prompt:
Chapter: That evening, as I sat with Edith in the music room, listening to some
pieces in the programme of that day which had attracted my notice, I
took advantage of an interval in the music to say, "I have a question
to ask you which I fear is rather indiscreet."

"I am quite sure it is not that," she replied, encouragingly.

"I am in the position of an eavesdropper," I continued, "who, having
overheard a little of a matter not intended for him, though seeming to
concern him, has the impudence to come to the speaker for the rest."

"An eavesdropper!" she repeated, looking puzzled.

"Yes," I said, "but an excusable one, as I think you will admit."

"This is very mysterious," she replied.

"Yes," said I, "so mysterious that often I have doubted whether I
really overheard at all what I am going to ask you about, or only
dreamed it. I want you to tell me. The matter is this: When I was
coming out of that sleep of a century, the first impression of which I
was conscious was of voices talking around me, voices that afterwards
I recognized as your father's, your mother's, and your own. First, I
remember your father's voice saying, 'He is going to open his eyes. He
had better see but one person at first.' Then you said, if I did not
dream it all, 'Promise me, then, that you will not tell him.' Your
father seemed to hesitate about promising, but you insisted, and your
mother interposing, he finally promised, and when I opened my eyes I
saw only him."

I had been quite serious when I said that I was not sure that I had
not dreamed the conversation I fancied I had overheard, so
incomprehensible was it that these people should know anything of me,
a contemporary of their great-grandparents, which I did not know
myself. But when I saw the effect of my words upon Edith, I knew that
it was no dream, but another mystery, and a more puzzling one than any
I had before encountered. For from the moment that the drift of my
question became apparent, she showed indications of the most acute
embarrassment. Her eyes, always so frank and direct in expression, had
dropped in a panic before mine, while her face crimsoned from neck to
forehead.

"Pardon me," I said, as soon as I had recovered from bewilderment at
the extraordinary effect of my words. "It seems, then, that I was not
dreaming. There is some secret, something about me, which you are
withholding from me. Really, doesn't it seem a little hard that a
person in my position should not be given all the information possible
concerning himself?"

"It does not concern you--that is, not directly. It is not about
you--exactly," she replied, scarcely audibly.

"But it concerns me in some way," I persisted. "It must be something
that would interest me."

"I don't know even that," she replied, venturing a momentary glance at
my face, furiously blushing, and yet with a quaint smile flickering
about her lips which betrayed a certain perception of humor in the
situation despite its embarrassment,--"I am not sure that it would
even interest you."

"Your father would have told me," I insisted, with an accent of
reproach. "It was you who forbade him. He thought I ought to know."

She did not reply. She was so entirely charming in her confusion that
I was now prompted, as much by the desire to prolong the situation as
by my original curiosity, to importune her further.

"Am I never to know? Will you never tell me?" I said.

"It depends," she answered, after a long pause.

"On what?" I persisted.

"Ah, you ask too much," she replied. Then, raising to mine a face
which inscrutable eyes, flushed cheeks, and smiling lips combined to
render perfectly bewitching, she added, "What should you think if I
said that it depended on--yourself?"

"On myself?" I echoed. "How can that possibly be?"

"Mr. West, we are losing some charming music," was her only reply to
this, and turning to the telephone, at a touch of her finger she set
the air to swaying to the rhythm of an adagio. After that she took
good care that the music should leave no opportunity for conversation.
She kept her face averted from me, and pretended to be absorbed in the
airs, but that it was a mere pretense the crimson tide standing at
flood in her cheeks sufficiently betrayed.

When at length she suggested that I might have heard all I cared to,
for that time, and we rose to leave the room, she came straight up to
me and said, without raising her eyes, "Mr. West, you say I have been
good to you. I have not been particularly so, but if you think I have,
I want you to promise me that you will not try again to make me tell
you this thing you have asked to-night, and that you will not try to
find it out from any one else,--my father or mother, for instance."

To such an appeal there was but one reply possible. "Forgive me for
distressing you. Of course I will promise," I said. "I would never
have asked you if I had fancied it could distress you. But do you
blame me for being curious?"

"I do not blame you at all."

"And some time," I added, "if I do not tease you, you may tell me of
your own accord. May I not hope so?"

"Perhaps," she murmured.

"Only perhaps?"

Looking up, she read my face with a quick, deep glance. "Yes," she
said, "I think I may tell you--some time;" and so our conversation
ended, for she gave me no chance to say anything more.

That night I don't think even Dr. Pillsbury could have put me to
sleep, till toward morning at least. Mysteries had been my accustomed
food for days now, but none had before confronted me at once so
mysterious and so fascinating as this, the solution of which Edith
Leete had forbidden me even to seek. It was a double mystery. How, in
the first place, was it conceivable that she should know any secret
about me, a stranger from a strange age? In the second place, even if
she should know such a secret, how account for the agitating effect
which the knowledge of it seemed to have upon her? There are puzzles
so difficult that one cannot even get so far as a conjecture as to the
solution, and this seemed one of them. I am usually of too practical a
turn to waste time on such conundrums; but the difficulty of a riddle
embodied in a beautiful young girl does not detract from its
fascination. In general, no doubt, maidens' blushes may be safely
assumed to tell the same tale to young men in all ages and races, but
to give that interpretation to Edith's crimson cheeks would,
considering my position and the length of time I had known her, and
still more the fact that this mystery dated from before I had known
her at all, be a piece of utter fatuity. And yet she was an angel, and
I should not have been a young man if reason and common sense had been
able quite to banish a roseate tinge from my dreams that night.

In the morning I went down stairs early in the hope of seeing Edith
alone. In this, however, I was disappointed. Not finding her in the
house, I sought her in the garden, but she was not there. In the
course of my wanderings I visited the underground chamber, and sat
down there to rest. Upon the reading table in the chamber several
periodicals and newspapers lay, and thinking that Dr. Leete might be
interested in glancing over a Boston daily of 1887, I brought one of
the papers with me into the house when I came.

At breakfast I met Edith. She blushed as she greeted me, but was
perfectly self-possessed. As we sat at table, Dr. Leete amused himself
with looking over the paper I had brought in. There was in it, as in
all the newspapers of that date, a great deal about the labor
troubles, strikes, lockouts, boycotts, the programmes of labor
parties, and the wild threats of the anarchists.

"By the way," said I, as the doctor read aloud to us some of these
items, "what part did the followers of the red flag take in the
establishment of the new order of things? They were making
considerable noise the last thing that I knew."

"They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of course,"
replied Dr. Leete. "They did that very effectually while they lasted,
for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best considered
projects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of those
fellows was one of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform."

"Subsidizing them!" I exclaimed in astonishment.

"Certainly," replied Dr. Leete. "No historical authority nowadays
doubts that they were paid by the great monopolies to wave the red
flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order,
by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms. What astonishes
me most is that you should have fallen into the trap so
unsuspectingly."

"What are your grounds for believing that the red flag party was
subsidized?" I inquired.

"Why simply because they must have seen that their course made a
thousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend. Not to
suppose that they were hired for the work is to credit them with an
inconceivable folly.[4] In the United States, of all countries, no
party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first
winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation, as the national
party eventually did."

"The national party!" I exclaimed. "That must have arisen after my
day. I suppose it was one of the labor parties."

"Oh no!" replied the doctor. "The labor parties, as such, never could
have accomplished anything on a large or permanent scale. For purposes
of national scope, their basis as merely class organizations was too
narrow. It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social
system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient
production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one
class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and
ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there
was any prospect that it would be achieved. Then the national party
arose to carry it out by political methods. It probably took that name
because its aim was to nationalize the functions of production and
distribution. Indeed, it could not well have had any other name, for
its purpose was to realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur and
completeness never before conceived, not as an association of men for
certain merely political functions affecting their happiness only
remotely and superficially, but as a family, a vital union, a common
life, a mighty heaven-touching tree whose leaves are its people, fed
from its veins, and feeding it in turn. The most patriotic of all
possible parties, it sought to justify patriotism and raise it from
an instinct to a rational devotion, by making the native land truly a
father land, a father who kept the people alive and was not merely an
idol for which they were expected to die."

[Footnote 4: I fully admit the difficulty of accounting for the course
of the anarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidized
by the capitalists, but, at the same time, there is no doubt that the
theory is wholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at the time by
any one, though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect.]

The personality of Edith Leete had naturally impressed me strongly
ever since I had come, in so strange a manner, to be an inmate of her
father's house, and it was to be expected that after what had happened
the night previous, I should be more than ever preoccupied with
thoughts of her. From the first I had been struck with the air of
serene frankness and ingenuous directness, more like that of a noble
and innocent boy than any girl I had ever known, which characterized
her. I was curious to know how far this charming quality might be
peculiar to herself, and how far possibly a result of alterations in
the social position of women which might have taken place since my
time. Finding an opportunity that day, when alone with Dr. Leete, I
turned the conversation in that direction.

"I suppose," I said, "that women nowadays, having been relieved of the
burden of housework, have no employment but the cultivation of their
charms and graces."

"So far as we men are concerned," replied Dr. Leete, "we should
consider that they amply paid their way, to use one of your forms of
expression, if they confined themselves to that occupation, but you
may be very sure that they have quite too much spirit to consent to be
mere beneficiaries of society, even as a return for ornamenting it.
They did, indeed, welcome their riddance from housework, because that
was not only exceptionally wearing in itself, but also wasteful, in
the extreme, of energy, as compared with the cooperative plan; but
they accepted relief from that sort of work only that they might
contribute in other and more effectual, as well as more agreeable,
ways to the common weal. Our women, as well as our men, are members of
the industrial army, and leave it only when maternal duties claim
them. The result is that most women, at one time or another of their
lives, serve industrially some five or ten or fifteen years, while
those who have no children fill out the full term."

"A woman does not, then, necessarily leave the industrial service on
marriage?" I queried.

"No more than a man," replied the doctor. "Why on earth should she?
Married women have no housekeeping responsibilities now, you know, and
a husband is not a baby that he should be cared for."

"It was thought one of the most grievous features of our civilization
that we required so much toil from women," I said; "but it seems to me
you get more out of them than we did."

Dr. Leete laughed. "Indeed we do, just as we do out of our men. Yet
the women of this age are very happy, and those of the nineteenth
century, unless contemporary references greatly mislead us, were very
miserable. The reason that women nowadays are so much more efficient
co-laborers with the men, and at the same time are so happy, is that,
in regard to their work as well as men's, we follow the principle of
providing every one the kind of occupation he or she is best adapted
to. Women being inferior in strength to men, and further disqualified
industrially in special ways, the kinds of occupation reserved for
them, and the conditions under which they pursue them, have reference
to these facts. The heavier sorts of work are everywhere reserved for
men, the lighter occupations for women. Under no circumstances is a
woman permitted to follow any employment not perfectly adapted, both
as to kind and degree of labor, to her sex. Moreover, the hours of
women's work are considerably shorter than those of men's, more
frequent vacations are granted, and the most careful provision is made
for rest when needed. The men of this day so well appreciate that they
owe to the beauty and grace of women the chief zest of their lives and
their main incentive to effort, that they permit them to work at all
only because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement
of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and
mind, during the period of maximum physical vigor. We believe that
the magnificent health which distinguishes our women from those of
your day, who seem to have been so generally sickly, is owing largely
to the fact that all alike are furnished with healthful and
inspiriting occupation."

"I understood you," I said, "that the women-workers belong to the army
of industry, but how can they be under the same system of ranking and
discipline with the men, when the conditions of their labor are so
different."

"They are under an entirely different discipline," replied Dr. Leete,
"and constitute rather an allied force than an integral part of the
army of the men. They have a woman general-in-chief and are under
exclusively feminine regime. This general, as also the higher
officers, is chosen by the body of women who have passed the time of
service, in correspondence with the manner in which the chiefs of the
masculine army and the President of the nation are elected. The
general of the women's army sits in the cabinet of the President and
has a veto on measures respecting women's work, pending appeals to
Congress. I should have said, in speaking of the judiciary, that we
have women on the bench, appointed by the general of the women, as
well as men. Causes in which both parties are women are determined by
women judges, and where a man and a woman are parties to a case, a
judge of either sex must consent to the verdict."

"Womanhood seems to be organized as a sort of _imperium in imperio_ in
your system," I said.

"To some extent," Dr. Leete replied; "but the inner _imperium_ is one
from which you will admit there is not likely to be much danger to the
nation. The lack of some such recognition of the distinct
individuality of the sexes was one of the innumerable defects of your
society. The passional attraction between men and women has too often
prevented a perception of the profound differences which make the
members of each sex in many things strange to the other, and capable
of sympathy only with their own. It is in giving full play to the
differences of sex rather than in seeking to obliterate them, as was
apparently the effort of some reformers in your day, that the
enjoyment of each by itself and the piquancy which each has for the
other, are alike enhanced. In your day there was no career for women
except in an unnatural rivalry with men. We have given them a world of
their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I assure
you they are very happy in it. It seems to us that women were more
than any other class the victims of your civilization. There is
something which, even at this distance of time, penetrates one with
pathos in the spectacle of their ennuied, undeveloped lives, stunted
at marriage, their narrow horizon, bounded so often, physically, by
the four walls of home, and morally by a petty circle of personal
interests. I speak now, not of the poorer classes, who were generally
worked to death, but also of the well-to-do and rich. From the great
sorrows, as well as the petty frets of life, they had no refuge in the
breezy outdoor world of human affairs, nor any interests save those of
the family. Such an existence would have softened men's brains or
driven them mad. All that is changed to-day. No woman is heard
nowadays wishing she were a man, nor parents desiring boy rather than
girl children. Our girls are as full of ambition for their careers as
our boys. Marriage, when it comes, does not mean incarceration for
them, nor does it separate them in any way from the larger interests
of society, the bustling life of the world. Only when maternity fills
a woman's mind with new interests does she withdraw from the world for
a time. Afterwards, and at any time, she may return to her place among
her comrades, nor need she ever lose touch with them. Women are a very
happy race nowadays, as compared with what they ever were before in
the world's history, and their power of giving happiness to men has
been of course increased in proportion."

"I should imagine it possible," I said, "that the interest which girls
take in their careers as members of the industrial army and candidates
for its distinctions might have an effect to deter them from
marriage."

Dr. Leete smiled. "Have no anxiety on that score, Mr. West," he
replied. "The Creator took very good care that whatever other
modifications the dispositions of men and women might with time take
on, their attraction for each other should remain constant. The mere
fact that in an age like yours, when the struggle for existence must
have left people little time for other thoughts, and the future was so
uncertain that to assume parental responsibilities must have often
seemed like a criminal risk, there was even then marrying and giving
in marriage, should be conclusive on this point. As for love nowadays,
one of our authors says that the vacuum left in the minds of men and
women by the absence of care for one's livelihood has been entirely
taken up by the tender passion. That, however, I beg you to believe,
is something of an exaggeration. For the rest, so far is marriage from
being an interference with a woman's career, that the higher positions
in the feminine army of industry are intrusted only to women who have
been both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex."

"Are credit cards issued to the women just as to the men?"

"Certainly."

"The credits of the women, I suppose, are for smaller sums, owing to
the frequent suspension of their labor on account of family
responsibilities."

"Smaller!" exclaimed Dr. Leete, "oh, no! The maintenance of all our
people is the same. There are no exceptions to that rule, but if any
difference were made on account of the interruptions you speak of, it
would be by making the woman's credit larger, not smaller. Can you
think of any service constituting a stronger claim on the nation's
gratitude than bearing and nursing the nation's children? According to
our view, none deserve so well of the world as good parents. There is
no task so unselfish, so necessarily without return, though the heart
is well rewarded, as the nurture of the children who are to make the
world for one another when we are gone."

"It would seem to follow, from what you have said, that wives are in
no way dependent on their husbands for maintenance."

"Of course they are not," replied Dr. Leete, "nor children on their
parents either, that is, for means of support, though of course they
are for the offices of affection. The child's labor, when he grows up,
will go to increase the common stock, not his parents', who will be
dead, and therefore he is properly nurtured out of the common stock.
The account of every person, man, woman, and child, you must
understand, is always with the nation directly, and never through any
intermediary, except, of course, that parents, to a certain extent,
act for children as their guardians. You see that it is by virtue of
the relation of individuals to the nation, of their membership in it,
that they are entitled to support; and this title is in no way
connected with or affected by their relations to other individuals who
are fellow members of the nation with them. That any person should be
dependent for the means of support upon another would be shocking to
the moral sense as well as indefensible on any rational social theory.
What would become of personal liberty and dignity under such an
arrangement? I am aware that you called yourselves free in the
nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then, however,
have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not
have applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a
position of galling personal dependence upon others as to the very
means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer,
women upon men, children upon parents. Instead of distributing the
product of the nation directly to its members, which would seem the
most natural and obvious method, it would actually appear that you had
given your minds to devising a plan of hand to hand distribution,
involving the maximum of personal humiliation to all classes of
recipients.

"As regards the dependence of women upon men for support, which then
was usual, of course, natural attraction in case of marriages of love
must often have made it endurable, though for spirited women I should
fancy it must always have remained humiliating. What, then, must it
have been in the innumerable cases where women, with or without the
form of marriage, had to sell themselves to men to get their living?
Even your contemporaries, callous as they were to most of the
revolting aspects of their society, seem to have had an idea that this
was not quite as it should be; but, it was still only for pity's sake
that they deplored the lot of the women. It did not occur to them that
it was robbery as well as cruelty when men seized for themselves the
whole product of the world and left women to beg and wheedle for their
share. Why--but bless me, Mr. West, I am really running on at a
remarkable rate, just as if the robbery, the sorrow, and the shame
which those poor women endured were not over a century since, or as if
you were responsible for what you no doubt deplored as much as I do."

"I must bear my share of responsibility for the world as it then was,"
I replied. "All I can say in extenuation is that until the nation was
ripe for the present system of organized production and distribution,
no radical improvement in the position of woman was possible. The root
of her disability, as you say, was her personal dependence upon man
for her livelihood, and I can imagine no other mode of social
organization than that you have adopted, which would have set woman
free of man at the same time that it set men free of one another. I
suppose, by the way, that so entire a change in the position of women
cannot have taken place without affecting in marked ways the social
relations of the sexes. That will be a very interesting study for me."

"The change you will observe," said Dr. Leete, "will chiefly be, I
think, the entire frankness and unconstraint which now characterizes
those relations, as compared with the artificiality which seems to
have marked them in your time. The sexes now meet with the ease of
perfect equals, suitors to each other for nothing but love. In your
time the fact that women were dependent for support on men made the
woman in reality the one chiefly benefited by marriage. This fact, so
far as we can judge from contemporary records, appears to have been
coarsely enough recognized among the lower classes, while among the
more polished it was glossed over by a system of elaborate
conventionalities which aimed to carry the precisely opposite meaning,
namely, that the man was the party chiefly benefited. To keep up this
convention it was essential that he should always seem the suitor.
Nothing was therefore considered more shocking to the proprieties than
that a woman should betray a fondness for a man before he had
indicated a desire to marry her. Why, we actually have in our
libraries books, by authors of your day, written for no other purpose
than to discuss the question whether, under any conceivable
circumstances, a woman might, without discredit to her sex, reveal an
unsolicited love. All this seems exquisitely absurd to us, and yet we
know that, given your circumstances, the problem might have a serious
side. When for a woman to proffer her love to a man was in effect to
invite him to assume the burden of her support, it is easy to see that
pride and delicacy might well have checked the promptings of the
heart. When you go out into our society, Mr. West, you must be
prepared to be often cross-questioned on this point by our young
people, who are naturally much interested in this aspect of
old-fashioned manners".[5]

"And so the girls of the twentieth century tell their love."

"If they choose," replied Dr. Leete. "There is no more pretense of a
concealment of feeling on their part than on the part of their lovers.
Coquetry would be as much despised in a girl as in a man. Affected
coldness, which in your day rarely deceived a lover, would deceive him
wholly now, for no one thinks of practicing it."

"One result which must follow from the independence of women I can see
for myself," I said. "There can be no marriages now except those of
inclination."

"That is a matter of course," replied Dr. Leete.

"Think of a world in which there are nothing but matches of pure love!
Ah me, Dr. Leete, how far you are from being able to understand what
an astonishing phenomenon such a world seems to a man of the
nineteenth century!"

"I can, however, to some extent, imagine it," replied the doctor. "But
the fact you celebrate, that there are nothing but love matches, means
even more, perhaps, than you probably at first realize. It means that
for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection,
with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the
race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation.
The necessities of poverty, the need of having a home, no longer tempt
women to accept as the fathers of their children men whom they neither
can love nor respect. Wealth and rank no longer divert attention from
personal qualities. Gold no longer 'gilds the straitened forehead of
the fool.' The gifts of person, mind, and disposition; beauty, wit,
eloquence, kindness, generosity, geniality, courage, are sure of
transmission to posterity. Every generation is sifted through a little
finer mesh than the last. The attributes that human nature admires are
preserved, those that repel it are left behind. There are, of course,
a great many women who with love must mingle admiration, and seek to
wed greatly, but these not the less obey the same law, for to wed
greatly now is not to marry men of fortune or title, but those who
have risen above their fellows by the solidity or brilliance of their
services to humanity. These form nowadays the only aristocracy with
which alliance is distinction.

"You were speaking, a day or two ago, of the physical superiority of
our people to your contemporaries. Perhaps more important than any of
the causes I mentioned then as tending to race purification has been
the effect of untrammeled sexual selection upon the quality of two or
three successive generations. I believe that when you have made a
fuller study of our people you will find in them not only a physical,
but a mental and moral improvement. It would be strange if it were not
so, for not only is one of the great laws of nature now freely working
out the salvation of the race, but a profound moral sentiment has come
to its support. Individualism, which in your day was the animating
idea of society, not only was fatal to any vital sentiment of
brotherhood and common interest among living men, but equally to any
realization of the responsibility of the living for the generation to
follow. To-day this sense of responsibility, practically unrecognized
in all previous ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of the
race, reinforcing, with an intense conviction of duty, the natural
impulse to seek in marriage the best and noblest of the other sex. The
result is, that not all the encouragements and incentives of every
sort which we have provided to develop industry, talent, genius,
excellence of whatever kind, are comparable in their effect on our
young men with the fact that our women sit aloft as judges of the
race and reserve themselves to reward the winners. Of all the whips,
and spurs, and baits, and prizes, there is none like the thought of
the radiant faces which the laggards will find averted.

"Celibates nowadays are almost invariably men who have failed to
acquit themselves creditably in the work of life. The woman must be a
courageous one, with a very evil sort of courage, too, whom pity for
one of these unfortunates should lead to defy the opinion of her
generation--for otherwise she is free--so far as to accept him for a
husband. I should add that, more exacting and difficult to resist than
any other element in that opinion, she would find the sentiment of her
own sex. Our women have risen to the full height of their
responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping
the keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this
respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in
which they educate their daughters from childhood."

After going to my room that night, I sat up late to read a romance of
Berrian, handed me by Dr. Leete, the plot of which turned on a
situation suggested by his last words, concerning the modern view of
parental responsibility. A similar situation would almost certainly
have been treated by a nineteenth century romancist so as to excite
the morbid sympathy of the reader with the sentimental selfishness of
the lovers, and his resentment toward the unwritten law which they
outraged. I need not describe--for who has not read "Ruth Elton?"--how
different is the course which Berrian takes, and with what tremendous
effect he enforces the principle which he states: "Over the unborn our
power is that of God, and our responsibility like His toward us. As we
acquit ourselves toward them, so let Him deal with us."

[Footnote 5: I may say that Dr. Leete's warning has been fully
justified by my experience. The amount and intensity of amusement
which the young people of this day, and the young women especially,
are able to extract from what they are pleased to call the oddities of
courtship in the nineteenth century, appear unlimited.]

I think if a person were ever excusable for losing track of the days
of the week, the circumstances excused me. Indeed, if I had been told
that the method of reckoning time had been wholly changed and the days
were now counted in lots of five, ten, or fifteen instead of seven, I
should have been in no way surprised after what I had already heard
and seen of the twentieth century. The first time that any inquiry as
to the days of the week occurred to me was the morning following the
conversation 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 lucky
discovery of the buried chamber to which we owe your society this
morning. It was on Saturday morning, soon after midnight, that you
first awoke, and Sunday afternoon when you awoke the second time with
faculties fully regained."

"So you still have Sundays and sermons," I said. "We had prophets who
foretold that long before this time the world would have dispensed
with both. I am very curious to know how the ecclesiastical systems
fit in with the rest of your social arrangements. I suppose you have a
sort 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. You
were quite done with national religious establishments in the
nineteenth century, and did you fancy we had gone back to them?"

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

"The religious practices of the people have naturally changed
considerably in a century," replied Dr. Leete; "but supposing them to
have remained unchanged, our social system would accommodate them
perfectly. The nation supplies any person or number of persons with
buildings on guarantee of the rent, and they remain tenants while they
pay it. As for the clergymen, if a number of persons wish the services
of an individual for any particular end of their own, apart from the
general service of the nation, they can always secure it, with that
individual's own consent, of course, just as we secure the service of
our editors, by contributing from their credit-cards an indemnity to
the nation for the loss of his services in general industry. This
indemnity paid the nation for the individual answers to the salary in
your day paid to the individual himself; and the various applications
of this principle leave private initiative full play in all details to
which national control is not applicable. Now, as to hearing a sermon
to-day, if you wish to do so, you can either go to a church to hear it
or 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 and
selecting an easy chair. There are some who still prefer to hear
sermons in church, but most of our preaching, like our musical
performances, is not in public, but delivered in acoustically prepared
chambers, connected by wire with subscribers' houses. If you prefer to
go to a church I shall be glad to accompany you, but I really don't
believe you are likely to hear anywhere a better discourse than you
will at home. I see by the paper that Mr. Barton is to preach this
morning, and he preaches only by telephone, and to audiences often
reaching 150,000."

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

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

MR. BARTON'S SERMON.

"We have had among us, during the past week, a critic from the
nineteenth century, a living representative of the epoch of our
great-grandparents. It would be strange if a fact so extraordinary had
not somewhat strongly affected our imaginations. Perhaps most of us
have been stimulated to some effort to realize the society of a
century ago, and figure to ourselves what it must have been like to
live then. In inviting you now to consider certain reflections upon
this subject which have occurred to me, I presume that I shall rather
follow than divert the course of your own thoughts."

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

"Mr. West," he said, "Edith suggests that you may find it slightly
embarrassing to listen to a discourse on the lines Mr. Barton is
laying down, and if so, you need not be cheated out of a sermon. She
will connect us with Mr. Sweetser's speaking room if you say so, and I
can 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 voice
of Mr. Barton had ceased abruptly. Now at another touch the room was
once more filled with the earnest sympathetic tones which had already
impressed me most favorably.

*    *    *    *    *

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

"Still, as regards the contrast between the poverty of the nation and
the world in the nineteenth century and their wealth now, it is not
greater, possibly, than had been before seen in human history, perhaps
not greater, for example, than that between the poverty of this
country during the earliest colonial period of the seventeenth century
and the relatively great wealth it had attained at the close of the
nineteenth, or between the England of William the Conqueror and that
of Victoria. Although the aggregate riches of a nation did not then,
as now, afford any accurate criterion of the masses of its people, yet
instances like these afford partial parallels for the merely material
side of the contrast between the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries. It is when we contemplate the moral aspect of that contrast
that we find ourselves in the presence of a phenomenon for which
history offers no precedent, however far back we may cast our eye. One
might almost be excused who should exclaim, 'Here, surely, is
something like a miracle!' Nevertheless, when we give over idle
wonder, and begin to examine the seeming prodigy critically, we find
it no prodigy at all, much less a miracle. It is not necessary to
suppose a moral new birth of humanity, or a wholesale destruction of
the wicked and survival of the good, to account for the fact before
us. It finds its simple and obvious explanation in the reaction of a
changed environment upon human nature. It means merely that a form of
society which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness,
and appealed solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human
nature, has been replaced by institutions based on the true
self-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealing to the social
and generous instincts of men.

"My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemed
in the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the old
social and industrial system, which taught them to view their natural
prey 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 have
tempted you to subsist on what superior skill or strength enabled you
to wrest from others equally needy. But suppose it were not merely
your own life that you were responsible for. I know well that there
must have been many a man among our ancestors who, if it had been
merely a question of his own life, would sooner have given it up than
nourished it by bread snatched from others. But this he was not
permitted to do. He had dear lives dependent on him. Men loved women
in those days, as now. God knows how they dared be fathers, but they
had babies as sweet, no doubt, to them as ours to us, whom they must
feed, clothe, educate. The gentlest creatures are fierce when they
have young to provide for, and in that wolfish society the struggle
for bread borrowed a peculiar desperation from the tenderest
sentiments. For the sake of those dependent on him, a man might not
choose, but must plunge into the foul fight,--cheat, overreach,
supplant, defraud, buy below worth and sell above, break down the
business by which his neighbor fed his young ones, tempt men to buy
what they ought not and to sell what they should not, grind his
laborers, sweat his debtors, cozen his creditors. Though a man sought
it carefully with tears, it was hard to find a way in which he could
earn a living and provide for his family except by pressing in before
some weaker rival and taking the food from his mouth. Even the
ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel necessity. While
they warned their flocks against the love of money, regard for their
families compelled them to keep an outlook for the pecuniary prizes of
their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed a trying business,
preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness which they and
everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to
poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conduct
which the law of self-preservation compelled men to break. Looking on
the inhuman spectacle of society, these worthy men bitterly bemoaned
the depravity of human nature; as if angelic nature would not have
been 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 divinity
within it. It was rather in those evil days when not even the fight
for life with one another, the struggle for mere existence, in which
mercy was folly, could wholly banish generosity and kindness from the
earth.

"It is not hard to understand the desperation with which men and
women, who under other conditions would have been full of gentleness
and ruth, fought and tore each other in the scramble for gold, when we
realize what it meant to miss it, what poverty was in that day. For
the body it was hunger and thirst, torment by heat and frost, in
sickness neglect, in health unremitting toil; for the moral nature it
meant oppression, contempt, and the patient endurance of indignity,
brutish associations from infancy, the loss of all the innocence of
childhood, the grace of womanhood, the dignity of manhood; for the
mind it meant the death of ignorance, the torpor of all those
faculties which distinguish us from brutes, the reduction of life to a
round of bodily functions.

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

"Some two or three centuries ago an act of barbarity was committed in
India, which, though the number of lives destroyed was but a few
score, was attended by such peculiar horrors that its memory is likely
to be perpetual. A number of English prisoners were shut up in a room
containing not enough air to supply one-tenth their number. The
unfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but, as
the agonies of suffocation began to take hold on them, they forgot all
else, and became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for himself,
and against all others, to force a way to one of the small apertures
of 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 its
horrors by the few survivors so shocked our forefathers that for a
century later we find it a stock reference in their literature as a
typical illustration of the extreme possibilities of human misery, as
shocking in its moral as its physical aspect. They could scarcely have
anticipated that to us the Black Hole of Calcutta, with its press of
maddened men tearing and trampling one another in the struggle to win
a place at the breathing holes, would seem a striking type of the
society of their age. It lacked something of being a complete type,
however, for in the Calcutta Black Hole there were no tender women, no
little children and old men and women, no cripples. They were at least
all men, strong to bear, who suffered.

"When we reflect that the ancient order of which I have been speaking
was prevalent up to the end of the nineteenth century, while to us the
new order which succeeded it already seems antique, even our parents
having known no other, we cannot fail to be astounded at the
suddenness with which a transition so profound beyond all previous
experience of the race must have been effected. Some observation of
the state of men's minds during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century will, however, in great measure, dissipate this astonishment.
Though general intelligence in the modern sense could not be said to
exist in any community at that time, yet, as compared with previous
generations, the one then on the stage was intelligent. The inevitable
consequence of even this comparative degree of intelligence had been a
perception of the evils of society, such as had never before been
general. It is quite true that these evils had been even worse, much
worse, in previous ages. It was the increased intelligence of the
masses which made the difference, as the dawn reveals the squalor of
surroundings which in the darkness may have seemed tolerable. The
keynote of the literature of the period was one of compassion for the
poor and unfortunate, and indignant outcry against the failure of the
social machinery to ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain from
these outbursts that the moral hideousness of the spectacle about them
was, at least by flashes, fully realized by the best of the men of
that time, and that the lives of some of the more sensitive and
generous hearted of them were rendered wellnigh unendurable by the
intensity of their sympathies.

"Although the idea of the vital unity of the family of mankind, the
reality of human brotherhood, was very far from being apprehended by
them as the moral axiom it seems to us, yet it is a mistake to suppose
that there was no feeling at all corresponding to it. I could read you
passages of great beauty from some of their writers which show that
the conception was clearly attained by a few, and no doubt vaguely by
many more. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the nineteenth
century was in name Christian, and the fact that the entire commercial
and industrial frame of society was the embodiment of the
anti-Christian spirit must have had some weight, though I admit it was
strangely little, with the nominal followers of Jesus Christ.

"When we inquire why it did not have more, why, in general, long after
a vast majority of men had agreed as to the crying abuses of the
existing social arrangement, they still tolerated it, or contented
themselves with talking of petty reforms in it, we come upon an
extraordinary fact. It was the sincere belief of even the best of men
at that epoch that the only stable elements in human nature, on which
a social system could be safely founded, were its worst propensities.
They had been taught and believed that greed and self-seeking were all
that held mankind together, and that all human associations would fall
to pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives or
curb their operation. In a word, they believed--even those who longed
to believe otherwise--the exact reverse of what seems to us
self-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualities
of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the
cohesive force of society. It seemed reasonable to them that men lived
together solely for the purpose of overreaching and oppressing one
another, and of being overreached and oppressed, and that while a
society that gave full scope to these propensities could stand, there
would be little chance for one based on the idea of cooperation for
the benefit of all. It seems absurd to expect any one to believe that
convictions like these were ever seriously entertained by men; but
that they were not only entertained by our great-grandfathers, but
were responsible for the long delay in doing away with the ancient
order, after a conviction of its intolerable abuses had become
general, is as well established as any fact in history can be. Just
here you will find the explanation of the profound pessimism of the
literature of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the note of
melancholy in its poetry, and the cynicism of its humor.

"Feeling that the condition of the race was unendurable, they had no
clear hope of anything better. They believed that the evolution of
humanity had resulted in leading it into a _cul de sac_, and that
there was no way of getting forward. The frame of men's minds at this
time is strikingly illustrated by treatises which have come down to
us, and may even now be consulted in our libraries by the curious, in
which laborious arguments are pursued to prove that despite the evil
plight of men, life was still, by some slight preponderance of
considerations, probably better worth living than leaving. Despising
themselves, they despised their Creator. There was a general decay of
religious belief. Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly veiled by
doubt and dread, alone lighted up the chaos of earth. That men should
doubt Him whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread the hands that
moulded them, seems to us indeed a pitiable insanity; but we must
remember that children who are brave by day have sometimes foolish
fears at night. The dawn has come since then. It is very easy to
believe in the fatherhood of God in the twentieth century.

"Briefly, as must needs be in a discourse of this character, I have
adverted to some of the causes which had prepared men's minds for the
change from the old to the new order, as well as some causes of the
conservatism of despair which for a while held it back after the time
was ripe. To wonder at the rapidity with which the change was
completed after its possibility was first entertained is to forget the
intoxicating effect of hope upon minds long accustomed to despair. The
sunburst, after so long and dark a night, must needs have had a
dazzling effect. From the moment men allowed themselves to believe
that humanity after all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squat
stature was not the measure of its possible growth, but that it stood
upon the verge of an avatar of limitless development, the reaction
must needs have been overwhelming. It is evident that nothing was able
to stand against the enthusiasm which the new faith inspired.

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

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

"You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless of
revolutions. In the time of one generation men laid aside the social
traditions and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social order
worthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in their
habits, they became co-workers, and found in fraternity, at once, the
science of wealth and happiness. 'What shall I eat and drink, and
wherewithal shall I be clothed?' stated as a problem beginning and
ending in self, had been an anxious and an endless one. But when once
it was conceived, not from the individual, but the fraternal
standpoint, 'What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal shall we be
clothed?'--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 individual
standpoint, but no sooner had the nation become the sole capitalist
and employer than not alone did plenty replace poverty, but the last
vestige of the serfdom of man to man disappeared from earth. Human
slavery, so often vainly scotched, at last was killed. The means of
subsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by employer to
employed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock as
among children at the father's table. It was impossible for a man any
longer to use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His esteem
was the only sort of gain he could thenceforth make out of him. There
was no more either arrogance or servility in the relations of human
beings to one another. For the first time since the creation every man
stood up straight before God. The fear of want and the lust of gain
became extinct motives when abundance was assured to all and
immoderate possessions made impossible of attainment. There were no
more beggars nor almoners. Equity left charity without an occupation.
The ten commandments became wellnigh obsolete in a world where there
was no temptation to theft, no occasion to lie either for fear or
favor, no room for envy where all were equal, and little provocation
to violence where men were disarmed of power to injure one another.
Humanity's ancient dream of liberty, equality, fraternity, mocked by
so many ages, at last was realized.

"As in the old society the generous, the just, the tender-hearted had
been placed at a disadvantage by the possession of those qualities, so
in the new society the cold-hearted, the greedy, and self-seeking
found themselves out of joint with the world. Now that the conditions
of life for the first time ceased to operate as a forcing process to
develop the brutal qualities of human nature, and the premium which
had heretofore encouraged selfishness was not only removed, but placed
upon unselfishness, it was for the first time possible to see what
unperverted human nature really was like. The depraved tendencies,
which had previously overgrown and obscured the better to so large an
extent, now withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the nobler
qualities showed a sudden luxuriance which turned cynics into
panegyrists and for the first time in human history tempted mankind to
fall in love with itself. Soon was fully revealed, what the divines
and philosophers of the old world never would have believed, that
human nature in its essential qualities is good, not bad, that men by
their 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. The
constant pressure, through numberless generations, of conditions of
life which might have perverted angels, had not been able to
essentially alter the natural nobility of the stock, and these
conditions once removed, like a bent tree, it had sprung back to its
normal uprightness.

"To put the whole matter in the nutshell of a parable, let me compare
humanity in the olden time to a rosebush planted in a swamp, watered
with black bog-water, breathing miasmatic fogs by day, and chilled
with poison dews at night. Innumerable generations of gardeners had
done their best to make it bloom, but beyond an occasional half-opened
bud with a worm at the heart, their efforts had been unsuccessful.
Many, indeed, claimed that the bush was no rosebush at all, but a
noxious shrub, fit only to be uprooted and burned. The gardeners, for
the most part, however, held that the bush belonged to the rose
family, but had some ineradicable taint about it, which prevented the
buds from coming out, and accounted for its generally sickly
condition. There were a few, indeed, who maintained that the stock was
good enough, that the trouble was in the bog, and that under more
favorable conditions the plant might be expected to do better. But
these persons were not regular gardeners, and being condemned by the
latter as mere theorists and day dreamers, were for the most part, so
regarded by the people. Moreover, urged some eminent moral
philosophers, even conceding for the sake of the argument that the
bush might possibly do better elsewhere, it was a more valuable
discipline for the buds to try to bloom in a bog than it would be
under more favorable conditions. The buds that succeeded in opening
might indeed be very rare, and the flowers pale and scentless, but
they represented far more moral effort than if they had bloomed
spontaneously in a garden.

"The regular gardeners and the moral philosophers had their way. The
bush remained rooted in the bog, and the old course of treatment went
on. Continually new varieties of forcing mixtures were applied to the
roots, and more recipes than could be numbered, each declared by its
advocates the best and only suitable preparation, were used to kill
the vermin and remove the mildew. This went on a very long time.
Occasionally some one claimed to observe a slight improvement in the
appearance of the bush, but there were quite as many who declared that
it did not look so well as it used to. On the whole there could not be
said to be any marked change. Finally, during a period of general
despondency as to the prospects of the bush where it was, the idea of
transplanting it was again mooted, and this time found favor. 'Let us
try it,' was the general voice. 'Perhaps it may thrive better
elsewhere, and here it is certainly doubtful if it be worth
cultivating longer.' So it came about that the rosebush of humanity
was transplanted, and set in sweet, warm, dry earth, where the sun
bathed it, the stars wooed it, and the south wind caressed it. Then it
appeared that it was indeed a rosebush. The vermin and the mildew
disappeared, 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 has
set in our hearts an infinite standard of achievement, judged by which
our past attainments seem always insignificant, and the goal never
nearer. Had our forefathers conceived a state of society in which men
should live together like brethren dwelling in unity, without strifes
or envying, violence or overreaching, and where, at the price of a
degree of labor not greater than health demands, in their chosen
occupations, they should be wholly freed from care for the morrow and
left with no more concern for their livelihood than trees which are
watered by unfailing streams,--had they conceived such a condition, I
say, it would have seemed to them nothing less than paradise. They
would have confounded it with their idea of heaven, nor dreamed that
there could possibly lie further beyond anything to be desired or
striven for.

"But how is it with us who stand on this height which they gazed up
to? Already we have wellnigh forgotten, except when it is especially
called to our minds by some occasion like the present, that it was
not always with men as it is now. It is a strain on our imaginations
to conceive the social arrangements of our immediate ancestors. We
find them grotesque. The solution of the problem of physical
maintenance so as to banish care and crime, so far from seeming to us
an ultimate attainment, appears but as a preliminary to anything like
real human progress. We have but relieved ourselves of an impertinent
and needless harassment which hindered our ancestors from undertaking
the real ends of existence. We are merely stripped for the race; no
more. We are like a child which has just learned to stand upright and
to walk. It is a great event, from the child's point of view, when he
first walks. Perhaps he fancies that there can be little beyond that
achievement, but a year later he has forgotten that he could not
always walk. His horizon did but widen when he rose, and enlarge as he
moved. A great event indeed, in one sense, was his first step, but
only as a beginning, not as the end. His true career was but then
first entered on. The enfranchisement of humanity in the last century,
from mental and physical absorption in working and scheming for the
mere bodily necessities, may be regarded as a species of second birth
of the race, without which its first birth to an existence that was
but a burden would forever have remained unjustified, but whereby it
is now abundantly vindicated. Since then, humanity has entered on a
new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties,
the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely
suspected. In place of the dreary hopelessness of the nineteenth
century, its profound pessimism as to the future of humanity, the
animating idea of the present age is an enthusiastic conception of the
opportunities of our earthly existence, and the unbounded
possibilities of human nature. The betterment of mankind from
generation to generation, physically, mentally, morally, is recognized
as the one great object supremely worthy of effort and of sacrifice.
We believe the race for the first time to have entered on the
realization of God's ideal of it, and each generation must now be a
step upward.

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

I never could tell just why, but Sunday afternoon during my old life
had been a time when I was peculiarly subject to melancholy, when the
color unaccountably faded out of all the aspects of life, and
everything appeared pathetically uninteresting. The hours, which in
general were wont to bear me easily on their wings, lost the power of
flight, and toward the close of the day, drooping quite to earth, had
fairly to be dragged along by main strength. Perhaps it was partly
owing to the established association of ideas that, despite the utter
change in my circumstances, I fell into a state of profound depression
on the afternoon of this my first Sunday in the twentieth century.

It was not, however, on the present occasion a depression without
specific cause, the mere vague melancholy I have spoken of, but a
sentiment suggested and certainly quite justified by my position. The
sermon of Mr. Barton, with its constant implication of the vast moral
gap between the century to which I belonged and that in which I found
myself, had had an effect strongly to accentuate my sense of
loneliness in it. Considerately and philosophically as he had spoken,
his words could scarcely have failed to leave upon my mind a strong
impression of the mingled pity, curiosity, and aversion which I, as a
representative of an abhorred epoch, must excite in all around me.

The extraordinary kindness with which I had been treated by Dr. Leete
and his family, and especially the goodness of Edith, had hitherto
prevented my fully realizing that their real sentiment toward me must
necessarily be that of the whole generation to which they belonged.
The recognition of this, as regarded Dr. Leete and his amiable wife,
however painful, I might have endured, but the conviction that Edith
must share their feeling was more than I could bear.

The crushing effect with which this belated perception of a fact so
obvious came to me opened my eyes fully to something which perhaps the
reader has already suspected,--I loved Edith.

Was it strange that I did? The affecting occasion on which our
intimacy had begun, when her hands had drawn me out of the whirlpool
of madness; the fact that her sympathy was the vital breath which had
set me up in this new life and enabled me to support it; my habit of
looking to her as the mediator between me and the world around in a
sense that even her father was not,--these were circumstances that had
predetermined a result which her remarkable loveliness of person and
disposition would alone have accounted for. It was quite inevitable
that she should have come to seem to me, in a sense quite different
from the usual experience of lovers, the only woman in this world. Now
that I had become suddenly sensible of the fatuity of the hopes I had
begun to cherish, I suffered not merely what another lover might, but
in addition a desolate loneliness, an utter forlornness, such as no
other lover, however unhappy, could have felt.

My hosts evidently saw that I was depressed in spirits, and did their
best to divert me. Edith especially, I could see, was distressed for
me, but according to the usual perversity of lovers, having once been
so mad as to dream of receiving something more from her, there was no
longer any virtue for me in a kindness that I knew was only sympathy.

Toward nightfall, after secluding myself in my room most of the
afternoon, I went into the garden to walk about. The day was overcast,
with an autumnal flavor in the warm, still air. Finding myself near
the excavation, I entered the subterranean chamber and sat down there.
"This," I muttered to myself, "is the only home I have. Let me stay
here, and not go forth any more." Seeking aid from the familiar
surroundings, I endeavored to find a sad sort of consolation in
reviving the past and summoning up the forms and faces that were about
me in my former life. It was in vain. There was no longer any life in
them. For nearly one hundred years the stars had been looking down on
Edith Bartlett's grave, and the graves of all my generation.

The past was dead, crushed beneath a century's weight, and from the
present I was shut out. There was no place for me anywhere. I was
neither dead nor properly alive.

"Forgive me for following you."

I looked up. Edith stood in the door of the subterranean room,
regarding me smilingly, but with eyes full of sympathetic distress.

"Send me away if I am intruding on you," she said; "but we saw that
you were out of spirits, and you know you promised to let me know if
that were so. You have not kept your word."

I rose and came to the door, trying to smile, but making, I fancy,
rather sorry work of it, for the sight of her loveliness brought home
to me the more poignantly the cause of my wretchedness.

"I was feeling a little lonely, that is all," I said. "Has it never
occurred to you that my position is so much more utterly alone than
any human being's ever was before that a new word is really needed to
describe it?"

"Oh, you must not talk that way,--you must not let yourself feel that
way,--you must not!" she exclaimed, with moistened eyes. "Are we not
your friends? It is your own fault if you will not let us be. You need
not be lonely."

"You are good to me beyond my power of understanding," I said, "but
don't you suppose that I know it is pity merely, sweet pity, but pity
only. I should be a fool not to know that I cannot seem to you as
other men of your own generation do, but as some strange uncanny
being, a stranded creature of an unknown sea, whose forlornness
touches your compassion despite its grotesqueness. I have been so
foolish, you were so kind, as to almost forget that this must needs be
so, and to fancy I might in time become naturalized, as we used to
say, in this age, so as to feel like one of you and to seem to you
like the other men about you. But Mr. Barton's sermon taught me how
vain such a fancy is, how great the gulf between us must seem to you."

"Oh that miserable sermon!" she exclaimed, fairly crying now in her
sympathy, "I wanted you not to hear it. What does he know of you? He
has read in old musty books about your times, that is all. What do you
care about him, to let yourself be vexed by anything he said? Isn't it
anything to you, that we who know you feel differently? Don't you care
more about what we think of you than what he does who never saw you?
Oh, Mr. West! you don't know, you can't think, how it makes me feel to
see you so forlorn. I can't have it so. What can I say to you? How can
I convince you how different our feeling for you is from what you
think?"

As before, in that other crisis of my fate when she had come to me,
she extended her hands towards me in a gesture of helpfulness, and, as
then, I caught and held them in my own; her bosom heaved with strong
emotion, and little tremors in the fingers which I clasped emphasized
the depth of her feeling. In her face, pity contended in a sort of
divine spite against the obstacles which reduced it to impotence.
Womanly compassion surely never wore a guise more lovely.

Such beauty and such goodness quite melted me, and it seemed that the
only fitting response I could make was to tell her just the truth. Of
course I had not a spark of hope, but on the other hand I had no fear
that she would be angry. She was too pitiful for that. So I said
presently, "It is very ungrateful in me not to be satisfied with such
kindness as you have shown me, and are showing me now. But are you so
blind as not to see why they are not enough to make me happy? Don't
you see that it is because I have been mad enough to love you?"

At my last words she blushed deeply and her eyes fell before mine, but
she made no effort to withdraw her hands from my clasp. For some
moments she stood so, panting a little. Then blushing deeper than
ever, but with a dazzling smile, she looked up.

"Are you sure it is not you who are blind?" she said.

That was all, but it was enough, for it told me that, unaccountable,
incredible as it was, this radiant daughter of a golden age had
bestowed upon me not alone her pity, but her love. Still, I half
believed I must be under some blissful hallucination even as I clasped
her in my arms. "If I am beside myself," I cried, "let me remain so."

"It is I whom you must think beside myself," she panted, escaping from
my arms when I had barely tasted the sweetness of her lips. "Oh! oh!
what must you think of me almost to throw myself in the arms of one I
have known but a week? I did not mean that you should find it out so
soon, but I was so sorry for you I forgot what I was saying. No, no;
you must not touch me again till you know who I am. After that, sir,
you shall apologize to me very humbly for thinking, as I know you do,
that I have been over quick to fall in love with you. After you know
who I am, you will be bound to confess that it was nothing less than
my duty to fall in love with you at first sight, and that no girl of
proper feeling in my place could do otherwise."

As may be supposed, I would have been quite content to waive
explanations, but Edith was resolute that there should be no more
kisses until she had been vindicated from all suspicion of
precipitancy in the bestowal of her affections, and I was fain to
follow the lovely enigma into the house. Having come where her mother
was, she blushingly whispered something in her ear and ran away,
leaving us together. It then appeared that, strange as my experience
had been, I was now first to know what was perhaps its strangest
feature. From Mrs. Leete I learned that Edith was the great-granddaughter
of no other than my lost love, Edith Bartlett. After mourning me for
fourteen years, she had made a marriage of esteem, and left a son who
had been Mrs. Leete's father. Mrs. Leete had never seen her
grandmother, but had heard much of her, and, when her daughter was
born, gave her the name of Edith. This fact might have tended to
increase the interest which the girl took, as she grew up, in all that
concerned her ancestress, and especially the tragic story of the
supposed death of the lover, whose wife she expected to be, in the
conflagration of his house. It was a tale well calculated to touch the
sympathy of a romantic girl, and the fact that the blood of the
unfortunate heroine was in her own veins naturally heightened Edith's
interest in it. A portrait of Edith Bartlett and some of her papers,
including a packet of my own letters, were among the family heirlooms.
The picture represented a very beautiful young woman about whom it was
easy to imagine all manner of tender and romantic things. My letters
gave Edith some material for forming a distinct idea of my
personality, and both together sufficed to make the sad old story very
real to her. She used to tell her parents, half jestingly, that she
would never marry till she found a lover like Julian West, and there
were none such nowadays.

Now all this, of course, was merely the daydreaming of a girl whose
mind had never been taken up by a love affair of her own, and would
have had no serious consequence but for the discovery that morning of
the buried vault in her father's garden and the revelation of the
identity of its inmate. For when the apparently lifeless form had been
borne into the house, the face in the locket found upon the breast was
instantly recognized as that of Edith Bartlett, and by that fact,
taken in connection with the other circumstances, they knew that I was
no other than Julian West. Even had there been no thought, as at first
there was not, of my resuscitation, Mrs. Leete said she believed that
this event would have affected her daughter in a critical and
life-long manner. The presumption of some subtle ordering of destiny,
involving her fate with mine, would under all circumstances have
possessed an irresistible fascination for almost any woman.

Whether when I came back to life a few hours afterward, and from the
first seemed to turn to her with a peculiar dependence and to find a
special solace in her company, she had been too quick in giving her
love at the first sign of mine, I could now, her mother said, judge
for myself. If I thought so, I must remember that this, after all, was
the twentieth and not the nineteenth century, and love was, no doubt,
now quicker in growth, as well as franker in utterance than then.

From Mrs. Leete I went to Edith. When I found her, it was first of all
to take her by both hands and stand a long time in rapt contemplation
of her face. As I gazed, the memory of that other Edith, which had
been affected as with a benumbing shock by the tremendous experience
that had parted us, revived, and my heart was dissolved with tender
and pitiful emotions, but also very blissful ones. For she who brought
to me so poignantly the sense of my loss was to make that loss good.
It was as if from her eyes Edith Bartlett looked into mine, and smiled
consolation to me. My fate was not alone the strangest, but the most
fortunate that ever befell a man. A double miracle had been wrought
for me. I had not been stranded upon the shore of this strange world
to find myself alone and companionless. My love, whom I had dreamed
lost, had been reembodied for my consolation. When at last, in an
ecstasy of gratitude and tenderness, I folded the lovely girl in my
arms, the two Ediths were blended in my thought, nor have they ever
since been clearly distinguished. I was not long in finding that on
Edith's part there was a corresponding confusion of identities. Never,
surely, was there between freshly united lovers a stranger talk than
ours that afternoon. She seemed more anxious to have me speak of Edith
Bartlett than of herself, of how I had loved her than how I loved
herself, rewarding my fond words concerning another woman with tears
and tender smiles and pressures of the hand.

"You must not love me too much for myself," she said. "I shall be very
jealous for her. I shall not let you forget her. I am going to tell
you something which you may think strange. Do you not believe that
spirits sometimes come back to the world to fulfill some work that lay
near their hearts? What if I were to tell you that I have sometimes
thought that her spirit lives in me,--that Edith Bartlett, not Edith
Leete, is my real name. I cannot know it; of course none of us can
know who we really are; but I can feel it. Can you wonder that I have
such a feeling, seeing how my life was affected by her and by you,
even before you came. So you see you need not trouble to love me at
all, if only you are true to her. I shall not be likely to be
jealous."

Dr. Leete had gone out that afternoon, and I did not have an interview
with him till later. He was not, apparently, wholly unprepared for the
intelligence I conveyed, and shook my hand heartily.

"Under any ordinary circumstances, Mr. West, I should say that this
step had been taken on rather short acquaintance; but these are
decidedly not ordinary circumstances. In fairness, perhaps I ought to
tell you," he added, smilingly, "that while I cheerfully consent to
the proposed arrangement, you must not feel too much indebted to me,
as I judge my consent is a mere formality. From the moment the secret
of the locket was out, it had to be, I fancy. Why, bless me, if Edith
had not been there to redeem her great-grandmother's pledge, I really
apprehend that Mrs. Leete's loyalty to me would have suffered a severe
strain."

That evening the garden was bathed in moonlight, and till midnight
Edith and I wandered to and fro there, trying to grow accustomed to
our happiness.

"What should I have done if you had not cared for me?" she exclaimed.
"I was afraid you were not going to. What should I have done then,
when I felt I was consecrated to you! As soon as you came back to
life, I was as sure as if she had told me that I was to be to you what
she could not be, but that could only be if you would let me. Oh, how
I wanted to tell you that morning, when you felt so terribly strange
among us, who I was, but dared not open my lips about that, or let
father or mother"--

"That must have been what you would not let your father tell me!" I
exclaimed, referring to the conversation I had overheard as I came out
of my trance.

"Of course it was," Edith laughed. "Did you only just guess that?
Father being only a man, thought that it would make you feel among
friends to tell you who we were. He did not think of me at all. But
mother knew what I meant, and so I had my way. I could never have
looked you in the face if you had known who I was. It would have been
forcing myself on you quite too boldly. I am afraid you think I did
that to-day, as it was. I am sure I did not mean to, for I know girls
were expected to hide their feelings in your day, and I was dreadfully
afraid of shocking you. Ah me, how hard it must have been for them to
have always had to conceal their love like a fault. Why did they think
it such a shame to love any one till they had been given permission?
It is so odd to think of waiting for permission to fall in love. Was
it because men in those days were angry when girls loved them? That is
not the way women would feel, I am sure, or men either, I think, now.
I don't understand it at all. That will be one of the curious things
about the women of those days that you will have to explain to me. I
don't believe Edith Bartlett was so foolish as the others."

After sundry ineffectual attempts at parting, she finally insisted
that we must say good night. I was about to imprint upon her lips the
positively last kiss, when she said, with an indescribable archness:--

"One thing troubles me. Are you sure that you quite forgive Edith
Bartlett for marrying any one else? The books that have come down to
us make out lovers of your time more jealous than fond, and that is
what makes me ask. It would be a great relief to me if I could feel
sure that you were not in the least jealous of my great-grandfather
for marrying your sweetheart. May I tell my great-grandmother's
picture when I go to my room that you quite forgive her for proving
false to you?"

Will the reader believe it, this coquettish quip, whether the speaker
herself had any idea of it or not, actually touched and with the
touching cured a preposterous ache of something like jealousy which I
had been vaguely conscious of ever since Mrs. Leete had told me of
Edith Bartlett's marriage. Even while I had been holding Edith
Bartlett's great-granddaughter in my arms, I had not, till this
moment, so illogical are some of our feelings, distinctly realized
that but for that marriage I could not have done so. The absurdity of
this frame of mind could only be equalled by the abruptness with which
it dissolved as Edith's roguish query cleared the fog from my
perceptions. I laughed as I kissed her.

"You may assure her of my entire forgiveness," I said, "although if it
had been any man but your great-grandfather whom she married, it would
have been a very different matter."

On reaching my chamber that night I did not open the musical telephone
that I might be lulled to sleep with soothing tunes, as had become my
habit. For once my thoughts made better music than even twentieth
century orchestras discourse, and it held me enchanted till well
toward morning, when I fell asleep.

"It's a little after the time you told me to wake you, sir. You did
not come out of it as quick as common, sir."

The voice was the voice of my man Sawyer. I started bolt upright in
bed and stared around. I was in my underground chamber. The mellow
light of the lamp which always burned in the room when I occupied it
illumined the familiar walls and furnishings. By my bedside, with the
glass of sherry in his hand which Dr. Pillsbury prescribed on first
rousing from a mesmeric sleep, by way of awakening the torpid physical
functions, stood Sawyer.

"Better take this right off, sir," he said, as I stared blankly at
him. "You look kind of flushed like, sir, and you need it."

I tossed off the liquor and began to realize what had happened to me.
It was, of course, very plain. All that about the twentieth century
had been a dream. I had but dreamed of that enlightened and care-free
race of men and their ingeniously simple institutions, of the glorious
new Boston with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains,
and its universal reign of comfort. The amiable family which I had
learned to know so well, my genial host and Mentor, Dr. Leete, his
wife, and their daughter, the second and more beauteous Edith, my
betrothed,--these, too, had been but figments of a vision.

For a considerable time I remained in the attitude in which this
conviction had come over me, sitting up in bed gazing at vacancy,
absorbed in recalling the scenes and incidents of my fantastic
experience. Sawyer, alarmed at my looks, was meanwhile anxiously
inquiring what was the matter with me. Roused at length by his
importunities to a recognition of my surroundings, I pulled myself
together with an effort and assured the faithful fellow that I was all
right. "I have had an extraordinary dream, that's all, Sawyer," I
said, "a most-ex-traor-dinary-dream."

I dressed in a mechanical way, feeling lightheaded and oddly uncertain
of myself, and sat down to the coffee and rolls which Sawyer was in
the habit of providing for my refreshment before I left the house. The
morning newspaper lay by the plate. I took it up, and my eye fell on
the date, May 31, 1887. I had known, of course, from the moment I
opened my eyes that my long and detailed experience in another century
had been a dream, and yet it was startling to have it so conclusively
demonstrated that the world was but a few hours older than when I had
lain down to sleep.

Glancing at the table of contents at the head of the paper, which
reviewed the news of the morning, I read the following summary:--

*    *    *    *    *

"FOREIGN AFFAIRS.--The impending war between France and Germany.
The French Chambers asked for new military credits to meet Germany's
increase of her army. Probability that all Europe will be involved in
case of war.--Great suffering among the unemployed in London. They
demand work. Monster demonstration to be made. The authorities
uneasy.--Great strikes in Belgium. The government preparing to repress
outbreaks. Shocking facts in regard to the employment of girls in
Belgium coal mines.--Wholesale evictions in Ireland.

"HOME AFFAIRS.--The epidemic of fraud unchecked. Embezzlement of
half a million in New York.--Misappropriation of a trust fund by executors.
Orphans left penniless.--Clever system of thefts by a bank teller;
$50,000 gone.--The coal barons decide to advance the price of coal and
reduce production.--Speculators engineering a great wheat corner at
Chicago.--A clique forcing up the price of coffee.--Enormous
land-grabs of Western syndicates.--Revelations of shocking corruption
among Chicago officials. Systematic bribery.--The trials of the Boodle
aldermen to go on at New York.--Large failures of business houses.
Fears of a business crisis.--A large grist of burglaries and
larcenies.--A woman murdered in cold blood for her money at New
Haven.--A householder shot by a burglar in this city last night.--A
man shoots himself in Worcester because he could not get work. A large
family left destitute.--An aged couple in New Jersey commit suicide
rather than go to the poor-house.--Pitiable destitution among the
women wage-workers in the great cities.--Startling growth of
illiteracy in Massachusetts.--More insane asylums wanted.--Decoration
Day addresses. Professor Brown's oration on the moral grandeur of
nineteenth century civilization."

*    *    *    *    *

It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked; there
could be no kind of doubt about that. Its complete microcosm this
summary of the day's news had presented, even to that last
unmistakable touch of fatuous self-complacency. Coming after such a
damning indictment of the age as that one day's chronicle of
world-wide bloodshed, greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy
of Mephistopheles, and yet of all whose eyes it had met this morning I
was, perhaps, the only one who perceived the cynicism, and but
yesterday I should have perceived it no more than the others. That
strange dream it was which had made all the difference. For I know not
how long, I forgot my surroundings after this, and was again in fancy
moving in that vivid dream-world, in that glorious city, with its
homes of simple comfort and its gorgeous public palaces. Around me
were again faces unmarred by arrogance or servility, by envy or greed,
by anxious care or feverish ambition, and stately forms of men and
women who had never known fear of a fellow man or depended on his
favor, but always, in the words of that sermon which still rang in my
ears, had "stood up straight before God."

With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable loss, not the less
poignant that it was a loss of what had never really been, I roused at
last from my reverie, and soon after left the house.

A dozen times between my door and Washington Street I had to stop and
pull myself together, such power had been in that vision of the Boston
of the future to make the real Boston strange. The squalor and
malodorousness of the town struck me, from the moment I stood upon the
street, as facts I had never before observed. But yesterday, moreover,
it had seemed quite a matter of course that some of my fellow-citizens
should wear silks, and others rags, that some should look well fed,
and others hungry. Now on the contrary the glaring disparities in the
dress and condition of the men and women who brushed each other on the
sidewalks shocked me at every step, and yet more the entire
indifference which the prosperous showed to the plight of the
unfortunate. Were these human beings, who could behold the
wretchedness of their fellows without so much as a change of
countenance? And yet, all the while, I knew well that it was I who had
changed, and not my contemporaries. I had dreamed of a city whose
people fared all alike as children of one family and were one
another's keepers in all things.

Another feature of the real Boston, which assumed the extraordinary
effect of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light,
was the prevalence of advertising. There had been no personal
advertising in the Boston of the twentieth century, because there was
no need of any, but here the walls of the buildings, the windows, the
broadsides of the newspapers in every hand, the very pavements,
everything in fact in sight, save the sky, were covered with the
appeals of individuals who sought, under innumerable pretexts, to
attract the contributions of others to their support. However the
wording might vary, the tenor of all these appeals was the same:--

"Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones,
am the right one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones.
Look at me. Make no mistake, John Jones is the man and nobody else.
Let the rest starve, but for God's sake remember John Jones!"

Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness of the spectacle most
impressed me, so suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I know
not. Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not
learn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one
another from the least to the greatest! This horrible babel of
shameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamor
of conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations, this stupendous
system of brazen beggary, what was it all but the necessity of a
society in which the opportunity to serve the world according to his
gifts, instead of being secured to every man as the first object of
social organization, had to be fought for!

I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood
and laughed aloud, to the scandal of the passers-by. For my life I
could not have helped it, with such a mad humor was I moved at sight
of the interminable rows of stores on either side, up and down the
street so far as I could see,--scores of them, to make the spectacle
more utterly preposterous, within a stone's throw devoted to selling
the same sort of goods. Stores! stores! stores! miles of stores! ten
thousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this one city, which
in my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse,
as they were ordered through one great store in every quarter, where
the buyer, without waste of time or labor, found under one roof the
world's assortment in whatever line he desired. There the labor of
distribution had been so slight as to add but a scarcely perceptible
fraction to the cost of commodities to the user. The cost of
production was virtually all he paid. But here the mere distribution
of the goods, their handling alone, added a fourth, a third, a half
and more, to the cost. All these ten thousand plants must be paid for,
their rent, their staffs of superintendence, their platoons of
salesmen, their ten thousand sets of accountants, jobbers, and
business dependents, with all they spent in advertising themselves and
fighting one another, and the consumers must do the paying. What a
famous process for beggaring a nation!

Were these serious men I saw about me, or children, who did their
business on such a plan? Could they be reasoning beings, who did not
see the folly which, when the product is made and ready for use,
wastes so much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with a
spoon that leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they not
likely to go hungry?

I had passed through Washington Street thousands of times before and
viewed the ways of those who sold merchandise, but my curiosity
concerning them was as if I had never gone by their way before. I took
wondering note of the show windows of the stores, filled with goods
arranged with a wealth of pains and artistic device to attract the
eye. I saw the throngs of ladies looking in, and the proprietors
eagerly watching the effect of the bait. I went within and noted the
hawk-eyed floor-walker watching for business, overlooking the clerks,
keeping them up to their task of inducing the customers to buy, buy,
buy, for money if they had it, for credit if they had it not, to buy
what they wanted not, more than they wanted, what they could not
afford. At times I momentarily lost the clue and was confused by the
sight. Why this effort to induce people to buy? Surely that had
nothing to do with the legitimate business of distributing products to
those who needed them. Surely it was the sheerest waste to force upon
people what they did not want, but what might be useful to another.
The nation was so much the poorer for every such achievement. What
were these clerks thinking of? Then I would remember that they were
not acting as distributors like those in the store I had visited in
the dream Boston. They were not serving the public interest, but their
immediate personal interest, and it was nothing to them what the
ultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, if
but they increased their own hoard, for these goods were their own,
and the more they sold and the more they got for them, the greater
their gain. The more wasteful the people were, the more articles they
did not want which they could be induced to buy, the better for these
sellers. To encourage prodigality was the express aim of the ten
thousand stores of Boston.

Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a whit worse men than any
others in Boston. They must earn a living and support their families,
and how were they to find a trade to do it by which did not
necessitate placing their individual interests before those of others
and that of all? They could not be asked to starve while they waited
for an order of things such as I had seen in my dream, in which the
interest of each and that of all were identical. But, God in heaven!
what wonder, under such a system as this about me--what wonder that
the city was so shabby, and the people so meanly dressed, and so many
of them ragged and hungry!

Some time after this it was that I drifted over into South Boston and
found myself among the manufacturing establishments. I had been in
this quarter of the city a hundred times before, just as I had been on
Washington Street, but here, as well as there, I now first perceived
the true significance of what I witnessed. Formerly I had taken pride
in the fact that, by actual count, Boston had some four thousand
independent manufacturing establishments; but in this very
multiplicity and independence I recognized now the secret of the
insignificant total product of their industry.

If Washington Street had been like a lane in Bedlam, this was a
spectacle as much more melancholy as production is a more vital
function, than distribution. For not only were these four thousand
establishments not working in concert, and for that reason alone
operating at prodigious disadvantage, but, as if this did not involve
a sufficiently disastrous loss of power, they were using their utmost
skill to frustrate one another's effort, praying by night and working
by day for the destruction of one another's enterprises.

The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers resounding from every side
was not the hum of a peaceful industry, but the clangor of swords
wielded by foemen. These mills and shops were so many forts, each
under its own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops about it,
and its sappers busy below, undermining them.

Within each one of these forts the strictest organization of industry
was insisted on; the separate gangs worked under a single central
authority. No interference and no duplicating of work were permitted.
Each had his allotted task, and none were idle. By what hiatus in the
logical faculty, by what lost link of reasoning, account, then, for
the failure to recognize the necessity of applying the same principle
to the organization of the national industries as a whole, to see that
if lack of organization could impair the efficiency of a shop, it must
have effects as much more disastrous in disabling the industries of
the nation at large as the latter are vaster in volume and more
complex in the relationship of their parts.

People would be prompt enough to ridicule an army in which there were
neither companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, or army
corps,--no unit of organization, in fact, larger than the corporal's
squad, with no officer higher than a corporal, and all the corporals
equal in authority. And yet just such an army were the manufacturing
industries of nineteenth century Boston, an army of four thousand
independent squads led by four thousand independent corporals, each
with a separate plan of campaign.

Knots of idle men were to be seen here and there on every side, some
idle because they could find no work at any price, others because they
could not get what they thought a fair price.

I accosted some of the latter, and they told me their grievances. It
was very little comfort I could give them. "I am sorry for you," I
said. "You get little enough, certainly, and yet the wonder to me is,
not that industries conducted as these are do not pay you living
wages, but that they are able to pay you any wages at all."

Making my way back again after this to the peninsular city, toward
three o'clock I stood on State Street, staring, as if I had never seen
them before, at the banks and brokers' offices, and other financial
institutions, of which there had been in the State Street of my vision
no vestige. Business men, confidential clerks, and errand boys were
thronging in and out of the banks, for it wanted but a few minutes of
the closing hour. Opposite me was the bank where I did business, and
presently I crossed the street, and, going in with the crowd, stood in
a recess of the wall looking on at the army of clerks handling money,
and the cues of depositors at the tellers' windows. An old gentleman
whom I knew, a director of the bank, passing me and observing my
contemplative attitude, stopped a moment.

"Interesting sight, isn't it, Mr. West," he said. "Wonderful piece of
mechanism; I find it so myself. I like sometimes to stand and look on
at it just as you are doing. It's a poem, sir, a poem, that's what I
call it. Did you ever think, Mr. West, that the bank is the heart of
the business system? From it and to it, in endless flux and reflux,
the life blood goes. It is flowing in now. It will flow out again in
the morning;" and pleased with his little conceit, the old man passed
on smiling.

Yesterday I should have considered the simile apt enough, but since
then I had visited a world incomparably more affluent than this, in
which money was unknown and without conceivable use. I had learned
that it had a use in the world around me only because the work of
producing the nation's livelihood, instead of being regarded as the
most strictly public and common of all concerns, and as such conducted
by the nation, was abandoned to the hap-hazard efforts of individuals.
This original mistake necessitated endless exchanges to bring about
any sort of general distribution of products. These exchanges money
effected--how equitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenement
house districts to the Back Bay--at the cost of an army of men taken
from productive labor to manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns
of its machinery, and a generally debauching influence on mankind
which had justified its description, from ancient time, as the "root
of all evil."

Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken the
throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called
"a wonderful piece of mechanism" was an imperfect device to remedy an
unnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.

After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the business
quarter for an hour or two, and later sat a while on one of the
benches of the Common, finding an interest merely in watching the
throngs that passed, such as one has in studying the populace of a
foreign city, so strange since yesterday had my fellow citizens and
their ways become to me. For thirty years I had lived among them, and
yet I seemed to have never noted before how drawn and anxious were
their faces, of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute faces of
the educated as well as the dull masks of the ignorant. And well it
might be so, for I saw now, as never before I had seen so plainly,
that each as he walked constantly turned to catch the whispers of a
spectre at his ear, the spectre of Uncertainty. "Do your work never so
well," the spectre was whispering,--"rise early and toil till late,
rob cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never know security. Rich
you may be now and still come to poverty at last. Leave never so much
wealth to your children, you cannot buy the assurance that your son
may not be the servant of your servant, or that your daughter will not
have to sell herself for bread."

A man passing by thrust an advertising card in my hand, which set
forth the merits of some new scheme of life insurance. The incident
reminded me of the only device, pathetic in its admission of the
universal need it so poorly supplied, which offered these tired and
hunted men and women even a partial protection from uncertainty. By
this means, those already well-to-do, I remembered, might purchase a
precarious confidence that after their death their loved ones would
not, for a while at least, be trampled under the feet of men. But this
was all, and this was only for those who could pay well for it. What
idea was possible to these wretched dwellers in the land of Ishmael,
where every man's hand was against each and the hand of each against
every other, of true life insurance as I had seen it among the people
of that dream land, each of whom, by virtue merely of his membership
in the national family, was guaranteed against need of any sort, by a
policy underwritten by one hundred million fellow countrymen.

Some time after this it was that I recall a glimpse of myself standing
on the steps of a building on Tremont Street, looking at a military
parade. A regiment was passing. It was the first sight in that dreary
day which had inspired me with any other emotions than wondering pity
and amazement. Here at last were order and reason, an exhibition of
what intelligent cooperation can accomplish. The people who stood
looking on with kindling faces,--could it be that the sight had for
them no more than but a spectacular interest? Could they fail to see
that it was their perfect concert of action, their organization under
one control, which made these men the tremendous engine they were,
able to vanquish a mob ten times as numerous? Seeing this so plainly,
could they fail to compare the scientific manner in which the nation
went to war with the unscientific manner in which it went to work?
Would they not query since what time the killing of men had been a
task so much more important than feeding and clothing them, that a
trained army should be deemed alone adequate to the former, while the
latter was left to a mob?

It was now toward nightfall, and the streets were thronged with the
workers from the stores, the shops, and mills. Carried along with the
stronger part of the current, I found myself, as it began to grow
dark, in the midst of a scene of squalor and human degradation such as
only the South Cove tenement district could present. I had seen the
mad wasting of human labor; here I saw in direst shape the want that
waste had bred.

From the black doorways and windows of the rookeries on every side
came gusts of fetid air. The streets and alleys reeked with the
effluvia of a slave ship's between-decks. As I passed I had glimpses
within of pale babies gasping out their lives amid sultry stenches, of
hopeless-faced women deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood no
trait save weakness, while from the windows leered girls with brows of
brass. Like the starving bands of mongrel curs that infest the streets
of Moslem towns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled the
air with shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the
garbage that littered the court-yards.

There was nothing in all this that was new to me. Often had I passed
through this part of the city and witnessed its sights with feelings
of disgust mingled with a certain philosophical wonder at the
extremities mortals will endure and still cling to life. But not alone
as regarded the economical follies of this age, but equally as touched
its moral abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since that
vision of another century. No more did I look upon the woful dwellers
in this Inferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human.
I saw in them my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh
of my flesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of human
wretchedness about me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced
my heart like a knife, so that I could not repress sighs and groans. I
not only saw but felt in my body all that I saw.

Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more
closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were
so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the
_hic jacet_ of a soul dead within.

As I looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was
affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent
spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the
ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and
soul had lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly faces,
and of the reproach that could not be gainsaid which was in their
eyes, that the full piteousness of the ruin that had been wrought was
revealed to me. I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony,
for I had been one of those who had endured that these things should
be. I had been one of those who, well knowing that they were, had not
desired to hear or be compelled to think much of them, but had gone on
as if they were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit. Therefore now
I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of
strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out
against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements,
every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called
after me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?

I have no clear recollection of anything after this till I found
myself standing on the carved stone steps of the magnificent home of
my betrothed in Commonwealth avenue. Amid the tumult of my thoughts
that day, I had scarcely once thought of her, but now obeying some
unconscious impulse my feet had found the familiar way to her door. I
was told that the family were at dinner, but word was sent out that I
should join them at table. Besides the family, I found several guests
present, all known to me. The table glittered with plate and costly
china. The ladies were sumptuously dressed and wore the jewels of
queens. The scene was one of costly elegance and lavish luxury. The
company was in excellent spirits, and there was plentiful laughter and
a running fire of jests.

To me it was as if, in wandering through the place of doom, my blood
turned to tears by its sights, and my spirit attuned to sorrow, pity,
and despair, I had happened in some glade upon a merry party of
roisterers. I sat in silence until Edith began to rally me upon my
sombre looks, What ailed me? The others presently joined in the
playful assault, and I became a target for quips and jests. Where had
I been, and what had I seen to make such a dull fellow of me?

"I have been in Golgotha," at last I answered. "I have seen Humanity
hanging on a cross! Do none of you know what sights the sun and stars
look down on in this city, that you can think and talk of anything
else? Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of
men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from
birth to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hush
your laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous crying
of the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of men
sodden in misery, turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an
army of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped
your ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds? For me, I can
hear nothing else."

Silence followed my words. A passion of pity had shaken me as I spoke,
but when I looked around upon the company, I saw that, far from being
stirred as I was, their faces expressed a cold and hard astonishment,
mingled in Edith's with extreme mortification, in her father's with
anger. The ladies were exchanging scandalized looks, while one of the
gentlemen had put up his eyeglass and was studying me with an air of
scientific curiosity, When I saw that things which were to me so
intolerable moved them not at all, that words that melted my heart to
speak had only offended them with the speaker, I was at first stunned
and then overcome with a desperate sickness and faintness at the
heart. What hope was there for the wretched, for the world, if
thoughtful men and tender women were not moved by things like these!
Then I bethought myself that it must be because I had not spoken
aright. No doubt I had put the case badly. They were angry because
they thought I was berating them, when God knew I was merely thinking
of the horror of the fact without any attempt to assign the
responsibility for it.

I restrained my passion, and tried to speak calmly and logically that
I might correct this impression. I told them that I had not meant to
accuse them, as if they, or the rich in general, were responsible for
the misery of the world. True indeed it was, that the superfluity
which they wasted would, otherwise bestowed, relieve much bitter
suffering. These costly viands, these rich wines, these gorgeous
fabrics and glistening jewels represented the ransom of many lives.
They were verily not without the guiltiness of those who waste in a
land stricken with famine. Nevertheless, all the waste of all the
rich, were it saved, would go but a little way to cure the poverty of
the world. There was so little to divide that even if the rich went
share and share with the poor, there would be but a common fare of
crusts, albeit made very sweet then by brotherly love.

The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of
the world's poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of
men, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake,
a colossal world-darkening blunder. And then I showed them how four
fifths of the labor of men was utterly wasted by the mutual warfare,
the lack of organization and concert among the workers. Seeking to
make the matter very plain, I instanced the case of arid lands where
the soil yielded the means of life only by careful use of the
watercourses for irrigation. I showed how in such countries it was
counted the most important function of the government to see that the
water was not wasted by the selfishness or ignorance of individuals,
since otherwise there would be famine. To this end its use was
strictly regulated and systematized, and individuals of their mere
caprice were not permitted to dam it or divert it, or in any way to
tamper with it.

The labor of men, I explained, was the fertilizing stream which alone
rendered earth habitable. It was but a scanty stream at best, and its
use required to be regulated by a system which expended every drop to
the best advantage, if the world were to be supported in abundance.
But how far from any system was the actual practice! Every man wasted
the precious fluid as he wished, animated only by the equal motives of
saving his own crop and spoiling his neighbor's, that his might sell
the better. What with greed and what with spite some fields were
flooded while others were parched, and half the water ran wholly to
waste. In such a land, though a few by strength or cunning might win
the means of luxury, the lot of the great mass must be poverty, and of
the weak and ignorant bitter want and perennial famine.

Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it had
neglected, and regulate for the common good the course of the
life-giving stream, and the earth would bloom like one garden, and
none of its children lack any good thing. I described the physical
felicity, mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would then
attend the lives of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new world,
blessed with plenty, purified by justice and sweetened by brotherly
kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed, but which might
so easily be made real. But when I had expected now surely the faces
around me to light up with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more
dark, angry, and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showed
only aversion and dread, while the men interrupted me with shouts of
reprobation and contempt. "Madman!" "Pestilent fellow!" "Fanatic!"
"Enemy of society!" were some of their cries, and the one who had
before taken his eyeglass to me exclaimed, "He says we are to have no
more poor. Ha! ha!"

"Put the fellow out!" exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and at the
signal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon me.

It seemed to me that my heart would burst with the anguish of finding
that what was to me so plain and so all-important was to them
meaningless, and that I was powerless to make it other. So hot had
been my heart that I had thought to melt an iceberg with its glow,
only to find at last the overmastering chill seizing my own vitals. It
was not enmity that I felt toward them as they thronged me, but pity
only, for them and for the world.

Although despairing, I could not give over. Still I strove with them.
Tears poured from my eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate. I
panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately afterward found myself
sitting upright in bed in my room in Dr. Leete's house, and the
morning sun shining through the open window into my eyes. I was
gasping. The tears were streaming down my face, and I quivered in
every nerve.

*    *    *    *    *

As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and
brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to
see the heaven's vault spread above him, so it was with me, as I
realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream,
and my presence in the twentieth was the reality.

The cruel sights which I had witnessed in my vision, and could so well
confirm from the experience of my former life, though they had, alas!
once been, and must in the retrospect to the end of time move the
compassionate to tears, were, God be thanked, forever gone by. Long
ago oppressor and oppressed, prophet and scorner, had been dust. For
generations, rich and poor had been forgotten words.

But in that moment, while yet I mused with unspeakable thankfulness
upon the greatness of the world's salvation and my privilege in
beholding it, there suddenly pierced me like a knife a pang of shame,
remorse, and wondering self-reproach, that bowed my head upon my
breast and made me wish the grave had hid me with my fellows from the
sun. For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help
on the deliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived
in those cruel, insensate days, what had I done to bring them to an
end? I had been every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my
brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a
worshipper of Chaos and Old Night, as any of my fellows. So far as my
personal influence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder than to
help forward the enfranchisement of the race which was even then
preparing. What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me,
to rejoice in a day whose dawning I had mocked?

"Better for you, better for you," a voice within me rang, "had this
evil dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream; better
your part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation,
than here, drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose
husbandmen you stoned;" and my spirit answered, "Better, truly."

When at length I raised my bowed head and looked forth from the
window, Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and was
gathering flowers. I hastened to descend to her. Kneeling before her,
with my face in the dust, I confessed with tears how little was my
worth to breathe the air of this golden century, and how infinitely
less to wear upon my breast its consummate flower. Fortunate is he
who, with a case so desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Julian senses that Edith is hiding something from him, but she refuses to tell him what it is. He promises to wait until she is ready to tell him. Julian gives some of the nineteenth-century newspapers in his sleeping chamber to Doctor Leete Leete informs Julian that the anarchists who were making such a fuss in the nineteenth century were actually subsidized by prominent capitalists in order to scare the public into opposing economic and social reform. The reforms that did occur were brought about not by labor or political parties, but by a universal social commitment to the ideal of the brotherhood of man. Women are also members of the industrial army, as they have been freed from the burden of domestic labor. Therefore, women are no longer dependent upon men for their maintenance. They are ranked according to a different system than male workers, and they have their own female general-in-chief, elected in the same manner as the male general-in-chief. She serves in the President's Cabinet and has veto power over any measure concerning women's work. Female judges preside over cases that involve only women, but judges of either sex may decide cases involving parties of both sexes. Leete explains that marriage is now based on love rather than wealth. Now that women are free to marry men who make the best fathers, society in general has improved greatly. Moreover, the relations between the sexes are much more frank. A woman can just as easily confess her love for a man as vice versa. One Sunday, Leete invites Julian to listen to a sermon by Mr. Barton transmitted over the telephone wires like music. When Julian hears that he has been the inspiration for the sermon, he is eager to listen. Barton praises the vast improvements made in the conditions of the nation's citizens in only a century. The conditions of the nineteenth century seem now like unmitigated barbarism. Afterwards, Julian becomes melancholy because he contributed to the inhumane and immoral conditions of the nineteenth century that Barton so fiercely criticizes. He feels that he inspires revulsion, pity, and curiosity in the people around him as a representative of such an ugly age. Noting his distress, Edith asks Julian to tell her the reason for it. Julian explains that the sermon has dashed his hopes of becoming an equal and integrated member of modern society. Edith assures him that she and her family are sincere in their feelings of friendship for him. Julian confesses his love for Edith, and Edith confesses her love for Julian. Afterwards, Julian learns of her secret: she is the great-granddaughter of Edith Bartlett Julian has a nightmare that his awakening into the twentieth-century utopia was all a dream. In the nightmare, he reads a nineteenth-century newspaper, a catalogue of the human misery caused by an economy based on private capital. In the nightmare, he fervently explains to Edith Bartlett's family why their way of life is so horrendous. He tries to explain to them how society can be changed for the better, but they become angry and expel him from their home. Julian is greatly relieved to find that his sudden return to the nineteenth century was nothing but a nightmare.