| Chapter 5
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| When, in the course of the evening the ladies retired, leaving
Dr. Leete and myself alone, he sounded me as to my disposition
for sleep, saying that if I felt like it my bed was ready for me; but
if I was inclined to wakefulness nothing would please him better
than to bear me company. "I am a late bird, myself," he said,
"and, without suspicion of flattery, I may say that a companion
more interesting than yourself could scarcely be imagined. It is
decidedly not often that one has a chance to converse with a
man of the nineteenth century."
| 1 | |
| Now I had been looking forward all the evening with some
dread to the time when I should be alone, on retiring for the
night. Surrounded by these most friendly strangers, stimulated
and supported by their sympathetic interest, I had been able to
keep my mental balance. Even then, however, in pauses of the
conversation I had had glimpses, vivid as lightning flashes, of the
horror of strangeness that was waiting to be faced when I could
no longer command diversion. I knew I could not sleep that
night, and as for lying awake and thinking, it argues no cowardice,
I am sure, to confess that I was afraid of it. When, in reply
to my host's question, I frankly told him this, he replied that it
would be strange if I did not feel just so, but that I need have no
anxiety about sleeping; whenever I wanted to go to bed, he
would give me a dose which would insure me a sound night's
sleep without fail. Next morning, no doubt, I would awake with
the feeling of an old citizen.
| 2 | |
| "Before I acquired that," I replied, "I must know a little more
about the sort of Boston I have come back to. You told me
when we were upon the house-top that though a century only
had elapsed since I fell asleep, it had been marked by greater
changes in the conditions of humanity than many a previous
millennium. With the city before me I could well believe that,
but I am very curious to know what some of the changes have
been. To make a beginning somewhere, for the subject is
doubtless a large one, what solution, if any, have you found for
the labor question? It was the Sphinx's riddle of the nineteenth
century, and when I dropped out the Sphinx was threatening to
devour society, because the answer was not forthcoming. It is
well worth sleeping a hundred years to learn what the right
answer was, if, indeed, you have found it yet."
| 3 | |
| "As no such thing as the labor question is known nowadays,"
replied Dr. Leete, "and there is no way in which it could arise, I
suppose we may claim to have solved it. Society would indeed
have fully deserved being devoured if it had failed to answer a
riddle so entirely simple. In fact, to speak by the book, it was not
necessary for society to solve the riddle at all. It may be said to
have solved itself. The solution came as the result of a process of
industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise.
All that society had to do was to recognize and cooperate with
that evolution, when its tendency had become unmistakable."
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| "I can only say," I answered, "that at the time I fell asleep no
such evolution had been recognized."
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| "It was in 1887 that you fell into this sleep, I think you said."
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| "Yes, May 30th, 1887."
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| My companion regarded me musingly for some moments.
Then he observed, "And you tell me that even then there was no
general recognition of the nature of the crisis which society was
nearing? Of course, I fully credit your statement. The singular
blindness of your contemporaries to the signs of the times is a
phenomenon commented on by many of our historians, but few
facts of history are more difficult for us to realize, so obvious and
unmistakable as we look back seem the indications, which must
also have come under your eyes, of the transformation about to
come to pass. I should be interested, Mr. West, if you would
give me a little more definite idea of the view which you and
men of your grade of intellect took of the state and prospects of
society in 1887. You must, at least, have realized that the
widespread industrial and social troubles, and the underlying
dissatisfaction of all classes with the inequalities of society, and
the general misery of mankind, were portents of great changes of
some sort."
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| "We did, indeed, fully realize that," I replied. "We felt that
society was dragging anchor and in danger of going adrift.
Whither it would drift nobody could say, but all feared the
rocks."
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| "Nevertheless," said Dr. Leete, "the set of the current was
perfectly perceptible if you had but taken pains to observe it,
and it was not toward the rocks, but toward a deeper channel."
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| "We had a popular proverb," I replied, "that `hindsight is
better than foresight,' the force of which I shall now, no doubt,
appreciate more fully than ever. All I can say is, that the
prospect was such when I went into that long sleep that I should
not have been surprised had I looked down from your house-top
to-day on a heap of charred and moss-grown ruins instead of this
glorious city."
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| Dr. Leete had listened to me with close attention and nodded
thoughtfully as I finished speaking. "What you have said," he
observed, "will be regarded as a most valuable vindication of
Storiot, whose account of your era has been generally thought
exaggerated in its picture of the gloom and confusion of men's
minds. That a period of transition like that should be full of
excitement and agitation was indeed to be looked for; but seeing
how plain was the tendency of the forces in operation, it was
natural to believe that hope rather than fear would have been
the prevailing temper of the popular mind."
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| "You have not yet told me what was the answer to the riddle
which you found," I said. "I am impatient to know by what
contradiction of natural sequence the peace and prosperity
which you now seem to enjoy could have been the outcome of
an era like my own."
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| "Excuse me," replied my host, "but do you smoke?" It was
not till our cigars were lighted and drawing well that he
resumed. "Since you are in the humor to talk rather than to
sleep, as I certainly am, perhaps I cannot do better than to try
to give you enough idea of our modern industrial system to
dissipate at least the impression that there is any mystery about
the process of its evolution. The Bostonians of your day had the
reputation of being great askers of questions, and I am going to
show my descent by asking you one to begin with. What should
you name as the most prominent feature of the labor troubles of
your day?"
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| "Why, the strikes, of course," I replied.
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| "Exactly; but what made the strikes so formidable?"
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| "The great labor organizations."
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| "And what was the motive of these great organizations?"
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| "The workmen claimed they had to organize to get their
rights from the big corporations," I replied.
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| "That is just it," said Dr. Leete; "the organization of labor and
the strikes were an effect, merely, of the concentration of capital
in greater masses than had ever been known before. Before this
concentration began, while as yet commerce and industry were
conducted by innumerable petty concerns with small capital,
instead of a small number of great concerns with vast capital, the
individual workman was relatively important and independent in
his relations to the employer. Moreover, when a little capital or a
new idea was enough to start a man in business for himself,
workingmen were constantly becoming employers and there was
no hard and fast line between the two classes. Labor unions were
needless then, and general strikes out of the question. But when
the era of small concerns with small capital was succeeded by
that of the great aggregations of capital, all this was changed.
The individual laborer, who had been relatively important to the
small employer, was reduced to insignificance and powerlessness
over against the great corporation, while at the same time the
way upward to the grade of employer was closed to him.
Self-defense drove him to union with his fellows.
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| "The records of the period show that the outcry against the
concentration of capital was furious. Men believed that it
threatened society with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than
it had ever endured. They believed that the great corporations
were preparing for them the yoke of a baser servitude than had
ever been imposed on the race, servitude not to men but to
soulless machines incapable of any motive but insatiable greed.
Looking back, we cannot wonder at their desperation, for
certainly humanity was never confronted with a fate more sordid
and hideous than would have been the era of corporate tyranny
which they anticipated.
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| "Meanwhile, without being in the smallest degree checked by
the clamor against it, the absorption of business by ever larger
monopolies continued. In the United States there was not, after
the beginning of the last quarter of the century, any opportunity
whatever for individual enterprise in any important field of
industry, unless backed by a great capital. During the last decade
of the century, such small businesses as still remained were
fast-failing survivals of a past epoch, or mere parasites on the
great corporations, or else existed in fields too small to attract
the great capitalists. Small businesses, as far as they still
remained, were reduced to the condition of rats and mice, living
in holes and corners, and counting on evading notice for the
enjoyment of existence. The railroads had gone on combining
till a few great syndicates controlled every rail in the land. In
manufactories, every important staple was controlled by a syndicate.
These syndicates, pools, trusts, or whatever their name,
fixed prices and crushed all competition except when combinations
as vast as themselves arose. Then a struggle, resulting in a
still greater consolidation, ensued. The great city bazar crushed
it country rivals with branch stores, and in the city itself
absorbed its smaller rivals till the business of a whole quarter was
concentrated under one roof, with a hundred former proprietors
of shops serving as clerks. Having no business of his own to put
his money in, the small capitalist, at the same time that he took
service under the corporation, found no other investment for his
money but its stocks and bonds, thus becoming doubly dependent
upon it.
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| "The fact that the desperate popular opposition to the consolidation
of business in a few powerful hands had no effect to
check it proves that there must have been a strong economical
reason for it. The small capitalists, with their innumerable petty
concerns, had in fact yielded the field to the great aggregations
of capital, because they belonged to a day of small things and
were totally incompetent to the demands of an age of steam and
telegraphs and the gigantic scale of its enterprises. To restore the
former order of things, even if possible, would have involved
returning to the day of stagecoaches. Oppressive and intolerable
as was the regime of the great consolidations of capital, even its
victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit the prodigious
increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national
industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of
management and unity of organization, and to confess that since
the new system had taken the place of the old the wealth of the
world had increased at a rate before undreamed of. To be sure
this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer,
increasing the gap between them and the poor; but the fact
remained that, as a means merely of producing wealth, capital
had been proved efficient in proportion to its consolidation. The
restoration of the old system with the subdivision of capital, if it
were possible, might indeed bring back a greater equality of
conditions, with more individual dignity and freedom, but it
would be at the price of general poverty and the arrest of
material progress.
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| "Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the
mighty wealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without
bowing down to a plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon
as men began to ask themselves these questions, they found the
answer ready for them. The movement toward the conduct of
business by larger and larger aggregations of capital, the
tendency toward monopolies, which had been so desperately and
vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its true significance, as a
process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to
open a golden future to humanity.
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| "Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the
final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The
industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted
by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private
persons at their caprice and for their profit, were intrusted to a
single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the
common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to
say, organized as the one great business corporation in which all
other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in
the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final
monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were
swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which
all citizens shared. The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great
Trust. In a word, the people of the United States concluded to
assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred
odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own
government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely
the same grounds that they had then organized for political
purposes. At last, strangely late in the world's history, the obvious
fact was perceived that no business is so essentially the
public business as the industry and commerce on which the
people's livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private
persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind,
though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering the
functions of political government to kings and nobles to be
conducted for their personal glorification."
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| "Such a stupendous change as you describe," said I, "did not,
of course, take place without great bloodshed and terrible
convulsions."
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| "On the contrary," replied Dr. Leete, "there was absolutely no
violence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion
had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people
was behind it. There was no more possibility of opposing it by
force than by argument. On the other hand the popular sentiment
toward the great corporations and those identified with
them had ceased to be one of bitterness, as they came to realize
their necessity as a link, a transition phase, in the evolution of
the true industrial system. The most violent foes of the great
private monopolies were now forced to recognize how invaluable
and indispensable had been their office in educating the people
up to the point of assuming control of their own business. Fifty
years before, the consolidation of the industries of the country
under national control would have seemed a very daring experiment
to the most sanguine. But by a series of object lessons, seen
and studied by all men, the great corporations had taught the
people an entirely new set of ideas on this subject. They had
seen for many years syndicates handling revenues greater than
those of states, and directing the labors of hundreds of thousands
of men with an efficiency and economy unattainable in smaller
operations. It had come to be recognized as an axiom that the
larger the business the simpler the principles that can be applied
to it; that, as the machine is truer than the hand, so the system,
which in a great concern does the work of the master's eye in a
small business, turns out more accurate results. Thus it came
about that, thanks to the corporations themselves, when it was
proposed that the nation should assume their functions, the
suggestion implied nothing which seemed impracticable even to
the timid. To be sure it was a step beyond any yet taken, a
broader generalization, but the very fact that the nation would
be the sole corporation in the field would, it was seen, relieve the
undertaking of many difficulties with which the partial monopolies
had contended."
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