A Traveler from Altruria: Romance Part 6

We laughed with him, all but the minister, whose mind seemed to have caught upon some other point, and who sat absently by.

"And is it your opinion, from what you know of the working-man generally, that they all have this twist in their heads?" the professor asked.

"They have, until they begin to rise. Then they get rid of it mighty soon.

Let a man save something--enough to get a house of his own, and take a boarder or two, and perhaps have a little money at interest--and he sees the matter in another light."

"Do you think he sees it more clearly?" asked the minister.

"He sees it differently."

"What do you think?" the minister pursued, turning to the lawyer. "You are used to dealing with questions of justice--"

"Rather more with questions of law, I'm afraid," the other returned, pleasantly, putting his feet together before him and looking down at them in a way he had. "But, still, I have a great interest in questions of justice, and I confess that I find a certain wild equity in this principle, which I see n.o.body could do business on. It strikes me as idyllic--it's a touch of real poetry in the rough-and-tumble prose of our economic life."

He referred this to me as something I might appreciate in my quality of literary man, and I responded in my quality of practical man: "There's certainly more rhyme than reason in it."

He turned again to the minister:

"I suppose the ideal of the Christian state is the family?"

"I hope so," said the minister, with the grat.i.tude that I have seen people of his cloth show when men of the world conceded premises which the world usually contests; it has seemed to me pathetic.

"And if that is the case, why, the logic of the postulate is that the prosperity of the weakest is the sacred charge and highest happiness of all the stronger. But the law has not recognized any such principle, in economics at least, and if the labor unions are based upon it they are outlaw, so far as any hope of enforcing it is concerned; and it is bad for men to feel themselves outlaw. How is it," the lawyer continued, turning to the Altrurian, "in your country? We can see no issue here, if the first principle of organized labor antagonizes the first principle of business."

"But I don't understand precisely yet what the first principle of business is," returned my guest.

"Ah, that raises another interesting question," said the lawyer. "Of course, every business man solves the problem practically according to his temperament and education, and I suppose that on first thoughts every business man would answer you accordingly. But perhaps the personal equation is something you wish to eliminate from the definition."

"Yes, of course."

"Still, I would rather not venture upon it first," said the lawyer.

"Professor, what should you say was the first principle of business?"

"Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest," the professor promptly answered.

"We will pa.s.s the parson and the doctor and the novelist as witnesses of no value. They can't possibly have any cognizance of the first principle of business; their affair is to look after the souls and bodies and fancies of other people. But what should you say it was?" he asked the banker.

"I should say it was an enlightened conception of one's own interests."

"And you?"

The manufacturer had no hesitation in answering: "The good of Number One, first, last, and all the time. There may be a difference of opinion about the best way to get at it; the long way may be the better, or the short way; the direct way or the oblique way, or the purely selfish way, or the partly selfish way; but if you ever lose sight of that end you might as well shut up shop. That seems to be the first law of nature, as well as the first law of business."

"Ah, we mustn't go to nature for our morality," the minister protested.

"We were not talking of morality," said the manufacturer; "we were talking of business."

This brought the laugh on the minister, but the lawyer cut it short: "Well, then, I don't really see why the trades-unions are not as business-like as the syndicates in their dealings with all those outside of themselves. Within themselves they practise an altruism of the highest order, but it is a tribal altruism; it is like that which prompts a Sioux to share his last mouthful with a starving Sioux, and to take the scalp of a starving Apache. How is it with your trades-unions in Altruria?" he asked my friend.

"We have no trades-unions in Altruria," he began.

"Happy Altruria!" cried the professor.

"We had them formerly," the Altrurian went on, "as you have them now. They claimed, as I suppose yours do, that they were forced into existence by the necessities of the case; that without union the working-man was unable to meet the capitalist on anything like equal terms, or to withstand his encroachments and oppressions. But to maintain themselves they had to extinguish industrial liberty among the working-men themselves, and they had to practise great cruelties against those who refused to join them or who rebelled against them."

"They simply destroy them here," said the professor.

"Well," said the lawyer, from his judicial mind, "the great syndicates have no scruples in destroying a capitalist who won't come into them or who tries to go out. They don't club him or stone him, but they under-sell him and freeze him out; they don't break his head, but they bankrupt him.

The principle is the same."

"Don't interrupt Mr. h.o.m.os," the banker entreated. "I am very curious to know just how they got rid of labor unions in Altruria."

"We had syndicates, too, and finally we had the _reductio ad absurdum_--we had a federation of labor unions find a federation of syndicates, that divided the nation into two camps. The situation was not only impossible, but it was insupportably ridiculous."

I ventured to say: "It hasn't become quite so much of a joke with us yet."

"Isn't it in a fair way to become so?" asked the doctor; and he turned to the lawyer: "What should you say was the logic of events among us for the last ten or twenty years?"

"There's nothing so capricious as the logic of events. It's like a woman's reasoning--you can't tell what it's aimed at, or where it's going to fetch up; all that you can do is to keep out of the way if possible. We may come to some such condition of things as they have in Altruria, where the faith of the whole nation is pledged to secure every citizen in the pursuit of happiness; or we may revert to some former condition, and the master may again own the man; or we may hitch and joggle along indefinitely, as we are doing now."

"But come, now," said the banker, while he laid a caressing touch on the Altrurian's shoulder, "you don't mean to say honestly that everybody works with his hands in Altruria?"

"Yes, certainly. We are mindful, as a whole people, of the divine law--'In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.'"

"But the capitalists? I'm anxious about Number One, you see."

"We have none."

"I forgot, of course. But the lawyers, the doctors, the parsons, the novelists?"

"They all do their share of hand-work."

The lawyer said: "That seems to dispose of the question of the working-man in society. But how about your minds? When do you cultivate your minds?

When do the ladies of Altruria cultivate their minds, if they have to do their own work, as I suppose they do? Or is it only the men who work, if they happen to be the husbands and fathers of the upper cla.s.ses?"

The Altrurian seemed to be sensible of the kindly scepticism which persisted in our reception of his statements, after all we had read of Altruria. He smiled indulgently, and said: "You mustn't imagine that work in Altruria is the same as it is here. As we all work, the amount that each one need do is very little, a few hours each day at the most, so that every man and woman has abundant leisure and perfect spirits for the higher pleasures which the education of their whole youth has fitted them to enjoy. If you can understand a state of things where the sciences and arts and letters are cultivated for their own sake, and not as a means of livelihood--"

"No," said the lawyer, smiling, "I'm afraid we can't conceive of that. We consider the pinch of poverty the highest incentive that a man can have.

If our gifted friend here," he said, indicating me, "were not kept like a toad under the harrow, with his nose on the grindstone, and the poorhouse staring him in the face--"

"For Heaven's sake," I cried out, "don't mix your metaphors so, anyway!"

"If it were not for that and all the other hardships that literary men undergo--

'Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail'--

his novels probably wouldn't be worth reading."