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A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #8449 · 377,115 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8449]
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Language: English

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A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA

Romance

By W. D. Howells

Author Of “The Coast Of Bohemia”, “The Quality Of Mercy”,
“A Hazard Of New Fortunes” Etc.

Harper & Brothers Publishers

New York And London

1908




A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA




I


I confess that with all my curiosity to meet an Altrurian, I was in no
hospitable mood toward the traveler when he finally presented himself,
pursuant to the letter of advice sent me by the friend who introduced him.
It would be easy enough to take care of him in the hotel; I had merely to
engage a room for him, and have the clerk tell him his money was not good
if he tried to pay for anything. But I had swung fairly into my story; its
people were about me all the time; I dwelt amid its events and places, and
I did not see how I could welcome my guest among them, or abandon them for
him. Still, when he actually arrived, and I took his hand as he stepped
from the train, I found it less difficult to say that I was glad to see
him than I expected. In fact, I was glad, for I could not look upon his
face without feeling a glow of kindness for him. I had not the least
trouble in identifying him, for he was so unlike all the Americans who
dismounted from the train with him, and who all looked hot, worried, and
anxious. He was a man no longer young, but in what we call the heyday of
life, when our own people are so absorbed in making provision for the
future that they may be said not to live in the present at all. This
Altrurian’s whole countenance, and especially his quiet, gentle eyes,
expressed a vast contemporaneity, with bounds of leisure removed to the
end of time; or, at least, this was the effect of something in them which
I am obliged to report in rather fantastic terms. He was above the middle
height, and he carried himself vigorously. His face was sunburned, or
sea-burned, where it was not bearded; and, although I knew from my
friend’s letter that he was a man of learning and distinction in his own
country, I should never have supposed him a person of scholarly life, he
was so far from sicklied over with anything like the pale cast of thought.
When he took the hand I offered him in my half-hearted welcome he gave it
a grasp that decided me to confine our daily greetings to something much
less muscular.

“Let me have your bag,” I said, as we do when we meet people at the train,
and he instantly bestowed a rather heavy valise upon me, with a smile in
his benignant eyes, as if it had been the greatest favor. “Have you got
any checks?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, in very good English, but with an accent new to me, “I
bought two.” He gave them to me, and I passed them to our hotel porter,
who was waiting there with the baggage-cart. Then I proposed that we
should walk across the meadow to the house, which is a quarter of a mile
or so from the station. We started, but he stopped suddenly and looked
back over his shoulder. “Oh, you needn’t be troubled about your trunks,” I
said. “The porter will get them to the house all right. They’ll be in your
room by the time we get there.”

“But he’s putting them into the wagon himself,” said the Altrurian.

“Yes; he always does that. He’s a strong young fellow. He’ll manage it.
You needn’t--” I could not finish saying he need not mind the porter; he
was rushing back to the station, and I had the mortification of seeing him
take an end of each trunk and help the porter toss it into the wagon; some
lighter pieces he put in himself, and he did not stop till all the baggage
the train had left was disposed of.

I stood holding his valise, unable to put it down in my embarrassment at
this eccentric performance, which had been evident not to me alone, but to
all the people who arrived by the train, and all their friends who came
from the hotel to meet them. A number of these passed me on the tally-ho
coach; and a lady, who had got her husband with her for over Sunday, and
was in very good spirits, called gayly down to me: “Your friend seems fond
of exercise!”

“Yes,” I answered, dryly; the sparkling repartee which ought to have come
to my help failed to show up. But it was impossible to be vexed with the
Altrurian when he returned to me, unruffled by his bout with the baggage
and serenely smiling.

“Do you know,” he said, “I fancied that good fellow was ashamed of my
helping him. I hope it didn’t seem a reflection upon him in any way before
your people? I ought to have thought of that.”

“I guess we can make it right with him. I dare say he felt more surprised
than disgraced. But we must make haste a little now; your train was half
an hour late, and we shall not stand so good a chance for supper if we are
not there pretty promptly.”

“No?” said the Altrurian. “Why?”

“Well,” I said, with evasive lightness, “first come, first served, you
know. That’s human nature.”

“Is it?” he returned, and he looked at me as one does who suspects another
of joking.

“Well, isn’t it?” I retorted; but I hurried to add: “Besides, I want to
have time after supper to show you a bit of our landscape. I think you’ll
enjoy it.” I knew he had arrived in Boston that morning by steamer, and I
now thought it high time to ask him: “Well, what do you think of America,
anyway?” I ought really to have asked him this the moment he stepped from
the train.

“Oh,” he said, “I’m intensely interested,” and I perceived that he spoke
with a certain reservation. “As the most advanced country of its time,
I’ve always been very curious to see it.”

The last sentence raised my dashed spirits again, and I said, confidently:
“You must find our system of baggage-checks delightful.” I said this
because it is one of the first things we brag of to foreigners, and I had
the habit of it. “By-the-way,” I ventured to add, “I suppose you meant to
say you _brought_ two checks when I asked you for them at the train just
now? But you really said you _bought_ them.”

“Yes,” the Altrurian replied, “I gave half a dollar apiece for them at the
station in Boston. I saw other people doing it,” he explained, noting my
surprise. “Isn’t it the custom?”

“I’m happy to say it isn’t yet, on most of our roads. They were tipping
the baggage-man, to make sure that he checked their baggage in time and
put it on the train. I had to do that myself when I came up; otherwise it
might have got along here some time next day. But the system is perfect.”

“The poor man looked quite worn out,” said the Altrurian, “and I am glad I
gave him something. He seemed to have several hundred pieces of baggage to
look after, and he wasn’t embarrassed like your porter by my helping him
put my trunks into the car. May I confess that the meanness of the
station, its insufficient facilities, its shabby waiting-rooms, and its
whole crowded and confused appearance gave me rather a bad impression?”

“I know,” I had to own, “it’s shameful; but you wouldn’t have found
another station in the city so bad.”

“Ah, then,” said the Altrurian, “I suppose this particular road is too
poor to employ more baggage-men or build new stations; they seemed rather
shabby all the way up.”

“Well, no,” I was obliged to confess, “it’s one of the richest roads in
the country. The stock stands at about 180. But I’m really afraid we shall
be late to supper if we don’t get on,” I broke off; though I was not
altogether sorry to arrive after the porter had disposed of the baggage. I
dreaded another display of active sympathy on the part of my strange
companion; I have often felt sorry myself for the porters of hotels, but I
have never thought of offering to help them handle the heavy trunks that
they manage.

The Altrurian was delighted with the hotel; and in fact it did look
extremely pretty, with its branching piazzas full of well-dressed people,
and its green lawns where the children were playing. I led the way to the
room which I had taken for him next my own; it was simply furnished, but
it was sweet with matting, fresh linen, and pure whitewashed walls. I
flung open the window-blinds and let him get a glimpse of the mountains
purpling under the sunset, the lake beneath, and the deeply foliaged
shores.

“Glorious! glorious!” he sighed.

“Yes,” I modestly assented. “We think that’s rather fine.” He stood
tranced before the window, and I thought I had better say: “Well, now I
can’t give you much time to get the dust of travel off; the dining-room
doors close at eight, and we must hurry down.”

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” he said, pulling off his coat.

I waited impatiently at the foot of the stairs, avoiding the question I
met on the lips and in the eyes of my acquaintance. The fame of my
friend’s behavior at the station must have spread through the whole place;
and everybody wished to know who he was. I answered simply he was a
traveler from Altruria; and in some cases I went further and explained
that the Altrurians were peculiar.

In much less time than it seemed my friend found me; and then I had a
little compensation for my suffering in his behalf. I could see that,
whatever people said of him, they felt the same mysterious liking at
sight of him that I had felt. He had made a little change in his dress,
and I perceived that the women thought him not only good-looking but
well-dressed. They followed him with their eyes as we went into the
dining-room, and I was rather proud of being with him, as if I somehow
shared the credit of his clothes and good looks. The Altrurian himself
seemed most struck with the head-waiter, who showed us to our places, and
while we were waiting for our supper I found a chance to explain that he
was a divinity student from one of the fresh-water colleges, and was
serving here during his summer vacation. This seemed to interest my friend
so much that I went on to tell him that many of the waitresses, whom he
saw standing there subject to the order of the guests, were country
school-mistresses in the winter.

“Ah, that is as it should be,” he said; “that is the kind of thing I
expected to meet with in America.”

“Yes,” I responded, in my flattered national vanity, “if America means
anything at all it means the honor of work and the recognition of personal
worth everywhere. I hope you are going to make a long stay with us. We
like to have travelers visit us who can interpret the spirit of our
institutions as well as read their letter. As a rule Europeans never quite
get our point of view. Now a great many of these waitresses are ladies, in
the true sense of the word--selfrespectful, intelligent, refined, and fit
to grace--”

I was interrupted by the noise my friend made in suddenly pushing back his
chair and getting to his feet. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “You’re not
ill, I hope?”

But he did not hear me. He had run half down the dining-hall toward the
slender young girl who was bringing us our supper. I had ordered rather
generously, for my friend had owned to a good appetite, and I was hungry
myself with waiting for him, so that the tray the girl carried was piled
up with heavy dishes. To my dismay I saw, rather than heard at that
distance, the Altrurian enter into a polite controversy with her, and
then, as if overcoming all her scruples by sheer strength of will, possess
himself of the tray and make off with it toward our table. The poor child
followed him, blushing to her hair; the head-waiter stood looking
helplessly on; the guests, who at that late hour were fortunately few,
were simply aghast at the scandal; the Altrurian alone seemed to think
his conduct the most natural thing in the world. He put the tray on the
side-table near us, and in spite of our waitress’s protests insisted upon
arranging the little bird-bath dishes before our plates. Then at last he
sat down, and the girl, flushed and tremulous, left the room, as I could
not help suspecting, to have a good cry in the kitchen. She did not come
back, and the head-waiter, who was perhaps afraid to send another in her
place, looked after our few wants himself. He kept a sharp eye on my
friend, as if he were not quite sure he was safe, but the Altrurian
resumed the conversation with all that lightness of spirits which I
noticed in him after he helped the porter with the baggage. I did not
think it the moment to take him to task for what he had just done; I was
not even sure that it was the part of a host to do so at all, and between
the one doubt and the other I left the burden of talk to him.

“What a charming young creature!” he began. “I never saw anything prettier
than the way she had of refusing my help, absolutely without coquetry or
affectation of any kind. She is, as you said, a perfect lady, and she
graces her work, as I am sure she would grace any exigency of life. She
quite realizes my ideal of an American girl, and I see now what the spirit
of your country must be from such an expression of it.”

I wished to tell him that while a country school-teacher who waits at
table in a summer hotel is very much to be respected in her sphere, she is
not regarded with that high honor which some other women command among us;
but I did not find this very easy, after what I had said of our esteem for
labor; and while I was thinking how I could hedge, my friend went on.

“I liked England greatly, and I liked the English, but I could not like
the theory of their civilization or the aristocratic structure of their
society. It seemed to me iniquitous, for we believe that inequality and
iniquity are the same in the last analysis.”

At this I found myself able to say: “Yes, there is something terrible,
something shocking, in the frank brutality with which Englishmen affirm
the essential inequality of men. The affirmation of the essential equality
of men was the first point of departure with us when we separated from
them.”

“I know,” said the Altrurian. “How grandly it is expressed in your
glorious Declaration!”

“Ah, you have read our Declaration of Independence, then?”

“Every Altrurian has read that,” answered my friend.

“Well,” I went on smoothly, and I hoped to render what I was going to say
the means of enlightening him without offence concerning the little
mistake he had just made with the waitress, “of course we don’t take that
in its closest literality.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said.

“Why, you know it was rather the political than the social traditions of
England that we broke with, in the Revolution.”

“How is that?” he returned. “Didn’t you break with monarchy and nobility,
and ranks and classes?”

“Yes, we broke with all those things.”

“But I found them a part of the social as well as the political structure
in England. You have no kings or nobles here. Have you any ranks or
classes?”

“Well, not exactly in the English sense. Our ranks and classes, such as we
have, are what I may call voluntary.”

“Oh, I understand. I suppose that from time to time certain ones among you
feel the need of serving, and ask leave of the commonwealth to subordinate
themselves to the rest of the state and perform all the lowlier offices in
it. Such persons must be held in peculiar honor. Is it something like
that?”

“Well, no, I can’t say it’s quite like that. In fact I think I’d better
let you trust to your own observation of our life.”

“But I’m sure,” said the Altrurian, with a simplicity so fine that it was
a long time before I could believe it quite real, “that I shall approach
it so much more intelligently with a little instruction from you. You say
that your social divisions are voluntary. But do I understand that those
who serve among you do not wish to do so?”

“Well, I don’t suppose they would serve if they could help it,” I replied.

“Surely,” said the Altrurian, with a look of horror, “you don’t mean that
they are slaves.”

“Oh no! oh no!” I said; “the war put an end to that. We are all free now,
black and white.”

“But if they do not wish to serve, and are not held in peculiar honor for
serving--”

“I see that my word ‘voluntary’ has misled you,” I put in. “It isn’t the
word exactly. The divisions among us are rather a process of natural
selection. You will see, as you get better acquainted with the workings of
our institutions, that there are no arbitrary distinctions here but the
fitness of the work for the man and the man for the work determines the
social rank that each one holds.”

“Ah, that is fine!” cried the Altrurian, with a glow of enthusiasm. “Then
I suppose that these intelligent young people who teach school in winter
and serve at table in the summer are in a sort of provisional state,
waiting for the process of natural selection to determine whether they
shall finally be teachers or waiters.”

“Yes, it might be stated in some such terms,” I assented, though I was not
altogether easy in my mind. It seemed to me that I was not quite candid
with this most candid spirit. I added: “You know we are a sort of
fatalists here in America. We are great believers in the doctrine that it
will all come out right in the end.”

“Ah, I don’t wonder at that,” said the Altrurian, “if the process of
natural selection works so perfectly among you as you say. But I am afraid
I don’t understand this matter of your domestic service yet. I believe you
said that all honest work is honored in America. Then no social slight
attaches to service, I suppose?”

“Well, I can’t say that, exactly. The fact is, a certain social slight
does attach to service, and that is one reason why I don’t quite like to
have students wait at table. It won’t be pleasant for them to remember it
in after-life, and it won’t be pleasant for their children to remember
it.”

“Then the slight would descend?”

“I think it would. One wouldn’t like to think one’s father or mother had
been at service.”

The Altrurian said nothing for a moment. Then he remarked: “So it seems
that while all honest work is honored among you, there are some kinds of
honest work that are not honored so much as others.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because some occupations are more degrading than others.”

“But why?” he persisted, as I thought, a little unreasonably.

“Really,” I said, “I think I must leave you to imagine.”

“I am afraid I can’t,” he said, sadly. “Then, if domestic service is
degrading in your eyes, and people are not willing servants among you, may
I ask why any are servants?”

“It is a question of bread-and-butter. They are obliged to be.”

“That is, they are forced to do work that is hateful and disgraceful to
them because they cannot live without?”

“Excuse me,” I said, not at all liking this sort of pursuit, and feeling
it fair to turn even upon a guest who kept it up. “Isn’t it so with you in
Altruria?”

“It was so once,” he admitted, “but not now. In fact, it is like a waking
dream to find one’s self in the presence of conditions here that we
outlived so long ago.”

There was an unconscious superiority in this speech that nettled me, and
stung me to retort: “We do not expect to outlive them. We regard them as
final, and as indestructibly based in human nature itself.”

“Ah,” said the Altrurian, with a delicate and caressing courtesy, “have I
said something offensive?”

“Not at all,” I hastened to answer. “It is not surprising that you did not
get our point of view exactly. You will by-and-by, and then, I think, you
will see that it is the true one. We have found that the logic of our
convictions could not be applied to the problem of domestic service. It is
everywhere a very curious and perplexing problem. The simple old solution
of the problem was to own your servants; but we found that this was not
consistent with the spirit of our free institutions. As soon as it was
abandoned the anomaly began. We had outlived the primitive period when the
housekeeper worked with her domestics and they were her help, and were
called so; and we had begun to have servants to do all the household work,
and to call them so. This state of things never seemed right to some of
our purest and best people. They fancied, as you seem to have done, that
to compel people through their necessities to do your hateful drudgery,
and to wound and shame them with a name which every American instinctively
resents, was neither republican nor Christian. Some of our thinkers tried
to mend matters by making their domestics a part of their families; and in
the life of Emerson you’ll find an amusing account of his attempt to have
his servant eat at the same table with himself and his wife. It wouldn’t
work. He and his wife could stand it, but the servant couldn’t.”

I paused, for this was where the laugh ought to have come in. The
Altrurian did not laugh, he merely asked, “Why?”

“Well, because the servant knew, if they didn’t, that they were a whole
world apart in their traditions, and were no more fit to associate than
New-Englanders and New-Zealanders. In the mere matter of education--”

“But I thought you said that these young girls who wait at table here were
teachers.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon; I ought to have explained. By this time it had
become impossible, as it now is, to get American girls to take service
except on some such unusual terms as we have in a summer hotel; and the
domestics were already ignorant foreigners, fit for nothing else. In such
a place as this it isn’t so bad. It is more as if the girls worked in a
shop or a factory. They command their own time, in a measure, their hours
are tolerably fixed, and they have one another’s society. In a private
family they would be subject to order at all times, and they would have no
social life. They would be in the family, out not of it. American girls
understand this, and so they won’t go out to service in the usual way.
Even in a summer hotel the relation has its odious aspects. The system of
giving fees seems to me degrading to those who have to take them. To offer
a student or a teacher a dollar for personal service--it isn’t right, or I
can’t make it so. In fact, the whole thing is rather anomalous with us.
The best that you can say of it is that it works, and we don’t know what
else to do.”

“But I don’t see yet,” said the Altrurian, “just why domestic service is
degrading in a country where all kinds of work are honored.”

“Well, my dear fellow, I have done my best to explain. As I intimated
before, we distinguish; and in the different kinds of labor we distinguish
against domestic service. I dare say it is partly because of the loss of
independence which it involves. People naturally despise a dependant.”

“Why?” asked the Altrurian, with that innocence of his which I was
beginning to find rather trying.

“Why?” I retorted. “Because it implies weakness.”

“And is weakness considered despicable among you?” he pursued.

“In every community it is despised practically, if not theoretically,” I
tried to explain. “The great thing that America has done is to offer the
race an opportunity--the opportunity for any man to rise above the rest
and to take the highest place, if he is able.” I had always been proud of
this fact, and I thought I had put it very well, but the Altrurian did not
seem much impressed by it.

He said: “I do not see how it differs from any country of the past in
that. But perhaps you mean that to rise carries with it an obligation
to those below ‘If any is first among you, let him be your servant.’ Is it
something like that?”

“Well, it is not quite like that,” I answered, remembering how very little
our self-made men as a class had done for others. “Every one is expected
to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little
rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America.
How is it with you in Altruria?” I demanded, hoping to get out of a
certain discomfort I felt in that way. “Do your risen men generally devote
themselves to the good of the community after they get to the top?”

“There is no rising among us,” he said, with what seemed a perception of
the harsh spirit of my question; and he paused a moment before he asked in
his turn: “How do men rise among you?”

“That would be rather a long story,” I replied. “But, putting it in the
rough, I should say that they rose by their talents, their shrewdness,
their ability to seize an advantage and turn it to their own account.”

“And is that considered noble?”

“It is considered smart. It is considered at the worst far better than a
dead level of equality. Are all men equal in Altruria? Are they all alike
gifted or beautiful, or short or tall?”

“No, they are only equal in duties and in rights. But, as you said just
now, that is a very long story. Are they equal in nothing here?”

“They are equal in opportunities.”

“Ah!” breathed the Altrurian, “I am glad to hear that.”

I began to feel a little uneasy, and I was not quite sure that this last
assertion of mine would hold water. Everybody but ourselves had now left
the dining-room, and I saw the head-waiter eying us impatiently. I pushed
back my chair and said: “I’m sorry to seem to hurry you, but I should like
to show you a very pretty sunset effect we have here before it is too
dark. When we get back, I want to introduce you to a few of my friends. Of
course, I needn’t tell you that there is a good deal of curiosity about
you, especially among the ladies.”

“Yes, I found that the case in England, largely. It was the women who
cared most to meet me. I understand that in America society is managed
even more by women than it is in England.”

“It’s entirely in their hands,” I said, with the satisfaction we all feel
in the fact. “We have no other leisure class. The richest men among us are
generally hard workers; devotion to business is the rule; but, as soon as
a man reaches the point where he can afford to pay for domestic service,
his wife and daughters expect to be released from it to the cultivation of
their minds and the enjoyment of social pleasures. It’s quite right.
That is what makes them so delightful to foreigners. You must have heard
their praises chanted in England. The English find our men rather stupid,
I believe; but they think our women are charming.”

“Yes, I was told that the wives of their nobility were sometimes
Americans,” said the Altrurian. “The English think that you regard such
marriages as a great honor, and that they are very gratifying to your
national pride.”

“Well, I suppose that is so in a measure,” I confessed. “I imagine that it
will not be long before the English aristocracy derives as largely from
American millionaires as from kings’ mistresses. Not,” I added,
virtuously, “that we approve of aristocracy.”

“No, I understand that,” said the Altrurian. “I shall hope to get your
point of view in this matter more distinctly by-and-by. As yet, I’m a
little vague about it.”

“I think I can gradually make it clear to you,” I returned.




II

We left the hotel, and I began to walk my friend across the meadow toward
the lake. I wished him to see the reflection of the afterglow in its still
waters, with the noble lines of the mountain-range that glassed itself
there; the effect is one of the greatest charms of that lovely region, the
sojourn of the sweetest summer in the world, and I am always impatient to
show it to strangers.

We climbed the meadow wall and passed through a stretch of woods to a path
leading down to the shore, and, as we loitered along in the tender gloom
of the forest, the music of the hermit-thrushes rang all round us like
crystal bells, like silver flutes, like the drip of fountains, like the
choiring of still-eyed cherubim. We stopped from time to time and
listened, while the shy birds sang unseen in their covert of shadows; but
we did not speak till we emerged from the trees and suddenly stood upon
the naked knoll overlooking the lake.

Then I explained: “The woods used to come down to the shore here, and we
had their mystery and music to the water’s edge; but last winter the owner
cut the timber off. It looks rather ragged now.” I had to recognize the
fact, for I saw the Altrurian staring about him over the clearing in a
kind of horror. It was a squalid ruin, a graceless desolation, which not
even the pitying twilight could soften. The stumps showed their hideous
mutilation everywhere; the brush had been burned, and the fires had
scorched and blackened the lean soil of the hill-slope and blasted it with
sterility. A few weak saplings, withered by the flames, drooped and
straggled about; it would be a century before the forces of nature could
repair the waste.

“You say the owner did this?” said the Altrurian. “Who is the owner?”

“Well, it does seem too bad,” I answered, evasively. “There has been a
good deal of feeling about it. The neighbors tried to buy him off before
he began the destruction, for they knew the value of the woods as an
attraction to summer-boarders; the city cottagers, of course, wanted to
save them, and together they offered for the land pretty nearly as much as
the timber was worth. But he had got it into his head that the land here
by the lake would sell for building lots if it was cleared, and he could
make money on that as well as on the trees; and so they had to go. Of
course, one might say that he was deficient in public spirit, but I don’t
blame him, altogether.”

“No,” the Altrurian assented, somewhat to my surprise, I confess.

I resumed: “There was no one else to look after his interests, and it was
not only his right but his duty to get the most he could for himself and
his own, according to his best light. That is what I tell people when they
fall foul of him for his want of public spirit.”

“The trouble seems to be, then, in the system that obliges each man to be
the guardian of his own interests. Is that what you blame?”

“No, I consider it a very perfect system. It is based upon individuality,
and we believe that individuality is the principle that differences
civilized men from savages, from the lower animals, and makes us a nation
instead of a tribe or a herd. There isn’t one of us, no matter how much he
censured this man’s want of public spirit, but would resent the slightest
interference with his property rights. The woods were his; he had the
right to do what he pleased with his own.”

“Do I understand you that, in America, a man may do what is wrong with his
own?”

“He may do anything with his own.”

“To the injury of others?”

“Well, not in person or property. But he may hurt them in taste and
sentiment as much as he likes. Can’t a man do what he pleases with his own
in Altruria?”

“No, he can only do right with his own.”

“And if he tries to do wrong, or what the community thinks is wrong?”

“Then the community takes his own from him.” Before I could think of
anything to say to this he went on: “But I wish you would explain to me
why it was left to this man’s neighbors to try and get him to sell his
portion of the landscape?”

“Why, bless my soul!” I exclaimed, “who else was there? You wouldn’t have
expected to take up a collection among the summer-boarders?”

“That wouldn’t have been so unreasonable; but I didn’t mean that. Was
there no provision for such an exigency in your laws? Wasn’t the state
empowered to buy him off at the full value of his timber and his land?”

“Certainly not,” I replied. “That would be rank paternalism.”

It began to get dark, and I suggested that we had better be going back
to the hotel. The talk seemed already to have taken us away from all
pleasure in the prospect; I said, as we found our way through the rich,
balsam-scented twilight of the woods, where one joy-haunted thrush was
still singing: “You know that in America the law is careful not to meddle
with a man’s private affairs, and we don’t attempt to legislate personal
virtue.”

“But marriage,” he said--“surely you have the institution of marriage?”

I was really annoyed at this. I returned, sarcastically; “Yes, I am glad
to say that there we can meet your expectation; we have marriage, not only
consecrated by the church, but established and defended by the state.
What has that to do with the question?”

“And you consider marriage,” he pursued, “the citadel of morality, the
fountain of all that is pure and good in your private life, the source of
home and the image of heaven?”

“There are some marriages,” I said, with a touch of our national humor,
“that do not quite fill the bill, but that is certainly our ideal of
marriage.”

“Then why do you say that you have not legislated personal virtue in
America?” he asked. “You have laws, I believe, against theft and murder,
and slander and incest, and perjury and drunkenness?”

“Why, certainly.”

“Then it appears to me that you have legislated honesty, regard for human
life, regard for character, abhorrence of unnatural vice, good faith, and
sobriety. I was told on the train coming up, by a gentleman who was
shocked at the sight of a man beating his horse, that you even had laws
against cruelty to animals.”

“Yes, and I am happy to say that they are enforced to such a degree that a
man cannot kill a cat cruelly without being punished for it.” The
Altrurian did not follow up his advantage, and I resolved not to be
outdone in magnanimity. “Come, I will own that you have the best of me on
those points. I must say you’ve trapped me very neatly, too; I can enjoy a
thing of that kind when it’s well done, and I frankly knock under. But I
had in mind something altogether different when I spoke. I was thinking of
those idealists who want to bind us hand and foot and render us the slaves
of a state where the most intimate relations of life shall be penetrated
by legislation and the very hearthstone shall be a tablet of laws.”

“Isn’t marriage a rather intimate relation of life?” asked the Altrurian.
“And I understood that gentleman on the train to say that you had laws
against cruelty to children, and societies established to see them
enforced. You don’t consider such laws an invasion of the home, do you, or
a violation of its immunities? I imagine,” he went on, “that the
difference between your civilization and ours is only one of degree, after
all, and that America and Altruria are really one at heart.”

I thought his compliment a bit hyperbolical, but I saw that it was
honestly meant, and as we Americans are first of all patriots, and vain
for our country before we are vain for ourselves, I was not proof against
the flattery it conveyed to me civically if not personally.

We were now drawing near the hotel, and I felt a certain glow of pleasure
in its gay effect on the pretty knoll where it stood. In its artless and
accidental architecture it was not unlike one of our immense coastwise
steamboats. The twilight had thickened to dusk, and the edifice was
brilliantly lighted with electrics, story above story, which streamed into
the gloom around like the lights of saloon and state-room. The corner of
wood making into the meadow hid the station; there was no other building
in sight; the hotel seemed riding at anchor on the swell of a placid sea.
I was going to call the Altrurian’s attention to this fanciful resemblance
when I remembered that he had not been in our country long enough to have
seen a Fall River boat, and I made toward the house without wasting the
comparison upon him. But I treasured it up in my own mind, intending some
day to make a literary use of it.

The guests were sitting in friendly groups about the piazzas or in rows
against the walls, the ladies with their gossip and the gentlemen with
their cigars. The night had fallen cool after a hot day, and they all had
the effect of having cast off care with the burden of the week that was
past, and to be steeping themselves in the innocent and simple enjoyment
of the hour. They were mostly middle-aged married folk, but some were old
enough to have sons and daughters among the young people who went and came
in a long, wandering promenade of the piazzas, or wove themselves through
the waltz past the open windows of the great parlor; the music seemed one
with the light that streamed far out on the lawn flanking the piazzas.
Every one was well-dressed and comfortable and at peace, and I felt that
our hotel was in some sort a microcosm of the republic.

We involuntarily paused, and I heard the Altrurian murmur: “Charming,
charming! This is really delightful!”

“Yes, isn’t it?” I returned, with a glow of pride. “Our hotel here is a
type of the summer hotel everywhere; it’s characteristic in not having
anything characteristic about it; and I rather like the notion of the
people in it being so much like the people in all the others that you
would feel yourself at home wherever you met such a company in such a
house. All over the country, north and south, wherever you find a group of
hills or a pleasant bit of water or a stretch of coast, you’ll find some
such refuge as this for our weary toilers. We began to discover some time
ago that it would not do to cut open the goose that laid our golden eggs,
even if it looked like an eagle, and kept on perching on our banners just
as if nothing had happened. We discovered that, if we continued to kill
ourselves with hard work, there would be no Americans pretty soon.”

The Altrurian laughed. “How delightfully you put it! How quaint! How
picturesque! Excuse me, but I can’t help expressing my pleasure in it. Our
own humor is so very different.”

“Ah,” I said; “what is your humor like?”

“I could hardly tell you, I’m afraid; I’ve never been much of a humorist
myself.”

Again a cold doubt of something ironical in the man went through me, but I
had no means of verifying it, and so I simply remained silent, waiting for
him to prompt me if he wished to know anything further about our national
transformation from bees perpetually busy into butterflies occasionally
idle. “And when you had made that discovery?” he suggested.

“Why, we’re nothing if not practical, you know, and as soon as we made
that discovery we stopped killing ourselves and invented the summer
resort. There are very few of our business or professional men now who
don’t take their four or five weeks’ vacation. Their wives go off early in
the summer, and, if they go to some resort within three or four hours of
the city, the men leave town Saturday afternoon and run out, or come up,
and spend Sunday with their families. For thirty-eight hours or so a hotel
like this is a nest of happy homes.”

“That is admirable,” said the Altrurian. “You are truly a practical
people. The ladies come early in the summer, you say?”

“Yes, sometimes in the beginning of June.”

“What do they come for?” asked the Altrurian.

“What for? Why, for rest!” I retorted, with some little temper.

“But I thought you told me awhile ago that as soon as a husband could
afford it he relieved his wife and daughters from all household work.”

“So he does.”

“Then what do the ladies wish to rest from?”

“From care. It is not work alone that kills. They are not relieved from
household care even when they are relieved from household work. There is
nothing so killing as household care. Besides, the sex seems to be born
tired. To be sure, there are some observers of our life who contend that
with the advance of athletics among our ladies, with boating and bathing,
and lawn-tennis and mountain-climbing and freedom from care, and these
long summers of repose, our women are likely to become as superior to the
men physically as they now are intellectually. It is all right. We should
like to see it happen. It would be part of the national joke.”

“Oh, have you a national joke?” asked the Altrurian. “But, of course! You
have so much humor. I wish you could give me some notion of it.”

“Well, it is rather damaging to any joke to explain it,” I replied, “and
your only hope of getting at ours is to live into it. One feature of it is
the confusion of foreigners at the sight of our men’s willingness to
subordinate themselves to our women.”

“Oh, I don’t find that very bewildering,” said the Altrurian. “It seems to
me a generous and manly trait of the American character. I’m proud to say
that it is one of the points at which your civilization and our own touch.
There can be no doubt that the influence of women in your public affairs
must be of the greatest advantage to you; it has been so with us.”

I turned and stared at him, but he remained insensible to my astonishment,
perhaps because it was now too dark for him to see it. “Our women have no
influence in public affairs,” I said, quietly, after a moment.

“They haven’t? Is it possible? But didn’t I understand you to imply just
now that your women were better educated than your men?”

“Well, I suppose that, taking all sorts and conditions among us, the women
are as a rule better schooled, if not better educated.”

“Then, apart from the schooling, they are not more cultivated?”

“In a sense you might say they were. They certainly go in for a lot of
things: art and music, and Browning and the drama, and foreign travel and
psychology, and political economy and Heaven knows what all. They have
more leisure for it; they have all the leisure there is, in fact; our
young men have to go into business. I suppose you may say our women are
more cultivated than our men; yes, I think there’s no questioning that.
They are the great readers among us. We poor devils of authors would be
badly off if it were not for our women. In fact, no author could make a
reputation among us without them. American literature exists because
American women appreciate it and love it.”

“But surely your men read books?”

“Some of them; not many, comparatively. You will often hear a complacent
ass of a husband and father say to an author: ‘My wife and daughters know
your books, but I can’t find time for anything but the papers nowadays. I
skim them over at breakfast, or when I’m going in to business on the
train.’ He isn’t the least ashamed to say that he reads nothing but the
newspapers.”

“Then you think that it would be better for him to read books?”

“Well, in the presence of four or five thousand journalists with drawn
scalping-knives I should not like to say so. Besides, modesty forbids.”

“No, but, really,” the Altrurian persisted, “you think that the literature
of a book is more carefully pondered than the literature of a daily
newspaper?”

“I suppose even the four or five thousand journalists with drawn
scalping-knives would hardly deny that.”

“And it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that the habitual reader of
carefully pondered literature ought to be more thoughtful than the readers
of literature which is not carefully pondered and which they merely skim
over on their way to business?”

“I believe we began by assuming the superior culture of our women, didn’t
we? You’ll hardly find an American that isn’t proud of it.”

“Then,” said the Altrurian, “if your women are generally better schooled
than your men, and more cultivated and more thoughtful, and are relieved
of household work in such great measure, and even of domestic cares, why
have they no part in your public affairs?”

I laughed, for I thought I had my friend at last. “For the best of all
possible reasons: they don’t want it.”

“Ah, that’s no reason,” he returned. “Why don’t they want it?”

“Really,” I said, out of all patience, “I think I must let you ask the
ladies themselves,” and I turned and moved again toward the hotel, but the
Altrurian gently detained me.

“Excuse me,” he began.

“No, no,” I said.
  “‘The feast is set, the guests are met,
    May’st hear the merry din.’
Come in and see the young people dance.”

“Wait,” he entreated; “tell me a little more about the old people first.
This digression about the ladies has been very interesting, but I thought
you were going to speak of the men here. Who are they, or, rather, what
are they?”

“Why, as I said before, they are all business men and professional men;
people who spend their lives in studies and counting-rooms and offices,
and have come up here for a few weeks or a few days of well-earned repose.
They are of all kinds of occupations: they are lawyers and doctors, and
clergymen and merchants, and brokers and bankers. There’s hardly any
calling you Won’t find represented among them. As I was thinking
just now, our hotel is a sort of microcosm of the American republic.”

“I am most fortunate in finding you here, where I can avail myself of your
intelligence in making my observations of your life under such
advantageous circumstances. It seems to me that with your help I might
penetrate the fact of American life, possess myself of the mystery of your
national joke, without stirring beyond the piazza of your hospitable
hotel,” said my friend. I doubted it, but one does not lightly put aside a
compliment like that to one’s intelligence, and I said I should be very
happy to be of use to him. He thanked me, and said: “Then, to begin with,
I understand that these gentlemen are here because they are all
overworked.”

“Of course. You can have no conception of how hard our business men and
our professional men work. I suppose there is nothing like it anywhere
else in the world. But, as I said before, we are beginning to find that we
cannot burn the candle at both ends and have it last long. So we put one
end out for a little while every summer. Still, there are frightful wrecks
of men strewn all along the course of our prosperity, wrecks of mind and
body. Our insane asylums are full of madmen who have broken under the
tremendous strain, and every country in Europe abounds in our dyspeptics.”
 I was rather proud of this terrible fact; there is no doubt but we
Americans are proud of overworking ourselves; Heaven knows why.

The Altrurian murmured: “Awful! Shocking!” But I thought somehow he had
not really followed me very attentively in my celebration of our national
violation of the laws of life and its consequences. “I am glad,” he went
on, “that your business men and professional men are beginning to realize
the folly and wickedness of overwork. Shall I find some of your other
weary workers here, too?”

“What other weary workers?” I asked in turn, for I imagined I had gone
over pretty much the whole list.

“Why,” said the Altrurian, “your mechanics and day laborers, your
iron-moulders and glass-blowers, your miners and farmers, your printers
and mill-operatives, your trainmen and quarry-hands. Or do they prefer to
go to resorts of their own?”




III

It was not easy to make sure of such innocence as prompted this inquiry of
my Altrurian friend. The doubt whether he could really be in earnest was
something that I had already felt; and it was destined to beset me, as it
did now, again and again. My first thought was that, of course, he was
trying a bit of cheap irony on me, a mixture of the feeble sarcasm and
false sentiment that makes us smile when we find it in the philippics of
the industrial agitators. For a moment I did not know but I had fallen
victim to a walking delegate on his vacation, who was employing his summer
leisure in going about the country in the guise of a traveler from
Altruria, and foisting himself upon people who would have had nothing to
do with him in his real character. But in another moment I perceived that
this was impossible. I could not suppose that the friend who had
introduced him to me would be capable of seconding so poor a joke, and,
besides, I could not imagine why a walking delegate should wish to address
his clumsy satire to me particularly. For the present, at least, there was
nothing for it but to deal with this inquiry as if it were made in good
faith and in the pursuit of useful information. It struck me as grotesque;
but it would not have been decent to treat it as if it were so. I was
obliged to regard it seriously, and so I decided to shirk it.

“Well,” I said, “that opens up rather a large field, which lies somewhat
outside of the province of my own activities. You know, I am a writer of
romantic fiction, and my time is so fully occupied in manipulating the
destinies of the good old-fashioned hero and heroine, and trying always to
make them end in a happy marriage, that I have hardly had a chance to look
much into the lives of agriculturists or artisans; and, to tell you the
truth, I don’t know what they do with their leisure. I’m pretty certain,
though, you won’t meet any of them in this hotel; they couldn’t afford it,
and I fancy they would find themselves out of their element among our
guests. We respect them thoroughly; every American does, and we know that
the prosperity of the country rests with them; we have a theory that they
are politically sovereign, but we see very little of them, and we don’t
associate with them. In fact, our cultivated people have so little
interest in them socially that they don’t like to meet them, even in
fiction; they prefer refined and polished ladies and gentlemen, whom they
can have some sympathy with; and I always go to the upper classes for my
types. It won’t do to suppose, though, that we are indifferent to the
working classes in their place. Their condition is being studied a good
deal just now, and there are several persons here who will be able to
satisfy your curiosity on the points you have made, I think. I will
introduce you to them.”

The Altrurian did not try to detain me this time. He said he should be
very glad indeed to meet my friends, and I led the way toward a little
group at the corner of the piazza. They were men whom I particularly
liked, for one reason or another; they were intelligent and open-minded,
and they were thoroughly American. One was a banker; another was a
minister; there was a lawyer, and there was a doctor; there was a
professor of political economy in one of our colleges; and there was a
retired manufacturer--I do not know what he used to manufacture: cotton or
iron, or something like that. They all rose politely as I came up with my
Altrurian, and I fancied in them a sensation of expectancy created by the
rumor of his eccentric behavior which must have spread through the hotel.
But they controlled this if they had it, and I could see, as the light
fell upon his face from a spray of electrics on the nearest pillar, that
sort of liking kindle in theirs which I had felt myself at first sight of
him.

I said, “Gentlemen, I wish to introduce my friend, Mr. Homos,” and then I
presented them severally to him by name. We all sat down, and I explained:
“Mr. Homos is from Altruria. He is visiting our country for the first
time, and is greatly interested in the working of our institutions. He has
been asking me some rather hard questions about certain phases of our
civilization; and the fact is that I have launched him upon you because I
don’t feel quite able to cope with him.”

They all laughed civilly at this sally of mine, but the professor asked,
with a sarcasm that I thought I hardly merited, “What point in our polity
can be obscure to the author of ‘Glove and Gauntlet’ and ‘Airs and
Graces’?”

They all laughed again, not so civilly, I felt, and then the banker asked
my friend: “Is it long since you left Altruria?”

“It seems a great while ago,” the Altrurian answered, “but it is really
only a few weeks.”

“You came by way of England, I suppose?”

“Yes; there is no direct line to America,” said the Altrurian.

“That seems rather odd,” I ventured, with some patriotic grudge.

“Oh, the English have direct lines everywhere,” the banker instructed me.

“The tariff has killed our shipbuilding,” said the professor. No one took
up this firebrand, and the professor added: “Your name is Greek, isn’t it,
Mr. Homos?”

“Yes; we are of one of the early Hellenic families,” said the Altrurian.

“And do you think,” asked the lawyer, who, like most lawyers, was a lover
of romance, and was well read in legendary lore especially, “that there is
any reason for supposing that Altruria is identical with the fabled
Atlantis’?”

“No, I can’t say that I do. We have no traditions of a submergence of the
continent, and there are only the usual evidences of a glacial epoch which
you find everywhere to support such a theory. Besides, our civilization is
strictly Christian, and dates back to no earlier period than that of the
first Christian commune after Christ. It is a matter of history with us
that one of these communists, when they were dispersed, brought the Gospel
to our continent; he was cast away on our eastern coast on his way to
Britain.”

“Yes, we know that,” the minister intervened, “but it is perfectly
astonishing that an island so large as Altruria should have been lost to
the knowledge of the rest of the world ever since the beginning of our
era. You would hardly think that there was a space of the ocean’s surface
a mile square which had not been traversed by a thousand keels since
Columbus sailed westward.”

“No, you wouldn’t. And I wish,” the doctor suggested in his turn, “that
Mr. Homos would tell us something about his country, instead of asking us
about ours.”

“Yes,” I coincided, “I’m sure we should all find it a good deal easier. At
least I should; but I brought our friend up in the hope that the professor
would like nothing better than to train a battery of hard facts upon a
defenceless stranger.” Since the professor had given me that little stab,
I was rather anxious to see how he would handle the desire for information
in the Altrurian which I had found so prickly.

This turned the laugh on the professor, and he pretended to be as curious
about Altruria as the rest, and said he would rather hear of it. But the
Altrurian said: “I hope you will excuse me. Sometime I shall be glad to
talk of Altruria as long as you like; or, if you will come to us, I shall
be still happier to show you many things that I couldn’t make you
understand at a distance. But I am in America to learn, not to teach, and
I hope you will have patience with my ignorance. I begin to be afraid that
it is so great as to seem a little incredible. I have fancied in my friend
here,” he went on, with a smile toward me, “a suspicion that I was not
entirely single in some of the inquiries I have made, but that I had some
ulterior motive, some wish to censure or satirize.”

“Oh, not at all,” I protested, for it was not polite to admit a conjecture
so accurate. “We are so well satisfied with our condition that we have
nothing but pity for the darkened mind of the foreigner, though we believe
in it fully: we are used to the English tourist.”

My friends laughed, and the Altrurian continued: “I am very glad to hear
it, for I feel myself at a peculiar disadvantage among you. I am not only
a foreigner, but I am so alien to you in all the traditions and habitudes
that I find it very difficult to get upon common ground with you. Of
course, I know theoretically what you are, but to realize it practically
is another thing. I had read so much about America and understood so
little that I could not rest without coming to see for myself. Some of the
apparent contradictions were so colossal--”

“We have everything on a large scale here,” said the banker, breaking off
the ash of his cigar with the end of his little finger, “and we rather
pride ourselves on the size of our inconsistencies, even. I know something
of the state of things in Altruria, and, to be frank with you, I will say
that it seems to me preposterous. I should say it was impossible, if it
were not an accomplished fact; but I always feel bound to recognize the
thing done. You have hitched your wagon to a star, and you have made the
star go; there is never any trouble with wagons, but stars are not easily
broken to harness, and you have managed to get yours well in hand. As I
said, I don’t believe in you, but I respect you.” I thought this charming,
myself; perhaps because it stated my own mind about Altruria so exactly
and in terms so just and generous.

“Pretty good,” said the doctor, in a murmur of satisfaction, at my ear,
“for a bloated bond-holder.”

“Yes,” I whispered back, “I wish I had said it. What an American way of
putting it! Emerson would have liked it himself. After all, he was our
prophet.”

“He must have thought so from the way we kept stoning him,” said the
doctor, with a soft laugh.

“Which of our contradictions,” asked the banker, in the same tone of
gentle bonhomie, “has given you and our friend pause just now?”

The Altrurian answered, after a moment: “I am not sure that it is a
contradiction, for as yet I have not ascertained the facts I was seeking.
Our friend was telling me of the great change that had taken place
in regard to work, and the increased leisure that your professional people
are now allowing themselves; and I was asking him where your working-men
spent their leisure.”

He went over the list of those he had specified, and I hung my head in
shame and pity; it really had such an effect of mawkish sentimentality.
But my friends received it in the best possible way. They did not laugh;
they heard him out, and then they quietly deferred to the banker, who made
answer for us all:

“Well, I can be almost as brief as the historian of Iceland in his chapter
on snakes: those people have no leisure to spend.”

“Except when they go out on a strike,” said the manufacturer, with a
certain grim humor of his own; I never heard anything more dramatic than
the account he once gave of the way he broke up a labor union. “I have
seen a good many of them at leisure then.”

“Yes,” the doctor chimed in, “and in my younger days, when I necessarily
had a good deal of charity practice, I used to find them at leisure when
they were ‘laid off.’ It always struck me as such a pretty euphemism. It
seemed to minify the harm of the thing so. It seemed to take all the
hunger and cold and sickness out of the fact. To be simply ‘laid off’ was
so different from losing your work and having to face beggary or
starvation.”

“Those people,” said the professor, “never put anything by. They are
wasteful and improvident, almost to a man; and they learn nothing by
experience, though they know as well as we do that it is simply a question
of demand and supply, and that the day of overproduction is sure to come,
when their work must stop unless the men that give them work are willing
to lose money.”

“And I’ve seen them lose it, sometimes, rather than shut down,” the
manufacturer remarked; “lose it hand over hand, to keep the men at work;
and then as soon as the tide turned the men would strike for higher wages.
You have no idea of the ingratitude of those people.” He said this toward
the minister, as if he did not wish to be thought hard; and, in fact, he
was a very kindly man.

“Yes,” replied the minister, “that is one of the most sinister features of
the situation. They seem really to regard their employers as their
enemies. I don’t know how it will end.”

“I know how it would end if I had my way,” said the professor. “There
wouldn’t be any labor unions, and there wouldn’t be any strikes.”

“That is all very well,” said the lawyer, from that judicial mind which I
always liked in him, “as far as the strikes are concerned, but I don’t
understand that the abolition of the unions would affect the impersonal
process of ‘laying off.’ The law of demand and supply I respect as much as
any one--it’s something like the constitution; but, all the same, I should
object extremely to have my income stopped by it every now and then. I’m
probably not so wasteful as a working-man generally is; still, I haven’t
laid by enough to make it a matter of indifference to me whether my income
went on or not. Perhaps the professor has.” The professor did not say, and
we all took leave to laugh. The lawyer concluded: “I don’t see how those
fellows stand it.”

“They don’t, all of them,” said the doctor. “Or their wives and children
don’t. Some of them die.”

“I wonder,” the lawyer pursued, “what has become of the good old American
fact that there is always work for those who are willing to work? I notice
that wherever five thousand men strike in the forenoon, there are five
thousand men to take their places in the afternoon--and not men who are
turning their hands to something new, but men who are used to doing the
very thing the strikers have done.”

“That is one of the things that teach the futility of strikes,” the
professor made haste to interpose, as if he had not quite liked to appear
averse to the interests of the workman; no one likes to do that. “If there
were anything at all to be hoped from them, it would be another matter.”

“Yes, but that isn’t the point, quite,” said the lawyer.

“By-the-way, what is the point?” I asked, with my humorous lightness.

“Why, I supposed,” said the banker, “it was the question how the working
classes amused their elegant leisure. But it seems to be almost anything
else.”

We all applauded the neat touch, but the Altrurian eagerly entreated:
“No, no; never mind that now. That is a matter of comparatively little
interest. I would so much rather know something about the status of the
working-man among you.”

“Do you mean his political status? It’s that of every other citizen.”

“I don’t mean that. I suppose that in America you have learned, as we have
in Altruria, that equal political rights are only means to an end, and as
an end have no value or reality. I meant the economic status of the
working-man, and his social status.”

I do not know why we were so long girding up our loins to meet this simple
question. I myself could not have hopefully undertaken to answer it; but
the others were each in their way men of affairs, and practically
acquainted with the facts, except perhaps the professor; but he had
devoted a great deal of thought to them, and ought to have been qualified
to make some sort of response. But even he was silent; and I had a vague
feeling that they were all somehow reluctant to formulate their knowledge,
as if it were uncomfortable or discreditable. The banker continued to
smoke quietly on for a moment; then he suddenly threw his cigar away.

“I like to free my mind of cant,” he said, with a short laugh, “when I can
afford it, and I propose to cast all sorts of American cant out of it in
answering your question. The economic status of the working-man among us
is essentially the same as that of the working-man all over the civilized
world. You will find plenty of people here, especially about election
time, to tell you differently, but they will not be telling you the truth,
though a great many of them think they are. In fact, I suppose most
Americans honestly believe because we have a republican form of
government, and manhood suffrage, and so on, that our economic conditions
are peculiar, and that our working-man has a status higher and better than
that of the working-man anywhere else. But he has nothing of the kind. His
circumstances are better, and provisionally his wages are higher, but it
is only a question of years or decades when his circumstances will be the
same and his wages the same as the European working-man’s. There is
nothing in our conditions to prevent this.”

“Yes, I understood from our friend here,” said the Altrurian, nodding
toward me, “that you had broken only with the political tradition of
Europe in your Revolution; and he has explained to me that you do not hold
all kinds of labor in equal esteem; but--”

“What kind of labor did he say we did hold in esteem?” asked the banker.

“Why, I understood him to say that if America meant anything at all it
meant the honor of work, but that you distinguished and did not honor some
kinds of work so much as others; for instance, domestic service, or
personal attendance of any kind.”

The banker laughed again. “Oh, he drew the line there, did he? Well, we
all have to draw the line somewhere. Our friend is a novelist, and I will
tell you in strict confidence that the line he has drawn is imaginary. We
don’t honor any kind of work any more than any other people. If a fellow
gets up, the papers make a great ado over his having been a woodchopper or
a bobbin-boy, or something of that kind, but I doubt if the fellow himself
likes it; he doesn’t if he’s got any sense. The rest of us feel that it’s
_infra dig._, and hope nobody will find out that we ever worked with our
hands for a living. I’ll go further,” said the banker, with the effect of
whistling prudence down the wind, “and I will challenge any of you to
gainsay me from his own experience or observation. How does esteem usually
express itself? When we wish, to honor a man, what do we do?”

“Ask him to dinner,” said the lawyer.

“Exactly. We offer him some sort of social recognition. Well, as soon as a
fellow gets up, if he gets up high enough, we offer him some sort of
social recognition; in fact, all sorts; but upon condition that he has
left off working with his hands for a living. We forgive all you please to
his past on account of the present. But there isn’t a working-man, I
venture to say, in any city or town, or even large village, in the whole
length and breadth of the United States who has any social recognition, if
he is still working at his trade. I don’t mean, merely, that he is
excluded from rich and fashionable society, but from the society of the
average educated and cultivated people. I’m not saying he is fit for it;
but I don’t care how intelligent and agreeable he might be--and some of
them are astonishingly intelligent, and so agreeable in their tone of mind
and their original way of looking at things that I like nothing better
than to talk with them--all of our invisible fences are up against him.”

The minister said: “I wonder if that sort of exclusiveness is quite
natural? Children seem to feel no sort of social difference among
themselves.”

“We can hardly go to children for a type of social order,” the professor
suggested.

“True,” the minister meekly admitted. “But somehow there is a protest in
us somewhere against these arbitrary distinctions--something that
questions whether they are altogether right. We know that they must be,
and always have been, and always will be, and yet--well, I will confess
it--I never feel at peace when I face them.”

“Oh,” said the banker, “if you come to the question of right and wrong,
that is another matter. I don’t say it’s right. I’m not discussing that
question; though I’m certainly not proposing to level the fences; I should
be the last to take my own down. I say simply that you are no more likely
to meet a working-man in American society than you are to meet a colored
man. Now you can judge,” he ended, turning directly to the Altrurian, “how
much we honor labor. And I hope I have indirectly satisfied your curiosity
as to the social status of the working-man among us.”

We were all silent.

Perhaps the others were occupied like myself in trying to recall some
instance of a working-man whom they had met in society, and perhaps we
said nothing because we all failed.

The Altrurian spoke at last.

“You have been so very full and explicit that I feel as if it were almost
unseemly to press any further inquiry; but I should very much like to know
how your working-men bear this social exclusion.”

“I’m sure I can’t say,” returned the banker. “A man does not care much to
get into society until he has something to eat, and how to get that is
always the first question with the working-man.”

“But you wouldn’t like it yourself?”

“No, certainly, I shouldn’t like it myself. I shouldn’t complain of not
being asked to people’s houses, and the working-men don’t; you can’t do
that; but I should feel it an incalculable loss. We may laugh at the
emptiness of society, or pretend to be sick of it, but there is no doubt
that society is the flower of civilization, and to be shut out from it is
to be denied the best privilege of a civilized man. There are society
women--we have all met them--whose graciousness and refinement of presence
are something of incomparable value; it is more than a liberal education
to have been admitted to it, but it is as inaccessible to the working-man
as--what shall I say? The thing is too grotesquely impossible for any sort
of comparison. Merely to conceive of its possibility is something that
passes a joke; it is a kind of offence.”

Again we were silent.

“I don’t know,” the banker continued, “how the notion of our social
equality originated, but I think it has been fostered mainly by the
expectation of foreigners, who argued it from our political equality.
As a matter of fact, it never existed, except in our poorest and most
primitive communities, in the pioneer days of the West and among the
gold-hunters of California. It was not dreamed of in our colonial society,
either in Virginia or Pennsylvania or New York or Massachusetts; and the
fathers of the republic, who were mostly slave-holders, were practically
as stiff-necked aristocrats as any people of their day. We have not a
political aristocracy, that is all; but there is as absolute a division
between the orders of men and as little love, in this country as in any
country on the globe. The severance of the man who works for his living
with his hands from the man who does not work for his living with his
hands is so complete, and apparently so final, that nobody even imagines
anything else, not even in fiction. Or, how is that?” he asked, turning to
me. “Do you fellows still put the intelligent, high-spirited, handsome
young artisan, who wins the millionaire’s daughter, into your books? I
used sometimes to find him there.”

“You might still find him in the fiction of the weekly story-papers; but,”
 I was obliged to own, “he would not go down with my readers. Even in the
story-paper fiction he would leave off working as soon as he married the
millionaire’s daughter, and go to Europe, or he would stay here and become
a social leader, but he would not receive working-men in his gilded
halls.”

The others rewarded my humor with a smile, but the banker said: “Then I
wonder you were not ashamed of filling our friend up with that stuff about
our honoring some kinds of labor. It is true that we don’t go about openly
and explicitly despising any kind of honest toil--people don’t do that
anywhere now; but we contemn it in terms quite as unmistakable. The
working-man acquiesces as completely as anybody else. He does not remain a
working-man a moment longer that he can help; and after he gets up, if he
is weak enough to be proud of having been one, it is because he feels that
his low origin is a proof of his prowess in rising to the top against
unusual odds. I don’t suppose there is a man in the whole civilized
world--outside of Altruria, of course---who is proud of working at a
trade, except the shoemaker Tolstoy, and is a count, and he does not make
very good shoes.”

We all laughed again: those shoes of Count Tolstoy’s are always such an
infallible joke.

The Altrurian, however, was cocked and primed with another question; he
instantly exploded it: “But are all the working-men in America eager to
rise above their condition? Is there none willing to remain among the mass
because the rest could not rise with him, and from the hope of yet
bringing labor to honor?”

The banker answered: “I never heard of any. No, the American ideal is not
to change the conditions for all, but for each to rise above the rest if
he can.”

“Do you think it is really so bad as that?” asked the minister, timidly.

The banker answered: “Bad? Do you call that bad? I thought it was very
good. But, good or bad, I don’t think you’ll find it deniable, if you
look into the facts. There may be working-men willing to remain so for
other working-men’s sake, but I have never met any--perhaps because the
working-man never goes into society.”

The unfailing question of the Altrurian broke the silence which ensued:
“Are there many of your working-men who are intelligent and agreeable--of
the type you mentioned a moment since?”

“Perhaps,” said the banker, “I had better refer you to one of our friends
here, who has had a great deal more to do with them than I have. He is a
manufacturer, and he has had to do with all kinds of work-people.”

“Yes, for my sins,” the manufacturer assented; and he added: “They are
often confoundedly intelligent, though I haven’t often found them very
agreeable, either in their tone of mind or their original way of looking
at things.”

The banker amiably acknowledged his thrust, and the Altrurian asked: “Ah,
they are opposed to your own?”

“Well, we have the same trouble here that you must have heard of in
England. As you know now that the conditions are the same here, you won’t
be surprised at the fact.”

“But the conditions,” the Altrurian pursued--“do you expect them always to
continue the same?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the manufacturer. “We can’t expect them to
change of themselves, and I shouldn’t know how to change them. It was
expected that the rise of the trusts and the syndicates would break the
unions, but somehow they haven’t. The situation remains the same. The
unions are not cutting one another’s throats now any more than we are. The
war is on a larger scale--that’s all.”

“Then let me see,” said the Altrurian, “whether I clearly understand the
situation as regards the working-man in America. He is dependent upon the
employer for his chance to earn a living, and he is never sure of this. He
may be thrown out of work by his employer’s disfavor or disaster, and his
willingness to work goes for nothing; there is no public provision of work
for him; there is nothing to keep him from want nor the prospect of
anything.”

“We are all in the same boat,” said the professor.

“But some of us have provisioned ourselves rather better and can generally
weather it through till we are picked up,” the lawyer put in.

“I am always saying the working-man is improvident,” returned the
professor.

“There are the charities,” the minister suggested.

“But his economical status,” the Altrurian pursued, “is in a state of
perpetual uncertainty, and to save himself in some measure he has
organized, and so has constituted himself a danger to the public peace?”

“A very great danger,” said the professor.

“I guess we can manage him,” the manufacturer remarked.

“And socially he is non-existent?”

The Altrurian turned with this question to the banker, who said: “He is
certainly not in society.”

“Then,” said my guest, “if the working-man’s wages are provisionally so
much better here than in Europe, why should they be discontented? What is
the real cause of their discontent?”

I have always been suspicious, in the company of practical men, of an
atmosphere of condescension to men of my calling, if nothing worse. I
fancy they commonly regard artists of all kinds as a sort of harmless
eccentrics, and that literary people they look upon as something droll, as
weak and soft, as not quite right. I believed that this particular group,
indeed, was rather abler to conceive of me as a rational person than most
others, but I knew that if even they had expected me to be as reasonable
as themselves they would not have been greatly disappointed if I were not;
and it seemed to me that I had put myself wrong with them in imparting to
the Altrurian that romantic impression that we hold labor in honor here. I
had really thought so, but I could not say so now, and I wished to
retrieve myself somehow. I wished to show that I was a practical man, too,
and so I made answer: “What is the cause of the working-man’s discontent?
It is very simple: the walking delegate.”




IV

I suppose I could not have fairly claimed any great originality for my
notion that the walking delegate was the cause of the labor troubles: he
is regularly assigned as the reason of a strike in the newspapers, and is
reprobated for his evil agency by the editors, who do not fail to read the
working-men many solemn lessons and fervently warn them against him, as
soon as the strike begins to go wrong--as it nearly always does. I
understand from them that the walking delegate is an irresponsible tyrant,
who emerges from the mystery that habitually hides him and from time to
time orders a strike in mere rancor of spirit and plenitude of power, and
then leaves the working-men and their families to suffer the consequences,
while he goes off somewhere and rolls in the lap of luxury, careless of
the misery he has created. Between his debauches of vicious idleness and
his accesses of baleful activity he is employed in poisoning the mind of
the working-men against his real interests and real friends. This is
perfectly easy, because the American working-man, though singularly shrewd
and sensible in other respects, is the victim of an unaccountable
obliquity of vision which keeps him from seeing his real interests and
real friends--or, at least, from knowing them when he sees them.

There could be no doubt, I thought, in the mind of any reasonable person
that the walking delegate was the source of the discontent among our
proletariate, and I alleged him with a confidence which met the approval
of the professor, apparently, for he nodded, as if to say that I had hit
the nail on the head this time; and the minister seemed to be freshly
impressed with a notion that could not be new to him. The lawyer and the
doctor were silent, as if waiting for the banker to speak again; but he
was silent, too. The manufacturer, to my chagrin, broke into a laugh. “I’m
afraid,” he said, with a sardonic levity which surprised me, “you’ll have
to go a good deal deeper than the walking delegate. He’s a symptom; he
isn’t the disease. The thing keeps on and on, and it seems to be always
about wages; but it isn’t about wages at the bottom. Some of those fellows
know it and some of them don’t, but the real discontent is with the whole
system, with the nature of things. I had a curious revelation on that
point the last time I tried to deal with my men as a union. They were
always bothering me about this and about that, and there was no end to the
bickering. I yielded point after point, but it didn’t make any difference.
It seemed as if the more I gave the more they asked. At last I made up my
mind to try to get at the real inwardness of the matter, and I didn’t wait
for their committee to come to me--I sent for their leading man, and said
I wanted to have it out with him. He wasn’t a bad fellow, and when I got
at him, man to man that way, I found he had sense, and he had ideas--it’s
no use pretending those fellows are fools; he had thought about his side
of the question, anyway. I said: ‘Now what does it all mean? Do you want
the earth, or don’t you? When is it going to end?’ I offered him something
to take, but he said he didn’t drink, and we compromised on cigars. ‘Now
when is it going to end?’ said I, and I pressed it home, and wouldn’t let
him fight off from the point. ‘Do you mean when is it all going to end?’
said he. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘all. I’m sick of it. If there’s any way out I’d
like to know it.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I’ll tell you, if you want to know.
It’s all going to end when you get the same amount of money for the same
amount of work as we do.’”

We all laughed uproariously. The thing was deliciously comical; and
nothing, I thought, attested the Altrurian’s want of humor like his
failure to appreciate this joke. He did not even smile in asking: “And
what did you say?”

“Well,” returned the manufacturer, with cosey enjoyment, “I asked him if
the men would take the concern and run it themselves.” We laughed again;
this seemed even better than the other joke. “But he said, ‘No’; they
would not like to do that. And then I asked him just what they would like,
if they could have their own way, and he said they would like to have me
run the business, and all share alike. I asked him what was the sense of
that, and why, if I could do something that all of them put together
couldn’t do, I shouldn’t be paid more than all of them put together; and
he said that if a man did his best he ought to be paid as much as the best
man. I asked him if that was the principle their union was founded on, and
he said, ‘Yes,’ that the very meaning of their union was the protection of
the weak by the strong and the equalization of earnings among all who do
their best.”

We waited for the manufacturer to go on, but he made a dramatic pause at
this point, as if to let it sink into our minds; and he did not speak
until the Altrurian prompted him with the question, “And what did you
finally do?”

“I saw there was only one way out for me, and I told the fellow I did not
think I could do business on that principle. We parted friends, but the
next Saturday I locked them out and smashed their union. They came back,
most of them--they had to--but I’ve treated with them ever since ‘as
individuals.’”

“And they’re much better off in your hands than they were in the union,”
 said the professor.

“I don’t know about that,” said the manufacturer, “but I’m sure I am.”

We laughed with him, all but the minister, whose mind seemed to have
caught upon some other point, and who sat absently by.

“And is it your opinion, from what you know of the working-man generally,
that they all have this twist in their heads?” the professor asked.

“They have, until they begin to rise. Then they get rid of it mighty soon.
Let a man save something--enough to get a house of his own, and take a
boarder or two, and perhaps have a little money at interest--and he sees
the matter in another light.”

“Do you think he sees it more clearly?” asked the minister.

“He sees it differently.”

“What do you think?” the minister pursued, turning to the lawyer. “You are
used to dealing with questions of justice--”

“Rather more with questions of law, I’m afraid,” the other returned,
pleasantly, putting his feet together before him and looking down at them
in a way he had. “But, still, I have a great interest in questions of
justice, and I confess that I find a certain wild equity in this
principle, which I see nobody could do business on. It strikes me as
idyllic--it’s a touch of real poetry in the rough-and-tumble prose of our
economic life.”

He referred this to me as something I might appreciate in my quality of
literary man, and I responded in my quality of practical man: “There’s
certainly more rhyme than reason in it.”

He turned again to the minister:

“I suppose the ideal of the Christian state is the family?”

“I hope so,” said the minister, with the gratitude that I have seen people
of his cloth show when men of the world conceded premises which the world
usually contests; it has seemed to me pathetic.

“And if that is the case, why, the logic of the postulate is that the
prosperity of the weakest is the sacred charge and highest happiness of
all the stronger. But the law has not recognized any such principle, in
economics at least, and if the labor unions are based upon it they are
outlaw, so far as any hope of enforcing it is concerned; and it is bad for
men to feel themselves outlaw. How is it,” the lawyer continued, turning
to the Altrurian, “in your country? We can see no issue here, if the first
principle of organized labor antagonizes the first principle of business.”

“But I don’t understand precisely yet what the first principle of business
is,” returned my guest.

“Ah, that raises another interesting question,” said the lawyer. “Of
course, every business man solves the problem practically according to his
temperament and education, and I suppose that on first thoughts every
business man would answer you accordingly. But perhaps the personal
equation is something you wish to eliminate from the definition.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Still, I would rather not venture upon it first,” said the lawyer.
“Professor, what should you say was the first principle of business?”

“Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest,” the professor
promptly answered.

“We will pass the parson and the doctor and the novelist as witnesses of
no value. They can’t possibly have any cognizance of the first principle
of business; their affair is to look after the souls and bodies and
fancies of other people. But what should you say it was?” he asked the
banker.

“I should say it was an enlightened conception of one’s own interests.”

“And you?”

The manufacturer had no hesitation in answering: “The good of Number One,
first, last, and all the time. There may be a difference of opinion about
the best way to get at it; the long way may be the better, or the short
way; the direct way or the oblique way, or the purely selfish way, or the
partly selfish way; but if you ever lose sight of that end you might as
well shut up shop. That seems to be the first law of nature, as well as
the first law of business.”

“Ah, we mustn’t go to nature for our morality,” the minister protested.

“We were not talking of morality,” said the manufacturer; “we were talking
of business.”

This brought the laugh on the minister, but the lawyer cut it short:
“Well, then, I don’t really see why the trades-unions are not as
business-like as the syndicates in their dealings with all those outside
of themselves. Within themselves they practise an altruism of the highest
order, but it is a tribal altruism; it is like that which prompts a Sioux
to share his last mouthful with a starving Sioux, and to take the scalp of
a starving Apache. How is it with your trades-unions in Altruria?” he
asked my friend.

“We have no trades-unions in Altruria,” he began.

“Happy Altruria!” cried the professor.

“We had them formerly,” the Altrurian went on, “as you have them now. They
claimed, as I suppose yours do, that they were forced into existence by
the necessities of the case; that without union the working-man was unable
to meet the capitalist on anything like equal terms, or to withstand his
encroachments and oppressions. But to maintain themselves they had to
extinguish industrial liberty among the working-men themselves, and they
had to practise great cruelties against those who refused to join them or
who rebelled against them.”

“They simply destroy them here,” said the professor.

“Well,” said the lawyer, from his judicial mind, “the great syndicates
have no scruples in destroying a capitalist who won’t come into them or
who tries to go out. They don’t club him or stone him, but they under-sell
him and freeze him out; they don’t break his head, but they bankrupt him.
The principle is the same.”

“Don’t interrupt Mr. Homos,” the banker entreated. “I am very curious to
know just how they got rid of labor unions in Altruria.”

“We had syndicates, too, and finally we had the _reductio ad absurdum_--we
had a federation of labor unions find a federation of syndicates, that
divided the nation into two camps. The situation was not only impossible,
but it was insupportably ridiculous.”

I ventured to say: “It hasn’t become quite so much of a joke with us yet.”

“Isn’t it in a fair way to become so?” asked the doctor; and he turned to
the lawyer: “What should you say was the logic of events among us for the
last ten or twenty years?”

“There’s nothing so capricious as the logic of events. It’s like a woman’s
reasoning--you can’t tell what it’s aimed at, or where it’s going to fetch
up; all that you can do is to keep out of the way if possible. We may come
to some such condition of things as they have in Altruria, where the faith
of the whole nation is pledged to secure every citizen in the pursuit of
happiness; or we may revert to some former condition, and the master may
again own the man; or we may hitch and joggle along indefinitely, as we
are doing now.”

“But come, now,” said the banker, while he laid a caressing touch on the
Altrurian’s shoulder, “you don’t mean to say honestly that everybody works
with his hands in Altruria?”

“Yes, certainly. We are mindful, as a whole people, of the divine law--‘In
the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.’”

“But the capitalists? I’m anxious about Number One, you see.”

“We have none.”

“I forgot, of course. But the lawyers, the doctors, the parsons, the
novelists?”

“They all do their share of hand-work.”

The lawyer said: “That seems to dispose of the question of the working-man
in society. But how about your minds? When do you cultivate your minds?
When do the ladies of Altruria cultivate their minds, if they have to do
their own work, as I suppose they do? Or is it only the men who work, if
they happen to be the husbands and fathers of the upper classes?”

The Altrurian seemed to be sensible of the kindly scepticism which
persisted in our reception of his statements, after all we had read of
Altruria. He smiled indulgently, and said: “You mustn’t imagine that work
in Altruria is the same as it is here. As we all work, the amount that
each one need do is very little, a few hours each day at the most, so that
every man and woman has abundant leisure and perfect spirits for the
higher pleasures which the education of their whole youth has fitted them
to enjoy. If you can understand a state of things where the sciences and
arts and letters are cultivated for their own sake, and not as a means of
livelihood--”

“No,” said the lawyer, smiling, “I’m afraid we can’t conceive of that. We
consider the pinch of poverty the highest incentive that a man can have.
If our gifted friend here,” he said, indicating me, “were not kept like a
toad under the harrow, with his nose on the grindstone, and the poorhouse
staring him in the face--”

“For Heaven’s sake,” I cried out, “don’t mix your metaphors so, anyway!”

“If it were not for that and all the other hardships that literary men
undergo--

  ‘Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail’--

his novels probably wouldn’t be worth reading.”

“Ah!” said the Altrurian, as if he did not quite follow this joking; and,
to tell the truth, I never find the personal thing in very good taste.
“You will understand, then, how extremely difficult it is for me to
imagine a condition of things like yours--although I have it under my very
eyes--where the money consideration is the first consideration.”

“Oh, excuse me,” urged the minister; “I don’t think that’s quite the
case.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the Altrurian, sweetly; “you can see how easily
I go astray.”

“Why, I don’t know,” the banker interposed, “that you are so far out in
what you say. If you had said that money was always the first motive, I
should have been inclined to dispute you, too; but when you say that money
is the first consideration, I think you are quite right. Unless a man
secures his financial basis for his work, he can’t do his work. It’s
nonsense to pretend otherwise. So the money consideration is the first
consideration. People here have to live by their work, and to live they
must have money. Of course, we all recognize a difference in the
qualities, as well as in the kinds, of work. The work of the laborer may
be roughly defined as the necessity of his life; the work of the business
man as the means, and the work of the artist and scientist as the end.
We might refine upon these definitions and make them closer, but they
will serve for illustration as they are. I don’t think there can be
any question as to which is the highest kind of work; some truths are
self-evident. He is a fortunate man whose work is an end, and every
business man sees this, and owns it to himself, at least when he meets
some man of an aesthetic or scientific occupation. He knows that this
luckier fellow has a joy in his work which he can never feel in business;
that his success in it can never be embittered by the thought that it is
the failure of another; that if he does it well, it is pure good; that
there cannot be any competition in it--there can be only a noble
emulation, as far as the work itself is concerned. He can always look up
to his work, for it is something above him; and a business man often has
to look down upon his business, for it is often beneath him, unless he is
a pretty low fellow.”

I listened to all this in surprise; I knew that the banker was a
cultivated man, a man of university training, and that he was a reader and
a thinker; but he had always kept a certain reserve in his talk, which he
now seemed to have thrown aside for the sake of the Altrurian, or because
the subject had a charm that lured him out of himself. “Well, now,” he
continued, “the question is of the money consideration, which is the first
consideration with us all: does it, or doesn’t it degrade the work, which
is the life, of those among us whose work is the highest? I understand
that this is the misgiving which troubles you in view of our conditions?”

The Altrurian assented, and I thought it a proof of the banker’s innate
delicacy that he did not refer the matter, so far as it concerned the
aesthetic life and work, to me; I was afraid he was going to do so. But he
courteously proposed to keep the question impersonal, and he went on to
consider it himself: “Well, I don’t suppose any one can satisfy you fully.
But I should say that it put such men under a double strain, and perhaps
that is the reason why so many of them break down in a calling that is
certainly far less exhausting than business. On one side, the artist is
kept to the level of the working-man, of the animal, of the creature whose
sole affair is to get something to eat and somewhere to sleep. This is
through his necessity. On the other side, he is exalted to the height of
beings who have no concern but with the excellence of their work, which
they were born and divinely authorized to do. This is through his purpose.
Between the two, I should say that he got mixed, and that his work shows
it.”

None of the others said anything, and, since I had not been personally
appealed to, I felt the freer to speak. “If you will suppose me to be
speaking from observation rather than experience--” I began.

“By all means,” said the banker, “go on;” and the rest made haste in
various forms to yield me the word.

“I should say that such a man certainly got mixed, but that his work kept
itself pure from the money consideration, as it were, in spite of him. A
painter or actor, or even a novelist, is glad to get all he can for his
work, and, such is our fallen nature, he does get all he knows how to get:
but, when he has once fairly passed into his work, he loses himself in it.
He does not think whether it will pay or not, whether it will be popular
or not, but whether he can make it good or not.”

“Well, that is conceivable,” said the banker. “But wouldn’t he rather do
something he would get less for, if he could afford it, than the thing he
knows he will get more for? Doesn’t the money consideration influence his
choice of subject?”

“Oddly enough, I don’t believe it does,” I answered, after a moment’s
reflection. “A man makes his choice once for all when he embraces the
aesthetic life, or, rather, it is made for him; no other life seems
possible. I know there is a general belief that an artist does the kind of
thing he has made go because it pays; but this only shows the prevalence
of business ideals. If he did not love to do the thing he does, he could
not do it well, no matter how richly it paid.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said the banker, and he added to the Altrurian:
“So, you see, we are not so bad as one would think. We are illogically
better, in fact.”

“Yes,” the other assented. “I knew something of your literature as well as
your conditions before I left home, and I perceived that by some anomaly
the one was not tainted by the other. It is a miraculous proof of the
divine mission of the poet.”

“And the popular novelist,” the lawyer whispered in my ear, but loud
enough for the rest to hear, and they all testified their amusement at my
cost.

The Altrurian, with his weak sense of humor, passed the joke. “It shows no
signs of corruption from greed, but I can’t help thinking that, fine as it
is, it might have been much finer if the authors who produced it had been
absolutely freed to their work, and had never felt the spur of need.”

“Are they absolutely freed to it in Altruria?” asked the professor. “I
understood you that everybody had to work for his living in Altruria.”

“That is a mistake. Nobody works for his living in Altruria; he works for
others’ living.”

“Ah, that is precisely what our working-men object to doing here,” said
the manufacturer. “In that last interview of mine with the walking
delegate he had the impudence to ask me why my men should work for my
living as well as their own.”

“He couldn’t imagine that you were giving them the work to do--the very
means of life,” said the professor.

“Oh no, that’s the last thing those fellows want to think of.”

“Perhaps,” the Altrurian suggested, “they might not have found it such a
hardship to work for your living if their own had been assured, as it is
with us. If you will excuse my saying it, we should think it monstrous in
Altruria for any man to have another’s means of life in his power; and in
our condition it is hardly imaginable. Do you really have it in your power
to take away a man’s opportunity to earn a living?”

The manufacturer laughed uneasily. “It is in my power to take away his
life; but I don’t habitually shoot my fellow-men, and I never dismissed a
man yet without good reason.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said the Altrurian. “I didn’t dream of accusing
you of such inhumanity. But, you see, our whole system is so very
different that, as I said, it is hard for me to conceive of yours, and I
am very curious to understand its workings. If you shot your fellow-man,
as you say, the law would punish you; but if, for some reason that you
decided to be good, you took away his means of living, and he actually
starved to death--”

“Then the law would have nothing to do with it,” the professor replied for
the manufacturer, who did not seem ready to answer. “But that is not the
way things fall out. The man would be supported in idleness, probably,
till he got another job, by his union, which would take the matter up.”

“But I thought that our friend did not employ union labor,” returned the
Altrurian.

I found all this very uncomfortable, and tried to turn the talk back to a
point that I felt curious about: “But in Altruria, if the literary class
is not exempt from the rule of manual labor, where do they find time and
strength to write?”

“Why, you must realize that our manual labor is never engrossing or
exhausting. It is no more than is necessary to keep the body in health. I
do not see how you remain well here, you people of sedentary occupations.”

“Oh, we all take some sort of exercise. We walk several hours a day, or we
row, or we ride a bicycle, or a horse, or we fence.”

“But to us,” returned the Altrurian, with a growing frankness which
nothing but the sweetness of his manner would have excused, “exercise for
exercise would appear stupid. The barren expenditure of force that began
and ended in itself, and produced nothing, we should--if you will excuse
my saying so--look upon as childish, if not insane or immoral.”




V

At this moment the lady who had hailed me so gayly from the top of the
coach while I stood waiting for the Altrurian to help the porter with the
baggage, just after the arrival of the train, came up with her husband to
our little group and said to me: “I want to introduce my husband to you.
He adores your books.” She went on much longer to this effect, while the
other men grinned round and her husband tried to look as if it were all
true, and her eyes wandered to the Altrurian, who listened gravely. I knew
perfectly well that she was using her husband’s zeal for my fiction to
make me present my friend; but I did not mind that, and I introduced him
to both of them. She took possession of him at once and began walking him
off down the piazza, while her husband remained with me, and the members
of our late conference drifted apart. I was not sorry to have it broken up
for the present; it seemed to me that it had lasted quite long enough, and
I lighted a cigar with the husband, and we strolled together in the
direction his wife had taken.

He began, apparently in compliment to literature in my person: “Yes, I
like to have a book where I can get at it when we’re not going out to the
theatre, and I want to quiet my mind down after business. I don’t care
much what the book is; my wife reads to me till I drop off, and then she
finishes the book herself and tells me the rest of the story. You see,
business takes it out of you so! Well, I let my wife do most of the
reading, anyway. She knows pretty much everything that’s going in that
line. We haven’t got any children, and it occupies her mind. She’s up to
all sorts of things--she’s artistic, and she’s musical, and she’s
dramatic, and she’s literary. Well, I like to have her. Women are funny,
anyway.”

He was a good-looking, good-natured, average American of the money-making
type; I believe he was some sort of a broker, but I do not quite know what
his business was. As we walked up and down the piazza, keeping a discreet
little distance from the corner where his wife had run off to with her
capture, he said he wished he could get more time with her in the
summer--but he supposed I knew what business was. He was glad she could
have the rest, anyway; she needed it.

“By-the-way,” he asked, “who is this friend of yours? The women are all
crazy about him, and it’s been an even thing between my wife and Miss
Groundsel which would fetch him first. But I’ll bet on my wife every time,
when it comes to a thing like that. He’s a good-looking fellow--some kind
of foreigner, I believe; pretty eccentric, too, I guess. Where is
Altruria, anyway?”

I told him, and he said: “Oh yes. Well, if we are going to restrict
immigration, I suppose we sha’n’t see many more Altrurians, and we’d
better make the most of this one. Heigh?”

I do not know why this innocent pleasantry piqued me to say: “If I
understand the Altrurians, my dear fellow, nothing could induce them to
emigrate to America. As far as I can make out, they would regard it very
much as we should regard settling among the Eskimos.”

“Is that so?” asked my new acquaintance, with perfect good temper. “Why?”

“Really, I can’t say, and I don’t know that I’ve explicit authority for my
statement.”

“They are worse than the English used to be,” he went on. “I didn’t know
that there were any foreigners who looked at us in that light now. I
thought the war settled all that.”

I sighed. “There are a good many things that the war didn’t settle so
definitely as we’ve been used to thinking, I’m afraid. But, for that
matter, I fancy an Altrurian would regard the English as a little lower in
the scale of savagery than ourselves even.”

“Is that so? Well, that’s pretty good on the English, anyway,” said my
companion, and he laughed with an easy satisfaction that I envied him.

“My dear!” his wife called to him from where she was sitting with the
Altrurian, “I wish you would go for my shawl. I begin to feel the air a
little.”

“I’ll go if you’ll tell me where,” he said, and he confided to me, “Never
knows where her shawl is one-quarter of the time.”

“Well, I think I left it in the office somewhere. You might ask at the
desk; or perhaps it’s in the rack by the dining-room door--or maybe up in
our room.”

“I thought so,” said her husband, with another glance at me, as if it were
the greatest fun in the world, and he started amiably off.

I went and took a chair by the lady and the Altrurian, and she began at
once: “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come! I have been trying to enlighten Mr.
Homos about some of the little social peculiarities among us that he finds
so hard to understand. He was just now,” the lady continued, “wanting to
know why all the natives out here were not invited to go in and join our
young people in the dance, and I’ve been trying to tell him that we
consider it a great favor to let them come and take up so much of the
piazza and look in at the windows.”

She gave a little laugh of superiority, and twitched her pretty head in
the direction of the young country girls and country fellows who were
thronging the place that night in rather unusual numbers. They were well
enough looking, and, as it was Saturday night, they were in their best. I
suppose their dress could have been criticised; the young fellows were
clothed by the ready-made clothing-store, and the young girls after their
own devices from the fashion papers; but their general effect was good,
and their behavior was irreproachable; they were very quiet--if anything,
too quiet. They took up a part of the piazza that was yielded them by
common usage, and sat watching the hop inside, not so much enviously, I
thought, as wistfully; and for the first time it struck me as odd that
they should have no part in the gayety. I had often seen them there
before, but I had never thought it strange they should be shut out. It had
always seemed quite normal, but now, suddenly, for one baleful moment, it
seemed abnormal. I suppose it was the talk we had been having about the
working-men in society which caused me to see the thing as the Altrurian
must have seen it; but I was, nevertheless, vexed with him for having
asked such a question, after he had been so fully instructed upon the
point. It was malicious of him, or it was stupid. I hardened my heart, and
answered: “You might have told him, for one thing, that they were not
dancing because they had not paid the piper.”

“Then the money consideration enters even into your social pleasures?”
 asked the Altrurian.

“Very much. Doesn’t it with you?”

He evaded this question, as he evaded all straightforward questions
concerning his country: “We have no money consideration, you know. But do
I understand that all your social entertainments are paid for by the
guests?”

“Oh no, not so bad as that, quite. There are a great many that the host
pays for. Even here, in a hotel, the host furnishes the music and the room
free to the guests of the house.”

“And none are admitted from the outside?”

“Oh yes, people are welcome from all the other hotels and boarding-houses
and the private cottages. The young men are especially welcome; there are
not enough young men in the hotel to go round, you see.” In fact, we could
see that some of the pretty girls within were dancing with other girls;
half-grown boys were dangling from the waists of tall young ladies and
waltzing on tiptoe.

“Isn’t that rather droll?” asked the Altrurian.

“It’s grotesque!” I said, and I felt ashamed of it. “But what are you to
do? The young men are hard at work in the cities, as many as can get work
there, and the rest are out West, growing up with the country. There are
twenty young girls for every young man at all the summer resorts in the
East.”

“But what would happen if these young farmers--I suppose they are
farmers--were invited in to take part in the dance?” asked my friend.

“But that is impossible.”

“Why?”

“Really, Mrs. Makely, I think I shall have to give him back to you,” I
said.

The lady laughed. “I am not sure that I want him back.”

“Oh yes,” the Altrurian entreated, with unwonted perception of the humor.
“I know that I must be very trying with my questions; but do not abandon
me to the solitude of my own conjectures. They are dreadful!”

“Well, I won’t,” said the lady, with another laugh. “And I will try to
tell you what would happen if those farmers, or farm-hands, or whatever
they are, were asked in. The mammas would be very indignant, and the young
ladies would be scared, and nobody would know what to do, and the dance
would stop.”

“Then the young ladies prefer to dance with one another and with little
boys--”

“No, they prefer to dance with young men of their own station; they would
rather not dance at all than dance with people beneath them. I don’t say
anything against these natives here; they are very civil and decent. But
they have not the same social traditions as the young ladies; they would
be out of place with them, and they would feel it.”

“Yes, I can see that they are not fit to associate with them,” said the
Altrurian, with a gleam of commonsense that surprised me, “and that as
long as your present conditions endure they never can be. You must excuse
the confusion which the difference between your political ideals and your
economic ideals constantly creates in me. I always think of you
politically first, and realize you as a perfect democracy; then come these
other facts, in which I cannot perceive that you differ from the
aristocratic countries of Europe in theory, or practice. It is very
puzzling. Am I right in supposing that the effect of your economy is to
establish insuperable inequalities among you, and to forbid the hope of
the brotherhood which your policy proclaims?”

Mrs. Makely looked at me as if she were helpless to grapple with his
meaning, and, for fear of worse, I thought best to evade it. I said: “I
don’t believe that anybody is troubled by those distinctions. We are used
to them, and everybody acquiesces in them, which is a proof that they are
a very good thing.”

Mrs. Makely now came to my support. “The Americans are very high-spirited,
in every class, and I don’t believe one of those nice farm-boys would like
being asked in any better than the young ladies. You can’t imagine how
proud some of them are.”

“So that they suffer from being excluded as inferiors?”

“Oh, I assure you they don’t feel themselves inferior! They consider
themselves as good as anybody. There are some very interesting characters
among them. Now, there is a young girl sitting at the first window, with
her profile outlined by the light, whom I feel it an honor to speak to.
That’s her brother, standing there with her--that tall, gaunt young man
with a Roman face; it’s such a common type here in the mountains. Their
father was a soldier, and he distinguished himself so in one of the last
battles that he was promoted. He was badly wounded, but he never took a
pension; he just came back to his farm and worked on till he died. Now the
son has the farm, and he and his sister live there with their mother. The
daughter takes in sewing, and in that way they manage to make both ends
meet. The girl is really a first-rate seamstress, and so cheap! I give her
a good deal of my work in the summer, and we are quite friends. She’s very
fond of reading; the mother is an invalid, but she reads aloud while the
daughter sews, and you’ve no idea how many books they get through. When
she comes for sewing, I like to talk with her about them; I always have
her sit down; it’s hard to realize that she isn’t a lady. I’m a good deal
criticised, I know, and I suppose I do spoil her a little; it puts notions
into such people’s heads, if you meet them in that way; they’re pretty
free and independent as it is. But when I’m with Lizzie I forget that
there is any difference between us; I can’t help loving the child. You
must take Mr. Homos to see them, Mr. Twelvemough. They’ve got the father’s
sword hung up over the head of the mother’s bed; it’s very touching. But
the poor little place is so bare!”

Mrs. Makely sighed, and there fell a little pause, which she broke with a
question she had the effect of having kept back.

“There is one thing I should like to ask you, too, Mr. Homos. Is it true
that everybody in Altruria does some kind of manual labor?”

“Why, certainly,” he answered, quite as if he had been an American.

“Ladies, too? Or perhaps you have none.”

I thought this rather offensive, but I could not see that the Altrurian
had taken it ill. “Perhaps we had better try to understand each other
clearly before I answer that question. You have no titles of nobility as
they have in England--”

“No, indeed! I hope we have outgrown those superstitions,” said Mrs.
Makely, with a republican fervor that did my heart good. “It is a word
that we apply first of all to the moral qualities of a person.”

“But you said just now that you sometimes forgot that your seamstress was
not a lady. Just what did you mean by that?”

Mrs. Makely hesitated. “I meant--I suppose I meant--that she had not the
surroundings of a lady; the social traditions.”

“Then it has something to do with social as well as moral qualities--with
ranks and classes?”

“Classes, yes; but, as you know, we have no ranks in America.” The
Altrurian took off his hat and rubbed an imaginable perspiration from his
forehead. He sighed deeply. “It is all very difficult.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Makely assented, “I suppose it is. All foreigners find it so.
In fact, it is something that you have to live into the notion of; it
can’t be explained.”

“Well, then, my dear madam, will you tell me without further question what
you understand by a lady, and let me live into the notion of it at my
leisure?”

“I will do my best,” said Mrs. Makely. “But it would be so much easier to
tell you _who_ was or who was not a lady. However, your acquaintance is so
limited yet that I must try to do something in the abstract and impersonal
for you. In the first place, a lady must be above the sordid anxieties in
every way. She need not be very rich, but she must have enough, so that
she need not be harassed about making both ends meet, when she ought to be
devoting herself to her social duties. The time is past with us when a
lady could look after the dinner, and perhaps cook part of it herself, and
then rush in to receive her guests and do the amenities. She must have a
certain kind of house, so that her entourage won’t seem cramped and mean,
and she must have nice frocks, of course, and plenty of them. She needn’t
be of the smart set; that isn’t at all necessary; but she can’t afford to
be out of the fashion. Of course, she must have a certain training. She
must have cultivated tastes; she must know about art and literature and
music, and all those kind of things, and, though it isn’t necessary to go
in for anything in particular, it won’t hurt her to have a fad or two. The
nicest kind of fad is charity; and people go in for that a great deal. I
think sometimes they use it to work up with, and there are some who use
religion in the same way; I think it’s horrid; but it’s perfectly safe;
you can’t accuse them of doing it. I’m happy to say, though, that mere
church association doesn’t count socially so much as it used to. Charity
is a great deal more insidious. But you see how hard it is to define
a lady. So much has to be left to the nerves, in all these things. And
then it’s changing all the time; Europe’s coming in, and the old American
ideals are passing away. Things that people did ten years ago would be
impossible now, or at least ridiculous. You wouldn’t be considered vulgar,
quite, but you would certainly be considered a back number, and that’s
almost as bad. Really,” said Mrs. Makely, “I don’t believe I can tell you
what a lady is.”

We all laughed together at her frank confession. The Altrurian asked: “But
do I understand that one of her conditions is that she shall have nothing
whatever to do?”

“Nothing to _do_!” cried Mrs. Makely. “A lady is busy from morning till
night. She always goes to bed perfectly worn out.”

“But with what?” asked the Altrurian.

“With making herself agreeable and her house attractive, with going to
lunches and teas and dinners and concerts and theatres and art
exhibitions, and charity meetings and receptions, and with writing a
thousand and one notes about them, and accepting and declining, and giving
lunches and dinners, and making calls and receiving them, and I don’t know
what all. It’s the most hideous slavery!” Her voice rose into something
like a shriek; one could see that her nerves were going at the mere
thought of it all. “You don’t have a moment to yourself; your life isn’t
your own.”

“But the lady isn’t allowed to do any useful kind of work?”

“_Work_! Don’t you call all that work, and _useful_? I’m sure I envy the
cook in my kitchen at times; I envy the woman that scrubs my floors. Stop!
Don’t ask why I don’t go into my kitchen, or get down on my knees with the
mop. It isn’t possible. You simply can’t. Perhaps you could if you were
very _grande dame_, but if you’re anywhere near the line of necessity, or
ever have been, you can’t. Besides, if we did do our own household work,
as I understand your Altrurian ladies do, what would become of the servant
class? We should be taking away their living, and that would be wicked.”

“It would certainly be wrong to take away the living of a
fellow-creature,” the Altrurian gravely admitted, “and I see the obstacle
in your way.”

“It’s a mountain,” said the lady, with exhaustion in her voice, but a
returning amiability; his forbearance must have placated her.

“May I ask what the use of your society life is?” he ventured, after a
moment.

“Use? Why should it have any? It kills time.”

“Then you are shut up to a hideous slavery without use, except to kill
time, and you cannot escape from it without taking away the living of
those dependent on you?”

“Yes,” I put in, “and that is a difficulty that meets us at every turn. It
is something that Matthew Arnold urged with great effect in his paper on
that crank of a Tolstoy. He asked what would become of the people who need
the work if we served and waited on ourselves, as Tolstoy preached. The
question is unanswerable.”

“That is true; in your conditions, it is unanswerable,” said the
Altrurian.

“I think,” said Mrs. Makely, “that, under the circumstances, we do pretty
well.”

“Oh, I don’t presume to censure you. And if you believe that your
conditions are the best--”

“We believe them the best in the best of all possible worlds,” I said,
devoutly; and it struck me that, if ever we came to have a national
church, some such affirmation as that concerning our economical conditions
ought to be in the confession of faith.

The Altrurian’s mind had not followed mine so far. “And your young girls,”
 he asked of Mrs. Makely--“how is their time occupied?”

“You mean after they come out in society?”

“I suppose so.”

She seemed to reflect. “I don’t know that it is very differently occupied.
Of course, they have their own amusements; they have their dances, and
little clubs, and their sewing-societies. I suppose that even an Altrurian
would applaud their sewing for the poor?” Mrs. Makely asked, rather
satirically.

“Yes,” he answered; and then he asked: “Isn’t it taking work away from
some needy seamstress, though? But I suppose you excuse it to the
thoughtlessness of youth.”

Mrs. Makely did not say, and he went on: “What I find it so hard to
understand is how you ladies can endure a life of mere nervous exertion,
such as you have been describing to me. I don’t see how you keep well.”

“We _don’t_ keep well,” said Mrs. Makely, with the greatest amusement. “I
don’t suppose that when you get above the working classes, till you reach
the very rich, you would find a perfectly well woman in America.”

“Isn’t that rather extreme?” I ventured to ask.

“No,” said Mrs. Makely, “it’s shamefully moderate,” and she seemed to
delight in having made out such a bad case for her sex. You can’t stop a
woman of that kind when she gets started; I had better left it alone.

“But,” said the Altrurian, “if you are forbidden by motives of humanity
from doing any sort of manual labor, which you must leave to those who
live by it, I suppose you take some sort of exercise?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Makely, shaking her head gayly, “we prefer to take
medicine.”

“You must approve of that,” I said to the Altrurian, “as you consider
exercise for its own sake insane or immoral. But, Mrs. Makely,” I
entreated, “you’re giving me away at a tremendous rate. I have just been
telling Mr. Homos that you ladies go in for athletics so much now in your
summer outings that there is danger of your becoming physically as well as
intellectually superior to us poor fellows. Don’t take that consolation
from me.”

“I won’t, altogether,” she said. “I couldn’t have the heart to, after the
pretty way you’ve put it. I don’t call it very athletic, sitting around on
hotel piazzas all summer long, as nineteen-twentieths of us do. But I
don’t deny that there is a Remnant, as Matthew Arnold calls them, who do
go in for tennis and boating and bathing and tramping and climbing.” She
paused, and then she concluded, gleefully: “And you ought to see what
wrecks they get home in the fall!”

The joke was on me; I could not help laughing, though I felt rather
sheepish before the Altrurian. Fortunately, he did not pursue the inquiry;
his curiosity had been given a slant aside from it.

“But your ladies,” he asked, “they have the summer for rest, however they
use it. Do they generally leave town? I understood Mr. Twelvemough to say
so,” he added, with a deferential glance at me.

“Yes, you may say it is the universal custom in the class that can afford
it,” said Mrs. Makely. She proceeded as if she felt a tacit censure in his
question. “It wouldn’t be the least use for us to stay and fry through our
summers in the city simply because our fathers and brothers had to.
Besides, we are worn out, at the end of the season, and they want us to
come away as much as we want to come.”

“Ah, I have always heard that the Americans are beautiful in their
attitude toward women.”

“They are perfect dears,” said Mrs. Makely, “and here comes one of the
best of them.”

At that moment her husband came up and laid her shawl across her
shoulders. “Whose character is it you’re blasting?” he asked, jocosely.

“Where in the world did you find it?” she asked, meaning the shawl.

“It was where you left it--on the sofa, in the side parlor. I had to take
my life in my hand when I crossed among all those waltzers in there. There
must have been as many as three couples on the floor. Poor girls! I pity
them, off at these places. The fellows in town have a good deal better
time. They’ve got their clubs, and they’ve got the theatre, and when the
weather gets too much for them they can run off down to the shore for the
night. The places anywhere within an hour’s ride are full of fellows. The
girls don’t have to dance with one another there, or with little boys. Of
course, that’s all right if they like it better.” He laughed at his wife,
and winked at me, and smoked swiftly, in emphasis of his irony.

“Then the young gentlemen whom the young ladies here usually meet in
society are all at work in the cities?” the Altrurian asked him, rather
needlessly, as I had already said so.

“Yes, those who are not out West, growing up with the country, except, of
course, the fellows who have inherited a fortune. They’re mostly off on
yachts.”

“But why do your young men go West to grow up with the country?” pursued
my friend.

“Because the East is _grown_ up. They have got to hustle, and the West is
the place to hustle. To make money,” added Makely, in response to a
puzzled glance of the Altrurian.

“Sometimes,” said his wife, “I almost hate the name of money.”

“Well, so long as you don’t hate the thing, Peggy.”

“Oh, we must have it, I suppose,” she sighed. “They used to say about the
girls who grew into old maids just after the Rebellion that they had lost
their chance in the war for the Union. I think quite as many lose their
chance now in the war for the dollar.”

“Mars hath slain his thousands, but Mammon hath slain his tens of
thousands,” I suggested, lightly; we all like to recognize the facts, so
long as we are not expected to do anything about them; then, we deny them.

“Yes, quite as bad as that,” said Mrs. Makely.

“Well, my dear, you are expensive, you know,” said her husband, “and if we
want to have you--why, we’ve got to hustle first.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you, you poor things! There’s nothing to be done about
it; it’s just got to go on and on; I don’t see how it’s ever to end.”

The Altrurian had been following us with that air of polite mystification
which I had begun to dread in him. “Then, in your good society you
postpone, and even forego, the happiness of life in the struggle to be
rich?”

“Well, you see,” said Makely, “a fellow don’t like to ask a girl to share
a home that isn’t as nice as the home she has left.”

“Sometimes,” his wife put in, rather sadly, “I think that it’s all a
mistake, and that we’d be willing to share the privations of the man we
loved.”

“Well,” said Makely, with a laugh, “we wouldn’t like to risk it.”

I laughed with him, but his wife did not, and in the silence that ensued
there was nothing to prevent the Altrurian from coming in with another of
his questions: “How far does this state of things extend downward? Does it
include the working classes, too?”

“Oh no!” we all answered together, and Mrs. Makely said: “With your
Altrurian ideas, I suppose you would naturally sympathize a great deal
more with the lower classes, and think they had to endure all the
hardships in our system; but if you could realize how the struggle goes on
in the best society, and how we all have to fight for what we get, or
don’t get, you would be disposed to pity our upper classes, too.”

“I am sure I should,” said the Altrurian.

Makely remarked: “I used to hear my father say that slavery was harder on
the whites than it was on the blacks, and that he wanted it done away with
for the sake of the masters.”

Makely rather faltered in conclusion, as if he were not quite satisfied
with his remark, and I distinctly felt a want of proportion in it; but I
did not wish to say anything. His wife had no reluctance.

“Well, there’s no comparison between the two things, but the struggle
certainly doesn’t affect the working classes as it does us. They go on
marrying and giving in marriage in the old way. They have nothing to lose,
and so they can afford it.”

“Blessed am dem what don’t expect nuffin! Oh, I tell you, it’s a
working-man’s country,” said Makely, through his cigar-smoke. “You ought
to see them in town, these summer nights, in the parks and squares and
cheap theatres. Their girls are not off for their health, anywhere, and
their fellows are not off growing up with the country. Their day’s work is
over, and they’re going in for a good time. And, then, walk through the
streets where they live, and see them out on the stoops with their wives
and children! I tell you, it’s enough to make a fellow wish he was poor
himself.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, “it’s astonishing how strong and well those women
keep, with their great families and their hard work. Sometimes I really
envy them.”

“Do you suppose,” said the Altrurian, “that they are aware of the
sacrifices which the ladies of the upper classes make in leaving all the
work to them, and suffering from the nervous debility which seems to be
the outcome of your society life?”

“They have not the remotest idea of it. They have no conception of what a
society woman goes through with. They think we do nothing. They envy us,
too, and sometimes they’re so ungrateful and indifferent, if you try to
help them, or get on terms with them, that I believe they hate us.”

“But that comes from ignorance?”

“Yes, though I don’t know that they are really any more ignorant of us
than we are of them. It’s the other half on both sides.”

“Isn’t that a pity, rather?”

“Of course it’s a pity, but what can you do? You can’t know what people
are like unless you live like them, and then the question is whether the
game is worth the candle. I should like to know how you manage in
Altruria.”

“Why, we have solved the problem in the only way, as you say, that it can
be solved. We all live alike.”

“Isn’t that a little, just a very trifling little bit, monotonous?” Mrs.
Makely asked, with a smile. “But there is everything, of course, in being
used to it. To an unregenerate spirit--like mine, for example--it seems
intolerable.”

“But why? When you were younger, before you were married, you all lived at
home together--or, perhaps, you were an only child?”

“Oh, no indeed! There were ten of us.”

“Then you all lived alike, and shared equally?”

“Yes, but we were a family.”

“We do not conceive of the human race except as a family.”

“Now, excuse me, Mr. Homos, that is all nonsense. You cannot have the
family feeling without love, and it is impossible to love other people.
That talk about the neighbor, and all that, is all well enough--” She
stopped herself, as if she dimly remembered who began that talk, and then
went on: “Of course, I accept it as a matter of faith, and the spirit of
it, nobody denies that; but what I mean is, that you must have frightful
quarrels all the time.” She tried to look as if this were where she really
meant to bring up, and he took her on the ground she had chosen.

“Yes, we have quarrels. Hadn’t you at home?”

“We fought like little cats and dogs, at times.”

Makely and I burst into a laugh at her magnanimous frankness. The
Altrurian remained serious. “But, because you lived alike, you knew each
other, and so you easily made up your quarrels. It is quite as simple with
us, in our life as a human family.”

This notion of a human family seemed to amuse Mrs. Makely more and more;
she laughed and laughed again. “You must excuse me,” she panted, at last,
“but I cannot imagine it! No, it is too ludicrous. Just fancy the jars of
an ordinary family multiplied by the population of a whole continent! Why,
you must be in a perpetual squabble. You can’t have any peace of your
lives. It’s worse, far worse, than our way.”

“But, madam,” he began, “you are supposing our family to be made up of
people with all the antagonistic interests of your civilization. As a
matter of fact--”

“No, no! _I know human nature_, Mr. Homos!” She suddenly jumped up and
gave him her hand. “Good-night,” she said, sweetly, and as she drifted off
on her husband’s arm she looked back at us and nodded in gay triumph.

The Altrurian turned upon me with unabated interest. “And have you no
provision in your system for finally making the lower classes understand
the sufferings and sacrifices of the upper classes in their behalf? Do you
expect to do nothing to bring them together in mutual kindness?”

“Well, not this evening,” I said, throwing the end of my cigar away. “I’m
going to bed--aren’t you?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, good-night. Are you sure you can find your room?”

“Oh yes. Good-night.”




VI

I left my guest abruptly, with a feeling of vexation not very easily
definable. His repetition of questions about questions which society has
so often answered, and always in the same way, was not so bad in him as it
would have been in a person of our civilization; he represented a wholly
different state of things, the inversion of our own, and much could be
forgiven him for that reason, just as in Russia much could be forgiven to
an American if he formulated his curiosity concerning imperialism from a
purely republican experience. I knew that in Altruria, for instance, the
possession of great gifts, of any kind of superiority, involved the sense
of obligation to others, and the wish to identify one’s self with the
great mass of men, rather than the ambition to distinguish one’s self from
them; and that the Altrurians honored their gifted men in the measure they
did this. A man reared in such a civilization must naturally find it
difficult to get our point of view; with social inclusion as the ideal, he
would with difficulty conceive of our ideal of social exclusion; but I
think we had all been very patient with him; we should have made short
work with an American who had approached us with the same inquiries.
Even from a foreigner, the citizen of a republic founded on the notion,
elsewhere exploded ever since Cain, that one is his brother’s keeper,
the things he asked seemed inoffensive only because they were puerile;
but they certainly were puerile. I felt that it ought to have been
self-evident to him that when a commonwealth of sixty million Americans
based itself upon the great principle of self-seeking, self-seeking was
the best thing, and, whatever hardship it seemed to work, it must carry
with it unseen blessings in tenfold measure. If a few hundred thousand
favored Americans enjoyed the privilege of socially contemning all the
rest, it was as clearly right and just that they should do so as that four
thousand American millionaires should be richer than all the other
Americans put together. Such a status, growing out of our political
equality and our material prosperity, must evince a divine purpose to any
one intimate with the designs of Providence, and it seemed a kind of
impiety to doubt its perfection. I excused the misgivings which I could
not help seeing in the Altrurian to his alien traditions, and I was aware
that my friends had done so, too. But, if I could judge from myself, he
must have left them all sensible of their effort; and this was not
pleasant. I could not blink the fact that although I had openly disagreed
with him on every point of ethics and economics, I was still responsible
for him as a guest. It was as if an English gentleman had introduced a
blatant American Democrat into Tory society; or, rather, as if a
Southerner of the olden time had harbored a Northern Abolitionist and
permitted him to inquire into the workings of slavery among his neighbors.
People would tolerate him as my guest for a time, but there must be an end
of their patience with the tacit enmity of his sentiments and the explicit
vulgarity of his ideals, and when the end came I must be attainted with
him.

I did not like the notion of this, and I meant to escape it if I could. I
confess that I would have willingly disowned him, as I had already
disavowed his opinions, but there was no way of doing it short of telling
him to go away, and I was not ready to do that. Something in the man, I do
not know what, mysteriously appealed to me. He was not contemptibly
puerile without being lovably childlike, and I could only make up my mind
to be more and more frank with him and to try and shield him, as well as
myself, from the effects I dreaded.

I fell asleep planning an excursion farther into the mountains, which
should take up the rest of the week that I expected him to stay with me,
and would keep him from following up his studies of American life where
they would be so injurious to both of us as they must in our hotel. A
knock at my door roused me, and I sent a drowsy “Come in!” toward it from
the bedclothes without looking that way.

“Good-morning!” came back in the rich, gentle voice of the Altrurian. I
lifted my head with a jerk from the pillow, and saw him standing against
the closed door, with my shoes in his hand. “Oh, I am sorry I waked you. I
thought--”

“Not at all, not at all,” I said. “It’s quite time, I dare say. But you
oughtn’t to have taken the trouble to bring my shoes in.”

“I wasn’t altogether disinterested in it,” he returned. “I wished you to
compliment me on them. Don’t you think they are pretty well done, for an
amateur?” He came toward my bed, and turned them about in his hands, so
that they would catch the light, and smiled down upon me.

“I don’t understand,” I began.

“Why,” he said, “I blacked them, you know.”

“You blacked them?”

“Yes,” he returned, easily. “I thought I would go into the baggage-room,
after we parted last night, to look for a piece of mine that had not been
taken to my room, and I found the porter there, with his wrist bound up.
He said he had strained it in handling a lady’s Saratoga--he said a
Saratoga was a large trunk--and I begged him to let me relieve him at the
boots he was blacking. He refused at first, but I insisted upon trying my
hand at a pair, and then he let me go on with the men’s boots; he said he
could varnish the ladies’ without hurting his wrist. It needed less skill
than I supposed, and after I had done a few pairs he said I could black
boots as well as he.”

“Did anybody see you?” I gasped, and I felt a cold perspiration break out
on me.

“No, we had the whole midnight hour to ourselves. The porter’s work with
the baggage was all over, and there was nothing to interrupt the
delightful chat we fell into. He is a very intelligent man, and he told me
all about that custom of feeing which you deprecate. He says that the
servants hate it as much as the guests; they have to take the tips now
because the landlords figure on them in the wages, and they cannot live
without them. He is a fine, manly fellow, and--”

“Mr. Homos,” I broke in, with the strength I found in his assurance that
no one had seen him helping the porter black boots, “I want to speak very
seriously with you, and I hope you will not be hurt if I speak very
plainly about a matter in which I have your good solely at heart.” This
was not quite true, and I winced inwardly a little when he thanked me with
that confounded sincerity of his which was so much like irony; but I went
on: “It is my duty to you, as my guest, to tell you that this thing of
doing for others is not such a simple matter here, as your peculiar
training leads you to think. You have been deceived by a superficial
likeness; but, really, I do not understand how you could have read all you
have done about us and not realize before coming here that America and
Altruria are absolutely distinct and diverse in their actuating
principles. They are both republics, I know; but America is a republic
where every man is for himself, and you cannot help others as you do at
home; it is dangerous--it is ridiculous. You must keep this fact in mind,
or you will fall into errors that will be very embarrassing to you in your
stay among us, and,” I was forced to add, “to all your friends. Now, I
certainly hoped, after what I had said to you and what my friends had
explained of our civilization, that you would not have done a thing of
this kind. I will see the porter, as soon as I am up, and ask him not to
mention the matter to any one, but, I confess, I don’t like to take an
apologetic tone with him; your conditions are so alien to ours that they
will seem incredible to him, and he will think I am stuffing him.”

“I don’t believe he will think that,” said the Altrurian, “and I hope you
won’t find the case so bad as it seems to you. I am extremely sorry to
have done wrong--”

“Oh, the thing wasn’t wrong in itself. It was only wrong under the
circumstances. Abstractly, it is quite right to help a fellow-being who
needs help; no one denies that, even in a country where every one is for
himself.”

“I am so glad to hear it,” said the Altrurian. “Then, at least, I have not
gone radically astray; and I do not think you need take the trouble to
explain the Altrurian ideas to the porter. I have done that already, and
they seemed quite conceivable to him; he said that poor folks had to act
upon them, even here, more or less, and that if they did not act upon them
there would be no chance for them at all. He says they have to help one
another very much as we do at home, and that it is only the rich folks
among you who are independent. I really don’t think you need speak to him
at all, unless you wish; and I was very careful to guard my offer of help
at the point where I understood from you and your friends that it might do
harm. I asked him if there was not some one who would help him out with
his boot-blacking for money, because in that case I should be glad to pay
him; but he said there was no one about who would take the job; that he
had to agree to black the boots, or else he would not have got the place
of porter, but that all the rest of the help would consider it a disgrace,
and would not help him for love or money. So it seemed quite safe to offer
him my services.”

I felt that the matter was almost hopeless, but I asked: “And what he
said--didn’t that suggest anything else to you?”

“How anything else?” asked the Altrurian, in his turn.

“Didn’t it occur to you that if none of his fellow-servants were willing
to help him black boots, and if he did it only because he was obliged to,
it was hardly the sort of work for you?”

“Why, no,” said the Altrurian, with absolute simplicity. He must have
perceived the despair I fell into at this answer, for he asked: “Why
should I have minded doing for others what I should have been willing to
do for myself?”

“There are a great many things we are willing to do for ourselves that we
are not willing to do for others. But even on that principle, which I
think false and illogical, you could not be justified. A gentleman is not
willing to black _his own_ boots. It is offensive to his feelings, to his
self-respect; it is something he will not do if he can get anybody else to
do it for him.”

“Then in America,” said the Altrurian, “it is not offensive to the
feelings of a gentleman to let another do for him what he would not do for
himself?”

“Certainly not.”

“Ah,” he returned, “then we understand something altogether different by
the word gentleman in Altruria. I see, now, how I have committed a
mistake. I shall be more careful hereafter.”

I thought I had better leave the subject, and, “By-the-way,” I said, “how
would you like to take a little tramp with me to-day farther up into the
mountains?”

“I should be delighted,” said the Altrurian, so gratefully that I was
ashamed to think why I was proposing the pleasure to him.

“Well, then, I shall be ready to start as soon as we have had breakfast. I
will join you down-stairs in half an hour.”

He left me at this hint, though really I was half afraid he might stay and
offer to lend me a hand at my toilet, in the expression of his national
character. I found him with Mrs. Makely, when I went down, and she began,
with a parenthetical tribute to the beauty of the mountains in the morning
light: “Don’t be surprised to see me up at this unnatural hour. I don’t
know whether it was the excitement of our talk last night, or what it was,
but my sulphonal wouldn’t act, though I took fifteen grains, and I was up
with the lark, or should have been, if there had been any lark outside of
literature to be up with. However, this air is so glorious that I don’t
mind losing a night’s sleep now and then. I believe that with a little
practice one could get along without any sleep at all here; at least, _I_
could. I’m sorry to say poor Mr. Makely _can’t_, apparently. He’s making
up for his share of my vigils, and I’m going to breakfast without him. Do
you know, I’ve done a very bold thing: I’ve got the head-waiter to give
you places at our table; I know you’ll hate it, Mr. Twelvemough, because
you naturally want to keep Mr. Homos to yourself, and I don’t blame you at
all; but I’m simply not going to _let_ you, and that’s all there is about
it.”

The pleasure I felt at this announcement was not unmixed, but I tried to
keep Mrs. Makely from thinking so, and I was immensely relieved when she
found a chance to say to me, in a low voice: “I know just how you’re
feeling, Mr. Twelvemough, and I’m going to help you keep him from doing
anything ridiculous, if I can. I _like_ him, and I think it’s a perfect
shame to have people laughing at him. I know we can manage him between
us.”

We so far failed, however, that the Altrurian shook hands with the
head-waiter when he pressed open the wire-netting door to let us into the
dining-room, and made a bow to our waitress of the sort one makes to a
lady. But we thought it best to ignore these little errors of his and
reserve our moral strength for anything more spectacular. Fortunately we
got through our breakfast with nothing worse than his jumping up and
stooping to hand the waitress a spoon she let fall; but this could easily
pass for some attention to Mrs. Makely at a little distance. There were
not many people down to breakfast yet; but I could see that there was a
good deal of subdued sensation among the waitresses, standing with folded
arms behind their tables, and that the head-waiter’s handsome face was red
with anxiety.

Mrs. Makely asked if we were going to church. She said she was driving
that way, and would be glad to drop us. “I’m not going myself,” she
explained, “because I couldn’t make anything of the sermon, with my head
in the state it is, and I’m going to compromise on a good action. I want
to carry some books and papers over to Mrs. Camp. Don’t you think that
will be quite as acceptable, Mr. Homos?”

“I should venture to hope it,” he said, with a tolerant seriousness not
altogether out of keeping with her lightness.

“Who is Mrs. Camp?” I asked, not caring to commit myself on the question.

“Lizzie’s mother. You know I told you about them last night. I think she
must have got through the books I lent her, and I know Lizzie didn’t like
to ask me for more, because she saw me talking with you, and didn’t want
to interrupt us. Such a nice girl! I think the Sunday papers must have
come, and I’ll take them over, too; Mrs. Camp is always so glad to get
them, and she is so delightful when she gets going about public events.
But perhaps you don’t approve of Sunday papers, Mr. Homos.”

“I’m sure I don’t know, madam. I haven’t seen them yet. You know this is
the first Sunday I’ve been in America.”

“Well, I’m sorry to say you won’t see the old Puritan Sabbath,” said Mrs.
Makely, with an abrupt deflection from the question of the Sunday papers.
“Though you ought to, up in these hills. The only thing left of it is
rye-and-Indian bread, and these baked beans and fish-balls.”

“But they are very good?”

“Yes, I dare say they are not the worst of it.”

She was a woman who tended to levity, and I was a little afraid she might
be going to say something irreverent; but, if she were, she was
forestalled by the Altrurian asking: “Would it be very indiscreet, madam,
if I were to ask you some time to introduce me to that family?”

“The Camps?” she returned. “Not at all. I should be perfectly delighted.”
 The thought seemed to strike her, and she asked: “Why not go with me this
morning, unless you are inflexibly bent on going to church, you and Mr.
Twelvemough?”

The Altrurian glanced at me, and I said I should be only too glad, if I
could carry some books, so that I could compromise on a good action, too.
“Take one of your own,” she instantly suggested.

“Do you think they wouldn’t be too severe upon it?” I asked.

“Well, Mrs. Camp might,” Mrs. Makely consented, with a smile. “She goes
in for rather serious fiction; but I think Lizzie would enjoy a good,
old-fashioned love-story, where everybody got married, as they do in your
charming books.”

I winced a little, for every one likes to be regarded seriously, and I did
not enjoy being remanded to the young-girl public; but I put a bold face
on it, and said: “My good action shall be done in behalf of Miss Lizzie.”

Half an hour later, Mrs. Makely having left word with the clerk where we
were gone, so that her husband need not be alarmed when he got up, we were
striking into the hills on a two-seated buckboard, with one of the best
teams of our hotel, and one of the most taciturn drivers. Mrs. Makely had
the Altrurian get into the back seat with her, and, after some attempts to
make talk with the driver, I leaned over and joined in their talk. The
Altrurian was greatly interested, not so much in the landscape--though he
owned its beauty when we cried out over it from point to point--but in the
human incidents and features. He noticed the cattle in the fields, and the
horses we met on the road, and the taste and comfort of the buildings, the
variety of the crops, and the promise of the harvest. I was glad of the
respite his questions gave me from the study of the intimate character of
our civilization, for they were directed now at these more material facts,
and I willingly joined Mrs. Makely in answering them. We explained that
the finest teams we met were from the different hotels or boarding-houses,
or at least from the farms where the people took city people to board; and
that certain shabby equipages belonged to the natives who lived solely by
cultivating the soil. There was not very much of the soil cultivated, for
the chief crop was hay, with here and there a patch of potatoes or beans,
and a few acres in sweet-corn. The houses of the natives, when they were
for their use only, were no better than their turnouts; it was where the
city boarder had found shelter that they were modern and pleasant. Now and
then we came to a deserted homestead, and I tried to make the Altrurian
understand how farming in New England had yielded to the competition of
the immense agricultural operations of the West. “You know,” I said, “that
agriculture is really an operation out there, as much as coal-mining is in
Pennsylvania, or finance in Wall Street; you have no idea of the vastness
of the scale.” Perhaps I swelled a little with pride in my celebration of
the national prosperity, as it flowed from our Western farms of five and
ten and twenty thousand acres; I could not very well help putting on the
pedal in these passages. Mrs. Makely listened almost, as eagerly, as the
Altrurian, for, as a cultivated American woman, she was necessarily
quite ignorant of her own country, geographically, politically, and
historically. “The only people left in the hill country of New England,” I
concluded, “are those who are too old or too lazy to get away. Any young
man of energy would be ashamed to stay, unless he wanted to keep a
boarding-house or live on the city vacationists in summer. If he doesn’t,
he goes West and takes up some of the new land, and comes back in
middle-life and buys a deserted farm to spend his summers on.”

“Dear me!” said the Altrurian. “Is it so simple as that? Then we can
hardly wonder at their owners leaving these worn-out farms; though I
suppose it must be with the pang of exile, sometimes.”

“Oh, I fancy there isn’t much sentiment involved,” I answered, lightly.

“Whoa!” said Mrs. Makely, speaking to the horses before she spoke to the
driver, as some women will. He pulled them up, and looked round at her.

“Isn’t that Reuben Camp, _now_, over there by that house?” she asked, as
if we had been talking of him; that is another way some women have.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the driver.

“Oh, well, then!” and “Reuben!” she called to the young man, who was
prowling about the door-yard of a sad-colored old farm-house, and peering
into a window here and there. “Come here a moment--won’t you, please?”

He lifted his head and looked round, and, when he had located the appeal
made to him, he came down the walk to the gate and leaned over it, waiting
for further instructions. I saw that it was the young man whom we had
noticed with the girl Mrs. Makely called Lizzie on the hotel piazza the
night before.

“Do you know whether I should find Lizzie at home this morning?”

“Yes, she’s there with mother,” said the young fellow, with neither liking
nor disliking in his tone.

“Oh, I’m so glad!” said the lady. “I didn’t know but she might be at
church. What in the world has happened here? Is there anything unusual
going on inside?”

“No, I was just looking to see if it was all right. The folks wanted I
should come round.”

“Why, where are they?”

“Oh, they’re gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yes; gone West. They’ve left the old place, because they couldn’t make a
living here any longer.”

“Why, this is quite a case in point,” I said. “Now, Mr. Homos, here is a
chance to inform yourself at first hand about a very interesting fact of
our civilization”; and I added, in a low voice, to Mrs. Makely: “Won’t you
introduce us?”

“Oh yes. Mr. Camp, this is Mr. Twelvemough, the author--you know his
books, of course; and Mr. Homos, a gentleman from Altruria.”

The young fellow opened the gate he leaned on and came out to us. He took
no notice of me, but he seized the Altrurian’s hand and wrung it. “I’ve
heard of _you_” he said. “Mrs. Makely, were you going to our place?”

“Why, yes.”

“So do, then. Mother would give almost anything to see Mr. Homos. We’ve
heard of Altruria, over our way,” he added to our friend. “Mother’s been
reading up all she can about it. She’ll want to talk with you, and she
won’t give the rest of us much of a chance, I guess.”

“Oh, I shall be glad to see her,” said the Altrurian, “and to tell her
everything I can. But won’t you explain to me first something about your
deserted farms here? It’s quite a new thing to me.”

“It isn’t a new thing to us,” said the young fellow, with a short laugh.
“And there isn’t much to explain about it. You’ll see them all through New
England. When a man finds he can’t get his funeral expenses out of the
land, he don’t feel like staying to be buried in it, and he pulls up and
goes.”

“But people used to get their living expenses here,” I suggested. “Why
can’t they now?”

“Well, they didn’t use to have Western prices to fight with; and then the
land wasn’t worn out so, and the taxes were not so heavy. How would you
like to pay twenty to thirty dollars on the thousand, and assessed up to
the last notch, in the city?”

“Why, what in the world makes your taxes so heavy?”

“Schools and roads. We’ve got to have schools, and you city folks want
good roads when you come here in the summer, don’t you? Then the season is
short, and sometimes we can’t make a crop. The frost catches the corn in
the field, and you have your trouble for your pains. Potatoes are the only
thing we can count on, except grass, and, when everybody raises potatoes,
you know where the price goes.”

“Oh, but now, Mr. Camp,” said Mrs. Makely, leaning over toward him, and
speaking in a cosey and coaxing tone, as if he must not really keep the
truth from an old friend like her, “isn’t it a good deal because the
farmers’ daughters want pianos, and the farmers’ sons want buggies? I
heard Professor Lumen saying, the other day, that, if the farmers were
willing to work as they used to work, they could still get a good living
off their farms, and that they gave up their places because they were too
lazy, in many cases, to farm them properly.”

“He’d better not let _me_ hear him saying that,” said the young fellow,
while a hot flush passed over his face. He added, bitterly: “If he wants
to see how easy it is to make a living up here, he can take this place and
try for a year or two; he can get it cheap. But I guess he wouldn’t want
it the year round; he’d only want it a few months in the summer, when he
could enjoy the sightliness of it, and see me working over there on my
farm, while he smoked on his front porch.” He turned round and looked at
the old house in silence a moment. Then, as he went on, his voice lost its
angry ring. “The folks here bought this place from the Indians, and they’d
been here more than two hundred years. Do you think they left it because
they were too lazy to run it, or couldn’t get pianos and buggies out of
it, or were such fools as not to know whether they were well off? It was
their _home_; they were born and lived and died here. There is the family
burying-ground over there.”

Neither Mrs. Makely nor myself was ready with a reply, and we left the
word with the Altrurian, who suggested: “Still, I suppose they will be
more prosperous in the West on the new land they take up?”

The young fellow leaned his arms on the wheel by which he stood. “What do
you mean by taking up new land?”

“Why, out of the public domain--”

“There _ain’t_ any public domain that’s worth having. All the good land is
in the hands of railroads and farm syndicates and speculators; and if you
want a farm in the West you’ve got to buy it; the East is the only place
where folks give them away, because they ain’t worth keeping. If you
haven’t got the ready money, you can buy one on credit, and pay ten,
twenty, and thirty per cent. interest, and live in a dugout on the
plains--till your mortgage matures.” The young man took his arms from the
wheel and moved a few steps backward, as he added: “I’ll see you over at
the house later.”

The driver touched his horses, and we started briskly off again. But I
confess I had quite enough of his pessimism, and as we drove away I leaned
back toward the Altrurian and said: “Now, it is all perfect nonsense to
pretend that things are at that pass with us. There are more millionaires
in America, probably, than there are in all the other civilized countries
of the globe, and it is not possible that the farming population should be
in such a hopeless condition. All wealth comes out of the earth, and you
may be sure they get their full share of it.”

“I am glad to hear you say so,” said the Altrurian. “What is the meaning
of this new party in the West that seems to have held a convention lately?
I read something of it in the train yesterday.”

“Oh, that is a lot of crazy Hayseeds, who don’t want to pay back the money
they have borrowed, or who find themselves unable to meet their interest.
It will soon blow over. We are always having these political flurries. A
good crop will make it all right with them.”

“But is it true that they have to pay such rates of interest as our young
friend mentioned?”

“Well,” I said, seeing the thing in the humorous light which softens for
us Americans so many of the hardships of others, “I suppose that man likes
to squeeze his brother man when he gets him in his grip. That’s human
nature, you know.”

“Is it?” asked the Altrurian.

It seemed to me that he had asked something like that before when I
alleged human nature in defence of some piece of every-day selfishness.
But I thought best not to notice it, and I went on: “The land is so rich
out there that a farm will often pay for itself with a single crop.”

“Is it possible?” cried the Altrurian. “Then I suppose it seldom really
happens that a mortgage is foreclosed, in the way our young friend
insinuated?”

“Well, I can’t say that exactly”; and, having admitted so much, I did not
feel bound to impart a fact that popped perversely into my mind. I was
once talking with a Western money-lender, a very good sort of fellow,
frank and open as the day; I asked him whether the farmers generally paid
off their mortgages, and he answered me that if the mortgage was to the
value of a fourth of the land, the farmer might pay it off, but if it were
to a half, or a third even, he never paid it, but slaved on and died in
his debts. “You may be sure, however,” I concluded, “that our young friend
takes a jaundiced view of the situation.”

“Now, really,” said Mrs. Makely, “I must insist upon dropping this
everlasting talk about money. I think it is perfectly disgusting, and I
believe it was Mr. Makely’s account of his speculations that kept me awake
last night. My brain got running on figures till the dark seemed to be all
sown with dollar-marks, like the stars in the Milky Way. I--ugh! What in
the world is it? Oh, you dreadful little things!”

Mrs. Makely passed swiftly from terror to hysterical laughter as the
driver pulled up short and a group of barefooted children broke in front
of his horses and scuttled out of the dust into the road-side bushes like
a covey of quails. There seemed to be a dozen of them, nearly all the same
in size, but there turned out to be only five or six; or at least no more
showed their gleaming eyes and teeth through the underbrush in quiet
enjoyment of the lady’s alarm.

“Don’t you know that you might have got killed?” she demanded, with that
severity good women feel for people who have just escaped with their
lives. “How lovely the dirty little dears are!” she added, in the next
wave of emotion. One bold fellow of six showed a half-length above the
bushes, and she asked: “Don’t you know that you oughtn’t to play in the
road when there are so many teams passing? Are all those your brothers and
sisters?”

He ignored the first question. “One’s my cousin.” I pulled out a
half-dozen coppers, and held my hand toward him. “See if there is one
for each.” They had no difficulty in solving the simple mathematical
problem except the smallest girl, who cried for fear and baffled longing.
I tossed the coin to her, and a little fat dog darted out at her feet and
caught it up in his mouth. “Oh, good gracious!” I called out in my light,
humorous way. “Do you suppose he’s going to spend it for candy?” The
little people thought that a famous joke, and they laughed with the
gratitude that even small favors inspire. “Bring your sister here,” I said
to the boldest boy, and, when he came up with the little woman, I put
another copper into her hand. “Look out that the greedy dog doesn’t get
it,” I said, and my gayety met with fresh applause. “Where do you live?” I
asked, with some vague purpose of showing the Altrurian the kindliness
that exists between our upper and lower classes.

“Over there,” said the boy. I followed the twist of his head, and glimpsed
a wooden cottage on the border of the forest, so very new that the
sheathing had not yet been covered with clapboards. I stood up in the
buckboard and saw that it was a story and a half high, and could have had
four or five rooms in it. The bare, curtainless windows were set in the
unpainted frames, but the front door seemed not to be hung yet. The people
meant to winter there, however, for the sod was banked up against the
wooden underpinning; a stovepipe stuck out of the roof of a little wing
behind. While I gazed a young-looking woman came to the door, as if she
had been drawn by our talk with the children, and then she jumped down
from the threshold, which still wanted a doorstep, and came slowly out to
us. The children ran to her with their coppers, and then followed her back
to us.

Mrs. Makely called to her before she reached us: “I hope you weren’t
frightened. We didn’t drive over any of them.”

“Oh, I wasn’t frightened,” said the young woman. “It’s a very safe place
to bring up children, in the country, and I never feel uneasy about them.”

“Yes, if they are not under the horses’ feet,” said Mrs. Makely, mingling
instruction and amusement very judiciously in her reply. “Are they all
yours?”

“Only five,” said the mother, and she pointed to the alien in her flock.
“He’s my sister’s. She lives just below here.” Her children had grouped
themselves about her, and she kept passing her hands caressingly over
their little heads as she talked. “My sister has nine children, but she
has the rest at church with her to-day.”

“You don’t speak like an American,” Mrs. Makely suggested.

“No, we’re English. Our husbands work in the quarry. That’s _my_ little
palace.” The woman nodded her head toward the cottage.

“It’s going to be very nice,” said Mrs. Makely, with an evident perception
of her pride in it.

“Yes, if we ever get money to finish it. Thank you for the children.”

“Oh, it was this gentleman.” Mrs. Makely indicated me, and I bore the
merit of my good action as modestly as I could.

“Then thank _you_, sir,” said the young woman, and she asked Mrs. Makely:
“You’re not living about here, ma’am?”

“Oh no, we’re staying at the hotel.”

“At the hotel! It must be very dear, there.”

“Yes, it is expensive,” said Mrs. Makely, with a note of that satisfaction
in her voice which we all feel in spending a great deal of money.

“But I suppose you can afford it,” said the woman, whose eye was running
hungrily over Mrs. Makely’s pretty costume. “Some are poor, and some are
rich. That’s the way the world has to be made up, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, very dryly, and the talk languished from this
point, so that the driver felt warranted in starting up his horses. When
we had driven beyond earshot she said: “I knew she was not an American,
as soon as she spoke, by her accent, and then those foreigners have no
self-respect. That was a pretty bold bid for a contribution to finish up
her ‘little palace’! I’m glad you didn’t give her anything, Mr.
Twelvemough. I was afraid your sympathies had been wrought upon.”

“Oh, not at all,” I answered. “I saw the mischief I had done with the
children.”

The Altrurian, who has not asked anything for a long time, but had
listened with eager interest to all that passed, now came up smiling with
his question: “Will you kindly tell me what harm would have been done by
offering the woman a little money to help finish up her cottage?”

I did not allow Mrs. Makely to answer, I was so eager to air my political
economy. “The very greatest harm. It would have pauperized her. You have
no idea how quickly they give way to the poison of that sort of thing. As
soon as they get any sort of help they expect more; they count upon it,
and they begin to live upon it. The sight of those coppers which I gave
her children--more out of joke than charity--demoralized the woman. She
took us for rich people, and wanted us to build her a house. You have to
guard against every approach to a thing of that sort.”

“I don’t believe,” said Mrs. Makely, “that an American would have hinted,
as she did.”

“‘No, an American would not have done that, I’m thankful to say. They take
fees, but they don’t ask charity, yet.” We went on to exult in the noble
independence of the American character in all classes, at some length. We
talked at the Altrurian, but he did not seem to hear us. At last he asked,
with a faint sigh: “Then, in your conditions, a kindly impulse to aid one
who needs your help is something to be guarded against as possibly
pernicious?”

“Exactly,” I said. “And now you see what difficulties beset us in dealing
with the problem of poverty. We cannot let people suffer, for that would
be cruel; and we cannot relieve their need without pauperizing them.”

“I see,” he answered. “It is a terrible quandary.”

“I wish,” said Mrs. Makely, “that you would tell us just how you manage
with the poor in Altruria.”

“We have none,” he replied.

“But the comparatively poor--you have some people who are richer than
others?”

“No. We should regard that as the worst incivism.”

“What is incivism?”

I interpreted, “Bad citizenship.”

“Well, then, if you will excuse me, Mr. Homos,” she said, “I think that is
simply impossible. There _must_ be rich and there _must_ be poor. There
always have been, and there always will be. That woman said it as well as
anybody. Didn’t Christ Himself say, ‘The poor ye have always with you’?”




VII


The Altrurian looked at Mrs. Makely with an amazement visibly heightened
by the air of complacency she put on after delivering this poser: “Do you
really think Christ meant that you _ought_ always to have the poor with
you?” he asked.

“Why, of course!” she answered, triumphantly. “How else are the sympathies
of the rich to be cultivated? The poverty of some and the wealth of
others, isn’t that what forms the great tie of human brotherhood? If we
were all comfortable, or all shared alike, there could not be anything
like charity, and Paul said, ‘The greatest of these is charity.’ I believe
it’s ‘love’ in the new version, but it comes to the same thing.”

The Altrurian gave a kind of gasp, and then lapsed into a silence that
lasted until we came in sight of the Camp farm-house. It stood on the
crest of a road-side upland, and looked down the beautiful valley, bathed
in Sabbath sunlight, and away to the ranges of hills, so far that it was
hard to say whether it was sun or shadow that dimmed their distance.
Decidedly, the place was what the country people call sightly. The old
house, once painted a Brandon red, crouched low to the ground, with its
lean-to in the rear, and its flat-arched wood-sheds and wagon-houses
stretching away at the side of the barn, and covering the approach to it
with an unbroken roof. There were flowers in the beds along the
underpinning of the house, which stood close to the street, and on one
side of the door was a clump of Spanish willow; an old-fashioned June rose
climbed over it from the other. An aged dog got stiffly to his feet from
the threshold stone and whimpered as our buckboard drew up; the poultry
picking about the path and among the chips lazily made way for us, and as
our wheels ceased to crunch upon the gravel we heard hasty steps, and
Reuben Camp came round the corner of the house in time to give Mrs. Makely
his hand and help her spring to the ground, which she did very lightly;
her remarkable mind had kept her body in a sort of sympathetic activity,
and at thirty-five she had the gracile ease and self-command of a girl.

“Ah, Reuben,” she sighed, permitting herself to call him by his first
name, with the emotion which expressed itself more definitely in the words
that followed, “how I envy you all this dear, old, homelike place! I never
come here without thinking of my grandfather’s farm in Massachusetts,
where I used to go every summer when I was a little girl. If I had a place
like this, I should never leave it.”

“Well, Mrs. Makely,” said young Camp, “you can have this place cheap, if
you really want it. Or almost any other place in the neighborhood.”

“Don’t say such a thing!” she returned. “It makes one feel as if the
foundations of the great deep were giving way. I don’t know what that
means exactly, but I suppose it’s equivalent to mislaying George’s hatchet
and going back on the Declaration generally; and I don’t like to hear you
talk so.”

Camp seemed to have lost his bitter mood, and he answered, pleasantly:
“The Declaration is all right, as far as it goes, but it don’t help us to
compete with the Western farm operations.”

“Why, you believe every one was born free and equal, don’t you?” Mrs.
Makely asked.

“Oh yes, I believe that; but--”

“Then why do you object to free and equal competition?”

The young fellow laughed, and said, as he opened the door for us: “Walk
right into the parlor, please. Mother will be ready for you in a minute.”
 He added: “I guess she’s putting on her best cap for you, Mr. Homos. It’s
a great event for her, your coming here. It is for all of us. We’re glad
to have you.”

“And I’m glad to be here,” said the Altrurian, as simply as the other. He
looked about the best room of a farm-house that had never adapted itself
to the tastes or needs of the city boarder, and was as stiffly repellent
in its upholstery and as severe in its decoration as hair-cloth chairs and
dark-brown wall-paper of a trellis pattern, with drab roses, could make
it. The windows were shut tight, and our host did not offer to open them.
A fly or two crossed the doorway into the hall, but made no attempt
to penetrate the interior, where we sat in an obscurity that left the
high-hung family photographs on the walls vague and uncertain. I made a
mental note of it as a place where it would be very characteristic to have
a rustic funeral take place; and I was pleased to have Mrs. Makely drop
into a sort of mortuary murmur, as she said: “I hope your mother is as
well as usual this morning?” I perceived that this murmur was produced by
the sepulchral influence of the room.

“Oh yes,” said Camp, and at that moment a door opened from the room across
the hall, and his sister seemed to bring in some of the light from it to
us where we sat. She shook hands with Mrs. Makely, who introduced me to
her, and then presented the Altrurian. She bowed very civilly to me, but
with a touch of severity, such as country people find necessary for the
assertion of their self-respect with strangers. I thought it very pretty,
and instantly saw that I could work it into some picture of character; and
I was not at all sorry that she made a difference in favor of the
Altrurian.

“Mother will be so glad to see you,” she said to him, and, “Won’t you come
right in?” she added to us all.

We followed her and found ourselves in a large, low, sunny room on
the southeast corner of the house, which had no doubt once been the
living-room, but which was now given up to the bedridden invalid; a door
opened into the kitchen behind, where the table was already laid for the
midday meal, with the plates turned down in the country fashion, and some
netting drawn over the dishes to keep the flies away.

Mrs. Makely bustled up to the bedside with her energetic, patronizing
cheerfulness. “Ah, Mrs. Camp, I am glad to see you looking so well this
morning. I’ve been meaning to run over for several days past, but I
couldn’t find a moment till this morning, and I knew you didn’t object to
Sunday visits.” She took the invalid’s hand in hers, and, with the air of
showing how little she felt any inequality between them, she leaned over
and kissed her, where Mrs. Camp sat propped against her pillows. She had a
large, nobly moulded face of rather masculine contour, and at the same
time the most motherly look in the world. Mrs. Makely bubbled and babbled
on, and every one waited patiently till she had done, and turned and said,
toward the Altrurian: “I have ventured to bring my friend, Mr. Homos, with
me. He is from Altruria.” Then she turned to me and said: “Mr. Twelvemough
you know already through his delightful books”; but, although she paid me
this perfunctory compliment it was perfectly apparent to me that in the
esteem of this disingenuous woman the distinguished stranger was a far
more important person than the distinguished author. Whether Mrs. Camp
read my perception of this fact in my face or not I cannot say, but she
was evidently determined that I should not feel a difference in her. She
held out her hand to me first, and said that I never could know how many
heavy hours I had helped to lighten for her, and then she turned to the
Altrurian and took his hand. “Oh!” she said, with a long, deep-drawn sigh,
as if that were the supreme moment of her life. “And are you really from
Altruria? It seems too good to be true!” Her devout look and her earnest
tone gave the commonplace words a quality that did not inhere in them, but
Mrs. Makely took them on their surface.

“Yes, doesn’t it?” she made haste to interpose, before the Altrurian could
say anything. “That is just the way we all feel about it, Mrs. Camp. I
assure you, if it were not for the accounts in the papers and the talk
about it everywhere, I couldn’t believe there _was_ any such place as
Altruria; and if it were not for Mr. Twelvemough here--who has to keep all
his inventions for his novels, as a mere matter of business routine--I
might really suspect him and Mr. Homos of--well, _working_ us, as my
husband calls it.”

The Altrurian smiled politely, but vaguely, as if he had not quite caught
her meaning, and I made answer for both: “I am sure, Mrs. Makely, if you
could understand my peculiar state of mind about Mr. Homos, you would
never believe that I was in collusion with him. I find him quite as
incredible as you do. There are moments when he seems so entirely
subjective with me that I feel as if he were no more definite or tangible
than a bad conscience.”

“Exactly!” said Mrs. Makely, and she laughed out her delight in my
illustration.

The Altrurian must have perceived that we were joking, though the Camps
all remained soberly silent. “I hope it isn’t so bad as that,” he said,
“though I have noticed that I seem to affect you all with a kind of
misgiving. I don’t know just what it is; but, if I could remove it, I
should be very glad to do so.”

Mrs. Makely very promptly seized her chance: “Well, then, in the first
place, my husband and I were talking it over last night after we left you,
and that was one of the things that kept us awake; it turned into money
afterward. It isn’t so much that a whole continent, as big as Australia,
remained undiscovered till within such a very few years, as it is the
condition of things among you: this sort of all living for one another,
and not each one for himself. My husband says that is simply moonshine;
such a thing never was and never can be; it is opposed to human nature,
and would take away incentive and all motive for exertion and advancement
and enterprise. I don’t know _what_ he didn’t say against it; but one
thing, he says it’s perfectly un-American.” The Altrurian remained silent,
gravely smiling, and Mrs. Makely added, with her most engaging little
manner: “I hope you won’t feel hurt, personally or patriotically, by what
I’ve repeated to you. I know my husband is awfully Philistine, though he
_is_ such a good fellow, and I don’t, by any means, agree with him on all
those points; but I _would_ like to know what you think of them. The
trouble is, Mrs. Camp,” she said, turning to the invalid, “that Mr. Homos
is so dreadfully reticent about his own country, and I am so curious to
hear of it at first hands, that I consider it justifiable to use any means
to make him open up about it.”

“There is no offence,” the Altrurian answered for himself, “in what Mr.
Makely says, though, from the Altrurian point of view, there is a good
deal of error.

“Does it seem so strange to you,” he asked, addressing himself to Mrs.
Camp, “that people should found a civilization on the idea of living for
one another instead of each for himself?”

“No indeed!” she answered. “Poor people have always had to live that way,
or they could not have lived at all.”

“That was what I understood your porter to say last night,” said the
Altrurian to me. He added, to the company generally: “I suppose that even
in America there are more poor people than there are rich people?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I suppose there are more people
independently rich than there are people independently poor.”

“We will let that formulation of it stand. If it is true, I do not see why
the Altrurian system should be considered so very un-American. Then, as to
whether there is or ever was really a practical altruism, a civic
expression of it, I think it cannot be denied that among the first
Christians, those who immediately followed Christ, and might be supposed
to be directly influenced by His life, there was an altruism practised as
radical as that which we have organized into a national polity and a
working economy in Altruria.”

“Ah, but you know,” said Mrs. Makely, with the air of advancing a point
not to be put aside, “they had to drop _that_. It was a dead failure. They
found that they couldn’t make it go at all among cultivated people, and
that, if Christianity was to advance, they would have to give up all that
crankish kind of idolatry of the mere letter. At any rate,” she went on,
with the satisfaction we all feel in getting an opponent into close
quarters, “you must confess that there is a much greater play of
individuality here.”

Before the Altrurian could reply, young Camp said: “If you want to see
American individuality, the real, simon-pure article, you ought to go down
to one of our big factory towns and look at the mill-hands coming home in
droves after a day’s work, young girls and old women, boys and men, all
fluffed over with cotton, and so dead tired that they can hardly walk.
They come shambling along with all the individuality of a flock of sheep.”

“Some,” said Mrs. Makely, heroically, as if she were one of these, “must
be sacrificed. Of course, some are not so individual as others. A great
deal depends upon temperament.”

“A great deal more depends upon capital,” said Camp, with an offensive
laugh. “If you have capital in America, you can have individuality; if you
haven’t, you can’t.”

His sister, who had not taken part in the talk before, said, demurely: “It
seems to me you’ve got a good deal of individuality, Reub, and you haven’t
got a great deal of capital, either,” and the two young people laughed
together.

Mrs. Makely was one of those fatuous women whose eagerness to make a point
excludes the consideration even of their own advantage. “I’m sure,” she
said, as if speaking for the upper classes, “we haven’t got any
individuality at all. We are as like as so many peas or pins. In fact, you
have to be so in society. If you keep asserting your own individuality too
much, people avoid you. It’s very vulgar and the greatest bore.”

“Then you don’t find individuality so desirable, after all,” said the
Altrurian.

“I perfectly detest it!” cried the lady, and evidently she had not the
least notion where she was in the argument. “For my part, I’m never happy
except when I’ve forgotten myself and the whole individual bother.”

Her declaration seemed somehow to close the incident, and we were all
silent a moment, which I employed in looking about the room, and taking in
with my literary sense the simplicity and even bareness of its furnishing.
There was the bed where the invalid lay, and near the head a table with a
pile of books and a kerosene-lamp on it, and I decided that she was a good
deal wakeful, and that she read by that lamp when she could not sleep at
night. Then there were the hard chairs we sat on, and some home-made
hooked rugs, in rounds and ovals, scattered about the clean floor; there
was a small melodeon pushed against the wall; the windows had paper
shades, and I recalled that I had not seen any blinds on the outside of
the house. Over the head of the bed hung a cavalryman’s sword, with its
belt--the sword that Mrs. Makely had spoken of. It struck me as a room
where a great many things might have happened, and I said: “You can’t
think, Mrs. Camp, how glad I am to see the inside of your house. It seems
to me so typical.”

A pleased intelligence showed itself in her face, and she answered: “Yes,
it is a real old-fashioned farmhouse. We have never taken boarders, and so
we have kept it as it was built pretty much, and only made such changes in
it as we needed or wanted for ourselves.”

“It’s a pity,” I went on, following up what I thought a fortunate lead,
“that we city people see so little of the farming life when we come into
the country. I have been here now for several seasons, and this is the
first time I have been inside a farmer’s house.”

“Is it possible!” cried the Altrurian, with an air of utter astonishment;
and, when I found the fact appeared so singular to him, I began to be
rather proud of its singularity.

“Yes, I suppose that most city people come and go, year after year, in the
country, and never make any sort of acquaintance with the people who live
there the year round. We keep to ourselves in the hotels, or, if we go out
at all, it is to make a call upon some city cottager, and so we do not get
out of the vicious circle of our own over-intimacy with ourselves and our
ignorance of others.”

“And you regard that as a great misfortune?” asked the Altrurian.

“Why, it’s inevitable. There is nothing to bring us together, unless it’s
some happy accident, like the present. But we don’t have a traveler from
Altruria to exploit every day, and so we have no business to come into
people’s houses.”

“You would have been welcome in ours long ago, Mr. Twelvemough,” said Mrs.
Camp.

“But, excuse me,” said the Altrurian, “what you say really seems dreadful
to me. Why, it is as if you were not the same race or kind of men!”

“Yes,” I answered. “It has sometimes seemed to me as if our big hotel
there were a ship anchored off some strange coast. The inhabitants come
out with supplies, and carry on their barter with the ship’s steward, and
we sometimes see them over the side, but we never speak to them or have
anything to do with them. We sail away at the close of the season, and
that is the end of it till next summer.”

The Altrurian turned to Mrs. Camp. “And how do you look at it? How does it
seem to you?”

“I don’t believe we have thought about it very much; but, now that Mr.
Twelvemough has spoken of it, I can see that it does look that way. And it
seems very strange, doesn’t it, for we are all the same people, and have
the same language and religion and country--the country that my husband
fought for and, I suppose I may say, died for; he was never the same man
after the war. It does appear as if we had some interests in common, and
might find it out if we ever came together.”

“It’s a great advantage, the city people going into the country so much as
they do now,” said Mrs. Makely. “They bring five million dollars into the
State of New Hampshire, alone, every summer.”

She looked round for the general approval which this fact merited, and
young Camp said: “And it shows how worthless the natives are, that they
can’t make both ends meet, with all that money, but have to give up their
farms and go West, after all. I suppose you think it comes from wanting
buggies and pianos.”

“Well, it certainly comes from something,” said Mrs. Makely, with the
courage of her convictions.

She was evidently not going to be put down by that sour young fellow, and
I was glad of it, though I must say I thought the thing she left to rankle
in his mind from our former meeting had not been said in very good taste.
I thought, too, that she would not fare best in any encounter of wits with
him, and I rather trembled for the result. I said, to relieve the strained
situation: “I wish there was some way of our knowing each other better.
I’m sure there’s a great deal of good-will on both sides.”

“No, there isn’t,” said Camp, “or at least I can answer for our side that
there isn’t. You come into the country to get as much for your money as
you can, and we mean to let you have as little as we can. That’s the whole
story, and if Mr. Homos believes anything different, he’s very much
mistaken.”

“I hadn’t formed any conclusion in regard to the matter, which is quite
new to me,” said the Altrurian, mildly. “But why is there no basis of
mutual kindness between you?”

“Because it’s like everything else with us; it’s a question of supply and
demand, and there is no room for any mutual kindness in a question of that
kind. Even if there were, there is another thing that would kill it. The
summer folks, as we call them, look down on the natives, as they call us,
and we know it.”

“Now, Mr. Camp, I am sure that you cannot say _I_ look down on the
natives,” said Mrs. Makely, with an air of argument.

The young fellow laughed. “Oh yes, you do,” he said, not unamiably, and he
added, “and you’ve got the right to. We’re not fit to associate with you,
and you know it, and we know it. You’ve got more money, and you’ve got
nicer clothes, and you’ve got prettier manners. You talk about things that
most natives never heard of, and you care for things they never saw. I
know it’s the custom to pretend differently, but I’m not going to pretend
differently.”

I recalled what my friend the banker said about throwing away cant, and I
asked myself if I were in the presence of some such free spirit again. I
did not see how young Camp could afford it; but then I reflected that he
had really nothing to lose by it, for he did not expect to make anything
out of us; Mrs. Makely would probably not give up his sister as seamstress
if the girl continued to work so well and so cheaply as she said.

“Suppose,” he went on, “that some old native took you at your word, and
came to call upon you at the hotel, with his wife, just as one of the city
cottagers would do if he wanted to make your acquaintance?”

“I should be perfectly delighted,” said Mrs. Makely, “and I should receive
them with the greatest possible cordiality.”

“The same kind of cordiality that you would show to the cottagers?”

“I suppose that I should feel that I had more in common with the
cottagers. We should be interested in the same things, and we should
probably know the same people and have more to talk about--”

“You would both belong to the same class, and that tells the whole story.
If you were out West, and the owner of one of those big twenty-thousand-acre
farms called on you with his wife, would you act toward them as you
would toward our natives? You wouldn’t. You would all be rich people
together, and you would understand one another because you had money.”

“Now, that is not so,” Mrs. Makely interrupted. “There are plenty of rich
people one wouldn’t wish to know at all, and who really can’t get into
society--who are ignorant and vulgar. And then, when you come to money, I
don’t see but what country people are as glad to get it as anybody.”

“Oh, gladder,” said the young man.

“Well?” demanded Mrs. Makely, as if this were a final stroke of logic. The
young man did not reply, and Mrs. Makely continued: “Now I will appeal to
your sister to say whether she has ever seen any difference in my manner
toward her from what I show to all the young ladies in the hotel.” The
young girl flushed and seemed reluctant to answer. “Why, Lizzie!” cried
Mrs. Makely, and her tone showed that she was really hurt.

The scene appeared to me rather cruel, and I glanced at Mrs. Camp with an
expectation that she would say something to relieve it. But she did not.
Her large, benevolent face expressed only a quiet interest in the
discussion.

“You know very well, Mrs. Makely,” said the girl, “you don’t regard me as
you do the young ladies in the hotel.”

There was no resentment in her voice or look, but only a sort of regret,
as if, but for this grievance, she could have loved the woman from whom
she had probably had much kindness. The tears came into Mrs. Makely’s
eyes, and she turned toward Mrs. Camp. “And is this the way you _all_ feel
toward us?” she asked.

“Why shouldn’t we?” asked the invalid, in her turn. “But, no, it isn’t the
way all the country people feel. Many of them feel as you would like to
have them feel; but that is because they do not think. When they think,
they feel as we do. But I don’t blame you. You can’t help yourselves any
more than we can. We’re all bound up together in that, at least.”

At this apparent relenting Mrs. Makely tricked her beams a little, and
said, plaintively, as if offering herself for further condolence: “Yes,
that is what that woman at the little shanty back there said: some have to
be rich, and some have to be poor; it takes all kinds to make a world.”

“How would you like to be one of those that have to be poor?” asked young
Camp, with an evil grin.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Makely, with unexpected spirit; “but I am sure
that I should respect the feelings of all, rich or poor.”

“I am sorry if we have hurt yours, Mrs. Makely,” said Mrs. Camp, with
dignity. “You asked us certain questions, and we thought you wished us to
reply truthfully. We could not answer you with smooth things.”

“But sometimes you do,” said Mrs. Makely, and the tears stood in her eyes
again. “And you know how fond I am of you all!”

Mrs. Camp wore a bewildered look. “Perhaps we have said more than we
ought. But I couldn’t help it, and I don’t see how the children could,
when you asked them here, before Mr. Homos.”

I glanced at the Altrurian, sitting attentive and silent, and a sudden
misgiving crossed my mind concerning him. Was he really a man, a human
entity, a personality like ourselves, or was he merely a sort of spiritual
solvent, sent for the moment to precipitate whatever sincerity there was
in us, and show us what the truth was concerning our relations to one
another? It was a fantastic conception, but I thought it was one that I
might employ in some sort of purely romantic design, and I was
professionally grateful for it. I said, with a humorous gayety: “Yes, we
all seem to have been compelled to be much more honest than we like; and
if Mr. Homos is going to write an account of his travels when he gets
home, he can’t accuse us of hypocrisy, at any rate. And I always used to
think it was one of our virtues! What with Mr. Camp, here, and my friend
the banker at the hotel, I don’t think he’ll have much reason to complain
even of our reticence.”

“Well, whatever he says of us,” sighed Mrs. Makely, with a pious glance at
the sword over the bed, “he will have to say that, in spite of our
divisions and classes, we are all Americans, and, if we haven’t the same
opinions and ideas on minor matters, we all have the same country.”

“I don’t know about that,” came from Reuben Camp, with shocking
promptness. “I don’t believe we all have the same country. America is one
thing for you, and it’s quite another thing for us. America means ease and
comfort and amusement for you, year in and year out, and if it means work,
it’s work that you _wish_ to do. For us, America means work that we _have_
to do, and hard work all the time if we’re going to make both ends meet.
It means liberty for you; but what liberty has a man got who doesn’t know
where his next meal is coming from? Once I was in a strike, when I was
working on the railroad, and I’ve seen men come and give up their liberty
for a chance to earn their family’s living. They knew they were right, and
that they ought to have stood up for their rights; but they had to lie
down and lick the hand that fed them. Yes, we are all Americans, but I
guess we haven’t all got the same country, Mrs. Makely. What sort of a
country has a blacklisted man got?”

“A blacklisted man?” she repeated. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, a kind of man I’ve seen in the mill towns, that the bosses have all
got on their books as a man that isn’t to be given work on any account;
that’s to be punished with hunger and cold, and turned into the street,
for having offended them; and that’s to be made to suffer through his
helpless family for having offended them.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Camp,” I interposed, “but isn’t a blacklisted man usually
a man who has made himself prominent in some labor trouble?”

“Yes,” the young fellow answered, without seeming sensible of the point I
had made.

“Ah!” I returned. “Then you can hardly blame the employers for taking it
out of him in any way they can. That’s human nature.”

“Good heavens!” the Altrurian cried out. “Is it possible that in America
it is human nature to take away the bread of a man’s family because he has
gone counter to your interest or pleasure on some economical question?”

“Well, Mr. Twelvemough seems to think so,” sneered the young man. “But
whether it’s human nature or not, it’s a fact that they do it, and you can
guess how much a blacklisted man must love the country where such a thing
can happen to him. What should you call such a thing as blacklisting in
Altruria?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Makely pleaded, “do let us get him to talking about
Altruria on any terms. I think all this about the labor question is so
tiresome; don’t you, Mrs. Camp?”

Mrs. Camp did not answer; but the Altrurian said, in reply to her son: “We
should have no name for such a thing, for with us such a thing would be
impossible. There is no crime so heinous with us that the punishment would
take away the criminal’s chance of earning his living.”

“Oh, if he was a criminal,” said young Camp, “he would be all right
_here_. The state would give him a chance to earn his living then.”

“But if he had no other chance of earning his living, and had committed no
offence against the laws--”

“Then the state would let him take to the road--like that fellow.”

He pulled aside the shade of the window where he sat, and we saw pausing
before the house, and glancing doubtfully at the doorstep, where the dog
lay, a vile and loathsome-looking tramp, a blot upon the sweet and
wholesome landscape, a scandal to the sacred day. His rags burlesqued the
form which they did not wholly hide; his broken shoes were covered with
dust; his coarse hair came in a plume through his tattered hat; his red,
sodden face, at once fierce and timid, was rusty with a fortnight’s beard.
He offended the eye like a visible stench, and the wretched carrion seemed
to shrink away from our gaze as if he were aware of his loathsomeness.

“Really,” said Mrs. Makely, “I thought those fellows were arrested now. It
is too bad to leave them at large. They are dangerous.” Young Camp left
the room, and we saw him going out toward the tramp.

“Ah, that’s quite right,” said the lady. “I hope Reuben is going to send
him about his business. Why, surely, he’s not going to feed the horrid
creature!” she added, as Camp, after a moment’s parley with the tramp,
turned with him and disappeared round a corner of the house. “Now, Mrs.
Camp, I think that is really a very bad example. It’s encouraging them.
Very likely he’ll go to sleep in your barn, and set it on fire with his
pipe. What do you do with tramps in Altruria, Mr. Homos?”

The Altrurian seemed not to have heard her. He said to Mrs. Camp: “Then I
understand from something your son let fall that he has not always been at
home with you here. Does he reconcile himself easily to the country after
the excitement of town life? I have read that the cities in America are
draining the country of the young people.”

“I don’t think he was sorry to come home,” said the mother, with a touch
of fond pride. “But there was no choice for him after his father died; he
was always a good boy, and he has not made us feel that we were keeping
him away from anything better. When his father was alive we let him go,
because then we were not so dependent, and I wished him to try his fortune
in the world, as all boys long to do. But he is rather peculiar, and he
seems to have got quite enough of the world. To be sure, I don’t suppose
he’s seen the brightest side of it. He first went to work in the mills
down at Ponkwasset, but he was ‘laid off’ there when the hard times came
and there was so much overproduction, and he took a job of railroading,
and was braking on a freight-train when his father left us.”

Mrs. Makely said, smiling: “No, I don’t think that was the brightest
outlook in the world. No wonder he has brought back such gloomy
impressions. I am sure that if he could have seen life under brighter
auspices he would not have the ideas he has.”

“Very likely,” said the mother, dryly. “Our experiences have a great deal
to do with forming our opinions. But I am not dissatisfied with my son’s
ideas. I suppose Reuben got a good many of his ideas from his father: he’s
his father all over again. My husband thought slavery was wrong, and he
went into the war to fight against it. He used to say when the war was
over that the negroes were emancipated, but slavery was not abolished
yet.”

“What in the world did he mean by that?” demanded Mrs. Makely.

“Something you wouldn’t understand as we do. I tried to carry on the farm
after he first went, and before Reuben was large enough to help me much
and ought to be in school, and I suppose I overdid. At any rate, that was
when I had my first shock of paralysis. I never was very strong, and I
presume my health was weakened by my teaching school so much, and
studying, before I was married. But that doesn’t matter now, and hasn’t
for many a year. The place was clear of debt then, but I had to get a
mortgage put on it. The savings-bank down in the village took it, and
we’ve been paying the interest ever since. My husband died paying it, and
my son will pay it all my life, and then I suppose the bank will
foreclose. The treasurer was an old playmate of my husband’s, and he said
that as long as either of us lived the mortgage could lie.”

“How splendid of him!” said Mrs. Makely. “I should think you had been very
fortunate.”

“I said that you would not see it as we do,” said the invalid, patiently.

The Altrurian asked: “Are there mortgages on many of the farms in the
neighborhood?”

“Nearly all,” said Mrs. Camp. “We seem to own them, but in fact they own
us.”

Mrs. Makely hastened to say: “My husband thinks it’s the best way to have
your property. If you mortgage it close up, you have all your capital
free, and you can keep turning it over. That’s what you ought to do, Mrs.
Camp. But what was the slavery that Captain Camp said was not abolished
yet?”

The invalid looked at her a moment without replying, and just then the
door of the kitchen opened, and Young Camp came in and began to gather
some food from the table on a plate.

“Why don’t you bring him to the table, Reub?” his sister called to him.

“Oh, he says he’d rather not come in, 

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