A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

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"I wish that I had time to go into a study of some of the curious phases
of the transformation from a civility in which the people lived _upon_
each other to one in which they lived _for_ each other. There is a famous
passage in the inaugural message of our first Altrurian president which
compares the new civic consciousness with that of a disembodied spirit
released to the life beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares
and greeds of the flesh. But perhaps I shall give a sufficiently clear
notion of the triumph of the change among us when I say that within half
a decade after the fall of the old plutocratic oligarchy one of the chief
directors of the Accumulation publicly expressed his gratitude to God
that the Accumulation had passed away forever. You will realize the
importance of such an expression in recalling the declarations some of
your slave-holders have made since the Civil War, that they would not have
slavery restored for any earthly consideration.

"But now, after this preamble, which has been so much longer than I meant
it to be, how shall I give you a sufficiently just conception of the
existing Altruria, the actual state from which I come?"

"Yes," came the nasal of the old farmer again, "that's what we are here
fur. I wouldn't give a copper to know all you went through beforehand.
It's too dumn like what we have been through ourselves, as fur as heard
from."

A shout of laughter went up from most of the crowd, but the Altrurian did
not seem to see any fun in it.

"Well," he resumed, "I will tell you, as well as I can, what Altruria is
like; but, in the first place, you will have to cast out of your minds all
images of civilization with which your experience has filled them. For a
time the shell of the old Accumulation remained for our social habitation,
and we dwelt in the old competitive and monopolistic forms after the life
had gone out of them--that is, we continued to live in populous cities,
and we toiled to heap up riches for the moth to corrupt, and we slaved on
in making utterly useless things, merely because we had the habit of
making them to sell. For a while we made the old sham things, which
pretended to be useful things and were worse than the confessedly useless
things. I will give you an illustration from the trades, which you will
all understand. The proletariate, in the competitive and monopolistic
time, used to make a kind of shoes for the proletariate, or the women of
the proletariate, which looked like fine shoes of the best quality. It
took just as much work to make these shoes as to make the best fine shoes;
but they were shams through and through. They wore out in a week, and the
people called them, because they were bought fresh for every Sunday--"

"Sat'd'y-night shoes," screamed the old farmer. "I know 'em. My gals buy
'em. Half-dolla' a pai', and not wo'th the money."

"Well," said the Altrurian, "they were a cheat and a lie in every way,
and under the new system it was not possible, when public attention
was called to the fact, to continue the falsehood they embodied. As soon
as the Saturday-night shoes realized itself to the public conscience,
an investigation began, and it was found that the principle of the
Saturday-night shoe underlay half our industries and made half the work
that was done.

"Then an immense reform took place. We renounced, in the most solemn
convocation of the whole economy, the principle of the Saturday-night
shoe, and those who had spent their lives in producing sham shoes--"

"Yes," said the professor, rising from his seat near us and addressing the
speaker, "I shall be very glad to know what became of the worthy and
industrious operatives who were thrown out of employment by this explosion
of economic virtue."

"Why," the Altrurian replied, "they were set to work making honest shoes;
and, as it took no more time to make a pair of honest shoes which lasted a
year than it took to make a pair of dishonest shoes that lasted a week,
the amount of labor in shoemaking was at once enormously reduced."

"Yes," said the professor, "I understand that. What became of the
shoemakers?"

"They joined the vast army of other laborers who had been employed,
directly or indirectly, in the fabrication of fraudulent wares. These
shoemakers--lasters, button-holers, binders, and so on--no longer wore
themselves out over their machines. One hour sufficed where twelve hours
were needed before, and the operatives were released to the happy labor of
the fields, where no one with us toils killingly, from dawn till dusk, but
does only as much work as is needed to keep the body in health. We had a
continent to refine and beautify; we had climates to change and seasons to
modify, a whole system of meteorology to readjust, and the public works
gave employment to the multitudes emancipated from the soul-destroying
service of shams. I can scarcely give you a notion of the vastness of the
improvements undertaken and carried through, or still in process of
accomplishment. But a single one will, perhaps, afford a sufficient
illustration. Our southeast coast, from its vicinity to the pole, had
always suffered from a winter of antarctic rigor; but our first president
conceived the plan of cutting off a peninsula, which kept the equatorial
current from making in to our shores; and the work was begun in his term,
though the entire strip, twenty miles in width and ninety-three in length,
was not severed before the end of the first Altrurian decade. Since that
time the whole region of our southeastern coast has enjoyed the climate of
your Mediterranean countries.

"It was not only the makers of fraudulent things who were released to
these useful and wholesome labors, but those who had spent themselves in
contriving ugly and stupid and foolish things were set free to the public
employment. The multitude of these monstrosities and iniquities was as
great as that of the shams--"

Here I lost some words, for the professor leaned over and whispered to me:
"He has got _that_ out of William Morris. Depend upon it, the man is a
humbug. He is not an Altrurian at all."

I confess that my heart misgave me; but I signalled the professor to be
silent, and again gave the Altrurian--if he was an Altrurian--my whole
attention.

XII

"And so," the Altrurian continued, "when the labor of the community was
emancipated from the bondage of the false to the free service of the true,
it was also, by an inevitable implication, dedicated to beauty and rescued
from the old slavery to the ugly, the stupid, and the trivial. The thing
that was honest and useful became, by the operation of a natural law, a
beautiful thing.

"Once we had not time enough to make things beautiful, we were so
overworked in making false and hideous things to sell; but now we had all
the time there was, and a glad emulation arose among the trades and
occupations to the end that everything done should be done finely as well
as done honestly. The artist, the man of genius, who worked from the love
of his work, became the normal man, and in the measure of his ability and
of his calling each wrought in the spirit of the artist. We got back the
pleasure of doing a thing beautifully, which was God's primal blessing
upon all His working children, but which we had lost in the horrible days
of our need and greed. There is not a working-man within the sound of my
voice but has known this divine delight, and would gladly know it always
if he only had the time. Well, now we had the time, the Evolution had
given us the time, and in all Altruria there was not a furrow driven or a
swath mown, not a hammer struck on house or on ship, not a stitch sewn or
a stone laid, not a line written or a sheet printed, not a temple raised
or an engine built, but it was done with an eye to beauty as well as to
use.

"As soon as we were freed from the necessity of preying upon one another,
we found that there was no hurry. The good work would wait to be well
done; and one of the earliest effects of the Evolution was the disuse of
the swift trains which had traversed the continent, night and day, that
one man might overreach another, or make haste to undersell his rival, or
seize some advantage of him, or plot some profit to his loss. Nine-tenths
of the railroads, which in the old times had ruinously competed, and then,
in the hands of the Accumulation, had been united to impoverish and
oppress the people, fell into disuse. The commonwealth operated the few
lines that were necessary for the collection of materials and the
distribution of manufactures, and for pleasure travel and the affairs of
state; but the roads that had been built to invest capital, or parallel
other roads, or 'make work,' as it was called, or to develop resources,
or boom localities, were suffered to fall into ruin; the rails were
stripped from the landscape, which they had bound as with shackles, and
the road-beds became highways for the use of kindly neighborhoods, or
nature recovered them wholly and hid the memory of their former abuse in
grass and flowers and wild vines. The ugly towns that they had forced into
being, as Frankenstein was fashioned, from the materials of the charnel,
and that had no life in or from the good of the community, soon tumbled
into decay. The administration used parts of them in the construction of
the villages in which the Altrurians now mostly live; but generally these
towns were built of materials so fraudulent, in form so vile, that it was
judged best to burn them. In this way their sites were at once purified
and obliterated.

"We had, of course, a great many large cities under the old egoistic
conditions, which increased and fattened upon the country, and fed their
cancerous life with fresh infusions of its blood. We had several cities of
half a million, and one of more than a million; we had a score of them
with a population of a hundred thousand or more. We were very proud of
them, and vaunted them as a proof of our unparalleled prosperity, though
really they never were anything but congeries of millionaires and the
wretched creatures who served them and supplied them. Of course, there was
everywhere the appearance of enterprise and activity, but it meant final
loss for the great mass of the business men, large and small, and final
gain for the millionaires. These and their parasites dwelt together, the
rich starving the poor and the poor plundering and misgoverning the rich;
and it was the intolerable suffering in the cities that chiefly hastened
the fall of the old Accumulation and the rise of the commonwealth.

"Almost from the moment of the Evolution the competitive and monopolistic
centres of population began to decline. In the clear light of the new
order it was seen that they were not fit dwelling-places for men, either
in the complicated and luxurious palaces where the rich fenced themselves
from their kind, or in the vast tenements, towering height upon height,
ten and twelve stories up, where the swarming poor festered in vice and
sickness and famine. If I were to tell you of the fashion of those cities
of our egoistic epoch, how the construction was one error from the first,
and every correction of an error bred a new defect, I should make you
laugh, I should make you weep. We let them fall to ruin as quickly as they
would, and their sites are still so pestilential, after the lapse of
centuries, that travelers are publicly guarded against them. Ravening
beasts and poisonous reptiles lurk in those abodes of the riches and the
poverty that are no longer known to our life. A part of one of the less
malarial of the old cities, however, is maintained by the commonwealth in
the form of its prosperity, and is studied by antiquarians for the
instruction, and by moralists for the admonition, it affords. A section of
a street is exposed, and you see the foundations of the houses; you see
the filthy drains that belched into the common sewers, trapped and
retrapped to keep the poison gases down; you see the sewers that rolled
their loathsome tides under the streets, amid a tangle of gas-pipes,
steam-pipes, water-pipes, telegraph-wires, electric lighting-wires,
electric motor-wires, and grip-cables--all without a plan, but makeshifts,
expedients, devices, to repair and evade the fundamental mistake of having
any such cities at all.

"There are now no cities in Altruria, in your meaning, but there are
capitals, one for each of the regions of our country and one for the whole
commonwealth. These capitals are for the transaction of public affairs, in
which every citizen of Altruria is schooled, and they are the residences
of the administrative officials, who are alternated every year, from the
highest to the lowest. A public employment with us is of no greater honor
or profit than any other, for with our absolute economic equality there
can be no ambition, and there is no opportunity for one citizen to
outshine another. But as the capitals are the centres of all the arts,
which we consider the chief of our public affairs, they are oftenest
frequented by poets, actors, painters, sculptors, musicians, and
architects. We regard all artists, who are in a sort creators, as the
human type which is likest the divine, and we try to conform our whole
industrial life to the artistic temperament. Even in the labors of the
field and shop, which are obligatory upon all, we study the inspiration of
this temperament, and in the voluntary pursuits we allow it full control.
Each, in these, follows his fancy as to what he shall do, and when he
shall do it, or whether he shall do anything at all. In the capitals are
the universities, theatres, galleries, museums, cathedrals, laboratories
and conservatories, and the appliances of every art and science, as well
as the administration buildings; and beauty as well as use is studied in
every edifice. Our capitals are as clean and quiet and healthful as the
country, and these advantages are secured simply by the elimination of the
horse, an animal which we should be as much surprised to find in the
streets of a town as the plesiosaurus or the pterodactyl. All
transportation in the capitals, whether for pleasure or business, is by
electricity, and swift electrical expresses connect the capital of each
region with the villages which radiate from it to the cardinal points.
These expresses run at the rate of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and
they enable the artist, the scientist, the literary man, of the remotest
hamlet, to visit the capital (when he is not actually resident there in
some public use) every day, after the hours of the obligatory industries;
or, if he likes, he may remain there a whole week or fortnight, giving six
hours a day instead of three to the obligatories, until the time is made
up. In case of very evident merit, or for the purpose of allowing him to
complete some work requiring continuous application, a vote of the local
agents may release him from the obligatories indefinitely. Generally,
however, our artists prefer not to ask this, but avail themselves of the
stated means we have of allowing them to work at the obligatories, and get
the needed exercise and variety of occupation in the immediate vicinity of
the capital.

"We do not think it well to connect the hamlets on the different lines of
radiation from the capital, except by the good country roads which
traverse each region in every direction. The villages are mainly inhabited
by those who prefer a rural life; they are farming villages; but in
Altruria it can hardly be said that one man is more a farmer than another.
We do not like to distinguish men by their callings; we do not speak of
the poet This or the shoemaker That, for the poet may very likely be a
shoemaker in the obligatories, and the shoemaker a poet in the
voluntaries. If it can be said that one occupation is honored above
another with us, it is that which we all share, and that is the
cultivation of the earth. We believe that this, when not followed
slavishly, or for gain, brings man into the closest relations to the
Deity, through a grateful sense of the divine bounty, and that it not only
awakens a natural piety in him, but that it endears to the worker that
piece of soil which he tills, and so strengthens his love of home. The
home is the very heart of the Altrurian system, and we do not think it
well that people should be away from their homes very long or very often.
In the competitive and monopolistic times men spent half their days in
racing back and forth across our continent; families were scattered by the
chase for fortune, and there was a perpetual paying and repaying of
visits. One-half the income of those railroads which we let fall into
disuse came from the ceaseless unrest. Now a man is born and lives and
dies among his own kindred, and the sweet sense of neighborhood, of
brotherhood, which blessed the golden age of the first Christian republic
is ours again. Every year the people of each region meet one another on
Evolution day, in the regionic capital; once in four years they all visit
the national capital. There is no danger of the decay of patriotism among
us; our country is our mother, and we love her as it is impossible to love
the step-mother that a competitive or monopolistic nation must be to its
citizens.

"I can only touch upon this feature and that of our system as I chance to
think of it. If any of you are curious about others, I shall be glad to
answer questions as well as I can. We have, of course," the Altrurian
proceeded, after a little indefinite pause, to let any speak who liked,
"no money in your sense. As the whole people control affairs, no man works
for another, and no man pays another. Every one does his share of labor,
and receives his share of food, clothing, and shelter, which is neither
more nor less than another's. If you can imagine the justice and
impartiality of a well-ordered family, you can conceive of the social and
economic life of Altruria. We are, properly speaking, a family rather than
a nation like yours.

"Of course, we are somewhat favored by our insular, or continental,
position; but I do not know that we are more so than you are. Certainly,
however, we are self-sufficing in a degree unknown to most European
countries; and we have within our borders the materials of every comfort
and the resources of every need. We have no commerce with the egoistic
world, as we call that outside, and I believe that I am the first
Altrurian to visit foreign countries avowedly in my national character,
though we have always had emissaries living abroad incognito. I hope that
I may say without offence that they find it a sorrowful exile, and that
the reports of the egoistic world, with its wars, its bankruptcies, its
civic commotions, and its social unhappiness, do not make us discontented
with our own condition. Before the Evolution we had completed the round of
your inventions and discoveries, impelled by the force that drives you on;
and we have since disused most of them as idle and unfit. But we profit,
now and then, by the advances you make in science, for we are passionately
devoted to the study of the natural laws, open or occult, under which all
men have their being. Occasionally an emissary returns with a sum of
money, and explains to the students of the national university the
processes by which it is lost and won; and at a certain time there was a
movement for its introduction among us, not for its use as you know it,
but for a species of counters in games of chance. It was considered,
however, to contain an element of danger, and the scheme was discouraged.

"Nothing amuses and puzzles our people more than the accounts our
emissaries give of the changes of fashion in the outside world, and of the
ruin of soul and body which the love of dress often works. Our own dress,
for men and for women, is studied, in one ideal of use and beauty, from
the antique; caprice and vagary in it would be thought an effect of vulgar
vanity. Nothing is worn that is not simple and honest in texture; we do
not know whether a thing is cheap or dear, except as it is easy or hard to
come by, and that which is hard to come by is forbidden as wasteful and
foolish. The community builds the dwellings of the community, and these,
too, are of a classic simplicity, though always beautiful and fit in form;
the splendors of the arts are lavished upon the public edifices, which we
all enjoy in common."

"Isn't this the greatest rehash of 'Utopia,' 'New Atlantis,' and 'City of
the Sun' that you ever imagined?" the professor whispered across me to the
banker. "The man is a fraud, and a very bungling fraud at that."

"Well, you must expose him, when he gets through," the banker whispered
back.

But the professor could not wait. He got upon his feet and called out:
"May I ask the gentleman from Altruria a question?"

"Certainly," the Altrurian blandly assented.

"Make it short!" Reuben Camp's voice broke in, impatiently. "We didn't
come here to listen to your questions."

The professor contemptuously ignored him. "I suppose you occasionally
receive emissaries from, as well as send them to, the world outside?"

"Yes, now and then castaways land on our coasts, and ships out of their
reckonings put in at our ports for water or provision."

"And how are they pleased with your system?"

"Why, I cannot better answer than by saying that they mostly refuse to
leave us."

"Ah, just as Bacon reports!" cried the professor.

"You mean in the _New Atlantis_?" returned the Altrurian. "Yes; it is
astonishing how well Bacon in that book, and Sir Thomas More in his
_Utopia_, have divined certain phases of our civilization and polity."

"I think he rather _has_ you, professor," the banker whispered, with a
laugh.

"But all those inspired visionaries," the Altrurian continued, while the
professor sat grimly silent, watching for another chance, "who have borne
testimony of us in their dreams, conceived of states perfect without the
discipline of a previous competitive condition. What I thought, however,
might specially interest you Americans in Altruria is the fact that our
economy was evolved from one so like that in which you actually have your
being. I had even hoped you might feel that, in all these points of
resemblance, America prophesies another Altruria. I know that to some of
you all that I have told of my country will seem a baseless fabric, with
no more foundation, in fact, than More's fairy-tale of another land where
men dealt kindly and justly by one another, and dwelt, a whole nation, in
the unity and equality of a family. But why should not a part of that
fable have come true in our polity, as another part of it has come true in
yours? When Sir Thomas More wrote that book, he noted with abhorrence the
monstrous injustice of the fact that men were hanged for small thefts in
England; and in the preliminary conversation between its characters he
denounced the killing of men for any sort of thefts. Now you no longer put
men to death for theft; you look back upon that cruel code of your mother
England with an abhorrence as great as his own. We, for our part, who have
realized the Utopian dream of brotherly equality, look back with the same
abhorrence upon a state where some were rich and some poor, some taught
and some untaught, some high and some low, and the hardest toil often
failed to supply a sufficiency of the food which luxury wasted in its
riots. That state seems as atrocious to us as the state which hanged a man
for stealing a loaf of bread seems to you.

"But we do not regret the experience of competition and monopoly. They
taught us some things in the operation of the industries. The labor-saving
inventions which the Accumulation perverted to money-making we have
restored to the use intended by their inventors and the Creator of their
inventors. After serving the advantage of socializing the industries which
the Accumulation effected for its own purposes, we continued the work in
large mills and shops, in the interest of the workers, whom we wished to
guard against the evil effects of solitude. But our mills and shops are
beautiful as well as useful. They look like temples, and they are temples,
dedicated to that sympathy between the divine and human which expresses
itself in honest and exquisite workmanship. They rise amid leafy boscages
beside the streams, which form their only power; for we have disused steam
altogether, with all the offences to the eye and ear which its use brought
into the world. Our life is so simple and our needs are so few that the
hand-work of the primitive toilers could easily supply our wants; but
machinery works so much more thoroughly and beautifully that we have in
great measure retained it. Only, the machines that were once the workmen's
enemies and masters are now their friends and servants; and, if any man
chooses to work alone with his own hands, the state will buy what he makes
at the same price that it sells the wares made collectively. This secures
every right of individuality.

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