Chapter I: A Sharp Cross-Examiner

With many expressions of sympathy and interest Edith listened to the story of my dream. When, finally, I had made an end, she remained musing.

“What are you thinking about?” I said.

“I was thinking,” she answered, “how it would have been if your dream had been true.”

“True!” I exclaimed. “How could it have been true?”

“I mean,” she said, “if it had all been a dream, as you supposed it was in your nightmare, and you had never really seen our Republic of the Golden Rule or me, but had only slept a night and dreamed the whole thing about us. And suppose you had gone forth just as you did in your dream, and had passed up and down telling men of the terrible folly and wickedness of their way of life and how much nobler and happier a way there was. Just think what good you might have done, how you might have helped people in those days when they needed help so much. It seems to me you must be almost sorry you came back to us.”

“You look as if you were almost sorry yourself,” I said, for her wistful expression seemed susceptible of that interpretation.

“Oh, no,” she answered, smiling. “It was only on your own account. As for me, I have very good reasons for being glad that you came back.”

“I should say so, indeed. Have you reflected that if I had dreamed it all you would have had no existence save as a figment in the brain of a sleeping man a hundred years ago?”

“I had not thought of that part of it,” she said smiling and still half serious; “yet if I could have been more useful to humanity as a fiction than as a reality, I ought not to have minded the--the inconvenience.”

But I replied that I greatly feared no amount of opportunity to help mankind in general would have reconciled me to life anywhere or under any conditions after leaving her behind in a dream--a confession of shameless selfishness which she was pleased to pass over without special rebuke, in consideration, no doubt, of my unfortunate bringing up.

“Besides,” I resumed, being willing a little further to vindicate myself, “it would not have done any good. I have just told you how in my nightmare last night, when I tried to tell my contemporaries and even my best friends about the nobler way men might live together, they derided me as a fool and madman. That is exactly what they would have done in reality had the dream been true and I had gone about preaching as in the case you supposed.”

“Perhaps a few might at first have acted as you dreamed they did,” she replied. “Perhaps they would not at once have liked the idea of economic equality, fearing that it might mean a leveling down for them, and not understanding that it would presently mean a leveling up of all together to a vastly higher plane of life and happiness, of material welfare and moral dignity than the most fortunate had ever enjoyed. But even if the rich had at first mistaken you for an enemy to their class, the poor, the great masses of the poor, the real nation, they surely from the first would have listened as for their lives, for to them your story would have meant glad tidings of great joy.”

“I do not wonder that you think so,” I answered, “but, though I am still learning the A B C of this new world, I knew my contemporaries, and I know that it would not have been as you fancy. The poor would have listened no better than the rich, for, though poor and rich in my day were at bitter odds in everything else, they were agreed in believing that there must always be rich and poor, and that a condition of material equality was impossible. It used to be commonly said, and it often seemed true, that the social reformer who tried to better the condition of the people found a more discouraging obstacle in the hopelessness of the masses he would raise than in the active resistance of the few, whose superiority was threatened. And indeed, Edith, to be fair to my own class, I am bound to say that with the best of the rich it was often as much this same hopelessness as deliberate selfishness that made them what we used to call conservative. So you see, it would have done no good even if I had gone to preaching as you fancied. The poor would have regarded my talk about the possibility of an equality of wealth as a fairy tale, not worth a laboring man’s time to listen to. Of the rich, the baser sort would have mocked and the better sort would have sighed, but none would have given ear seriously.”

But Edith smiled serenely.

“It seems very audacious for me to try to correct your impressions of your own contemporaries and of what they might be expected to think and do, but you see the peculiar circumstances give me a rather unfair advantage. Your knowledge of your times necessarily stops short with 1887, when you became oblivious of the course of events. I, on the other hand, having gone to school in the twentieth century, and been obliged, much against my will, to study nineteenth-century history, naturally know what happened after the date at which your knowledge ceased. I know, impossible as it may seem to you, that you had scarcely fallen into that long sleep before the American people began to be deeply and widely stirred with aspirations for an equal order such as we enjoy, and that very soon the political movement arose which, after various mutations, resulted early in the twentieth century in overthrowing the old system and setting up the present one.”

This was indeed interesting information to me, but when I began to question Edith further, she sighed and shook her head.

“Having tried to show my superior knowledge, I must now confess my ignorance. All I know is the bare fact that the revolutionary movement began, as I said, very soon after you fell asleep. Father must tell you the rest. I might as well admit while I am about it, for you would soon find it out, that I know almost nothing either as to the Revolution or nineteenth-century matters generally. You have no idea how hard I have been trying to post myself on the subject so as to be able to talk intelligently with you, but I fear it is of no use. I could not understand it in school and can not seem to understand it any better now. More than ever this morning I am sure that I never shall. Since you have been telling me how the old world appeared to you in that dream, your talk has brought those days so terribly near that I can almost see them, and yet I can not say that they seem a bit more intelligible than before.”

“Things were bad enough and black enough certainly,” I said; “but I don’t see what there was particularly unintelligible about them. What is the difficulty?”

“The main difficulty comes from the complete lack of agreement between the pretensions of your contemporaries about the way their society was organized and the actual facts as given in the histories.”

“For example?” I queried.

“I don’t suppose there is much use in trying to explain my trouble,” she said. “You will only think me stupid for my pains, but I’ll try to make you see what I mean. You ought to be able to clear up the matter if anybody can. You have just been telling me about the shockingly unequal conditions of the people, the contrasts of waste and want, the pride and power of the rich, the abjectness and servitude of the poor, and all the rest of the dreadful story.”

“Yes.”

“It appears that these contrasts were almost as great as at any previous period of history.”

“It is doubtful,” I replied, “if there was ever a greater disparity between the conditions of different classes than you would find in a half hour’s walk in Boston, New York, Chicago, or any other great city of America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.”

“And yet,” said Edith, “it appears from all the books that meanwhile the Americans’ great boast was that they differed from all other and former nations in that they were free and equal. One is constantly coming upon this phrase in the literature of the day. Now, you have made it clear that they were neither free nor equal in any ordinary sense of the word, but were divided as mankind had always been before into rich and poor, masters and servants. Won’t you please tell me, then, what they meant by calling themselves free and equal?”

“It was meant, I suppose, that they were all equal before the law.”

“That means in the courts. And were the rich and poor equal in the courts? Did they receive the same treatment?”

“I am bound to say,” I replied, “that they were nowhere else more unequal. The law applied in terms to all alike, but not in fact. There was more difference in the position of the rich and the poor man before the law than in any other respect. The rich were practically above the law, the poor under its wheels.”

“In what respect, then, were the rich and poor equal?”

“They were said to be equal in opportunities.”

“Opportunities for what?”

“For bettering themselves, for getting rich, for getting ahead of others in the struggle for wealth.”

“It seems to me that only meant, if it were true, not that all were equal, but that all had an equal chance to make themselves unequal. But was it true that all had equal opportunities for getting rich and bettering themselves?”

“It may have been so to some extent at one time when the country was new,” I replied, “but it was no more so in my day. Capital had practically monopolized all economic opportunities by that time; there was no opening in business enterprise for those without large capital save by some extraordinary fortune.”

“But surely,” said Edith, “there must have been, in order to give at least a color to all this boasting about equality, some one respect in which the people were really equal?”

“Yes, there was. They were political equals. They all had one vote alike, and the majority was the supreme lawgiver.”

“So the books say, but that only makes the actual condition of things more absolutely unaccountable.”

“Why so?”

“Why, because if these people all had an equal voice in the government--these toiling, starving, freezing, wretched masses of the poor--why did they not without a moment’s delay put an end to the inequalities from which they suffered?”

“Very likely,” she added, as I did not at once reply, “I am only showing how stupid I am by saying this. Doubtless I am overlooking some important fact, but did you not say that all the people, at least all the men, had a voice in the government?”

“Certainly; by the latter part of the nineteenth century manhood suffrage had become practically universal in America.”

“That is to say, the people through their chosen agents made all the laws. Is that what you mean?”

“Certainly.”

“But I remember you had Constitutions of the nation and of the States. Perhaps they prevented the people from doing quite what they wished.”

“No; the Constitutions were only a little more fundamental sort of laws. The majority made and altered them at will. The people were the sole and supreme final power, and their will was absolute.”

“If, then, the majority did not like any existing arrangement, or think it to their advantage, they could change it as radically as they wished?”

“Certainly; the popular majority could do anything if it was large and determined enough.”

“And the majority, I understand, were the poor, not the rich--the ones who had the wrong side of the inequalities that prevailed?”

“Emphatically so; the rich were but a handful comparatively.”

“Then there was nothing whatever to prevent the people at any time, if they just willed it, from making an end of their sufferings and organizing a system like ours which would guarantee their equality and prosperity?”

“Nothing whatever.”

“Then once more I ask you to kindly tell me why, in the name of common sense, they didn’t do it at once and be happy instead of making a spectacle of themselves so woeful that even a hundred years after it makes us cry?”

“Because,” I replied, “they were taught and believed that the regulation of industry and commerce and the production and distribution of wealth was something wholly outside of the proper province of government.”

“But, dear me, Julian, life itself and everything that meanwhile makes life worth living, from the satisfaction of the most primary physical needs to the gratification of the most refined tastes, all that belongs to the development of mind as well as body, depend first, last, and always on the manner in which the production and distribution of wealth is regulated. Surely that must have been as true in your day as ours.”

“Of course.”

“And yet you tell me, Julian, that the people, after having abolished the rule of kings and taken the supreme power of regulating their affairs into their own hands, deliberately consented to exclude from their jurisdiction the control of the most important, and indeed the only really important, class of their interests.”