Chapter: When I awoke I felt greatly refreshed, and lay a considerable time in
a dozing state, enjoying the sensation of bodily comfort. The
experiences of the day previous, my waking to find myself in the year
2000, the sight of the new Boston, my host and his family, and the
wonderful things I had heard, were a blank in my memory. I thought I
was in my bed-chamber at home, and the half-dreaming, half-waking
fancies which passed before my mind related to the incidents and
experiences of my former life. Dreamily I reviewed the incidents of
Decoration Day, my trip in company with Edith and her parents to Mount
Auburn, and my dining with them on our return to the city. I recalled
how extremely well Edith had looked, and from that fell to thinking of
our marriage; but scarcely had my imagination begun to develop this
delightful theme than my waking dream was cut short by the
recollection of the letter I had received the night before from the
builder announcing that the new strikes might postpone indefinitely
the completion of the new house. The chagrin which this recollection
brought with it effectually roused me. I remembered that I had an
appointment with the builder at eleven o'clock, to discuss the strike,
and opening my eyes, looked up at the clock at the foot of my bed to
see what time it was. But no clock met my glance, and what was more, I
instantly perceived that I was not in my room. Starting up on my
couch, I stared wildly round the strange apartment.

I think it must have been many seconds that I sat up thus in bed
staring about, without being able to regain the clew to my personal
identity. I was no more able to distinguish myself from pure being
during those moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to be
before it has received the ear-marks, the individualizing touches
which make it a person. Strange that the sense of this inability
should be such anguish! but so we are constituted. There are no words
for the mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping
for myself in a boundless void. No other experience of the mind gives
probably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from
the loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes
during such a momentary obscuration of the sense of one's identity. I
trust I may never know what it is again.

I do not know how long this condition had lasted,--it seemed an
interminable time,--when, like a flash, the recollection of everything
came back to me. I remembered who and where I was, and how I had come
here, and that these scenes as of the life of yesterday which had
been passing before my mind concerned a generation long, long ago
mouldered to dust. Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the room
clasping my temples with all my might between my hands to keep them
from bursting. Then I fell prone on the couch, and, burying my face in
the pillow, lay with out motion. The reaction which was inevitable,
from the mental elation, the fever of the intellect that had been the
first effect of my tremendous experience, had arrived. The emotional
crisis which had awaited the full realization of my actual position,
and all that it implied, was upon me, and with set teeth and laboring
chest, gripping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay there and
fought for my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of
feeling, associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had
dissolved and lost coherence and were seething together in apparently
irretrievable chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was left
stable. There only remained the will, and was any human will strong
enough to say to such a weltering sea "Peace, be still"? I dared not
think. Every effort to reason upon what had befallen me, and realize
what it implied, set up an intolerable swimming of the brain. The idea
that I was two persons, that my identity was double, began to
fascinate me with its simple solution of my experience.

I knew that I was on the verge of losing my mental balance. If I lay
there thinking, I was doomed. Diversion of some sort I must have, at
least the diversion of physical exertion. I sprang up, and, hastily
dressing, opened the door of my room and went down-stairs. The hour
was very early, it being not yet fairly light, and I found no one in
the lower part of the house. There was a hat in the hall, and, opening
the front door, which was fastened with a slightness indicating that
burglary was not among the perils of the modern Boston, I found myself
on the street. For two hours I walked or ran through the streets of
the city, visiting most quarters of the peninsular part of the town.
None but an antiquarian who knows something of the contrast which the
Boston of to-day offers to the Boston of the nineteenth century can
begin to appreciate what a series of bewildering surprises I underwent
during that time. Viewed from the house-top the day before, the city
had indeed appeared strange to me, but that was only in its general
aspect. How complete the change had been I first realized now that I
walked the streets. The few old landmarks which still remained only
intensified this effect, for without them I might have imagined myself
in a foreign town. A man may leave his native city in childhood, and
return fifty years later, perhaps, to find it transformed in many
features. He is astonished, but he is not bewildered. He is aware of a
great lapse of time, and of changes likewise occurring in himself
meanwhile. He but dimly recalls the city as he knew it when a child.
But remember that there was no sense of any lapse of time with me. So
far as my consciousness was concerned, it was but yesterday, but a few
hours, since I had walked these streets in which scarcely a feature
had escaped a complete metamorphosis. The mental image of the old city
was so fresh and strong that it did not yield to the impression of the
actual city, but contended with it, so that it was first one and then
the other which seemed the more unreal. There was nothing I saw which
was not blurred in this way, like the faces of a composite photograph.

Finally, I stood again at the door of the house from which I had come
out. My feet must have instinctively brought me back to the site of my
old home, for I had no clear idea of returning thither. It was no more
homelike to me than any other spot in this city of a strange
generation, nor were its inmates less utterly and necessarily
strangers than all the other men and women now on the earth. Had the
door of the house been locked, I should have been reminded by its
resistance that I had no object in entering, and turned away, but it
yielded to my hand, and advancing with uncertain steps through the
hall, I entered one of the apartments opening from it. Throwing myself
into a chair, I covered my burning eyeballs with my hands to shut out
the horror of strangeness. My mental confusion was so intense as to
produce actual nausea. The anguish of those moments, during which my
brain seemed melting, or the abjectness of my sense of helplessness,
how can I describe? In my despair I groaned aloud. I began to feel
that unless some help should come I was about to lose my mind. And
just then it did come. I heard the rustle of drapery, and looked up.
Edith Leete was standing before me. Her beautiful face was full of the
most poignant sympathy.

"Oh, what is the matter, Mr. West?" she said. "I was here when you
came in. I saw how dreadfully distressed you looked, and when I heard
you groan, I could not keep silent. What has happened to you? Where
have you been? Can't I do something for you?"

Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands in a gesture of
compassion as she spoke. At any rate I had caught them in my own and
was clinging to them with an impulse as instinctive as that which
prompts the drowning man to seize upon and cling to the rope which is
thrown him as he sinks for the last time. As I looked up into her
compassionate face and her eyes moist with pity, my brain ceased to
whirl. The tender human sympathy which thrilled in the soft pressure
of her fingers had brought me the support I needed. Its effect to calm
and soothe was like that of some wonder-working elixir.

"God bless you," I said, after a few moments. "He must have sent you
to me just now. I think I was in danger of going crazy if you had not
come." At this the tears came into her eyes.

"Oh, Mr. West!" she cried. "How heartless you must have thought us!
How could we leave you to yourself so long! But it is over now, is it
not? You are better, surely."

"Yes," I said, "thanks to you. If you will not go away quite yet, I
shall be myself soon."

"Indeed I will not go away," she said, with a little quiver of her
face, more expressive of her sympathy than a volume of words. "You
must not think us so heartless as we seemed in leaving you so by
yourself. I scarcely slept last night, for thinking how strange your
waking would be this morning; but father said you would sleep till
late. He said that it would be better not to show too much sympathy
with you at first, but to try to divert your thoughts and make you
feel that you were among friends."

"You have indeed made me feel that," I answered. "But you see it is a
good deal of a jolt to drop a hundred years, and although I did not
seem to feel it so much last night, I have had very odd sensations
this morning." While I held her hands and kept my eyes on her face, I
could already even jest a little at my plight.

"No one thought of such a thing as your going out in the city alone so
early in the morning," she went on. "Oh, Mr. West, where have you
been?"

Then I told her of my morning's experience, from my first waking till
the moment I had looked up to see her before me, just as I have told
it here. She was overcome by distressful pity during the recital, and,
though I had released one of her hands, did not try to take from me
the other, seeing, no doubt, how much good it did me to hold it. "I
can think a little what this feeling must been like," she said. "It
must have been terrible. And to think you were left alone to struggle
with it! Can you ever forgive us?"

"But it is gone now. You have driven it quite away for the present," I
said.

"You will not let it return again," she queried anxiously.

"I can't quite say that," I replied. "It might be too early to say
that, considering how strange everything will still be to me."

"But you will not try to contend with it alone again, at least," she
persisted. "Promise that you will come to us, and let us sympathize
with you, and try to help you. Perhaps we can't do much, but it will
surely be better than to try to bear such feelings alone."

"I will come to you if you will let me," I said.

"Oh yes, yes, I beg you will," she said eagerly. "I would do anything
to help you that I could."

"All you need do is to be sorry for me, as you seem to be now," I
replied.

"It is understood, then," she said, smiling with wet eyes, "that you
are to come and tell me next time, and not run all over Boston among
strangers."

This assumption that we were not strangers seemed scarcely strange, so
near within these few minutes had my trouble and her sympathetic tears
brought us.

"I will promise, when you come to me," she added, with an expression
of charming archness, passing, as she continued, into one of
enthusiasm, "to seem as sorry for you as you wish, but you must not
for a moment suppose that I am really sorry for you at all, or that I
think you will long be sorry for yourself. I know, as well as I know
that the world now is heaven compared with what it was in your day,
that the only feeling you will have after a little while will be one
of thankfulness to God that your life in that age was so strangely cut
off, to be returned to you in this."





Dr. and Mrs. Leete were evidently not a little startled to learn, when
they presently appeared, that I had been all over the city alone that
morning, and it was apparent that they were agreeably surprised to see
that I seemed so little agitated after the experience.

"Your stroll could scarcely have failed to be a very interesting one,"
said Mrs. Leete, as we sat down to table soon after. "You must have
seen a good many new things."

"I saw very little that was not new," I replied. "But I think what
surprised me as much as anything was not to find any stores on
Washington Street, or any banks on State. What have you done with the
merchants and bankers? Hung them all, perhaps, as the anarchists
wanted to do in my day?"

"Not so bad as that," replied Dr. Leete. "We have simply dispensed
with them. Their functions are obsolete in the modern world."

"Who sells you things when you want to buy them?" I inquired.

"There is neither selling nor buying nowadays; the distribution of
goods is effected in another way. As to the bankers, having no money
we have no use for those gentry."

"Miss Leete," said I, turning to Edith, "I am afraid that your father
is making sport of me. I don't blame him, for the temptation my
innocence offers must be extraordinary. But, really, there are limits
to my credulity as to possible alterations in the social system."

"Father has no idea of jesting, I am sure," she replied, with a
reassuring smile.

The conversation took another turn then, the point of ladies' fashions
in the nineteenth century being raised, if I remember rightly, by Mrs.
Leete, and it was not till after breakfast, when the doctor had
invited me up to the house-top, which appeared to be a favorite resort
of his, that he recurred to the subject.

"You were surprised," he said, "at my saying that we got along without
money or trade, but a moment's reflection will show that trade existed
and money was needed in your day simply because the business of
production was left in private hands, and that, consequently, they are
superfluous now."

"I do not at once see how that follows," I replied.

"It is very simple," said Dr. Leete. "When innumerable different and
independent persons produced the various things needful to life and
comfort, endless exchanges between individuals were requisite in
order that they might supply themselves with what they desired. These
exchanges constituted trade, and money was essential as their medium.
But as soon as the nation became the sole producer of all sorts of
commodities, there was no need of exchanges between individuals that
they might get what they required. Everything was procurable from one
source, and nothing could be procured anywhere else. A system of
direct distribution from the national storehouses took the place of
trade, and for this money was unnecessary."

"How is this distribution managed?" I asked.

"On the simplest possible plan," replied Dr. Leete. "A credit
corresponding to his share of the annual product of the nation is
given to every citizen on the public books at the beginning of each
year, and a credit card issued him with which he procures at the
public storehouses, found in every community, whatever he desires
whenever he desires it. This arrangement, you will see, totally
obviates the necessity for business transactions of any sort between
individuals and consumers. Perhaps you would like to see what our
credit-cards are like.

"You observe," he pursued as I was curiously examining the piece of
pasteboard he gave me, "that this card is issued for a certain number
of dollars. We have kept the old word, but not the substance. The
term, as we use it, answers to no real thing, but merely serves as an
algebraical symbol for comparing the values of products with one
another. For this purpose they are all priced in dollars and cents,
just as in your day. The value of what I procure on this card is
checked off by the clerk, who pricks out of these tiers of squares the
price of what I order."

"If you wanted to buy something of your neighbor, could you transfer
part of your credit to him as consideration?" I inquired.

"In the first place," replied Dr. Leete, "our neighbors have nothing
to sell us, but in any event our credit would not be transferable,
being strictly personal. Before the nation could even think of
honoring any such transfer as you speak of, it would be bound to
inquire into all the circumstances of the transaction, so as to be
able to guarantee its absolute equity. It would have been reason
enough, had there been no other, for abolishing money, that its
possession was no indication of rightful title to it. In the hands of
the man who had stolen it or murdered for it, it was as good as in
those which had earned it by industry. People nowadays interchange
gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is
considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence and
disinterestedness which should prevail between citizens and the sense
of community of interest which supports our social system. According
to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all
its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of
others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can
possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization."

"What if you have to spend more than your card in any one year?" I
asked.

"The provision is so ample that we are more likely not to spend it
all," replied Dr. Leete. "But if extraordinary expenses should exhaust
it, we can obtain a limited advance on the next year's credit, though
this practice is not encouraged, and a heavy discount is charged to
check it. Of course if a man showed himself a reckless spendthrift he
would receive his allowance monthly or weekly instead of yearly, or if
necessary not be permitted to handle it all."

"If you don't spend your allowance, I suppose it accumulates?"

"That is also permitted to a certain extent when a special outlay is
anticipated. But unless notice to the contrary is given, it is
presumed that the citizen who does not fully expend his credit did not
have occasion to do so, and the balance is turned into the general
surplus."

"Such a system does not encourage saving habits on the part of
citizens," I said.

"It is not intended to," was the reply. "The nation is rich, and does
not wish the people to deprive themselves of any good thing. In your
day, men were bound to lay up goods and money against coming failure
of the means of support and for their children. This necessity made
parsimony a virtue. But now it would have no such laudable object,
and, having lost its utility, it has ceased to be regarded as a
virtue. No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for
himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture,
education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the
cradle to the grave."

"That is a sweeping guarantee!" I said. "What certainty can there be
that the value of a man's labor will recompense the nation for its
outlay on him? On the whole, society may be able to support all its
members, but some must earn less than enough for their support, and
others more; and that brings us back once more to the wages question,
on which you have hitherto said nothing. It was at just this point, if
you remember, that our talk ended last evening; and I say again, as I
did then, that here I should suppose a national industrial system like
yours would find its main difficulty. How, I ask once more, can you
adjust satisfactorily the comparative wages or remuneration of the
multitude of avocations, so unlike and so incommensurable, which are
necessary for the service of society? In our day the market rate
determined the price of labor of all sorts, as well as of goods. The
employer paid as little as he could, and the worker got as much. It
was not a pretty system ethically, I admit; but it did, at least,
furnish us a rough and ready formula for settling a question which
must be settled ten thousand times a day if the world was ever going
to get forward. There seemed to us no other practicable way of doing
it."

"Yes," replied Dr. Leete, "it was the only practicable way under a
system which made the interests of every individual antagonistic to
those of every other; but it would have been a pity if humanity could
never have devised a better plan, for yours was simply the application
to the mutual relations of men of the devil's maxim, 'Your necessity
is my opportunity.' The reward of any service depended not upon its
difficulty, danger, or hardship, for throughout the world it seems
that the most perilous, severe, and repulsive labor was done by the
worst paid classes; but solely upon the strait of those who needed the
service."

"All that is conceded," I said. "But, with all its defects, the plan
of settling prices by the market rate was a practical plan; and I
cannot conceive what satisfactory substitute you can have devised for
it. The government being the only possible employer, there is of
course no labor market or market rate. Wages of all sorts must be
arbitrarily fixed by the government. I cannot imagine a more complex
and delicate function than that must be, or one, however performed,
more certain to breed universal dissatisfaction."

"I beg your pardon," replied Dr. Leete, "but I think you exaggerate
the difficulty. Suppose a board of fairly sensible men were charged
with settling the wages for all sorts of trades under a system which,
like ours, guaranteed employment to all, while permitting the choice
of avocations. Don't you see that, however unsatisfactory the first
adjustment might be, the mistakes would soon correct themselves? The
favored trades would have too many volunteers, and those discriminated
against would lack them till the errors were set right. But this is
aside from the purpose, for, though this plan would, I fancy, be
practicable enough, it is no part of our system."

"How, then, do you regulate wages?" I once more asked.

Dr. Leete did not reply till after several moments of meditative
silence. "I know, of course," he finally said, "enough of the old
order of things to understand just what you mean by that question; and
yet the present order is so utterly different at this point that I am
a little at loss how to answer you best. You ask me how we regulate
wages; I can only reply that there is no idea in the modern social
economy which at all corresponds with what was meant by wages in your
day."

"I suppose you mean that you have no money to pay wages in," said I.
"But the credit given the worker at the government storehouse answers
to his wages with us. How is the amount of the credit given
respectively to the workers in different lines determined? By what
title does the individual claim his particular share? What is the
basis of allotment?"

"His title," replied Dr. Leete, "is his humanity. The basis of his
claim is the fact that he is a man."

"The fact that he is a man!" I repeated, incredulously. "Do you
possibly mean that all have the same share?"

"Most assuredly."

The readers of this book never having practically known any other
arrangement, or perhaps very carefully considered the historical
accounts of former epochs in which a very different system prevailed,
cannot be expected to appreciate the stupor of amazement into which
Dr. Leete's simple statement plunged me.

"You see," he said, smiling, "that it is not merely that we have no
money to pay wages in, but, as I said, we have nothing at all
answering to your idea of wages."

By this time I had pulled myself together sufficiently to voice some
of the criticisms which, man of the nineteenth century as I was, came
uppermost in my mind, upon this to me astounding arrangement. "Some
men do twice the work of others!" I exclaimed. "Are the clever workmen
content with a plan that ranks them with the indifferent?"

"We leave no possible ground for any complaint of injustice," replied
Dr. Leete, "by requiring precisely the same measure of service from
all."

"How can you do that, I should like to know, when no two men's powers
are the same?"

"Nothing could be simpler," was Dr. Leete's reply. "We require of each
that he shall make the same effort; that is, we demand of him the best
service it is in his power to give."

"And supposing all do the best they can," I answered, "the amount of
the product resulting is twice greater from one man than from
another."

"Very true," replied Dr. Leete; "but the amount of the resulting
product has nothing whatever to do with the question, which is one of
desert. Desert is a moral question, and the amount of the product a
material quantity. It would be an extraordinary sort of logic which
should try to determine a moral question by a material standard. The
amount of the effort alone is pertinent to the question of desert. All
men who do their best, do the same. A man's endowments, however
godlike, merely fix the measure of his duty. The man of great
endowments who does not do all he might, though he may do more than a
man of small endowments who does his best, is deemed a less deserving
worker than the latter, and dies a debtor to his fellows. The Creator
sets men's tasks for them by the faculties he gives them; we simply
exact their fulfillment."

"No doubt that is very fine philosophy," I said; "nevertheless it
seems hard that the man who produces twice as much as another, even if
both do their best, should have only the same share."

"Does it, indeed, seem so to you?" responded Dr. Leete. "Now, do you
know, that seems very curious to me? The way it strikes people
nowadays is, that a man who can produce twice as much as another with
the same effort, instead of being rewarded for doing so, ought to be
punished if he does not do so. In the nineteenth century, when a horse
pulled a heavier load than a goat, I suppose you rewarded him. Now, we
should have whipped him soundly if he had not, on the ground that,
being much stronger, he ought to. It is singular how ethical standards
change." The doctor said this with such a twinkle in his eye that I
was obliged to laugh.

"I suppose," I said, "that the real reason that we rewarded men for
their endowments, while we considered those of horses and goats merely
as fixing the service to be severally required of them, was that the
animals, not being reasoning beings, naturally did the best they
could, whereas men could only be induced to do so by rewarding them
according to the amount of their product. That brings me to ask why,
unless human nature has mightily changed in a hundred years, you are
not under the same necessity."

"We are," replied Dr. Leete. "I don't think there has been any change
in human nature in that respect since your day. It is still so
constituted that special incentives in the form of prizes, and
advantages to be gained, are requisite to call out the best endeavors
of the average man in any direction."

"But what inducement," I asked, "can a man have to put forth his best
endeavors when, however much or little he accomplishes, his income
remains the same? High characters may be moved by devotion to the
common welfare under such a system, but does not the average man tend
to rest back on his oar, reasoning that it is of no use to make a
special effort, since the effort will not increase his income, nor its
withholding diminish it?"

"Does it then really seem to you," answered my companion, "that human
nature is insensible to any motives save fear of want and love of
luxury, that you should expect security and equality of livelihood to
leave them without possible incentives to effort? Your contemporaries
did not really think so, though they might fancy they did. When it was
a question of the grandest class of efforts, the most absolute
self-devotion, they depended on quite other incentives. Not higher
wages, but honor and the hope of men's gratitude, patriotism and the
inspiration of duty, were the motives which they set before their
soldiers when it was a question of dying for the nation, and never
was there an age of the world when those motives did not call out what
is best and noblest in men. And not only this, but when you come to
analyze the love of money which was the general impulse to effort in
your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but
one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the
others, and with many the more influential, being desire of power, of
social position, and reputation for ability and success. So you see
that though we have abolished poverty and the fear of it, and
inordinate luxury with the hope of it, we have not touched the greater
part of the motives which underlay the love of money in former times,
or any of those which prompted the supremer sorts of effort. The
coarser motives, which no longer move us, have been replaced by higher
motives wholly unknown to the mere wage earners of your age. Now that
industry of whatever sort is no longer self-service, but service of
the nation, patriotism, passion for humanity, impel the worker as in
your day they did the soldier. The army of industry is an army, not
alone by virtue of its perfect organization, but by reason also of the
ardor of self-devotion which animates its members.

"But as you used to supplement the motives of patriotism with the love
of glory, in order to stimulate the valor of your soldiers, so do we.
Based as our industrial system is on the principle of requiring the
same unit of effort from every man, that is, the best he can do, you
will see that the means by which we spur the workers to do their best
must be a very essential part of our scheme. With us, diligence in the
national service is the sole and certain way to public repute, social
distinction, and official power. The value of a man's services to
society fixes his rank in it. Compared with the effect of our social
arrangements in impelling men to be zealous in business, we deem the
object-lessons of biting poverty and wanton luxury on which you
depended a device as weak and uncertain as it was barbaric. The lust
of honor even in your sordid day notoriously impelled men to more
desperate effort than the love of money could."

"I should be extremely interested," I said, "to learn something of
what these social arrangements are."

"The scheme in its details," replied the doctor, "is of course very
elaborate, for it underlies the entire organization of our industrial
army; but a few words will give you a general idea of it."

At this moment our talk was charmingly interrupted by the emergence
upon the aerial platform where we sat of Edith Leete. She was dressed
for the street, and had come to speak to her father about some
commission she was to do for him.

"By the way, Edith," he exclaimed, as she was about to leave us to
ourselves, "I wonder if Mr. West would not be interested in visiting
the store with you? I have been telling him something about our system
of distribution, and perhaps he might like to see it in practical
operation."

"My daughter," he added, turning to me, "is an indefatigable shopper,
and can tell you more about the stores than I can."

The proposition was naturally very agreeable to me, and Edith being
good enough to say that she should be glad to have my company, we left
the house together.





"If I am going to explain our way of shopping to you," said my
companion, as we walked along the street, "you must explain your way
to me. I have never been able to understand it from all I have read on
the subject. For example, when you had such a vast number of shops,
each with its different assortment, how could a lady ever settle upon
any purchase till she had visited all the shops? for, until she had,
she could not know what there was to choose from."

"It was as you suppose; that was the only way she could know," I
replied.

"Father calls me an indefatigable shopper, but I should soon be a very
fatigued one if I had to do as they did," was Edith's laughing
comment.

"The loss of time in going from shop to shop was indeed a waste which
the busy bitterly complained of," I said; "but as for the ladies of
the idle class, though they complained also, I think the system was
really a godsend by furnishing a device to kill time."

"But say there were a thousand shops in a city, hundreds, perhaps, of
the same sort, how could even the idlest find time to make their
rounds?"

"They really could not visit all, of course," I replied. "Those who
did a great deal of buying, learned in time where they might expect to
find what they wanted. This class had made a science of the
specialties of the shops, and bought at advantage, always getting the
most and best for the least money. It required, however, long
experience to acquire this knowledge. Those who were too busy, or
bought too little to gain it, took their chances and were generally
unfortunate, getting the least and worst for the most money. It was
the merest chance if persons not experienced in shopping received the
value of their money."

"But why did you put up with such a shockingly inconvenient
arrangement when you saw its faults so plainly?" Edith asked me.

"It was like all our social arrangements," I replied. "You can see
their faults scarcely more plainly than we did, but we saw no remedy
for them."

"Here we are at the store of our ward," said Edith, as we turned in at
the great portal of one of the magnificent public buildings I had
observed in my morning walk. There was nothing in the exterior aspect
of the edifice to suggest a store to a representative of the
nineteenth century. There was no display of goods in the great
windows, or any device to advertise wares, or attract custom. Nor was
there any sort of sign or legend on the front of the building to
indicate the character of the business carried on there; but instead,
above the portal, standing out from the front of the building, a
majestic life-size group of statuary, the central figure of which was
a female ideal of Plenty, with her cornucopia. Judging from the
composition of the throng passing in and out, about the same
proportion of the sexes among shoppers obtained as in the nineteenth
century. As we entered, Edith said that there was one of these great
distributing establishments in each ward of the city, so that no
residence was more than five or ten minutes' walk from one of them. It
was the first interior of a twentieth-century public building that I
had ever beheld, and the spectacle naturally impressed me deeply. I
was in a vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows
on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet
above. Beneath it, in the centre of the hall, a magnificent fountain
played, cooling the atmosphere to a delicious freshness with its
spray. The walls and ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated
to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior.
Around the fountain was a space occupied with chairs and sofas, on
which many persons were seated conversing. Legends on the walls all
about the hall indicated to what classes of commodities the counters
below were devoted. Edith directed her steps towards one of these,
where samples of muslin of a bewildering variety were displayed, and
proceeded to inspect them.

"Where is the clerk?" I asked, for there was no one behind the
counter, and no one seemed coming to attend to the customer.

"I have no need of the clerk yet," said Edith; "I have not made my
selection."

"It was the principal business of clerks to help people to make their
selections in my day," I replied.

"What! To tell people what they wanted?"

"Yes; and oftener to induce them to buy what they didn't want."

"But did not ladies find that very impertinent?" Edith asked,
wonderingly. "What concern could it possibly be to the clerks whether
people bought or not?"

"It was their sole concern," I answered. "They were hired for the
purpose of getting rid of the goods, and were expected to do their
utmost, short of the use of force, to compass that end."

"Ah, yes! How stupid I am to forget!" said Edith. "The storekeeper and
his clerks depended for their livelihood on selling the goods in your
day. Of course that is all different now. The goods are the nation's.
They are here for those who want them, and it is the business of the
clerks to wait on people and take their orders; but it is not the
interest of the clerk or the nation to dispose of a yard or a pound of
anything to anybody who does not want it." She smiled as she added,
"How exceedingly odd it must have seemed to have clerks trying to
induce one to take what one did not want, or was doubtful about!"

"But even a twentieth-century clerk might make himself useful in
giving you information about the goods, though he did not tease you to
buy them," I suggested.

"No," said Edith, "that is not the business of the clerk. These
printed cards, for which the government authorities are responsible,
give us all the information we can possibly need."

I saw then that there was fastened to each sample a card containing in
succinct form a complete statement of the make and materials of the
goods and all its qualities, as well as price, leaving absolutely no
point to hang a question on.

"The clerk has, then, nothing to say about the goods he sells?" I
said.

"Nothing at all. It is not necessary that he should know or profess to
know anything about them. Courtesy and accuracy in taking orders are
all that are required of him."

"What a prodigious amount of lying that simple arrangement saves!" I
ejaculated.

"Do you mean that all the clerks misrepresented their goods in your
day?" Edith asked.

"God forbid that I should say so!" I replied, "for there were many who
did not, and they were entitled to especial credit, for when one's
livelihood and that of his wife and babies depended on the amount of
goods he could dispose of, the temptation to deceive the customer--or
let him deceive himself--was wellnigh overwhelming. But, Miss Leete, I
am distracting you from your task with my talk."

"Not at all. I have made my selections." With that she touched a
button, and in a moment a clerk appeared. He took down her order on a
tablet with a pencil which made two copies, of which he gave one to
her, and enclosing the counterpart in a small receptacle, dropped it
into a transmitting tube.

"The duplicate of the order," said Edith as she turned away from the
counter, after the clerk had punched the value of her purchase out of
the credit card she gave him, "is given to the purchaser, so that any
mistakes in filling it can be easily traced and rectified."

"You were very quick about your selections," I said. "May I ask how
you knew that you might not have found something to suit you better in
some of the other stores? But probably you are required to buy in your
own district."

"Oh, no," she replied. "We buy where we please, though naturally most
often near home. But I should have gained nothing by visiting other
stores. The assortment in all is exactly the same, representing as it
does in each case samples of all the varieties produced or imported by
the United States. That is why one can decide quickly, and never need
visit two stores."

"And is this merely a sample store? I see no clerks cutting off goods
or marking bundles."

"All our stores are sample stores, except as to a few classes of
articles. The goods, with these exceptions, are all at the great
central warehouse of the city, to which they are shipped directly from
the producers. We order from the sample and the printed statement of
texture, make, and qualities. The orders are sent to the warehouse,
and the goods distributed from there."

"That must be a tremendous saving of handling," I said. "By our
system, the manufacturer sold to the wholesaler, the wholesaler to the
retailer, and the retailer to the consumer, and the goods had to be
handled each time. You avoid one handling of the goods, and eliminate
the retailer altogether, with his big profit and the army of clerks it
goes to support. Why, Miss Leete, this store is merely the order
department of a wholesale house, with no more than a wholesaler's
complement of clerks. Under our system of handling the goods,
persuading the customer to buy them, cutting them off, and packing
them, ten clerks would not do what one does here. The saving must be
enormous."

"I suppose so," said Edith, "but of course we have never known any
other way. But, Mr. West, you must not fail to ask father to take you
to the central warehouse some day, where they receive the orders from
the different sample houses all over the city and parcel out and send
the goods to their destinations. He took me there not long ago, and
it was a wonderful sight. The system is certainly perfect; for
example, over yonder in that sort of cage is the dispatching clerk.
The orders, as they are taken by the different departments in the
store, are sent by transmitters to him. His assistants sort them and
enclose each class in a carrier-box by itself. The dispatching clerk
has a dozen pneumatic transmitters before him answering to the general
classes of goods, each communicating with the corresponding department
at the warehouse. He drops the box of orders into the tube it calls
for, and in a few moments later it drops on the proper desk in the
warehouse, together with all the orders of the same sort from the
other sample stores. The orders are read off, recorded, and sent to be
filled, like lightning. The filling I thought the most interesting
part. Bales of cloth are placed on spindles and turned by machinery,
and the cutter, who also has a machine, works right through one bale
after another till exhausted, when another man takes his place; and it
is the same with those who fill the orders in any other staple. The
packages are then delivered by larger tubes to the city districts, and
thence distributed to the houses. You may understand how quickly it is
all done when I tell you that my order will probably be at home sooner
than I could have carried it from here."

"How do you manage in the thinly settled rural districts?" I asked.

"The system is the same," Edith explained; "the village sample shops
are connected by transmitters with the central county warehouse, which
may be twenty miles away. The transmission is so swift, though, that
the time lost on the way is trifling. But, to save expense, in many
counties one set of tubes connect several villages with the warehouse,
and then there is time lost waiting for one another. Sometimes it is
two or three hours before goods ordered are received. It was so where
I was staying last summer, and I found it quite inconvenient".[2]

"There must be many other respects also, no doubt, in which the
country stores are inferior to the city stores," I suggested.

"No," Edith answered, "they are otherwise precisely as good. The
sample shop of the smallest village, just like this one, gives you
your choice of all the varieties of goods the nation has, for the
county warehouse draws on the same source as the city warehouse."

As we walked home I commented on the great variety in the size and
cost of the houses. "How is it," I asked, "that this difference is
consistent with the fact that all citizens have the same income?"

"Because," Edith explained, "although the income is the same, personal
taste determines how the individual shall spend it. Some like fine
horses; others, like myself, prefer pretty clothes; and still others
want an elaborate table. The rents which the nation receives for these
houses vary, according to size, elegance, and location, so that
everybody can find something to suit. The larger houses are usually
occupied by large families, in which there are several to contribute
to the rent; while small families, like ours, find smaller houses more
convenient and economical. It is a matter of taste and convenience
wholly. I have read that in old times people often kept up
establishments and did other things which they could not afford for
ostentation, to make people think them richer than they were. Was it
really so, Mr. West?"

"I shall have to admit that it was," I replied.

"Well, you see, it could not be so nowadays; for everybody's income is
known, and it is known that what is spent one way must be saved
another."

[Footnote 2: I am informed since the above is in type that this lack
of perfection in the distributing service of some of the country
districts is to be remedied, and that soon every village will have its
own set of tubes.]





When we arrived home, Dr. Leete had not yet returned, and Mrs. Leete
was not visible. "Are you fond of music, Mr. West?" Edith asked.

I assured her that it was half of life, according to my notion.

"I ought to apologize for inquiring," she said. "It is not a question
that we ask one another nowadays; but I have read that in your day,
even among the cultured class, there were some who did not care for
music."

"You must remember, in excuse," I said, "that we had some rather
absurd kinds of music."

"Yes," she said, "I know that; I am afraid I should not have fancied
it all myself. Would you like to hear some of ours now, Mr. West?"

"Nothing would delight me so much as to listen to you," I said.

"To me!" she exclaimed, laughing. "Did you think I was going to play
or sing to you?"

"I hoped so, certainly," I replied.

Seeing that I was a little abashed, she subdued her merriment and
explained. "Of course, we all sing nowadays as a matter of course in
the training of the voice, and some learn to play instruments for
their private amusement; but the professional music is so much grander
and more perfect than any performance of ours, and so easily commanded
when we wish to hear it, that we don't think of calling our singing or
playing music at all. All the really fine singers and players are in
the musical service, and the rest of us hold our peace for the main
part. But would you really like to hear some music?"

I assured her once more that I would.

"Come, then, into the music room," she said, and I followed her into
an apartment finished, without hangings, in wood, with a floor of
polished wood. I was prepared for new devices in musical instruments,
but I saw nothing in the room which by any stretch of imagination
could be conceived as such. It was evident that my puzzled appearance
was affording intense amusement to Edith.

"Please look at to-day's music," she said, handing me a card, "and
tell me what you would prefer. It is now five o'clock, you will
remember."

The card bore the date "September 12, 2000," and contained the longest
programme of music I had ever seen. It was as various as it was long,
including a most extraordinary range of vocal and instrumental solos,
duets, quartettes, and various orchestral combinations. I remained
bewildered by the prodigious list until Edith's pink finger-tip
indicated a particular section of it, where several selections were
bracketed, with the words "5 P.M." against them; then I observed
that this prodigious programme was an all-day one, divided into
twenty-four sections answering to the hours. There were but a few
pieces of music in the "5 P.M." section, and I indicated an organ
piece as my preference.

"I am so glad you like the organ," said she. "I think there is
scarcely any music that suits my mood oftener."

She made me sit down comfortably, and, crossing the room, so far as I
could see, merely touched one or two screws, and at once the room was
filled with the music of a grand organ anthem; filled, not flooded,
for, by some means, the volume of melody had been perfectly graduated
to the size of the apartment. I listened, scarcely breathing, to the
close. Such music, so perfectly rendered, I had never expected to
hear.

"Grand!" I cried, as the last great wave of sound broke and ebbed away
into silence. "Bach must be at the keys of that organ; but where is
the organ?"

"Wait a moment, please," said Edith; "I want to have you listen to
this waltz before you ask any questions. I think it is perfectly
charming;" and as she spoke the sound of violins filled the room with
the witchery of a summer night. When this had also ceased, she said:
"There is nothing in the least mysterious about the music, as you seem
to imagine. It is not made by fairies or genii, but by good, honest,
and exceedingly clever human hands. We have simply carried the idea of
labor saving by cooperation into our musical service as into
everything else. There are a number of music rooms in the city,
perfectly adapted acoustically to the different sorts of music. These
halls are connected by telephone with all the houses of the city whose
people care to pay the small fee, and there are none, you may be sure,
who do not. The corps of musicians attached to each hall is so large
that, although no individual performer, or group of performers, has
more than a brief part, each day's programme lasts through the
twenty-four hours. There are on that card for to-day, as you will see
if you observe closely, distinct programmes of four of these concerts,
each of a different order of music from the others, being now
simultaneously performed, and any one of the four pieces now going on
that you prefer, you can hear by merely pressing the button which will
connect your house-wire with the hall where it is being rendered. The
programmes are so coordinated that the pieces at any one time
simultaneously proceeding in the different halls usually offer a
choice, not only between instrumental and vocal, and between different
sorts of instruments; but also between different motives from grave to
gay, so that all tastes and moods can be suited."

"It appears to me, Miss Leete," I said, "that if we could have devised
an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes,
perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and
beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of
human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further
improvements."

"I am sure I never could imagine how those among you who depended at
all on music managed to endure the old-fashioned system for providing
it," replied Edith. "Music really worth hearing must have been, I
suppose, wholly out of the reach of the masses, and attainable by the
most favored only occasionally, at great trouble, prodigious expense,
and then for brief periods, arbitrarily fixed by somebody else, and in
connection with all sorts of undesirable circumstances. Your concerts,
for instance, and operas! How perfectly exasperating it must have
been, for the sake of a piece or two of music that suited you, to have
to sit for hours listening to what you did not care for! Now, at a
dinner one can skip the courses one does not care for. Who would ever
dine, however hungry, if required to eat everything brought on the
table? and I am sure one's hearing is quite as sensitive as one's
taste. I suppose it was these difficulties in the way of commanding
really good music which made you endure so much playing and singing in
your homes by people who had only the rudiments of the art."

"Yes," I replied, "it was that sort of music or none for most of us."

"Ah, well," Edith sighed, "when one really considers, it is not so
strange that people in those days so often did not care for music. I
dare say I should have detested it, too."

"Did I understand you rightly," I inquired, "that this musical
programme covers the entire twenty-four hours? It seems to on this
card, certainly; but who is there to listen to music between say
midnight and morning?"

"Oh, many," Edith replied. "Our people keep all hours; but if the
music were provided from midnight to morning for no others, it still
would be for the sleepless, the sick, and the dying. All our
bedchambers have a telephone attachment at the head of the bed by
which any person who may be sleepless can command music at pleasure,
of the sort suited to the mood."

"Is there such an arrangement in the room assigned to me?"

"Why, certainly; and how stupid, how very stupid, of me not to think
to tell you of that last night! Father will show you about the
adjustment before you go to bed to-night, however; and with the
receiver at your ear, I am quite sure you will be able to snap your
fingers at all sorts of uncanny feelings if they trouble you again."

That evening Dr. Leete asked us about our visit to the store, and in
the course of the desultory comparison of the ways of the nineteenth
century and the twentieth, which followed, something raised the
question of inheritance. "I suppose," I said, "the inheritance of
property is not now allowed."

"On the contrary," replied Dr. Leete, "there is no interference with
it. In fact, you will find, Mr. West, as you come to know us, that
there is far less interference of any sort with personal liberty
nowadays than you were accustomed to. We require, indeed, by law that
every man shall serve the nation for a fixed period, instead of
leaving him his choice, as you did, between working, stealing, or
starving. With the exception of this fundamental law, which is,
indeed, merely a codification of the law of nature--the edict of
Eden--by which it is made equal in its pressure on men, our system
depends in no particular upon legislation, but is entirely voluntary,
the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational
conditions. This question of inheritance illustrates just that point.
The fact that the nation is the sole capitalist and land-owner of
course restricts the individual's possessions to his annual credit,
and what personal and household belongings he may have procured with
it. His credit, like an annuity in your day, ceases on his death, with
the allowance of a fixed sum for funeral expenses. His other
possessions he leaves as he pleases."

"What is to prevent, in course of time, such accumulations of valuable
goods and chattels in the hands of individuals as might seriously
interfere with equality in the circumstances of citizens?" I asked.

"That matter arranges itself very simply," was the reply. "Under the
present organization of society, accumulations of personal property
are merely burdensome the moment they exceed what adds to the real
comfort. In your day, if a man had a house crammed full with gold and
silver plate, rare china, expensive furniture, and such things, he was
considered rich, for these things represented money, and could at any
time be turned into it. Nowadays a man whom the legacies of a hundred
relatives, simultaneously dying, should place in a similar position,
would be considered very unlucky. The articles, not being salable,
would be of no value to him except for their actual use or the
enjoyment of their beauty. On the other hand, his income remaining the
same, he would have to deplete his credit to hire houses to store the
goods in, and still further to pay for the service of those who took
care of them. You may be very sure that such a man would lose no time
in scattering among his friends possessions which only made him the
poorer, and that none of those friends would accept more of them than
they could easily spare room for and time to attend to. You see, then,
that to prohibit the inheritance of personal property with a view to
prevent great accumulations would be a superfluous precaution for the
nation. The individual citizen can be trusted to see that he is not
overburdened. So careful is he in this respect, that the relatives
usually waive claim to most of the effects of deceased friends,
reserving only particular objects. The nation takes charge of the
resigned chattels, and turns such as are of value into the common
stock once more."

"You spoke of paying for service to take care of your houses," said I;
"that suggests a question I have several times been on the point of
asking. How have you disposed of the problem of domestic service? Who
are willing to be domestic servants in a community where all are
social equals? Our ladies found it hard enough to find such even when
there was little pretense of social equality."

"It is precisely because we are all social equals whose equality
nothing can compromise, and because service is honorable, in a society
whose fundamental principle is that all in turn shall serve the rest,
that we could easily provide a corps of domestic servants such as you
never dreamed of, if we needed them," replied Dr. Leete. "But we do
not need them."

"Who does your housework, then?" I asked.

"There is none to do," said Mrs. Leete, to whom I had addressed this
question. "Our washing is all done at public laundries at excessively
cheap rates, and our cooking at public kitchens The making and
repairing of all we wear are done outside in public shops.
Electricity, of course, takes the place of all fires and lighting. We
choose houses no larger than we need, and furnish them so as to
involve the minimum of trouble to keep them in order. We have no use
for domestic servants."

"The fact," said Dr. Leete, "that you had in the poorer classes a
boundless supply of serfs on whom you could impose all sorts of
painful and disagreeable tasks, made you indifferent to devices to
avoid the necessity for them. But now that we all have to do in turn
whatever work is done for society, every individual in the nation has
the same interest, and a personal one, in devices for lightening the
burden. This fact has given a prodigious impulse to labor-saving
inventions in all sorts of industry, of which the combination of the
maximum of comfort and minimum of trouble in household arrangements
was one of the earliest results.

"In case of special emergencies in the household," pursued Dr. Leete,
"such as extensive cleaning or renovation, or sickness in the family,
we can always secure assistance from the industrial force."

"But how do you recompense these assistants, since you have no money?"

"We do not pay them, of course, but the nation for them. Their
services can be obtained by application at the proper bureau, and
their value is pricked off the credit card of the applicant."

"What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!" I exclaimed.
"In my day, even wealth and unlimited servants did not enfranchise
their possessors from household cares, while the women of the merely
well-to-do and poorer classes lived and died martyrs to them."

"Yes," said Mrs. Leete, "I have read something of that; enough to
convince me that, badly off as the men, too, were in your day, they
were more fortunate than their mothers and wives."

"The broad shoulders of the nation," said Dr. Leete, "bear now like a
feather the burden that broke the backs of the women of your day.
Their misery came, with all your other miseries, from that incapacity
for cooperation which followed from the individualism on which your
social system was founded, from your inability to perceive that you
could make ten times more profit out of your fellow men by uniting
with them than by contending with them. The wonder is, not that you
did not live more comfortably, but that you were able to live together
at all, who were all confessedly bent on making one another your
servants, and securing possession of one another's goods."

"There, there, father, if you are so vehement, Mr. West will think you
are scolding him," laughingly interposed Edith.

"When you want a doctor," I asked, "do you simply apply to the proper
bureau and take any one that may be sent?"

"That rule would not work well in the case of physicians," replied Dr.
Leete. "The good a physician can do a patient depends largely on his
acquaintance with his constitutional tendencies and condition. The
patient must be able, therefore, to call in a particular doctor, and
he does so just as patients did in your day. The only difference is
that, instead of collecting his fee for himself, the doctor collects
it for the nation by pricking off the amount, according to a regular
scale for medical attendance, from the patient's credit card."

"I can imagine," I said, "that if the fee is always the same, and a
doctor may not turn away patients, as I suppose he may not, the good
doctors are called constantly and the poor doctors left in idleness."

"In the first place, if you will overlook the apparent conceit of the
remark from a retired physician," replied Dr. Leete, with a smile, "we
have no poor doctors. Anybody who pleases to get a little smattering
of medical terms is not now at liberty to practice on the bodies of
citizens, as in your day. None but students who have passed the severe
tests of the schools, and clearly proved their vocation, are permitted
to practice. Then, too, you will observe that there is nowadays no
attempt of doctors to build up their practice at the expense of other
doctors. There would be no motive for that. For the rest, the doctor
has to render regular reports of his work to the medical bureau, and
if he is not reasonably well employed, work is found for him."





The questions which I needed to ask before I could acquire even an
outline acquaintance with the institutions of the twentieth century
being endless, and Dr. Leete's good-nature appearing equally so, we
sat up talking for several hours after the ladies left us. Reminding
my host of the point at which our talk had broken off that morning, I
expressed my curiosity to learn how the organization of the industrial
army was made to afford a sufficient stimulus to diligence in the lack
of any anxiety on the worker's part as to his livelihood.

"You must understand in the first place," replied the doctor, "that
the supply of incentives to effort is but one of the objects sought in
the organization we have adopted for the army. The other, and equally
important, is to secure for the file-leaders and captains of the
force, and the great officers of the nation, men of proven abilities,
who are pledged by their own careers to hold their followers up to
their highest standard of performance and permit no lagging. With a
view to these two ends the industrial army is organized. First comes
the unclassified grade of common laborers, men of all work, to which
all recruits during their first three years belong. This grade is a
sort of school, and a very strict one, in which the young men are
taught habits of obedience, subordination, and devotion to duty. While
the miscellaneous nature of the work done by this force prevents the
systematic grading of the workers which is afterwards possible, yet
individual records are kept, and excellence receives distinction
corresponding with the penalties that negligence incurs. It is not,
however, policy with us to permit youthful recklessness or
indiscretion, when not deeply culpable, to handicap the future careers
of young men, and all who have passed through the unclassified grade
without serious disgrace have an equal opportunity to choose the life
employment they have most liking for. Having selected this, they enter
upon it as apprentices. The length of the apprenticeship naturally
differs in different occupations. At the end of it the apprentice
becomes a full workman, and a member of his trade or guild. Now not
only are the individual records of the apprentices for ability and
industry strictly kept, and excellence distinguished by suitable
distinctions, but upon the average of his record during apprenticeship
the standing given the apprentice among the full workmen depends.

"While the internal organizations of different industries, mechanical
and agricultural, differ according to their peculiar conditions, they
agree in a general division of their workers into first, second, and
third grades, according to ability, and these grades are in many cases
subdivided into first and second classes. According to his standing as
an apprentice a young man is assigned his place as a first, second, or
third grade worker. Of course only young men of unusual ability pass
directly from apprenticeship into the first grade of the workers. The
most fall into the lower grades, working up as they grow more
experienced, at the periodical regradings. These regradings take place
in each industry at intervals corresponding with the length of the
apprenticeship to that industry, so that merit never need wait long to
rise, nor can any rest on past achievements unless they would drop
into a lower rank. One of the notable advantages of a high grading is
the privilege it gives the worker in electing which of the various
branches or processes of his industry he will follow as his specialty.
Of course it is not intended that any of these processes shall be
disproportionately arduous, but there is often much difference between
them, and the privilege of election is accordingly highly prized. So
far as possible, indeed, the preferences even of the poorest workmen
are considered in assigning them their line of work, because not only
their happiness but their usefulness is thus enhanced. While, however,
the wish of the lower grade man is consulted so far as the exigencies
of the service permit, he is considered only after the upper grade men
have been provided for, and often he has to put up with second or
third choice, or even with an arbitrary assignment when help is
needed. This privilege of election attends every regrading, and when a
man loses his grade he also risks having to exchange the sort of work
he likes for some other less to his taste. The results of each
regrading, giving the standing of every man in his industry, are
gazetted in the public prints, and those who have won promotion since
the last regrading receive the nation's thanks and are publicly
invested with the badge of their new rank."

"What may this badge be?" I asked.

"Every industry has its emblematic device," replied Dr. Leete, "and
this, in the shape of a metallic badge so small that you might not see
it unless you knew where to look, is all the insignia which the men of
the army wear, except where public convenience demands a distinctive
uniform. This badge is the same in form for all grades of industry,
but while the badge of the third grade is iron, that of the second
grade is silver, and that of the first is gilt.

"Apart from the grand incentive to endeavor afforded by the fact that
the high places in the nation are open only to the highest class men,
and that rank in the army constitutes the only mode of social
distinction for the vast majority who are not aspirants in art,
literature, and the professions, various incitements of a minor, but
perhaps equally effective, sort are provided in the form of special
privileges and immunities in the way of discipline, which the superior
class men enjoy. These, while intended to be as little as possible
invidious to the less successful, have the effect of keeping
constantly before every man's mind the great desirability of attaining
the grade next above his own.

"It is obviously important that not only the good but also the
indifferent and poor workmen should be able to cherish the ambition of
rising. Indeed, the number of the latter being so much greater, it is
even more essential that the ranking system should not operate to
discourage them than that it should stimulate the others. It is to
this end that the grades are divided into classes. The grades as well
as the classes being made numerically equal at each regrading, there
is not at any time, counting out the officers and the unclassified and
apprentice grades, over one-ninth of the industrial army in the lowest
class, and most of this number are recent apprentices, all of whom
expect to rise. Those who remain during the entire term of service in
the lowest class are but a trifling fraction of the industrial army,
and likely to be as deficient in sensibility to their position as in
ability to better it.

"It is not even necessary that a worker should win promotion to a
higher grade to have at least a taste of glory. While promotion
requires a general excellence of record as a worker, honorable
mention and various sorts of prizes are awarded for excellence less
than sufficient for promotion, and also for special feats and single
performances in the various industries. There are many minor
distinctions of standing, not only within the grades but within the
classes, each of which acts as a spur to the efforts of a group. It is
intended that no form of merit shall wholly fail of recognition.

"As for actual neglect of work, positively bad work, or other overt
remissness on the part of men incapable of generous motives, the
discipline of the industrial army is far too strict to allow anything
whatever of the sort. A man able to do duty, and persistently
refusing, is sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread and water
till he consents.

"The lowest grade of the officers of the industrial army, that of
assistant foremen or lieutenants, is appointed out of men who have
held their place for two years in the first class of the first grade.
Where this leaves too large a range of choice, only the first group of
this class are eligible. No one thus comes to the point of commanding
men until he is about thirty years old. After a man becomes an
officer, his rating of course no longer depends on the efficiency of
his own work, but on that of his men. The foremen are appointed from
among the assistant foremen, by the same exercise of discretion
limited to a small eligible class. In the appointments to the still
higher grades another principle is introduced, which it would take
too much time to explain now.

"Of course such a system of grading as I have described would have
been impracticable applied to the small industrial concerns of your
day, in some of which there were hardly enough employees to have left
one apiece for the classes. You must remember that, under the national
organization of labor, all industries are carried on by great bodies
of men, many of your farms or shops being combined as one. It is also
owing solely to the vast scale on which each industry is organized,
with coordinate establishments in every part of the country, that we
are able by exchanges and transfers to fit every man so nearly with
the sort of work he can do best.

"And now, Mr. West, I will leave it to you, on the bare outline of its
features which I have given, if those who need special incentives to
do their best are likely to lack them under our system. Does it not
seem to you that men who found themselves obliged, whether they wished
or not, to work, would under such a system be strongly impelled to do
their best?"

I replied that it seemed to me the incentives offered were, if any
objection were to be made, too strong; that the pace set for the young
men was too hot; and such, indeed, I would add with deference, still
remains my opinion, now that by longer residence among you I have
become better acquainted with the whole subject.

Dr. Leete, however, desired me to reflect, and I am ready to say that
it is perhaps a sufficient reply to my objection, that the worker's
livelihood is in no way dependent on his ranking, and anxiety for that
never embitters his disappointments; that the working hours are short,
the vacations regular, and that all emulation ceases at forty-five,
with the attainment of middle life.

"There are two or three other points I ought to refer to," he added,
"to prevent your getting mistaken impressions. In the first place, you
must understand that this system of preferment given the more
efficient workers over the less so, in no way contravenes the
fundamental idea of our social system, that all who do their best are
equally deserving, whether that best be great or small. I have shown
that the system is arranged to encourage the weaker as well as the
stronger with the hope of rising, while the fact that the stronger are
selected for the leaders is in no way a reflection upon the weaker,
but in the interest of the common weal.

"Do not imagine, either, because emulation is given free play as an
incentive under our system, that we deem it a motive likely to appeal
to the nobler sort of men, or worthy of them. Such as these find their
motives within, not without, and measure their duty by their own
endowments, not by those of others. So long as their achievement is
proportioned to their powers, they would consider it preposterous to
expect praise or blame because it chanced to be great or small. To
such natures emulation appears philosophically absurd, and despicable
in a moral aspect by its substitution of envy for admiration, and
exultation for regret, in one's attitude toward the successes and the
failures of others.

"But all men, even in the last year of the twentieth century, are not
of this high order, and the incentives to endeavor requisite for those
who are not must be of a sort adapted to their inferior natures. For
these, then, emulation of the keenest edge is provided as a constant
spur. Those who need this motive will feel it. Those who are above its
influence do not need it.

"I should not fail to mention," resumed the doctor, "that for those
too deficient in mental or bodily strength to be fairly graded with
the main body of workers, we have a separate grade, unconnected with
the others,--a sort of invalid corps, the members of which are
provided with a light class of tasks fitted to their strength. All our
sick in mind and body, all our deaf and dumb, and lame and blind and
crippled, and even our insane, belong to this invalid corps, and bear
its insignia. The strongest often do nearly a man's work, the
feeblest, of course, nothing; but none who can do anything are willing
quite to give up. In their lucid intervals, even our insane are eager
to do what they can."

"That is a pretty idea of the invalid corps," I said. "Even a
barbarian from the nineteenth century can appreciate that. It is a
very graceful way of disguising charity, and must be grateful to the
feelings of its recipients."

"Charity!" repeated Dr. Leete. "Did you suppose that we consider the
incapable class we are talking of objects of charity?"

"Why, naturally," I said, "inasmuch as they are incapable of
self-support."

But here the doctor took me up quickly.

"Who is capable of self-support?" he demanded. "There is no such thing
in a civilized society as self-support. In a state of society so
barbarous as not even to know family cooperation, each individual may
possibly support himself, though even then for a part of his life
only; but from the moment that men begin to live together, and
constitute even the rudest sort of society, self-support becomes
impossible. As men grow more civilized, and the subdivision of
occupations and services is carried out, a complex mutual dependence
becomes the universal rule. Every man, however solitary may seem his
occupation, is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as
the nation, as large as humanity. The necessity of mutual dependence
should imply the duty and guarantee of mutual support; and that it did
not in your day constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of your
system."

"That may all be so," I replied, "but it does not touch the case of
those who are unable to contribute anything to the product of
industry."

"Surely I told you this morning, at least I thought I did," replied
Dr. Leete, "that the right of a man to maintenance at the nation's
table depends on the fact that he is a man, and not on the amount of
health and strength he may have, so long as he does his best."

"You said so," I answered, "but I supposed the rule applied only to
the workers of different ability. Does it also hold of those who can
do nothing at all?"

"Are they not also men?"

"I am to understand, then, that the lame, the blind, the sick, and the
impotent, are as well off as the most efficient, and have the same
income?"

"Certainly," was the reply.

"The idea of charity on such a scale," I answered, "would have made
our most enthusiastic philanthropists gasp."

"If you had a sick brother at home," replied Dr. Leete, "unable to
work, would you feed him on less dainty food, and lodge and clothe him
more poorly, than yourself? More likely far, you would give him the
preference; nor would you think of calling it charity. Would not the
word, in that connection, fill you with indignation?"

"Of course," I replied; "but the cases are not parallel. There is a
sense, no doubt, in which all men are brothers; but this general sort
of brotherhood is not to be compared, except for rhetorical purposes,
to the brotherhood of blood, either as to its sentiment or its
obligations."

"There speaks the nineteenth century!" exclaimed Dr. Leete. "Ah, Mr.
West, there is no doubt as to the length of time that you slept. If I
were to give you, in one sentence, a key to what may seem the
mysteries of our civilization as compared with that of your age, I
should say that it is the fact that the solidarity of the race and the
brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our
thinking and feeling, ties as real and as vital as physical
fraternity.

"But even setting that consideration aside, I do not see why it so
surprises you that those who cannot work are conceded the full right
to live on the produce of those who can. Even in your day, the duty of
military service for the protection of the nation, to which our
industrial service corresponds, while obligatory on those able to
discharge it, did not operate to deprive of the privileges of
citizenship those who were unable. They stayed at home, and were
protected by those who fought, and nobody questioned their right to
be, or thought less of them. So, now, the requirement of industrial
service from those able to render it does not operate to deprive of
the privileges of citizenship, which now implies the citizen's
maintenance, him who cannot work. The worker is not a citizen because
he works, but works because he is a citizen. As you recognize the duty
of the strong to fight for the weak, we, now that fighting is gone by,
recognize his duty to work for him.

"A solution which leaves an unaccounted-for residuum is no solution at
all; and our solution of the problem of human society would have been
none at all had it left the lame, the sick, and the blind outside with
the beasts, to fare as they might. Better far have left the strong and
well unprovided for than these burdened ones, toward whom every heart
must yearn, and for whom ease of mind and body should be provided, if
for no others. Therefore it is, as I told you this morning, that the
title of every man, woman, and child to the means of existence rests
on no basis less plain, broad, and simple than the fact that they are
fellows of one race--members of one human family. The only coin
current is the image of God, and that is good for all we have.

"I think there is no feature of the civilization of your epoch so
repugnant to modern ideas as the neglect with which you treated your
dependent classes. Even if you had no pity, no feeling of brotherhood,
how was it that you did not see that you were robbing the incapable
class of their plain right in leaving them unprovided for?"

"I don't quite follow you there," I said. "I admit the claim of this
class to our pity, but how could they who produced nothing claim a
share of the product as a right?"

"How happened it," was Dr. Leete's reply, "that your workers were able
to produce more than so many savages would have done? Was it not
wholly on account of the heritage of the past knowledge and
achievements of the race, the machinery of society, thousands of years
in contriving, found by you ready-made to your hand? How did you come
to be possessors of this knowledge and this machinery, which represent
nine parts to one contributed by yourself in the value of your
product? You inherited it, did you not? And were not these others,
these unfortunate and crippled brothers whom you cast out, joint
inheritors, co-heirs with you? What did you do with their share? Did
you not rob them when you put them off with crusts, who were entitled
to sit with the heirs, and did you not add insult to robbery when you
called the crusts charity?

"Ah, Mr. West," Dr. Leete continued, as I did not respond, "what I do
not understand is, setting aside all considerations either of justice
or brotherly feeling toward the crippled and defective, how the
workers of your day could have had any heart for their work, knowing
that their children, or grand-children, if unfortunate, would be
deprived of the comforts and even necessities of life. It is a mystery
how men with children could favor a system under which they were
rewarded beyond those less endowed with bodily strength or mental
power. For, by the same discrimination by which the father profited,
the son, for whom he would give his life, being perchance weaker than
others, might be reduced to crusts and beggary. How men dared leave
children behind them, I have never been able to understand."

    NOTE.--Although in his talk on the previous evening Dr. Leete
    had emphasized the pains taken to enable every man to
    ascertain and follow his natural bent in choosing an
    occupation, it was not till I learned that the worker's
    income is the same in all occupations that I realized how
    absolutely he may be counted on to do so, and thus, by
    selecting the harness which sets most lightly on himself,
    find that in which he can pull best. The failure of my age in
    any systematic or effective way to develop and utilize the
    natural aptitudes of men for the industries and intellectual
    avocations was one of the great wastes, as well as one of the
    most common causes of unhappiness in that time. The vast
    majority of my contemporaries, though nominally free to do
    so, never really chose their occupations at all, but were
    forced by circumstances into work for which they were
    relatively inefficient, because not naturally fitted for it.
    The rich, in this respect, had little advantage over the
    poor. The latter, indeed, being generally deprived of
    education, had no opportunity even to ascertain the natural
    aptitudes they might have, and on account of their poverty
    were unable to develop them by cultivation even when
    ascertained. The liberal and technical professions, except by
    favorable accident, were shut to them, to their own great
    loss and that of the nation. On the other hand, the
    well-to-do, although they could command education and
    opportunity, were scarcely less hampered by social prejudice,
    which forbade them to pursue manual avocations, even when
    adapted to them, and destined them, whether fit or unfit, to
    the professions, thus wasting many an excellent
    handicraftsman. Mercenary considerations, tempting men to
    pursue money-making occupations for which they were unfit,
    instead of less remunerative employments for which they were
    fit, were responsible for another vast perversion of talent.
    All these things now are changed. Equal education and
    opportunity must needs bring to light whatever aptitudes a
    man has, and neither social prejudices nor mercenary
    considerations hamper him in the choice of his life work.





As Edith had promised he should do, Dr. Leete accompanied me to my
bedroom when I retired, to instruct me as to the adjustment of the
musical telephone. He showed how, by turning a screw, the volume of
the music could be made to fill the room, or die away to an echo so
faint and far that one could scarcely be sure whether he heard or
imagined it. If, of two persons side by side, one desired to listen to
music and the other to sleep, it could be made audible to one and
inaudible to another.

"I should strongly advise you to sleep if you can to-night, Mr. West,
in preference to listening to the finest tunes in the world," the
doctor said, after explaining these points. "In the trying experience
you are just now passing through, sleep is a nerve tonic for which
there is no substitute."

Mindful of what had happened to me that very morning, I promised to
heed his counsel.

"Very well," he said, "then I will set the telephone at eight
o'clock."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

He explained that, by a clock-work combination, a person could arrange
to be awakened at any hour by the music.

It began to appear, as has since fully proved to be the case, that I
had left my tendency to insomnia behind me with the other discomforts
of existence in the nineteenth century; for though I took no sleeping
draught this time, yet, as the night before, I had no sooner touched
the pillow than I was asleep.

I dreamed that I sat on the throne of the Abencerrages in the
banqueting hall of the Alhambra, feasting my lords and generals, who
next day were to follow the crescent against the Christian dogs of
Spain. The air, cooled by the spray of fountains, was heavy with the
scent of flowers. A band of Nautch girls, round-limbed and
luscious-lipped, danced with voluptuous grace to the music of brazen
and stringed instruments. Looking up to the latticed galleries, one
caught a gleam now and then from the eye of some beauty of the royal
harem, looking down upon the assembled flower of Moorish chivalry.
Louder and louder clashed the cymbals, wilder and wilder grew the
strain, till the blood of the desert race could no longer resist the
martial delirium, and the swart nobles leaped to their feet; a
thousand scimitars were bared, and the cry, "Allah il Allah!" shook
the hall and awoke me, to find it broad daylight, and the room
tingling with the electric music of the "Turkish Reveille."

At the breakfast-table, when I told my host of my morning's
experience, I learned that it was not a mere chance that the piece of
music which awakened me was a reveille. The airs played at one of the
halls during the waking hours of the morning were always of an
inspiring type.

"By the way," I said, "I have not thought to ask you anything about
the state of Europe. Have the societies of the Old World also been
remodeled?"

"Yes," replied Dr. Leete, "the great nations of Europe as well as
Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, are now organized
industrially like the United States, which was the pioneer of the
evolution. The peaceful relations of these nations are assured by a
loose form of federal union of world-wide extent. An international
council regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of the members
of the union and their joint policy toward the more backward races,
which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions.
Complete autonomy within its own limits is enjoyed by every nation."

"How do you carry on commerce without money?" I said. "In trading with
other nations, you must use some sort of money, although you dispense
with it in the internal affairs of the nation."

"Oh, no; money is as superfluous in our foreign as in our internal
relations. When foreign commerce was conducted by private enterprise,
money was necessary to adjust it on account of the multifarious
complexity of the transactions; but nowadays it is a function of the
nations as units. There are thus only a dozen or so merchants in the
world, and their business being supervised by the international
council, a simple system of book accounts serves perfectly to regulate
their dealings. Customs duties of every sort are of course
superfluous. A nation simply does not import what its government does
not think requisite for the general interest. Each nation has a bureau
of foreign exchange, which manages its trading. For example, the
American bureau, estimating such and such quantities of French goods
necessary to America for a given year, sends the order to the French
bureau, which in turn sends its order to our bureau. The same is done
mutually by all the nations."

"But how are the prices of foreign goods settled, since there is no
competition?"

"The price at which one nation supplies another with goods," replied
Dr. Leete, "must be that at which it supplies its own citizens. So you
see there is no danger of misunderstanding. Of course no nation is
theoretically bound to supply another with the product of its own
labor, but it is for the interest of all to exchange some commodities.
If a nation is regularly supplying another with certain goods, notice
is required from either side of any important change in the relation."

"But what if a nation, having a monopoly of some natural product,
should refuse to supply it to the others, or to one of them?"

"Such a case has never occurred, and could not without doing the
refusing party vastly more harm than the others," replied Dr. Leete.
"In the first place, no favoritism could be legally shown. The law
requires that each nation shall deal with the others, in all respects,
on exactly the same footing. Such a course as you suggest would cut
off the nation adopting it from the remainder of the earth for all
purposes whatever. The contingency is one that need not give us much
anxiety."

"But," said I, "supposing a nation, having a natural monopoly in some
product of which it exports more than it consumes, should put the
price away up, and thus, without cutting off the supply, make a profit
out of its neighbors' necessities? Its own citizens would of course
have to pay the higher price on that commodity, but as a body would
make more out of foreigners than they would be out of pocket
themselves."

"When you come to know how prices of all commodities are determined
nowadays, you will perceive how impossible it is that they could be
altered, except with reference to the amount or arduousness of the
work required respectively to produce them," was Dr. Leete's reply.
"This principle is an international as well as a national guarantee;
but even without it the sense of community of interest, international
as well as national, and the conviction of the folly of selfishness,
are too deep nowadays to render possible such a piece of sharp
practice as you apprehend. You must understand that we all look
forward to an eventual unification of the world as one nation. That,
no doubt, will be the ultimate form of society, and will realize
certain economic advantages over the present federal system of
autonomous nations. Meanwhile, however, the present system works so
nearly perfectly that we are quite content to leave to posterity the
completion of the scheme. There are, indeed, some who hold that it
never will be completed, on the ground that the federal plan is not
merely a provisional solution of the problem of human society, but the
best ultimate solution."

"How do you manage," I asked, "when the books of any two nations do
not balance? Supposing we import more from France than we export to
her."

"At the end of each year," replied the doctor, "the books of every
nation are examined. If France is found in our debt, probably we are
in the debt of some nation which owes France, and so on with all the
nations. The balances that remain after the accounts have been cleared
by the international council should not be large under our system.
Whatever they may be, the council requires them to be settled every
few years, and may require their settlement at any time if they are
getting too large; for it is not intended that any nation shall run
largely in debt to another, lest feelings unfavorable to amity should
be engendered. To guard further against this, the international
council inspects the commodities interchanged by the nations, to see
that they are of perfect quality."

"But what are the balances finally settled with, seeing that you have
no money?"

"In national staples; a basis of agreement as to what staples shall be
accepted, and in what proportions, for settlement of accounts, being a
preliminary to trade relations."

"Emigration is another point I want to ask you about," said I. "With
every nation organized as a close industrial partnership, monopolizing
all means of production in the country, the emigrant, even if he were
permitted to land, would starve. I suppose there is no emigration
nowadays."

"On the contrary, there is constant emigration, by which I suppose you
mean removal to foreign countries for permanent residence," replied
Dr. Leete. "It is arranged on a simple international arrangement of
indemnities. For example, if a man at twenty-one emigrates from
England to America, England loses all the expense of his maintenance
and education, and America gets a workman for nothing. America
accordingly makes England an allowance. The same principle, varied to
suit the case, applies generally. If the man is near the term of his
labor when he emigrates, the country receiving him has the allowance.
As to imbecile persons, it is deemed best that each nation should be
responsible for its own, and the emigration of such must be under
full guarantees of support by his own nation. Subject to these
regulations, the right of any man to emigrate at any time is
unrestricted."

"But how about mere pleasure trips; tours of observation? How can a
stranger travel in a country whose people do not receive money, and
are themselves supplied with the means of life on a basis not extended
to him? His own credit card cannot, of course, be good in other lands.
How does he pay his way?"

"An American credit card," replied Dr. Leete, "is just as good in
Europe as American gold used to be, and on precisely the same
condition, namely, that it be exchanged into the currency of the
country you are traveling in. An American in Berlin takes his credit
card to the local office of the international council, and receives in
exchange for the whole or part of it a German credit card, the amount
being charged against the United States in favor of Germany on the
international account."

*    *    *    *    *

"Perhaps Mr. West would like to dine at the Elephant to-day," said
Edith, as we left the table.

"That is the name we give to the general dining-house of our ward,"
explained her father. "Not only is our cooking done at the public
kitchens, as I told you last night, but the service and quality of the
meals are much more satisfactory if taken at the dining-house. The
two minor meals of the day are usually taken at home, as not worth the
trouble of going out; but it is general to go out to dine. We have not
done so since you have been with us, from a notion that it would be
better to wait till you had become a little more familiar with our
ways. What do you think? Shall we take dinner at the dining-house
to-day?"

I said that I should be very much pleased to do so.

Not long after, Edith came to me, smiling, and said:--

"Last night, as I was thinking what I could do to make you feel at
home until you came to be a little more used to us and our ways, an
idea occurred to me. What would you say if I were to introduce you to
some very nice people of your own times, whom I am sure you used to be
well acquainted with?"

I replied, rather vaguely, that it would certainly be very agreeable,
but I did not see how she was going to manage it.

"Come with me," was her smiling reply, "and see if I am not as good as
my word."

My susceptibility to surprise had been pretty well exhausted by the
numerous shocks it had received, but it was with some wonderment that
I followed her into a room which I had not before entered. It was a
small, cosy apartment, walled with cases filled with books.

"Here are your friends," said Edith, indicating one of the cases, and
as my eye glanced over the names on the backs of the volumes,
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Defoe, Dickens,
Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, Irving, and a score of other great writers
of my time and all time, I understood her meaning. She had indeed made
good her promise in a sense compared with which its literal
fulfillment would have been a disappointment. She had introduced me to
a circle of friends whom the century that had elapsed since last I
communed with them had aged as little as it had myself. Their spirit
was as high, their wit as keen, their laughter and their tears as
contagious, as when their speech had whiled away the hours of a former
century. Lonely I was not and could not be more, with this goodly
companionship, however wide the gulf of years that gaped between me
and my old life.

"You are glad I brought you here," exclaimed Edith, radiant, as she
read in my face the success of her experiment. "It was a good idea,
was it not, Mr. West? How stupid in me not to think of it before! I
will leave you now with your old friends, for I know there will be no
company for you like them just now; but remember you must not let old
friends make you quite forget new ones!" and with that smiling caution
she left me.

Attracted by the most familiar of the names before me, I laid my hand
on a volume of Dickens, and sat down to read. He had been my prime
favorite among the book-writers of the century,--I mean the nineteenth
century,--and a week had rarely passed in my old life during which I
had not taken up some volume of his works to while away an idle hour.
Any volume with which I had been familiar would have produced an
extraordinary impression, read under my present circumstances, but my
exceptional familiarity with Dickens, and his consequent power to call
up the associations of my former life, gave to his writings an effect
no others could have had, to intensify, by force of contrast, my
appreciation of the strangeness of my present environment. However new
and astonishing one's surroundings, the tendency is to become a part
of them so soon that almost from the first the power to see them
objectively and fully measure their strangeness, is lost. That power,
already dulled in my case, the pages of Dickens restored by carrying
me back through their associations to the standpoint of my former
life. With a clearness which I had not been able before to attain, I
saw now the past and present, like contrasting pictures, side by side.

The genius of the great novelist of the nineteenth century, like that
of Homer, might indeed defy time; but the setting of his pathetic
tales, the misery of the poor, the wrongs of power, the pitiless
cruelty of the system of society, had passed away as utterly as Circe
and the sirens, Charybdis and Cyclops.

During the hour or two that I sat there with Dickens open before me, I
did not actually read more than a couple of pages. Every paragraph,
every phrase, brought up some new aspect of the world-transformation
which had taken place, and led my thoughts on long and widely
ramifying excursions. As meditating thus in Dr. Leete's library I
gradually attained a more clear and coherent idea of the prodigious
spectacle which I had been so strangely enabled to view, I was filled
with a deepening wonder at the seeming capriciousness of the fate that
had given to one who so little deserved it, or seemed in any way set
apart for it, the power alone among his contemporaries to stand upon
the earth in this latter day. I had neither foreseen the new world nor
toiled for it, as many about me had done regardless of the scorn of
fools or the misconstruction of the good. Surely it would have been
more in accordance with the fitness of things had one of those
prophetic and strenuous souls been enabled to see the travail of his
soul and be satisfied; he, for example, a thousand times rather than
I, who, having beheld in a vision the world I looked on, sang of it in
words that again and again, during these last wondrous days, had rung
in my mind:--


    For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see.
    Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

    Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled.
    In the Parliament of man, the federation of the world.

    Then the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
    And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

    For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
    And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.


What though, in his old age, he momentarily lost faith in his own
prediction, as prophets in their hours of depression and doubt
generally do; the words had remained eternal testimony to the seership
of a poet's heart, the insight that is given to faith.

I was still in the library when some hours later Dr. Leete sought me
there. "Edith told me of her idea," he said, "and I thought it an
excellent one. I had a little curiosity what writer you would first
turn to. Ah, Dickens! You admired him, then! That is where we moderns
agree with you. Judged by our standards, he overtops all the writers
of his age, not because his literary genius was highest, but because
his great heart beat for the poor, because he made the cause of the
victims of society his own, and devoted his pen to exposing its
cruelties and shams. No man of his time did so much as he to turn
men's minds to the wrong and wretchedness of the old order of things,
and open their eyes to the necessity of the great change that was
coming, although he himself did not clearly foresee it."





A heavy rainstorm came up during the day, and I had concluded that the
condition of the streets would be such that my hosts would have to
give up the idea of going out to dinner, although the dining-hall I
had understood to be quite near. I was much surprised when at the
dinner hour the ladies appeared prepared to go out, but without either
rubbers or umbrellas.

The mystery was explained when we found ourselves on the street, for a
continuous waterproof covering had been let down so as to inclose the
sidewalk and turn it into a well lighted and perfectly dry corridor,
which was filled with a stream of ladies and gentlemen dressed for
dinner. At the corners the entire open space was similarly roofed in.
Edith Leete, with whom I walked, seemed much interested in learning
what appeared to be entirely new to her, that in the stormy weather
the streets of the Boston of my day had been impassable, except to
persons protected by umbrellas, boots, and heavy clothing. "Were
sidewalk coverings not used at all?" she asked. They were used, I
explained, but in a scattered and utterly unsystematic way, being
private enterprises. She said to me that at the present time all the
streets were provided against inclement weather in the manner I saw,
the apparatus being rolled out of the way when it was unnecessary. She
intimated that it would be considered an extraordinary imbecility to
permit the weather to have any effect on the social movements of the
people.

Dr. Leete, who was walking ahead, overhearing something of our talk,
turned to say that the difference between the age of individualism and
that of concert was well characterized by the fact that, in the
nineteenth century, when it rained, the people of Boston put up three
hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth
century they put up one umbrella over all the heads.

As we walked on, Edith said, "The private umbrella is father's
favorite figure to illustrate the old way when everybody lived for
himself and his family. There is a nineteenth century painting at the
Art Gallery representing a crowd of people in the rain, each one
holding his umbrella over himself and his wife, and giving his
neighbors the drippings, which he claims must have been meant by the
artist as a satire on his times."

We now entered a large building into which a stream of people was
pouring. I could not see the front, owing to the awning, but, if in
correspondence with the interior, which was even finer than the store
I visited the day before, it would have been magnificent. My companion
said that the sculptured group over the entrance was especially
admired. Going up a grand staircase we walked some distance along a
broad corridor with many doors opening upon it. At one of these, which
bore my host's name, we turned in, and I found myself in an elegant
dining-room containing a table for four. Windows opened on a courtyard
where a fountain played to a great height and music made the air
electric.

"You seem at home here," I said, as we seated ourselves at table, and
Dr. Leete touched an annunciator.

"This is, in fact, a part of our house, slightly detached from the
rest," he replied. "Every family in the ward has a room set apart in
this great building for its permanent and exclusive use for a small
annual rental. For transient guests and individuals there is
accommodation on another floor. If we expect to dine here, we put in
our orders the night before, selecting anything in market, according
to the daily reports in the papers. The meal is as expensive or as
simple as we please, though of course everything is vastly cheaper as
well as better than it would be if prepared at home. There is actually
nothing which our people take more interest in than the perfection of
the catering and cooking done for them, and I admit that we are a
little vain of the success that has been attained by this branch of
the service. Ah, my dear Mr. West, though other aspects of your
civilization were more tragical, I can imagine that none could have
been more depressing than the poor dinners you had to eat, that is,
all of you who had not great wealth."

"You would have found none of us disposed to disagree with you on that
point," I said.

The waiter, a fine-looking young fellow, wearing a slightly
distinctive uniform, now made his appearance. I observed him closely,
as it was the first time I had been able to study particularly the
bearing of one of the enlisted members of the industrial army. This
young man, I knew from what I had been told, must be highly educated,
and the equal, socially and in all respects, of those he served. But
it was perfectly evident that to neither side was the situation in the
slightest degree embarrassing. Dr. Leete addressed the young man in a
tone devoid, of course, as any gentleman's would be, of
superciliousness, but at the same time not in any way deprecatory,
while the manner of the young man was simply that of a person intent
on discharging correctly the task he was engaged in, equally without
familiarity or obsequiousness. It was, in fact, the manner of a
soldier on duty, but without the military stiffness. As the youth left
the room, I said, "I cannot get over my wonder at seeing a young man
like that serving so contentedly in a menial position."

"What is that word 'menial'? I never heard it," said Edith.

"It is obsolete now," remarked her father. "If I understand it
rightly, it applied to persons who performed particularly disagreeable
and unpleasant tasks for others, and carried with it an implication of
contempt. Was it not so, Mr. West?"

"That is about it," I said. "Personal service, such as waiting on
tables, was considered menial, and held in such contempt, in my day,
that persons of culture and refinement would suffer hardship before
condescending to it."

"What a strangely artificial idea," exclaimed Mrs. Leete, wonderingly.

"And yet these services had to be rendered," said Edith.

"Of course," I replied. "But we imposed them on the poor, and those
who had no alternative but starvation."

"And increased the burden you imposed on them by adding your
contempt," remarked Dr. Leete.

"I don't think I clearly understand," said Edith. "Do you mean that
you permitted people to do things for you which you despised them for
doing, or that you accepted services from them which you would have
been unwilling to render them? You can't surely mean that, Mr. West?"

I was obliged to tell her that the fact was just as she had stated.
Dr. Leete, however, came to my relief.

"To understand why Edith is surprised," he said, "you must know that
nowadays it is an axiom of ethics that to accept a service from
another which we would be unwilling to return in kind, if need were,
is like borrowing with the intention of not repaying, while to enforce
such a service by taking advantage of the poverty or necessity of a
person would be an outrage like forcible robbery. It is the worst
thing about any system which divides men, or allows them to be
divided, into classes and castes, that it weakens the sense of a
common humanity. Unequal distribution of wealth, and, still more
effectually, unequal opportunities of education and culture, divided
society in your day into classes which in many respects regarded each
other as distinct races. There is not, after all, such a difference as
might appear between our ways of looking at this question of service.
Ladies and gentlemen of the cultured class in your day would no more
have permitted persons of their own class to render them services they
would scorn to return than we would permit anybody to do so. The poor
and the uncultured, however, they looked upon as of another kind from
themselves. The equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture which
all persons now enjoy have simply made us all members of one class,
which corresponds to the most fortunate class with you. Until this
equality of condition had come to pass, the idea of the solidarity of
humanity, the brother hood of all men, could never have become the
real conviction and practical principle of action it is nowadays. In
your day the same phrases were indeed used, but they were phrases
merely."

"Do the waiters, also, volunteer?"

"No," replied Dr. Leete. "The waiters are young men in the
unclassified grade of the industrial army who are assignable to all
sorts of miscellaneous occupations not requiring special skill.
Waiting on table is one of these, and every young recruit is given a
taste of it. I myself served as a waiter for several months in this
very dining-house some forty years ago. Once more you must remember
that there is recognized no sort of difference between the dignity of
the different sorts of work required by the nation. The individual is
never regarded, nor regards himself, as the servant of those he
serves, nor is he in any way dependent upon them. It is always the
nation which he is serving. No difference is recognized between a
waiter's functions and those of any other worker. The fact that his is
a personal service is indifferent from our point of view. So is a
doctor's. I should as soon expect our waiter to-day to look down on me
because I served him as a doctor, as think of looking down on him
because he serves me as a waiter."

After dinner my entertainers conducted me about the building, of which
the extent, the magnificent architecture and richness of
embellishment, astonished me. It seemed that it was not merely a
dining-hall, but likewise a great pleasure-house and social rendezvous
of the quarter, and no appliance of entertainment or recreation seemed
lacking.

"You find illustrated here," said Dr. Leete, when I had expressed my
admiration, "what I said to you in our first conversation, when you
were looking out over the city, as to the splendor of our public and
common life as compared with the simplicity of our private and home
life, and the contrast which, in this respect, the twentieth bears to
the nineteenth century. To save ourselves useless burdens, we have as
little gear about us at home as is consistent with comfort, but the
social side of our life is ornate and luxurious beyond anything the
world ever knew before. All the industrial and professional guilds
have clubhouses as extensive as this, as well as country, mountain,
and seaside houses for sport and rest in vacations."

    NOTE. In the latter part of the nineteenth century it became
    a practice of needy young men at some of the colleges of the
    country to earn a little money for their term bills by
    serving as waiters on tables at hotels during the long summer
    vacation. It was claimed, in reply to critics who expressed
    the prejudices of the time in asserting that persons
    voluntarily following such an occupation could not be
    gentlemen, that they were entitled to praise for vindicating,
    by their example, the dignity of all honest and necessary
    labor. The use of this argument illustrates a common
    confusion in thought on the part of my former contemporaries.
    The business of waiting on tables was in no more need of
    defense than most of the other ways of getting a living in
    that day, but to talk of dignity attaching to labor of any
    sort under the system then prevailing was absurd. There is no
    way in which selling labor for the highest price it will
    fetch is more dignified than selling goods for what can be
    got. Both were commercial transactions to be judged by the
    commercial standard. By setting a price in money on his
    service, the worker accepted the money measure for it, and
    renounced all clear claim to be judged by any other. The
    sordid taint which this necessity imparted to the noblest and
    the highest sorts of service was bitterly resented by
    generous souls, but there was no evading it. There was no
    exemption, however transcendent the quality of one's service,
    from the necessity of haggling for its price in the
    market-place. The physician must sell his healing and the
    apostle his preaching like the rest. The prophet, who had
    guessed the meaning of God, must dicker for the price of the
    revelation, and the poet hawk his visions in printers' row.
    If I were asked to name the most distinguishing felicity of
    this age, as compared to that in which I first saw the light,
    I should say that to me it seems to consist in the dignity
    you have given to labor by refusing to set a price upon it
    and abolishing the market-place forever. By requiring of
    every man his best you have made God his task-master, and by
    making honor the sole reward of achievement you have imparted
    to all service the distinction peculiar in my day to the
    soldier's.

 Leete explains that there is no longer any need for money to facilitate exchanges because the nation is the only producer and distributor of goods and services. Each year, the nation's wealth is divided evenly. Each citizen is issued a credit card for his share of the nation's wealth to purchase the goods and services he desires. Credit is not transferable, so there is no buying and selling between private citizens. The credit is more than enough to fulfill a citizen's needs, but there are provisions to manage the credit of those who spend recklessly. At the end of the year, any surplus credit returns to the nation. All citizens perform the same amount of labor, because the nation expects every citizen to do his best with his skills and abilities. Julian asks why the average citizen would work so hard if he is guaranteed to receive the same pay as anyone else. Leete is surprised that Julian seems to think that only fear of poverty and love of luxury can motivate men to do their best. He reminds Julian that honor is also a motivation, pointing out the heroic acts of military men as an example. Now, a citizen's labor for the nation is the only means to gain honor and distinction. Each worker is assigned a grade and a class within his grade in recognition of his skill and effort. At fixed intervals, every worker is re-evaluated. Workers of higher standing are given first choice as to which part of their chosen industry to work in. For small, but still praiseworthy performance, there are numerous prizes and awards. Likewise, there are proportional punishments for those who fail to do their duty. Workers of higher grades are officers in the industrial army, and their performance is measured by the work of the men under their command. Those who are handicapped are given tasks suitable to their abilities. Those who cannot perform any tasks are not required to work. Julian is astonished that those who do not work can still claim an equal share of the nation's wealth as a right. Leete replies that even able-bodied men in a society derive benefits from the labor and skills of others. Julian accompanies Edith on a shopping trip to her ward's distribution center, a beautiful, impressive public building. The nation tries to ensure that every citizen is within walking distance of a distribution center. After inspecting an astonishing variety of samples, Edith gives her order to the clerk, who transmits it by vacuum tube to Boston's central storehouse. Her goods will be delivered to her house before she gets home. The selection of goods is exactly the same in every distribution center, and even isolated villages are connected to storehouses by the tube system. Edith tells Julian that a citizen has 24-hour access to professionally-performed music, transmitted over a telephone connection. Julian is astonished at the wide selection of music on the day's program. Julian no longer suffers from insomnia, because he falls asleep with the aid of the musical telephone. In the morning, Leete explains to Julian that many countries have converted to the same industrial system as the United States. Those that have not are slowly being transformed. An international council regulates the trade between nations. A country cannot charge more than it charges its own citizens for a good or service. International debts are averaged and settled every few years to prevent large trade imbalances from developing. Moreover, citizens are free to emigrate to other countries. Tourists trade their credit for cards of the country they visit. Afterwards, Edith shows Julian the family library, full of classics by the writers of Julian's day. Julian joins the Leetes for dinner at a public kitchen. During the walk, a fierce storm overtakes Boston, but the pedestrians are protected by a large covering over the sidewalks, a public umbrella of sorts. Edith Leete is surprised to discover that, in Julian's day, certain jobs, such as that of a waiter, were considered "menial." Now that everyone belongs to the same class, there are no such attitudes.

