Chapter: When, in the course of our tour of inspection, we came to the library,
we succumbed to the temptation of the luxurious leather chairs with
which it was furnished, and sat down in one of the book-lined alcoves
to rest and chat awhile.

"Edith tells me that you have been in the library all the morning,"
said Mrs. Leete. "Do you know, it seems to me, Mr. West, that you are
the most enviable of mortals."

"I should like to know just why," I replied.

"Because the books of the last hundred years will be new to you," she
answered. "You will have so much of the most absorbing literature to
read as to leave you scarcely time for meals these five years to come.
Ah, what would I give if I had not already read Berrian's novels."

"Or Nesmyth's, mamma," added Edith.

"Yes, or Oates' poems, or 'Past and Present,' or, 'In the Beginning,'
or,--oh, I could name a dozen books, each worth a year of one's
life," declared Mrs. Leete, enthusiastically.

"I judge, then, that there has been some notable literature produced
in this century."

"Yes," said Dr. Leete. "It has been an era of unexampled intellectual
splendor. Probably humanity never before passed through a moral and
material evolution, at once so vast in its scope and brief in its time
of accomplishment, as that from the old order to the new in the early
part of this century. When men came to realize the greatness of the
felicity which had befallen them, and that the change through which
they had passed was not merely an improvement in details of their
condition, but the rise of the race to a new plane of existence with
an illimitable vista of progress, their minds were affected in all
their faculties with a stimulus, of which the outburst of the mediaeval
renaissance offers a suggestion but faint indeed. There ensued an era
of mechanical invention, scientific discovery, art, musical and
literary productiveness to which no previous age of the world offers
anything comparable."

"By the way," said I, "talking of literature, how are books published
now? Is that also done by the nation?"

"Certainly."

"But how do you manage it? Does the government publish everything that
is brought it as a matter of course, at the public expense, or does
it exercise a censorship and print only what it approves?"

"Neither way. The printing department has no censorial powers. It is
bound to print all that is offered it, but prints it only on condition
that the author defray the first cost out of his credit. He must pay
for the privilege of the public ear, and if he has any message worth
hearing we consider that he will be glad to do it. Of course, if
incomes were unequal, as in the old times, this rule would enable only
the rich to be authors, but the resources of citizens being equal, it
merely measures the strength of the author's motive. The cost of an
edition of an average book can be saved out of a year's credit by the
practice of economy and some sacrifices. The book, on being published,
is placed on sale by the nation."

"The author receiving a royalty on the sales as with us, I suppose," I
suggested.

"Not as with you, certainly," replied Dr. Leete, "but nevertheless in
one way. The price of every book is made up of the cost of its
publication with a royalty for the author. The author fixes this
royalty at any figure he pleases. Of course if he puts it unreasonably
high it is his own loss, for the book will not sell. The amount of
this royalty is set to his credit and he is discharged from other
service to the nation for so long a period as this credit at the rate
of allowance for the support of citizens shall suffice to support him.
If his book be moderately successful, he has thus a furlough for
several months, a year, two or three years, and if he in the mean time
produces other successful work, the remission of service is extended
so far as the sale of that may justify. An author of much acceptance
succeeds in supporting himself by his pen during the entire period of
service, and the degree of any writer's literary ability, as
determined by the popular voice, is thus the measure of the
opportunity given him to devote his time to literature. In this
respect the outcome of our system is not very dissimilar to that of
yours, but there are two notable differences. In the first place, the
universally high level of education nowadays gives the popular verdict
a conclusiveness on the real merit of literary work which in your day
it was as far as possible from having. In the second place, there is
no such thing now as favoritism of any sort to interfere with the
recognition of true merit. Every author has precisely the same
facilities for bringing his work before the popular tribunal. To judge
from the complaints of the writers of your day, this absolute equality
of opportunity would have been greatly prized."

"In the recognition of merit in other fields of original genius, such
as music, art, invention, design," I said, "I suppose you follow a
similar principle."

"Yes," he replied, "although the details differ. In art, for example,
as in literature, the people are the sole judges. They vote upon the
acceptance of statues and paintings for the public buildings, and
their favorable verdict carries with it the artist's remission from
other tasks to devote himself to his vocation. On copies of his work
disposed of, he also derives the same advantage as the author on sales
of his books. In all these lines of original genius the plan pursued
is the same,--to offer a free field to aspirants, and as soon as
exceptional talent is recognized to release it from all trammels and
let it have free course. The remission of other service in these cases
is not intended as a gift or reward, but as the means of obtaining
more and higher service. Of course there are various literary, art,
and scientific institutes to which membership comes to the famous and
is greatly prized. The highest of all honors in the nation, higher
than the presidency, which calls merely for good sense and devotion to
duty, is the red ribbon awarded by the vote of the people to the great
authors, artists, engineers, physicians, and inventors of the
generation. Not over a certain number wear it at any one time, though
every bright young fellow in the country loses innumerable nights'
sleep dreaming of it. I even did myself."

"Just as if mamma and I would have thought any more of you with it,"
exclaimed Edith; "not that it isn't, of course, a very fine thing to
have."

"You had no choice, my dear, but to take your father as you found him
and make the best of him," Dr. Leete replied; "but as for your
mother, there, she would never have had me if I had not assured her
that I was bound to get the red ribbon or at least the blue."

On this extravagance Mrs. Leete's only comment was a smile.

"How about periodicals and newspapers?" I said. "I won't deny that
your book publishing system is a considerable improvement on ours,
both as to its tendency to encourage a real literary vocation, and,
quite as important, to discourage mere scribblers; but I don't see how
it can be made to apply to magazines and newspapers. It is very well
to make a man pay for publishing a book, because the expense will be
only occasional; but no man could afford the expense of publishing a
newspaper every day in the year. It took the deep pockets of our
private capitalists to do that, and often exhausted even them before
the returns came in. If you have newspapers at all, they must, I
fancy, be published by the government at the public expense, with
government editors, reflecting government opinions. Now, if your
system is so perfect that there is never anything to criticise in the
conduct of affairs, this arrangement may answer. Otherwise I should
think the lack of an independent unofficial medium for the expression
of public opinion would have most unfortunate results. Confess, Dr.
Leete, that a free newspaper press, with all that it implies, was a
redeeming incident of the old system when capital was in private
hands, and that you have to set off the loss of that against your
gains in other respects."

"I am afraid I can't give you even that consolation," replied Dr.
Leete, laughing. "In the first place, Mr. West, the newspaper press is
by no means the only or, as we look at it, the best vehicle for
serious criticism of public affairs. To us, the judgments of your
newspapers on such themes seem generally to have been crude and
flippant, as well as deeply tinctured with prejudice and bitterness.
In so far as they may be taken as expressing public opinion, they give
an unfavorable impression of the popular intelligence, while so far as
they may have formed public opinion, the nation was not to be
felicitated. Nowadays, when a citizen desires to make a serious
impression upon the public mind as to any aspect of public affairs, he
comes out with a book or pamphlet, published as other books are. But
this is not because we lack newspapers and magazines, or that they
lack the most absolute freedom. The newspaper press is organized so as
to be a more perfect expression of public opinion than it possibly
could be in your day, when private capital controlled and managed it
primarily as a money-making business, and secondarily only as a
mouthpiece for the people."

"But," said I, "if the government prints the papers at the public
expense, how can it fail to control their policy? Who appoints the
editors, if not the government?"

"The government does not pay the expense of the papers, nor appoint
their editors, nor in any way exert the slightest influence on their
policy," replied Dr. Leete. "The people who take the paper pay the
expense of its publication, choose its editor, and remove him when
unsatisfactory. You will scarcely say, I think, that such a newspaper
press is not a free organ of popular opinion."

"Decidedly I shall not," I replied, "but how is it practicable?"

"Nothing could be simpler. Supposing some of my neighbors or myself
think we ought to have a newspaper reflecting our opinions, and
devoted especially to our locality, trade, or profession. We go about
among the people till we get the names of such a number that their
annual subscriptions will meet the cost of the paper, which is little
or big according to the largeness of its constituency. The amount of
the subscriptions marked off the credits of the citizens guarantees
the nation against loss in publishing the paper, its business, you
understand, being that of a publisher purely, with no option to refuse
the duty required. The subscribers to the paper now elect somebody as
editor, who, if he accepts the office, is discharged from other
service during his incumbency. Instead of paying a salary to him, as
in your day, the subscribers pay the nation an indemnity equal to the
cost of his support for taking him away from the general service. He
manages the paper just as one of your editors did, except that he has
no counting-room to obey, or interests of private capital as against
the public good to defend. At the end of the first year, the
subscribers for the next either reelect the former editor or choose
any one else to his place. An able editor, of course, keeps his place
indefinitely. As the subscription list enlarges, the funds of the
paper increase, and it is improved by the securing of more and better
contributors, just as your papers were."

"How is the staff of contributors recompensed, since they cannot be
paid in money."

"The editor settles with them the price of their wares. The amount is
transferred to their individual credit from the guarantee credit of
the paper, and a remission of service is granted the contributor for a
length of time corresponding to the amount credited him, just as to
other authors. As to magazines, the system is the same. Those
interested in the prospectus of a new periodical pledge enough
subscriptions to run it for a year; select their editor, who
recompenses his contributors just as in the other case, the printing
bureau furnishing the necessary force and material for publication, as
a matter of course. When an editor's services are no longer desired,
if he cannot earn the right to his time by other literary work, he
simply resumes his place in the industrial army. I should add that,
though ordinarily the editor is elected only at the end of the year,
and as a rule is continued in office for a term of years, in case of
any sudden change he should give to the tone of the paper, provision
is made for taking the sense of the subscribers as to his removal at
any time."

"However earnestly a man may long for leisure for purposes of study or
meditation," I remarked, "he cannot get out of the harness, if I
understand you rightly, except in these two ways you have mentioned.
He must either by literary, artistic, or inventive productiveness
indemnify the nation for the loss of his services, or must get a
sufficient number of other people to contribute to such an indemnity."

"It is most certain," replied Dr. Leete, "that no able-bodied man
nowadays can evade his share of work and live on the toil of others,
whether he calls himself by the fine name of student or confesses to
being simply lazy. At the same time our system is elastic enough to
give free play to every instinct of human nature which does not aim at
dominating others or living on the fruit of others' labor. There is
not only the remission by indemnification but the remission by
abnegation. Any man in his thirty-third year, his term of service
being then half done, can obtain an honorable discharge from the army,
provided he accepts for the rest of his life one half the rate of
maintenance other citizens receive. It is quite possible to live on
this amount, though one must forego the luxuries and elegancies of
life, with some, perhaps, of its comforts."

When the ladies retired that evening, Edith brought me a book and
said:--

"If you should be wakeful to-night, Mr. West, you might be interested
in looking over this story by Berrian. It is considered his
masterpiece, and will at least give you an idea what the stories
nowadays are like."

I sat up in my room that night reading "Penthesilia" till it grew gray
in the east, and did not lay it down till I had finished it. And yet
let no admirer of the great romancer of the twentieth century resent
my saying that at the first reading what most impressed me was not so
much what was in the book as what was left out of it. The
story-writers of my day would have deemed the making of bricks without
straw a light task compared with the construction of a romance from
which should be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of
wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and
refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and
ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer,
together with sordid anxieties of any sort for one's self or others; a
romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love
unfretted by artificial barriers created by differences of station or
possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart. The reading of
"Penthesilia" was of more value than almost any amount of explanation
would have been in giving me something like a general impression of
the social aspect of the twentieth century. The information Dr. Leete
had imparted was indeed extensive as to facts, but they had affected
my mind as so many separate impressions, which I had as yet succeeded
but imperfectly in making cohere. Berrian put them together for me in
a picture.

[Footnote 3: I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that
reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared
with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in
which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and
obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to
discourage any ordinary taste for literature.]





Next morning I rose somewhat before the breakfast hour. As I descended
the stairs, Edith stepped into the hall from the room which had been
the scene of the morning interview between us described some chapters
back.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, with a charmingly arch expression, "you thought
to slip out unbeknown for another of those solitary morning rambles
which have such nice effects on you. But you see I am up too early for
you this time. You are fairly caught."

"You discredit the efficacy of your own cure," I said, "by supposing
that such a ramble would now be attended with bad consequences."

"I am very glad to hear that," she said. "I was in here arranging some
flowers for the breakfast table when I heard you come down, and
fancied I detected something surreptitious in your step on the
stairs."

"You did me injustice," I replied. "I had no idea of going out at
all."

Despite her effort to convey an impression that my interception was
purely accidental, I had at the time a dim suspicion of what I
afterwards learned to be the fact, namely, that this sweet creature,
in pursuance of her self-assumed guardianship over me, had risen for
the last two or three mornings at an unheard-of hour, to insure
against the possibility of my wandering off alone in case I should be
affected as on the former occasion. Receiving permission to assist her
in making up the breakfast bouquet, I followed her into the room from
which she had emerged.

"Are you sure," she asked, "that you are quite done with those
terrible sensations you had that morning?"

"I can't say that I do not have times of feeling decidedly queer," I
replied, "moments when my personal identity seems an open question. It
would be too much to expect after my experience that I should not have
such sensations occasionally, but as for being carried entirely off my
feet, as I was on the point of being that morning, I think the danger
is past."

"I shall never forget how you looked that morning," she said.

"If you had merely saved my life," I continued, "I might, perhaps,
find words to express my gratitude, but it was my reason you saved,
and there are no words that would not belittle my debt to you." I
spoke with emotion, and her eyes grew suddenly moist.

"It is too much to believe all this," she said, "but it is very
delightful to hear you say it. What I did was very little. I was very
much distressed for you, I know. Father never thinks anything ought to
astonish us when it can be explained scientifically, as I suppose this
long sleep of yours can be, but even to fancy myself in your place
makes my head swim. I know that I could not have borne it at all."

"That would depend," I replied, "on whether an angel came to support
you with her sympathy in the crisis of your condition, as one came to
me." If my face at all expressed the feelings I had a right to have
toward this sweet and lovely young girl, who had played so angelic a
role toward me, its expression must have been very worshipful just
then. The expression or the words, or both together, caused her now to
drop her eyes with a charming blush.

"For the matter of that," I said, "if your experience has not been as
startling as mine, it must have been rather overwhelming to see a man
belonging to a strange century, and apparently a hundred years dead,
raised to life."

"It seemed indeed strange beyond any describing at first," she said,
"but when we began to put ourselves in your place, and realize how
much stranger it must seem to you, I fancy we forgot our own feelings
a good deal, at least I know I did. It seemed then not so much
astounding as interesting and touching beyond anything ever heard of
before."

"But does it not come over you as astounding to sit at table with me,
seeing who I am?"

"You must remember that you do not seem so strange to us as we must to
you," she answered. "We belong to a future of which you could not form
an idea, a generation of which you knew nothing until you saw us. But
you belong to a generation of which our forefathers were a part. We
know all about it; the names of many of its members are household
words with us. We have made a study of your ways of living and
thinking; nothing you say or do surprises us, while we say and do
nothing which does not seem strange to you. So you see, Mr. West, that
if you feel that you can, in time, get accustomed to us, you must not
be surprised that from the first we have scarcely found you strange at
all."

"I had not thought of it in that way," I replied. "There is indeed
much in what you say. One can look back a thousand years easier than
forward fifty. A century is not so very long a retrospect. I might
have known your great-grand-parents. Possibly I did. Did they live in
Boston?"

"I believe so."

"You are not sure, then?"

"Yes," she replied. "Now I think, they did."

"I had a very large circle of acquaintances in the city," I said. "It
is not unlikely that I knew or knew of some of them. Perhaps I may
have known them well. Wouldn't it be interesting if I should chance
to be able to tell you all about your great-grandfather, for
instance?"

"Very interesting."

"Do you know your genealogy well enough to tell me who your forbears
were in the Boston of my day?"

"Oh, yes."

"Perhaps, then, you will some time tell me what some of their names
were."

She was engrossed in arranging a troublesome spray of green, and did
not reply at once. Steps upon the stairway indicated that the other
members of the family were descending.

"Perhaps, some time," she said.

After breakfast, Dr. Leete suggested taking me to inspect the central
warehouse and observe actually in operation the machinery of
distribution, which Edith had described to me. As we walked away from
the house I said, "It is now several days that I have been living in
your household on a most extraordinary footing, or rather on none at
all. I have not spoken of this aspect of my position before because
there were so many other aspects yet more extraordinary. But now that
I am beginning a little to feel my feet under me, and to realize that,
however I came here, I am here, and must make the best of it, I must
speak to you on this point."

"As for your being a guest in my house," replied Dr. Leete, "I pray
you not to begin to be uneasy on that point, for I mean to keep you a
long time yet. With all your modesty, you can but realize that such a
guest as yourself is an acquisition not willingly to be parted with."

"Thanks, doctor," I said. "It would be absurd, certainly, for me to
affect any oversensitiveness about accepting the temporary hospitality
of one to whom I owe it that I am not still awaiting the end of the
world in a living tomb. But if I am to be a permanent citizen of this
century I must have some standing in it. Now, in my time a person more
or less entering the world, however he got in, would not be noticed in
the unorganized throng of men, and might make a place for himself
anywhere he chose if he were strong enough. But nowadays everybody is
a part of a system with a distinct place and function. I am outside
the system, and don't see how I can get in; there seems no way to get
in, except to be born in or to come in as an emigrant from some other
system."

Dr. Leete laughed heartily.

"I admit," he said, "that our system is defective in lacking provision
for cases like yours, but you see nobody anticipated additions to the
world except by the usual process. You need, however, have no fear
that we shall be unable to provide both a place and occupation for you
in due time. You have as yet been brought in contact only with the
members of my family, but you must not suppose that I have kept your
secret. On the contrary, your case, even before your resuscitation,
and vastly more since, has excited the profoundest interest in the
nation. In view of your precarious nervous condition, it was thought
best that I should take exclusive charge of you at first, and that you
should, through me and my family, receive some general idea of the
sort of world you had come back to before you began to make the
acquaintance generally of its inhabitants. As to finding a function
for you in society, there was no hesitation as to what that would be.
Few of us have it in our power to confer so great a service on the
nation as you will be able to when you leave my roof, which, however,
you must not think of doing for a good time yet."

"What can I possibly do?" I asked. "Perhaps you imagine I have some
trade, or art, or special skill. I assure you I have none whatever. I
never earned a dollar in my life, or did an hour's work. I am strong,
and might be a common laborer, but nothing more."

"If that were the most efficient service you were able to render the
nation, you would find that avocation considered quite as respectable
as any other," replied Dr. Leete; "but you can do something else
better. You are easily the master of all our historians on questions
relating to the social condition of the latter part of the nineteenth
century, to us one of the most absorbingly interesting periods of
history; and whenever in due time you have sufficiently familiarized
yourself with our institutions, and are willing to teach us something
concerning those of your day, you will find an historical lectureship
in one of our colleges awaiting you."

"Very good! very good indeed," I said, much relieved by so practical a
suggestion on a point which had begun to trouble me. "If your people
are really so much interested in the nineteenth century, there will
indeed be an occupation ready-made for me. I don't think there is
anything else that I could possibly earn my salt at, but I certainly
may claim without conceit to have some special qualifications for such
a post as you describe."





I found the processes at the warehouse quite as interesting as Edith
had described them, and became even enthusiastic over the truly
remarkable illustration which is seen there of the prodigiously
multiplied efficiency which perfect organization can give to labor. It
is like a gigantic mill, into the hopper of which goods are being
constantly poured by the train-load and ship-load, to issue at the
other end in packages of pounds and ounces, yards and inches, pints
and gallons, corresponding to the infinitely complex personal needs of
half a million people. Dr. Leete, with the assistance of data
furnished by me as to the way goods were sold in my day, figured out
some astounding results in the way of the economies effected by the
modern system.

As we set out homeward, I said: "After what I have seen to-day,
together with what you have told me, and what I learned under Miss
Leete's tutelage at the sample store, I have a tolerably clear idea of
your system of distribution, and how it enables you to dispense with a
circulating medium. But I should like very much to know something more
about your system of production. You have told me in general how your
industrial army is levied and organized, but who directs its efforts?
What supreme authority determines what shall be done in every
department, so that enough of everything is produced and yet no labor
wasted? It seems to me that this must be a wonderfully complex and
difficult function, requiring very unusual endowments."

"Does it indeed seem so to you?" responded Dr. Leete. "I assure you
that it is nothing of the kind, but on the other hand so simple, and
depending on principles so obvious and easily applied, that the
functionaries at Washington to whom it is trusted require to be
nothing more than men of fair abilities to discharge it to the entire
satisfaction of the nation. The machine which they direct is indeed a
vast one, but so logical in its principles and direct and simple in
its workings, that it all but runs itself; and nobody but a fool could
derange it, as I think you will agree after a few words of
explanation. Since you already have a pretty good idea of the working
of the distributive system, let us begin at that end. Even in your day
statisticians were able to tell you the number of yards of cotton,
velvet, woolen, the number of barrels of flour, potatoes, butter,
number of pairs of shoes, hats, and umbrellas annually consumed by the
nation. Owing to the fact that production was in private hands, and
that there was no way of getting statistics of actual distribution,
these figures were not exact, but they were nearly so. Now that every
pin which is given out from a national warehouse is recorded, of
course the figures of consumption for any week, month, or year, in the
possession of the department of distribution at the end of that
period, are precise. On these figures, allowing for tendencies to
increase or decrease and for any special causes likely to affect
demand, the estimates, say for a year ahead, are based. These
estimates, with a proper margin for security, having been accepted by
the general administration, the responsibility of the distributive
department ceases until the goods are delivered to it. I speak of the
estimates being furnished for an entire year ahead, but in reality
they cover that much time only in case of the great staples for which
the demand can be calculated on as steady. In the great majority of
smaller industries for the product of which popular taste fluctuates,
and novelty is frequently required, production is kept barely ahead of
consumption, the distributive department furnishing frequent estimates
based on the weekly state of demand.

"Now the entire field of productive and constructive industry is
divided into ten great departments, each representing a group of
allied industries, each particular industry being in turn represented
by a subordinate bureau, which has a complete record of the plant and
force under its control, of the present product, and means of
increasing it. The estimates of the distributive department, after
adoption by the administration, are sent as mandates to the ten great
departments, which allot them to the subordinate bureaus representing
the particular industries, and these set the men at work. Each bureau
is responsible for the task given it, and this responsibility is
enforced by departmental oversight and that of the administration; nor
does the distributive department accept the product without its own
inspection; while even if in the hands of the consumer an article
turns out unfit, the system enables the fault to be traced back to the
original workman. The production of the commodities for actual public
consumption does not, of course, require by any means all the national
force of workers. After the necessary contingents have been detailed
for the various industries, the amount of labor left for other
employment is expended in creating fixed capital, such as buildings,
machinery, engineering works, and so forth."

"One point occurs to me," I said, "on which I should think there might
be dissatisfaction. Where there is no opportunity for private
enterprise, how is there any assurance that the claims of small
minorities of the people to have articles produced, for which there is
no wide demand, will be respected? An official decree at any moment
may deprive them of the means of gratifying some special taste, merely
because the majority does not share it."

"That would be tyranny indeed," replied Dr. Leete, "and you may be
very sure that it does not happen with us, to whom liberty is as dear
as equality or fraternity. As you come to know our system better, you
will see that our officials are in fact, and not merely in name, the
agents and servants of the people. The administration has no power to
stop the production of any commodity for which there continues to be a
demand. Suppose the demand for any article declines to such a point
that its production becomes very costly. The price has to be raised in
proportion, of course, but as long as the consumer cares to pay it,
the production goes on. Again, suppose an article not before produced
is demanded. If the administration doubts the reality of the demand, a
popular petition guaranteeing a certain basis of consumption compels
it to produce the desired article. A government, or a majority, which
should undertake to tell the people, or a minority, what they were to
eat, drink, or wear, as I believe governments in America did in your
day, would be regarded as a curious anachronism indeed. Possibly you
had reasons for tolerating these infringements of personal
independence, but we should not think them endurable. I am glad you
raised this point, for it has given me a chance to show you how much
more direct and efficient is the control over production exercised by
the individual citizen now than it was in your day, when what you
called private initiative prevailed, though it should have been
called capitalist initiative, for the average private citizen had
little enough share in it."

"You speak of raising the price of costly articles," I said. "How can
prices be regulated in a country where there is no competition between
buyers or sellers?"

"Just as they were with you," replied Dr. Leete. "You think that needs
explaining," he added, as I looked incredulous, "but the explanation
need not be long; the cost of the labor which produced it was
recognized as the legitimate basis of the price of an article in your
day, and so it is in ours. In your day, it was the difference in wages
that made the difference in the cost of labor; now it is the relative
number of hours constituting a day's work in different trades, the
maintenance of the worker being equal in all cases. The cost of a
man's work in a trade so difficult that in order to attract volunteers
the hours have to be fixed at four a day is twice as great as that in
a trade where the men work eight hours. The result as to the cost of
labor, you see, is just the same as if the man working four hours were
paid, under your system, twice the wages the other gets. This
calculation applied to the labor employed in the various processes of
a manufactured article gives its price relatively to other articles.
Besides the cost of production and transportation, the factor of
scarcity affects the prices of some commodities. As regards the great
staples of life, of which an abundance can always be secured,
scarcity is eliminated as a factor. There is always a large surplus
kept on hand from which any fluctuations of demand or supply can be
corrected, even in most cases of bad crops. The prices of the staples
grow less year by year, but rarely, if ever, rise. There are, however,
certain classes of articles permanently, and others temporarily,
unequal to the demand, as, for example, fresh fish or dairy products
in the latter category, and the products of high skill and rare
materials in the other. All that can be done here is to equalize the
inconvenience of the scarcity. This is done by temporarily raising the
price if the scarcity be temporary, or fixing it high if it be
permanent. High prices in your day meant restriction of the articles
affected to the rich, but nowadays, when the means of all are the
same, the effect is only that those to whom the articles seem most
desirable are the ones who purchase them. Of course the nation, as any
other caterer for the public needs must be, is frequently left with
small lots of goods on its hands by changes in taste, unseasonable
weather, and various other causes. These it has to dispose of at a
sacrifice just as merchants often did in your day, charging up the
loss to the expenses of the business. Owing, however, to the vast body
of consumers to which such lots can be simultaneously offered, there
is rarely any difficulty in getting rid of them at trifling loss. I
have given you now some general notion of our system of production,
as well as distribution. Do you find it as complex as you expected?"

I admitted that nothing could be much simpler.

"I am sure," said Dr. Leete, "that it is within the truth to say that
the head of one of the myriad private businesses of your day, who had
to maintain sleepless vigilance against the fluctuations of the
market, the machinations of his rivals, and the failure of his
debtors, had a far more trying task than the group of men at
Washington who nowadays direct the industries of the entire nation.
All this merely shows, my dear fellow, how much easier it is to do
things the right way than the wrong. It is easier for a general up in
a balloon, with perfect survey of the field, to manoeuvre a million men
to victory than for a sergeant to manage a platoon in a thicket."

"The general of this army, including the flower of the manhood of the
nation, must be the foremost man in the country, really greater even
than the President of the United States," I said.

"He is the President of the United States," replied Dr. Leete, "or
rather the most important function of the presidency is the headship
of the industrial army."

"How is he chosen?" I asked.

"I explained to you before," replied Dr. Leete, "when I was describing
the force of the motive of emulation among all grades of the
industrial army, that the line of promotion for the meritorious lies
through three grades to the officer's grade, and thence up through the
lieutenancies to the captaincy or foremanship, and superintendency or
colonel's rank. Next, with an intervening grade in some of the larger
trades, come the general of the guild, under whose immediate control
all the operations of the trade are conducted. This officer is at the
head of the national bureau representing his trade, and is responsible
for its work to the administration. The general of his guild holds a
splendid position, and one which amply satisfies the ambition of most
men, but above his rank, which may be compared--to follow the military
analogies familiar to you--to that of a general of division or
major-general, is that of the chiefs of the ten great departments, or
groups of allied trades. The chiefs of these ten grand divisions of
the industrial army may be compared to your commanders of army corps,
or lieutenant-generals, each having from a dozen to a score of
generals of separate guilds reporting to him. Above these ten great
officers, who form his council, is the general-in-chief, who is the
President of the United States.

"The general-in-chief of the industrial army must have passed through
all the grades below him, from the common laborers up. Let us see how
he rises. As I have told you, it is simply by the excellence of his
record as a worker that one rises through the grades of the privates
and becomes a candidate for a lieutenancy. Through the lieutenancies
he rises to the colonelcy, or superintendent's position, by
appointment from above, strictly limited to the candidates of the best
records. The general of the guild appoints to the ranks under him, but
he himself is not appointed, but chosen by suffrage."

"By suffrage!" I exclaimed. "Is not that ruinous to the discipline of
the guild, by tempting the candidates to intrigue for the support of
the workers under them?"

"So it would be, no doubt," replied Dr. Leete, "if the workers had any
suffrage to exercise, or anything to say about the choice. But they
have nothing. Just here comes in a peculiarity of our system. The
general of the guild is chosen from among the superintendents by vote
of the honorary members of the guild, that is, of those who have
served their time in the guild and received their discharge. As you
know, at the age of forty-five we are mustered out of the army of
industry, and have the residue of life for the pursuit of our own
improvement or recreation. Of course, however, the associations of our
active lifetime retain a powerful hold on us. The companionships we
formed then remain our companionships till the end of life. We always
continue honorary members of our former guilds, and retain the keenest
and most jealous interest in their welfare and repute in the hands of
the following generation. In the clubs maintained by the honorary
members of the several guilds, in which we meet socially, there are no
topics of conversation so common as those which relate to these
matters, and the young aspirants for guild leadership who can pass the
criticism of us old fellows are likely to be pretty well equipped.
Recognizing this fact, the nation entrusts to the honorary members of
each guild the election of its general, and I venture to claim that no
previous form of society could have developed a body of electors so
ideally adapted to their office, as regards absolute impartiality,
knowledge of the special qualifications and record of candidates,
solicitude for the best result, and complete absence of self-interest.

"Each of the ten lieutenant-generals or heads of departments is
himself elected from among the generals of the guilds grouped as a
department, by vote of the honorary members of the guilds thus
grouped. Of course there is a tendency on the part of each guild to
vote for its own general, but no guild of any group has nearly enough
votes to elect a man not supported by most of the others. I assure you
that these elections are exceedingly lively."

"The President, I suppose, is selected from among the ten heads of the
great departments," I suggested.

"Precisely, but the heads of departments are not eligible to the
presidency till they have been a certain number of years out of
office. It is rarely that a man passes through all the grades to the
headship of a department much before he is forty, and at the end of a
five years' term he is usually forty-five. If more, he still serves
through his term, and if less, he is nevertheless discharged from the
industrial army at its termination. It would not do for him to return
to the ranks. The interval before he is a candidate for the presidency
is intended to give time for him to recognize fully that he has
returned into the general mass of the nation, and is identified with
it rather than with the industrial army. Moreover, it is expected that
he will employ this period in studying the general condition of the
army, instead of that of the special group of guilds of which he was
the head. From among the former heads of departments who may be
eligible at the time, the President is elected by vote of all the men
of the nation who are not connected with the industrial army."

"The army is not allowed to vote for President?"

"Certainly not. That would be perilous to its discipline, which it is
the business of the President to maintain as the representative of the
nation at large. His right hand for this purpose is the inspectorate,
a highly important department of our system; to the inspectorate come
all complaints or information as to defects in goods, insolence or
inefficiency of officials, or dereliction of any sort in the public
service. The inspectorate, however, does not wait for complaints. Not
only is it on the alert to catch and sift every rumor of a fault in
the service, but it is its business, by systematic and constant
oversight and inspection of every branch of the army, to find out what
is going wrong before anybody else does. The President is usually not
far from fifty when elected, and serves five years, forming an
honorable exception to the rule of retirement at forty-five. At the
end of his term of office, a national Congress is called to receive
his report and approve or condemn it. If it is approved, Congress
usually elects him to represent the nation for five years more in the
international council. Congress, I should also say, passes on the
reports of the outgoing heads of departments, and a disapproval
renders any one of them ineligible for President. But it is rare,
indeed, that the nation has occasion for other sentiments than those
of gratitude toward its high officers. As to their ability, to have
risen from the ranks, by tests so various and severe, to their
positions, is proof in itself of extraordinary qualities, while as to
faithfulness, our social system leaves them absolutely without any
other motive than that of winning the esteem of their fellow citizens.
Corruption is impossible in a society where there is neither poverty
to be bribed nor wealth to bribe, while as to demagoguery or intrigue
for office, the conditions of promotion render them out of the
question."

"One point I do not quite understand," I said. "Are the members of the
liberal professions eligible to the presidency? and if so, how are
they ranked with those who pursue the industries proper?"

"They have no ranking with them," replied Dr. Leete. "The members of
the technical professions, such as engineers and architects, have a
ranking with the constructive guilds; but the members of the liberal
professions, the doctors and teachers, as well as the artists and men
of letters who obtain remissions of industrial service, do not belong
to the industrial army. On this ground they vote for the President,
but are not eligible to his office. One of its main duties being the
control and discipline of the industrial army, it is essential that
the President should have passed through all its grades to understand
his business."

"That is reasonable," I said; "but if the doctors and teachers do not
know enough of industry to be President, neither, I should think, can
the President know enough of medicine and education to control those
departments."

"No more does he," was the reply. "Except in the general way that he
is responsible for the enforcement of the laws as to all classes, the
President has nothing to do with the faculties of medicine and
education, which are controlled by boards of regents of their own, in
which the President is ex-officio chairman, and has the casting vote.
These regents, who, of course, are responsible to Congress, are chosen
by the honorary members of the guilds of education and medicine, the
retired teachers and doctors of the country."

"Do you know," I said, "the method of electing officials by votes of
the retired members of the guilds is nothing more than the application
on a national scale of the plan of government by alumni, which we used
to a slight extent occasionally in the management of our higher
educational institutions."

"Did you, indeed?" exclaimed Dr. Leete, with animation. "That is quite
new to me, and I fancy will be to most of us, and of much interest as
well. There has been great discussion as to the germ of the idea, and
we fancied that there was for once something new under the sun. Well!
well! In your higher educational institutions! that is interesting
indeed. You must tell me more of that."

"Truly, there is very little more to tell than I have told already," I
replied. "If we had the germ of your idea, it was but as a germ."





That evening I sat up for some time after the ladies had retired,
talking with Dr. Leete about the effect of the plan of exempting men
from further service to the nation after the age of forty-five, a
point brought up by his account of the part taken by the retired
citizens in the government.

"At forty-five," said I, "a man still has ten years of good manual
labor in him, and twice ten years of good intellectual service. To be
superannuated at that age and laid on the shelf must be regarded
rather as a hardship than a favor by men of energetic dispositions."

"My dear Mr. West," exclaimed Dr. Leete, beaming upon me, "you cannot
have any idea of the piquancy your nineteenth century ideas have for
us of this day, the rare quaintness of their effect. Know, O child of
another race and yet the same, that the labor we have to render as our
part in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physical
existence is by no means regarded as the most important, the most
interesting, or the most dignified employment of our powers. We look
upon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully
devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the
intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean
life. Everything possible is indeed done by the just distribution of
burdens, and by all manner of special attractions and incentives to
relieve our labor of irksomeness, and, except in a comparative sense,
it is not usually irksome, and is often inspiring. But it is not our
labor, but the higher and larger activities which the performance of
our task will leave us free to enter upon, that are considered the
main business of existence.

"Of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic,
literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one thing
valuable to their possessors. Many look upon the last half of life
chiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts; for travel, for
social relaxation in the company of their lifetime friends; a time
for the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and
special tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of
recreation; in a word, a time for the leisurely and unperturbed
appreciation of the good things of the world which they have helped to
create. But whatever the differences between our individual tastes as
to the use we shall put our leisure to, we all agree in looking
forward to the date of our discharge as the time when we shall first
enter upon the full enjoyment of our birthright, the period when we
shall first really attain our majority and become enfranchised from
discipline and control, with the fee of our lives vested in
ourselves. As eager boys in your day anticipated twenty-one, so men
nowadays look forward to forty-five. At twenty-one we become men, but
at forty-five we renew youth. Middle age and what you would have
called old age are considered, rather than youth, the enviable time of
life. Thanks to the better conditions of existence nowadays, and above
all the freedom of every one from care, old age approaches many years
later and has an aspect far more benign than in past times. Persons of
average constitution usually live to eighty-five or ninety, and at
forty-five we are physically and mentally younger, I fancy, than you
were at thirty-five. It is a strange reflection that at forty-five,
when we are just entering upon the most enjoyable period of life, you
already began to think of growing old and to look backward. With you
it was the forenoon, with us it is the afternoon, which is the
brighter half of life."

After this I remember that our talk branched into the subject of
popular sports and recreations at the present time as compared with
those of the nineteenth century.

"In one respect," said Dr. Leete, "there is a marked difference. The
professional sportsmen, which were such a curious feature of your day,
we have nothing answering to, nor are the prizes for which our
athletes contend money prizes, as with you. Our contests are always
for glory only. The generous rivalry existing between the various
guilds, and the loyalty of each worker to his own, afford a constant
stimulation to all sorts of games and matches by sea and land, in
which the young men take scarcely more interest than the honorary
guildsmen who have served their time. The guild yacht races off
Marblehead take place next week, and you will be able to judge for
yourself of the popular enthusiasm which such events nowadays call out
as compared with your day. The demand for '_panem et circenses_'
preferred by the Roman populace is recognized nowadays as a wholly
reasonable one. If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is
a close second, and the nation caters for both. Americans of the
nineteenth century were as unfortunate in lacking an adequate
provision for the one sort of need as for the other. Even if the
people of that period had enjoyed larger leisure they would, I fancy,
have often been at a loss how to pass it agreeably. We are never in
that predicament."





In the course of an early morning constitutional I visited
Charlestown. Among the changes, too numerous to attempt to indicate,
which mark the lapse of a century in that quarter, I particularly
noted the total disappearance of the old state prison.

"That went before my day, but I remember hearing about it," said Dr.
Leete, when I alluded to the fact at the breakfast table. "We have no
jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated in the hospitals."

"Of atavism!" I exclaimed, staring.

"Why, yes," replied Dr. Leete. "The idea of dealing punitively with
those unfortunates was given up at least fifty years ago, and I think
more."

"I don't quite understand you," I said. "Atavism in my day was a word
applied to the cases of persons in whom some trait of a remote
ancestor recurred in a noticeable manner. Am I to understand that
crime is nowadays looked upon as the recurrence of an ancestral
trait?"

"I beg your pardon," said Dr. Leete with a smile half humorous, half
deprecating, "but since you have so explicitly asked the question, I
am forced to say that the fact is precisely that."

After what I had already learned of the moral contrasts between the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, it was doubtless absurd in me
to begin to develop sensitiveness on the subject, and probably if Dr.
Leete had not spoken with that apologetic air and Mrs. Leete and Edith
shown a corresponding embarrassment, I should not have flushed, as I
was conscious I did.

"I was not in much danger of being vain of my generation before," I
said; "but, really"--

"This is your generation, Mr. West," interposed Edith. "It is the one
in which you are living, you know, and it is only because we are alive
now that we call it ours."

"Thank you. I will try to think of it so," I said, and as my eyes met
hers their expression quite cured my senseless sensitiveness. "After
all," I said, with a laugh, "I was brought up a Calvinist, and ought
not to be startled to hear crime spoken of as an ancestral trait."

"In point of fact," said Dr. Leete, "our use of the word is no
reflection at all on your generation, if, begging Edith's pardon, we
may call it yours, so far as seeming to imply that we think ourselves,
apart from our circumstances, better than you were. In your day fully
nineteen twentieths of the crime, using the word broadly to include
all sorts of misdemeanors, resulted from the inequality in the
possessions of individuals; want tempted the poor, lust of greater
gains, or the desire to preserve former gains, tempted the well-to-do.
Directly or indirectly, the desire for money, which then meant every
good thing, was the motive of all this crime, the taproot of a vast
poison growth, which the machinery of law, courts, and police could
barely prevent from choking your civilization outright. When we made
the nation the sole trustee of the wealth of the people, and
guaranteed to all abundant maintenance, on the one hand abolishing
want, and on the other checking the accumulation of riches, we cut
this root, and the poison tree that overshadowed your society
withered, like Jonah's gourd, in a day. As for the comparatively small
class of violent crimes against persons, unconnected with any idea of
gain, they were almost wholly confined, even in your day, to the
ignorant and bestial; and in these days, when education and good
manners are not the monopoly of a few, but universal, such atrocities
are scarcely ever heard of. You now see why the word "atavism" is used
for crime. It is because nearly all forms of crime known to you are
motiveless now, and when they appear can only be explained as the
outcropping of ancestral traits. You used to call persons who stole,
evidently without any rational motive, kleptomaniacs, and when the
case was clear deemed it absurd to punish them as thieves. Your
attitude toward the genuine kleptomaniac is precisely ours toward the
victim of atavism, an attitude of compassion and firm but gentle
restraint.

"Your courts must have an easy time of it," I observed. "With no
private property to speak of, no disputes between citizens over
business relations, no real estate to divide or debts to collect,
there must be absolutely no civil business at all for them; and with
no offenses against property, and mighty few of any sort to provide
criminal cases, I should think you might almost do without judges and
lawyers altogether."

"We do without the lawyers, certainly," was Dr. Leete's reply. "It
would not seem reasonable to us, in a case where the only interest of
the nation is to find out the truth, that persons should take part in
the proceedings who had an acknowledged motive to color it."

"But who defends the accused?"

"If he is a criminal he needs no defense, for he pleads guilty in most
instances," replied Dr. Leete. "The plea of the accused is not a mere
formality with us, as with you. It is usually the end of the case."

"You don't mean that the man who pleads not guilty is thereupon
discharged?"

"No, I do not mean that. He is not accused on light grounds, and if he
denies his guilt, must still be tried. But trials are few, for in most
cases the guilty man pleads guilty. When he makes a false plea and is
clearly proved guilty, his penalty is doubled. Falsehood is, however,
so despised among us that few offenders would lie to save themselves."

"That is the most astounding thing you have yet told me," I exclaimed.
"If lying has gone out of fashion, this is indeed the 'new heavens and
the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness,' which the prophet
foretold."

"Such is, in fact, the belief of some persons nowadays," was the
doctor's answer. "They hold that we have entered upon the millennium,
and the theory from their point of view does not lack plausibility.
But as to your astonishment at finding that the world has outgrown
lying, there is really no ground for it. Falsehood, even in your day,
was not common between gentlemen and ladies, social equals. The lie of
fear was the refuge of cowardice, and the lie of fraud the device of
the cheat. The inequalities of men and the lust of acquisition offered
a constant premium on lying at that time. Yet even then, the man who
neither feared another nor desired to defraud him scorned falsehood.
Because we are now all social equals, and no man either has anything
to fear from another or can gain anything by deceiving him, the
contempt of falsehood is so universal that it is rarely, as I told
you, that even a criminal in other respects will be found willing to
lie. When, however, a plea of not guilty is returned, the judge
appoints two colleagues to state the opposite sides of the case. How
far these men are from being like your hired advocates and
prosecutors, determined to acquit or convict, may appear from the fact
that unless both agree that the verdict found is just, the case is
tried over, while anything like bias in the tone of either of the
judges stating the case would be a shocking scandal."

"Do I understand," I said, "that it is a judge who states each side of
the case as well as a judge who hears it?"

"Certainly. The judges take turns in serving on the bench and at the
bar, and are expected to maintain the judicial temper equally whether
in stating or deciding a case. The system is indeed in effect that of
trial by three judges occupying different points of view as to the
case. When they agree upon a verdict, we believe it to be as near to
absolute truth as men well can come."

"You have given up the jury system, then?"

"It was well enough as a corrective in the days of hired advocates,
and a bench sometimes venal, and often with a tenure that made it
dependent, but is needless now. No conceivable motive but justice
could actuate our judges."

"How are these magistrates selected?"

"They are an honorable exception to the rule which discharges all men
from service at the age of forty-five. The President of the nation
appoints the necessary judges year by year from the class reaching
that age. The number appointed is, of course, exceedingly few, and
the honor so high that it is held an offset to the additional term of
service which follows, and though a judge's appointment may be
declined, it rarely is. The term is five years, without eligibility to
reappointment. The members of the Supreme Court, which is the guardian
of the constitution, are selected from among the lower judges. When a
vacancy in that court occurs, those of the lower judges, whose terms
expire that year, select, as their last official act, the one of their
colleagues left on the bench whom they deem fittest to fill it."

"There being no legal profession to serve as a school for judges," I
said, "they must, of course, come directly from the law school to the
bench."

"We have no such things as law schools," replied the doctor, smiling.
"The law as a special science is obsolete. It was a system of
casuistry which the elaborate artificiality of the old order of
society absolutely required to interpret it, but only a few of the
plainest and simplest legal maxims have any application to the
existing state of the world. Everything touching the relations of men
to one another is now simpler, beyond any comparison, than in your
day. We should have no sort of use for the hair-splitting experts who
presided and argued in your courts. You must not imagine, however,
that we have any disrespect for those ancient worthies because we have
no use for them. On the contrary, we entertain an unfeigned respect,
amounting almost to awe, for the men who alone understood and were
able to expound the interminable complexity of the rights of property,
and the relations of commercial and personal dependence involved in
your system. What, indeed, could possibly give a more powerful
impression of the intricacy and artificiality of that system than the
fact that it was necessary to set apart from other pursuits the cream
of the intellect of every generation, in order to provide a body of
pundits able to make it even vaguely intelligible to those whose fates
it determined. The treatises of your great lawyers, the works of
Blackstone and Chitty, of Story and Parsons, stand in our museums,
side by side with the tomes of Duns Scotus and his fellow scholastics,
as curious monuments of intellectual subtlety devoted to subjects
equally remote from the interests of modern men. Our judges are simply
widely informed, judicious, and discreet men of ripe years.

"I should not fail to speak of one important function of the minor
judges," added Dr. Leete. "This is to adjudicate all cases where a
private of the industrial army makes a complaint of unfairness against
an officer. All such questions are heard and settled without appeal by
a single judge, three judges being required only in graver cases. The
efficiency of industry requires the strictest discipline in the army
of labor, but the claim of the workman to just and considerate
treatment is backed by the whole power of the nation. The officer
commands and the private obeys, but no officer is so high that he
would dare display an overbearing manner toward a workman of the
lowest class. As for churlishness or rudeness by an official of any
sort, in his relations to the public, not one among minor offenses is
more sure of a prompt penalty than this. Not only justice but civility
is enforced by our judges in all sorts of intercourse. No value of
service is accepted as a set-off to boorish or offensive manners."

It occurred to me, as Dr. Leete was speaking, that in all his talk I
had heard much of the nation and nothing of the state governments. Had
the organization of the nation as an industrial unit done away with
the states? I asked.

"Necessarily," he replied. "The state governments would have
interfered with the control and discipline of the industrial army,
which, of course, required to be central and uniform. Even if the
state governments had not become inconvenient for other reasons, they
were rendered superfluous by the prodigious simplification in the task
of government since your day. Almost the sole function of the
administration now is that of directing the industries of the country.
Most of the purposes for which governments formerly existed no longer
remain to be subserved. We have no army or navy, and no military
organization. We have no departments of state or treasury, no excise
or revenue services, no taxes or tax collectors. The only function
proper of government, as known to you, which still remains, is the
judiciary and police system. I have already explained to you how
simple is our judicial system as compared with your huge and complex
machine. Of course the same absence of crime and temptation to it,
which make the duties of judges so light, reduces the number and
duties of the police to a minimum."

"But with no state legislatures, and Congress meeting only once in
five years, how do you get your legislation done?"

"We have no legislation," replied Dr. Leete, "that is, next to none.
It is rarely that Congress, even when it meets, considers any new laws
of consequence, and then it only has power to commend them to the
following Congress, lest anything be done hastily. If you will
consider a moment, Mr. West, you will see that we have nothing to make
laws about. The fundamental principles on which our society is founded
settle for all time the strifes and misunderstandings which in your
day called for legislation.

"Fully ninety-nine hundredths of the laws of that time concerned the
definition and protection of private property and the relations of
buyers and sellers. There is neither private property, beyond personal
belongings, now, nor buying and selling, and therefore the occasion of
nearly all the legislation formerly necessary has passed away.
Formerly, society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the
gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it
over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you
will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of
constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of
laws. A central Congress and forty state legislatures, turning out
some twenty thousand laws a year, could not make new props fast enough
to take the place of those which were constantly breaking down or
becoming ineffectual through some shifting of the strain. Now society
rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial supports as
the everlasting hills."

"But you have at least municipal governments besides the one central
authority?"

"Certainly, and they have important and extensive functions in looking
out for the public comfort and recreation, and the improvement and
embellishment of the villages and cities."

"But having no control over the labor of their people, or means of
hiring it, how can they do anything?"

"Every town or city is conceded the right to retain, for its own
public works, a certain proportion of the quota of labor its citizens
contribute to the nation. This proportion, being assigned it as so
much credit, can be applied in any way desired."





That afternoon Edith casually inquired if I had yet revisited the
underground chamber in the garden in which I had been found.

"Not yet," I replied. "To be frank, I have shrunk thus far from doing
so, lest the visit might revive old associations rather too strongly
for my mental equilibrium."

"Ah, yes!" she said, "I can imagine that you have done well to stay
away. I ought to have thought of that."

"No," I said, "I am glad you spoke of it. The danger, if there was
any, existed only during the first day or two. Thanks to you, chiefly
and always, I feel my footing now so firm in this new world, that if
you will go with me to keep the ghosts off, I should really like to
visit the place this afternoon."

Edith demurred at first, but, finding that I was in earnest, consented
to accompany me. The rampart of earth thrown up from the excavation
was visible among the trees from the house, and a few steps brought us
to the spot. All remained as it was at the point when work was
interrupted by the discovery of the tenant of the chamber, save that
the door had been opened and the slab from the roof replaced.
Descending the sloping sides of the excavation, we went in at the door
and stood within the dimly-lighted room.

Everything was just as I had beheld it last on that evening one
hundred and thirteen years previous, just before closing my eyes for
that long sleep. I stood for some time silently looking about me. I
saw that my companion was furtively regarding me with an expression of
awed and sympathetic curiosity. I put out my hand to her and she
placed hers in it, the soft fingers responding with a reassuring
pressure to my clasp. Finally she whispered, "Had we not better go out
now? You must not try yourself too far. Oh, how strange it must be to
you!"

"On the contrary," I replied, "it does not seem strange; that is the
strangest part of it."

"Not strange?" she echoed.

"Even so," I replied. "The emotions with which you evidently credit
me, and which I anticipated would attend this visit, I simply do not
feel. I realize all that these surroundings suggest, but without the
agitation I expected. You can't be nearly as much surprised at this as
I am myself. Ever since that terrible morning when you came to my
help, I have tried to avoid thinking of my former life, just as I have
avoided coming here, for fear of the agitating effects. I am for all
the world like a man who has permitted an injured limb to lie
motionless under the impression that it is exquisitely sensitive, and
on trying to move it finds that it is paralyzed."

"Do you mean your memory is gone?"

"Not at all. I remember everything connected with my former life, but
with a total lack of keen sensation. I remember it for clearness as if
it had been but a day since then, but my feelings about what I
remember are as faint as if to my consciousness, as well as in fact, a
hundred years had intervened. Perhaps it is possible to explain this,
too. The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of
time in making the past seem remote. When I first woke from that
trance, my former life appeared as yesterday, but now, since I have
learned to know my new surroundings, and to realize the prodigious
changes that have transformed the world, I no longer find it hard, but
very easy, to realize that I have slept a century. Can you conceive of
such a thing as living a hundred years in four days? It really seems
to me that I have done just that, and that it is this experience which
has given so remote and unreal an appearance to my former life. Can
you see how such a thing might be?"

"I can conceive it," replied Edith, meditatively, "and I think we
ought all to be thankful that it is so, for it will save you much
suffering, I am sure."

"Imagine," I said, in an effort to explain, as much to myself as to
her, the strangeness of my mental condition, "that a man first heard
of a bereavement many, many years, half a lifetime perhaps, after the
event occurred. I fancy his feeling would be perhaps something as mine
is. When I think of my friends in the world of that former day, and
the sorrow they must have felt for me, it is with a pensive pity,
rather than keen anguish, as of a sorrow long, long ago ended."

"You have told us nothing yet of your friends," said Edith. "Had you
many to mourn you?"

"Thank God, I had very few relatives, none nearer than cousins," I
replied. "But there was one, not a relative, but dearer to me than any
kin of blood. She had your name. She was to have been my wife soon. Ah
me!"

"Ah me!" sighed the Edith by my side. "Think of the heartache she must
have had."

Something in the deep feeling of this gentle girl touched a chord in
my benumbed heart. My eyes, before so dry, were flooded with the tears
that had till now refused to come. When I had regained my composure, I
saw that she too had been weeping freely.

"God bless your tender heart," I said. "Would you like to see her
picture?"

A small locket with Edith Bartlett's picture, secured about my neck
with a gold chain, had lain upon my breast all through that long
sleep, and removing this I opened and gave it to my companion. She
took it with eagerness, and after poring long over the sweet face,
touched the picture with her lips.

"I know that she was good and lovely enough to well deserve your
tears," she said; "but remember her heartache was over long ago, and
she has been in heaven for nearly a century."

It was indeed so. Whatever her sorrow had once been, for nearly a
century she had ceased to weep, and, my sudden passion spent, my own
tears dried away. I had loved her very dearly in my other life, but it
was a hundred years ago! I do not know but some may find in this
confession evidence of lack of feeling, but I think, perhaps, that
none can have had an experience sufficiently like mine to enable them
to judge me. As we were about to leave the chamber, my eye rested upon
the great iron safe which stood in one corner. Calling my companion's
attention to it, I said:--

"This was my strong room as well as my sleeping room. In the safe
yonder are several thousand dollars in gold, and any amount of
securities. If I had known when I went to sleep that night just how
long my nap would be, I should still have thought that the gold was a
safe provision for my needs in any country or any century, however
distant. That a time would ever come when it would lose its purchasing
power, I should have considered the wildest of fancies. Nevertheless,
here I wake up to find myself among a people of whom a cartload of
gold will not procure a loaf of bread."

As might be expected, I did not succeed in impressing Edith that there
was anything remarkable in this fact. "Why in the world should it?"
she merely asked.





It had been suggested by Dr. Leete that we should devote the next
morning to an inspection of the schools and colleges of the city, with
some attempt on his own part at an explanation of the educational
system of the twentieth century.

"You will see," said he, as we set out after breakfast, "many very
important differences between our methods of education and yours, but
the main difference is that nowadays all persons equally have those
opportunities of higher education which in your day only an
infinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed. We should think we
had gained nothing worth speaking of, in equalizing the physical
comfort of men, without this educational equality."

"The cost must be very great," I said.

"If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it,"
replied Dr. Leete, "nor even if it took it all save a bare pittance.
But in truth the expense of educating ten thousand youth is not ten
nor five times that of educating one thousand. The principle which
makes all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a
small scale holds as to education also."

"College education was terribly expensive in my day," said I.

"If I have not been misinformed by our historians," Dr. Leete
answered, "it was not college education but college dissipation and
extravagance which cost so highly. The actual expense of your colleges
appears to have been very low, and would have been far lower if their
patronage had been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheap
as the lower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers,
receive the same support. We have simply added to the common school
system of compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred
years ago, a half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age
of twenty-one and giving him what you used to call the education of a
gentleman, instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no
mental equipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplication
table."

"Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years of
education," I replied, "we should not have thought we could afford the
loss of time from industrial pursuits. Boys of the poorer classes
usually went to work at sixteen or younger, and knew their trade at
twenty."

"We should not concede you any gain even in material product by that
plan," Dr. Leete replied. "The greater efficiency which education
gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short
period for the time lost in acquiring it."

"We should also have been afraid," said I, "that a high education,
while it adapted men to the professions, would set them against manual
labor of all sorts."

"That was the effect of high education in your day, I have read,"
replied the doctor; "and it was no wonder, for manual labor meant
association with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people. There
is no such class now. It was inevitable that such a feeling should
exist then, for the further reason that all men receiving a high
education were understood to be destined for the professions or for
wealthy leisure, and such an education in one neither rich nor
professional was a proof of disappointed aspirations, an evidence of
failure, a badge of inferiority rather than superiority. Nowadays, of
course, when the highest education is deemed necessary to fit a man
merely to live, without any reference to the sort of work he may do,
its possession conveys no such implication."

"After all," I remarked, "no amount of education can cure natural
dullness or make up for original mental deficiencies. Unless the
average natural mental capacity of men is much above its level in my
day, a high education must be pretty nearly thrown away on a large
element of the population. We used to hold that a certain amount of
susceptibility to educational influences is required to make a mind
worth cultivating, just as a certain natural fertility in soil is
required if it is to repay tilling."

"Ah," said Dr. Leete, "I am glad you used that illustration, for it is
just the one I would have chosen to set forth the modern view of
education. You say that land so poor that the product will not repay
the labor of tilling is not cultivated. Nevertheless, much land that
does not begin to repay tilling by its product was cultivated in your
day and is in ours. I refer to gardens, parks, lawns, and, in general,
to pieces of land so situated that, were they left to grow up to weeds
and briers, they would be eyesores and inconveniences to all about.
They are therefore tilled, and though their product is little, there
is yet no land that, in a wider sense, better repays cultivation. So
it is with the men and women with whom we mingle in the relations of
society, whose voices are always in our ears, whose behavior in
innumerable ways affects our enjoyment,--who are, in fact, as much
conditions of our lives as the air we breathe, or any of the physical
elements on which we depend. If, indeed, we could not afford to
educate everybody, we should choose the coarsest and dullest by
nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we could
give. The naturally refined and intellectual can better dispense with
aids to culture than those less fortunate in natural endowments.

"To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we should not
consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population
of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women, as
was the plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man satisfied,
merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous
crowd? Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a
palatial apartment, if the windows on all four sides opened into
stable yards? And yet just that was the situation of those considered
most fortunate as to culture and refinement in your day. I know that
the poor and ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the
latter, living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness,
seem little better off than the former. The cultured man in your age
was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a
smelling bottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this question
of universal high education. No single thing is so important to every
man as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons. There
is nothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that will
enhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors. When it
fails to do so, the value of his own education to him is reduced by
half, and many of the tastes he has cultivated are made positive
sources of pain.

"To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly
uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that
between different natural species, which have no means of
communication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of a
partial enjoyment of education! Its universal and equal enjoyment
leaves, indeed, the differences between men as to natural endowments
as marked as in a state of nature, but the level of the lowest is
vastly raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have some inkling of the
humanities, some appreciation of the things of the mind, and an
admiration for the still higher culture they have fallen short of.
They have become capable of receiving and imparting, in various
degrees, but all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a
refined social life. The cultured society of the nineteenth
century,--what did it consist of but here and there a few microscopic
oases in a vast, unbroken wilderness? The proportion of individuals
capable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the mass
of their contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any
broad view of humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One generation of
the world to-day represents a greater volume of intellectual life than
any five centuries ever did before.

"There is still another point I should mention in stating the grounds
on which nothing less than the universality of the best education
could now be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, "and that is, the
interest of the coming generation in having educated parents. To put
the matter in a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our
educational system rests: first, the right of every man to the
completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as
necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his
fellow-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment
of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an
intelligent and refined parentage."

I shall not describe in detail what I saw in the schools that day.
Having taken but slight interest in educational matters in my former
life, I could offer few comparisons of interest. Next to the fact of
the universality of the higher as well as the lower education, I was
most struck with the prominence given to physical culture, and the
fact that proficiency in athletic feats and games as well as in
scholarship had a place in the rating of the youth.

"The faculty of education," Dr. Leete explained, "is held to the same
responsibility for the bodies as for the minds of its charges. The
highest possible physical, as well as mental, development of every one
is the double object of a curriculum which lasts from the age of six
to that of twenty-one."

The magnificent health of the young people in the schools impressed me
strongly. My previous observations, not only of the notable personal
endowments of the family of my host, but of the people I had seen in
my walks abroad, had already suggested the idea that there must have
been something like a general improvement in the physical standard of
the race since my day, and now, as I compared these stalwart young men
and fresh, vigorous maidens with the young people I had seen in the
schools of the nineteenth century, I was moved to impart my thought to
Dr. Leete. He listened with great interest to what I said.

"Your testimony on this point," he declared, "is invaluable. We
believe that there has been such an improvement as you speak of, but
of course it could only be a matter of theory with us. It is an
incident of your unique position that you alone in the world of to-day
can speak with authority on this point. Your opinion, when you state
it publicly, will, I assure you, make a profound sensation. For the
rest it would be strange, certainly, if the race did not show an
improvement. In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of
mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by
overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of
children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of
life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the
most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully
nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of all
is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is never
excessive; care for one's self and one's family, anxiety as to
livelihood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life--all these
influences, which once did so much to wreck the minds and bodies of
men and women, are known no more. Certainly, an improvement of the
species ought to follow such a change. In certain specific respects we
know, indeed, that the improvement has taken place. Insanity, for
instance, which in the nineteenth century was so terribly common a
product of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared, with its
alternative, suicide."





We had made an appointment to meet the ladies at the dining-hall for
dinner, after which, having some engagement, they left us sitting at
table there, discussing our wine and cigars with a multitude of other
matters.

"Doctor," said I, in the course of our talk, "morally speaking, your
social system is one which I should be insensate not to admire in
comparison with any previously in vogue in the world, and especially
with that of my own most unhappy century. If I were to fall into a
mesmeric sleep to-night as lasting as that other, and meanwhile the
course of time were to take a turn backward instead of forward, and I
were to wake up again in the nineteenth century, when I had told my
friends what I had seen, they would every one admit that your world
was a paradise of order, equity, and felicity. But they were a very
practical people, my contemporaries, and after expressing their
admiration for the moral beauty and material splendor of the system,
they would presently begin to cipher and ask how you got the money to
make everybody so happy; for certainly, to support the whole nation at
a rate of comfort, and even luxury, such as I see around me, must
involve vastly greater wealth than the nation produced in my day. Now,
while I could explain to them pretty nearly everything else of the
main features of your system, I should quite fail to answer this
question, and failing there, they would tell me, for they were very
close cipherers, that I had been dreaming; nor would they ever believe
anything else. In my day, I know that the total annual product of the
nation, although it might have been divided with absolute equality,
would not have come to more than three or four hundred dollars per
head, not very much more than enough to supply the necessities of life
with few or any of its comforts. How is it that you have so much
more?"

"That is a very pertinent question, Mr. West," replied Dr. Leete, "and
I should not blame your friends, in the case you supposed, if they
declared your story all moonshine, failing a satisfactory reply to it.
It is a question which I cannot answer exhaustively at any one
sitting, and as for the exact statistics to bear out my general
statements, I shall have to refer you for them to books in my library,
but it would certainly be a pity to leave you to be put to confusion
by your old acquaintances, in case of the contingency you speak of,
for lack of a few suggestions.

"Let us begin with a number of small items wherein we economize wealth
as compared with you. We have no national, state, county, or
municipal debts, or payments on their account. We have no sort of
military or naval expenditures for men or materials, no army, navy, or
militia. We have no revenue service, no swarm of tax assessors and
collectors. As regards our judiciary, police, sheriffs, and jailers,
the force which Massachusetts alone kept on foot in your day far more
than suffices for the nation now. We have no criminal class preying
upon the wealth of society as you had. The number of persons, more or
less absolutely lost to the working force through physical disability,
of the lame, sick, and debilitated, which constituted such a burden on
the able-bodied in your day, now that all live under conditions of
health and comfort, has shrunk to scarcely perceptible proportions,
and with every generation is becoming more completely eliminated.

"Another item wherein we save is the disuse of money and the thousand
occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby
an army of men was formerly taken away from useful employments. Also
consider that the waste of the very rich in your day on inordinate
personal luxury has ceased, though, indeed, this item might easily be
over-estimated. Again, consider that there are no idlers now, rich or
poor,--no drones.

"A very important cause of former poverty was the vast waste of labor
and materials which resulted from domestic washing and cooking, and
the performing separately of innumerable other tasks to which we apply
the cooperative plan.

"A larger economy than any of these--yes, of all together--is effected
by the organization of our distributing system, by which the work done
once by the merchants, traders, storekeepers, with their various
grades of jobbers, wholesalers, retailers, agents, commercial
travelers, and middlemen of all sorts, with an excessive waste of
energy in needless transportation and interminable handlings, is
performed by one-tenth the number of hands and an unnecessary turn of
not one wheel. Something of what our distributing system is like you
know. Our statisticians calculate that one eightieth part of our
workers suffices for all the processes of distribution which in your
day required one eighth of the population, so much being withdrawn
from the force engaged in productive labor."

"I begin to see," I said, "where you get your greater wealth."

"I beg your pardon," replied Dr. Leete, "but you scarcely do as yet.
The economies I have mentioned thus far, in the aggregate, considering
the labor they would save directly and indirectly through saving of
material, might possibly be equivalent to the addition to your annual
production of wealth of one-half its former total. These items are,
however, scarcely worth mentioning in comparison with other prodigious
wastes, now saved, which resulted inevitably from leaving the
industries of the nation to private enterprise. However great the
economies your contemporaries might have devised in the consumption
of products, and however marvelous the progress of mechanical
invention, they could never have raised themselves out of the slough
of poverty so long as they held to that system.

"No mode more wasteful for utilizing human energy could be devised,
and for the credit of the human intellect it should be remembered that
the system never was devised, but was merely a survival from the rude
ages when the lack of social organization made any sort of cooperation
impossible."

"I will readily admit," I said, "that our industrial system was
ethically very bad, but as a mere wealth-making machine, apart from
moral aspects, it seemed to us admirable."

"As I said," responded the doctor, "the subject is too large to
discuss at length now, but if you are really interested to know the
main criticisms which we moderns make on your industrial system as
compared with our own, I can touch briefly on some of them.

"The wastes which resulted from leaving the conduct of industry to
irresponsible individuals, wholly without mutual understanding or
concert, were mainly four: first, the waste by mistaken undertakings;
second, the waste from the competition and mutual hostility of those
engaged in industry; third, the waste by periodical gluts and crises,
with the consequent interruptions of industry; fourth, the waste from
idle capital and labor, at all times. Any one of these four great
leaks, were all the others stopped, would suffice to make the
difference between wealth and poverty on the part of a nation.

"Take the waste by mistaken undertakings, to begin with. In your day
the production and distribution of commodities being without concert
or organization, there was no means of knowing just what demand there
was for any class of products, or what was the rate of supply.
Therefore, any enterprise by a private capitalist was always a
doubtful experiment. The projector having no general view of the field
of industry and consumption, such as our government has, could never
be sure either what the people wanted, or what arrangements other
capitalists were making to supply them. In view of this, we are not
surprised to learn that the chances were considered several to one in
favor of the failure of any given business enterprise, and that it was
common for persons who at last succeeded in making a hit to have
failed repeatedly. If a shoemaker, for every pair of shoes he
succeeded in completing, spoiled the leather of four or five pair,
besides losing the time spent on them, he would stand about the same
chance of getting rich as your contemporaries did with their system of
private enterprise, and its average of four or five failures to one
success.

"The next of the great wastes was that from competition. The field of
industry was a battlefield as wide as the world, in which the workers
wasted, in assailing one another, energies which, if expended in
concerted effort, as to-day, would have enriched all. As for mercy or
quarter in this warfare, there was absolutely no suggestion of it. To
deliberately enter a field of business and destroy the enterprises of
those who had occupied it previously, in order to plant one's own
enterprise on their ruins, was an achievement which never failed to
command popular admiration. Nor is there any stretch of fancy in
comparing this sort of struggle with actual warfare, so far as
concerns the mental agony and physical suffering which attended the
struggle, and the misery which overwhelmed the defeated and those
dependent on them. Now nothing about your age is, at first sight, more
astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in
the same industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers
to a common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies
to be throttled and overthrown. This certainly seems like sheer
madness, a scene from bedlam. But more closely regarded, it is seen to
be no such thing. Your contemporaries, with their mutual
throat-cutting, knew very well what they were at. The producers of the
nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the
maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance
at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, he at the
same time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental.
It was just as feasible and as common to increase one's private hoard
by practices injurious to the general welfare. One's worst enemies
were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan of
making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the
article he produced was what each particular producer desired. It was
for his interest that no more of it should be produced than he himself
could produce. To secure this consummation as far as circumstances
permitted, by killing off and discouraging those engaged in his line
of industry, was his constant effort. When he had billed off all he
could, his policy was to combine with those he could not kill, and
convert their mutual warfare into a warfare upon the public at large
by cornering the market, as I believe you used to call it, and putting
up prices to the highest point people would stand before going without
the goods. The day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to
gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life, so that
he might keep the public at the verge of starvation, and always
command famine prices for what he supplied. This, Mr. West, is what
was called in the nineteenth century a system of production. I will
leave it to you if it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a great
deal more like a system for preventing production. Some time when we
have plenty of leisure I am going to ask you to sit down with me and
try to make me comprehend, as I never yet could, though I have
studied the matter a great deal, how such shrewd fellows as your
contemporaries appear to have been in many respects ever came to
entrust the business of providing for the community to a class whose
interest it was to starve it. I assure you that the wonder with us is,
not that the world did not get rich under such a system, but that it
did not perish outright from want. This wonder increases as we go on
to consider some of the other prodigious wastes that characterized it.

"Apart from the waste of labor and capital by misdirected industry,
and that from the constant bloodletting of your industrial warfare,
your system was liable to periodical convulsions, overwhelming alike
the wise and unwise, the successful cut-throat as well as his victim.
I refer to the business crises at intervals of five to ten years,
which wrecked the industries of the nation, prostrating all weak
enterprises and crippling the strongest, and were followed by long
periods, often of many years, of so-called dull times, during which
the capitalists slowly regathered their dissipated strength while the
laboring classes starved and rioted. Then would ensue another brief
season of prosperity, followed in turn by another crisis and the
ensuing years of exhaustion. As commerce developed, making the nations
mutually dependent, these arises became world-wide, while the
obstinacy of the ensuing state of collapse increased with the area
affected by the convulsions, and the consequent lack of rallying
centres. In proportion as the industries of the world multiplied and
became complex, and the volume of capital involved was increased,
these business cataclysms became more frequent, till, in the latter
part of the nineteenth century, there were two years of bad times to
one of good, and the system of industry, never before so extended or
so imposing, seemed in danger of collapsing by its own weight. After
endless discussions, your economists appear by that time to have
settled down to the despairing conclusion that there was no more
possibility of preventing or controlling these crises than if they had
been drouths or hurricanes. It only remained to endure them as
necessary evils, and when they had passed over to build up again the
shattered structure of industry, as dwellers in an earthquake country
keep on rebuilding their cities on the same site.

"So far as considering the causes of the trouble inherent in their
industrial system, your contemporaries were certainly correct. They
were in its very basis, and must needs become more and more maleficent
as the business fabric grew in size and complexity. One of these
causes was the lack of any common control of the different industries,
and the consequent impossibility of their orderly and coordinate
development. It inevitably resulted from this lack that they were
continually getting out of step with one another and out of relation
with the demand.

"Of the latter there was no criterion such as organized distribution
gives us, and the first notice that it had been exceeded in any group
of industries was a crash of prices, bankruptcy of producers, stoppage
of production, reduction of wages, or discharge of workmen. This
process was constantly going on in many industries, even in what were
called good times, but a crisis took place only when the industries
affected were extensive. The markets then were glutted with goods, of
which nobody wanted beyond a sufficiency at any price. The wages and
profits of those making the glutted classes of goods being reduced or
wholly stopped, their purchasing power as consumers of other classes
of goods, of which there was no natural glut, was taken away, and, as
a consequence, goods of which there was no natural glut became
artificially glutted, till their prices also were broken down, and
their makers thrown out of work and deprived of income. The crisis was
by this time fairly under way, and nothing could check it till a
nation's ransom had been wasted.

"A cause, also inherent in your system, which often produced and
always terribly aggravated crises, was the machinery of money and
credit. Money was essential when production was in many private hands,
and buying and selling was necessary to secure what one wanted. It
was, however, open to the obvious objection of substituting for food,
clothing, and other things a merely conventional representative of
them. The confusion of mind which this favored, between goods and
their representative, led the way to the credit system and its
prodigious illusions. Already accustomed to accept money for
commodities, the people next accepted promises for money, and ceased
to look at all behind the representative for the thing represented.
Money was a sign of real commodities, but credit was but the sign of a
sign. There was a natural limit to gold and silver, that is, money
proper, but none to credit, and the result was that the volume of
credit, that is, the promises of money, ceased to bear any
ascertainable proportion to the money, still less to the commodities,
actually in existence. Under such a system, frequent and periodical
crises were necessitated by a law as absolute as that which brings to
the ground a structure overhanging its centre of gravity. It was one
of your fictions that the government and the banks authorized by it
alone issued money; but everybody who gave a dollar's credit issued
money to that extent, which was as good as any to swell the
circulation till the next crises. The great extension of the credit
system was a characteristic of the latter part of the nineteenth
century, and accounts largely for the almost incessant business crises
which marked that period. Perilous as credit was, you could not
dispense with its use, for, lacking any national or other public
organization of the capital of the country, it was the only means you
had for concentrating and directing it upon industrial enterprises. It
was in this way a most potent means for exaggerating the chief peril
of the private enterprise system of industry by enabling particular
industries to absorb disproportionate amounts of the disposable
capital of the country, and thus prepare disaster. Business
enterprises were always vastly in debt for advances of credit, both to
one another and to the banks and capitalists, and the prompt
withdrawal of this credit at the first sign of a crisis was generally
the precipitating cause of it.

"It was the misfortune of your contemporaries that they had to cement
their business fabric with a material which an accident might at any
moment turn into an explosive. They were in the plight of a man
building a house with dynamite for mortar, for credit can be compared
with nothing else.

"If you would see how needless were these convulsions of business
which I have been speaking of, and how entirely they resulted from
leaving industry to private and unorganized management, just consider
the working of our system. Overproduction in special lines, which was
the great hobgoblin of your day, is impossible now, for by the
connection between distribution and production supply is geared to
demand like an engine to the governor which regulates its speed. Even
suppose by an error of judgment an excessive production of some
commodity. The consequent slackening or cessation of production in
that line throws nobody out of employment. The suspended workers are
at once found occupation in some other department of the vast workshop
and lose only the time spent in changing, while, as for the glut, the
business of the nation is large enough to carry any amount of product
manufactured in excess of demand till the latter overtakes it. In such
a case of over-production, as I have supposed, there is not with us,
as with you, any complex machinery to get out of order and magnify a
thousand times the original mistake. Of course, having not even money,
we still less have credit. All estimates deal directly with the real
things, the flour, iron, wood, wool, and labor, of which money and
credit were for you the very misleading representatives. In our
calculations of cost there can be no mistakes. Out of the annual
product the amount necessary for the support of the people is taken,
and the requisite labor to produce the next year's consumption
provided for. The residue of the material and labor represents what
can be safely expended in improvements. If the crops are bad, the
surplus for that year is less than usual, that is all. Except for
slight occasional effects of such natural causes, there are no
fluctuations of business; the material prosperity of the nation flows
on uninterruptedly from generation to generation, like an ever
broadening and deepening river.

"Your business crises, Mr. West," continued the doctor, "like either
of the great wastes I mentioned before, were enough, alone, to have
kept your noses to the grindstone forever; but I have still to speak
of one other great cause of your poverty, and that was the idleness of
a great part of your capital and labor. With us it is the business of
the administration to keep in constant employment every ounce of
available capital and labor in the country. In your day there was no
general control of either capital or labor, and a large part of both
failed to find employment. 'Capital,' you used to say, 'is naturally
timid,' and it would certainly have been reckless if it had not been
timid in an epoch when there was a large preponderance of probability
that any particular business venture would end in failure. There was
no time when, if security could have been guaranteed it, the amount of
capital devoted to productive industry could not have been greatly
increased. The proportion of it so employed underwent constant
extraordinary fluctuations, according to the greater or less feeling
of uncertainty as to the stability of the industrial situation, so
that the output of the national industries greatly varied in different
years. But for the same reason that the amount of capital employed at
times of special insecurity was far less than at times of somewhat
greater security, a very large proportion was never employed at all,
because the hazard of business was always very great in the best of
times.

"It should be also noted that the great amount of capital always
seeking employment where tolerable safety could be insured terribly
embittered the competition between capitalists when a promising
opening presented itself. The idleness of capital, the result of its
timidity, of course meant the idleness of labor in corresponding
degree. Moreover, every change in the adjustments of business, every
slightest alteration in the condition of commerce or manufactures, not
to speak of the innumerable business failures that took place yearly,
even in the best of times, were constantly throwing a multitude of men
out of employment for periods of weeks or months, or even years. A
great number of these seekers after employment were constantly
traversing the country, becoming in time professional vagabonds, then
criminals. 'Give us work!' was the cry of an army of the unemployed at
nearly all seasons, and in seasons of dullness in business this army
swelled to a host so vast and desperate as to threaten the stability
of the government. Could there conceivably be a more conclusive
demonstration of the imbecility of the system of private enterprise as
a method for enriching a nation than the fact that, in an age of such
general poverty and want of everything, capitalists had to throttle
one another to find a safe chance to invest their capital and workmen
rioted and burned because they could find no work to do?

"Now, Mr. West," continued Dr. Leete, "I want you to bear in mind that
these points of which I have been speaking indicate only negatively
the advantages of the national organization of industry by showing
certain fatal defects and prodigious imbecilities of the systems of
private enterprise which are not found in it. These alone, you must
admit, would pretty well explain why the nation is so much richer than
in your day. But the larger half of our advantage over you, the
positive side of it, I have yet barely spoken of. Supposing the system
of private enterprise in industry were without any of the great leaks
I have mentioned; that there were no waste on account of misdirected
effort growing out of mistakes as to the demand, and inability to
command a general view of the industrial field. Suppose, also, there
were no neutralizing and duplicating of effort from competition.
Suppose, also, there were no waste from business panics and crises
through bankruptcy and long interruptions of industry, and also none
from the idleness of capital and labor. Supposing these evils, which
are essential to the conduct of industry by capital in private hands,
could all be miraculously prevented, and the system yet retained; even
then the superiority of the results attained by the modern industrial
system of national control would remain overwhelming.

"You used to have some pretty large textile manufacturing
establishments, even in your day, although not comparable with ours.
No doubt you have visited these great mills in your time, covering
acres of ground, employing thousands of hands, and combining under one
roof, under one control, the hundred distinct processes between, say,
the cotton bale and the bale of glossy calicoes. You have admired the
vast economy of labor as of mechanical force resulting from the
perfect interworking with the rest of every wheel and every hand. No
doubt you have reflected how much less the same force of workers
employed in that factory would accomplish if they were scattered, each
man working independently. Would you think it an exaggeration to say
that the utmost product of those workers, working thus apart, however
amicable their relations might be, was increased not merely by a
percentage, but many fold, when their efforts were organized under one
control? Well now, Mr. West, the organization of the industry of the
nation under a single control, so that all its processes interlock,
has multiplied the total product over the utmost that could be done
under the former system, even leaving out of account the four great
wastes mentioned, in the same proportion that the product of those
millworkers was increased by cooperation. The effectiveness of the
working force of a nation, under the myriad-headed leadership of
private capital, even if the leaders were not mutual enemies, as
compared with that which it attains under a single head, may be
likened to the military efficiency of a mob, or a horde of barbarians
with a thousand petty chiefs, as compared with that of a disciplined
army under one general--such a fighting machine, for example, as the
German army in the time of Von Moltke."

"After what you have told me," I said, "I do not so much wonder that
the nation is richer now than then, but that you are not all
Croesuses."

"Well," replied Dr. Leete, "we are pretty well off. The rate at which
we live is as luxurious as we could wish. The rivalry of ostentation,
which in your day led to extravagance in no way conducive to comfort,
finds no place, of course, in a society of people absolutely equal in
resources, and our ambition stops at the surroundings which minister
to the enjoyment of life. We might, indeed, have much larger incomes,
individually, if we chose so to use the surplus of our product, but we
prefer to expend it upon public works and pleasures in which all
share, upon public halls and buildings, art galleries, bridges,
statuary, means or transit, and the conveniences of our cities, great
musical and theatrical exhibitions, and in providing on a vast scale
for the recreations of the people. You have not begun to see how we
live yet, Mr. West. At home we have comfort, but the splendor of our
life is, on its social side, that which we share with our fellows.
When you know more of it you will see where the money goes, as you
used to say, and I think you will agree that we do well so to expend
it."

"I suppose," observed Dr. Leete, as we strolled homeward from the
dining hall, "that no reflection would have cut the men of your
wealth-worshiping century more keenly than the suggestion that they
did not know how to make money. Nevertheless, that is just the verdict
history has passed on them. Their system of unorganized and
antagonistic industries was as absurd economically as it was morally
abominable. Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial
production selfishness is suicide. Competition, which is the instinct
of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while
combination is the secret of efficient production; and not till the
idea of increasing the individual hoard gives place to the idea of
increasing the common stock can industrial combination be realized,
and the acquisition of wealth really begin. Even if the principle of
share and share alike for all men were not the only humane and
rational basis for a society, we should still enforce it as
economically expedient, seeing that until the disintegrating influence
of self-seeking is suppressed no true concert of industry is
possible."

 Leete explains that the government does not regulate the production of art. An author simply has to pay for the first printing of his book. The government then places the book on sale at a price determined by the author. The author's work hours are reduced according to the amount his work earns in royalties. Therefore, people with literary talent can devote themselves entirely to writing, but no one is prevented from trying his or her hand at it. It is much the same with other creative endeavors. If a group of people wants to publish a magazine or newspaper, they gather enough annual subscriptions to cover the cost of printing it. The subscribers elect an editor, who is then released from other service for the duration of his term. The subscribers, who pay for the editor's maintenance, periodically choose to re-elect or oust the editor. Contributors are compensated from the publication's general credit, and their hours of labor are reduced accordingly. If a man cannot be freed from the nation's service through artistic or literary means, he can retire at age thirty-three, but he will receive only one-half of the yearly credit of other citizens. The nation can accurately calculate the expected demand for any good or service because it is the sole producer and distributor. Even goods with very small markets are produced, as long as consumers are willing to pay the price for them. Citizens can also petition the nation to produce goods that are not already in production. The price of any product is determined by the value of the labor needed to produce it. The leaders of trade guilds, workers who have the rank of "general" in the industrial army, are elected by retired members of the guild. Guilds for the same trade are further organized into "departments," headed by "lieutenant generals" elected by retired workers for the same trade. The President of the nation is elected from among retired lieutenant generals by the members of the "liberal professions"--doctors, teachers, artists, and so on--not by the industrial army. The President serves five years, and if Congress is pleased with him, he is then elected to serve the nation on the international council for five more years. The abolishment of private capital has removed most of the incentives for crime. Because everyone is equal with regard to possessions, neither poverty nor luxury can tempt individuals to commit crimes for material gain. All citizens are now well-educated, so violent crimes, unrelated to material gain, are also nearly non-existent. Those arrested for crimes usually plead guilty because lying is so strongly discouraged in modern society. If an alleged criminal pleads not guilty, two judges argue, one for each side of the case, and a third judge delivers the verdict. The President appoints judges from the pool of retired citizens, and the judges elect the members of the Supreme Court. There is no longer any need for special training to understand law, as the law has been greatly simplified. There are no longer any state governments, and there is very little legislation passed by Congress. Education, devoted to furthering physical and intellectual development, is free and compulsory until a citizen reaches twenty-one years of age. The greater efficiency of well-educated workers makes such education cost-effective. Moreover, an education makes a citizen's company more agreeable and interesting to his neighbors. The nation is capable of providing a high standard of living to all its citizens, because it has greatly reduced the waste involved in an economy run on private capital. The nation has no military forces or tax collection department to maintain. The criminal justice system is much simpler and smaller because there are far fewer predatory criminals. There are far fewer sick and disabled, and there is no need for the financial institutions required to regulate and distribute money. Because washing and cooking are now performed by the nation's workers rather that by individuals themselves, a great deal of time and labor is saved. Because the nation is the only distributor of goods, a good deal of waste related to competing distributors is eliminated. Production is firmly pinned to demand, so there are no periodic business crises in which large portions of the labor force are idle.

