His sister, who had not taken part in the talk before, said, demurely: "It seems to me you've got a good deal of individuality, Reub, and you haven't got a great deal of capital, either," and the two young people laughed together.

Mrs. Makely was one of those fatuous women whose eagerness to make a point excludes the consideration even of their own advantage. "I'm sure," she said, as if speaking for the upper classes, "we haven't got any individuality at all. We are as like as so many peas or pins. In fact, you have to be so in society. If you keep asserting your own individuality too much, people avoid you. It's very vulgar and the greatest bore."

"Then you don't find individuality so desirable, after all," said the Altrurian.

"I perfectly detest it!" cried the lady, and evidently she had not the least notion where she was in the argument. "For my part, I'm never happy except when I've forgotten myself and the whole individual bother."

Her declaration seemed somehow to close the incident, and we were all silent a moment, which I employed in looking about the room, and taking in with my literary sense the simplicity and even bareness of its furnishing. There was the bed where the invalid lay, and near the head a table with a pile of books and a kerosene-lamp on it, and I decided that she was a good deal wakeful, and that she read by that lamp when she could not sleep at night. Then there were the hard chairs we sat on, and some home-made hooked rugs, in rounds and ovals, scattered about the clean floor; there was a small melodeon pushed against the wall; the windows had paper shades, and I recalled that I had not seen any blinds on the outside of the house. Over the head of the bed hung a cavalryman's sword, with its belt—the sword that Mrs. Makely had spoken of. It struck me as a room where a great many things might have happened, and I said: "You can't think, Mrs. Camp, how glad I am to see the inside of your house. It seems to me so typical."

A pleased intelligence showed itself in her face, and she answered: "Yes, it is a real old-fashioned farmhouse. We have never taken boarders, and so we have kept it as it was built pretty much, and only made such changes in it as we needed or wanted for ourselves."

"It's a pity," I went on, following up what I thought a fortunate lead, "that we city people see so little of the farming life when we come into the country. I have been here now for several seasons, and this is the first time I have been inside a farmer's house."

"Is it possible!" cried the Altrurian, with an air of utter astonishment; and, when I found the fact appeared so singular to him, I began to be rather proud of its singularity.

"Yes, I suppose that most city people come and go, year after year, in the country, and never make any sort of acquaintance with the people who live there the year round. We keep to ourselves in the hotels, or, if we go out at all, it is to make a call upon some city cottager, and so we do not get out of the vicious circle of our own over-intimacy with ourselves and our ignorance of others."

"And you regard that as a great misfortune?" asked the Altrurian.

"Why, it's inevitable. There is nothing to bring us together, unless it's some happy accident, like the present. But we don't have a traveler from Altruria to exploit every day, and so we have no business to come into people's houses."

"You would have been welcome in ours long ago, Mr. Twelvemough," said Mrs. Camp.

"But, excuse me," said the Altrurian, "what you say really seems dreadful to me. Why, it is as if you were not the same race or kind of men!"

"Yes," I answered. "It has sometimes seemed to me as if our big hotel there were a ship anchored off some strange coast. The inhabitants come out with supplies, and carry on their barter with the ship's steward, and we sometimes see them over the side, but we never speak to them or have anything to do with them. We sail away at the close of the season, and that is the end of it till next summer."

The Altrurian turned to Mrs. Camp. "And how do you look at it? How does it seem to you?"

"I don't believe we have thought about it very much; but, now that Mr. Twelvemough has spoken of it, I can see that it does look that way. And it seems very strange, doesn't it, for we are all the same people, and have the same language and religion and country—the country that my husband fought for and, I suppose I may say, died for; he was never the same man after the war. It does appear as if we had some interests in common, and might find it out if we ever came together."

"It's a great advantage, the city people going into the country so much as they do now," said Mrs. Makely. "They bring five million dollars into the State of New Hampshire, alone, every summer."

She looked round for the general approval which this fact merited, and young Camp said: "And it shows how worthless the natives are, that they can't make both ends meet, with all that money, but have to give up their farms and go West, after all. I suppose you think it comes from wanting buggies and pianos."

"Well, it certainly comes from something," said Mrs. Makely, with the courage of her convictions.

She was evidently not going to be put down by that sour young fellow, and I was glad of it, though I must say I thought the thing she left to rankle in his mind from our former meeting had not been said in very good taste. I thought, too, that she would not fare best in any encounter of wits with him, and I rather trembled for the result. I said, to relieve the strained situation: "I wish there was some way of our knowing each other better. I'm sure there's a great deal of good-will on both sides."

"No, there isn't," said Camp, "or at least I can answer for our side that there isn't. You come into the country to get as much for your money as you can, and we mean to let you have as little as we can. That's the whole story, and if Mr. Homos believes anything different, he's very much mistaken."

"I hadn't formed any conclusion in regard to the matter, which is quite new to me," said the Altrurian, mildly. "But why is there no basis of mutual kindness between you?"

"Because it's like everything else with us; it's a question of supply and demand, and there is no room for any mutual kindness in a question of that kind. Even if there were, there is another thing that would kill it. The summer folks, as we call them, look down on the natives, as they call us, and we know it."

"Now, Mr. Camp, I am sure that you cannot say I look down on the natives," said Mrs. Makely, with an air of argument.

The young fellow laughed. "Oh yes, you do," he said, not unamiably, and he added, "and you've got the right to. We're not fit to associate with you, and you know it, and we know it. You've got more money, and you've got nicer clothes, and you've got prettier manners. You talk about things that most natives never heard of, and you care for things they never saw. I know it's the custom to pretend differently, but I'm not going to pretend differently."

I recalled what my friend the banker said about throwing away cant, and I asked myself if I were in the presence of some such free spirit again. I did not see how young Camp could afford it; but then I reflected that he had really nothing to lose by it, for he did not expect to make anything out of us; Mrs. Makely would probably not give up his sister as seamstress if the girl continued to work so well and so cheaply as she said.

"Suppose," he went on, "that some old native took you at your word, and came to call upon you at the hotel, with his wife, just as one of the city cottagers would do if he wanted to make your acquaintance?"

"I should be perfectly delighted," said Mrs. Makely, "and I should receive them with the greatest possible cordiality."

"The same kind of cordiality that you would show to the cottagers?"

"I suppose that I should feel that I had more in common with the cottagers. We should be interested in the same things, and we should probably know the same people and have more to talk about—"

"You would both belong to the same class, and that tells the whole story. If you were out West, and the owner of one of those big twenty-thousand- acre farms called on you with his wife, would you act toward them as you would toward our natives? You wouldn't. You would all be rich people together, and you would understand one another because you had money."

"Now, that is not so," Mrs. Makely interrupted. "There are plenty of rich people one wouldn't wish to know at all, and who really can't get into society—who are ignorant and vulgar. And then, when you come to money, I don't see but what country people are as glad to get it as anybody."

"Oh, gladder," said the young man.

"Well?" demanded Mrs. Makely, as if this were a final stroke of logic. The young man did not reply, and Mrs. Makely continued: "Now I will appeal to your sister to say whether she has ever seen any difference in my manner toward her from what I show to all the young ladies in the hotel." The young girl flushed and seemed reluctant to answer. "Why, Lizzie!" cried Mrs. Makely, and her tone showed that she was really hurt.

The scene appeared to me rather cruel, and I glanced at Mrs. Camp with an expectation that she would say something to relieve it. But she did not. Her large, benevolent face expressed only a quiet interest in the discussion.

"You know very well, Mrs. Makely," said the girl, "you don't regard me as you do the young ladies in the hotel."

There was no resentment in her voice or look, but only a sort of regret, as if, but for this grievance, she could have loved the woman from whom she had probably had much kindness. The tears came into Mrs. Makely's eyes, and she turned toward Mrs. Camp. "And is this the way you all feel toward us?" she asked.

"Why shouldn't we?" asked the invalid, in her turn. "But, no, it isn't the way all the country people feel. Many of them feel as you would like to have them feel; but that is because they do not think. When they think, they feel as we do. But I don't blame you. You can't help yourselves any more than we can. We're all bound up together in that, at least."

At this apparent relenting Mrs. Makely tricked her beams a little, and said, plaintively, as if offering herself for further condolence: "Yes, that is what that woman at the little shanty back there said: some have to be rich, and some have to be poor; it takes all kinds to make a world."

"How would you like to be one of those that have to be poor?" asked young Camp, with an evil grin.

"I don't know," said Mrs. Makely, with unexpected spirit; "but I am sure that I should respect the feelings of all, rich or poor."

"I am sorry if we have hurt yours, Mrs. Makely," said Mrs. Camp, with dignity. "You asked us certain questions, and we thought you wished us to reply truthfully. We could not answer you with smooth things."

"But sometimes you do," said Mrs. Makely, and the tears stood in her eyes again. "And you know how fond I am of you all!"

Mrs. Camp wore a bewildered look. "Perhaps we have said more than we ought. But I couldn't help it, and I don't see how the children could, when you asked them here, before Mr. Homos."

I glanced at the Altrurian, sitting attentive and silent, and a sudden misgiving crossed my mind concerning him. Was he really a man, a human entity, a personality like ourselves, or was he merely a sort of spiritual solvent, sent for the moment to precipitate whatever sincerity there was in us, and show us what the truth was concerning our relations to one another? It was a fantastic conception, but I thought it was one that I might employ in some sort of purely romantic design, and I was professionally grateful for it. I said, with a humorous gayety: "Yes, we all seem to have been compelled to be much more honest than we like; and if Mr. Homos is going to write an account of his travels when he gets home, he can't accuse us of hypocrisy, at any rate. And I always used to think it was one of our virtues! What with Mr. Camp, here, and my friend the banker at the hotel, I don't think he'll have much reason to complain even of our reticence."

"Well, whatever he says of us," sighed Mrs. Makely, with a pious glance at the sword over the bed, "he will have to say that, in spite of our divisions and classes, we are all Americans, and, if we haven't the same opinions and ideas on minor matters, we all have the same country."

"I don't know about that," came from Reuben Camp, with shocking promptness. "I don't believe we all have the same country. America is one thing for you, and it's quite another thing for us. America means ease and comfort and amusement for you, year in and year out, and if it means work, it's work that you wish to do. For us, America means work that we have to do, and hard work all the time if we're going to make both ends meet. It means liberty for you; but what liberty has a man got who doesn't know where his next meal is coming from? Once I was in a strike, when I was working on the railroad, and I've seen men come and give up their liberty for a chance to earn their family's living. They knew they were right, and that they ought to have stood up for their rights; but they had to lie down and lick the hand that fed them. Yes, we are all Americans, but I guess we haven't all got the same country, Mrs. Makely. What sort of a country has a blacklisted man got?"

"A blacklisted man?" she repeated. "I don't know what you mean."

"Well, a kind of man I've seen in the mill towns, that the bosses have all got on their books as a man that isn't to be given work on any account; that's to be punished with hunger and cold, and turned into the street, for having offended them; and that's to be made to suffer through his helpless family for having offended them."

"Excuse me, Mr. Camp," I interposed, "but isn't a blacklisted man usually a man who has made himself prominent in some labor trouble?"

"Yes," the young fellow answered, without seeming sensible of the point I had made.

"Ah!" I returned. "Then you can hardly blame the employers for taking it out of him in any way they can. That's human nature."

"Good heavens!" the Altrurian cried out. "Is it possible that in America it is human nature to take away the bread of a man's family because he has gone counter to your interest or pleasure on some economical question?"

"Well, Mr. Twelvemough seems to think so," sneered the young man. "But whether it's human nature or not, it's a fact that they do it, and you can guess how much a blacklisted man must love the country where such a thing can happen to him. What should you call such a thing as blacklisting in Altruria?"

"Oh yes," Mrs. Makely pleaded, "do let us get him to talking about Altruria on any terms. I think all this about the labor question is so tiresome; don't you, Mrs. Camp?"

Mrs. Camp did not answer; but the Altrurian said, in reply to her son: "We should have no name for such a thing, for with us such a thing would be impossible. There is no crime so heinous with us that the punishment would take away the criminal's chance of earning his living."

"Oh, if he was a criminal," said young Camp, "he would be all right here. The state would give him a chance to earn his living then."

"But if he had no other chance of earning his living, and had committed no offence against the laws—"

"Then the state would let him take to the road—like that fellow."

He pulled aside the shade of the window where he sat, and we saw pausing before the house, and glancing doubtfully at the doorstep, where the dog lay, a vile and loathsome-looking tramp, a blot upon the sweet and wholesome landscape, a scandal to the sacred day. His rags burlesqued the form which they did not wholly hide; his broken shoes were covered with dust; his coarse hair came in a plume through his tattered hat; his red, sodden face, at once fierce and timid, was rusty with a fortnight's beard. He offended the eye like a visible stench, and the wretched carrion seemed to shrink away from our gaze as if he were aware of his loathsomeness.

"Really," said Mrs. Makely, "I thought those fellows were arrested now. It is too bad to leave them at large. They are dangerous." Young Camp left the room, and we saw him going out toward the tramp.

"Ah, that's quite right," said the lady. "I hope Reuben is going to send him about his business. Why, surely, he's not going to feed the horrid creature!" she added, as Camp, after a moment's parley with the tramp, turned with him and disappeared round a corner of the house. "Now, Mrs. Camp, I think that is really a very bad example. It's encouraging them. Very likely he'll go to sleep in your barn, and set it on fire with his pipe. What do you do with tramps in Altruria, Mr. Homos?"

The Altrurian seemed not to have heard her. He said to Mrs. Camp: "Then I understand from something your son let fall that he has not always been at home with you here. Does he reconcile himself easily to the country after the excitement of town life? I have read that the cities in America are draining the country of the young people."

"I don't think he was sorry to come home," said the mother, with a touch of fond pride. "But there was no choice for him after his father died; he was always a good boy, and he has not made us feel that we were keeping him away from anything better. When his father was alive we let him go, because then we were not so dependent, and I wished him to try his fortune in the world, as all boys long to do. But he is rather peculiar, and he seems to have got quite enough of the world. To be sure, I don't suppose he's seen the brightest side of it. He first went to work in the mills down at Ponkwasset, but he was 'laid off' there when the hard times came and there was so much overproduction, and he took a job of railroading, and was braking on a freight-train when his father left us."

Mrs. Makely said, smiling: "No, I don't think that was the brightest outlook in the world. No wonder he has brought back such gloomy impressions. I am sure that if he could have seen life under brighter auspices he would not have the ideas he has."

"Very likely," said the mother, dryly. "Our experiences have a great deal to do with forming our opinions. But I am not dissatisfied with my son's ideas. I suppose Reuben got a good many of his ideas from his father: he's his father all over again. My husband thought slavery was wrong, and he went into the war to fight against it. He used to say when the war was over that the negroes were emancipated, but slavery was not abolished yet."

"What in the world did he mean by that?" demanded Mrs. Makely.

"Something you wouldn't understand as we do. I tried to carry on the farm after he first went, and before Reuben was large enough to help me much and ought to be in school, and I suppose I overdid. At any rate, that was when I had my first shock of paralysis. I never was very strong, and I presume my health was weakened by my teaching school so much, and studying, before I was married. But that doesn't matter now, and hasn't for many a year. The place was clear of debt then, but I had to get a mortgage put on it. The savings-bank down in the village took it, and we've been paying the interest ever since. My husband died paying it, and my son will pay it all my life, and then I suppose the bank will foreclose. The treasurer was an old playmate of my husband's, and he said that as long as either of us lived the mortgage could lie."

"How splendid of him!" said Mrs. Makely. "I should think you had been very fortunate."

"I said that you would not see it as we do," said the invalid, patiently.

The Altrurian asked: "Are there mortgages on many of the farms in the neighborhood?"

"Nearly all," said Mrs. Camp. "We seem to own them, but in fact they own us."

Mrs. Makely hastened to say: "My husband thinks it's the best way to have your property. If you mortgage it close up, you have all your capital free, and you can keep turning it over. That's what you ought to do, Mrs. Camp. But what was the slavery that Captain Camp said was not abolished yet?"

The invalid looked at her a moment without replying, and just then the door of the kitchen opened, and Young Camp came in and began to gather some food from the table on a plate.

"Why don't you bring him to the table, Reub?" his sister called to him.

"Oh, he says he'd rather not come in, as long as we have company. He says he isn't dressed for dinner; left his spike-tail in the city."

The young man laughed, and his sister with him.



VIII

Young Camp carried out the plate of victuals to the tramp, and Mrs. Makely said to his mother: "I suppose you would make the tramp do some sort of work to earn his breakfast on week-days?"

"Not always," Mrs. Camp replied. "Do the boarders at the hotel always work to earn their breakfast?"

"No, certainly not," said Mrs. Makely, with the sharpness of offence. "But they always pay for it."

"I don't think that paying for a thing is earning it. Perhaps some one else earned the money that pays for it. But I believe there is too much work in the world. If I were to live my life over again, I should not work half so hard. My husband and I took this place when we were young married people, and began working to pay for it. We wanted to feel that it was ours, that we owned it, and that our children should own it afterward. We both worked all day long like slaves, and many a moonlight night we were up till morning, almost, gathering the stones from our fields and burying them in deep graves that we had dug for them. But we buried our youth and strength and health in those graves, too, and what for? I don't own the farm that we worked so hard to pay for, and my children won't. That is what it has all come to. We were rightly punished for our greed, I suppose. Perhaps no one has a right to own any portion of the earth. Sometimes I think so, but my husband and I earned this farm, and now the savings-bank owns it. That seems strange, doesn't it? I suppose you'll say that the bank paid for it. Well, perhaps so; but the bank didn't earn it. When I think of that I don't always think that a person who pays for his breakfast has the best right to a breakfast."

I could see the sophistry of all this, but I had not the heart to point it out; I felt the pathos of it, too. Mrs. Makely seemed not to see the one nor to feel the other very distinctly. "Yes, but surely," she said, "if you give a tramp his breakfast without making him work for it, you must see that it is encouraging idleness. And idleness is very corrupting—the sight of it."

"You mean to the country people? Well, they have to stand a good deal of that. The summer folks that spend four or five months of the year here don't seem to do anything from morning till night."

"Ah, but you must recollect that they are resting! You have no idea how hard they all work in town during the winter," Mrs. Makely urged, with an air of argument.

"Perhaps the tramps are resting, too. At any rate, I don't think the sight of idleness in rags, and begging at back doors, is very corrupting to the country people; I never heard of a single tramp who had started from the country; they all come from the cities. It's the other kind of idleness that tempts our young people. The only tramps that my son says he ever envies are the well-dressed, strong young fellows from town that go tramping through the mountains for exercise every summer."

The ladies both paused. They seemed to have got to the end of their tether; at least, Mrs. Makely had apparently nothing else to advance, and I said, lightly: "But that is just the kind of tramps that Mr. Homos would most disapprove of. He says that in Altruria they would consider exercise for exercise' sake a wicked waste of force and little short of lunacy."

I thought my exaggeration might provoke him to denial, but he seemed not to have found it unjust. "Why, you know," he said to Mrs. Camp, "in Altruria every one works with his hands, so that the hard work shall not all fall to any one class; and this manual labor of each is sufficient to keep the body in health, as well as to earn a living. After the three, hours' work, which constitutes a day's work with us, is done, the young people have all sorts of games and sports, and they carry them as late into life as the temperament of each demands. But what I was saying to Mr. Twelvemough—perhaps I did not make myself clear—was that we should regard the sterile putting forth of strength in exercise, if others were each day worn out with hard manual labor, as insane or immoral. But I can account for it differently with you, because I understand that in your conditions a person of leisure could not do any manual labor without taking away the work of some one who needed it to live by; and could not even relieve an overworked laborer, and give him the money for the work, without teaching him habits of idleness. In Altruria we can all keep ourselves well by doing each his share of hard work, and we can help those who are exhausted, when such a thing happens, without injuring them materially or morally."

Young Camp entered at this moment, and the Altrurian hesitated. "Oh, do go on!" Mrs. Makely entreated. She added to Camp: "We've got him to talking about Altruria at last, and we wouldn't have him stopped for worlds."

The Altrurian looked around at all our faces, and no doubt read our eager curiosity in them. He smiled and said: "I shall be very glad, I'm sure. But I do not think you will find anything so remarkable in our civilization, if you will conceive of it as the outgrowth of the neighborly instinct. In fact, neighborliness is the essence of Altrurianism. If you will imagine having the same feeling toward all," he explained to Mrs. Makely, "as you have toward your next-door neighbor—"

"My next-door neighbor!" she cried. "But I don't know the people next door! We live in a large apartment house, some forty families, and I assure you I do not know a soul among them."

He looked at her with a puzzled air, and she continued: "Sometimes it does seem rather hard. One day the people on the same landing with us lost one of their children, and I should never have been a whit the wiser if my cook hadn't happened to mention it. The servants all know each other; they meet in the back elevator, and get acquainted. I don't encourage it. You can't tell what kind of families they belong to."

"But surely," the Altrurian persisted, "you have friends in the city whom you think of as your neighbors?"

"No, I can't say that I have," said Mrs. Makely. "I have my visiting-list, but I shouldn't think of anybody on that as a neighbor."

The Altrurian looked so blank and baffled that I could hardly help laughing. "Then I should not know how to explain Altruria to you, I'm afraid."

"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. Homos."

"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. Homos," 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. Homos 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 Saturday 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 repetition 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 he through the railroads. It would he 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."

We all laughed a little, perceiving the semi-ironical spirit of his talk; but the Altrurian must have taken it in dead earnest: "But, in that case, the number of people thrown out of work would be very great, wouldn't it? And what would become of them?"

"Well, they would have whatever their farms brought to make a new start with somewhere else; and, besides, that question of what would become of people thrown out of work by a given improvement is something that capital cannot consider. We used to introduce a bit of machinery in the mill, every now and then, that threw out a dozen or a hundred people; but we couldn't stop for that."

"And you never knew what became of them?"

"Sometimes. Generally not. We took it for granted that they would light on their feet somehow."

"And the state—the whole people—the government—did nothing for them?"

"If it became a question of the poor-house, yes."

"Or the jail," the lawyer suggested.

"Speaking of the poor-house," said the professor, "did our exemplary rural friends tell you how they sell out their paupers to the lowest bidder, and get them boarded sometimes as low as a dollar and a quarter a week?"

"Yes, young Mr. Camp told me of that. He seemed to think it was terrible."

"Did he? Well, I'm glad to hear that of young Mr. Camp. From all that I've been told before, he seems to reserve his conscience for the use of capitalists. What does he propose to do about it?"

"He seems to think the state ought to find work for them."

"Oh, paternalism! Well, I guess the state won't."

"That was his opinion, too."

"It seems a hard fate," said the minister, "that the only provision the law makes for people who are worn out by sickness or a life of work should be something that assorts them with idiots and lunatics, and brings such shame upon them that it is almost as terrible as death."

"It is the only way to encourage independence and individuality," said the professor. "Of course, it has its dark side. But anything else would be sentimental and unbusinesslike, and, in fact, un-American."

"I am not so sure that it would be un-Christian," the minister timidly ventured, in the face of such an authority on political economy.

"Oh, as to that, I must leave the question to the reverend clergy," said the professor.

A very unpleasant little silence followed. It was broken by the lawyer, who put his feet together, and, after a glance down at them, began to say: "I was very much interested this afternoon by a conversation I had with some of the young fellows in the hotel. You know most of them are graduates, and they are taking a sort of supernumerary vacation this summer before they plunge into the battle of life in the autumn. They were talking of some other fellows, classmates of theirs, who were not so lucky, but had been obliged to begin the fight at once. It seems that our fellows here are all going in for some sort of profession: medicine or law or engineering or teaching or the church, and they were commiserating those other fellows not only because they were not having the supernumerary vacation, but because they were going into business. That struck me as rather odd, and I tried to find out what it meant, and, as nearly as I could find out, it meant that most college graduates would not go into business if they could help it. They seemed to feel a sort of incongruity between their education and the business life. They pitied the fellows that had to go in for it, and apparently the fellows that had to go in for it pitied themselves, for the talk seemed to have begun about a letter that one of the chaps here had got from poor Jack or Jim somebody, who had been obliged to go into his father's business, and was groaning over it. The fellows who were going to study professions were hugging themselves at the contrast between their fate and his, and were making remarks about business that were, to say the least, unbusinesslike. A few years ago we should have made a summary disposition of the matter, and I believe some of the newspapers still are in doubt about the value of a college education to men who have got to make their way. What do you think?"

The lawyer addressed his question to the manufacturer, who answered, with a comfortable satisfaction, that he did not think those young men if they went into business would find that they knew too much.

"But they pointed out," said the lawyer, "that the great American fortunes had been made by men who had never had their educational advantages, and they seemed to think that what we call the education of a gentleman was a little too good for money-making purposes."

"Well," said the other, "they can console themselves with the reflection that going into business isn't necessarily making money; it isn't necessarily making a living, even."

"Some of them seem to have caught on to that fact; and they pitied Jack or Jim partly because the chances were so much against him. But they pitied him mostly because in the life before him he would have no use for his academic training, and he had better not gone to college at all. They said he would be none the better for it, and would always be miserable when he looked back to it."

The manufacturer did not reply, and the professor, after a preliminary hemming, held his peace. It was the banker who took the word: "Well, so far as business is concerned, they were right. It is no use to pretend that there is any relation between business and the higher education. There is no business man who will pretend that there is not often an actual incompatibility if he is honest. I know that when we get together at a commercial or financial dinner we talk as if great merchants and great financiers were beneficent geniuses, who evoked the prosperity of mankind by their schemes from the conditions that would otherwise have remained barren. Well, very likely they are, but we must all confess that they do not know it at the time. What they are consciously looking out for then is the main chance. If general prosperity follows, all well and good; they are willing to be given the credit for it. But, as I said, with business as business, the 'education of a gentleman' has nothing to do. That education is always putting the old Ciceronian question: whether the fellow arriving at a starving city with a cargo of grain is bound to tell the people before he squeezes them that there are half a dozen other fellows with grain just below the horizon. As a gentleman he would have to tell them, because he could not take advantage of their necessities; but, as a business man, he would think it bad business to tell them, or no business at all. The principle goes all through; I say, business is business; and I am not going to pretend that business will ever be anything else. In our business battles we don't take off our hats to the other side and say, 'Gentlemen of the French Guard, have the goodness to fire.' That may be war, but it is not business. We seize all the advantages we can; very few of us would actually deceive; but if a fellow believes a thing, and we know he is wrong, we do not usually take the trouble to set him right, if we are going to lose anything by undeceiving him. That would not be business. I suppose you think that is dreadful?" He turned smilingly to the minister.

"I wish—I wish," said the minister, gently, "it could be otherwise."

"Well, I wish so, too," returned the banker. "But it isn't. Am I right or am I wrong?" he demanded of the manufacturer, who laughed.

"I am not conducting this discussion. I will not deprive you of the floor."

"What you say," I ventured to put in, "reminds me of the experience of a friend of mine, a brother novelist. He wrote a story where the failure of a business man turned on a point just like that you have instanced. The man could have retrieved himself if he had let some people believe that what was so was not so, but his conscience stepped in and obliged him to own the truth. There was a good deal of talk about the case, I suppose, because it was not in real life, and my friend heard divers criticisms. He heard of a group of ministers who blamed him for exalting a case of common honesty, as if it were something extraordinary; and he heard of some business men who talked it over and said he had worked the case up splendidly, but he was all wrong in the outcome—the fellow would never have told the other fellows. They said it would not have been business."

We all laughed except the minister and the Altrurian; the manufacturer said: "Twenty-five years hence, the fellow who is going into business may pity the fellows who are pitying him for his hard fate now."

"Very possibly, but not necessarily," said the banker. "Of course, the business man is on top, as far as money goes; he is the fellow who makes the big fortunes; the millionaire lawyers and doctors and ministers are exceptional. But his risks are tremendous. Ninety-five times out of a hundred he fails. To be sure, he picks up and goes on, but he seldom gets there, after all."

"Then in your system," said the Altrurian, "the great majority of those who go into what you call the battle of life are defeated?"

"The killed, wounded, and missing sum up a frightful total," the banker admitted. "But whatever the end is, there is a great deal of prosperity on the way. The statistics are correct, but they do not tell the whole truth. It is not so bad as it seems. Still, simply looking at the material chances, I don't blame those young fellows for not wanting to go into business. And when you come to other considerations! We used to cut the knot of the difficulty pretty sharply; we said a college education was wrong, or the hot and hot American spread-eaglers did. Business is the national ideal, and the successful business man is the American type. It is a business man's country."

"Then, if I understand you," said the Altrurian, "and I am very anxious to have a clear understanding of the matter, the effect of the university with you is to unfit a youth for business life."

"Oh no. It may give him great advantages in it, and that is the theory and expectation of most fathers who send their sons to the university. But, undoubtedly, the effect is to render business life distasteful. The university nurtures all sorts of lofty ideals, which business has no use for."

"Then the effect is undemocratic?"

"No, it is simply unbusinesslike. The boy is a better democrat when he leaves college than he will be later, if he goes into business. The university has taught him and equipped him to use his own gifts and powers for his advancement; but the first lesson of business, and the last, is to use other men's gifts and powers. If he looks about him at all, he sees that no man gets rich simply by his own labor, no matter how mighty a genius he is, and that, if you want to get rich, you must make other men work for you, and pay you for the privilege of doing so. Isn't that true?"

The banker turned to the manufacturer with this question, and the other said: "The theory is, that we give people work," and they both laughed.

The minister said: "I believe that in Altruria no man works for the profit of another?"

"No; each works for the profit of all," replied the Altrurian.

"Well," said the banker, "you seem to have made it go. Nobody can deny that. But we couldn't make it go here."

"Why? I am very curious to know why our system seems so impossible to you."

"Well, it is contrary to the American spirit. It is alien to our love of individuality."

"But we prize individuality, too, and we think we secure it under our system. Under yours, it seems to me that while the individuality of the man who makes other men work for him is safe, except from itself, the individuality of the workers—"

"Well, that is their lookout. We have found that, upon the whole, it is best to let every man look out for himself. I know that, in a certain light, the result has an ugly aspect; but, nevertheless, in spite of all, the country is enormously prosperous. The pursuit of happiness, which is one of the inalienable rights secured to us by the Declaration, is, and always has been, a dream; but the pursuit of the dollar yields tangible proceeds, and we get a good deal of excitement out of it as it goes on. You can't deny that we are the richest nation in the world. Do you call Altruria a rich country?"

I could not quite make out whether the banker was serious or not in all this talk; sometimes I suspected him of a fine mockery, but the Altrurian took him upon the surface of his words.

"I hardly know whether it is or not. The question of wealth does not enter into our scheme. I can say that we all have enough, and that no one is even in the fear of want."

"Yes, that is very well. But we should think it was paying too much for it if we had to give up the hope of ever having more than we wanted," and at this point the banker uttered his jolly laugh, and I perceived that he had been trying to draw the Altrurian out and practise upon his patriotism. It was a great relief to find that he had been joking in so much that seemed a dead give-away of our economical position. "In Altruria," he asked, "who is your ideal great man? I don't mean personally, but abstractly."

The Altrurian thought a moment. "With us there is so little ambition for distinction, as you understand it, that your question is hard to answer. But I should say, speaking largely, that it was some man who had been able for the time being to give the greatest happiness to the greatest number— some artist or poet or inventor or physician."

I was somewhat surprised to have the banker take this preposterous statement seriously, respectfully. "Well, that is quite conceivable with your system. What should you say," he demanded of the rest of us generally, "was our ideal of greatness?"

No one replied at once, or at all, till the manufacturer said: "We will let you continue to run it."

"Well, it is a very curious inquiry, and I have thought it over a good deal. I should say that within a generation our ideal has changed twice. Before the war, and during all the time from the Revolution onward, it was undoubtedly the great politician, the publicist, the statesman. As we grew older and began to have an intellectual life of our own, I think the literary fellows had a pretty good share of the honors that were going— that is, such a man as Longfellow was popularly considered a type of greatness. When the war came, it brought the soldier to the front, and there was a period of ten or fifteen years when he dominated the national imagination. That period passed, and the great era of material prosperity set in. The big fortunes began to tower up, and heroes of another sort began to appeal to our admiration. I don't think there is any doubt but the millionaire is now the American ideal. It isn't very pleasant to think so, even for people who have got on, but it can't very hopefully be denied. It is the man with the most money who now takes the prize in our national cake-walk."

The Altrurian turned curiously toward me, and I did my best to tell him what a cake-walk was. When I had finished, the banker resumed, only to say, as he rose from his chair to bid us good-night: "In any average assembly of Americans the greatest millionaire would take the eyes of all from the greatest statesman, the greatest poet, or the greatest soldier we ever had. That," he added to the Altrurian, "will account to you for many things as you travel through our country."



IX

The next time the members of our little group came together, the manufacturer began at once upon the banker:

"I should think that our friend the professor, here, would hardly like that notion of yours, that business, as business, has nothing to do with the education of a gentleman. If this is a business man's country, and if the professor has nothing in stock but the sort of education that business has no use for, I should suppose that he would want to go into some other line."

The banker mutely referred the matter to the professor, who said, with that cold grin of his which I hated:

"Perhaps we shall wait for business to purge and live cleanly. Then it will have some use for the education of a gentleman."

"I see," said the banker, "that I have touched the quick in both of you, when I hadn't the least notion of doing so. But I shouldn't really like to prophesy which will adapt itself to the other—education or business. Let us hope there will be mutual concessions. There are some pessimists who say that business methods, especially on the large scale of the trusts and combinations, have grown worse instead of better; but this may be merely what is called a 'transition state.' Hamlet must be cruel to be kind; the darkest hour comes before dawn—and so on. Perhaps when business gets the whole affair of life into its hands, and runs the republic, as its enemies now accuse it of doing, the process of purging and living cleanly will begin. I have known lots of fellows who started in life rather scampishly; but when they felt secure of themselves, and believed that they could afford to be honest, they became so. There's no reason why the same thing shouldn't happen on a large scale. We must never forget that we are still a very novel experiment, though we have matured so rapidly in some respects that we have come to regard ourselves as an accomplished fact. We are really less so than we were forty years ago, with all the tremendous changes since the war. Before that we could take certain matters for granted. If a man got out of work, he turned his hand to something else; if a man failed in business, he started in again from some other direction; as a last resort, in both cases, he went West, pre-empted a quarter-section of public land, and grew up with the country. Now the country is grown up; the public land is gone; business is full on all sides, and the hand that turned itself to something else has lost its cunning. The struggle for life has changed from a free-fight to an encounter of disciplined forces, and the free-fighters that are left get ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital. Decidedly, we are in a transition state, and if the higher education tried to adapt itself to business needs, there are chances that it might sacrifice itself without helping business. After all, how much education does business need? Were our great fortunes made by educated men, or men of university training? I don't know but these young fellows are right about that."

"Yes, that may all be," I put in. "But it seems to me that you give Mr. Homos, somehow, a wrong impression of our economic life by your generalizations. You are a Harvard man yourself."

"Yes, and I am not a rich man. A million or two, more or less; but what is that? I have suffered, at the start and all along, from the question as to what a man with the education of a gentleman ought to do in such and such a juncture. The fellows who have not that sort of education have not that sort of question, and they go in and win."

"So you admit, then," said the professor, "that the higher education elevates a business man's standard of morals?"

"Undoubtedly. That is one of its chief drawbacks," said the banker, with a laugh.

"Well," I said, with the deference due even to a man who had only a million or two, more or less, "we must allow you to say such things. But if the case is so bad with the business men who have made the great fortunes—the business men who have never had the disadvantage of a university education—I wish you would explain to Mr. Homos why, in every public exigency, we instinctively appeal to the business sense of the community as if it were the fountain of wisdom, probity, and equity. Suppose there were some question of vital interest—I won't say financial, but political or moral or social—on which it was necessary to rouse public opinion, what would be the first thing to do? To call a meeting over the signatures of the leading business men, because no other names appeal with such force to the public. You might get up a call signed by all the novelists, artists, ministers, lawyers, and doctors in the state, and it would not have a tithe of the effect, with the people at large, that a call signed by a few leading merchants, bank presidents, railroad men, and trust officers would have. What is the reason? It seems strange that I should be asking you to defend yourself against yourself."

"Not at all, my dear fellow, not at all," the banker replied, with his caressing bonhomie. "Though I will confess, to begin with, that I do not expect to answer your question to your entire satisfaction. I can only do my best—on the instalment plan."

He turned to the Altrurian, and then went on: "As I said the other night, this is a business man's country. We are a purely commercial people; money is absolutely to the fore; and business, which is the means of getting the most money, is the American ideal. If you like, you may call it the American fetish; I don't mind calling it so myself. The fact that business is our ideal, or our fetish, will account for the popular faith in business men, who form its priesthood, its hierarchy. I don't know, myself, any other reason for regarding business men as solider than novelists or artists or ministers, not to mention lawyers and doctors. They are supposed to have long heads; but it appears that ninety-five times out of a hundred they haven't. They are supposed to be very reliable; but it is almost invariably a business man of some sort who gets out to Canada while the state examiner is balancing his books, and it is usually the longest headed business men who get plundered by him. No, it is simply because business is our national ideal that the business man is honored above all other men among us. In the aristocratic countries they forward a public object under the patronage of the nobility and gentry; in a plutocratic country they get the business men to indorse it. I suppose that the average American citizen feels that they wouldn't indorse a thing unless it was safe; and the average American citizen likes to be safe—he is cautious. As a matter of fact, business men are always taking risks, and business is a game of chance, in a certain degree. Have I made myself intelligible?"

"Entirely so," said the Altrurian; and he seemed so thoroughly well satisfied that he forbore asking any further question.

No one else spoke. The banker lighted a cigar, and resumed at the point where he left off when I ventured to enter upon the defence of his class with him. I must say that he had not convinced me at all. At that moment I would rather have trusted him, in any serious matter of practical concern, than all the novelists I ever heard of. But I thought I would leave the word to him, without further attempt to reinstate him in his self-esteem. In fact, he seemed to be getting along very well without it, or else he was feeling that mysterious control from the Altrurian which I had already suspected him of using. Voluntarily or involuntarily, the banker proceeded with his contribution to the Altrurian's stock of knowledge concerning our civilization:

"I don't believe, however, that the higher education is any more of a failure, as a provision for a business career, than the lower education is for the life of labor. I suppose that the hypercritical observer might say that in a wholly commercial civilization like ours the business man really needed nothing beyond the three R's, and the working-man needed no R at all. As a practical affair, there is a good deal to be said in favor of that view. The higher education is part of the social ideal which we have derived from the past, from Europe. It is part of the provision for the life of leisure, the life of the aristocrat, which nobody of our generation leads, except women. Our women really have some use for the education of a gentleman, but our men have none. How will that do for a generalization?" the banker asked of me.

"Oh," I admitted, with a laugh, "it is a good deal like one of my own. I have always been struck with that phase of our civilization."

"Well, then," the banker resumed, "take the lower education. That is part of the civic ideal which, I suppose, I may say we evolved from the depths of our inner consciousness of what an American citizen ought to be. It includes instruction in all the R's, and in several other letters of the alphabet. It is given free by the state, and no one can deny that it is thoroughly socialistic in conception and application."

"Distinctly so," said the professor. "Now that the text-books are furnished by the state, we have only to go a step further and provide a good, hot lunch for the children every day, as they do in Paris."

"Well," the banker returned, "I don't know that I should have much to say against that. It seems as reasonable as anything in the system of education which we force upon the working classes. They know perfectly well, whether we do or not, that the three R's will not make their children better mechanics or laborers, and that, if the fight for a mere living is to go on from generation to generation, they will have no leisure to apply the little learning they get in the public schools for their personal culture. In the mean time we deprive the parents of their children's labor, in order that they may be better citizens for their schooling, as we imagine; I don't know whether they are or not. We offer them no sort of compensation for their time, and I think we ought to feel obliged to them for not wanting wages for their children while we are teaching them to be better citizens."

"You know," said the professor, "that has been suggested by some of their leaders."

"No, really? Well, that is too good!" The banker threw back his head and roared, and we all laughed with him. When we had sobered down again, he said: "I suppose that when a working-man makes all the use he can of his lower education he becomes a business man, and then he doesn't need the higher. Professor, you seem to be left out in the cold by our system, whichever way you take it."

"Oh," said the professor, "the law of supply and demand works both ways: it creates the demand, if the supply comes first; and if we keep on giving the sons of business men the education of a gentleman, we may yet make them feel the need of it. We shall evolve a new sort of business man."

"The sort that can't make money, or wouldn't exactly like to, on some terms?" asked the banker. "Well, perhaps we shall work out our democratic salvation in that way. When you have educated your new business man to the point where he can't consent to get rich at the obvious cost of others, you've got him on the way back to work with his hands. He will sink into the ranks of labor, and give the fellow with the lower education a chance. I've no doubt he'll take it. I don't know but you're right, professor."

The lawyer had not spoken as yet. Now he said: "Then it is education, after all, that is to bridge the chasm between the classes and the masses, though it seems destined to go a long way around about it. There was a time, I believe, when we expected religion to do that."

"Well, it may still be doing it, for all I know," said the banker. "What do you say?" he asked, turning to the minister. "You ought to be able to give us some statistics on the subject with that large congregation of yours. You preach to more people than any other pulpit in your city."

The banker named one of the principal cities in the East, and the minister answered, with, modest pride: "I am not sure of that; but our society is certainly a very large one."

"Well, and how many of the lower classes are there in it—people who work for their living with their hands?"

The minister stirred uneasily in his chair, and at last he said, with evident unhappiness: "They—I suppose—they have their own churches. I have never thought that such a separation of the classes was right; and I have had some of the very best people—socially and financially—with me in the wish that there might be more brotherliness between the rich and poor among us. But as yet—"

He stopped; the banker pursued: "Do you mean there are no working-people in your congregation?"

"I cannot think of any," returned the minister, so miserably that the banker forbore to press the point.

The lawyer broke the awkward pause which followed: "I have heard it asserted that there is no country in the world where the separation of the classes is so absolute as in ours. In fact, I once heard a Russian revolutionist, who had lived in exile all over Europe, say that he had never seen anywhere such a want of kindness or sympathy between rich and poor as he had observed in America. I doubted whether he was right. But he believed that, if it ever came to the industrial revolution with us, the fight would be more uncompromising than any such fight that the world had ever seen. There was no respect from low to high, he said, and no consideration from high to low, as there were in countries with traditions and old associations."

"Well," said the banker, "there may be something in that. Certainly, so far as the two forces have come into conflict here, there has been no disposition, on either side, to 'make war with the water of roses.' It's astonishing, in fact, to see how ruthless the fellows who have just got up are toward the fellows who are still down. And the best of us have been up only a generation or two—and the fellows who are still down know it."

"And what do you think would be the outcome of such a conflict?" I asked, with my soul divided between fear of it and the perception of its excellence as material. My fancy vividly sketched the outline of a story which should forecast the struggle and its event, somewhat on the plan of the Battle of Dorking.

"We should beat," said the banker, breaking his cigar-ash off with his little finger; and I instantly cast him, with his ironic calm, for the part of a great patrician leader in my "Fall of the Republic." Of course, I disguised him somewhat, and travestied his worldly bonhomie with the bluff sang-froid of the soldier; these things are easily done.

"What makes you think we should beat?" asked the manufacturer, with a certain curiosity.

"Well, all the good jingo reasons: we have got the materials for beating. Those fellows throw away their strength whenever they begin to fight, and they've been so badly generalled, up to the present time, that they have wanted to fight at the outset of every quarrel. They have been beaten in every quarrel, but still they always want to begin by fighting. That is all right. When they have learned enough to begin by voting, then we shall have to look out. But if they keep on fighting, and always putting themselves in the wrong and getting the worst of it, perhaps we can fix the voting so we needn't be any more afraid of that than we are of the fighting. It's astonishing how short-sighted they are. They, have no conception of any cure for their grievances except more wages and fewer hours."

"But," I asked, "do you really think they have any just grievances?"

"Of course not, as a business man," said the banker. "If I were a working-man, I should probably think differently. But we will suppose, for the sake of argument, that their day is too long and their pay is too short. How do they go about to better themselves? They strike. Well, a strike is a fight, and in a fight, nowadays, it is always skill and money that win. The working-men can't stop till they have put themselves outside of the public sympathy which the newspapers say is so potent in their behalf; I never saw that it did them the least good. They begin by boycotting, and breaking the heads of the men who want to work. They destroy property, and they interfere with business—the two absolutely sacred things in the American religion. Then we call out the militia and shoot a few of them, and their leaders declare the strike off. It is perfectly simple."

"But will it be quite as simple," I asked, reluctant in behalf of my projected romance, to have the matter so soon disposed of—"will it be quite so simple if their leaders ever persuade the working-men to leave the militia, as they threaten to do, from time to time?"

"No, not quite so simple," the banker admitted. "Still, the fight would be comparatively simple. In the first place, I doubt—though I won't be certain about it—whether there are a great many working-men in the militia now. I rather fancy it is made up, for the most part, of clerks and small tradesmen and book-keepers, and such employes of business as have time and money for it. I may be mistaken."

No one seemed able to say whether he was mistaken or not; and, after waiting a moment, he proceeded: "I feel pretty sure that it is so in the city companies and regiments, at any rate, and that if every working-man left them it would not seriously impair their effectiveness. But when the working-men have left the militia, what have they done? They have eliminated the only thing that disqualifies it for prompt and unsparing use against strikers. As long as they are in it we might have our misgivings, but if they were once out of it we should have none. And what would they gain? They would not be allowed to arm and organize as an inimical force. That was settled once for all in Chicago, in the case of the International Groups. A few squads of policemen would break them up. Why," the banker exclaimed, with his good-humored laugh, "how preposterous they are when you come to look at it! They are in the majority, the immense majority, if you count the farmers, and they prefer to behave as if they were the hopeless minority. They say they want an eight-hour law, and every now and then they strike and try to fight it. Why don't they vote it? They could make it the law in six months by such overwhelming numbers that no one would dare to evade or defy it. They can make any law they want, but they prefer to break such laws as we have. That 'alienates public sympathy,' the newspapers say; but the spectacle of their stupidity and helpless wilfulness is so lamentable that I could almost pity them. If they chose, it would take only a few years to transform our government into the likeness of anything they wanted. But they would rather not have what they want, apparently, if they can only keep themselves from getting it, and they have to work hard to do that!"

"I suppose," I said, "that they are misled by the un-American principles and methods of the Socialists among them."

"Why, no," returned the banker, "I shouldn't say that. As far as I understand it, the Socialists are the only fellows among them who propose to vote their ideas into laws, and nothing can be more American than that. I don't believe the Socialists stir up the strikes—at least, among our working-men; though the newspapers convict them of it, generally without trying them. The Socialists seem to accept the strikes as the inevitable outcome of the situation, and they make use of them as proofs of the industrial discontent. But, luckily for the status, our labor leaders are not Socialists, for your Socialist, whatever you may say against him, has generally thought himself into a Socialist. He knows that until the working-men stop fighting, and get down to voting—until they consent to be the majority—there is no hope for them. I am not talking of anarchists, mind you, but of Socialists, whose philosophy is more law, not less, and who look forward to an order so just that it can't be disturbed."

"And what," the minister faintly said, "do you think will be the outcome of it all?"

"We had that question the other night, didn't we? Our legal friend here seemed to feel that we might rub along indefinitely as we are doing, or work out an Altruria of our own; or go back to the patriarchal stage and own our working-men. He seemed not to have so much faith in the logic of events as I have. I doubt if it is altogether a woman's logic. Parole femmine, fatti maschi, and the logic of events isn't altogether words; it's full of hard knocks, too. But I'm no prophet. I can't forecast the future; I prefer to take it as it comes. There's a little tract of William Morris's, though—I forget just what he calls it—that is full of curious and interesting speculation on this point. He thinks that, if we keep the road we are now going, the last state of labor will be like its first, and it will be owned."

"Oh, I don't believe that will ever happen in America," I protested.

"Why not?" asked the banker. "Practically, it is owned already in a vastly greater measure than we recognize. And where would the great harm be? The new slavery would not be like the old. There needn't be irresponsible whipping and separation of families, and private buying and selling. The proletariate would probably be owned by the state, as it was at one time in Greece; or by large corporations, which would be much more in keeping with the genius of our free institutions; and an enlightened public opinion would cast safeguards about it in the form of law to guard it from abuse. But it would be strictly policed, localized, and controlled. There would probably be less suffering than there is now, when a man may be cowed into submission to any terms through the suffering of his family; when he may be starved out and turned out if he is unruly. You may be sure that nothing of that kind would happen in the new slavery. We have not had nineteen hundred years of Christianity for nothing."

The banker paused, and, as the silence continued, he broke it with a laugh, which was a prodigious relief to my feelings, and I suppose to the feelings of all. I perceived that he had been joking, and I was confirmed in this when he turned to the Altrurian and laid his hand upon his shoulder. "You see," he said, "I'm a kind of Altrurian myself. What is the reason why we should not found a new Altruria here on the lines I've drawn? Have you never had philosophers—well, call them philanthropists; I don't mind—of my way of thinking among you?"

"Oh yes," said the Altrurian. "At one time, just before we emerged from the competitive conditions, there was much serious question whether capital should not own labor instead of labor owning capital. That was many hundred years ago."

"I am proud to find myself such an advanced thinker," said the banker. "And how came you to decide that labor should own capital?"

"We voted it," answered the Altrurian.

"Well," said the banker, "our fellows are still fighting it, and getting beaten."

I found him later in the evening talking with Mrs. Makely. "My dear sir," I said, "I liked your frankness with my Altrurian friend immensely; and it may be well to put the worst foot foremost; but what is the advantage of not leaving us a leg to stand upon?"

He was not in the least offended at my boldness, as I had feared he might be, but he said, with that jolly laugh of his: "Capital! Well, perhaps I have worked my candor a little too hard; I suppose there is such a thing. But don't you see that it leaves me in the best possible position to carry the war into Altruria when we get him to open up about his native land?"

"Ah! If you can get him to do it."

"Well, we were just talking about that. Mrs. Makely has a plan."

"Yes," said the lady, turning an empty chair near her own toward me. "Sit down and listen."



X

I sat down, and Mrs. Makely continued: "I have thought it all out, and I want you to confess that in all practical matters a woman's brain is better than a man's. Mr. Bullion, here, says it is, and I want you to say so, too."

"Yes," the banker admitted, "when it comes down to business a woman is worth any two of us."

"And we have just been agreeing," I coincided, "that the only gentlemen among us are women. Mrs. Makely, I admit, without further dispute, that the most unworldly woman is worldlier than the worldliest man; and that in all practical matters we fade into dreamers and doctrinaires beside you. Now, go on."

But she did not mean to let me off so easily. She began to brag herself up, as women do whenever you make them the slightest concession.

"Here, you men," she said, "have been trying for a whole week to get something out of Mr. Homos about his country, and you have left it to a poor, weak woman, at last, to think how to manage it. I do believe that you get so much interested in your own talk, when you are with him, that you don't let him get in a word, and that's the reason you haven't found out anything about Altruria yet from him."

In view of the manner in which she had cut in at Mrs. Camp's, and stopped Homos on the very verge of the only full and free confession he had ever been near making about Altruria, I thought this was pretty cool; but, for fear of worse, I said:

"You're quite right, Mrs. Makely. I'm sorry to say that there has been a shameful want of self-control among us, and that, if we learn anything at all from him, it will be because you have taught us how."

She could not resist this bit of taffy. She scarcely gave herself time to gulp it before she said:

"Oh, it's very well to say that now! But where would you have been if I hadn't set my wits to work? Now, listen! It just popped into my mind, like an inspiration, when I was thinking of something altogether different. It flashed upon me in an instant: a good object, and a public occasion."

"Well?" I said, finding this explosion and electrical inspiration rather enigmatical.

"Why, you know, the Union Chapel, over in the village, is in a languishing condition, and the ladies have been talking all summer about doing something for it, getting up something—a concert or theatricals or a dance or something—and applying the proceeds to repainting and papering the visible church; it needs it dreadfully. But, of course, those things are not exactly religious, don't you know; and a fair is so much trouble; and such a bore, when you get the articles ready, even; and everybody feels swindled; and now people frown on raffles, so there is no use thinking of them. What you want is something striking. We did think of a parlor-reading, or perhaps ventriloquism; but the performers all charge so much that there wouldn't be anything left after paying expenses."

She seemed to expect some sort of prompting at this point; so I said: "Well?"

"Well," she repeated, "that is just where your Mr. Homos comes in."

"Oh! How does he come in there?"

"Why, get him to deliver a Talk on Altruria. As soon as he knows it's for a good object, he will be on fire to do it; and they must live so much in common there that the public occasion will be just the thing that will appeal to him."

It did seem a good plan to me, and I said so. But Mrs. Makely was so much in love with it that she was not satisfied with my modest recognition.

"Good? It's magnificent! It's the very thing! And I have thought it out, down to the last detail—"

"Excuse me," I interrupted. "Do you think there is sufficient general interest in the subject, outside of the hotel, to get a full house for him? I shouldn't like to see him subjected to the mortification of empty benches."

"What in the world are you thinking of? Why, there isn't a farm-house, anywhere within ten miles, where they haven't heard of Mr. Homos; and there isn't a servant under this roof, or in any of the boarding-houses, who doesn't know something about Altruria and want to know more. It seems that your friend has been much oftener with the porters and the stable-boys than he has been with us."

I had only too great reason to fear so. In spite of my warnings and entreaties, he had continued to behave toward every human being he met exactly as if they were equals. He apparently could not conceive of that social difference which difference of occupation creates among us. He owned that he saw it, and from the talk of our little group he knew it existed; but, when I expostulated with him upon some act in gross violation of society usage, he only answered that he could not imagine that what he saw and knew could actually be. It was quite impossible to keep him from bowing with the greatest deference to our waitress; he shook hands with the head-waiter every morning as well as with me; there was a fearful story current in the house, that he had been seen running down one of the corridors to relieve a chambermaid laden with two heavy water-pails which she was carrying to the rooms to fill up the pitchers. This was probably not true; but I myself saw him helping in the hotel hay-field one afternoon, shirt-sleeved like any of the hired men. He said that it was the best possible exercise, and that he was ashamed he could give no better excuse for it than the fact that without something of the kind he should suffer from indigestion. It was grotesque, and out of all keeping with a man of his cultivation and breeding. He was a gentleman and a scholar, there was no denying, and yet he did things in contravention of good form at every opportunity, and nothing I could say had any effect with him. I was perplexed beyond measure, the day after I had reproached him for his labor in the hay-field, to find him in a group of table-girls, who were listening while the head-waiter read aloud to them in the shade of the house; there was a corner looking toward the stables which was given up to them by tacit consent of the guests during a certain part of the afternoon.

I feigned not to see him, but I could not forbear speaking to him about it afterward. He took it in good part, but he said he had been rather disappointed in the kind of literature they liked and the comments they made on it; he had expected that with the education they had received, and with their experience of the seriousness of life, they would prefer something less trivial. He supposed, however, that a romantic love-story, where a poor American girl marries an English lord, formed a refuge for them from the real world which promised them so little and held them so cheap. It was quite useless for one to try to make him realize his behavior in consorting with servants as a kind of scandal.

The worst of it was that his behavior, as I could see, had already begun to demoralize the objects of his misplaced politeness. At first the servants stared and resented it, as if it were some tasteless joke; but in an incredibly short time, when they saw that he meant his courtesy in good faith, they took it as their due. I had always had a good understanding with the head-waiter, and I thought I could safely smile with him at the queer conduct of my friend toward himself and his fellow-servants. To my astonishment he said: "I don't see why he shouldn't treat them as if they were ladies and gentlemen. Doesn't he treat you and your friends so?"

It was impossible to answer this, and I could only suffer in silence, and hope the Altrurian would soon go. I had dreaded the moment when the landlord should tell me that his room was wanted; now I almost desired it; but he never did. On the contrary, the Altrurian was in high favor with him. He said he liked to see a man make himself pleasant with everybody; and that he did not believe he had ever had a guest in the house who was so popular all round.

"Of course," Mrs. Makely went on, "I don't criticise him—with his peculiar traditions. I presume I should be just so myself if I had been brought up in Altruria, which, thank goodness, I wasn't. But Mr. Homos is a perfect dear, and all the women in the house are in love with him, from the cook's helpers, up and down. No, the only danger is that there won't be room in the hotel parlors for all the people that will want to hear him, and we shall have to make the admission something that will be prohibitive in most cases. We shall have to make it a dollar."

"Well," I said, "I think that will settle the question as far as the farming population is concerned. It's twice as much as they ever pay for a reserved seat in the circus, and four times as much as a simple admission. I'm afraid, Mrs. Makely, you're going to be very few, though fit."

"Well, I've thought it all over, and I'm going to put the tickets at one dollar."

"Very good. Have you caught your hare?"

"No, I haven't yet. And I want you to help me catch him. What do you think is the best way to go about it?"

The banker said he would leave us to the discussion of that question, but Mrs. Makely could count upon him in everything if she could only get the man to talk. At the end of our conference we decided to interview the Altrurian together.

I shall always be ashamed of the way that woman wheedled the Altrurian, when we found him the next morning, walking up and down the piazza, before breakfast—that is, it was before our breakfast; when we asked him to go in with us, he said he had just had his breakfast, and was waiting for Reuben Camp, who had promised to take him up as he passed with a load of hay for one of the hotels in the village.

"Ah, that reminds me, Mr. Homos," the unscrupulous woman began on him at once. "We want to interest you in a little movement we're getting up for the Union Chapel in the village. You know it's the church where all the different sects have their services; alternately. Of course, it's rather an original way of doing, but there is sense in it where the people are too poor to go into debt for different churches, and—"

"It's admirable!" said the Altrurian. "I have heard about it from the Camps. It is an emblem of the unity which ought to prevail among Christians of all professions. How can I help you, Mrs. Makely?"

"I knew you would approve of it!" she exulted. "Well, it's simply this: The poor little place has got so shabby that I'm almost ashamed to be seen going into it, for one; and want to raise money enough to give it a new coat of paint outside and put on some kind of pretty paper, of an ecclesiastical pattern, on the inside. I declare, those staring white walls, with the cracks in the plastering zigzagging every which way, distract me so that I can't put my mind on the sermon. Don't you think that paper, say of a Gothic design, would be a great improvement? I'm sure it would; and it's Mr. Twelvemough's idea, too."

I learned this fact now for the first time; but, with Mrs. Makely's warning eye upon me, I could not say so, and I made what sounded to me like a Gothic murmur of acquiescence. It sufficed for Mrs. Makely's purpose, at any rate, and she went on, without giving the Altrurian a chance to say what he thought the educational effect of wall-paper would be: