Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887

by Edward Bellamy

  Chapter 26

  I think if a person were ever excusable for losing track of the days ofthe week, the circumstances excused me. Indeed, if I had been told thatthe method of reckoning time had been wholly changed and the days werenow counted in lots of five, ten, or fifteen instead of seven, I shouldhave been in no way surprised after what I had already heard and seenof the twentieth century. The first time that any inquiry as to thedays of the week occurred to me was the morning following theconversation related in the last chapter. At the breakfast table Dr.Leete asked me if I would care to hear a sermon.

  "Is it Sunday, then?" I exclaimed.

  "Yes," he replied. "It was on Friday, you see, when we made the luckydiscovery of the buried chamber to which we owe your society thismorning. It was on Saturday morning, soon after midnight, that youfirst awoke, and Sunday afternoon when you awoke the second time withfaculties fully regained."

  "So you still have Sundays and sermons," I said. "We had prophets whoforetold that long before this time the world would have dispensed withboth. I am very curious to know how the ecclesiastical systems fit inwith the rest of your social arrangements. I suppose you have a sort ofnational church with official clergymen."

  Dr. Leete laughed, and Mrs. Leete and Edith seemed greatly amused.

  "Why, Mr. West," Edith said, "what odd people you must think us. Youwere quite done with national religious establishments in thenineteenth century, and did you fancy we had gone back to them?"

  "But how can voluntary churches and an unofficial clerical professionbe reconciled with national ownership of all buildings, and theindustrial service required of all men?" I answered.

  "The religious practices of the people have naturally changedconsiderably in a century," replied Dr. Leete; "but supposing them tohave remained unchanged, our social system would accommodate themperfectly. The nation supplies any person or number of persons withbuildings on guarantee of the rent, and they remain tenants while theypay it. As for the clergymen, if a number of persons wish the servicesof an individual for any particular end of their own, apart from thegeneral service of the nation, they can always secure it, with thatindividual's own consent, of course, just as we secure the service ofour editors, by contributing from their credit cards an indemnity tothe nation for the loss of his services in general industry. Thisindemnity paid the nation for the individual answers to the salary inyour day paid to the individual himself; and the various applicationsof this principle leave private initiative full play in all details towhich national control is not applicable. Now, as to hearing a sermonto-day, if you wish to do so, you can either go to a church to hear itor stay at home."

  "How am I to hear it if I stay at home?"

  "Simply by accompanying us to the music room at the proper hour andselecting an easy chair. There are some who still prefer to hearsermons in church, but most of our preaching, like our musicalperformances, is not in public, but delivered in acoustically preparedchambers, connected by wire with subscribers' houses. If you prefer togo to a church I shall be glad to accompany you, but I really don'tbelieve you are likely to hear anywhere a better discourse than youwill at home. I see by the paper that Mr. Barton is to preach thismorning, and he preaches only by telephone, and to audiences oftenreaching 150,000."

  "The novelty of the experience of hearing a sermon under suchcircumstances would incline me to be one of Mr. Barton's hearers, iffor no other reason," I said.

  An hour or two later, as I sat reading in the library, Edith came forme, and I followed her to the music room, where Dr. and Mrs. Leete werewaiting. We had not more than seated ourselves comfortably when thetinkle of a bell was heard, and a few moments after the voice of a man,at the pitch of ordinary conversation, addressed us, with an effect ofproceeding from an invisible person in the room. This was what thevoice said:

  MR. BARTON'S SERMON

  "We have had among us, during the past week, a critic from thenineteenth century, a living representative of the epoch of ourgreat-grandparents. It would be strange if a fact so extraordinary hadnot somewhat strongly affected our imaginations. Perhaps most of ushave been stimulated to some effort to realize the society of a centuryago, and figure to ourselves what it must have been like to live then.In inviting you now to consider certain reflections upon this subjectwhich have occurred to me, I presume that I shall rather follow thandivert the course of your own thoughts."

  Edith whispered something to her father at this point, to which henodded assent and turned to me.

  "Mr. West," he said, "Edith suggests that you may find it slightlyembarrassing to listen to a discourse on the lines Mr. Barton is layingdown, and if so, you need not be cheated out of a sermon. She willconnect us with Mr. Sweetser's speaking room if you say so, and I canstill promise you a very good discourse."

  "No, no," I said. "Believe me, I would much rather hear what Mr. Bartonhas to say."

  "As you please," replied my host.

  When her father spoke to me Edith had touched a screw, and the voice ofMr. Barton had ceased abruptly. Now at another touch the room was oncemore filled with the earnest sympathetic tones which had alreadyimpressed me most favorably.

  "I venture to assume that one effect has been common with us as aresult of this effort at retrospection, and that it has been to leaveus more than ever amazed at the stupendous change which one briefcentury has made in the material and moral conditions of humanity.

  "Still, as regards the contrast between the poverty of the nation andthe world in the nineteenth century and their wealth now, it is notgreater, possibly, than had been before seen in human history, perhapsnot greater, for example, than that between the poverty of this countryduring the earliest colonial period of the seventeenth century and therelatively great wealth it had attained at the close of the nineteenth,or between the England of William the Conqueror and that of Victoria.Although the aggregate riches of a nation did not then, as now, affordany accurate criterion of the masses of its people, yet instances likethese afford partial parallels for the merely material side of thecontrast between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It is whenwe contemplate the moral aspect of that contrast that we find ourselvesin the presence of a phenomenon for which history offers no precedent,however far back we may cast our eye. One might almost be excused whoshould exclaim, 'Here, surely, is something like a miracle!'Nevertheless, when we give over idle wonder, and begin to examine theseeming prodigy critically, we find it no prodigy at all, much less amiracle. It is not necessary to suppose a moral new birth of humanity,or a wholesale destruction of the wicked and survival of the good, toaccount for the fact before us. It finds its simple and obviousexplanation in the reaction of a changed environment upon human nature.It means merely that a form of society which was founded on the pseudoself-interest of selfishness, and appealed solely to the anti-socialand brutal side of human nature, has been replaced by institutionsbased on the true self-interest of a rational unselfishness, andappealing to the social and generous instincts of men.

  "My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemedin the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the oldsocial and industrial system, which taught them to view their naturalprey in their fellow-men, and find their gain in the loss of others. Nodoubt it seems to you that no necessity, however dire, would havetempted you to subsist on what superior skill or strength enabled youto wrest from others equally needy. But suppose it were not merely yourown life that you were responsible for. I know well that there musthave been many a man among our ancestors who, if it had been merely aquestion of his own life, would sooner have given it up than nourishedit by bread snatched from others. But this he was not permitted to do.He had dear lives dependent on him. Men loved women in those days, asnow. God knows how they dared be fathers, but they had babies as sweet,no doubt, to them as ours to us, whom they must feed, clothe, educate.The gentlest creatures are fierce when they have young to provide for,and in that wolfish society the struggle for bread borrowed a peculiar
desperation from the tenderest sentiments. For the sake of thosedependent on him, a man might not choose, but must plunge into the foulfight--cheat, overreach, supplant, defraud, buy below worth and sellabove, break down the business by which his neighbor fed his youngones, tempt men to buy what they ought not and to sell what they shouldnot, grind his laborers, sweat his debtors, cozen his creditors. Thougha man sought it carefully with tears, it was hard to find a way inwhich he could earn a living and provide for his family except bypressing in before some weaker rival and taking the food from hismouth. Even the ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruelnecessity. While they warned their flocks against the love of money,regard for their families compelled them to keep an outlook for thepecuniary prizes of their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed atrying business, preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness whichthey and everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world,reduce to poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws ofconduct which the law of self-preservation compelled men to break.Looking on the inhuman spectacle of society, these worthy men bitterlybemoaned the depravity of human nature; as if angelic nature would nothave been debauched in such a devil's school! Ah, my friends, believeme, it is not now in this happy age that humanity is proving thedivinity within it. It was rather in those evil days when not even thefight for life with one another, the struggle for mere existence, inwhich mercy was folly, could wholly banish generosity and kindness fromthe earth.

  "It is not hard to understand the desperation with which men and women,who under other conditions would have been full of gentleness andtruth, fought and tore each other in the scramble for gold, when werealize what it meant to miss it, what poverty was in that day. For thebody it was hunger and thirst, torment by heat and frost, in sicknessneglect, in health unremitting toil; for the moral nature it meantoppression, contempt, and the patient endurance of indignity, brutishassociations from infancy, the loss of all the innocence of childhood,the grace of womanhood, the dignity of manhood; for the mind it meantthe death of ignorance, the torpor of all those faculties whichdistinguish us from brutes, the reduction of life to a round of bodilyfunctions.

  "Ah, my friends, if such a fate as this were offered you and yourchildren as the only alternative of success in the accumulation ofwealth, how long do you fancy would you be in sinking to the morallevel of your ancestors?

  "Some two or three centuries ago an act of barbarity was committed inIndia, which, though the number of lives destroyed was but a few score,was attended by such peculiar horrors that its memory is likely to beperpetual. A number of English prisoners were shut up in a roomcontaining not enough air to supply one-tenth their number. Theunfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but, as theagonies of suffocation began to take hold on them, they forgot allelse, and became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for himself,and against all others, to force a way to one of the small apertures ofthe prison at which alone it was possible to get a breath of air. Itwas a struggle in which men became beasts, and the recital of itshorrors by the few survivors so shocked our forefathers that for acentury later we find it a stock reference in their literature as atypical illustration of the extreme possibilities of human misery, asshocking in its moral as its physical aspect. They could scarcely haveanticipated that to us the Black Hole of Calcutta, with its press ofmaddened men tearing and trampling one another in the struggle to win aplace at the breathing holes, would seem a striking type of the societyof their age. It lacked something of being a complete type, however,for in the Calcutta Black Hole there were no tender women, no littlechildren and old men and women, no cripples. They were at least allmen, strong to bear, who suffered.

  "When we reflect that the ancient order of which I have been speakingwas prevalent up to the end of the nineteenth century, while to us thenew order which succeeded it already seems antique, even our parentshaving known no other, we cannot fail to be astounded at the suddennesswith which a transition so profound beyond all previous experience ofthe race must have been effected. Some observation of the state ofmen's minds during the last quarter of the nineteenth century will,however, in great measure, dissipate this astonishment. Though generalintelligence in the modern sense could not be said to exist in anycommunity at that time, yet, as compared with previous generations, theone then on the stage was intelligent. The inevitable consequence ofeven this comparative degree of intelligence had been a perception ofthe evils of society, such as had never before been general. It isquite true that these evils had been even worse, much worse, inprevious ages. It was the increased intelligence of the masses whichmade the difference, as the dawn reveals the squalor of surroundingswhich in the darkness may have seemed tolerable. The key-note of theliterature of the period was one of compassion for the poor andunfortunate, and indignant outcry against the failure of the socialmachinery to ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain from theseoutbursts that the moral hideousness of the spectacle about them was,at least by flashes, fully realized by the best of the men of thattime, and that the lives of some of the more sensitive and generoushearted of them were rendered well nigh unendurable by the intensity oftheir sympathies.

  "Although the idea of the vital unity of the family of mankind, thereality of human brotherhood, was very far from being apprehended bythem as the moral axiom it seems to us, yet it is a mistake to supposethat there was no feeling at all corresponding to it. I could read youpassages of great beauty from some of their writers which show that theconception was clearly attained by a few, and no doubt vaguely by manymore. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the nineteenth centurywas in name Christian, and the fact that the entire commercial andindustrial frame of society was the embodiment of the anti-Christianspirit must have had some weight, though I admit it was strangelylittle, with the nominal followers of Jesus Christ.

  "When we inquire why it did not have more, why, in general, long aftera vast majority of men had agreed as to the crying abuses of theexisting social arrangement, they still tolerated it, or contentedthemselves with talking of petty reforms in it, we come upon anextraordinary fact. It was the sincere belief of even the best of menat that epoch that the only stable elements in human nature, on which asocial system could be safely founded, were its worst propensities.They had been taught and believed that greed and self-seeking were allthat held mankind together, and that all human associations would fallto pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives orcurb their operation. In a word, they believed--even those who longedto believe otherwise--the exact reverse of what seems to usself-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualities ofmen, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the cohesiveforce of society. It seemed reasonable to them that men lived togethersolely for the purpose of overreaching and oppressing one another, andof being overreached and oppressed, and that while a society that gavefull scope to these propensities could stand, there would be littlechance for one based on the idea of cooperation for the benefit of all.It seems absurd to expect any one to believe that convictions likethese were ever seriously entertained by men; but that they were notonly entertained by our great-grandfathers, but were responsible forthe long delay in doing away with the ancient order, after a convictionof its intolerable abuses had become general, is as well established asany fact in history can be. Just here you will find the explanation ofthe profound pessimism of the literature of the last quarter of thenineteenth century, the note of melancholy in its poetry, and thecynicism of its humor.

  "Feeling that the condition of the race was unendurable, they had noclear hope of anything better. They believed that the evolution ofhumanity had resulted in leading it into a cul de sac, and that therewas no way of getting forward. The frame of men's minds at this time isstrikingly illustrated by treatises which have come down to us, and mayeven now be consulted in our libraries by the curious, in whichlaborious arguments are pursued to prove that despite the evil plightof men, life was still, by some slight preponderance o
f considerations,probably better worth living than leaving. Despising themselves, theydespised their Creator. There was a general decay of religious belief.Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly veiled by doubt and dread,alone lighted up the chaos of earth. That men should doubt Him whosebreath is in their nostrils, or dread the hands that moulded them,seems to us indeed a pitiable insanity; but we must remember thatchildren who are brave by day have sometimes foolish fears at night.The dawn has come since then. It is very easy to believe in thefatherhood of God in the twentieth century.

  "Briefly, as must needs be in a discourse of this character, I haveadverted to some of the causes which had prepared men's minds for thechange from the old to the new order, as well as some causes of theconservatism of despair which for a while held it back after the timewas ripe. To wonder at the rapidity with which the change was completedafter its possibility was first entertained is to forget theintoxicating effect of hope upon minds long accustomed to despair. Thesunburst, after so long and dark a night, must needs have had adazzling effect. From the moment men allowed themselves to believe thathumanity after all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squatstature was not the measure of its possible growth, but that it stoodupon the verge of an avatar of limitless development, the reaction mustneeds have been overwhelming. It is evident that nothing was able tostand against the enthusiasm which the new faith inspired.

  "Here, at last, men must have felt, was a cause compared with which thegrandest of historic causes had been trivial. It was doubtless becauseit could have commanded millions of martyrs, that none were needed. Thechange of a dynasty in a petty kingdom of the old world often cost morelives than did the revolution which set the feet of the human race atlast in the right way.

  "Doubtless it ill beseems one to whom the boon of life in ourresplendent age has been vouchsafed to wish his destiny other, and yetI have often thought that I would fain exchange my share in this sereneand golden day for a place in that stormy epoch of transition, whenheroes burst the barred gate of the future and revealed to the kindlinggaze of a hopeless race, in place of the blank wall that had closed itspath, a vista of progress whose end, for very excess of light, stilldazzles us. Ah, my friends! who will say that to have lived then, whenthe weakest influence was a lever to whose touch the centuriestrembled, was not worth a share even in this era of fruition?

  "You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless ofrevolutions. In the time of one generation men laid aside the socialtraditions and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social orderworthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in theirhabits, they became co-workers, and found in fraternity, at once, thescience of wealth and happiness. 'What shall I eat and drink, andwherewithal shall I be clothed?' stated as a problem beginning andending in self, had been an anxious and an endless one. But when onceit was conceived, not from the individual, but the fraternalstandpoint, 'What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal shall we beclothed?'--its difficulties vanished.

  "Poverty with servitude had been the result, for the mass of humanity,of attempting to solve the problem of maintenance from the individualstandpoint, but no sooner had the nation become the sole capitalist andemployer than not alone did plenty replace poverty, but the lastvestige of the serfdom of man to man disappeared from earth. Humanslavery, so often vainly scotched, at last was killed. The means ofsubsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by employer toemployed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock as amongchildren at the father's table. It was impossible for a man any longerto use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His esteem was theonly sort of gain he could thenceforth make out of him. There was nomore either arrogance or servility in the relations of human beings toone another. For the first time since the creation every man stood upstraight before God. The fear of want and the lust of gain becameextinct motives when abundance was assured to all and immoderatepossessions made impossible of attainment. There were no more beggarsnor almoners. Equity left charity without an occupation. The tencommandments became well nigh obsolete in a world where there was notemptation to theft, no occasion to lie either for fear or favor, noroom for envy where all were equal, and little provocation to violencewhere men were disarmed of power to injure one another. Humanity'sancient dream of liberty, equality, fraternity, mocked by so many ages,at last was realized.

  "As in the old society the generous, the just, the tender-hearted hadbeen placed at a disadvantage by the possession of those qualities; soin the new society the cold-hearted, the greedy, and self-seeking foundthemselves out of joint with the world. Now that the conditions of lifefor the first time ceased to operate as a forcing process to developthe brutal qualities of human nature, and the premium which hadheretofore encouraged selfishness was not only removed, but placed uponunselfishness, it was for the first time possible to see whatunperverted human nature really was like. The depraved tendencies,which had previously overgrown and obscured the better to so large anextent, now withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the noblerqualities showed a sudden luxuriance which turned cynics intopanegyrists and for the first time in human history tempted mankind tofall in love with itself. Soon was fully revealed, what the divines andphilosophers of the old world never would have believed, that humannature in its essential qualities is good, not bad, that men by theirnatural intention and structure are generous, not selfish, pitiful, notcruel, sympathetic, not arrogant, godlike in aspirations, instinct withdivinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice, images of Godindeed, not the travesties upon Him they had seemed. The constantpressure, through numberless generations, of conditions of life whichmight have perverted angels, had not been able to essentially alter thenatural nobility of the stock, and these conditions once removed, likea bent tree, it had sprung back to its normal uprightness.

  "To put the whole matter in the nutshell of a parable, let me comparehumanity in the olden time to a rosebush planted in a swamp, wateredwith black bog-water, breathing miasmatic fogs by day, and chilled withpoison dews at night. Innumerable generations of gardeners had donetheir best to make it bloom, but beyond an occasional half-opened budwith a worm at the heart, their efforts had been unsuccessful. Many,indeed, claimed that the bush was no rosebush at all, but a noxiousshrub, fit only to be uprooted and burned. The gardeners, for the mostpart, however, held that the bush belonged to the rose family, but hadsome ineradicable taint about it, which prevented the buds from comingout, and accounted for its generally sickly condition. There were afew, indeed, who maintained that the stock was good enough, that thetrouble was in the bog, and that under more favorable conditions theplant might be expected to do better. But these persons were notregular gardeners, and being condemned by the latter as mere theoristsand day dreamers, were, for the most part, so regarded by the people.Moreover, urged some eminent moral philosophers, even conceding for thesake of the argument that the bush might possibly do better elsewhere,it was a more valuable discipline for the buds to try to bloom in a bogthan it would be under more favorable conditions. The buds thatsucceeded in opening might indeed be very rare, and the flowers paleand scentless, but they represented far more moral effort than if theyhad bloomed spontaneously in a garden.

  "The regular gardeners and the moral philosophers had their way. Thebush remained rooted in the bog, and the old course of treatment wenton. Continually new varieties of forcing mixtures were applied to theroots, and more recipes than could be numbered, each declared by itsadvocates the best and only suitable preparation, were used to kill thevermin and remove the mildew. This went on a very long time.Occasionally some one claimed to observe a slight improvement in theappearance of the bush, but there were quite as many who declared thatit did not look so well as it used to. On the whole there could not besaid to be any marked change. Finally, during a period of generaldespondency as to the prospects of the bush where it was, the idea oftransplanting it was again mooted, and this time found favor. 'Let ustry it,' was the general voice. 'Perhaps it may thriv
e betterelsewhere, and here it is certainly doubtful if it be worth cultivatinglonger.' So it came about that the rosebush of humanity wastransplanted, and set in sweet, warm, dry earth, where the sun bathedit, the stars wooed it, and the south wind caressed it. Then itappeared that it was indeed a rosebush. The vermin and the mildewdisappeared, and the bush was covered with most beautiful red roses,whose fragrance filled the world.

  "It is a pledge of the destiny appointed for us that the Creator hasset in our hearts an infinite standard of achievement, judged by whichour past attainments seem always insignificant, and the goal nevernearer. Had our forefathers conceived a state of society in which menshould live together like brethren dwelling in unity, without strifesor envying, violence or overreaching, and where, at the price of adegree of labor not greater than health demands, in their chosenoccupations, they should be wholly freed from care for the morrow andleft with no more concern for their livelihood than trees which arewatered by unfailing streams,--had they conceived such a condition, Isay, it would have seemed to them nothing less than paradise. Theywould have confounded it with their idea of heaven, nor dreamed thatthere could possibly lie further beyond anything to be desired orstriven for.

  "But how is it with us who stand on this height which they gazed up to?Already we have well nigh forgotten, except when it is especiallycalled to our minds by some occasion like the present, that it was notalways with men as it is now. It is a strain on our imaginations toconceive the social arrangements of our immediate ancestors. We findthem grotesque. The solution of the problem of physical maintenance soas to banish care and crime, so far from seeming to us an ultimateattainment, appears but as a preliminary to anything like real humanprogress. We have but relieved ourselves of an impertinent and needlessharassment which hindered our ancestor from undertaking the real endsof existence. We are merely stripped for the race; no more. We are likea child which has just learned to stand upright and to walk. It is agreat event, from the child's point of view, when he first walks.Perhaps he fancies that there can be little beyond that achievement,but a year later he has forgotten that he could not always walk. Hishorizon did but widen when he rose, and enlarge as he moved. A greatevent indeed, in one sense, was his first step, but only as abeginning, not as the end. His true career was but then first enteredon. The enfranchisement of humanity in the last century, from mentaland physical absorption in working and scheming for the mere bodilynecessities, may be regarded as a species of second birth of the race,without which its first birth to an existence that was but a burdenwould forever have remained unjustified, but whereby it is nowabundantly vindicated. Since then, humanity has entered on a new phaseof spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties, the veryexistence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely suspected. Inplace of the dreary hopelessness of the nineteenth century, itsprofound pessimism as to the future of humanity, the animating idea ofthe present age is an enthusiastic conception of the opportunities ofour earthly existence, and the unbounded possibilities of human nature.The betterment of mankind from generation to generation, physically,mentally, morally, is recognized as the one great object supremelyworthy of effort and of sacrifice. We believe the race for the firsttime to have entered on the realization of God's ideal of it, and eachgeneration must now be a step upward.

  "Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall havepassed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end islost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God 'who is ourhome,' the return of the individual by the way of death, and the returnof the race by the fulfillment of the evolution, when the divine secrethidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a tear for thedark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes,press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Itssummer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens arebefore it."