF THE BLIND


       *       *       *       *       *

EQUALITY.

       *       *       *       *       *

CHAPTER I.

A SHARP CROSS-EXAMINER.

With many expressions of sympathy and interest Edith listened to the
story of my dream. When, finally, I had made an end, she remained musing.

"What are you thinking about?" I said.

"I was thinking," she answered, "how it would have been if your dream had
been true."

"True!" I exclaimed. "How could it have been true?"

"I mean," she said, "if it had all been a dream, as you supposed it was
in your nightmare, and you had never really seen our Republic of the
Golden Rule or me, but had only slept a night and dreamed the whole thing
about us. And suppose you had gone forth just as you did in your dream,
and had passed up and down telling men of the terrible folly and
wickedness of their way of life and how much nobler and happier a way
there was. Just think what good you might have done, how you might have
helped people in those days when they needed help so much. It seems to me
you must be almost sorry you came back to us."

"You look as if you were almost sorry yourself," I said, for her wistful
expression seemed susceptible of that interpretation.

"Oh, no," she answered, smiling. "It was only on your own account. As for
me, I have very good reasons for being glad that you came back."

"I should say so, indeed. Have you reflected that if I had dreamed it all
you would have had no existence save as a figment in the brain of a
sleeping man a hundred years ago?"

"I had not thought of that part of it," she said smiling and still half
serious; "yet if I could have been more useful to humanity as a fiction
than as a reality, I ought not to have minded the--the inconvenience."

But I replied that I greatly feared no amount of opportunity to help
mankind in general would have reconciled me to life anywhere or under any
conditions after leaving her behind in a dream--a confession of shameless
selfishness which she was pleased to pass over without special rebuke, in
consideration, no doubt, of my unfortunate bringing up.

"Besides," I resumed, being willing a little further to vindicate myself,
"it would not have done any good. I have just told you how in my
nightmare last night, when I tried to tell my contemporaries and even my
best friends about the nobler way men might live together, they derided
me as a fool and madman. That is exactly what they would have done in
reality had the dream been true and I had gone about preaching as in the
case you supposed."

"Perhaps a few might at first have acted as you dreamed they did," she
replied. "Perhaps they would not at once have liked the idea of economic
equality, fearing that it might mean a leveling down for them, and not
understanding that it would presently mean a leveling up of all together
to a vastly higher plane of life and happiness, of material welfare and
moral dignity than the most fortunate had ever enjoyed. But even if the
rich had at first mistaken you for an enemy to their class, the poor, the
great masses of the poor, the real nation, they surely from the first
would have listened as for their lives, for to them your story would have
meant glad tidings of great joy."

"I do not wonder that you think so," I answered, "but, though I am still
learning the A B C of this new world, I knew my contemporaries, and I
know that it would not have been as you fancy. The poor would have
listened no better than the rich, for, though poor and rich in my day
were at bitter odds in everything else, they were agreed in believing
that there must always be rich and poor, and that a condition of material
equality was impossible. It used to be commonly said, and it often seemed
true, that the social reformer who tried to better the condition of the
people found a more discouraging obstacle in the hopelessness of the
masses he would raise than in the active resistance of the few, whose
superiority was threatened. And indeed, Edith, to be fair to my own
class, I am bound to say that with the best of the rich it was often as
much this same hopelessness as deliberate selfishness that made them what
we used to call conservative. So you see, it would have done no good even
if I had gone to preaching as you fancied. The poor would have regarded
my talk about the possibility of an equality of wealth as a fairy tale,
not worth a laboring man's time to listen to. Of the rich, the baser sort
would have mocked and the better sort would have sighed, but none would
have given ear seriously."

But Edith smiled serenely.

"It seems very audacious for me to try to correct your impressions of
your own contemporaries and of what they might be expected to think and
do, but you see the peculiar circumstances give me a rather unfair
advantage. Your knowledge of your times necessarily stops short with
1887, when you became oblivious of the course of events. I, on the other
hand, having gone to school in the twentieth century, and been obliged,
much against my will, to study nineteenth-century history, naturally know
what happened after the date at which your knowledge ceased. I know,
impossible as it may seem to you, that you had scarcely fallen into that
long sleep before the American people began to be deeply and widely
stirred with aspirations for an equal order such as we enjoy, and that
very soon the political movement arose which, after various mutations,
resulted early in the twentieth century in overthrowing the old system
and setting up the present one."

This was indeed interesting information to me, but when I began to
question Edith further, she sighed and shook her head.

"Having tried to show my superior knowledge, I must now confess my
ignorance. All I know is the bare fact that the revolutionary movement
began, as I said, very soon after you fell asleep. Father must tell you
the rest. I might as well admit while I am about it, for you would soon
find it out, that I know almost nothing either as to the Revolution or
nineteenth-century matters generally. You have no idea how hard I have
been trying to post myself on the subject so as to be able to talk
intelligently with you, but I fear it is of no use. I could not
understand it in school and can not seem to understand it any better now.
More than ever this morning I am sure that I never shall. Since you have
been telling me how the old world appeared to you in that dream, your
talk has brought those days so terribly near that I can almost see them,
and yet I can not say that they seem a bit more intelligible than
before."

"Things were bad enough and black enough certainly," I said; "but I don't
see what there was particularly unintelligible about them. What is the
difficulty?"

"The main difficulty comes from the complete lack of agreement between
the pretensions of your contemporaries about the way their society was
organized and the actual facts as given in the histories."

"For example?" I queried.

"I don't suppose there is much use in trying to explain my trouble," she
said. "You will only think me stupid for my pains, but I'll try to make
you see what I mean. You ought to be able to clear up the matter if
anybody can. You have just been telling me about the shockingly unequal
conditions of the people, the contrasts of waste and want, the pride and
power of the rich, the abjectness and servitude of the poor, and all the
rest of the dreadful story."

"Yes."

"It appears that these contrasts were almost as great as at any previous
period of history."

"It is doubtful," I replied, "if there was ever a greater disparity
between the conditions of different classes than you would find in a half
hour's walk in Boston, New York, Chicago, or any other great city of
America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century."

"And yet," said Edith, "it appears from all the books that meanwhile the
Americans' great boast was that they differed from all other and former
nations in that they were free and equal. One is constantly coming upon
this phrase in the literature of the day. Now, you have made it clear
that they were neither free nor equal in any ordinary sense of the word,
but were divided as mankind had always been before into rich and poor,
masters and servants. Won't you please tell me, then, what they meant by
calling themselves free and equal?"

"It was meant, I suppose, that they were all equal before the law."

"That means in the courts. And were the rich and poor equal in the
courts? Did they receive the same treatment?"

"I am bound to say," I replied, "that they were nowhere else more
unequal. The law applied in terms to all alike, but not in fact. There
was more difference in the position of the rich and the poor man before
the law than in any other respect. The rich were practically above the
law, the poor under its wheels."

"In what respect, then, were the rich and poor equal?"

"They were said to be equal in opportunities."

"Opportunities for what?"

"For bettering themselves, for getting rich, for getting ahead of others
in the struggle for wealth."

"It seems to me that only meant, if it were true, not that all were
equal, but that all had an equal chance to make themselves unequal. But
was it true that all had equal opportunities for getting rich and
bettering themselves?"

"It may have been so to some extent at one time when the country was
new," I replied, "but it was no more so in my day. Capital had
practically monopolized all economic opportunities by that time; there
was no opening in business enterprise for those without large capital
save by some extraordinary fortune."

"But surely," said Edith, "there must have been, in order to give at
least a color to all this boasting about equality, some one respect in
which the people were really equal?"

"Yes, there was. They were political equals. They all had one vote alike,
and the majority was the supreme lawgiver."

"So the books say, but that only makes the actual condition of things
more absolutely unaccountable."

"Why so?"

"Why, because if these people all had an equal voice in the
government--these toiling, starving, freezing, wretched masses of the
poor--why did they not without a moment's delay put an end to the
inequalities from which they suffered?"

"Very likely," she added, as I did not at once reply, "I am only showing
how stupid I am by saying this. Doubtless I am overlooking some important
fact, but did you not say that all the people, at least all the men, had
a voice in the government?"

"Certainly; by the latter part of the nineteenth century manhood suffrage
had become practically universal in America."

"That is to say, the people through their chosen agents made all the
laws. Is that what you mean?"

"Certainly."

"But I remember you had Constitutions of the nation and of the States.
Perhaps they prevented the people from doing quite what they wished."

"No; the Constitutions were only a little more fundamental sort of laws.
The majority made and altered them at will. The people were the sole and
supreme final power, and their will was absolute."

"If, then, the majority did not like any existing arrangement, or think
it to their advantage, they could change it as radically as they wished?"

"Certainly; the popular majority could do anything if it was large and
determined enough."

"And the majority, I understand, were the poor, not the rich--the ones
who had the wrong side of the inequalities that prevailed?"

"Emphatically so; the rich were but a handful comparatively."

"Then there was nothing whatever to prevent the people at any time, if
they just willed it, from making an end of their sufferings and
organizing a system like ours which would guarantee their equality and
prosperity?"

"Nothing whatever."

"Then once more I ask you to kindly tell me why, in the name of common
sense, they didn't do it at once and be happy instead of making a
spectacle of themselves so woeful that even a hundred years after it
makes us cry?"

"Because," I replied, "they were taught and believed that the regulation
of industry and commerce and the production and distribution of wealth
was something wholly outside of the proper province of government."

"But, dear me, Julian, life itself and everything that meanwhile makes
life worth living, from the satisfaction of the most primary physical
needs to the gratification of the most refined tastes, all that belongs
to the development of mind as well as body, depend first, last, and
always on the manner in which the production and distribution of wealth
is regulated. Surely that must have been as true in your day as ours."

"Of course."

"And yet you tell me, Julian, that the people, after having abolished the
rule of kings and taken the supreme power of regulating their affairs
into their own hands, deliberately consented to exclude from their
jurisdiction the control of the most important, and indeed the only
really important, class of their interests."

"Do not the histories say so?"

"They do say so, and that is precisely why I could never believe them.
The thing seemed so incomprehensible I thought there must be some way of
explaining it. But tell me, Julian, seeing the people did not think that
they could trust themselves to regulate their own industry and the
distribution of the product, to whom did they leave the responsibility?"

"To the capitalists."

"And did the people elect the capitalists?"

"Nobody elected them."

"By whom, then, were they appointed?"

"Nobody appointed them."

"What a singular system! Well, if nobody elected or appointed them, yet
surely they must have been accountable to somebody for the manner in
which they exercised powers on which the welfare and very existence of
everybody depended."

"On the contrary, they were accountable to nobody and nothing but their
own consciences."

"Their consciences! Ah, I see! You mean that they were so benevolent, so
unselfish, so devoted to the public good, that people tolerated their
usurpation out of gratitude. The people nowadays would not endure the
irresponsible rule even of demigods, but probably it was different in
your day."

"As an ex-capitalist myself, I should be pleased to confirm your surmise,
but nothing could really be further from the fact. As to any benevolent
interest in the conduct of industry and commerce, the capitalists
expressly disavowed it. Their only object was to secure the greatest
possible gain for themselves without any regard whatever to the welfare
of the public."

"Dear me! Dear me! Why you make out these capitalists to have been even
worse than the kings, for the kings at least professed to govern for the
welfare of their people, as fathers acting for children, and the good
ones did try to. But the capitalists, you say, did not even pretend to
feel any responsibility for the welfare of their subjects?"

"None whatever."

"And, if I understand," pursued Edith, "this government of the
capitalists was not only without moral sanction of any sort or plea of
benevolent intentions, but was practically an economic failure--that is,
it did not secure the prosperity of the people."

"What I saw in my dream last night," I replied, "and have tried to tell
you this morning, gives but a faint suggestion of the misery of the world
under capitalist rule."

Edith meditated in silence for some moments. Finally she said: "Your
contemporaries were not madmen nor fools; surely there is something you
have not told me; there must be some explanation or at least color of
excuse why the people not only abdicated the power of controling their
most vital and important interests, but turned them over to a class which
did not even pretend any interest in their welfare, and whose government
completely failed to secure it."

"Oh, yes," I said, "there was an explanation, and a very fine-sounding
one. It was in the name of individual liberty, industrial freedom, and
individual initiative that the economic government of the country was
surrendered to the capitalists."

"Do you mean that a form of government which seems to have been the most
irresponsible and despotic possible was defended in the name of liberty?"

"Certainly; the liberty of economic initiative by the individual."

"But did you not just tell me that economic initiative and business
opportunity in your day were practically monopolized by the capitalists
themselves?"

"Certainly. It was admitted that there was no opening for any but
capitalists in business, and it was rapidly becoming so that only the
greatest of the capitalists themselves had any power of initiative."

"And yet you say that the reason given for abandoning industry to
capitalist government was the promotion of industrial freedom and
individual initiative among the people at large."

"Certainly. The people were taught that they would individually enjoy
greater liberty and freedom of action in industrial matters under the
dominion of the capitalists than if they collectively conducted the
industrial system for their own benefit; that the capitalists would,
moreover, look out for their welfare more wisely and kindly than they
could possibly do it themselves, so that they would be able to provide
for themselves more bountifully out of such portion of their product as
the capitalists might be disposed to give them than they possibly could
do if they became their own employers and divided the whole product among
themselves."

"But that was mere mockery; it was adding insult to injury."

"It sounds so, doesn't it? But I assure you it was considered the
soundest sort of political economy in my time. Those who questioned it
were set down as dangerous visionaries."

"But I suppose the people's government, the government they voted for,
must have done something. There must have been some odds and ends of
things which the capitalists left the political government to attend to."

"Oh, yes, indeed. It had its hands full keeping the peace among the
people. That was the main part of the business of political governments
in my day."

"Why did the peace require such a great amount of keeping? Why didn't it
keep itself, as it does now?"

"On account of the inequality of conditions which prevailed. The strife
for wealth and desperation of want kept in quenchless blaze a hell of
greed and envy, fear, lust, hate, revenge, and every foul passion of the
pit. To keep this general frenzy in some restraint, so that the entire
social system should not resolve itself into a general massacre, required
an army of soldiers, police, judges, and jailers, and endless law-making
to settle the quarrels. Add to these elements of discord a horde of
outcasts degraded and desperate, made enemies of society by their
sufferings and requiring to be kept in check, and you will readily admit
there was enough for the people's government to do."

"So far as I can see," said Edith, "the main business of the people's
government was to struggle with the social chaos which resulted from its
failure to take hold of the economic system and regulate it on a basis of
justice."

"That is exactly so. You could not state the whole case more adequately
if you wrote a book."

"Beyond protecting the capitalist system from its own effects, did the
political government do absolutely nothing?"

"Oh, yes, it appointed postmasters and tidewaiters, maintained an army
and navy, and picked quarrels with foreign countries."

"I should say that the right of a citizen to have a voice in a government
limited to the range of functions you have mentioned would scarcely have
seemed to him of much value."

"I believe the average price of votes in close elections in America in my
time was about two dollars."

"Dear me, so much as that!" said Edith. "I don't know exactly what the
value of money was in your day, but I should say the price was rather
extortionate."

"I think you are right," I answered. "I used to give in to the talk about
the pricelessness of the right of suffrage, and the denunciation of those
whom any stress of poverty could induce to sell it for money, but from
the point of view to which you have brought me this morning I am inclined
to think that the fellows who sold their votes had a far clearer idea of
the sham of our so-called popular government, as limited to the class of
functions I have described, than any of the rest of us did, and that if
they were wrong it was, as you suggest, in asking too high a price."

"But who paid for the votes?"

"You are a merciless cross-examiner," I said. "The classes which had an
interest in controling the government--that is, the capitalists and the
office-seekers--did the buying. The capitalists advanced the money
necessary to procure the election of the office-seekers on the
understanding that when elected the latter should do what the capitalists
wanted. But I ought not to give you the impression that the bulk of the
votes were bought outright. That would have been too open a confession of
the sham of popular government as well as too expensive. The money
contributed by the capitalists to procure the election of the
office-seekers was mainly expended to influence the people by indirect
means. Immense sums under the name of campaign funds were raised for this
purpose and used in innumerable devices, such as fireworks, oratory,
processions, brass bands, barbecues, and all sorts of devices, the object
of which was to galvanize the people to a sufficient degree of interest
in the election to go through the motion of voting. Nobody who has not
actually witnessed a nineteenth-century American election could even
begin to imagine the grotesqueness of the spectacle."

"It seems, then," said Edith, "that the capitalists not only carried on
the economic government as their special province, but also practically
managed the machinery of the political government as well."

"Oh, yes, the capitalists could not have got along at all without control
of the political government. Congress, the Legislatures, and the city
councils were quite necessary as instruments for putting through their
schemes. Moreover, in order to protect themselves and their property
against popular outbreaks, it was highly needful that they should have
the police, the courts, and the soldiers devoted to their interests, and
the President, Governors, and mayors at their beck."

"But I thought the President, the Governors, and Legislatures represented
the people who voted for them."

"Bless your heart! no, why should they? It was to the capitalists and not
to the people that they owed the opportunity of officeholding. The people
who voted had little choice for whom they should vote. That question was
determined by the political party organizations, which were beggars to
the capitalists for pecuniary support. No man who was opposed to
capitalist interests was permitted the opportunity as a candidate to
appeal to the people. For a public official to support the people's
interest as against that of the capitalists would be a sure way of
sacrificing his career. You must remember, if you would understand how
absolutely the capitalists controled the Government, that a President,
Governor, or mayor, or member of the municipal, State, or national
council, was only temporarily a servant of the people or dependent on
their favour. His public position he held only from election to election,
and rarely long. His permanent, lifelong, and all-controling interest,
like that of us all, was his livelihood, and that was dependent, not on
the applause of the people, but the favor and patronage of capital, and
this he could not afford to imperil in the pursuit of the bubbles of
popularity. These circumstances, even if there had been no instances of
direct bribery, sufficiently explained why our politicians and
officeholders with few exceptions were vassals and tools of the
capitalists. The lawyers, who, on account of the complexities of our
system, were almost the only class competent for public business, were
especially and directly dependent upon the patronage of the great
capitalistic interests for their living."

"But why did not the people elect officials and representatives of their
own class, who would look out for the interests of the masses?"

"There was no assurance that they would be more faithful. Their very
poverty would make them the more liable to money temptation; and the
poor, you must remember, although so much more pitiable, were not morally
any better than the rich. Then, too--and that was the most important
reason why the masses of the people, who were poor, did not send men of
their class to represent them--poverty as a rule implied ignorance, and
therefore practical inability, even where the intention was good. As soon
as the poor man developed intelligence he had every temptation to desert
his class and seek the patronage of capital."

Edith remained silent and thoughtful for some moments.

"Really," she said, finally, "it seems that the reason I could not
understand the so-called popular system of government in your day is that
I was trying to find out what part the people had in it, and it appears
that they had no part at all."

"You are getting on famously," I exclaimed. "Undoubtedly the confusion of
terms in our political system is rather calculated to puzzle one at
first, but if you only grasp firmly the vital point that the rule of the
rich, the supremacy of capital and its interests, as against those of the
people at large, was the central principle of our system, to which every
other interest was made subservient, you will have the key that clears up
every mystery."




CHAPTER II.

WHY THE REVOLUTION DID NOT COME EARLIER.

Absorbed in our talk, we had not heard the steps of Dr. Leete as he
approached.

"I have been watching you for ten minutes from the house," he said,
"until, in fact, I could no longer resist the desire to know what you
find so interesting."

"Your daughter," said I, "has been proving herself a mistress of the
Socratic method. Under a plausible pretext of gross ignorance, she has
been asking me a series of easy questions, with the result that I see as
I never imagined it before the colossal sham of our pretended popular
government in America. As one of the rich I knew, of course, that we had
a great deal of power in the state, but I did not before realize how
absolutely the people were without influence in their own government."

"Aha!" exclaimed the doctor in great glee, "so my daughter gets up early
in the morning with the design of supplanting her father in his position
of historical instructor?"

Edith had risen from the garden bench on which we had been seated and was
arranging her flowers to take into the house. She shook her head rather
gravely in reply to her father's challenge.

"You need not be at all apprehensive," she said; "Julian has quite cured
me this morning of any wish I might have had to inquire further into the
condition of our ancestors. I have always been dreadfully sorry for the
poor people of that day on account of the misery they endured from
poverty and the oppression of the rich. Henceforth, however, I wash my
hands of them and shall reserve my sympathy for more deserving objects."

"Dear me!" said the doctor, "what has so suddenly dried up the fountains
of your pity? What has Julian been telling you?"

"Nothing, really, I suppose, that I had not read before and ought to have
known, but the story always seemed so unreasonable and incredible that I
never quite believed it until now. I thought there must be some modifying
facts not set down in the histories."

"But what is this that he has been telling you?"

"It seems," said Edith, "that these very people, these very masses of the
poor, had all the time the supreme control of the Government and were
able, if determined and united, to put an end at any moment to all the
inequalities and oppressions of which they complained and to equalize
things as we have done. Not only did they not do this, but they gave as a
reason for enduring their bondage that their liberties would be
endangered unless they had irresponsible masters to manage their
interests, and that to take charge of their own affairs would imperil
their freedom. I feel that I have been cheated out of all the tears I
have shed over the sufferings of such people. Those who tamely endure
wrongs which they have the power to end deserve not compassion but
contempt. I have felt a little badly that Julian should have been one of
the oppressor class, one of the rich. Now that I really understand the
matter, I am glad. I fear that, had he been one of the poor, one of the
mass of real masters, who with supreme power in their hands consented to
be bondsmen, I should have despised him."

Having thus served formal notice on my contemporaries that they must
expect no more sympathy from her, Edith went into the house, leaving me
with a vivid impression that if the men of the twentieth century should
prove incapable of preserving their liberties, the women might be trusted
to do so.

"Really, doctor," I said, "you ought to be greatly obliged to your
daughter. She has saved you lots of time and effort."

"How so, precisely?"

"By rendering it unnecessary for you to trouble yourself to explain to me
any further how and why you came to set up your nationalized industrial
system and your economic equality. If you have ever seen a desert or sea
mirage, you remember that, while the picture in the sky is very clear and
distinct in itself, its unreality is betrayed by a lack of detail, a sort
of blur, where it blends with the foreground on which you are standing.
Do you know that this new social order of which I have so strangely
become a witness has hitherto had something of this mirage effect? In
itself it is a scheme precise, orderly, and very reasonable, but I could
see no way by which it could have naturally grown out of the utterly
different conditions of the nineteenth century. I could only imagine that
this world transformation must have been the result of new ideas and
forces that had come into action since my day. I had a volume of
questions all ready to ask you on the subject, but now we shall be able
to use the time in talking of other things, for Edith has shown me in ten
minutes' time that the only wonderful thing about your organization of
the industrial system as public business is not that it has taken place,
but that it waited so long before taking place, that a nation of rational
beings consented to remain economic serfs of irresponsible masters for
more than a century after coming into possession of absolute power to
change at pleasure all social institutions which inconvenienced them."

"Really," said the doctor, "Edith has shown herself a very efficient
teacher, if an involuntary one. She has succeeded at one stroke in giving
you the modern point of view as to your period. As we look at it, the
immortal preamble of the American Declaration of Independence, away back
in 1776, logically contained the entire statement of the doctrine of
universal economic equality guaranteed by the nation collectively to its
members individually. You remember how the words run:

"'We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created
equal, with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights
governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these rights it is the right of the people to alter or to
abolish it and institute a new government, laying its foundations on such
principles and organizing its powers in such form as may seem most likely
to effect their safety and happiness.'

"Is it possible, Julian, to imagine any governmental system less adequate
than ours which could possibly realize this great ideal of what a true
people's government should be? The corner stone of our state is economic
equality, and is not that the obvious, necessary, and only adequate
pledge of these three birthrights--life, liberty, and happiness? What is
life without its material basis, and what is an equal right to life but a
right to an equal material basis for it? What is liberty? How can men be
free who must ask the right to labor and to live from their fellow-men
and seek their bread from the hands of others? How else can any
government guarantee liberty to men save by providing them a means of
labor and of life coupled with independence; and how could that be done
unless the government conducted the economic system upon which employment
and maintenance depend? Finally, what is implied in the equal right of
all to the pursuit of happiness? What form of happiness, so far as it
depends at all on material facts, is not bound up with economic
conditions; and how shall an equal opportunity for the pursuit of
happiness be guaranteed to all save by a guarantee of economic equality?"

"Yes," I said, "it is indeed all there, but why were we so long in seeing
it?"

"Let us make ourselves comfortable on this bench," said the doctor, "and
I will tell you what is the modern answer to the very interesting
question you raise. At first glance, certainly the delay of the world in
general, and especially of the American people, to realize that democracy
logically meant the substitution of popular government for the rule of
the rich in regulating the production and distribution of wealth seems
incomprehensible, not only because it was so plain an inference from the
idea of popular government, but also because it was one which the masses
of the people were so directly interested in carrying out. Edith's
conclusion that people who were not capable of so simple a process of
reasoning as that did not deserve much sympathy for the afflictions they
might so easily have remedied, is a very natural first impression.

"On reflection, however, I think we shall conclude that the time taken by
the world in general and the Americans in particular in finding out the
full meaning of democracy as an economic as well as a political
proposition was not greater than might have been expected, considering
the vastness of the conclusions involved. It is the democratic idea that
all human beings are peers in rights and dignity, and that the sole just
excuse and end of human governments is, therefore, the maintenance and
furtherance of the common welfare on equal terms. This idea was the
greatest social conception that the human mind had up to that time ever
formed. It contained, when first conceived, the promise and potency of a
complete transformation of all then existing social institutions, one and
all of which had hitherto been based and formed on the principle of
personal and class privilege and authority and the domination and selfish
use of the many by the few. But it was simply inconsistent with the
limitations of the human intellect that the implications of an idea so
prodigious should at once have been taken in. The idea must absolutely
have time to grow. The entire present order of economic democracy and
equality was indeed logically bound up in the first full statement of the
democratic idea, but only as the full-grown tree is in the seed: in the
one case, as in the other, time was an essential element in the evolution
of the result.

"We divide the history of the evolution of the democratic idea into two
broadly contrasted phases. The first of these we call the phase of
negative democracy. To understand it we must consider how the democratic
idea originated. Ideas are born of previous ideas and are long in
outgrowing the characteristics and limitations impressed on them by the
circumstances under which they came into existence. The idea of popular
government, in the case of America as in previous republican experiments
in general, was a protest against royal government and its abuses.
Nothing is more certain than that the signers of the immortal Declaration
had no idea that democracy necessarily meant anything more than a device
for getting along without kings. They conceived of it as a change in the
forms of government only, and not at all in the principles and purposes
of government.

"They were not, indeed, wholly without misgivings lest it might some time
occur to the sovereign people that, being sovereign, it would be a good
idea to use their sovereignty to improve their own condition. In fact,
they seem to have given some serious thought to that possibility, but so
little were they yet able to appreciate the logic and force of the
democratic idea that they believed it possible by ingenious clauses in
paper Constitutions to prevent the people from using their power to help
themselves even if they should wish to.

"This first phase of the evolution of democracy, during which it was
conceived of solely as a substitute for royalty, includes all the
so-called republican experiments up to the beginning of the twentieth
century, of which, of course, the American Republic was the most
important. During this period the democratic idea remained a mere protest
against a previous form of government, absolutely without any new
positive or vital principle of its own. Although the people had deposed
the king as driver of the social chariot, and taken the reins into their
own hands, they did not think as yet of anything but keeping the vehicle
in the old ruts and naturally the passengers scarcely noticed the change.

"The second phase in the evolution of the democratic idea began with the
awakening of the people to the perception that the deposing of kings,
instead of being the main end and mission of democracy, was merely
preliminary to its real programme, which was the use of the collective
social machinery for the indefinite promotion of the welfare of the
people at large.

"It is an interesting fact that the people began to think of applying
their political power to the improvement of their material condition in
Europe earlier than in America, although democratic forms had found much
less acceptance there. This was, of course, on account of the perennial
economic distress of the masses in the old countries, which prompted them
to think first about the bearing any new idea might have on the question
of livelihood. On the other hand, the general prosperity of the masses in
America and the comparative ease of making a living up to the beginning
of the last quarter of the nineteenth century account for the fact that
it was not till then that the American people began to think seriously of
improving their economic condition by collective action.

"During the negative phase of democracy it had been considered as
differing from monarchy only as two machines might differ, the general
use and purpose of which were the same. With the evolution of the
democratic idea into the second or positive phase, it was recognized that
the transfer of the supreme power from king and nobles to people meant
not merely a change in the forms of government, but a fundamental
revolution in the whole idea of government, its motives, purposes, and
functions--a revolution equivalent to a reversal of polarity of the
entire social system, carrying, so to speak, the entire compass card with
it, and making north south, and east west. Then was seen what seems so
plain to us that it is hard to understand why it was not always seen,
that instead of its being proper for the sovereign people to confine
themselves to the functions which the kings and classes had discharged
when they were in power, the presumption was, on the contrary, since the
interest of kings and classes had always been exactly opposed to those of
the people, that whatever the previous governments had done, the people
as rulers ought not to do, and whatever the previous governments had not
done, it would be presumably for the interest of the people to do; and
that the main use and function of popular government was properly one
which no previous government had ever paid any attention to, namely, the
use of the power of the social organization to raise the material and
moral welfare of the whole body of the sovereign people to the highest
possible point at which the same degree of welfare could be secured to
all--that is to say, an equal level. The democracy of the second or
positive phase triumphed in the great Revolution, and has since been the
only form of government known in the world."

"Which amounts to saying," I observed, "that there never was a democratic
government properly so called before the twentieth century."

"Just so," assented the doctor. "The so-called republics of the first
phase we class as pseudo-republics or negative democracies. They were
not, of course, in any sense, truly popular governments at all, but
merely masks for plutocracy, under which the rich were the real though
irresponsible rulers! You will readily see that they could have been
nothing else. The masses from the beginning of the world had been the
subjects and servants of the rich, but the kings had been above the rich,
and constituted a check on their dominion. The overthrow of the kings
left no check at all on the power of the rich, which became supreme. The
people, indeed, nominally were sovereigns; but as these sovereigns were
individually and as a class the economic serfs of the rich, and lived
at their mercy, the so-called popular government became the mere
stalking-horse of the capitalists.

"Regarded as necessary steps in the evolution of society from pure
monarchy to pure democracy, these republics of the negative phase mark a
stage of progress; but if regarded as finalities they were a type far
less admirable on the whole than decent monarchies. In respect especially
to their susceptibility to corruption and plutocratic subversion they
were the worst kind of government possible. The nineteenth century,
during which this crop of pseudo-democracies ripened for the sickle of
the great Revolution, seems to the modern view nothing but a dreary
interregnum of nondescript, _faineant_ government intervening
between the decadence of virile monarchy in the eighteenth century and
the rise of positive democracy in the twentieth. The period may be
compared to that of the minority of a king, during which the royal power
is abused by wicked stewards. The people had been proclaimed as
sovereign, but they had not yet assumed the sceptre."

"And yet," said I, "during the latter part of the nineteenth century,
when, as you say, the world had not yet seen a single specimen of popular
government, our wise men were telling us that the democratic system had
been fully tested and was ready to be judged on its results. Not a few of
them, indeed, went so far as to say that the democratic experiment had
proved a failure when, in point of fact, it seems that no experiment in
democracy, properly understood, had as yet ever been so much as
attempted."

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

"It is a very sympathetic task," he said, "to explain the slowness of the
masses in feeling their way to a comprehension of all that the democratic
idea meant for them, but it is one equally difficult and thankless to
account for the blank failure of the philosophers, historians, and
statesmen of your day to arrive at an intelligent estimate of the logical
content of democracy and to forecast its outcome. Surely the very
smallness of the practical results thus far achieved by the democratic
movement as compared with the magnitude of its proposition and the forces
behind it ought to have suggested to them that its evolution was yet but
in the first stage. How could intelligent men delude themselves with the
notion that the most portentous and revolutionary idea of all time had
exhausted its influence and fulfilled its mission in changing the title
of the executive of a nation from king to President, and the name of the
national Legislature from Parliament to Congress? If your pedagogues,
college professors and presidents, and others who were responsible for
your education, had been worth their salt, you would have found nothing
in the present order of economic equality that would in the least have
surprised you. You would have said at once that it was just what you had
been taught must necessarily be the next phase in the inevitable
evolution of the democratic idea."

Edith beckoned from the door and we rose from our seat.

"The revolutionary party in the great Revolution," said the doctor, as we
sauntered toward the house, "carried on the work of agitation and
propaganda under various names more or less grotesque and ill-fitting as
political party names were apt to be, but the one word democracy, with
its various equivalents and derivatives, more accurately and completely
expressed, explained, and justified their method, reason, and purpose
than a library of books could do. The American people fancied that they
had set up a popular government when they separated from England, but
they were deluded. In conquering the political power formerly exercised
by the king, the people had but taken the outworks of the fortress of
tyranny. The economic system which was the citadel and commanded every
part of the social structure remained in possession of private and
irresponsible rulers, and so long as it was so held, the possession of
the outworks was of no use to the people, and only retained by the
sufferance of the garrison of the citadel. The Revolution came when the
people saw that they must either take the citadel or evacuate the
outworks. They must either complete the work of establishing popular
government which had been barely begun by their fathers, or abandon all
that their fathers had accomplished."




CHAPTER III.

I ACQUIRE A STAKE IN THE COUNTRY.

On going into breakfast the ladies met us with a highly interesting piece
of intelligence which they had found in the morning's news. It was, in
fact, nothing less than an announcement of action taken by the United
States Congress in relation to myself. A resolution had, it appeared,
been unanimously passed which, after reciting the facts of my
extraordinary return to life, proceeded to clear up any conceivable
question that might arise as to my legal status by declaring me an
American citizen in full standing and entitled to all a citizen's rights
and immunities, but at the same time a guest of the nation, and as such
free of the duties and services incumbent upon citizens in general except
as I might choose to assume them.

Secluded as I had been hitherto in the Leete household, this was almost
the first intimation I had the public in my case. That interest, I was
now informed, had passed beyond my personality and was already producing
a general revival of the study of nineteenth-century literature and
politics, and especially of the history and philosophy of the transition
period, when the old order passed into the new.

"The fact is," said the doctor, "the nation has only discharged a debt of
gratitude in making you its guest, for you have already done more for our
educational interests by promoting historical study than a regiment of
instructors could achieve in a lifetime."

Recurring to the topic of the congressional resolution, the doctor said
that, in his opinion, it was superfluous, for though I had certainly
slept on my rights as a citizen rather an extraordinary length of time,
there was no ground on which I could be argued to have forfeited any of
them. However that might be, seeing the resolution left no doubt as to my
status, he suggested that the first thing we did after breakfast should
be to go down to the National Bank and open my citizen's account.

"Of course," I said, as we left the house, "I am glad to be relieved of
the necessity of being a pensioner on you any longer, but I confess I
feel a little cheap about accepting as a gift this generous provision of
the nation."

"My dear Julian," replied the doctor, "it is sometimes a little difficult
for me to quite get your point of view of our institutions."

"I should think it ought to be easy enough in this case. I feel as if I
were an object of public charity."

"Ah!" said the doctor, "you feel that the nation has done you a favor,
laid you under an obligation. You must excuse my obtuseness, but the fact
is we look at this matter of the economic provision for citizens from an
entirely different standpoint. It seems to us that in claiming and
accepting your citizen's maintenance you perform a civic duty,
whereby you put the nation--that is, the general body of your
fellow-citizens--under rather more obligation than you incur."

I turned to see if the doctor were not jesting, but he was evidently
quite serious.

"I ought by this time to be used to finding that everything goes by
contraries in these days," I said, "but really, by what inversion of
common sense, as it was understood in the nineteenth century, do you make
out that by accepting a pecuniary provision from the nation I oblige it
more than it obliges me?"

"I think it will be easy to make you see that," replied the doctor,
"without requiring you to do any violence to the methods of reasoning to
which your contemporaries were accustomed. You used to have, I believe, a
system of gratuitous public education maintained by the state."

"Yes."

"What was the idea of it?"

"That a citizen was not a safe voter without education."

"Precisely so. The state therefore at great expense provided free
education for the people. It was greatly for the advantage of the citizen
to accept this education just as it is for you to accept this provision,
but it was still more for the interest of the state that the citizen
should accept it. Do you see the point?"

"I can see that it is the interest of the state that I should accept an
education, but not exactly why it is for the state's interest that I
should accept a share of the public wealth."

"Nevertheless it is the same reason, namely, the public interest in good
government. We hold it to be a self-evident principle that every one who
exercises the suffrage should not only be educated, but should have a
stake in the country, in order that self-interest may be identified with
public interest. As the power exercised by every citizen through the
suffrage is the same, the economic stake should be the same, and so you
see we come to the reason why the public safety requires that you should
loyally accept your equal stake in the country quite apart from the
personal advantage you derive by doing so."

"Do you know," I said, "that this idea of yours, that every one who votes
should have an economic stake in the country, is one which our rankest
Tories were very fond of insisting on, but the practical conclusion they
drew from it was diametrically opposed to that which you draw? They would
have agreed with you on the axiom that political power and economic stake
in the country should go together, but the practical application they
made of it was negative instead of positive. You argue that because an
economic interest in the country should go with the suffrage, all who
have the suffrage should have that interest guaranteed them. They argued,
on the contrary, that from all who had not the economic stake the
suffrage should be taken away. There were not a few of my friends who
maintained that some such limitation of the suffrage was needed to save
the democratic experiment from failure."

"That is to say," observed the doctor, "it was proposed to save the
democratic experiment by abandoning it. It was an ingenious thought, but
it so happened that democracy was not an experiment which could be
abandoned, but an evolution which must be fulfilled. In what a striking
manner does that talk of your contemporaries about limiting the suffrage
to correspond with the economic position of citizens illustrate the
failure of even the most intelligent classes in your time to grasp the
full significance of the democratic faith which they professed! The
primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of the individual.
That dignity, consisting in the quality of human nature, is essentially
the same in all individuals, and therefore equality is the vital
principle of democracy. To this intrinsic and equal dignity of the
individual all material conditions must be made subservient, and personal
accidents and attributes subordinated. The raising up of the human being
without respect of persons is the constant and only rational motive of
the democratic policy. Contrast with this conception that precious notion
of your contemporaries as to restricting suffrage. Recognizing the
material disparities in the circumstances of individuals, they proposed
to conform the rights and dignities of the individual to his material
circumstances instead of conforming the material circumstances to the
essential and equal dignity of the man."

"In short," said I, "while under our system we conformed men to things,
you think it more reasonable to conform things to men?"

"That is, indeed," replied the doctor, "the vital difference between the
old and the new orders."

We walked in silence for some moments. Presently the doctor said: "I was
trying to recall an expression you just used which suggested a wide
difference between the sense in which the same phrase was understood in
your day and now is. I was saying that we thought everybody who voted
ought to have a property stake in the country, and you observed that some
people had the same idea in your time, but according to our view of what
a stake in the country is no one had it or could have it under your
economic system."

"Why not?" I demanded. "Did not men who owned property in a country--a
millionaire, for instance, like myself--have a stake in it?"

"In the sense that his property was geographically located in the country
it might be perhaps called a stake within the country but not a stake in
the country. It was the exclusive ownership of a piece of the country or
a portion of the wealth in the country, and all it prompted the owner to
was devotion to and care for that specific portion without regard to the
rest. Such a separate stake or the ambition to obtain it, far from making
its owner or seeker a citizen devoted to the common weal, was quite as
likely to make him a dangerous one, for his selfish interest was to
aggrandize his separate stake at the expense of his fellow-citizens and
of the public interest. Your millionaires--with no personal reflection
upon yourself, of course--appear to have been the most dangerous class of
citizens you had, and that is just what might be expected from their
having what you called but what we should not call a stake in the
country. Wealth owned in that way could only be a divisive and antisocial
influence.

"What we mean by a stake in the country is something which nobody could
possibly have until economic solidarity had replaced the private
ownership of capital. Every one, of course, has his own house and piece
of land if he or she desires them, and always his or her own income to
use at pleasure; but these are allotments for use only, and, being always
equal, can furnish no ground for dissension. The capital of the nation,
the source of all this consumption, is indivisibly held by all in common,
and it is impossible that there should be any dispute on selfish grounds
as to the administration of this common interest on which all private
interests depend, whatever differences of judgment there may be. The
citizen's share in this common fund is a sort of stake in the country
that makes it impossible to hurt another's interest without hurting one's
own, or to help one's own interest without promoting equally all other
interests. As to its economic bearings it may be said that it makes the
Golden Rule an automatic principle of government. What we would do for
ourselves we must of necessity do also for others. Until economic
solidarity made it possible to carry out in this sense the idea that
every citizen ought to have a stake in the country, the democratic system
never had a chance to develop its genius."

"It seems," I said, "that your foundation principle of economic equality
which I supposed was mainly suggested and intended in the interest of the
material well-being of the people, is quite as much a principle of
political policy for safeguarding the stability and wise ordering of
government."

"Most assuredly," replied the doctor. "Our economic system is a measure
of statesmanship quite as much as of humanity. You see, the first
condition of efficiency or stability in any government is that the
governing power should have a direct, constant, and supreme interest in
the general welfare--that is, in the prosperity of the whole state as
distinguished from any part of it. It had been the strong point of
monarchy that the king, for selfish reasons as proprietor of the country,
felt this interest. The autocratic form of government, solely on that
account, had always a certain rough sort of efficiency. It had been, on
the other hand, the fatal weakness of democracy, during its negative
phase previous to the great Revolution, that the people, who were the
rulers, had individually only an indirect and sentimental interest in the
state as a whole, or its machinery--their real, main, constant, and
direct interest being concentrated upon their personal fortunes, their
private stakes, distinct from and adverse to the general stake. In
moments of enthusiasm they might rally to the support of the
commonwealth, but for the most part that had no custodian, but was at the
mercy of designing men and factions who sought to plunder the
commonwealth and use the machinery of government for personal or class
ends. This was the structural weakness of democracies, by the effect of
which, after passing their first youth, they became invariably, as the
inequality of wealth developed, the most corrupt and worthless of all
forms of government and the most susceptible to misuse and perversion for
selfish, personal, and class purposes. It was a weakness incurable so
long as the capital of the country, its economic interests, remained in
private hands, and one that could be remedied only by the radical
abolition of private capitalism and the unification of the nation's
capital under collective control. This done, the same economic
motive--which, while the capital remained in private hands, was a
divisive influence tending to destroy that public spirit which is the
breath of life in a democracy--became the most powerful of cohesive
forces, making popular government not only ideally the most just but
practically the most successful and efficient of political systems. The
citizen, who before had been the champion of a part against the rest,
became by this change a guardian of the whole."




CHAPTER IV.

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY BANK PARLOR.

The formalities at the bank proved to be very simple. Dr. Leete
introduced me to the superintendent, and the rest followed as a matter of
course, the whole process not taking three minutes. I was informed that
the annual credit of the adult citizen for that year was $4,000, and that
the portion due me for the remainder of the year, it being the latter
part of September, was $1,075.41. Taking vouchers to the amount of $300,
I left the rest on deposit precisely as I should have done at one of the
nineteenth-century banks in drawing money for present use. The
transaction concluded, Mr. Chapin, the superintendent, invited me into
his office.

"How does our banking system strike you as compared with that of your
day?" he asked.

"It has one manifest advantage from the point of view of a penniless
_revenant_ like myself," I said--"namely, that one receives a credit
without having made a deposit; otherwise I scarcely know enough of it to
give an opinion."

"When you come to be more familiar with our banking methods," said the
superintendent. "I think you will be struck with their similarity to your
own. Of course, we have no money and nothing answering to money, but the
whole science of banking from its inception was preparing the way for the
abolition of money. The only way, really, in which our system differs
from yours is that every one starts the year with the same balance to his
credit and that this credit is not transferable. As to requiring deposits
before accounts are opened, we are necessarily quite as strict as your
bankers were, only in our case the people, collectively, make the deposit
for all at once. This collective deposit is made up of such provisions of
different commodities and such installations for the various public
services as are expected to be necessary. Prices or cost estimates are
put on these commodities and services, and the aggregate sum of the
prices being divided by the population gives the amount of the citizen's
personal credit, which is simply his aliquot share of the commodities and
services available for the year. No doubt, however, Dr. Leete has told
you all about this."

"But I was not here to be included in the estimate of the year," I said.
"I hope that my credit is not taken out of other people's."

"You need feel no concern," replied the superintendent. "While it is
astonishing how variations in demand balance one another when great
populations are concerned, yet it would be impossible to conduct so big a
business as ours without large margins. It is the aim in the production
of perishable things, and those in which fancy often changes, to keep as
little ahead of the demand as possible, but in all the important staples
such great surpluses are constantly carried that a two years' drought
would not affect the price of non-perishable produce, while an unexpected
addition of several millions to the population could be taken care of at
any time without disturbance."

"Dr. Leete has told me," I said, "that any part of the credit not used by
a citizen during the year is canceled, not being good for the next year.
I suppose that is to prevent the possibility of hoarding, by which the
equality of your economic condition might be undermined."

"It would have the effect to prevent such hoarding, certainly," said the
superintendent, "but it is otherwise needful to simplify the national
bookkeeping and prevent confusion. The annual credit is an order on a
specific provision available during a certain year. For the next year a
new calculation with somewhat different elements has to be made, and to
make it the books must be balanced and all orders canceled that have not
been presented, so that we may know just where we stand."

"What, on the other hand, will happen if I run through my credit before
the year is out?"

The superintendent smiled. "I have read," he said, "that the spendthrift
evil was quite a serious one in your day. Our system has the advantage
over yours that the most incorrigible spendthrift can not trench on his
principal, which consists in his indivisible equal share in the capital
of the nation. All he can at most do is to waste the annual dividend.
Should you do this, I have no doubt your friends will take care of you,
and if they do not you may be sure the nation will, for we have not the
strong stomachs that enabled our forefathers to enjoy plenty with hungry
people about them. The fact is, we are so squeamish that the knowledge
that a single individual in the nation was in want would keep us all
awake nights. If you insisted on being in need, you would have to hide
away for the purpose.

"Have you any idea," I asked, "how much this credit of $4,000 would have
been equal to in purchasing power in 1887?"

"Somewhere about $6,000 or $7,000, I should say," replied Mr. Chapin. "In
estimating the economic position of the citizen you must consider that a
great variety of services and commodities are now supplied gratuitously
on public account, which formerly individuals had to pay for, as, for
example, water, light, music, news, the theatre and opera, all sorts of
postal and electrical communications, transportation, and other things
too numerous to detail."

"Since you furnish so much on public or common account, why not furnish
everything in that way? It would simplify matters, I should say."

"We think, on the contrary, that it would complicate the administration,
and certainly it would not suit the people as well. You see, while we
insist on equality we detest uniformity, and seek to provide free play to
the greatest possible variety of tastes in our expenditure."

Thinking I might be interested in looking them over, the superintendent
had brought into the office some of the books of the bank. Without having
been at all expert in nineteenth-century methods of bookkeeping, I was
much impressed with the extreme simplicity of these accounts compared
with any I had been familiar with. Speaking of this, I added that it
impressed me the more, as I had received an impression that, great as
were the superiorities of the national co-operative system over our way
of doing business, it must involve a great increase in the amount of
bookkeeping as compared with what was necessary under the old system. The
superintendent and Dr. Leete looked at each other and smiled.

"Do you know, Mr. West," said the former, "it strikes us as very odd that
you should have that idea? We estimate that under our system one
accountant serves where dozens were needed in your day."

"But," said I, "the nation has now a separate account with or for every
man, woman, and child in the country."

"Of course," replied the superintendent, "but did it not have the same in
your day? How else could it have assessed and collected taxes or exacted
a dozen other duties from citizens? For example, your tax system alone
with its inquisitions, appraisements, machinery of collection and
penalties was vastly more complex than the accounts in these books before
you, which consist, as you see, in giving to every person the same credit
at the beginning of the year, and afterward simply recording the
withdrawals without calculations of interest or other incidents whatever.
In fact, Mr. West, so simple and invariable are the conditions that the
accounts are kept automatically by a machine, the accountant merely
playing on a keyboard."

"But I understand that every citizen has a record kept also of his
services as the basis of grading and regrading."

"Certainly, and a most minute one, with most careful guards against error
or unfairness. But it is a record having none of the complications of one
of your money or wages accounts for work done, but is rather like the
simple honor records of your educational institutions by which the
ranking of the students was determined."

"But the citizen also has relations with the public stores from which he
supplies his needs?"

"Certainly, but not a relation of account. As your people would have
said, all purchases are for cash only--that is, on the credit card."

"There remains," I persisted, "the accounting for goods and services
between the stores and the productive departments and between the several
departments."

"Certainly; but the whole system being under one head and all the parts
working together with no friction and no motive for any indirection, such
accounting is child's work compared with the adjustment of dealings
between the mutually suspicious private capitalists, who divided among
themselves the field of business in your day, and sat up nights devising
tricks to deceive, defeat, and overreach one another."

"But how about the elaborate statistics on which you base the
calculations that guide production? There at least is need of a good deal
of figuring."

"Your national and State governments," replied Mr. Chapin, "published
annually great masses of similar statistics, which, while often very
inaccurate, must have cost far more trouble to accumulate, seeing that
they involved an unwelcome inquisition into the affairs of private
persons instead of a mere collection of reports from the books of
different departments of one great business. Forecasts of probable
consumption every manufacturer, merchant, and storekeeper had to make in
your day, and mistakes meant ruin. Nevertheless, he could but guess,
because he had no sufficient data. Given the complete data that we have,
and a forecast is as much increased in certainty as it is simplified in
difficulty."

"Kindly spare me any further demonstration of the stupidity of my
criticism."

"Dear me, Mr. West, there is no question of stupidity. A wholly new
system of things always impresses the mind at first sight with an effect
of complexity, although it may be found on examination to be simplicity
itself. But please do not stop me just yet, for I have told you only one
side of the matter. I have shown you how few and simple are the accounts
we keep compared with those in corresponding relations kept by you; but
the biggest part of the subject is the accounts you had to keep which we
do not keep at all. Debit and credit are no longer known; interest,
rents, profits, and all the calculations based on them no more have any
place in human affairs. In your day everybody, besides his account with
the state, was involved in a network of accounts with all about him. Even
the humblest wage-earner was on the books of half a dozen tradesmen,
while a man of substance might be down in scores or hundreds, and this
without speaking of men not engaged in commerce. A fairly nimble dollar
had to be set down so many times in so many places, as it went from hand
to hand, that we calculate in about five years it must have cost itself
in ink, paper, pens, and clerk hire, let alone fret and worry. All these
forms of private and business accounts have now been done away with.
Nobody owes anybody, or is owed by anybody, or has any contract with
anybody, or any account of any sort with anybody, but is simply beholden
to everybody for such kindly regard as his virtues may attract."




CHAPTER V.

I EXPERIENCE A NEW SENSATION.

"Doctor," said I as we came out of the bank, "I have a most extraordinary
feeling."

"What sort of a feeling?"

"It is a sensation which I never had anything like before," I said, "and
never expected to have. I feel as if I wanted to go to work. Yes, Julian
West, millionaire, loafer by profession, who never did anything useful in
his life and never wanted to, finds himself seized with an overmastering
desire to roll up his sleeves and do something toward rendering an
equivalent for his living."

"But," said the doctor, "Congress has declared you the guest of the
nation, and expressly exempted you from the duty of rendering any sort of
public service."

"That is all very well, and I take it kindly, but I begin to feel that I
should not enjoy knowing that I was living on other people."

"What do you suppose it is," said the doctor, smiling, "that has given
you this sensitiveness about living on others which, as you say, you
never felt before?"

"I have never been much given to self-analysis," I replied, "but the
change of feeling is very easily explained in this case. I find myself
surrounded by a community every member of which not physically
disqualified is doing his or her own part toward providing the material
prosperity which I share. A person must be of remarkably tough
sensibilities who would not feel ashamed under such circumstances if he
did not take hold with the rest and do his part. Why didn't I feel that
way about the duty of working in the nineteenth century? Why, simply
because there was no such system then for sharing work, or indeed any
system at all. For the reason that there was no fair play or suggestion
of justice in the distribution of work, everybody shirked it who could,
and those who could not shirk it cursed the luckier ones and got even by
doing as bad work as they could. Suppose a rich young fellow like myself
had a feeling that he would like to do his part. How was he going to go
about it? There was absolutely no social organization by which labor
could be shared on any principle of justice. There was no possibility of
co-operation. We had to choose between taking advantage of the economic
system to live on other people or have them take advantage of it to live
on us. We had to climb on their backs as the only way of preventing them
from climbing on our backs. We had the alternative of profiting by an
unjust system or being its victims. There being no more moral
satisfaction in the one alternative than the other, we naturally
preferred the first. By glimpses all the more decent of us realized the
ineffable meanness of sponging our living out of the toilers, but our
consciences were completely bedeviled by an economic system which seemed
a hopeless muddle that nobody could see through or set right or do right
under. I will undertake to say that there was not a man of my set,
certainly not of my friends, who, placed just as I am this morning in
presence of an absolutely simple, just, and equal system for distributing
the industrial burden, would not feel just as I do the impulse to roll up
his sleeves and take hold."

"I am quite sure of it," said the doctor. "Your experience strikingly
confirms the chapter of revolutionary history which tells us that when
the present economic order was established those who had been under the
old system the most irreclaimable loafers and vagabonds, responding to
the absolute justice and fairness of the new arrangements, rallied to the
service of the state with enthusiasm. But talking of what you are to do,
why was not my former suggestion a good one, that you should tell our
people in lectures about the nineteenth century?"

"I thought at first that it would be a good idea," I replied, "but our
talk in the garden this morning has about convinced me that the very last
people who had any intelligent idea of the nineteenth century, what it
meant, and what it was leading to, were just myself and my contemporaries
of that time. After I have been with you a few years I may learn enough
about my own period to discuss it intelligently."

"There is something in that," replied the doctor. "Meanwhile, you see
that great building with the dome just across the square? That is our
local Industrial Exchange. Perhaps, seeing that we are talking of what
you are to do to make yourself useful, you may be interested in learning
a little of the method by which our people choose their occupations."

I readily assented, and we crossed the square to the exchange.

"I have given you thus far," said the doctor, "only a general outline of
our system of universal industrial service. You know that every one of
either sex, unless for some reason temporarily or permanently exempt,
enters the public industrial service in the twenty-first year, and after
three years of a sort of general apprenticeship in the unclassified
grades elects a special occupation, unless he prefers to study further
for one of the scientific professions. As there are a million youth, more
or less, who thus annually elect their occupations, you may imagine that
it must be a complex task to find a place for each in which his or her
own taste shall be suited as well as the needs of the public service."

I assured the doctor that I had indeed made this reflection.

"A very few moments will suffice," he said, "to disabuse your mind of
that notion and to show you how wonderfully a little rational system has
simplified the task of finding a fitting vocation in life which used to
be so difficult a matter in your day and so rarely was accomplished in a
satisfactory manner."

Finding a comfortable corner for us near one of the windows of the
central hall, the doctor presently brought a lot of sample blanks and
schedules and proceeded to explain them to me. First he showed me the
annual statement of exigencies by the General Government, specifying in
what proportion the force of workers that was to become available that
year ought to be distributed among the several occupations in order to
carry on the industrial service. That was the side of the subject which
represented the necessities of the public service that must be met. Next
he showed me the volunteering or preference blank, on which every youth
that year graduating from the unclassified service indicated, if he chose
to, the order of his preference as to the various occupations making up
the public service, it being inferred, if he did not fill out the blank,
that he or she was willing to be assigned for the convenience of the
service.

"But," said I, "locality of residence is often quite as important as the
kind of one's occupation. For example, one might not wish to be separated
from parents, and certainly would not wish to be from a sweetheart,
however agreeable the occupation assigned might be in other respects."

"Very true," said the doctor. "If, indeed, our industrial system
undertook to separate lovers and friends, husbands and wives, parents and
children, without regard to their wishes, it certainly would not last
long. You see this column of localities. If you make your cross against
Boston in that column, it becomes imperative upon the administration to
provide you employment somewhere in this district. It is one of the
rights of every citizen to demand employment within his home district.
Otherwise, as you say, ties of love and friendship might be rudely
broken. But, of course, one can not have his cake and eat it too; if you
make work in the home district imperative, you may have to take an
occupation to which you would have preferred some other that might have
been open to you had you been willing to leave home. However, it is not
common that one needs to sacrifice a chosen career to the ties of
affection. The country is divided into industrial districts or circles,
in each of which there is intended to be as nearly as possible a complete
system of industry, wherein all the important arts and occupations are
represented. It is in this way made possible for most of us to find an
opportunity in a chosen occupation without separation from friends. This
is the more simply done, as the modern means of communication have so far
abolished distance that the man who lives in Boston and works in
Springfield, one hundred miles away, is quite as near his place of
business as was the average workingman of your day. One who, living in
Boston, should work two hundred miles away (in Albany), would be far
better situated than the average suburbanite doing business in Boston a
century ago. But while a great number desire to find occupations at home,
there are also many who from love of change much prefer to leave the
scenes of their childhood. These, too, indicate their preferences by
marking the number of the district to which they prefer to be assigned.
Second or third preferences may likewise be indicated, so that it would
go hard indeed if one could not obtain a location in at least the part of
the country he desired, though the locality preference is imperative only
when the person desires to stay in the home district. Otherwise it is
consulted so far as consistent with conflicting claims. The volunteer
having thus filled out his preference blank, takes it to the proper
registrar and has his ranking officially stamped upon it."

"What is the ranking?" I asked.

"It is the figure which indicates his previous standing in the schools
and during his service as an unclassified worker, and is supposed to give
the best attainable criterion thus far of his relative intelligence,
efficiency, and devotion to duty. Where there are more volunteers for
particular occupations than there is room for, the lowest in ranking have
to be content with a second or third preference. The preference blanks
are finally handed in at the local exchange, and are collated at the
central office of the industrial district. All who have made home work
imperative are first provided for in accordance with rank. The blanks of
those preferring work in other districts are forwarded to the national
bureau and there collated with those from other districts, so that the
volunteers may be provided for as nearly as may be according to their
wishes, subject, where conflict of claim arises, to their relative
ranking right. It has always been observed that the personal
eccentricities of individuals in great bodies have a wonderful tendency
to balance and mutually complement one another, and this principle is
strikingly illustrated in our system of choice of occupation and
locality. The preference blanks are filled out in June, and by the first
of August everybody knows just where he or she is to report for service
in October.

"However, if any one has received an assignment which is decidedly
unwelcome either as to location or occupation, it is not even then, or
indeed at any time, too late to endeavor to find another. The
administration has done its best to adjust the individual aptitude and
wishes of each worker to the needs of the public service, but its
machinery is at his service for any further attempts he may wish to make
to suit himself better."

And then the doctor took me to the Transfer Department and showed me how
persons who were dissatisfied either with their assignment of occupation
or locality could put themselves in communication with all others in any
part of the country who were similarly dissatisfied, and arrange, subject
to liberal regulations, such exchanges as might be mutually agreeable.

"If a person is not absolutely unwilling to do anything at all," he said,
"and does not object to all parts of the country equally, he ought to be
able sooner or later to provide himself both with pretty nearly the
occupation and locality he desires. And if, after all, there should be
any one so dull that he can not hope to succeed in his occupation or make
a better exchange with another, yet there is no occupation now tolerated
by the state which would not have been as to its conditions a godsend to
the most fortunately situated workman of your day. There is none in which
peril to life or health is not reduced to a minimum, and the dignity and
rights of the worker absolutely guaranteed. It is a constant study of the
administration so to bait the less attractive occupations with special
advantages as to leisure and otherwise always to keep the balance of
preference between them as nearly true as possible; and if, finally,
there were any occupation which, after all, remained so distasteful as to
attract no volunteers, and yet was necessary, its duties would be
performed by all in rotation."

"As, for example," I said, "the work of repairing and cleansing the
sewers."

"If that sort of work were as offensive as it must have been in your day,
I dare say it might have to be done by a rotation in which all would take
their turn," replied the doctor, "but our sewers are as clean as our
streets. They convey only water which has been chemically purified and
deodorized before it enters them by an apparatus connected with every
dwelling. By the same apparatus all solid sewage is electrically
cremated, and removed in the form of ashes. This improvement in the sewer
system, which followed the great Revolution very closely, might have
waited a hundred years before introduction but for the Revolution,
although the necessary scientific knowledge and appliances had long been
available. The case furnishes merely one instance out of a thousand of
the devices for avoiding repulsive and perilous sorts of work which,
while simple enough, the world would never have troubled itself to adopt
so long as the rich had in the poor a race of uncomplaining economic
serfs on which to lay all their burdens. The effect of economic equality
was to make it equally the interest of all to avoid, so far as possible,
the more unpleasant tasks, since henceforth they must be shared by all.
In this way, wholly apart from the moral aspects of the matter, the
progress of chemical, sanitary, and mechanical science owes an
incalculable debt to the Revolution."

"Probably," I said, "you have sometimes eccentric persons--'crooked
sticks' we used to call them--who refuse to adapt themselves to the
social order on any terms or admit any such thing as social duty. If such
a person should flatly refuse to render any sort of industrial or useful
service on any terms, what would be done with him? No doubt there is a
compulsory side to your system for dealing with such persons?"

"Not at all," replied the doctor. "If our system can not stand on its
merits as the best possible arrangement for promoting the highest welfare
of all, let it fall. As to the matter of industrial service, the law is
simply that if any one shall refuse to do his or her part toward the
maintenance of the social order he shall not be allowed to partake of its
benefits. It would obviously not be fair to the rest that he should do
so. But as to compelling him to work against his will by force, such an
idea would be abhorrent to our people. The service of society is, above
all, a service of honor, and all its associations are what you used to
call chivalrous. Even as in your day soldiers would not serve with
skulkers, but drummed cowards out of the camp, so would our workers
refuse the companionship of persons openly seeking to evade their civic
duty."

"But what do you do with such persons?"

"If an adult, being neither criminal nor insane, should deliberately and
fixedly refuse to render his quota of service in any way, either in a
chosen occupation or, on failure to choose, in an assigned one, he would
be furnished with such a collection of seeds and tools as he might choose
and turned loose on a reservation expressly prepared for such persons,
corresponding a little perhaps with the reservations set apart for such
Indians in your day as were unwilling to accept civilization. There he
would be left to work out a better solution of the problem of existence
than our society offers, if he could do so. We think we have the best
possible social system, but if there is a better we want to know it, so
that we may adopt it. We encourage the spirit of experiment."

"And are there really cases," I said, "of individuals who thus
voluntarily abandon society in preference to fulfilling their social
duty?"

"There have been such cases, though I do not know that there are any at
the present time. But the provision for them exists."




CHAPTER VI.

HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE.

When we reached the house the doctor said:

"I am going to leave you to Edith this morning. The fact is, my duties as
mentor, while extremely to my taste, are not quite a sinecure. The
questions raised in our talks frequently suggest the necessity of
refreshing my general knowledge of the contrasts between your day and
this by looking up the historical authorities. The conversation this
morning has indicated lines of research which will keep me busy in the
library the rest of the day."

I found Edith in the garden, and received her congratulations upon my
fully fledged citizenship. She did not seem at all surprised on learning
my intention promptly to find a place in the industrial service.

"Of course you will want to enter the service as soon as you can," she
said. "I knew you would. It is the only way to get in touch with the
people and feel really one of the nation. It is the great event we all
look forward to from childhood."

"Talking of industrial service," I said, "reminds me of a question it has
a dozen times occurred to me to ask you. I understand that everyone who
is able to do so, women as well as men, serves the nation from twenty-one
to forty-five years of age in some useful occupation; but so far as I
have seen, although you are the picture of health and vigor, you have no
employment, but are quite like young ladies of elegant leisure in my day,
who spent their time sitting in the parlor and looking handsome. Of
course, it is highly agreeable to me that you should be so free, but how,
exactly, is so much leisure on your part squared with the universal
obligation of service?"

Edith was greatly amused. "And so you thought I was shirking? Had it not
occurred to you that there might probably be such things as vacations or
furloughs in the industrial service, and that the rather unusual and
interesting guest in our household might furnish a natural occasion for
me to take an outing if I could get it?"

"And can you take your vacation when you please?"

"We can take a portion of it when we please, always subject, of course,
to the needs of the service."

"But what do you do when you are at work--teach school, paint china, keep
books for the Government, stand behind a counter in the public stores, or
operate a typewriter or telegraph wire?"

"Does that list exhaust the number of women's occupations in your day?"

"Oh, no; those were only some of their lighter and pleasanter
occupations. Women were also the scrubbers, the washers, the servants of
all work. The most repulsive and humiliating kinds of drudgery were put
off upon the women of the poorer class; but I suppose, of course, you do
not do any such work."

"You may be sure that I do my part of whatever unpleasant things there
are to do, and so does every one in the nation; but, indeed, we have long
ago arranged affairs so that there is very little such work to do. But,
tell me, were there no women in your day who were machinists, farmers,
engineers, carpenters, iron workers, builders, engine drivers, or members
of the other great crafts?"

"There were no women in such occupations. They were followed by men
only."

"I suppose I knew that," she said; "I have read as much; but it is
strange to talk with a man of the nineteenth century who is so much like
a man of to-day and realize that the women were so different as to seem
like another order of beings."

"But, really," said I, "I don't understand how in these respects the
women can do very differently now unless they are physically much
stronger. Most of these occupations you have just mentioned were too
heavy for their strength, and for that reason, largely, were limited to
men, as I should suppose they must still be."

"There is not a trade or occupation in the whole list," replied Edith,
"in which women do not take part. It is partly because we are physically
much more vigorous than the poor creatures of your time that we do the
sorts of work that were too heavy for them, but it is still more an
account of the perfection of machinery. As we have grown stronger, all
sorts of work have grown lighter. Almost no heavy work is done directly
now; machines do all, and we only need to guide them, and the lighter the
hand that guides, the better the work done. So you see that nowadays
physical qualities have much less to do than mental with the choice of
occupations. The mind is constantly getting nearer to the work, and
father says some day we may be able to work by sheer will power directly
and have no need of hands at all. It is said that there are actually more
women than men in great machine works. My mother was first lieutenant in
a great iron works. Some have a theory that the sense of power which one
has in controlling giant engines appeals to women's sensibilities even
more than to men's. But really it is not quite fair to make you guess
what my occupation is, for I have not fully decided on it."

"But you said you were already at work."

"Oh, yes, but you know that before we choose our life occupation we are
three years in the unclassified or miscellaneous class of workers. I am
in my second year in that class."

"What do you do?"

"A little of everything and nothing long. The idea is to give us during
that period a little practical experience in all the main departments of
work, so that we may know better how and what to choose as an occupation.
We are supposed to have got through with the schools before we enter this
class, but really I have learned more since I have been at work than in
twice the time spent in school. You can not imagine how perfectly
delightful this grade of work is. I don't wonder some people prefer to
stay in it all their lives for the sake of the constant change in tasks,
rather than elect a regular occupation. Just now I am among the
agricultural workers on the great farm near Lexington. It is delightful,
and I have about made up my mind to choose farm work as an occupation.
That is what I had in mind when I asked you to guess my trade. Do you
think you would ever have guessed that?"

"I don't think I ever should, and unless the conditions of farm work have
greatly changed since my day I can not imagine how you could manage it in
a woman's costume."

Edith regarded me for a moment with an expression of simple surprise, her
eyes growing large. Then her glance fell to her dress, and when she again
looked up her expression had changed to one which was at once meditative,
humorous, and wholly inscrutable. Presently she said:

"Have you not observed, my dear Julian, that the dress of the women you
see on the streets is different from that which women wore in the
nineteenth century?"

"I have noticed, of course, that they generally wear no skirts, but you
and your mother dress as women did in my day."

"And has it not occurred to you to wonder why our dress was not like
theirs--why we wear skirts and they do not?"

"Possibly that has occurred to me among the thousand other questions that
every day arise in my mind, only to be driven out by a thousand others
before I can ask them; but I think in this case I should have rather
wondered why these other women did not dress as you do instead of why you
did not dress as they do, for your costume, being the one I was
accustomed to, naturally struck me as the normal type, and this other
style as a variation for some special or local reason which I should
later learn about. You must not think me altogether stupid. To tell the
truth, these other women have as yet scarcely impressed me as being very
real. You were at first the only person about whose reality I felt
entirely sure. All the others seemed merely parts of a fantastic farrago
of wonders, more or less possible, which is only just beginning to become
intelligible and coherent. In time I should doubtless have awakened to
the fact that there were other women in the world besides yourself and
begun to make inquiries about them."

As I spoke of the absoluteness with which I had depended on her during
those first bewildering days for the assurance even of my own identity
the quick tears rushed to my companion's eyes, and--well, for a space the
other women were more completely forgotten than ever.

Presently she said: "What were we talking about? Oh, yes,
I remember--about those other women. I have a confession to make. I have
been guilty toward you all this time of a sort of fraud, or at least of a
flagrant suppression of the truth, which ought not to be kept up a moment
longer. I sincerely hope you will forgive me, in consideration of my
motive, and not----"

"Not what?"

"Not be too much startled."

"You make me very curious," I said. "What is this mystery? I think I can
stand the disclosure."

"Listen, then," she said. "That wonderful night when we saw you first, of
course our great thought was to avoid agitating you when you should
recover full consciousness by any more evidence of the amazing things
that had happened since your day than it was necessary you should see. We
knew that in your time the use of long skirts by women was universal, and
we reflected that to see mother and me in the modern dress would no doubt
strike you very strangely. Now, you see, although skirtless costumes are
the general--indeed, almost universal--wear for most occasions, all
possible costumes, ancient and modern, of all races, ages, and
civilizations, are either provided or to be obtained on the shortest
possible notice at the stores. It was therefore very easy for us to
furnish ourselves with the old-style dress before father introduced you
to us. He said people had in your day such strange ideas of feminine
modesty and propriety that it would be the best way to do. Can you
forgive us, Julian, for taking such an advantage of your ignorance?"

"Edith," I said, "there were a great many institutions of the nineteenth
century which we tolerated because we did not know how to get rid of
them, without, however, having a bit better opinion of them than you
have, and one of them was the costume by means of which our women used to
disguise and cripple themselves."

"I am delighted!" exclaimed Edith. "I perfectly detest these horrible
bags, and will not wear them a moment longer!" And bidding me wait where
I was, she ran into the house.

Five minutes, perhaps, I waited there in the arbor, where we had been
sitting, and then, at a light step on the grass, looked up to see Edith
with eyes of smiling challenge standing before me in modern dress. I have
seen her in a hundred varieties of that costume since then, and have
grown familiar with the exhaustless diversity of its adaptations, but I
defy the imagination of the greatest artist to devise a scheme of color
and fabric that would again produce upon me the effect of enchanting
surprise which I received from that quite simple and hasty toilet.

I don't know how long I stood looking at her without a thought of words,
my eyes meanwhile no doubt testifying eloquently enough how adorable I
found her. She seemed, however, to divine more than that in my
expression, for presently she exclaimed:

"I would give anything to know what you are thinking down in the bottom
of your mind! It must be something awfully funny. What are you turning so
red for?"

"I am blushing for myself," I said, and that is all I would tell her,
much as she teased me. Now, at this distance of time I may tell the
truth. My first sentiment, apart from overwhelming admiration, had been a
slight astonishment at her absolute ease and composure of bearing under
my gaze. This is a confession that may well seem incomprehensible to
twentieth-century readers, and God forbid that they should ever catch the
point of view which would enable them to understand it better! A woman of
my day, unless professionally accustomed to use this sort of costume,
would have seemed embarrassed and ill at ease, at least for a time, under
a gaze so intent as mine, even though it were a brother's or a father's.
I, it seems, had been prepared for at least some slight appearance of
discomposure on Edith's part, and was consciously surprised at a manner
which simply expressed an ingenuous gratification at my admiration. I
refer to this momentary experience because it has always seemed to me to
illustrate in a particularly vivid way the change that has taken place
not only in the customs but in the mental attitude of the sexes as to
each other since my former life. In justice to myself I must hasten to
add that this first feeling of surprise vanished even as it arose, in a
moment, between two heart-beats. I caught from her clear, serene eyes the
view point of the modern man as to woman, never again to lose it. Then it
was that I flushed red with shame for myself. Wild horses could not have
dragged from me the secret of that blush at the time, though I have told
her long ago.

"I was thinking," I said, and I was thinking so, too, "that we ought to
be greatly obliged to twentieth-century women for revealing for the first
time the artistic possibilities of the masculine dress."

"The masculine dress," she repeated, as if not quite comprehending my
meaning. "Do you mean my dress?"

"Why, yes; it is a man's dress I suppose, is it not?"

"Why any more than a woman's?" she answered rather blankly. "Ah, yes, I
actually forgot for a moment whom I was talking to. I see; so it was
considered a man's dress in your day, when the women masqueraded as
mermaids. You may think me stupid not to catch your idea more quickly,
but I told you I was dull at history. It is now two full generations
since women as well as men have worn this dress, and the idea of
associating it with men more than women would occur to no one but a
professor of history. It strikes us merely as the only natural and
convenient solution of the dress necessity, which is essentially the same
for both sexes, since their bodily conformation is on the same general
lines."




CHAPTER VII.

A STRING OF SURPRISES.

The extremely delicate tints of Edith's costume led me to remark that the
color effects of the modern dress seemed to be in general very light as
compared with those which prevailed in my day.

"The result," I said, "is extremely pleasing, but if you will excuse a
rather prosaic suggestion, it occurs to me that with the whole nation
given over to wearing these delicate schemes of color, the accounts for
washing must be pretty large. I should suppose they would swamp the
national treasury if laundry bills are anything like what they used to
be."

This remark, which I thought a very sensible one, set Edith to laughing.
"Doubtless we could not do much else if we washed our clothes," she said;
"but you see we do not wash them."

"Not wash them!--why not?"

"Because we don't think it nice to wear clothes again after they have
been so much soiled as to need washing."

"Well, I won't say that I am surprised," I replied; "in fact, I think I
am no longer capable of being surprised at anything; but perhaps you will
kindly tell me what you do with a dress when it becomes soiled."

"We throw it away--that is, it goes back to the mills to be made into
something else."

"Indeed! To my nineteenth-century intellect, throwing away clothing would
seem even more expensive than washing it."

"Oh, no, much less so. What do you suppose, now, this costume of mine
cost?"

"I don't know, I am sure. I never had a wife to pay dressmaker's bills
for, but I should say certainly it cost a great deal of money."

"Such costumes cost from ten to twenty cents," said Edith. "What do you
suppose it is made of?"

I took the edge of her mantle between my fingers.

"I thought it was silk or fine linen," I replied, "but I see it is not.
Doubtless it is some new fiber."

"We have discovered many new fibers, but it is rather a question of
process than material that I had in mind. This is not a textile fabric at
all, but paper. That is the most common material for garments nowadays."

"But--but," I exclaimed, "what if it should come on to rain on these
paper clothes? Would they not melt, and at a little strain would they not
part?"

"A costume such as this," said Edith, "is not meant for stormy weather,
and yet it would by no means melt in a rainstorm, however severe. For
storm-garments we have a paper that is absolutely impervious to moisture
on the outer surface. As to toughness, I think you would find it as hard
to tear this paper as any ordinary cloth. The fabric is so strengthened
with fiber as to hold together very stoutly."

"But in winter, at least, when you need warmth, you must have to fall
back on our old friend the sheep."

"You mean garments made of sheep's hair? Oh, no, there is no modern use
for them. Porous paper makes a garment quite as warm as woolen could, and
vastly lighter than the clothes you had. Nothing but eider down could
have been at once so warm and light as our winter coats of paper."

"And cotton!--linen! Don't tell me that they have been given up, like
wool?"

"Oh, no; we weave fabrics of these and other vegetable products, and they
are nearly as cheap as paper, but paper is so much lighter and more
easily fashioned into all shapes that it is generally preferred for
garments. But, at any rate, we should consider no material fit for
garments which could not be thrown away after being soiled. The idea of
washing and cleaning articles of bodily use and using them over and over
again would be quite intolerable. For this reason, while we want
beautiful garments, we distinctly do not want durable ones. In your day,
it seems, even worse than the practice of washing garments to be used
again you were in the habit of keeping your outer garments without
washing at all, not only day after day, but week after week, year after
year, sometimes whole lifetimes, when they were specially valuable, and
finally, perhaps, giving them away to others. It seems that women
sometimes kept their wedding dresses long enough for their daughters to
wear at their weddings. That would seem shocking to us, and yet, even
your fine ladies did such things. As for what the poor had to do in the
way of keeping and wearing their old clothes till they went to rags, that
is something which won't bear thinking of."

"It is rather startling," I said, "to find the problem of clean clothing
solved by the abolition of the wash tub, although I perceive that that
was the only radical solution. 'Warranted to wear and wash' used to be
the advertisement of our clothing merchants, but now it seems, if you
would sell clothing, you must warrant the goods neither to wear nor to
wash."

"As for wearing," said Edith, "our clothing never gets the chance to show
how it would wear before we throw it away, any more than the other
fabrics, such as carpets, bedding, and hangings that we use about our
houses."

"You don't mean that they are paper-made also!" I exclaimed.

"Not always made of paper, but always of some fabric so cheap that they
can be rejected after the briefest period of using. When you would have
swept a carpet we put in a new one. Where you would wash or air bedding
we renew it, and so with all the hangings about our houses so far as we
use them at all. We upholster with air or water instead of feathers. It
is more than I can understand how you ever endured your musty, fusty,
dusty rooms with the filth and disease germs of whole generations stored
in the woolen and hair fabrics that furnished them. When we clean out a
room we turn the hose on ceiling, walls, and floor. There is nothing to
harm--nothing but tiled or other hard-finished surfaces. Our hygienists
say that the change in customs in these matters relating to the purity of
our clothing and dwellings, has done more than all our other improvements
to eradicate the germs of contagious and other diseases and relegate
epidemics to ancient history.

"Talking of paper," said Edith, extending a very trim foot by way of
attracting attention to its gear, "what do you think of our modern
shoes?"

"Do you mean that they also are made of paper?" I exclaimed.

"Of course."

"I noticed the shoes your father gave me were very light as compared with
anything I had ever worn before. Really that is a great idea, for
lightness in foot wear is the first necessity. Scamp shoemakers used to
put paper soles in shoes in my day. It is evident that instead of
prosecuting them for rascals we should have revered them as unconscious
prophets. But, for that matter, how do you prepare soles of paper that
will last?"

"There are plenty of solutions which will make paper as hard as iron."

"And do not these shoes leak in winter?"

"We have different kinds for different weathers. All are seamless, and
the wet-weather sort are coated outside with a lacquer impervious to
moisture."

"That means, I suppose, that rubbers too as articles of wear have been
sent to the museum?"

"We use rubber, but not for wear. Our waterproof paper is much lighter
and better every way."

"After all this it is easy to believe that your hats and caps are also
paper-made."

"And so they are to a great extent," said Edith; "the heavy headgear that
made your men bald ours would not endure. We want as little as possible
on our heads, and that as light as may be."

"Go on!" I exclaimed. "I suppose I am next to be told that the delicious
but mysterious articles of food which come by the pneumatic carrier from
the restaurant or are served there are likewise made out of paper.
Proceed--I am prepared to believe it!"

"Not quite so bad as that," laughed my companion, "but really the next
thing to it, for the dishes you eat them from are made of paper. The
crash of crockery and glass, which seems to have been a sort of running
accompaniment to housekeeping in your day, is no more heard in the land.
Our dishes and kettles for eating or cooking, when they need cleaning are
thrown away, or rather, as in the case of all these rejected materials I
have spoken of, sent back to the factories to be reduced again to pulp
and made over into other forms."

"But you certainly do not use paper kettles? Fire will still burn, I
fancy, although you seem to have changed most of the other rules we went
by."

"Fire will still burn, indeed, but the electrical heat has been adopted
for cooking as well as for all other purposes. We no longer heat our
vessels from without but from within, and the consequence is that we do
our cooking in paper vessels on wooden stoves, even as the savages used
to do it in birch-bark vessels with hot stones, for, so the philosophers
say, history repeats itself in an ever-ascending spiral."

And now Edith began to laugh at my perplexed expression. She declared
that it was clear my credulity had been taxed with these accounts of
modern novelties about as far as it would be prudent to try it without
furnishing some further evidence of the truth of the statements she had
made. She proposed accordingly, for the balance of the morning, a visit
to some of the great paper-process factories.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE GREATEST WONDER YET--FASHION DETHRONED.

"You surely can not form the slightest idea of the bodily ecstasy it
gives me to have done with that horrible masquerade in mummy clothes,"
exclaimed my companion as we left the house. "To think this is the first
time we have actually been walking together!"

"Surely you forget," I replied; "we have been out together several
times."

"Out together, yes, but not walking," she answered; "at least I was not
walking. I don't know what would be the proper zoological term to
describe the way I got over the ground inside of those bags, but it
certainly was not walking. The women of your day, you see, were trained
from childhood in that mode of progression, and no doubt acquired some
skill in it; but I never had skirts on in my life except once, in some
theatricals. It was the hardest thing I ever tried, and I doubt if I ever
again give you so strong a proof of my regard. I am astonished that you
did not seem to notice what a distressful time I was having."

But if, being accustomed, as I had been, to the gait of women hampered by
draperies, I had not observed anything unusual in Edith's walk when we
had been out on previous occasions, the buoyant grace of her carriage and
the elastic vigor of her step as she strode now by my side was a
revelation of the possibilities of an athletic companionship which was
not a little intoxicating.

To describe in detail what I saw in my tour that day through
the paper-process factories would be to tell an old story to
twentieth-century readers; but what far more impressed me than all the
ingenuity and variety of mechanical adaptations was the workers
themselves and the conditions of their labor. I need not tell my readers
what the great mills are in these days--lofty, airy halls, walled with
beautiful designs in tiles and metal, furnished like palaces, with every
convenience, the machinery running almost noiselessly, and every incident
of the work that might be offensive to any sense reduced by ingenious
devices to the minimum. Neither need I describe to you the princely
workers in these palaces of industry, the strong and splendid men and
women, with their refined and cultured faces, prosecuting with the
enthusiasm of artists their self-chosen tasks of combining use and
beauty. You all know what your factories are to-day; no doubt you find
them none too pleasant or convenient, having been used to such things all
your lives. No doubt you even criticise them in various ways as falling
short of what they might be, for such is human nature; but if you would
understand how they seem to me, shut your eyes a moment and try to
conceive in fancy what our cotton and woolen and paper mills were like a
hundred years ago.

Picture low rooms roofed with rough and grimy timbers and walled with
bare or whitewashed brick. Imagine the floor so crammed with machinery
for economy of space as to allow bare room for the workers to writhe
about among the flying arms and jaws of steel, a false motion meaning
death or mutilation. Imagine the air space above filled, instead of air,
with a mixture of stenches of oil and filth, unwashed human bodies, and
foul clothing. Conceive a perpetual clang and clash of machinery like the
screech of a tornado.

But these were only the material conditions of the scene. Shut your eyes
once more, that you may see what I would fain forget I had ever seen--the
interminable rows of women, pallid, hollow-cheeked, with faces vacant and
stolid but for the accent of misery, their clothing tattered, faded, and
foul; and not women only, but multitudes of little children, weazen-faced
and ragged--children whose mother's milk was barely out of their blood,
their bones yet in the gristle.

       *       *       *       *       *

Edith introduced me to the superintendent of one of the factories, a
handsome woman of perhaps forty years. She very kindly showed us about
and explained matters to me, and was much interested in turn to know what
I thought of the modern factories and their points of contrast with those
of former days. Naturally, I told her that I had been impressed, far more
than by anything in the new mechanical appliances, with the
transformation in the condition of the workers themselves.

"Ah, yes," she said, "of course you would say so; that must indeed be the
great contrast, though the present ways seem so entirely a matter of
course to us that we forget it was not always so. When the workers settle
how the work shall be done, it is not wonderful that the conditions
should be the pleasantest possible. On the other hand, when, as in your
day, a class like your private capitalists, who did not share the work,
nevertheless settled how it should be done it is not surprising that the
conditions of industry should have been as barbarous as they were,
especially when the operation of the competitive system compelled the
capitalists to get the most work possible out of the workers on the
cheapest terms."

"Do I understand." I asked, "that the workers in each trade regulate for
themselves the conditions of their particular occupation?"

"By no means. The unitary character of our industrial administration is
the vital idea of it, without which it would instantly become
impracticable. If the members of each trade controlled its conditions,
they would presently be tempted to conduct it selfishly and adversely to
the general interest of the community, seeking, as your private
capitalists did, to get as much and give as little as possible. And not
only would every distinctive class of workers be tempted to act in this
manner, but every subdivision of workers in the same trade would
presently be pursuing the same policy, until the whole industrial system
would become disintegrated, and we should have to call the capitalists
from their graves to save us. When I said that the workers regulated the
conditions of work, I meant the workers as a whole--that is, the people
at large, all of whom are nowadays workers, you know. The regulation and
mutual adjustment of the conditions of the several branches of the
industrial system are wholly done by the General Government. At the same
time, however, the regulation of the conditions of work in any occupation
is effectively, though indirectly, controlled by the workers in it
through the right we all have to choose and change our occupations.
Nobody would choose an occupation the conditions of which were not
satisfactory, so they have to be made and kept satisfactory."

       *       *       *       *       *

While we were at the factory the noon hour came, and I asked the
superintendent and Edith to go out to lunch with me. In fact, I wanted to
ascertain whether my newly acquired credit card was really good for
anything or not.

"There is one point about your modern costumes," I said, as we sat at our
table in the dining hall, "about which I am rather curious. Will you tell
me who or what sets the fashions?"

"The Creator sets the only fashion which is now generally followed,"
Edith answered.

"And what is that?"

"The fashion of our bodies," she answered.

"Ah, yes, very good," I replied, "and very true, too, of your costumes,
as it certainly was not of ours; but my question still remains. Allowing
that you have a general theory of dress, there are a thousand differences
in details, with possible variations of style, shape, color, material,
and what not. Now, the making of garments is carried on, I suppose, like
all your other industries, as public business, under collective
management, is it not?"

"Certainly. People, of course, can make their own clothes if they wish
to, just as they can make anything else, but it would be a great waste of
time and energy."

"Very well. The garments turned out by the factories have to be made up
on some particular design or designs. In my day the question of designs
of garments was settled by society leaders, fashion journals, edicts from
Paris, or the Lord knows how; but at any rate the question was settled
for us, and we had nothing to do but to obey. I don't say it was a good
way; on the contrary, it was detestable; but what I want to know is, What
system have you instead, for I suppose you have now no society leaders,
fashion journals, or Paris edicts? Who settles the question what you
shall wear?"

"We do," replied the superintendent.

"You mean, I suppose, that you determine it collectively by democratic
methods. Now, when I look around me in this dining hall and see the
variety and beauty of the costumes, I am bound to say that the result of
your system seems satisfactory, and yet I think it would strike even the
strongest believer in the principle of democracy that the rule of the
majority ought scarcely to extend to dress. I admit that the yoke of
fashion which we bowed to was very onerous, and yet it was true that if
we were brave enough, as few indeed were, we might defy it; but with the
style of dress determined by the administration, and only certain styles
made, you must either follow the taste of the majority or lie abed. Why
do you laugh? Is it not so?"

"We were smiling," replied the superintendent, "on account of a slight
misapprehension on your part. When I said that we regulated questions of
dress, I meant that we regulated them not collectively, by majority, but
individually, each for himself or herself."

"But I don't see how you can," I persisted. "The business of producing
fabrics and of making them into garments is carried on by the Government.
Does not that imply, practically, a governmental control or initiative in
fashions of dress?"

"Dear me, no!" exclaimed the superintendent. "It is evident, Mr. West, as
indeed the histories say, that governmental action carried with it in
your day an arbitrary implication which it does not now. The Government
is actually now what it nominally was in the America of your day--the
servant, tool, and instrument by which the people give effect to their
will, itself being without will. The popular will is expressed in two
ways, which are quite distinct and relate to different provinces: First,
collectively, by majority, in regard to blended, mutually involved
interests, such as the large economic and political concerns of the
community; second, personally, by each individual for himself or herself
in the furtherance of private and self-regarding matters. The Government
is not more absolutely the servant of the collective will in regard to
the blended interests of the community than it is of the individual
convenience in personal matters. It is at once the august representative
of all in general concerns, and everybody's agent, errand boy, and
factotum for all private ends. Nothing is too high or too low, too great
or too little, for it to do for us.

"The dressmaking department holds its vast provision of fabrics and
machinery at the absolute disposition of the whims of every man or woman
in the nation. You can go to one of the stores and order any costume of
which a historical description exists, from the days of Eve to yesterday,
or you can furnish a design of your own invention for a brand-new
costume, designating any material at present existing, and it will be
sent home to you in less time than any nineteenth-century dressmaker ever
even promised to fill an order. Really, talking of this, I want you to
see our garment-making machines in operation. Our paper garments, of
course, are seamless, and made wholly by machinery. The apparatus being
adjustable to any measure, you can have a costume turned out for you
complete while you are looking over the machine. There are, of course,
some general styles and shapes that are usually popular, and the stores
keep a supply of them on hand, but that is for the convenience of the
people, not of the department, which holds itself always ready to follow
the initiative of any citizen and provide anything ordered in the least
possible time."

"Then anybody can set the fashion?" I said.

"Anybody can set it, but whether it is followed depends on whether it is
a good one, and really has some new point in respect of convenience or
beauty; otherwise it certainly will not become a fashion. Its vogue will
be precisely proportioned to the merit the popular taste recognizes in
it, just as if it were an invention in mechanics. If a new idea in dress
has any merit in it, it is taken up with great promptness, for our people
are extremely interested in enhancing personal beauty by costume, and the
absence of any arbitrary standards of style such as fashion set for you
leaves us on the alert for attractions and novelties in shape and color.
It is in variety of effect that our mode of dressing seems indeed to
differ most from yours. Your styles were constantly being varied by the
edicts of fashion, but as only one style was tolerated at a time, you had
only a successive and not a simultaneous variety, such as we have. I
should imagine that this uniformity of style, extending, as I understand
it often did, to fabric, color, and shape alike, must have caused your
great assemblages to present a depressing effect of sameness.

"That was a fact fully admitted in my day," I replied. "The artists were
the enemies of fashion, as indeed all sensible people were, but
resistance was in vain. Do you know, if I were to return to the
nineteenth century, there is perhaps nothing else I could tell my
contemporaries of the changes you have made that would so deeply impress
them as the information that you had broken the scepter of fashion, that
there were no longer any arbitrary standards in dress recognized, and
that no style had any other vogue that might be given it by individual
recognition of its merits. That most of the other yokes humanity wore
might some day be broken, the more hopeful of us believed, but the yoke
of fashion we never expected to be freed from, unless perhaps in heaven."

"The reign of fashion, as the history books call it, always seemed to me
one of the most utterly incomprehensible things about the old order,"
said Edith. "It would seem that it must have had some great force behind
it to compel such abject submission to a rule so tyrannical. And yet
there seems to have been no force at all used. Do tell us what the secret
was, Julian?"

"Don't ask me," I protested. "It seemed to be some fell enchantment that
we were subject to--that is all I know. Nobody professed to understand
why we did as we did. Can't you tell us," I added, turning to the
superintendent--"how do you moderns diagnose the fashion mania that made
our lives such a burden to us?"

"Since you appeal to me," replied our companion, "I may say that the
historians explain the dominion of fashion in your age as the natural
result of a disparity of economic conditions prevailing in a community in
which rigid distinctions of caste had ceased to exist. It resulted from
two factors: the desire of the common herd to imitate the superior class,
and the desire of the superior class to protect themselves from that
imitation and preserve distinction of appearance. In times and countries
where class was caste, and fixed by law or iron custom, each caste had
its distinctive dress, to imitate which was not allowed to another class.
Consequently fashions were stationary. With the rise of democracy, the
legal protection of class distinctions was abolished, while the actual
disparity in social ranks still existed, owing to the persistence of
economic inequalities. It was now free for all to imitate the superior
class, and thus seem at least to be as good as it, and no kind of
imitation was so natural and easy as dress. First, the socially ambitious
led off in this imitation; then presently the less pretentious were
constrained to follow their example, to avoid an apparent confession of
social inferiority; till, finally, even the philosophers had to follow
the herd and conform to the fashion, to avoid being conspicuous by an
exceptional appearance."

"I can see," said Edith, "how social emulation should make the masses
imitate the richer and superior class, and how the fashions should in
this way be set; but why were they changed so often, when it must have
been so terribly expensive and troublesome to make the changes?"

"For the reason," answered the superintendent, "that the only way the
superior class could escape their imitators and preserve their
distinction in dress was by adopting constantly new fashions, only to
drop them for still newer ones as soon as they were imitated.--Does it
seem to you, Mr. West, that this explanation corresponds with the facts
as you observed them?"

"Entirely so," I replied. "It might be added, too, that the changes in
fashions were greatly fomented and assisted by the self-interest of vast
industrial and commercial interests engaged in purveying the materials of
dress and personal belongings. Every change, by creating a demand for new
materials and rendering those in use obsolete, was what we called good
for trade, though if tradesmen were unlucky enough to be caught by a
sudden change of fashion with a lot of goods on hand it meant ruin to
them. Great losses of this sort, indeed, attended every change in
fashion."

"But we read that there were fashions in many things besides dress," said
Edith.

"Certainly," said the superintendent. "Dress was the stronghold and main
province of fashion because imitation was easiest and most effective
through dress, but in nearly everything that pertained to the habits of
living, eating, drinking, recreation, to houses, furniture, horses and
carriages, and servants, to the manner of bowing even, and shaking hands,
to the mode of eating food and taking tea, and I don't know what
else--there were fashions which must be followed, and were changed as
soon as they were followed. It was indeed a sad, fantastic race, and, Mr.
West's contemporaries appear to have fully realized it; but as long as
society was made up of unequals with no caste barriers to prevent
imitation, the inferiors were bound to ape the superiors, and the
superiors were bound to baffle imitation, so far as possible, by seeking
ever-fresh devices for expressing their superiority."

"In short," I said, "our tedious sameness in dress and manners appears to
you to have been the logical result of our lack of equality in
conditions."

"Precisely so," answered the superintendent. "Because you were not equal,
you made yourself miserable and ugly in the attempt to seem so. The
aesthetic equivalent of the moral wrong of inequality was the artistic
abomination of uniformity. On the other hand, equality creates an
atmosphere which kills imitation, and is pregnant with originality, for
every one acts out himself, having nothing to gain by imitating any one
else."




CHAPTER IX.

SOMETHING THAT HAD NOT CHANGED.

When we parted with the superintendent of the paper-process factory I
said to Edith that I had taken in since that morning about all the new
impressions and new philosophies I could for the time mentally digest,
and felt great need of resting my mind for a space in the contemplation
of something--if indeed there were anything--which had not changed or
been improved in the last century.

After a moment's consideration Edith exclaimed: "I have it! Ask no
questions, but just come with me."

Presently, as we were making our way along the route she had taken, she
touched my arm, saying, "Let us hurry a little."

Now, hurrying was the regulation gait of the nineteenth century. "Hurry
up!" was about the most threadbare phrase in the English language, and
rather than "_E pluribus unum_" should especially have been the
motto of the American people, but it was the first time the note of haste
had impressed my consciousness since I had been living twentieth-century
days. This fact, together with the touch of my companion upon my arm as
she sought to quicken my pace, caused me to look around, and in so doing
to pause abruptly.

"What is this?" I exclaimed.

"It is too bad!" said my companion. "I tried to get you past without
seeing it."

But indeed, though I had asked what was this building we stood in
presence of, nobody could know so well as I what it was. The mystery was
how it had come to be there for in the midst of this splendid city of
equals, where poverty was an unknown word, I found myself face to face
with a typical nineteenth-century tenement house of the worst sort--one
of the rookeries, in fact, that used to abound in the North End and other
parts of the city. The environment was indeed in strong enough contrast
with that of such buildings in my time, shut in as they generally were by
a labyrinth of noisome alleys and dark, damp courtyards which were
reeking reservoirs of foetid odors, kept in by lofty, light-excluding
walls. This building stood by itself, in the midst of an open square, as
if it had been a palace or other show place. But all the more, indeed, by
this fine setting was the dismal squalor of the grimy structure
emphasized. It seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gloom and chill which
all the bright sunshine of the breezy September afternoon was unable to
dominate. One would not have been surprised, even at noonday, to see
ghosts at the black windows. There was an inscription over the door, and
I went across the square to read it, Edith reluctantly following me.
These words I read, above the central doorway:

"THIS HABITATION OF CRUELTY IS PRESERVED AS A MEMENTO TO COMING
GENERATIONS OF THE RULE OF THE RICH."

"This is one of the ghost buildings," said Edith, "kept to scare the
people with, so that they may never risk anything that looks like
bringing back the old order of things by allowing any one on any plea to
obtain an economic advantage over another. I think they had much better
be torn down, for there is no more danger of the world's going back to
the old order than there is of the globe reversing its rotation."

A band of children, accompanied by a young woman, came across the square
as we stood before the building, and filed into the doorway and up the
black and narrow stairway. The faces of the little ones were very
serious, and they spoke in whispers.

"They are school children." said Edith. "We are all taken through this
building, or some other like it, when we are in the schools, and the
teacher explains what manner of things used to be done and endured there.
I remember well when I was taken through this building as a child. It was
long afterward before I quite recovered from the terrible impression I
received. Really, I don't think it is a good idea to bring young children
here, but it is a custom that became settled in the period after the
Revolution, when the horror of the bondage they had escaped from was yet
fresh in the minds of the people, and their great fear was that by some
lack of vigilance the rule of the rich might be restored.

"Of course," she continued, "this building and the others like it, which
were reserved for warnings when the rest were razed to the ground, have
been thoroughly cleaned and strengthened and made sanitary and safe every
way, but our artists have very cunningly counterfeited all the old
effects of filth and squalor, so that the appearance of everything is
just as it was. Tablets in the rooms describe how many human beings used
to be crowded into them, and the horrible conditions of their lives. The
worst about it is that the facts are all taken from historical records,
and are absolutely true. There are some of these places in which the
inhabitants of the buildings as they used to swarm in them are reproduced
in wax or plaster with every detail of garments, furniture, and all the
other features based on actual records or pictures of the time. There is
something indescribably dreadful in going through the buildings fitted
out in that way. The dumb figures seem to appeal to you to help them. It
was so long ago, and yet it makes one feel conscience-stricken not to be
able to do anything."

"But, Julian, come away. It was just a stupid accident my bringing you
past here. When I undertook to show you something that had not changed
since your day, I did not mean to mock you."

Thanks to modern rapid transit, ten minutes later we stood on the ocean
shore, with the waves of the Atlantic breaking noisily at our feet and
its blue floor extending unbroken to the horizon. Here indeed was
something that had not been changed--a mighty existence, to which a
thousand years were as one day and one day as a thousand years. There
could be no tonic for my case like the inspiration of this great
presence, this unchanging witness of all earth's mutations. How petty
seemed the little trick of time that had been played on me as I stood in
the presence of this symbol of everlastingness which made past, present,
and future terms of little meaning!

In accompanying Edith to the part of the beach where we stood I had taken
no note of directions, but now, as I began to study the shore, I observed
with lively emotion that she had unwittingly brought me to the site of my
old seaside place at Nahant. The buildings were indeed gone, and the
growth of trees had quite changed the aspect of the landscape, but the
shore line remained unaltered, and I knew it at once. Bidding her follow
me, I led the way around a point to a little strip of beach between the
sea and a wall of rock which shut off all sight or sound of the land
behind. In my former life the spot had been a favorite resort when I
visited the shore. Here in that life so long ago, and yet recalled as if
of yesterday, I had been used from a lad to go to do my day dreaming.
Every feature of the little nook was as familiar to me as my bedroom and
all was quite unchanged. The sea in front, the sky above, the islands and
the blue headlands of the distant coast--all, indeed, that filled the
view was the same in every detail. I threw myself upon the warm sand by
the margin of the sea, as I had been wont to do, and in a moment the
flood of familiar associations had so completely carried me back to my
old life that all the marvels that had happened to me, when presently I
began to recall them, seemed merely as a day dream that had come to me
like so many others before it in that spot by the shore. But what a dream
it had been, that vision of the world to be; surely of all the dreams
that had come to me there by the sea the weirdest!

There had been a girl in the dream, a maiden much to be desired. It had
been ill if I had lost her; but I had not, for this was she, the girl in
this strange and graceful garb, standing by my side and smiling down at
me. I had by some great hap brought her back from dreamland, holding her
by the very strength of my love when all else of the vision had dissolved
at the opening of the eyes.

Why not? What youth has not often been visited in his dreams by maidenly
ideals fairer than walk on earth, whom, waking, he has sighed for and for
days been followed by the haunting beauty of their half-remembered faces?
I, more fortunate than they, had baffled the jealous warder at the gates
of sleep and brought my queen of dreamland through.

When I proceeded to state to Edith this theory to account for her
presence, she professed to find it highly reasonable, and we proceeded at
much length to develop the idea. Falling into the conceit that she was an
anticipation of the twentieth-century woman instead of my being an
excavated relic of the nineteenth-century man, we speculated what we
should do for the summer. We decided to visit the great pleasure resorts,
where, no doubt, she would under the circumstances excite much curiosity
and at the same time have an opportunity of studying what to her
twentieth-century mind would seem even more astonishing types of humanity
than she would seem to them--namely, people who, surrounded by a needy
and anguished world, could get their own consent to be happy in a
frivolous and wasteful idleness. Afterward we would go to Europe and
inspect such things there as might naturally be curiosities to a girl out
of the year 2000, such as a Rothschild, an emperor, and a few specimens
of human beings, some of which were at that time still extant in Germany,
Austria, and Russia, who honestly believed that God had given to certain
fellow-beings a divine title to reign over them.




CHAPTER X.

A MIDNIGHT PLUNGE.

It was after dark when we reached home, and several hours later before we
had made an end of telling our adventures. Indeed, my hosts seemed at all
times unable to hear too much of my impressions of modern things,
appearing to be as much interested in what I thought of them as I was in
the things themselves.

"It is really, you see," Edith's mother had said, "the manifestation of
vanity on our part. You are a sort of looking-glass to us, in which we
can see how we appear from a different point of view from our own. If it
were not for you, we should never have realized what remarkable people we
are, for to one another, I assure you, we seem very ordinary."

To which I replied that in talking with them I got the same looking-glass
effect as to myself and my contemporaries, but that it was one which by
no means ministered to my vanity.

When, as we talked, the globe of the color clock turning white announced
that it was midnight, some one spoke of bed, but the doctor had another
scheme.

"I propose," said he, "by way of preparing a good night's rest for us
all, that we go over to the natatorium and take a plunge."

"Are there any public baths open so late as this?" I said. "In my day
everything was shut up long before now."

Then and there the doctor gave me the information which, matter of course
as it is to twentieth-century readers, was surprising enough to me, that
no public service or convenience is ever suspended at the present day,
whether by day or night, the year round; and that, although the service
provided varies in extent, according to the demand, it never varies in
quality.

"It seems to us," said the doctor, "that among the minor inconveniences
of life in your day none could have been more vexing than the recurrent
interruption of all, or of the larger part of all, public services every
night. Most of the people, of course, are asleep then, but always a
portion of them have occasion to be awake and about, and all of us
sometimes, and we should consider it a very lame public service that did
not provide for the night workers as good a service as for the day
workers. Of course, you could not do it, lacking any unitary industrial
organization, but it is very easy with us. We have day and night shifts
for all the public services--the latter, of course, much the smaller."

"How about public holidays; have you abandoned them?"

"Pretty generally. The occasional public holidays in your time were
prized by the people, as giving them much-needed breathing spaces.
Nowadays, when the working day is so short and the working year so
interspersed with ample vacations, the old-fashioned holiday has ceased
to serve any purpose, and would be regarded as a nuisance. We prefer to
choose and use our leisure time as we please."

It was to the Leander Natatorium that we had directed our steps. As I
need not remind Bostonians, this is one of the older baths, and
considered quite inferior to the modern structures. To me, however, it
was a vastly impressive spectacle. The lofty interior glowing with light,
the immense swimming tank, the four great fountains filling the air with
diamond-dazzle and the noise of falling water, together with the throng
of gayly dressed and laughing bathers, made an exhilarating and
magnificent scene, which was a very effective introduction to the
athletic side of the modern life. The loveliest thing of all was the
great expanse of water made translucent by the light reflected from the
white tiled bottom, so that the swimmers, their whole bodies visible,
seemed as if floating on a pale emerald cloud, with an effect of buoyancy
and weightlessness that was as startling as charming. Edith was quick to
tell me, however, that this was as nothing to the beauty of some of the
new and larger baths, where, by varying the colors of the tiling at the
bottom, the water is made to shade through all the tints of the rainbow
while preserving the same translucent appearance.

I had formed an impression that the water would be fresh, but the green
hue, of course, showed it to be from the sea.

"We have a poor opinion of fresh water for swimming when we can get
salt," said the doctor. "This water came in on the last tide from the
Atlantic."

"But how do you get it up to this level?"

"We make it carry itself up," laughed the doctor; "it would be a pity if
the tidal force that raises the whole harbor fully seven feet, could not
raise what little we want a bit higher. Don't look at it so
suspiciously," he added. "I know that Boston Harbor water was far from
being clean enough for bathing in your day, but all that is changed. Your
sewerage systems, remember, are forgotten abominations, and nothing that
can defile is allowed to reach sea or river nowadays. For that reason we
can and do use sea water, not only for all the public baths, but provide
it as a distinct service for our home baths and also for all the public
fountains, which, thus inexhaustibly supplied, can be kept always
playing. But let us go in."

"Certainly, if you say so," said I, with a shiver, "but are you sure that
it is not a trifle cool? Ocean water was thought by us to be chilly for
bathing in late September."

"Did you think we were going to give you your death?" said the doctor.
"Of course, the water is warmed to a comfortable temperature; these baths
are open all winter."

"But, dear me! how can you possibly warm such great bodies of water,
which are so constantly renewed, especially in winter?"

"Oh, we have no conscience at all about what we make the tides do for
us," replied the doctor. "We not only make them lift the water up here,
but heat it, too. Why, Julian, cold or hot are terms without real
meaning, mere coquettish airs which Nature puts on, indicating that she
wants to be wooed a little. She would just as soon warm you as freeze
you, if you will approach her rightly. The blizzards which used to freeze
your generation might just as well have taken the place of your coal
mines. You look incredulous, but let me tell you now, as a first step
toward the understanding of modern conditions, that power, with all its
applications of light, heat, and energy, is to-day practically
exhaustless and costless, and scarcely enters as an element into
mechanical calculation. The uses of the tides, winds, and waterfalls are
indeed but crude methods of drawing on Nature's resources of strength
compared with others that are employed by which boundless power is
developed from natural inequalities of temperature."

A few moments later I was enjoying the most delicious sea bath that ever
up to that time had fallen to my lot; the pleasure of the pelting under
the fountains was to me a new sensation in life.

"You'll make a first-rate twentieth-century Bostonian," said the doctor,
laughing at my delight. "It is said that a marked feature of our modern
civilization is that we are tending to revert to the amphibious type of
our remote ancestry; evidently you will not object to drifting with the
tide."

It was one o'clock when we reached home.

"I suppose," said Edith, as I bade her good-night, "that in ten minutes
you will be back among your friends of the nineteenth century if you
dream as you did last night. What would I not give to take the journey
with you and see for myself what the world was like!"

"And I would give as much to be spared a repetition of the experience," I
said, "unless it were in your company."

"Do you mean that you really are afraid you will dream of the old times
again?"

"So much afraid," I replied, "that I have a good mind to sit up all night
to avoid the possibility of another such nightmare."

"Dear me! you need not do that," she said. "If you wish me to, I will see
that you are troubled no more in that way."

"Are you, then, a magician?"

"If I tell you not to dream of any particular matter, you will not," she
said.

"You are easily the mistress of my waking thoughts," I said; "but can you
rule my sleeping mind as well?"

"You shall see," she said, and, fixing her eyes upon mine, she said
quietly, "Remember, you are not to dream of anything to-night which
belonged to your old life!" and, as she spoke, I knew in my mind that it
would be as she said.




CHAPTER XI.

LIFE THE BASIS OF THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY.

Among the pieces of furniture in the subterranean bedchamber where Dr.
Leete had found me sleeping was one of the strong boxes of iron cunningly
locked which in my time were used for the storage of money and valuables.
The location of this chamber so far underground, its solid stone
construction and heavy doors, had not only made it impervious to noise
but equally proof against thieves, and its very existence being,
moreover, a secret, I had thought that no place could be safer for
keeping the evidences of my wealth.

Edith had been very curious about the safe, which was the name we gave to
these strong boxes, and several times when we were visiting the vault had
expressed a lively desire to see what was inside. I had proposed to open
it for her, but she had suggested that, as her father and mother would be
as much interested in the process as herself, it would be best to
postpone the treat till all should be present.

As we sat at breakfast the day after the experiences narrated in the
previous chapters, she asked why that morning would not be a good time to
show the inside of the safe, and everybody agreed that there could be no
better.

"What is in the safe?" asked Edith's mother.

"When I last locked it in the year 1887," I replied, "there were in it
securities and evidences of value of various sorts representing something
like a million dollars. When we open it this morning we shall find,
thanks to the great Revolution, a fine collection of waste paper.--I
wonder, by the way, doctor, just what your judges would say if I were to
take those securities to them and make a formal demand to be reinstated
in the possessions which they represented? Suppose I said: 'Your Honors,
these properties were once mine and I have never voluntarily parted with
them. Why are they not mine now, and why should they not be returned to
me?' You understand, of course, that I have no desire to start a revolt
against the present order, which I am very ready to admit is much better
than the old arrangements, but I am quite curious to know just what the
judges would reply to such a demand, provided they consented to entertain
it seriously. I suppose they would laugh me out of court. Still, I think
I might argue with some plausibility that, seeing I was not present when
the Revolution divested us capitalists of our wealth, I am at least
entitled to a courteous explanation of the grounds on which that course
was justified at the time. I do not want my million back, even if it were
possible to return it, but as a matter of rational satisfaction I should
like to know on just what plea it was appropriated and is retained by the
community."

"Really Julian," said the doctor, "it would be an excellent idea if you
were to do just what you have suggested--that is, bring a formal suit
against the nation for reinstatement in your former property. It would
arouse the liveliest popular interest and stimulate a discussion of the
ethical basis of our economic equality that would be of great educational
value to the community. You see the present order has been so long
established that it does not often occur to anybody except historians
that there ever was any other. It would be a good thing for the people to
have their minds stirred up on the subject and be compelled to do some
fundamental thinking as to the merits of the differences between the old
and the new order and the reasons for the present system. Confronting the
court with those securities in your hand, you would make a fine dramatic
situation. It would be the nineteenth century challenging the twentieth,
the old civilization, demanding an accounting of the new. The judges, you
may be sure, would treat you with the greatest consideration. They would
at once admit your rights under the peculiar circumstances to have the
whole question of wealth distribution and the rights of property reopened
from the beginning, and be ready to discuss it in the broadest spirit."

"No doubt," I answered, "but it is just an illustration, I suppose, of
the lack of unselfish public spirit among my contemporaries that I do not
feel disposed to make myself a spectacle even in the cause of education.
Besides, what is the need? You can tell me as well as the judges could
what the answer would be, and as it is the answer I want and not the
property that will do just as well."

"No doubt," said the doctor, "I could give you the general line of
reasoning they would follow."

"Very well. Let us suppose, then, that you are the court. On what ground
would you refuse to return me my million, for I assume that you would
refuse?"

"Of course it would be the same ground," replied the doctor, "that the
nation proceeded upon in nationalizing the property which that same
million represented at the time of the great Revolution."

"I suppose so; that is what I want to get at. What is that ground?"

"The court would say that to allow any person to withdraw or withhold
from the public administration for the common use any larger portion of
capital than the equal portion allotted to all for personal use and
consumption would in so far impair the ability of society to perform its
first duty to its members."

"What is this first duty of society to its members, which would be
interfered with by allowing particular citizens to appropriate more than
an equal proportion of the capital of the country?"

"The duty of safeguarding the first and highest right of its members--the
right of life."

"But how is the duty of society to safeguard the lives of its members
interfered with when one person, has more capital than another?"

"Simply," answered the doctor, "because people have to eat in order to
live, also to be clothed and to consume a mass of necessary and desirable
things, the sum of which constitutes what we call wealth or capital. Now,
if the supply of these things was always unlimited, as is the air we need
to breathe, it would not be necessary to see that each one had his share,
but the supply of wealth being, in fact, at any one time limited, it
follows that if some have a disproportionate share, the rest will not
have enough and may be left with nothing, as was indeed the case of
millions all over the world until the great Revolution established
economic equality. If, then, the first right of the citizen is protection
to life and the first duty of society is to furnish it, the state must
evidently see to it that the means of life are not unduly appropriated by
particular individuals, but are distributed so as to meet the needs of
all. Moreover, in order to secure the means of life to all, it is not
merely necessary that the state should see that the wealth available for
consumption is properly distributed at any given time; for, although all
might in that case fare well for to-day, tomorrow all might starve
unless, meanwhile, new wealth were being produced. The duty of society to
guarantee the life of the citizen implies, therefore, not merely the
equal distribution of wealth for consumption, but its employment as
capital to the best possible advantage for all in the production of more
wealth. In both ways, therefore, you will readily see that society would
fail in its first and greatest function in proportion as it were to
permit individuals beyond the equal allotment to withdraw wealth, whether
for consumption or employment as capital, from the public administration
in the common interest."

"The modern ethics of ownership is rather startlingly simple to a
representative of the nineteenth century," I observed. "Would not the
judges even ask me by what right or title of ownership I claimed my
wealth?"

"Certainly not. It is impossible that you or any one could have so strong
a title to material things as the least of your fellow-citizens have to
their lives, or could make so strong a plea for the use of the collective
power to enforce your right to things as they could make that the
collective power should enforce their right to life against your right to
things at whatever point the two claims might directly or indirectly
conflict. The effect of the disproportionate possession of the wealth of
a community by some of its members to curtail and threaten the living of
the rest is not in any way affected by the means by which that wealth was
obtained. The means may have constituted, as in past times they often did
by their iniquity, an added injury to the community; but the fact of the
disproportion, however resulting, was a continuing injury, without regard
to its beginnings. Our ethics of wealth is indeed, as you say, extremely
simple. It consists merely in the law of self-preservation, asserted in
the name of all against the encroachments of any. It rests upon a
principle which a child can understand as well as a philosopher, and
which no philosopher ever attempted to refute--namely, the supreme right
of all to live, and consequently to insist that society shall be so
organized as to secure that right.

"But, after all," said the doctor, "what is there in our economic
application of this principle which need impress a man of your time with
any other sensation than one of surprise that it was not earlier made?
Since what you were wont to call modern civilization existed, it has been
a principle subscribed to by all governments and peoples that it is the
first and supreme duty of the state to protect the lives of the citizens.
For the purpose of doing this the police, the courts, the army, and the
greater part of the machinery of governments has existed. You went so far
as to hold that a state which did not at any cost and to the utmost of
its resources safeguard the lives of its citizens forfeited all claim to
their allegiance.

"But while professing this principle so broadly in words, you completely
ignored in practice half and vastly the greater half of its meaning. You
wholly overlooked and disregarded the peril to which life is exposed on
the economic side--the hunger, cold, and thirst side. You went on the
theory that it was only by club, knife, bullet, poison, or some other
form of physical violence that life could be endangered, as if hunger,
cold, and thirst--in a word, economic want--were not a far more constant
and more deadly foe to existence than all the forms of violence together.
You overlooked the plain fact that anybody who by any means, however
indirect or remote, took away or curtailed one's means of subsistence
attacked his life quite as dangerously as it could be done with knife or
bullet--more so, indeed, seeing that against direct attack he would have
a better chance of defending himself. You failed to consider that no
amount of police, judicial, and military protection would prevent one
from perishing miserably if he had not enough to eat and wear."

"We went on the theory," I said, "that it was not well for the state to
intervene to do for the individual or to help him to do what he was able
to do for himself. We held that the collective organization should only
be appealed to when the power of the individual was manifestly unequal to
the task of self-defense."

"It was not so bad a theory if you had lived up to it," said the doctor,
"although the modern theory is far more rational that whatever can be
done better by collective than individual action ought to be so
undertaken, even if it could, after a more imperfect fashion, be
individually accomplished. But don't you think that under the economic
conditions which prevailed in America at the end of the nineteenth
century, not to speak of Europe, the average man armed with a good
revolver would have found the task of protecting himself and family
against violence a far easier one than that of protecting them against
want? Were not the odds against him far greater in the latter struggle
than they could have been, if he were a tolerably good shot, in the
former? Why, then, according to your own maxim, was the collective force
of society devoted without stint to safeguarding him against violence,
which he could have done for himself fairly well, while he was left to
struggle against hopeless odds for the means of a decent existence? What
hour, of what day of what year ever passed in which the number of deaths,
and the physical and moral anguish resulting from the anarchy of the
economic struggle and the crushing odds against the poor, did not
outweigh as a hundred to one that same hour's record of death or
suffering resulting from violence? Far better would society have
fulfilled its recognized duty of safeguarding the lives of its members
if, repealing every criminal law and dismissing every judge and
policeman, it had left men to protect themselves as best they might
against physical violence, while establishing in place of the machinery
of criminal justice a system of economic administration whereby all would
have been guaranteed against want. If, indeed, it had but substituted
this collective economic organization for the criminal and judicial
system it presently would have had as little need of the latter as we do,
for most of the crimes that plagued you were direct or indirect
consequences of your unjust economic conditions, and would have
disappeared with them.

"But excuse my vehemence. Remember that I am arraigning your civilization
and not you. What I wanted to bring out is that the principle that the
first duty of society is to safeguard the lives of its members was as
fully admitted by your world as by ours, and that in failing to give the
principle an economic as well as police, judicial, and military
interpretation, your world convicted itself of an inconsistency as
glaring in logic as it was cruel in consequences. We, on the other hand,
in assuming as a nation the responsibility of safeguarding the lives of
the people on the economic side, have merely, for the first time,
honestly carried out a principle as old as the civilized state."

"That is clear enough," I said. "Any one, on the mere statement of the
case, would of course be bound to admit that the recognized duty of the
state to guarantee the life of the citizen against the action of his
fellows does logically involve responsibility to protect him from
influences attacking the economic basis of life quite as much as from
direct forcible assaults. The more advanced governments of my day, by
their poor laws and pauper systems, in a dim way admitted this
responsibility, although the kind of provision they made for the
economically unfortunate was so meager and accompanied with such
conditions of ignominy that men would ordinarily rather die than accept
it. But grant that the sort of recognition we gave of the right of the
citizen to be guaranteed a subsistence was a mockery more brutal than its
total denial would have been, and that a far larger interpretation of its
duty in this respect was incumbent on the state, yet how does it
logically follow that society is bound to guarantee or the citizen to
demand an absolute economic equality?"

"It is very true, as you say," answered the doctor, "that the duty of
society to guarantee every member the economic basis of his life might be
after some fashion discharged short of establishing economic equality.
Just so in your day might the duty of the state to safeguard the lives of
citizens from physical violence have been discharged after a nominal
fashion if it had contented itself with preventing outright murders,
while leaving the people to suffer from one another's wantonness all
manner of violence not directly deadly; but tell me, Julian, were
governments in your day content with so construing the limit of their
duty to protect citizens from violence, or would the citizens have been
content with such a limitation?"

"Of course not."

"A government which in your day," continued the doctor, "had limited its
undertaking to protect citizens from violence to merely preventing
murders would not have lasted a day. There were no people so barbarous as
to have tolerated it. In fact, not only did all civilized governments
undertake to protect citizens from assaults against their lives, but from
any and every sort of physical assault and offense, however petty. Not
only might not a man so much as lay a finger on another in anger, but if
he only wagged his tongue against him maliciously he was laid by the
heels in jail. The law undertook to protect men in their dignity as well
as in their mere bodily integrity, rightly recognizing that to be
insulted or spit upon is as great a grievance as any assault upon life
itself.

"Now, in undertaking to secure the citizen in his right to life on the
economic side, we do but studiously follow your precedents in
safeguarding him from direct assault. If we did but secure his economic
basis so far as to avert death by direct effect of hunger and cold as
your pauper laws made a pretense of doing, we should be like a State in
your day which forbade outright murder but permitted every kind of
assault that fell short of it. Distress and deprivation resulting from
economic want falling short of actual starvation precisely correspond to
the acts of minor violence against which your State protected citizens as
carefully as against murder. The right of the citizen to have his life
secured him on the economic side can not therefore be satisfied by any
provision for bare subsistence, or by anything less than the means for
the fullest supply of every need which it is in the power of the nation
by the thriftiest stewardship of the national resources to provide for
all.

"That is to say, in extending the reign of law and public justice to the
protection and security of men's interests on the economic side, we have
merely followed, as we were reasonably bound to follow, your much-vaunted
maxim of 'equality before the law.' That maxim meant that in so far as
society collectively undertook any governmental function, it must act
absolutely without respect of persons for the equal benefit of all.
Unless, therefore, we were to reject the principle of 'equality before
the law,' it was impossible that society, having assumed charge of the
production and distribution of wealth as a collective function, could
discharge it on any other principle than equality."

"If the court please," I said, "I should like to be permitted at this
point to discontinue and withdraw my suit for the restoration of my
former property. In my day we used to hold on to all we had and fight for
all we could get with a good stomach, for our rivals were as selfish as
we, and represented no higher right or larger view. But this modern
social system with its public stewardship of all capital for the general
welfare quite changes the situation. It puts the man who demands more
than his share in the light of a person attacking the livelihood and
seeking to impair the welfare of everybody else in the nation. To enjoy
that attitude anybody must be a good deal better convinced of the justice
of his title than I ever was even in the old days."




CHAPTER XII.

HOW INEQUALITY OF WEALTH DESTROYS LIBERTY.

"Nevertheless," said the doctor, "I have stated only half the reason the
judges would give wherefore they could not, by returning your wealth,
permit the impairment of our collective economic system and the
beginnings of economic inequality in the nation. There is another great
and equal right of all men which, though strictly included under the
right of life, is by generous minds set even above it: I mean the right
of liberty--that is to say, the right not only to live, but to live in
personal independence of one's fellows, owning only those common social
obligations resting on all alike.

"Now, the duty of the state to safeguard the liberty of citizens was
recognized in your day just as was its duty to safeguard their lives, but
with the same limitation, namely, that the safeguard should apply only to
protect from attacks by violence. If it were attempted to kidnap a
citizen and reduce him by force to slavery, the state would interfere,
but not otherwise. Nevertheless, it was true in your day of liberty and
personal independence, as of life, that the perils to which they were
chiefly exposed were not from force or violence, but resulted from
economic causes, the necessary consequences of inequalities of wealth.
Because the state absolutely ignored this side, which was incomparably
the largest side of the liberty question, its pretense of defending the
liberties of citizens was as gross a mockery as that of guaranteeing
their lives. Nay, it was a yet more absolute mockery and on a far vaster
scale.

"For, although I have spoken of the monopolization of wealth and of the
productive machinery by a portion of the people as being first of all a
threat to the lives of the rest of the community and to be resisted as
such, nevertheless the main practical effect of the system was not to
deprive the masses of mankind of life outright, but to force them,
through want, to buy their lives by the surrender of their liberties.
That is to say, they accepted servitude to the possessing class and
became their serfs on condition of receiving the means of subsistence.
Although multitudes were always perishing from lack of subsistence, yet
it was not the deliberate policy of the possessing class that they should
do so. The rich had no use for dead men; on the other hand, they had
endless use for human beings as servants, not only to produce more
wealth, but as the instruments of their pleasure and luxury.

"As I need not remind you who were familiar with it, the industrial
system of the world before the great Revolution was wholly based upon the
compulsory servitude of the mass of mankind to the possessing class,
enforced by the coercion of economic need."

"Undoubtedly," I said, "the poor as a class were in the economic service
of the rich, or, as we used to say, labor was dependent on capital for
employment, but this service and employment had become in the nineteenth
century an entirely voluntary relation on the part of the servant or
employee. The rich had no power to compel the poor to be their servants.
They only took such as came voluntarily to ask to be taken into service,
and even begged to be, with tears. Surely a service so sought after could
scarcely be called compulsory."

"Tell us, Julian," said the doctor, "did the rich go to one another and
ask the privilege of being one another's servants or employees?"

"Of course not."

"But why not?"

"Because, naturally, no one could wish to be another's servant or subject
to his orders who could get along without it."

"I should suppose so, but why, then, did the poor so eagerly seek to
serve the rich when the rich refused with scorn to serve one another? Was
it because the poor so loved the rich?"

"Scarcely."

"Why then?"

"It was, of course, for the reason that it was the only way the poor
could get a living."

"You mean that it was only the pressure of want or the fear of it that
drove the poor to the point of becoming the servants of the rich?"

"That is about it."

"And would you call that voluntary service? The distinction between
forced service and such service as that would seem quite imperceptible to
us. If a man may be said to do voluntarily that which only the pressure
of bitter necessity compels him to elect to do, there has never been any
such thing as slavery, for all the acts of a slave are at the last the
acceptance of a less evil for fear of a worse. Suppose, Julian, you or a
few of you owned the main water supply, or food supply, clothing supply,
land supply, or main industrial opportunities in a community and could
maintain your ownership, that fact alone would make the rest of the
people your slaves, would it not, and that, too, without any direct
compulsion on your part whatever?"

"No doubt."

"Suppose somebody should charge you with holding the people under
compulsory servitude, and you should answer that you laid no hand on them
but that they willingly resorted to you and kissed your hands for the
privilege of being allowed to serve you in exchange for water, food, or
clothing, would not that be a very transparent evasion on your part of
the charge of slaveholding?"

"No doubt it would be."

"Well, and was not that precisely the relation the capitalists or
employers as a class held toward the rest of the community through their
monopolization of wealth and the machinery of production?"

"I must say that it was."

"There was a great deal said by the economists of your day," the doctor
went on, "about the freedom of contract--the voluntary, unconstrained
agreement of the laborer with the employer as to the terms of his
employment. What hypocrisy could have been so brazen as that pretense
when, as a matter of fact, every contract made between the capitalist who
had bread and could keep it and the laborer who must have it or die would
have been declared void, if fairly judged, even under your laws as a
contract made under duress of hunger, cold, and nakedness, nothing less
than the threat of death! If you own the things men must have, you own
the men who must have them."

"But the compulsion of want," said I, "meaning hunger and cold, is a
compulsion of Nature. In that sense we are all under compulsory servitude
to Nature."

"Yes, but not to one another. That is the whole difference between
slavery and freedom. To-day no man serves another, but all the common
good in which we equally share. Under your system the compulsion of
Nature through the appropriation by the rich of the means of supplying
Nature's demands was turned into a club by which the rich made the poor
pay Nature's debt of labor not only for themselves but for the rich also,
with a vast overcharge besides for the needless waste of the system."

"You make out our system to have been little better than slavery. That is
a hard word."

"It is a very hard word, and we want above all things to be fair. Let us
look at the question. Slavery exists where there is a compulsory using of
men by other men for the benefit of the users. I think we are quite
agreed that the poor man in your day worked for the rich only because his
necessities compelled him to. That compulsion varied in force according
to the degree of want the worker was in. Those who had a little economic
means would only render the lighter kinds of service on more or less easy
and honorable conditions, while those who had less means or no means at
all would do anything on any terms however painful or degrading. With the
mass of the workers the compulsion of necessity was of the sharpest kind.
The chattel slave had the choice between working for his master and the
lash. The wage-earner chose between laboring for an employer or starving.
In the older, cruder forms of slavery the masters had to be watching
constantly to prevent the escape of their slaves, and were troubled with
the charge of providing for them. Your system was more convenient, in
that it made Nature your taskmaster, and depended on her to keep your
servants to the task. It was a difference between the direct exercise of
coercion, in which the slave was always on the point of rebellion, and an
indirect coercion by which the same industrial result was obtained, while
the slave, instead of rebelling against his master's authority, was
grateful for the opportunity of serving him."

"But," said I, "the wage-earner received wages and the slave received
nothing."

"I beg your pardon. The slave received subsistence--clothing and
shelter--and the wage-earner who could get more than these out of his
wages was rarely fortunate. The rate of wages, except in new countries
and under special conditions and for skilled workers, kept at about the
subsistence point, quite as often dropping below as rising above. The
main difference was that the master expended the subsistence wage of the
chattel slave for him while the earner expended it for himself. This was
better for the worker in some ways; in others less desirable, for the
master out of self-interest usually saw that the chattel,
children had enough; while the employer, having no stake in the life or
health of the wage-earner, did not concern himself as to whether he lived
or died. There were never any slave quarters so vile as the tenement
houses of the city slums where the wage-earners were housed."

"But at least," said I, "there was this radical difference between the
wage-earner of my day and the chattel slave: the former could leave his
employer at will, the latter could not."

"Yes, that is a difference, but one surely that told not so much in favor
of as against the wage-earner. In all save temporarily fortunate
countries with sparse population the laborer would have been glad indeed
to exchange the right to leave his employer for a guarantee that he would
not be discharged by him. Fear of losing his opportunity to work--his
job, as you called it--was the nightmare of the laborer's life as it was
reflected in the literature of your period. Was it not so?"

I had to admit that it was even so.

"The privilege of leaving one employer for another," pursued the doctor,
"even if it had not been more than balanced by the liability to
discharge, was of very little worth to the worker, in view of the fact
that the rate of wages was at about the same point wherever he might go,
and the change would be merely a choice between the personal dispositions
of different masters, and that difference was slight enough, for business
rules controlled the relations of masters and men."

I rallied once more.

"One point of real superiority at least you must admit the wage-earner
had over the chattel slave. He could by merit rise out of his condition
and become himself an employer, a rich man."

"Surely, Julian, you forget that there has rarely been a slave system
under which the more energetic, intelligent, and thrifty slaves could and
did not buy their freedom or have it given them by their masters. The
freedmen in ancient Rome rose to places of importance and power quite as
frequently as did the born proletarian of Europe or America get out of
his condition."

I did not think of anything to reply at the moment, and the doctor,
having compassion on me, pursued: "It is an old illustration of the
different view points of the centuries that precisely this point which
you make of the possibility of the wage-earner rising, although it was
getting to be a vanishing point in your day, seems to us the most truly
diabolical feature of the whole system. The prospect of rising as a
motive to reconcile the wage-earner or the poor man in general to his
subjection, what did it amount to? It was but saying to him, 'Be a good
slave, and you, too, shall have slaves of your own.' By this wedge did
you separate the cleverer of the wage-workers from the mass of them and
dignify treason to humanity by the name of ambition. No true man should
wish to rise save to raise others with him."

"One point of difference, however, you must at least admit," I said. "In
chattel slavery the master had a power over the persons of his slaves
which the employer did not have over even the poorest of his employees:
he could not lay his hand upon them in violence."

"Again, Julian," said the doctor, "you have mentioned a point of
difference that tells in favor of chattel slavery as a more humane
industrial method than the wage system. If here and there the anger of
the chattel slave owner made him forget his self-restraint so far as to
cripple or maim his slaves, yet such cases were on the whole rare, and
such masters were held to an account by public opinion if not by law; but
under the wage system the employer had no motive of self-restraint to
spare life or limb of his employees, and he escaped responsibility by the
fact of the consent and even eagerness of the needy people to undertake
the most perilous and painful tasks for the sake of bread. We read that
in the United States every year at least two hundred thousand men, women,
and children were done to death or maimed in the performance of their
industrial duties, nearly forty thousand alone in the single branch of
the steam railroad service. No estimate seems to have ever been attempted
of the many times greater number who perished more indirectly through the
injurious effects of bad industrial conditions. What chattel-slave system
ever made a record of such wastefulness of human life, as that?

"Nay, more, the chattel-slave owner, if he smote his slave, did it in
anger and, as likely as not, with some provocation; but these wholesale
slaughters of wage-earners that made your land red were done in sheer
cold-bloodedness, without any other motive on the part of the
capitalists, who were responsible, save gain.

"Still again, one of the more revolting features of chattel slavery has
always been considered the subjection of the slave women to the lust of
their masters. How was it in this respect under the rule of the rich? We
read in our histories that great armies of women in your day were forced
by poverty to make a business of submitting their bodies to those who had
the means of furnishing them a little bread. The books say that these
armies amounted in your great cities to bodies of thirty or forty
thousand women. Tales come down to us of the magnitude of the maiden
tribute levied upon the poorer classes for the gratification of the lusts
of those who could pay, which the annals of antiquity could scarcely
match for horror. Am I saying too much, Julian?"

"You have mentioned nothing but facts which stared me in the face all my
life," I replied, "and yet it appears I have had to wait for a man of
another century to tell me what they meant."

"It was precisely because they stared you and your contemporaries so
constantly in the face, and always had done so, that you lost the faculty
of judging their meaning. They were, as we might say, too near the eyes
to be seen aright. You are far enough away from the facts now to begin to
see them clearly and to realize their significance. As you shall continue
to occupy this modern view point, you will more and more completely come
to see with us that the most revolting aspect of the human condition
before the great Revolution was not the suffering from physical privation
or even the outright starvation of multitudes which directly resulted
from the unequal distribution of wealth, but the indirect effect of that
inequality to reduce almost the total human race to a state of degrading
bondage to their fellows. As it seems to us, the offense of the old order
against liberty was even greater than the offense to life; and even if it
were conceivable that it could have satisfied the right of life by
guaranteeing abundance to all, it must just the same have been destroyed,
for, although the collective administration of the economic system had
been unnecessary to guarantee life, there could be no such thing as
liberty so long as by the effect of inequalities of wealth and the
private control of the means of production the opportunity of men to
obtain the means of subsistence depended on the will of other men."




CHAPTER XIII.

PRIVATE CAPITAL STOLEN FROM THE SOCIAL FUND.

"I observe," pursued the doctor, "that Edith is getting very impatient
with these dry disquisitions, and thinks it high time we passed from
wealth in the abstract to wealth in the concrete, as illustrated by the
contents of your safe. I will delay the company only while I say a very
few words more; but really this question of the restoration of your
million, raised half in jest as it was, so vitally touches the central
and fundamental principle of our social order that I want to give you at
least an outline idea of the modern ethics of wealth distribution.

"The essential difference between the new and the old point of view you
fully possess by this time. The old ethics conceived of the question of
what a man might rightfully possess as one which began and ended with the
relation of individuals to things. Things have no rights as against moral
beings, and there was no reason, therefore, in the nature of the case as
thus stated, why individuals should not acquire an unlimited ownership of
things so far as their abilities permitted. But this view absolutely
ignored the social consequences which result from an unequal distribution
of material things in a world where everybody absolutely depends for life
and all its uses on their share of those things. That is to say, the old
so-called ethics of property absolutely overlooked the whole ethical side
of the subject--namely, its bearing on human relations. It is precisely
this consideration which furnishes the whole basis of the modern ethics
of property. All human beings are equal in rights and dignity, and only
such a system of wealth distribution can therefore be defensible as
respects and secures those equalities. But while this is the principle
which you will hear most generally stated as the moral ground of our
economic equality, there is another quite sufficient and wholly different
ground on which, even if the rights of life and liberty were not
involved, we should yet maintain that equal sharing of the total product
of industry was the only just plan, and that any other was robbery.

"The main factor in the production of wealth among civilized men is the
social organism, the machinery of associated labor and exchange by which
hundreds of millions of individuals provide the demand for one another's
product and mutually complement one another's labors, thereby making the
productive and distributive systems of a nation and of the world one
great machine. This was true even under private capitalism, despite the
prodigious waste and friction of its methods; but of course it is a far
more important truth now when the machinery of co-operation runs with
absolute smoothness and every ounce of energy is utilized to the utmost
effect. The element in the total industrial product which is due to the
social organism is represented by the difference between the value of
what one man produces as a worker in connection with the social
organization and what he could produce in a condition of isolation.
Working in concert with his fellows by aid of the social organism, he and
they produce enough to support all in the highest luxury and refinement.
Toiling in isolation, human experience has proved that he would be
fortunate if he could at the utmost produce enough to keep himself alive.
It is estimated, I believe, that the average daily product of a worker in
America to-day is some fifty dollars. The product of the same man working
in isolation would probably be highly estimated on the same basis of
calculation if put at a quarter of a dollar. Now tell me, Julian, to whom
belongs the social organism, this vast machinery of human association,
which enhances some two hundredfold the product of every one's labor?"

"Manifestly," I replied, "it can belong to no one in particular, but to
nothing less than society collectively. Society collectively can be the
only heir to the social inheritance of intellect and discovery, and it is
society collectively which furnishes the continuous daily concourse by
which alone that inheritance is made effective."

"Exactly so. The social organism, with all that it is and all it makes
possible, is the indivisible inheritance of all in common. To whom, then,
properly belongs that two hundredfold enhancement of the value of every
one's labor which is owing to the social organism?"

"Manifestly to society collectively--to the general fund."

"Previous to the great Revolution," pursued the doctor. "Although there
seems to have been a vague idea of some such social fund as this, which
belonged to society collectively, there was no clear conception of its
vastness, and no custodian of it, or possible provision to see that it
was collected and applied for the common use. A public organization of
industry, a nationalized economic system, was necessary before the social
fund could be properly protected and administered. Until then it must
needs be the subject of universal plunder and embezzlement. The social
machinery was seized upon by adventurers and made a means of enriching
themselves by collecting tribute from the people to whom it belonged and
whom it should have enriched. It would be one way of describing the
effect of the Revolution to say that it was only the taking possession by
the people collectively of the social machinery which had always belonged
to them, thenceforth to be conducted as a public plant, the returns of
which were to go to the owners as the equal proprietors and no longer to
buccaneers.

"You will readily see," the doctor went on, "how this analysis of the
product of industry must needs tend to minimize the importance of the
personal equation of performance as between individual workers. If the
modern man, by aid of the social machinery, can produce fifty dollars'
worth of product where he could produce not over a quarter of a dollar's
worth without society, then forty-nine dollars and three quarters out of
every fifty dollars must be credited to the social fund to be equally
distributed. The industrial efficiency of two men working without society
might have differed as two to one--that is, while one man was able to
produce a full quarter dollar's worth of work a day, the other could
produce only twelve and a half cents' worth. This was a very great
difference under those circumstances, but twelve and a half cents is so
slight a proportion of fifty dollars as not to be worth mentioning. That
is to say, the difference in individual endowments between the two men
would remain the same, but that difference would be reduced to relative
unimportance by the prodigious equal addition made to the product of both
alike by the social organism. Or again, before gunpowder was invented one
man might easily be worth two as a warrior. The difference between the
men as individuals remained what it was; yet the overwhelming factor
added to the power of both alike by the gun practically equalized them as
fighters. Speaking of guns, take a still better illustration--the
relation of the individual soldiers in a square of infantry to the
formation. There might be large differences in the fighting power of the
individual soldiers singly outside the ranks. Once in the ranks, however,
the formation added to the fighting efficiency of every soldier equally
an element so overwhelming as to dwarf the difference between the
individual efficiency of different men. Say, for instance, that the
formation added ten to the fighting force of every member, then the man
who outside the ranks was as two to one in power compared with his
comrade would, when they both stood in the ranks, compare with him only
as twelve to eleven--an inconsiderable difference.

"I need scarcely point out to you, Julian, the bearing of the principle
of the social fund on economic equality when the industrial system was
nationalized. It made it obvious that even if it were possible to figure
out in a satisfactory manner the difference in the industrial products
which in an accounting with the social fund could be respectively
credited to differences in individual performance, the result would not
be worth the trouble. Even the worker of special ability, who might hope
to gain most by it, could not hope to gain so much as he would lose in
common with others by sacrifici

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