Part 21 (2/2)
”The poor dumb beast of humanity rose, and the throne tumbled, and the sceptre was broken, and the crown rolled away into that darkness of the past. We thought that heaven had descended to us, and that liberty, equality, and fraternity were ours. We could not see what should again alienate us from one another, or how one brother could again oppress another. With a free field and no favor we believed we should prosper on together, and there would be peace and plenty for all. We had the republic again after so many ages now, and the republic, as we knew it in our dim annals, was brotherhood and universal happiness. All but a very few, who prophesied evil of our lawless freedom, were wrapped in a delirium of hope. Men's minds and men's hands were suddenly released to an activity unheard of before. Invention followed invention; our rivers and seas became the warp of commerce where the steam-sped shuttles carried the woof of enterprise to and fro with tireless celerity; machines to save labor multiplied themselves as if they had been procreative forces, and wares of every sort were produced with incredible swiftness and cheapness. Money seemed to flow from the ground; vast fortunes 'rose like an exhalation,'
as your Milton says.
”At first we did not know that they were the breath of the nethermost pits of h.e.l.l, and that the love of money, which was becoming universal with us, was filling the earth with the hate of men. It was long before we came to realize that in the depths of our steams.h.i.+ps were those who fed the fires with their lives, and that our mines from which we dug our wealth were the graves of those who had died to the free light and air, without finding the rest of death. We did not see that the machines for saving labor were monsters that devoured women and children, and wasted men at the bidding of the power which no man must touch.
”That is, we thought we must not touch it, for it called itself prosperity and wealth and the public good, and it said that it gave bread, and it impudently bade the toiling myriads consider what would become of them if it took away their means of wearing themselves out in its service. It demanded of the state absolute immunity and absolute impunity, the right to do its will wherever and however it would, without question from the people who were the final law. It had its way, and under its rule we became the richest people under the sun. The Acc.u.mulation, as we called this power, because we feared to call it by its true name, rewarded its own with gains of twenty, of a hundred, of a thousand per cent., and to satisfy its need, to produce the labor that operated its machines, there came into existence a hapless race of men who bred their kind for its service, and whose little ones were its prey almost from their cradles.
Then the infamy became too great, and the law, the voice of the people, so long guiltily silent, was lifted in behalf of those who had no helper. The Acc.u.mulation came under control for the first time, and could no longer work its slaves twenty hours a day amid perils to life and limb from its machinery and in conditions that forbade them decency and morality. The time of a hundred and a thousand per cent. pa.s.sed; but still the Acc.u.mulation demanded immunity and impunity, and, in spite of its conviction of the enormities it had practised, it declared itself the only means of civilization and progress. It began to give out that it was timid, though its history was full of the boldest frauds and crimes, and it threatened to withdraw itself if it were ruled or even crossed; and again it had its way, and we seemed to prosper more and more. The land was filled with cities where the rich flaunted their splendor in palaces, and the poor swarmed in squalid tenements. The country was drained of its life and force, to feed the centres of commerce and industry. The whole land was bound together with a network of iron roads that linked the factories and founderies to the fields and mines, and blasted the landscape with the enterprise that spoiled the lives of men.
”Then, all at once, when its work seemed perfect and its dominion sure, the Acc.u.mulation was stricken with consciousness of the lie always at its heart. It had hitherto cried out for a free field and no favor, for unrestricted compet.i.tion; but, in truth, it had never prospered except as a monopoly. Whenever and wherever compet.i.tion had play there had been nothing but disaster to the rival enterprises, till one rose over the rest. Then there was prosperity for that one.
”The Acc.u.mulation began to act upon its new consciousness. The iron roads united; the warring industries made peace, each kind under a single leaders.h.i.+p. Monopoly, not compet.i.tion, was seen to be the beneficent means of distributing the favors and blessings of the Acc.u.mulation to mankind.
But, as before, there was alternately a glut and dearth of things, and it often happened that when starving men went ragged through the streets the storehouses were piled full of rotting harvests that the farmers toiled from dawn till dusk to grow, and the warehouses fed the moth with the stuffs that the operative had woven his life into at his loom. Then followed, with a blind and mad succession, a time of famine, when money could not buy the super-abundance that vanished, none knew how or why.
”The money itself vanished from time to time, and disappeared into the vaults of the Acc.u.mulation, for no better reason than that for which it poured itself out at other times. Our theory was that the people--that is to say, the government of the people--made the people's money, but, as a matter of fact, the Acc.u.mulation made it and controlled it and juggled with it; and now you saw it, and now you did not see it. The government made gold coins, but the people had nothing but the paper money that the Acc.u.mulation made. But whether there was scarcity or plenty, the failures went on with a continuous ruin that nothing could check, while our larger economic life proceeded in a series of violent shocks, which we called financial panics, followed by long periods of exhaustion and recuperation.
”There was no law in our economy, but as the Acc.u.mulation had never cared for the nature of law, it did not trouble itself for its name in our order of things. It had always bought the law it needed for its own use, first through the voter at the polls in the more primitive days, and then, as civilization advanced, in the legislatures and the courts. But the corruption even of these methods was far surpa.s.sed when the era of consolidation came, and the necessity for statutes and verdicts and decisions became more stringent. Then we had such a burlesque of--”
”Look here!” a sharp, nasal voice snarled across the rich, full pipe of the Altrurian, and we all instantly looked there. The voice came from an old farmer, holding himself stiffly up, with his hands in his pockets and his lean frame bent toward the speaker. ”When are you goin' to get to Altrury? We know all about Ameriky.”
He sat down again, and it was a moment before the crowd caught on. Then a yell of delight and a roar of volleyed laughter went up from the lower cla.s.ses, in which, I am sorry to say, my friend the banker joined, so far as the laughter was concerned. ”Good! That's it! First-rate!” came from a hundred vulgar throats.
”Isn't it a perfect shame?” Mrs. Makely demanded. ”I think some of you gentlemen ought to say something. What will Mr. h.o.m.os think of our civilization if we let such interruptions go unrebuked?”
She was sitting between the banker and myself, and her indignation made him laugh more and more. ”Oh, it serves him right,” he said. ”Don't you see that he is hoist with his own petard? Let him alone. He's in the hands of his friends.”
The Altrurian waited for the tumult to die away, and then he said, gently: ”I don't understand.”
The old farmer jerked himself to his feet again. ”It's like this: I paid my dolla' to hear about a country where there wa'n't no co'perations nor no monop'lies nor no buyin' up cou'ts; and I ain't agoin' to have no allegory shoved down my throat, instead of a true history, noways. I know all about how it is _here_. Fi'st, run their line through your backya'd, and then kill off your cattle, and keep kerryin' on it up from cou't to cou't, till there ain't hide or hair on 'em left--”
”Oh, set down, set down! Let the man go on! He'll make it all right with you,” one of the construction gang called out; but the farmer stood his ground, and I could hear him through the laughing and shouting keep saying something, from time to time, about not wanting to pay no dolla' for no talk about co'perations and monop'lies that we had right under our own noses the whole while, and, you might say, in your very bread-troughs; till, at last, I saw Reuben Camp make his way toward him, and, after an energetic expostulation, turn to leave him again.
Then he faltered out, ”I guess it's all right,” and dropped out of sight in the group he had risen from. I fancied his wife scolding him there, and all but shaking him in public.
”I should be very sorry,” the Altrurian proceeded, ”to have any one believe that I have not been giving you a _bona fide_ account of conditions in my country before the Evolution, when we first took the name of Altruria in our great, peaceful campaign against the Acc.u.mulation. As for offering you any allegory or travesty of your own conditions, I will simply say that I do not know them well enough to do so intelligently.
But, whatever they are, G.o.d forbid that the likeness which you seem to recognize should ever go so far as the desperate state of things which we finally reached. I will not trouble you with details; in fact, I have been afraid that I had already treated of our affairs too abstractly; but, since your own experience furnishes you the means of seizing my meaning, I will go on as before.
”You will understand me when I explain that the Acc.u.mulation had not erected itself into the sovereignty with us unopposed. The working-men, who suffered most from its oppression had early begun to band themselves against it, with the instinct of self-preservation, first trade by trade and art by art, and then in congresses and federations of the trades and arts, until finally they enrolled themselves in one vast union, which included all the working-men, whom their necessity or their interest did not leave on the side of the Acc.u.mulation. This beneficent and generous a.s.sociation of the weak for the sake of the weakest did not accomplish itself fully till the baleful instinct of the Acc.u.mulation had reduced the monopolies to one vast monopoly, till the stronger had devoured the weaker among its members, and the supreme agent stood at the head of our affairs, in everything but name, our imperial ruler. We had hugged so long the delusion of each man for himself that we had suffered all realty to be taken from us. The Acc.u.mulation owned the land as well as the mines under it and the shops over it; the Acc.u.mulation owned the seas and the s.h.i.+ps that sailed the seas, and the fish that swam in their depths; it owned transportation and distribution, and the wares and products that were to be carried to and fro; and, by a logic irresistible and inexorable, the Acc.u.mulation _was_, and we were _not_.
”But the Acc.u.mulation, too, had forgotten something. It had found it so easy to buy legislatures and courts that it did not trouble itself about the polls. It left us the suffrage, and let us amuse ourselves with the periodical election of the political clay images which it manipulated and moulded to any shape and effect at its pleasure. The Acc.u.mulation knew that it was the sovereignty, whatever figure-head we called president or governor or mayor: we had other names for these officials, but I use their a.n.a.logues for the sake of clearness, and I hope my good friend over there will not think I am still talking about America.”
”No,” the old farmer called back, without rising, ”we hain't got there quite yit.”
”No hurry,” said a trainman. ”All in good time. Go on!” he called to the Altrurian.
The Altrurian resumed:
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