A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

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The hour set for the Talk to begin was three o'clock, so that people could
have their naps comfortably over, after the one o'clock dinner, and be
just in the right frame of mind for listening. But long before the
appointed time the people who dine at twelve, and never take an afternoon
nap, began to arrive, on foot, in farm-wagons, smart buggies, mud-crusted
carryalls, and all manner of ramshackle vehicles. They arrived as if
coming to a circus, old husbands and wives, young couples and their
children, pretty girls and their fellows, and hitched their horses to the
tails of their wagons, and began to make a picnic lunch in the shadow of
the grove lying between the hotel and the station. About two we heard the
snorting of a locomotive at a time when no train was due, and a
construction train came in view, with the men waving their handkerchiefs
from the windows, and apparently ready for all the fun there was to be in
the thing. Some of them had a small flag in each hand, the American Stars
and Stripes and the white flag of Altruria, in compliment to my guest, I
suppose. A good many of the farmers came over to the hotel to buy tickets,
which they said they expected to get after they came, and Mrs. Makely was
obliged to pacify them with all sorts of lying promises. From moment to
moment she was in consultation with the landlord, who decided to throw
open the dining-room, which connected with the parlor, so as to allow the
help and the neighbors to hear without incommoding the hotel guests. She
said that this took a great burden off her mind, and that now she should
feel perfectly easy, for now no one could complain about being mixed up
with the servants and the natives, and yet every one could hear perfectly.

She could not rest until she had sent for Homos and told him of this
admirable arrangement. I did not know whether to be glad or not when he
instantly told her that, if there was to be any such separation of his
auditors, in recognition of our class distinctions, he must refuse to
speak at all.

"Then what in the world are we to do?" she wailed out, and the tears came
into her eyes.

"Have you got the money for all your tickets?" he asked, with a sort of
disgust for the whole transaction in his tone.

"Yes, and more, too. I don't believe there's a soul, in the hotel or out
of it, that hasn't paid at least a dollar to hear you; and that makes it
so very embarrassing. Oh, _dear_ Mr. Homos! You won't be so implacably
high-principled as all that! Think that you are doing it for the house of
Gawd."

The woman made me sick.

"Then no one," said the Altrurian, "can feel aggrieved, or unfairly used,
if I say what I have to say in the open air, where all can listen equally,
without any manner of preference or distinction. We will go up to the edge
of the grove overlooking the tennis-court, and hold our meeting there, as
the Altrurian meetings are always held, with the sky for a roof, and with
no walls but the horizon."

"The very thing!" cried Mrs. Makely. "Who would ever have thought you were
so practical, Mr. Homos? I don't believe you're an Altrurian, after all; I
believe you are an American in disguise."

The Altrurian turned away, without making any response to this flattering
attribution of our nationality to him; but Mrs. Makely had not waited for
any. She had flown off, and I next saw her attacking the landlord, with
such apparent success that he slapped himself on the leg and vanished, and
immediately the porters and bell-boys and all the men-servants began
carrying out chairs to the tennis-court, which was already well set round
with benches. In a little while the whole space was covered, and settees
were placed well up the ground toward the grove.

By half-past two the guests of the hotel came out and took the best seats,
as by right, and the different tallyhoes and mountain wagons began to
arrive from the other hotels, with their silly hotel cries, and their gay
groups dismounted and dispersed themselves over the tennis-court until all
the chairs were taken. It was fine to see how the natives and the trainmen
and the hotel servants, with an instinctive perception of the proprieties,
yielded these places to their superiors, and, after the summer folks were
all seated, scattered themselves on the grass and the pine-needles about
the border of the grove. I should have liked to instance the fact to the
Altrurian, as a proof that this sort of subordination was a part of human
nature, and that a principle which pervaded our civilization, after the
democratic training of our whole national life, must be divinely
implanted. But there was no opportunity for me to speak with him after the
fact had accomplished itself, for by this time he had taken his place in
front of a little clump of low pines and was waiting for the assembly to
quiet itself before he began to speak. I do not think there could have
been less than five hundred present, and the scene had that accidental
picturesqueness which results from the grouping of all sorts of faces and
costumes. Many of our ladies had pretty hats and brilliant parasols, but I
must say that the soberer tone of some of the old farm-wives' brown
calicoes and outdated bonnets contributed to enrich the coloring, and
there was a certain gayety in the sunny glisten of the men's straw hats
everywhere that was very good.

The sky overhead was absolutely stainless, and the light of the cool
afternoon sun streamed upon the slopes of the solemn mountains to the
east. The tall pines in the background blackened themselves against the
horizon; nearer they showed more and more decidedly their bluish green,
and the yellow of the newly fallen needles painted their aisles deep into
the airy shadows.

A little wind stirred their tops, and for a moment, just before the
Altrurian began to speak, drew from them an organ-tone that melted
delicately away as his powerful voice rose.

XI

"I could not give you a clear account of the present state of things in my
country," the Altrurian began, "without first telling you something of our
conditions before the time of our Evolution. It seems to be the law of all
life that nothing can come to fruition without dying and seeming to make
an end. It must be sown in corruption before it can be raised in
incorruption. The truth itself must perish to our senses before it can
live to our souls; the Son of Man must suffer upon the cross before we can
know the Son, of God.

"It was so with His message to the world, which we received in the old
time as an ideal realized by the earliest Christians, who loved one
another and who had all things common. The apostle cast away upon our
heathen coasts won us with the story of this first Christian republic, and
he established a commonwealth of peace and good-will among us in its
likeness. That commonwealth perished, just as its prototype perished, or
seemed to perish; and long ages of civic and economic warfare succeeded,
when every man's hand was against his neighbor, and might was the rule
that got itself called right. Religion ceased to be the hope of this
world, and became the vague promise of the next. We descended into the
valley of the shadow, and dwelt amid chaos for ages before we groped again
into the light.

"The first glimmerings were few and indistinct, but men formed themselves
about the luminous points here and there, and, when these broke and
dispersed into lesser gleams, still men formed themselves about each of
them. There arose a system of things better, indeed, than that darkness,
but full of war and lust and greed, in which the weak rendered homage to
the strong, and served them in the field and in the camp, and the strong
in turn gave the weak protection against the other strong. It was a juggle
in which the weak did not see that their safety was, after all, from
themselves; but it was an image of peace, however false and fitful, and it
endured for a time. It endured for a limited time, if we measure by the
life of the race; it endured for an unlimited time if we measure by the
lives of the men who were born and died while it endured.

"But that disorder, cruel and fierce and stupid, which endured because it
sometimes masked itself as order, did at last pass away. Here and there
one of the strong overpowered the rest; then the strong became fewer and
fewer, and in their turn they all yielded to a supreme lord, and
throughout the land there was one rule, as it was called then, or one
misrule, as we should call it now. This rule, or this misrule, continued
for ages more; and again, in the immortality of the race, men toiled and
struggled, and died without the hope of better things.

"Then the time came when the long nightmare was burst with the vision of a
future in which all men were the law, and not one man, or any less number
of men than all.

"The poor dumb beast of humanity rose, and the throne tumbled, and the
sceptre was broken, and the crown rolled away into that darkness of the
past. We thought that heaven had descended to us, and that liberty,
equality, and fraternity were ours. We could not see what should again
alienate us from one another, or how one brother could again oppress
another. With a free field and no favor we believed we should prosper on
together, and there would be peace and plenty for all. We had the republic
again after so many ages now, and the republic, as we knew it in our dim
annals, was brotherhood and universal happiness. All but a very few, who
prophesied evil of our lawless freedom, were wrapped in a delirium of
hope. Men's minds and men's hands were suddenly released to an activity
unheard of before. Invention followed invention; our rivers and seas
became the warp of commerce where the steam-sped shuttles carried the woof
of enterprise to and fro with tireless celerity; machines to save labor
multiplied themselves as if they had been procreative forces, and wares of
every sort were produced with incredible swiftness and cheapness. Money
seemed to flow from the ground; vast fortunes 'rose like an exhalation,'
as your Milton says.

"At first we did not know that they were the breath of the nethermost pits
of hell, and that the love of money, which was becoming universal with us,
was filling the earth with the hate of men. It was long before we came to
realize that in the depths of our steamships were those who fed the fires
with their lives, and that our mines from which we dug our wealth were the
graves of those who had died to the free light and air, without finding
the rest of death. We did not see that the machines for saving labor were
monsters that devoured women and children, and wasted men at the bidding
of the power which no man must touch.

"That is, we thought we must not touch it, for it called itself prosperity
and wealth and the public good, and it said that it gave bread, and it
impudently bade the toiling myriads consider what would become of them if
it took away their means of wearing themselves out in its service. It
demanded of the state absolute immunity and absolute impunity, the right
to do its will wherever and however it would, without question from the
people who were the final law. It had its way, and under its rule we
became the richest people under the sun. The Accumulation, as we called
this power, because we feared to call it by its true name, rewarded its
own with gains of twenty, of a hundred, of a thousand per cent., and to
satisfy its need, to produce the labor that operated its machines, there
came into existence a hapless race of men who bred their kind for its
service, and whose little ones were its prey almost from their cradles.
Then the infamy became too great, and the law, the voice of the people, so
long guiltily silent, was lifted in behalf of those who had no helper. The
Accumulation came under control for the first time, and could no longer
work its slaves twenty hours a day amid perils to life and limb from its
machinery and in conditions that forbade them decency and morality. The
time of a hundred and a thousand per cent. passed; but still the
Accumulation demanded immunity and impunity, and, in spite of its
conviction of the enormities it had practised, it declared itself the only
means of civilization and progress. It began to give out that it was
timid, though its history was full of the boldest frauds and crimes, and
it threatened to withdraw itself if it were ruled or even crossed; and
again it had its way, and we seemed to prosper more and more. The land was
filled with cities where the rich flaunted their splendor in palaces, and
the poor swarmed in squalid tenements. The country was drained of its life
and force, to feed the centres of commerce and industry. The whole land
was bound together with a network of iron roads that linked the factories
and founderies to the fields and mines, and blasted the landscape with the
enterprise that spoiled the lives of men.

"Then, all at once, when its work seemed perfect and its dominion sure,
the Accumulation was stricken with consciousness of the lie always at its
heart. It had hitherto cried out for a free field and no favor, for
unrestricted competition; but, in truth, it had never prospered except as
a monopoly. Whenever and wherever competition had play there had been
nothing but disaster to the rival enterprises, till one rose over the
rest. Then there was prosperity for that one.

"The Accumulation began to act upon its new consciousness. The iron roads
united; the warring industries made peace, each kind under a single
leadership. Monopoly, not competition, was seen to be the beneficent means
of distributing the favors and blessings of the Accumulation to mankind.
But, as before, there was alternately a glut and dearth of things, and
it often happened that when starving men went ragged through the streets
the storehouses were piled full of rotting harvests that the farmers
toiled from dawn till dusk to grow, and the warehouses fed the moth with
the stuffs that the operative had woven his life into at his loom. Then
followed, with a blind and mad succession, a time of famine, when money
could not buy the super-abundance that vanished, none knew how or why.

"The money itself vanished from time to time, and disappeared into the
vaults of the Accumulation, for no better reason than that for which it
poured itself out at other times. Our theory was that the people--that is
to say, the government of the people--made the people's money, but, as a
matter of fact, the Accumulation made it and controlled it and juggled
with it; and now you saw it, and now you did not see it. The government
made gold coins, but the people had nothing but the paper money that the
Accumulation made. But whether there was scarcity or plenty, the failures
went on with a continuous ruin that nothing could check, while our larger
economic life proceeded in a series of violent shocks, which we called
financial panics, followed by long periods of exhaustion and recuperation.

"There was no law in our economy, but as the Accumulation had never cared
for the nature of law, it did not trouble itself for its name in our order
of things. It had always bought the law it needed for its own use, first
through the voter at the polls in the more primitive days, and then, as
civilization advanced, in the legislatures and the courts. But the
corruption even of these methods was far surpassed when the era of
consolidation came, and the necessity for statutes and verdicts and
decisions became more stringent. Then we had such a burlesque of--"

"Look here!" a sharp, nasal voice snarled across the rich, full pipe of
the Altrurian, and we all instantly looked there. The voice came from an
old farmer, holding himself stiffly up, with his hands in his pockets and
his lean frame bent toward the speaker. "When are you goin' to get to
Altrury? We know all about Ameriky."

He sat down again, and it was a moment before the crowd caught on. Then a
yell of delight and a roar of volleyed laughter went up from the lower
classes, in which, I am sorry to say, my friend the banker joined, so far
as the laughter was concerned. "Good! That's it! First-rate!" came from a
hundred vulgar throats.

"Isn't it a perfect shame?" Mrs. Makely demanded. "I think some of you
gentlemen ought to say something. What will Mr. Homos think of our
civilization if we let such interruptions go unrebuked?"

She was sitting between the banker and myself, and her indignation made
him laugh more and more. "Oh, it serves him right," he said. "Don't you
see that he is hoist with his own petard? Let him alone. He's in the hands
of his friends."

The Altrurian waited for the tumult to die away, and then he said, gently:
"I don't understand."

The old farmer jerked himself to his feet again. "It's like this: I paid
my dolla' to hear about a country where there wa'n't no co'perations nor
no monop'lies nor no buyin' up cou'ts; and I ain't agoin' to have no
allegory shoved down my throat, instead of a true history, noways. I know
all about how it is _here_. Fi'st, run their line through your backya'd,
and then kill off your cattle, and keep kerryin' on it up from cou't to
cou't, till there ain't hide or hair on 'em left--"

"Oh, set down, set down! Let the man go on! He'll make it all right with
you," one of the construction gang called out; but the farmer stood his
ground, and I could hear him through the laughing and shouting keep saying
something, from time to time, about not wanting to pay no dolla' for no
talk about co'perations and monop'lies that we had right under our own
noses the whole while, and, you might say, in your very bread-troughs;
till, at last, I saw Reuben Camp make his way toward him, and, after an
energetic expostulation, turn to leave him again.

Then he faltered out, "I guess it's all right," and dropped out of sight
in the group he had risen from. I fancied his wife scolding him there, and
all but shaking him in public.

"I should be very sorry," the Altrurian proceeded, "to have any one
believe that I have not been giving you a _bona fide_ account of
conditions in my country before the Evolution, when we first took the name
of Altruria in our great, peaceful campaign against the Accumulation. As
for offering you any allegory or travesty of your own conditions, I will
simply say that I do not know them well enough to do so intelligently.
But, whatever they are, God forbid that the likeness which you seem to
recognize should ever go so far as the desperate state of things which we
finally reached. I will not trouble you with details; in fact, I have been
afraid that I had already treated of our affairs too abstractly; but,
since your own experience furnishes you the means of seizing my meaning, I
will go on as before.

"You will understand me when I explain that the Accumulation had not
erected itself into the sovereignty with us unopposed. The working-men,
who suffered most from its oppression had early begun to band themselves
against it, with the instinct of self-preservation, first trade by trade
and art by art, and then in congresses and federations of the trades and
arts, until finally they enrolled themselves in one vast union, which
included all the working-men, whom their necessity or their interest did
not leave on the side of the Accumulation. This beneficent and generous
association of the weak for the sake of the weakest did not accomplish
itself fully till the baleful instinct of the Accumulation had reduced the
monopolies to one vast monopoly, till the stronger had devoured the weaker
among its members, and the supreme agent stood at the head of our affairs,
in everything but name, our imperial ruler. We had hugged so long the
delusion of each man for himself that we had suffered all realty to be
taken from us. The Accumulation owned the land as well as the mines under
it and the shops over it; the Accumulation owned the seas and the ships
that sailed the seas, and the fish that swam in their depths; it owned
transportation and distribution, and the wares and products that were to
be carried to and fro; and, by a logic irresistible and inexorable, the
Accumulation _was_, and we were _not_.

"But the Accumulation, too, had forgotten something. It had found it so
easy to buy legislatures and courts that it did not trouble itself about
the polls. It left us the suffrage, and let us amuse ourselves with the
periodical election of the political clay images which it manipulated and
moulded to any shape and effect at its pleasure. The Accumulation knew
that it was the sovereignty, whatever figure-head we called president or
governor or mayor: we had other names for these officials, but I use their
analogues for the sake of clearness, and I hope my good friend over there
will not think I am still talking about America."

"No," the old farmer called back, without rising, "we hain't got there
quite yit."

"No hurry," said a trainman. "All in good time. Go on!" he called to the
Altrurian.

The Altrurian resumed:

"There had been, from the beginning, an almost ceaseless struggle between
the Accumulation and the proletariate. The Accumulation always said that
it was the best friend of the proletariate, and it denounced, through the
press which it controlled, the proletarian leaders who taught that it was
the enemy of the proletariate, and who stirred up strikes and tumults of
all sorts, for higher wages and fewer hours. But the friend of the
proletariate, whenever occasion served, treated the proletariate like a
deadly enemy. In seasons of overproduction, as it was called, it locked
the workmen out or laid them off, and left their families to starve, or
ran light work and claimed the credit of public benefactors for running at
all. It sought every chance to reduce wages; it had laws passed to forbid
or cripple the workmen in their strikes; and the judges convicted them of
conspiracy, and wrested the statutes to their hurt, in cases where there
had been no thought of embarrassing them, even among the legislators. God
forbid that you should ever come to such a pass in America; but, if you
ever should, God grant that you may find your way out as simply as we did
at last, when freedom had perished in everything but name among us, and
justice had become a mockery.

"The Accumulation had advanced so smoothly, so lightly, in all its steps
to the supreme power, and had at last so thoroughly quelled the uprisings
of the proletariate, that it forgot one thing: it forgot the despised and
neglected suffrage. The ballot, because it had been so easy to annul its
effect, had been left in the people's hands; and when, at last, the
leaders of the proletariate ceased to counsel strikes, or any form of
resistance to the Accumulation that could be tormented into the likeness
of insurrection against the government, and began to urge them to attack
it in the political way, the deluge that swept the Accumulation out of
existence came trickling and creeping over the land. It appeared first in
the country, a spring from the ground; then it gathered head in the
villages; then it swelled to a torrent in the cities. I cannot stay to
trace its course; but suddenly, one day, when the Accumulation's abuse of
a certain power became too gross, it was voted out of that power. You will
perhaps be interested to know that it was with the telegraphs that the
rebellion against the Accumulation began, and the government was forced,
by the overwhelming majority which the proletariate sent to our
parliament, to assume a function which the Accumulation had impudently
usurped. Then the transportation of smaller and more perishable wares--"

"Yes," a voice called--"express business. Go on!"

"Was legislated a function of the post-office," the Altrurian went on.
"Then all transportation was taken into the hands of the political
government, which had always been accused of great corruption in its
administration, but which showed itself immaculately pure compared with
the Accumulation. The common ownership of mines necessarily followed, with
an allotment of lands to any one who wished to live by tilling the land;
but not a foot of the land was remitted to private hands for the purposes
of selfish pleasure or the exclusion of any other from the landscape. As
all business had been gathered into the grasp of the Accumulation, and the
manufacture of everything they used and the production of everything that
they ate was in the control of the Accumulation, its transfer to the
government was the work of a single clause in the statute.

"The Accumulation, which had treated the first menaces of resistance with
contempt, awoke to its peril too late. When it turned to wrest the
suffrage from the proletariate, at the first election where it attempted
to make head against them, it was simply snowed under, as your picturesque
phrase is. The Accumulation had no voters, except the few men at its head
and the creatures devoted to it by interest and ignorance. It seemed, at
one moment, as if it would offer an armed resistance to the popular will,
but, happily, that moment of madness passed. Our Evolution was
accomplished without a drop of bloodshed, and the first great political
brotherhood, the commonwealth of Altruria, was founded.

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