A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

W >> W. D. Howells >> A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

The minister said: "I believe that in Altruria no man works for the profit
of another?"

"No; each works for the profit of all," replied the Altrurian.

"Well," said the banker, "you seem to have made it go. Nobody can deny
that. But we couldn't make it go here."

"Why? I am very curious to know why our system seems so impossible to
you."

"Well, it is contrary to the American spirit. It is alien to our love of
individuality."

"But we prize individuality, too, and we think we secure it under our
system. Under yours, it seems to me that while the individuality of the
man who makes other men work for him is safe, except from itself, the
individuality of the workers--"

"Well, that is their lookout. We have found that, upon the whole, it is
best to let every man look out for himself. I know that, in a certain
light, the result has an ugly aspect; but, nevertheless, in spite of all,
the country is enormously prosperous. The pursuit of happiness, which is
one of the inalienable rights secured to us by the Declaration, is, and
always has been, a dream; but the pursuit of the dollar yields tangible
proceeds, and we get a good deal of excitement out of it as it goes on.
You can't deny that we are the richest nation in the world. Do you call
Altruria a rich country?"

I could not quite make out whether the banker was serious or not in all
this talk; sometimes I suspected him of a fine mockery, but the Altrurian
took him upon the surface of his words.

"I hardly know whether it is or not. The question of wealth does not enter
into our scheme. I can say that we all have enough, and that no one is
even in the fear of want."

"Yes, that is very well. But we should think it was paying too much for it
if we had to give up the hope of ever having more than we wanted," and at
this point the banker uttered his jolly laugh, and I perceived that he had
been trying to draw the Altrurian out and practise upon his patriotism. It
was a great relief to find that he had been joking in so much that seemed
a dead give-away of our economical position. "In Altruria," he asked, "who
is your ideal great man? I don't mean personally, but abstractly."

The Altrurian thought a moment. "With us there is so little ambition for
distinction, as you understand it, that your question is hard to answer.
But I should say, speaking largely, that it was some man who had been able
for the time being to give the greatest happiness to the greatest number--
some artist or poet or inventor or physician."

I was somewhat surprised to have the banker take this preposterous
statement seriously, respectfully. "Well, that is quite conceivable with
your system. What should you say," he demanded of the rest of us
generally, "was our ideal of greatness?"

No one replied at once, or at all, till the manufacturer said: "We will
let you continue to run it."

"Well, it is a very curious inquiry, and I have thought it over a good
deal. I should say that within a generation our ideal has changed twice.
Before the war, and during all the time from the Revolution onward, it was
undoubtedly the great politician, the publicist, the statesman. As we grew
older and began to have an intellectual life of our own, I think the
literary fellows had a pretty good share of the honors that were going--
that is, such a man as Longfellow was popularly considered a type of
greatness. When the war came, it brought the soldier to the front, and
there was a period of ten or fifteen years when he dominated the national
imagination. That period passed, and the great era of material prosperity
set in. The big fortunes began to tower up, and heroes of another sort
began to appeal to our admiration. I don't think there is any doubt but
the millionaire is now the American ideal. It isn't very pleasant to think
so, even for people who have got on, but it can't very hopefully be
denied. It is the man with the most money who now takes the prize in our
national cake-walk."

The Altrurian turned curiously toward me, and I did my best to tell him
what a cake-walk was. When I had finished, the banker resumed, only to
say, as he rose from his chair to bid us good-night: "In any average
assembly of Americans the greatest millionaire would take the eyes of all
from the greatest statesman, the greatest poet, or the greatest soldier we
ever had. That," he added to the Altrurian, "will account to you for many
things as you travel through our country."

IX

The next time the members of our little group came together, the
manufacturer began at once upon the banker:

"I should think that our friend the professor, here, would hardly like
that notion of yours, that business, as business, has nothing to do with
the education of a gentleman. If this is a business man's country, and if
the professor has nothing in stock but the sort of education that business
has no use for, I should suppose that he would want to go into some other
line."

The banker mutely referred the matter to the professor, who said, with
that cold grin of his which I hated:

"Perhaps we shall wait for business to purge and live cleanly. Then it
will have some use for the education of a gentleman."

"I see," said the banker, "that I have touched the quick in both of you,
when I hadn't the least notion of doing so. But I shouldn't really like to
prophesy which will adapt itself to the other--education or business. Let
us hope there will be mutual concessions. There are some pessimists who
say that business methods, especially on the large scale of the trusts and
combinations, have grown worse instead of better; but this may be merely
what is called a 'transition state.' Hamlet must be cruel to be kind; the
darkest hour comes before dawn--and so on. Perhaps when business gets
the whole affair of life into its hands, and runs the republic, as its
enemies now accuse it of doing, the process of purging and living cleanly
will begin. I have known lots of fellows who started in life rather
scampishly; but when they felt secure of themselves, and believed that
they could afford to be honest, they became so. There's no reason why the
same thing shouldn't happen on a large scale. We must never forget that we
are still a very novel experiment, though we have matured so rapidly in
some respects that we have come to regard ourselves as an accomplished
fact. We are really less so than we were forty years ago, with all the
tremendous changes since the war. Before that we could take certain
matters for granted. If a man got out of work, he turned his hand to
something else; if a man failed in business, he started in again from some
other direction; as a last resort, in both cases, he went West, pre-empted
a quarter-section of public land, and grew up with the country. Now the
country is grown up; the public land is gone; business is full on all
sides, and the hand that turned itself to something else has lost its
cunning. The struggle for life has changed from a free-fight to an
encounter of disciplined forces, and the free-fighters that are left get
ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital. Decidedly,
we are in a transition state, and if the higher education tried to adapt
itself to business needs, there are chances that it might sacrifice itself
without helping business. After all, how much education does business
need? Were our great fortunes made by educated men, or men of university
training? I don't know but these young fellows are right about that."

"Yes, that may all be," I put in. "But it seems to me that you give Mr.
Homos, somehow, a wrong impression of our economic life by your
generalizations. You are a Harvard man yourself."

"Yes, and I am not a rich man. A million or two, more or less; but what is
that? I have suffered, at the start and all along, from the question as to
what a man with the education of a gentleman ought to do in such and such
a juncture. The fellows who have not that sort of education have not that
sort of question, and they go in and win."

"So you admit, then," said the professor, "that the higher education
elevates a business man's standard of morals?"

"Undoubtedly. That is one of its chief drawbacks," said the banker, with a
laugh.

"Well," I said, with the deference due even to a man who had only a
million or two, more or less, "we must allow _you_ to say such things. But
if the case is so bad with the business men who have made the great
fortunes--the business men who have never had the disadvantage of a
university education--I wish you would explain to Mr. Homos why, in every
public exigency, we instinctively appeal to the business sense of the
community as if it were the fountain of wisdom, probity, and equity.
Suppose there were some question of vital interest--I won't say financial,
but political or moral or social--on which it was necessary to rouse
public opinion, what would be the first thing to do? To call a meeting
over the signatures of the leading business men, because no other names
appeal with such force to the public. You might get up a call signed by
all the novelists, artists, ministers, lawyers, and doctors in the state,
and it would not have a tithe of the effect, with the people at large,
that a call signed by a few leading merchants, bank presidents, railroad
men, and trust officers would have. What is the reason? It seems strange
that I should be asking you to defend yourself against yourself."

"Not at all, my dear fellow, not at all," the banker replied, with his
caressing bonhomie. "Though I will confess, to begin with, that I do not
expect to answer your question to your entire satisfaction. I can only do
my best--on the instalment plan."

He turned to the Altrurian, and then went on: "As I said the other night,
this is a business man's country. We are a purely commercial people; money
is absolutely to the fore; and business, which is the means of getting the
most money, is the American ideal. If you like, you may call it the
American fetish; I don't mind calling it so myself. The fact that business
is our ideal, or our fetish, will account for the popular faith in
business men, who form its priesthood, its hierarchy. I don't know,
myself, any other reason for regarding business men as solider than
novelists or artists or ministers, not to mention lawyers and doctors.
They are supposed to have long heads; but it appears that ninety-five
times out of a hundred they haven't. They are supposed to be very
reliable; but it is almost invariably a business man of some sort who gets
out to Canada while the state examiner is balancing his books, and it is
usually the longest headed business men who get plundered by him. No, it
is simply because business is our national ideal that the business man is
honored above all other men among us. In the aristocratic countries they
forward a public object under the patronage of the nobility and gentry; in
a plutocratic country they get the business men to indorse it. I suppose
that the average American citizen feels that they wouldn't indorse a thing
unless it was safe; and the average American citizen likes to be safe--he
is cautious. As a matter of fact, business men are always taking risks,
and business is a game of chance, in a certain degree. Have I made myself
intelligible?"

"Entirely so," said the Altrurian; and he seemed so thoroughly well
satisfied that he forbore asking any further question.

No one else spoke. The banker lighted a cigar, and resumed at the point
where he left off when I ventured to enter upon the defence of his class
with him. I must say that he had not convinced me at all. At that moment
I would rather have trusted him, in any serious matter of practical
concern, than all the novelists I ever heard of. But I thought I would
leave the word to him, without further attempt to reinstate him in his
self-esteem. In fact, he seemed to be getting along very well without it,
or else he was feeling that mysterious control from the Altrurian which I
had already suspected him of using. Voluntarily or involuntarily, the
banker proceeded with his contribution to the Altrurian's stock of
knowledge concerning our civilization:

"I don't believe, however, that the higher education is any more of a
failure, as a provision for a business career, than the lower education is
for the life of labor. I suppose that the hypercritical observer might say
that in a wholly commercial civilization like ours the business man really
needed nothing beyond the three R's, and the working-man needed no R at
all. As a practical affair, there is a good deal to be said in favor of
that view. The higher education is part of the social ideal which we have
derived from the past, from Europe. It is part of the provision for the
life of leisure, the life of the aristocrat, which nobody of our
generation leads, except women. Our women really have some use for the
education of a gentleman, but our men have none. How will that do for a
generalization?" the banker asked of me.

"Oh," I admitted, with a laugh, "it is a good deal like one of my own. I
have always been struck with that phase of our civilization."

"Well, then," the banker resumed, "take the lower education. That is part
of the civic ideal which, I suppose, I may say we evolved from the depths
of our inner consciousness of what an American citizen ought to be. It
includes instruction in all the R's, and in several other letters of the
alphabet. It is given free by the state, and no one can deny that it is
thoroughly socialistic in conception and application."

"Distinctly so," said the professor. "Now that the text-books are
furnished by the state, we have only to go a step further and provide a
good, hot lunch for the children every day, as they do in Paris."

"Well," the banker returned, "I don't know that I should have much to say
against that. It seems as reasonable as anything in the system of
education which we force upon the working classes. _They_ know perfectly
well, whether we do or not, that the three R's will not make their
children better mechanics or laborers, and that, if the fight for a mere
living is to go on from generation to generation, they will have no
leisure to apply the little learning they get in the public schools for
their personal culture. In the mean time we deprive the parents of their
children's labor, in order that they may be better citizens for their
schooling, as we imagine; I don't know whether they are or not. We offer
them no sort of compensation for their time, and I think we ought to feel
obliged to them for not wanting wages for their children while we are
teaching them to be better citizens."

"You know," said the professor, "that has been suggested by some of their
leaders."

"No, really? Well, that is too good!" The banker threw back his head and
roared, and we all laughed with him. When we had sobered down again, he
said: "I suppose that when a working-man makes all the use he can of his
lower education he becomes a business man, and then he doesn't need the
higher. Professor, you seem to be left out in the cold by our system,
whichever way you take it."

"Oh," said the professor, "the law of supply and demand works both ways:
it creates the demand, if the supply comes first; and if we keep on giving
the sons of business men the education of a gentleman, we may yet make
them feel the need of it. We shall evolve a new sort of business man."

"The sort that can't make money, or wouldn't exactly like to, on some
terms?" asked the banker. "Well, perhaps we shall work out our democratic
salvation in that way. When you have educated your new business man to the
point where he can't consent to get rich at the obvious cost of others,
you've got him on the way back to work with his hands. He will sink into
the ranks of labor, and give the fellow with the lower education a chance.
I've no doubt he'll take it. I don't know but you're right, professor."

The lawyer had not spoken as yet. Now he said: "Then it is education,
after all, that is to bridge the chasm between the classes and the masses,
though it seems destined to go a long way around about it. There was a
time, I believe, when we expected religion to do that."

"Well, it may still be doing it, for all I know," said the banker. "What
do you say?" he asked, turning to the minister. "You ought to be able to
give us some statistics on the subject with that large congregation of
yours. You preach to more people than any other pulpit in your city."

The banker named one of the principal cities in the East, and the minister
answered, with, modest pride: "I am not sure of that; but our society is
certainly a very large one."

"Well, and how many of the lower classes are there in it--people who work
for their living with their hands?"

The minister stirred uneasily in his chair, and at last he said, with
evident unhappiness: "They--I suppose--they have their own churches. I
have never thought that such a separation of the classes was right; and I
have had some of the very best people--socially and financially--with me
in the wish that there might be more brotherliness between the rich and
poor among us. But as yet--"

He stopped; the banker pursued: "Do you mean there are _no_ working-people
in your congregation?"

"I cannot think of any," returned the minister, so miserably that the
banker forbore to press the point.

The lawyer broke the awkward pause which followed: "I have heard it
asserted that there is no country in the world where the separation of the
classes is so absolute as in ours. In fact, I once heard a Russian
revolutionist, who had lived in exile all over Europe, say that he had
never seen anywhere such a want of kindness or sympathy between rich and
poor as he had observed in America. I doubted whether he was right. But he
believed that, if it ever came to the industrial revolution with us, the
fight would be more uncompromising than any such fight that the world had
ever seen. There was no respect from low to high, he said, and no
consideration from high to low, as there were in countries with traditions
and old associations."

"Well," said the banker, "there may be something in that. Certainly, so
far as the two forces have come into conflict here, there has been no
disposition, on either side, to 'make war with the water of roses.' It's
astonishing, in fact, to see how ruthless the fellows who have just got up
are toward the fellows who are still down. And the best of us have been up
only a generation or two--and the fellows who are still down know it."

"And what do you think would be the outcome of such a conflict?" I asked,
with my soul divided between fear of it and the perception of its
excellence as material. My fancy vividly sketched the outline of a story
which should forecast the struggle and its event, somewhat on the plan of
the Battle of Dorking.

"We should beat," said the banker, breaking his cigar-ash off with his
little finger; and I instantly cast him, with his ironic calm, for the
part of a great patrician leader in my "Fall of the Republic." Of course,
I disguised him somewhat, and travestied his worldly bonhomie with the
bluff sang-froid of the soldier; these things are easily done.

"What makes you think we should beat?" asked the manufacturer, with a
certain curiosity.

"Well, all the good jingo reasons: we have got the materials for beating.
Those fellows throw away their strength whenever they begin to fight, and
they've been so badly generalled, up to the present time, that they have
wanted to fight at the outset of every quarrel. They have been beaten in
every quarrel, but still they always want to begin by fighting. That is
all right. When they have learned enough to begin by _voting_, then we
shall have to look out. But if they keep on fighting, and always putting
themselves in the wrong and getting the worst of it, perhaps we can fix
the voting so we needn't be any more afraid of that than we are of the
fighting. It's astonishing how short-sighted they are. They, have no
conception of any cure for their grievances except more wages and fewer
hours."

"But," I asked, "do you really think they have any just grievances?"

"Of course not, as a business man," said the banker. "If I were a
working-man, I should probably think differently. But we will suppose, for
the sake of argument, that their day is too long and their pay is too
short. How do they go about to better themselves? They strike. Well, a
strike is a fight, and in a fight, nowadays, it is always skill and money
that win. The working-men can't stop till they have put themselves outside
of the public sympathy which the newspapers say is so potent in their
behalf; I never saw that it did them the least good. They begin by
boycotting, and breaking the heads of the men who want to work. They
destroy property, and they interfere with business--the two absolutely
sacred things in the American religion. Then we call out the militia and
shoot a few of them, and their leaders declare the strike off. It is
perfectly simple."

"But will it be quite as simple," I asked, reluctant in behalf of my
projected romance, to have the matter so soon disposed of--"will it be
quite so simple if their leaders ever persuade the working-men to leave
the militia, as they threaten to do, from time to time?"

"No, not quite so simple," the banker admitted. "Still, the fight would be
comparatively simple. In the first place, I doubt--though I won't be
certain about it--whether there are a great many working-men in the
militia now. I rather fancy it is made up, for the most part, of clerks
and small tradesmen and book-keepers, and such employes of business as
have time and money for it. I may be mistaken."

No one seemed able to say whether he was mistaken or not; and, after
waiting a moment, he proceeded: "I feel pretty sure that it is so in the
city companies and regiments, at any rate, and that if every working-man
left them it would not seriously impair their effectiveness. But when the
working-men have left the militia, what have they done? They have
eliminated the only thing that disqualifies it for prompt and unsparing
use against strikers. As long as they are in it we might have our
misgivings, but if they were once out of it we should have none. And what
would they gain? They would not be allowed to arm and organize as an
inimical force. _That_ was settled once for all in Chicago, in the case of
the International Groups. A few squads of policemen would break them up.
Why," the banker exclaimed, with his good-humored laugh, "how preposterous
they are when you come to look at it! They are in the majority, the
immense majority, if you count the farmers, and they prefer to behave as
if they were the hopeless minority. They say they want an eight-hour law,
and every now and then they strike and try to fight it. Why don't they
_vote_ it? They could _make_ it the law in six months by such overwhelming
numbers that no one would dare to evade or defy it. They can make any law
they want, but they prefer to break such laws as we have. That 'alienates
public sympathy,' the newspapers say; but the spectacle of their stupidity
and helpless wilfulness is so lamentable that I could almost pity them. If
they chose, it would take only a few years to transform our government
into the likeness of anything they wanted. But they would rather not have
what they want, apparently, if they can only keep themselves from getting
it, and they have to work hard to do that!"

"I suppose," I said, "that they are misled by the un-American principles
and methods of the Socialists among them."

"Why, no," returned the banker, "I shouldn't say that. As far as I
understand it, the Socialists are the only fellows among them who propose
to vote their ideas into laws, and nothing can be more American than that.
I don't believe the Socialists stir up the strikes--at least, among our
working-men; though the newspapers convict them of it, generally without
trying them. The Socialists seem to accept the strikes as the inevitable
outcome of the situation, and they make use of them as proofs of the
industrial discontent. But, luckily for the status, our labor leaders are
not Socialists, for your Socialist, whatever you may say against him, has
generally thought himself into a Socialist. He knows that until the
working-men stop fighting, and get down to voting--until they consent to
be the majority--there is no hope for them. I am not talking of
anarchists, mind you, but of Socialists, whose philosophy is more law, not
less, and who look forward to an order so just that it can't be
disturbed."

"And what," the minister faintly said, "do you think will be the outcome
of it all?"

"We had that question the other night, didn't we? Our legal friend here
seemed to feel that we might rub along indefinitely as we are doing, or
work out an Altruria of our own; or go back to the patriarchal stage and
own our working-men. He seemed not to have so much faith in the logic of
events as I have. I doubt if it is altogether a woman's logic. _Parole
femmine, fatti maschi,_ and the logic of events isn't altogether words;
it's full of hard knocks, too. But I'm no prophet. I can't forecast the
future; I prefer to take it as it comes. There's a little tract of William
Morris's, though--I forget just what he calls it--that is full of curious
and interesting speculation on this point. He thinks that, if we keep the
road we are now going, the last state of labor will be like its first, and
it will be owned."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15