Chapter: I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. "What!"
you say, "eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen
fifty-seven, of course." I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was
about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after
Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east
wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period
marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the
present year of grace, 2000.

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

But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should
the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render
service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum
of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you
will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been
exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however,
was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. It
was, in fact, much larger now that three generations had been
supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of
use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like
magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily
lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting
the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. The man who
had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live
on the income of his investments. To explain at this point how the
ancient methods of industry made this possible would delay us too
much. I shall only stop now to say that interest on investments was a
species of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in
industry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able to
levy. It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems so
unnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was never
criticised by your ancestors. It had been the effort of law-givers and
prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least to
limit it to the smallest possible rate. All these efforts had,
however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the ancient
social organizations prevailed. At the time of which I write, the
latter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally given
up trying to regulate the subject at all.

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

But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very
luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of
their brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that
their own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion for
fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes;
commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who
had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place
in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep
hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their
agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger,
the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a
very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable
displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the
passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope,
exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible
compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while
others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and
injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should
be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the
specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not,
indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always some
danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would
lose their seats.

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

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

The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular
hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared,
that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled
at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher
order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems
unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that
very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing about
the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the
ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their
hands, began to fall under its influence. As for those whose parents
and grandparents before them had been so fortunate as to keep their
seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential
difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was
absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling
for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical
compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can
offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my
own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.

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

My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. "Handsome she might
have been," I hear them saying, "but graceful never, in the costumes
which were the fashion at that period, when the head covering was a
dizzy structure a foot tall, and the almost incredible extension of
the skirt behind by means of artificial contrivances more thoroughly
dehumanized the form than any former device of dressmakers. Fancy any
one graceful in such a costume!" The point is certainly well taken,
and I can only reply that while the ladies of the twentieth century
are lovely demonstrations of the effect of appropriate drapery in
accenting feminine graces, my recollection of their great-grandmothers
enables me to maintain that no deformity of costume can wholly
disguise them.

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

The reader who observes the dates alluded to will of course recognize
in these disturbances of industry the first and incoherent phase of
the great movement which ended in the establishment of the modern
industrial system with all its social consequences. This is all so
plain in the retrospect that a child can understand it, but not being
prophets, we of that day had no clear idea what was happening to us.
What we did see was that industrially the country was in a very queer
way. The relation between the workingman and the employer, between
labor and capital, appeared in some unaccountable manner to have
become dislocated. The working classes had quite suddenly and very
generally become infected with a profound discontent with their
condition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only
knew how to go about it. On every side, with one accord, they
preferred demands for higher pay, shorter hours, better dwellings,
better educational advantages, and a share in the refinements and
luxuries of life, demands which it was impossible to see the way to
granting unless the world were to become a great deal richer than it
then was. Though they knew something of what they wanted, they knew
nothing of how to accomplish it, and the eager enthusiasm with which
they thronged about any one who seemed likely to give them any light
on the subject lent sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, some
of whom had little enough light to give. However chimerical the
aspirations of the laboring classes might be deemed, the devotion
with which they supported one another in the strikes, which were their
chief weapon, and the sacrifices which they underwent to carry them
out left no doubt of their dead earnestness.

As to the final outcome of the labor troubles, which was the phrase by
which the movement I have described was most commonly referred to, the
opinions of the people of my class differed according to individual
temperament. The sanguine argued very forcibly that it was in the very
nature of things impossible that the new hopes of the workingmen could
be satisfied, simply because the world had not the wherewithal to
satisfy them. It was only because the masses worked very hard and
lived on short commons that the race did not starve outright, and no
considerable improvement in their condition was possible while the
world, as a whole, remained so poor. It was not the capitalists whom
the laboring men were contending with, these maintained, but the
iron-bound environment of humanity, and it was merely a question of
the thickness of their skulls when they would discover the fact and
make up their minds to endure what they could not cure.

The less sanguine admitted all this. Of course the workingmen's
aspirations were impossible of fulfillment for natural reasons, but
there were grounds to fear that they would not discover this fact
until they had made a sad mess of society They had the votes and the
power to do so if they pleased, and their leaders meant they should.
Some of these desponding observers went so far as to predict an
impending social cataclysm. Humanity, they argued, having climbed to
the top round of the ladder of civilization, was about to take a
header into chaos, after which it would doubtless pick itself up, turn
round, and begin to climb again. Repeated experiences of this sort in
historic and prehistoric times possibly accounted for the puzzling
bumps on the human cranium. Human history, like all great movements,
was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of
indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination,
with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet
better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and
sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the
perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its
nether goal in the regions of chaos.

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

The nervous tension of the public mind could not have been more
strikingly illustrated than it was by the alarm resulting from the
talk of a small band of men who called themselves anarchists, and
proposed to terrify the American people into adopting their ideas by
threats of violence, as if a mighty nation which had but just put down
a rebellion of half its own numbers, in order to maintain its
political system, were likely to adopt a new social system out of
fear.

As one of the wealthy, with a large stake in the existing order of
things, I naturally shared the apprehensions of my class. The
particular grievance I had against the working classes at the time of
which I write, on account of the effect of their strikes in postponing
my wedded bliss, no doubt lent a special animosity to my feeling
toward them.

 The narrator, Julian West, announces that he was first in Boston in 1857. He realizes that his readers of the year 2000 will be shocked that he is a thirty year-old man asserting that he was alive in 1857. At that time, the civilization of the present day did not exist. Society was divided into four classes or nations, including the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. He was rich and educated, so he "derived the means of support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return." His ancestors had lived the same way, and he expected that his descendants would, too. His grandfather had accumulated some wealth, which his family had lived on ever since. The original sum was not that large, but investments had made the money grow. This "mystery of use without consumption" will seem odd to the present readers, but it was common during Julian West's time. People had been trying to regulate interest for generations, but by the late nineteenth century, they had largely given up. To give his readers an idea of his society, Julian West compares it to a big coach. Most of the people were harnessed to it and forced to drag it along a rough road. Some people sat on the coach and never got down, despite the struggles of those below to pull it over the rough spots in the road. The ones riding had a nice time, which they spent discussing the people below. A seat on the top was in great demand but very hard to attain, because those on top were allowed to reserve their seats for whomever they liked, usually their children. But the seats were unstable and often people would be thrown from them and have to pick up a rope and begin pulling the coach. Julian admits that the reader will wonder how the people on top could be so unfeeling about those below, especially when their own weight added to the burden of their fellow human beings. In fact, they often expressed great sympathy for the workers below them. When things got very bad, they would call out encouragement or promise rewards in the next life, and many of them got together and contributed money to buy salves and medication for the injured. However, the main effect of seeing the sufferings of those below was to increase the value of the seats above. While people of the twentieth century will find all this hard to believe, they must take into account the two facts that supported this state of affairs. First, people believed there was no other way to run society and second, those on top believed they were different from and better than those who pulled the coach, and they therefore deserved their seats on top. In 1887 Julian West is thirty and engaged to Edith Bartlett. Her family is also wealthy. They are to be married as soon as their house is built. Each class of people, whom Julian West calls nations, lives in separate areas of the city. The delay of the completion of his house is caused by labor strikes. Strikes had been common from the time of a great business crisis in 1873. Julian West knows his readers will recognize these dates as the first stages of what was to become the modern industrial system. The people of the time, however, were confused about what was happening to them. The relation between worker and owner had suddenly become problematic, and workers had the idea that they could improve their conditions. They demand higher pay, better housing, shorter hours, and the so forth. People of the wealthy class all agree that there is no way to give the workers what they want because there is not enough wealth in the world to satisfy them. They believe either that the workers will one day realize this and accept their lot in life, or that the workers will make a mess of things after gaining so much power. The latter is an extreme opinion, but one that Julian West often hears in his circle of friends. The ruling class is especially frightened by the anarchists. Julian West is no different from his frightened contemporaries, and his animosity toward the workers increases when his wedding plans are delayed.

