 CHAPTER XII PART II of A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. CHAPTER XII PART II It is impossible to follow closely the course of the Alturian's account of his country, which grew more and more incredible as he went on, and implied every insulting criticism of ours. Someone asked him about war in Alturia, and he said, The very name of our country implies the absence of war. At the time of the evolution our country bore to the rest of our continent the same relative proportion that your country bears to your continent. The egoistic nations to the north and south of us entered into an offensive and defensive alliance to put down the new altruistic Commonwealth, and declared war against us. Their forces were met at the frontier by our entire population in arms, and full of the martial spirit bred of the constant hostilities of the competitive and monopolistic epoch just ended. Negotiations began in the face of the imposing demonstration we made, and we were never afterward molested by our neighbors, who finally yielded to the spectacle of our civilization and united their political and social fate with ours. At present our whole continent is Alturian. For a long time we kept up a system of coast defenses, but it is also a long time since we abandoned these. For it is a maxim with us that where every citizen's life is a pledge of the public safety, that country can never be in danger of foreign enemies. In this, as in all other things, we believe ourselves the true followers of Christ, whose doctrine we seek to make our life as He made it His. We have several forms of ritual, but no form of creed, and our religious differences may be said to be aesthetic and temperamental rather than theological and essential. We have no denominations, for we fear in this, as in other matters, to give names to things lest we should cling to the names instead of the things. We love the realities, and for this reason we look at the life of a man rather than his profession, for proof that he is a religious man. I have been several times asked, during my sojourn among you, what are the sources of compassion, of sympathy, of humanity, of charity with us, if we have not only no want or fear of want, but not even any economic inequality. I suppose this is because you are so constantly struck by the misery arising from economic inequality and want, or the fear of want among yourselves, that you instinctively look in that direction. But have you ever seen sweeter compassion, tenderer sympathy, warmer humanity, heavenly or charity than that shown in the family where all are economically equal and no one can want while any other has to give? Altruia, I say again, is a family, and, as we are mortal, we are still subject to those nobler sorrows which God has appointed to men, and which are so different from the squalid accidents that they have made for themselves. Sickness and death call out the most angelic ministries of love, and those who wish to give themselves to others may do so without hindrance from those cares, and even those duties resting upon men where each must look out first for himself and for his own. Oh, believe me, believe me, you can know nothing of the divine rapture of self-sacrifice while you must dread the sacrifice of another in it. You are not free, as we are, to do everything for others, for it is your duty to do rather for those of your own household. There is something, he continued, which I hardly know how to speak of, and here we all began to prick our ears. I prepared myself as well as I could for another affront, though I shuddered when the banker heartily called out, Don't hesitate to say anything you wish, Mr. Homoes. I, for one, should like to hear you express yourself fully. It was always the unexpected, certainly, that happened from the Alturian. It is merely this, he said, having come to live rightly upon earth as we believe, or having at least ceased to deny God in our statutes and customs, the fear of death, as it once weighed upon us, has been lifted from our souls. The mystery of it has so far been taken away that we perceive it as something just and natural. Now that all unkindness has been banished from among us, we can conceive of no such cruelty as death once seen. If we do not know yet the full meaning of death, we know that the Creator of it, and of us, went mercy and blessing by it. When one dies, we grieve, but not as those without hope. We do not say that the dead have gone to a better place, and then selfishly bewail them, for we have the kingdom of heaven upon earth already, and we know that wherever they go they will be homesick for Alturia, and when we think of the years that may pass before we meet them again, our hearts ache, as theirs must. But the presence of the risen Christ in our daily lives is our assurance that no one ceases to be, and that we shall see our dead again. I cannot explain this to you. I can only affirm it." The Alturian spoke very solemnly, and a reverent hush fell upon the assembly. It was broken by the voice of a woman wailing out, "'Oh, do you suppose if we live so we should feel so, too, that I should know my little girl was living?' "'Why not?' asked the Alturian. To my vast astonishment, the manufacturer who sat the farthest from me in the same line with Mrs. Makley, the Professor, and the banker, rose and asked tremulously, "'And have you had any direct communication with the other world, as any disembodied spirit returned to testify of the life beyond the grave?' The Professor nodded significantly across Mrs. Makley to me, and then frowned and shook his head. I asked her if she knew what he meant. "'Why, didn't you know that spiritualism was that poor man's foible? He lost his son in a railroad accident—and ever since!' She stopped and gave her attention to the Alturian, who was replying to the manufacturer's question. "'We do not need any such testimony. Our life here makes a sure of the life there. At any rate, no externation of the supernatural, no objective miracle, has been wrought in our behalf. We have had faith to do what we prayed for, and the prescience of which I speak has been added unto us.' The manufacturer asked, as the bereaved mother had asked, "'And if I live so, should I feel so?' Again the Alturian answered. "'Why not?' The poor woman quavered. "'Oh, I do believe it. I just know it must be true.' The manufacturer shook his head sorrowfully, and sat down, and remained there, looking at the ground. "'I am aware,' the Alturian went on, "'that what I have said as to our realizing the kingdom of heaven on the earth must seem boastful and arrogant. That is what you pray for every day, but you do not believe it possible, for God's will to be done on earth as it is done in heaven. "'That is. You do not, if you are like the competitive and monopolistic people we once were. We once regarded that petition as a formula vaguely pleasing to the deity, but we no more expected his kingdom to come than we expected him to give us each day our daily bread. We knew that if we wanted something to eat we should have to hustle for it and get there first. I used a slang of that far-off time, which, I confess, had a vulgar vigor. But now everything is changed, and the change has taken place chiefly from one cause, namely the disuse of money. At first it was thought that some sort of circulating medium must be used, that life could not be transacted without it. But life began to go on perfectly well when each dwelt in the place assigned him, which was no better and no worse than any other. And when, after he had given his three hours a day to the obligatory labours, he had a right to his sheer food, light, heat, and raiment. The voluntary labours to which he gave much time or little brought him no increase of those necessaries, but only credit and affection. We had always heard it said that the love of money was the root of all evil, but we had taken this for a saying merely. Now we realised it as an active, vital truth. As soon as money was abolished the power to purchase was gone, and even if there had been any means of buying beyond the daily needs with overwork, the community had no power to sell to the individual. No man owned anything, but every man had the right to anything that he could use, when he could not use it, his right lapsed. With the expropriation of the individual, the whole vast catalogue of crimes against property shrank to nothing. The thief could only steal from the community, but if he stole, what was he to do with his booty? It was still possible for a depredator to destroy, but few men's hate is so comprehensive as to include all other men, and when the individual could no longer hurt some other individual in his property, destruction ceased. All the many murders done from love of money or of what money could buy were at an end. Where there was no want, men no longer bartered their souls or women their bodies for the means to keep themselves alive. The vices vanished with the crimes, and the diseases almost as largely disappeared. People were no longer sickened by sloth and surfeit, or deformed and depleted by overwork and famine. They were wholesomely housed in healthful places, and they were clad fitly for their labor and fitly for their leisure. The caprices of vanity were not suffered to attain the beauty of the national dress. With the stress of superfluous social and business duties, and the perpetual fear of want which all classes felt, more or less, with the tumult of the cities and the solitude of the country, insanity had increased among us till the whole land was dotted with asylums, and the mad were numbered by hundreds of thousands. In every region they were an army, an awful army of anguish and despair. Now they have decreased to a number so small, and are of a type so mild, that we can hardly count insanity among our causes of unhappiness. We have totally eliminated chance from our economic life. There is still a chance that a man will be tall or short in Altruria, that he will be strong or weak, well or ill, gay or grave, happy or unhappy in love, but none that he will be rich or poor, busy or idle, live splendidly or meanly. These stupid and vulgar accidents of human contrivance cannot befall us, but I shall not be able to tell you just how or why, or to detail the process of eliminating chance. I may say, however, that it began with the nationalization of telegraphs, expresses, railroads, mines, and all large industries operated by stock companies. This at once struck a fatal blow at the speculation in values, real and unreal, and at the stock exchange or bourse we had our own name for that gambler's paradise or gambler's hell, whose baleful influence penetrated every branch of business. There were still business fluctuations as long as we had business, but they were on a smaller and smaller scale, and with the final lapse of business they necessarily vanished. All economic chance vanished. The founders of the Commonwealth understood perfectly that business was the sterile activity of the function interposed between the demand and the supply, that it was nothing structural, and they intended its extinction and expected it from the moment that money was abolished. This is all pretty tiresome, said the Professor to our immediate party. I don't see why we oblige ourselves to listen to that fellow's stuff, as if a civilized state could exist for a day without money or business. He went on to give his opinion of the Alturian's pretended description, in a tone so audible that it attracted the notice of the nearest group of railroad hands, who were listening closely to Homoes, and one of them sang out to the Professor, Can't you wait and let the first man finish? and another yelled, Put him out! And then they all laughed with a humorous perception of the impossibility of literally executing the suggestion. By the time all was quiet again, I heard the Alturian sing, As to our social life, I cannot describe it in detail, but I can give you some notion of its spirit. We make our pleasures civic and public as far as possible, and the ideal is inclusive and not exclusive. There are, of course, festivities which all cannot share, but our distribution into small communities favors the possibility of all doing so. Our daily life, however, is so largely social that we seldom meet by special invitation or engagement. When we do, it is with the perfect understanding that the assemblage confers no social distinction, but is for a momentary convenience. In fact, these occasions are rather avoided, recalling as they do, the vapid and tedious entertainments of the competitive epoch, the receptions and balls and dinners of a semi-barbaric people striving for social prominence by shutting a certain number in and a certain number out, and over-dressing, over-feeding, and over-drinking, anything premeditated in the way of a pleasure we think stupid and mistaken. We like to meet suddenly, or on the spur of the moment, out of doors, if possible, and arrange a picnic or a dance or a play, and let people come and go without ceremony. No one is more host than guest. All are hosts and guests. People consort much according to their tastes, literary, musical, artistic, scientific, or mechanical, but these tastes are made approaches, not barriers, and we find out that we have many more tastes in common than was formally supposed. But after all, our life is serious, and no one among us is quite happy in the general esteem unless he has dedicated himself in some special way to the general good. Our ideal is not rights, but duties. The greatest distinction which anyone can enjoy with us is to have found out some new and signal way of serving the community, and then it is not good form for him to seek recognition. The doing any fine thing is the purest pleasure it can give. Applause flatters, but it hurts too, and our benefactors, as we call them, have learned to shun it. We are still far from thinking our civilization perfect, but we are sure that our civic ideals are perfect. What we have already accomplished is to have given a whole continent perpetual peace, to have founded an economy in which there is no possibility of want, to have killed out political and social ambition, to have disused money and eliminated chance, to have realized the brotherhood of the race, and to have outlived the fear of death. The altruarian suddenly stopped with these words and sat down. He had spoken a long time, and with a fullness which my report gives little notion of. But though most of his cultivated listeners were weary, and a good many ladies had left their seats and gone back to the hotel, not one of the natives, or the work people of any sort, had stirred, now they remained a moment motionless and silent, before they rose from all parts of the field and shouted, Go on, don't stop, tell us about it. I saw Ruben Camp climb the shoulders of a big fellow near where the altruarian had stood. He waved the crowd to silence with outspread arms. He isn't going to say anything more, he's tired. But if any man don't think he's got his dollars worth, let him walk up to the door and the ticket agent will refund him his money. The crowd laughed, and someone shouted, Good for you, room. Camp continued. But our friend here will shake the hand of any man, woman, or child that wants to speak to him, and you needn't wipe it on the grass first either. He's a man, and I want to say that he's going to spend the next week with us at my mother's house, and we shall be glad to have you call. The crowd, the rustic and ruder part of it, cheered and cheered till the mountain echoes answered. Then a rail-roader called for three times three with a tiger and got it. The guests of the hotel broke away and went toward the house over the long shadows of the meadow. The lower classes pressed forward on camp's invitation. Well, did you ever hear a more disgusting rigmarole? asked Mrs. Makley, as our little group halted indecisively about her, with all those imaginary commonwealths to draw upon from Plato through Moore, Bacon, and Campanella, down to Bellamy and Morris. He has constructed the shakiest effigy ever made of old clothes stuffed with straw, said the Professor. The manufacturer was silent. The banker said, I don't know. He grappled pretty boldly with your insinuations. That frank declaration, that Altruia was all these pretty soap-bubble worlds solidified, was rather fine. It was splendid, cried Mrs. Makley. The lawyer and the minister came to others from where they had been sitting together. She called out to them, Why in the world didn't one of you gentlemen get up and propose a vote of thanks? The difficulty with me is, continued the banker, that he has rendered Altruia incredible. I have no doubt that he is an Altruian, but I doubt very much if he comes from anywhere in particular, and I find this quite a blow, for we had got Altruia nicely located on the map, and were beginning to get a count of it in the newspapers. Yes, that is just exactly the way I feel about it, sighed Mrs. Makley. But still, don't you think there ought to have been a vote of thanks, Mr. Bouillon? Why, certainly, the fellow was immensely amusing, and you must have got a lot of money by him. It was an oversight not to make him a formal acknowledgement of some kind. If we offered him money, he would have to leave it all behind him here when he went home to Altruia. Just as we do when we go to heaven, I suggested. The banker did not answer. And I instantly felt that in the presence of the minister my remark was out of taste. Well then, don't you think, said Mrs. Makley, who had a leathery insensibility to everything but the purpose possessing her, that we ought at least to go and say something to him personally? Yes, I think we ought, said the banker, and we all walked up to where the Altruian stood, still thickly surrounded by the lower classes, who were shaking hands with him, and getting in a word with him now and then. One of the construction gang said carelessly, No all-rail route to Altruia, I suppose. No, answered Homoes. It's a far sea voyage. Well, I shouldn't mind working my passage if you think they let me stay after I got there. Ah, you mustn't go to Altruia. You must let Altruia come to you, returned Homoes, with that confounded smile of his that always won my heart. Yes, shouted Rubin Camp, whose thin face was red with excitement. That's the word. Have Altruia right here and right now. The old farmer, who had several times spoken, cackled out. I didn't know, one while, when you was talking about not having no money, but what some on us had, had Altruia here for quite a spell already. I don't pass more than fifty dollars through my hands most years. A laugh went up, and then, at sight of Mrs. Makley heading our little party, the people round Homoes civilly made way for us. She rushed upon him and seized his hand in both of hers. She dropped her fan, parasol, gloves, handkerchief, and vinaigrette in the grass to do so. Oh, Mr. Homoes, she fluted, and the tears came into her eyes. It was beautiful, beautiful, every word of it. I sat in a perfect trance from beginning to end, and I felt that it was all as true as it was beautiful. People all around me were breathless with interest, and I don't know how I can ever thank you enough. Yes, indeed, the Professor hastened to say, before the Altruian could answer, and he beamed malignantly upon him through his spectacles while he spoke. It was like some strange romance. I don't know that I should go so far as that, said the banker in his turn, but it certainly seemed too good to be true. Yes, the Altruian responded simply, but a little sadly. Now that I am away from it all, and in conditions so different, I sometimes had to ask myself, as I went on, if my whole life had not hitherto been a dream, and Altruia were not some blessed vision of the night. Then you know how to account for a feeling which I must acknowledge too, the lawyer asked courteously. But it was most interesting. The kingdom of God upon earth, said the Minister. It ought not to be incredible, but that, more than anything else you told us of, gave me pause. You, of all men, returned the Altruian gently. Yes, said the Minister with a certain dejection. When I remember what I have seen of men, when I reflect on what human nature is, how can I believe that the kingdom of God will ever come upon the earth? But in heaven, where he reigns, who is it, does his will. The spirits of men, pursued the Altruian? Yes, but conditioned, as men are here. But if they were conditioned, as men are there— Now I can't let you too good people get into a theological dispute, Mrs. Makley pushed in. Here is Mr. Twelve-Mall, dying to shake hands with Mr. Homoes, and compliment his distinguished guest. Ah, Mr. Homoes knows what I must have thought of his talk without my telling him, I began skillfully. But I am sorry that I am to lose my distinguished guests so soon. Ruben Kemp broke out. I was my blunder, Mr. Twelve-Mall. Mr. Homoes and I had talked it over conditionally, and I was not to speak of it till he had told you, but it slipped out in the excitement of the moment. Oh, it's all right, I said, and I shook hands cordially with both of them. It will be the greatest possible advantage for Mr. Homoes to see certain phases of American life at close range, and he couldn't possibly see them under better auspices than yours, Kemp. Yes, I'm going to drive him through the hill-country after Hange, and then I'm going to take him down and show him one of our big factory towns. I believe this was done, but finally the Altruarian went on to New York, where he was to pass the winter. We parted friends, I even offered him some introductions, but his acquaintance had become more and more difficult, and I was not sorry to part with him. That taste of his for low company was incurable, and I was glad that I was not to be responsible any longer for whatever strange thing he might do next. I think he remained very popular with the classes he most affected. A throng of natives, construction hands, and table girls, saw him off on his train, and he left large numbers of such admirers in our house and neighborhood, devout in the faith that there was such a commonwealth as Altruria, and that he was really an Altruarian. As for the more cultivated people who had met him, they continued of two minds upon both points. End of Chapter 12, Part 2, Recording by T. A. Niles and End of A Traveler from Altruria by William Dean Howells