Looking Backward: 2000-1887 Read online

  LOOKING BACKWARD.

  CHAPTER I.

  I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. "What!"you say, "eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteenfifty-seven, of course." I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It wasabout four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day afterChristmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the eastwind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote periodmarked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in thepresent year of grace, 2000.

  These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I addthat I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that noperson can be blamed for refusing to read another word of whatpromises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless Iearnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and willundertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince himof this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge ofjustifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when Iwas born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, inthe latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day,or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which wereto develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurredto modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, ornations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differencesbetween them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays,of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself wasrich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements ofhappiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury,and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements oflife, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others,rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grandparentshad lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if Ihad any, would enjoy a like easy existence.

  But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why shouldthe world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to renderservice? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sumof money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, youwill naturally infer, must have been very large not to have beenexhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however,was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. Itwas, in fact, much larger now that three generations had beensupported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery ofuse without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems likemagic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happilylost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shiftingthe burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. The man whohad accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to liveon the income of his investments. To explain at this point how theancient methods of industry made this possible would delay us toomuch. I shall only stop now to say that interest on investments was aspecies of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged inindustry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able tolevy. It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems sounnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was nevercriticised by your ancestors. It had been the effort of law-givers andprophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least tolimit it to the smallest possible rate. All these efforts had,however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the ancientsocial organizations prevailed. At the time of which I write, thelatter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally givenup trying to regulate the subject at all.

  By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of theway people lived together in those days, and especially of therelations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot dobetter than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coachwhich the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomelyalong a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, andpermitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow.Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard aroad, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even atthe steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy andcomfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy thescenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of thestraining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and thecompetition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end inlife to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to hischild after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seatto whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents bywhich it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were soeasy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of thecoach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground,where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and helpto drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. Itwas naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat,and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friendswas a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.

  But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their veryluxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot oftheir brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge thattheir own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion forfellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes;commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those whohad to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad placein the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steephill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, theiragonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger,the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made avery distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditabledisplays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times thepassengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope,exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possiblecompensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, whileothers contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled andinjured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach shouldbe so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when thespecially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not,indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always somedanger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all wouldlose their seats.

  It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle ofthe misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers'sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them tohold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers couldonly have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would everfall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to thefunds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselvesextremely little about those who dragged the coach.

  I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of thetwentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts,both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first place, it wasfirmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in whichSociety could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and thefew rode, and not only this, but that no very radical improvement evenwas possible, either in the harness, the coach, the roadway, or thedistribution of the toil. It had always been as it was, and it alwayswould be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophyforbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.

  The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singularhallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared,that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulledat the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higherorder of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seemsunaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared thatvery hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing aboutthe hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from theground, before they had outgro
wn the marks of the rope upon theirhands, began to fall under its influence. As for those whose parentsand grandparents before them had been so fortunate as to keep theirseats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essentialdifference between their sort of humanity and the common article wasabsolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feelingfor the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophicalcompassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I canoffer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked myown attitude toward the misery of my brothers.

  In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried, I wasengaged to wed Edith Bartlett. She, like myself, rode on the top ofthe coach. That is to say, not to encumber ourselves further with anillustration which has, I hope, served its purpose of giving thereader some general impression of how we lived then, her family waswealthy. In that age, when money alone commanded all that wasagreeable and refined in life, it was enough for a woman to be rich tohave suitors; but Edith Bartlett was beautiful and graceful also.

  My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. "Handsome she mighthave been," I hear them saying, "but graceful never, in the costumeswhich were the fashion at that period, when the head covering was adizzy structure a foot tall, and the almost incredible extension ofthe skirt behind by means of artificial contrivances more thoroughlydehumanized the form than any former device of dressmakers. Fancy anyone graceful in such a costume!" The point is certainly well taken,and I can only reply that while the ladies of the twentieth centuryare lovely demonstrations of the effect of appropriate drapery inaccenting feminine graces, my recollection of their great-grandmothersenables me to maintain that no deformity of costume can whollydisguise them.

  Our marriage only waited on the completion of the house which I wasbuilding for our occupancy in one of the most desirable parts of thecity, that is to say, a part chiefly inhabited by the rich. For itmust be understood that the comparative desirability of differentparts of Boston for residence depended then, not on natural features,but on the character of the neighboring population. Each class ornation lived by itself, in quarters of its own. A rich man livingamong the poor, an educated man among the uneducated, was like oneliving in isolation among a jealous and alien race. When the house hadbeen begun, its completion by the winter of 1886 had been expected.The spring of the following year found it, however, yet incomplete,and my marriage still a thing of the future. The cause of a delaycalculated to be particularly exasperating to an ardent lover was aseries of strikes, that is to say, concerted refusals to work on thepart of the brick-layers, masons, carpenters, painters, plumbers, andother trades concerned in house building. What the specific causes ofthese strikes were I do not remember. Strikes had become so common atthat period that people had ceased to inquire into their particulargrounds. In one department of industry or another, they had beennearly incessant ever since the great business crisis of 1873. In factit had come to be the exceptional thing to see any class of laborerspursue their avocation steadily for more than a few months at a time.

  The reader who observes the dates alluded to will of course recognizein these disturbances of industry the first and incoherent phase ofthe great movement which ended in the establishment of the modernindustrial system with all its social consequences. This is all soplain in the retrospect that a child can understand it, but not beingprophets, we of that day had no clear idea what was happening to us.What we did see was that industrially the country was in a very queerway. The relation between the workingman and the employer, betweenlabor and capital, appeared in some unaccountable manner to havebecome dislocated. The working classes had quite suddenly and verygenerally become infected with a profound discontent with theircondition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they onlyknew how to go about it. On every side, with one accord, theypreferred demands for higher pay, shorter hours, better dwellings,better educational advantages, and a share in the refinements andluxuries of life, demands which it was impossible to see the way togranting unless the world were to become a great deal richer than itthen was. Though they knew something of what they wanted, they knewnothing of how to accomplish it, and the eager enthusiasm with whichthey thronged about any one who seemed likely to give them any lighton the subject lent sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, someof whom had little enough light to give. However chimerical theaspirations of the laboring classes might be deemed, the devotionwith which they supported one another in the strikes, which were theirchief weapon, and the sacrifices which they underwent to carry themout left no doubt of their dead earnestness.

  As to the final outcome of the labor troubles, which was the phrase bywhich the movement I have described was most commonly referred to, theopinions of the people of my class differed according to individualtemperament. The sanguine argued very forcibly that it was in the verynature of things impossible that the new hopes of the workingmen couldbe satisfied, simply because the world had not the wherewithal tosatisfy them. It was only because the masses worked very hard andlived on short commons that the race did not starve outright, and noconsiderable improvement in their condition was possible while theworld, as a whole, remained so poor. It was not the capitalists whomthe laboring men were contending with, these maintained, but theiron-bound environment of humanity, and it was merely a question ofthe thickness of their skulls when they would discover the fact andmake up their minds to endure what they could not cure.

  The less sanguine admitted all this. Of course the workingmen'saspirations were impossible of fulfillment for natural reasons, butthere were grounds to fear that they would not discover this factuntil they had made a sad mess of society They had the votes and thepower to do so if they pleased, and their leaders meant they should.Some of these desponding observers went so far as to predict animpending social cataclysm. Humanity, they argued, having climbed tothe top round of the ladder of civilization, was about to take aheader into chaos, after which it would doubtless pick itself up, turnround, and begin to climb again. Repeated experiences of this sort inhistoric and prehistoric times possibly accounted for the puzzlingbumps on the human cranium. Human history, like all great movements,was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea ofindefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination,with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yetbetter illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward andsunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained theperihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to itsnether goal in the regions of chaos.

  This, of course, was an extreme opinion, but I remember serious menamong my acquaintances who, in discussing the signs of the times,adopted a very similar tone. It was no doubt the common opinion ofthoughtful men that society was approaching a critical period whichmight result in great changes. The labor troubles, their causes,course, and cure, took lead of all other topics in the public prints,and in serious conversation.

  The nervous tension of the public mind could not have been morestrikingly illustrated than it was by the alarm resulting from thetalk of a small band of men who called themselves anarchists, andproposed to terrify the American people into adopting their ideas bythreats of violence, as if a mighty nation which had but just put downa rebellion of half its own numbers, in order to maintain itspolitical system, were likely to adopt a new social system out offear.

  As one of the wealthy, with a large stake in the existing order ofthings, I naturally shared the apprehensions of my class. Theparticular grievance I had against the working classes at the time ofwhich I write, on account of the effect of their strikes in postponingmy wedded bliss, no doubt lent a special animosity to my feelingtoward them.