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 was
inclined to wakefulness nothing would please him better than to bear me
company. "I am a late bird, myself," he said, "and, without suspicion
of flattery, I may say that a companion more interesting than yourself
could scarcely be imagined. It is decidedly not often that one has a
chance to converse with a man of the nineteenth century."
Now I had been looking forward all the evening with some dread to the
time when I should be alone, on retiring for the night. Surrounded by
these most friendly strangers, stimulated and supported by their
sympathetic interest, I had been able to keep my mental balance. Even
then, however, in pauses of the conversation I had had glimpses, vivid
as lightning flashes, of the horror of strangeness that was waiting to
be faced when I could no longer command diversion. I knew I could not
sleep that night, and as for lying awake and thinking, it argues no
cowardice, I am sure, to confess that I was afraid of it. When, in
reply to my host's question, I frankly told him this, he replied that
it would be strange if I did not feel just so, but that I need have no
anxiety about sleeping; whenever I wanted to go to bed, he would give
me 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 old
citizen.
"Before I acquired that," I replied, "I must know a little more about
the sort of Boston I have come back to. You told me when we were upon
the house-top that though a century only had elapsed since I fell
asleep, it had been marked by greater changes in the conditions of
humanity than many a previous millennium. With the city before me I
could well believe that, but I am very curious to know what some of the
changes have been. To make a beginning somewhere, for the subject is
doubtless a large one, what solution, if any, have you found for the
labor 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 a
hundred years to learn what the right answer was, if, indeed, you have
found 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 may
claim to have solved it. Society would indeed have fully deserved being
devoured if it had failed to answer a riddle so entirely simple. In
fact, to speak by the book, it was not necessary for society to solve
the riddle at all. It may be said to have solved itself. The solution
came as the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not
have terminated otherwise. All that society had to do was to recognize
and cooperate with that evolution, when its tendency had become
unmistakable."
"I can only say," I answered, "that at the time I fell asleep no such
evolution 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 the
nature of the crisis which society was nearing? Of course, I fully
credit your statement. The singular blindness of your contemporaries to
the signs of the times is a phenomenon commented on by many of our
historians, but few facts of history are more difficult for us to
realize, so obvious and unmistakable as we look back seem the
indications, which must also have come under your eyes, of the
transformation 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 you
and men of your grade of intellect took of the state and prospects of
society in 1887. You must, at least, have realized that the widespread
industrial and social troubles, and the underlying dissatisfaction of
all classes with the inequalities of society, and the general misery of
mankind, were portents of great changes of some sort."
"We did, indeed, fully realize that," I replied. "We felt that society
was dragging anchor and in danger of going adrift. Whither it would
drift nobody could say, but all feared the rocks."
"Nevertheless," said Dr. Leete, "the set of the current was perfectly
perceptible if you had but taken pains to observe it, and it was not
toward the rocks, but toward a deeper channel."
"We had a popular proverb," I replied, "that 'hindsight is better than
foresight,' the force of which I shall now, no doubt, appreciate more
fully than ever. All I can say is, that the prospect was such when I
went into that long sleep that I should not have been surprised had I
looked down from your house-top to-day on a heap of charred and
moss-grown ruins instead of this glorious city."
Dr. Leete had listened to me with close attention and nodded
thoughtfully as I finished speaking. "What you have said," he observed,
"will be regarded as a most valuable vindication of Storiot, whose
account of your era has been generally thought exaggerated in its
picture of the gloom and confusion of men's minds. That a period of
transition like that should be full of excitement and agitation was
indeed to be looked for; but seeing how plain was the tendency of the
forces in operation, it was natural to believe that hope rather than
fear would have been the prevailing temper of the popular mind."
"You have not yet told me what was the answer to the riddle which you
found," I said. "I am impatient to know by what contradiction of
natural sequence the peace and prosperity which you now seem to enjoy
could have been the outcome of an era like my own."
"Excuse me," replied my host, "but do you smoke?" It was not till our
cigars were lighted and drawing well that he resumed. "Since you are in
the humor to talk rather than to sleep, as I certainly am, perhaps I
cannot do better than to try to give you enough idea of our modern
industrial system to dissipate at least the impression that there is
any mystery about the process of its evolution. The Bostonians of your
day had the reputation of being great askers of questions, and I am
going to show my descent by asking you one to begin with. What should
you name as the most prominent feature of the labor troubles of your
day?"
"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 the
big corporations," I replied.
"That is just it," said Dr. Leete; "the organization of labor and the
strikes were an effect, merely, of the concentration of capital in
greater masses than had ever been known before. Before this
concentration began, while as yet commerce and industry were conducted
by innumerable petty concerns with small capital, instead of a small
number of great concerns with vast capital, the individual workman was
relatively important and independent in his relations to the employer.
Moreover, when a little capital or a new idea was enough to start a man
in business for himself, workingmen were constantly becoming employers
and there was no hard and fast line between the two classes. Labor
unions were needless then, and general strikes out of the question. But
when the era of small concerns with small capital was succeeded by that
of the great aggregations of capital, all this was changed. The
individual laborer, who had been relatively important to the small
employer, was reduced to insignificance and powerlessness over against
the great corporation, while at the same time the way upward to the
grade of employer was closed to him. Self-defense drove him to union
with his fellows.
"The records of the period show that the outcry against the
concentration of capital was furious. Men believed that it threatened
society with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever endured.
They believed that the great corporations were preparing for them the
yoke of a baser servitude than had ever been imposed on the race,
servitude not to men but to soulless machines incapable of any motive
but insatiable greed. Looking back, we cannot wonder at their
desperation, for certainly humanity was never confronted with a fate
more sordid and hideous than would have been the era of corporate
tyranny which they anticipated.
"Meanwhile, without being in the smallest degree checked by the clamor
against it, the absorption of business by ever larger monopolies
continued. In the United States there was not, after the beginning of
the last quarter of the century, any opportunity whatever for
individual enterprise in any important field of industry, unless backed
by a great capital. During the last decade of the century, such small
businesses as still remained were fast-failing survivals of a past
epoch, or mere parasites on the great corporations, or else existed in
fields too small to attract the great capitalists. Small businesses, as
far as they still remained, were reduced to the condition of rats and
mice, living in holes and corners, and counting on evading notice for
the enjoyment of existence. The railroads had gone on combining till a
few great syndicates controlled every rail in the land. In
manufactories, every important staple was controlled by a syndicate.
These syndicates, pools, trusts, or whatever their name, fixed prices
and crushed all competition except when combinations as vast as
themselves arose. Then a struggle, resulting in a still greater
consolidation, ensued. The great city bazar crushed it country rivals
with branch stores, and in the city itself absorbed its smaller rivals
till the business of a whole quarter was concentrated under one roof,
with a hundred former proprietors of shops serving as clerks. Having no
business of his own to put his money in, the small capitalist, at the
same time that he took service under the corporation, found no other
investment for his money but its stocks and bonds, thus becoming doubly
dependent upon it.
"The fact that the desperate popular opposition to the consolidation of
business in a few powerful hands had no effect to check it proves that
there must have been a strong economical reason for it. The small
capitalists, with their innumerable petty concerns, had in fact yielded
the field to the great aggregations of capital, because they belonged
to a day of small things and were totally incompetent to the demands of
an age of steam and telegraphs and the gigantic scale of its
enterprises. To restore the former order of things, even if possible,
would have involved returning to the day of stagecoaches. Oppressive
and intolerable as was the regime of the great consolidations of
capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit
the prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the
national industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of
management and unity of organization, and to confess that since the new
system had taken the place of the old the wealth of the world had
increased at a rate before undreamed of. To be sure this vast increase
had gone chiefly to make the rich richer, increasing the gap between
them and the poor; but the fact remained that, as a means merely of
producing wealth, capital had been proved efficient in proportion to
its consolidation. The restoration of the old system with the
subdivision of capital, if it were possible, might indeed bring back a
greater equality of conditions, with more individual dignity and
freedom, but it would be at the price of general poverty and the arrest
of material progress.
"Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the mighty
wealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without bowing down
to a plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon as men began to ask
themselves these questions, they found the answer ready for them. The
movement toward the conduct of business by larger and larger
aggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which had been
so desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its true
significance, as a process which only needed to complete its logical
evolution to open a golden future to humanity.
"Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the final
consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry and
commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of
irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their
caprice and for their profit, were intrusted to a single syndicate
representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the
common profit. The nation, that is to say, organized as the one great
business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed; it
became the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the
sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser
monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies
of which all citizens shared. The epoch of trusts had ended in The
Great Trust. In a word, the people of the United States concluded to
assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred odd years
before they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing
now for industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they had
then organized for political purposes. At last, strangely late in the
world's history, the obvious fact was perceived that no business is so
essentially the public business as the industry and commerce on which
the people's livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private
persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind,
though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering the
functions of political government to kings and nobles to be conducted
for their personal glorification."
"Such a stupendous change as you describe," said I, "did not, of
course, take place without great bloodshed and terrible convulsions."
"On the contrary," replied Dr. Leete, "there was absolutely no
violence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had become
fully 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 corporations
and those identified with them had ceased to be one of bitterness, as
they came to realize their necessity as a link, a transition phase, in
the evolution of the true industrial system. The most violent foes of
the great private monopolies were now forced to recognize how
invaluable and indispensable had been their office in educating the
people up to the point of assuming control of their own business. Fifty
years before, the consolidation of the industries of the country under
national control would have seemed a very daring experiment to the most
sanguine. But by a series of object lessons, seen and studied by all
men, the great corporations had taught the people an entirely new set
of ideas on this subject. They had seen for many years syndicates
handling revenues greater than those of states, and directing the
labors of hundreds of thousands of men with an efficiency and economy
unattainable in smaller operations. It had come to be recognized as an
axiom that the larger the business the simpler the principles that can
be applied to it; that, as the machine is truer than the hand, so the
system, which in a great concern does the work of the master's eye in a
small business, turns out more accurate results. Thus it came about
that, thanks to the corporations themselves, when it was proposed that
the nation should assume their functions, the suggestion implied
nothing which seemed impracticable even to the timid. To be sure it was
a step beyond any yet taken, a broader generalization, but the very
fact that the nation would be the sole corporation in the field would,
it was seen, relieve the undertaking of many difficulties with which
the partial monopolies had contended."