 Chapter 5 of With Her In Our Land This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org With Her In Our Land by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Chapter 5 My Country In through the Golden Gate we steamed at last, one glorious morning. Calm Tammope's basking on the northern side, and the billowing city rising tumultuously on the southern, with the brilliant beauty of the fair glowing on the water's edge. I had been through before, and showed her through the glass as we passed, the seal rocks and the cliff house with the great sutro baths beside it, and then the jewelled tower, the streaming banners of that wonder city of a year. It was in February. There had been rain, and now the luminous rich green of the blazing southern spring was cloaking every sloping shore. The long bay stretched wide on either hand. The fair-bay city's opposite embroidered the western shore for miles. San Francisco rose before us. Elador stood by my side, holding my arm with tense excitement. Your country, dear! she said. How beautiful it is! I shall love it! I was loving it myself at that moment, as I never had before. Behind me was that long journey of us three adventurous explorers, our longer imprisonment, and then these travels of ours through war-torn Europe, and the slow dark reaches of the Oriental civilization. It certainly looks good to me, I told her. We spent many days at the great exposition, and others, later, at the still-lovely, a smaller one at San Diego. Days of great happiness to both of us, and real pride to me. Later on, I lost this feeling, replacing it with a growing discomfort. I suppose everyone loves and honors his own country, practically everyone, and we Americans, so younger people, so buoyantly carried along on the flood of easy geographical expansion, so suddenly increased in numbers, not by natural growth of our own stock, but by crowding injections of alien blood, by vast hordes of low-grade laborers whose ignorant masses made our own ignorant masses feel superior to all the earth. We Americans are almost as boastful as the still-newer federation of Germany. I had thought myself a sociologist, an ethnologist, one able to judge fairly from wide knowledge, and yet, with all my knowledge, with all my lucid criticism of my country's eras and shortcomings, I had kept an unshaken inner conviction of our superiority. Elador had shaken it. It was not that she had found any fault with the institutions of my beloved land, quite the contrary. She believed it faultless, or nearly so. She expected too much. Knowing her, as I now did, becoming more and more familiar with the amazing lucidity and fairness of her mind, with its orderly marshalling of well-knit facts and the swinging searchlight of perception which covered every point in her field of vision, I had a strange helpless sense of coming to judgment. In her land, I had never fully realised the quality of mind developed by their cultural system. Some of its power and clarity was of course plain to us, but we could no more measure that mind than a child can measure its teachers. I had lived with it now, watched it work, seen it in relation to others, to those of learned men and women of various nations. There was no ostentation about Elador's intellectual processes. She made no display of learning, did not contradict and argue. Sometimes in questions of fact, if it seemed essential to the matter under discussion, she would quote authority and opposition, but for the most part she listened, asking a few questions to satisfy herself as to the point of view of her interlocutor. I used to note with appreciative delight how these innocent almost irrelevant questions could bring out answers, each one of which was a branching guidepost as to the mind of the speaker. Sometimes just two would show him to be capable of believing flat contradictions, or merely one would indicate a limitation of knowledge or an attitude of prejudice, which placed the man at once. These were not smart questions, with a flippantly triumphant and all too logical demand at the end, leaving the victim confused and angry. He never realised what was being done to him. How do you have patience with these chumps? I asked her. They seem like children in your hands, and yet you don't hurt them a bit. Perhaps that is why she answered gravely. We are so used to children at home, and when a whole country is always more or less teaching children, why it makes us patient I suppose. What good would it do to humiliate these people? They all know things more than I do, about most things. They may know more about some things, but it's their mental processes that seem so muddy, so sticky, so slow and fumbling somehow. You're right there Van. It impresses me very much. There is an enormous fund of knowledge in the minds of your people. I mean any of these people I have met, but the minds themselves are, to me, astonishing. The Oriental mind is far more highly developed than the Occidental, in some lines, but as serenely unconscious of its limits as the other is. What strikes me most of all is the lack of connection between all this knowledge they have accumulated and the way they live. I'm hoping to find it wholly different here. You Americans I understand are the people who do things. Before I go on with Ellador's impressions of America, I want to explain a little further, lest my native-born fellow citizens resent to bitterly her ultimate criticisms. She perhaps would not have published those criticisms at all, but I can now. The sensitiveness I felt at first, the hurt, pride, the honest pain, as my pet ideals inexorably changed colour under that searchlight of hers, do what I would to maintain them in their earlier glory. All this is outgrown. I love my country, better than I ever did before. I understand it better. Probably that accounts for the increased tenderness and patience. But, if ever a country needed to wake up and look itself in the face, it is this one. Ellador, in that amazing little pocket history she compiled, had set up the order of exercises in our development and placed the nation's induced sequence as contributors. Running over its neat pages, with the outline maps, the charts with their varied washes of colour, showing this or that current of tendency and pressure of condition, one gathered at once a clear bird's-eye view of what humanity had been doing all this time. She speculated, sagely with me, as to what trifling deflection of type, what variation in environment was responsible for the divigation of races, especially those of quite recent common stock. But in the little book was no speculation, merely the simple facts. Referring to it, she could show in a few moments what special influences made Egypt, Egypt, and differentiated Assyria from Chaldea. She shook her head sadly over those long early ages. They were slow to learn, weren't they, she'd say. Never seemed to put two and two together at all. I suppose that peculiar rest of the mental processes was due first to mere social inertia, with its piled-up weight of custom, and then much more to religion. That finality, that believing, seemed to put an end to real thinking and learning. But, my dear, interposed, they were learned surely. The ancient priests had practically all the learning, and in the dark ages the church in Europe was all that kept learning alive at all. Do you mean learning, dear, or just remembering? she asked. What did the medieval church learn? This was a distinction I had never thought of. Of course what we have always called learning was knowing what went before, long before, and mostly what people had written. Still, I made out something of a case about the study of alchemy and medicine, which she gravely admitted. It remained true that the church, any church in any period, has set its face like a flint against the people's learning anything new, and as we commonly know, had promptly punished the most progressive. It is a wonder to me, said Elador tenderly, that you have done as well as you have, with all these awful handicaps. But you, America, you have a different opportunity. I don't suppose you quite realise yourselves what a marvellous difference there is between you and every other people on earth. Then she pointed out, briefly, how by the start in religious rebellion we had set free the mind from its heaviest shackles. By throwing off the monarchy and aristocracy we had escaped another weight, how our practically unlimited area and fluctuating condition made custom but a name, and how the mixture of races broke the current of heredity. All this we had gone over on the steamer, sitting by the hour in our long chairs, watching the big smooth swells roll by, and talking of my country. You have reason to be proud, she would say. No people on earth ever had such a chance. I used to feel misgivings then, especially after Hawaii. I tried to arrange some satisfying defence for our treatment of the Asiatics, the Negroes, Mexico. I thought of all that I could to excuse the open evils that I knew, in temperance, prostitution, graft, lynching. I began to see more holes in the bright fabric of Columbia's robe than I had ever noticed before, and bigger ones. But at that I did not anticipate. We spent several weeks in California. I took her to see Shasta, the Yosemite, the cedars of Monterey, the big trees, the imperial valley. All through the country she poured out constant praises of the boundless loveliness of the land, the air, the sunshine, even the rain. Rain did not depress Elador. She was a forester. And she read avidly. She read John Muir with rapture. How I should have loved him, she said. She read the brief history of the state, and some books about it, Ramona for instance. She visited and talked with some leading Japanese and Chinaman. And she read steadily with a fixed, non-committal face, the newspapers. If I asked her anything about it at all, she would pour forth honest delight in the flowers and fruit, the beauty and brightness of the land. If I pressed for more, she would say, wait, Van Deer, give me time. I've only just come. I don't know enough yet to talk. But I, knowing how quickly she learned, and how accurately she related new knowledge to old, watched her face with growing dismay. In Europe I had seen that beautiful face pale with horror. In Asia, sicken with loathing. Now, after going around the world, after reaching this youngest land, this land of hope and pride, of wealth and power, I saw that face I loved so well, set in sad lines of disappointment, fairly age before my eyes. She was still cheerful with me, still happy out of doors, and her heart rose as I had hoped it would among the mountains, on the far-spread, lustrous deserts, in that wordless wonder, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. But as she read, as she sat thinking, I could see the light die out of her face, and a depressing look creep over it, a look of agonized disappointment, yet of patience too, and a courageous, deep determination. It was as if a mother had learned that her baby was an idiot. As we drew eastward, and the cities grew larger, noisier, blacker, her distress increased. She began to urge me to play games with her, to read aloud from books she loved, and especially to talk of her land. I was willing, more than willing. As I saw my country through her eyes, as I saw its effect on her, I became less and less inclined, indeed less able, to discuss with her it. But the tension grew, her suffering increased, until I told her, as I had that terrible night in Europe, that she must talk to me about it. You see, you will have to, whether you want to or not, I argued. You cannot take all America to task about itself. You would get yourself disliked, besides, if you don't want to tell them about your country, and if you pitch into theirs, they will insist on knowing where you come from quite naturally. I can't bear to see you getting more and more distressed in saying nothing about it. Besides, it is barely possible that I might offer some palliation or explanation of some of the worst things. What do you consider the worst things? She asked casually enough. But I was already wise enough to see at once that we might not agree on definition. Suppose we do this, I suggested. Here you are, as extra mundane as a Martian. You were like an investigating committee from another world. Quite apart from my love for you, my sympathy with you, my admiration for you. Yes, all serious and sincere, my dear. I do appreciate this unparalleled opportunity to get a real outsider's point of view. This is something that never happened before, you see. Marco Polo came nearest to it, perhaps, when he went poking into the Asiatic Wonderland. But these old adventurers of ours, whatever their hardships, never took it so hard as you do. They enjoyed satisfying their curiosity. They always thought their own birthplace infinitely superior, and the more inferior they found other places, the more they enjoyed it. Now with you, it seems to hurt your feelings most horribly. I wish you could somehow detach yourself from it, so that you could learn and not suffer. You are quite right, dear boy. It is most unphilosophical of me. I suppose it is largely a result of our long period of lovingness at home, that things strike so harshly on my mind. And partly you're being a woman, don't you think? I urged. You see, yours is a feminine culture and naturally more sensitive, isn't it? Perhaps that is it, she said, pondering. The very first thing that strikes me in this great, rich, lovely land of yours is its unmotherliness. We were, of course, used to seeing everything taken care of. But surely it was worse, far worse, in the other countries, wasn't it? She smiled tenderly and sadly. Yes, Van, it was. But here, well, doubtless I expected too much. But isn't there some comfort in the contrast? I asked eagerly. Here is not the petrified oppression, the degradation of women that so sickened you in Asia, and here is not the wild brutality of war that so horrified you in Europe. No, not either of those, she slowly agreed. But you see, I had warning that Europe was at war, and heard red about it a little. It was like going into a slaughterhouse for the first time. Then, all I learned in my studies in Europe prepared me to find what I did find in Asia, and Asia was in some ways better than I had been told, in some ways worse. But here, oh, Van. That look of grey anguish had settled on her face again. She seized my arms, held me fast, searched my face as if I was withholding something. Big, slow tears welled over and dropped. This is the top of the tree, Van. This is the last young nation, beginning over again in a new world, a new world. Here was everything to make life richly happy, everything. And you had all the dreadful record of the past to guide you, to teach you at least what not to do. You had courage, you had independence, you had intelligence, education, opportunity, and such splendid principles to start with, such high ideals. And then all kinds of people coming, oh surely, surely, surely this should be the crown of the world. Why, Van, Europe was like a man with with delirium tremens. Asia was like something gnarled and twisted with hopeless age. But America is a splendid child with, she covered her face with her hands. I couldn't stand this. I was an American and she was my wife. I took her in my arms. Look her, you blessed her, lander, I said. I'm not going to have my country wiped off the map in disgrace. You must remember that all judgment is comparative. You cannot compare any other country with your country for two reasons. First, your long isolation. And second, that miraculous manlessness of yours. This world of ours has been in more or less intercourse in exchange for many more thousands of years than her land has lived. We Americans were not a new created race. We were just English and Dutch and French and Scandinavian and Italian and so on, just everybody. We brought with us our inherited tendencies of course, all of them. And while we did make a clean break with some of the old evils, we had no revelation as to a perfect social method. You're expecting too much. Don't you see, I went on for she said nothing, that a splendid child may be a pretty bad child sometimes and may have the measles pretty hard and yet not be hopeless. She raised her wet face from my shoulder and her own warm loving smile illuminated it once more. You're right, Van. You're wholly right, she agreed. I was most unreasonable, most unwise. It is just a piece of the same world, a lot of pieces, mixed samples on a new piece of ground. And it was a magnificent undertaking. I can see that. And you are young, aren't you? Oh, Van dear, you do make it easier. I held her very close for a while. This journey among strange lands had brought me one deep joy. Ellador had grown to need me as she never did in her own peaceful home. You see, dearest, I said, you have a dual mission. You are to study all about the world and take your knowledge back with you. But all you need of it there is to decide whether you'll come out and play with us or not, or that any more of us come in. Then you have what I as a citizen of the rest of the world, rather the biggest part of it, consider a more important duty. If that Herland mind of yours can find out what ails us, and how we are to mend it, if your little country with its strange experiment can bring aid in solving the problems of the world, that is what I call a historic mission. How does that strike you, Mrs. Jennings? It was good to see her rise to it. That wonderful mother heart, which all those women had, seemed to shine out like a sunrise. I went on delighted with my success. I'll just forget I'm an American, I said. This country is the child. I'm not its father or anything. I'm just a doctor, hygienist, an investigator. You're another, and a bigger one. Now I understand that you find the child is in a bad way. Worse off than I thought it was. To judge from your expression there on several occasions, you think it is a very dirty child, a careless child, a wasteful child, with a bad temper, and no manners. Am I right? Not about the temper, dear. Petish at times, but not vindictive, and very, very kind. Van, I think I've been too hard on the child. I'm quite ashamed. Yes, we are two investigators. I'm so glad there are two. She stopped and looked at me with an expression I never saw enough of, that I used to long for in vain at first. That look as if she needed me. No matter what we have in her land, she said slowly, we miss this, this united feeling. It grows, Van. I feel more and more as if, somehow or other, we were really blended. We have nothing just like it. No, you haven't, with all your paradise, so let's allow some good things in your case, and particularly in this case of the bad child, and we'll pitch in and work out a diagnosis, won't we, and then prescribe. We pitched in. First, she had insisted on knowing the whole country. We made a sort of spiral, beginning on the outside, and circulated south, east, north, west, and so over again, till we wound ourselves up into Pica. By that time, we had been in every state, in all the principal cities, and in many of those tiny towns, which are more truly indicative of the spirit of the community than the larger ones. When we were interested in a given place, we would stay a while. There was nothing to hurry us, and when Elidor showed signs of wear and tear, there was always some sweet, wild country to fly to and rest. She sampled both seacoasts, the Great Lakes and some little ones, many a long winding river, mountains wooded, and mountains bare, the restful plains, the shadowy cypress swamps. Her prompt reaction to the beauty of the real country was always beneficial, and, to my great delight, she grew to love it, and even to feel a pride in its vast extent and variety, just as I did. We both admitted that it was a most illegitimate ground for pride, but we both felt it. As she saw more of the cities and of the people, by mere usage she grew accustomed to what had grieved her most at first. Also, I suggested a method which she gladly used and found most comforting, in which we classified all the evils as transient, and concerned ourselves merely with finding out how they came there and how to remove them. Some of these things you'll just outgrow, she said relievedly. Some are already outgrown. America is not nearly so cocky as Dickens found her. She is now in an almost morbid attitude of self distrust and condemnation, but she'll outgrow that too. It was a great relief to me to have her push through that period of shock disappointment so readily. But of course the vigor of her mental constitution made it possible for her to throw off a trouble like that more easily than we can do it. She soon devised methods of our own, of acquiring further information. In her capacity of a traveller, and recently come from the seat of war to say nothing of the Orient, she found frequent opportunity for addressing women's clubs, churches and forums of various kinds, and so coming in touch with large bodies of people and their reactions. I am learning to realise the popular mind, she said. I can already distinguish between the different parts of the country. And oh, van! She laughed a little, caught her breath over, and added with an odd restraint. I'm getting to know the women. Why do you say it like that? I inquired. She looked at me in what I might describe as 40 ways at once. It was funny. There was such an odd mixture of pride and shame, of hope and disillusionment, of a high faith and a profound distrust. I can stand it, she protested. The child is by no means hopeless. In fact, I begin to think it is a very promising child van. But oh, how it does behave! And she laughed. I was a little resentful. We were such good chums by this time, we had played together such a lot and studied together so widely. We had such a safe foundation of mutual experience that I began to dare to make fun of my strange princess now and then, and she took it most graciously. There's one thing I won't stand for, I told her solemnly. You can call my country a desert. My people incompetent, dishonest, wasteful, and careless to a degree. You can blag at our agriculture, horticulture, abhoriculture, floriculture, viticulture, and apiculture, so you suggested with a serious face. You can divide our architecture and make trivial objections to the use of sot as a civic decoration. But there is one thing I, as an American man, will not stand. You mustn't criticise our women. I won't, she said meekly, a twinkle in her eye. I won't say one word about them, dear, until you ask me to. We're at I knew that my doom was sealed once more. Could I rest without knowing what she thought of them? End of chapter five, recording by Kate M. Chapter six of With Her In Our Land. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. With Her In Our Land by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Chapter six, the diagnosis. How are you getting on with the case, Mrs. J? I asked Elador one evening when she seemed rather discouraged. What symptoms are worrying you most now? She looked at me with wide, anxious eyes. Too much in earnest to mind the Mrs. J, which usually rather teased her. It's an awfully important case, Van, dear. She answered soberly. And a serious one. Very serious, I think. I've been reading a lot, had to, to get background and perspective. And I feel as if I understood a good deal better. Still, you helped me ever so much by saying that you were not new people. Just mixed Europeans. But the new country and the new conditions began to make you all into a new people, only... These pauses are quite terrifying, I protested. Won't you explain your ominous still and sinister only? She smiled a little. Why, the still should have been followed by the amount which I did not understand, and the only... She stopped again. Well, out with it, my dear. Only what? Only you have done it too fast and too much in the dark. You weren't conscious, you see. Not conscious. America? Not conscious? Not self-conscious, I mean, Van. This I scouted entirely, till she added patiently. Perhaps I should say nationally conscious or socially conscious. You were plunged into an enormous social enterprise. A huge swift, violent experiment. The current of social evolution burst forth over here, like a subterranean river finding an outlet. Things that the stratified crust of Asia could not let through, and the heavy shell of European culture could not either, just burst forth over here and swept you along. Democracy had been accumulating through all the centuries. The other nations forced it back, held it down. It boiled over in France, but the lid was clapped on again for a while. Here it could pour forward and it poured. Then all the people of the same period of social development wanted to come to and did. Lots of them. That was inevitable. All that America means in this sense is a new phase of social development. And anyone can be an American who belongs to it. Guess you were right so far, Mrs. Doctor. Go ahead. But while this was happening to you, you were doing things yourselves. Some of them in line with your real position and movement, some dead against it. For instance, your religion. Religion against what? Expound further. Against democracy. You don't mean the Christian religion, do you? I urged. Rather shocked. Oh no, indeed. That would have been a great help to the world if they had ever taken it up. I was always entertained and somewhat startled by Elador's detached view. She knew the same facts, so familiar to us, but they had not the same connotations. I think Jesus was simply wonderful. She went on. What a pity it was he did not live longer. This was a new suggestion to me. Of course, I no longer accepted that pitiful old idea of his being a prearranged sacrifice to his own father, but I never deliberately thought of his having continued alive and its possible effects. He is supposed to have been executed at about the age of 33, was he not? She went on. Think of it, hardly a grown man. He should have had 30 or 40 more years of teaching. It would all have become clearer, more consistent. He would have worked things out, explained them, made people understand. He would have made clear to them what they were to do. It was an awful loss. I said nothing at all, but watched the sweet earnest face, the wise far-seeing eyes, and really agreed with her, though in my mind rose a confused dim, throng of horrified ejections, belonging not to my own mind, but to those of other people. Tell me how you mean that our religion was against democracy, I persisted. It was so personal, she said, and so unjust. There must have crept into it in early times a lot of the Buddhist philosophy, either direct or filtered, the acquiring merit idea and ascetism. The worst part of all was the idea of sacrifice. That is so ancient. Of course what Jesus meant was social unity, that your neighbour was yourself, that we were all one humanity. Many gifts, but the same spirit. He must have meant that, for that is so. What I mean by your religion is the grade of Calvinism which dominated young America, and the still older branches, and the various small newer ones. It was also personal. My soul, my salvation, my conscience, my sins. And here was the great living working truth of democracy, carrying you on in spite of yourselves, a pluribus unum. Your economic philosophy was dead against it too, that foolish laissez faire idea. And your politics, though what was new in it started pretty well, has never been able to make such headway against the highest religious sanction, the increasing economic pressure, and the general drag of custom and tradition, inertia. You are somewhat puzzling, my fair Marco Polo, I urged. So you mean to extol our politics, American politics? Why of course, she said, her eyes shining. The principles of democracy are wholly right. The law of federation, the method of rotation in office, the stark necessity for general education that the people may understand clearly, the establishment of liberty, that they may act freely. It is splendidly, gloriously right. But why do I say this to an American? I wish you could say it, to every American man, woman and child, I answered soberly. Of course we used to feel that way about it, but things have changed somehow. Yes, yes, she went on eagerly. That's what I mean. You started right, for the most part, but those high-minded, brave old ancestors of yours did not understand sociology. How should they? It wasn't even born. They did not know how society worked, or what would hurt it the most. So the preachers went on exhorting the people to save their own souls, or get it done for them by imputed virtues of someone else, and no one understood the needs of the country. Why, Van, Van Dyke Jennings, as I understand more and more how noble and courageous and high-minded was this splendid child, and then see it now bloated and weak, with unnatural growth, preyed on by all manner of parasites inside and out, attacked by diseases of all kinds, sneered at, criticised, condemned by the older nations, and yet bravely stumbling on, making progress in spite of it all. I'm getting to just love America. That pleased me, naturally, but I didn't like her picture of my country as bloated and verminous. I demanded explanation. Do you think we're too big? I asked. Too much country to be handled properly. Oh, no, she answered promptly. Not too big in land. That would have been like the long, lean lines of youth, the far-reaching bones of a country gradually rounding out and filling in as you grow. But you couldn't wait to grow, you just swelled. What on earth do you mean, Elador? You have stuffed yourself with the most ill-assorted and unassimilable mass of human material that ever was held together by artificial means, she answered remorselessly. You go to England and the people are English. Only three percent of aliens, even in London, I understand. And in France the people are French, bless them. And in Italy, Italian. But here? It's no wonder I was discouraged at first. It has taken a lot of study and hard thinking to see a way out at all. But I do see it. It was simply awful when I began. Just look. Here you were. A little band of really promising people of different nations, yet of the same general stock and like-minded. That was the main thing. The real union is the union of idea. Without that? No nation. You made settlements. You grew strong and bold. You shook off the old government. You set up a new flag. And then? Then, said I proudly, we opened our arms to all the world, if that is what you are finding fault with. We welcomed other people to our big new country. The poor and oppressed of all nations, I quoted solemnly. That's what I mean by saying you were ignorant of sociology, was her cheerful reply. It never occurred to you that the poor and oppressed were not necessarily good stuff for a democracy. I looked at her rather rebelliously. Why just study them, she went on, in that large, sweeping way of hers. Haven't there been poor and oppressed enough in their past? In Chaldea and Assyria and Egypt and Rome? In all Europe, everywhere? Why, Van, it is the poor and oppressed who make monarchy and despotism. Don't you see that? Hold on, my dear. Hold on. This is too much. Are you blaming the poor, helpless things for their tyrannical oppression? No more than I blame an apple tree for bearing apples, she answered. You don't seriously advance the idea that the oppressor began it, do you? Just one oppressor jumping on the necks of a thousand free men? Surely you see that the general status and character of a people creates and maintains its own kind of government? Yes, I agreed. But all the same, they are human. And if you give them proper conditions, they can all rise. Surely we have proved that. Give them proper conditions and give them time? Yes. Time. They do it in one generation. We have citizens, good citizens of all races, who were born into despotic countries, all equal in our democracy. How many Chinese and Japanese citizens have you? She asked quietly. How are your African citizens treated in this equal democracy? This was rather a faser. About the first awful mistake you made was in loading yourself up with those reluctant Africans Elador went on. If it wasn't so horrible, it would be funny, awfully funny. A beautiful, healthy young country, saddling itself with an antiques in every other civilised nation, had repudiated. And here they are, by millions and millions, flatly denied citizenship. Socially excluded. An enormous alien element in your democracy. They are not aliens. I persisted stoutly. They are Americans. Loyal Americans. They make admirable soldiers. Yes. And servants. You will let them serve you and fight for you. But that's all apparently. Nearly a tenth of the population and not part of the democracy. And they never asked to come. Well, I said rather sullenly. I admit it. Everyone does. It was an enormous, costly national mistake. And we paid for it heavily. And it's there yet an unsolved question. I admit it all. Go on, please. We were dead wrong on the blacks and pretty hard on the reds. We may be wrong on the yellows. I guess this is a white man's country, isn't it? You're not objecting to the white immigrants, are you? To legitimate immigrants, able and willing to be American citizens, there can be no objection. But to millions of deliberately imported people, not immigrants at all, but victims, poor, ignorant people, scraped up by paid agents, deceived by lying advertisements, brought over here by greedy American ship owners and employers of labor. There are objections, many and strong. But Elador, even granting it is, as you say, they too can be made into American citizens, surely. They can be. But are they? I suppose you all tacitly assume that they are. But an outsider does not see it. We have been all over the country now, pretty thoroughly. I have met and talked with people of all classes and all races, both men and women. Remember, I'm new to the world. And I've just come here from studying Europe and Asia and Africa. I have the hinterland of history pretty clearly summarized. Though of course I can't pretend to be thorough. And I tell you, Ron, there are millions of people in your country who do not belong to it at all. She saw that I was about to defend our foreign born and went on. I do not mean the immigrants solely. There are Bostonians of Beacon Hill who belong in London. There are New Yorkers of five generations who belong in Paris. There are vast multitudes who belong in Berlin, in Dublin, in Jerusalem. And there are plenty of native sons and daughters of the revolution who are aristocrats, plutocrats, anything but Democrats. Why of course there are. We believe in having all kinds. There's room for everybody. This is the melting pot, you know. And do you think that you can put a little of everything into a melting pot and produce a good metal? Well fused and flawless? Gold, silver, copper and iron, lead, radium, pipe clay, coal dust and plain dirt? A simile is an untrustworthy animal if you ride it too hard. I grinned and admitted that there were limits to the powers of fusion. Please understand, she urges gently. I am not looking down on one kind of people because they are different from others. I like them all. I think your prejudice against the black is silly, wicked and hypocritical. You have no idea how ridiculous it looks to an outsider to hear your southern enthusiasts raving about the horrors of miscegenation and then to count the mulattoes, quadroons, octaroons and all the successive shades by which the black race becomes white before their eyes or to see them shudder at social equality while the babies are nourished at black breasts and cared for in their most impressionable years by black nurses, their children. She stopped at that, turned away from me, and walked to the opposite window where she stood for some time with her hands clenched and her shoulders heaving. Where was I? She asked presently, definitely dropping the question of children. Black, yes. And how about the yellow? Do they melt? Do you want them to melt? Isn't your exclusion of them an admission that you think some kinds of people unassimilable? That democracy must pick and choose a little? What would you have us do? I asked rather suddenly. Exclude everybody? Think we are superior to the whole world? Elador laughed and kissed me. I think you are, she whispered tenderly. No, I don't mean that at all. It would be too great a strain on the imagination. If you want a prescription, far too late, it is this. Democracy is a psychic relation. It requires the intelligent, conscious co-operation of a great many persons, all equal in the characteristics required to play that kind of a game. You could have safely welcomed to your great undertaking, people of every race and nation, who were individually fitted to assist. Not by any means because they were poor and depressed, nor because of that glittering generality that all men are born free and equal. But because the human race is in different stages of development, and only some of the races, or some individuals in a given race, have reached the democratic stage. But how could we discriminate? You mustn't ask me too much, fam. I'm a stranger. I don't know all I ought to, and of course, I'm all the time measuring by my background of experience in my own country. I find you people talk a good bit about the brotherhood of man, but you haven't seemed to think about the possibilities of a sisterhood of women. I looked up alertly, but she gave a mischief of a smile and shook her head. You do not want to hear about the women, I remember, but seriously dear, this is one of the most dangerous mistakes you have made. It complicates everything. It makes your efforts to establish democracy like trying to make a ship go by steam, and at the same time admitting banks of oars, masses of sales and cordage, and me paddles and outriggers. You can certainly make some prescription for this particularly dreadful state, can't you? I urged. Sometimes an outsider can see better than those who are being melted. She pondered a while, then began slowly. Legitimate immigration is like the coming of children to you, new blood for the nations, citizens may not born, and they should be met like children with loving welcome, with adequate preparation, with the fullest and wisest education for their new place. Where you have that crowded little filter on Ellis Island, you ought to have immigration bureaus on either coast at ports so specified, with a great additional department to definitely Americanize the newcomers, to teach them the language, spirit, traditions, and customs of the country. Talk about offering hospitality to all the world. What kind of hospitality is it to let your guests crowd and pack into the front hall, to offer them neither bed, bread nor association? That's what I mean by saying that you are not conscious, you haven't taken your immigration seriously enough. The consequence is that you are only partially America, an American clogged and confused, weakened and mismanaged for lack of political compatibility. Is this all? I asked after a little. You make me feel as if my country was a cross between a patchwork quilt and a pudding stone. Oh dear no, she cheerfully assured me. That's only a beginning of my diagnosis. The patient's worst disease was that disgraceful, out of date attack of slavery, only escaped by a surgical operation, painful, costly, and not by any means wholly successful. The second is this chronic distension from absorbing too much and too varied material, just pumping it in at wild speed. The third is the most conspicuously foolish of all to a hurlander. Oh, leaving the women out? Yes, it's so, so well, I can't express to you how ridiculous it looks. We're getting over it, I urged. Eleven states now, you know, it's getting on. Oh yes, yes, it's getting on, but I'm looking at your history and your conditions and your loud complaints, and then to see this great mass of fellow citizens treated as if they weren't there. It's unbelievable. But I told you about that before we came, said I. I told you in Herland, you knew it. I knew it, truly. But Van, suppose anyone had told you that in Herland, women were the only citizens. Would that have prevented your being surprised? I looked back for a moment, remembering how we men, after living there so long, after knowing that women were the only citizens, still never got over the ever-recurring astonishment of realising it. No wonder it surprises you, dear. I should think it would, but go on about the women. I'm not touching on the women at all, Van. This is only in treating of democracy, of your country and what ails it. You see? Well, dear, see what? It is so presumptuous of me to try to explain democracy to you, an American citizen. Of course you understand, but evidently the country at large doesn't. In a monarchy you have this one, a loud ruler, and his subordinate rulers, and the people submit to them. Sometimes it works very well, but in any case it is something done for and to the people by someone they let do it. A democracy, a real one, means the people socially conscious and doing it themselves, doing it themselves, not just electing a ruler and subordinates and submitting to them, transferring the divine right of kings to the divine right of aldermen or senators. A democracy is a game everybody has to play, has to. Else it is not a democracy. And here, you people deliberately left out half, but they never had been in, you know, in the previous governments. Now, Van, that's really unworthy of you. As subjects they were the same as men, and as queens they were the same as kings. But you began a new game, that you said must be by the people, and so on, and left out half. It was funny, I admitted, and unfortunate, but we're improving. Do go on. That's three counts, I believe, she agreed. Next lamentable mistake, failure to see that democracy must be economic, meaning socialism. No, not exactly. Meaning what socialism means or ought to mean. You could not have a monarchy where the king was in no way different from his subjects. A monarchy must be expressed not only in the immediate symbols of robe and crown thrown in scepter, but in the palace and the court, the list of lords and gentlemen in waiting. It's all part of monarchy, so you cannot have a democracy while there are people markedly differentiated from the others, with symbolism of dress and decoration, with courts and palaces and crowds of servitors. You can't expect all the people to be just alike, can you? No, not even to be equal. Some people will always be more valuable than others, and some more useful than others, but a poet, a blacksmith, and a dancing master might all be friends and fellow citizens in a true democratic sense. Your millionaires vote, and your day labourers vote, but it does not bring them together as fellow citizens. That's why your little old New England towns and your fresh young Western ones have more of America in them than is possible, could ever be possible in such a political menagerie as New York, for instance. Meaning the tiger, I inquired. Including the tiger, with the elephant, the moose and the donkey, especially the donkey. No, I do not really mean those totems. I mean the weird collection of political methods, interests, stages of growth. New York's an oligarchy, it's a plutocracy, it's a hierarchy. It reverts to the clown system with its Irishmen, and back of that to the patriarchy with its Jews. It's anything and everything you like, but it's not a democracy. If it was, what would it do to prove it? Just what do you expect of what you call democracy? Don't you idealise it? I asked. No, she shook her head decidedly. I do not idealise it. I'm familiar with it, you see. We have one at home, you know. So they had. I had forgotten. In fact, I had not very clearly noticed. We had been so much impressed by their all-being women, that we had not done justice to their political development. It's no miracle, she said. Just people cooperating to govern themselves. We have universal suffrage, you know, and train our children in the use of it before they come to the real thing. That far-seeing Mr. Gill is trying to do that in your public schools, I notice, and Mr. George of the Junior Republics. It requires a common knowledge of the common need, local self-management, recognising the will of the majority, and a big, ceaseless, loving effort to make the majority wiser. It's surely nothing so wonderful, Van, for a lot of intelligent people to get together and manage their common interests. It certainly had worked well in Herland. So well. So easily. So smoothly that it was hardly visible. But the people who get together have got to be within reach of one another, she went on. They've got to have common interests. What united action can you expect between Fifth Avenue and Avenue A? I've had all I can stand for one dose, my lady. I now protested. From what you have said, I should think your splendid child would have died in infancy a hundred years ago. But we haven't, you see. We're alive and kicking, especially kicking. I have faith in my country yet. It is still able to lead the world, if it will, she agreed. It has still all the natural advantages it began with, and it has added new ones. I'm not despairing nor blaming Van. I'm diagnosing, and pretty soon I'll prescribe. But just now I suggest that we change politics for Tennis. We did. I can still beat her at Tennis, having played fifteen years to her one, but not so often as fornally. End of Chapter 6. Recording by Kate M. Chapter 7 of With Her in Our Land. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. If there was one more thing than another, I had wanted to show Elador it was our homes. My home, of course, and others that I knew. In all the peace and beauty of her land, there was nowhere the small lit circle of intimate love and mutually considered comfort, which means so much to us. The love, the comfort, were everywhere, to be sure, but that was different. It was like reflected lighting, instead of a lamp on the center table. It was like an evenly steam-heated house, instead of one with an open fire in each room. We had missed those fires, so warm to the front, so inadequate on the back, so inclusive of those who can sit near it, so exclusive of everyone else. Now, as we visited far and wide, and as Elador, in her new capacity as speaker to clubs and churches went farther and wider, she was becoming well acquainted with our American homes, it seemed to me. But it did not satisfy her. She had become more and more the sociologist, the investigator. They are all alike, she said. The people vary, of course, but the setting is practically the same. Why, Van, in all my visits, in so many states, in so many kind families, I have found the most amusing similarity in homes. I can find the bathroom in the dark, I know just what they'll have for dinner. There seem to be only some eight or ten dinners or luncheons known. I was a little netled, just a little. There is a limit to edible animals, if that's what you mean, I protested, beef and veal, mutton and lamb, pig, fresh, salted and smoked, poultry and game. Oh, and fish. That's ten, and can be stretched, of course. No, I don't mean the basis of supplies. I mean only the lack of specialization in it all. You see, the women have talked with me, eagerly. It really is pathetic, Van, the effort, effort, effort to do what ought to be so easy, and the expense. We know it is laborious, but most women hold it is their duty, dear. Of course I agree with you, but most of our people don't, you see. And the men, I'm afraid, consider their own comfort. I only wish they did, she remarked surprisingly, but I'm studying the home, not merely on the economic side. I'm studying it as a world institution. It's new to me, you see. Europe, Africa, Asia, the islands, America, see here, dear, we haven't seen South America. Let's learn Spanish and go. Elador spoke of learning a new language as if it were a dance, a brief and entertaining process. We did it, too. At least she did. I knew some Spanish already and polished it up with her new enthusiasm to help. It was not until observing her intellectual processes in our journeyings together that I had realized the potential energy of the Hurland mind. Its breadth and depth, its calm control, its rationality, its fertility of resource were apparent while we were there, but accustomed as I was to the common limitations of our own minds, to the narrow specialization with accompanying atrophy of other powers, to the brain-fag and mental breakdown, with all the deadly lower grades of feeble mindedness and last gulf of insanity. I had not realized that these disabilities were unknown in Hurland. A healthy brain does not show any more than a sick one, and the airy strength of a bounding acrobat can hardly be judged if you see him in a hammock. For this last year or two, I was observing a Hurland brain at work, assimilating floods of new impressions, suffering keen and severe emotional shocks, hampered by an inevitable nostalgia, and yet picking up languages in passing as one picks flowers by the roadside. We made our trip to South America, with Spanish history carefully laid in beforehand, and learned what every one of us ignorant United Statesians ought to know. That America is a world spanning double continent, not merely a patch on one, and that if we do our duty by our brother countries, we may someday fill out legitimately that large, high-sounding name of ours and really be the United States of America. I certainly have enough data now to be fair in my deduction, Elador said on our home trip. It has been awfully interesting visiting your world, and coming back to your country now with wider knowledge and a background of experience, I think I can be fairer to it. So if you're ready, we'll go back to where we left off that day I jumped to South America. She turned over her book of notes on the United States and looked at me cheerfully. Homes, she said, the home, the American home, and the homes of all the rest of the world, past and present. I tucked the Kenwood rug closer about her feet, settled my own, and prepared to listen. Yes, ma'am, here you and I, at great expense, have circled the habitable globe, been most everywhere except to Australasia and South Africa, spent a good year canvassing the U.S., and if you're not ready to give us your diagnosis and prescriptions, why I shall lose faith in Herland. Want it for the world, or just your country? She asked serenely. Oh, well, give us both. You're capable of it, but not quite all at once. I couldn't take it in. America first, please. It's not so long. She began slowly. Not if you generalize safely. One could, of course, say that because the Jones children were let alone, they spilled the ink, teased the dog, hurt the kitten, let the canary out, ate too much jam, soiled their clothes, pulled up the tulip bulbs, smeared the wallpaper, broke the china, tore the curtains, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth. And you could tell just how it happened in each case. That would take some time. Especially if you added a similar account of the Smith children and the Brown children and so on. But if you say neglected children are liable to become mischievous, you've said it all. They'll be as short as that, I begged. It would not be illuminating. We spent many hours on the endless subject, rich, fruitful hours, full of insight, simplification, and hope. I'm not so shocked as I was at first, she told me. I've seen that Europe goes on being Europe, even if each nation loses a million men, two million men. They'll grow again. I see that all this horror is no new thing to the world. Poor world, poor wretched blind baby. But it's a sturdy baby for all that. It's here. It has not died. What seems to be the matter, speaking very generally, is this. People have not understood their works, their second nature, that is. They have not understood. That's all. Stupid? Hopelessly stupid? I asked. Not at all. Not in the least. But here's the trouble. Their minds were always filled up beforehand with what they used to believe. Talk about putting new wine in old bottles. It's putting old wine in new bottles that has kept the world back. You can see it all the way along, she pursued. New life, continually arising, new condition, but always the old, older, oldest ideas, theories, beliefs. Every nation, every race, hampered, and haggred in by what it used to think, used to believe, used to know. All the nice, fresh, eager struggling children forcibly filled up with the same old stuff. It is pretty terrible, Van. But it's so funny that I can stand it. In one way, human misery is a joke, because you don't have to have it. Then new people came over to a new continent and started a new country with a lot of new ideas, yet you kept enough old ones to drown any country. No wonder you've splashed so much just to keep above water. I didn't say much. I wanted her to work it out, gradually. She was letting me see her do it. Of course, in this record I'm piecing together a great many talks, a great many ideas, and I'm afraid leaving out some. It was no light matter she had undertaken, even for a hurlender. This family and home idea is responsible for a great part of it, she said. Not as I find you quite generally believe, as a type and pattern of all that is good and lovely, but as a persistent, primitive social group, interfering with the development of later groups. If you look at what you ought to have evolved by this time, it becomes fairly easy to see what is the matter. Take your own case, with its wonderful new start, a clean slate of a country, and a very good installation of people to begin with. A good religion too, in essence, and a prompt appreciation of the need of being generally educated. Then your splendid political opening, the great wave of democracy pouring out into expression. Room for all, wealth for all. What should have been the result? Easily. Why, Van, the proudest Yankee, Southerner, Westerner that ever lived doesn't begin to estimate what your people might have done. What they have done is a good deal, but oh, what they might have done. You see, they didn't understand democracy. They began to play, but they didn't know the game. It was like a small child running a big auto. Democracy calls for the conscious, intelligent, coordinate action of all the people. Without it, it is like a partly paralyzed king. First, you left out half the people. An awful mistake. You only gradually took in the other half. You saw dimly the need of education, but you didn't know what education was. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are needed even in monarchies. You needed special education for the new social process. Democracy calls for the understanding, recognition, and universal practice of social laws. Laws which are natural, like those of physics and chemistry. But your religion and your education too, taught authority? Not real law. You couldn't make a good electrician on mere authority, could you? He has to understand, not merely obey. Neither can you make the citizens of a democracy. Reference for and submission to authority are right in monarchies, wrong in democracies. When Demos is king, he must learn to act for himself, not to do, as he is told. And back of your Christian religion is the Hebrew. Back of that, the family. It all comes down to that absurd root error of the proprietary family. We were easily at one in this view, but I had never related it to America's political shortcomings before. That old boss father is behind God, she went on calmly. The personal concept of God as a father, with his special children, his benign patronage, his quick rage, long anger, and eternal vengeance, she shivered. It is an ugly picture. The things men have thought about God, she said slowly, are a ghastly proof of the way they have previously behaved, as they have improved their ideas of God have improved slowly. When kings were established, they crystallized the whole thing in plain sight, and you had kings a very long time you see, have them yet. Kings and fathers, bosses, rulers, masters, overlords. It is all such a poor preparation for democracy. Fathers and kings and the Hebrew deity are behind you and above you. Democracy is before you, around you. It is a thing to do. You have to learn it by trying. There is no tradition and no authority. It calls for brave, careful, continuous scientific experiment, with record of progress and prompt relinquishment of failures and mistakes. It is open in front and in motion. Democracy is a going concern. How a foreigner does love an idiom or a bit of slang. Even this Hurland angel was not above it. Now you in young America had left off the king idea, for the most part, but you had the king's ancestor, the father, the absolute boss, and you had a religion heavily weighted with that same basic concept. Moreover, as Protestants, book worshipers, in default of a king, you must need to make a written ruler for yourselves, and that poor, blind, blessed baby, democracy, promptly made itself a cast iron constitution and crawled under it. That was something to chew on. It was so. It was undeniably so. We had done just that. We had been so anxious for stability, as if a young living thing could remain stable, the quality of stones. You grew in spite of it. You had to. The big wild land helped, and the remoteness and necessity for the individual action and continual experiment. The migration of the children helped. Migration of the children? What on earth do you mean, Elador? Why, haven't you noticed? Hardly any of your children stay at home any more than they can help. Any longer than they can help. And as soon as they are able, they get off, as far as they can. They may love the old homestead, but they don't stay in it. This was so too. You see, that steadily lightens up this old mistake about authority. It is the change to the laboratory system of living, finding out how by doing it. It does not seem to me that there is much authority left in the American home, I urged. All the immigrants complain of just that. Of course they do. Your immigrants naturally understand democracy even less than you do. You have all of you set the word freedom over the most intricately coordinated kind of political relation. You see, the authority method is so simple. It is in order, and you merely do it. No thought, no effort, no responsibility. God says so, the king or the captain says so, the book says so, and back of it all, the family, the father boss. What's that nice story? Papa says so, and if he says so, it is so, if it ain't so. But Alador, really, there is almost none of that in the American family. Surely you must have seen the difference. I have. In the oldest countries, the most absolute father boss and family worship, the dead father being even more potent than the live ones. Van, dear, the thing I cannot fully understand is this reverence people have for dead people. Why is it? How is it? Why is a man who wasn't much when he was alive anything more when he is dead? You do not really believe that people are dwindling and deteriorating from aged age, do you? That is precisely what we used to believe, I told her. For the greater part of our history, for all of it, really, the evolution idea is still less than a century old, in popular thought. But you Americans who are free, who are progressive, who are willing to change in most things, why do you still talk about what your fathers said and did, as if it was so important? It's because of our recent birth as a nation, I suppose, I answered, in the prodigious struggle those fathers of ours made, the pilgrim fathers, the church fathers, the revolutionary fathers, and now our own immediate fathers in the civil war. But why is it that you only reverence them politically and perhaps religiously? Nobody quotes them in business methods, in art or science or medicine or mechanics. Why do you assume that they were so permanently wise in knowing how to govern a huge machine-run, electrically connected city-dominated nation when they were unable even to imagine? It's so foolish, Van. It is foolish, I admitted it, but I told her, perhaps a little testily, that I didn't see what our homes had to do with it. Then that wise lady said sweet, kind, discriminating things about us till I felt better, and came back with smooth clarity to the subject. Please understand, dear, that I am not talking about marriage. The beauty and joy and fruitful power of this dear union are a growing wonder to me. You know that. I knew that. She made me realize it with a praising heart every day. No, this monogamous marriage of yours is distinctly right, when it is a real one. It is the making a business of it that I object to. You mean the women kept at housework? That's part of it, about a third of it. I mean the whole thing. The men saddling themselves for life with the task of feeding the greedy thing, and the poor children heavily stamped with it before they can escape. That's the worst. She stopped at that for a little. So far she had not entered on a condition of women or of children in any thorough way. She had notes enough, volumes. What I'm trying to establish is this, she said slowly, the connection between what seems to me errors in your social fabric and the natural result of these in your political action. The family relation is the oldest. The democratic relation is the newest. The family relation demands close, interconnected love, authority and service. The democratic relation demands universal justice and goodwill. The capacity for the widest coordinate action in the common interest together with a high individual responsibility. People have to be educated for this. It is not easy. Your homes require the heaviest drain on personal energy, on personal loyalty, and leave a small percentage either of feeling or action for the state. You don't expect everyone to be a statesman, do you? Why not? Everyone must be in a democracy. But we should not make better citizens if we neglected our homes, should we? Does it make a man a better soldier if he stays at home to protect his family? Oh, Van Deere, don't you see? These poor, foolish fighting men are at least united, coordinated, making a common effort for a common cause. They are, or think they are, protecting their homes together. I suppose you mean socialism again, I rather sulkily suggested, but she took it very sweetly. We isolated Herlanders, never heard of socialism, she answered. We had no German-Jewish economist to explain to us in interminable, and to most people, uncomprehensible prolixity, the reasons why it was better to work together for common good. Perhaps the feminine mind did not need so much explanation of so obvious a fact. We co-mothers, in our isolation, with a small visible group of blood relations, without any father-boss, just saw that our interests were in common. We couldn't help seeing it. Stop a bit, sister, said I. Are you insinuating that Mr. Father is at the bottom of the whole trouble? Are you going to be as mean as Adam and lay all the blame on him? She laughed gleefully. Not quite. I won't curse him. I won't suggest ages of hideous injustice to all men because of the alleged transgression of one man. No, it is not Mr. Father I am blaming, nor his fatherhood, for that is evidently the high crown of physiological transmission. Always these Herland women bowed their heads at what they called the holy mystery of fatherhood, and always we men were, well, not completely pleased. But it does seem clear, she went on briskly, that much mischief has followed from too much father. He did put himself forward so. He thought he was the whole thing and motherhood. Motherhood was quite a subordinate process. I always squirmed a little in the back of my mind at this attitude. All their tender reverence for fatherhood didn't seem in the least to make up for their absolute unconscious pride in motherhood. Perhaps they were right. The dominance of him, she went on, the egoism of him, my name, and not letting her have any. My house, my line, my family. If she had to be mentioned it was on the spindle side. And when he is annoyed with her, what's that man in symboline, Mr. posthumous, wishing there was some way to have children without these women? It is funny now, isn't it, Van? It certainly is. Man or not, I can face facts when I see them. It is only two-plane that Mr. Father has grossly overestimated his importance in the part. Don't you think the American husband and father is a slight improvement on the earlier kind, I modestly inquired, at which she turned upon me with swift caresses and delighted agreement. That's the beauty and the wonder of your country, Van. You are growing swiftly and splendidly in spite of yourselves. This great thing you started so valiantly is sweeping you along with it, educating and developing as it goes. Your men are better, your women are freer, your children have more chance to grow than anywhere on earth. That's good to hear, my dear, I said with a sigh of relief. Then why so gloomy about us? Suppose everybody was entitled to a yearly income of five thousand dollars. Suppose most people averaged about five cents. Suppose a specially April, vigorous and well-placed group had worked it up to fifty dollars. Why, Van, your superiority to less fortunate peoples is not worth mentioning compared to your inferiority to what you ought to be. Now we are coming to it, I sighed, resignedly. Pitch in, dear, give it to us. Only be sure and show the way to help it. She nodded grimly. I will do both as well as I can. Let us take physical conditions first. With your numbers, your intelligence and mechanical ingenuity, your limitless materials, the United States should by now have the best roads on earth. This would be an immediate and progressive economic advantage and would incidentally go far to solve other problems as you call your neglected work such as unemployment, the negro question, criminality, social discontent. That there are not good roads in Central Africa does not surprise nor annoy me, that they are lacking in the United States is discreditable. Granted, I said hastily, granted, absolutely, you needn't stop on that point. There's only one thing, she went on serenely. Here you are a democracy, free, the power in the hands of the people. You let that group of conservatives saddle you with a constitution which has so interfered with free action that you've forgotten you had it. In this ridiculous helplessness, like poor old Gulliver, bound by the Liliputians, you have sat open-eyed, not moving a finger, and allowed individuals, mere private persons, to help themselves to the biggest richest best things in the country. You know what is thought of a housekeeper who lets dishonest servants run the house with waste and robbery, or of a king who is openly preyed upon by extortionate parasites. What can we think of a democracy, a huge, strong, young democracy, allowing itself to become infested with such parasites as these? Talk of bloodsuckers. You have your oil suckers and coal suckers, water suckers and wood suckers, railroad suckers, and farm suckers. This splendid young country is crawling with them, and has not the intelligence, the energy, to shake them off. But most of us do not believe in socialism, you see, I protested. You believe in it altogether too much, she replied flatly. You seem to think that every step toward decent economic health and development has been appropriated by socialism, and that you cannot do one thing toward economic freedom and progress unless you become socialists. There was something in this. I admit the socialists are partly to blame for this, she went on, with their insistent claims. But do you think it is any excuse for a great people to say, we have all believed this absurd thing because they told us so? Was it our stupidity that shocked you so at first? I ventured. She flashed a bright look at me. How brilliant of you, Van, that was exactly it, and I hated to say so to you. How can you, for instance, let that little bunch of men own all your anthracite coal, and make you pay what they choose for it? You who wouldn't pay England a little tax on tea. It puzzled me beyond words at first. Such intelligence, such power, such pride, such freedom, such good will, and yet such abysmal idiocy. That's what brought me around to the home, you see. We've wandered a long way from it, haven't we? No, that's just the point. You should have, but you have it. Don't you see? All these changes, which are so glaringly necessary and so patently easy to make, require this one ability to think in terms of the community. You only think in terms of the family. Here are men engaged in some absolutely social enterprise, like the railroad business, in huge groups, most intricately coordinated. And from the dividend suckers to the road builders, every man thinks only of his pay of what he is to get out of it. What is a railroad, you might ask them all? An investment, says the dividend sucker. A means of speculation, says the sucker at large. A paying business, says the corporate owner. A thing that pays salaries, says the officer. A thing that furnishes jobs, says the digger and builder. But what has all this to do with the home? It has this to do with it, she answered slowly and sadly. Your children grow up in charge of home-bound mothers who recognize no interest, ambition, or duty outside the home, except to get to heaven if they can. These home-bound women are man-suckers. All they get, he must give them, and they want a good deal. So he says, the world is my noister and says its teeth in that. It is not only this relentless economic pressure, though. What underlies it and accounts for it all is the limitation of idea. You think home, you talk home, you work home. Where you should, from the earliest childhood, be seeing life in terms of the community. You cannot get much fleet action from a flotilla of canoes, with every man's first duty to paddle his own, could you? What do you want done? I asked after a while. Definite training in democratic thought, feeling in action, from infancy. An economic administration of common resources under which the home would cease to be a burden and become an unconscious source of happiness and comfort. And of course, the socialization of home industry. To be continued. With her in our land by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Chapter eight, more diagnosis. Our study of American problems went on now with persistence. Elador was as busy, as patient, as inexorably efficient, as an eminent surgeon engaged in a first class operation. We studied together, she wrote carefully from time to time, and read me the results, or part of them. And we talked at all hours, not only between ourselves, but with many other persons of all kinds and classes. I've seen the ruined lands that were once so rich, she said one day. And the crowded lands now being drained by a too thick population. Those blind mothers can't they once think of what is going to happen to their children. But here I see land in plenty, carelessly skimmed and left, or not even skimmed, just lying open to the sun. While your squeezed millions smother in the cities. You are used to it, to you it is merely a fact, accepted without question. To an outsider it seems as horribly strange as to see a people living in cellars, thick and crawling, while great airy homes stand empty above. My study is mainly to get at your state of mind, to understand if possible what mysterious ideas and convictions keep you so poor, so dirty, so crowded, so starved, so ill-clothed, so unhealthy, so unhappy, when there is no need of it. Now look here Elador, that's rather strong isn't it? You sure they don't describe the American people that way? Then she produced another of those little groups of assorted statistics she was so fond of. She gave the full wealth of the country, as at present administered, and showed that it ought to give nearly two thousand dollars to each of us. That is per capita you see Van, not per family. For a family of five that would be nine or ten thousand, not a bad nest egg besides what they earn. Then she showed me the estimate made by our latest scientific commission of inquiry, that fully one half of our wage earners did not receive income sufficient to maintain helpful conditions of living. A world almanac was at hand, and she pointed out on page 228 the summary of manufacturers. Here you have enough to show how people live in this splendid country Van. See here, average number of wage earners, six million six hundred and fifteen thousand and forty six, wages three billion four hundred and twenty seven million thirty eight thousand, which being divided gives to each five hundred and eighteen dollars plus less than five hundred and twenty a year Van less than ten dollars a week to keep a family average family five one hundred and four dollars a year two dollars a week a piece for Americans to live on. And you know what food and rent costs? Of course they are not healthy, how could they be? I looked at the figures uncomfortably, she gave me a few more. Salaried employees average one thousand one hundred and eighty seven plus that's a bit more than twice as much about four dollars and forty cents a week a piece for Americans to live on. How much do you want them to have? I asked a little irritably, but she was sweetly patient inquiring how much would you be willing to live on or how little rather? I don't mean luxuries, I mean a decent healthy life. Think you could do it on four dollars and forty cents? Think you could do it on less than six dollars, say rent, board, clothing, car fares? Now I had spent a few months during my youth living on a modest salary of ten dollars a week and remembered it as a period of hardship and deprivation. There was six dollars a week for board, sixty cents for car fare, ninety cents for my modest fifteen cent lunches, seventy cents for tobacco. It left one dollar and eighty cents for clothing and amusements if any. I had thought it hard enough at that time to endure life on ten dollars a week for one. It had never occurred to me that the working men had to keep five on it and here were six million of them who did, it appeared, and a lot of clerks who were only twice as well off. Ten dollars a week for each person is little enough for a decent living in this country, isn't it, man? That would call for fifty dollars a week for a family of five, two thousand six hundred a year. But my dear girl, the business would not stand it. You ask impossibilities, I protested. She turned to her figures again. Here's the value added by manufacturer, she said. That must be what these workers produce, isn't it? Eight billion five hundred and thirty million, two hundred and sixty one thousand. Now we'll take out these wages. It leaves five billion one hundred and three million two hundred and twenty three thousand dollars. Then we'll take out the salaries. That leaves four billion thirty one million six hundred and forty nine thousand. Where does that go? Here is a four billion dollar item for services. Whom's? It must be those proprietors and firm members. Only two hundred and seventy three thousand two hundred and sixty five of them. Let's see. Out of that four billion, they get nearly sixteen thousand a year each. Don't you think it is a little remarkable, man? These services are valued at fourteen times as much as those of the salaries of employees and thirty times as much as the workers. My dear girl, I said, you have the most wonderful mind I ever lived with, ever met. And you know more than I do about ever so many things. But you haven't touched economics yet. There are laws here which you take no notice of. And I told her of the iron law of wages, the law of supply and demand and others. She listened, giving careful attention. You call them laws, she said presently. Are they laws of nature? Why, yes, I agreed slowly of human nature acting under economic conditions. Surely the economic conditions are those of soil, climate, materials available, the amount and quality of strength, intelligence, scientific and mechanical development. Why, of course, but also there are those I have mentioned. Do you mean to tell me that it is a law of nature for men to arrange their working and paying so that half the people shall be unhealthy? Do you really believe for a minute that this has to be so? But I was not prepared to repudiate all my education and economics at once and doggedly pointed out it is a law of human nature. Then she smiled at me with cheerful derision. I am glad to say that Elador had risen above the extreme horror and pain of her first year among us and was able to smile at what used to bring distress. It must be male human nature, quote she, we have no such law in her land. But you are all sisters, I said rather lamely. Well, you are all sisters and brothers, aren't you? Of course, man, I know the difference. You have had your long history of quarrels and hatred of inimical strange races of conquest and slavery. It looks to me as if the contempt of the rich for the poor was a lineal descendant of that of the conqueror for the vanquished, a helpless enemy, a slave, a serf, an employee and the state of mind coming along unchanged. But the funny part of it is that in this blessed land, with more general goodwill and intelligence than I have found anywhere, you should have allowed this old foolishness to hang on so long. Now, Van Deere, don't you see how foolish it is? This is a democracy to be efficient that demands a competent electorate, doesn't it? Why, we know that, I answered with some paint. Those forefathers of ours that you so scoff at knew that much. That's why we have our great system of free public education from kindergarten to college. And in 1914, said Elador, turning to that handy volume again, you had a public school primary enrollment of 17,934,982. A drop in high school enrollment down to 1,218,804. Only one out of 17 to get that far. And another drop to a college enrollment of 87,820. That free public education does not seem to go far, does it? But most of these children have to go to work early and they cannot take the time for more education, even if they could afford it. Does going to work early make them better citizens? I dare say it does. Some of the college graduates aren't any too good. She shook her head at this and confronted me with more figures. The college graduates certainly made a pretty good showing and the terrible dregs as she called the criminals and poppers were not as a rule well educated. Do look at it reasonably, Van. I'm not trying to be unpleasant and I know I'm ignorant of this economics, you talk of. I'm looking as a stranger of average intelligence and with the additional advantage of an entirely different background at your country. You have natural advantages as good as Earth affords. You have plenty of room. You have good racial stocks in large variety. You have every element of wealth. You have a good many true principles to go on. And yet in the time you have been at it, in 140 years, you have built up the most crowded cities on earth, robbed and neglected and wasted the soil, made politics a thing of shame, developed private wealth that is monstrous and general poverty that is disgraceful. There was some silence after this. It was extremely unpleasant. It was quite true. I know it is better here than in Europe, she went on. I know that with all your imperfections and errors, you are better off than Germany. Poor mistake in Germany. So authoritatively perfect that she became proud, so proud that she became hateful, so hateful that it will take generations before the world can forgive her. You are not lost, Van, not a bit of it. But surely you can see that it is as I say, I could who couldn't. It is very easy for me to show what could be done how easily and how soon. In 10 years time, you could see an end of poverty in 20 of crime in 30 of disease. This whole great land could be as fair and clean and healthy and happy as my own and vastly richer in products, even richer in happiness with this heaven of married love to crown all else. She took my hand at the end and was still for a little. But for the most part, you don't have that, she continued evenly. Van, I've been reading. I've been talking with doctors and many wise persons, and it seems to me, dear, that you don't appreciate marriage. I had to grin at that, this herlander who never saw a man till a few years ago and had only married one of them. Moreover, I recalled with a momentary touch of bitterness that we were not married people at present, not in the usual sense. And then I was ashamed. I had accepted my bargain, such as it was, with open eyes. I had had all this time of unbroken happy love, living so near a beautiful woman who gave me comfort and rest and calmness in some mysterious, super sexual way, and keeping always the dear hope of a further fulfillment. We had had no misunderstandings, no quarrels, and while I owned that at first there had been periods of some unease for me, they were as nothing to our larger joy. It was as if in clean vigour and activity, I was on an expedition with a well-loved sister, a sister dearer and sweeter than all the world, and with that background of a still happier future. From this, I looked at the world about me, seeing it as I had never seen it before, as it was. All the eager, fresh young boys and girls, all the happy, hopeful lovers, the marriages, and then how painful a portion of miserable failures. It was not only the divorces, not only the undivorced ill-doing, but the low order of happiness among so many. That was what Elador had in mind with her fine sense of personal relationship. She did not know as much as I of the deeper gulf, what she meant was the dreary level. You make fun of it, you know, she went on. It's a joke, a question for discussion. Is marriage a failure? It is being discussed by many, ignored, made the subject of cheap talk. There are many who feel this, I answered her. There is a great effort to check the divorce evil to preserve the sanctity of marriage. Another thing my Elador had learned I think from being in America was a spice of mischief. It became her well, with a mind as keen and powerful as hers, lack of humor would have been a serious loss. Have they tried benzoate to preserve the sanctity of marriage? She inquired. Or is it enough to be her medically sealed under pressure at the boiling point? I'm not much of a cook, nor is she for that matter, but I could smile at that too. Without going into the marriage question at present, I wish you would go on with your herland view of economics, I told her. It looks to me as if you wanted to adopt socialism at once, and that's out of the question. Most of us don't believe in it. Most of you don't seem to understand it, it seems to me, she answered. If you mean by socialism the principles of socialism? Yes, that is the way we manage in her land. The land is ours visibly. We never divided it up into little bits as you people have. What we raised on it and out of it was ours too, visibly. When there was little, we had little. Children first of course, and now that there is a balance plenty, why of course everyone has enough. Had you no selfish women, no ambitious women, no super women trying to get ahead of the others, why of course we had, still have some few. Well, how did you manage them? Why that is what government is for, isn't it? She replied to preserve justice, to prevent the selfish and ambitious from injuring the others, to see to it that production is increased and distributed fairly carried on. We say that government is the best that governs least, I told her. Yes, I've heard that. Do any of you really believe it? Why do you believe it? How can you? But look at Germany, I cried. There you see what comes of too much government. I wish you would look at Germany. Every other nation might study Germany with great improvement. She replied a little hotly. Just because Germany has gone criminally insane, that is no reason for underrating all the magnificent work she has done. The attitude of some people toward Germany is like that of your lynchers. Nations that do wrong are not to be put to death with torture shortly. Like individual criminals, they need study, help, better conditions. I think Germany is one of the most glorious, pathetic, awful examples of the way our world works, she concluded so only. They wouldn't thank you for calling them pathetic, I said. No, I know they wouldn't. Their weakest spot is their blind pride. I find all your nations are proud. It's easy to see why. Well, if you see it easily, do tell us why it's one of your laws of nature, she explained with a twinkle in her eye. You know something of perspective? The farther a thing is away from you, the smaller it is, the less well you can see it, the less you are able to understand it, and by the law of nature, you look down upon it. That was the reason when nations were really far apart and separate. Now that you are all so close together, you should have long since come to see and know and understand and work together. That means love, you know. But to prevent that are two big unnecessary foolish things. One is ignorance, the common ignorance which takes the place of distance. The man next door is as strange as the man and the intipities, if you don't know him. The nations of the earth don't try to understand each other, Van. Then, as a positive evil, you have each built up for yourselves an artificial wall of brag and boastfulness. Each nation ignores the other nations and deliberately teaches its helpless children that it alone is the greatest and best. Why, Van? The tears always came when she touched upon children, but this time they vanished in a flashing smile. Children, she said. Anything more like the behavior of a lot of poor little underbread children, it would be hard to find. Quarrelsome, selfish, each bragging that he can lick the others. Oh, you poor deers, how you do need your mother, and she's coming at last. I suppose you think she will solve these economic problems forthwith. Why not, Van? Look here, dear. Why can't you people see that here she spoke very slowly as if she were writing some ABCs very large on a blackboard? There is nothing to prevent human beings in this historic period from being healthy, beautiful, rich, intelligent, good, and happy. That's easy to say, my dear. I remarked rather glumly. I wish it was true. Why isn't it true, she demanded? Do you think Satan prevents you, or God, or what? Don't you see? Can't you see? God's on the side of all the growing good of life. God's with you. What's against? I suppose it is only ourselves, I agreed. But that's something. Of course, I know what you mean. We could conceivably do and be all that you say, but there's an if, an if as big as all the world, if we knew what to do, and if we would act together. That is not half such an obstacle, as you think, Van. You know enough now easily to set everything going in the right direction. It doesn't have to be done by hand, you know. It does itself give it a chance. You know what to do for one baby, to give it the best chance of health, full growth, and happy usefulness, don't you? Well, yes, we do know that much, I admitted. Very well then, do it for all of them. And you lift the whole stock. That's easy. You know how good roads, waterways, and efficient transportation build up the wealth of the community. Very well. Have them everywhere. She was splendid in her young enthusiasm. That keen, strong face, all lit and shining with love for the naughty world and wise suggestions for its betterment. But I could not catch the fire. I don't want to dash your hopes, my dear, I told her gently. You are, in a sense, correct. Even I could make a plan that would strain things out quite a bit. The difficulty is to get that plan accepted by the majority. No king is going to do it, and in a democracy you have to convince more than half the people. That's slow work. She sat silent, looking out of our high hotel window and thinking of what I said. It isn't as if our minds were empty, said I. We don't think we're ignorant. We think we know it all. Only the wise are eager to learn, I'm afraid, and for everything you tell the people as truth, there are no end of other teachers to tell them something else. It's not so easy as it looks. There's more excuse for us than would appear at first sight. We had made special studies, as we traveled about, of different industries and social conditions. Now we plunged more deeply into economics, politics, and the later researches of sociology and social psychology. Elador became more and more interested. Again and again she wished for the presence and help of certain of her former teachers in her land. How they would love it, she said. They wouldn't be tired or discouraged. They'd just plunge in and find a way to help in no time. Even I can see something. From time to time she gave me the benefit of the things she saw. The reason we had so little trouble is that we had no men. I'm sure of that. The reason you have made so much progress is because you have had men. I'm sure of that too. Men are splendid, but here was a marked pause. The reason you had so much trouble is not because of the men, but because of this strange dissociation of the men and women. Instead of the smooth, helpful interrelationship, you have so much misery. I never knew, of course not, how could I, that there could be such misery to have two kinds of people evidently adapted for such perfect coordinate action, once in a while you see it even now, and then to have them hurt and degrade one another so. Another time she propounded this suggestion. Can't some of your big men and women of course work out and experiment station in methods of living and economic and social unit, you know, to have for reference to establish facts as you do in other things? What do you mean? I asked her compulsory eugenics and a cooperative colony? Don't tease me, Van. I'm not as foolish as that. Know what I mean is something like this. Take a given piece of ground, most anywhere, and have it surveyed by competent experts to see how much it could produce under the best methods known. Then see how many persons it would take to do the necessary work to ensure that production. Then see by what arrangements of living those persons could be kept helpful and happy at the least expense. For that unit you'd have something to go on, some definite proof of what the country could do. You leave out the human side of the problem, my dear. We have so many different causes for living, where and how and as we do, our people are not pawns on a chessboard, they can't be managed to prove theories. It was no wonder that Elador, for all her wonderful clarity of vision, her exceptional advantage of viewpoint, should be somewhat overwhelmed in our sociological morass. The very simplicity and ease of living to which she was accustomed made her see a delusive simplicity and ease in attempting to solve our problem. How about the diagnosis I suggested? Suppose we merely consider symptoms a while, what strikes you most forcibly in the way of symptoms? Physically? Yes, physically first. As to the land, neglect, waste, awful glaring waste, she answered promptly. It makes me sick, it makes me want to cry. As a mere wilderness, of course, it would be interesting. But as a wilderness with a hundred million people in it, and such able people, I don't know whether it is more laughable or horrible. As to the water, neglect and waste again, an hideous suicidal defilement. As to means of communication, words failed her. You know how I feel about your roads in the city streets are worse. One would think to see the way you rip up and lay down in your cities that an organized group of human habitations had never been built before. Such childish experiments over and over and over. Why, a city van is no new thing, it can be foreseen and planned for. That was done in ancient Egypt, in Assyria, and today with all you know, with the whole past to learn from. Van, as I come into your cities by rail and see the poor, miserable, dirty, unhealthy things, it makes me feel almost as badly as those European battlefields. They are at least trying to kill one another. You are doing it unconsciously. A city should be the loveliest thing. Why, you remember? Oh, Van. For the moment, homesickness overcame her. I did remember. From that first low flight of ours soaring across the garden land, that fruitful park and pleasure ground, with its little villages so clean, so bright in color, so lovely an arrangement, lying here and there among the green, all strung together by those smooth shaded roads and winding paths. From that bird's eye view to my later more intimate knowledge, I recalled them with deep admiration and with a painful envy. They had no slums, not in all her land. They had no neglected dirty places. They had no crowded tenements. They lived in houses and the houses were in gardens and their manufacturing, storing and exchanging, all the larger business of life was carried on in buildings, if possible, even more lovely than their dwelling houses. It could be done. I had seen it. I don't wonder you cry, my dear. The designs for such a city, glorious in beauty, have been already made and worked out in extreme detail by Hendrick Anderson and his friends. The greatest artists in the world would be proud to give their best to build and beautify it. America could give little in works of art and her land is not so available for such a purpose as something near Europe, but she could give engineering and mechanical skill, materials and money. The thing could be in good running order inside of five years. Took but ten to open the Panama Canal and that, all told, cost but three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars. Say, we took half a billion for the world city since our present national wealth of one hundred and eighty seven billion seven hundred and thirty nine million seventy one thousand dollars allows to each of us man woman and child one thousand eight hundred and seventy seven dollars if we all had an equal share in it. It would seem simplicity itself to have each of that hundred million of us contribute ten dollars and there is a billion at once. There is money enough. There is land enough. There is labor enough. There is intelligence enough. There is art science invention enough. There is love enough. Why don't we do it? End of chapter eight