Chapter 28
"It's a little after the time you told me to wake you, sir. You did notcome out of it as quick as common, sir."
The voice was the voice of my man Sawyer. I started bolt upright in bedand stared around. I was in my underground chamber. The mellow light ofthe lamp which always burned in the room when I occupied it illuminedthe familiar walls and furnishings. By my bedside, with the glass ofsherry in his hand which Dr. Pillsbury prescribed on first rousing froma mesmeric sleep, by way of awakening the torpid physical functions,stood Sawyer.
"Better take this right off, sir," he said, as I stared blankly at him."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 century hadbeen a dream. I had but dreamed of that enlightened and care-free raceof men and their ingeniously simple institutions, of the glorious newBoston with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains, and itsuniversal reign of comfort. The amiable family which I had learned toknow so well, my genial host and Mentor, Dr. Leete, his wife, and theirdaughter, the second and more beauteous Edith, my betrothed--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," I said,"a most-ex-traor-dinary dream."
I dressed in a mechanical way, feeling light-headed and oddly uncertainof myself, and sat down to the coffee and rolls which Sawyer was in thehabit 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. TheFrench 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 of half amillion 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.--Enormous land-grabsof Western syndicates.--Revelations of shocking corruption amongChicago 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.--A manshoots 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 the womenwage-workers in the great cities.--Startling growth of illiteracy inMassachusetts.--More insane asylums wanted.--Decoration Day addresses.Professor Brown's oration on the moral grandeur of nineteenth centurycivilization."
It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked; there couldbe no kind of doubt about that. Its complete microcosm this summary ofthe day's news had presented, even to that last unmistakable touch offatuous self-complacency. Coming after such a damning indictment of theage as that one day's chronicle of world-wide bloodshed, greed, andtyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy of Mephistopheles, and yet of allwhose eyes it had met this morning I was, perhaps, the only one whoperceived the cynicism, and but yesterday I should have perceived it nomore than the others. That strange dream it was which had made all thedifference. For I know not how long, I forgot my surroundings afterthis, and was again in fancy moving in that vivid dream-world, in thatglorious city, with its homes of simple comfort and its gorgeous publicpalaces. Around me were again faces unmarred by arrogance or servility,by envy or greed, by anxious care or feverish ambition, and statelyforms of men and women who had never known fear of a fellow man ordepended on his favor, but always, in the words of that sermon whichstill rang in my ears, 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, andothers hungry. Now on the contrary the glaring disparities in the dressand 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 the wretchednessof their fellows without so much as a change of countenance? And yet,all the while, I knew well that it was I who had changed, and not mycontemporaries. I had dreamed of a city whose people fared all alike aschildren of one family and were one another'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. Letthe 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 know not.Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not learn tobe helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one another fromthe least to the greatest! This horrible babel of shamelessself-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamor ofconflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations, this stupendous system ofbrazen beggary, what was it all but the necessity of a society in whichthe opportunity to serve the world according to his gifts, instead ofbeing secured to every man as the first object of social organization,had to be fought for!
I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood andlaughed aloud, to the scandal of the passers-by. For my life I couldnot have helped it, with such a mad humor was I moved at sight of theinterminable rows of stores on either side, up and down the street sofar as I could see--scores of them, to make the spectac
le more utterlypreposterous, within a stone's throw devoted to selling the same sortof goods. Stores! stores! stores! miles of stores! ten thousand storesto distribute the goods needed by this one city, which in my dream hadbeen supplied with all things from a single warehouse, as they wereordered through one great store in every quarter, where the buyer,without waste of time or labor, found under one roof the world'sassortment in whatever line he desired. There the labor of distributionhad been so slight as to add but a scarcely perceptible fraction to thecost of commodities to the user. The cost of production was virtuallyall he paid. But here the mere distribution of the goods, theirhandling alone, added a fourth, a third, a half and more, to the cost.All these ten thousand plants must be paid for, their rent, theirstaffs of superintendence, their platoons of salesmen, their tenthousand sets of accountants, jobbers, and business dependents, withall they spent in advertising themselves and fighting one another, andthe consumers must do the paying. What a famous process for beggaring anation!
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, wastesso much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with a spoonthat leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they not likelyto 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 the eye.I saw the throngs of ladies looking in, and the proprietors eagerlywatching the effect of the bait. I went within and noted the hawk-eyedfloor-walker watching for business, overlooking the clerks, keepingthem up to their task of inducing the customers to buy, buy, buy, formoney if they had it, for credit if they had it not, to buy what theywanted not, more than they wanted, what they could not afford. At timesI momentarily lost the clue and was confused by the sight. Why thiseffort to induce people to buy? Surely that had nothing to do with thelegitimate business of distributing products to those who needed them.Surely it was the sheerest waste to force upon people what they did notwant, but what might be useful to another. The nation was so much thepoorer for every such achievement. What were these clerks thinking of?Then I would remember that they were not acting as distributors likethose in the store I had visited in the dream Boston. They were notserving the public interest, but their immediate personal interest, andit was nothing to them what the ultimate effect of their course on thegeneral prosperity might be, if but they increased their own hoard, forthese goods were their own, and the more they sold and the more theygot for them, the greater their gain. The more wasteful the peoplewere, the more articles they did not want which they could be inducedto buy, the better for these sellers. To encourage prodigality was theexpress aim of the ten thousand stores of Boston.
Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a whit worse men than any othersin Boston. They must earn a living and support their families, and howwere they to find a trade to do it by which did not necessitate placingtheir individual interests before those of others and that of all? Theycould not be asked to starve while they waited for an order of thingssuch as I had seen in my dream, in which the interest of each and thatof all were identical. But, God in heaven! what wonder, under such asystem as this about me--what wonder that the city was so shabby, andthe people so meanly dressed, and so many of 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 in thisquarter 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 very multiplicityand independence I recognized now the secret of the insignificant totalproduct 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 involve asufficiently 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, each underits own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops about it, and itssappers 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, for thefailure to recognize the necessity of applying the same principle tothe organization of the national industries as a whole, to see that iflack of organization could impair the efficiency of a shop, it musthave effects as much more disastrous in disabling the industries of thenation at large as the latter are vaster in volume and more complex inthe 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 thelatter, and they told me their grievances. It was very little comfort Icould give them. "I am sorry for you," I said. "You get little enough,certainly, and yet the wonder to me is, not that industries conductedas these are do not pay you living wages, but that they are able to payyou 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, thelife blood goes. It is flowing in now. It will flow out again in themorning"; and pleased with his little conceit, the old man passed onsmiling.
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 learned thatit had a use in the world around me only because the work of producingthe nation's livelihood, instead of being regarded as the most strictlypublic and common of all concerns, and as such conducted by the na
tion,was abandoned to the hap-hazard efforts of individuals. This originalmistake necessitated endless exchanges to bring about any sort ofgeneral distribution of products. These exchanges money effected--howequitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenement house districts tothe Back Bay--at the cost of an army of men taken from productive laborto manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns of its machinery, and agenerally debauching influence on mankind which had justified itsdescription, from ancient time, as the "root of 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 "awonderful 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 the benchesof the Common, finding an interest merely in watching the throngs thatpassed, such as one has in studying the populace of a foreign city, sostrange since yesterday had my fellow citizens and their ways become tome. For thirty years I had lived among them, and yet I seemed to havenever noted before how drawn and anxious were their faces, of the richas of the poor, the refined, acute faces of the educated as well as thedull masks of the ignorant. And well it might be so, for I saw now, asnever before I had seen so plainly, that each as he walked constantlyturned to catch the whispers of a spectre at his ear, the spectre ofUncertainty. "Do your work never so well," the spectre waswhispering--"rise early and toil till late, rob cunningly or servefaithfully, you shall never know security. Rich you may be now andstill come to poverty at last. Leave never so much wealth to yourchildren, you cannot buy the assurance that your son may not be theservant of your servant, or that your daughter will not have to sellherself for bread."
A man passing by thrust an advertising card in my hand, which set forththe merits of some new scheme of life insurance. The incident remindedme of the only device, pathetic in its admission of the universal needit so poorly supplied, which offered these tired and hunted men andwomen even a partial protection from uncertainty. By this means, thosealready well-to-do, I remembered, might purchase a precariousconfidence that after their death their loved ones would not, for awhile at least, be trampled under the feet of men. But this was all,and this was only for those who could pay well for it. What idea waspossible to these wretched dwellers in the land of Ishmael, where everyman's hand was against each and the hand of each against every other,of true life insurance as I had seen it among the people of that dreamland, each of whom, by virtue merely of his membership in the nationalfamily, was guaranteed against need of any sort, by a policyunderwritten 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, ableto vanquish a mob ten times as numerous? Seeing this so plainly, couldthey fail to compare the scientific manner in which the nation went towar with the unscientific manner in which it went to work? Would theynot query since what time the killing of men had been a task so muchmore important than feeding and clothing them, that a trained armyshould be deemed alone adequate to the former, while the latter wasleft 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 grow dark,in the midst of a scene of squalor and human degradation such as onlythe South Cove tenement district could present. I had seen the madwasting of human labor; here I saw in direst shape the want that wastehad bred.
From the black doorways and windows of the rookeries on every side camegusts of fetid air. The streets and alleys reeked with the effluvia ofa slave ship's between-decks. As I passed I had glimpses within of palebabies gasping out their lives amid sultry stenches, of hopeless-facedwomen deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood no trait saveweakness, while from the windows leered girls with brows of brass. Likethe starving bands of mongrel curs that infest the streets of Moslemtowns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled the air withshrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the garbage thatlittered 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 feelings ofdisgust mingled with a certain philosophical wonder at the extremitiesmortals will endure and still cling to life. But not alone as regardedthe economical follies of this age, but equally as touched its moralabominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since that vision ofanother century. No more did I look upon the woful dwellers in thisInferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human. I saw inthem my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh of myflesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of human wretchednessabout me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced my heart like aknife, so that I could not repress sighs and groans. I not only saw butfelt 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 thehic 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, andof the reproach that could not be gainsaid which was in their eyes,that the full piteousness of the ruin that had been wrought wasrevealed to me. I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony, forI had been one of those who had endured that these things should be. Ihad been one of those who, well knowing that they were, had not desiredto hear or be compelled to think much of them, but had gone on as ifthey were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit. Therefore now Ifound upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangledsouls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against mefrom the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick ofthe pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as Ifled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?
I have no clear recollection of anything after this till I found myselfstanding on the carved stone steps of the magnificent home of mybetrothed in Commonwealth Avenue. Amid the tumult of my thoughts thatday, 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 the playfulassault, and I became a target for quips and jests. Where had I been,and what had I seen to make such a dull fellow of me?
"I have been in Golgotha," at last I answered. "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 of menand 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 men soddenin misery turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an army ofwomen selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped yourears that you do not hear these doleful sounds? For me, I can hearnothing 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 the heart.What hope was there for the wretched, for the world, if thoughtful menand tender women were not moved by things like these! Then I bethoughtmyself that it must be because I had not spoken aright. No doubt I hadput the case badly. They were angry because they thought I was beratingthem, when God knew I was merely thinking of the horror of the factwithout any attempt to assign the responsibility for it.
I restrained my passion, and tried to speak calmly and logically that Imight 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 superfluity whichthey wasted would, otherwise bestowed, relieve much bitter suffering.These costly viands, these rich wines, these gorgeous fabrics andglistening jewels represented the ransom of many lives. They wereverily not without the guiltiness of those who waste in a land strickenwith famine. Nevertheless, all the waste of all the rich, were itsaved, would go but a little way to cure the poverty of the world.There was so little to divide that even if the rich went share andshare with the poor, there would be but a common fare of crusts, albeitmade 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, acolossal 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 to makethe matter very plain, I instanced the case of arid lands where thesoil yielded the means of life only by careful use of the watercoursesfor irrigation. I showed how in such countries it was counted the mostimportant function of the government to see that the water was notwasted by the selfishness or ignorance of individuals, since otherwisethere would be famine. To this end its use was strictly regulated andsystematized, and individuals of their mere caprice were not permittedto dam it or divert it, or in any way to tamper 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. Buthow far from any system was the actual practice! Every man wasted theprecious 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, and noneof its children lack any good thing. I described the physical felicity,mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would then attend thelives of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new world, blessed withplenty, purified by justice and sweetened by brotherly kindness, theworld of which I had indeed but dreamed, but which might so easily bemade real. But when I had expected now surely the faces around me tolight up with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more dark, angry,and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showed only aversionand dread, while the men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation andcontempt. "Madman!" "Pestilent fellow!" "Fanatic!" "Enemy of society!"were some of their cries, and the one who had before taken his eyeglassto me exclaimed, "He says we are to have no more 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 had beenmy heart that I had thought to melt an iceberg with its glow, only tofind at last the overmastering chill seizing my own vitals. It was notenmity that I felt toward them as they thronged me, but pity only, forthem 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 the morningsun shining through the open window into my eyes. I was gasping. Thetears were streaming down my face, and I quivered in every 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 to seethe heaven's vault spread above him, so it was with me, as I realizedthat my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream, and mypresence 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. Long agooppressor 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 my breastand made me wish the grave had hid me with my fellows from the sun. ForI had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help on thedeliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived in thosecruel, insensate days, what had I done to bring them to an end? I hadbeen every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my brothers, ascynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a worshiper ofChaos and Old Night, as any of my fellows. So far as my personalinfluence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder than to helpforward the enfranchisement of the race which was even then preparing.What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me, to rejoice ina 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 the window,Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and was gatheringflowers. I hastened to descend to her. Kneeling before her, with myface in the dust, I confessed with tears how little was my worth tobreathe the air of this golden century, and how infinitely less to wearupon my breast its consummate flower. Fortunate is he who
, with a caseso desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful.
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