Part 6 (2/2)
”Happy Altruria!” cried the professor.
”We had them formerly,” the Altrurian went on, ”as you have them now. They claimed, as I suppose yours do, that they were forced into existence by the necessities of the case; that without union the working-man was unable to meet the capitalist on anything like equal terms, or to withstand his encroachments and oppressions. But to maintain themselves they had to extinguish industrial liberty among the working-men themselves, and they had to practise great cruelties against those who refused to join them or who rebelled against them.”
”They simply destroy them here,” said the professor.
”Well,” said the lawyer, from his judicial mind, ”the great syndicates have no scruples in destroying a capitalist who won't come into them or who tries to go out. They don't club him or stone him, but they under-sell him and freeze him out; they don't break his head, but they bankrupt him.
The principle is the same.”
”Don't interrupt Mr. h.o.m.os,” the banker entreated. ”I am very curious to know just how they got rid of labor unions in Altruria.”
”We had syndicates, too, and finally we had the _reductio ad absurdum_--we had a federation of labor unions find a federation of syndicates, that divided the nation into two camps. The situation was not only impossible, but it was insupportably ridiculous.”
I ventured to say: ”It hasn't become quite so much of a joke with us yet.”
”Isn't it in a fair way to become so?” asked the doctor; and he turned to the lawyer: ”What should you say was the logic of events among us for the last ten or twenty years?”
”There's nothing so capricious as the logic of events. It's like a woman's reasoning--you can't tell what it's aimed at, or where it's going to fetch up; all that you can do is to keep out of the way if possible. We may come to some such condition of things as they have in Altruria, where the faith of the whole nation is pledged to secure every citizen in the pursuit of happiness; or we may revert to some former condition, and the master may again own the man; or we may hitch and joggle along indefinitely, as we are doing now.”
”But come, now,” said the banker, while he laid a caressing touch on the Altrurian's shoulder, ”you don't mean to say honestly that everybody works with his hands in Altruria?”
”Yes, certainly. We are mindful, as a whole people, of the divine law--'In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.'”
”But the capitalists? I'm anxious about Number One, you see.”
”We have none.”
”I forgot, of course. But the lawyers, the doctors, the parsons, the novelists?”
”They all do their share of hand-work.”
The lawyer said: ”That seems to dispose of the question of the working-man in society. But how about your minds? When do you cultivate your minds?
When do the ladies of Altruria cultivate their minds, if they have to do their own work, as I suppose they do? Or is it only the men who work, if they happen to be the husbands and fathers of the upper cla.s.ses?”
The Altrurian seemed to be sensible of the kindly scepticism which persisted in our reception of his statements, after all we had read of Altruria. He smiled indulgently, and said: ”You mustn't imagine that work in Altruria is the same as it is here. As we all work, the amount that each one need do is very little, a few hours each day at the most, so that every man and woman has abundant leisure and perfect spirits for the higher pleasures which the education of their whole youth has fitted them to enjoy. If you can understand a state of things where the sciences and arts and letters are cultivated for their own sake, and not as a means of livelihood--”
”No,” said the lawyer, smiling, ”I'm afraid we can't conceive of that. We consider the pinch of poverty the highest incentive that a man can have.
If our gifted friend here,” he said, indicating me, ”were not kept like a toad under the harrow, with his nose on the grindstone, and the poorhouse staring him in the face--”
”For Heaven's sake,” I cried out, ”don't mix your metaphors so, anyway!”
”If it were not for that and all the other hards.h.i.+ps that literary men undergo--
'Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail'--
his novels probably wouldn't be worth reading.”
<script>