Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887

  Chapter 5

  When, in the course of the evening the ladies retired, leaving Dr.Leete and myself alone, he sounded me as to my disposition for sleep,saying that if I felt like it my bed was ready for me; but if I wasinclined to wakefulness nothing would please him better than to bear mecompany. "I am a late bird, myself," he said, "and, without suspicionof flattery, I may say that a companion more interesting than yourselfcould scarcely be imagined. It is decidedly not often that one has achance to converse with a man of the nineteenth century."

  Now I had been looking forward all the evening with some dread to thetime when I should be alone, on retiring for the night. Surrounded bythese most friendly strangers, stimulated and supported by theirsympathetic interest, I had been able to keep my mental balance. Eventhen, however, in pauses of the conversation I had had glimpses, vividas lightning flashes, of the horror of strangeness that was waiting tobe faced when I could no longer command diversion. I knew I could notsleep that night, and as for lying awake and thinking, it argues nocowardice, I am sure, to confess that I was afraid of it. When, inreply to my host's question, I frankly told him this, he replied thatit would be strange if I did not feel just so, but that I need have noanxiety about sleeping; whenever I wanted to go to bed, he would giveme a dose which would insure me a sound night's sleep without fail.Next morning, no doubt, I would awake with the feeling of an oldcitizen.

  "Before I acquired that," I replied, "I must know a little more aboutthe sort of Boston I have come back to. You told me when we were uponthe house-top that though a century only had elapsed since I fellasleep, it had been marked by greater changes in the conditions ofhumanity than many a previous millennium. With the city before me Icould well believe that, but I am very curious to know what some of thechanges have been. To make a beginning somewhere, for the subject isdoubtless a large one, what solution, if any, have you found for thelabor question? It was the Sphinx's riddle of the nineteenth century,and when I dropped out the Sphinx was threatening to devour society,because the answer was not forthcoming. It is well worth sleeping ahundred years to learn what the right answer was, if, indeed, you havefound it yet."

  "As no such thing as the labor question is known nowadays," replied Dr.Leete, "and there is no way in which it could arise, I suppose we mayclaim to have solved it. Society would indeed have fully deserved beingdevoured if it had failed to answer a riddle so entirely simple. Infact, to speak by the book, it was not necessary for society to solvethe riddle at all. It may be said to have solved itself. The solutioncame as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could nothave terminated otherwise. All that society had to do was to recognizeand cooperate with that evolution, when its tendency had becomeunmistakable."

  "I can only say," I answered, "that at the time I fell asleep no suchevolution had been recognized."

  "It was in 1887 that you fell into this sleep, I think you said."

  "Yes, May 30th, 1887."

  My companion regarded me musingly for some moments. Then he observed,"And you tell me that even then there was no general recognition of thenature of the crisis which society was nearing? Of course, I fullycredit your statement. The singular blindness of your contemporaries tothe signs of the times is a phenomenon commented on by many of ourhistorians, but few facts of history are more difficult for us torealize, so obvious and unmistakable as we look back seem theindications, which must also have come under your eyes, of thetransformation about to come to pass. I should be interested, Mr. West,if you would give me a little more definite idea of the view which youand men of your grade of intellect took of the state and prospects ofsociety in 1887. You must, at least, have realized that the widespreadindustrial and social troubles, and the underlying dissatisfaction ofall classes with the inequalities of society, and the general misery ofmankind, were portents of great changes of some sort."

  "We did, indeed, fully realize that," I replied. "We felt that societywas dragging anchor and in danger of going adrift. Whither it woulddrift nobody could say, but all feared the rocks."

  "Nevertheless," said Dr. Leete, "the set of the current was perfectlyperceptible if you had but taken pains to observe it, and it was nottoward the rocks, but toward a deeper channel."

  "We had a popular proverb," I replied, "that 'hindsight is better thanforesight,' the force of which I shall now, no doubt, appreciate morefully than ever. All I can say is, that the prospect was such when Iwent into that long sleep that I should not have been surprised had Ilooked down from your house-top to-day on a heap of charred andmoss-grown ruins instead of this glorious city."

  Dr. Leete had listened to me with close attention and noddedthoughtfully as I finished speaking. "What you have said," he observed,"will be regarded as a most valuable vindication of Storiot, whoseaccount of your era has been generally thought exaggerated in itspicture of the gloom and confusion of men's minds. That a period oftransition like that should be full of excitement and agitation wasindeed to be looked for; but seeing how plain was the tendency of theforces in operation, it was natural to believe that hope rather thanfear would have been the prevailing temper of the popular mind."

  "You have not yet told me what was the answer to the riddle which youfound," I said. "I am impatient to know by what contradiction ofnatural sequence the peace and prosperity which you now seem to enjoycould have been the outcome of an era like my own."

  "Excuse me," replied my host, "but do you smoke?" It was not till ourcigars were lighted and drawing well that he resumed. "Since you are inthe humor to talk rather than to sleep, as I certainly am, perhaps Icannot do better than to try to give you enough idea of our modernindustrial system to dissipate at least the impression that there isany mystery about the process of its evolution. The Bostonians of yourday had the reputation of being great askers of questions, and I amgoing to show my descent by asking you one to begin with. What shouldyou name as the most prominent feature of the labor troubles of yourday?"

  "Why, the strikes, of course," I replied.

  "Exactly; but what made the strikes so formidable?"

  "The great labor organizations."

  "And what was the motive of these great organizations?"

  "The workmen claimed they had to organize to get their rights from thebig corporations," I replied.

  "That is just it," said Dr. Leete; "the organization of labor and thestrikes were an effect, merely, of the concentration of capital ingreater masses than had ever been known before. Before thisconcentration began, while as yet commerce and industry were conductedby innumerable petty concerns with small capital, instead of a smallnumber of great concerns with vast capital, the individual workman wasrelatively important and independent in his relations to the employer.Moreover, when a little capital or a new idea was enough to start a manin business for himself, workingmen were constantly becoming employersand there was no hard and fast line between the two classes. Laborunions were needless then, and general strikes out of the question. Butwhen the era of small concerns with small capital was succeeded by thatof the great aggregations of capital, all this was changed. Theindividual laborer, who had been relatively important to the smallemployer, was reduced to insignificance and powerlessness over againstthe great corporation, while at the same time the way upward to thegrade of employer was closed to him. Self-defense drove him to unionwith his fellows.

  "The records of the period show that the outcry against theconcentration of capital was furious. Men believed that it threatenedsociety with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever endured.They believed that the great corporations were preparing for them theyoke of a baser servitude than had ever been imposed on the race,servitude not to men but to soulless machines incapable of any motivebut insatiable greed. Looking back, we cannot wonder at theirdesperation, for certainly humanity was never confronted with a fatemore sordid and hideous than would have been the era of corporatetyranny which they anticipated.

  "Meanwhile, without being in the smallest degree checked by the clamora
gainst it, the absorption of business by ever larger monopoliescontinued. In the United States there was not, after the beginning ofthe last quarter of the century, any opportunity whatever forindividual enterprise in any important field of industry, unless backedby a great capital. During the last decade of the century, such smallbusinesses as still remained were fast-failing survivals of a pastepoch, or mere parasites on the great corporations, or else existed infields too small to attract the great capitalists. Small businesses, asfar as they still remained, were reduced to the condition of rats andmice, living in holes and corners, and counting on evading notice forthe enjoyment of existence. The railroads had gone on combining till afew great syndicates controlled every rail in the land. Inmanufactories, every important staple was controlled by a syndicate.These syndicates, pools, trusts, or whatever their name, fixed pricesand crushed all competition except when combinations as vast asthemselves arose. Then a struggle, resulting in a still greaterconsolidation, ensued. The great city bazar crushed it country rivalswith branch stores, and in the city itself absorbed its smaller rivalstill the business of a whole quarter was concentrated under one roof,with a hundred former proprietors of shops serving as clerks. Having nobusiness of his own to put his money in, the small capitalist, at thesame time that he took service under the corporation, found no otherinvestment for his money but its stocks and bonds, thus becoming doublydependent upon it.

  "The fact that the desperate popular opposition to the consolidation ofbusiness in a few powerful hands had no effect to check it proves thatthere must have been a strong economical reason for it. The smallcapitalists, with their innumerable petty concerns, had in fact yieldedthe field to the great aggregations of capital, because they belongedto a day of small things and were totally incompetent to the demands ofan age of steam and telegraphs and the gigantic scale of itsenterprises. To restore the former order of things, even if possible,would have involved returning to the day of stagecoaches. Oppressiveand intolerable as was the regime of the great consolidations ofcapital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admitthe prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to thenational industries, the vast economies effected by concentration ofmanagement and unity of organization, and to confess that since the newsystem had taken the place of the old the wealth of the world hadincreased at a rate before undreamed of. To be sure this vast increasehad gone chiefly to make the rich richer, increasing the gap betweenthem and the poor; but the fact remained that, as a means merely ofproducing wealth, capital had been proved efficient in proportion toits consolidation. The restoration of the old system with thesubdivision of capital, if it were possible, might indeed bring back agreater equality of conditions, with more individual dignity andfreedom, but it would be at the price of general poverty and the arrestof material progress.

  "Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the mightywealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without bowing downto a plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon as men began to askthemselves these questions, they found the answer ready for them. Themovement toward the conduct of business by larger and largeraggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which had beenso desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its truesignificance, as a process which only needed to complete its logicalevolution to open a golden future to humanity.

  "Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the finalconsolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry andcommerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set ofirresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at theircaprice and for their profit, were intrusted to a single syndicaterepresenting the people, to be conducted in the common interest for thecommon profit. The nation, that is to say, organized as the one greatbusiness corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed; itbecame the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, thesole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lessermonopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economiesof which all citizens shared. The epoch of trusts had ended in TheGreat Trust. In a word, the people of the United States concluded toassume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred odd yearsbefore they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizingnow for industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they hadthen organized for political purposes. At last, strangely late in theworld's history, the obvious fact was perceived that no business is soessentially the public business as the industry and commerce on whichthe people's livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to privatepersons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind,though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering thefunctions of political government to kings and nobles to be conductedfor their personal glorification."

  "Such a stupendous change as you describe," said I, "did not, ofcourse, take place without great bloodshed and terrible convulsions."

  "On the contrary," replied Dr. Leete, "there was absolutely noviolence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had becomefully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was behind it.There was no more possibility of opposing it by force than by argument.On the other hand the popular sentiment toward the great corporationsand those identified with them had ceased to be one of bitterness, asthey came to realize their necessity as a link, a transition phase, inthe evolution of the true industrial system. The most violent foes ofthe great private monopolies were now forced to recognize howinvaluable and indispensable had been their office in educating thepeople up to the point of assuming control of their own business. Fiftyyears before, the consolidation of the industries of the country undernational control would have seemed a very daring experiment to the mostsanguine. But by a series of object lessons, seen and studied by allmen, the great corporations had taught the people an entirely new setof ideas on this subject. They had seen for many years syndicateshandling revenues greater than those of states, and directing thelabors of hundreds of thousands of men with an efficiency and economyunattainable in smaller operations. It had come to be recognized as anaxiom that the larger the business the simpler the principles that canbe applied to it; that, as the machine is truer than the hand, so thesystem, which in a great concern does the work of the master's eye in asmall business, turns out more accurate results. Thus it came aboutthat, thanks to the corporations themselves, when it was proposed thatthe nation should assume their functions, the suggestion impliednothing which seemed impracticable even to the timid. To be sure it wasa step beyond any yet taken, a broader generalization, but the veryfact that the nation would be the sole corporation in the field would,it was seen, relieve the undertaking of many difficulties with whichthe partial monopolies had contended."