I think if a person were ever excusable for losing track of the days
of the week, the circumstances excused me. Indeed, if I had been told
that the method of reckoning time had been wholly changed and the days
were now counted in lots of five, ten, or fifteen instead of seven, I
should have been in no way surprised after what I had already heard
and seen of the twentieth century. The first time that any inquiry as
to the days of the week occurred to me was the morning following the
conversation related in the last chapter. At the breakfast table Dr.
Leete asked me if I would care to hear a sermon.
"Yes," he replied. "It was on Friday, you see, when we made the lucky
discovery of the buried chamber to which we owe your society this
morning. It was on Saturday morning, soon after midnight, that you
first awoke, and Sunday afternoon when you awoke the second time with
faculties fully regained."
"So you still have Sundays and sermons," I said. "We had prophets who
foretold that long before this time the world would have dispensed
with both. I am very curious to know how the ecclesiastical systems
fit in with the rest of your social arrangements. I suppose you have a
sort of national church with official clergymen."
Dr. Leete laughed, and Mrs. Leete and Edith seemed greatly amused.
"Why, Mr. West," Edith said, "what odd people you must think us. You
were quite done with national religious establishments in the
nineteenth century, and did you fancy we had gone back to them?"
"But how can voluntary churches and an unofficial clerical profession
be reconciled with national ownership of all buildings, and the
industrial service required of all men?" I answered.
"The religious practices of the people have naturally changed
considerably in a century," replied Dr. Leete; "but supposing them to
have remained unchanged, our social system would accommodate them
perfectly. The nation supplies any person or number of persons with
buildings on guarantee of the rent, and they remain tenants while they
pay it. As for the clergymen, if a number of persons wish the services
of an individual for any particular end of their own, apart from the
general service of the nation, they can always secure it, with that
individual's own consent, of course, just as we secure the service of
our editors, by contributing from their credit-cards an indemnity to
the nation for the loss of his services in general industry. This
indemnity paid the nation for the individual answers to the salary in
your day paid to the individual himself; and the various applications
of this principle leave private initiative full play in all details to
which national control is not applicable. Now, as to hearing a sermon
to-day, if you wish to do so, you can either go to a church to hear it
or stay at home."
"Simply by accompanying us to the music room at the proper hour and
selecting an easy chair. There are some who still prefer to hear
sermons in church, but most of our preaching, like our musical
performances, is not in public, but delivered in acoustically prepared
chambers, connected by wire with subscribers' houses. If you prefer to
go to a church I shall be glad to accompany you, but I really don't
believe you are likely to hear anywhere a better discourse than you
will at home. I see by the paper that Mr. Barton is to preach this
morning, and he preaches only by telephone, and to audiences often
reaching 150,000."
"The novelty of the experience of hearing a sermon under such
circumstances would incline me to be one of Mr. Barton's hearers, if
for no other reason," I said.
An hour or two later, as I sat reading in the library, Edith came for
me, and I followed her to the music room, where Dr. and Mrs. Leete
were waiting. We had not more than seated ourselves comfortably when
the tinkle of a bell was heard, and a few moments after the voice of a
man, at the pitch of ordinary conversation, addressed us, with an
effect of proceeding from an invisible person in the room. This was
what the voice said:
"Mr. West," he said, "Edith suggests that you may find it slightly
embarrassing to listen to a discourse on the lines Mr. Barton is
laying down, and if so, you need not be cheated out of a sermon. She
will connect us with Mr. Sweetser's speaking room if you say so, and I
can still promise you a very good discourse."
"No, no," I said. "Believe me, I would much rather hear what Mr.
Barton has to say."
When her father spoke to me Edith had touched a screw, and the voice
of Mr. Barton had ceased abruptly. Now at another touch the room was
once more filled with the earnest sympathetic tones which had already
impressed me most favorably.
I venture to assume that one effect has been common with us as a
result of this effort at retrospection, and that it has been to leave
us more than ever amazed at the stupendous change which one brief
century has made in the material and moral conditions of humanity.
Still, as regards the contrast between the poverty of the nation and
the world in the nineteenth century and their wealth now, it is not
greater, possibly, than had been before seen in human history, perhaps
not greater, for example, than that between the poverty of this
country during the earliest colonial period of the seventeenth century
and the relatively great wealth it had attained at the close of the
nineteenth, or between the England of William the Conqueror and that
of Victoria. Although the aggregate riches of a nation did not then,
as now, afford any accurate criterion of the masses of its people, yet
instances like these afford partial parallels for the merely material
side of the contrast between the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries. It is when we contemplate the moral aspect of that contrast
that we find ourselves in the presence of a phenomenon for which
history offers no precedent, however far back we may cast our eye. One
might almost be excused who should exclaim, 'Here, surely, is
something like a miracle!' Nevertheless, when we give over idle
wonder, and begin to examine the seeming prodigy critically, we find
it no prodigy at all, much less a miracle. It is not necessary to
suppose a moral new birth of humanity, or a wholesale destruction of
the wicked and survival of the good, to account for the fact before
us. It finds its simple and obvious explanation in the reaction of a
changed environment upon human nature. It means merely that a form of
society which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness,
and appealed solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human
nature, has been replaced by institutions based on the true
self-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealing to the social
and generous instincts of men.
My friends, if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemed
in the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the old
social and industrial system, which taught them to view their natural
prey in their fellow-men, and find their gain in the loss of others.
No doubt it seems to you that no necessity, however dire, would have
tempted you to subsist on what superior skill or strength enabled you
to wrest from others equally needy. But suppose it were not merely
your own life that you were responsible for. I know well that there
must have been many a man among our ancestors who, if it had been
merely a question of his own life, would sooner have given it up than
nourished it by bread snatched from others. But this he was not
permitted to do. He had dear lives dependent on him. Men loved women
in those days, as now. God knows how they dared be fathers, but they
had babies as sweet, no doubt, to them as ours to us, whom they must
feed, clothe, educate. The gentlest creatures are fierce when they
have young to provide for, and in that wolfish society the struggle
for bread borrowed a peculiar desperation from the tenderest
sentiments. For the sake of those dependent on him, a man might not
choose, but must plunge into the foul fight,—cheat, overreach,
supplant, defraud, buy below worth and sell above, break down the
business by which his neighbor fed his young ones, tempt men to buy
what they ought not and to sell what they should not, grind his
laborers, sweat his debtors, cozen his creditors. Though a man sought
it carefully with tears, it was hard to find a way in which he could
earn a living and provide for his family except by pressing in before
some weaker rival and taking the food from his mouth. Even the
ministers of religion were not exempt from this cruel necessity. While
they warned their flocks against the love of money, regard for their
families compelled them to keep an outlook for the pecuniary prizes of
their calling. Poor fellows, theirs was indeed a trying business,
preaching to men a generosity and unselfishness which they and
everybody knew would, in the existing state of the world, reduce to
poverty those who should practice them, laying down laws of conduct
which the law of self-preservation compelled men to break. Looking on
the inhuman spectacle of society, these worthy men bitterly bemoaned
the depravity of human nature; as if angelic nature would not have
been debauched in such a devil's school! Ah, my friends, believe me,
it is not now in this happy age that humanity is proving the divinity
within it. It was rather in those evil days when not even the fight
for life with one another, the struggle for mere existence, in which
mercy was folly, could wholly banish generosity and kindness from the
earth.
It is not hard to understand the desperation with which men and
women, who under other conditions would have been full of gentleness
and ruth, fought and tore each other in the scramble for gold, when we
realize what it meant to miss it, what poverty was in that day. For
the body it was hunger and thirst, torment by heat and frost, in
sickness neglect, in health unremitting toil; for the moral nature it
meant oppression, contempt, and the patient endurance of indignity,
brutish associations from infancy, the loss of all the innocence of
childhood, the grace of womanhood, the dignity of manhood; for the
mind it meant the death of ignorance, the torpor of all those
faculties which distinguish us from brutes, the reduction of life to a
round of bodily functions.
Ah, my friends, if such a fate as this were offered you and your
children as the only alternative of success in the accumulation of
wealth, how long do you fancy would you be in sinking to the moral
level of your ancestors?
Some two or three centuries ago an act of barbarity was committed in
India, which, though the number of lives destroyed was but a few
score, was attended by such peculiar horrors that its memory is likely
to be perpetual. A number of English prisoners were shut up in a room
containing not enough air to supply one-tenth their number. The
unfortunates were gallant men, devoted comrades in service, but, as
the agonies of suffocation began to take hold on them, they forgot all
else, and became involved in a hideous struggle, each one for himself,
and against all others, to force a way to one of the small apertures
of the prison at which alone it was possible to get a breath of air.
It was a struggle in which men became beasts, and the recital of its
horrors by the few survivors so shocked our forefathers that for a
century later we find it a stock reference in their literature as a
typical illustration of the extreme possibilities of human misery, as
shocking in its moral as its physical aspect. They could scarcely have
anticipated that to us the Black Hole of Calcutta, with its press of
maddened men tearing and trampling one another in the struggle to win
a place at the breathing holes, would seem a striking type of the
society of their age. It lacked something of being a complete type,
however, for in the Calcutta Black Hole there were no tender women, no
little children and old men and women, no cripples. They were at least
all men, strong to bear, who suffered.
When we reflect that the ancient order of which I have been speaking
was prevalent up to the end of the nineteenth century, while to us the
new order which succeeded it already seems antique, even our parents
having known no other, we cannot fail to be astounded at the
suddenness with which a transition so profound beyond all previous
experience of the race must have been effected. Some observation of
the state of men's minds during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century will, however, in great measure, dissipate this astonishment.
Though general intelligence in the modern sense could not be said to
exist in any community at that time, yet, as compared with previous
generations, the one then on the stage was intelligent. The inevitable
consequence of even this comparative degree of intelligence had been a
perception of the evils of society, such as had never before been
general. It is quite true that these evils had been even worse, much
worse, in previous ages. It was the increased intelligence of the
masses which made the difference, as the dawn reveals the squalor of
surroundings which in the darkness may have seemed tolerable. The
keynote of the literature of the period was one of compassion for the
poor and unfortunate, and indignant outcry against the failure of the
social machinery to ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain from
these outbursts that the moral hideousness of the spectacle about them
was, at least by flashes, fully realized by the best of the men of
that time, and that the lives of some of the more sensitive and
generous hearted of them were rendered wellnigh unendurable by the
intensity of their sympathies.
Although the idea of the vital unity of the family of mankind, the
reality of human brotherhood, was very far from being apprehended by
them as the moral axiom it seems to us, yet it is a mistake to suppose
that there was no feeling at all corresponding to it. I could read you
passages of great beauty from some of their writers which show that
the conception was clearly attained by a few, and no doubt vaguely by
many more. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the nineteenth
century was in name Christian, and the fact that the entire commercial
and industrial frame of society was the embodiment of the
anti-Christian spirit must have had some weight, though I admit it was
strangely little, with the nominal followers of Jesus Christ.
When we inquire why it did not have more, why, in general, long after
a vast majority of men had agreed as to the crying abuses of the
existing social arrangement, they still tolerated it, or contented
themselves with talking of petty reforms in it, we come upon an
extraordinary fact. It was the sincere belief of even the best of men
at that epoch that the only stable elements in human nature, on which
a social system could be safely founded, were its worst propensities.
They had been taught and believed that greed and self-seeking were all
that held mankind together, and that all human associations would fall
to pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives or
curb their operation. In a word, they believed—even those who longed
to believe otherwise—the exact reverse of what seems to us
self-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualities
of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the
cohesive force of society. It seemed reasonable to them that men lived
together solely for the purpose of overreaching and oppressing one
another, and of being overreached and oppressed, and that while a
society that gave full scope to these propensities could stand, there
would be little chance for one based on the idea of co=F6peration for
the benefit of all. It seems absurd to expect any one to believe that
convictions like these were ever seriously entertained by men; but
that they were not only entertained by our great-grandfathers, but
were responsible for the long delay in doing away with the ancient
order, after a conviction of its intolerable abuses had become
general, is as well established as any fact in history can be. Just
here you will find the explanation of the profound pessimism of the
literature of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the note of
melancholy in its poetry, and the cynicism of its humor.
Feeling that the condition of the race was unendurable, they had no
clear hope of anything better. They believed that the evolution of
humanity had resulted in leading it into a _cul de sac_, and that
there was no way of getting forward. The frame of men's minds at this
time is strikingly illustrated by treatises which have come down to
us, and may even now be consulted in our libraries by the curious, in
which laborious arguments are pursued to prove that despite the evil
plight of men, life was still, by some slight preponderance of
considerations, probably better worth living than leaving. Despising
themselves, they despised their Creator. There was a general decay of
religious belief. Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly veiled by
doubt and dread, alone lighted up the chaos of earth. That men should
doubt Him whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread the hands that
moulded them, seems to us indeed a pitiable insanity; but we must
remember that children who are brave by day have sometimes foolish
fears at night. The dawn has come since then. It is very easy to
believe in the fatherhood of God in the twentieth century.
Briefly, as must needs be in a discourse of this character, I have
adverted to some of the causes which had prepared men's minds for the
change from the old to the new order, as well as some causes of the
conservatism of despair which for a while held it back after the time
was ripe. To wonder at the rapidity with which the change was
completed after its possibility was first entertained is to forget the
intoxicating effect of hope upon minds long accustomed to despair. The
sunburst, after so long and dark a night, must needs have had a
dazzling effect. From the moment men allowed themselves to believe
that humanity after all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squat
stature was not the measure of its possible growth, but that it stood
upon the verge of an avatar of limitless development, the reaction
must needs have been overwhelming. It is evident that nothing was able
to stand against the enthusiasm which the new faith inspired.
Here, at last, men must have felt, was a cause compared with which
the grandest of historic causes had been trivial. It was doubtless
because it could have commanded millions of martyrs, that none were
needed. The change of a dynasty in a petty kingdom of the old world
often cost more lives than did the revolution which set the feet of
the human race at last in the right way.
Doubtless it ill beseems one to whom the boon of life in our
resplendent age has been vouchsafed to wish his destiny other, and yet
I have often thought that I would fain exchange my share in this
serene and golden day for a place in that stormy epoch of transition,
when heroes burst the barred gate of the future and revealed to the
kindling gaze of a hopeless race, in place of the blank wall that had
closed its path, a vista of progress whose end, for very excess of
light, still dazzles us. Ah, my friends! who will say that to have
lived then, when the weakest influence was a lever to whose touch the
centuries trembled, was not worth a share even in this era of
fruition?
You know the story of that last, greatest, and most bloodless of
revolutions. In the time of one generation men laid aside the social
traditions and practices of barbarians, and assumed a social order
worthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to be predatory in their
habits, they became co-workers, and found in fraternity, at once, the
science of wealth and happiness. 'What shall I eat and drink, and
wherewithal shall I be clothed?' stated as a problem beginning and
ending in self, had been an anxious and an endless one. But when once
it was conceived, not from the individual, but the fraternal
standpoint, 'What shall we eat and drink, and wherewithal shall we be
clothed?'—its difficulties vanished.
Poverty with servitude had been the result, for the mass of humanity,
of attempting to solve the problem of maintenance from the individual
standpoint, but no sooner had the nation become the sole capitalist
and employer than not alone did plenty replace poverty, but the last
vestige of the serfdom of man to man disappeared from earth. Human
slavery, so often vainly scotched, at last was killed. The means of
subsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by employer to
employed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock as
among children at the father's table. It was impossible for a man any
longer to use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His esteem
was the only sort of gain he could thenceforth make out of him. There
was no more either arrogance or servility in the relations of human
beings to one another. For the first time since the creation every man
stood up straight before God. The fear of want and the lust of gain
became extinct motives when abundance was assured to all and
immoderate possessions made impossible of attainment. There were no
more beggars nor almoners. Equity left charity without an occupation.
The ten commandments became wellnigh obsolete in a world where there
was no temptation to theft, no occasion to lie either for fear or
favor, no room for envy where all were equal, and little provocation
to violence where men were disarmed of power to injure one another.
Humanity's ancient dream of liberty, equality, fraternity, mocked by
so many ages, at last was realized.
As in the old society the generous, the just, the tender-hearted had
been placed at a disadvantage by the possession of those qualities, so
in the new society the cold-hearted, the greedy, and self-seeking
found themselves out of joint with the world. Now that the conditions
of life for the first time ceased to operate as a forcing process to
develop the brutal qualities of human nature, and the premium which
had heretofore encouraged selfishness was not only removed, but placed
upon unselfishness, it was for the first time possible to see what
unperverted human nature really was like. The depraved tendencies,
which had previously overgrown and obscured the better to so large an
extent, now withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the nobler
qualities showed a sudden luxuriance which turned cynics into
panegyrists and for the first time in human history tempted mankind to
fall in love with itself. Soon was fully revealed, what the divines
and philosophers of the old world never would have believed, that
human nature in its essential qualities is good, not bad, that men by
their natural intention and structure are generous, not selfish,
pitiful, not cruel, sympathetic, not arrogant, godlike in aspirations,
instinct with divinest impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice,
images of God indeed, not the travesties upon Him they had seemed. The
constant pressure, through numberless generations, of conditions of
life which might have perverted angels, had not been able to
essentially alter the natural nobility of the stock, and these
conditions once removed, like a bent tree, it had sprung back to its
normal uprightness.
To put the whole matter in the nutshell of a parable, let me compare
humanity in the olden time to a rosebush planted in a swamp, watered
with black bog-water, breathing miasmatic fogs by day, and chilled
with poison dews at night. Innumerable generations of gardeners had
done their best to make it bloom, but beyond an occasional half-opened
bud with a worm at the heart, their efforts had been unsuccessful.
Many, indeed, claimed that the bush was no rosebush at all, but a
noxious shrub, fit only to be uprooted and burned. The gardeners, for
the most part, however, held that the bush belonged to the rose
family, but had some ineradicable taint about it, which prevented the
buds from coming out, and accounted for its generally sickly
condition. There were a few, indeed, who maintained that the stock was
good enough, that the trouble was in the bog, and that under more
favorable conditions the plant might be expected to do better. But
these persons were not regular gardeners, and being condemned by the
latter as mere theorists and day dreamers, were for the most part, so
regarded by the people. Moreover, urged some eminent moral
philosophers, even conceding for the sake of the argument that the
bush might possibly do better elsewhere, it was a more valuable
discipline for the buds to try to bloom in a bog than it would be
under more favorable conditions. The buds that succeeded in opening
might indeed be very rare, and the flowers pale and scentless, but
they represented far more moral effort than if they had bloomed
spontaneously in a garden.
The regular gardeners and the moral philosophers had their way. The
bush remained rooted in the bog, and the old course of treatment went
on. Continually new varieties of forcing mixtures were applied to the
roots, and more recipes than could be numbered, each declared by its
advocates the best and only suitable preparation, were used to kill
the vermin and remove the mildew. This went on a very long time.
Occasionally some one claimed to observe a slight improvement in the
appearance of the bush, but there were quite as many who declared that
it did not look so well as it used to. On the whole there could not be
said to be any marked change. Finally, during a period of general
despondency as to the prospects of the bush where it was, the idea of
transplanting it was again mooted, and this time found favor. 'Let us
try it,' was the general voice. 'Perhaps it may thrive better
elsewhere, and here it is certainly doubtful if it be worth
cultivating longer.' So it came about that the rosebush of humanity
was transplanted, and set in sweet, warm, dry earth, where the sun
bathed it, the stars wooed it, and the south wind caressed it. Then it
appeared that it was indeed a rosebush. The vermin and the mildew
disappeared, and the bush was covered with most beautiful red roses,
whose fragrance filled the world.
It is a pledge of the destiny appointed for us that the Creator has
set in our hearts an infinite standard of achievement, judged by which
our past attainments seem always insignificant, and the goal never
nearer. Had our forefathers conceived a state of society in which men
should live together like brethren dwelling in unity, without strifes
or envying, violence or overreaching, and where, at the price of a
degree of labor not greater than health demands, in their chosen
occupations, they should be wholly freed from care for the morrow and
left with no more concern for their livelihood than trees which are
watered by unfailing streams,—had they conceived such a condition, I
say, it would have seemed to them nothing less than paradise. They
would have confounded it with their idea of heaven, nor dreamed that
there could possibly lie further beyond anything to be desired or
striven for.
But how is it with us who stand on this height which they gazed up
to? Already we have wellnigh forgotten, except when it is especially
called to our minds by some occasion like the present, that it was
not always with men as it is now. It is a strain on our imaginations
to conceive the social arrangements of our immediate ancestors. We
find them grotesque. The solution of the problem of physical
maintenance so as to banish care and crime, so far from seeming to us
an ultimate attainment, appears but as a preliminary to anything like
real human progress. We have but relieved ourselves of an impertinent
and needless harassment which hindered our ancestors from undertaking
the real ends of existence. We are merely stripped for the race; no
more. We are like a child which has just learned to stand upright and
to walk. It is a great event, from the child's point of view, when he
first walks. Perhaps he fancies that there can be little beyond that
achievement, but a year later he has forgotten that he could not
always walk. His horizon did but widen when he rose, and enlarge as he
moved. A great event indeed, in one sense, was his first step, but
only as a beginning, not as the end. His true career was but then
first entered on. The enfranchisement of humanity in the last century,
from mental and physical absorption in working and scheming for the
mere bodily necessities, may be regarded as a species of second birth
of the race, without which its first birth to an existence that was
but a burden would forever have remained unjustified, but whereby it
is now abundantly vindicated. Since then, humanity has entered on a
new phase of spiritual development, an evolution of higher faculties,
the very existence of which in human nature our ancestors scarcely
suspected. In place of the dreary hopelessness of the nineteenth
century, its profound pessimism as to the future of humanity, the
animating idea of the present age is an enthusiastic conception of the
opportunities of our earthly existence, and the unbounded
possibilities of human nature. The betterment of mankind from
generation to generation, physically, mentally, morally, is recognized
as the one great object supremely worthy of effort and of sacrifice.
We believe the race for the first time to have entered on the
realization of God's ideal of it, and each generation must now be a
step upward.
Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall have
passed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end is
lost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God 'who is our
home,' the return of the individual by the way of death, and the
return of the race by the fulfilment of the evolution, when the divine
secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With a tear for
the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our
eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended.
Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens
are before it.
