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Table of contents
INTRODUCTION
THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
CHAPTER 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:
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 agr
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