You must have suspected before this that, so far as the rapid
accumulation of wealth is concerned, our society was in that
stationary condition so much dreaded by your economists as the end
of all material progress. An assumption among your thinkers that any
permanent diminishment of the production of wealth is the forerunner
of disaster to society, is one of those mistakes easily accounted
for by the surroundings of your present stage of development. Your
experience teaches you that where the wealth producing energies are
in the highest stage of action, your civilization shows all its
other forces equally advancing; and where on the other hand, capital
and wealth are restricted, there is a state of general stagnation.
These opposite conditions, however, you will find to be, more than
anything else, the result of difference in degrees of intelligence,
knowledge, and consequently ambition. Your aims, even the higher ones,
are so indissolubly connected with wealth as the means by which most
of them are promoted, that your incentives to acquire riches have
become a part of your intellectual constitution. Where the penalty of
a straightened financial condition is the forfeiture of everything
which makes life desirable, even a denial of the opportunities of
association with the better class, and a surrender of offspring to
the degradation and contempt which comes of limited knowledge, it may
reasonably be expected that the struggle for wealth would be keen.
Equally as an incentive also are the innumerable avenues of gain, which
are everywhere open for the investment of capital, and the remarkable
profits which accrue to keep up the spirit of money-making adventure.
You will certainly agree with me that this crushing, elbowing, and
treading on each other’s heels in the attempt to get money is not the
best possible form or type of society: more especially since you are
not all fairly and evenly equipped in this struggle, the mass of your
people reap no benefit from it, and its result is only to double up the
incomes of the few.
Stagnation is not necessarily a condition of the stationary state, as
many of your writers lead you to believe. It is merely a revolution in
the aims of society, brought about by changes which are inevitable,
and which your civilization is sooner or later bound to reach. Every
newly applied science and invention, and above all every acre of land
brought under cultivation, render this period so much dreaded by you
more remote; but you will come to it all the same. It will merely
be a using up of all the resources of capital to RAPIDLY multiply
itself. During your present progressive period, so far as that term is
applicable to the speedy gathering in of wealth, your society presents
to us an aspect of mercenary abandonment beyond anything we have ever
experienced ourselves, and with a full knowledge of the end that will
come we look forward with a high degree of interest to that time when
you will arrive at the stationary condition.
As you approach that period where the diminished profits of capital
will discourage the great activity and aggressiveness which now
characterize it, some very great changes will gradually be brought
about. Assuming that labor will continue to enlighten itself it will
slowly change its relations with capital, so that in the end instead of
being below, as it is now, it will be on top, as with us. Many of the
ways by which wealth now multiplies itself will be shut off, and with
its acquirement no longer indispensable to the honors of life, and the
difficulties of its attainment in any large volume increased, society
will not be given so intensely to its individual accumulation. Your
intellectual activities will be turned more in the direction of other
motives. To repair waste and provide for the necessities of the living
will be about all that is left to employ your industries, and there
will be enough for capital to do within these limits to moderately
enlarge itself; while yet within this narrowed field, limited wealth
will be able to provide itself with income enough to sustain and reward
habits of prudential saving. Although great wealth will be exceedingly
difficult to obtain, a fair competency will be within the reach of
all; since labor coming to the front, owing to the weakened powers of
wealth, will assume its deserving place in the forces of economy and
legislation, and will demand and receive a fairer share of the profits
of industry.
After the advance of civilization and knowledge beyond a certain
period, the ambitions and necessities of a people will furnish abundant
incentives to keep society in a state of activity. The energies of
life are stimulated, not so much by the large occasional rewards which
come to a few, like prizes in a lottery, as the steady and certain
remuneration of each day’s output of action to all. The ability to
obtain from industry a considerable margin beyond the daily expenses of
life is sufficient to keep alive the mental and physical energies, and
is certain to bring about that general state of hopefulness, which more
than anything else promotes thrift and stimulates ambition.
It may be somewhat at variance with your views of political economy,
to believe that any reduction of the power and value of capital will
not in a corresponding degree depress labor. You must bear in mind,
however, that the stationary state, as exemplified by our society,
differs from your progressive condition, not in the lesser abundance
of capital, but in its better diffusion, more dependent relations,
and smaller comparative profits. It follows from this as a matter of
course, that it requires the possession of a larger amount of the
products of labor to bring about that condition of life known as a
competency than it does with you. But by a well determined arrangement
in all ways in favor of those who toil, by which a fair margin is
secured between income and expense, the coveted independence is always
within reach.
Under our system, capital becoming diffused among the masses in
comparatively small portions, and having no such extraordinary uses,
nor such high rates of interest as with you, it assumes its natural
place as an adjunct to all the enterprises of labor. All our factories
are consequently carried on by co-operation. No such a thing is known
on our planet as the owner of a manufacturing establishment depressing
at his will and pleasure the pay of perhaps a whole community of
working people. When an establishment is required for the manufacture
of some product in demand, our workmen undertake it as a business
belonging wholly to themselves, and there is never any lack of means
among them to do it.
The utter helpless condition of your workmen, as a class, is not
entirely owing to their enforced scant share in the profits of
industry. Whoever among them, by greater abstinence or otherwise,
succeeds in saving any considerable portion of his earnings,
hastens either to change his situation for that of employer, where
self-interest inclines him to favor low wages, or to seek among the
greater encouragements outside a change of occupation. By this process
capital and labor are constantly being divorced, and the ranks of your
workmen are left to contain only those whose necessities hold them
there.
In the condition of things with us, bestowing upon labor all the
emoluments of industry, it becomes the most advantageous pursuit of
life. With wages at a uniform and fixed sum, from which there can be no
deviation except to increase, the working man proceeds to lay by his
surplus, until, in a reasonable time, it can be made to do service in
adding to the fruits of his toil.
In our society there is no possibility, and no one has hopes of gaining
money by chance. We hold it to be a demoralizing evil that wealth
should be obtained without industry. The quality of mind which you
honor under the name of shrewdness, and which seldom hesitates to
profit by the losses and even the miseries of others, would find life
a burden on account of the odium attached, in any community on our
planet. The privilege to build up an individual fortune, by taking
from the substance of the whole people in any unlimited degree which
an unscrupulous ingenuity can devise, is one of the peculiarities
of your civilization. To this general license, with its very small
limitation, is to be ascribed most of your social miseries. The
lessons presented to your youth at the very first glance at the
affairs of life are calculated to impress them with the belief that
success is not so much for the strong and considerate, as it is for
the wary and cunning; and that the business of creating wealth is
of the slightest importance, when compared with the many successful
arts and schemes for capturing it after its production. The example
is witnessed everywhere among you of money-making without loss of
honor or respect, by the method of drawing from others, by taking
advantage of their necessities, excessive and unfair portions of
their substance for some sort of service rendered. The consequence is
that life with you is constantly renewed, on the one hand, by persons
with more or less inherited capital, who are educated to believe that
existence is a game, whose winning instances are the best guides to
follow; and on the other by the great mass of hereditary toilers who
submit themselves as victims under sheer force of necessity and usage.
This state of your civilization brings into play many of your lower
feelings, as indispensable instruments of success. When selfishness
is the chief promoter of thrift, practical charity is only aroused by
unusual provocation. The miseries of existence are unseen and unfelt
by others than the sufferers themselves among you, just as your senses
become oblivious to the presence of disturbing influences which you
find it unprofitable to suppress. The necessity for each one looking
out for himself in your fierce battles of life makes him unmindful
of others. Yet benevolence dwells within all your hearts as a divine
attribute, which cannot be wholly destroyed, no matter how neglected
its cultivation. Like the retarded germination of seed in a too deeply
surmounting soil, it comes to the light among you here and there, under
favorable conditions, with an increasing frequency which reveals your
destiny as unerringly as the golden horizon presages the coming of the
sun.
The difference in the degree by which each individual holds the common
welfare in comparison with his own, marks the stage of progress
towards perfection in society. You hold within yourselves, by a
divine provision, the elements to this end. Your history is full
of instances to prove that self-sacrifice is an act which inspires
a greater commendation than any other. All your normal mental
organizations are endowed with the propensity to benefit others, which
only the conditions of your society circumscribe by a conflict of
interest. What is now in your higher faculties, during your present
development, a pleasure, will become a passion by further progress
and cultivation, and, by a still more extended pursuit, a necessity
to the tranquility and enjoyment of your lives. Filial and parental
love from mere instincts have grown among you to be the most gratifying
of inclinations. Sexual affinity, from its origin of brutal desire,
has been transformed, in your higher circles, to a pure and tender
sentiment of disinterested regard. Not long ago your lunatics were
chained to stakes like beasts. Your infected were left to die upon the
roadsides. Your infirm were shut from sight, consumed with vermin among
their rags. You house, clothe, and care for all these now with almost
the solicitude that parents bestow upon children. If you should submit
yourselves now for a time to the presence of these old inhumanities,
and observe their disturbing effects upon the happiness of your lives,
it would be a fair measurement of your progress toward the stationary
state.
Supposing yourself to be one of an audience assembled for the purpose
of obtaining pleasure from a performance on the stage, your delight
would, in a large degree, depend upon the manifestations of approval
surrounding you. Any expression of dissatisfaction would spoil your
enjoyment, no matter upon what it might be founded. It might arise,
for instance, from unfair opportunities of view, or from the usurped
privilege of some to obstruct the vision of others. Your inclinations,
arising from no higher motive than self interest, would lead you to
assist in bringing about that state of general satisfaction which is
indispensable to your own comfort and happiness. This illustrates one
of the motives which, in our stage of development, impels us to arrange
that, so far possible, every individual shall enjoy equal privileges in
society. Happiness is simply not possible without it.
Your moralists might argue that to close and intimate a sympathy with
the misfortunes of others would keep us so constantly unhappy as to
make life unendurable. In answer to this, you have only to consider
that if you separate from all your ills those which either directly or
remotely are brought upon you by your imperfect social state, there are
but few left besides death and its attendant sorrows. And of these few
entirely comprised under the heads of sickness and accidents, there is
a possibility of their greater diminishment by better modes of life.
That you are slowly and gradually moving towards the stationary
condition, unmistakable evidence proves. Material as well as spiritual
indications confirm this belief. You can easily observe that wealth in
the hands of the few is losing its opportunities for rapid increase.
In your oldest advanced regions it has already worked out its resources
to the extent of endeavoring to find abroad occasions for profitable
use. But for the monopoly of land, which enables it to extract from
industry an amount for its services out of all proportion with its
value elsewhere, it would have been much further advanced towards the
stationary state.
One of the greatest obstacles opposing your approach towards the
perfect society is your propensity to theorize and speculate upon
matters which it is not given you to know. We have a saying that he who
gets his feet in the air is lost. We mean by that to convey the idea,
that all speculation not founded on positive knowledge is so utterly
worthless, that any indulgence therein is useless to society. The
opinion is unchallenged among us, that the inhabitants of the Earth are
too prone to get their feet in the air. And yet the very ease by which
this misfortune is accomplished among you is a proof of your goodness.
Your inclination to virtue is your weak side of approach, and all your
inherent and intuitive charity, which might during all these centuries
have been exercised upon yourselves, has been to a great extent wasted
upon your schemes of salvation, in which you have no assurance
whatever but the wild promises of imagination. When you come fully to
understand that happiness, true prosperity, virtue, and even beauty are
but synonyms of truth, and that misery, crime, misfortune, and ugliness
are but other names for falsehood, you will no longer have any dread or
hesitation to search for that verity which destroys old beliefs, even
though that search melts into air your most cherished traditions. You
come to understand after a while that a truth can disseminate nothing
but good; and that a falsehood, no matter how venerable with age, nor
how respectable by adoption, can generate little else than evil. Your
creeds have attracted you and plowed deep into your affections, because
in them is gathered from yourselves the divine sentiments of goodness,
out of which they are all robed in a pretended monopoly. Your virtues
are brought into service within their narrow limits, and your energies
and substance consumed in the work of enlarging their influence, while
the more fruitful material for your charities lies neglected in the
evils and miseries of your society.
The Earth is your dominion. Tread firmly upon it. Remember it has been
put into your keeping, and that your people are entirely responsible
for its social condition. He who assists to improve that, serves the
Deity better than he who spends his life in genuflections and prayers.
When you look around among the wretched criminals among you, punished
and unpunished, and the poverty-stricken, and the sad-eyed, neglected
children; see the unsuppressed temptations to evil, the unrecognized
virtue, and the uneven opportunities for individual advancement, you
should bear in mind that all these are but evidences of the violation
of the trust imposed in you by the divine intelligence. There is,
perhaps, no spectacle upon the Earth that inspires more pity among
the inhabitants of Mars, than the constant waste of your best parts
in submitting yourselves to the impositions of your seers, who lead
you away from your duties, under the theory that the Earth is merely
a battle ground and field of conquest for the perpetuation of their
doctrines, all else upon it being blank vanities. They have kept you
away from the true business of your lives, and have mesmerized you,
alternately terrifying and delighting you by unreal fancies; now
exhibiting to you a paradise and at another time a nightmare. They have
involved you in a perpetual shadow, discouraging you of all hopes of
brightness until your celestial birth. By exhibiting only your grosser
parts, and threatening the vengeance of an austere and capricious god
of their own imaginary creation, they both degrade you and belittle
your conceptions of the Deity. You could bend your faces upward with
a better sincerity, if, instead of following phantoms all these ages,
with your feet in the air, you could show a truer interpretation of
the divine purpose in establishing a happier and more perfect dwelling
together.