A Traveler from Altruria: Romance
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W. D. Howells >> A Traveler from Altruria: Romance
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They all laughed civilly at this sally of mine, but the professor asked,
with a sarcasm that I thought I hardly merited, "What point in our polity
can be obscure to the author of 'Glove and Gauntlet' and 'Airs and
Graces'?"
They all laughed again, not so civilly, I felt, and then the banker asked
my friend: "Is it long since you left Altruria?"
"It seems a great while ago," the Altrurian answered, "but it is really
only a few weeks."
"You came by way of England, I suppose?"
"Yes; there is no direct line to America," said the Altrurian.
"That seems rather odd," I ventured, with some patriotic grudge.
"Oh, the English have direct lines everywhere," the banker instructed me.
"The tariff has killed our shipbuilding," said the professor. No one took
up this firebrand, and the professor added: "Your name is Greek, isn't it,
Mr. Homos?"
"Yes; we are of one of the early Hellenic families," said the Altrurian.
"And do you think," asked the lawyer, who, like most lawyers, was a lover
of romance, and was well read in legendary lore especially, "that there is
any reason for supposing that Altruria is identical with the fabled
Atlantis'?"
"No, I can't say that I do. We have no traditions of a submergence of the
continent, and there are only the usual evidences of a glacial epoch which
you find everywhere to support such a theory. Besides, our civilization is
strictly Christian, and dates back to no earlier period than that of the
first Christian commune after Christ. It is a matter of history with us
that one of these communists, when they were dispersed, brought the Gospel
to our continent; he was cast away on our eastern coast on his way to
Britain."
"Yes, we know that," the minister intervened, "but it is perfectly
astonishing that an island so large as Altruria should have been lost to
the knowledge of the rest of the world ever since the beginning of our
era. You would hardly think that there was a space of the ocean's surface
a mile square which had not been traversed by a thousand keels since
Columbus sailed westward."
"No, you wouldn't. And I wish," the doctor suggested in his turn, "that
Mr. Homos would tell us something about his country, instead of asking us
about ours."
"Yes," I coincided, "I'm sure we should all find it a good deal easier. At
least I should; but I brought our friend up in the hope that the professor
would like nothing better than to train a battery of hard facts upon a
defenceless stranger." Since the professor had given me that little stab,
I was rather anxious to see how he would handle the desire for information
in the Altrurian which I had found so prickly.
This turned the laugh on the professor, and he pretended to be as curious
about Altruria as the rest, and said he would rather hear of it. But the
Altrurian said: "I hope you will excuse me. Sometime I shall be glad to
talk of Altruria as long as you like; or, if you will come to us, I shall
be still happier to show you many things that I couldn't make you
understand at a distance. But I am in America to learn, not to teach, and
I hope you will have patience with my ignorance. I begin to be afraid that
it is so great as to seem a little incredible. I have fancied in my friend
here," he went on, with a smile toward me, "a suspicion that I was not
entirely single in some of the inquiries I have made, but that I had some
ulterior motive, some wish to censure or satirize."
"Oh, not at all," I protested, for it was not polite to admit a conjecture
so accurate. "We are so well satisfied with our condition that we have
nothing but pity for the darkened mind of the foreigner, though we believe
in it fully: we are used to the English tourist."
My friends laughed, and the Altrurian continued: "I am very glad to hear
it, for I feel myself at a peculiar disadvantage among you. I am not only
a foreigner, but I am so alien to you in all the traditions and habitudes
that I find it very difficult to get upon common ground with you. Of
course, I know theoretically what you are, but to realize it practically
is another thing. I had read so much about America and understood so
little that I could not rest without coming to see for myself. Some of the
apparent contradictions were so colossal--"
"We have everything on a large scale here," said the banker, breaking off
the ash of his cigar with the end of his little finger, "and we rather
pride ourselves on the size of our inconsistencies, even. I know something
of the state of things in Altruria, and, to be frank with you, I will say
that it seems to me preposterous. I should say it was impossible, if it
were not an accomplished fact; but I always feel bound to recognize the
thing done. You have hitched your wagon to a star, and you have made the
star go; there is never any trouble with wagons, but stars are not easily
broken to harness, and you have managed to get yours well in hand. As I
said, I don't believe in you, but I respect you." I thought this charming,
myself; perhaps because it stated my own mind about Altruria so exactly
and in terms so just and generous.
"Pretty good," said the doctor, in a murmur of satisfaction, at my ear,
"for a bloated bond-holder."
"Yes," I whispered back, "I wish I had said it. What an American way of
putting it! Emerson would have liked it himself. After all, he was our
prophet."
"He must have thought so from the way we kept stoning him," said the
doctor, with a soft laugh.
"Which of our contradictions," asked the banker, in the same tone of
gentle bonhomie, "has given you and our friend pause just now?"
The Altrurian answered, after a moment: "I am not sure that it is a
contradiction, for as yet I have not ascertained the facts I was seeking.
Our friend was telling me of the great change that had taken place
in regard to work, and the increased leisure that your professional people
are now allowing themselves; and I was asking him where your working-men
spent their leisure."
He went over the list of those he had specified, and I hung my head in
shame and pity; it really had such an effect of mawkish sentimentality.
But my friends received it in the best possible way. They did not laugh;
they heard him out, and then they quietly deferred to the banker, who made
answer for us all:
"Well, I can be almost as brief as the historian of Iceland in his chapter
on snakes: those people have no leisure to spend."
"Except when they go out on a strike," said the manufacturer, with a
certain grim humor of his own; I never heard anything more dramatic than
the account he once gave of the way he broke up a labor union. "I have
seen a good many of them at leisure then."
"Yes," the doctor chimed in, "and in my younger days, when I necessarily
had a good deal of charity practice, I used to find them at leisure when
they were 'laid off.' It always struck me as such a pretty euphemism. It
seemed to minify the harm of the thing so. It seemed to take all the
hunger and cold and sickness out of the fact. To be simply 'laid off' was
so different from losing your work and having to face beggary or
starvation."
"Those people," said the professor, "never put anything by. They are
wasteful and improvident, almost to a man; and they learn nothing by
experience, though they know as well as we do that it is simply a question
of demand and supply, and that the day of overproduction is sure to come,
when their work must stop unless the men that give them work are willing
to lose money."
"And I've seen them lose it, sometimes, rather than shut down," the
manufacturer remarked; "lose it hand over hand, to keep the men at work;
and then as soon as the tide turned the men would strike for higher wages.
You have no idea of the ingratitude of those people." He said this toward
the minister, as if he did not wish to be thought hard; and, in fact, he
was a very kindly man.
"Yes," replied the minister, "that is one of the most sinister features of
the situation. They seem really to regard their employers as their
enemies. I don't know how it will end."
"I know how it would end if I had my way," said the professor. "There
wouldn't be any labor unions, and there wouldn't be any strikes."
"That is all very well," said the lawyer, from that judicial mind which I
always liked in him, "as far as the strikes are concerned, but I don't
understand that the abolition of the unions would affect the impersonal
process of 'laying off.' The law of demand and supply I respect as much as
any one--it's something like the constitution; but, all the same, I should
object extremely to have my income stopped by it every now and then. I'm
probably not so wasteful as a working-man generally is; still, I haven't
laid by enough to make it a matter of indifference to me whether my income
went on or not. Perhaps the professor has." The professor did not say, and
we all took leave to laugh. The lawyer concluded: "I don't see how those
fellows stand it."
"They don't, all of them," said the doctor. "Or their wives and children
don't. Some of them die."
"I wonder," the lawyer pursued, "what has become of the good old American
fact that there is always work for those who are willing to work? I notice
that wherever five thousand men strike in the forenoon, there are five
thousand men to take their places in the afternoon--and not men who are
turning their hands to something new, but men who are used to doing the
very thing the strikers have done."
"That is one of the things that teach the futility of strikes," the
professor made haste to interpose, as if he had not quite liked to appear
averse to the interests of the workman; no one likes to do that. "If there
were anything at all to be hoped from them, it would be another matter."
"Yes, but that isn't the point, quite," said the lawyer.
"By-the-way, what is the point?" I asked, with my humorous lightness.
"Why, I supposed," said the banker, "it was the question how the working
classes amused their elegant leisure. But it seems to be almost anything
else."
We all applauded the neat touch, but the Altrurian eagerly entreated:
"No, no; never mind that now. That is a matter of comparatively little
interest. I would so much rather know something about the status of the
working-man among you."
"Do you mean his political status? It's that of every other citizen."
"I don't mean that. I suppose that in America you have learned, as we have
in Altruria, that equal political rights are only means to an end, and as
an end have no value or reality. I meant the economic status of the
working-man, and his social status."
I do not know why we were so long girding up our loins to meet this simple
question. I myself could not have hopefully undertaken to answer it; but
the others were each in their way men of affairs, and practically
acquainted with the facts, except perhaps the professor; but he had
devoted a great deal of thought to them, and ought to have been qualified
to make some sort of response. But even he was silent; and I had a vague
feeling that they were all somehow reluctant to formulate their knowledge,
as if it were uncomfortable or discreditable. The banker continued to
smoke quietly on for a moment; then he suddenly threw his cigar away.
"I like to free my mind of cant," he said, with a short laugh, "when I can
afford it, and I propose to cast all sorts of American cant out of it in
answering your question. The economic status of the working-man among us
is essentially the same as that of the working-man all over the civilized
world. You will find plenty of people here, especially about election
time, to tell you differently, but they will not be telling you the truth,
though a great many of them think they are. In fact, I suppose most
Americans honestly believe because we have a republican form of
government, and manhood suffrage, and so on, that our economic conditions
are peculiar, and that our working-man has a status higher and better than
that of the working-man anywhere else. But he has nothing of the kind. His
circumstances are better, and provisionally his wages are higher, but it
is only a question of years or decades when his circumstances will be the
same and his wages the same as the European working-man's. There is
nothing in our conditions to prevent this."
"Yes, I understood from our friend here," said the Altrurian, nodding
toward me, "that you had broken only with the political tradition of
Europe in your Revolution; and he has explained to me that you do not hold
all kinds of labor in equal esteem; but--"
"What kind of labor did he say we did hold in esteem?" asked the banker.
"Why, I understood him to say that if America meant anything at all it
meant the honor of work, but that you distinguished and did not honor some
kinds of work so much as others; for instance, domestic service, or
personal attendance of any kind."
The banker laughed again. "Oh, he drew the line there, did he? Well, we
all have to draw the line somewhere. Our friend is a novelist, and I will
tell you in strict confidence that the line he has drawn is imaginary. We
don't honor any kind of work any more than any other people. If a fellow
gets up, the papers make a great ado over his having been a woodchopper or
a bobbin-boy, or something of that kind, but I doubt if the fellow himself
likes it; he doesn't if he's got any sense. The rest of us feel that it's
_infra dig._, and hope nobody will find out that we ever worked with our
hands for a living. I'll go further," said the banker, with the effect of
whistling prudence down the wind, "and I will challenge any of you to
gainsay me from his own experience or observation. How does esteem usually
express itself? When we wish, to honor a man, what do we do?"
"Ask him to dinner," said the lawyer.
"Exactly. We offer him some sort of social recognition. Well, as soon as a
fellow gets up, if he gets up high enough, we offer him some sort of
social recognition; in fact, all sorts; but upon condition that he has
left off working with his hands for a living. We forgive all you please to
his past on account of the present. But there isn't a working-man, I
venture to say, in any city or town, or even large village, in the whole
length and breadth of the United States who has any social recognition, if
he is still working at his trade. I don't mean, merely, that he is
excluded from rich and fashionable society, but from the society of the
average educated and cultivated people. I'm not saying he is fit for it;
but I don't care how intelligent and agreeable he might be--and some of
them are astonishingly intelligent, and so agreeable in their tone of mind
and their original way of looking at things that I like nothing better
than to talk with them--all of our invisible fences are up against him."
The minister said: "I wonder if that sort of exclusiveness is quite
natural? Children seem to feel no sort of social difference among
themselves."
"We can hardly go to children for a type of social order," the professor
suggested.
"True," the minister meekly admitted. "But somehow there is a protest in
us somewhere against these arbitrary distinctions--something that
questions whether they are altogether right. We know that they must be,
and always have been, and always will be, and yet--well, I will confess
it--I never feel at peace when I face them."
"Oh," said the banker, "if you come to the question of right and wrong,
that is another matter. I don't say it's right. I'm not discussing that
question; though I'm certainly not proposing to level the fences; I should
be the last to take my own down. I say simply that you are no more likely
to meet a working-man in American society than you are to meet a colored
man. Now you can judge," he ended, turning directly to the Altrurian, "how
much we honor labor. And I hope I have indirectly satisfied your curiosity
as to the social status of the working-man among us."
We were all silent.
Perhaps the others were occupied like myself in trying to recall some
instance of a working-man whom they had met in society, and perhaps we
said nothing because we all failed.
The Altrurian spoke at last.
"You have been so very full and explicit that I feel as if it were almost
unseemly to press any further inquiry; but I should very much like to know
how your working-men bear this social exclusion."
"I'm sure I can't say," returned the banker. "A man does not care much to
get into society until he has something to eat, and how to get that is
always the first question with the working-man."
"But you wouldn't like it yourself?"
"No, certainly, I shouldn't like it myself. I shouldn't complain of not
being asked to people's houses, and the working-men don't; you can't do
that; but I should feel it an incalculable loss. We may laugh at the
emptiness of society, or pretend to be sick of it, but there is no doubt
that society is the flower of civilization, and to be shut out from it is
to be denied the best privilege of a civilized man. There are society
women--we have all met them--whose graciousness and refinement of presence
are something of incomparable value; it is more than a liberal education
to have been admitted to it, but it is as inaccessible to the working-man
as--what shall I say? The thing is too grotesquely impossible for any sort
of comparison. Merely to conceive of its possibility is something that
passes a joke; it is a kind of offence."
Again we were silent.
"I don't know," the banker continued, "how the notion of our social
equality originated, but I think it has been fostered mainly by the
expectation of foreigners, who argued it from our political equality.
As a matter of fact, it never existed, except in our poorest and most
primitive communities, in the pioneer days of the West and among the
gold-hunters of California. It was not dreamed of in our colonial society,
either in Virginia or Pennsylvania or New York or Massachusetts; and the
fathers of the republic, who were mostly slave-holders, were practically
as stiff-necked aristocrats as any people of their day. We have not a
political aristocracy, that is all; but there is as absolute a division
between the orders of men and as little love, in this country as in any
country on the globe. The severance of the man who works for his living
with his hands from the man who does not work for his living with his
hands is so complete, and apparently so final, that nobody even imagines
anything else, not even in fiction. Or, how is that?" he asked, turning to
me. "Do you fellows still put the intelligent, high-spirited, handsome
young artisan, who wins the millionaire's daughter, into your books? I
used sometimes to find him there."
"You might still find him in the fiction of the weekly story-papers; but,"
I was obliged to own, "he would not go down with my readers. Even in the
story-paper fiction he would leave off working as soon as he married the
millionaire's daughter, and go to Europe, or he would stay here and become
a social leader, but he would not receive working-men in his gilded
halls."
The others rewarded my humor with a smile, but the banker said: "Then I
wonder you were not ashamed of filling our friend up with that stuff about
our honoring some kinds of labor. It is true that we don't go about openly
and explicitly despising any kind of honest toil--people don't do that
anywhere now; but we contemn it in terms quite as unmistakable. The
working-man acquiesces as completely as anybody else. He does not remain a
working-man a moment longer that he can help; and after he gets up, if he
is weak enough to be proud of having been one, it is because he feels that
his low origin is a proof of his prowess in rising to the top against
unusual odds. I don't suppose there is a man in the whole civilized
world--outside of Altruria, of course---who is proud of working at a
trade, except the shoemaker Tolstoy, and is a count, and he does not make
very good shoes."
We all laughed again: those shoes of Count Tolstoy's are always such an
infallible joke.
The Altrurian, however, was cocked and primed with another question; he
instantly exploded it: "But are all the working-men in America eager to
rise above their condition? Is there none willing to remain among the mass
because the rest could not rise with him, and from the hope of yet
bringing labor to honor?"
The banker answered: "I never heard of any. No, the American ideal is not
to change the conditions for all, but for each to rise above the rest if
he can."
"Do you think it is really so bad as that?" asked the minister, timidly.
The banker answered: "Bad? Do you call that bad? I thought it was very
good. But, good or bad, I don't think you'll find it deniable, if you
look into the facts. There may be working-men willing to remain so for
other working-men's sake, but I have never met any--perhaps because the
working-man never goes into society."
The unfailing question of the Altrurian broke the silence which ensued:
"Are there many of your working-men who are intelligent and agreeable--of
the type you mentioned a moment since?"
"Perhaps," said the banker, "I had better refer you to one of our friends
here, who has had a great deal more to do with them than I have. He is a
manufacturer, and he has had to do with all kinds of work-people."
"Yes, for my sins," the manufacturer assented; and he added: "They are
often confoundedly intelligent, though I haven't often found them very
agreeable, either in their tone of mind or their original way of looking
at things."
The banker amiably acknowledged his thrust, and the Altrurian asked: "Ah,
they are opposed to your own?"
"Well, we have the same trouble here that you must have heard of in
England. As you know now that the conditions are the same here, you won't
be surprised at the fact."
"But the conditions," the Altrurian pursued--"do you expect them always to
continue the same?"
"Well, I don't know," said the manufacturer. "We can't expect them to
change of themselves, and I shouldn't know how to change them. It was
expected that the rise of the trusts and the syndicates would break the
unions, but somehow they haven't. The situation remains the same. The
unions are not cutting one another's throats now any more than we are. The
war is on a larger scale--that's all."
"Then let me see," said the Altrurian, "whether I clearly understand the
situation as regards the working-man in America. He is dependent upon the
employer for his chance to earn a living, and he is never sure of this. He
may be thrown out of work by his employer's disfavor or disaster, and his
willingness to work goes for nothing; there is no public provision of work
for him; there is nothing to keep him from want nor the prospect of
anything."
"We are all in the same boat," said the professor.
"But some of us have provisioned ourselves rather better and can generally
weather it through till we are picked up," the lawyer put in.
"I am always saying the working-man is improvident," returned the
professor.
"There are the charities," the minister suggested.
"But his economical status," the Altrurian pursued, "is in a state of
perpetual uncertainty, and to save himself in some measure he has
organized, and so has constituted himself a danger to the public peace?"
"A very great danger," said the professor.
"I guess we can manage him," the manufacturer remarked.
"And socially he is non-existent?"
The Altrurian turned with this question to the banker, who said: "He is
certainly not in society."
"Then," said my guest, "if the working-man's wages are provisionally so
much better here than in Europe, why should they be discontented? What is
the real cause of their discontent?"
I have always been suspicious, in the company of practical men, of an
atmosphere of condescension to men of my calling, if nothing worse. I
fancy they commonly regard artists of all kinds as a sort of harmless
eccentrics, and that literary people they look upon as something droll, as
weak and soft, as not quite right. I believed that this particular group,
indeed, was rather abler to conceive of me as a rational person than most
others, but I knew that if even they had expected me to be as reasonable
as themselves they would not have been greatly disappointed if I were not;
and it seemed to me that I had put myself wrong with them in imparting to
the Altrurian that romantic impression that we hold labor in honor here. I
had really thought so, but I could not say so now, and I wished to
retrieve myself somehow. I wished to show that I was a practical man, too,
and so I made answer: "What is the cause of the working-man's discontent?
It is very simple: the walking delegate."
IV
I suppose I could not have fairly claimed any great originality for my
notion that the walking delegate was the cause of the labor troubles: he
is regularly assigned as the reason of a strike in the newspapers, and is
reprobated for his evil agency by the editors, who do not fail to read the
working-men many solemn lessons and fervently warn them against him, as
soon as the strike begins to go wrong--as it nearly always does. I
understand from them that the walking delegate is an irresponsible tyrant,
who emerges from the mystery that habitually hides him and from time to
time orders a strike in mere rancor of spirit and plenitude of power, and
then leaves the working-men and their families to suffer the consequences,
while he goes off somewhere and rolls in the lap of luxury, careless of
the misery he has created. Between his debauches of vicious idleness and
his accesses of baleful activity he is employed in poisoning the mind of
the working-men against his real interests and real friends. This is
perfectly easy, because the American working-man, though singularly shrewd
and sensible in other respects, is the victim of an unaccountable
obliquity of vision which keeps him from seeing his real interests and
real friends--or, at least, from knowing them when he sees them.
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