We have, like you, wealth with its self-rewarding luxuries, but its
character is very different. Its chosen pleasures and inclinations are
unlike yours. Acquisitiveness has no such controlling motives as with
you. The hope of social elevation, the anxiety to place the sufferings
of poverty beyond reach, and the love of power, are not elements in
our desire for gain. As an inducement to the accumulation of wealth,
all these motives are supplanted by the one overweening passion for
distinguishment which its possession affords, by contributing to the
well-being and happiness of others. The even opportunities of life, and
the entire absence of poverty as you have it, with its miseries, do
away with the most fertile stimulus to individual greed among you; and
the strong passion to hoard, which you call avarice, becomes with us,
from the singleness of its motives, one of the noblest of our religious
aspirations. Whatever luxuries wealth provides for itself are shared
by all; and since the nature and form of our society precludes the
necessity of alms-giving, charity, as you understand it, is unknown.
The general dissemination of self-pride and independence, as much the
result of our religious beliefs as of our political and educational
methods, secures us against those evils of indiscriminate charity
which are found to paralyze industry everywhere upon the Earth, in its
present stage of development.
In our political system we have provided so well for the even and
sufficient reward of toil, that our animal requirements, so easily
supplied, are never wanting in individual cases to the extent of
suffering. In the extremity of invalidism or other misfortune,
assistance comes, not in the form of charity as you know it, but as the
anxious and sympathetic support of a family to one of its members in
distress. The field of benevolence in wealth is, therefore, entirely
within the province of education and art; which in accordance with
our religious aspirations and beliefs, takes the same form in their
furtherance of the purposes of the Deity as your devotional enterprises
of promulgating your religious faiths.
Our rich contribute largely from their substance to the purposes of
education, with a philanthropy that is greatly intensified by the
religious enthusiasm gratified by the act; but they do not build nor
contribute to our temples of worship as yours do, since the attendance
upon these is unsolicited and voluntary, and a mere pleasurable
gratification of our spiritual hopes and aspirations. Unattended by
saving forms and conditions, as with you, the worship within our
temples is not considered of consequence to our spiritual welfare.
These religious centers, unlike yours, assume no power to condone or
compromise with evil. No burdened, unclean conscience comes to them
with the hope of absolution, to return again laden with its misdeeds
for another purging. No wholesale peculator brings a portion of his
evil gains as an atonement for the inflicted miseries of his avaricious
career. There is nothing whatever within our temples or surrounding
them, but the peace and self conscious satisfaction of the divine
co-operation in our efforts to cultivate ourselves, and the praise and
glory of our own success forms the spirit of our worship.
Our society being without exclusiveness, and the ostentation of riches
a thing unknown, there is no ambition to get beyond the general fare
in dwellings. The whole city block, surmounted by its one continuous
roof, may be either a single or a number of dwellings, to accord with
the incomes of its occupants. Under our land system the cost of rent
is such a small item in the living expenses, that all are enabled to
share alike in their housings, and to equally enjoy the benefit of our
wholesome sanitary provisions. No one amongst us dwells in a hovel.
We labor that the surroundings of all shall be uniformly pleasant
and comfortable. With us the suspicion of unseen misery is enough to
disturb the pleasures of life. Besides the unpleasant suggestions of
discomfit which a rough and incommodious dwelling would arouse, it
would be considered by us a painful violation of taste, and a sacrifice
of the opportunities of art.
Consequently within the limits of our cities you will not find any
external distinction among our dwelling places, to denote the financial
standing of their occupants. But as a whole block becomes occasionally
occupied by a single family, whose large fortune enables them to enjoy
its magnificent proportions, there is not wanting within those luxuries
of wealth urged by the prevailing tastes. The establishment becomes
the pride and pleasure of its locality. In conformity with all other
of the city’s blocks, it has three lofty stories. The lower one on
each of its facades consists of a series of Corinthian columns with
highly wrought capitals, resting upon which, and forming the second
story elevation, are a line of arches, supporting the flush outer walls
of the story above. This story, which is abundantly lighted by its
transparent roof, has its exterior surface decorated in bas relief with
architraves and cornices designed in our elaborate styles. Every block
has an arched and vestibuled main entrance at each of its four corners,
over which there rises a tower containing a powerful electric light,
illuminating at night the interior as well as the surrounding streets.
As our thoroughfares which radiate from the city’s center are straight,
and better adapted for business and the industries, they are devoted to
these purposes. Consequently, on the circular or concentric streets are
located most of our dwellings; the choicest of which, as to location,
are those fronting the parks, which, as I have already given you to
understand, circumscribe at intervals every neighborhood of the city.
It is, then, in these convex or concave fronts, standing on opposite
lines of the park belt, that the abodes of wealth are mostly to be
found.
You would discover the whole of one of these buildings, except its
middle story, devoted to the use of the public, and containing on its
first floor a number of class rooms assigned to a system of teaching
to which your kindergartens bear some similarity, and a few others in
which the scholars have advanced to a higher grade. The character of
the instruction would be indicated by the appliances and implements
of industry everywhere to be seen, the busy use of them at intervals
by the classes, and the pride and emulation of the scholars, in their
struggling efforts toward skill in their handling. In another room you
would find a smaller class, the special proteges of the owner, composed
of a few, who, by the early manifestations of an unusual promise, were
being assisted in their pursuance of some branch of science or art.
Outside of this department of instruction you would find an extensive
library, with its reading room attachments ingeniously arranged for
convenience, and a large apartment, usually in the center of the
building, well lighted from the roof, in which was collected the art
treasures, and upon which was lavished by its owner that fondness for
the beautiful which becomes him as a member of our society.
The upper story is a public assembly chamber for occasions of rejoicing
and pleasure, and is adorned with statuary, fountains, and blooming
plants. This grand apartment is so tempered in warmth by the cheap
appliances of our municipality, that it becomes a winter garden during
our long, inclement seasons, when the parks are sere and icy.
One of these establishments would suggest to your view an exaggerated
estimate of its founder’s wealth. In most cases his income extends but
little beyond the support of this enterprise. In his dream of wealth he
has achieved the hope of his ambition, and he stops there.
Your passion of hoarding beyond a competency, without purpose except
the lust for hoarding, is the offshoot of that instinct in the
carnivorous brute, which impels him to refuse to his hungry fellows any
portion of his captured carcass, one-tenth of which he cannot consume.
This low and brute-born heritage of greed only fails of a better
suppression in your society, because you have neglected to entirely
remedy, by your political methods, the generally precarious way in
which your animal and intellectual wants are supplied. Suffering now
follows just as close to a miss in your struggles for sustenance, as it
did when your skin-clad hunters failed of their game.
Your passion to get and hold is intensified and brutalized in
its lack of regard for the consequences to others, by the large
number of artificial necessities only attainable in your society
by a considerable accumulation of money, the want of which implies
degradation, and a sacrifice of many things that have grown to be dear
to life. Every addition to the savings removes to a greater distance
that dreaded condition of your civilization, known as poverty. The
insatiable character of the hoarding is not unlike the motive of
overcaution in a wanderer, who, terrorized by the appearance of a
dreaded animal in his path, increases his distance by flight far beyond
all possible approach of the dangerous presence.
Your breathless pursuit of wealth, beyond all reasonable limit of
obtaining the objects of desire, is induced also by the remarkable
opportunities its possession affords to appropriate the earnings of
industry. The capacity of your wealth to absorb and control the fruits
of toil exists in a geometrical ratio of increase with the greater
wealth employed, and the taste of power once felt is seldom appeased,
but increases with every money addition. Under your favorable laws, it
may extend to the privilege of a single individual exacting the whole
surplus earnings of an army of busy workers.
Through centuries of legislation and usuage you have established
various processes, by which wealth is enabled to extract an undue
portion of the earnings of industry. Among these processes may be named
rates of interest on money graded to the necessities of borrowers,
rents gauged by the ability of tenants to pay, monopoly supplies with
prices fixed just below the point of compelled abstinence, variations
in the value of mediums of exchange, with other unsuppressed agencies
promoting frequent change of values for the opportunities of capital
and the distress of labor; stupendous aggregations of wealth reversing
the laws of economy by advancing the price of necessities on the
one hand and depressing the wages of labor on the other; and more
successful than all, a system of land proprietorship which permits
holders of the Earth’s surface, in addition to their privilege of
exacting a large portion of the profits of industry in rent, a further
right to pocket, in the form of appreciated values of their land,
an unearned share of the collective fruits of the industries which
surround them.
Our divergent views of existence are exemplified in the care we have
taken to provide for an evener division of the products of industry.
With us, property is the means, and not the end, beyond which there
are any number of attainments in life incomparably more desirable
and beneficial to society, and our legislation has been directed
chiefly to the care and cultivation of these. The great aim of our
government has been to provide for the well-being of persons, while it
may be said of yours that the most attention has been devoted to the
welfare of property; by which is meant its protection and increase,
regardless of the manner of its distribution, or the doubtful methods
of its extraction from the energies of labor. In the pursuit of this
policy you are only perpetuating, without much change, your primitive
conditions, when the strong arm gathered the most of the wealth.
Your early born instincts do not seem sufficiently evolutionized to
co-operate in any undertaking which denies opportunities of the strong
over the weak; and the unhappy consequence is a society so mercenary
that the general estimate among you is not from any quality which
indicates a nearness to the Deity, but principally from the cool
numerical calculations of property attachments.
The unity of our spiritual and temporal interests makes it necessary
that every government act shall be a religious one. The spirit of
kindness, and charity to all which is the only deserving part of your
religions, we have taken as the foundation of all our public acts, and
have made it the cornerstone of government itself. Our legislation,
if the mere assent to measures recommended can be called by that
name, considers first the welfare of persons comprising the whole,
subservient to which every possible interest must take its place. And
the welfare of persons, in our politico-religious point of view, is
dependent upon the proper and equitable rewards of industry; their
equal opportunities of acquiring knowledge; an encouragement of their
morality by a recognition of their virtues, making it the necessary
stepping-stone to their advancement; and the sweeping away of every
social form which establishes a sense of inferiority, destroys the
pride of self, and institutes that feeling of degradation which is the
most prolific source of evil in society.
It is easy to note your tendency in these directions. The barbaric
institution of force and its concomitant of fear, as agencies in the
management and control of men, is gradually being eliminated from
all your progressive governments, and the better methods of assent
and co-operation are getting in their salutary work of emancipation.
Knowledge is spreading itself among you--no longer a dessert
only upon a few favored tables, but a chief dish under the newly
acquired appetites of the many. The glamour of your wealth and the
impressiveness of your religion are losing their reverential respect,
with the focused light directed upon their doubtful origins. You
have inaugurated the beginning of a new faith, with better spiritual
foundations, not condemning the world and its society, but loving it,
following in the footsteps of the divine presence within its limits,
taking a hand in its affairs, and directing them towards the better
possibilities in view.
Ah, my brother, the coming of your Messiah was both more and less
than you have imagined. The era of new and better things in social
development is preceded by the gradual decay of old convictions, which
have served their time and are no longer useful, except in their place
within the catalogue of traditions to mark the progress of thought.
Society assumes its beliefs under an impulse of progression, as much
controlled by evolutionary laws as the organic substances of the Earth.
No one can teach the world. With a free exercise of its intellectual
faculty, it teaches itself. The power of an idea, among the moral
forces, is in its corresponding with a proper stage of development to
receive it. A solitary thought is useless, as a moral agent, without
its already existing half-formed figments scattered about in society.
Its power to move lies in the coalescence of its parts. Ideas and
beliefs have been adopted at different stages of your civilization,
and have served as great motors to progress, which, ages before, were
enunciated without impression. Society rids itself of its rudimentary
impressions and beliefs, in much the same manner that an animal, under
changing environments, sheds its old organs and develops new ones.
Every new belief affecting society is subservient to it, and is only
adopted slowly and by degrees. If it be a truth making its way, its
final installation is marked by an unquestioned acquiescence and an
undisturbed tranquility. If an error, agitation and unrest mark the
whole period of its accession.
The coming of your Messiah was more than you have supposed, because
grander and more imposing than its assumed supernaturalisms was
its enthronement of two central ideas. One was the adoption of the
sentiment of brotherhood as a means of adjusting the relations of men
with each other, and the other was the inauguration of spiritual hope
as a guide in the actions of life. Out of this beginning has come all
that is good in your social progress. The general acceptance of these
ideas, as agencies in your civilization, began its work by weakening
the old society, and it finally destroyed it by extinguishing the bands
of physical force which held it together. The cultivation of these
inspirational beliefs in their purity, as they were bestowed upon you
by the divine intelligence, would have soon brought to you the same
peace and good will that they have shed upon the inhabitants of Mars;
but you were not to be indulged so soon in this happy offering. The
few who had been dominating the many for ages, appropriating their
earnings, and even sacrificing their lives, in a lust for power and
wealth, were not to let escape them so fine an opportunity to hold the
simple-minded by a new agency, ten-fold more subjugating than the old
method of coercion by force. The religious superstition of the age, a
mere diversion for the untaught multitude, inert and unpromising, was
vitalized by the infusion of these new, humane and spiritual impulses;
and, with many added ingeniously contrived supernaturalisms, and an
attractive moral code, it was built up into a system and organized
into a society which has borne its heavy weight upon your progress,
and spread its dominion more successfully than the war-like legions
it supplanted. It has accomplished no good which is not entirely due
to the irresistible expansion of the truths it appropriated at its
inception out of nature’s evolutionary process of social development,
viz., the regard for one another, as a guide in all the actions of
life, and that hope eternal which spiritualizes and elevates our
existence.
The coming of your Messiah was less than you have believed, because
you have mistaken a personality, in which the genius of advanced and
salutary doctrines manifested itself, for a part and presence of the
Deity himself. As the promulgation of thoughts that were conceived
under the inspiration and pressure of a natural force in the process
of social development is less than the awful presence and verbal
communication of the Deity, so, in the same degree, was the coming of
your Messiah less.
But you will have a second coming, my brother, unperverted by the
craft of your seers, and uncontaminated with the superstitions of a
crude society like the first. It will be of you and a part of you,
raising you up to a higher esteem of yourselves, glorifying you as
the progenitors of all good, under a divine and irresistible law
of betterment. It will relieve you of the evil thoughts that have
condemned and degraded you. The new hope, like a newly discovered
strength, will push out in all directions, in the exercise of its
salutary work. Instead of discourse and exhortation to the lowly and
down trodden, with promises as impossible of denial as of verification,
it will lift them upon their feet by the strong hand of a better social
method. Like the first coming, its symbolic picture will be carved into
monuments, reproduced in all the departments of art, and cherished as
the chief reminder of your duties and obligations to the Deity. It will
be no symbol of anguish and sorrow, like the first, but in place of it
THE DIVINE FIGURE OF A STRONG MAN SUPPORTING AND ENCOURAGING A WEAK
ONE. Yes, my brother, you will have a s-e-c-o-n-d c-o-m--
* * * * *
What is all this? I raise myself upon my couch The sun is an hour
up. Through my window I see an enquiring group, marvelling at my
tardiness. My cows linger for their milking, and utter their complaints
in a gentle lowing. My pet deer stand with their large wondering eyes
fixed upon me, and the appearance of my face at the pane has drawn
toward me my whole restless and scrabbling flock of poultry, impatient
for their morning feed. I look toward the easy chair and it is empty.
My celestial visitor has departed.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] Draper’s Intellectual Development of Europe.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic spelling which may have been in use at the time of
publication has been retained.