 15 When, in the course of our tour of inspection, we came to the library, we succumbed to the temptation of the exurious leather chairs with which it was furnished, and sat down in one of the book-lined alcoves to rest and chat a while. Footnote I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of thyme and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature. And footnote Edith tells me that you have been in the library all the morning, said Mrs. Leith. Do you know, it seems to me, Mr. West, that you are the most enviable of mortals? I should like to know just why, I replied. Because the books of the last hundred years will be new to you, she answered. You'll have so much of the most absorbing literature to read as to leave you scarcely time for meals, these five years to come. Ah, what would I give if I had not already read Barian's novels? For Nasmith's mama, added Edith, yes, or Oad's poems, or past and present, or in the beginning, or, oh, I could name a dozen books, each worth a year of one's life, declared Mrs. Leith enthusiastically. I judge, then, that there has been some notable literature produced in this century. Yes, said Dr. Leith, it has been an era of unexampled intellectuals plenne, probably humanity never before passed through a moral and material evolution at once so vast in its scope and brief in its time of accomplishment as that from the old order to the new in the early part of the century. When men came to realize the greatness of the felicity which had befallen them, and that the change through which they had passed was not merely an improvement in details of their condition, but the rise of the race to a new plane of existence with an illimitable vista of progress, their minds were affected in all their faculties with a stimulus of which the outburst of the medieval renaissance offers a suggestion but faint indeed. Their ensued an era of mechanical invention, scientific discovery, art, musical and literary productiveness to which no previous age of the world offers anything comparable. By the way, said I, talking of literature, how are books published now? Is that also done by the nation? Certainly. But how do you manage it? Does the government publish everything that has brought it, as a matter of course, at the public expense? Or does it exercise a censorship and print only what it approves? Neither way, the printing department has no sensorial powers. It is bound to print all that is offered it, but prints it only on condition that the author defrays the first cost out of his credit. He must pay for the privilege of the public ear, and if he has any message worth hearing, we consider that he will be glad to do it. Of course, if incomes were unequal as in the old times, this rule would enable only the rich to be authors, but the resources of citizens being equal, it merely measures the strength of the author's motive. The cost of an edition of an average book can be saved out of a year's credit by the practice of economy and some sacrifices. The book on being published is placed on sale by the nation. The author receiving a royalty on the sales, as with us, I suppose, I suggested. Not as with you, certainly, replied Dr. Lied, but nevertheless in one way. The price of every book is made up of the cost of its publication with a royalty for the author. The author fixes this royalty at any figure he pleases. Of course, if he puts it unreasonably high, it is his own loss, for the book will not sell. The amount of this royalty is set to his credit, and he is discharged from other servers to the nation for so long a period as this credit at the rate of allowance for the support of citizens shall suffice to support him. If his book be moderately successful, he has thus a fellow for several months, a year, two or three years, and if he in the meantime produces other successful work, the remission of service is extended so far as the sale of that may justify. An author of much acceptance succeeds in supporting himself by his pen during the entire period of service, and the degree of any writer's literary ability, as determined by the popular voice, is thus the measure of the opportunity given him to devote his time to literature. In this respect, the outcome of our system is not very dissimilar to that of yours, but there are two notable differences. In the first place, the universally high level of education nowadays gives the popular verdict a conclusiveness on the real merit of literary work which in your day it was as far as possible from having. In the second place, there is no such thing now as favoritism of any sort to interfere with the recognition of true merit. Every author has precisely the same facilities for bringing his work before the popular tribunal. To judge from the complaints of the writers of your day, this absolute equality of opportunity would have been greatly prized. In the recognition of merit in other fields of original genius, such as music, art, invention, design, I said, I suppose you follow a similar principle. Yes, he replied, although the details differ. In art, for example, as in literature, the people are their sole judges. They vote upon the acceptance of statues and paintings for the public buildings, and their favorable verdict carries with it the artist's remission from other tasks to devote himself to his vocation. On copies of his work disposed of, he also derives the same advantage as the author on sales of his books. In all these lines of original genius, the planned pursuit is the same, to offer a free field to aspirants, and as soon as exceptional talent is recognized to release it from all trammels and let it have free cause. The remission of other service in these cases is not intended as a gift or reward, but as the means of obtaining more and higher service. Of course there are various literary, art, and scientific institutes to which membership comes to the famous and is greatly prized. The highest of all honours in the nation, higher than the presidency, which calls merely for good sense and devotion to duty, is the red ribbon awarded by the vote of people to the great authors, artists, engineers, physicians, and inventors of the generation. Not over a certain number wear it at any one time, though every bright young fellow in the country loses innumerable nights' sleep dreaming of it. I even did myself. Just as if Mamma and I would have thought any more of you with it, exclaimed Edith. Not that it isn't, of course, a very fine thing to have. You had no choice, my dear, but to take your father as you found him and make the best of him, Dr. Leed replied. But as for your mother, there she would never have had me if I had not assured her that I was bound to get the red ribbon or at least the blue. On this extravagance Mrs. Leed's only comment was a smile. How about periodicals and newspapers, I said? I won't deny that your book publishing system is a considerable improvement on ours, both as to its tendency to encourage a real literary vocation and quite as important to discourage mere scribblers. But I don't see how it can be made to apply to magazines and newspapers. It is very well to make a man pay for publishing a book because the expense will be only occasional. But no man could afford the expense of publishing a newspaper every day in the year. It took the deep pockets of our private capitalists to do that, and often exhausted even them before the returns came in. If you have newspapers at all, they must, I fancy, be published by the government at the public expense, with government editors reflecting government opinions. Now, if your system is so perfect that there is never anything to criticize in the conduct of affairs, this arrangement may answer. Otherwise, I should think the lack of an independent, unofficial medium for the expression of public opinion would have most unfortunate results. Confess, Dr. Leed, that a free newspaper press, with all that it implies, was a redeeming incident of the old system when capital was in private hands, and that you have to set off the loss of that against your gains in other respects. I'm afraid I can't give you even that consolation, replied Dr. Leed, laughing. In the first place, Mr. West, the newspaper press is by no means the only, or as we look at it, the best vehicle for serious criticism of public affairs. To us, the judgments of your newspapers on such themes seem generally to have been crude and flippant, as well as deeply tinctured with prodigious and bitterness. In so far as they may be taken as expressing public opinion, they give an unfavorable impression of the popular intelligence, while so far as they may have formed public opinion, the nation was not to be felicitated. Nowadays, when a citizen desires to make a serious impression upon the public mind as to any aspect of public affairs, he comes out with a book or pamphlet, published at other books are. But this is not because we lack newspapers and magazines, or that they lack the most absolute freedom. The newspaper press is organized so as to be a more perfect expression of public opinion than it possibly could be in your day, when private capital controlled and managed it primarily as a money-making business, and secondarily only as a mouthpiece for the people. But, said I, if the government prints the papers at a public expense, how can it fail to control their policy? Who appoints the editors, if not the government? The government does not pay the expense of the papers, nor appoint their editors, nor in any way exert the slightest influence on their policy, replied Ratulid. The people who take the paper pay the expense of its publication, choose its editor, and remove him when unsatisfactory. He will scarcely say I think that such a newspaper press is not a free organ of popular opinion. Decidedly I shall not, I replied. But how is it practicable? Nothing could be simpler. Supposing some of my neighbours, or myself, think we ought to have a newspaper reflecting our opinions, and devoted especially to our locality, trade, or profession. We go about among the people till we get the names of such a number that their annual subscriptions will meet the cost of the paper, which is little or big according to the largeness of its constituency. The amount of the subscriptions marked off the credits of the citizens guarantees the nation against loss in publishing the paper, its business, you understand, being that of a publisher purely, with no option to refuse the duty required. The subscribers to the paper now elect somebody as editor, who, if he accepts the office, is discharged from other service during his incumbency. Instead of paying a salary to him, as in your day, the subscribers pay the nation an indemnity equal to the cost of his support for taking him away from the general service. He manages the paper just as one of your editors did, except that he has no counting room to obey, or interests of private capital as against the public good to defend. At the end of the first year, the subscribers for the next either re-elect the former editor or choose anyone else to his place. An able editor, of course, keeps his place indefinitely. As the subscription list enlarges, the funds of the paper increase, and it is improved by the securing of more and better contributors, just as your papers were. How is the staff of contributors recompensed, since they cannot be paid in money? The editor settles with them the price of their wares. The amount is transferred to their individual credit from the guarantee credit of the paper, and the remission of services granted to the contributor for a length of time corresponding to the amount credited to him, just as to other authors. As to magazines, the system is the same. Those interested in the prospectus of a new periodical pledge enough subscriptions to run it for a year. Select their editor, who recompenses his contributors just as in the other case, the printing bureau furnishing the necessary force and material for publication as a matter of course. When an editor's services are no longer desired, if he cannot earn the right to his time by other literary work, he simply resumes his place in the industrial army. I should add that, though ordinarily the editor is elected only at the end of the year, and as a rule is continued in office for a term of years, in case of any certain change he should give to the tone of the paper, provision is made for taking the sense of the subscribers as to his removal at any time. However earnestly a man may long for leisure for purposes of study or meditation, I remarked. He cannot get out of the harness, if I understand you rightly, except in these two ways he have mentioned. He must either, by literary, artistic, or inventive productiveness, indemnify the nation for the loss of his services, or must get a sufficient number of other people to contribute to such an indemnity. It is most certain, replied Dr. Leet, that no able-bodied man nowadays can evade his share of work and live on the toil of others, whether he calls himself by the fine name of student or confesses to being simply lazy. At the same time our system is elastic enough to give free play to every instinct of human nature which does not aim at dominating others or living on the fruit of others' labour. There is not only the remission by indemnification, but the remission by abnegation. Any man in his thirty-third year, his term of service being then half done, can obtain an honourable discharge from the army, provided he accepts for the rest of his life one half the rate of maintenance other citizens receive. It is quite possible to live on this amount, though one must forgo the luxuries and eloquencies of life with some perhaps of its comforts. When the ladies retired that evening, Edith brought me a book and said, If you should be wakeful tonight, Mr. West, you might be interested in looking over this story by Berrian. It is considered his masterpiece, and will at least give you an idea what the stories nowadays are like. I sat up in my room that night reading Panthecilia, till it grew grey in the east, and did not lay it down till I had finished it, and yet let no admirer of the great romancer of the twentieth century resent my saying that at the first reading what most impressed me was not so much what was in the book as what was left out of it. The story writers of my day would have deemed the making of bricks without straw a light task compared with the construction of a romance from which should be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, causeness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer, together with sordid anxieties of any sort for oneself or others, a romance in which there should indeed be love galore but love unfredded by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart. The reading of Panthecilia was of more value than almost any amount of explanation would have been in giving me something like a general impression of the social aspect of the twentieth century. The information Dr. Lied had imparted was indeed extensive as to facts, but they had affected my mind as so many separate impressions, which I had as yet succeeded but imperfectly in making cohere. Barion put them together for me in a picture. CHAPTER XVI Next morning I rose somewhat before the breakfast hour. As I descended the stairs, Edith stepped into the hall from the room which had been the scene of the morning interview between us, described some chapters back. Ah, she exclaimed, with a charmingly arch expression. You thought to slip out and be known for another of those solitary morning rambles which have such nice effects on you, but you see I am up too early for you this time. You are fairly caught. You discredited the efficacy of your own cure, I said, by supposing that such a ramble would now be attended with bad consequences. I am very glad to hear that, she said. I was in here arranging some flowers for the breakfast table when I heard you come down, and fancy did I detect something surreptitious in your step on the stairs. You did me injustice, I replied. I had no idea of going out at all. CHAPTER XVI Despite her effort to convey an impression that my interception was purely accidental, I had at the time a dim suspicion of what I afterwards learned to be the fact, namely, that this sweet creature, in pursuance of her self-assumed garden-ship over me, had risen for the last two or three mornings at an unheard of hour to ensure against the possibility of my wandering off alone in case I should be affected as on the former occasion. Receiving permission to assist her in making up the breakfast bouquet, I followed her into the room from which she had emerged. Are you sure, she asked, that you are quite done with those terrible sensations you had that morning? I can't say that I do not have times of feeding decidedly queer, I replied, moments when my personal identity seems an open question. It would be too much to expect after my experience that I should not have such sensations occasionally, but as for being carried entirely off my feet as I was on the point of being that morning, I think the danger is past. I shall never forget how you looked that morning, she said. If you had merely saved my life, I continued, I might perhaps find words to express my gratitude. But it was my reason you saved, and there are no words that would not belittle my debt to you. I spoke with emotion, and her eyes grew suddenly moist. It is too much to believe all this, she said, but it is very delightful to hear you say it. What I did was very little. I was very much distressed for you, I know. Father never thinks anything ought to astonish us when it can be explained scientifically, as I suppose this long sleep of yours can be. But even to fancy myself in your place makes my head swim. I know that I could not have borne it at all. That would depend, I replied, on whether an angel came to support you with her sympathy in the crisis of your condition as one came to me. If my face at all expressed the feelings I had a right to have towards this sweet and lovely young girl who had played so angelic a role toward me, its expression must have been very worshipful just then. The expression, or the words, or both together, calls her now to drop her eyes with a charming blush. For the matter of that, I said, if your experience has not been as startling as mine, it must have been rather overwhelming to see a man belonging to a strange sentry, and apparently a hundred years dead, raised to life. It seemed indeed strange beyond any describing at first, she said, but when we began to put ourselves in your place and realize how much stranger it must seem to you, I fancy we forgot our own feelings a good deal, at least I know I did. It seemed then not so much astounding as interesting and touching beyond anything ever heard of before, but does it not come over you as astounding to sit at the table with me, seeing who I am? You must remember that you do not seem so strange to us as we must to you, she answered. We belong to a future of which you could not form an idea, a generation of which you knew nothing until you saw us. But you belong to a generation of which our forefathers were a part. We know all about it. The names of many of its members are household words with us. We have made a study of your ways of living and thinking. Nothing you say or do surprises us, while we say and do nothing which does not seem strange to you. So you see, Mr West, that if you feel that you can, in time, get accustomed to us, you must not be surprised that from the first we have scarcely found you strange at all. I had not thought of it in that way, I replied. There is indeed much in what you say. One can look back a thousand years easier than forward fifty. A century is not so very long of retrospect. I might have known your great-grandparents. Possibly I did. Did they live in Boston? I believe so. You're not sure then? Yes, she replied. Now I think they did. I had a very large circle of acquaintances in the city, I said. It is not unlikely that I knew or knew of some of them. Perhaps I may have known them well. Wouldn't it be interesting if I should chance to be able to tell you all about your great-grandfather, for instance? Very interesting. Do you know your genealogy well enough to tell me who your forebears were in the Boston of my day? Oh, yes. Perhaps then you will sometimes tell me what some of their names were. She was engrossed in arranging a troublesome spray of green, and did not reply at once. Steps upon the stairway indicated that the other members of the family were descending. Perhaps some time, she said. After breakfast Dr. Leed suggested taking me to inspect the Central Warehouse and observe actually in operation the machinery of distribution which Edith had described to me. As we walked away from the house, I said, It is now several days that I have been living in your household on a most extraordinary footing, or rather, on none at all. I have not spoken of this aspect of my position before because there were so many other aspects, yet more extraordinary. But now that I am beginning a little to feel my feet under me, and to realize that however I came here, I am here, and must make the best of it, I must speak to you on this point. As for your being a guest in my house, replied Dr. Leed, I pray you not to begin to be uneasy on that point, for I mean to keep you a long time yet. With all your modesty, you can but realize that such a guest as yourself is an acquisition not willingly to be parted with. Thanks, Dr. Leed, I said. It would be absurd, certainly, for me to affect any oversensitiveness about accepting the temporary hospitality of one to whom I owe it that I am not still awaiting the end of the world in a living tomb. But if I am to be a permanent citizen of this century, I must have some standing in it. Now, in my time, a person more or less entering the world however he got in, would not be noticed in the unorganized throng of man, and might make a place for himself anywhere he chose if he were strong enough. But nowadays everybody is a part of a system with a distinct place and function. I am outside the system and don't see how I can get in. There seems no way to get in except to be born in or to come in as an immigrant from some other system. Dr. Leed laughed heartily. I admit, he said, that our system is defective in lacking provision for cases like yours, but you see nobody anticipated additions to the world except by the usual process. You need, however, have no fear that we shall be unable to provide both a place and occupation for you in due time. You have as yet been broad in contact only with the members of my family, but you must not suppose that I have kept your secret. On the contrary, your case, even before your resuscitation, and vastly more since, has excited the profoundest interest in the nation. In view of your precarious nervous condition, it was thought best that I should take exclusive charge of you at first, and that you should, through me and my family, receive some general idea of the sort of world you had come back to before you began to make the acquaintance generally of its inhabitants. As to finding a function for you in society, there was no hesitation as to what that would be. Few of us have it in our power to confer so great a service on the nation as you will be able to when you leave my roof, which, however, you must not think of doing for a good time yet. What can I possibly do? I asked. Perhaps you imagine I have some trade or art or special skill. I assure you I have none whatever. I never earned a dollar in my life or did an hour's work. I am strong and might be a common labourer, but nothing more. If that were the most efficient service you were able to render the nation, you would find that avocation considered quite as respectable as any other, replied Dr. Lied. But you can do something else better. You are easily the master of all our historians on questions relating to the social condition of the latter part of the 19th century, to us one of the most absorbingly interesting periods of history, and whenever in due time you are sufficiently familiarized yourself with our institutions and are willing to teach us something concerning those of your day, you will find an historical lectureship in one of our colleges awaiting you. Very good. Very good indeed, I said, much relieved by so practical a suggestion on a point which had begun to trouble me. If your people are really so much interested in the 19th century, there will indeed be an occupation ready made for me. I don't think there is anything else that I could possibly earn my soul at, but I certainly may claim without conceit to have some special qualifications for such a post as you describe. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 and 18 of Looking Backward. This lipovox recording is the public domain, recording by Anna Simon, Looking Backward 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy. Chapter 17. I found the processes at the warehouse quite as interesting as Ed had described them, and became even enthusiastic over the truly remarkable illustration which is seen there of the prodigiously multiplied efficiency which perfect organization can give to Labour. It is like a gigantic mill into the hopper of which goods are being constantly poured by the train load and ship load to issue at the other end in packages of pounds and ounces, yards and inches, pints and gallons corresponding to the infinitely complex personal needs of half a million people. Dr. Leed, with the assistance of data furnished by me as to the way goods were sold in my day, figured out some astounding results in the way of the economies affected by the modern system. As we set out homeward I said, after what I've seen today, together with what you've told me and what I learned under Ms. Leed's tutelage at the sample stall, I have a tolerably clear idea of your system of distribution and how it enables you to dispense with a circulating medium. But I should like very much to know something more about your system of production. You have told me in general how your industrial army is levied and organized, but who directs its efforts? What supreme authority determines what shall be done in every department so that enough of everything is produced and yet no labor wasted? It seems to me that this must be a wonderfully complex and difficult function requiring very unusual endowments. Does it indeed seem so to you? responded Dr. Leed. I assure you that is nothing of the kind, but on the other hand, so simple and depending on principles so obvious and easily applied, that the functionaries at Washington to whom it is trusted require to be nothing more than man of fair abilities to discharge it to the entire satisfaction of the nation. The machine which they direct is indeed a vast one, but so logical in its principles and direct and simple in its workings that it all but runs itself, and nobody but a fool could derange it, as I think you will agree after a few words of explanation. Since you already have a pretty good idea of the working of the distributive system, let us begin at that end. Even in your day satisitions were able to tell you the number of yards of cotton, velvet, woolen, the number of barrels of flour, potatoes, butter, number of pairs of shoes, hats, and umbrellas, annually consumed by the nation, owing to the fact that production was in private hands and that there was no way of getting statistics of actual distribution. These figures were not exact, but they were nearly so. Now that every pin which is given out from a national warehouse is recorded, of course the figures of consumption for any week, month, or year in the possession of the Department of Distribution at the end of that period are precise. On these figures, allowing for tendencies to increase or decrease, and for any special causes likely to affect demand, the estimates, say for a year ahead, are based. These estimates, with a proper margin for security, having been accepted by the General Administration, the responsibility of the Distributive Department seizes until the goods are delivered to it. I speak of the estimates being furnished for an entire year ahead, but in reality they cover that much time only in case of the great staples for which the demand can be calculated on as steady. In the great majority of smaller industries, for the product of which popular taste fluctuates, and novelty is frequently required, production is kept barely ahead of consumption, the Distributive Department furnishing frequent estimates based on the weekly state of demand. Now the entire field of productive and constructive industry is divided into ten great departments, each representing a group of allied industries, each particular industry being in turn represented by a subordinate bureau, which has a complete record of the plant and force under its control, of the present product, and means of increasing it. The estimates of the Distributive Department, after adoption by the Administration, are sent as mandate to the ten great departments, which allot them to the subordinate bureaus representing the particular industries, and these set the men at work. Each bureau is responsible for the task given it, and this responsibility is enforced by departmental oversight and that of the Administration, nor does the Distributive Department accept the product without its own inspection, while even if in the hands of the consumer an article turns out unfit, the system enables the fold to be traced back to the original workmen. The production of the commodities for actual public consumption does not of course require by any means all the national force of workers. After the necessary contingents have been detailed for the various industries, the amount of labour left for other employment is expanded in creating fixed capital, such as buildings, machinery, engineering works, and so forth. One point occurs to me, I said, on which I should think there might be dissatisfaction, where there is no opportunity for private enterprise. How is there any assurance that the claims of small minorities of the people to have articles produced, for which there is no wide demand, will be respected? An official decree at any moment may deprive them of the means of gratifying some special taste, merely because the majority does not share it. That would be tyranny indeed, replied Dr. Lied, and you may be very sure that it does not happen with us, to whom liberty is as dear as equality or fraternity. As you come to know our system better, you will see that our officials are in fact, and not merely in name, the agents and servants of the people. The Administration has no power to stop the production of any commodity, for which there continues to be a demand. Suppose the demand for any article declines to such a point that its production becomes very costly. The price has to be raised in proportion, of course, but as long as the consumer cares to pay it, the production goes on. Again, suppose an article not before produced is demanded. If the Administration doubts the reality of the demand, a popular petition, guaranteeing a certain basis of consumption, compels it to produce the desired article. A government, or a majority, which should undertake to tell the people, or a minority, what they were to eat, drink, or wear, as I believe governments in America did in your day, would be regarded as a curious anachronism indeed. Possibly you had reasons for tolerating these infringements of personal independence, but we should not think them indurable. I am glad you raised this point, for it has given me a chance to show you how much more direct and efficient is the control over production exercised by the individual citizen now than it was in your day, when what you called private initiative prevailed, though it should have been called capitalist initiative, for the average private citizen had little enough share in it. You speak of raising the price of costly articles, I said. How can prices be regulated in a country where there is no competition between buyers or sellers? Just as they were with you, replied Dr. Leed. You think that needs explaining, he added, as I looked incredulous, but the explanation need not be long. The cost of the labour which produced it was recognised as the legitimate basis of the price of an article in your day, and so it is in ours. In your day it was the difference in wages that made the difference in the cost of labour. Now it is the relative number of hours constituting a day's work in different trades, the maintenance of the worker being equal in all cases. The cost of a man's work in a trade so difficult that in order to attract volunteers, the hours have to be fixed at four a day, is twice as great as that in a trade where the men work eight hours. The result, as to the cost of labour, you see, is just the same as that the men working four hours were paid under your system, twice the wages the others get. This calculation applied to the labour employed in the various processes of a manufactured article gives its price relatively to other articles. Besides the cost of production and transportation, the factor of scarcity affects the prices of some commodities. As regards the great staples of life of which an abundance can always be secured, scarcity is eliminated as a factor. There is always a large surplus kept on hand from which any fluctuations of demand or supply can be corrected, even in most cases of bad crops. The prices of the staples grow less year by year, but rarely, if ever, rise. There are, however, certain classes of articles permanently and others temporarily unequal to the demand, as, for example, fresh fish or dairy products in a latter category, and the products of high skill and rare materials in the other. All that can be done here is to equalize the inconvenience of the scarcity. This is done by temporarily raising the price if the scarcity be temporary or fixing it high if it be permanent. High prices in your day meant restriction of the articles affected to the rich, but nowadays when the means of all are the same, the effect is only that those to whom the articles seem most desirable are the ones who purchase them. Of course, the nation, as any other caterer for the public needs must be, is frequently left with small lots of goods on its hands by changes in taste, unseasonable weather, and various other causes. These it has to dispose of at a sacrifice, just as merchants often did in your day, charging up the loss to the expenses of the business. Owing, however, to the vast body of consumers to which such lots can be simultaneously offered, there is rarely any difficulty in getting rid of them at trifling loss. I've given you now some general notion of our system of production, as well as distribution. Do you find it as complex as you expected? I admitted that nothing could be much simpler. I am sure, said Dr. Lied, that it is within the truth to say that the head of one of the myriad private businesses of your day who had to maintain sleepless vigilance against the fluctuations of the market, the machinations of his rivals, and the failure of his debtors, had a far more trying task than the group of men at Washington who nowadays direct the industries of the entire nation. All this merely shows, my dear fellow, how much easier it is to do things the right way than the wrong. It is easier for a general up in a balloon with perfect survey of the field to manoeuvre a million men to victory, than for a sergeant to manage a platoon in a thicket. The general of this army, including the flower of manhood of the nation, must be the foremost man in the country, really great or even, and the president of the United States, I said. He is the president of the United States, replied Dr. Lied, or rather the most important function of the presidency is the headship of the industrial army. How is he chosen? I asked. I explained to you before, replied Dr. Lied, when I was describing the force of the motive of emulation among all grades of the industrial army, that the line of promotion for the meritorious lies through three grades to the office's grade, and lands up through the left tendencies to the captaincy or formanship and superintendency or colonels rank. Next, with an intervening grade in some of the larger trades, comes the general of the guild, under whose immediate control all the operations of the trade are conducted. This officer is at the head of the national bureau representing his trade, and is responsible for its work to the administration. The general of his guild holds a splendid position, and one which amply satisfies the ambition of most men. But above his rank, which may be compared, to follow the military analogies familiar to you, to that of a general of division, or major general, is that of the chiefs of the ten grade departments, or groups of allied trades. The chiefs of these ten grand divisions of the industrial army may be compared to your commanders of army corps, or left-hand generals, each having from a dozen to a score of generals of separate guilds reporting to him. Above these ten grade officers, who form his council, is the general-in-chief, who is the president of the United States. The general-in-chief of the industrial army must have passed through all the grades below him, from the common laborers up, let us see how he rises. As I have told you, it is simply by the excellence of his record as a worker that one rises through the grades of the privates and becomes a candidate for a leftenancy. Through the leftenancies he rises to the colonelcy, or superintendent's position, by appointment from above, strictly limited to the candidates of the best records. The general of the guild appoints the ranks under him, but he himself is not appointed, but chosen by suffrage. By suffrage, I exclaimed, is not that ruinous to the discipline of the guild by tempting the candidates to intrigue for the support of the workers under them. So it would be, no doubt, replied or to lead, if the workers had any suffrage to exercise or anything to say about the choice, but they have nothing. Just here comes in a peculiarity of our system. The general of the guild is chosen from among the superintendents by vote of the honorary members of the guild, that is, of those who have served their time in the guild and received their discharge. As you know, at the age of forty-five we are mustered out of the army of industry and have the residue of life for the pursuit of our own improvement or recreation. Of course, however, the associations of our active lifetime retain a powerful hold on us. The companionships we formed then remain our companionships till the end of life. We always continue honorary members of our former guilds, and retain the keenest and most jealous interest in their welfare and repute in the hands of the following generation. In the clubs maintained by the honorary members of the several guilds in which we meet socially, there are no topics of conversation so common as those which relate to these matters, and the young aspirants for guild leadership who can pass the criticism of us old fellows are likely to be pretty well equipped. Recognizing this fact, the nation entrusts to the honorary members of each guild the election of its general, and I venture to claim that no previous formal society could have developed a body of electus so ideally adapted to their office, as regards absolute impartiality, knowledge of the special qualifications and record of candidates, solicitude for the best result, and complete absence of self-interest. Each of the ten and left-tenant generals, or heads of departments, is himself elected from among the generals of the guilds grouped as a department by vote of the honorary members of the guilds thus grouped. Of course there is a tendency on the part of each guild to vote for its own general, but no guild of any group has nearly enough votes to elect a man not supported by most of the others. I assure you that these elections are exceedingly lively. The president, I suppose, is elected from among the ten heads of the great departments. Precisely, but the heads of the department are not eligible to the presidency till they have been a certain number of years out of office. It is rarely that a man passes through all the grades to the headship of a department much before he is forty, and at the end of a five-year term he is usually forty-five. If more he still serves through his term, and if less he is nevertheless discharged from the industrial army at his termination. It would not do for him to return to the ranks. The interval before he is a candidate for the presidency is intended to give time for him to recognize fully that he has returned into the general march of the nation and is identified with it rather than with the industrial army. Moreover, it is expected that he will employ this period in studying the general condition of the army instead of that of the special group of guilds of which he was the head. From among the former heads of departments who may be eligible at the time, the president is elected by vote of all the men of the nation who are not connected with the industrial army. The army is not allowed to vote for president? Certainly not. That would be perilous to its discipline, which it is the business of the president to maintain as the representative of the nation at large. His right hand for this purpose is the inspectorate, a highly important department of our system. To the inspectorate come all complaints or information as a defect in goods, insolence or inefficiency of officials, or dereliction of any sort in the public service. The inspectorate, however, does not wait for complaints. Not only is it on the alert to catch and sift every rumour of a fault in the service, but it is its business by systematic and constant oversight and inspection of every branch of the army to find out what is going wrong before anybody else does. The president is usually not far from fifty when elected and serves five years, forming an honourable exception to the rule of retirement at forty-five. At the end of his term of office, a national congress is called to receive his report and approve or condemn it. If it is approved, Congress usually elects him to represent the nation for five years more in the international council. Congress, I should also say, passes on the reports of the outgoing heads of departments, and a disapproval renders any one of them ineligible for president. But it is rare indeed that the nation has occasion for other sentiments than those of gratitude to what its high offices. As to their ability to have risen from the ranks by tests so various and severe to their positions is proof in itself of extraordinary qualities. While as to faithfulness, our social system leaves them absolutely without any other motive than that of winning the esteem of their fellow citizens. Corruption is impossible in a society where there is neither poverty to be bribed nor wealth to bribe, while, as a demagoguery or intrigue for office, the conditions of promotion render them out of the question. One point I do not quite understand, I said. Are the members of the liberal professions eligible to the presidency? And if so, how were they ranked with those who pursue the industry's proper? They have no ranking with them, replied Dr. Lied. The members of the technical professions, such as engineers and architects, have a ranking with the constructive guilds. But the members of the liberal professions, the doctors and teachers, as well as the artists and men of letters, who obtain remissions of industrial service, do not belong to the industrial army. On this ground they vote for the president, but are not eligible to his office. One of its main duties being the control and discipline of the industrial army, it is essential that the president should have passed through all its grades to understand his business. That is reasonable, I said. But if the doctors and teachers do not know enough of industry to be president, neither, I should think, can the president know enough of medicine and education to control those departments? No more does he, was the reply. Except in the general way that he is responsible for the enforcement of the laws as to all classes, the president has nothing to do with the faculties of medicine and education, which are controlled by boards of regions of their own, in which the president is ex-officio, chairman, and has the casting vote. These regions, who, of course, are responsible to Congress, are chosen by the honorary members of the guilds of education and medicine, the retired teachers and doctors of the country. Do you know, I said, the method of electing officials by votes of the retired members of the guilds is nothing more than the application on a national scale of the plan of government by alumni, which we use to a slight extent occasionally in the management of our higher educational institutions. Did you indeed, exclaimed Doctor Leed with animation, that is quite new to me, that I fancy will be to most of us, and of much interest as well. There has been great discussion as to the germ of the idea, and we fancied that there was for once something new under the sun. Well, well, in your higher educational institutions, that is interesting indeed. You must tell me more of that. Truly, there is very little more to tell than I have told already, I replied. If we had the germ of your idea, it was but as a germ. Chapter 18 That evening I set up for some time after the ladies had retired, talking with Doctor Leed about the effect of the plan of exempting men from further service to the nation after the age of forty-five, a point brought up by his account of the part taken by the retired citizens in the government. At forty-five, said I, a man still has ten years of good manual labour in him, and twice ten years of good intellectual service. To be superannuated at that age and laid on the shelf must be regarded rather as a hardship than a favour by men of energetic dispositions. My dear Mr West, exclaimed Doctor Leed, beaming upon me, you cannot have any idea of the pickancy your nineteenth-century ideas have for us of this day, the rare quaintness of their effect. No, oh child of another race, and yet the same, that the labour we have to render as our part in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physical existence is by no means regarded as the most important, the most interesting, or the most dignified employment of our powers. We look upon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life. Everything possible is indeed done by the just distribution of burdens, and by all manner of special attractions and incentives to relieve our labour of irksomeness, and, except in a comparative sense, it is not usually irksome, and is often inspiring. But it is not our labour, but the higher and larger activities which the performance of our task will leave us free to enter upon that are considered the main business of existence. Of course, not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic, literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one thing valuable to their possessors. Many look upon the last half of life chiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts, for travel, for social relaxation in the company of their lifetime friends, a time for the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and special tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of recreation. In a word, a time for the leisurely and unperturbed appreciation of the good things of the world which they have helped to create. But whatever the differences between our individual tastes, as to the use we shall put our leisure to, we all agree in looking forward to the date of our discharge as the time when we shall first enter upon the full enjoyment of our birthright, the period when we shall first really attain our majority and become enfranchised from discipline and control with the fee of our lives vested in ourselves. As eager boys in your day anticipated twenty-one, so men nowadays look forward to forty-five. At twenty-one we become men, but at forty-five we renew youth. Middle age and what you would have called old age are considered, rather than youth, the enviable time of life. Thanks to the better conditions of existence nowadays, and above all the freedom of everyone from care, old age approaches many years later and has an aspect far more benign than in past times. Persons of average constitution usually live to eighty-five or ninety, and at forty-five we are physically and mentally younger, I fancy, than you were at thirty-five. It is a strange reflection that at forty-five, when we are just entering upon the most enjoyable period of life, you already began to think of growing old and to look backward. With you it was the four noon, with us it is the afternoon, which is the brighter half of life. After this I remember that our talk brand into the subject of popular sports and recreations at the present time as compared with those with the nineteenth century. In one respect, Dr. Lied, there is a marked difference. The professional sportsmen, which were such a curious feature of your day, we have nothing answering to, nor are the prizes for which our athletes contend money prizes as with you. Our contests are always for glory only. The generous rivalry existing between the various guilds and the loyalty of each worker to his own afford a constant stimulation to all sorts of games and matches by sea and land, in which the young men take scarcely more interest than the honoree guildsmen who have served their time. The guild yard races of Marblehead take place next week, and you will be able to judge for yourself of the popular enthusiasm with such events nowadays cool out as compared with your day. The demand for panum at circumstances, preferred by the Roman populace, is recognized nowadays as a holy reasonable one. If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second, and the nation caters for both. Americans of the nineteenth century were as unfortunate in lacking an adequate provision for the one sort of need as for the other. Even if the people of that period had enjoyed larger leisure, they would, I fancy, have often been at a loss how to pass it agreeably. We are never in that predicament. In the course of an early morning constitutional I visited Charleston. Among the changes, two numerous to attempt to indicate which mark the lapse of a century in that quarter are particularly noted the total disappearance of the old state prison. That went before my day, but I remember hearing about it, said Dr. Lied, when I alluded to the fact at the breakfast table. We have no jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated in the hospitals. Of atavism, I exclaimed, staring. Why, yes, replied Dr. Lied. The idea of dealing punitively with those unfortunate was given up at least fifty years ago, and I think more. I don't quite understand you, I said. Atavism in my day was a word applied to the cases of persons in whom some trade of a remote ancestor recurred in a noticeable manner. Am I to understand that crime is nowadays looked upon as the recurrence of an ancestral trade? I beg your pardon, said Dr. Lied, with a smile half humorous, half deprecating. But, since you have so explicitly asked the question, I am forced to say that the fact is precisely that. After what I had already learned of the moral contrasts between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, it was doubtless absurd in me to begin to develop sensitiveness on the subject, and probably if Dr. Lied had not spoken with that apologetic air, and Mrs. Lied and Edith, shown a corresponding embarrassment, I should not have flushed as I was conscious I did. I was not in much danger of being vain of my generation before, I said, But, really, this is your generation, Mr. West, interposed Edith. It is the one in which you are living, you know, and it is only because we are alive now that we call it ours. Thank you, I will try to think of it so, I said, and as my eyes met hers their expression quite cured my senseless sensitiveness. After all, I said, with a laugh, I was brought up a Calvinist, and ought not to be startled to hear crime spoken of as an ancestral trade. In point of fact, said Dr. Lied, our use of the word is no reflection at all on your generation, if, begging Edith's pardon, we may call it yours, so far as seeming to imply that we think ourselves, apart from our circumstances, better than you were. In your day, fully 1920th of the crime, using the word broadly to include all sorts of misdemeanours, resulted from the inequality in the possessions of individuals. Want tempted the poor, lust of greater gains, or the desire to preserve former gains, tempted the well to do. Directly or indirectly, the desire for money, which then meant every good thing, was the motive of all this crime, the taproot of a vast poison growth, which the machinery of law, courts, and police could barely prevent from choking your civilization outright. When we made the nation the sole trustee of the wealth of the people, and guaranteed to all abundant maintenance, on the one hand abolishing want, and on the other checking the accumulation of riches, we cut this root, and the poison tree that overshadowed your society with it, like Jonas Gord in a day. As for the comparatively small class of violent crimes against persons, unconnected with any idea of gain, they were almost wholly confined, even in your day, to the ignorant and bestial. And in these days, when education and good manners are not the monopoly of a few, but universal, such atrocities are scarcely ever heard of. You now see why the word atavism is used for crime. It is because nearly all forms of crime known to you are motiveless now, and when they appear can only be explained as the outcropping of ancestral trades. You are used to call persons who stole, evidently without any rational motive, kleptomaniacs, and when the case was clear, deemed it absurd to punish them as thieves. Your attitude toward the genuine kleptomaniac is precisely ours toward the victim of atavism, an attitude of compassion, and firm but gentle restraint. Your courts must have an easy time of it, I observed, with no private property to speak of, no disputes between citizens over business relations, no real estate to divide, or debts to collect, there must be absolutely no civil business at all for them, and with no offences against property, and mighty few of any sort, to provide criminal cases, I should think you might almost do without judges and lawyers altogether. We do without the lawyers, certainly, was Dr. Leed's reply. It would not seem reasonable to us, in a case where the only interest of the nation is to find out the truth, that persons should take part in the proceedings who had an acknowledged motive to colour it. But who defends the accused? If he is a criminal, he needs no defence, for he pleads guilty in most instances, replied Dr. Leed. The plea of the accused is not a mere formality with us as with you. It is usually the end of the case. You don't mean that the man who pleads not guilty is thereupon discharged? No, I do not mean that. He is not accused on light grounds, and if he denies his guilt, it must still be tried. But trials are few, for in most cases the guilty man pleads guilty. When he makes a false plea, and is clearly proved guilty, his penalty is doubled. Falsehood is, however, so despised among us that few offenders would lie to save themselves. That is the most astounding thing you have yet told me, I exclaimed. If lying has gone out of fashion, this is indeed the new heavens and the new earth were in wealth righteousness, which the Prophet foretold. Such is, in fact, the belief of some persons nowadays, was the Dr's answer. They hold that we have entered upon the millennium, and the theory from their point of view does not lack plausibility. But as to your astonishment at finding that the world has outgrown lying, there is really no ground for it. Falsehood, even in your day, was not common between gentlemen and ladies, social equals, the lie of fear with refuge of cowardice, and the lie of fraud, the devise of the cheat. The inequalities of man, and the lust of acquisition, offered a constant premium on lying at that time. Yet, even then, the man who neither feared another, nor desired to defraud him, scorned falsehood. Because we are now all social equals, and no man either has anything to fear from another, or can gain anything by deceiving him. The contempt of falsehood is so universal, that it is rarely, as I told you, that even a criminal, in other respects, will be found willing to lie. When, however, a plea of not guilty is returned, the judge appoints two colleagues to state the opposite sides of the case. How far these men are from being like your hired advocates and prosecutors, determined to acquit or convict, may appear from the fact that unless both agree that the verdict found is just the case is tried over, while anything like bias in the tone of either of the judges stating the case would be a shocking scandal. Do I understand, I said, that it is a judge who states each side of the case, as well as a judge who hears it. Certainly, the judges take turns in serving on the bench and at the bar, and are expected to maintain the judicial temper equally, whether in stating or deciding a case. The system is indeed in effect that of trial by three judges occupying different points of view as to the case. When they agree upon a verdict, we believe it to be as near to absolute truth as men well can come. You have given up the jury system, then. It was well enough as a corrective in the days of hired advocates and a bench sometimes venal, and often with a tenure that made it dependent, but is needless now. No conceivable motive but justice could actuate our judges. How are these magistrates selected? They are an honorable exception to the rule which discharges all men from service at the age of forty-five. The president of the nation appoints the necessary judges year by year from the class reaching that age. The number appointed is, of course, exceedingly few, and the honor so high that it is held an offset to the additional term of service which follows, and though a judge's appointment may be declined, it rarely is. The term is five years without eligibility to reappointment. The members of the Supreme Court, which is the guardian of the Constitution, are selected from among the lower judges. When a vacancy in that court occurs, those of the lower judges whose term expires that year select as their last official act the one of their colleagues left on the bench whom they deem fittest to fill it. There being no legal profession to serve as a school for judges, I said, they must, of course, come directly from the law school to the bench. We have no such things as law schools, replied the doctor, smiling. The law as a special science is obsolete. It was a system of chaser history which the elaborate artificiality of the old order of society absolutely required to interpret it, but only a few of the plainest and simplest legal maxims have any application to the existing state of the world. Everything touching the relations of men to one another is now simpler beyond any comparison than in your day. We should have no sort of use for the hair-splitting experts who presided and argued in your courts. You must not imagine, however, that we have any disrespect for those ancient worthies, because we have no use for them. On the contrary, we entertain an unfaithful respect amounting almost to all for the men who alone understood and were able to expound the interminable complexity of the rights of property and the relations of commercial and personal dependence involved in your system. What, indeed, could possibly give a more powerful impression of the intricacy and artificiality of that system, and the fact that it was necessary to set apart from other pursuits the cream of the intellect of every generation in order to provide a body of pundits able to make it even vaguely intelligible to those whose fates it determined. The treatises of your great lawyers, the works of Blackstone and Chitty, of Storie and Parsons, stand in our museums, side by side with the tomes of Don Scodus and his fellow scholastics, as curious monuments of intellectual subtlety devoted to subjects equally remote from the interests of modern men. Our judges are simply widely informed, judicious and discreet men of ripe years. I should not fail to speak of one important function of the minor judges, added Dr. Leed. This is to agiticate all cases where a private of the industrial army makes a complaint of unfairness against an officer. All such questions are heard and settled without appeal by a single judge, three judges being required only in graver cases. The efficiency of industry requires the strictest discipline in the army of labour, but the claim of the workmen to just and consider a treatment is backed by the whole power of the nation. The officer commands and the private obeys, but no officer is so high that he would dare display in overbearing manner towards a workman of the lowest class. As for childishness or rudeness by an official of any sort in its relations to the public, not one among minor offences is more sure of a prompt penalty than this. Not only justice, but civility is enforced by our judges in all sorts of intercourse. No value of service is accepted as a set-off to boorish or offensive manners. It occurred to me, as Dr. Leed was speaking, that in all his talk I had heard much of the nation and nothing of the state governments. Had the organisation of the nation as an industrial unit done away with the states, I asked. Necessarily, he replied, the state governments would have interfered with the control and discipline of the industrial army, which of course required to be central and uniform. Even if the state governments had not become inconvenient for other reasons, they were rendered superfluous by the prodigious simplification in the task of government since your day. Almost the sole function of the administration now is that of directing the industries of the country. Most of the purposes for which governments formally existed no longer remain to be observed. We have no army or navy and no military organisation. We have no departments of state or treasury, no excise or revenue services, no taxes or tax collectors. The only function proper of government, as known to you, which still remains, is a judiciary and police system. I have already explained to you how simple is our judicial system, as compared with your huge and complex machine. Of course, the same absence of crime and temptation to it, which make the duty of judges so light, reduces the number and duties of the police to a minimum. But with no state legislatures, and congress meeting only once in five years, how do you get your legislation done? We have no legislation, replied Dr. Lied. That is, next to none. It is rarely that congress, even when it meets, considers any new laws of consequence, and then it only has power to commend them to the following congress, lest anything be done hastily. If you will consider a moment, Mr. West, you will see that we have nothing to make laws about. The fundamental principles on which our society is founded settle for all time the strives and misunderstandings which in your day called for legislation. Fully 9900s of the laws of that time concern the definition and protection of private property and the relations of buyers and sellers. There is neither private property beyond personal belongings now, nor buying and selling, and therefore the occasion of nearly all the legislation formally necessary has passed away. Formally society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather up wrong, if you will pardon the feeble witticism, by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy robes in the form of laws. A central congress and 40 state legislators turning out some 20,000 laws a year could not make new props fast enough to take the place of those which were constantly breaking down or becoming infectious through some shifting of the strain. Now society rests on its base and is in as little need of artificial supports at the everlasting hills. But you have at least municipal governments besides the one central authority. Certainly and they have important and extensive functions in looking out for the public comfort and recreation and the improvement and embellishment of the villages and cities. But having no control over the labour of their people or means of hiring it, how can they do anything? Every town or city is conceded the right to retain, for its own public works, a certain proportion of the quota of labour its citizens contribute to the nation. This proportion, being assigned it as so much credit, can be applied in any way desired. That afternoon Edith casually inquired if I had yet revisited the underground chamber in the garden in which I had been found. Not yet, I replied, to be frank I have shrunk thus far from doing so lest the visit might revive old associations rather too strongly for my mental equilibrium. Ah yes, she said, I can imagine that you have done well to stay away. I ought to have thought of that. No, I said, I am glad you spoke of it. The danger, if there was any, existed only during the first day or two. Thanks to you, chiefly and always, I feel my footing now so firm in this new world that if you will go with me to keep the ghosts off, I should really like to visit the place this afternoon. Edith demurred at first, but finding that I was in earnest consented to accompany me. The rampart of earth thrown up from the excavation was visible among the trees from the house, and a few steps brought us to the spot. All remained as it was at the point when work was interrupted by the discovery of the tenets of the chamber, save that the door had been opened and the slab from the roof replaced. Descending the sloping sides of the excavation, he went in at the door and stood within the dimly lighted room. Everything was just as I had beheld at last on that evening, one hundred and thirteen years previously, just before closing my eyes for that long sleep. I stood for some time silently looking about me. I saw that my companion was furtively regarding me with an expression of odd and sympathetic curiosity. I put out my hand to her, and she placed hers in it, the soft fingers responding with a reassuring pressure to my clasp. Finally she whispered, Had we not better go out now, you must not try yourself too far. Oh, how strange it must be to you. On the contrary, I replied, It does not seem strange. That is the strangest part of it. Not strange, she echoed. Even so, I replied, The emotions with which you evidently credit me and which I anticipated would attend this visit, I simply do not feel. I realise all that these surroundings suggest, but without the agitation I expected. You can't be nearly as much surprised at this as I am myself. Ever since that terrible morning when you came to my help, I have tried to avoid thinking of my former life, just as I have avoided coming here for fear of the irritating effects. I am for all the world like a man who has permitted an injured limb to lie motionless, and the impression that it's exquisitely sensitive, and on trying to move it finds that it is paralysed. Do you mean your memory is gone? Not at all. I remember everything connected with my former life, but with a total lack of keen sensation. I remember it for clearness as if it had been but a day since then. But my feelings about what I remember are as faint as if to my consciousness as well as in fact a hundred years had intervened. Perhaps it is possible to explain this too. The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote. When I first woke from that trance, my former life appeared as yesterday. But now, since I have learned to know my new surroundings and to realise the prodigious changes that have transformed the world, I no longer find it hard but very easy to realise that I have slept a century. Can you conceive of such a thing as living a hundred years in four days? It really seems to me that I have done just that, and that it is this experience which has given so remote and unreal an appearance to my former life. Can you see how such a thing might be? I can conceive it, replied Edith meditatively, and I think we all ought to be thankful that it is so, for it will save you much suffering, I am sure. Imagine, I said, in an effort to explain as much to myself as to her, the strangeness of my mental condition, that a man first heard of a bereavement many, many years, half a lifetime perhaps, after the event occurred. My fanciest feeling would be perhaps something as mine is. When I think of my friends in the world of that former day, and the sorrow they must have felt for me, it is with a pensive pity rather than keen anguish, as if a sorrow long, long ago ended. You have told us nothing yet of your friends, said Edith. Had you many to mourn you? Thank God I had very few relatives, none nearer than cousins, I replied. But there was one, not a relative, but dearer to me than any kin of blood. She had your name. She was to have been my wife soon. Ah me. Ah me, sighed the Edith by my side. Think of the heartache she must have had. Something in the deep feeling of this gentle girl touched a cord in my benumbed heart. My eyes, before so dry, were fluttered with the tears that had till now refused to come. When I had regained my composure, I saw that she too had been weeping freely. God bless your tender heart, I said. Would you like to see her picture? A small locket with Edith Bartlett's picture, secured about my neck with a gold chain, had lain upon my breast all through that long sleep, and, removing this, I opened and gave it to my companion. She took it with eagerness, and after pouring long over the sweet face, touched the picture with her lips. I know that she was good and lovely enough to well deserve your tears, she said, but remember her heartache was over long ago, and she's been in heaven for nearly a century. It was indeed so. Whatever her sorrow had once been, for nearly a century she had ceased to weep, and my sudden passion spent, my own tears dried away. I had loved her very dearly in my other life, but it was a hundred years ago. I do not know, but some may find in this confession evidence of lack of feeling, but I think perhaps that none can have had an experience sufficiently like mine to enable them to judge me. As we were about to leave the chamber, my eye rested upon the great iron safe which stood in one corner. Calling my companion's attention to it, I said, This was my strong room as well as my sleeping room. In the safe yonder are several thousand dollars in gold and any amount of securities. If I had known when I went to sleep that night just how long my nap would be, I should still have thought that the gold was a safe provision for my needs in any country or any century, however distant. At a time would ever come when it would lose its purchasing power, I should have considered the wildest of fancies. Nevertheless here I wake up to find myself among a people of whom a cart load of gold will not procure a loaf of bread. As might be expected, I did not succeed in impressing Edith that there was anything remarkable in this fact. Why in the world should it? she immediately asked. Chapter 21 It had been suggested by Dr. Lied that we should divert the next morning to an inspection of the schools and colleges of the city, with some attempt on his own part and an explanation of the educational system of the twentieth century. You'll see, said he, as we set out after breakfast, many very important differences between our methods of education and yours, but the main difference is that nowadays all persons equally have those opportunities of higher education, which in your day only an infinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed. We should think we'd gained nothing worth speaking of in equalizing the physical comfort of men without this educational equality. The cost must be very great, I said. If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it, replied Dr. Lied, nor even if it took an all-saver-bear pittance, but in truth the expense of educating 10,000 youth is not ten nor five times that of educating 1,000. The principle which makes all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a small scale holds as to education also. College education was terribly expensive in my day, said I. If I have not been misinformed by our historians, Dr. Lied answered, it was not college education, but college dissipation and extravagance which costs so highly. The actual expense of your colleges appears to have been very low, and would have been far lower if their patronage had been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheap as the lower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers, receive the same support. We have simply added to the common school system of compulsory education, invoked in Massachusetts a hundred years ago, a half-dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age of twenty-one, and giving him what he used to call the education of a gentleman, instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no mental equipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplication table. Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years of education, I replied, we should not have thought we could have fought the loss of time from industrial pursuits. Boys of the poorer classes usually went to work at sixteen or younger and knew their trade at twenty. We should not concede you any gain even in material product by that plan, Dr. Lied replied. The greater efficiency which education gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short period for the time lost in acquiring it. We should also have been afraid, said I, that a high education, while it adept of men to the professions, would set them against manual labor of all sorts. That was the effect of high education in your day, I have read, replied the Doctor, and it was no wonder, for manual labor meant association with a rude, coarse, and incoherent class of people. There is no such class now. It was inevitable that such a feeling should exist then, for the further reason that all men receiving a high education were understood to be destined for the professions or for wealthy leisure, and such an education, in one neither rich nor professional, was a proof of disappointed aspirations, an evidence of failure, a batch of inferiority rather than superiority. Nowadays of course, when the highest education is deemed necessary to fit a man merely to live, without any reference to the sort of work he may do, its possession conveys no such implication. After all, I remarked, no amount of education can cure natural dullness or make up for original mental deficiencies. Unless the average natural mental capacity of men is much above its level in my day, a high education must be pretty nearly thrown away on a large element of the population. We used to hold that a certain amount of susceptibility to educational influences is required to make a mind worth cultivating. Just as a certain natural fertility in soil is required if it is to repay tilling. Ah, said Dr. Liedt, I am glad you used that illustration, for it is just the one I would have chosen to set forth the modern view of education. You say that land so poor that the product will not repay the labor of tilling is not cultivated. Nevertheless, much land that does not begin to repay tilling by its product was cultivated in your day and is in ours. I refer to gardens, parks, lawns, and in general to pieces of land so situated that, where they left to grow up to weeds and briars, they would be eyesores and inconveniences to all about. They are therefore tilt, and though their product is little, there is yet no land that, in a wider sense, better repays cultivation. So it is with the men and women with whom we mingle in the relations of society, whose voices are always in our ears, whose behavior in innumerable ways affects our enjoyment, who are in fact as much conditions of our lives as the air we breathe or any of the physical elements on which we depend. If indeed we could not afford to educate everybody, we should choose the coarsest and dullest by nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we could give. The naturally refined and intellectual can better dispense with aids to culture than those less fortunate in natural endowments. To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we should not consider a life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women as was the plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man satisfied merely because he has perfumed himself to mingle with a melodorous crowd? Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a palatial apartment, if the windows on all four sides open into stable yards? And yet just that was the situation of those considered most fortunate as to culture and refinement in your day. I know that the poor and ignorant envied the rich and culture then, but to us the latter, living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness, seemed little better off than the former. The cultured man, in your age, was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog, solacing himself with a smelling bottle. You see perhaps now how we look at this question of universal high education. No single thing is so important to every man as to have for neighbours intelligent, companionable persons. There is nothing therefore which the nation can do for him that will enhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbours. When it fails to do so, the value of his own education to him is reduced by half, and many of the tastes he has cultivated are made positive sources of pain. To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them, almost like that between different natural species which have no means of communication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of a partial enjoyment of education? Its universal and equal enjoyment leaves indeed the differences between man as to natural endowments as marked as in a state of nature, but the level of the lowest is vastly raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have some inkling of the humanities, some appreciation of the things of the mind, and an admiration for the still higher culture they have fallen short of. They have become capable of receiving and imparting in various degrees, but all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a refined social life, the culture at society of the nineteenth century, what it consists of, but here and there a few microscopic oases in a vast and broken wilderness. The proportion of individuals capable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercools to the mass of their contemporaries used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any broad view of humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One generation of the world today represents a greater volume of intellectual life than any five centuries ever did before. There is still another point I should mention in stating the grounds on which nothing less than the universality of the best education could now be tolerated, continued Dr. Lied, and that is the interest of the coming generation in having educated parents. To put the matter in a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our educational system rests. First, the right of every man to the complete education the nation can give him on his own account as necessary to his enjoyment of himself. Second, the right of his fellow citizens to have him educated as necessary to their enjoyment of his society. Third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage. I shall not describe in detail what I saw in the schools that day. Having taken but slight interest in educational matters in my formal life, I could offer a few comparisons of interest. Next to the fact of the universality of the higher as well as the lower education, I was most struck with a prominence given to physical culture, and the fact that proficiency in athletic feats and games as well as in scholarship had a place in the rating of the youth. The Faculty of Education, Dr. Lied explained, is held to the same responsibility for the bodies as for the minds of its charges. The highest possible physical as well as mental development of every one is a double object of a curriculum which lasts from the age of six to that of twenty-one. The magnificent health of the young people in the schools impressed me strongly. My previous observations, not only of the notable personal endowments of the family of my host but of the people I had seen in my walks abroad, had already suggested the idea that there must have been something like a general improvement in the physical standard of the race since my day. And now, as I compared these stalwart young men and fresh vigorous maidens with the young people I had seen in the schools of the 19th century, I was moved to impart my thought to Dr. Lied. He listened with great interest to what I said. Your testimony on this point, he declared, is invaluable. We believe that there has been such an improvement as you speak of, but of course it could only be a matter of theory with us. It is an incident of your unique position that you alone in the world of today can speak with authority on this point. Your opinion, when you state it publicly, will, I assure you, make a profound sensation. For the rest it would be strange, certainly, if the race did not show an improvement. In your day, riches deborged one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty set the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labour required of children and the burdens laid on women and feebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoyed the most favourable conditions of physical life. The young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared for. The labour which is required of all is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor and is never excessive. Care for oneself and one's family, anxiety as the livelihood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life. All these influences, which once did so much direct the minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more. Certainly an improvement of the species ought to follow such a change. In certain specific respects we know indeed that the improvement has taken place. Insanity, for instance, which in the 19th century was so terribly common, a product of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared with its alternative, suicide. End of chapter 21