 CHAPTER 27 I never could tell just why, but Sunday afternoon during my old life had been a time when I was peculiarly subject to melancholy, when the colour unaccountably faded out of all the aspects of life, and everything appeared pathetically uninteresting. The hours, which in general were one to bear me easily on their wings, lost the power of flight, and toward the close of the day, drooping quite to earth, had fairly to be dragged along by main strength. Perhaps it was partly owing to the established association of ideas that, despite the utter change in my circumstances, I fell into a state of profound depression on the afternoon of this my first Sunday in the 20th century. It was not, however, on the present occasion a depression without specific cause, the mere vague melancholy I have spoken of, but a sentiment suggested and certainly quite justified by my position. The sermon of Mr Barton, with its constant implication of a vast moral gap between the century to which I belonged and that in which I found myself, had had an effect strongly to accentuate my sense of loneliness in it. Considerately and philosophically as he had spoken, his words could scarcely have failed to leave upon my mind a strong impression of the mingled pity, curiosity, and aversion which I, as a representative of an abhorred epoch, must excite in all around me. The extraordinary kindness with which I had been treated by Dr Alid and his family, and especially the goodness of Edith, had hitherto prevented my fully realising that their real sentiment toward me must necessarily be that of the whole generation to which they belonged. The recognition of this, as regarded Dr Alid and his amiable wife, however painful I might have endured, but the conviction that Edith must share their feeling was more than I could bear. The crushing effect to which this belated perception of effect so obvious came to me opened my eyes fully to something which perhaps the reader has already suspected. I loved Edith. Was it strange that I did? The effecting occasion on which our intimacy had begun when her hands had drawn me out of the whirlpool of madness. The fact that her sympathy was the vital breath which had set me up in this new life and enabled me to support it. My habit of looking to her as the mediator between me and the world around in a sense that even her father was not. These were circumstances that had predetermined a result which her remarkable loveliness of person and disposition would alone have accounted for. It was quite inevitable that she should have come to seem to me, in a sense quite different from the usual experience of lovers, the only woman in this world. Not that I had become suddenly sensible of the fatuity of the hopes I had begun to cherish. I suffered not merely what another lover might, but in addition a desolate loneliness, an utter forlorness, such as no other lover, however unhappy, could have felt. My hosts evidently saw that I was depressed in spirits and did their best to divert me. Edith, especially, I could see, was distressed from me. But according to the usual perversity of lovers, having once been so mad as the dream of receiving something more from her, there was no longer any virtue from me in a kindness that I knew was only sympathy. To what nightfall, after secluding myself in my room most of the afternoon, I went into the garden to walk about. The day was overcast, with an autumnal flavour in the warm, still air. Finding myself near the excavation, I entered the subterranean chamber and sat down there. This, I muttered to myself, is the only home I have. Let me stay here and not go forth any more. Seeking aid from the familiar surroundings, I endeavoured to find a sad sort of consolation in reviving the past and summoning up the forms and faces that were about me in my former life. It was in vain. There was no longer any life in them. For nearly one hundred years the stars had been looking down on Edith Partlett's grave and the graves of all my generation. The past was dead, crushed beneath a century's weight, and from the present I was shut out. There was no place for me anywhere. I was neither dead nor properly alive. Forgive me for following you. I looked up. Edith stood in the door of the subterranean room, regarding me smilingly, but with eyes full of sympathetic distress. Send me away if I am intruding on you, she said, but we saw that you were out of spirit, and you know you promised to let me know if that were so. You have not kept your word. I rose and came to the door, trying to smile, but making I fancy, rather sorry work of it, for the sight of our loveliness brought home to me, the more prognally, the cause of my wretchedness. I was feeling a little lonely, that is all, I said. Has it never occurred to you that my position is so much more utterly alone than any human beings ever was before, that a new word is really needed to describe it? Oh, you must not talk that way. You must not let yourself feel that way. You must not, she exclaimed, with moistened eyes. Are we not your friends? It is your own fault if you will not let us be. You need not be lonely. You are good to me beyond my power of understanding, I said, but don't you suppose that I know it is pity merely? Sweet pity, but pity only. I should be a fool not to know that I cannot seem to you as other men of your own generation do, but as some strange uncanny being, a stranded creature of an unknown sea, whose forlornness touches your compassion, despite its grotesqueness. I've been so foolish. You are so kind as to almost forget that this must need to be so. And to fancy I might in time become naturalized, as we used to say, in this age, so as to feel like one of you, and to seem to you like the other men about you. But Mr Barton Sermon taught me how vain such a fancy is, how great the gulf between us must seem to you. Oh, that miserable Sermon, she exclaimed, fairly crying now in her sympathy. I wanted you not to hear it. What does he know of you? He's read in old, musty books about your times. That is all. What do you care about him? To let yourself be vexed by anything he said? Isn't it anything to you that we who know you feel differently? Don't you care more about what we think of you than what he does, who never saw you? Oh, Mr West, you don't know. You can't think how it makes me feel to see you so forlorn. I can't have it so. What can I say to you? How can I convince you? How different our feeling for you is from what you think? As before, in that other crisis of my fate, when she had come to me, she extended her hands toward me in a gesture of helpfulness, and, as then, I called and held them in my own. Her bosom heaved with strong emotion, and little tremors in the fingers which I clasped emphasized the death of her feeling. In her face, pity contended in a sort of divine spite against the obstacles which reduced it to impotence. Womanly compassion surely never wore a guise more lovely. Such beauty and such goodness quite melted me, and it seemed that the only fitting response I could make was to tell her just the truth. Of course, I had not a spark of hope, but on the other hand, I had no fear that she would be angry. She was too pitiful for that. So, I said presently, It is very ungrateful of me not to be satisfied with such kindness as you have shown me, and are showing me now, but are you so blind as not to see why they are not enough to make me happy? Don't you see that it is because I have been mad enough to love you? At my last words, she blushed deeply, and her eyes fell before mine, but she made no effort to withdraw her hands from my clasp. For some moments she stood so, panting a little, then blushing deeper than ever, but with a dazzling smile she looked up. Are you sure it is not you who are blind? She said. That was all, but it was enough, for it told me that unaccountable, incredible as it was, this radiant daughter of a golden age had bestowed upon me, not alone her pity, but her love. Still, I half believed I must be under some blissful hallucination, even as I clasped her in my arms. If I am beside myself, I cried, let me remain so. It is I whom you must think beside myself, she panted, escaping for my arms, when I had barely tasted the sweetness of her lips. Oh, what must you think of me, almost to throw myself in the arms of one I have known but a weak? I did not mean that you should find it out so soon, but I was so sorry for you, I forgot what I was saying. No, no, you must not touch me again till you know who I am. After that, sir, you shall apologise to me very humbly for thinking, as I know you do, that I have been over quick to fall in love with you. After you know who I am, you will be bound to confess that it was nothing less than my duty to fall in love with you at first sight, and that no girl of proper feeling in my place could do otherwise. As may be supposed, I would have been quite content to wave explanations, but Edith was resolute that there should be no more kisses until she had been vindicated from all suspicion of precipitancy and the stole of her affections, and I was feigned to follow the lovely enigma into the house. Having come where her mother was, she blushingly whispered something in her ear, and ran away, leaving us together. It then appeared that, strange as my experience had been, I was now first to know what was perhaps its strangest feature. For Mrs. Leith, I learned that Edith was the great-granddaughter of no other than my lost love, Edith Bartlett. After mourning me for fourteen years, she had made a marriage of esteem, and left her son, who had Mrs. Leith's father. Mrs. Leith had never seen her grandmother, but had heard much of her, and when her daughter was born gave her the name of Edith. This fact might have tended to increase the interest which the girl took as she grew up in all that concerned her ancestors, and especially the tragic story of the supposed death of the lover whose wife she expected to be in the conflagration of his house. It was a tale well calculated to touch the sympathy of a romantic girl, and the fact that the blood of the unfortunate heroine was in her own veins naturally heightened Edith's interest in it. A portrait of Edith Bartlett and some of her papers, including a packet of my own letters, were among the family heirlooms. The picture represented a very beautiful young woman about whom it was easy to imagine all manner of tender and romantic things. My letters gave Edith some material for forming a distinct idea of my personality, and both together suffice to make the sad old story very real to her. She used to tell her parents, half justingly, that she would never marry till she found a lover like Julian West, and there were none such nowadays. Now all this, of course, was merely the daydreaming of a girl whose mind had never been taken up by a lover fair of her own, and would have had no serious consequence but for the discovery that morning of the buried vault in her father's garden and the revelation of the identity of its inmate. For when the apparently lifeless form had been borne into the house, the face in a locket found upon the breast was instantly recognized as that of Edith Bartlett, and by that fact, taken in connection with the other circumstances, they knew that I was no other than Julian West. Even had there been no thought, as at first there was not, of my resuscitation, Mrs. Leeds said she believed that this event would have affected her daughter in a critical and lifelong manner. The presumption of some subtle ordering of destiny involving her fate with mine would under all circumstances have possessed an irresistible fascination for almost any woman. Whether when I came back to life a few hours afterward, and from the first seemed to turn to her with a peculiar dependence, and to find a special solace in her company, she had been too quick in giving her love at the first sign of mine, I could now, her mother said, judge for myself. If I thought so, I must remember that this, after all, was the twentieth and not the nineteenth century, and love was, no doubt, now quicker in growth as well as franker in utterance than then. For Mrs. Leeds I went to Edith. When I found her, it was first of all to take her by both hands and stand a long time in rapt contemplation of her face. As I gazed, the memory of that other Edith which had been affected us with a benumming shock by the tremendous experience that had parted us revived, and my heart was dissolved with tender and pitiful emotions, but also very blissful ones. For she who brought to me so poignantly the sense of my loss was to make that loss good. It was as if from her eyes Edith part that looked into mine, and smiled consolation to me. My fate was not alone the strangest, but the most fortunate that ever befell a man. A double miracle had been wrought for me. I had not been stranded upon the shore of this strange world to find myself alone and companionless. My love whom I dreamt lost had been re-embodied for my consolation. When, at last, in an ecstasy of gratitude and tenderness, I folded the lovely girl in my arms, the two Ediths were blended in my thought, nor have they ever since been clearly distinguished. I was not long in finding that on Edith's part there was a corresponding confusion of identities. Never, surely, was there between freshly united lovers a stranger talk than ours that afternoon. She seemed more anxious to have me speak of Edith Bartlett than of herself, of how I had loved her than how I loved herself, rewarding my fond words concerning another woman with tears and tender smiles and pressures of the hand. You must not love me too much for myself, she said. I shall be very jealous for her. I shall not let you forget her. I am going to tell you something which may seem strange. Do you not believe that spirits sometimes come back to the world to fulfil some work that lay near their hearts? What if I were to tell you that I have sometimes thought that her spirit lives in me? That Edith Bartlett, not Edith Leed, is my real name. I cannot know it. Of course, none of us can know who we really are. But I can feel it. Can you wonder that I have such a feeling, seeing how my life was affected by her and by you, even before you came? So you see, you need not trouble to love me at all, if only you are true to her. I shall not be likely to be jealous. Dr. Leed had gone out that afternoon, and I did not have an interview with him till later. He was not apparently wholly unprepared for the intelligence I conveyed, and shook my hand heartily. Under any ordinary circumstances, Mr. West, I should say that this step had been taken on rather short acquaintance. But these are decidedly not ordinary circumstances. In fairness, perhaps I ought to tell you, he added smilingly, that while I cheerfully consent to the proposed arrangement, you must not feel too much indebted to me, as I judge my consent is a mere formality. From the moment the secret of the locket was out, it had to be, I fancy. Why, bless me, if Edith had not been there to redeem her great-grandmother's pledge, I really apprehend that Mrs. Leed's loyalty to me would have suffered a severe strain. That evening the garden was bathed in moonlight, until midnight Edith and I wanted to and fro there, trying to grow accustomed to our happiness. What should I have done if you had not cared for me? she exclaimed. I was afraid you were not going to. What should I have done then, when I felt I was consecrated to you? As soon as you came back to life I was as sure as if she had told me that I was to be to you what she could not be, but that could only be if you would let me. Oh, how I wanted to tell you that morning, when you felt so terribly strange among us, who I was, but dared not open my lips about that, or let father or mother. That must have been what you would not lend your father tell me, I exclaimed, referring to the conversation I'd overheard as I came out of my trance. Of course it was, Edith laughed. Did you only just guess that? Father, being only a man, thought that it would make you feel among friends to tell you who we were. He did not think of me at all, but mother knew what I meant, and so I had my way. I could never have looked you in the face if you had known who I was. It would have been forcing myself on you quite too boldly. I'm afraid you think I did that today as it was. I'm sure I did not mean to, for I know girls were expected to hide their feelings in your day, and I was dreadfully afraid of shocking you. Ah, me, how hard it must have been for them to have always had to conceal their love like a fold. Why did they think it's such a shame to love anyone till they have been given permission? It is so odd to think of waiting for permission to fall in love. Was it because men in those days were angry when girls loved them? That is not the way women would feel, I'm sure, or men either, I think, now. I don't understand it at all. That would be one of the curious things about the women of those days that you will have to explain to me. I don't believe Edith Bartlett was so foolish as the others. After sundry in a factual attempt at parting, she finally insisted that we must say good night. I was about to imprint upon her lips the positively last kiss when she said, with an indescribable archeness, One thing troubles me. Are you sure that you quite forgive Edith Bartlett for marrying anyone else? The books that have come down to us make out lovers of your time more jealous than fond, and that is what makes me ask. It would be a great relief to me if I could feel sure that you were not in the least jealous of my great-grandfather for marrying your sweetheart. May I tell my great-grandmother's picture when I go to my room that you quite forgive her for proving false to you? Will the reader believe it, this cockatish quip, whether the speaker herself had any idea of it or not, actually touched, and with the touching, cured a preposterous ache of something like jealousy which I've been vaguely conscious of ever since Mrs. Leed had told me of Edith Bartlett's marriage. Even while I'd been holding Edith Bartlett's great-granddaughter in my arms, I had not till this moment, so illogical are some of our feelings, distinctly realized that but for that marriage I could not have done so. The absurdity of this frame of mind could only be equaled by the abruptness with which it dissolved as Edith's roguish query cleared the fog from my perceptions. I laughed as I kissed her. You may assure her of my entire forgiveness, I said, although it would have been any man but your great-grandfather whom she married it would have been a very different matter. On reaching my chamber that night I did not open the musical telephone that I might be lulled to sleep with soothing tunes as I'd become my habit. For once my thoughts made better music than even twentieth-century orchestra's discourse and it held me enchanted till well toward morning when I fell asleep. End of Chapter Twenty-Seven. Chapter Twenty-Eight of Looking Backward. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Anosimum. Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy. Chapter Twenty-Eight. It's a little after the time you told me to wake you, sir. You did not come out of it as quick as common, sir. The voice was the voice of my man Sawyer. I started bold upright in bed and stared around. I was in my underground chamber. The metal light of the lamp which always burned in the room when I occupied it illumined the familiar walls and furnishings. By my bedside with the glass of sherry in his hand which Dr. Pillsbury described on first rousing from aspirinx sleep, by way of awakening the torpid physical functions, stood Sawyer. Best take this right off, sir, he said, as I stared blankly at him. You look kind of flushed like so, and you need it. I tossed off the liquor, and began to realize what had happened to me. It was, of course, very plain. All that about the twentieth century had been a dream. I had but dreamt of that enlightened and carefree rays of man and their ingeniously simple institutions. Of the glorious new Boston with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains, and its universal reign of comfort. The amiable family which I had learned to know so well, my genial host and mentor, Dr. Leed, his wife and their daughter, the second and more pious Edith, my betrothed. These, too, had been but figments of a vision. For a considerable time I remained in the attitude in which this conviction had come over me, setting up in bed, gazing at vacancy, absorbed in recalling the scenes and incidents of my fantastic experience. Soya, alarmed at my looks, was meanwhile anxiously inquiring what was the matter with me. Roused at length by his importunities to a recognition of my surroundings, I pulled myself together with an effort and assured the faithful fellow that I was all right. I have had an extraordinary dream, that's all, Soya, I said. A most extraordinary dream. I dressed in a mechanical way, feeling light-headed and oddly uncertain of myself, and sat down to the coffee and rolls which Soya was in the habit of providing for my refreshment before I left the house. The morning newspaper lay by the plate. I took it up and my eye fell on the date, May 31st, 1887. I had known, of course, from the moment I opened my eyes, that my long and detailed experience in another century had been a dream, and yet it was startling to have it so conclusively demonstrated that the world was but a few hours older than when I had laid down to sleep. Glancing at the table of contents at the head of the paper, which reviewed the news of the morning, I read the following summary. Foreign affairs. The impending war between France and Germany. The French jambes asked for new military credits to meet Germany's increase of her army. Probability that all Europe will be involved in case of war. Great suffering among the unemployed in London. They demand work. Monster demonstration to be made. The authorities uneasy. Great strikes in Belgium. The government preparing to repress outbreaks. Shocking facts in regard to the employment of girls in Belgium coal mines. Wholesaler evictions in Ireland. Home affairs. The epidemic of fraud unchecked, embezzlement of half a million in New York. Misappropriation of a trust fund by executives. Orphans left penniless. Clever system of thefts by a bank teller. Fifty thousand dollars gone. The coal-bearants decide to advance the prize of coal and reduce production. Speculators engineering a great wheat corner at Chicago. A clique forcing up the prize of coffee. Enormous land grabs of western syndicates. Revelations of shocking corruption among Chicago officials. Systematic bribery. The trials of the brutal older men to go on at New York. Large filliers of business houses. Fears of a business crisis. A large grist of burglaries and larcenies. A woman murdered in cold blood for her money at New Haven. A householder shot by a burglar in his city last night. A man shoots himself in Worcester because he could not get work. A large family left destitute. An aged couple in New Jersey commits suicide rather than go to the poor house. Pitiable destitution among the women and wage workers in the great cities. Startling growth of illiteracy in Massachusetts. More insane asylums wanted. Decoration day addresses. Professor Brown's oration on the moral grandeur of 19th century civilization. It was indeed the 19th century to which I had awaked. There could be no kind of doubt about that. Its complete microcosm, this summary of the days news had presented, even to that last unmistakable touch of fascist self-complacency. Coming after such a damning indictment of the age as that one day's chronicle of worldwide bloodshed, greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy of Mephistophilus, and yet of all whose eyes it had met this morning I was, perhaps, the only one who perceived the cynicism. And but yesterday I should have perceived it no more than the others. That strange dream it was which had made all the difference. For I know not how long I forgot my surroundings after this, and was again in fancy moving in that vivid dream-world, in that glorious city with its homes of simple comfort and its gorgeous public palaces. Around me were again faces unmarred by arrogance or civility, by envy or greed, by anxious care or feverish ambition, and stately forms of men and women who had never known fear of a fellow man or dependent on his favour, but always, in the words of that sermon which still rang in my ears, had stood up straight before God. With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable loss, not the less poignant that it was a loss of what had never really been, I roused at last from reverie, and soon after left the house. A dozen times between my door and Washington Street I had to stop and pull myself together, such power had been in that vision of the Boston of the future to make the real Boston strange. The squalor and melodorousness of the town struck me, from the moment I stood upon the street, as facts I had never before observed. But yesterday, moreover, it had seemed quite a matter of course that some of my fellow citizens should wear silks and others rags, that some should look well fed and others hungry. Now, on the contrary, the glaring disparities in the dress and condition of the men and women who brushed each other on the sidewalks shocked me at every step, and yet more the entire indifference which the prosperous showed to the plight of the unfortunate. Were these human beings who could behold the wretchedness of their fellows without so much as a change of countenance? And yet, all the while, I knew well that it was I who had changed, and not my contemporaries. I had dreamt of a city whose people fared all alike as children of one family, and were one another's keepers in all things. Another feature of the real Boston, which assumed the extraordinary effect of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light, was the prevalence of advertising. There had been no personal advertising in the Boston of the twentieth century, because there was no need of any. But here the walls of the buildings, the windows, the broadsides of the newspapers in every hand, the very pavements, everything in fact, in sight, save the sky, were covered with the appeals of individuals who sought, and their innumerable pretexts, to attract the contributions of others to their support. However the wording might vary, the tenor of all these appeals was the same. Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones, and the right one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones. Look at me. Make no mistake. John Jones is the man and nobody else. Let the rest starve, but for God's sake remember John Jones. Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness of the spectacle most impressed me, so suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I know not. Wretched man, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not learn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one another from the least to the greatest. This horrible babel of shameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamour of conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations, this depended system of brazen beggary. What was it all but the necessity of a society in which the opportunity to serve the world according to his gifts, instead of being secured to every man as the first object of social organisation, had to be fought for? I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood and laughed aloud to the scandal of the passers-by. For my life I could not have helped it, with such a mad humour was I moved at sight of the interminable rows of stores on either side, up and down the street so far as I could see. Scores of them, to make the spectacle more utterly preposterous, within a stone's throw, devoted to selling the same sort of goods. Stores, stores, stores, miles of stores, ten thousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this one city, which had my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse, as they were ordered through one great store in every quarter, where the buyer, without waste of time or labour, found under one roof the world's assortment in whatever line he desired. There the labour of distribution had been so slight as to add but a scarcely perceptible fraction to the cost of commodities to the user. The cost of production was virtually all he paid. But here the mere distribution of the goods, their handling alone, added a fourth, a third, a half, and more to the cost. All these ten thousand plans must be paid for, their rent, their staffs of superintendents, their platoons of salesmen, their ten thousand sets of accountants, jobbers, and business dependents, with all they spent in advertising themselves and fighting one another, and the consumers must do the paying. What a famous process for beggaring a nation! Were these serious men I saw about me, or children, who did their business on such a plan? Could they be reasoning beings, who did not see the fully, which, when the product is made and ready for use, wastes so much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with a spoon that leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they not likely to go hungry? I had passed through Washington Street thousands of times before, and viewed the ways of those who sold merchandise, but my curiosity concerning them was as if I'd never gone by their way before. I took wondering note of the show windows of the stalls, filled with goods arranged with the wealth of paints and an artistic device to attract the eye. I saw the throngs of ladies looking in, and the proprietors eagerly watching the effect of the bait. I went within and noted the hawk-eyed floor-walker watching for business, overlooking the clerks, keeping them up to a task of inducing the customers to buy, buy, buy for money if they had it, for credit if they had it not, to buy what they wanted not, more than they wanted, what they could not afford. At times I momentarily lost the clue and was confused by the sight. Why this effort to induce people to buy? Surely that had nothing to do with the legitimate business of distributing products to those who needed them. Surely it was a sheerest waste to force upon people what they did not want but what might be useful to another. The nation was so much the poorer for every such achievement. What were these clerks thinking of? Then I would remember that they were not acting as distributors like those in the store I'd visited in the Dream Boston. They were not serving the public interest but their immediate personal interest, and it was nothing to them what the ultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, if but they increased their own horde, for these goods were their own, and the more they sold and the more they got for them the greater their gain. The more wasteful the people were, the more articles they did not want which they could be induced to buy, the better for these sellers. To encourage prodigality was the express aim of the ten thousand stores of Boston. Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a wit worse men than any others in Boston. They must earn a living and support their families, and how were they to find a trade to do it by which did not necessitate placing their individual interests before those of others and that of all. They could not be asked to starve while they waited for an order of things such as I'd seen in my dream, in which the interest of each and that of all were identical. But, God in heaven, what wonder under such a system as this about me? What wonder that the city was so shabby and the people so meanly dressed and so many of them ragged and hungry? Some time after this it was that I'd drifted over into South Boston and found myself among the manufacturing establishments. I'd been in this quarter of the city a hundred times before, just as I'd been on Washington Street. But here, as well as there, I now first perceived the true significance of what I witnessed. Formerly I had taken pride in the fact that by actual count Boston had some four thousand independent manufacturing establishments. But in this very multiplicity and independence I recognized now the secret of the insignificant total product of their industry. If Washington Street had been like a lane in bedlam, this was a spectacle as much more melancholy as production is more vital function than distribution. For not only were these four thousand establishments not working in concert, and for that reason alone operating at prodigious disadvantage, but as if this did not involve a sufficiently disastrous loss of power, they were using their utmost skill to frustrate one another's effort, praying by night and working by day for the destruction of one another's enterprises. The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers resounding from every side was not the hum of a peaceful industry, but a clanger of swords wielded by foemen. These mills and shops were so many forts each under its own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops about it, and its sepas busy below, undermining them. Within each one of these forts the strictest organization of industry was insisted on. The separate gangs worked under a single central authority. No interference and no duplicating of work were permitted. Each had as a lot of task and none were idle. By what hiatus in the logical faculty, by what lost link of reasoning, account then for the failure to recognize the necessity of applying the same principle to the organization of the national industries as a whole, to see that if lack of organization could impair the efficiency of a shop, it must have effects as much more disastrous in disabling the industries of the nation at large as the latter are vast in volume and more complex in the relationship of their parts. People would be prompt enough to ridicule an army in which there were neither companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, or army corps. No unit of organization, in fact, larger than the corporals' squad, with no officer higher than a corporal, and all the corporals equal in an authority. And yet just such an army were the manufacturing industries of nineteenth-century Boston, an army of four thousand independent squads led by four thousand independent corporals, each with a separate plan of campaign. Nuts of idle men were to be seen here and there on every side, some idle because they could find no work at any price, others because they could not get what they thought a fair price. I accosted some of the latter, and they told me their grievances. It was very little comfort I could give them. I am sorry for you, I said. You get little enough certainly, and yet the wonder to me is not that industries conducted as these are do not pay you living wages, but that they are able to pay you any wages at all. Making my way back again after this to the peninsula city, toward three o'clock I stood on State Street, staring, as if I'd never seen them before, at the banks and broker's offices, and other financial institutions of which there had been in the State Street of my vision no vestige. Businessmen, confidential clerks, and errand-boys were thronging in and out of the banks, for it wanted but a few minutes of the closing hour. Opposite me was the bank where I did business, and presently I crossed the street, and, going in with the crowd, stood in a recess of the wall, looking on at the army of clerks handling money, and accused with depositors at the teller's windows. An old gentleman whom I knew, a director of the bank, passing me and observing my contemplative attitude, stopped the moment. Interesting sight isn't it, Mr West? he said. Wonderful piece of mechanism. I find it so myself. I like sometimes to stand and look on at it just as you are doing. It's a poem, sir. A poem. That's what I call it. Did you ever think, Mr West, that the bank is the heart of the business system? From it, and to it, in endless flux and reflux, the lifeblood goes. It is flowing in now. It will flow out again in the morning. And pleased with this little conceit, the old man passed on, smiling. Yesterday I should have considered the simile apt enough, but since then I had visited a world incomparably more affluent than this, in which money was unknown and without conceivable use. I had learned that it had a use in the world around me only because the work of producing the nation's livelihood, instead of being regarded as the most strictly public and common of all concerns, and as such conducted by the nation, was abandoned to the haphazard efforts of individuals. This original mistake necessitated endless exchanges to bring about any sort of general distribution of products. These exchanges money affected how equitably might be seen in a walk from the tenement house districts to the back bay, at the cost of an army of men taken from productive labour to manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns of its machinery, and a generally debauching influence on mankind which had justified its description from ancient time as the root of all evil. Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem, he had mistaken the throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called a wonderful piece of mechanism was an imperfect device to remedy an unnecessary defect, a clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple. After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the business quarter for an hour or two, and later set awhile on one of the benches of the common, finding an interest merely in watching the throngs that passed, such as one has in studying the populace of a foreign city, so strange since yesterday had my fellow-citizens and their ways become to me. For thirty years I'd lived among them, and yet I seemed to have never noted before how drawn and anxious were their faces, of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute faces of the educated, as well as the dull masks of the ignorant. And well it might be so, for I saw now, as never before I'd seen so plainly, that each as he walked constantly turned to catch the whispers of a spectre at his ear, the spectre of uncertainty. Do your work never so well, the spectre was whispering, rise early and toil till late, rob cunningly, or serve faithfully, you shall never know security. Rich you may be now, and still come to poverty at last. Leave never so much wealth to your children, you cannot buy the assurance that your son may not be the servant of your servant, or that your daughter will not have to sell herself for bread. A man passing by thrust an advertising card in my hand, which set forth the merits of some new scheme of life insurance. The incident reminded me of the only device, pathetic in its admission of the universal needed so poorly supplied, which offered these tired and hunted men and women even a partial protection from uncertainty. By this means, those already well to do, I remembered, might purchase a precarious confidence, that after their death their loved ones would not, for a while at least, be trampled under the feet of man. But this was all, and this was only for those who could pay well for it. What idea was possible to these wretched dwellers in the land of Ishmael, where every man's hand was against each, and the hand of each against every other? Of true life insurance, as I'd seen it, among the people of that dreamland, each of whom, by virtue merely of his membership in the national family, was guaranteed against need of any sword by a policy underwritten by one hundred million fellow countrymen? Some time after this it was that I recall a glimpse of myself standing on the steps of a building on Tremont Street, looking at a military parade. A regiment was passing. It was the first sight in that dreary day which had inspired me with any other emotions than wandering pity and amazement. Here at last were order and reason, an exhibition of what intelligent cooperation can accomplish. The people who stood looking on with kindling faces, could it be that the sight had for them no more than but a spectacular interest? Could they fail to see that it was their perfect concert of action, their organization under one control, which made these men the tremendous engine they were, able to vanquish a mob ten times as numerous? Seeing this so plainly, could they fail to compare the scientific manner in which the nation went to war with the unscientific manner in which it went to work? Would they not query, since what time the killing of men had been a task so much more important than feeding and clothing them, that a trained army should be deemed alone adequate to the former, while the latter was left to a mob? It was now toward nightfall, and the streets were strong with the workers from the stalls, the shops, and mills. Carried along with the stronger part of the current, I found myself, as it began to grow dark, in the midst of a scene of squalor and human degradation, such as only the South Cove Tenement District could present. I had seen the mad wasting of human labour. Here I saw, in direst shape, the want that waste had bred. From the black doorways and windows of the rookries on every side came gusts of fetid air. The streets and alleys reeked with the effluvia of the slave ships between decks. As I passed, I had glimpses within, of pale babies gasping out their lives amid sultry stentions, of hopeless-faced women deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood no trade-safe weakness, while from the windows leered girls with brows of bras. Like the starving bands of mongrel-curse that infest the streets of Muslim towns, swarms of half-clad, brutalized children filled the air with shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the garbage that littered the courtyards. There was nothing in all this that was new to me. Often had I passed through this part of the city and witnessed its sights, with feelings of disgust, mingled with a certain philosophical wonder, at the extremities mortals will endure and still cling to life. But not alone, as regarded the economical follies of this age, but equally as touched its moral abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since that vision of another century. No more did I look upon the hopeful dwellers in this inferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human. I saw in them my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of human wretchedness about me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced my heart like a knife so that I could not repress size and groans. I not only saw but felt in my body all that I saw. Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the thick jacket of a soul dead within. As I looked, horror struck from one death's head to another. I was affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks, I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual, if mind and soul had lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly faces and of the reproach that could not be gained said which was in their eyes that the full pitchlessness of the ruin that had been wrought was revealed to me. I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony, for I had been one of those who had endured that these things should be. I had been one of those who, well knowing that they were, had not desired to hear or be compelled to think much of them, but had gone on as if they were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit. Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavement, every brick of the pestilential rookries, found the tongue and called after me as I fled. What has thou done with thy brother Abel? I have no clear recollection of anything after this till I found myself standing on the carved stone steps of the magnificent home of my betrothed in Commonwealth Avenue. Amid the tumult of my thoughts that day I had scarcely once thought of her, but now obeying some unconscious impulse my feet had found the familiar way to her door. I was told that the family were at dinner, but word was sent out that I should join them at table. Besides the family I found several guests present, all known to me. The table glittered with plate and costly china. The ladies were sumptuously dressed and wore the jewels of queens. The scene was one of costly elegance and lavish luxury. The company was in excellent spirits and there was plentiful laughter and a running fire of chests. To me it was as if, in wandering through the place of doom, my blood turned to tears by its sights and my spirit attuned to sorrow, pity and despair. I had happened in some glade upon a merry party of roisterers. I sat in silence until Edith began to rally me upon my sombre looks, what helped me? The others presently joined in the playful assault and I became a target for quips and jests. Where had I been and what had I seen to make such a dull fellow of me? I have been in Golgotha, at last I answered. I have seen humanity hanging on a cross. Do none of you know what sights the sun and stars look down on in this city, that you can think and talk of anything else? Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that aren't one agony from birth to death? Listen, their dwellings are so near that if you hush your laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous crying of the little ones that suckle poverty, the wholesome curses of men suddenly misery turned half way back to brutes, the cheffering of an army of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped your ears that you do not hear these dull full sounds? For me, I can hear nothing else. Silence followed my words. A passion of pity had shaken me as I spoke, but when I looked round upon the company I saw that, far from being stirred as I was, their faces expressed a cold and hard astonishment, mingled in edits with extreme mortification, in their fathers with anger. The ladies were exchanging scandalized looks, while one of the gentlemen had put up his eyeglass and was studying me with an air of scientific curiosity. When I saw that things which were to me so intolerable moved them not at all, that words that melted my heart to speak had only offended them with the speaker. I was at first stunned and then overcome with a desperate sickness and faintness at the heart. What hope was there for the wretched, for the world, if thoughtful men and tender women were not moved by things like these? Then I bestought myself that it must be because I had not spoken a right. No doubt I had put the case badly. They were angry because they thought I was berating them. When God knew I was merely thinking of the horror of the fact without any attempt to assign the responsibility for it. I restrained my passion and tried to speak calmly and logically that I might correct this impression. I told them that I had not meant to accuse them as if they, or the rich in general, were responsible for the misery of the world. True indeed it was that the superfluity which they wasted would otherwise bestowed relieve much bitter suffering. These costly vines, these rich vines, these gorgeous fabrics and glistening jewels represented the ransom of many lives. They were verily not without the guiltiness of those who waste in a land stricken with famine. Nevertheless, all the waste of all the rich where it saved would go but a little way to cure the poverty of the world. There was so little to divide that even if the rich went share and share with the poor there would be but a common fair of crusts, albeit made very sweet then by brotherly love. The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world's poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal, world-darkening blunder. And then I showed them how four-fifths of the labour of men was utterly wasted by the mutual warfare, the lack of organisation and concert among the workers. Seeking to make the matter very plain, I instant the case of arid lands where the soil yielded the means of life only by careful use of the water-courses for irrigation. I showed how in such countries it was counted the most important function of the government to see that the water was not wasted by the selfishness or ignorance of individuals, since otherwise there would be famine. To this end its use was strictly regulated and systematised, and individuals of their mere caprice were not permitted to dam it or divert it or in any way to temper with it. The labour of men, I explained, was the fertilising stream which alone rendered earth inhabitable. It was but a scanty stream at best, and its use required to be regulated by a system which expended every drop to the best advantage if the world were to be supported in abundance. But how far from any system was the actual practice? Every man wasted the precious fluid as he wished, animated only by the equal motives of saving his own crop and spoiling his neighbours, that his might sail the better. What would greed and what would spite some fields were flooded while others were parted, and half the water ran wholly to waste? In such a land, though a few by strength or cunning might win the means of luxury, the lot of the great mass must be poverty, and of the weak and ignorant, bitter want and perennial famine. Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it had neglected, and regulate for the common good the course of the life-giving stream, and the earth would bloom like one garden, and none of its children lack any good thing. I described the physical felicity, mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would then attend the lives of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new world, blessed with plenty, purified by justice, and sweetened by brotherly kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamt, but which might so easily be made real. But when I had expected now surely the faces around me to light up with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more dark, angry and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the lady showed only aversion and dread, while the men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation and contempt. Madman, pestilent fellow, fanatic, enemy of society, for some of their cries, and the one who had before taken his eyeglass to me, exclaimed, He says we are to have no more poor. Put the fellow out, exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and at the signal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon me. It seemed to me that my heart would burst with the anguish of finding that what was to me so plain and so all-important was to them meaningless, and that I was powerless to make it other. So hot had been my heart that I had thought to melt an iceberg with its glow, only to find at last the overmastering chills seizing my own vitals. It was not enmity that I felt toward them as they thronged me, but pity only for them and for the world. Although despairing, I could not give over. Still I strove with them, tears poured from my eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate, I panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately after it found myself sitting upright in bed, in my room in Dr. Leeds' house, and the morning sun shining through the open window into my eyes. I was gasping, the tears were streaming down my face, and I quivered in every nerve. As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to see the heavens vault spread above him, so it was with me as I realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream, and my presence in the twentieth was the reality. The cruel sights which I had witnessed in my vehem and could so well confirm from the experience of my former life, though they had, alas, once been, and must in the retrospect to the end of time move the compassionate to tears, where, God be thanked, for ever gone by. Long ago oppressor and oppressed, prophet and scourner had been dust. For generations rich and poor had been forgotten words. But in that moment, while yet I am used with unspeakable thankfulness upon the greatness of the world's salvation and my privilege in beholding it, there suddenly pierced me like a knife, a pang of shame, remorse, a wandering self-approach, that bowed my head upon my breast, and made me wish the grave had hit me with my fellows from the sun. For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help on the deliverance, where at I now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived in those cruel, insensitive days, what had I done to bring them to an end? I had been every witness indifferent to the wretchedness of my brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a worshipper of chaos and old night as any of my fellows. So far as my personal influence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder than to help forward the enfranchisement of the race which was even then preparing. What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me, to rejoice in a day whose dawning I had mocked? Better for you, better for you, a voice within me rang, had this evil dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream. Better your part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation than here, drinking of wells you dig not, and eating of trees whose husbandmen you stoned? And my spirit answered, better, truly. When at length I raised my bowed head and looked forth from the window, Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and was gathering flowers. I hastened to dissenter her. Kneeling before her, with my face in the dust, I confessed with tears how little was my worth to breathe the air of this golden century, and how infinitely less to wear upon my breast its consummate flower. Fortunate is he who, with a case so desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful. End of Chapter 28. End of Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy. Recorded by Anna Simon in 2009.