Part 31 (2/2)
It is probable, however, that in the minds of most of them, the value of united action, the value to each of the example of the others, and the security against absolute poverty and helplessness in the first years of hard struggle, as well as the comfort of social ties, has counted for a great deal.
Nor ought I to forget the moral advantages, which appear to me immense and not to be underrated. Since the foundation of the colony, it has not had a criminal among its numbers; it has sent no man to jail; it has not had a lawsuit, neither among the members nor with outside people; it has not an insane person, nor one blind or deaf and dumb; nor has there been any case of deformity. It has no poor; and the support of its own helpless persons is a part of its plan.
This means that the Aurora community has not once in nineteen years of its existence used the courts, the jails, or the asylums of the state; that it has contributed nothing to the criminal or the pauper parts of the population.
This result in a newly settled state, and among a rude society, will appear not less remarkable when I add that the community has no library; that its members, so far as I could see, lack even the most common and moderate literary culture, aspiring to nothing further than the ability to read, write, and cipher; that from the president down it is absolutely without intellectual life. Moreover, it has very few amus.e.m.e.nts. Dancing is very little practiced; there is so little social life that there is not even a hall for public meetings in the village; apple-parings and occasional picnics in the summer, the playing of a band, a sermon twice a month, and visiting among the families, are the chief, indeed the only excitements in their monotonous lives. With all this there is singularly little merely animal enjoyment among them: they do not drink liquor; the majority, I was told, do not even smoke tobacco; there is no gayety among the people. Doubtless the winter, which brings them all together in the village, leads to some amus.e.m.e.nts; but I could hear of nothing set, or looked forward to, or elaborately planned. ”The women talk, more or less,” said one man to me, when I asked if there were never disagreements and family jars; ”but we have learned to bear that, and it makes no trouble.”
It seemed to me that I saw in the faces and forms of the people the results of this too monotonous existence. The young women are mostly pale, flat-chested, and somewhat thin. The young men look good-natured, but aimless. The older women and men are slow in their movements, placid, very quiet, and apparently satisfied with their lives.
I suppose the lack of smart dress and finery among the young people on Sunday, and at the wedding, gave a somewhat monotonous and dreary impression of the a.s.semblage. This was probably strengthened in my mind by the fact that the somewhat shabby appearance of the people was only of a piece with the shabby and neglected look of their village, so that the whole conveyed an impression of carelessness and decay. Nineteen years of steady labor ought to have brought them, I could not but think, a little further: ought to have given them tastefully ornamented grounds, pretty houses, a public bath, a library and a.s.sembly-room, and neat Sunday clothing. It appeared to me that the stern repression of the whole intellectual side of life by their leader had borne this evil fruit. But it may be that the people themselves were to blame: they are Germans of a low cla.s.s, and ”Pennsylvania Dutch”--people, too often, who do not aim high. Then, too, it must be admitted that farm-life in Oregon is not, in general, above the plane of Aurora. Dutchtown is an Oregonian paradise; and the Aurora people are commonly said to ”have every thing very nice about them.”
Moreover, I could see that such a community must, unless it has for its head a person of strong intellectual life, advance more slowly and with greater difficulty than its members might, if they were living in the great world and thrown upon their individual resources.
Economically, I think there is no doubt that in the clearing up of their land, and the establishment of orchards and other productive industries, these Communists had a decided and important advantage over farmers undertaking similar enterprises with the help of laborers to whom they must have paid wages. For, though the wages of a day-laborer nowhere yield much more than his support and that of his family, they yield this in an uneconomical manner, a part of the sum earned being dropped on the way to middlemen, and a part going for whisky, sprees, blue Mondays, and illness arising out of bad situation, improper food, etc. The Aurora colonists labored without money wages; they could economize to the last possible degree in order to tide over a difficult place; they at all times measured their outlay by their means on hand; and I do not doubt that they made Aurora, with its orchards and other valuable improvements, for half what it would have cost by individual effort.
Nor can it be safely a.s.serted that there is no higher future for Aurora.
Dr. Keil cannot carry them further--but he is sixty-four years old; if, when he dies, the presidency should fall into the hands of a person who, with tact enough to keep the people together, should have also intellectual culture enough to desire to lift them up to a higher plane of living, I can see nothing to prevent his success. The difficulty is that Dr. Keil's system produces no such man. Moses was brought up at Pharaoh's court, and not among the Israelites whom he liberated, and who made his whole life miserable for him.
II.--BETHEL.
Bethel is, of course, the older community; I describe it here after Aurora, because my visit to it was made after I had seen the Oregon community, and also because here is shown to what Aurora tends. The two societies are still one, having their efforts in common; and I was told that if the people at Bethel could sell their property, they would all remove to Oregon.
The Bethel Community now owns about four thousand acres of good land, exclusive of a tract of thirteen hundred acres at Nineveh, in the neighboring county of Adair, where six families of the community live, who are engaged chiefly in farming, having, however, also an old saw-mill and a tannery, and a shoemaker's and a blacksmith's shop. These families were removed thither twenty-five years ago, because it was thought the land there had a valuable water-power.
Bethel has now above two hundred members, and about twenty-five families. There are fifty children in the school, I was told.
They have a saw-mill and grist-mill, a tannery, a few looms, a general store, and a drug-store, and shops for carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, tinners, tailors, shoemakers, and hatters, all on a small scale, but sufficient to supply not only themselves but the neighboring farmers.
They had formerly a distillery, but that and a woolen factory were burned down a few years ago. They mean to rebuild the last.
All the people are Germans, and I found here many relatives of persons I had met at Aurora.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BETHEL COMMUNE, MISSOURI.]
The town has much the same characteristic features as Aurora, except that it has not the exceptionally large and factory-like dwellings. It has one main street, poorly kept, and in parts even without a sidewalk; cattle and pigs were straying about it, too, and altogether it did not look very prosperous. But the brick dwellings which lined the street were substantially built, and the saw and grist mill which lies at the lower end is a well-constructed building of brick. Half-way up the main street was a drug-store, large enough I should have said to accommodate with purges and cathartics a town of twenty-five hundred inhabitants; and on a cross-street was another. Besides the chief store, I was surprised to see two other smaller shops; and still more surprised to be told that they belonged to and were kept by persons who had left the community, but who remained here in its midst. Of these I shall have something to say by and by.
At the head of the street stands the tavern or hotel, kept in the German or Pennsylvania Dutch way--with a bed in the large common room, and meals served in the kitchen. The German cooking was substantial and good. To the right of the hotel, at some distance, stands the church, placed in the middle of a young grove of trees planted much too thickly ever to prosper. The church has a floor of large red tiles; a narrow pulpit at one end; a place railed off at the other end, where the band plays on high festivals, and two doors for the entrance of the s.e.xes, who sit on separate sides of the house. From the tower I had a view of the greater part of the community's territory, which lies finely, and is evidently a well-selected and valuable tract of land.
As in Aurora, they have preaching here every other Sunday, and no week-day meetings or a.s.semblages of any kind. They told me, however, that they have a Sunday-school for the children, where they are instructed in the Bible.
The preacher and head of this society is a Mr. Giese, appointed by Dr.
Keil; he keeps also the drug-store, where I was sorry to see liquor sold to laboring men and others, but in a very quiet way.
The Bethel Society has six trustees, chosen by the members, but holding office during good behavior. As in Aurora, no business report is made to the society. Giese is cas.h.i.+er and book-keeper, and the trustees examine his accounts once a year.
The real estate in Bethel is held upon a very extraordinary tenure. It appears that--the settlement having begun in 1844--by 1847 there were in the society some dissatisfied persons, who clamored for a part.i.tion of the property. Dr. Keil thereupon determined to divide it, and to each member or householder a certain part was made over as his own. Out of the gains of the community in the three years was reserved sufficient to support the aged and infirm, and I believe the mills were also kept as part of the common stock. Thereupon some dissatisfied persons sold their shares and went off. The remainder lived on in common, and without changing their relations. To each person a deed was given of his share; but those who remained in the society were told--so the matter was explained to me by two of the trustees--not to put their deeds on record; and later a deed of the whole property of the community, including the individual holdings, was made out in the name of the president, Mr. Giese. I did not see this doc.u.ment, but presume, of course, that it gave him a t.i.tle only in trust for all.
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