Part 3

A strict law was passed, and has since been rigidly enforced, forbidding mental or artistic development being carried beyond a certain fixed standard, a standard attainable by all. Quite naturally learning and the arts have gradually died out among this people. Where there are no rewards either of fame or personal advancement, the spur to mental or artistic achievement is found wanting. The arts particularly have languished. Art, as is well known, can only live by the strength of the imagination--and the imagination is fed by contrasts of life and degrees of picturesqueness. One of the old American sages, Emerson I think it was, well said of the artist, “If the rich were not rich, how poor would the poet be!” Quite naturally, in such a civilization as this, no conditions exist for either creating or maintaining artistic ability.

Can you not imagine, my dear Hannevig, that under such a system and order of life, time might be found to be a weighty burden? After the two hours devoted to labor, there are still fourteen waking hours to be disposed of. The people have, it is true, their clubs and their theaters, the national games, their libraries and gardens. But just because all these are free and at their command, is, I presume, reason enough for their finding the amusements thus provided tame and uninteresting. Most of the inhabitants of this city spend their days at the gymnasium. In the exercises and games there practiced, one sees the only evidence or show of excitement and interest indulged in. Both men and women are muscled like athletes, from their continual exercises and perpetual bathing. The athletic party is now trying to pass a law to permit races and contests on the old Greek plan. But the conservatives will scarcely pass it, as they urge that the Olympian games, by developing the physical powers, were in reality only a training-school for the Greek army, and internecine trouble and dissension would surely follow any such public games, as they did in the Greek states.

You have, I believe, asked me if the people here are not allowed to find a scope for their superfluous energies in politics. But politics, as a profession, as a separate and independent function of activity, has ceased to exist. The state or Government is run on the great universal principle of reciprocity which governs the entire community. It exists for the people, is administered by the people, and acts for the people. All surplus revenues, derived from a minimum of equalized taxation are turned over to the public fund, being applied to public use. The machinery of the Government is run on the same principle of light labor which governs individual exertions. Each citizen, men and women alike, of course, serves his or her term as a government official, as in old Prussia men served in the army. As no one is ever re-elected, no matter what his capacity or ability, and as each citizen only serves once during his life-time, there is no such thing known as political strife, or bribery or corruption. Neither is there any political life. The government is as automatic a performance as one of the silk-looms of a factory.

There are certain changes which have lately taken place in the political and international affairs of the people which lead one into a labyrinth of speculation. There has, for instance, been a noticeable and lamentable dying out of international commerce and a general sluggishness of trade which greatly alarms the community at large. All trade and commerce are conducted on the socialistic principle, which forbids the venture of private capital, did such here exist, or of private enterprise. It is the State which directs all such ventures. But the State, for some reason or other, does not appear to be a success as a merchant or as commercial financier. For one thing, the State is tremendously absorbed in its own affairs. As it takes care of its people, educating, training and developing them; as it looks after the material comforts and necessities of its vast population, its own internal duties really absorb all its energies. Then, in a government, founded as this one is, on a principle of equality, which principle is the sworn enemy of ambition there must of necessity be a lack of initiative, a feebleness in aggressive attack, and a want of determination in the pursuance of any given policy. It is only ambitious stable governments which can command and maintain a definite policy of national action. Even the American Republic found it difficult, with its recurrent changes in official departments, to carry into effect great international projects. The people, here, have ended by contenting themselves with the exercise of only so much executive, political or commercial activity as is found actually necessary to maintain their own existence. Men, whether as individuals or as a collective body, are indeed only actively aggressive, ambitious or audacious in proportion as they meet with opposition. It is struggle, and not the absence of it, which makes both men and a nation great.

I have, therefore, ceased to ask myself where are the old magnificent energies which once characterized this people. One looks in vain for the former warfare of intelligence, for the old time audacity of invention, for the fray of commercial contest, for the powerful massing of capital we read of as characteristic of Americans two hundred years ago. All this has gone with the old competitive system.

With the abolishment of competition have died out, naturally, all the prizes and rewards in life which came from individual struggle. As accumulation of personal property, in lands or in moneys, and the possibility of personal advancement are forbidden by law, under this form of government, all incentives to personal activity have disappeared. The law of equality, with its logical decrees for the suppression of superiority, has brought about the other extreme, sterility. The crippling of individual activity has finally produced its legitimate result--it has fatally sapped the energies of the people.

It is a curious and interesting feature in one’s study of this people, to find that it is not the establishment of the law of equality which has been the cause of decay in this people, but the enforcement of the opposite law--the law it was soon found necessary to establish against inequality. It naturally and logically followed that if men are to be made equal, such equality can only be maintained by the suppression of degrees of inequality. Mentally, for instance, the standard must be made low enough for all to attain it; each man, therefore, in time, no matter what his fitness, capacity or gift, was forced to subordinate his particular qualities to the general possibility of attainment. This level of a common mediocrity was more or less difficult to inforce and develop. Their own historians record many interesting accounts of the slow death of inequality. In one I read only yesterday, “So instinctive through long centuries of oppression and misuse of power was the impulse among men to aspire to superiority of attainment, to excel in mental development, or to exhibit richer creative power, that for years the state penitentiaries were filled with men whose crime was their unconquerable desire selfishly to surpass their less fortunate brothers. It is only within our own enlightened twenty-first century that this grave fault has been remedied. Now, happily, no one dreams of insuring his own personal happiness at the expense of others.”

And so, my dear Hannevig, the old drama of history is enacted anew. Years ago men were unhappy because the many had to struggle against the favored few. Here, where all are equal, men are miserable because they are so; because all having equal claims to happiness, find life equally dull and aimless. The perpetual moan here is, O for a chance to _be_ something, to do something, to achieve something!

I shall be able to send you only one more letter, as I return in a few days--by balloon this time, I think, instead of by tunnel.

VII.

CHRISTMAS DAY.

MY GOOD HANNEVIG: I have only just time to send you one more incident and scene. It being, as you may have observed at the top of my letter, Christmas Day, I was curious to see how this festival would be observed here. Somewhat to my surprise I observed that the population went about their avocations just as usual. Then I reflected, in a country, where every day after eleven in the morning a true holiday sets in, there being nothing for any one to do except to enjoy himself, it would be difficult fitly to celebrate any special fete day. In point of fact, there are none such. The people voted them out of the calendar, saying they had all they could do to kill the ordinary enjoyment hours of each week without having to invent new games or occupations for a dozen different feast days. So all holidays are prescribed by law except Christmas. This day is kept up for two reasons--because it is thought to be an excellent time to show off the children brought up by the State to the people, and also because on Christmas Day each child is allowed to spend the day at home.

The exercises of the day began at the great Ethical Temple. Here ten thousand children were gathered to listen first to a lecture on the history of Christmas. There was a play in which Santa Claus appeared and a number of other legendary characters, to show the children in what mythological, absurd beings the children of the unenlightened nineteenth century believed in. Then ten thousand toys were distributed, dolls and whips and tops, and sleighs and skates. But as all were distributed indiscriminately by State officers to the children as they passed out on review, of course all the boys got the dolls and the girls the whips and tops. An hour afterward, outside the great building, I saw groups of the children doing a tremendous exchange, far more interested in bartering damaged dolls for shining skates than in endeavoring to establish the identity of their own parents, whom, indeed, having only seen a few times in the course of their lives, they barely know by sight.

I was slowly walking homeward, speculating on these and other revelations made by a more intimate knowledge of the workings of this great community, when I encountered a familiar face. It was that of my young lady-friend, whose conversation I reported to you above. She joined me and we walked on together.

“I hear you are going back to Sweden; is it true?” she asked.

“Yes, I return in a few days.”

“But you have enjoyed your trip--and--us?”

“Immensely. You are a wonderful country.”

“That, if I remember, is just what foreigners said to Americans two hundred years ago.” (I like this young girl particularly. She is more intelligent than most of the women one meets here. She is allowed to be, she told me, because she was so much less good-looking than others, which is true. But in this land of dead equality one is grateful for a little intelligence, even if it be served up with ugliness.)

“There is one thing I can not become accustomed to,” I said not wishing to be called to closer account for my impressions, “and that is that there are no church steeples or spires. The absence of them gives such a uniform look to all your cities.”

“Churches? Oh, they went out long ago, you know. Religion, it was found, brought about discussion. It was voted immoral.”

“Yes, I know. Only I thought a few spires or churches might possibly have been preserved in a kind of sentimental pickle, as castles and ruins are kept in England, to add what an old writer calls ‘the necessary element of decay to the landscape.’”

“That was Ruskin, was it not? What a quaint old writer! His books read as if they were written in a dead language. As for the churches, they were all destroyed, you know, in the war between the radicals and the orthodox, and not a stone was left standing. Since then the State has erected these huge Ethical Temples, where all the religions are explained and where the philosophy of ethics is taught the people. The finest of all these temples is the Temple of the Liberators; have you seen it yet?”--she asked.

“I have not, but I should like to do so. Will you be my guide?”

She led me thither.

We soon came to a structure which being smaller, and of fairly good and symmetrical proportions, was a little less hideous than the other temples I had seen. Inside, in the center of the building was a colossal statue--a portrait it is said--of the founder, Henry George. Around the sides of the wall, were niches where portrait busts of the martyrs stand--the nihilists, early anarchists, and socialists who endured persecution and often death in the early days of socialism. A book I noticed was placed near the Henry George statue. It was the socialistic bible “Poverty and Progress” which with a number of other such books forms the chief literature of the people. Once a year, my young friend told me, there is a sacred reading to the people from this book.

As we turned to pursue our way homeward she again began to question me--“But you haven’t told me yet what you think of us--as a country and a people,” she persisted.

“Well, since you will have it I will tell you. You are a great and surprising people. I mean great in the sense of numbers, however, for great, politically and morally, you can never be again. You appear to have attained a certain order of perfection which, however, is only relative. You think you have solved all the great problems; but you have only begun to solve them. In attempting to make the people happy by insuring equality of goods and equal division of property, you have found it necessary to stultify ambition and to kill aspiration. Therefore a healthy, vigorous morale has ceased to exist. In making leisure a law you have robbed it of its sweetness. Ennui is the curse of the land. The arts languish, because the arts depend on the imagination, and imagination has been declared illegal, since all are not born with it. Your libraries and museums are open, but who sees them filled with readers and students? In other words, man having been born heir to all things, has ceased to value them. And so I leave you, well content to go back to my barbaric Sweden, where the forms of political government are so bad that men wrestle like gods to remedy them, and where men themselves are still born so unequal that they have to fight like demons to live at all. We are still chaotic, and unformed, and unredeemed, and unregenerate. But we are tremendously alive. And so I return with eager joy to take my part in the strife, to be a man, in other words, and not a part of a colossal machine. Why not go back with me? It will be a great experience, you would go back at least two hundred years.”

She sighed and murmured: “We are not allowed to travel. It is forbidden. It breeds dissatisfaction. But I wish we were. It sounds so very beautiful and strange.” And so I left her, as I must you, for my letter is a volume. In a few days I shall be telling you all I can not write. Adieu,

Yours,

WOLFGANG.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Text in italics is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Archaic spelling which may have been in use at the time of publication has been retained.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Republic of the Future, by Anna Bowman Dodd