Part 22 (1/2)
”There had been, from the beginning, an almost ceaseless struggle between the Acc.u.mulation and the proletariate. The Acc.u.mulation always said that it was the best friend of the proletariate, and it denounced, through the press which it controlled, the proletarian leaders who taught that it was the enemy of the proletariate, and who stirred up strikes and tumults of all sorts, for higher wages and fewer hours. But the friend of the proletariate, whenever occasion served, treated the proletariate like a deadly enemy. In seasons of overproduction, as it was called, it locked the workmen out or laid them off, and left their families to starve, or ran light work and claimed the credit of public benefactors for running at all. It sought every chance to reduce wages; it had laws pa.s.sed to forbid or cripple the workmen in their strikes; and the judges convicted them of conspiracy, and wrested the statutes to their hurt, in cases where there had been no thought of embarra.s.sing them, even among the legislators. G.o.d forbid that you should ever come to such a pa.s.s in America; but, if you ever should, G.o.d grant that you may find your way out as simply as we did at last, when freedom had perished in everything but name among us, and justice had become a mockery.
”The Acc.u.mulation had advanced so smoothly, so lightly, in all its steps to the supreme power, and had at last so thoroughly quelled the uprisings of the proletariate, that it forgot one thing: it forgot the despised and neglected suffrage. The ballot, because it had been so easy to annul its effect, had been left in the people's hands; and when, at last, the leaders of the proletariate ceased to counsel strikes, or any form of resistance to the Acc.u.mulation that could be tormented into the likeness of insurrection against the government, and began to urge them to attack it in the political way, the deluge that swept the Acc.u.mulation out of existence came trickling and creeping over the land. It appeared first in the country, a spring from the ground; then it gathered head in the villages; then it swelled to a torrent in the cities. I cannot stay to trace its course; but suddenly, one day, when the Acc.u.mulation's abuse of a certain power became too gross, it was voted out of that power. You will perhaps be interested to know that it was with the telegraphs that the rebellion against the Acc.u.mulation began, and the government was forced, by the overwhelming majority which the proletariate sent to our parliament, to a.s.sume a function which the Acc.u.mulation had impudently usurped. Then the transportation of smaller and more perishable wares--”
”Yes,” a voice called--”express business. Go on!”
”Was legislated a function of the post-office,” the Altrurian went on.
”Then all transportation was taken into the hands of the political government, which had always been accused of great corruption in its administration, but which showed itself immaculately pure compared with the Acc.u.mulation. The common owners.h.i.+p of mines necessarily followed, with an allotment of lands to any one who wished to live by tilling the land; but not a foot of the land was remitted to private hands for the purposes of selfish pleasure or the exclusion of any other from the landscape. As all business had been gathered into the grasp of the Acc.u.mulation, and the manufacture of everything they used and the production of everything that they ate was in the control of the Acc.u.mulation, its transfer to the government was the work of a single clause in the statute.
”The Acc.u.mulation, which had treated the first menaces of resistance with contempt, awoke to its peril too late. When it turned to wrest the suffrage from the proletariate, at the first election where it attempted to make head against them, it was simply snowed under, as your picturesque phrase is. The Acc.u.mulation had no voters, except the few men at its head and the creatures devoted to it by interest and ignorance. It seemed, at one moment, as if it would offer an armed resistance to the popular will, but, happily, that moment of madness pa.s.sed. Our Evolution was accomplished without a drop of bloodshed, and the first great political brotherhood, the commonwealth of Altruria, was founded.
”I wish that I had time to go into a study of some of the curious phases of the transformation from a civility in which the people lived _upon_ each other to one in which they lived _for_ each other. There is a famous pa.s.sage in the inaugural message of our first Altrurian president which compares the new civic consciousness with that of a disembodied spirit released to the life beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares and greeds of the flesh. But perhaps I shall give a sufficiently clear notion of the triumph of the change among us when I say that within half a decade after the fall of the old plutocratic oligarchy one of the chief directors of the Acc.u.mulation publicly expressed his grat.i.tude to G.o.d that the Acc.u.mulation had pa.s.sed away forever. You will realize the importance of such an expression in recalling the declarations some of your slave-holders have made since the Civil War, that they would not have slavery restored for any earthly consideration.
”But now, after this preamble, which has been so much longer than I meant it to be, how shall I give you a sufficiently just conception of the existing Altruria, the actual state from which I come?”
”Yes,” came the nasal of the old farmer again, ”that's what we are here fur. I wouldn't give a copper to know all you went through beforehand.
It's too dumn like what we have been through ourselves, as fur as heard from.”
A shout of laughter went up from most of the crowd, but the Altrurian did not seem to see any fun in it.
”Well,” he resumed, ”I will tell you, as well as I can, what Altruria is like; but, in the first place, you will have to cast out of your minds all images of civilization with which your experience has filled them. For a time the sh.e.l.l of the old Acc.u.mulation remained for our social habitation, and we dwelt in the old compet.i.tive and monopolistic forms after the life had gone out of them--that is, we continued to live in populous cities, and we toiled to heap up riches for the moth to corrupt, and we slaved on in making utterly useless things, merely because we had the habit of making them to sell. For a while we made the old sham things, which pretended to be useful things and were worse than the confessedly useless things. I will give you an ill.u.s.tration from the trades, which you will all understand. The proletariate, in the compet.i.tive and monopolistic time, used to make a kind of shoes for the proletariate, or the women of the proletariate, which looked like fine shoes of the best quality. It took just as much work to make these shoes as to make the best fine shoes; but they were shams through and through. They wore out in a week, and the people called them, because they were bought fresh for every Sunday--”
”Sat'd'y-night shoes,” screamed the old farmer. ”I know 'em. My gals buy 'em. Half-dolla' a pai', and not wo'th the money.”
”Well,” said the Altrurian, ”they were a cheat and a lie in every way, and under the new system it was not possible, when public attention was called to the fact, to continue the falsehood they embodied. As soon as the Sat.u.r.day-night shoes realized itself to the public conscience, an investigation began, and it was found that the principle of the Sat.u.r.day-night shoe underlay half our industries and made half the work that was done.
”Then an immense reform took place. We renounced, in the most solemn convocation of the whole economy, the principle of the Sat.u.r.day-night shoe, and those who had spent their lives in producing sham shoes--”
”Yes,” said the professor, rising from his seat near us and addressing the speaker, ”I shall be very glad to know what became of the worthy and industrious operatives who were thrown out of employment by this explosion of economic virtue.”
”Why,” the Altrurian replied, ”they were set to work making honest shoes; and, as it took no more time to make a pair of honest shoes which lasted a year than it took to make a pair of dishonest shoes that lasted a week, the amount of labor in shoemaking was at once enormously reduced.”
”Yes,” said the professor, ”I understand that. What became of the shoemakers?”
”They joined the vast army of other laborers who had been employed, directly or indirectly, in the fabrication of fraudulent wares. These shoemakers--lasters, b.u.t.ton-holers, binders, and so on--no longer wore themselves out over their machines. One hour sufficed where twelve hours were needed before, and the operatives were released to the happy labor of the fields, where no one with us toils killingly, from dawn till dusk, but does only as much work as is needed to keep the body in health. We had a continent to refine and beautify; we had climates to change and seasons to modify, a whole system of meteorology to readjust, and the public works gave employment to the mult.i.tudes emanc.i.p.ated from the soul-destroying service of shams. I can scarcely give you a notion of the vastness of the improvements undertaken and carried through, or still in process of accomplishment. But a single one will, perhaps, afford a sufficient ill.u.s.tration. Our southeast coast, from its vicinity to the pole, had always suffered from a winter of antarctic rigor; but our first president conceived the plan of cutting off a peninsula, which kept the equatorial current from making in to our sh.o.r.es; and the work was begun in his term, though the entire strip, twenty miles in width and ninety-three in length, was not severed before the end of the first Altrurian decade. Since that time the whole region of our southeastern coast has enjoyed the climate of your Mediterranean countries.
”It was not only the makers of fraudulent things who were released to these useful and wholesome labors, but those who had spent themselves in contriving ugly and stupid and foolish things were set free to the public employment. The mult.i.tude of these monstrosities and iniquities was as great as that of the shams--”
Here I lost some words, for the professor leaned over and whispered to me: ”He has got _that_ out of William Morris. Depend upon it, the man is a humbug. He is not an Altrurian at all.”
I confess that my heart misgave me; but I signalled the professor to be silent, and again gave the Altrurian--if he was an Altrurian--my whole attention.
XII
”And so,” the Altrurian continued, ”when the labor of the community was emanc.i.p.ated from the bondage of the false to the free service of the true, it was also, by an inevitable implication, dedicated to beauty and rescued from the old slavery to the ugly, the stupid, and the trivial. The thing that was honest and useful became, by the operation of a natural law, a beautiful thing.
”Once we had not time enough to make things beautiful, we were so overworked in making false and hideous things to sell; but now we had all the time there was, and a glad emulation arose among the trades and occupations to the end that everything done should be done finely as well as done honestly. The artist, the man of genius, who worked from the love of his work, became the normal man, and in the measure of his ability and of his calling each wrought in the spirit of the artist. We got back the pleasure of doing a thing beautifully, which was G.o.d's primal blessing upon all His working children, but which we had lost in the horrible days of our need and greed. There is not a working-man within the sound of my voice but has known this divine delight, and would gladly know it always if he only had the time. Well, now we had the time, the Evolution had given us the time, and in all Altruria there was not a furrow driven or a swath mown, not a hammer struck on house or on s.h.i.+p, not a st.i.tch sewn or a stone laid, not a line written or a sheet printed, not a temple raised or an engine built, but it was done with an eye to beauty as well as to use.
”As soon as we were freed from the necessity of preying upon one another, we found that there was no hurry. The good work would wait to be well done; and one of the earliest effects of the Evolution was the disuse of the swift trains which had traversed the continent, night and day, that one man might overreach another, or make haste to undersell his rival, or seize some advantage of him, or plot some profit to his loss. Nine-tenths of the railroads, which in the old times had ruinously competed, and then, in the hands of the Acc.u.mulation, had been united to impoverish and oppress the people, fell into disuse. The commonwealth operated the few lines that were necessary for the collection of materials and the distribution of manufactures, and for pleasure travel and the affairs of state; but the roads that had been built to invest capital, or parallel other roads, or 'make work,' as it was called, or to develop resources, or boom localities, were suffered to fall into ruin; the rails were stripped from the landscape, which they had bound as with shackles, and the road-beds became highways for the use of kindly neighborhoods, or nature recovered them wholly and hid the memory of their former abuse in gra.s.s and flowers and wild vines. The ugly towns that they had forced into being, as Frankenstein was fas.h.i.+oned, from the materials of the charnel, and that had no life in or from the good of the community, soon tumbled into decay. The administration used parts of them in the construction of the villages in which the Altrurians now mostly live; but generally these towns were built of materials so fraudulent, in form so vile, that it was judged best to burn them. In this way their sites were at once purified and obliterated.