 CHAPTER XXII We'd made an appointment to meet the ladies at the dining-hall for dinner, after which, having some engagement, they left us sitting at table there, discussing our wine and cigars with a multitude of other matters. Dr. said I, in the course of our talk. Morally speaking, your social system is one which I should be incensored not to admire in comparison with any previously invoked in the world, and especially with that of my own most unhappy century. If I were to fall into a mesmeric sleep to-night as lasting as that other, and meanwhile the course of time were to take a turn backward instead of forward, and I were to wake up again in the nineteenth century. When I told my friends what I'd seen, they would everyone admit that your world was a paradise of order, equity and felicity. But they were very practical people, my contemporaries, and after expressing their admiration for the moral beauty and material splendor of the system, they would presently begin to cipher and ask how you got the money to make everybody so happy, for certainly to support the whole nation at a rate of comfort and even luxury, such as I see around me, must involve vastly greater wealth than the nation produced in my day. Now, while I could explain to them pretty nearly everything else of the main features of your system, I should quite fail to answer this question, and failing there, they would tell me, for they were very close ciphers, that I had been dreaming, nor would they ever believe anything else. In my day I know that the total annual product of the nation, although it might have been divided with absolute equality, would not have come to more than three or four hundred dollars per head, not very much more than enough to supply the necessities of life with few or any of its comforts. How is it that you have so much more? That is a very pertinent question, Mr West, replied Dr Leed, and I should not blame your friends in the case you supposed if they declared your story all moonshine, failing a satisfactory reply to it. It is a question which I cannot answer exhaustively at anyone sitting, and as for the exact statistics to bear out my general statements, I shall have to refer you for them to books in my library. But it would suddenly be a pity to leave you to be put to confusion by your old acquaintances, in case with a contingency you speak of, for lack of a few suggestions. Let us begin with a number of small items wherein we economise wealth as compared with you. We have no national, state, county or municipal debts or payments on their account. We have no sort of military or naval expenditures from men or materials, no army, navy or militia. We have no revenue service, no swarm or tax assesses and collectors. As regards our judiciary, police, sheriffs and jailers, the force which Massachusetts alone kept on foot in your day far more than suffices for the nation now. We have no criminal class preying upon the wealth of society as you had. The number of persons more or less absolutely lost to the working force through physical disability of the lame, sick and debilitated, which constituted such a burden on the able-bodied in your day, now that all live under conditions of health and comfort, has shrunk to scarcely perceptible proportions, and with every generation is becoming more completely eliminated. Another item wherein we save is a disuse of money and a thousand occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts whereby an army of men was formally taken away from useful employments. Also consider that the waste of the very rich in your day on inordinate personal luxury has ceased, though indeed this item might easily be overestimated. Again consider that there are no idlers now, rich or poor, no drones. A very important cause of former poverty was the vast waste of labour and materials which resulted from domestic washing and cooking and the performing separately of innumerable other tasks to which we apply the cooperative plan. A larger economy than any of these, yes, of all together, is affected by the organisation of our distributing system, by which the work done once by the merchants, traders, storekeepers, with their various grades of jobbers, wholesalers, retailers, agents, commercial travellers and middlemen of all sorts, when an excessive waste of energy in needless transportation and interminable handlings is performed by one tenth the number of hands and an unnecessary turn of not one wheel. Something of what our distributing system is like, you know. Our decisions calculate that one eightieth part of our workers suffices for all the processes of distribution which in your day required one eighth of the population, so much being withdrawn from the force engaged in productive labour. I begin to see, I said, where you get your greater wealth. I beg your pardon, replied Dr. Lied, but you scarcely do as yet. The economies I've mentioned thus far, in the aggregate, considering the labour they would save directly and indirectly, through saving of material, might possibly be equivalent to the addition to your annual production of wealth of one half its former total. These items are, however, scarcely worth mentioning in comparison with other prodigious wastes, now saved, which resulted inevitably from leaving the industry's flanation to private enterprise. However great the economies your contemporaries might have devised in the consumption of products, and however marvellous the progress of mechanical invention, they could never have raised themselves out of the slow of poverty so long as they held to that system. No mode more wasteful for utilising human energy could be devised, and for the credit of the human intellect it should be remembered that the system never was devised, but it was merely a survival from the rude ages when the lack of social organisation made any sort of cooperation impossible. I will readily admit, I said, that our industrial system was ethically very bad, but as a mere wealth-making machine, apart from moral aspects, it seemed to us admirable. As I said, responded the doctor, the subject is too large to discuss at length now, but if you are really interested to know the main criticisms which we moderns make on your industrial system as compared with our own, I can touch briefly on some of them. The wastes which resulted from leaving the conduct of industry to irresponsible individuals wholly without mutual understanding or concert were mainly full. First, the waste by mistaken undertakings. Second, the waste from the competition and mutual hostility of those engaged in industry. Third, the waste by periodical gluts and crisis with the consequent interruptions of industry. Fourth, the waste from idle capital and labour at all times. Any one of these four great leaks or all the others stopped would suffice to make the difference between wealth and poverty on the part of a nation. Take the waste by mistaken undertakings to begin with. In your day, the production and distribution of commodities being without concert or organisation. There was no means of knowing just what demand there was for any class of products or what was the rate of supply. Therefore, any enterprise by a private capitalist was always a doubtful experiment. The projector having no general view of the field of industry and consumption, such as our government has, could never be sure either what the people wanted or what arrangements other capitalists are making to supply them. In view of this, we are not surprised to learn that the chances were considered several to one in favour of the failure of any given business enterprise, and that it was common for persons who at last succeeded in making a hit to have failed repeatedly. If a shoemaker, for every pair of shoes he succeeded in completing, spoiled the leather of four or five pair besides losing the time spent on them, he would stand about the same chance of getting rich as your contemporaries did with their system of private enterprise and its average of four or five failures to one success. The next of the great wastes was that from competition. The field of industry was a battlefield as wide as the world in which the workers wasted, in assailing one another, energies which, if expended in concerted effort, as to day, would have enriched all. As for mercy or quarter in this warfare, there was absolutely no suggestion of it. To deliberately enter a field of business and destroy the enterprises of those who had occupied it previously, in order to plant what's own enterprise on their ruins, was an achievement which never failed to command popular admiration. Nor is there any stretch of fancy in comparing this sort of struggle with actual warfare, so far as concerns the mental agony and physical suffering which attended the struggle, and the misery which overwhelmed the defeated and those dependent on them. Now nothing about your ages at first sight more astounding to a man of modern times and the fact that man engaged in the same industry instead of fraternizing his comrades and co-laborers to a common end should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be throttled and overthrown. This certainly seems like sheer madness, a scene from Batlem, but more closely regarded it is seen to be no such thing. Your contemporaries with their mutual throat-cutting knew very well what they were at. The producers of the 19th century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community. If in working to this end he at the same time increased the aggregate wealth that was merely incidental. It was just as feasible and as common to increase one's private hold by practices injurious to the general welfare. One's worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for under your plan of making private profit the mode of production, a scarcity of the article he produced was what each particular producer desired. It was for his interest that no more of it should be produced than he himself could produce. To secure this consummation as far as circumstances permitted by killing off and discouraging those engaged in his line of industry was his constant effort. When he had killed off all he could, his policy was to combine with those he could not kill and convert their mutual warfare into warfare upon the public at large by cornering the market, as I believe you used to call it, and putting up prizes to the highest point people would stand before going without the goods. The daydream of the nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life so that he might keep the public at the verge of starvation and always command famine prizes for what he supplied. This, Mr West, is what was called in the nineteenth century a system of production. I will leave it to you if it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a great deal more like a system for preventing production. Sometime when we have plenty of leisure I am going to ask you to sit down with me and try to make me comprehend as I never yet could, though I have studied the matter a great deal. How such rude fellows as your contemporaries appear to have been in many respects ever came to entrust the business of providing for the community to a class whose interest it was to starve it. I assure you that the wonder with us is not that the world did not get rich under such a system but that it did not perish outright from want. This wonder increases as we go on to consider some of the other prodigious wastes that characterised it. Apart from the waste of labour and capital by misdirected industry, and that from the constant bloodletting of your industrial warfare, your system was liable to periodical convulsions, overwhelming alike the wise and the unwise, the successful cutthroat as well as its victim. I referred to the business crises at intervals of five to ten years, which wrecked the industries of the nation, prostrating all weak enterprises and crippling the strongest, and were followed by long periods, often of many years, of so called dull times, during which the capitalists slowly regarded their dissipated strength while the labouring classes starved and rioted. Then would ensue another brief season of prosperity, followed in turn by another crisis and the ensuing years of exhaustion. As commerce developed, making the nations mutually dependent, these crises became worldwide, while the obstinacy of the ensuing state of collapse increased with the area affected by the convulsions and the consequent lack of rallying centres. In proportion as the industries of the world multiplied and became complex and the volume of capital involved was increased, these business cataclysms became more frequent till, in a latter part of the 19th century, there were two years of bad times to one of good, and the system of industry, never before so extended or so imposing, seemed in danger of collapsing by its own weight. After endless discussions your economists appeared by that time to have settled down to the despairing conclusion that there was no more possibility of preventing or controlling these crises than if they had been droughts or hurricanes. It only remained to endure them as necessary evils, and when they had passed over to build up again the shattered structure of industry as dwellers in an earthquake country keep on rebuilding their cities on the same site. So far as considering the causes of the trouble inherent in their industrial system, your contemporaries were certainly correct. They were in its very basis and must need to become more and more maleficent as the business fabric grew in size and complexity. One of these causes was the lack of any common control of the different industries and the consequent impossibility of their orderly and coordinate development. It inevitably resulted from this lack that they were continually getting out of step with one another and out of relation with the demand. Of the latter there was no criterion such as organized distribution gives us, and the first notice that had been exceeded in any group of industries was a crash of prizes, bankruptcy of producers, stoppage of production, reduction of wages or discharge of workmen. This process was constantly going on in many industries, even in what were called good times, but a crisis took place only when the industries affected were extensive. The markets then were glutted with goods of which nobody wanted beyond the sufficiency at any price. The wages and profits of those making the glutted classes of goods being reduced or wholly stopped, their purchasing power as consumers of other classes of goods of which there were no natural glut was taken away, and as a consequence goods of which there was no natural glut became artificially glutted till their prices also were broken down and their makers thrown out of work and deprived of income. The crisis was by this time fairly in the way and nothing could check it till the nations ransom had been wasted. A cause also inherent in your system, which often produced and always terribly aggravated crises, was the machinery of money and credit. Money was essential when production was in many private hands, and buying and selling was necessary to secure what one wanted. It was, however, open to the obvious objection of substituting for food, clothing and other things a merely conventional representative of them. A confusion of mind which this favoured between goods and their representative led the way to the credit system and its prodigious illusions. Already accustomed to accept money for commodities, the people next accepted promises for money and ceased to look at all behind the representative for the thing represented. Money was a sign of real commodities, but credit was but the sign of a sign. There was a natural limit to gold and silver, that is, money proper, but none to credit, and the result was that the volume of credit, that is, the promises of money, seized to bear any ascertainable proportion to the money, still less to the commodities, actually in existence. Another such a system, frequent and periodical crises, were necessitated by a law as absolute as that which brings to the ground a structure overhanging its centre of gravity. It was one of your fictions that the government and the banks authorised by it alone issued money. But everybody who gave a dollar's credit issued money to that extent, which was as good as any to swell the circulation till the next crisis. The great extension of the credit system was a characteristic of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and accounts largely for the almost incessant business crises which marked that period. Parallels as credit was, you could not dispense with its use, for lacking any national or other public organisation of the capital of the country. It was the only means you had for concentrating and directing it upon industrial enterprises. It was in this way a most potent means for exaggerating the chief peril of the private enterprise system of industry, by enabling particular industries to absorb disproportionate amounts of the disposable capital of the country, and thus prepare disaster. Business enterprises were always vastly in debt for advances of credit, both to one another and to the banks and capitalists, and the prompt withdrawal of this credit at the first sign of a crisis was generally the precipitating cause of it. It was the misfortune of your contemporaries that they had to cement their business fabric with a material which in accident might at any moment turn into an explosive. They were in the plight of a man building a house with dynamite from water, for credit can be compared with nothing else. If you would see how needless were these convulsions of business which I have been speaking of, and how entirely they resulted from leaving industry to private and unorganised management, just consider the working of our system. Overproduction in special lines, which was the great hop-couple in of your day, is impossible now, for by the connection between distribution and production, supply is geared to demand like an engine to the governor which regulates its speed, even supposed by an error of judgment an excessive production of some commodity. A consequence slackening or cessation of production in that line throws nobody out of employment. The suspended workers are at once found occupation in some other department of the vast workshop and lose only the time spent in changing, while, as for the glut, the business of the nation is large enough to carry any amount of product manufactured in excess of demand to the latter overtakes it. In such a case of overproduction as I have supposed, there is not with us, as with you, any complex machinery to get out of order and magnify a thousand times the original mistake. Of course, having not even money, we still less have credit. All estimates deal directly with the real things, the flour, iron, wood, wool and labour of which money and credit were for you the very misleading representatives. In our calculation of cost there can be no mistakes. Out of the annual product the amount necessary for the support of the people is taken and the requisite labour to produce the next year's consumption is provided for. The residue of the material and labour represents what can be safely expended in improvements. If the crops are bad, the surplus for that year is less than usual, that is all. Except for slight occasional effects of such natural causes there are no fluctuations of business. The material prosperity of the nation flows on uninterruptedly from generation to generation, like an ever-broadening and deepening river. Your business crises, Mr West, continued the doctor, like either of the great wastes I mentioned before, were enough alone to have kept your noses to the grindstone forever, but I have still to speak of one other great cause of your poverty, and that was the idleness of a great part of your capital and labour. With us it is the business of the administration to keep in constant employment every ounce of available capital and labour in the country. In your day there was no general control of either capital or labour, and a large part of both failed to find employment. Capital, you used to say, is naturally timid, and it would certainly have been reckless if it had not been timid in an epoch when there was a large preponderance of probability that any particular business venture would end in failure. There was no time when, if security could have been guaranteed, the amount of capital devoted to productive industry could not have been greatly increased. The proportion of it so employed underwent constant extraordinary fluctuations, according to the greater or less feeling of uncertainty as the disability of the industrial situation, so that the output of the national industries greatly varied in different years. But for the same reason that the amount of capital employed at times of special insecurity was far less than at times of somewhat greater security, a very large proportion was never employed at all, because the hazard of business was always very great in the best of times. It should be also noted that the great amount of capital always seeking employment, where tolerable safety could be ensured, terribly omitted the competition between capitalists when a promising opening presented itself. The idleness of capital, the result of its timidity, of course meant the idleness of labour in corresponding degree. Moreover, every change in the adjustments of business, every slightest alteration in the condition of commerce or manufacturers, not to speak of the innumerable business failures that took place yearly, even in the best of times, were constantly throwing a multitude of men out of employment for periods of weeks or months or even years. A great number of these seekers after employment were constantly traversing the country, becoming in time professional vagabonds, then criminals. Give us work was the cry of an army of the unemployed at near the all seasons, and in seasons of dullness in business this army swelled to a host so vast and desperate as to threaten the stability of the government. Could there conceivably be a more conclusive demonstration of the imbecility of the system of private enterprise as a method for enriching a nation, than the fact that, in an age of such general poverty and want of everything, capitalists had to throttle one another to find a safe chance to invest their capital and workmen rioted and burned because they could find no work to do. Now, Mr West, continued Dr. Liedt, I want you to bear in mind that these points of which I've been speaking indicate only negatively the advantages of the national organization of industry by showing certain fatal defects and prodigious imbecilities of the systems of private enterprise which are not found in it. These alone, you must admit, would pretty well explain why the nation is so much richer than in your day. But the larger half of our advantage over you, the positive side of it, I have yet barely spoken of. Supposing the system of private enterprise and industry were without any of the great leaks I have mentioned, that there were no waste on account of misdirected effort growing out of mistakes as such a demand and inability to command a general view of the industrial field, suppose also there were no neutralizing and duplicating of effort from competition, suppose also there were no waste from business panics and crises through bankruptcies and long interruptions of industry and also none from the idleness of capital and labor. Supposing these evils which are essential to the conduct of industry by capital in private hands could all be miraculously prevented and the system yet retained, even then the superiority of the results attained by the modern industrial system of national control would remain overwhelming. You used to have some pretty large textile manufacturing establishments even in your day, although not comparable with ours. No doubt you have visited these great mills in your time, covering acres of ground, employing thousands of hands, and combining under one roof, under one control, the hundred distinct processes between, say, the cotton bale and the bale of Colossi calicoes. You have admired the vast economy of labor as a mechanical force resulting from the perfect interworking with the rest of every wheel and every hand. No doubt you have reflected how much less the same force of workers employed in that factory would accomplish if they were scattered, each man working independently. Would you think it's an exaggeration to say that the utmost product of those workers working thus apart, however amicable their relations might be, was increased not merely by a percentage, but many fold when their efforts were organized under one control? Well now, Mr West, the organization of the industry of the nation under a single control so that all its processes interlock has multiplied the total product over the utmost that could be done under the former system, even leaving out of account the four great wastes mentioned in the same proportion that the product of those mill workers was increased by cooperation. The effectiveness of the working force of a nation under the myriad-headed leadership of private capital, even if the leaders were not mutual enemies, as compared with that which it attains under a single head, may be likened to the military efficiency of a mob or a horde of barbarians with a thousand petty chiefs, as compared with that of a disciplined army under one general, such a fighting machine, for example, as a German army in the time of von Moltke. After what you have told me, I said, I do not so much wonder that the nation is richer now than then, but that you are not all cruisers. Well, replied Dr Lied, we are pretty well off. The rate at which we live is as luxurious as we could wish. The rivalry of ostentation, which in your day led to extravagance in no way conducive to comfort, find no place, of course, in a society of people absolutely equal in resources, and our omission stops at the surroundings which minister to the enjoyment of life. We might indeed have much larger incomes individually if we chose so to use the surplus of our product, but we prefer to expend it upon public works and pleasures in which all share, upon public halls and buildings, art galleries, bridges, statuary, means of transit, and the conveniences of our cities, great musical and theatrical exhibitions, and in providing on a vast skill for the recreations of the people. You have not begun to see how we live yet, Mr West. At home we have comfort, but the splendour of our life is, on its social side, that which we share with our fellows. When you know more of it, you will see where the money goes, as you used to say, and I think you will agree that we do well so to expend it. I suppose, observed Dr Lied as we strolled homeward from the dining hall, that no reflection would have cut the men of your wealth-worshiping century more keenly than the suggestion that they did not know how to make money. Nevertheless, that is just the verdict history has passed on them. Their system of unorganised and antagonistic industries was as absurd economically as it was morally abominable. Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial production selfishness is suicide. Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is a secret of efficient production, and not till the idea of increasing the individual hoard gives place to the idea of increasing the common stock can industrial combination be realised, and the acquisition of wealth really begin. Even if the principles share and share alike for all men were not the only humane and rational basis for society, we should still enforce it as economically expedient, seeing that until the disintegrating influence of self-seeking is suppressed, no true concept of industry is possible. CHAPTER XXIII THAT EVENING As I sat with Edith in the music room listening to some pieces in the programme of that day, which had attracted my notice, I took advantage of an interval in the music to say, I have a question to ask you, which I fear is rather indiscreet. I am quite sure it is not that, she replied, encouragingly. I am in the position of an eavesdropper, I continued, who, having overheard a little of a matter not intended for him, though seeming to concern him, has the impunence to come to the speaker for the rest. An eavesdropper, she repeated, looking puzzled. Yes, I said, but an excusable one, as I think you will admit. This is very mysterious, she replied. Yes, said I, so mysterious that often I have doubted whether I really overheard at all what I am going to ask you about, or only dreamt it. I want you to tell me. The matter is this. When I was coming out of that sleep of a century, the first impression of which I was conscious was of voices talking around me, voices that afterwards I recognised as your fathers, your mothers, and your own. First I remember your father's voice, saying, he is going to open his eyes, he had better see but one person at first. Then you said, if I did not dream at all, promise me then, that you will not tell him. Your father seemed to hesitate about promising, but you insisted, and your mother interposing, he finally promised, and when I opened my eyes, I saw only him. I had been quite serious when I said that I was not sure that I had not dreamt the conversation, I fenced it, I had overheard. So incomprehensible was it that these people should know anything of me, a contemporary of their great-grandparents, which I did not know myself. But when I saw the effect of my words upon Edith, I knew that it was no dream, but another mystery, and a more puzzling one than any I had before encountered. For from the moment that the drift of my question became apparent, she showed indications of the most acute embarrassment. Her eyes, always so frank and direct in expression, had dropped in a panic before mine, while her face crimsoned from neck to forehead. Pardon me, I said, as soon as I had recovered from bewilderment at the extraordinary effect of my words. It seems then that I was not dreaming. There is some secret, something about me, which you are withholding from me. Really, doesn't it seem a little hard that a person in my position should not be given all the information possible concerning himself? It does not concern you, that is, not directly. It is not about you exactly, she replied, scarcely audibly. But it concerns me in some way, I persisted. It must be something that would interest me. I don't know even that, she replied, venturing a momentary glance at my face, furiously blushing, and yet with a quaint smile flickering about her lips, which betrayed a certain perception of humour in the situation, despite its embarrassment. I am not sure that it would even interest you. Your father would have told me, I insisted, with an accent of reproach. It was you who forbade him. He thought I ought to know. She did not reply. She was so entirely charming in her confusion that I was now prompted, as much by the desire to prolong the situation as by my original curiosity, to impotune her further. Am I never to know? Will you never tell me? I said. It depends, she answered, after a long pause. On what, I persisted. Ah, you asked too much, she replied. Then, raising to mine a face which, inscrutable eyes, flushed cheeks, and smiling lips, combined to render perfectly bewitching, she added, What should you think, if I said, that it depended on yourself? On myself, I echoed. How can that possibly be? Mr West, we are losing some charming music, was her only reply to this, and turning to the telephone at a touch of her finger, she sat the airs to swaying to the rhythm of an adagio. After that, she took good care that the music should leave no opportunity for conversation. She kept her face averted from me, and pretended to be absorbed in the airs, but that it was of mere pretence the crimson tide standing at flood in her cheeks sufficiently betrayed. When at length she suggested that I might have heard all I cared to for that time, and we rose to leave the room, she came straight up to me and said, without raising her eyes, Mr West, you say that I've been good to you, I have not been particularly so, but if you think I have, I want you to promise me that you will not try again to make me tell you this thing you have asked tonight, and that you will not try to find it out from anyone else, my father or mother, for instance. The such an appeal, there was but one reply possible. Forgive me for distressing you. Of course I will promise, I said. I would never have asked you if I had fancied it could distress you, but do you blame me for being curious? I do not blame you at all, and some time, I added, if I do not tease you, you may tell me of your own accord. May I not hope so? Perhaps, she murmured. Only perhaps? Looking up, she read my face with a quick deep glance. Yes, she said. I think I may tell you some time. And so our conversation ended, for she gave me no chance to say anything more. That night I don't think even Dr. Pillsbury could have put me to sleep, till toward morning at least. Mysteries have been my customed food for days now, but none had before confronted me at once so mysterious and so fascinating as this, the solution of which, either the lead had forbidden me even to seek. It was a double mystery. How, in the first place, was it conceivable that she should know any secret about me, a stranger from a strange age? In the second place, even if she should know such a secret, how account for the agitating effect which the knowledge of it seemed to have upon her? There are puzzles so difficult that one cannot even get so far as a conjecture as to the solution, and this seemed one of them. I am usually of too practical a turn to waste time on such conundrums, but the difficulty of a riddle embodied in a beautiful young girl does not detract from its fascination. In general, no doubt, Maiden's blushers may be safely assumed to tell the same tale to young men in all ages and races, but to give that interpretation to either his crimson cheeks would, considering my position and the length of time I'd known her, and still more the fact that this mystery dated from before I had known her at all, be a piece of utter fatuity. And yet, she was an angel, and I should not have been a young man if reason and common sense had been able, quite to banish, arose your tinge from my dreams that night. Chapter 24 In the morning I went downstairs, early in the hope of seeing Edith alone. In this, however, I was disappointed. Not finding her in the house, I sought her in the garden, but she was not there. In the course of my wanderings I visited the underground chamber and sat down there to rest. Upon the reading-table in the chamber several periodicals and newspapers lay, and thinking that Dr. Leed might be interested in glancing over a Boston daily of 1887, I brought one of the papers with me into the house when I came. At breakfast I met Edith. She blushed as she greeted me, but was perfectly self-possessed. As we sat at table, Dr. Leed amused himself with looking over the paper I had brought in. There was in it, as in all the newspapers of that date, a great deal about the labor troubles, strikes, lockouts, boycotts, the programs of labor parties, and the wild threats of the anarchists. By the way, said I, as the doctor read aloud to us some of these items, what part did the followers of the red flag take in the establishment of the new order of things? They were making considerable noise the last thing that I knew. They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of course, replied Dr. Leed. They did that very effectually while they lasted, for their talk so disgusted people, as they deprived the best-considered projects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of those fellows was one of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform. Subsidizing them, I exclaimed in astonishment. Certainly, replied Dr. Leed. No historical authority nowadays doubts that they were paid by the great monopolies to wave the red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order, by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms. What astonishes me most is that you should have fallen into the trap so unsuspectingly. What are your grounds for believing that the red flag party was subsidized? I inquired. Why, simply, because they must have seen that their cause made a thousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend. Not to suppose that they were hired for the work is to credit them with an inconceivable folly. Footnote. I fully admit the difficulty of accounting for the cause of the anarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidized by the capitalists, but at the same time there is no doubt that the theory is wholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at the time by anyone, though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect. And footnote. In the United States, of all countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation, as the national party eventually did. The national party, I exclaimed, that must have arisen after my day. I suppose it was one of the Labour parties. Ho, no, replied the doctor. The Labour parties as such never could have accomplished anything on a large or permanent scale. For purposes of national scope, their basis as merely class organizations was too narrow. It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, man and women, that there was any prospect that it would be achieved. Then the national party arose to carry it out by political methods. It probably took that name because its aim was to nationalize the functions of production and distribution. Indeed, it could not well have had any other name, for its purpose was to realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur and completeness never before conceived, not as an association of men for certain merely political functions affecting their happiness only remotely and superficially, but as a family, a vital union, a common life, a mighty heaven-touching tree whose leaves are its people fed from its veins and feeding it in turn. In the most patriotic of all possible parties, it sought to justify patriotism and raise it from an instinct to a rational devotion by making the native land truly a fatherland, a father who kept the people alive and was not merely an idol for which they were expected to die. The personality of Edith Lied had naturally impressed me strongly ever since I had come in so strange a manner to be an inmate of her father's house, and it was to be expected that after what had happened the night previous I should be more than ever preoccupied with thoughts of her. From the first I had been struck with the air of serene frankness and ingenious directness, more like that of a noble and innocent boy than any girl I'd ever known, which characterized her. I was curious to know how far this charming quality might be peculiar to herself, and how far possibly a result of alterations in the social position of women which might have taken place since my time. Finding an opportunity that day when alone with Dr. Lied I turned the conversation in that direction. I suppose, I said, that women nowadays, having been relieved of the burden of housework, have no employment but the cultivation of their charms and graces. So far as we men are concerned, replied Dr. Lied, we should consider that they simply paid their way to use one of your forms of expression if they confined themselves to that occupation. But you may be very sure that they have quite too much spirit to consent to be mere beneficiaries of society, even as returned for ornamenting it. They did indeed welcome their widens from housework because that was not only exceptionally wearing in itself, but also wasteful in the extreme of energy, as compared with the cooperative plan. But they accepted relief from that sort of work only that they might contribute in other and more effectual, as well as more agreeable, ways to the common wheel. Our women, as well as our men, are members of the industrial army, and leave it only when maternal duties claim them. The result is that most women, at one time or another of their lives, serve industrially some five or ten or fifteen years, while those who have no children fill out the full term. A woman does not then necessarily leave the industrial service on marriage, I queried. No more than a man, replied the doctor. Why on earth should she? Married women have no housekeeping responsibilities now, you know, and a husband is not a baby that you should be careful. It was thought one of the most grievous features of our civilization that we required so much toil from women, I said, but it seems to me you get more out of them than we did. Dr. Lied loved. Indeed we do, just as we do out of our men. Yet the women of this age are very happy, and those of the nineteenth century, unless contemporary references greatly mislead us, were very miserable. The reason that women nowadays are so much more efficient co-laborers with the men, and at the same time are so happy, is that, in regard to their work as well as men's, we follow the principle of providing everyone the kind of occupation he or she is best adapted to. Women being inferior in strength to men, and further disqualified industrially in special ways, the kinds of occupations reserved for them, and the conditions under which they pursue them, have reference to these facts. The heavier sorts of work are everywhere reserved for men, the lighter occupations for women, and are no circumstances is a woman permitted to follow any employment not perfectly adapted, both as to kind and degree of labour to her sex. Moreover, the hours of women's work are considerably shorter than those of men's, more frequent vacations are granted, and the most careful provision is made for rest when needed. The men of this day so well appreciate that they owe to the beauty and grace of women the chief zest of their lives, and their main incentive to effort, that they permit them to work at all only because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement of labour, of assault adapted to their powers, is well for body and mind during the period of maximum physical vigour. We believe that the magnificent health which distinguishes our women from those of your day, who seem to have been so generally sickly, is owed largely to the fact that all like are furnished with healthful and inspiring occupation. I understood you, I said, that the women workers belong to the army of industry, but how can they be under the same system of ranking and discipline with the men when the conditions of their labour are so different? They are under an entirely different discipline, replied Dr. Lied, and constitute rather an allied force than an integral part of the army of the men. They have a woman general in chief, and are under exclusively feminine regime. This general, as also the higher officers, is chosen by the body of women who have passed the time of service in correspondence with the men in which the chiefs of the masculine army and the president of the nation are elected. The general of the women's army sits in the cabinet of the president and has a veto on measures respecting women's work pending appeals to Congress. I should have said, in speaking of the judiciary, that we have women on the bench, appointed by the general of the women, as well as men. Causes in which both parties are women are determined by women judges, and where a man and a woman are parties to a case, a judge of either sex must consent to the verdict. Womanhood seems to be organised as a sort of Imperium in Imperio in your system, I said. To some extent, Dr. Lied replied, but the inner Imperium is one from which you will admit there is not likely to be much danger to the nation. The lack of some such recognition of the distinct individuality of the sexes was one of the innumerable defects of your society. The passion attraction between men and women has too often prevented a perception of the profound differences which make the members of each sex, in many things, strange to the other, and capable of sympathy only with their own. It is in giving full play to the difference of sex rather than in seeking to obliterate them, as was apparently the effort of some reformers in your day, that the enjoyment of each by itself and the pecancy which each has for the other are alike enhanced. In your day there was no career for women except in an unnatural rivalry with men. We have given them a world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I assure you they are very happy in it. It seems to us that women were more than any other class the victims of your civilization. There is something which, even at this distance of time, penetrates one with pathos in the spectacle of their annoyed, undeveloped lives stunted at marriage, their narrow horizon bounded so often physically by the four walls of home, and morally by a petty circle of personal interests. I speak now not of the poorer classes, who were generally worked to death, but also of the well-to-do and rich. From the great sorrows as well as the petty frets of life, they had no refuge in the breezy outdoor world of human affairs, nor any interests save those of the family. Such an existence would have softened men's brains or driven them mad. All that is changed today. No woman is heard nowadays wishing she were a man, nor parents desiring boy rather than girl children. Our girls are as full of ambition for their careers as our boys. Marriage, when it comes, does not mean incarceration for them, nor does it separate them in any way from the larger interests of society, the bustling life of the world. Only when maternity fills a woman's mind with new interests does she withdraw from the world for a time. Afterward, and at any time, she may return to her place among her comrades, nor need she ever lose touch with them. Women are a very happy race nowadays, as compared with what they ever were before in the world's history, and their power of giving happiness to men has been, of course, increased in proportion. I should imagine it possible, I said, that the interest which girls take in their careers as members of the industrial army and candidates for its distinctions might have an effect to deter them from marriage. Dr. Leeds smiled. Have no anxiety on that score, Mr. West, he replied. The creator took very good care that whatever other modifications the dispositions of men and women might with time take on, their attraction for each other should remain constant. The mere fact that in an age like yours, when the struggle for existence must have left people little time for other thoughts, and the future was so uncertain that to assume parental responsibilities must have often seemed like a criminal risk, there was even then marrying and giving in marriage should be conclusive on this point. As for love nowadays, one of our authors says that the vacuum left in the minds of men and women by the absence of care for one's livelihood has been entirely taken up by the tender passion. That, however, I beg you to believe is something of an exaggeration. For the rest, so far is marriage from being an interference with a woman's career, that the higher positions in the feminine army of industry are entrusted only to women who have been both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex. Are credit cards issued to the women just as to the men? Certainly. The credits of the women, I suppose, are for smaller sums, owing to the frequent suspension of their labour on account of family responsibilities. Smaller, exclaimed Dr. Lied, oh no, the maintenance of all our people is the same. There are no exceptions to that rule, but if any difference were made on account of the interruptions you speak of, it would be by making the woman's credit larger, not smaller. Can you think of any service constituting a stronger claim on the nation's gratitude than bearing and nursing the nation's children? According to our view, none deserve so well of the world as good parents. There is no task so unselfish, so necessarily without return, though the heart is well rewarded, as a nurture of the children who are to make the world for one another when we are gone. It would seem to follow from what you have said that wives are in no way dependent on their husbands for maintenance. Of course they are not, replied Dr. Lied, nor children on their parents either, that is, for means of support, though of course they are for the officers of affection. The child's labour, when he grows up, will go to increase the common stock, not as parents, who will be dead, and therefore he is properly nurtured out of the common stock. The account of every person, man, woman and child, you must understand, is always at the nation directly, and never through any intermediary, except of course that parents to a certain extent act for children as their guardians. You see that it is by virtue of the relation of individuals to the nation, of their membership in it, that they are entitled to support, and this title is in no way connected with or affected by their relations to other individuals who are fellow members of the nation with them. That any person should be dependent for the means of support upon another will be shocking to the moral sense as well as indefensible on any rational social theory. What would become of personal liberty and dignity under such an arrangement? I am aware that you called yourselves free in the nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then however have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not have applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a position of calling personal dependence upon others as to the very means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer, women upon men, children upon parents. Instead of distributing the product of the nation directly to its members, which would seem the most natural and obvious method, it would actually appear that you had given your minds to devising a plan of hand to hand distribution, involving the maximum of personal humiliation to all classes of recipients. As regards the dependence of women upon men for support, which then was usual, of course, natural attraction in case of marriages of love may often have made it endurable, though for spirited women I should fancy it must always have remained humiliating. What then must it have been in the innumerable cases where women, with or without the form of marriage, had to sell themselves to men to get their living? Even your contemporaries, callous as they were to most of the revolting aspects of their society, seemed to have had an idea that this was not quite as it should be, but it was still only for pity's sake that they deplored a lot of the women. It did not occur to them that it was robbery as well as cruelty, when men seized for themselves the whole product of the world and left women to beg and weedle for their share. Why, pet bless me with the West, I'm really running on at a remarkable rate, just as the robbery, the sorrow, and the shame which those poor women endured were not over a century since, or as if you were responsible for what you no doubt deplored as much as I do. I must bear my share of responsibility for the world as it then was, I replied. All I can say in extenuation is that until the nation was ripe for the present system of organized production and distribution, no radical improvement in the position of women was possible. The root of her disability, as you say, was her personal dependence upon men for her livelihood, and I can imagine no other mode of social organization than that you have adopted, which would have set women free of men at the same time that it set men free of one another. I suppose, by the way, that so entire a change in the position of women cannot have taken place without affecting in marked ways the social relations of the sexes. That will be a very interesting study for me. The change you will observe, said Dr. Lied, will chiefly be, I think, the entire frankness and unconstraint which now characterizes those relations, as compared with the artificiality which seems to have marked them in your time. The sexes now meet with the ease of perfect equals, suit us to each other for nothing but love. In your time the fact that women were dependent for support on men made the woman, in reality, the one chiefly benefited by marriage. This fact, so far as we can judge from contemporary records, appears to have been costly enough recognized among the lower classes, while among the more polished it was glossed over by a system of elaborate conventionalities which aimed to carry the precisely opposite meaning, namely that the man was the party chiefly benefited. To keep up this convention it was essential that he should always seem the suitor. Nothing was therefore considered more shocking to the proprieties than that a woman should betray a fondness for a man before he had indicated a desire to marry her. Why, we actually have in our libraries, books, by authors of your day, written for no other purpose than to discuss the question whether under any conceivable circumstances a woman might, without discredit to her sex, reveal an answer that had love. All this seems exquisitely absurd to us, and yet we know that, given your circumstances, the problem might have a serious side. When for a woman to proffer her love to a man was an effect to invite him to assume the burden of her support, it is easy to see that pride and delicacy might well have checked the promptings of the heart. When you go out into our society, Mr West, you must be prepared to be often cross-questioned on this point by our young people, who are naturally much interested in this aspect of old-fashioned manners. Footnote I may say that our elite's warning has been fully justified by my experience. The amount and intensity of amusement which the young people of this day, and the young women especially, are able to extract from what they are pleased to call the oddities of courtship in the nineteenth century appear unlimited. End Footnote And so the girls of the twentieth century tell their love. If they choose, reply Dr Leed, there is no more pretense of a concealment of feeling on their part than on the part of their lovers. Cocketry would be as much despised as a girl as in a man. Affected coldness, which in your day rarely deceived a lover, would deceive him wholly now, for no one thinks of practising it. One result which must follow from the independence of women I can see for myself, I said. There can be no marriages now except those of inclination. That is a matter of course, replied Dr Leed. Think of a world in which there are nothing but matches of pure love. Ah, me, Dr Leed, how far you are from being able to understand what an astonishing phenomenon such a world seems to a man of the nineteenth century. I can, however, to some extent imagine it, replied the doctor. But the fact you celebrate that there are nothing but love-matches means even more perhaps than you probably at first realise. It means that for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation. The necessities of poverty, the need of having a home, no longer tempt women to accept as the fathers of their children, men whom they neither can love nor respect. Wealth and rank no longer divert attention from personal qualities. Gold no longer guilts the straightened forehead of the fool. The gifts of person, mind and disposition, beauty, wit, eloquence, kindness, generosity, geniality, courage, are sure of transmission to posterity. Every generation is sifted through a little finer mesh than the last. The attributes that human nature admires are preserved, those that repel it are left behind. There are, of course, a great many women who with love must mingle admiration and seek to wed greatly, but these not less obey the same law, for to wed greatly now is not to marry men of fortune or title, but those who have risen above their fellows by the solidity or brilliance of their services to humanity. These form nowadays the only aristocracy with which alliance is distinction. You were speaking a day or two ago of the physical superiority of our people to your contemporaries. Perhaps more important than any of the causes I mentioned then, as tending to race purification, has been the effect of untrammeled sexual selection upon the quality of two or three successive generations. I believe that when you have made a fuller study of our people, you will find in them not only a physical, but a mental and moral improvement. It would be strange if it were not so, for not only is one of the great laws of nature now freely working out the salvation of the race, but a profound moral sentiment has come to its support. Individualism, which in your day was the animating idea of society, not only was fatal to any vital sentiment of brotherhood and common interest among living men, but equally to any realization of the responsibility of the living for the generation to follow. Today this sense of responsibility, practically unrecognized in all previous ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of the race, reinforcing with an intense conviction of duty the natural impulse to seek and marriage the best and noblest of the other sex. The result is that not all the encouragement and incentives of every sort which are provided to develop industry, talent, genius, excellence of whatever kind are comparable in their effect on our young men with the fact that our women sit aloft as judges of the race and reserve themselves to reward the winners. Of all the whips and spurs and baits and prizes, there is none like the thought of the radiant faces which the laggards will find averted. Celebrates nowadays are almost invariably men who have failed to equip themselves creditably in the work of life. The woman must be a courageous one, with a very evil sort of courage, too, whom pity for one of these unfortunate should lead to defy the opinion of her generation, for otherwise she is free, so far as to accept him for a husband. I should add that more exacting and difficult to resist than any other element in that opinion, she would find the sentiment of her own sex. Our women have risen to the full height of their responsibility as the wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the keys of the future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in which they educate their daughters from childhood. After going to my room that night, I set up late to read a romance of Barian, handed me by Dr. Lied, the plot of which turned on a situation suggested by his last words, concerning the modern view of parental responsibility. A similar situation would almost certainly have been treated by a nineteenth-century romances, so as to excite the morbid sympathy of the reader with the sentimental selfishness of the lovers, and his resentment toward the unwritten law which they outraged. I need not describe, for who has not read Ruth Elton, how different is the cause which Barian takes, and with what tremendous effect he enforces the principle which he states. Over the unborn our power is that of God, and our responsibility like his toward us, as we acquit ourselves toward them, so let him deal with us. I think if a person were ever excusable for losing track of the days of the week, the circumstances excused me. Indeed, if I had been told that the method of reckoning time had been wholly changed, and the days were now counted in lots of five, ten, or fifteen, instead of seven, I should have been in no way surprised after what I had already heard and seen of the twentieth century. The first time that any inquiry as to the days of the week occurred to me was the morning following the conversation related in the last chapter. At the breakfast table Dr. Lied asked me if I would care to hear a sermon. Is it Sunday, then? I exclaimed. Yes, he replied. It was on Friday, you see, when we made the lucky discovery of the buried chamber to which we owe your society this morning. It was on Saturday morning, soon after midnight, that you first awoke, and Sunday afternoon when you awoke the second time with faculties fully regained. So you still have Sundays and sermons, I said. We had prophets who foretold that long before this time the world would have dispensed with both. I'm very curious to know how the ecclesiastical systems fit in with the rest of your social arrangements. I suppose you have a sort of national church with official clergymen. Dr. Lied laughed, and Mrs. Lied and Edith seemed greatly amused. Why, Mr. West, Edith said, what odd people you must think us. You were quite done with national religious establishments in the 19th century, and did you fancy we had gone back to them? But how can voluntary churches and an unofficial clerical profession be reconciled with national ownership of all buildings and the industrial service required of all men? I answered. The religious practices of the people have naturally changed considerably in a century, replied Dr. Lied, but supposing them to have remained unchanged, our social system would accommodate them perfectly. The nation supplies any person or number of persons with buildings on guarantee of the rent, and they remain tenants while they pay it. As for the clergymen, if a number of persons wished the services of an individual for any particular end of their own, apart from the general service of the nation, they can always secure it with that individual's own consent, of course, just as we secure the service of our editors, by contributing from their credit cards an indemnity to the nation for the loss of its services in general industry. This indemnity paid the nation for the individual, answers to the salary in your day paid to the individual himself, and the various applications of this principle leave private initiative full play in all details to which national control is not applicable. Now, as to hearing a sermon today, if you wish to do so, you can either go to a church to hear it or stay at home. How am I to hear it if I stay at home? Simply by accompanying us to the music room at the proper hour and selecting an easy chair. There are some who still prefer to hear sermons in church, but most of our preaching, like our musical performances, is not in public, but delivered in acoustically prepared chambers, connected by wire with subscribers' houses. If you prefer to go to a church, I shall be glad to accompany you, but I really don't believe you are likely to hear anywhere of better discourse than you will at home. I see by the paper that Mr Barton is to preach this morning, and he preaches only by telephone, and to audiences, often reaching one hundred and fifty thousand. The novelty of the experience of hearing a sermon under such circumstances would incline me to be one of Mr Barton's hearers, if for no other reason, I said. An hour or two later, as I sat reading in the library, Edith came for me, and I followed her to the music room, where Dr. and Mrs. Leed were waiting. We had not more than seated ourselves comfortably when the tinkle of a bell was heard, and a few moments after the voice of a man, at the pitch of ordinary conversation, addressed us with an effect of proceeding from an invisible person in the room. This was what the voice said. Mr Barton's Sermon We've had among us, during the past week, a critic from the nineteenth century, a living representative of the epoch of our great-grandparents. It would be strange a fact so extraordinary had not somewhat strongly affected our imaginations. Perhaps most of us have been stimulated to some effort to realise the society of a century ago, and figure to ourselves what it must have been like to live then. In inviting you now to consider certain reflections upon this subject which have occurred to me, I presume that I shall rather follow than divert the course of your own thoughts. Edith whispered something to her father at this point, to which he nodded ascent and turned to me. Mr West, he said, Edith suggests that you may find it slightly embarrassing to listen to a discourse on the lines Mr Barton is laying down, and if so, you need not be cheated out of a sermon. She will connect us with Mr. Sweetser's speaking room, if you say so, and I can still promise you a very good discourse. No, no, I said. Believe me, I would much rather hear what Mr Barton has to say. As you please, replied my host. When their father spoke to me, Edith had touched a screw, and the voice of Mr Barton had seized abruptly. Now, and another touch, the room was once more filled with the earnest sympathetic tones which had already impressed me most favourably. I venture to assume that one effect has been common with us as a result of this effort at retrospection, and that it has been to leave us more than ever amazed at the stupendous change which one brief century has made in the material and moral conditions of humanity. Still, as regards the contrast between the poverty of the nation and the world in the nineteenth century, and their wealth now, it is not greater, possibly, than had been before seen in human history. Perhaps not greater, for example, than that between the poverty of this country during the earliest colonial period of the seventeenth century, and the relatively great wealth it had attained at the close of the nineteenth, or between the England of William the Conqueror and that of Victoria. Although the aggregate riches of the nation did not then, as now, afford any accurate criterion of the masses of its people. Yet instances like these afford partial parallels for the merely material side of the contrast within the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It is when we contemplate the moral aspect of that contrast that we find ourselves in the presence of a phenomenon for which history offers no precedent, however far back we may cast our eye. One might almost be excused who should exclaim, here surely is something like a miracle. Nevertheless, when we give over idle wonder and begin to examine the seeming prodigy critically, we find it no prodigy at all, much less a miracle. It is not necessary to suppose a moral new birth of humanity, or a wholesale destruction of the wicked and survival of the good to account for the fact before us. It finds its simple and obvious explanation in the reaction of a changed environment upon human nature. It means merely that a form of society which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness and appealed solely to the antisocial and brutal side of human nature has been replaced by institutions based on the true self-interest of irrational and selfishness and appealing to the social and generous instincts of man. My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemed in the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the old social and industrial system which taught them to view their natural prey in their fellow men and find their gain in the loss of others. No doubt it seems to you that no necessity, however dire, would have tempted you to subsist on what superior skill or strength enabled you to rest from others equally needy. But suppose it were not merely your own life that you were responsible for. I know well that there must have been many a man among our ancestors who, if it had been merely a question of his own life, would sooner have given it up than nourished it by bread snatched from others. But this he was not permitted to do. He had dear lives dependent on him. Men loved women in those days as now. God knows how they dared be fathers, but they had babies as sweet, no doubt, to them as ours to us, whom they must feed, clothe, educate. The gentlest creatures are fears when they have young to provide for, and in that wolfish society the struggle for bread borrowed a peculiar desperation from the tenderest sentiments. For the sake of those dependent on him a man might not choose but must plunge into the foul fight, cheat, overreach, supplant, defraud, buy below worth, and sell above, break down the business by which his neighbour fed his young ones, tempt men to buy what they ought not and to sell what they should not, grind his labourers, sweat his debtors, cousin his creditors. Though a man sought it carefully with tears it was hard to find a way in which he could earn a living and provide for his family except by pressing in before some weaker rival and taking the food from his mouth. Even the ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel necessity. While they warned their flocks against their love of money, regard for their families compelled them to keep an outlook for the pecuniary prizes of their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed a trying business, preaching to man a generosity and unselfishness which they and everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conduct which the law of self-preservation compelled men to break. Looking on the inhuman spectacle of society these worthy men busily bemoaned the depravity of human nature as if angelic nature wouldn't have been debauched in such a devil's school. Ah, my friends, believe me, it is not now in this happy age that humanity is proving the divinity within it. It was rather in those evil days when not even the fight for life with one another the struggle for mere existence in which mercy was folly could wholly banish generosity and kindness from the earth. It is not hard to understand the desperation with which men and women who, under other conditions, would have been full of gentleness and truth, fought and tore each other in the scramble for gold when we realized what it meant to miss it, what poverty was in that day. For the body it was hunger and thirst, torment by heat and frost, in sickness neglect, in health, unremitting toil. For the moral nature it meant oppression, contempt, and the patient endurance of indignity, brutal associations from infancy, the loss of all the innocence of childhood, the grace of womanhood, the dignity of manhood. For the mind it meant the death of ignorance, the torpor of all those faculties which distinguish us from brutes, the reduction of life to a round of bodily functions. Ah, my friends, if such a fate as this were offered you and your children as the only alternative of success in the accumulation of wealth, how long do you fancy would you be in sinking to the moral level of your ancestors? Some two or three centuries ago an act of barbarity was committed in India, which, though the number of lives destroyed was but a few score, was attended by such peculiar horrors that its memory is likely to be perpetual. A number of English prisoners were shut up in a room containing not enough air to supply one-tenth their number. The infortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but as the agonies of suffocation began to take hold on them they forgot all else and became involved in hideous struggle, each one for himself and against all others, to force away to one of the small apertures the prison at which alone it was possible to get a breath of air. It was a struggle in which man became beasts and the recital of its horrors by the few survivors so shocked our forefathers that for a century later we find it a stock reference in their literature as a typical illustration of the extreme possibilities of human misery, as shocking in its moral as its physical aspect. They could scarcely have anticipated that to us the black hole of Kolkata, with its press of maddened man tearing and trampling one another in the struggle to win a place at the breathing holes, would seem a striking type of the society of their age. It lacked something of being a complete type, however, for in the Kolkata black hole there were no tender women, no little children, and old men and women, no cripples. They were at least all men strong to bear who suffered. When we reflect that the ancient order of which I have been speaking was prevalent up to the end of the nineteenth century, while to us the new order which succeeded it already seems antique, even our parents having known no other, we cannot fail to be astounded at the suddenness with which a transition so profound beyond all previous experience of the race must have been affected. Some observation of the state of men's minds during the last quarter of the nineteenth century will, however, in great measure, dissipate this astonishment. Though general intelligence in the modern sense could not be said to exist in any community at that time, yet, as compared with previous generations, the one then on the stage was intelligent. The inevitable consequence of even this comparative degree of intelligence had been a perception of the evils of society, such as had never before been general. It is quite true that these evils had been even worse, much worse, in previous ages. It was the increased intelligence of the masses which made the difference, as the dawn reveals the squalor of surroundings which in the darkness may have seemed tolerable. The keynote of the literature of the period was one of compassion for the poor and unfortunate, an indignant outcry against the failure of the social machinery to ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain from these outbursts that the moral hideousness of the spectacle about them was, at least by fleshes, fully realized by the best of the men of that time, and that the lives of some of the more sensitive and generous hearted of them were rendered well-nigh unendurable by the intensity of their sympathies. Although the idea of the vital unity of the family of mankind, the reality of human brotherhood was very far from being apprehended by them, as the moral axiom it seems to us, yet it is a mistake to suppose that there was no feeling at all corresponding to it. I could read you passages of great beauty from some of their writers which show that the conception was clearly attained by a few, and no doubt vaguely by many more. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the nineteenth century was in name Christian, and the fact that the entire commercial and industrial frame of society was the embodiment of the anti-Christian spirit must have had some weight, and though I admit it was strangely little, with the nominal followers of Jesus Christ. When we inquire why it did not have more, why in general, long after a vast majority of men had agreed as to the crying abuses of the existing social arrangement, they still tolerated it, or contented themselves with talking of petty reforms in it, we come upon an extraordinary fact. It was the sincere belief of even the best of men at that epoch that the only stable elements in human nature on which a social system could be safely founded were its worst propensities. They had been taught and believed that greed and self-seeking were all that held mankind together, and that all human associations would fall to pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives or curb their operation. In a word, they believed, even those who longed to believe otherwise, the exact reverse of what seems to us self-evident. They believed, that is, that the antisocial qualities of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the cohesive force of society. It seemed reasonable to them, that men lived together solely for the purpose of overreaching and oppressing one another, and of being overreached and oppressed, and that while a society that gave full scope to these propensities could stand, there would be little chance for one based on the idea of cooperation for the benefit of all. It seems absurd to expect anyone to believe that convictions like these were ever seriously entertained by men, but that they were not only entertained by our great-grandfathers, but were responsible for the long delay in doing away with the ancient order after a conviction of its intolerable abuses had become general. It has well established as any effect in history can be. Just here you will find the explanation of the profound pessimism of the literature of last quarter of the nineteenth century, the note of melancholy in its poetry, and the cynicism of its humour. Feeling that the condition of the race was unendurable, they had no clear hope of anything better. They believed that the evolution of humanity had resulted in leading it into a cul-de-sac, and that there was no way of getting forward. The frame of men's minds at this time is strikingly illustrated by treatises which have come down to us, and may even now be consulted in our libraries by the curious, in which laborious arguments are pursued to prove that despite the evil plight of men, life was still by some slight preponderance of considerations probably better worth living than leaving. Despising themselves, they despised their creator. It was a general decay of religious belief. Pale and watery gleams from skies thickly veiled by doubt and dread alone lighted up the chaos of earth. That men should doubt him whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread the hands that moulded them seems to us indeed a pitchable insanity. But we must remember that children who are brave by day have sometimes foolish fears at night. The dawn has come since then. It is very easy to believe in the fatherhood of God in the twentieth century. Briefly, as must needs be in a discourse of this character, I have adverted to some of the causes which had prepared men's minds for the change from the old to the new order, as well as some causes of the conservatism of despair which for a while held it back after the time was ripe. To wonder at the rapidity with which the change was completed after its possibility was first entertained is to forget the intoxicating effect of hope upon minds longer accustomed to despair. The sunburst after so long and dark a night must needs have had a dazzling effect. From the moment men allowed themselves to believe that humanity after all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squat stature was not the measure of its possible growth, but that it stood upon the verge of an avatar of limitless development, the reaction must needs have been overwhelming. It is evident that nothing was able to stand against the enthusiasm which the new faith inspired. Here at last men must have felt was a cause compared with which the grandest of historic causes had been trivial. It was doubtless because it could have commanded millions of martyrs that none were needed. The change of a dynasty in a petty kingdom of the old world often cost more lives than did the revolution which set the feet of the human race at last in the right way. Doubtless it ill-beseems one to whom the boon of life in our resplendent age has been vouchsafed to wish his destiny other, and yet I have often thought that I would feign exchange my share in this serene and golden day for a place in that stormy epoch of transition when heroes burst the barred gate of the future and revealed to the kindling gaze of a hopeless race in place of the blank wall that had closed its path, a vista of progress whose end, for very excessive light, still dazzles us. Ah, my friends, who will say that to have lived then when the weakest influence was a lever to whose touch the centuries trembled was not worth a share even in this era of fruition. You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless of revolutions. In the time of one generation man laid aside the social traditions and practices of barbarians and assumed a social order worthy of rational and human beings. Seizing to be predatory in their habits they became co-workers and found in fraternity at once the signs of wealth and happiness. What shall I eat and drink and wherewithal shall I be clothed, stated as a problem beginning and ending in self, have been an anxious and an endless one. But when once it was conceived, not from the individual, but the fraternal standpoint, what shall we eat and drink and wherewithal shall we be clothed, its difficulties vanished. Poverty with servitude had been the result for the mass of humanity of attempting to solve the problem of maintenance from the individual's standpoint, but no sooner had the nation become the sole capitalist and employer that not alone did plenty replace poverty, but the last vestige of the servdom of man to man disappeared from earth. Human slavery so often vainly scotched at last was killed. The means of subsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by employer to employed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock as among children at the father's table. It was impossible for a man any longer to use his fellow man as tools for his own profit. His esteem was the only sort of gain he could thenceforth make out of him. There was no more either arrogance or civility in the relations of human beings to one another. For the first time since the creation every man stood up straight before God. The fear of want and the lust of gain became extinct motives when abundance was assured to all and in moderate possessions made impossible of attainment. There were no more bearers nor almanus. Equity left charity without an occupation. The ten commandments became well-nigh obsolete in a world where there was no temptation to theft, no occasion to lie either for fear or favor, no room for envy where all were equal, and little provocation to violence where men were disarmed of power to injure one another. Humanity's ancient dream of liberty, equality, fraternity, mocked by so many ages at last was realized. As in the old society the generous, the just, the tender-hearted had been placed at a disadvantage by the possession of those qualities. So in the new society the cold-hearted, the greedy, and self-seeking found themselves out of joint with the world. Now that the conditions of life for the first time ceased to operate as a forcing process to develop the brutal qualities of human nature, and the premium which had hit to four encouraged selfishness was not only removed but placed upon unselfishness. It was for the first time possible to see what unperverted human nature really was like. The depraved tendencies which had previously overgrown and obscured the better to so large an extent, now withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the nobler qualities showed a sudden luxurience which turned cynics into penigieres, and for the first time in human history tempted mankind to fall in love with itself. Soon was fully revealed what the divines and philosophers of the old world never would have believed, that human nature in its essential qualities is good, not bad, that men by their natural intention and structure are generous, not selfish, pitiful, not cruel, sympathetic, not arrogant, godlike in aspirations, instinct with the finest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice, images of God indeed, not the travesties upon him they had seemed. The constant pressure, through the numberless generations of conditions of life which might have perverted angels, had not been able to essentially alter the natural nobility of the stock, and these conditions once removed like a bent tree it had sprung back to its normal uprightness. To put the whole matter in a nutshell of a parable, let me compare humanity in the olden time to a rose bush planted in a swamp, watered with black bog water, breathing miasmatic fogs by day, and chilled with poisoned juice at night. Innumerable generations of gardeners had done their best to make a bloom, but beyond an occasional half-opened bud with a worm at the heart their efforts had been unsuccessful. Many indeed claimed that the bush was no rose bush at all, but a noxious shrub fit only to be uprooted and burned. The gardeners for the most part, however, held that the bush belonged to the rose family, but had some ineradicable taint about it, which prevented the buds from coming out and accounted for its generally sickly condition. There were few indeed who maintained that the stock was good enough, that the trouble was in the bog, and that under more favourable conditions the plant might be expected to do better. But these persons were not regular gardeners, and being condemned by the letter as mere theorists and daydreamers were, for the most part, so regarded by the people. Moreover urged some eminent moral philosophers, even conceding for the sake of the argument that the bush might possibly do better elsewhere. It was a more valuable discipline for the buds to try to bloom in a bog than it would be under more favourable conditions. The buds that succeeded in opening might indeed be very rare, and the flowers pale and scentless, but they were presented far more moral effort than if they had bloomed spontaneously in a garden. The regular gardeners and the moral philosophers had their way. The bush remained rooted in the bog, and the old cause of treatment went on. Continually new varieties of forcing mixtures were applied to the roots, and more recipes than could be numbered. Each declared by its advocates the best and only suitable preparation were used to kill the vermin and remove the mildew. This went on a very long time. Occasionally someone claimed to observe a slight improvement in the appearance of the bush, but there were quite as many who declared that it did not look so well as it used to. On the whole they could not be said to be any marked change. Finally, during a period of general despondency as to the prospects of the bush where it was, the idea of transplanting it was again mooted, and this time found favour. Let us try it was a general voice. Perhaps it may thrive better elsewhere, and here it is certainly doubtful if it be worth cultivating longer. So it came about that the rose bush of humanity was transplanted, and set in sweet warm dry earth where the sun bathed it, the stars wooded, and the south wind caressed it. Then it appeared that it was indeed a rose bush. The vermin and the mildew disappeared, and the bush was covered with most beautiful red roses, whose fragrance filled the world. It is a pledge of the destiny appointed for us that the Creator has set in our hearts an infinite standard of achievement, judged by which our past attainments seem always insignificant and the goal never nearer. Had our forefathers conceived a state of society in which men should live together like brethren dwelling in unity, without strives or envying, violence or overreaching, and where at the price of a degree of labour not greater than health demands, in their chosen occupations they should be wholly freed from care for the moral, and left with no more concern for their livelihood than trees which are watered by unfailing streams. Had they conceived such a condition, I say, it would have seemed to them nothing less than paradise. They would have confounded it with their idea of heaven, nor dreamt that they could possibly lie further beyond anything to be desired or striven for. But how is it with us who stand on this height which they gazed up to? Already we have well now forgotten, except when it is especially called to our minds by some occasion like the present, that it was not always with men as it is now. It is a strain on our imaginations to conceive the social arrangements of our immediate ancestors. We find them grotesque. The solution of the problem of physical maintenance so as to banish care and crime so far from seeming to us an ultimate attainment appears but as a preliminary to anything like real human progress. We have but relieved ourselves of an impertinent and needless harassment which hindered our ancestor from undertaking the real ends of existence. We are merely stripped for the race, no more. We are like a child which has just learned to stand upright and to walk. It is a great event from the child's point of view, when he first walks. Perhaps he fancies that there can be a little beyond that achievement, but a year later he is forgotten that he could not always walk. His horizon did but widen when he rose, and enlarge as he moved. A great event indeed, in one sense, was his first step, but only as a beginning, not as the end. His true career was but then first entered on. The enfranchisement of humanity in the last century from mental and physical absorption in working and scheming for the mere bodily necessities may be regarded as a species of second birth of the race, without which its first birth to an existence that was but a burden would forever have remained unjustified, but whereby it is now abundantly vindicated. Since then, humanity has entered on a new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties, the very existence of which, in human nature, our ancestors scarcely suspected. In place of the dreary hopelessness of the nineteenth century, its profound pessimism as to the future of humanity, the animating idea of the present age is an enthusiastic conception of the opportunities of our earthly existence, and the unbounded possibilities of human nature. The betterment of mankind from generation to generation, physically, mentally, morally, is recognized as the one great object supremely worthy of effort and of sacrifice. We believe the race for the first time to have entered on the realization of God's ideal of it, and each generation must now be a step upward. Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall have passed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end is lost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God who is our home, the return of the individual by the way of death, and the return of the race by the fulfillment of the evolution, when the divine secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and wary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the Chrysalis. The heavens are before it.