City of Endless Night

by Hastings , Milo M. ;

  In a general way I understood that German labor differed not only in being eugenically created as a distinct breed, but that the labor group was also a very distinct caste economically and politically. The laborer, being denied access to the Level of Free Women, had no need for money or bank credit in any form. This seemed to me to reduce him to a condition of pure slavery – since he received no pay for his services other than the bare maintenance supplied by the state.

  Because of this evidence of economic inferiority, I had at first supposed that labor was in every way an inferior caste. But in this I had been gravely mistaken, nor had I been able fully to comprehend my error until this brewing labor trouble revealed in concrete form the political superiority of labor. In my failure to comprehend the true state of affairs I had been a little stupid, for the political basis of German society is revealed to the seeing eye in the Hohenzollern eagle emblazoned on the red flag, the emblem of the rule of labor.

  Historically I believe this belies the origin of the red flag for it was first used as the emblem of democratic socialism, a nineteenth-century theory of a social order in which all social and economic classes were to be blended into a true democracy differing somewhat in its economic organization, but essentially the same politically as the true democracy which we have achieved in the World State. But with the Bolshevist regime in Russia after the First World War, the red flag was appropriated as the emblem of the political supremacy and rule of the proletariat or labor class.

  I make these references to bygone history because they throw light on the peculiar status of the German Labor Caste, which is possessed of political superiority combined with social and economic inferiority. It was the Bolshevist brand of socialism that finally overran Germany in the era of loose and ineffective rule of the world by the League of Nations. Though I make no pretense of being an accurate authority on history, the League of Nations, if I remember rightly, was humanity’s first timid conception of the World State. Rather weakly born, it was promptly emasculated by the rise in America of a political party founded on the ideas of a great national hero who had just died. The obstructionist policy of this party was inherent in its origin, for it was inspired and held together by the ideas of a dead man, whose followers could only repeat as their test of faith a phrase that has come down to us as an idiom – ‘What would He do?’

  ‘He’ being dead could do nothing, neither could he change his mind, but having left an indelible record of his ideas by the strenuous verbiage of his virile and inspiring rhetoric, there was no room for doubt. As in all political and religious faiths founded on the ideas of dead heroes, this made for solidarity and power and quite prevented any adaptation of the form of government to the needs of the world that had arisen since his demise.

  I have digressed here from my theme of the political status of the German labor caste, but it is fascinating to trace things to their origin to find the links of the chain of cause and effect. So, if I have read my history aright, the emasculation of the League of Nations by the American obstructionists caused, or at least permitted the rise, and dominance of the Bolshevists in twentieth-century Germany. Had the Germans been democrats at heart the pendulum would have swung back as it did with other peoples, and been stayed at the point of equilibrium which we recognized as the stable mean of democracy.

  But in the old days before the modern intermingling of the races it seems that there were certain tastes that had become instinctive in racial groups. Thus, just as the German stomach craved the rich flavor of sausage, so the German mind craved the dazzling show of Royal flummery. Had it not been for this the First World War could have never been, for the socialists of that time were bitterly opposed to war and Germany was the world’s greatest stronghold of socialism, yet when their beloved imperial poser, William the Great, called for war the German socialists, with the exception of a few whom they afterwards murdered, went forth to war almost without protest.

  When I first began to hear of the political rights of Labor, I went to my friend Hellar and asked for an explanation.

  ‘Is not the chain of authority absolute,’ I asked, ‘up through the industrial organization direct to the Emperor and so to God himself?’

  ‘But,’ said Hellar, ‘the workers do not believe in God!’

  ‘What,’ I stammered, ‘workers not believe in God! It is impossible. Have not the workers simple trusting minds?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Hellar, ‘it is the natural mind of man! Skepticism, which is the basis of scientific reasoning, is an artificial thing, first created in the world under the competitive economic order when it became essential to self-preservation in a world of trade based on deceit. In our new order we have had difficulty in maintaining enough of it for scientific purposes even in the intellectual classes. There is no skepticism among the laborers now, I assure you. They believe as easily as they breathe.’

  ‘Then how,’ I demanded in amazement, ‘does it come that they do not believe in God?’

  ‘Because,’ said Hellar, ‘they have never heard of God.

  ‘The laborer does not know of God because we have restored God since the perfection of our caste system, and hence it was easy to promulgate the idea among the intellectuals and not among the workers. It was necessary to restore God for the intellectuals in order to give them greater respect for the power of the Royal House, but the laborers need no God because they believe themselves to be the source from which the Royal House derives its right to rule. They believe the Emperor to be their own servant ruling by their permission.’

  ‘The Emperor a servant to labor!’ I exclaimed; ‘this is absurd.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Hellar; ‘why should it be otherwise? We are an absurd people, because we have always laughed at the wrong things. Still this principle is very old and has not always been confined to the Germans. After the revolutions in the twentieth century the American plutocrats employed poverty-stricken European nobility for servants and exalted them to high stations and obeyed them explicitly in all social matters with which their service was concerned.

  ‘The laborers restored William III because they wished to have an exalted servant. He led them to war and became a hero. He reorganized the state and became their political servant, also their emperor and their tyrant. It is not an impossible relation, for it is not unlike the relation between the mother and the child or between a man and his mistress. And yet it is different, more formal, with functions better defined.

  ‘The Emperor is the administrative head of the government and we intellectuals are merely his hirelings. We are merely the feathers of the royal eagle, our color is black, we have no part in the red blood of human brotherhood, we are outcasts from the socialistic labor world – for we receive money compensation to which laborers would not stoop. But labor owns the state. This roof of Berlin over our heads and all that is therein contained, is the property of the workers who produced it.’

  I shook my head in mute admission of my lack of comprehension.

  ‘And who,’ asked Hellar, ‘did you think owned Berlin?’

  I confessed that I had never thought of that.

  ‘Few of our intellectual class have ever thought of that,’ replied Hellar, ‘unless they are well read in political history. But at the time of the Hohenzollern restoration labor owned all property in true communal ownership. They did not release it to the Royal House, but merely turned over the administration of the property to the Emperor as an agent.’

  These belated explanations of the fundamental ideas of German society quite confused and confounded me, though Hellar seemed in no wise surprised at my ignorance, since as a chemist I had originally been supposed to know only of atoms and valences and suchlike matters. Seeking a way out of these contradictions I asked: ‘How is it then that labor is so powerless, since you say that it owns the state, and even the Emperor rules by its permission?’

  ‘Napoleon – have you ever heard of him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted – and then recall
ing my role as a German chemist I hastened to add – ‘Napoleon was a directing chemist who achieved a plan for increasing the food supply in his day by establishing the sugar beet industry.’

  ‘Is that so?’ exclaimed Hellar. ‘I didn’t know that. I thought he was only an Emperor – anyway, Napoleon said that if you tell men they are equal you can do as you please with them. So when William III was elected to the throne by labor, he insisted that they retain the power and re-elect him every five years. He was very popular because he invented the armored city – our new Berlin – someday I will tell you of that – and so of course he was re-elected, and his son after him. Though most of the intellectuals do not know that it exists the ceremony of election is a great occasion on the labor levels. The Emperor speaks all day through the horns and on the picture screens. The workers think he is actually speaking, though of course it is a collection of old films and records of the Royal Voice. When they have seen and heard the speeches, the laborers vote, and then go back to their work and are very happy.’

  ‘But suppose they should sometime fail to re-elect him?’

  ‘No danger,’ said Hellar; ‘there is only one name on the ballot and the ballots are dumped into the paper mill without inspection.’

  ‘Most extraordinary,’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Most ordinary,’ contradicted Hellar; ‘it is not even an exclusively German institution; we have merely perfected it. Voting everywhere is a very useful device in organized government. In the cruder form used in democracies there were two or more candidates. It usually made little difference which was elected; but the system was imperfect because the voters who voted for the candidate which lost were not pleased. Then there was the trouble of counting the ballots. We avoid all this.’

  ‘It is all very interesting,’ I said, ‘but who is the real authority?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hellar, ‘this matter of authority is one of our most subtle conceptions. The weakness of ancient governments was in the fact that the line of authority was broken. It came somewhere to an end. But now authority flows up from labor to the Emperor and then descends again to labor through the administrative line of which we are one link. It is an unbroken circuit.’

  But I was still unsatisfied, for it annoyed me not to be able to understand the system of German politics, as I had always prided myself that, for a scientist, I understood politics remarkably well.

  II

  I had gone to Hellar for enlightenment because I was gravely alarmed over the rumors of a strike among the laborers in the Protium Works. I had read in the outside world of the murder and destruction of these former civil wars of industry. With a working population so cruelly held to the treadmill of industrial bondage the idea of a strike conjured up in my fancy the beginning of a bloody revolution. With so vast a population so utterly dependent upon the orderly processes of industry the possible terrors of an industrial revolution were horrible beyond imagining; and for the moment all thoughts of escape, or of my own plans for negotiating the surrender of Berlin to the World State, were swept aside by the stern responsibilities that devolved upon me as the Director of Works wherein a terrible strike seemed brewing.

  The first rumor of the strike of the laborers in the Protium Works had come to me from the Listening-in-Service. Since Berlin was too complicated and congested a spot for wireless communication to be practical, the electrical conduct of sound was by antiquated means of metal wires. The workers’ Free Speech Halls were all provided with receiving horns by which they made their appeals to His Majesty, of which I shall speak presently. These instruments were provided with cut-offs in the halls. They had been so designed by the electrical engineers, who were of the intellectual caste, that not even the workers who installed and repaired them knew that the cut-offs were a blind and that the Listening-in-Service heard every word that was said at their secret meetings, when all but workers were, by law and custom, excluded from the halls.

  And so the report came to me that the workers were threatening strike. Their grievance came about in this fashion. My new process had reduced the number of men needed in the works. This would require that some of the men be transferred to other industries. But the transfer was a slow process, as all the workers would have to be examined anatomically and their psychic reflexes tested by the labor assignment experts and those selected re-trained for other labor. That work was proceeding slowly, for there was a shortage of experts because some similar need of transfers existed in one of the metal industries. Moreover, my labor psychologist considered it dangerous to transfer too many men, as they were creatures of habit, and he advised that we ought merely to cease to take on new workers, but wait for old age and death to reduce the number of our men, meanwhile retaining the use of the old extraction process in part of the works.

  ‘Impossible,’ I replied, ‘unless you would have your rations cut and the city put on a starvation diet. Do you not know that the reserve store of protium that was once enough to last eight years is now reduced to less than as many months’ supply?’

  ‘That is none of my affair,’ said the labor psychologist; ‘these chemical matters I do not comprehend. But I advise against these transfers, for our workers are already in a furor about the change of operations in the work.’

  ‘But,’ I protested, ‘the new operations are easier than the old; besides we can cut down the speed of operations, which ought to help you take care of these surplus men.’

  ‘Pardon, Herr Chief,’ returned the elderly labor psychologist, ‘you are a great chemist, a very great chemist, for your invention has upset the labor operation more than has anything that ever happened in my long experience, but I fear you do not realize how necessary it is to go slow in these matters. You ask men who have always opened a faucet from left to right to now open one that moves in a vertical plane. Here, I will show you; move your arm so; do you not see that it takes different muscles?’

  ‘Yes, of course, but what of it? The solution flows faster and the operation is easier.’

  ‘It is easy for you to say that; for you or me it would make no difference since our muscles have all been developed indiscriminately.’

  ‘But what are your labor gymnasiums for, if not to develop all muscles?’

  ‘Now do not misunderstand me. I serve as an interpreter between the minds of the workers and your mind as Director of the Works. As for the muscles developed in the gymnasium, those were developed for sport and not for labor. But that is not the worst of it; you have designed the new benches so low that the mixers must stoop at their work. It is very painful.’

  ‘Good God,’ I cried, ‘what became of the stools? The mixers are to sit down – I ordered two thousand stools.’

  ‘That I know, Herr Chief, but the equipment expert consulted me about the matter and I countermanded the order. It would never do. I did not consult you, it is true, but that was merely a kindness. I did not wish to expose your lack of knowledge, if I may call it such.’

  ‘Call it what you please,’ I snapped, for at the time I thought my labor psychologist was a fool, ‘but get those stools, immediately.’

  ‘But it would never do.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because these men have always stood at their work.’

  ‘But why can they not sit down now?’

  ‘Because they never have sat down.’

  ‘Do they not sit down to eat?’

  ‘Yes, but not to work. It is very different. You do not understand the psychic immobility of labor. Habits grow stronger as the mentality is simplified. I have heard that there are animals in the zoological garden that still perform useless operations that their remote ancestors required in their jungle life.’

  ‘Then do you infer that these men who must stand at their work inherited the idea from their ancestors?’

  ‘That is a matter of eugenics. I do not know, but I do know that we are preparing for trouble with these changes. Still I hope to work it out without serious difficulty, if you do not insist on these
transfers. When workmen have already been forced to change their habitual method of work and then see their fellows being removed to other and still stranger work it breeds dangerous unrest.’

  ‘One thing is certain,’ I replied; ‘we cannot delay the installation of the new method; as fast as the equipment is ready the new operation must replace the old.’

  ‘But the effect of that policy will be that there will not be enough work, and besides the work is, as you say, lighter and that will result in the cutting down of the food rations.’

  ‘But I have already arranged that,’ I said triumphantly; ‘the Rationing Bureau have adjusted the calorie standards so that the men will get as much food as they have been used to.’

  ‘What! you have done that?’ exclaimed the labor psychologist; ‘then there will be trouble. That will destroy the balance of the food supply and the expenditure of muscular energy and the men will get fat. Then the other men will accuse them of stealing food and we shall have bloodshed.’

  ‘A moment ago,’ I smiled, ‘you told me I did not know your business. Now I will tell you that you do not know mine. We ordered special food bulked up in volume; the scheme is working nicely; you need not worry about that. As for the other matter, this surplus of men, it seems to me that the only thing is to cut down the working hours temporarily until the transfers can be made.’

  The psychologist shook his head. ‘It is dangerous,’ he said, ‘and very unusual. I advise instead that you have the operation engineers go over the processes and involve the operations, both to make them more nearly resemble the old ones, and to add to the time and energy consumption of the tasks.’

  ‘No,’ I said emphatically, ‘I invented a more economical process for this industry and I do not propose to see my invention prostituted in this fashion. I appreciate your advice, but if we cannot transfer the workers any faster, then the labor hours must be cut. I will issue the order tomorrow. This is my final decision.’