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 acquire 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 coöperate 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 its
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 stage-coaches.
Oppressive and intolerable as was the régime 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."