"It's a little after the time you told me to wake you, sir. You did
not come out of it as quick as common, sir."
The voice was the voice of my man Sawyer. I started bolt upright in
bed and stared around. I was in my underground chamber. The mellow
light of the lamp which always burned in the room when I occupied it
illumined the familiar walls and furnishings. By my bedside, with the
glass of sherry in his hand which Dr. Pillsbury prescribed on first
rousing from a mesmeric sleep, by way of awakening the torpid physical
functions, stood Sawyer.
"Better take this right off, sir," he said, as I stared blankly at
him. "You look kind of flushed like, sir, and you need it."
I tossed off the liquor and began to realize what had happened to me.
It was, of course, very plain. All that about the twentieth century
had been a dream. I had but dreamed of that enlightened and care-free
race of men and their ingeniously simple institutions, of the glorious
new Boston with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains,
and its universal reign of comfort. The amiable family which I had
learned to know so well, my genial host and Mentor, Dr. Leete, his
wife, and their daughter, the second and more beauteous Edith, my
betrothed,--these, too, had been but figments of a vision.
For a considerable time I remained in the attitude in which this
conviction had come over me, sitting up in bed gazing at vacancy,
absorbed in recalling the scenes and incidents of my fantastic
experience. Sawyer, alarmed at my looks, was meanwhile anxiously
inquiring what was the matter with me. Roused at length by his
importunities to a recognition of my surroundings, I pulled myself
together with an effort and assured the faithful fellow that I was all
right. "I have had an extraordinary dream, that's all, Sawyer," I
said, "a most-ex-traor-dinary-dream."
I dressed in a mechanical way, feeling lightheaded and oddly uncertain
of myself, and sat down to the coffee and rolls which Sawyer was in
the habit of providing for my refreshment before I left the house. The
morning newspaper lay by the plate. I took it up, and my eye fell on
the date, May 31, 1887. I had known, of course, from the moment I
opened my eyes that my long and detailed experience in another century
had been a dream, and yet it was startling to have it so conclusively
demonstrated that the world was but a few hours older than when I had
lain down to sleep.
Glancing at the table of contents at the head of the paper, which
reviewed the news of the morning, I read the following summary:--
* * * * *
"FOREIGN AFFAIRS.--The impending war between France and Germany.
The French Chambers asked for new military credits to meet Germany's
increase of her army. Probability that all Europe will be involved in
case of war.--Great suffering among the unemployed in London. They
demand work. Monster demonstration to be made. The authorities
uneasy.--Great strikes in Belgium. The government preparing to repress
outbreaks. Shocking facts in regard to the employment of girls in
Belgium coal mines.--Wholesale evictions in Ireland.
"HOME AFFAIRS.--The epidemic of fraud unchecked. Embezzlement of
half a million in New York.--Misappropriation of a trust fund by executors.
Orphans left penniless.--Clever system of thefts by a bank teller;
$50,000 gone.--The coal barons decide to advance the price of coal and
reduce production.--Speculators engineering a great wheat corner at
Chicago.--A clique forcing up the price of coffee.--Enormous
land-grabs of Western syndicates.--Revelations of shocking corruption
among Chicago officials. Systematic bribery.--The trials of the Boodle
aldermen to go on at New York.--Large failures of business houses.
Fears of a business crisis.--A large grist of burglaries and
larcenies.--A woman murdered in cold blood for her money at New
Haven.--A householder shot by a burglar in this city last night.--A
man shoots himself in Worcester because he could not get work. A large
family left destitute.--An aged couple in New Jersey commit suicide
rather than go to the poor-house.--Pitiable destitution among the
women wage-workers in the great cities.--Startling growth of
illiteracy in Massachusetts.--More insane asylums wanted.--Decoration
Day addresses. Professor Brown's oration on the moral grandeur of
nineteenth century civilization."
* * * * *
It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked; there
could be no kind of doubt about that. Its complete microcosm this
summary of the day's news had presented, even to that last
unmistakable touch of fatuous self-complacency. Coming after such a
damning indictment of the age as that one day's chronicle of
world-wide bloodshed, greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy
of Mephistopheles, and yet of all whose eyes it had met this morning I
was, perhaps, the only one who perceived the cynicism, and but
yesterday I should have perceived it no more than the others. That
strange dream it was which had made all the difference. For I know not
how long, I forgot my surroundings after this, and was again in fancy
moving in that vivid dream-world, in that glorious city, with its
homes of simple comfort and its gorgeous public palaces. Around me
were again faces unmarred by arrogance or servility, by envy or greed,
by anxious care or feverish ambition, and stately forms of men and
women who had never known fear of a fellow man or depended on his
favor, but always, in the words of that sermon which still rang in my
ears, had "stood up straight before God."
With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable loss, not the less
poignant that it was a loss of what had never really been, I roused at
last from my reverie, and soon after left the house.
A dozen times between my door and Washington Street I had to stop and
pull myself together, such power had been in that vision of the Boston
of the future to make the real Boston strange. The squalor and
malodorousness of the town struck me, from the moment I stood upon the
street, as facts I had never before observed. But yesterday, moreover,
it had seemed quite a matter of course that some of my fellow-citizens
should wear silks, and others rags, that some should look well fed,
and others hungry. Now on the contrary the glaring disparities in the
dress and condition of the men and women who brushed each other on the
sidewalks shocked me at every step, and yet more the entire
indifference which the prosperous showed to the plight of the
unfortunate. Were these human beings, who could behold the
wretchedness of their fellows without so much as a change of
countenance? And yet, all the while, I knew well that it was I who had
changed, and not my contemporaries. I had dreamed of a city whose
people fared all alike as children of one family and were one
another's keepers in all things.
Another feature of the real Boston, which assumed the extraordinary
effect of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light,
was the prevalence of advertising. There had been no personal
advertising in the Boston of the twentieth century, because there was
no need of any, but here the walls of the buildings, the windows, the
broadsides of the newspapers in every hand, the very pavements,
everything in fact in sight, save the sky, were covered with the
appeals of individuals who sought, under innumerable pretexts, to
attract the contributions of others to their support. However the
wording might vary, the tenor of all these appeals was the same:--
"Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones,
am the right one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones.
Look at me. Make no mistake, John Jones is the man and nobody else.
Let the rest starve, but for God's sake remember John Jones!"
Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness of the spectacle most
impressed me, so suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I know
not. Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not
learn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one
another from the least to the greatest! This horrible babel of
shameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamor
of conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations, this stupendous
system of brazen beggary, what was it all but the necessity of a
society in which the opportunity to serve the world according to his
gifts, instead of being secured to every man as the first object of
social organization, had to be fought for!
I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood
and laughed aloud, to the scandal of the passers-by. For my life I
could not have helped it, with such a mad humor was I moved at sight
of the interminable rows of stores on either side, up and down the
street so far as I could see,--scores of them, to make the spectacle
more utterly preposterous, within a stone's throw devoted to selling
the same sort of goods. Stores! stores! stores! miles of stores! ten
thousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this one city, which
in my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse,
as they were ordered through one great store in every quarter, where
the buyer, without waste of time or labor, found under one roof the
world's assortment in whatever line he desired. There the labor of
distribution had been so slight as to add but a scarcely perceptible
fraction to the cost of commodities to the user. The cost of
production was virtually all he paid. But here the mere distribution
of the goods, their handling alone, added a fourth, a third, a half
and more, to the cost. All these ten thousand plants must be paid for,
their rent, their staffs of superintendence, their platoons of
salesmen, their ten thousand sets of accountants, jobbers, and
business dependents, with all they spent in advertising themselves and
fighting one another, and the consumers must do the paying. What a
famous process for beggaring a nation!
Were these serious men I saw about me, or children, who did their
business on such a plan? Could they be reasoning beings, who did not
see the folly which, when the product is made and ready for use,
wastes so much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with a
spoon that leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they not
likely to go hungry?
I had passed through Washington Street thousands of times before and
viewed the ways of those who sold merchandise, but my curiosity
concerning them was as if I had never gone by their way before. I took
wondering note of the show windows of the stores, filled with goods
arranged with a wealth of pains and artistic device to attract the
eye. I saw the throngs of ladies looking in, and the proprietors
eagerly watching the effect of the bait. I went within and noted the
hawk-eyed floor-walker watching for business, overlooking the clerks,
keeping them up to their task of inducing the customers to buy, buy,
buy, for money if they had it, for credit if they had it not, to buy
what they wanted not, more than they wanted, what they could not
afford. At times I momentarily lost the clue and was confused by the
sight. Why this effort to induce people to buy? Surely that had
nothing to do with the legitimate business of distributing products to
those who needed them. Surely it was the sheerest waste to force upon
people what they did not want, but what might be useful to another.
The nation was so much the poorer for every such achievement. What
were these clerks thinking of? Then I would remember that they were
not acting as distributors like those in the store I had visited in
the dream Boston. They were not serving the public interest, but their
immediate personal interest, and it was nothing to them what the
ultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, if
but they increased their own hoard, for these goods were their own,
and the more they sold and the more they got for them, the greater
their gain. The more wasteful the people were, the more articles they
did not want which they could be induced to buy, the better for these
sellers. To encourage prodigality was the express aim of the ten
thousand stores of Boston.
Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a whit worse men than any
others in Boston. They must earn a living and support their families,
and how were they to find a trade to do it by which did not
necessitate placing their individual interests before those of others
and that of all? They could not be asked to starve while they waited
for an order of things such as I had seen in my dream, in which the
interest of each and that of all were identical. But, God in heaven!
what wonder, under such a system as this about me--what wonder that
the city was so shabby, and the people so meanly dressed, and so many
of them ragged and hungry!
Some time after this it was that I drifted over into South Boston and
found myself among the manufacturing establishments. I had been in
this quarter of the city a hundred times before, just as I had been on
Washington Street, but here, as well as there, I now first perceived
the true significance of what I witnessed. Formerly I had taken pride
in the fact that, by actual count, Boston had some four thousand
independent manufacturing establishments; but in this very
multiplicity and independence I recognized now the secret of the
insignificant total product of their industry.
If Washington Street had been like a lane in Bedlam, this was a
spectacle as much more melancholy as production is a more vital
function, than distribution. For not only were these four thousand
establishments not working in concert, and for that reason alone
operating at prodigious disadvantage, but, as if this did not involve
a sufficiently disastrous loss of power, they were using their utmost
skill to frustrate one another's effort, praying by night and working
by day for the destruction of one another's enterprises.
The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers resounding from every side
was not the hum of a peaceful industry, but the clangor of swords
wielded by foemen. These mills and shops were so many forts, each
under its own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops about it,
and its sappers busy below, undermining them.
Within each one of these forts the strictest organization of industry
was insisted on; the separate gangs worked under a single central
authority. No interference and no duplicating of work were permitted.
Each had his allotted task, and none were idle. By what hiatus in the
logical faculty, by what lost link of reasoning, account, then, for
the failure to recognize the necessity of applying the same principle
to the organization of the national industries as a whole, to see that
if lack of organization could impair the efficiency of a shop, it must
have effects as much more disastrous in disabling the industries of
the nation at large as the latter are vaster in volume and more
complex in the relationship of their parts.
People would be prompt enough to ridicule an army in which there were
neither companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, or army
corps,--no unit of organization, in fact, larger than the corporal's
squad, with no officer higher than a corporal, and all the corporals
equal in authority. And yet just such an army were the manufacturing
industries of nineteenth century Boston, an army of four thousand
independent squads led by four thousand independent corporals, each
with a separate plan of campaign.
Knots of idle men were to be seen here and there on every side, some
idle because they could find no work at any price, others because they
could not get what they thought a fair price.
I accosted some of the latter, and they told me their grievances. It
was very little comfort I could give them. "I am sorry for you," I
said. "You get little enough, certainly, and yet the wonder to me is,
not that industries conducted as these are do not pay you living
wages, but that they are able to pay you any wages at all."
Making my way back again after this to the peninsular city, toward
three o'clock I stood on State Street, staring, as if I had never seen
them before, at the banks and brokers' offices, and other financial
institutions, of which there had been in the State Street of my vision
no vestige. Business men, confidential clerks, and errand boys were
thronging in and out of the banks, for it wanted but a few minutes of
the closing hour. Opposite me was the bank where I did business, and
presently I crossed the street, and, going in with the crowd, stood in
a recess of the wall looking on at the army of clerks handling money,
and the cues of depositors at the tellers' windows. An old gentleman
whom I knew, a director of the bank, passing me and observing my
contemplative attitude, stopped a moment.
"Interesting sight, isn't it, Mr. West," he said. "Wonderful piece of
mechanism; I find it so myself. I like sometimes to stand and look on
at it just as you are doing. It's a poem, sir, a poem, that's what I
call it. Did you ever think, Mr. West, that the bank is the heart of
the business system? From it and to it, in endless flux and reflux,
the life blood goes. It is flowing in now. It will flow out again in
the morning;" and pleased with his little conceit, the old man passed
on smiling.
Yesterday I should have considered the simile apt enough, but since
then I had visited a world incomparably more affluent than this, in
which money was unknown and without conceivable use. I had learned
that it had a use in the world around me only because the work of
producing the nation's livelihood, instead of being regarded as the
most strictly public and common of all concerns, and as such conducted
by the nation, was abandoned to the hap-hazard efforts of individuals.
This original mistake necessitated endless exchanges to bring about
any sort of general distribution of products. These exchanges money
effected--how equitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenement
house districts to the Back Bay--at the cost of an army of men taken
from productive labor to manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns
of its machinery, and a generally debauching influence on mankind
which had justified its description, from ancient time, as the "root
of all evil."
Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken the
throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called
"a wonderful piece of mechanism" was an imperfect device to remedy an
unnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.
After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the business
quarter for an hour or two, and later sat a while on one of the
benches of the Common, finding an interest merely in watching the
throngs that passed, such as one has in studying the populace of a
foreign city, so strange since yesterday had my fellow citizens and
their ways become to me. For thirty years I had lived among them, and
yet I seemed to have never noted before how drawn and anxious were
their faces, of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute faces of
the educated as well as the dull masks of the ignorant. And well it
might be so, for I saw now, as never before I had seen so plainly,
that each as he walked constantly turned to catch the whispers of a
spectre at his ear, the spectre of Uncertainty. "Do your work never so
well," the spectre was whispering,--"rise early and toil till late,
rob cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never know security. Rich
you may be now and still come to poverty at last. Leave never so much
wealth to your children, you cannot buy the assurance that your son
may not be the servant of your servant, or that your daughter will not
have to sell herself for bread."
A man passing by thrust an advertising card in my hand, which set
forth the merits of some new scheme of life insurance. The incident
reminded me of the only device, pathetic in its admission of the
universal need it so poorly supplied, which offered these tired and
hunted men and women even a partial protection from uncertainty. By
this means, those already well-to-do, I remembered, might purchase a
precarious confidence that after their death their loved ones would
not, for a while at least, be trampled under the feet of men. But this
was all, and this was only for those who could pay well for it. What
idea was possible to these wretched dwellers in the land of Ishmael,
where every man's hand was against each and the hand of each against
every other, of true life insurance as I had seen it among the people
of that dream land, each of whom, by virtue merely of his membership
in the national family, was guaranteed against need of any sort, by a
policy underwritten by one hundred million fellow countrymen.
Some time after this it was that I recall a glimpse of myself standing
on the steps of a building on Tremont Street, looking at a military
parade. A regiment was passing. It was the first sight in that dreary
day which had inspired me with any other emotions than wondering pity
and amazement. Here at last were order and reason, an exhibition of
what intelligent coöperation can accomplish. The people who stood
looking on with kindling faces,--could it be that the sight had for
them no more than but a spectacular interest? Could they fail to see
that it was their perfect concert of action, their organization under
one control, which made these men the tremendous engine they were,
able to vanquish a mob ten times as numerous? Seeing this so plainly,
could they fail to compare the scientific manner in which the nation
went to war with the unscientific manner in which it went to work?
Would they not query since what time the killing of men had been a
task so much more important than feeding and clothing them, that a
trained army should be deemed alone adequate to the former, while the
latter was left to a mob?
It was now toward nightfall, and the streets were thronged with the
workers from the stores, the shops, and mills. Carried along with the
stronger part of the current, I found myself, as it began to grow
dark, in the midst of a scene of squalor and human degradation such as
only the South Cove tenement district could present. I had seen the
mad wasting of human labor; here I saw in direst shape the want that
waste had bred.
From the black doorways and windows of the rookeries on every side
came gusts of fetid air. The streets and alleys reeked with the
effluvia of a slave ship's between-decks. As I passed I had glimpses
within of pale babies gasping out their lives amid sultry stenches, of
hopeless-faced women deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood no
trait save weakness, while from the windows leered girls with brows of
brass. Like the starving bands of mongrel curs that infest the streets
of Moslem towns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled the
air with shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the
garbage that littered the court-yards.
There was nothing in all this that was new to me. Often had I passed
through this part of the city and witnessed its sights with feelings
of disgust mingled with a certain philosophical wonder at the
extremities mortals will endure and still cling to life. But not alone
as regarded the economical follies of this age, but equally as touched
its moral abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since that
vision of another century. No more did I look upon the woful dwellers
in this Inferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human.
I saw in them my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh
of my flesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of human
wretchedness about me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced
my heart like a knife, so that I could not repress sighs and groans. I
not only saw but felt in my body all that I saw.
Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more
closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were
so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the
_hic jacet_ of a soul dead within.
As I looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was
affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent
spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the
ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and
soul had lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly faces,
and of the reproach that could not be gainsaid which was in their
eyes, that the full piteousness of the ruin that had been wrought was
revealed to me. I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony,
for I had been one of those who had endured that these things should
be. I had been one of those who, well knowing that they were, had not
desired to hear or be compelled to think much of them, but had gone on
as if they were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit. Therefore now
I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of
strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out
against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements,
every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called
after me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?
I have no clear recollection of anything after this till I found
myself standing on the carved stone steps of the magnificent home of
my betrothed in Commonwealth avenue. Amid the tumult of my thoughts
that day, I had scarcely once thought of her, but now obeying some
unconscious impulse my feet had found the familiar way to her door. I
was told that the family were at dinner, but word was sent out that I
should join them at table. Besides the family, I found several guests
present, all known to me. The table glittered with plate and costly
china. The ladies were sumptuously dressed and wore the jewels of
queens. The scene was one of costly elegance and lavish luxury. The
company was in excellent spirits, and there was plentiful laughter and
a running fire of jests.
To me it was as if, in wandering through the place of doom, my blood
turned to tears by its sights, and my spirit attuned to sorrow, pity,
and despair, I had happened in some glade upon a merry party of
roisterers. I sat in silence until Edith began to rally me upon my
sombre looks, What ailed me? The others presently joined in the
playful assault, and I became a target for quips and jests. Where had
I been, and what had I seen to make such a dull fellow of me?
"I have been in Golgotha," at last I answered. "I have seen Humanity
hanging on a cross! Do none of you know what sights the sun and stars
look down on in this city, that you can think and talk of anything
else? Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of
men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from
birth to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hush
your laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous crying
of the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of men
sodden in misery, turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an
army of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped
your ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds? For me, I can
hear nothing else."
Silence followed my words. A passion of pity had shaken me as I spoke,
but when I looked around upon the company, I saw that, far from being
stirred as I was, their faces expressed a cold and hard astonishment,
mingled in Edith's with extreme mortification, in her father's with
anger. The ladies were exchanging scandalized looks, while one of the
gentlemen had put up his eyeglass and was studying me with an air of
scientific curiosity, When I saw that things which were to me so
intolerable moved them not at all, that words that melted my heart to
speak had only offended them with the speaker, I was at first stunned
and then overcome with a desperate sickness and faintness at the
heart. What hope was there for the wretched, for the world, if
thoughtful men and tender women were not moved by things like these!
Then I bethought myself that it must be because I had not spoken
aright. No doubt I had put the case badly. They were angry because
they thought I was berating them, when God knew I was merely thinking
of the horror of the fact without any attempt to assign the
responsibility for it.
I restrained my passion, and tried to speak calmly and logically that
I might correct this impression. I told them that I had not meant to
accuse them, as if they, or the rich in general, were responsible for
the misery of the world. True indeed it was, that the superfluity
which they wasted would, otherwise bestowed, relieve much bitter
suffering. These costly viands, these rich wines, these gorgeous
fabrics and glistening jewels represented the ransom of many lives.
They were verily not without the guiltiness of those who waste in a
land stricken with famine. Nevertheless, all the waste of all the
rich, were it saved, would go but a little way to cure the poverty of
the world. There was so little to divide that even if the rich went
share and share with the poor, there would be but a common fare of
crusts, albeit made very sweet then by brotherly love.
The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of
the world's poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of
men, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake,
a colossal world-darkening blunder. And then I showed them how four
fifths of the labor of men was utterly wasted by the mutual warfare,
the lack of organization and concert among the workers. Seeking to
make the matter very plain, I instanced the case of arid lands where
the soil yielded the means of life only by careful use of the
watercourses for irrigation. I showed how in such countries it was
counted the most important function of the government to see that the
water was not wasted by the selfishness or ignorance of individuals,
since otherwise there would be famine. To this end its use was
strictly regulated and systematized, and individuals of their mere
caprice were not permitted to dam it or divert it, or in any way to
tamper with it.
The labor of men, I explained, was the fertilizing stream which alone
rendered earth habitable. It was but a scanty stream at best, and its
use required to be regulated by a system which expended every drop to
the best advantage, if the world were to be supported in abundance.
But how far from any system was the actual practice! Every man wasted
the precious fluid as he wished, animated only by the equal motives of
saving his own crop and spoiling his neighbor's, that his might sell
the better. What with greed and what with spite some fields were
flooded while others were parched, and half the water ran wholly to
waste. In such a land, though a few by strength or cunning might win
the means of luxury, the lot of the great mass must be poverty, and of
the weak and ignorant bitter want and perennial famine.
Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it had
neglected, and regulate for the common good the course of the
life-giving stream, and the earth would bloom like one garden, and
none of its children lack any good thing. I described the physical
felicity, mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would then
attend the lives of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new world,
blessed with plenty, purified by justice and sweetened by brotherly
kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed, but which might
so easily be made real. But when I had expected now surely the faces
around me to light up with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more
dark, angry, and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showed
only aversion and dread, while the men interrupted me with shouts of
reprobation and contempt. "Madman!" "Pestilent fellow!" "Fanatic!"
"Enemy of society!" were some of their cries, and the one who had
before taken his eyeglass to me exclaimed, "He says we are to have no
more poor. Ha! ha!"
"Put the fellow out!" exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and at the
signal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon me.
It seemed to me that my heart would burst with the anguish of finding
that what was to me so plain and so all-important was to them
meaningless, and that I was powerless to make it other. So hot had
been my heart that I had thought to melt an iceberg with its glow,
only to find at last the overmastering chill seizing my own vitals. It
was not enmity that I felt toward them as they thronged me, but pity
only, for them and for the world.
Although despairing, I could not give over. Still I strove with them.
Tears poured from my eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate. I
panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately afterward found myself
sitting upright in bed in my room in Dr. Leete's house, and the
morning sun shining through the open window into my eyes. I was
gasping. The tears were streaming down my face, and I quivered in
every nerve.
* * * * *
As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and
brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to
see the heaven's vault spread above him, so it was with me, as I
realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream,
and my presence in the twentieth was the reality.
The cruel sights which I had witnessed in my vision, and could so well
confirm from the experience of my former life, though they had, alas!
once been, and must in the retrospect to the end of time move the
compassionate to tears, were, God be thanked, forever gone by. Long
ago oppressor and oppressed, prophet and scorner, had been dust. For
generations, rich and poor had been forgotten words.
But in that moment, while yet I mused with unspeakable thankfulness
upon the greatness of the world's salvation and my privilege in
beholding it, there suddenly pierced me like a knife a pang of shame,
remorse, and wondering self-reproach, that bowed my head upon my
breast and made me wish the grave had hid me with my fellows from the
sun. For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help
on the deliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived
in those cruel, insensate days, what had I done to bring them to an
end? I had been every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my
brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a
worshipper of Chaos and Old Night, as any of my fellows. So far as my
personal influence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder than to
help forward the enfranchisement of the race which was even then
preparing. What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me,
to rejoice in a day whose dawning I had mocked?
"Better for you, better for you," a voice within me rang, "had this
evil dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream; better
your part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation,
than here, drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose
husbandmen you stoned;" and my spirit answered, "Better, truly."
When at length I raised my bowed head and looked forth from the
window, Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and was
gathering flowers. I hastened to descend to her. Kneeling before her,
with my face in the dust, I confessed with tears how little was my
worth to breathe the air of this golden century, and how infinitely
less to wear upon my breast its consummate flower. Fortunate is he
who, with a case so desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful.
POSTSCRIPT.
THE RATE OF THE WORLD'S PROGRESS.
_To the Editor of the Boston Transcript_: The Transcript of March 30,
1888, contained a review of _Looking Backward_, in response to which I
beg to be allowed a word. The description to which the book is
devoted, of the radically new social and industrial institutions and
arrangements supposed to be enjoyed by the people of the United States
in the twentieth century, is not objected to as depicting a degree of
human felicity and moral development necessarily unattainable by the
race, provided time enough had been allowed for its evolution from the
present chaotic state of society. In failing to allow this, the
reviewer thinks that the author has made an absurd mistake, which
seriously detracts from the value of the book as a work of realistic
imagination. Instead of placing the realization of the ideal social
state a scant fifty years ahead, it is suggested that he should have
made his figure seventy-five centuries. There is certainly a large
discrepancy between seventy-five centuries and fifty years, and if the
reviewer is correct in his estimate of the probable rate of human
progress, the outlook of the world is decidedly discouraging. But is
he right? I think not.
_Looking Backward_, although in form a fanciful romance, is intended,
in all seriousness, as a forecast, in accordance with the principles
of evolution, of the next stage in the industrial and social
development of humanity, especially in this country; and no part of it
is believed by the author to be better supported by the indications of
probability than the implied prediction that the dawn of the new era
is already near at hand, and that the full day will swiftly follow.
Does this seem at first thought incredible, in view of the vastness of
the changes presupposed? What is the teaching of history, but that
great national transformations, while ages in unnoticed preparation,
when once inaugurated, are accomplished with a rapidity and resistless
momentum proportioned to their magnitude, not limited by it?
In 1759, when Quebec fell, the might of England in America seemed
irresistible, and the vassalage of the colonies assured. Nevertheless,
thirty years later, the first President of the American Republic was
inaugurated. In 1849, after Novara, Italian prospects appeared as
hopeless as at any time since the Middle Ages; yet only fifteen years
after, Victor Emmanuel was crowned King of United Italy. In 1864, the
fulfillment of the thousand-year dream of German unity was apparently
as far off as ever. Seven years later it had been realized, and
William had assumed at Versailles the Crown of Barbarossa. In 1832,
the original Anti-slavery Society was formed in Boston by a few
so-called visionaries. Thirty-eight years later, in 1870, the society
disbanded, its programme fully carried out.
These precedents do not, of course, prove that any such industrial and
social transformation as is outlined in _Looking Backward_ is
impending; but they do show that, when the moral and economical
conditions for it are ripe, it may be expected to go forward with
great rapidity. On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a
swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the
hour strikes. The question is not, then, how extensive the
scene-shifting must be to set the stage for the new fraternal
civilization, but whether there are any special indications that a
social transformation is at hand. The causes that have been bringing
it ever nearer have been at work from immemorial time. To the stream
of tendency setting toward an ultimate realization of a form of
society which, while vastly more efficient for material prosperity,
should also satisfy and not outrage the moral instincts, every sigh of
poverty, every tear of pity, every humane impulse, every generous
enthusiasm, every true religious feeling, every act by which men have
given effect to their mutual sympathy by drawing more closely together
for any purpose, have contributed from the beginnings of
civilization. That this long stream of influence, ever widening and
deepening, is at last about to sweep away the barriers it has so long
sapped, is at least one obvious interpretation of the present
universal ferment of men's minds as to the imperfections of present
social arrangements. Not only are the toilers of the world engaged in
something like a world-wide insurrection, but true and humane men and
women, of every degree, are in a mood of exasperation, verging on
absolute revolt, against social conditions that reduce life to a
brutal struggle for existence, mock every dictate of ethics and
religion, and render wellnigh futile the efforts of philanthropy.
As an iceberg, floating southward from the frozen North, is gradually
undermined by warmer seas, and, become at last unstable, churns the
sea to yeast for miles around by the mighty rockings that portend its
overturn, so the barbaric industrial and social system, which has come
down to us from savage antiquity, undermined by the modern humane
spirit, riddled by the criticism of economic science, is shaking the
world with convulsions that presage its collapse.
All thoughtful men agree that the present aspect of society is
portentous of great changes. The only question is, whether they will
be for the better or the worse. Those who believe in man's essential
nobleness lean to the former view, those who believe in his essential
baseness to the latter. For my part, I hold to the former opinion.
_Looking Backward_ was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies
before us and not behind us, and is not far away. Our children will
surely see it, and we, too, who are already men and women, if we
deserve it by our faith and by our works.
EDWARD BELLAMY