Looking Backward 2000-1887
Looking Backward 2000-1887INTRODUCTIONTHE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"AUTHOR'S PREFACECHAPTER I.CHAPTER II.CHAPTER III.CHAPTER IV.CHAPTER V.CHAPTER VI.CHAPTER VII.CHAPTER VIII.CHAPTER IX.CHAPTER X.CHAPTER XI.CHAPTER XII.CHAPTER XIII.CHAPTER XIV.CHAPTER XV.CHAPTER XVI.CHAPTER XVII.CHAPTER XVIII.CHAPTER XIX.CHAPTER XX.CHAPTER XXI.CHAPTER XXII.CHAPTER XXIII.CHAPTER XXIV.CHAPTER XXV.CHAPTER XXVI.CHAPTER XXVII.CHAPTER XXVIII.THE RATE OF THE WORLD'S PROGRESS.FOOTNOTES:Copyright
Looking Backward 2000-1887
Edward Bellamy
INTRODUCTION
BY HEYWOOD BROUN
A good many of my radical friends express a certain kindly
condescension when they speak of Edward Bellamy's "Looking
Backward."
"Of course you know," they say, "that it really isn't first-rate
economics."
And yet in further conversation I have known a very large number of
these same somewhat scornful Socialists to admit, "You know, the
first thing that got me started to thinking about Socialism was
Bellamy's 'Looking Backward.'"
From the beginning it has been a highly provocative book. It is
now. Many of the questions both of mood and technique are even more
pertinent in the year 1931 than they were in 1887. A critic of
theBoston Transcript said, when the novel first
appeared, that the new State imagined by Bellamy was all very well,
but that the author lost much of his effectiveness by putting his
Utopia a scant fifty years ahead, and that he might much better
have made it seventy-five centuries.
It is true that the fifty years assigned for changing the world
utterly are almost gone by now. Not everything which was predicted
in "Looking Backward" has come to pass. But the laugh is not
against Bellamy, but against his critic. Some of the
things which must have seemed most improbable of all to
the Transcript man of 1887 are now actually in
being.
In one respect Edward Bellamy set down a picture of modern American
life which is almost a hundred per cent realized. It startled me to
read the passage in which Edith shows the musical schedule to
Julian West, and tells him to choose which selection he wishes to
have brought through the air into the music room. It is true that
Bellamy imagined this broadcasting to be done over telephone wires,
as is indeed the case to-day in some phases of national hook-ups.
But consider this quotation:
"He [Dr. Leete] showed how, by turning a screw, the volume of the
music could be made to fill the room, or die away to an echo so
faint and far that one could scarcely be sure whether he heard or
imagined it."
That might almost have been lifted bodily from an article in some
newspaper radio column.
But Bellamy did see with clear vision things and factors much more
important than the possibility of hearing a sermon without going to
church. Much which is now established in Soviet Russia bears at
least a likeness to the industrial army visioned in this prophetic
book. However, Communism can scarcely claim Bellamy as its own, for
he emphasizes repeatedly the non-violent features of the revolution
which he imagined. Indeed, at one point he argues that the
left-wingers of his own day impeded change by the very
excesses of their technical philosophy.
There is in his book no acceptance of a transitional stage of class
dictatorship. He sees the change coming through a general
recognition of the failings of the capitalist system. Indeed, he
sees a point in economic development where capitalism may not even
be good enough for the capitalist.
To the strict Marxian Socialist this is profound and ridiculous
heresy. To me it does not seem fantastic. And things have happened
in the world already which were not dreamt of in Karl Marx's
philosophy.
The point I wish to stress is the prevalent notion that all radical
movements in America stem from the writings of foreign authors.
Now, Bellamy, of course, was familiar with the pioneer work of
Marx. And that part of it which he liked he took over.
Nevertheless, he developed a contribution which was entirely his
own. It is irrelevant to say that, after all, the two men differed
largely in their view of the technique by which the new world was
to be accomplished. A difference in technique, as Trotzky knows to
his sorrow, may be as profound as a difference in principle.
Bellamy was essentially a New-Englander. His background was that of
Boston and its remote suburbs. And when he preaches the necessity
of the coöperative commonwealth, he does it with a Yankee twang. In
fact, he is as essentially native[Pg iv] American as
Norman Thomas, the present leader of the Socialist Party in this
country.
I cannot confess any vast interest in the love story which serves
as a thread for Bellamy's vision of a reconstructed society. But it
can be said that it is so palpably a thread of sugar crystal that
it need not get in the way of any reader.
I am among those who first became interested in Socialism through
reading "Looking Backward" when I was a freshman in college. It
came in the first half-year of a course which was designed to prove
that all radical panaceas were fundamentally unsound in their
conception. The professor played fair. He gave us the arguments for
the radical cause in the fall and winter, and proceeded to demolish
them in spring and early summer.
But what one learns in the winter sticks more than words uttered in
the warmth of drowsy May and June. Possibly I took more cuts toward
the end of the lecture course. All I can remember is the arguments
in favor of the radical plans. Their fallacies I have
forgotten.
I differ from Bellamy's condescending converts because I feel that
he is close to an entirely practical and possible scheme of life.
Since much of the fantastic quality of his vision has been rubbed
down into reality within half a century, I think there is at least
a fair chance that another fifty years will confirm Edward
Bellamy's position as one of the most authentic prophets of our
age.
THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"
"We askTo put forth just our strength, our human
strength,All starting fairly, all equipped alike.""But when full roused, each giant limb awake,Each sinew strung, the great heart pulsing fast,He shall start up and stand on his own earth,Then shall his long, triumphant march begin,Thence shall his being date."Browning.
The great poet's lines express Edward Bellamy's aim in writing his
famous book. That aim would realize in our country's daily being
the Great Declaration that gave us national existence; would, in
equality of opportunity, give man his own earth to stand on, and
thereby—the race for the first time enabled to enter unhampered
upon the use of its God-given possibilities—achieve a progress
unexampled and marvelous.
It is now twelve years since the writing of 'Looking Backward'
changed one of the most brilliant of the younger
American authors into an impassioned social reformer whose work was
destined to have momentous effect upon the movement of his age. His
quality had hitherto been manifest in romances like 'Doctor
Heidenhof's Process' and 'Miss Ludington's Sister,' and in many
short stories exquisite in their imaginative texture and largely
distinguished by a strikingly original development of psychical
themes. Tales like 'The Blindman's World' and 'To Whom This May
Come' will long linger in the memory of magazine readers of the
past twenty years.
'Doctor Heidenhof' was at once recognized as a psychological study
of uncommon power. "Its writer," said an English review, "is the
lineal intellectual descendant of Hawthorne." Nor was there in
America any lack of appreciation of that originality and that
distinction of style which mark Edward Bellamy's early work. In all
this there was a strong dominant note prophetic of the author's
future activity. That note was a steadfast faith in the intrinsic
goodness of human nature, a sense of the meaning of love in its
true and universal sense. 'Looking Backward,' though ostensibly a
romance, is universally recognized as a great economic treatise in
a framework of fiction. Without this guise it could not
have obtained the foothold that it did; there is just
enough of the skillful novelist's touch in its composition to give
plausibility to the book and exert a powerful influence upon the
popular imagination. The ingenious device by which a man of the
nineteenth century is transferred to the end of the twentieth, and
the vivid dramatic quality of the dream at the end of the book, are
instances of the art of the trained novelist which make the work
unique of its kind. Neither could the book have been a success had
not the world been ripe for its reception. The materials were ready
and waiting; the spark struck fire in the midst of them. Little
more than a decade has followed its publication, and the world is
filled with the agitation that it helped kindle. It has given
direction to economic thought and shape to political
action.
Edward Bellamy was born in 1850,—almost exactly in the middle of
the century whose closing years he was destined so notably to
affect. His home has always been in his native village of Chicopee
Falls, Massachusetts, now a portion of the city of Chicopee, one of
the group of municipalities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He
lived on Church Street in a house long the home of his father, a
beloved Baptist clergyman of the town. His clerical ancestry is
perhaps responsible for his essentially religious
nature. His maternal grandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one
of the early pastors of Springfield, and among his paternal
ancestors was Dr. Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, Connecticut, a
distinguished theologian of revolutionary days, a friend of
Jonathan Edwards, and the preceptor of Aaron Burr. He, however,
outgrew with his boyhood all trammels of sect. But this inherited
trait marked his social views with a strongly anti-materialistic
and spiritual cast; an ethical purpose dominated his ideas, and he
held that a merely material prosperity would not be worth the
working for as a social ideal. An equality in material well-being,
however, he regarded as the soil essential for the true spiritual
development of the race.
Young Bellamy entered Union College at Schenectady, but was not
graduated. After a year in Germany he studied law and entered the
bar, but never practiced. A literary career appealed to him more
strongly, and journalism seemed the more available gateway thereto.
His first newspaper experience was on the staff of the New York
'Evening Post,' and from that journal he went to the Springfield
'Union.' Besides his European trip, a journey to Hawaii by way of
Panama and a return across the continent gave a
considerable geographical range to his knowledge of the
world at large.
It is notable that his first public utterance, made before a local
lyceum when a youth in his teens, was devoted to sentiments of
social reform that foreshadowed his future work. When 'Looking
Backward' was the sensation of the year, a newspaper charge brought
against Mr. Bellamy was that he was "posing for notoriety." To
those who know the retiring, modest, and almost diffident
personality of the author, nothing could have been more absurd. All
opportunities to make money upon the magnificent advertising given
by a phenomenal literary success were disregarded. There were
offers of lecture engagements that would have brought quick
fortune, requests from magazine editors for articles and stories on
any terms that he might name, proffered inducements from publishers
to write a new book and to take advantage of the occasion to make a
volume of his short stories with the assurance of a magnificent
sale,—to all this he was strikingly indifferent. Two or three
public addresses, a few articles in the reviews, and for a while
the editorship of 'The New Nation,' a weekly periodical which he
established in Boston,—this was the sum of his public activity
until he should have made himself ready for a second
sustained effort. To all sordid incentives he was as indifferent as
if he had been a child of his new order, a century later. The hosts
of personal friends whom his work made for him knew him as a
winsome personality; and really to know him was to love him. His
nature was keenly sympathetic; his conversation ready and charming,
quickly responsive to suggestion, illuminated by gentle humor and
occasionally a flash of playful satire. He disliked controversy,
with its waste of energy in profitless discussion, and jestingly
averred that if there were any reformers living in his neighborhood
he should move away.
The cardinal features of 'Looking Backward,' that distinguish it
from the generality of Utopian literature, lie in its definite
scheme of industrial organization on a national basis, and the
equal share allotted to all persons in the products of industry, or
the public income, on the same ground that men share equally in the
free gifts of nature, like air to breathe and water to drink; it
being absolutely impossible to determine any equitable ratio
between individual industrial effort and individual share in
industrial product on a graded basis. The book, however, was little
more than an outline of the system, and, after an interval devoted
to continuous thought and study, many points called for
elaboration. Mr. Bellamy gave his last years and his ripest efforts
to an exposition of the economical and ethical basis of the new
order which he held that the natural course of social evolution
would establish.
'Equality' is the title of his last book. It is a more elaborate
work than 'Looking Backward,' and in fact is a comprehensive
economic treatise upon the subject that gives it its name. It is a
sequel to its famous predecessor, and its keynote is given in the
remark that the immortal preamble of the American Declaration of
Independence (characterized as the true constitution of the United
States), logically contained the entire statement of universal
economic equality guaranteed by the nation collectively to its
members individually. "The corner-stone of our state is economic
equality, and is not that the obvious, necessary, and only adequate
pledge of these three rights,—life, liberty, and happiness? What is
life without its material basis, and what is an equal right to life
but a right to an equal material basis for it? What is liberty? How
can men be free who must ask the right to labor and to live from
their fellow-men and seek their bread from the hands of others? How
else can any government guarantee liberty to men save by providing
them a means of labor and of life coupled with
independence; and how could that be done unless the government
conducted the economic system upon which employment and maintenance
depend? Finally, what is implied in the equal right of all to the
pursuit of happiness? What form of happiness, so far as it depends
at all upon material facts, is not bound up with economic
conditions; and how shall an equal opportunity for the pursuit of
happiness be guaranteed to all save by a guarantee of economic
equality?"
The book is so full of ideas, so replete with suggestive aspects,
so rich in quotable parts, as to form an arsenal of argument for
apostles of the new democracy. As with 'Looking Backward,' the
humane and thoughtful reader will lay down 'Equality' and regard
the world about him with a feeling akin to that with which the
child of the tenement returns from his "country week" to the foul
smells, the discordant noises, the incessant strife of the wonted
environment.
But the writing of 'Equality' was a task too great for the physical
strength and vitality of its author. His health, never robust, gave
way completely, and the book was finished by an indomitable and
inflexible dominion of the powerful mind over the failing body
which was nothing short of heroic. Consumption, that
common New England inheritance, developed suddenly, and in
September of 1897 Mr. Bellamy went with his family to Denver,
willing to seek the cure which he scarcely hoped to
find.
The welcome accorded to him in the West, where his work had met
with widespread and profound attention, was one of his latest and
greatest pleasures. Letters came from mining camps, from farms and
villages, the writers all longing to do something for him to show
their love.
The singular modesty already spoken of as characterizing Mr.
Bellamy, and an entire unwillingness to accept any personal and
public recognition, had perhaps kept him from a realization of the
fact that his fame was international. But the author of a book
which in ten years had sold nearly a million of copies in England
and America, and which had been translated into German, French,
Russian, Italian, Arabic, Bulgarian, and several other languages
and dialects, found himself not among strangers, although two
thousand miles from the home of his lifetime.
He greatly appreciated and gratefully acknowledged his welcome to
Colorado, which he left in April, 1898, when he realized that his
life was rapidly drawing to a close.
He died on Sunday morning, May 22, after a month in the old home
which he had eagerly desired to see again, leaving a widow and two
young children.
At the simple service held there, with his kindred and the friends
of a lifetime about him, the following passages from 'Looking
Backward' and 'Equality' were read as a fitting expression, in his
own words, of that hope for the bettering and uplifting of
Humanity, which was the real passion of his noble life.
"Said not the serpent in the old story, 'If you eat of the fruit of
the tree of knowledge you shall be as gods?' The promise was true
in words, but apparently there was some mistake about the tree.
Perhaps it was the tree of selfish knowledge, or else the fruit was
not ripe. The story is obscure. Christ later said the same thing
when he told men that they might be the sons of God. But he made no
mistake as to the tree he showed them, and the fruit was ripe. It
was the fruit of love, for universal love is at once the seed and
fruit, cause and effect, of the highest and completest knowledge.
Through boundless love man becomes a god, for thereby is he made
conscious of his oneness with God, and all things are put under his
feet. 'If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his
love is perfected in us.' 'He that loveth his brother
dwelleth in the light.' 'If any man say, I love God, and hateth his
brother, he is a liar.' 'He that loveth not his brother abideth in
death.' 'God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in
God.' 'Every one that loveth knoweth God.' 'He that loveth not
knoweth not God.'
"Here is the very distillation of Christ's teaching as to the
conditions of entering on the divine life. In this we find the
sufficient explanation why the revelation which came to Christ so
long ago and to other illumined souls could not possibly be
received by mankind in general so long as an inhuman social order
made a wall between man and God, and why, the moment that wall was
cast down, the revelation flooded the earth like a sunburst.
"'If we love one another, God dwelleth in us,' and mark how the
words were made good in the way by which at last the race found
God! It was not, remember, by directly, purposely, or consciously
seeking God. The great enthusiasm of humanity which overthrew the
older and brought in the fraternal society was not primarily or
consciously a Godward aspiration at all. It was essentially a
humane movement. It was a melting and flowing forth of men's hearts
toward one another; a rush of contrite, repentant
tenderness; an impassioned impulse of mutual love and self-devotion
to the common weal. But 'if we love one another, God dwelleth in
us,' and so man found it. It appears that there came a moment, the
most transcendent moment in the history of the race of man, when
with the fraternal glow of this world of new-found embracing
brothers there seems to have mingled the ineffable thrill of a
divine participation, as if the hand of God were clasped over the
joined hands of men. And so it has continued to this day and shall
for evermore.
"Your seers and poets in exalted moments had seen that death was
but a step in life, but this seemed to most of you to have been a
hard saying. Nowadays, as life advances toward its close, instead
of being shadowed by gloom, it is marked by an access of
impassioned expectancy which would cause the young to envy the old,
but for the knowledge that in a little while the same door will be
opened to them. In your day the undertone of life seems to have
been one of unutterable sadness, which, like the moaning of the sea
to those who live near the ocean, made itself audible whenever for
a moment the noise and bustle of petty engrossments ceased. Now
this undertone is so exultant that we are still to hear it.
"Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall have
passed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end
is lost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God, 'who is
our home,' the return of the individual by the way of death, and
the return of the race by the fulfillment of its evolution, when
the divine secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded.
With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future,
and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of
the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the
chrysalis. The heavens are before it."
There are those who have made strenuous objections to the ideals of
Edward Bellamy on the ground that they are based on nothing better
than purely material well-being. In the presence of the foregoing
utterance can they maintain that attitude?Sylvester Baxter.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
Historical Section Shawmut College, Boston,
December 26, 2000.
Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century,
enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and
logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no
doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely
historical to realize that the present organization of society is,
in its completeness, less than a century old. No historical fact
is, however, better established than that till nearly the end of
the nineteenth century it was the general belief that the ancient
industrial system, with all its shocking social consequences, was
destined to last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of
time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does it seem that so
prodigious a moral and material transformation as has taken place
since then could have been accomplished in so brief an
interval? The readiness with which men accustom themselves,
as matters of course, to improvements in their condition, which,
when anticipated, seemed to leave nothing more to be desired, could
not be more strikingly illustrated. What reflection could be better
calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for
their reward on the lively gratitude of future ages!
The object of this volume is to assist persons who, while desiring
to gain a more definite idea of the social contrasts between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are daunted by the formal
aspect of the histories which treat the subject. Warned by a
teacher's experience that learning is accounted a weariness to the
flesh, the author has sought to alleviate the instructive quality
of the book by casting it in the form of a romantic narrative,
which he would be glad to fancy not wholly devoid of interest on
its own account.
The reader, to whom modern social institutions and their underlying
principles are matters of course, may at times find Dr. Leete's
explanations of them rather trite,—but it must be remembered that
to Dr. Leete's guest they were not matters of course, and that this
book is written for the express purpose of inducing the reader
to forget for the nonce that they are so to him. One
word more. The almost universal theme of the writers and orators
who have celebrated this bi-millennial epoch has been the future
rather than the past, not the advance that has been made, but the
progress that shall be made, ever onward and upward, till the race
shall achieve its ineffable destiny. This is well, wholly well, but
it seems to me that nowhere can we find more solid ground for
daring anticipations of human development during the next one
thousand years, than by "Looking Backward" upon the progress of the
last one hundred.
That this volume may be so fortunate as to find readers whose
interest in the subject shall incline them to overlook the
deficiencies of the treatment is the hope in which the author steps
aside and leaves Mr. Julian West to speak for himself.
CHAPTER I.
I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857.
"What!" you say, "eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He
means nineteen fifty-seven, of course." I beg pardon, but there is
no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the
26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I
first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader,
was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality
characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000.
These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I
add that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age,
that no person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of
what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.
Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is
intended, and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to
entirely convince him of this. If I may, then,
provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption,
that I know better than the reader when I was born, I will go on
with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of
the nineteenth century the civilization of today, or anything like
it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it
were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify
the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or
nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences
between them were far greater than those between any nations
nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant.
I myself was rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all
the elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that
age. Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the
pleasures and refinements of life, I derived the means of my
support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in
return. My parents and grandparents had lived in the same way, and
I expected that my descendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like
easy existence.
But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why
should the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able
to render service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had
accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever since
lived. The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been
very large not to have been exhausted in supporting three
generations in idleness. This, however, was not the fact. The sum
had been originally by no means large. It was, in fact, much larger
now that three generations had been supported upon it in idleness,
than it was at first. This mystery of use without consumption, of
warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an
ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to
great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's
support on the shoulders of others. The man who had accomplished
this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live on the income
of his investments. To explain at this point how the ancient
methods of industry made this possible would delay us too much. I
shall only stop now to say that interest on investments was a
species of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in
industry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able to
levy. It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems so
unnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was never
criticised by your ancestors. It had been the effort of law-givers
and prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at
least to limit it to the smallest possible rate. All these efforts
had, however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the
ancient social organizations prevailed. At the time of
which I write, the latter part of the nineteenth century,
governments had generally given up trying to regulate the subject
at all.
By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of
the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the
relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do
better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach
which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged
toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was
hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily
very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along
so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got
down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very
breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants
could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the
merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great
demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as
the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and
to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man
could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there
were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost.
For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and
at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out
of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly
compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on
which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally
regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat, and the
apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a
constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.
But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very
luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of
their brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that
their own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion for
fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes;
commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those
who had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a
bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a
particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of
the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless
lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were
trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which
often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top
of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down
encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to
patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another
world for the hardness of their lot, while others
contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and
injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach
should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief
when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief
was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was
always some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in
which all would lose their seats.
It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle
of the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the
passengers' sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and
to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before. If
the passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor
their friends would ever fall from the top, it is probable that,
beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages, they
would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who
dragged the coach.
I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the
twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two
facts, both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first
place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other
way in which Society could get along, except the many pulled at the
rope and the few rode, and not only this, but that no very radical
improvement even was possible, either in the harness,
the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had
always been as it was, and it always would be so. It was a pity,
but it could not be helped, and philosophy forbade wasting
compassion on what was beyond remedy.
The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular
hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared,
that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who
pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a
higher order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This
seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and
shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The
strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but
just climbed up from the ground, before they had outgrown the marks
of the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its influence. As
for those whose parents and grandparents before them had been so
fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they
cherished of the essential difference between their sort of
humanity and the common article was absolute. The effect of such a
delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the
mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious.
To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the
indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my own
attitude toward the misery of my brothers.
In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried, I
was engaged to wed Edith Bartlett. She, like myself, rode on the
top of the coach. That is to say, not to encumber ourselves further
with an illustration which has, I hope, served its purpose of
giving the reader some general impression of how we lived then, her
family was wealthy. In that age, when money alone commanded all
that was agreeable and refined in life, it was enough for a woman
to be rich to have suitors; but Edith Bartlett was beautiful and
graceful also.
My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. "Handsome she
might have been," I hear them saying, "but graceful never, in the
costumes which were the fashion at that period, when the head
covering was a dizzy structure a foot tall, and the almost
incredible extension of the skirt behind by means of artificial
contrivances more thoroughly dehumanized the form than any former
device of dressmakers. Fancy any one graceful in such a costume!"
The point is certainly well taken, and I can only reply that while
the ladies of the twentieth century are lovely demonstrations of
the effect of appropriate drapery in accenting feminine graces, my
recollection of their great-grandmothers enables me to maintain
that no deformity of costume can wholly disguise them.
Our marriage only waited on the completion of the house which I was
building for our occupancy in one of the most desirable
parts of the city, that is to say, a part chiefly inhabited by the
rich. For it must be understood that the comparative desirability
of different parts of Boston for residence depended then, not on
natural features, but on the character of the neighboring
population. Each class or nation lived by itself, in quarters of
its own. A rich man living among the poor, an educated man among
the uneducated, was like one living in isolation among a jealous
and alien race. When the house had been begun, its completion by
the winter of 1886 had been expected. The spring of the following
year found it, however, yet incomplete, and my marriage still a
thing of the future. The cause of a delay calculated to be
particularly exasperating to an ardent lover was a series of
strikes, that is to say, concerted refusals to work on the part of
the brick-layers, masons, carpenters, painters, plumbers, and other
trades concerned in house building. What the specific causes of
these strikes were I do not remember. Strikes had become so common
at that period that people had ceased to inquire into their
particular grounds. In one department of industry or another, they
had been nearly incessant ever since the great business crisis of
1873. In fact it had come to be the exceptional thing to see any
class of laborers pursue their avocation steadily for more than a
few months at a time.
The reader who observes the dates alluded to will of
course recognize in these disturbances of industry the first and
incoherent phase of the great movement which ended in the
establishment of the modern industrial system with all its social
consequences. This is all so plain in the retrospect that a child
can understand it, but not being prophets, we of that day had no
clear idea what was happening to us. What we did see was that
industrially the country was in a very queer way. The relation
between the workingman and the employer, between labor and capital,
appeared in some unaccountable manner to have become dislocated.
The working classes had quite suddenly and very generally become
infected with a profound discontent with their condition, and an
idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only knew how to go
about it. On every side, with one accord, they preferred demands
for higher pay, shorter hours, better dwellings, better educational
advantages, and a share in the refinements and luxuries of life,
demands which it was impossible to see the way to granting unless
the world were to become a great deal richer than it then was.
Though they knew something of what they wanted, they knew nothing
of how to accomplish it, and the eager enthusiasm with which they
thronged about any one who seemed likely to give them any light on
the subject lent sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, some
of whom had little enough light to give. However chimerical the
aspirations of the laboring classes might be deemed, the
devotion with which they supported one another in the strikes,
which were their chief weapon, and the sacrifices which they
underwent to carry them out left no doubt of their dead
earnestness.
As to the final outcome of the labor troubles, which was the phrase
by which the movement I have described was most commonly referred
to, the opinions of the people of my class differed according to
individual temperament. The sanguine argued very forcibly that it
was in the very nature of things impossible that the new hopes of
the workingmen could be satisfied, simply because the world had not
the wherewithal to satisfy them. It was only because the masses
worked very hard and lived on short commons that the race did not
starve outright, and no considerable improvement in their condition
was possible while the world, as a whole, remained so poor. It was
not the capitalists whom the laboring men were contending with,
these maintained, but the iron-bound environment of humanity, and
it was merely a question of the thickness of their skulls when they
would discover the fact and make up their minds to endure what they
could not cure.
The less sanguine admitted all this. Of course the workingmen's
aspirations were impossible of fulfillment for natural reasons, but
there were grounds to fear that they would not discover this fact
until they had made a sad mess of society They had the
votes and the power to do so if they pleased, and their leaders
meant they should. Some of these desponding observers went so far
as to predict an impending social cataclysm. Humanity, they argued,
having climbed to the top round of the ladder of civilization, was
about to take a header into chaos, after which it would doubtless
pick itself up, turn round, and begin to climb again. Repeated
experiences of this sort in historic and prehistoric times possibly
accounted for the puzzling bumps on the human cranium. Human
history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to
the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right
line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature.
The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of
the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the
aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of
civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal
in the regions of chaos.
This, of course, was an extreme opinion, but I remember serious men
among my acquaintances who, in discussing the signs of the times,
adopted a very similar tone. It was no doubt the common opinion of
thoughtful men that society was approaching a critical period which
might result in great changes. The labor troubles, their causes,
course, and cure, took lead of all other topics in the public
prints, and in serious conversation.
The nervous tension of the public mind could not have been more
strikingly illustrated than it was by the alarm resulting from the
talk of a small band of men who called themselves anarchists, and
proposed to terrify the American people into adopting their ideas
by threats of violence, as if a mighty nation which had but just
put down a rebellion of half its own numbers, in order to maintain
its political system, were likely to adopt a new social system out
of fear.
As one of the wealthy, with a large stake in the existing order of
things, I naturally shared the apprehensions of my class. The
particular grievance I had against the working classes at the time
of which I write, on account of the effect of their strikes in
postponing my wedded bliss, no doubt lent a special animosity to my
feeling toward them.
CHAPTER II.
The thirtieth day of May, 1887, fell on a Monday. It was one of the
annual holidays of the nation in the latter third of the nineteenth
century, being set apart under the name of Decoration Day, for
doing honor to the memory of the soldiers of the North who took
part in the war for the preservation of the union of the States.
The survivors of the war, escorted by military and civic
processions and bands of music, were wont on this occasion to visit
the cemeteries and lay wreaths of flowers upon the graves of their
dead comrades, the ceremony being a very solemn and touching one.
The eldest brother of Edith Bartlett had fallen in the war, and on
Decoration Day the family was in the habit of making a visit to
Mount Auburn, where he lay.
I had asked permission to make one of the party, and, on our return
to the city at nightfall, remained to dine with the family of my
betrothed. In the drawing-room, after dinner, I picked up an
evening paper and read of a fresh strike in the building trades,
which would probably still further delay the completion of my
unlucky house. I remember distinctly how exasperated I was at
this, and the objurgations, as forcible as the presence of the
ladies permitted, which I lavished upon workmen in general, and
these strikers in particular. I had abundant sympathy from those
about me, and the remarks made in the desultory conversation which
followed, upon the unprincipled conduct of the labor agitators,
were calculated to make those gentlemen's ears tingle. It was
agreed that affairs were going from bad to worse very fast, and
that there was no telling what we should come to soon. "The worst
of it," I remember Mrs. Bartlett's saying, "is that the working
classes all over the world seem to be going crazy at once. In
Europe it is far worse even than here. I'm sure I should not dare
to live there at all. I asked Mr. Bartlett the other day where we
should emigrate to if all the terrible things took place which
those socialists threaten. He said he did not know any place now
where society could be called stable except Greenland, Patagonia,
and the Chinese Empire." "Those Chinamen knew what they were
about," somebody added, "when they refused to let in our western
civilization. They knew what it would lead to better than we did.
They saw it was nothing but dynamite in disguise."
After this, I remember drawing Edith apart and trying to persuade
her that it would be better to be married at once without waiting
for the completion of the house, spending the time in travel till
our home was ready for us. She was remarkably handsome
that evening, the mourning costume that she wore in recognition of
the day setting off to great advantage the purity of her
complexion. I can see her even now with my mind's eye just as she
looked that night. When I took my leave she followed me into the
hall and I kissed her good-by as usual. There was no circumstance
out of the common to distinguish this parting from previous
occasions when we had bade each other good-by for a night or a day.
There was absolutely no premonition in my mind, or I am sure in
hers, that this was more than an ordinary separation.
Ah, well!
The hour at which I had left my betrothed was a rather early one
for a lover, but the fact was no reflection on my devotion. I was a
confirmed sufferer from insomnia, and although otherwise perfectly
well had been completely fagged out that day, from having slept
scarcely at all the two previous nights. Edith knew this and had
insisted on sending me home by nine o'clock, with strict orders to
go to bed at once.
The house in which I lived had been occupied by three generations
of the family of which I was the only living representative in the
direct line. It was a large, ancient wooden mansion, very elegant
in an old-fashioned way within, but situated in a quarter that had
long since become undesira