A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

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There could be no doubt, I thought, in the mind of any reasonable person
that the walking delegate was the source of the discontent among our
proletariate, and I alleged him with a confidence which met the approval
of the professor, apparently, for he nodded, as if to say that I had hit
the nail on the head this time; and the minister seemed to be freshly
impressed with a notion that could not be new to him. The lawyer and the
doctor were silent, as if waiting for the banker to speak again; but he
was silent, too. The manufacturer, to my chagrin, broke into a laugh. "I'm
afraid," he said, with a sardonic levity which surprised me, "you'll have
to go a good deal deeper than the walking delegate. He's a symptom; he
isn't the disease. The thing keeps on and on, and it seems to be always
about wages; but it isn't about wages at the bottom. Some of those fellows
know it and some of them don't, but the real discontent is with the whole
system, with the nature of things. I had a curious revelation on that
point the last time I tried to deal with my men as a union. They were
always bothering me about this and about that, and there was no end to the
bickering. I yielded point after point, but it didn't make any difference.
It seemed as if the more I gave the more they asked. At last I made up my
mind to try to get at the real inwardness of the matter, and I didn't wait
for their committee to come to me--I sent for their leading man, and said
I wanted to have it out with him. He wasn't a bad fellow, and when I got
at him, man to man that way, I found he had sense, and he had ideas--it's
no use pretending those fellows are fools; he had thought about his side
of the question, anyway. I said: 'Now what does it all mean? Do you want
the earth, or don't you? When is it going to end?' I offered him something
to take, but he said he didn't drink, and we compromised on cigars. 'Now
when is it going to end?' said I, and I pressed it home, and wouldn't let
him fight off from the point. 'Do you mean when is it all going to end?'
said he. 'Yes,' said I, 'all. I'm sick of it. If there's any way out I'd
like to know it.' 'Well,' said he, 'I'll tell you, if you want to know.
It's all going to end when you get the same amount of money for the same
amount of work as we do.'"

We all laughed uproariously. The thing was deliciously comical; and
nothing, I thought, attested the Altrurian's want of humor like his
failure to appreciate this joke. He did not even smile in asking: "And
what did you say?"

"Well," returned the manufacturer, with cosey enjoyment, "I asked him if
the men would take the concern and run it themselves." We laughed again;
this seemed even better than the other joke. "But he said, 'No'; they
would not like to do that. And then I asked him just what they would like,
if they could have their own way, and he said they would like to have me
run the business, and all share alike. I asked him what was the sense of
that, and why, if I could do something that all of them put together
couldn't do, I shouldn't be paid more than all of them put together; and
he said that if a man did his best he ought to be paid as much as the best
man. I asked him if that was the principle their union was founded on, and
he said, 'Yes,' that the very meaning of their union was the protection of
the weak by the strong and the equalization of earnings among all who do
their best."

We waited for the manufacturer to go on, but he made a dramatic pause at
this point, as if to let it sink into our minds; and he did not speak
until the Altrurian prompted him with the question, "And what did you
finally do?"

"I saw there was only one way out for me, and I told the fellow I did not
think I could do business on that principle. We parted friends, but the
next Saturday I locked them out and smashed their union. They came back,
most of them--they had to--but I've treated with them ever since 'as
individuals.'"

"And they're much better off in your hands than they were in the union,"
said the professor.

"I don't know about that," said the manufacturer, "but I'm sure I am."

We laughed with him, all but the minister, whose mind seemed to have
caught upon some other point, and who sat absently by.

"And is it your opinion, from what you know of the working-man generally,
that they all have this twist in their heads?" the professor asked.

"They have, until they begin to rise. Then they get rid of it mighty soon.
Let a man save something--enough to get a house of his own, and take a
boarder or two, and perhaps have a little money at interest--and he sees
the matter in another light."

"Do you think he sees it more clearly?" asked the minister.

"He sees it differently."

"What do you think?" the minister pursued, turning to the lawyer. "You are
used to dealing with questions of justice--"

"Rather more with questions of law, I'm afraid," the other returned,
pleasantly, putting his feet together before him and looking down at them
in a way he had. "But, still, I have a great interest in questions of
justice, and I confess that I find a certain wild equity in this
principle, which I see nobody could do business on. It strikes me as
idyllic--it's a touch of real poetry in the rough-and-tumble prose of our
economic life."

He referred this to me as something I might appreciate in my quality of
literary man, and I responded in my quality of practical man: "There's
certainly more rhyme than reason in it."

He turned again to the minister:

"I suppose the ideal of the Christian state is the family?"

"I hope so," said the minister, with the gratitude that I have seen people
of his cloth show when men of the world conceded premises which the world
usually contests; it has seemed to me pathetic.

"And if that is the case, why, the logic of the postulate is that the
prosperity of the weakest is the sacred charge and highest happiness of
all the stronger. But the law has not recognized any such principle, in
economics at least, and if the labor unions are based upon it they are
outlaw, so far as any hope of enforcing it is concerned; and it is bad for
men to feel themselves outlaw. How is it," the lawyer continued, turning
to the Altrurian, "in your country? We can see no issue here, if the first
principle of organized labor antagonizes the first principle of business."

"But I don't understand precisely yet what the first principle of business
is," returned my guest.

"Ah, that raises another interesting question," said the lawyer. "Of
course, every business man solves the problem practically according to his
temperament and education, and I suppose that on first thoughts every
business man would answer you accordingly. But perhaps the personal
equation is something you wish to eliminate from the definition."

"Yes, of course."

"Still, I would rather not venture upon it first," said the lawyer.
"Professor, what should you say was the first principle of business?"

"Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest," the professor
promptly answered.

"We will pass the parson and the doctor and the novelist as witnesses of
no value. They can't possibly have any cognizance of the first principle
of business; their affair is to look after the souls and bodies and
fancies of other people. But what should you say it was?" he asked the
banker.

"I should say it was an enlightened conception of one's own interests."

"And you?"

The manufacturer had no hesitation in answering: "The good of Number One,
first, last, and all the time. There may be a difference of opinion about
the best way to get at it; the long way may be the better, or the short
way; the direct way or the oblique way, or the purely selfish way, or the
partly selfish way; but if you ever lose sight of that end you might as
well shut up shop. That seems to be the first law of nature, as well as
the first law of business."

"Ah, we mustn't go to nature for our morality," the minister protested.

"We were not talking of morality," said the manufacturer; "we were talking
of business."

This brought the laugh on the minister, but the lawyer cut it short:
"Well, then, I don't really see why the trades-unions are not as
business-like as the syndicates in their dealings with all those outside
of themselves. Within themselves they practise an altruism of the highest
order, but it is a tribal altruism; it is like that which prompts a Sioux
to share his last mouthful with a starving Sioux, and to take the scalp of
a starving Apache. How is it with your trades-unions in Altruria?" he
asked my friend.

"We have no trades-unions in Altruria," he began.

"Happy Altruria!" cried the professor.

"We had them formerly," the Altrurian went on, "as you have them now. They
claimed, as I suppose yours do, that they were forced into existence by
the necessities of the case; that without union the working-man was unable
to meet the capitalist on anything like equal terms, or to withstand his
encroachments and oppressions. But to maintain themselves they had to
extinguish industrial liberty among the working-men themselves, and they
had to practise great cruelties against those who refused to join them or
who rebelled against them."

"They simply destroy them here," said the professor.

"Well," said the lawyer, from his judicial mind, "the great syndicates
have no scruples in destroying a capitalist who won't come into them or
who tries to go out. They don't club him or stone him, but they under-sell
him and freeze him out; they don't break his head, but they bankrupt him.
The principle is the same."

"Don't interrupt Mr. Homos," the banker entreated. "I am very curious to
know just how they got rid of labor unions in Altruria."

"We had syndicates, too, and finally we had the _reductio ad absurdum_--we
had a federation of labor unions find a federation of syndicates, that
divided the nation into two camps. The situation was not only impossible,
but it was insupportably ridiculous."

I ventured to say: "It hasn't become quite so much of a joke with us yet."

"Isn't it in a fair way to become so?" asked the doctor; and he turned to
the lawyer: "What should you say was the logic of events among us for the
last ten or twenty years?"

"There's nothing so capricious as the logic of events. It's like a woman's
reasoning--you can't tell what it's aimed at, or where it's going to fetch
up; all that you can do is to keep out of the way if possible. We may come
to some such condition of things as they have in Altruria, where the faith
of the whole nation is pledged to secure every citizen in the pursuit of
happiness; or we may revert to some former condition, and the master may
again own the man; or we may hitch and joggle along indefinitely, as we
are doing now."

"But come, now," said the banker, while he laid a caressing touch on the
Altrurian's shoulder, "you don't mean to say honestly that everybody works
with his hands in Altruria?"

"Yes, certainly. We are mindful, as a whole people, of the divine law--'In
the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.'"

"But the capitalists? I'm anxious about Number One, you see."

"We have none."

"I forgot, of course. But the lawyers, the doctors, the parsons, the
novelists?"

"They all do their share of hand-work."

The lawyer said: "That seems to dispose of the question of the working-man
in society. But how about your minds? When do you cultivate your minds?
When do the ladies of Altruria cultivate their minds, if they have to do
their own work, as I suppose they do? Or is it only the men who work, if
they happen to be the husbands and fathers of the upper classes?"

The Altrurian seemed to be sensible of the kindly scepticism which
persisted in our reception of his statements, after all we had read of
Altruria. He smiled indulgently, and said: "You mustn't imagine that work
in Altruria is the same as it is here. As we all work, the amount that
each one need do is very little, a few hours each day at the most, so that
every man and woman has abundant leisure and perfect spirits for the
higher pleasures which the education of their whole youth has fitted them
to enjoy. If you can understand a state of things where the sciences and
arts and letters are cultivated for their own sake, and not as a means of
livelihood--"

"No," said the lawyer, smiling, "I'm afraid we can't conceive of that. We
consider the pinch of poverty the highest incentive that a man can have.
If our gifted friend here," he said, indicating me, "were not kept like a
toad under the harrow, with his nose on the grindstone, and the poorhouse
staring him in the face--"

"For Heaven's sake," I cried out, "don't mix your metaphors so, anyway!"

"If it were not for that and all the other hardships that literary men
undergo--

'Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail'--

his novels probably wouldn't be worth reading."

"Ah!" said the Altrurian, as if he did not quite follow this joking; and,
to tell the truth, I never find the personal thing in very good taste.
"You will understand, then, how extremely difficult it is for me to
imagine a condition of things like yours--although I have it under my very
eyes--where the money consideration is the first consideration."

"Oh, excuse me," urged the minister; "I don't think that's quite the
case."

"I beg your pardon," said the Altrurian, sweetly; "you can see how easily
I go astray."

"Why, I don't know," the banker interposed, "that you are so far out in
what you say. If you had said that money was always the first motive, I
should have been inclined to dispute you, too; but when you say that money
is the first consideration, I think you are quite right. Unless a man
secures his financial basis for his work, he can't do his work. It's
nonsense to pretend otherwise. So the money consideration is the first
consideration. People here have to live by their work, and to live they
must have money. Of course, we all recognize a difference in the
qualities, as well as in the kinds, of work. The work of the laborer may
be roughly defined as the necessity of his life; the work of the business
man as the means, and the work of the artist and scientist as the end.
We might refine upon these definitions and make them closer, but they
will serve for illustration as they are. I don't think there can be
any question as to which is the highest kind of work; some truths are
self-evident. He is a fortunate man whose work is an end, and every
business man sees this, and owns it to himself, at least when he meets
some man of an aesthetic or scientific occupation. He knows that this
luckier fellow has a joy in his work which he can never feel in business;
that his success in it can never be embittered by the thought that it is
the failure of another; that if he does it well, it is pure good; that
there cannot be any competition in it--there can be only a noble
emulation, as far as the work itself is concerned. He can always look up
to his work, for it is something above him; and a business man often has
to look down upon his business, for it is often beneath him, unless he is
a pretty low fellow."

I listened to all this in surprise; I knew that the banker was a
cultivated man, a man of university training, and that he was a reader and
a thinker; but he had always kept a certain reserve in his talk, which he
now seemed to have thrown aside for the sake of the Altrurian, or because
the subject had a charm that lured him out of himself. "Well, now," he
continued, "the question is of the money consideration, which is the first
consideration with us all: does it, or doesn't it degrade the work, which
is the life, of those among us whose work is the highest? I understand
that this is the misgiving which troubles you in view of our conditions?"

The Altrurian assented, and I thought it a proof of the banker's innate
delicacy that he did not refer the matter, so far as it concerned the
aesthetic life and work, to me; I was afraid he was going to do so. But he
courteously proposed to keep the question impersonal, and he went on to
consider it himself: "Well, I don't suppose any one can satisfy you fully.
But I should say that it put such men under a double strain, and perhaps
that is the reason why so many of them break down in a calling that is
certainly far less exhausting than business. On one side, the artist is
kept to the level of the working-man, of the animal, of the creature whose
sole affair is to get something to eat and somewhere to sleep. This is
through his necessity. On the other side, he is exalted to the height of
beings who have no concern but with the excellence of their work, which
they were born and divinely authorized to do. This is through his purpose.
Between the two, I should say that he got mixed, and that his work shows
it."

None of the others said anything, and, since I had not been personally
appealed to, I felt the freer to speak. "If you will suppose me to be
speaking from observation rather than experience--" I began.

"By all means," said the banker, "go on;" and the rest made haste in
various forms to yield me the word.

"I should say that such a man certainly got mixed, but that his work kept
itself pure from the money consideration, as it were, in spite of him. A
painter or actor, or even a novelist, is glad to get all he can for his
work, and, such is our fallen nature, he does get all he knows how to get:
but, when he has once fairly passed into his work, he loses himself in it.
He does not think whether it will pay or not, whether it will be popular
or not, but whether he can make it good or not."

"Well, that is conceivable," said the banker. "But wouldn't he rather do
something he would get less for, if he could afford it, than the thing he
knows he will get more for? Doesn't the money consideration influence his
choice of subject?"

"Oddly enough, I don't believe it does," I answered, after a moment's
reflection. "A man makes his choice once for all when he embraces the
aesthetic life, or, rather, it is made for him; no other life seems
possible. I know there is a general belief that an artist does the kind of
thing he has made go because it pays; but this only shows the prevalence
of business ideals. If he did not love to do the thing he does, he could
not do it well, no matter how richly it paid."

"I am glad to hear it," said the banker, and he added to the Altrurian:
"So, you see, we are not so bad as one would think. We are illogically
better, in fact."

"Yes," the other assented. "I knew something of your literature as well as
your conditions before I left home, and I perceived that by some anomaly
the one was not tainted by the other. It is a miraculous proof of the
divine mission of the poet."

"And the popular novelist," the lawyer whispered in my ear, but loud
enough for the rest to hear, and they all testified their amusement at my
cost.

The Altrurian, with his weak sense of humor, passed the joke. "It shows no
signs of corruption from greed, but I can't help thinking that, fine as it
is, it might have been much finer if the authors who produced it had been
absolutely freed to their work, and had never felt the spur of need."

"Are they absolutely freed to it in Altruria?" asked the professor. "I
understood you that everybody had to work for his living in Altruria."

"That is a mistake. Nobody works for his living in Altruria; he works for
others' living."

"Ah, that is precisely what our working-men object to doing here," said
the manufacturer. "In that last interview of mine with the walking
delegate he had the impudence to ask me why my men should work for my
living as well as their own."

"He couldn't imagine that you were giving them the work to do--the very
means of life," said the professor.

"Oh no, that's the last thing those fellows want to think of."

"Perhaps," the Altrurian suggested, "they might not have found it such a
hardship to work for your living if their own had been assured, as it is
with us. If you will excuse my saying it, we should think it monstrous in
Altruria for any man to have another's means of life in his power; and in
our condition it is hardly imaginable. Do you really have it in your power
to take away a man's opportunity to earn a living?"

The manufacturer laughed uneasily. "It is in my power to take away his
life; but I don't habitually shoot my fellow-men, and I never dismissed a
man yet without good reason."

"Oh, I beg your pardon," said the Altrurian. "I didn't dream of accusing
you of such inhumanity. But, you see, our whole system is so very
different that, as I said, it is hard for me to conceive of yours, and I
am very curious to understand its workings. If you shot your fellow-man,
as you say, the law would punish you; but if, for some reason that you
decided to be good, you took away his means of living, and he actually
starved to death--"

"Then the law would have nothing to do with it," the professor replied for
the manufacturer, who did not seem ready to answer. "But that is not the
way things fall out. The man would be supported in idleness, probably,
till he got another job, by his union, which would take the matter up."

"But I thought that our friend did not employ union labor," returned the
Altrurian.

I found all this very uncomfortable, and tried to turn the talk back to a
point that I felt curious about: "But in Altruria, if the literary class
is not exempt from the rule of manual labor, where do they find time and
strength to write?"

"Why, you must realize that our manual labor is never engrossing or
exhausting. It is no more than is necessary to keep the body in health. I
do not see how you remain well here, you people of sedentary occupations."

"Oh, we all take some sort of exercise. We walk several hours a day, or we
row, or we ride a bicycle, or a horse, or we fence."

"But to us," returned the Altrurian, with a growing frankness which
nothing but the sweetness of his manner would have excused, "exercise for
exercise would appear stupid. The barren expenditure of force that began
and ended in itself, and produced nothing, we should--if you will excuse
my saying so--look upon as childish, if not insane or immoral."

V

At this moment the lady who had hailed me so gayly from the top of the
coach while I stood waiting for the Altrurian to help the porter with the
baggage, just after the arrival of the train, came up with her husband to
our little group and said to me: "I want to introduce my husband to you.
He adores your books." She went on much longer to this effect, while the
other men grinned round and her husband tried to look as if it were all
true, and her eyes wandered to the Altrurian, who listened gravely. I knew
perfectly well that she was using her husband's zeal for my fiction to
make me present my friend; but I did not mind that, and I introduced him
to both of them. She took possession of him at once and began walking him
off down the piazza, while her husband remained with me, and the members
of our late conference drifted apart. I was not sorry to have it broken up
for the present; it seemed to me that it had lasted quite long enough, and
I lighted a cigar with the husband, and we strolled together in the
direction his wife had taken.

He began, apparently in compliment to literature in my person: "Yes, I
like to have a book where I can get at it when we're not going out to the
theatre, and I want to quiet my mind down after business. I don't care
much what the book is; my wife reads to me till I drop off, and then she
finishes the book herself and tells me the rest of the story. You see,
business takes it out of you so! Well, I let my wife do most of the
reading, anyway. She knows pretty much everything that's going in that
line. We haven't got any children, and it occupies her mind. She's up to
all sorts of things--she's artistic, and she's musical, and she's
dramatic, and she's literary. Well, I like to have her. Women are funny,
anyway."

He was a good-looking, good-natured, average American of the money-making
type; I believe he was some sort of a broker, but I do not quite know what
his business was. As we walked up and down the piazza, keeping a discreet
little distance from the corner where his wife had run off to with her
capture, he said he wished he could get more time with her in the summer--
but he supposed I knew what business was. He was glad she could have the
rest, anyway; she needed it.

"By-the-way," he asked, "who is this friend of yours? The women are all
crazy about him, and it's been an even thing between my wife and Miss
Groundsel which would fetch him first. But I'll bet on my wife every time,
when it comes to a thing like that. He's a good-looking fellow--some kind
of foreigner, I believe; pretty eccentric, too, I guess. Where is
Altruria, anyway?"

I told him, and he said: "Oh yes. Well, if we are going to restrict
immigration, I suppose we sha'n't see many more Altrurians, and we'd
better make the most of this one. Heigh?"

I do not know why this innocent pleasantry piqued me to say: "If I
understand the Altrurians, my dear fellow, nothing could induce them to
emigrate to America. As far as I can make out, they would regard it very
much as we should regard settling among the Eskimos."

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