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THE
Riverside Library
* * * * *
Looking Backward
2000-1887
By
EDWARD BELLAMY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY TICKNOR AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1889, BY EDWARD BELLAMY
COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1915, AND 1917, BY EMMA S. BELLAMY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
INTRODUCTION
BY HEYWOOD BROUN
A good many of my radical friends express a certain kindly
condescension when they speak of Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward."
"Of course you know," they say, "that it really isn't first-rate
economics."
And yet in further conversation I have known a very large number of
these same somewhat scornful Socialists to admit, "You know, the first
thing that got me started to thinking about Socialism was Bellamy's
'Looking Backward.'"
From the beginning it has been a highly provocative book. It is now.
Many of the questions both of mood and technique are even more
pertinent in the year 1931 than they were in 1887. A critic of the
_Boston Transcript_ said, when the novel first appeared, that the new
State imagined by Bellamy was all very well, but that the author lost
much of his effectiveness by putting his Utopia a scant fifty years
ahead, and that he might much better have made it seventy-five
centuries.
It is true that the fifty years assigned for changing the world
utterly are almost gone by now. Not everything which was predicted in
"Looking Backward" has come to pass. But the laugh is not against
Bellamy, but against his critic. Some of the things which must have
seemed most improbable of all to the _Transcript_ man of 1887 are now
actually in being.
In one respect Edward Bellamy set down a picture of modern American
life which is almost a hundred per cent realized. It startled me to
read the passage in which Edith shows the musical schedule to Julian
West, and tells him to choose which selection he wishes to have
brought through the air into the music room. It is true that Bellamy
imagined this broadcasting to be done over telephone wires, as is
indeed the case to-day in some phases of national hook-ups. But
consider this quotation:
"He [Dr. Leete] showed how, by turning a screw, the volume of the
music could be made to fill the room, or die away to an echo so faint
and far that one could scarcely be sure whether he heard or imagined
it."
That might almost have been lifted bodily from an article in some
newspaper radio column.
But Bellamy did see with clear vision things and factors much more
important than the possibility of hearing a sermon without going to
church. Much which is now established in Soviet Russia bears at least
a likeness to the industrial army visioned in this prophetic book.
However, Communism can scarcely claim Bellamy as its own, for he
emphasizes repeatedly the non-violent features of the revolution which
he imagined. Indeed, at one point he argues that the left-wingers of
his own day impeded change by the very excesses of their technical
philosophy.
There is in his book no acceptance of a transitional stage of class
dictatorship. He sees the change coming through a general recognition
of the failings of the capitalist system. Indeed, he sees a point in
economic development where capitalism may not even be good enough for
the capitalist.
To the strict Marxian Socialist this is profound and ridiculous
heresy. To me it does not seem fantastic. And things have happened in
the world already which were not dreamt of in Karl Marx's philosophy.
The point I wish to stress is the prevalent notion that all radical
movements in America stem from the writings of foreign authors. Now,
Bellamy, of course, was familiar with the pioneer work of Marx. And
that part of it which he liked he took over. Nevertheless, he
developed a contribution which was entirely his own. It is irrelevant
to say that, after all, the two men differed largely in their view of
the technique by which the new world was to be accomplished. A
difference in technique, as Trotzky knows to his sorrow, may be as
profound as a difference in principle.
Bellamy was essentially a New-Englander. His background was that of
Boston and its remote suburbs. And when he preaches the necessity of
the coöperative commonwealth, he does it with a Yankee twang. In fact,
he is as essentially native American as Norman Thomas, the present
leader of the Socialist Party in this country.
I cannot confess any vast interest in the love story which serves as a
thread for Bellamy's vision of a reconstructed society. But it can be
said that it is so palpably a thread of sugar crystal that it need not
get in the way of any reader.
I am among those who first became interested in Socialism through
reading "Looking Backward" when I was a freshman in college. It came
in the first half-year of a course which was designed to prove that
all radical panaceas were fundamentally unsound in their conception.
The professor played fair. He gave us the arguments for the radical
cause in the fall and winter, and proceeded to demolish them in spring
and early summer.
But what one learns in the winter sticks more than words uttered in
the warmth of drowsy May and June. Possibly I took more cuts toward
the end of the lecture course. All I can remember is the arguments in
favor of the radical plans. Their fallacies I have forgotten.
I differ from Bellamy's condescending converts because I feel that he
is close to an entirely practical and possible scheme of life. Since
much of the fantastic quality of his vision has been rubbed down into
reality within half a century, I think there is at least a fair chance
that another fifty years will confirm Edward Bellamy's position as one
of the most authentic prophets of our age.
THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"
"We ask
To put forth just our strength, our human strength,
All starting fairly, all equipped alike."
"But when full roused, each giant limb awake,
Each sinew strung, the great heart pulsing fast,
He shall start up and stand on his own earth,
Then shall his long, triumphant march begin,
Thence shall his being date."
BROWNING.
The great poet's lines express Edward Bellamy's aim in writing his
famous book. That aim would realize in our country's daily being the
Great Declaration that gave us national existence; would, in equality
of opportunity, give man his own earth to stand on, and thereby--the
race for the first time enabled to enter unhampered upon the use of
its God-given possibilities--achieve a progress unexampled and
marvelous.
It is now twelve years since the writing of 'Looking Backward' changed
one of the most brilliant of the younger American authors into an
impassioned social reformer whose work was destined to have momentous
effect upon the movement of his age. His quality had hitherto been
manifest in romances like 'Doctor Heidenhof's Process' and 'Miss
Ludington's Sister,' and in many short stories exquisite in their
imaginative texture and largely distinguished by a strikingly original
development of psychical themes. Tales like 'The Blindman's World' and
'To Whom This May Come' will long linger in the memory of magazine
readers of the past twenty years.
'Doctor Heidenhof' was at once recognized as a psychological study of
uncommon power. "Its writer," said an English review, "is the lineal
intellectual descendant of Hawthorne." Nor was there in America any
lack of appreciation of that originality and that distinction of style
which mark Edward Bellamy's early work. In all this there was a strong
dominant note prophetic of the author's future activity. That note was
a steadfast faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature, a sense
of the meaning of love in its true and universal sense. 'Looking
Backward,' though ostensibly a romance, is universally recognized as a
great economic treatise in a framework of fiction. Without this guise
it could not have obtained the foothold that it did; there is just
enough of the skillful novelist's touch in its composition to give
plausibility to the book and exert a powerful influence upon the
popular imagination. The ingenious device by which a man of the
nineteenth century is transferred to the end of the twentieth, and the
vivid dramatic quality of the dream at the end of the book, are
instances of the art of the trained novelist which make the work
unique of its kind. Neither could the book have been a success had not
the world been ripe for its reception. The materials were ready and
waiting; the spark struck fire in the midst of them. Little more than
a decade has followed its publication, and the world is filled with
the agitation that it helped kindle. It has given direction to
economic thought and shape to political action.
Edward Bellamy was born in 1850,--almost exactly in the middle of the
century whose closing years he was destined so notably to affect. His
home has always been in his native village of Chicopee Falls,
Massachusetts, now a portion of the city of Chicopee, one of the group
of municipalities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He lived on
Church Street in a house long the home of his father, a beloved
Baptist clergyman of the town. His clerical ancestry is perhaps
responsible for his essentially religious nature. His maternal
grandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one of the early pastors of
Springfield, and among his paternal ancestors was Dr. Joseph Bellamy
of Bethlehem, Connecticut, a distinguished theologian of revolutionary
days, a friend of Jonathan Edwards, and the preceptor of Aaron Burr.
He, however, outgrew with his boyhood all trammels of sect. But this
inherited trait marked his social views with a strongly
anti-materialistic and spiritual cast; an ethical purpose dominated
his ideas, and he held that a merely material prosperity would not be
worth the working for as a social ideal. An equality in material
well-being, however, he regarded as the soil essential for the true
spiritual development of the race.
Young Bellamy entered Union College at Schenectady, but was not
graduated. After a year in Germany he studied law and entered the bar,
but never practiced. A literary career appealed to him more strongly,
and journalism seemed the more available gateway thereto. His first
newspaper experience was on the staff of the New York 'Evening Post,'
and from that journal he went to the Springfield 'Union.' Besides his
European trip, a journey to Hawaii by way of Panama and a return
across the continent gave a considerable geographical range to his
knowledge of the world at large.
It is notable that his first public utterance, made before a local
lyceum when a youth in his teens, was devoted to sentiments of social
reform that foreshadowed his future work. When 'Looking Backward' was
the sensation of the year, a newspaper charge brought against Mr.
Bellamy was that he was "posing for notoriety." To those who know the
retiring, modest, and almost diffident personality of the author,
nothing could have been more absurd. All opportunities to make money
upon the magnificent advertising given by a phenomenal literary
success were disregarded. There were offers of lecture engagements
that would have brought quick fortune, requests from magazine editors
for articles and stories on any terms that he might name, proffered
inducements from publishers to write a new book and to take advantage
of the occasion to make a volume of his short stories with the
assurance of a magnificent sale,--to all this he was strikingly
indifferent. Two or three public addresses, a few articles in the
reviews, and for a while the editorship of 'The New Nation,' a weekly
periodical which he established in Boston,--this was the sum of his
public activity until he should have made himself ready for a second
sustained effort. To all sordid incentives he was as indifferent as if
he had been a child of his new order, a century later. The hosts of
personal friends whom his work made for him knew him as a winsome
personality; and really to know him was to love him. His nature was
keenly sympathetic; his conversation ready and charming, quickly
responsive to suggestion, illuminated by gentle humor and occasionally
a flash of playful satire. He disliked controversy, with its waste of
energy in profitless discussion, and jestingly averred that if there
were any reformers living in his neighborhood he should move away.
The cardinal features of 'Looking Backward,' that distinguish it from
the generality of Utopian literature, lie in its definite scheme of
industrial organization on a national basis, and the equal share
allotted to all persons in the products of industry, or the public
income, on the same ground that men share equally in the free gifts of
nature, like air to breathe and water to drink; it being absolutely
impossible to determine any equitable ratio between individual
industrial effort and individual share in industrial product on a
graded basis. The book, however, was little more than an outline of
the system, and, after an interval devoted to continuous thought and
study, many points called for elaboration. Mr. Bellamy gave his last
years and his ripest efforts to an exposition of the economical and
ethical basis of the new order which he held that the natural course
of social evolution would establish.
'Equality' is the title of his last book. It is a more elaborate work
than 'Looking Backward,' and in fact is a comprehensive economic
treatise upon the subject that gives it its name. It is a sequel to
its famous predecessor, and its keynote is given in the remark that
the immortal preamble of the American Declaration of Independence
(characterized as the true constitution of the United States),
logically contained the entire statement of universal economic
equality guaranteed by the nation collectively to its members
individually. "The corner-stone of our state is economic equality, and
is not that the obvious, necessary, and only adequate pledge of these
three rights,--life, liberty, and happiness? What is life without its
material basis, and what is an equal right to life but a right to an
equal material basis for it? What is liberty? How can men be free who
must ask the right to labor and to live from their fellow-men and seek
their bread from the hands of others? How else can any government
guarantee liberty to men save by providing them a means of labor and
of life coupled with independence; and how could that be done unless
the government conducted the economic system upon which employment and
maintenance depend? Finally, what is implied in the equal right of all
to the pursuit of happiness? What form of happiness, so far as it
depends at all upon material facts, is not bound up with economic
conditions; and how shall an equal opportunity for the pursuit of
happiness be guaranteed to all save by a guarantee of economic
equality?"
The book is so full of ideas, so replete with suggestive aspects, so
rich in quotable parts, as to form an arsenal of argument for apostles
of the new democracy. As with 'Looking Backward,' the humane and
thoughtful reader will lay down 'Equality' and regard the world about
him with a feeling akin to that with which the child of the tenement
returns from his "country week" to the foul smells, the discordant
noises, the incessant strife of the wonted environment.
But the writing of 'Equality' was a task too great for the physical
strength and vitality of its author. His health, never robust, gave
way completely, and the book was finished by an indomitable and
inflexible dominion of the powerful mind over the failing body which
was nothing short of heroic. Consumption, that common New England
inheritance, developed suddenly, and in September of 1897 Mr. Bellamy
went with his family to Denver, willing to seek the cure which he
scarcely hoped to find.
The welcome accorded to him in the West, where his work had met with
widespread and profound attention, was one of his latest and greatest
pleasures. Letters came from mining camps, from farms and villages,
the writers all longing to do something for him to show their love.
The singular modesty already spoken of as characterizing Mr. Bellamy,
and an entire unwillingness to accept any personal and public
recognition, had perhaps kept him from a realization of the fact that
his fame was international. But the author of a book which in ten
years had sold nearly a million of copies in England and America, and
which had been translated into German, French, Russian, Italian,
Arabic, Bulgarian, and several other languages and dialects, found
himself not among strangers, although two thousand miles from the home
of his lifetime.
He greatly appreciated and gratefully acknowledged his welcome to
Colorado, which he left in April, 1898, when he realized that his life
was rapidly drawing to a close.
He died on Sunday morning, May 22, after a month in the old home which
he had eagerly desired to see again, leaving a widow and two young
children.
At the simple service held there, with his kindred and the friends of
a lifetime about him, the following passages from 'Looking Backward'
and 'Equality' were read as a fitting expression, in his own words, of
that hope for the bettering and uplifting of Humanity, which was the
real passion of his noble life.
"Said not the serpent in the old story, 'If you eat of the fruit of
the tree of knowledge you shall be as gods?' The promise was true in
words, but apparently there was some mistake about the tree. Perhaps
it was the tree of selfish knowledge, or else the fruit was not ripe.
The story is obscure. Christ later said the same thing when he told
men that they might be the sons of God. But he made no mistake as to
the tree he showed them, and the fruit was ripe. It was the fruit of
love, for universal love is at once the seed and fruit, cause and
effect, of the highest and completest knowledge. Through boundless
love man becomes a god, for thereby is he made conscious of his
oneness with God, and all things are put under his feet. 'If we love
one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.' 'He
that loveth his brother dwelleth in the light.' 'If any man say, I
love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.' 'He that loveth not
his brother abideth in death.' 'God is love, and he that dwelleth in
love dwelleth in God.' 'Every one that loveth knoweth God.' 'He that
loveth not knoweth not God.'
"Here is the very distillation of Christ's teaching as to the
conditions of entering on the divine life. In this we find the
sufficient explanation why the revelation which came to Christ so long
ago and to other illumined souls could not possibly be received by
mankind in general so long as an inhuman social order made a wall
between man and God, and why, the moment that wall was cast down, the
revelation flooded the earth like a sunburst.
"'If we love one another, God dwelleth in us,' and mark how the words
were made good in the way by which at last the race found God! It was
not, remember, by directly, purposely, or consciously seeking God. The
great enthusiasm of humanity which overthrew the older and brought in
the fraternal society was not primarily or consciously a Godward
aspiration at all. It was essentially a humane movement. It was a
melting and flowing forth of men's hearts toward one another; a rush
of contrite, repentant tenderness; an impassioned impulse of mutual
love and self-devotion to the common weal. But 'if we love one
another, God dwelleth in us,' and so man found it. It appears that
there came a moment, the most transcendent moment in the history of
the race of man, when with the fraternal glow of this world of
new-found embracing brothers there seems to have mingled the ineffable
thrill of a divine participation, as if the hand of God were clasped
over the joined hands of men. And so it has continued to this day and
shall for evermore.
"Your seers and poets in exalted moments had seen that death was but a
step in life, but this seemed to most of you to have been a hard
saying. Nowadays, as life advances toward its close, instead of being
shadowed by gloom, it is marked by an access of impassioned expectancy
which would cause the young to envy the old, but for the knowledge
that in a little while the same door will be opened to them. In your
day the undertone of life seems to have been one of unutterable
sadness, which, like the moaning of the sea to those who live near the
ocean, made itself audible whenever for a moment the noise and bustle
of petty engrossments ceased. Now this undertone is so exultant that
we are still to hear it.
"Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall have
passed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end is
lost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God, 'who is our
home,' the return of the individual by the way of death, and the
return of the race by the fulfillment of its evolution, when the
divine secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a
tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and,
veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race
is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The
heavens are before it."
There are those who have made strenuous objections to the ideals of
Edward Bellamy on the ground that they are based on nothing better
than purely material well-being. In the presence of the foregoing
utterance can they maintain that attitude?
SYLVESTER BAXTER.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
Historical Section Shawmut College, Boston,
December 26, 2000.
Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying
the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it
seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for
those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that
the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than
a century old. No historical fact is, however, better established than
that till nearly the end of the nineteenth century it was the general
belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking
social consequences, was destined to last, with possibly a little
patching, to the end of time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does
it seem that so prodigious a moral and material transformation as has
taken place since then could have been accomplished in so brief an
interval? The readiness with which men accustom themselves, as
matters of course, to improvements in their condition, which, when
anticipated, seemed to leave nothing more to be desired, could not be
more strikingly illustrated. What reflection could be better
calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for their
reward on the lively gratitude of future ages!
The object of this volume is to assist persons who, while desiring to
gain a more definite idea of the social contrasts between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are daunted by the formal aspect
of the histories which treat the subject. Warned by a teacher's
experience that learning is accounted a weariness to the flesh, the
author has sought to alleviate the instructive quality of the book by
casting it in the form of a romantic narrative, which he would be glad
to fancy not wholly devoid of interest on its own account.
The reader, to whom modern social institutions and their underlying
principles are matters of course, may at times find Dr. Leete's
explanations of them rather trite,--but it must be remembered that to
Dr. Leete's guest they were not matters of course, and that this book
is written for the express purpose of inducing the reader to forget
for the nonce that they are so to him. One word more. The almost
universal theme of the writers and orators who have celebrated this
bi-millennial epoch has been the future rather than the past, not the
advance that has been made, but the progress that shall be made, ever
onward and upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable destiny.
This is well, wholly well, but it seems to me that nowhere can we find
more solid ground for daring anticipations of human development during
the next one thousand years, than by "Looking Backward" upon the
progress of the last one hundred.
That this volume may be so fortunate as to find readers whose interest
in the subject shall incline them to overlook the deficiencies of the
treatment is the hope in which the author steps aside and leaves Mr.
Julian West to speak for himself.
LOOKING BACKWARD.
CHAPTER I.
I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. "What!"
you say, "eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen
fifty-seven, of course." I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was
about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after
Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east
wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period
marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the
present year of grace, 2000.
These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add
that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no
person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what
promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I
earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will
undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him
of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of
justifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when I
was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in
the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day,
or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were
to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred
to modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or
nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences
between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays,
of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was
rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of
happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury,
and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of
life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others,
rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grandparents
had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I
had any, would enjoy a like easy existence.
But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should
the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render
service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum
of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you
will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been
exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however,
was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. It
was, in fact, much larger now that three generations had been
supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of
use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like
magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily
lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting
the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. The man who
had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live
on the income of his investments. To explain at this point how the
ancient methods of industry made this possible would delay us too
much. I shall only stop now to say that interest on investments was a
species of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in
industry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able to
levy. It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems so
unnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was never
criticised by your ancestors. It had been the effort of law-givers and
prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least to
limit it to the smallest possible rate. All these efforts had,
however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the ancient
social organizations prevailed. At the time of which I write, the
latter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally given
up trying to regulate the subject at all.
By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the
way people lived together in those days, and especially of the
relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do
better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach
which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely
along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and
permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow.
Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a
road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at
the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and
comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the
scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the
straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the
competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in
life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his
child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat
to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by
which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so
easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the
coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground,
where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help
to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It
was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat,
and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends
was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.
But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very
luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of
their brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that
their own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion for
fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes;
commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who
had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place
in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep
hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their
agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger,
the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a
very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable
displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the
passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope,
exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible
compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while
others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and
injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should
be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the
specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not,
indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always some
danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would
lose their seats.
It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of
the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers'
sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to
hold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers could
only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever
fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the
funds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselves
extremely little about those who dragged the coach.
I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the
twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts,
both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first place, it was
firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in which
Society could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and the
few rode, and not only this, but that no very radical improvement even
was possible, either in the harness, the coach, the roadway, or the
distribution of the toil. It had always been as it was, and it always
would be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy
forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.
The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular
hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared,
that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled
at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher
order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems
unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that
very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing about
the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the
ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their
hands, began to fall under its influence. As for those whose parents
and grandparents before them had been so fortunate as to keep their
seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential
difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was
absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling
for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical
compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can
offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my
own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.
In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried, I was
engaged to wed Edith Bartlett. She, like myself, rode on the top of
the coach. That is to say, not to encumber ourselves further with an
illustration which has, I hope, served its purpose of giving the
reader some general impression of how we lived then, her family was
wealthy. In that age, when money alone commanded all that was
agreeable and refined in life, it was enough for a woman to be rich to
have suitors; but Edith Bartlett was beautiful and graceful also.
My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. "Handsome she might
have been," I hear them saying, "but graceful never, in the costumes
which were the fashion at that period, when the head covering was a
dizzy structure a foot tall, and the almost incredible extension of
the skirt behind by means of artificial contrivances more thoroughly
dehumanized the form than any former device of dressmakers. Fancy any
one graceful in such a costume!" The point is certainly well taken,
and I can only reply that while the ladies of the twentieth century
are lovely demonstrations of the effect of appropriate drapery in
accenting feminine graces, my recollection of their great-grandmothers
enables me to maintain that no deformity of costume can wholly
disguise them.
Our marriage only waited on the completion of the house which I was
building for our occupancy in one of the most desirable parts of the
city, that is to say, a part chiefly inhabited by the rich. For it
must be understood that the comparative desirability of different
parts of Boston for residence depended then, not on natural features,
but on the character of the neighboring population. Each class or
nation lived by itself, in quarters of its own. A rich man living
among the poor, an educated man among the uneducated, was like one
living in isolation among a jealous and alien race. When the house had
been begun, its completion by the winter of 1886 had been expected.
The spring of the following year found it, however, yet incomplete,
and my marriage still a thing of the future. The cause of a delay
calculated to be particularly exasperating to an ardent lover was a
series of strikes, that is to say, concerted refusals to work on the
part of the brick-layers, masons, carpenters, painters, plumbers, and
other trades concerned in house building. What the specific causes of
these strikes were I do not remember. Strikes had become so common at
that period that people had ceased to inquire into their particular
grounds. In one department of industry or another, they had been
nearly incessant ever since the great business crisis of 1873. In fact
it had come to be the exceptional thing to see any class of laborers
pursue their avocation steadily for more than a few months at a time.
The reader who observes the dates alluded to will of course recognize
in these disturbances of industry the first and incoherent phase of
the great movement which ended in the establishment of the modern
industrial system with all its social consequences. This is all so
plain in the retrospect that a child can understand it, but not being
prophets, we of that day had no clear idea what was happening to us.
What we did see was that industrially the country was in a very queer
way. The relation between the workingman and the employer, between
labor and capital, appeared in some unaccountable manner to have
become dislocated. The working classes had quite suddenly and very
generally become infected with a profound discontent with their
condition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only
knew how to go about it. On every side, with one accord, they
preferred demands for higher pay, shorter hours, better dwellings,
better educational advantages, and a share in the refinements and
luxuries of life, demands which it was impossible to see the way to
granting unless the world were to become a great deal richer than it
then was. Though they knew something of what they wanted, they knew
nothing of how to accomplish it, and the eager enthusiasm with which
they thronged about any one who seemed likely to give them any light
on the subject lent sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, some
of whom had little enough light to give. However chimerical the
aspirations of the laboring classes might be deemed, the devotion
with which they supported one another in the strikes, which were their
chief weapon, and the sacrifices which they underwent to carry them
out left no doubt of their dead earnestness.
As to the final outcome of the labor troubles, which was the phrase by
which the movement I have described was most commonly referred to, the
opinions of the people of my class differed according to individual
temperament. The sanguine argued very forcibly that it was in the very
nature of things impossible that the new hopes of the workingmen could
be satisfied, simply because the world had not the wherewithal to
satisfy them. It was only because the masses worked very hard and
lived on short commons that the race did not starve outright, and no
considerable improvement in their condition was possible while the
world, as a whole, remained so poor. It was not the capitalists whom
the laboring men were contending with, these maintained, but the
iron-bound environment of humanity, and it was merely a question of
the thickness of their skulls when they would discover the fact and
make up their minds to endure what they could not cure.
The less sanguine admitted all this. Of course the workingmen's
aspirations were impossible of fulfillment for natural reasons, but
there were grounds to fear that they would not discover this fact
until they had made a sad mess of society They had the votes and the
power to do so if they pleased, and their leaders meant they should.
Some of these desponding observers went so far as to predict an
impending social cataclysm. Humanity, they argued, having climbed to
the top round of the ladder of civilization, was about to take a
header into chaos, after which it would doubtless pick itself up, turn
round, and begin to climb again. Repeated experiences of this sort in
historic and prehistoric times possibly accounted for the puzzling
bumps on the human cranium. Human history, like all great movements,
was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of
indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination,
with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet
better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and
sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the
perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its
nether goal in the regions of chaos.
This, of course, was an extreme opinion, but I remember serious men
among my acquaintances who, in discussing the signs of the times,
adopted a very similar tone. It was no doubt the common opinion of
thoughtful men that society was approaching a critical period which
might result in great changes. The labor troubles, their causes,
course, and cure, took lead of all other topics in the public prints,
and in serious conversation.
The nervous tension of the public mind could not have been more
strikingly illustrated than it was by the alarm resulting from the
talk of a small band of men who called themselves anarchists, and
proposed to terrify the American people into adopting their ideas by
threats of violence, as if a mighty nation which had but just put down
a rebellion of half its own numbers, in order to maintain its
political system, were likely to adopt a new social system out of
fear.
As one of the wealthy, with a large stake in the existing order of
things, I naturally shared the apprehensions of my class. The
particular grievance I had against the working classes at the time of
which I write, on account of the effect of their strikes in postponing
my wedded bliss, no doubt lent a special animosity to my feeling
toward them.