Part 2

It is now nearly two hundred years since women have enjoyed the same freedom and rights as men. It is interesting and curious to note the changes, both upon the character and nature of the two sexes, which has been the result of this development. One’s first impression, in coming here, is that women are the sole inhabitants of the country. One sees them everywhere--in all the public offices, as heads of departments, as government clerks, as officials, as engineers, machinists, aeronauts, tax collectors, firemen, filling, in fact, every office and vocation in civil, political and social life. The few men--by comparison, whom I saw seemed to me to be allowed to exist as specimen examples of a fallen race. Of course, this view is more or less exaggeration. But the women here do appear to possess by far the most energy, vigor, vitality and ambition. Their predominance in office just now is owing to their over-powering number, the women’s vote polled being ten to one over that of the men. This strong sex influence has been fruitful in greatly changing and modifying the domestic, social and political laws of the community.

Women, for instance, having satisfactorily emancipated themselves from the bondage of domestic drudgery and the dominion of servants, by means of the improvement in machinery and the invention of the famous culinary conduits, found one obstacle still in their path to complete and co-equal man-freedom. There still remained the children to be taken care of and brought up. As motherhood came in course of time to be considered in its true light, as perhaps the chief cause of the degradation of women, it was finally abolished by act of legislature. Women were still to continue to bear children, or else the socialistic society itself would cease to be. A law was passed providing that children almost immediately after birth, should be brought up, educated and trained under state direction to be returned to their parents when fully grown, and ready for their duties as men and women citizens. In this way women stand at last on as absolutely equal a physical plane with men as it is possible to make them.

It has followed, of course, that with the jurisdiction of the state over the children of the community, all family life has died out. Men and women live together as man and wife, but the relation between them has become more nominal than real. It is significant of the changes that have been brought about between the sexes, that the word “home” has entirely dropped out of the language. A man’s house has in truth ceased to be his home. There are no children there to greet him, his wife, who is his comrade, a man, a citizen like himself, is as rarely at home as he. Their food can be eaten anywhere--there is no common board; there is not even a servant to welcome the master with a smile. The word _wife_ has also lost all its original significance. It stands for nothing. Husband and wife are in reality two men having equal rights, with the same range of occupation, the same duties as citizens to perform, the same haunts and the same dreary leisure.

Is it therefore, my dear Hannevig, to be wondered at, that all ideas of love, and that all strong mutual attraction and affections should have died out between the sexes? Man loves, longs for passionately and protects with tender solicitude only that which is difficult to conquer. The imagination must at least be inflamed. But where there is no struggle, no opposition, no conditions which breed longing, desire, or the poetry of a little healthy despair, how is love or any sentiment at all to be awakened or kindled? Here there is no parental authority to make a wall between lovers, nor is there inequality of fortunes, nor any marked difference between the two sexes, even in their daily duties or in their lives. I am more and more impressed with the conviction, as I look into this question--this question of what we should consider the growth of an abnormal indifference between the sexes--that the latter cause is perhaps the one which has been chiefly instrumental in the bringing about so complete a change over the face of the passions. Woman has placed herself by the side of man, as his co-equal in labor and vocation, only to make the real distance between them the greater. She has gained her independence at the expense of her strongest appeal to man, her power as mistress, wife and mother. How can a man get up any very vivid or profound sentiment or affection for these men-women--who are neither mothers nor housekeepers, who differ in no smallest degree from themselves in their pursuits and occupation? Constant and perpetual companionship, from earliest infancy to manhood and old age has resulted in blunting all sense of any real difference between the sexes. Whatever slight inequalities may still exist between men and women in the matter of muscular energy or physical strength is more than counterbalanced by the enormous disproportion between them, numerically, as voters.

Some very curious and important political changes have been effected by the preponderance of the women’s vote.

Wars, for instance, have been within the last fifty years declared illegal. Woman found that whereas she was eminently fitted for all men’s avocations in time of peace, when it came to war she made a very poor figure of a soldier. Wars, therefore, were soon voted down; foreign difficulties were adjusted by arbitration. As women, as a rule, were sent on these foreign diplomatic missions, I have heard it wickedly whispered that the chief cause of the usually speedy conclusion of any trouble with a foreign court was because of the babel of tongues which ensued: a foreign court being willing to concede any thing rather than to continue negotiations with women-diplomatists. But this of course, is to be put down to pure maliciousness. Women since time immemorial, have had the best of man whenever it came to contests of the tongue, and this appears to be the one insignia of their former prestige which the sex insists on claiming.

In my next I shall try to give you some conception of the position which man occupies, as a citizen and as worker in this community. I shall, I think, also be able to give you some most interesting results of the effects produced by the communistic, socialistic principles which have been incorporated into the constitution of this people.

It is late and I am weary, so farewell for a few days.

Ever and ever, --------.

V.

;

More and more, as I study these institutions, am I reminded of the resemblance between these American socialists and the ancient Spartans. The Spartan was also a part of the State--had all things on a grand Communal scale--had public games, public theaters, baths, museums and festivals, was brought up by the state, his womenkind being considered as a part of it.

In this modern community, however, there are two important features which the simpler Spartans did not have to cope with. The Greeks stood at the dawn of civilization. The American finds himself at what he considers is the completion of it. Break away from his past as hard as ever he may try, he has still found himself heir to this past, and his heredity dominates him in spite of all his attempts to throw it off. The Greeks, also, were a warlike people, and the American is a peace lover, preferring the pipe to the sword. Perhaps above all else in the sum of these differences ought we to remember, the great factor of machinery as a substitute for manual labor. The sword raised man out of the dust. The piston has levelled him with it. I believe, my dear Hannevig, that if machinery had never been invented, socialism would never have been dreamed of. Machinery was the true cause of the conflict between capital and labor, and not the unequal distribution of land, as the great founder of this Communal Society, Henry George, asserted in this book, the bible of this people. Machinery needed capital to run it, and was more or less indifferent to labor. The laborer, with machinery as his rival, stood a far less possible chance of becoming a capitalist himself than he did when battling against men; his duties more and more closely resembling in their monotony and routine, the very machine that he was called on to feed, in turn re-acting on his natural aptitude.

However, to go into the depths of this knotty question involves too much space for a letter. Let me, instead recall to your mind, as I have recently done to my own, the chief features of importance in the history of this people which have placed them where they now are.

You recollect, of course, the terrible reign of blood that took place during the awful conflict between the republican Americans and the socialists and anarchists in 1900. The war began, nominally, as an act of resistance on the part of the Americans against the encroaching and insistent demands of the socialists, demands covering the abolishment of private ownership in land, of the division of property, both real and personal, and the overthrow, generally of all the then existing economic and social institutions. These socialists and anarchists represented the foreign element in the country, those who had imported their revolutionary doctrines with them. (If I remember rightly the early Americans had given all rights of citizenship to this foreign contingency, in a moment of mistaken Republican zeal, a political mistake they lived to rue bitterly later). Well, at first in this anarchist war, the Americans won, did they not? I find my memory tripping me at times--possibly would have continued to win had the war been conducted on strict military tactics. But the anarchists finding themselves unsuccessful as soldiers and warriors, resorted to the ingenious means of destroying their enemies by the use of explosives. Dynamite accomplished what the cannon and the bayonet were powerless to effect. Towns, cities and even the villages and hamlets, were lighted by the torch of electricity and seared level with the ground. Dynamite was reserved for the armies and for individual offenders. During that reign of destruction, it seemed as if not a man, woman or child would survive to carry even the memory of the great tragedy to their graves with them.

However, since the anarchist’s plan was to reconstruct the whole face of society on a new basis, it was to be expected, of course, that the revolution they undertook as the means of effecting this would be carried through at whatever cost.

There is one feature of this war which has always struck me as possessing a very humorous side. The anarchists, you remember, were foreigners, chiefly Germans, Irishmen and a few Russians. When the war was ended, by the destruction of very nearly all the Republican contingency, the anarchists broke out into dissension among themselves. The German element would not submit to Irish dictation--the latter leaders having, apparently, a great opinion of their own talent for political leadership--and the Irish in turn violently resisted the German dicta. A veritable anarchy ensued, a war so fierce that it looked at one time as if the whole continent might be left a howling wilderness, with neither conqueror nor conquered to enter and take possession of what was now, in truth, but a desert. Fortunately, however, a few of the Americans had survived. Among them were some of the descendants of the ancient New England statesmen. These men, although under sentence of death, were liberated, that they might act as peacemakers between the two factions. Americans, you see, had had so much experience in reconciling, conciliating and pacifying the difficulties between the Irish and German parties during the American Republican era, that these survivors were eminently fitted to adjust affairs at issue between them now. The American Council decided that the Irishmen should draw up the laws and regulations for the new Communal and Socialistic constitution, while the Germans should see that the new society was properly organized; a decision which proves the real genius for statescraft which these ingenious Americans possessed. For Irishmen are proverbially affluent of ideas and incapable of putting them into action, unless it be violent action, while the Germans have proved themselves practical organizers and ideal political policemen. The sagacity of the old American Republicans was shown in the manner in which they themselves, in their era of power, had made use of the distinguishing qualities of the two races, when such hordes overflowed the land during the great emigration period. The Irishmen were kept in the large cities, where they were allowed to misgovern the towns to their hearts’ desire, being thus given a vent for their turbulent political spirit; while the Germans, on the contrary, were sent into the still unconquered wilderness to turn it into a garden by their industry and thrift. The American having thus made use of the Irishmen to run his political machinery for him, and of the Germans to extend the territorial lines of order and civilization, secured unto himself all his own time for money making. Hence the colossal American fortunes, which, as we read of them now, seem to us like a tale of magicians. Such a policy must have seemed to a nineteenth-century American as a very shrewd and ingenious way of utilizing elements which otherwise might prove dangerous. The policy was, in truth, a fatally short-sighted one, as was proved later; since it was the enormous accumulation of fortunes in a few hands and the supposed tyranny of capital which wrought to a frenzy the envy and anger of the foreign poorer classes, then under the sway of the anarchist revolutionists.

After the American statesmen had made peace between the conquering but quarrelsome anarchists, these latter set about organizing the new society. Anarchy itself, although the principles for which it had fought and conquered now prevailed, it was found, must subordinate itself to some form or order before it could hope to enforce order upon others.

The Anarchist’s war-cry had been, as you remember--Away with private property! away with all authority! away with the State! away with all political machinery! But now the leaders discovered that a belief in the reign of anarchy was one thing, and its practice was quite another. For a time, as you know, there was a terrible period of disorder, during which the grossest excesses were practiced under the name of “Perfect Individualism,” “a common property, common freedom, common distribution for all.” After a few years of the wildest indulgence, rapacity, crime, and cruelty--for, of course, there being no government, there could be neither restraints imposed nor crimes punished--the people themselves at last began to cry aloud for some form of government which should include at least order and decency. The Socialists’ doctrines were then decided upon as being more in conformity with the demands of the people and with the necessities of organizing a state than were the formless theories of the anarchists.

The leaders among the people, as has been done so many times before in the history of the world, began again the making of new laws, for the establishment of an ideal government and the forming of a new constitution which was to insure perfect and complete happiness to the individual and the race.

For over a hundred and fifty years, now, this ideal socialistic society had existed, and what are the results? No people ever assuredly had a more wonderful chance at constructing a society on an ideal basis than had these socialists. Think of it! An entire continent at their disposal, their enemies or opponents all killed or in exile and they themselves united in desire and in political interest. Well, if some of the ineradicable, indestructible principles in human nature could be changed as easily as laws are made and unmade, the chances for an ideal realization of the happiness of mankind would be the more easily attained. But the Socialists committed the grave error of omitting to count some of these determining human laws into the sum of their calculations.

Time and paper are, however, finite, and also, presumably, your patience. I will postpone until my next the few remaining conclusions to which a brief study of this people and their government have led

Your faithful

WOLFGANG.

VI.

DEAR FRIEND: The longer I stay here the more I am impressed with the profound melancholy which appears to have taken possession of this people. The men, particularly, seem sunk in a torpor of dejection and settled apathy. The women, although by no means so vivacious and vigorous as our women, are, however, far more animated, and seem to have a keener relish for life, than the men. Probably the comparatively recent emancipation of the women, their new political and social freedom, adds a zest to the routine of life here which men do not feel.

So universal is the dreary aspect of the people, whether at work or play--and they play, I observe, far more languidly than they work--that the type of face among them has undergone a strange and interesting transformation. You remember in the old prints the typical “Yankee” face, with its keen, penetrating eye, its courageous, determined chin, its intelligent brow, and its extraordinarily shrewd and intently alert expression. This vivacity and energy, once the chief charm of the American face, has entirely disappeared. In its stead, imagine wooden, almost sodden features, heavy, dull eyes, receding chins, and a brow on which dulness that very nearly approaches stupidity is writ in large letters. On all the faces is a stereotyped expression, a mingling of discontent and dejection. There is the same lack of variety of types among the faces I have noticed, as there is a want of contrast in the houses and streets. The entire population appears to have one face; wherever one turns one sees it repeated _ad infinitum_, whether it be that of man or woman, youth or old age.

I have accounted to myself for this curious physiological uniformity by finding in it simply a reflection of the uniformity seen in the life and occupations of this people. The race having been leveled to a common plane, there has been a gradual dying out of individuality. The inevitable curtailment of individual aims, individual struggle, individual ambitions, has naturally resulted in producing a featureless type of character, common to all. Since, of course, it is character alone which moulds feature, this people, being all more or less alike, have come, in process of time, to look alike. Nature, after all, is only clay in the potter’s hand; man, with his laws and creeds, fashions in the end his own face.

I found it, however, far more difficult to account for the cloud of melancholy and dejection which appears to have settled upon this people, than to seek the causes of the above physiological aspect. I asked myself, again and again, why should this people, of all people, be full of this discontent and unhappiness? Haven’t they come to the realization of all their dreams? Have they not attained to the very summit and to the full glory of the possession of their social, civic and political desires and aspirations? Is there not equality of sex? Has not leisure instead of labor become a law? Is not private property abolished--is not the land the property of the State--the wage system become a thing of the past, and the possession of capital made a crime punishable by law? Does not the State also exist for the people, educating them, training them for their work in life, distributing among them any surplus funds that the public treasury may accumulate, and furnishing for their amusement and leisure a vast system of educational clubs, educational theaters, public games, museums and shows? If a people are not happy under such conditions, what will insure content?

Yet come with me. Let us walk through the principal thoroughfares, and watch the multitudes of people wandering listlessly up and down the streets; let us see them as they drift aimlessly into the theaters, museums, clubs; let us look in on them as they idly finger the new books and newspapers, yawning over them as they read, and you will agree with me, that the entire population seems to have but one really serious purpose in life--to murder time which appears to be slowly killing them.

After much thought on the reasons of this strange apathy, this inertia, and sloth of energy, I have come to two conclusions which have helped me to solve the problem of this people’s unhappiness. My first conclusion is that the people are dying for want of work--of downright hard work; my second conclusion is that in trying to establish the law of equality, the founders of this ideal community committed the fatal mistake of counting out those indestructible, ineradicable human tendencies and aspirations which have hitherto been the source of all human progress, to which I alluded in my last letter.

First, let us take the subject of work. As all work, men and women alike, and as machinery has been brought here to a wonderful degree of perfection, the actual labor necessary to maintain the people is, of necessity, very light. At first, a hundred or so years ago, in the early days of the community, the time of labor was fixed at five hours per day. But every decade, with the growth of the population, the labor hours have been diminishing. Recently a law has been put into effect, forbidding any one’s working more than two hours a day. This latter law has been found to be an actual necessity, from an economic point of view, as a provision against surplus production. A man, therefore, has the whole of the rest of his day on his hands, to spend as best he may.

The original hope and belief of the founders of Socialism was that if the people could only be given sufficient leisure, the whole race would be lifted to an extraordinary plane of perfection; that, were men given time enough, each man and woman would devote himself and herself to the development and improvement of his or her mental tastes and capacities. At first, I believe, such was the case. For at least thirty years there was an extraordinary zeal for learning and self-improvement. But in time, a reaction came. The founders had forgotten to make allowances for the mass of sluggards, idlers, and ne’er-do-wells who are always the immovable block in the reformer’s path of progress. Two parties were soon developed; the party of enlightenment and the conservative party. Learning being the sole channel for the exercise of individual capacity or individual ambition, the old baneful system of competition soon developed itself. A superior class, a class composed of scholars, students, artists and authors, arose, whose views and whose political ideas threatened the very life and liberties of the community. The aristocracy of intellect, it was found was as dangerous to the State as an aristocracy founded on pride of descent or on the possession of ancestral acres. It became necessary, therefore, to make a law against learning and the sciences. All scholars, authors, artists and scientists who were found on examination to be more gifted than the average, were exiled.