CHAPTER XIII.
As Edith had promised he should do, Dr. Leete accompanied me to my
bedroom when I retired, to instruct me as to the adjustment of the
musical telephone. He showed how, by turning a screw, the volume of
the music could be made to fill the room, or die away to an echo so
faint and far that one could scarcely be sure whether he heard or
imagined it. If, of two persons side by side, one desired to listen to
music and the other to sleep, it could be made audible to one and
inaudible to another.
"I should strongly advise you to sleep if you can to-night, Mr. West,
in preference to listening to the finest tunes in the world," the
doctor said, after explaining these points. "In the trying experience
you are just now passing through, sleep is a nerve tonic for which
there is no substitute."
Mindful of what had happened to me that very morning, I promised to
heed his counsel.
"Very well," he said, "then I will set the telephone at eight
o'clock."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He explained that, by a clock-work combination, a person could arrange
to be awakened at any hour by the music.
It began to appear, as has since fully proved to be the case, that I
had left my tendency to insomnia behind me with the other discomforts
of existence in the nineteenth century; for though I took no sleeping
draught this time, yet, as the night before, I had no sooner touched
the pillow than I was asleep.
I dreamed that I sat on the throne of the Abencerrages in the
banqueting hall of the Alhambra, feasting my lords and generals, who
next day were to follow the crescent against the Christian dogs of
Spain. The air, cooled by the spray of fountains, was heavy with the
scent of flowers. A band of Nautch girls, round-limbed and
luscious-lipped, danced with voluptuous grace to the music of brazen
and stringed instruments. Looking up to the latticed galleries, one
caught a gleam now and then from the eye of some beauty of the royal
harem, looking down upon the assembled flower of Moorish chivalry.
Louder and louder clashed the cymbals, wilder and wilder grew the
strain, till the blood of the desert race could no longer resist the
martial delirium, and the swart nobles leaped to their feet; a
thousand scimitars were bared, and the cry, "Allah il Allah!" shook
the hall and awoke me, to find it broad daylight, and the room
tingling with the electric music of the "Turkish Reveille."
At the breakfast-table, when I told my host of my morning's
experience, I learned that it was not a mere chance that the piece of
music which awakened me was a reveille. The airs played at one of the
halls during the waking hours of the morning were always of an
inspiring type.
"By the way," I said, "I have not thought to ask you anything about
the state of Europe. Have the societies of the Old World also been
remodeled?"
"Yes," replied Dr. Leete, "the great nations of Europe as well as
Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, are now organized
industrially like the United States, which was the pioneer of the
evolution. The peaceful relations of these nations are assured by a
loose form of federal union of world-wide extent. An international
council regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of the members
of the union and their joint policy toward the more backward races,
which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions.
Complete autonomy within its own limits is enjoyed by every nation."
"How do you carry on commerce without money?" I said. "In trading with
other nations, you must use some sort of money, although you dispense
with it in the internal affairs of the nation."
"Oh, no; money is as superfluous in our foreign as in our internal
relations. When foreign commerce was conducted by private enterprise,
money was necessary to adjust it on account of the multifarious
complexity of the transactions; but nowadays it is a function of the
nations as units. There are thus only a dozen or so merchants in the
world, and their business being supervised by the international
council, a simple system of book accounts serves perfectly to regulate
their dealings. Customs duties of every sort are of course
superfluous. A nation simply does not import what its government does
not think requisite for the general interest. Each nation has a bureau
of foreign exchange, which manages its trading. For example, the
American bureau, estimating such and such quantities of French goods
necessary to America for a given year, sends the order to the French
bureau, which in turn sends its order to our bureau. The same is done
mutually by all the nations."
"But how are the prices of foreign goods settled, since there is no
competition?"
"The price at which one nation supplies another with goods," replied
Dr. Leete, "must be that at which it supplies its own citizens. So you
see there is no danger of misunderstanding. Of course no nation is
theoretically bound to supply another with the product of its own
labor, but it is for the interest of all to exchange some commodities.
If a nation is regularly supplying another with certain goods, notice
is required from either side of any important change in the relation."
"But what if a nation, having a monopoly of some natural product,
should refuse to supply it to the others, or to one of them?"
"Such a case has never occurred, and could not without doing the
refusing party vastly more harm than the others," replied Dr. Leete.
"In the first place, no favoritism could be legally shown. The law
requires that each nation shall deal with the others, in all respects,
on exactly the same footing. Such a course as you suggest would cut
off the nation adopting it from the remainder of the earth for all
purposes whatever. The contingency is one that need not give us much
anxiety."
"But," said I, "supposing a nation, having a natural monopoly in some
product of which it exports more than it consumes, should put the
price away up, and thus, without cutting off the supply, make a profit
out of its neighbors' necessities? Its own citizens would of course
have to pay the higher price on that commodity, but as a body would
make more out of foreigners than they would be out of pocket
themselves."
"When you come to know how prices of all commodities are determined
nowadays, you will perceive how impossible it is that they could be
altered, except with reference to the amount or arduousness of the
work required respectively to produce them," was Dr. Leete's reply.
"This principle is an international as well as a national guarantee;
but even without it the sense of community of interest, international
as well as national, and the conviction of the folly of selfishness,
are too deep nowadays to render possible such a piece of sharp
practice as you apprehend. You must understand that we all look
forward to an eventual unification of the world as one nation. That,
no doubt, will be the ultimate form of society, and will realize
certain economic advantages over the present federal system of
autonomous nations. Meanwhile, however, the present system works so
nearly perfectly that we are quite content to leave to posterity the
completion of the scheme. There are, indeed, some who hold that it
never will be completed, on the ground that the federal plan is not
merely a provisional solution of the problem of human society, but the
best ultimate solution."
"How do you manage," I asked, "when the books of any two nations do
not balance? Supposing we import more from France than we export to
her."
"At the end of each year," replied the doctor, "the books of every
nation are examined. If France is found in our debt, probably we are
in the debt of some nation which owes France, and so on with all the
nations. The balances that remain after the accounts have been cleared
by the international council should not be large under our system.
Whatever they may be, the council requires them to be settled every
few years, and may require their settlement at any time if they are
getting too large; for it is not intended that any nation shall run
largely in debt to another, lest feelings unfavorable to amity should
be engendered. To guard further against this, the international
council inspects the commodities interchanged by the nations, to see
that they are of perfect quality."
"But what are the balances finally settled with, seeing that you have
no money?"
"In national staples; a basis of agreement as to what staples shall be
accepted, and in what proportions, for settlement of accounts, being a
preliminary to trade relations."
"Emigration is another point I want to ask you about," said I. "With
every nation organized as a close industrial partnership, monopolizing
all means of production in the country, the emigrant, even if he were
permitted to land, would starve. I suppose there is no emigration
nowadays."
"On the contrary, there is constant emigration, by which I suppose you
mean removal to foreign countries for permanent residence," replied
Dr. Leete. "It is arranged on a simple international arrangement of
indemnities. For example, if a man at twenty-one emigrates from
England to America, England loses all the expense of his maintenance
and education, and America gets a workman for nothing. America
accordingly makes England an allowance. The same principle, varied to
suit the case, applies generally. If the man is near the term of his
labor when he emigrates, the country receiving him has the allowance.
As to imbecile persons, it is deemed best that each nation should be
responsible for its own, and the emigration of such must be under
full guarantees of support by his own nation. Subject to these
regulations, the right of any man to emigrate at any time is
unrestricted."
"But how about mere pleasure trips; tours of observation? How can a
stranger travel in a country whose people do not receive money, and
are themselves supplied with the means of life on a basis not extended
to him? His own credit card cannot, of course, be good in other lands.
How does he pay his way?"
"An American credit card," replied Dr. Leete, "is just as good in
Europe as American gold used to be, and on precisely the same
condition, namely, that it be exchanged into the currency of the
country you are traveling in. An American in Berlin takes his credit
card to the local office of the international council, and receives in
exchange for the whole or part of it a German credit card, the amount
being charged against the United States in favor of Germany on the
international account."
* * * * *
"Perhaps Mr. West would like to dine at the Elephant to-day," said
Edith, as we left the table.
"That is the name we give to the general dining-house of our ward,"
explained her father. "Not only is our cooking done at the public
kitchens, as I told you last night, but the service and quality of the
meals are much more satisfactory if taken at the dining-house. The
two minor meals of the day are usually taken at home, as not worth the
trouble of going out; but it is general to go out to dine. We have not
done so since you have been with us, from a notion that it would be
better to wait till you had become a little more familiar with our
ways. What do you think? Shall we take dinner at the dining-house
to-day?"
I said that I should be very much pleased to do so.
Not long after, Edith came to me, smiling, and said:--
"Last night, as I was thinking what I could do to make you feel at
home until you came to be a little more used to us and our ways, an
idea occurred to me. What would you say if I were to introduce you to
some very nice people of your own times, whom I am sure you used to be
well acquainted with?"
I replied, rather vaguely, that it would certainly be very agreeable,
but I did not see how she was going to manage it.
"Come with me," was her smiling reply, "and see if I am not as good as
my word."
My susceptibility to surprise had been pretty well exhausted by the
numerous shocks it had received, but it was with some wonderment that
I followed her into a room which I had not before entered. It was a
small, cosy apartment, walled with cases filled with books.
"Here are your friends," said Edith, indicating one of the cases, and
as my eye glanced over the names on the backs of the volumes,
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Defoe, Dickens,
Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, Irving, and a score of other great writers
of my time and all time, I understood her meaning. She had indeed made
good her promise in a sense compared with which its literal
fulfillment would have been a disappointment. She had introduced me to
a circle of friends whom the century that had elapsed since last I
communed with them had aged as little as it had myself. Their spirit
was as high, their wit as keen, their laughter and their tears as
contagious, as when their speech had whiled away the hours of a former
century. Lonely I was not and could not be more, with this goodly
companionship, however wide the gulf of years that gaped between me
and my old life.
"You are glad I brought you here," exclaimed Edith, radiant, as she
read in my face the success of her experiment. "It was a good idea,
was it not, Mr. West? How stupid in me not to think of it before! I
will leave you now with your old friends, for I know there will be no
company for you like them just now; but remember you must not let old
friends make you quite forget new ones!" and with that smiling caution
she left me.
Attracted by the most familiar of the names before me, I laid my hand
on a volume of Dickens, and sat down to read. He had been my prime
favorite among the book-writers of the century,--I mean the nineteenth
century,--and a week had rarely passed in my old life during which I
had not taken up some volume of his works to while away an idle hour.
Any volume with which I had been familiar would have produced an
extraordinary impression, read under my present circumstances, but my
exceptional familiarity with Dickens, and his consequent power to call
up the associations of my former life, gave to his writings an effect
no others could have had, to intensify, by force of contrast, my
appreciation of the strangeness of my present environment. However new
and astonishing one's surroundings, the tendency is to become a part
of them so soon that almost from the first the power to see them
objectively and fully measure their strangeness, is lost. That power,
already dulled in my case, the pages of Dickens restored by carrying
me back through their associations to the standpoint of my former
life. With a clearness which I had not been able before to attain, I
saw now the past and present, like contrasting pictures, side by side.
The genius of the great novelist of the nineteenth century, like that
of Homer, might indeed defy time; but the setting of his pathetic
tales, the misery of the poor, the wrongs of power, the pitiless
cruelty of the system of society, had passed away as utterly as Circe
and the sirens, Charybdis and Cyclops.
During the hour or two that I sat there with Dickens open before me, I
did not actually read more than a couple of pages. Every paragraph,
every phrase, brought up some new aspect of the world-transformation
which had taken place, and led my thoughts on long and widely
ramifying excursions. As meditating thus in Dr. Leete's library I
gradually attained a more clear and coherent idea of the prodigious
spectacle which I had been so strangely enabled to view, I was filled
with a deepening wonder at the seeming capriciousness of the fate that
had given to one who so little deserved it, or seemed in any way set
apart for it, the power alone among his contemporaries to stand upon
the earth in this latter day. I had neither foreseen the new world nor
toiled for it, as many about me had done regardless of the scorn of
fools or the misconstruction of the good. Surely it would have been
more in accordance with the fitness of things had one of those
prophetic and strenuous souls been enabled to see the travail of his
soul and be satisfied; he, for example, a thousand times rather than
I, who, having beheld in a vision the world I looked on, sang of it in
words that again and again, during these last wondrous days, had rung
in my mind:--
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see.
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled.
In the Parliament of man, the federation of the world.
Then the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.
What though, in his old age, he momentarily lost faith in his own
prediction, as prophets in their hours of depression and doubt
generally do; the words had remained eternal testimony to the seership
of a poet's heart, the insight that is given to faith.
I was still in the library when some hours later Dr. Leete sought me
there. "Edith told me of her idea," he said, "and I thought it an
excellent one. I had a little curiosity what writer you would first
turn to. Ah, Dickens! You admired him, then! That is where we moderns
agree with you. Judged by our standards, he overtops all the writers
of his age, not because his literary genius was highest, but because
his great heart beat for the poor, because he made the cause of the
victims of society his own, and devoted his pen to exposing its
cruelties and shams. No man of his time did so much as he to turn
men's minds to the wrong and wretchedness of the old order of things,
and open their eyes to the necessity of the great change that was
coming, although he himself did not clearly foresee it."
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