Looking Backward: 2000-1887 Read online

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  I think if a person were ever excusable for losing track of the daysof the week, the circumstances excused me. Indeed, if I had been toldthat the method of reckoning time had been wholly changed and the dayswere now counted in lots of five, ten, or fifteen instead of seven, Ishould have been in no way surprised after what I had already heardand seen of the twentieth century. The first time that any inquiry asto the days of the week occurred to me was the morning following theconversation related in the last chapter. At the breakfast table Dr.Leete asked me if I would care to hear a sermon.

  "Is it Sunday, then?" I exclaimed.

  "Yes," he replied. "It was on Friday, you see, when we made the luckydiscovery of the buried chamber to which we owe your society thismorning. It was on Saturday morning, soon after midnight, that youfirst awoke, and Sunday afternoon when you awoke the second time withfaculties fully regained."

  "So you still have Sundays and sermons," I said. "We had prophets whoforetold that long before this time the world would have dispensedwith both. I am very curious to know how the ecclesiastical systemsfit in with the rest of your social arrangements. I suppose you have asort of national church with official clergymen."

  Dr. Leete laughed, and Mrs. Leete and Edith seemed greatly amused.

  "Why, Mr. West," Edith said, "what odd people you must think us. Youwere quite done with national religious establishments in thenineteenth century, and did you fancy we had gone back to them?"

  "But how can voluntary churches and an unofficial clerical professionbe reconciled with national ownership of all buildings, and theindustrial service required of all men?" I answered.

  "The religious practices of the people have naturally changedconsiderably in a century," replied Dr. Leete; "but supposing them tohave remained unchanged, our social system would accommodate themperfectly. The nation supplies any person or number of persons withbuildings on guarantee of the rent, and they remain tenants while theypay it. As for the clergymen, if a number of persons wish the servicesof an individual for any particular end of their own, apart from thegeneral service of the nation, they can always secure it, with thatindividual's own consent, of course, just as we secure the service ofour editors, by contributing from their credit-cards an indemnity tothe nation for the loss of his services in general industry. Thisindemnity paid the nation for the individual answers to the salary inyour day paid to the individual himself; and the various applicationsof this principle leave private initiative full play in all details towhich national control is not applicable. Now, as to hearing a sermonto-day, if you wish to do so, you can either go to a church to hear itor stay at home."

  "How am I to hear it if I stay at home?"

  "Simply by accompanying us to the music room at the proper hour andselecting an easy chair. There are some who still prefer to hearsermons in church, but most of our preaching, like our musicalperformances, is not in public, but delivered in acoustically preparedchambers, connected by wire with subscribers' houses. If you prefer togo to a church I shall be glad to accompany you, but I really don'tbelieve you are likely to hear anywhere a better discourse than youwill at home. I see by the paper that Mr. Barton is to preach thismorning, and he preaches only by telephone, and to audiences oftenreaching 150,000."

  "The novelty of the experience of hearing a sermon under suchcircumstances would incline me to be one of Mr. Barton's hearers, iffor no other reason," I said.

  An hour or two later, as I sat reading in the library, Edith came forme, and I followed her to the music room, where Dr. and Mrs. Leetewere waiting. We had not more than seated ourselves comfortably whenthe tinkle of a bell was heard, and a few moments after the voice of aman, at the pitch of ordinary conversation, addressed us, with aneffect of proceeding from an invisible person in the room. This waswhat the voice said:--

  MR. BARTON'S SERMON.

  "We have had among us, during the past week, a critic from thenineteenth century, a living representative of the epoch of ourgreat-grandparents. It would be strange if a fact so extraordinary hadnot somewhat strongly affected our imaginations. Perhaps most of ushave been stimulated to some effort to realize the society of acentury ago, and figure to ourselves what it must have been like tolive then. In inviting you now to consider certain reflections uponthis subject which have occurred to me, I presume that I shall ratherfollow than divert the course of your own thoughts."

  Edith whispered something to her father at this point, to which henodded assent and turned to me.

  "Mr. West," he said, "Edith suggests that you may find it slightlyembarrassing to listen to a discourse on the lines Mr. Barton islaying down, and if so, you need not be cheated out of a sermon. Shewill connect us with Mr. Sweetser's speaking room if you say so, and Ican still promise you a very good discourse."

  "No, no," I said. "Believe me, I would much rather hear what Mr.Barton has to say."

  "As you please," replied my host.

  When her father spoke to me Edith had touched a screw, and the voiceof Mr. Barton had ceased abruptly. Now at another touch the room wasonce more filled with the earnest sympathetic tones which had alreadyimpressed me most favorably.

  * * * * *

  "I venture to assume that one effect has been common with us as aresult of this effort at retrospection, and that it has been to leaveus more than ever amazed at the stupendous change which one briefcentury has made in the material and moral conditions of humanity.

  "Still, as regards the contrast between the poverty of the nation andthe world in the nineteenth century and their wealth now, it is notgreater, possibly, than had been before seen in human history, perhapsnot greater, for example, than that between the poverty of thiscountry during the earliest colonial period of the seventeenth centuryand the relatively great wealth it had attained at the close of thenineteenth, or between the England of William the Conqueror and thatof Victoria. Although the aggregate riches of a nation did not then,as now, afford any accurate criterion of the masses of its people, yetinstances like these afford partial parallels for the merely materialside of the contrast between the nineteenth and the twentiethcenturies. It is when we contemplate the moral aspect of that contrastthat we find ourselves in the presence of a phenomenon for whichhistory offers no precedent, however far back we may cast our eye. Onemight almost be excused who should exclaim, 'Here, surely, issomething like a miracle!' Nevertheless, when we give over idlewonder, and begin to examine the seeming prodigy critically, we findit no prodigy at all, much less a miracle. It is not necessary tosuppose a moral new birth of humanity, or a wholesale destruction ofthe wicked and survival of the good, to account for the fact beforeus. It finds its simple and obvious explanation in the reaction of achanged environment upon human nature. It means merely that a form ofsociety which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness,and appealed solely to the anti-social and brutal side of humannature, has been replaced by institutions based on the trueself-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealing to the socialand generous instincts of men.

  "My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemedin the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the oldsocial and industrial system, which taught them to view their naturalprey in their fellow-men, and find their gain in the loss of others.No doubt it seems to you that no necessity, however dire, would havetempted you to subsist on what superior skill or strength enabled youto wrest from others equally needy. But suppose it were not merelyyour own life that you were responsible for. I know well that theremust have been many a man among our ancestors who, if it had beenmerely a question of his own life, would sooner have given it up thannourished it by bread snatched from others. But this he was notpermitted to do. He had dear lives dependent on him. Men loved womenin those days, as now. God knows how they dared be fathers, but theyhad babies as sweet, no doubt, to them as ours to us, whom they mustfeed, clothe, educate. The gentlest creatures are fierce when theyhave young to provide for, and in that wolfish soci
ety the strugglefor bread borrowed a peculiar desperation from the tenderestsentiments. For the sake of those dependent on him, a man might notchoose, but must plunge into the foul fight,--cheat, overreach,supplant, defraud, buy below worth and sell above, break down thebusiness by which his neighbor fed his young ones, tempt men to buywhat they ought not and to sell what they should not, grind hislaborers, sweat his debtors, cozen his creditors. Though a man soughtit carefully with tears, it was hard to find a way in which he couldearn a living and provide for his family except by pressing in beforesome weaker rival and taking the food from his mouth. Even theministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel necessity. Whilethey warned their flocks against the love of money, regard for theirfamilies compelled them to keep an outlook for the pecuniary prizes oftheir calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed a trying business,preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness which they andeverybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce topoverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conductwhich the law of self-preservation compelled men to break. Looking onthe inhuman spectacle of society, these worthy men bitterly bemoanedthe depravity of human nature; as if angelic nature would not havebeen debauched in such a devil's school! Ah, my friends, believe me,it is not now in this happy age that humanity is proving the divinitywithin it. It was rather in those evil days when not even the fightfor life with one another, the struggle for mere existence, in whichmercy was folly, could wholly banish generosity and kindness from theearth.

  "It is not hard to understand the desperation with which men andwomen, who under other conditions would have been full of gentlenessand ruth, fought and tore each other in the scramble for gold, when werealize what it meant to miss it, what poverty was in that day. Forthe body it was hunger and thirst, torment by heat and frost, insickness neglect, in health unremitting toil; for the moral nature itmeant oppression, contempt, and the patient endurance of indignity,brutish associations from infancy, the loss of all the innocence ofchildhood, the grace of womanhood, the dignity of manhood; for themind it meant the death of ignorance, the torpor of all thosefaculties which distinguish us from brutes, the reduction of life to around of bodily functions.

  "Ah, my friends, if such a fate as this were offered you and yourchildren as the only alternative of success in the accumulation ofwealth, how long do you fancy would you be in sinking to the morallevel of your ancestors?

  "Some two or three centuries ago an act of barbarity was committed inIndia, which, though the number of lives destroyed was but a fewscore, was attended by such peculiar horrors that its memory is likelyto be perpetual. A number of English prisoners were shut up in a roomcontaining not enough air to supply one-tenth their number. Theunfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but, asthe agonies of suffocation began to take hold on them, they forgot allelse, and became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for himself,and against all others, to force a way to one of the small aperturesof the prison at which alone it was possible to get a breath of air.It was a struggle in which men became beasts, and the recital of itshorrors by the few survivors so shocked our forefathers that for acentury later we find it a stock reference in their literature as atypical illustration of the extreme possibilities of human misery, asshocking in its moral as its physical aspect. They could scarcely haveanticipated that to us the Black Hole of Calcutta, with its press ofmaddened men tearing and trampling one another in the struggle to wina place at the breathing holes, would seem a striking type of thesociety of their age. It lacked something of being a complete type,however, for in the Calcutta Black Hole there were no tender women, nolittle children and old men and women, no cripples. They were at leastall men, strong to bear, who suffered.

  "When we reflect that the ancient order of which I have been speakingwas prevalent up to the end of the nineteenth century, while to us thenew order which succeeded it already seems antique, even our parentshaving known no other, we cannot fail to be astounded at thesuddenness with which a transition so profound beyond all previousexperience of the race must have been effected. Some observation ofthe state of men's minds during the last quarter of the nineteenthcentury will, however, in great measure, dissipate this astonishment.Though general intelligence in the modern sense could not be said toexist in any community at that time, yet, as compared with previousgenerations, the one then on the stage was intelligent. The inevitableconsequence of even this comparative degree of intelligence had been aperception of the evils of society, such as had never before beengeneral. It is quite true that these evils had been even worse, muchworse, in previous ages. It was the increased intelligence of themasses which made the difference, as the dawn reveals the squalor ofsurroundings which in the darkness may have seemed tolerable. Thekeynote of the literature of the period was one of compassion for thepoor and unfortunate, and indignant outcry against the failure of thesocial machinery to ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain fromthese outbursts that the moral hideousness of the spectacle about themwas, at least by flashes, fully realized by the best of the men ofthat time, and that the lives of some of the more sensitive andgenerous hearted of them were rendered wellnigh unendurable by theintensity of their sympathies.

  "Although the idea of the vital unity of the family of mankind, thereality of human brotherhood, was very far from being apprehended bythem as the moral axiom it seems to us, yet it is a mistake to supposethat there was no feeling at all corresponding to it. I could read youpassages of great beauty from some of their writers which show thatthe conception was clearly attained by a few, and no doubt vaguely bymany more. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the nineteenthcentury was in name Christian, and the fact that the entire commercialand industrial frame of society was the embodiment of theanti-Christian spirit must have had some weight, though I admit it wasstrangely little, with the nominal followers of Jesus Christ.

  "When we inquire why it did not have more, why, in general, long aftera vast majority of men had agreed as to the crying abuses of theexisting social arrangement, they still tolerated it, or contentedthemselves with talking of petty reforms in it, we come upon anextraordinary fact. It was the sincere belief of even the best of menat that epoch that the only stable elements in human nature, on whicha social system could be safely founded, were its worst propensities.They had been taught and believed that greed and self-seeking were allthat held mankind together, and that all human associations would fallto pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives orcurb their operation. In a word, they believed--even those who longedto believe otherwise--the exact reverse of what seems to usself-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualitiesof men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished thecohesive force of society. It seemed reasonable to them that men livedtogether solely for the purpose of overreaching and oppressing oneanother, and of being overreached and oppressed, and that while asociety that gave full scope to these propensities could stand, therewould be little chance for one based on the idea of cooperation forthe benefit of all. It seems absurd to expect any one to believe thatconvictions like these were ever seriously entertained by men; butthat they were not only entertained by our great-grandfathers, butwere responsible for the long delay in doing away with the ancientorder, after a conviction of its intolerable abuses had becomegeneral, is as well established as any fact in history can be. Justhere you will find the explanation of the profound pessimism of theliterature of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the note ofmelancholy in its poetry, and the cynicism of its humor.

  "Feeling that the condition of the race was unendurable, they had noclear hope of anything better. They believed that the evolution ofhumanity had resulted in leading it into a _cul de sac_, and thatthere was no way of getting forward. The frame of men's minds at thistime is strikingly illustrated by treatises which have come down tous, and may even now be consulted in our libraries by the curious, inwhich laborious arguments are pursued to prove that despite the evilplight of men, l
ife was still, by some slight preponderance ofconsiderations, probably better worth living than leaving. Despisingthemselves, they despised their Creator. There was a general decay ofreligious belief. Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly veiled bydoubt and dread, alone lighted up the chaos of earth. That men shoulddoubt Him whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread the hands thatmoulded them, seems to us indeed a pitiable insanity; but we mustremember that children who are brave by day have sometimes foolishfears at night. The dawn has come since then. It is very easy tobelieve in the fatherhood of God in the twentieth century.

  "Briefly, as must needs be in a discourse of this character, I haveadverted to some of the causes which had prepared men's minds for thechange from the old to the new order, as well as some causes of theconservatism of despair which for a while held it back after the timewas ripe. To wonder at the rapidity with which the change wascompleted after its possibility was first entertained is to forget theintoxicating effect of hope upon minds long accustomed to despair. Thesunburst, after so long and dark a night, must needs have had adazzling effect. From the moment men allowed themselves to believethat humanity after all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squatstature was not the measure of its possible growth, but that it stoodupon the verge of an avatar of limitless development, the reactionmust needs have been overwhelming. It is evident that nothing was ableto stand against the enthusiasm which the new faith inspired.

  "Here, at last, men must have felt, was a cause compared with whichthe grandest of historic causes had been trivial. It was doubtlessbecause it could have commanded millions of martyrs, that none wereneeded. The change of a dynasty in a petty kingdom of the old worldoften cost more lives than did the revolution which set the feet ofthe human race at last in the right way.

  "Doubtless it ill beseems one to whom the boon of life in ourresplendent age has been vouchsafed to wish his destiny other, and yetI have often thought that I would fain exchange my share in thisserene and golden day for a place in that stormy epoch of transition,when heroes burst the barred gate of the future and revealed to thekindling gaze of a hopeless race, in place of the blank wall that hadclosed its path, a vista of progress whose end, for very excess oflight, still dazzles us. Ah, my friends! who will say that to havelived then, when the weakest influence was a lever to whose touch thecenturies trembled, was not worth a share even in this era offruition?

  "You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless ofrevolutions. In the time of one generation men laid aside the socialtraditions and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social orderworthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in theirhabits, they became co-workers, and found in fraternity, at once, thescience of wealth and happiness. 'What shall I eat and drink, andwherewithal shall I be clothed?' stated as a problem beginning andending in self, had been an anxious and an endless one. But when onceit was conceived, not from the individual, but the fraternalstandpoint, 'What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal shall we beclothed?'--its difficulties vanished.

  "Poverty with servitude had been the result, for the mass of humanity,of attempting to solve the problem of maintenance from the individualstandpoint, but no sooner had the nation become the sole capitalistand employer than not alone did plenty replace poverty, but the lastvestige of the serfdom of man to man disappeared from earth. Humanslavery, so often vainly scotched, at last was killed. The means ofsubsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by employer toemployed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock asamong children at the father's table. It was impossible for a man anylonger to use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His esteemwas the only sort of gain he could thenceforth make out of him. Therewas no more either arrogance or servility in the relations of humanbeings to one another. For the first time since the creation every manstood up straight before God. The fear of want and the lust of gainbecame extinct motives when abundance was assured to all andimmoderate possessions made impossible of attainment. There were nomore beggars nor almoners. Equity left charity without an occupation.The ten commandments became wellnigh obsolete in a world where therewas no temptation to theft, no occasion to lie either for fear orfavor, no room for envy where all were equal, and little provocationto violence where men were disarmed of power to injure one another.Humanity's ancient dream of liberty, equality, fraternity, mocked byso many ages, at last was realized.

  "As in the old society the generous, the just, the tender-hearted hadbeen placed at a disadvantage by the possession of those qualities, soin the new society the cold-hearted, the greedy, and self-seekingfound themselves out of joint with the world. Now that the conditionsof life for the first time ceased to operate as a forcing process todevelop the brutal qualities of human nature, and the premium whichhad heretofore encouraged selfishness was not only removed, but placedupon unselfishness, it was for the first time possible to see whatunperverted human nature really was like. The depraved tendencies,which had previously overgrown and obscured the better to so large anextent, now withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the noblerqualities showed a sudden luxuriance which turned cynics intopanegyrists and for the first time in human history tempted mankind tofall in love with itself. Soon was fully revealed, what the divinesand philosophers of the old world never would have believed, thathuman nature in its essential qualities is good, not bad, that men bytheir natural intention and structure are generous, not selfish,pitiful, not cruel, sympathetic, not arrogant, godlike in aspirations,instinct with divinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice,images of God indeed, not the travesties upon Him they had seemed. Theconstant pressure, through numberless generations, of conditions oflife which might have perverted angels, had not been able toessentially alter the natural nobility of the stock, and theseconditions once removed, like a bent tree, it had sprung back to itsnormal uprightness.

  "To put the whole matter in the nutshell of a parable, let me comparehumanity in the olden time to a rosebush planted in a swamp, wateredwith black bog-water, breathing miasmatic fogs by day, and chilledwith poison dews at night. Innumerable generations of gardeners haddone their best to make it bloom, but beyond an occasional half-openedbud with a worm at the heart, their efforts had been unsuccessful.Many, indeed, claimed that the bush was no rosebush at all, but anoxious shrub, fit only to be uprooted and burned. The gardeners, forthe most part, however, held that the bush belonged to the rosefamily, but had some ineradicable taint about it, which prevented thebuds from coming out, and accounted for its generally sicklycondition. There were a few, indeed, who maintained that the stock wasgood enough, that the trouble was in the bog, and that under morefavorable conditions the plant might be expected to do better. Butthese persons were not regular gardeners, and being condemned by thelatter as mere theorists and day dreamers, were for the most part, soregarded by the people. Moreover, urged some eminent moralphilosophers, even conceding for the sake of the argument that thebush might possibly do better elsewhere, it was a more valuablediscipline for the buds to try to bloom in a bog than it would beunder more favorable conditions. The buds that succeeded in openingmight indeed be very rare, and the flowers pale and scentless, butthey represented far more moral effort than if they had bloomedspontaneously in a garden.

  "The regular gardeners and the moral philosophers had their way. Thebush remained rooted in the bog, and the old course of treatment wenton. Continually new varieties of forcing mixtures were applied to theroots, and more recipes than could be numbered, each declared by itsadvocates the best and only suitable preparation, were used to killthe vermin and remove the mildew. This went on a very long time.Occasionally some one claimed to observe a slight improvement in theappearance of the bush, but there were quite as many who declared thatit did not look so well as it used to. On the whole there could not besaid to be any marked change. Finally, during a period of generaldespondency as to the prospects of the bush where it was, the idea oftransplanting it was again mooted, and this time found favor. 'Let ustry it,' was
the general voice. 'Perhaps it may thrive betterelsewhere, and here it is certainly doubtful if it be worthcultivating longer.' So it came about that the rosebush of humanitywas transplanted, and set in sweet, warm, dry earth, where the sunbathed it, the stars wooed it, and the south wind caressed it. Then itappeared that it was indeed a rosebush. The vermin and the mildewdisappeared, and the bush was covered with most beautiful red roses,whose fragrance filled the world.

  "It is a pledge of the destiny appointed for us that the Creator hasset in our hearts an infinite standard of achievement, judged by whichour past attainments seem always insignificant, and the goal nevernearer. Had our forefathers conceived a state of society in which menshould live together like brethren dwelling in unity, without strifesor envying, violence or overreaching, and where, at the price of adegree of labor not greater than health demands, in their chosenoccupations, they should be wholly freed from care for the morrow andleft with no more concern for their livelihood than trees which arewatered by unfailing streams,--had they conceived such a condition, Isay, it would have seemed to them nothing less than paradise. Theywould have confounded it with their idea of heaven, nor dreamed thatthere could possibly lie further beyond anything to be desired orstriven for.

  "But how is it with us who stand on this height which they gazed upto? Already we have wellnigh forgotten, except when it is especiallycalled to our minds by some occasion like the present, that it wasnot always with men as it is now. It is a strain on our imaginationsto conceive the social arrangements of our immediate ancestors. Wefind them grotesque. The solution of the problem of physicalmaintenance so as to banish care and crime, so far from seeming to usan ultimate attainment, appears but as a preliminary to anything likereal human progress. We have but relieved ourselves of an impertinentand needless harassment which hindered our ancestors from undertakingthe real ends of existence. We are merely stripped for the race; nomore. We are like a child which has just learned to stand upright andto walk. It is a great event, from the child's point of view, when hefirst walks. Perhaps he fancies that there can be little beyond thatachievement, but a year later he has forgotten that he could notalways walk. His horizon did but widen when he rose, and enlarge as hemoved. A great event indeed, in one sense, was his first step, butonly as a beginning, not as the end. His true career was but thenfirst entered on. The enfranchisement of humanity in the last century,from mental and physical absorption in working and scheming for themere bodily necessities, may be regarded as a species of second birthof the race, without which its first birth to an existence that wasbut a burden would forever have remained unjustified, but whereby itis now abundantly vindicated. Since then, humanity has entered on anew phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties,the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcelysuspected. In place of the dreary hopelessness of the nineteenthcentury, its profound pessimism as to the future of humanity, theanimating idea of the present age is an enthusiastic conception of theopportunities of our earthly existence, and the unboundedpossibilities of human nature. The betterment of mankind fromgeneration to generation, physically, mentally, morally, is recognizedas the one great object supremely worthy of effort and of sacrifice.We believe the race for the first time to have entered on therealization of God's ideal of it, and each generation must now be astep upward.

  "Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall havepassed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end islost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God 'who is ourhome,' the return of the individual by the way of death, and thereturn of the race by the fulfilment of the evolution, when the divinesecret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a tear forthe dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling oureyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended.Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavensare before it."