Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“Yes, nearly all of them, and the next row are mostly nut trees. You see, the fruit trees are shorter and don’t take the sun off. The middle ones are elms wherever elms grow well. I tell you, John, it is the experience of a lifetime to take a long motor trip over the roads of America! You can pick your climate, or run with the season. Nellie and I started once from New Orleans in February — the violets out. We came north with them; I picked her a fresh bunch every day!”

  He showed me the grape vines trained from tree to tree in Tuscan fashion; the lines of berry bushes, and the endless ribbon of perennial flowers that made the final border of the pathway. On its inner side were beds of violets, lilies of the valley, and thick ferns; and around each fountain were groups of lilies and water-loving plants.

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “I simply don’t believe it! How could any nation afford to keep up such roads!”

  Owen drew me to a seat — we had dismounted to examine a fountain and see the flowers. He produced pencil and paper.

  “I’m no expert,” he said. “I can’t give you exact figures. But I want you to remember that the trees pay. Pay! These roads, hundreds of thousands of miles of them, constitute quite a forest, and quite an orchard. Nuts, as Hallie told you, are in growing use as food. We have along these roads, as beautiful clean shade trees, the finest improved kinds of chestnut, walnut, butternut, pecan — whatever grows best in the locality.”

  And then he made a number of startling assertions and computations, and showed me the profit per mile of two rows of well-kept nut trees.

  “I suppose Hallie has told you about tree farming?” he added.

  “She said something about it — but I didn’t rightly know what she meant.”

  “Oh, it’s a big thing; it has revolutionized agriculture. As you’re sailing over the country now you don’t see so many bald spots. A healthy, permanent world has to keep its fur on.”

  I was impressed by that casual remark, “As you’re sailing over the country.”

  “Look here, Owen, I think I have the r glimmer of an idea. Didn’t the common

  ‘ use of airships help to develop this social consciousness you’re always talking about — this general view of things?”

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re dead right, John — it did, and I don’t believe any of us would have thought to mention it.” He looked at me admiringly. “Behold the power of a naturally strong mind — in spite of circumstances! Yes, really that’s a fact. You see few people are able to visualize what they have not seen. Most of us had no more idea of the surface of the earth than an ant has of a meadow. In each mind was only a thready fragment of an idea of the world — no real geographic view. And when we got flying all over it commonly, it became real and familiar to us — like a big garden.

  “I guess that helped on the tree idea. You see, in our earlier kind of agriculture the first thing we did was to cut down the forest, dig up and burn over, plow, harrow, and brush fine — to plant our little grasses. All that dry, soft, naked soil was helplessly exposed to the rain — and the rain washed it steadily away. In one heavy storm soil that it had taken centuries of forest growth to make would be carried off to clog the livers and harbors. This struck us all at once as wasteful. We began to realize that food could grow on trees as well as grasses; that the cubic space occupied by a chestnut tree could produce more bushels of nutriment than the linear space below it. Of course we have our wheat fields yet, but around every exposed flat acreage is a broad belt of turf and trees; every river and brook is broadly bordered with turf and trees, or shrubs. We have stopped soil waste to a very great extent. Also we make soil — but that is a different matter.”

  “Hurrying Mother Nature again, eh?” “Yes, the advance in scientific agriculture is steady. Don’t you remember that German professor who raised all kinds of things in water? Just fed them a pinch of chemicals now and then? They said he had a row of trees before his door with their roots in barrels of water — the third generation that had never touched ground. We kept on studying, and began to learn how to put together the proper kind of soil for different kinds of plants. Rock-crushers furnished the basis, then add the preferred constituents and sell, by the bag or the ship load. You can have a radish bed in a box on your window sill, if you like radishes, that will raise you the fattest, sweetest, juiciest, crispiest, tenderest little pink beauties you ever saw — all the year round. No weed seeds in that soil, either.”

  We rolled slowly back in the green shade. There was plenty of traffic, but all quiet, orderly, and comfortable. The people were a constant surprise to me. They were certainly better looking, even the poorest. And on the faces of the newest immigrants there was an expression of blazing hope that was almost better than the cheery peacefulness of the native born.

  Wherever I saw workmen, they worked swiftly, with eager interest. Nowhere did I see the sagging slouch, the slow drag of foot and dull swing of arm which I had always associated with day laborers. We saw men working in the fields — and women, too; but I had learned not to lay my neck on the block too frequently. I knew that my protest would only bring out explanations of the advantage of field work over house work — and that women were as strong as men — or thereabouts. But I was surprised at their eagerness.

  “They look as busy as a lot of ants on an ant heap,” I said.

  “It’s their heap, you see,” Owen answered. “And they are not tired — that makes a great difference.”

  “They seem phenomenally well dressed — looks like a scene in an opera. Sort of agricultural uniform?”

  “Why not?” Owen was always asking me “why not” — and there wasn’t any answer to it. “We used to have hunting suits and fishing suits and plumbing suits, and so on. It isn’t really a uniform, just the natural working out of the best appointed dress for the trade.”

  Again I held my tongue; not asking how they could afford it, but remembering the shorter hours, the larger incomes, the more universal education.

  We got back to Yonkers, put up the car — these things could be hired, I found, for twenty-five cents an hour — and had lunch in a little eating place which bore out Hallie’s statement as to the high standard of food everywhere. Our meal was twenty-five cents for each of us. I saw Owen smile at me, but I refused to be surprised. We settled down in our boat again, and pushed smoothly up the river.

  “I wish you’d get one thing clear in my mind,” I said at last. “Just how did you tackle the liquor question. I haven’t seen a saloon — or a drunken man. Nellie said something about people’s not wanting to drink any more — but there were several millions who did want to, thirty years ago, and plenty of people who wanted them to. What were your steps?”

  “The first step was to eliminate the self-interest of the dealer — the big business pressure that had to make drunkards. That was done in state after state, within a few years, by introducing government ownership and management. With that went an absolute government guarantee of purity. In five or six years there was no bad liquor sold, and no public drinking places except government ones.

  “But that wasn’t enough — not by a long way. It wasn’t the love of liquor that supported the public house — it was the need of the public house itself.”

  I stared rather uncertainly,

  “The meeting place,” he went on. “Men have to get together. We have had public houses as long as we have had private ones, almost. It is a social need.”

  “A social need with a pretty bad result, it seems to me,” I said, “that took men away from their families, leading to all manner of vicious indulgence.”

  “Yes, they used to; but that was because only men used them. I said a social need, not a masculine one. We have met it in this way. Whenever we build private houses — if it is the lowest country unit, or the highest city block, we build accommodations for living together.

  “Every little village has its Town House, with club rooms of all sorts; the people flock together f
reely, for games, for talk, for lectures, and plays, and dances, and sermons — it is universal. And in the city — you don’t see a saloon on every corner, but you do see almost as many places where you can ‘meet a man’ and talk with him on equal ground.”

  “Meet a woman, too?” I suggested.

  “Yes; especially, yes. People can meet, as individuals or in groups, freely and frequently, in city or country. But men can not flock by themselves in special places provided for their special vices — without taking a great deal of extra trouble.”

  “I should think they would take the trouble, then,” said I.

  “But why? When there is every arrangement made for a natural good time; when you are not overworked, not underfed, not miserable and hopeless. When you can drop into a comfortable chair and have excellent food and drink in pleasant company; and hear good music, or speaking, or reading, or see pictures; or, if you like, play any kind of game; swim, ride, fly, do what you want to, for change and recreation — why long for liquor in a low place?”

  “But the men — the real men, people as they were,” I insisted. “You had a world full of drinking men who liked the saloon; did you — what do you call it? — eliminate them?”

  A few of them, yes,” he replied gravely; Some preferred it; others, thorough-going dipsomaniacs, we gave hospital treatment and permanent restraint; they lived and worked and were well provided for in places where there was no liquor. But there were not many of that kind. Most men drank under a constant pressure of conditions driving them to it, and the mere force of habit.

  “Just remember that the weight and terror of life is lifted off us — for good and all.”

  “Socialism, you mean?”

  “Yes, real socialism. The wealth and power of all of us belongs to all of us now. The Wolf is dead.”

  “Other things besides poverty drove a man to drink in my time,” I ventured.

  “Oh, yes — and some men continued to drink. I told you there was liquor to be had — good liquor, too. And other drug habits held on for a while. But we stopped the source of the trouble. The old men died off, the younger ones got over it, and the new ones — that’s what you don’t realize yet: We make a new kind of people now.”

  He was silent, his strong mouth set in a kind smile, his eyes looking far up the blue river.

  “Well, what comes next? What’s done it?” I demanded. “Religion, education, or those everlasting women?”

  He laughed outright; laughed till the boat rocked,

  “How you do hate to admit that it’s their turn. John! Haven’t we had full swing — everything in our hands — for all historic time? They have only begun. Thirty years? Why, John, they have done so much in these thirty years that the world’s heart is glad at last. You don’t know”

  I didn’t know. But I did feel a distinct resentment at being treated like an extinct species.

  “They have simply stepped on to an eminence men have been all these years building,” I said. “We have done all the hard work — are doing it yet, for all I see. We have made it possible for them to live at all! We have made the whole civilization of the world — they just profit by it. And now you speak as if, somehow, they had managed to achieve more than we have!”

  Owen considered a while thoughtfully. “What you say is true. We have done a good deal of the work; we did largely make and modify our civilization. But if you read some of the newer histories “ he stopped and looked at me as if I had just happened. “Why you don’t know yet, do you? History has been rewritten.”

  “You speak as if ‘history’ was a one act play.”

  “I don’t mean it’s all done, of course — but we do have now a complete new treatment of the world’s history. Each nation its own, some several of them, there’s no dead level of agreement, I assure you. But our old androcentric version of life began to be questioned about 1910, I think — and new versions appeared, more and more of them. The big scholars took it up, there was new research work, and now we are not so glib in our assurance that we did it all.”

  “You’re getting pretty close to things I used to know something about,” I remarked drily.

  “If you knew all that was known, then, you wouldn’t know this, John. Don’t you remember what Lester Ward calls ‘the illusion of the near’ — how the most familiar facts were precisely those we often failed to understand? In all our history, ancient and modern, we had the underlying assumption that men were the human race, the people who did things; and that women — were ‘their women.’”

  And precisely what have you lately discovered? That Horatio at the bridge was Horatia, after all? That the world was conquered by an Alexandra — and a Napoleona?” I laughed with some bitterness.

  “No,” said Owen gently, “There is no question about the battles — men did the fighting, of course. But we have learned that ‘the decisive battles of history’ were not so decisive as we thought them. Man, as a destructive agent did modify history, unquestionably. What did make history, make civilization, was constructive industry. And for many ages women did most of that.”

  “Did women build the Pyramids? the Acropolis? the Roads of Rome?”

  “No, nor many other things. But they gave the world its first start in agriculture and the care of animals; they clothed it and fed it and ornamented it and kept it warm; their ceaseless industry made rich the simple early cultures. Consider — without men, Egypt and Assyria could not have fought — but they could have grown rich and wise. Without women — they could have fought until the last man died alone — if the food held out.

  “But I won’t bother you with this, John. You’ll get all you want out of books better than I can give it. What I set out to say was that the most important influence in weeding out intemperance was that of the women.”

  I was in a very bad temper by this time, it was disagreeable enough to have this — or any other part of it, true; but what I could not stand was to see that big hearted man speak of it in such a cheerful matter-of-fact way.

  “Have the men of today no pride?” I asked. “How can you stand it — being treated as inferiors — by women?”

  “Women stood it for ten thousand years,” he answered, “being treated as inferiors — by men.”

  We went home in silence.

  Chapter 9

  I LEARNED to understand the immense material prosperity of the country much more easily than its social progress.

  The exquisite agriculture which made millions of acres from raw farms and ranches into rich gardens, the forestry which had changed our straggling woodlands into great tree-farms, yielding their steady crops of cut boughs, thinned underbrush, and full-grown trunks, those endless orchard roads, with their processions of workers making continual excursions in their special cars, keeping roadway and bordering trees in perfect order — all this one could see.

  There were, of course far more of the wilder, narrower roads, perfect as the road-bed, but not parked, with all untrimmed nature to travel through.

  The airships did make a difference. To look down on the flowing, outspread miles beneath gave a sense of the unity and continuous beauty of our country, quite different from the streak views we used to get. An airship is a moving mountain-top.

  The cities were even more strikingly beautiful, in that the change was greater, the contrast sharper. I never tired of wandering about on foot along the streets of cities, and I visited several, finding, as Nellie said, that it took no longer to improve twenty than one; the people in each could do it as soon as they chose to.

  But what made them choose? What had got into the people? That was what puzzled me most. It did not show outside, like the country changes, and the rebuilt cities; the people did not look remarkable, though they were different, too. I watched and studied them, trying to analyze the changes that could be seen. Most visible was cleanliness, comfort, and beauty in dress.

  I had never dreamed of the relief to the spectator in not seeing any poverty. We were used to it, of course; w
e had our excuses, religious and economic, we even found, or thought we found, artistic pleasure in this social disease. But now I realized what a nightmare it had been — the sights, the sounds, the smells of poverty — merely to an outside observer.

  These people had good bodies, too. They were not equally beautiful, by any means; thirty years, of course, could not wholly return to the normal a race long stunted and overworked. But in the difference in the young generation I could see at a glance the world’s best hope, that the “long inheritance” is far deeper than the short.

  Those of about twenty and under, those who were born after some of these changes had been made, were like another race. Big, sturdy, blooming creatures, boys and girls alike, swift and graceful, eager, happy, courteous — I supposed at first that these were the children of exceptionally placed people; but soon found, with a heart-stirring sort of shock, that all the children were like that.

  Some of the old folk still carried the scars of earlier conditions, but the children were new people.

  Then of my own accord I demanded reasons. Nellie laughed sweetly.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come to your appetite,” she said. “I’ve been longing to talk to you about that, and you were always bored.”

  “It’s a good deal of a dose, Nell; you’ll admit that. And one hates to be forcibly fed. But now I do want to get an outline, a sort of general idea, of what you do with children. Can you condense a little recent history, and make it easy to an aged stranger?”

  “Aged I You are growing younger every day, John. I believe that comparatively brainless life you led in Tibet was good for you. That was all new impression on the brain; the first part rested. Now you are beginning where you left off. I wish you would recognize that.”

  I shook my head. “Never mind me, I’m trying not to think of my chopped-off life; but tell me how you manufacture this kind of people.”

  My sister sat still, thinking, for a little. “I want to avoid repetition if possible — tell me just how much you have in mind already.” But I refused to be catechised.