CHAPTER XXVIII.
"It's a little after the time you told me to wake you, sir. You didnot come out of it as quick as common, sir."
The voice was the voice of my man Sawyer. I started bolt upright inbed and stared around. I was in my underground chamber. The mellowlight of the lamp which always burned in the room when I occupied itillumined the familiar walls and furnishings. By my bedside, with theglass of sherry in his hand which Dr. Pillsbury prescribed on firstrousing from a mesmeric sleep, by way of awakening the torpid physicalfunctions, stood Sawyer.
"Better take this right off, sir," he said, as I stared blankly athim. "You look kind of flushed like, sir, and you need it."
I tossed off the liquor and began to realize what had happened to me.It was, of course, very plain. All that about the twentieth centuryhad been a dream. I had but dreamed of that enlightened and care-freerace of men and their ingeniously simple institutions, of the gloriousnew Boston with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains,and its universal reign of comfort. The amiable family which I hadlearned to know so well, my genial host and Mentor, Dr. Leete, hiswife, and their daughter, the second and more beauteous Edith, mybetrothed,--these, too, had been but figments of a vision.
For a considerable time I remained in the attitude in which thisconviction had come over me, sitting up in bed gazing at vacancy,absorbed in recalling the scenes and incidents of my fantasticexperience. Sawyer, alarmed at my looks, was meanwhile anxiouslyinquiring what was the matter with me. Roused at length by hisimportunities to a recognition of my surroundings, I pulled myselftogether with an effort and assured the faithful fellow that I was allright. "I have had an extraordinary dream, that's all, Sawyer," Isaid, "a most-ex-traor-dinary-dream."
I dressed in a mechanical way, feeling lightheaded and oddly uncertainof myself, and sat down to the coffee and rolls which Sawyer was inthe habit of providing for my refreshment before I left the house. Themorning newspaper lay by the plate. I took it up, and my eye fell onthe date, May 31, 1887. I had known, of course, from the moment Iopened my eyes that my long and detailed experience in another centuryhad been a dream, and yet it was startling to have it so conclusivelydemonstrated that the world was but a few hours older than when I hadlain down to sleep.
Glancing at the table of contents at the head of the paper, whichreviewed the news of the morning, I read the following summary:--
* * * * *
"FOREIGN AFFAIRS.--The impending war between France and Germany.The French Chambers asked for new military credits to meet Germany'sincrease of her army. Probability that all Europe will be involved incase of war.--Great suffering among the unemployed in London. Theydemand work. Monster demonstration to be made. The authoritiesuneasy.--Great strikes in Belgium. The government preparing to repressoutbreaks. Shocking facts in regard to the employment of girls inBelgium coal mines.--Wholesale evictions in Ireland.
"HOME AFFAIRS.--The epidemic of fraud unchecked. Embezzlement ofhalf a million in New York.--Misappropriation of a trust fund by executors.Orphans left penniless.--Clever system of thefts by a bank teller;$50,000 gone.--The coal barons decide to advance the price of coal andreduce production.--Speculators engineering a great wheat corner atChicago.--A clique forcing up the price of coffee.--Enormousland-grabs of Western syndicates.--Revelations of shocking corruptionamong Chicago officials. Systematic bribery.--The trials of the Boodlealdermen to go on at New York.--Large failures of business houses.Fears of a business crisis.--A large grist of burglaries andlarcenies.--A woman murdered in cold blood for her money at NewHaven.--A householder shot by a burglar in this city last night.--Aman shoots himself in Worcester because he could not get work. A largefamily left destitute.--An aged couple in New Jersey commit suiciderather than go to the poor-house.--Pitiable destitution among thewomen wage-workers in the great cities.--Startling growth ofilliteracy in Massachusetts.--More insane asylums wanted.--DecorationDay addresses. Professor Brown's oration on the moral grandeur ofnineteenth century civilization."
* * * * *
It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked; therecould be no kind of doubt about that. Its complete microcosm thissummary of the day's news had presented, even to that lastunmistakable touch of fatuous self-complacency. Coming after such adamning indictment of the age as that one day's chronicle ofworld-wide bloodshed, greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthyof Mephistopheles, and yet of all whose eyes it had met this morning Iwas, perhaps, the only one who perceived the cynicism, and butyesterday I should have perceived it no more than the others. Thatstrange dream it was which had made all the difference. For I know nothow long, I forgot my surroundings after this, and was again in fancymoving in that vivid dream-world, in that glorious city, with itshomes of simple comfort and its gorgeous public palaces. Around mewere again faces unmarred by arrogance or servility, by envy or greed,by anxious care or feverish ambition, and stately forms of men andwomen who had never known fear of a fellow man or depended on hisfavor, but always, in the words of that sermon which still rang in myears, had "stood up straight before God."
With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable loss, not the lesspoignant that it was a loss of what had never really been, I roused atlast from my reverie, and soon after left the house.
A dozen times between my door and Washington Street I had to stop andpull myself together, such power had been in that vision of the Bostonof the future to make the real Boston strange. The squalor andmalodorousness of the town struck me, from the moment I stood upon thestreet, as facts I had never before observed. But yesterday, moreover,it had seemed quite a matter of course that some of my fellow-citizensshould wear silks, and others rags, that some should look well fed,and others hungry. Now on the contrary the glaring disparities in thedress and condition of the men and women who brushed each other on thesidewalks shocked me at every step, and yet more the entireindifference which the prosperous showed to the plight of theunfortunate. Were these human beings, who could behold thewretchedness of their fellows without so much as a change ofcountenance? And yet, all the while, I knew well that it was I who hadchanged, and not my contemporaries. I had dreamed of a city whosepeople fared all alike as children of one family and were oneanother's keepers in all things.
Another feature of the real Boston, which assumed the extraordinaryeffect of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light,was the prevalence of advertising. There had been no personaladvertising in the Boston of the twentieth century, because there wasno need of any, but here the walls of the buildings, the windows, thebroadsides of the newspapers in every hand, the very pavements,everything in fact in sight, save the sky, were covered with theappeals of individuals who sought, under innumerable pretexts, toattract the contributions of others to their support. However thewording might vary, the tenor of all these appeals was the same:--
"Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones,am the right one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones.Look at me. Make no mistake, John Jones is the man and nobody else.Let the rest starve, but for God's sake remember John Jones!"
Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness of the spectacle mostimpressed me, so suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I knownot. Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will notlearn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of oneanother from the least to the greatest! This horrible babel ofshameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamorof conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations, this stupendoussystem of brazen beggary, what was it all but the necessity of asociety in which the opportunity to serve the world according to hisgifts, instead of being secured to every man as the first object ofsocial organization, had to be fought for!
I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stoodand laughed aloud, to the scandal of the passers-by. For my life Icould not have helped it, with such a mad humor was I moved at sightof the interminable rows of stores on eit
her side, up and down thestreet so far as I could see,--scores of them, to make the spectaclemore utterly preposterous, within a stone's throw devoted to sellingthe same sort of goods. Stores! stores! stores! miles of stores! tenthousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this one city, whichin my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse,as they were ordered through one great store in every quarter, wherethe buyer, without waste of time or labor, found under one roof theworld's assortment in whatever line he desired. There the labor ofdistribution had been so slight as to add but a scarcely perceptiblefraction to the cost of commodities to the user. The cost ofproduction was virtually all he paid. But here the mere distributionof the goods, their handling alone, added a fourth, a third, a halfand more, to the cost. All these ten thousand plants must be paid for,their rent, their staffs of superintendence, their platoons ofsalesmen, their ten thousand sets of accountants, jobbers, andbusiness dependents, with all they spent in advertising themselves andfighting one another, and the consumers must do the paying. What afamous process for beggaring a nation!
Were these serious men I saw about me, or children, who did theirbusiness on such a plan? Could they be reasoning beings, who did notsee the folly which, when the product is made and ready for use,wastes so much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with aspoon that leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they notlikely to go hungry?
I had passed through Washington Street thousands of times before andviewed the ways of those who sold merchandise, but my curiosityconcerning them was as if I had never gone by their way before. I tookwondering note of the show windows of the stores, filled with goodsarranged with a wealth of pains and artistic device to attract theeye. I saw the throngs of ladies looking in, and the proprietorseagerly watching the effect of the bait. I went within and noted thehawk-eyed floor-walker watching for business, overlooking the clerks,keeping them up to their task of inducing the customers to buy, buy,buy, for money if they had it, for credit if they had it not, to buywhat they wanted not, more than they wanted, what they could notafford. At times I momentarily lost the clue and was confused by thesight. Why this effort to induce people to buy? Surely that hadnothing to do with the legitimate business of distributing products tothose who needed them. Surely it was the sheerest waste to force uponpeople what they did not want, but what might be useful to another.The nation was so much the poorer for every such achievement. Whatwere these clerks thinking of? Then I would remember that they werenot acting as distributors like those in the store I had visited inthe dream Boston. They were not serving the public interest, but theirimmediate personal interest, and it was nothing to them what theultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, ifbut they increased their own hoard, for these goods were their own,and the more they sold and the more they got for them, the greatertheir gain. The more wasteful the people were, the more articles theydid not want which they could be induced to buy, the better for thesesellers. To encourage prodigality was the express aim of the tenthousand stores of Boston.
Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a whit worse men than anyothers in Boston. They must earn a living and support their families,and how were they to find a trade to do it by which did notnecessitate placing their individual interests before those of othersand that of all? They could not be asked to starve while they waitedfor an order of things such as I had seen in my dream, in which theinterest of each and that of all were identical. But, God in heaven!what wonder, under such a system as this about me--what wonder thatthe city was so shabby, and the people so meanly dressed, and so manyof them ragged and hungry!
Some time after this it was that I drifted over into South Boston andfound myself among the manufacturing establishments. I had been inthis quarter of the city a hundred times before, just as I had been onWashington Street, but here, as well as there, I now first perceivedthe true significance of what I witnessed. Formerly I had taken pridein the fact that, by actual count, Boston had some four thousandindependent manufacturing establishments; but in this verymultiplicity and independence I recognized now the secret of theinsignificant total product of their industry.
If Washington Street had been like a lane in Bedlam, this was aspectacle as much more melancholy as production is a more vitalfunction, than distribution. For not only were these four thousandestablishments not working in concert, and for that reason aloneoperating at prodigious disadvantage, but, as if this did not involvea sufficiently disastrous loss of power, they were using their utmostskill to frustrate one another's effort, praying by night and workingby day for the destruction of one another's enterprises.
The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers resounding from every sidewas not the hum of a peaceful industry, but the clangor of swordswielded by foemen. These mills and shops were so many forts, eachunder its own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops about it,and its sappers busy below, undermining them.
Within each one of these forts the strictest organization of industrywas insisted on; the separate gangs worked under a single centralauthority. No interference and no duplicating of work were permitted.Each had his allotted task, and none were idle. By what hiatus in thelogical faculty, by what lost link of reasoning, account, then, forthe failure to recognize the necessity of applying the same principleto the organization of the national industries as a whole, to see thatif lack of organization could impair the efficiency of a shop, it musthave effects as much more disastrous in disabling the industries ofthe nation at large as the latter are vaster in volume and morecomplex in the relationship of their parts.
People would be prompt enough to ridicule an army in which there wereneither companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, or armycorps,--no unit of organization, in fact, larger than the corporal'ssquad, with no officer higher than a corporal, and all the corporalsequal in authority. And yet just such an army were the manufacturingindustries of nineteenth century Boston, an army of four thousandindependent squads led by four thousand independent corporals, eachwith a separate plan of campaign.
Knots of idle men were to be seen here and there on every side, someidle because they could find no work at any price, others because theycould not get what they thought a fair price.
I accosted some of the latter, and they told me their grievances. Itwas very little comfort I could give them. "I am sorry for you," Isaid. "You get little enough, certainly, and yet the wonder to me is,not that industries conducted as these are do not pay you livingwages, but that they are able to pay you any wages at all."
Making my way back again after this to the peninsular city, towardthree o'clock I stood on State Street, staring, as if I had never seenthem before, at the banks and brokers' offices, and other financialinstitutions, of which there had been in the State Street of my visionno vestige. Business men, confidential clerks, and errand boys werethronging in and out of the banks, for it wanted but a few minutes ofthe closing hour. Opposite me was the bank where I did business, andpresently I crossed the street, and, going in with the crowd, stood ina recess of the wall looking on at the army of clerks handling money,and the cues of depositors at the tellers' windows. An old gentlemanwhom I knew, a director of the bank, passing me and observing mycontemplative attitude, stopped a moment.
"Interesting sight, isn't it, Mr. West," he said. "Wonderful piece ofmechanism; I find it so myself. I like sometimes to stand and look onat it just as you are doing. It's a poem, sir, a poem, that's what Icall it. Did you ever think, Mr. West, that the bank is the heart ofthe business system? From it and to it, in endless flux and reflux,the life blood goes. It is flowing in now. It will flow out again inthe morning;" and pleased with his little conceit, the old man passedon smiling.
Yesterday I should have considered the simile apt enough, but sincethen I had visited a world incomparably more affluent than this, inwhich money was unknown and without conceivable use. I had learnedthat it had a use in the world around me only because the work ofproducing the nation's livelihood, i
nstead of being regarded as themost strictly public and common of all concerns, and as such conductedby the nation, was abandoned to the hap-hazard efforts of individuals.This original mistake necessitated endless exchanges to bring aboutany sort of general distribution of products. These exchanges moneyeffected--how equitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenementhouse districts to the Back Bay--at the cost of an army of men takenfrom productive labor to manage it, with constant ruinous breakdownsof its machinery, and a generally debauching influence on mankindwhich had justified its description, from ancient time, as the "rootof all evil."
Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken thethrobbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called"a wonderful piece of mechanism" was an imperfect device to remedy anunnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.
After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the businessquarter for an hour or two, and later sat a while on one of thebenches of the Common, finding an interest merely in watching thethrongs that passed, such as one has in studying the populace of aforeign city, so strange since yesterday had my fellow citizens andtheir ways become to me. For thirty years I had lived among them, andyet I seemed to have never noted before how drawn and anxious weretheir faces, of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute faces ofthe educated as well as the dull masks of the ignorant. And well itmight be so, for I saw now, as never before I had seen so plainly,that each as he walked constantly turned to catch the whispers of aspectre at his ear, the spectre of Uncertainty. "Do your work never sowell," the spectre was whispering,--"rise early and toil till late,rob cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never know security. Richyou may be now and still come to poverty at last. Leave never so muchwealth to your children, you cannot buy the assurance that your sonmay not be the servant of your servant, or that your daughter will nothave to sell herself for bread."
A man passing by thrust an advertising card in my hand, which setforth the merits of some new scheme of life insurance. The incidentreminded me of the only device, pathetic in its admission of theuniversal need it so poorly supplied, which offered these tired andhunted men and women even a partial protection from uncertainty. Bythis means, those already well-to-do, I remembered, might purchase aprecarious confidence that after their death their loved ones wouldnot, for a while at least, be trampled under the feet of men. But thiswas all, and this was only for those who could pay well for it. Whatidea was possible to these wretched dwellers in the land of Ishmael,where every man's hand was against each and the hand of each againstevery other, of true life insurance as I had seen it among the peopleof that dream land, each of whom, by virtue merely of his membershipin the national family, was guaranteed against need of any sort, by apolicy underwritten by one hundred million fellow countrymen.
Some time after this it was that I recall a glimpse of myself standingon the steps of a building on Tremont Street, looking at a militaryparade. A regiment was passing. It was the first sight in that drearyday which had inspired me with any other emotions than wondering pityand amazement. Here at last were order and reason, an exhibition ofwhat intelligent cooperation can accomplish. The people who stoodlooking on with kindling faces,--could it be that the sight had forthem no more than but a spectacular interest? Could they fail to seethat it was their perfect concert of action, their organization underone control, which made these men the tremendous engine they were,able to vanquish a mob ten times as numerous? Seeing this so plainly,could they fail to compare the scientific manner in which the nationwent to war with the unscientific manner in which it went to work?Would they not query since what time the killing of men had been atask so much more important than feeding and clothing them, that atrained army should be deemed alone adequate to the former, while thelatter was left to a mob?
It was now toward nightfall, and the streets were thronged with theworkers from the stores, the shops, and mills. Carried along with thestronger part of the current, I found myself, as it began to growdark, in the midst of a scene of squalor and human degradation such asonly the South Cove tenement district could present. I had seen themad wasting of human labor; here I saw in direst shape the want thatwaste had bred.
From the black doorways and windows of the rookeries on every sidecame gusts of fetid air. The streets and alleys reeked with theeffluvia of a slave ship's between-decks. As I passed I had glimpseswithin of pale babies gasping out their lives amid sultry stenches, ofhopeless-faced women deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood notrait save weakness, while from the windows leered girls with brows ofbrass. Like the starving bands of mongrel curs that infest the streetsof Moslem towns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled theair with shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among thegarbage that littered the court-yards.
There was nothing in all this that was new to me. Often had I passedthrough this part of the city and witnessed its sights with feelingsof disgust mingled with a certain philosophical wonder at theextremities mortals will endure and still cling to life. But not aloneas regarded the economical follies of this age, but equally as touchedits moral abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since thatvision of another century. No more did I look upon the woful dwellersin this Inferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human.I saw in them my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, fleshof my flesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of humanwretchedness about me offended not now my senses merely, but piercedmy heart like a knife, so that I could not repress sighs and groans. Inot only saw but felt in my body all that I saw.
Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me moreclosely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies wereso many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the_hic jacet_ of a soul dead within.
As I looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I wasaffected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucentspirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw theideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind andsoul had lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly faces,and of the reproach that could not be gainsaid which was in theireyes, that the full piteousness of the ruin that had been wrought wasrevealed to me. I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony,for I had been one of those who had endured that these things shouldbe. I had been one of those who, well knowing that they were, had notdesired to hear or be compelled to think much of them, but had gone onas if they were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit. Therefore nowI found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude ofstrangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried outagainst me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements,every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and calledafter me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?
I have no clear recollection of anything after this till I foundmyself standing on the carved stone steps of the magnificent home ofmy betrothed in Commonwealth avenue. Amid the tumult of my thoughtsthat day, I had scarcely once thought of her, but now obeying someunconscious impulse my feet had found the familiar way to her door. Iwas told that the family were at dinner, but word was sent out that Ishould join them at table. Besides the family, I found several guestspresent, all known to me. The table glittered with plate and costlychina. The ladies were sumptuously dressed and wore the jewels ofqueens. The scene was one of costly elegance and lavish luxury. Thecompany was in excellent spirits, and there was plentiful laughter anda running fire of jests.
To me it was as if, in wandering through the place of doom, my bloodturned to tears by its sights, and my spirit attuned to sorrow, pity,and despair, I had happened in some glade upon a merry party ofroisterers. I sat in silence until Edith began to rally me upon mysombre looks, What ailed me? The others presently joined in theplayful assault, and I became a target for quips and jests. Where hadI been, and what had I seen to make such a dull fellow of me?
"I have been in Golgotha," at last I an
swered. "I have seen Humanityhanging on a cross! Do none of you know what sights the sun and starslook down on in this city, that you can think and talk of anythingelse? Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude ofmen and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony frombirth to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hushyour laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous cryingof the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of mensodden in misery, turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of anarmy of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stoppedyour ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds? For me, I canhear nothing else."
Silence followed my words. A passion of pity had shaken me as I spoke,but when I looked around upon the company, I saw that, far from beingstirred as I was, their faces expressed a cold and hard astonishment,mingled in Edith's with extreme mortification, in her father's withanger. The ladies were exchanging scandalized looks, while one of thegentlemen had put up his eyeglass and was studying me with an air ofscientific curiosity, When I saw that things which were to me sointolerable moved them not at all, that words that melted my heart tospeak had only offended them with the speaker, I was at first stunnedand then overcome with a desperate sickness and faintness at theheart. What hope was there for the wretched, for the world, ifthoughtful men and tender women were not moved by things like these!Then I bethought myself that it must be because I had not spokenaright. No doubt I had put the case badly. They were angry becausethey thought I was berating them, when God knew I was merely thinkingof the horror of the fact without any attempt to assign theresponsibility for it.
I restrained my passion, and tried to speak calmly and logically thatI might correct this impression. I told them that I had not meant toaccuse them, as if they, or the rich in general, were responsible forthe misery of the world. True indeed it was, that the superfluitywhich they wasted would, otherwise bestowed, relieve much bittersuffering. These costly viands, these rich wines, these gorgeousfabrics and glistening jewels represented the ransom of many lives.They were verily not without the guiltiness of those who waste in aland stricken with famine. Nevertheless, all the waste of all therich, were it saved, would go but a little way to cure the poverty ofthe world. There was so little to divide that even if the rich wentshare and share with the poor, there would be but a common fare ofcrusts, albeit made very sweet then by brotherly love.
The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause ofthe world's poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class ofmen, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake,a colossal world-darkening blunder. And then I showed them how fourfifths of the labor of men was utterly wasted by the mutual warfare,the lack of organization and concert among the workers. Seeking tomake the matter very plain, I instanced the case of arid lands wherethe soil yielded the means of life only by careful use of thewatercourses for irrigation. I showed how in such countries it wascounted the most important function of the government to see that thewater was not wasted by the selfishness or ignorance of individuals,since otherwise there would be famine. To this end its use wasstrictly regulated and systematized, and individuals of their merecaprice were not permitted to dam it or divert it, or in any way totamper with it.
The labor of men, I explained, was the fertilizing stream which alonerendered earth habitable. It was but a scanty stream at best, and itsuse required to be regulated by a system which expended every drop tothe best advantage, if the world were to be supported in abundance.But how far from any system was the actual practice! Every man wastedthe precious fluid as he wished, animated only by the equal motives ofsaving his own crop and spoiling his neighbor's, that his might sellthe better. What with greed and what with spite some fields wereflooded while others were parched, and half the water ran wholly towaste. In such a land, though a few by strength or cunning might winthe means of luxury, the lot of the great mass must be poverty, and ofthe weak and ignorant bitter want and perennial famine.
Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it hadneglected, and regulate for the common good the course of thelife-giving stream, and the earth would bloom like one garden, andnone of its children lack any good thing. I described the physicalfelicity, mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would thenattend the lives of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new world,blessed with plenty, purified by justice and sweetened by brotherlykindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed, but which mightso easily be made real. But when I had expected now surely the facesaround me to light up with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever moredark, angry, and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showedonly aversion and dread, while the men interrupted me with shouts ofreprobation and contempt. "Madman!" "Pestilent fellow!" "Fanatic!""Enemy of society!" were some of their cries, and the one who hadbefore taken his eyeglass to me exclaimed, "He says we are to have nomore poor. Ha! ha!"
"Put the fellow out!" exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and at thesignal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon me.
It seemed to me that my heart would burst with the anguish of findingthat what was to me so plain and so all-important was to themmeaningless, and that I was powerless to make it other. So hot hadbeen my heart that I had thought to melt an iceberg with its glow,only to find at last the overmastering chill seizing my own vitals. Itwas not enmity that I felt toward them as they thronged me, but pityonly, for them and for the world.
Although despairing, I could not give over. Still I strove with them.Tears poured from my eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate. Ipanted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately afterward found myselfsitting upright in bed in my room in Dr. Leete's house, and themorning sun shining through the open window into my eyes. I wasgasping. The tears were streaming down my face, and I quivered inevery nerve.
* * * * *
As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured andbrought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes tosee the heaven's vault spread above him, so it was with me, as Irealized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream,and my presence in the twentieth was the reality.
The cruel sights which I had witnessed in my vision, and could so wellconfirm from the experience of my former life, though they had, alas!once been, and must in the retrospect to the end of time move thecompassionate to tears, were, God be thanked, forever gone by. Longago oppressor and oppressed, prophet and scorner, had been dust. Forgenerations, rich and poor had been forgotten words.
But in that moment, while yet I mused with unspeakable thankfulnessupon the greatness of the world's salvation and my privilege inbeholding it, there suddenly pierced me like a knife a pang of shame,remorse, and wondering self-reproach, that bowed my head upon mybreast and made me wish the grave had hid me with my fellows from thesun. For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done to helpon the deliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice? I who had livedin those cruel, insensate days, what had I done to bring them to anend? I had been every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of mybrothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted aworshipper of Chaos and Old Night, as any of my fellows. So far as mypersonal influence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder than tohelp forward the enfranchisement of the race which was even thenpreparing. What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me,to rejoice in a day whose dawning I had mocked?
"Better for you, better for you," a voice within me rang, "had thisevil dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream; betteryour part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation,than here, drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whosehusbandmen you stoned;" and my spirit answered, "Better, truly."
When at length I raised my bowed head and looked forth from thewindow, Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and wasgathering flowers. I hastened to descend to her. Kneeling before her,with my face in the dust, I confessed with tears ho
w little was myworth to breathe the air of this golden century, and how infinitelyless to wear upon my breast its consummate flower. Fortunate is hewho, with a case so desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful.
POSTSCRIPT.
THE RATE OF THE WORLD'S PROGRESS.
_To the Editor of the Boston Transcript_: The Transcript of March 30,1888, contained a review of _Looking Backward_, in response to which Ibeg to be allowed a word. The description to which the book isdevoted, of the radically new social and industrial institutions andarrangements supposed to be enjoyed by the people of the United Statesin the twentieth century, is not objected to as depicting a degree ofhuman felicity and moral development necessarily unattainable by therace, provided time enough had been allowed for its evolution from thepresent chaotic state of society. In failing to allow this, thereviewer thinks that the author has made an absurd mistake, whichseriously detracts from the value of the book as a work of realisticimagination. Instead of placing the realization of the ideal socialstate a scant fifty years ahead, it is suggested that he should havemade his figure seventy-five centuries. There is certainly a largediscrepancy between seventy-five centuries and fifty years, and if thereviewer is correct in his estimate of the probable rate of humanprogress, the outlook of the world is decidedly discouraging. But ishe right? I think not.
_Looking Backward_, although in form a fanciful romance, is intended,in all seriousness, as a forecast, in accordance with the principlesof evolution, of the next stage in the industrial and socialdevelopment of humanity, especially in this country; and no part of itis believed by the author to be better supported by the indications ofprobability than the implied prediction that the dawn of the new erais already near at hand, and that the full day will swiftly follow.Does this seem at first thought incredible, in view of the vastness ofthe changes presupposed? What is the teaching of history, but thatgreat national transformations, while ages in unnoticed preparation,when once inaugurated, are accomplished with a rapidity and resistlessmomentum proportioned to their magnitude, not limited by it?
In 1759, when Quebec fell, the might of England in America seemedirresistible, and the vassalage of the colonies assured. Nevertheless,thirty years later, the first President of the American Republic wasinaugurated. In 1849, after Novara, Italian prospects appeared ashopeless as at any time since the Middle Ages; yet only fifteen yearsafter, Victor Emmanuel was crowned King of United Italy. In 1864, thefulfillment of the thousand-year dream of German unity was apparentlyas far off as ever. Seven years later it had been realized, andWilliam had assumed at Versailles the Crown of Barbarossa. In 1832,the original Anti-slavery Society was formed in Boston by a fewso-called visionaries. Thirty-eight years later, in 1870, the societydisbanded, its programme fully carried out.
These precedents do not, of course, prove that any such industrial andsocial transformation as is outlined in _Looking Backward_ isimpending; but they do show that, when the moral and economicalconditions for it are ripe, it may be expected to go forward withgreat rapidity. On no other stage are the scenes shifted with aswiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once thehour strikes. The question is not, then, how extensive thescene-shifting must be to set the stage for the new fraternalcivilization, but whether there are any special indications that asocial transformation is at hand. The causes that have been bringingit ever nearer have been at work from immemorial time. To the streamof tendency setting toward an ultimate realization of a form ofsociety which, while vastly more efficient for material prosperity,should also satisfy and not outrage the moral instincts, every sigh ofpoverty, every tear of pity, every humane impulse, every generousenthusiasm, every true religious feeling, every act by which men havegiven effect to their mutual sympathy by drawing more closely togetherfor any purpose, have contributed from the beginnings ofcivilization. That this long stream of influence, ever widening anddeepening, is at last about to sweep away the barriers it has so longsapped, is at least one obvious interpretation of the presentuniversal ferment of men's minds as to the imperfections of presentsocial arrangements. Not only are the toilers of the world engaged insomething like a world-wide insurrection, but true and humane men andwomen, of every degree, are in a mood of exasperation, verging onabsolute revolt, against social conditions that reduce life to abrutal struggle for existence, mock every dictate of ethics andreligion, and render wellnigh futile the efforts of philanthropy.
As an iceberg, floating southward from the frozen North, is graduallyundermined by warmer seas, and, become at last unstable, churns thesea to yeast for miles around by the mighty rockings that portend itsoverturn, so the barbaric industrial and social system, which has comedown to us from savage antiquity, undermined by the modern humanespirit, riddled by the criticism of economic science, is shaking theworld with convulsions that presage its collapse.
All thoughtful men agree that the present aspect of society isportentous of great changes. The only question is, whether they willbe for the better or the worse. Those who believe in man's essentialnobleness lean to the former view, those who believe in his essentialbaseness to the latter. For my part, I hold to the former opinion._Looking Backward_ was written in the belief that the Golden Age liesbefore us and not behind us, and is not far away. Our children willsurely see it, and we, too, who are already men and women, if wedeserve it by our faith and by our works.
EDWARD BELLAMY
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends