Chapter I
I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year
1857. "What!" you say, "eighteen fifty-seven? That is an
odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course." I beg pardon,
but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December
the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I
first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was
at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing
it in the present year of grace, 2000.
These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add that
I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person
can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be
a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly assure
the reader that no imposition is intended and will undertake, if he shall
follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may, then,
provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that
I know better than the reader when I was born, I will go on with my narrative.
As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century
the civilization of to-day, or anything like it, did not exist, although
the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing
had, however, occurred to modify the immemorial division of society into
the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since
the differences between them were far greater than those between any nations
nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself
was rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements
of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury,
and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of
life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering
no sort of service in return. My parents and grandparents had lived in
the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I had any, would
enjoy a like easy existence.
- - -
By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the
way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations
of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to
compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses
of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly
and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though
the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing
the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers
who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were
very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants
could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits
of the straining team.
- - -
It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of
the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers’
sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to
hold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers could
only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever
fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the funds
for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely
little about those who dragged the coach.
I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the twentieth
century as incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both very curious,
which partly explain it. In the first place, it was firmly and sincerely
believed that there was no other way in which Society could get along,
except the many pulled at the rope and the few rode, and not only this,
but that no very radical improvement even was possible, either in the
harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had
always been as it was, and it always would be so. It was a pity, but it
could not be helped, and philosophy forbade wasting compassion on what
was beyond remedy.
The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular hallucination
which those on the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not
exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of
finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order of beings who might
justly expect to be drawn. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode
on this very coach and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed.
The strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but
just climbed up from the ground, before they had outgrown the marks of
the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its influence. As for those
whose parents and grandparents before them had been so fortunate as to
keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential
difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute.
The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings
of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious.
To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the indifference
which, at the period I write of, marked my own attitude toward the misery
of my brothers.
- - -
Chapter V
"Early in the last century the evolution was completed
by the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry
and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible
corporations and syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for
their profit, were intrusted to a single syndicate representing the people,
to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit. The nation,
that is to say, organized as the one great business corporation in which
all other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in
the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly
in which all previous and lesser monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly
in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared. The epoch of
trusts had ended in The Great Trust. In a word, the people of the United
States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as
one hundred odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own
government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the same
grounds that they had then organized for political purposes. At last,
strangely late in the world's history, the obvious fact was perceived
that no business is so essentially the public business as the industry
and commerce on which the people's livelihood depends, and that to entrust
it to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar
in kind, though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering the
functions of political government to kings and nobles to be conducted
for their personal glorification."
- - -
Chapter VI
DR. Leete ceased speaking, and I remained silent, endeavoring
to form some general conception of the changes in the arrangements of
society implied in the tremendous revolution which he had described.
Finally I said, "The idea of such an extension of the functions of
government is, to say the least, rather overwhelming."
"Extension!" he repeated, "where is the extension?"
"In my day," I replied, "it was considered that the proper
functions of government, strictly speaking, were limited to keeping the
peace and defending the people against the public enemy, that is, to the
military and police powers."
"And, in heaven's name, who are the public enemies?" exclaimed
Dr. Leete. "Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and
nakedness? In your day governments were accustomed, on the slightest international
misunderstanding, to seize upon the bodies of citizens and deliver them
over by hundreds of thousands to death and mutilation, wasting their treasures
the while like water; and all this oftenest for no imaginable profit to
the victims. We have no wars now, and our governments no war powers, but
in order to protect every citizen against hunger, cold, and nakedness,
and provide for all his physical and mental needs, the function is assumed
of directing his industry for a term of years. No, Mr. West, I am sure
on reflection you will perceive that it was in your age, not in ours,
that the extension of the functions of governments was extraordinary.
Not even for the best ends would men now allow their governments such
powers as were then used for the most maleficent.”
- - -
“But you have not yet told me how you have settled the labor problem.
It is the problem of capital which we have been discussing,” I said.
“After the nation had assumed conduct of the mills, machinery, railroads,
farms, mines, and capital in general of the country, the labor question
still remained. In assuming the responsibilities of capital the nation
had assumed the difficulties of the capitalist’s position.”
"The moment the nation assumed the responsibilities of capital those
difficulties vanished,” replied Dr. Leete. “The national organization
of labor under one direction was the complete solution of what was, in
your day and under your system, justly regarded as the insoluble labor
problem. When the nation became the sole employer, all the citizens, by
virtue of their citizenship, became employees, to be distributed according
to the needs of industry.”
"That is," I suggested, "you have simply applied the principle
of universal military service, as it was understood in our day, to the
labor question."
“Yes," said Dr. Leete, “that was something which followed
as a matter of course as soon as the nation had become the sole capitalist.
The people were already accustomed to the idea that the obligation of
every citizen, not physically disabled, to contribute his military services
to the defense of the nation was equal and absolute. That it was equally
the duty of every citizen to contribute his quota of industrial or intellectual
services to the maintenance of the nation was equally evident, though
it was not until the nation became the employer of labor that citizens
were able to render this sort of service with any pretense either of universality
or equity. No organization of labor was possible when the employing power
was divided among hundreds or thousands of individuals and corporations,
between which concert of any kind was neither desired, nor indeed feasible.
It constantly happened then that vast numbers who desired to labor could
find no opportunity, and on the other band, those who desired to evade
a part or all of their debt could easily do so."
“Service, now, I suppose, is compulsory upon all," I suggested.
"It is rather a matter of course than of compulsion," replied
Dr. Leete. "It is regarded as so absolutely natural and reasonable
that the idea of its being compulsory has ceased to be thought of. He
would be thought to be an incredibly contemptible person who should need
compulsion in such a case. Nevertheless, to speak of service being compulsory
would be a weak way to state its absolute inevitableness. Our entire social
order is so wholly based upon and deduced from it that if it were conceivable
that a man could escape it, he would be left with no possible way to provide
for his existence. He would have excluded himself from the world, cut
himself off from his kind, in a word, committed suicide."
"Is the term of service in this industrial army for life?"
"Oh, no; it both begins later and ends earlier than the average working
period in your day. Your workshops were filled with children and old men,
but we hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of
maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease
and agreeable relaxation. The period of industrial service is twenty-four
years, beginning at the close of the course of education at twenty-one
and terminating at forty-five. After forty-five, while discharged from
labor, the citizen still remains liable to special calls, in case of emergencies
causing a sudden great increase in the demand for labor, till he reaches
the age of fifty-five, but such calls are rarely, in fact almost never,
made. The fifteenth day of October of every year is what we call Muster
Day, because those who have reached the age of twenty-one are then mustered
into the industrial service, and at the same time those who, after twenty-four
years' service, have reached the age of forty-five, are honorably mustered
out. It is the great day of the year with us, whence we reckon all other
events, our Olympiad, save that it is annual."
Source: Edward Bellamy Looking Backward 2000-1887.
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.