and so dexterously presented as in a book that begins to be forgotten
now, but which some thirty years ago took the continent by storm. This
was the volume in which Mr. Edward Bellamy "looked backward" from his
supposed point of vantage in the year 2000 A. D. and saw us as we are
and as we shall be. No two plans of a socialist state are ever quite
alike. But the scheme of society outlined in "Looking Backward" may be
examined as the most attractive and the most consistent outline of a
socialist state that has, within the knowledge of the present writer,
ever been put forward. It is worth while, in the succeeding chapter to
examine it in detail. No better starting point for the criticism of
collectivist theories can be found than in a view of the basis on which
is supposed to rest the halcyon life of Mr. Bellamy's charming
commonwealth.
_VI.--How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward_
THE reading public is as wayward and as fickle as a bee among the
flowers. It will not long pause anywhere, and it easily leaves each
blossom for a better. But like the bee, while impelled by an instinct
that makes it search for sugar, it sucks in therewith its solid
sustenance.
I am not quite certain that the bee does exactly do this; but it is just
the kind of thing that the bee is likely to do. And in any case it is
precisely the thing which the reading public does. It will not read
unless it is tempted by the sugary sweetness of the romantic interest.
It must have its hero and its heroine and its course of love that never
will run smooth. For information the reader cares nothing. If he absorbs
it, it must be by accident, and unawares. He passes over the heavy tomes
filled with valuable fact, and settles like the random bee upon the
bright flowers of contemporary romance.
Hence if the reader is to be ensnared into absorbing something useful,
it must be hidden somehow among the flowers. A treatise on religion must
be disguised as a love story in which a young clergyman, sworn into holy
orders, falls in love with an actress. The facts of history are imparted
by a love story centering around the adventures of a hitherto unknown
son of Louis the Fourteenth. And a discussion of the relations of labor
and capital takes the form of a romance in which the daughter of a
multi-millionaire steps voluntarily out of her Fifth Avenue home to work
in a steam laundry.
Such is the recognized method by which the great unthinking public is
taught to think. Slavery was not fully known till Mrs. Stowe wrote
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the slow tyranny of the law's delay was taught
to the world for ever in the pages of "Bleak House."
So it has been with socialism. No single influence ever brought its
ideas and its propaganda so forcibly and clearly before the public mind
as Mr. Edward Bellamy's brilliant novel, "Looking Backward," published
some thirty years ago. The task was arduous. Social and economic theory
is heavy to the verge of being indigestible. There is no such thing as a
gay book on political economy for reading in a hammock. Yet Mr. Bellamy
succeeded. His book is in cold reality nothing but a series of
conversations explaining how a socialist commonwealth is supposed to
work. Yet he contrives to bring into it a hero and a heroine, and
somehow the warm beating of their hearts and the stolen glances in their
eyes breathe into the dry dust of economic argument the breath of life.
Nor was ever a better presentation made of the essential program of
socialism.
It is worth while then, as was said in the preceding chapter, to
consider Mr. Bellamy's commonwealth as the most typical and the most
carefully constructed of all the ready-made socialisms that have been
put forward.
The mere machinery of the story can be lightly passed over. It is
intended simply as the sugar that lures the random bee. The hero, living
in Boston in 1887, is supposed to fall asleep in a deep, underground
chamber which he has made for himself as a remedy against a harassing
insomnia. Unknown to the sleeper the house above his retreat is burned
down. He remains in a trance for a hundred and thirteen years and awakes
to find himself in the Boston of the year 2000 A. D. Kind hands remove
him from his sepulcher. He is revived. He finds himself under the care
of a certain learned and genial Dr. Leete, whose house stands on the
very site where once the sleeper lived. The beautiful daughter of Dr.
Leete looks upon the newcomer from the lost world with eyes in which, to
the mind of the sagacious reader, love is seen at once to dawn. In
reality she is the great-granddaughter of the fiancée whom the sleeper
was to have married in his former life; thus a faint suggestion of the
transmigration of souls illuminates their intercourse. Beyond that there
is no story and at the end of the book the sleeper, in another dream,
is conveniently transported back to 1887 which he can now contrast, in
horror, with the ideal world of 2000 A. D.
And what was this world? The sleeper's first vision of it was given him
by Dr. Leete, who took him to the house top and let him see the Boston
of the future. Wide avenues replace the crowded, noisy streets. There
are no shops but only here and there among the trees great marble
buildings, the emporiums from which the goods are delivered to the
purple public.
And the goods are delivered indeed! Dr. Leete explains it all with
intervals of grateful cigar smoking and of music and promenades with the
beautiful Edith, and meals in wonderful communistic restaurants with
romantic waiters, who feel themselves, _mirabile dictu_, quite
independent.
And this is how the commonwealth operates. Everybody works or at least
works until the age of forty, so that it may be truly said in these
halcyon days everybody works but father. But the work of life does not
begin till education ends at the age of twenty-one. After that all the
young men and women pass for three years into the general "Industrial
Army," much as the young men used to pass into the ranks of
conscription. Afterwards each person may select any trade that he likes.
But the hours are made longer or shorter according to whether too many
or too few young people apply to come in. A gardener works for more
hours than a scavenger. Yet all occupations are equally honorable. The
wages of all the people are equal; or rather there are no wages at all,
as the workers merely receive cards, which entitle them to goods of such
and such a quantity at any of the emporiums. The cards are punched out
as the goods are used. The goods are all valued according to the amount
of time used in their making and each citizen draws out the same total
amount. But he may take it out in installments just as he likes, drawing
many things one month and few the next. He may even get goods in advance
if he has any special need. He may, within a certain time limit, save up
his cards, but it must be remembered that the one thing which no card
can buy and which no citizens can own is the "means of production."
These belong collectively to all. Land, mines, machinery, factories and
the whole mechanism of transport, these things are public property
managed by the State. Its workers in their use of them are all directed
by public authority as to what they shall make and when they shall make
it, and how much shall be made. On these terms all share alike; the
cripple receives as much as the giant; the worker of exceptional
dexterity and energy the same as his slower and less gifted fellow.
All the management, the control--and let this be noted, for there is no
escape from it either by Mr. Bellamy or by anybody else--is exercised by
boards of officials elected by the people. All the complex organization
by which production goes on by which the workers are supervised and
shifted from trade to trade, by which their requests for a change of
work or an extension of credit are heard and judged--all of this is done
by the elected "bosses." One lays stress on this not because it is Mr.
Bellamy's plan, but because it is, and it _has to be_, the plan of
anybody who constructs a socialist commonwealth.
Mr. Bellamy has many ingenious arrangements to meet the needs of people
who want to be singers or actors or writers,--in other words, who do not
want to work. They may sing or act as much as they like, provided that
enough other people will hand over enough of their food cards to keep
them going. But if no one wants to hear them sing or see them act they
may starve,--just as they do now. Here the author harks back
unconsciously to his nineteenth century individualism; he need not have
done so; other socialist writers would have it that one of the
everlasting boards would "sit on" every aspiring actor or author before
he was allowed to begin. But we may take it either way. It is not the
major point. There is no need to discuss the question of how to deal
with the artist under socialism. If the rest of it were all right, no
one need worry about the artist. Perhaps he would do better without
being remunerated at all. It is doubtful whether the huge commercial
premium that greets success to-day does good or harm. But let it pass.
It is immaterial to the present matter.
One comes back to the essential question of the structure of the
commonwealth. Can such a thing, or anything conceived in its likeness,
possibly work? The answer is, and must be, absolutely and emphatically
no.
Let anyone conversant with modern democracy as it is,--not as its
founders dreamed of it,--picture to himself the operation of a system
whereby anything and everything is controlled by elected officials, from
whom there is no escape, outside of whom is no livelihood and to whom
all men must bow! Democracy, let us grant it, is the best system of
government as yet operative in this world of sin. Beside autocratic
kingship it shines with a white light; it is obviously the portal of the
future. But we know it now too well to idealize its merits.
A century and a half ago when the world was painfully struggling out of
the tyranny of autocratic kingship, when English liberalism was in its
cradle, when Thomas Jefferson was composing the immortal phrases of the
Declaration of Independence and unknown patriots dreamed of freedom in
France,--at such an epoch it was but natural that the principle of
popular election should be idealized as the sovereign remedy for the
political evils of mankind. It was natural and salutary that it should
be so. The force of such idealization helped to carry forward the human
race to a new milestone on the path of progress.
But when it is proposed to entrust to the method of elective control not
a part but the whole of the fortunes of humanity, to commit to it not
merely the form of government and the necessary maintenance of law,
order and public safety, but the whole operation of the production and
distribution of the world's goods, the case is altered. The time is ripe
then for retrospect over the experience of the nineteenth century and
for a realization of what has proved in that experience the peculiar
defects of elective democracy.
Mr. Bellamy pictures his elected managers,--as every socialist has to
do,--as a sagacious and paternal group, free from the interest of self
and the play of the baser passions and animated only by the thought of
the public good. Gravely they deliberate; wisely and justly they decide.
Their gray heads--for Bellamy prefers them old--are bowed in quiet
confabulation over the nice adjustment of the national production, over
the petition of this or that citizen. The public care sits heavily on
their breast. Their own peculiar fortune they have lightly passed by.
They do not favor their relations or their friends. They do not count
their hours of toil. They do not enumerate their gain. They work, in
short, as work the angels.
Now let me ask in the name of sanity where are such officials to be
found? Here and there, perhaps, one sees in the world of to-day in the
stern virtue of an honorable public servant some approximation to such a
civic ideal. But how much, too, has been seen of the rule of "cliques"
and "interests" and "bosses;" of the election of genial incompetents
popular as spendthrifts; of crooked partisans warm to their friends and
bitter to their enemies; of administration by a party for a party; and
of the insidious poison of commercial greed defiling the wells of public
honesty. The unending conflict between business and politics, between
the private gain and the public good, has been for two generations the
despair of modern democracy. It turns this way and that in its vain
effort to escape corruption. It puts its faith now in representative
legislatures, and now in appointed boards and commissions; it appeals to
the vote of the whole people or it places an almost autocratic power and
a supreme responsibility in the hands of a single man. And nowhere has
the escape been found. The melancholy lesson is being learned that the
path of human progress is arduous and its forward movement slow and that
no mere form of government can aid unless it is inspired by a higher
public spirit of the individual citizen than we have yet managed to
achieve.
And of the world of to-day, be it remembered, elective democratic
control covers only a part of the field. Under socialism it covers it
all. To-day in our haphazard world a man is his own master; often indeed
the mastership is but a pitiful thing, little more than being master of
his own failure and starvation; often indeed the dead weight of
circumstance, the accident of birth, the want of education, may so press
him down that his freedom is only a mockery. Let us grant all that. But
under socialism freedom is gone. There is nothing but the rule of the
elected boss. The worker is commanded to his task and obey he must. If
he will not, there is, there can only be, the prison and the scourge, or
to be cast out in the wilderness to starve.
Consider what it would mean to be under a socialist state. Here for
example is a worker who is, who says he is, too ill to work. He begs
that he may be set free. The grave official, as Mr. Bellamy sees him,
looks at the worker's tongue. "My poor fellow," says he, "you are indeed
ill. Go and rest yourself under a shady tree while the others are busy
with the harvest." So speaks the ideal official dealing with the ideal
citizen in the dream life among the angels. But suppose that the worker,
being not an angel but a human being, is but a mere hulking, lazy brute
who prefers to sham sick rather than endure the tedium of toil. Or
suppose that the grave official is not an angel, but a man of hateful
heart or one with a personal spite to vent upon his victim. What then?
How could one face a régime in which the everlasting taskmaster held
control? There is nothing like it among us at the present day except
within the melancholy precincts of the penitentiary. There and there
only, the socialist system is in operation.
Who can deny that under such a system the man with the glib tongue and
the persuasive manner, the babbling talker and the scheming organizer,
would secure all the places of power and profit, while patient merit
went to the wall?
Or turn from the gray officials to the purple citizens of the soap
bubble commonwealth of socialism. All work, we are told, and all receive
their remuneration. We must not think of it as money-wages, but, all
said and done, an allotted share of goods, marked out upon a card,
comes pretty much to the same thing. The wages that the citizens receive
must either be equal or not equal. That at least is plain logic. Either
everybody gets exactly the same wages irrespective of capability and
diligence, or else the wages or salaries or whatever one calls them, are
graded, so that one receives much and the other little.
Now either of these alternatives spells disaster. If the wages are
graded according to capacity, then the grading is done by the
everlasting elective officials. They can, and they will, vote themselves
and their friends or adherents into the good jobs and the high places.
The advancement of a bright and capable young man will depend, not upon
what he does, but upon what the elected bosses are pleased to do with
him; not upon the strength of his own hands, but upon the strength of
the "pull" that he has with the bosses who run the part of the industry
that he is in. Unequal wages under socialism would mean a fierce and
corrupt scramble for power, office and emolument, beside which the
utmost aberrations of Tammany Hall would seem as innocuous as a Sunday
School picnic.
"But," objects Mr. Bellamy or any other socialist, "you forget. Please
remember that under socialism the scramble for wealth is limited; no man
can own capital, but only consumption goods. The most that any man may
acquire is merely the articles that he wants to consume, not the engines
and machinery of production itself. Hence even avarice dwindles and
dies, when its wonted food of 'capitalism' is withdrawn."
But surely this point of view is the very converse of the teachings of
common sense. "Consumption goods" are the very things that we _do_ want.
All else is but a means to them. One admits, as per exception, the queer
acquisitiveness of the miser-millionaire, playing the game for his own
sake. Undoubtedly he exists. Undoubtedly his existence is a product of
the system, a pathological product, a kind of elephantiasis of
individualism. But speaking broadly, consumption goods, present or
future, are the end in sight of the industrial struggle. Give me the
houses and the gardens, the yachts, the motor cars and the champagne and
I do not care who owns the gravel crusher and the steam plow. And if
under a socialist commonwealth a man can vote to himself or gain by the
votes of his adherents, a vast income of consumption goods and leave to
his unhappy fellow a narrow minimum of subsistence, then the resulting
evil of inequality is worse, far worse than it could even be to-day.
Or try, if one will, the other horn of the dilemma. That, too, one will
find as ill a resting place as an upright thistle. Let the wages,--as
with Mr. Bellamy,--all be equal. The managers then cannot vote
themselves large emoluments if they try. But what about the purple
citizens? Will they work, or will they lie round in their purple
garments and loaf? Work? Why should they work, their pay is there "fresh
and fresh"? Why should they turn up on time for their task? Why should
they not dawdle at their labor sitting upon the fence in endless
colloquy while the harvest rots upon the stalk? If among them is one
who cares to work with a fever of industry that even socialism cannot
calm, let him do it. We, his fellows, will take our time. Our pay is
there as certain and as sound as his. Not for us the eager industry and
the fond plans for the future,--for the home and competence--that
spurred on the strenuous youth of old days,--not for us the earnest
planning of the husband and wife thoughtful and anxious for the future
of their little ones. Not for us the honest penny saved for a rainy day.
Here in the dreamland of socialism there are no rainy days. It is
sunshine all the time in this lotus land of the loafer. And for the
future, let the "State" provide; for the children's welfare let the
"State" take thought; while we live it shall feed us, when we fall ill
it shall tend us and when we die it shall bury us. Meantime let us eat,
drink and be merry and work as little as we may. Let us sit among the
flowers. It is too hot to labor. Let us warm ourselves beside the public
stove. It is too cold to work.
But what? Such conduct, you say, will not be allowed in the
commonwealth. Idleness and slovenly, careless work will be forbidden?
Ah! then you must mean that beside the worker will be the overseer with
the whip; the time-clock will mark his energy upon its dial; the machine
will register his effort; and if he will not work there is lurking for
him in the background the shadowed door of the prison. Exactly and
logically so. Socialism, in other words, is slavery.
But here the socialist and his school interpose at once with an
objection. Under the socialist commonwealth, they say, the people will
want to work; they will have acquired a new civic spirit; they will work
eagerly and cheerfully for the sake of the public good and from their
love of the system under which they live. The loafer will be extinct.
The sponge and the parasite will have perished. Even crime itself, so
the socialist tells us, will diminish to the vanishing point, till there
is nothing of it except here and there a sort of pathological survival,
an atavism, or a "throwing back" to the forgotten sins of the
grandfathers. Here and there, some poor fellow afflicted with this
disease may break into my socialistic house and steal my pictures and my
wine. Poor chap! Deal with him very gently. He is not wicked. He is ill.
This last argument, in a word, begs the whole question. With perfect
citizens any government is good. In a population of angels a socialistic
commonwealth would work to perfection. But until we have the angels we
must keep the commonwealth waiting.
Nor is it necessary here to discuss the hundred and one modifications of
the socialistic plan. Each and all fail for one and the same reason. The
municipal socialist, despairing of the huge collective state, dreams of
his little town as an organic unit in which all share alike; the
syndicalist in his fancy sees his trade united into a co-operative body
in which all are equal; the gradualist, in whose mind lingers the leaven
of doubt, frames for himself a hazy vision of a prolonged preparation
for the future, of socialism achieved little by little, the citizens
being trained as it goes on till they are to reach somehow or somewhere
in cloud land the nirvana of the elimination of self; like indeed, they
are, to the horse in the ancient fable that was being trained to live
without food but died, alas, just as the experiment was succeeding.
There is no way out. Socialism is but a dream, a bubble floating in the
air. In the light of its opalescent colors we may see many visions of
what we might be if we were better than we are, we may learn much that
is useful as to what we can be even as we are; but if we mistake the
floating bubble for the marble palaces of the city of desire, it will
lead us forward in our pursuit till we fall over the edge of the abyss
beyond which is chaos.
_VII.--What Is Possible and What Is Not_
SOCIALISM, then, will not work, and neither will individualism, or at
least the older individualism that we have hitherto made the basis of
the social order. Here, therefore, stands humanity, in the middle of its
narrow path in sheer perplexity, not knowing which way to turn. On
either side is the brink of an abyss. On one hand is the yawning gulf of
social catastrophe represented by socialism. On the other, the slower,
but no less inevitable disaster that would attend the continuation in
its present form of the system under which we have lived. Either way
lies destruction; the one swift and immediate as a fall from a great
height; the other gradual, but equally dreadful, as the slow
strangulation in a morass. Somewhere between the two lies such narrow
safety as may be found.
The Ancients were fond of the metaphor, taken from the vexed Sicilian
Seas, of Scylla and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threatened the
affrightened mariner on either side. To avoid one he too hastily cast
the ship to destruction in the other. Such is precisely the position
that has been reached at the present crisis in the course of human
progress. When we view the shortcomings of the present individualism,
its waste of energy, its fretful overwork, its cruel inequality and the
bitter lot that it brings to the uncounted millions of the submerged, we
are inclined to cry out against it, and to listen with a ready ear to
the easy promises of the idealist. But when we turn to the contrasted
fallacies of socialism, its obvious impracticality and the dark gulf of
social chaos that yawns behind it, we are driven back shuddering to
cherish rather the ills we have than fly to others we know not of.
Yet out of the whole discussion of the matter some few things begin to
merge into the clearness of certain day. It is clear enough on the one
hand that we can expect no sudden and complete transformation of the
world in which we live. Such a process is impossible. The industrial
system is too complex, its roots are too deeply struck and its whole
organism of too delicate a growth to permit us to tear it from the soil.
Nor is humanity itself fitted for the kind of transformation which fills
the dreams of the perfectionist. The principle of selfishness that has
been the survival instinct of existence since life first crawled from
the slime of a world in evolution, is as yet but little mitigated. In
the long process of time some higher cosmic sense may take its place. It
has not done so yet. If the kingdom of socialism were opened to-morrow,
there are but few fitted to enter.