A Traveler from Altruria: Romance Part 16

"Well," she returned, lightly, "if it's anything like neighborliness as I've seen it in small places, deliver me from it! I like being independent. That's why I like the city. You're let alone."

"I was down in New York once, and I went through some of the streets and houses where the poor people live," said young Camp, "and they seemed to know each other and to be quite neighborly."

"And would you like to be all messed in with one another that way?"

demanded the lady.

"Well, I thought it was better than living as we do in the country, so far apart that we never see one another, hardly. And it seems to me better than not having any neighbors at all."

"Well, every one to his taste," said Mrs. Makely. "I wish you would tell us how people manage with you socially, Mr. h.o.m.os."

"Why, you know," he began, "we have neither city nor country in your sense, and so we are neither so isolated nor so crowded together. You feel that you lose a great deal in not seeing one another oftener?" he asked Camp.

"Yes. Folks rust out living alone. It's Human nature to want to get together."

"And I understand Mrs. Makely that it is human nature to want to keep apart?"

"Oh no, but to come together independently," she answered.

"Well, that is what we have contrived in our life at home. I should have to say, in the first place, that--"

"Excuse me just one moment, Mr. h.o.m.os," said Mrs. Makely. This perverse woman was as anxious to hear about Altruria as any of us, but she was a woman who would rather hear the sound of her own voice than any other, even if she were dying, as she would call it, to hear the other. The Altrurian stopped politely, and Mrs. Makely went on: "I have been thinking of what Mr. Camp was saying about the blacklisted men, and their all turning into tramps--"

"But I didn't say that, Mrs. Makely," the young fellow protested, in astonishment.

"Well, it stands to reason that if the tramps have all been blacklisted men--"

"But I didn't say that, either."

"No matter! What I am trying to get at is this: if a workman has made himself a nuisance to the employers, haven't they a right to punish him in any way they can?"

"I believe there's no law yet against blacklisting," said Camp.

"Very well, then, I don't see what they've got to complain of. The employers surely know their own business."

"They claim to know the men's, too. That's what they're always saying; they will manage their own affairs in their own way. But no man, or company, that does business on a large scale has any affairs that are not partly other folks' affairs, too. All the saying in the world won't make it different."

"Very well, then," said Mrs. Makely, with a force of argument which she seemed to think was irresistible, "I think the workmen had better leave things to the employers, and then they won't get blacklisted. It's as broad as it's long."

I confess that, although I agreed with Mrs. Makely in regard to what the workmen had better do, her position had been arrived at by such extraordinary reasoning that I blushed for her; at the same time, I wanted to laugh. She continued, triumphantly: "You see, the employers have ever so much more at stake."

"Then men have everything at stake--the work of their hands," said the young fellow.

"Oh, but surely," said Mrs. Makely, "you wouldn't set that against capital? You wouldn't compare the two?"

"Yes, I should," said Camp, and I could see his eye kindle and his jaw stiffen.

"Then I suppose you would say that a man ought to get as much for his work as an employer gets for his capital. If you think one has as much at stake as the other, you must think they ought to be paid alike."

"That is _just_ what I think," said Camp, and Mrs. Makely burst into a peal of amiable laughter.

"Now, that is too preposterous!"

"Why is it preposterous?" he demanded, with a quivering nostril.

"Why, simply because it _is_" said the lady, but she did not say why, and although I thought so, too, I was glad she did not attempt to do it, for her conclusions seemed to me much better than her reasons.

The old wooden clock in the kitchen began to strike, and she rose briskly to her feet and went and laid the books she had been holding in her lap on the table beside Mrs. Camp's bed. "We must really be going," she said, as she leaned over and kissed the invalid. "It is your dinner-time, and we shall barely get back for lunch if we go by the Loop road; and I want very much to have Mr. h.o.m.os see the Witch's Falls on the way. I have got two or three of the books here that Mr. Makely brought me last night--I sha'n't have time to read them at once--and I'm smuggling in one of Mr.

Twelvemough's, that he's too modest to present for himself." She turned a gay glance upon me, and Mrs. Camp thanked me, and a number of civilities followed from all sides. In the process of their exchange, Mrs. Makely's spirits perceptibly rose, and she came away in high good-humor with the whole Camp family. "Well, now, I am sure," she said to the Altrurian, as we began the long ascent of the Loop road, "you must allow that you have seen some very original characters. But how _warped_ people get living alone so much! That is the great drawback of the country. Mrs. Camp thinks the savings-bank did her a real injury in taking a mortgage on her place, and Reuben seems to have seen just enough of the outside world to get it all wrong. But they are the best-hearted creatures in the world, and I know you won't misunderstand them. That unsparing country bluntness--don't you think it's perfectly delightful? I do like to stir poor Reuben up, and get him talking. He is a good boy, if he _is_ so wrong-headed, and he's the most devoted son and brother in the world. Very few young fellows would waste their lives on an old farm like that; I suppose, when his mother dies, he will marry and strike out for himself in some growing place."

"He did not seem to think the world held out any very bright inducements for him to leave home," the Altrurian suggested.

"Oh, let him get one of these lively, pushing Yankee girls for a wife, and he will think very differently," said Mrs. Makely.

The Altrurian disappeared that afternoon, and I saw little or nothing of him till the next day at supper. Then he said he had been spending the time with young Camp, who had shown him something of the farm-work, and introduced him to several of the neighbors; he was very much interested in it all, because at home he was, at present, engaged in farm-work himself, and he was curious to contrast the American and Altrurian methods. We began to talk of the farming interest again, later in the day, when the members of our little group came together, and I told them what the Altrurian had been doing. The doctor had been suddenly called back to town; but the minister was there, and the lawyer and the professor and the banker and the manufacturer.

It was the banker who began to comment on what I said, and he seemed to be in the frank humor of the Sat.u.r.day night before. "Yes," he said, "it's a hard life, and they have to look sharp if they expect to make both ends meet. I would not like to undertake it myself with their resources."

The professor smiled, in asking the Altrurian: "Did your agricultural friends tell you anything of the little rural traffic in votes that they carry on about election time? That is one of the side means they have of making both ends meet."

"I don't understand," said the Altrurian.

"Why, you know, you can buy votes among our virtuous yeomen from two dollars up at the ordinary elections. When party feeling runs high, and there are vital questions at stake, the votes cost more."

The Altrurian looked round at us all aghast. "Do, you mean that Americans buy votes?"

The professor smiled again. "Oh no; I only mean that they sell them. Well, I don't wonder that they rather prefer to blink the fact; but it is a fact, nevertheless, and pretty notorious."

"Good heavens!" cried the Altrurian. "And what defence have they for such treason? I don't mean those who sell; from what I have seen of the bareness and hardship of their lives, I could well imagine that there might sometimes come a pinch when they would be glad of the few dollars that they could get in that way; but what have those who buy to say?"

"Well," said the professor, "it isn't a transaction that's apt to be talked about much on either side."

"I think," the banker interposed, "that there is some exaggeration about that business; but it certainly exists, and I suppose it is a growing evil in the country. I fancy it arises, somewhat, from a want of, clear thinking on the subject. Then there is no doubt but it comes, sometimes, from poverty. A man sells his vote, as a woman sells her person, for money, when neither can turn virtue into cash. They feel that they must live, and neither of them would be satisfied if Dr. Johnson told them he didn't see the necessity. In fact, I shouldn't myself, if I were in their places. You can't have the good of a civilization like ours without having the bad; but I am not going to deny that the bad is bad. Some people like to do that; but I don't find my account in it. In either case, I confess that I think the buyer is worse than the seller--incomparably worse. I suppose you are not troubled with either case in Altruria?"

"Oh no!" said the Altrurian, with an utter horror, which no repet.i.tion of his words can give the sense of. "It would be unimaginable."

"Still," the banker suggested, "you have cakes and ale, and at times the ginger is hot in the mouth?"

"I don't pretend that we have immunity from error; but upon such terms as you have described we have none. It would be impossible."

The Altrurian's voice expressed no contempt, but only a sad patience, a melancholy surprise, such as a celestial angel might feel in being suddenly confronted with some secret shame and horror of the Pit.

"Well," said the banker, "with us the only way is to take the business view and try to strike an average somewhere."

"Talking of business," said the professor, turning to the manufacturer, who had been quietly smoking, "why don't some of you capitalists take hold of farming here in the East, and make a business of it as they do in the West?"

"Thank you," said the other; "if you mean me, I would rather not invest."

He was silent a moment, and then he went on, as if the notion were beginning to win upon him: "It may come to something like that, though. If it does, the natural course, I should think, would be through the railroads. It would be a very easy matter for them to buy up all the good farms along their lines and put tenants on them, and run them in their own interest. Really, it isn't a bad scheme. The waste in the present method is enormous, and there is no reason why the roads should not own the farms, as they are beginning to own the mines. They could manage them better than the small farmers do in every way. I wonder the thing hasn't occurred to some smart railroad man."