A Traveller from Altruria..................................................................................................................................1

W. D. Howells ..........................................................................................................................................1

I confess that with all my curiosity to meet an Altrurian, I was in no hospitable mood towards the traveller

when he finally presented himself, pursuant to the letter of advice sent me by the friend who introduced him.

It would be easy enough to take care of him in the hotel; I had merely to engage a room for him, and have the

clerk tell him his money was not good if he tried to pay for anything. But I had swung fairly into my story; its

people were about me all the time; I dwelt amidst its events and places, and I did not see how I could

welcome my guest among them, or abandon them for him. Still, when he actually arrived, and I took his hand

as he stepped from the train, I found it less difficult to say that I was glad to see him than I expected. In fact, I

was glad, for I could not look upon his face without feeling a glow of kindness for him. I had not the least

trouble in identifying him, he was so unlike all the Americans who dismounted from the train with him, and

who all looked hot, worried and anxious. He was a man no longer young, but in what we call the heyday of

life, when our own people are so absorbed in making provision for the future that they may be said not to live

in the present at all. This Altrurian's whole countenance, and especially his quiet, gentle eyes, expressed a

vast contemporaneity, with bounds of leisure removed to the end of time; or, at least, this was the effect of

something in them which I am obliged to report in rather fantastic terms. He was above the middle height and

he carried himself vigorously. His face was sunburnt, or seaburnt, where it was not bearded; and although I

knew from my friend's letter that he was a man of learning and distinction in his own country, I should never

have supposed him a person of scholarly life, he was so far from sicklied over with anything like the pale cast

of thought. When he took the hand I offered him in my halfhearted welcome he gave it a grasp that decided

"Let me have your bag," I said, as we do when we meet people at the train, and he instantly bestowed a rather

heavy valise upon me, with a smile in his benignant eyes, as if it had been the greatest favor. "Have you got

"Yes," he said, in very good English, but with an accent new to me: "I bought two." He gave them to me and

I passed them to our hotel porter, who was waiting there with the baggage cart. Then I proposed that we

should walk across the meadow to the house, which is a quarter of a mile or so from the station. We started,

but he stopped suddenly and looked back over his shoulder. "Oh, you needn't be troubled about your trunks,"

I said. "The porter will get them to the house all right. They'll be in your room by the time we get there."

"Yes; he always does that. He's a strong young fellow. He'll manage it. You needn't" I could not finish

saying that he need not mind the porter; he was rushing back to the station, and I had the mortification of

seeing him take an end of each trunk and help the porter toss it into the wagon; some lighter pieces he put in

himself, and he did not stop till all the baggage the train had left was disposed of.

I stood holding his valise, unable to put it down in my embarrassment at this eccentric performance, which

had been evident not to me alone, but to all the people who arrived by the train, and all their friends who

came from the hotel to meet them. A number of these passed me on the tallyho coach; and a lady, who had

got her husband with her for over Sunday, and was in very good spirits, called gayly down to me: "Your

"Yes," I answered dryly; the sparkling repartee which ought to have come to my help failed to show up. But

it was impossible to be vexed with the Altrurian when he returned to me, unruffled by his bout with the

"Do you know," he said, "I fancied that good fellow was ashamed of my helping him. I hope it didn't seem a

reflection upon him in any way before your people? I ought to have thought of that."

"I guess we can make it right with him. I dare say he felt more surprised disgraced. But we must make haste a

little now; your train was half an hour late, and we shall not stand so good a chance for supper if we are not

"Well," I said, with evasive lightness, "first come, first served, you know. That's human nature."

"Is it?" he returned, and he looked at me as one does who suspects another of joking.

"Well, isn't it?" I retorted; but I hurried to add: "Besides, I want to have time after supper to show you a bit of

our landscape. I think you'll enjoy it." I knew he had arrived in Boston that morning by steamer, and I now

thought it high time to ask him: "Well, what do you think of America, anyway?" I ought really to have asked

"Oh," he said, "I'm intensely interested," and I perceived that he spoke with reservation. "As the most

The last sentence raised my dashed spirits again, and I said confidently: "You must find our system of

baggage checks delightful." I said this because it is one of the first things we brag of to foreigners, and I had

the habit of it. "By the way," I ventured to add, "I suppose you meant to say you brought two checks when I

"Yes," the Altrurian replied, "I gave half a dollar apiece for them at the station in Boston. I saw other people

"I'm happy to say it isn't yet, on most roads. They were tipping the baggage man, to make sure that he

checked their baggage in time, and put it on the train. I had to do that myself when I came up; otherwise it

"The poor man looked quite worn out," said the Altrurian, "and I am glad I gave him something. He seemed

to have several hundred pieces of baggage to look after, and he wasn't embarrassed like your porter by my

helping him put my trunks into the car. May I confess that the meanness of the station, its insufficient

facilities, its shabby waiting rooms, and its whole crowded and confused appearance gave me rather a bad

"I know," I had to own, "it's shameful; but you wouldn't have found another station in the city so bad."

"Ah, then," said the Altrurian, "I suppose this particular road is too poor to employ more baggage men, or

"Well, no," I was obliged to confess, "it's one of the richest roads in the country. The stock stands at about

180. But I'm really afraid we shall be late to supper, if we don't get on," I broke off; though I was not

altogether sorry to arrive after the porter had disposed of the baggage. I dreaded another display of active

sympathy on the part of my strange companion; I have often felt sorry myself for the porters of hotels, but I

have never thought of offering to help them handle the heavy trunks that they manage.

The Altrurian was delighted with the hotel; and in fact it did look extremely pretty, with its branching piazzas

full of welldressed people, and its green lawns where the children were playing. I led the way to the room

which I had taken for him next my own; it was simply furnished, but it was sweet with new matting, fresh

linen and pure whitewashed walls. I flung open the window blinds and let him get a glimpse of the mountains

"Yes," I modestly assented. "We think that's rather fine." He stood tranced before the window, and I thought I

had better say, "Well, now I can't give you much time to get the dust of travel off; the dining room doors

I waited impatiently at the foot of the stairs, avoiding the question I met on the lips and in the eyes of my

acquaintance. The fame of my friend's behavior at the station must have spread through the whole place;

everybody wished to know who he was. I answered simply that he was a traveller from Altruria; in some

In much less time than it seemed my friend found me; and then I had a little compensation for my suffering in

his behalf. I could see that, whatever people said of him, they felt the same mysterious liking at sight of him

that I had felt. He had made a little change in his dress, and I perceived that the women thought him not only

goodlooking, but welldressed. They followed him with their eyes as we went into the dining room, and I

was rather proud of being with him, as if I somehow shared the credit of his clothes and good looks. The

Altrurian himself seemed most struck with the head waiter, who showed us to our places, and while we were

waiting for our supper I found a chance to explain that he was a divinity student from one of the freshwater

colleges, and was serving here during his summer vacation. This seemed to interest my friend so much that I

went on to tell him that many of the waitresses, whom he saw standing there subject to the order of the

"Ah, that is as it should be," he said; "that is the kind of thing I expected to meet with in America."

"Yes," I responded, in my flattered national vanity, "if America means anything at all it means the honor of

work and the recognition of personal worth everywhere. I hope you are going to make a long stay with us.

We like to have travellers visit us who can interpret the spirit of our institutions as well as read their letter. As

a rule, Europeans never quite get our point of view. Now a great many of these waitresses are ladies, in the

I was interrupted by the noise my friend made in suddenly pushing back his chair and getting to his feet.

But he did not hear me. He had run half down the dining hall toward the slender young girl who was bringing

us our supper. I had ordered rather generously, for my friend had owned to a good appetite, and I was hungry

myself with waiting for him, so that the tray the girl carried was piled up with heavy dishes. To my dismay I

saw, rather than heard at that distance, the Altrurian enter into a polite controversy with her, and then, as if

overcoming all her scruples by sheer strength of will, possess himself of the tray and make off with it toward

our table. The poor child followed him, blushing to her hair; the head waiter stood looking helplessly on; the

guests, who at that late hour were fortunately few, were simply aghast at the scandal; the Altrurian alone

seemed to think his conduct the most natural thing in the world. He put the tray on the side table near us, and

in spite of our waitress's protests insisted upon arranging the little birdbath dishes before our plates. Then at

last he sat down, and the girl, flushed and tremulous, left the room, as I could not help suspecting, to have a

good cry in the kitchen. She did not come back, and the head waiter, who was perhaps afraid of sending

another in her place, looked after our few wants himself. He kept a sharp eye on my friend, as if he were not

quite sure he was safe, but the Altrurian resumed the conversation with all that lightness of spirits which I

noticed in him after he helped the porter with the baggage. I did not think it the moment to take him to task

for what he had just done; I was not even sure that it was the part of a host to do so at all, and between the

"What a charming young creature!" he began. "I never saw anything prettier than the way she had of refusing

my help, absolutely without coquetry or affectation of any kind. She is, as you said, a perfect lady, and she

graces her work, as I am sure she would grace any exigency of life. She quite realizes my ideal of an

American girl, and I see now what the spirit of your country must be from such an expression of it." I wished

to tell him that while a country school teacher who waits at table in a summer hotel is very much to be

respected in her sphere, she is, not regarded with that high honor which some other women command among

us; but I did not find this very easy, after what I had said of the esteem in which labor was held; and while I

was thinking how I could hedge, my friend went on. "I liked England greatly, and I liked the English, but I

could not like the theory of their civilization, or the aristocratic structure of their society. It seemed to me

iniquitous, for we believe that inequality and iniquity are the same in the last analysis."

At this I found myself able to say: "Yes, there is something terrible, something shocking, in the frank

brutality with which Englishmen affirm the essential inequality of men. The affirmation of the essential

equality of men was the first point of departure with us, when we separated from them."

"I know," said the Altrurian. "How grandly it is expressed in your glorious Declaration."

"Well," I went on smoothly, and I hoped to render what I was going to say the means of enlightening him

without offence concerning the little mistake he had just made with the waitress "of course we don't take that

"Why, you know it was rather the political than the social tradition of England that we broke with, in the

"How is that?" he returned. "Didn't you break with monarchy and nobility and ranks and classes?"

"But I found them a part of the social as well as the political structure in England. You have no kings or

"Well, not exactly, in the English sense. Our ranks and classes, such as we have, are what I may call

"Oh, I understand. I suppose that from time to time certain ones among you feel the need of serving, and ask

leave of the commonwealth to subordinate themselves to the rest of the state, and perform all the lowlier

offices in it. Such persons must be held in peculiar honor. Is it something like that?"

"Well, no, I can't say it's quite like that. In fact, I think I'd better let you trust to your own observation of our

"But I am sure," said the Altrurian, with a simplicity so fine that it was a long time before I could believe it

quite real, "that I shall approach it so much more intelligently with a little instruction from you. You say that

your social divisions are voluntary. But do I understand that those who serve among you do, not wish to do

"Surely," said the Altrurian with a look of horror, "you don't mean that they are slaves!"

"Oh, no! Oh, no!" I said; "the War put an end to that. We are all free, now, black and white."

"But if they do not wish to serve, and are not held in peculiar honor for serving"

"I see that my word , 'voluntary' has misled you," I put in. "It isn't the word exactly. The divisions among us

are rather a process of natural selection. You will see, as you get better acquainted with the working of our

institutions, that there are no arbitrary distinctions here, but the fitness of the work for the man and the man

"All, that is fine!" cried the Altrurian with a glow of enthusiasm. "Then I suppose that these intelligent young

people who teach school in winter and serve at table in the summer are in a sort of provisional state, waiting

for the process of natural selection to determine whether they shall finally be teachers or waiters."

"Yes, it might be stated in some such terms," I assented, though I was not altogether easy in my mind. It

seemed to me that I was not quite candid with this most candid spirit. I added, "You know we are a sort of

fatalists here in America. We are great believers in the doctrine that it will all come out right in the end."

"Ah, I don't wonder at that," said the Altrurian, "if the process of natural selection works so perfectly among

you as you say. But I am afraid I don't understand this matter of your domestic service yet. I believe you said

that all honest work is honored in America. Then no social slight attaches to service, I suppose?"

"Well, I can't say that, exactly. The fact is, a certain social slight does attach to service, and that is one reason

why I don't quite like to have students wait at table. It won't be pleasant for them to remember it in after life,

"I think it would. One wouldn't like to think one's father or mother had been at service."

The Altrurian said nothing for a moment. Then he remarked, "So it seems that while all honest work is

honored among you, there are some kinds of honest work that are not honored so much as others."

"I am afraid I can't," he said sadly. "Then, if domestic service is degrading in your eyes, and people are not

"That is, they are forced to do work that is hateful and disgraceful to them because they cannot live without?"

"Excuse me," I said, not at all liking this sort of pursuit, and feeling it fair to turn even upon a guest who kept

"It was so once," he admitted, "but not now. In fact, it is like a waking dream to find oneself in the presence

There was an unconscious superiority in this speech that nettled me, and stung me to retort: "We do not

expect to outlive them. We regard them as final, and as indestructibly based in human nature itself."

"Ah," said the Altrurian with a delicate and caressing courtesy, "have I said something offensive?"

"Not at all," I hastened to answer. "It is not surprising that you do not get our point of view exactly. You will,

by and by, and then, I think, you will see that it is the true one. We have found that the logic of our

convictions could not be applied to the problem of domestic service. It is everywhere a very curious and

perplexing problem. The simple old solution of the problem was to own your servants; but we found that this

was not consistent with the spirit of our free institutions. As soon as it was abandoned the anomaly began.

We had outlived the primitive period when the housekeeper worked with her domestics and they were her

help, and were called so; and we had begun to have servants to do all the household work, and to call them

so. This state of things never seemed right to some of our purest and best people. They fancied, as you seem

to have done, that to compel people through their necessities to do your hateful drudgery, and to wound and

shame them with a name which every American instinctively resents, was neither republican nor Christian.

Some of our thinkers tried to mend matters by making their domestics a part of their families; and in the life

of Emerson you'll find an amusing account of his attempt to have his servant eat at the same table with

himself and his wife. It wouldn't work. He and his wife could stand it, but the servant couldn't."

I paused, for this was where the laugh ought to have come in. The Altrurian did not laugh, he merely asked:

"Well, because the servant knew, if they didn't, that they were a whole world apart in their traditions, and

were no more fit to associate than New Englanders and New Zealanders. In the mere matter of

"But I thought you said that these young girls who wait at table here were teachers."

"Oh, I beg your pardon; I ought to have explained. By this time it had become impossible, as it is now, to get

American girls to take service except on some such unusual terms as we have in a summer hotel; and the

domestics were already ignorant foreigners, fit for nothing else. In such a place as this it isn't so bad. It is

more as if the girls worked in a shop or a factory. They command their own time, in a measure; their hours

are tolerably fixed, and they have each other's society. In a private family they would be subject to order at all

times, and they would have no social life. They would be in the family, but not of it. American girls

understand this, and so they won't go out to service in the usual way. Even in a summer hotel the relation has

its odious aspects. The system of giving fees seems to me degrading to those who have to take them. To offer

a student or a teacher a dollar for personal serviceit isn't right, or I can't make it so. In fact, the whole thing

is rather anomalous with us. The best that you can say of it is that it works, and we don't know what else to

"But I don't see yet," said the Altrurian, "just why domestic service is degrading in a country where all kinds

"Well, my dear fellow, I have done my best to explain. As I intimated before, we distinguish; and in the

different kinds of labor we distinguish against domestic service. I dare say it is partly because of the loss of

"Why?" asked the Altrurian, with that innocence of his which I was beginning to find rather trying.

"In every community it is despised practically, if not theoretically," I tried to explain. "The great thing that

America has done is to offer the race an opportunity: the opportunity for any man to rise above the rest, and

to take the highest place, if he is able." I had always been proud of this fact, and I thought I had put it very

He said: "I do not see how it differs from any country of the past in that. But perhaps you mean that to rise

carries with it an obligation to those below. 'If any is first among you, let him be your servant.' Is it something

"Well, it is not quite like that," I answered, remembering how very little our selfmade men as a class had

done for others. "Everyone is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little

rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America. How is it with you in Altruria?" I

demanded, hoping to get out of a certain discomfort I felt, in that way. "Do your risen men generally devote

"There is no rising among us," he said, with what seemed a perception of the harsh spirit of my question; and

"That would be rather a long story," I replied. "But putting it in the rough, I should say that they rose by their

talents, their shrewdness, their ability to seize an advantage and turn it to their own account."

"It is considered smart. It is considered at the worst far better than a dead level of equality. Are all men equal

"No, they are only equal in duties and in rights. But, as you said just now, that is a very long story. Are they

I began to feel a little uneasy, and I was not quite sure that this last assertion of mine would hold water.

Everybody but ourselves had now left the dining room, and I saw the head waiter eying us impatiently. I

pushed back my chair and said, "I'm sorry to seem to hurry you, but I should like to show you a very pretty

sunset effect we have here before it is too dark. When we get back, I want to introduce you to a few of my

friends. Of course, I needn't tell you that there is a good deal of curiosity about you, especially among the

"Yes, I found that the case in England, largely. It was the women who cared most to meet me. I understand

"It's entirely in their hands," I said, with the satisfaction we all feel in the fact. "We have no other leisure

class. The richest men among us are generally hard workers; devotion to business is the rule; but as soon as a

man reaches the point where he can afford to pay for domestic service, his wife and daughters expect to be

released from it to the cultivation of their minds and the enjoyment of social pleasures. It's quite right. That is

what makes them so delightful to foreigners. You must have heard their praises chanted in England. The

English find our men rather stupid, I believe; but they think our women are charming."

"Yes, I was told that the wives of their nobility were sometimes Americans," said the Altrurian. "The English

think that you regard such marriages as a great honor, and that they are very gratifying to your national

"Well, I suppose that is so in a measure," I confessed. "Not," I added virtuously, "that we approve of

"No, I understand that," said the Altrurian. "I shall hope to get your point of view in this matter more

WE left the hotel, and I began to walk my friend across the meadow toward the lake. I wished him to see the

reflection of the afterglow in its still waters, with the noble lines of the mountain range that glassed itself

there; the effect is one of the greatest charms of that lovely region, the sojourn of the sweetest summer in the

We climbed the meadow wall and passed through a stretch of woods, to a path leading down to the shore, and

as we loitered along in the tender gloom of the forest, the vespers of the hermitthrushes rang all round us,

like crystal bells, like silver flutes, like the airy drip of fountains, like the choiring of stilleyed cherubim. We

stopped from time to time and listened, while the shy birds sang unseen in their covert of shadows; but we

did not speak till we emerged from the trees and suddenly stood upon the naked knoll overlooking the lake.

Then I explained, "The woods used to come down to the shore here, and we had their mystery and music to

the water's edge; but last winter the owner cut the timber off. It looks rather ragged now." I had to recognize

the fact, for I saw the Altrurian staring about him over the clearing, in a kind of horror. It was a squalid ruin, a

graceless desolation, which not even the pitying twilight could soften. The stumps showed their hideous

mutilation everywhere; the brush had been burned, and the fires had scorched and blackened the lean soil of

the hill slope, and blasted it with sterility. A few weak saplings, withered by the flames, drooped and

straggled about; it would be a century before the forces of nature could repair the waste.

"Well, it does seem too bad," I answered evasively. "There has been a good deal of feeling about it. The

neighbors tried to buy him off before he began the destruction, for they knew the value of the woods as an

attraction to summerboard; the city cottagers, of course, wanted to save them, and together they offered for

the land pretty nearly as much as the timber was worth. But he had got it into his head that the land here by

the lake would sell for building lots if it was cleared, and he could make money on that as well as on the

trees; and so they had to go. Of course, one might say that he was deficient in public spirit, but I don't blame

I resumed, "There was no one else to look after his interests, and it was not only his right but his duty to get

the most he could for himself and his own, according to his best light. That is what I tell people when they

"The trouble seems to be, then, in the system that obliges each man to be the guardian of his own interests. Is

"No, I consider it a very perfect system. It is based upon individuality, and we believe that individuality is the

principle that differences civilized men from savages, from the lower animals, and makes us a nation instead

of a tribe or a herd. There isn't one of us, no matter how much he censured this man's want of public spirit,

but would resent the slightest interference with his property rights. The woods were his; he had a right to do

"Do I understand you that, in America, a man may do what is wrong with his own?"

"Well, not in person or property. But he may hurt them in taste and sentiment as much as he likes. Can't a

"And do you call that a free country here such an outrage upon private rights as that can be perpetrated?"

"Tell me," said the Altrurian, "Do you consider it a free country where such an outrage upon public feelings

as this can be perpetrated?" Before I could answer he went on: "But I wish you would explain why it was left

to this man's neighbors to try and get him to sell his portion of the landscape?"

"Why, bless my soul!" I exclaimed, "who else was there? You wouldn't have expected to take up a collection

"That wouldn't have been so unreasonable; but I didn't mean that. Was there no provision for such an

exigency in your laws? Wasn't the state empowered to buy him off at the full value of his timber and his

"Certainly not," I replied. "That would be rank paternalism. Is that the way you manage in Altruria? To be

sure, it's better than confiscation, which I supposed was your method when you spoke of the community

"Ah, that would be very unjust. It is a good many centuries since the landscape rights passed entirely into the

keeping of the commonwealth in the Altrurian Synthesis, but one of the last cases of state purchase was rather

remarkable, and it is remembered perhaps because it was one of the last. The expropriated owner was a man

of very old family and extremely conservative. He was rather cherished among us as a bit of archaic poetry, a

relic of former times, a kind of romantic ruin. The savage sense of greed persisted very strongly in him; he

thought he had a right to do what he pleased with his own, to do wrong with his own if he pleased; and one

night he broke the dam of a beautiful lake on his estate, and destroyed the lovely cataract that the waters

flowed into below, and left a bed of ugly ooze and barren sand where the waves had danced and the lilies

swayed. He contended that the lake was his and that it covered an area of valuable farmland, which he was

entitled to the use of. His act was regarded as a public outrage; nothing like it had happened for generations;

and the feeling was very strong against him, but of course he was left to the operation of law. The state took

his property, and paid him for it at his own valuation; there was some talk of trying him for lese

communitatis, but it was finally decided merely to have him instructed in the first simple principles of

political economy, such as that regard for others is the primal law of human nature, and that a public wrong

can never be a private right. I am not sure, but I think his was the very last case of the kind that we had to

It began to get dark, and I suggested that we had better be going back to the hotel. The talk seemed already to

have taken us away from all pleasure in the prospect; and the fact is that what he had said about political

economy appeared to me so grotesque that I longed to see him in the grip of an eminent political economist

of our own, who was staying in the hotel; I thought he could teach my friend a thing or two about political

economy. But I was impatient to give him a foretaste of what he would probably get a surfeit of before our

economist was through with him, and I said, as we found our way through the rich, balsamscented twilight

of the woods, where one joyhaunted thrush was still singing, "You Altrurians, then, have actually tried that

He halted me, and even in that vague light, which was rather an obscurity, I could see the astonishment in his

I was really annoyed at this. I returned sarcastically: "Yes, I am glad to say that for once we can meet an

expectation of yours; we have marriage, not only consecrated by the church, but established and defended by

"And you consider marriage," he pursued, "the citadel of morality, the fountain of all that is pure and good in

"There are some marriages," I said with a touch of our national humor, "that do not quite fill the bill, but that

"Then why do you say that you have not legislated personal virtue in America?" he asked. "You have laws, I

believe, against theft and murder and slander and incest and perjury and drunkenness?"

"Then it appears to me that you have legislated honesty, regard for human life, regard for character,

abhorrence of unnatural vice, good faith and sobriety. I was told on the train coming up, by a gentleman who

was shocked at the sight of a man beating his horse, that you even had laws against cruelty to animals."

"Yes, and I am happy to say that they are enforced to such a degree that a man cannot kill a cat cruelly

without being punished for it." The Altrurian did not follow up his advantage, and I resolved not to be

outdone in magnanimity. "Come, I will own that you have the best of me on those points. I must say you've

trapped me very neatly, too; I can enjoy a thing of that kind when it's well done, and I frankly knock under.

But I had in mind something altogether different when I spoke. I was thinking of those idealists who want to

bind us hand and foot, and render us the slaves of a state where the most intimate relations of life shall be

"Isn't marriage a rather intimate relation of life?" asked the Altrurian. "And I understood that gentleman on

the train to say that you had laws against cruelty to children and societies established to see them enforced.

You don't consider such laws an invasion of the home, do you, or a violation of its immunities? I imagine,"

he went on, "that the difference between your civilization and ours is only one of degree, after all, and that

America and Altruria are really one at heart. I can't tell you how proud and glad I am to find it so. It is like

I thought his compliment a bit hyperbolical, but I saw that it was honestly meant, and as we Americans are

first of all patriots, and vain for our country before we are vain for ourselves, I was not proof against the

flattery it conveyed to me civically if not personally. I relented a little toward my guest, but all the same I

meant to deliver him over to our political economist as soon as we reached the hotel.

We were now drawing near it, and I felt a certain glow of pleasure in its gay effect, on the pretty knoll where

it stood. In its artless and. accidental architecture it was not unlike one of our immense coastwise steamboats.

The twilight had thickened to dusk, and the edifice was brilliantly lighted with electrics, story above story,

which streamed into the gloom around like the lights of saloon and stateroom. The corner of wood making

into the meadow hid the station; there was no other building in sight; the hotel seemed riding at anchor on the

swell of a placid sea. I was going to call the Altrurian's attention to this fanciful resemblance when I

remembered that he had not been in our country long enough to have seen a Fall River boat, and I made haste

toward the house without wasting the comparison upon him. But I treasured it up in my own mind, intending

The guests were sitting in friendly groups about the piazzas or in rows against the walls, the ladies with their

gossip and the gentlemen with their cigars. The night had fallen cool after a hot day, and they all had the

effect of having cast off care with the burden of the week that was past and to be steeping themselves in the

innocent and simple enjoyment of the hour. They were mostly middleaged married folk, but some were old

enough to have sons and daughters among the young people who went and came in a long, wandering

promenade of the piazzas, or wove themselves through the waltz past the open windows of the great parlor;

the music seemed one with the light that streamed far out on the lawn flanking the piazzas. Everyone was

well dressed and comfortable and at peace, and I felt that our hotel was in some sort a microcosm of the

We involuntarily paused, and I heard the Altrurian murmur, "Charming, charming! This is really delightful!"

"Yes, isn't it?" I returned, with a glow of pride. "Our hotel here is a type of the summer hotel everywhere; it's

characteristic in not having anything characteristic about it; and I rather like the notion of the people in it

being so much like the people in all the others that you would feel yourself at home wherever you met such a

company in such a house. All over the country, north and south, wherever you find a group of hills or a

pleasant bit of water or a stretch of coast, you'll find some such refuge as this for our weary toilers. We began

to discover some time ago that it would not do to cut open the goose that laid our golden eggs, even if it

looked like an eagle, and kept on perching on our banners just as if nothing had happened. We discovered

that, if we continued to kill ourselves with hard work, there would be no Americans pretty soon."

The Altrurian laughed. "How delightfully you put it! How quaint! How picturesque! Excuse me, but I can't

"I could hardly tell you, I'm afraid; I've never been much of a humorist myself."

Again a cold doubt of something ironical in the man went through me, but I had no means of verifying it, and

so I simply remained silent, waiting for him to prompt me if he wished to know anything further about our

national transformation from bees perpetually busy into butterflies occasionally idle. "And when you had

"Why, we're nothing if not practical, you know, and as soon as we made that discovery we stopped killing

ourselves and invented the summer resort. There are very few of our business or professional men, now, who

don't take their four or five weeks' vacation. Their wives go off early in the summer, and if they go to some

resort within three or four hours of the city, the men leave town Saturday afternoon and run out, or come up,

and spend Sunday with their families. For thirtyeight hours or so, a hotel like this is a congeries of happy

"That is admirable," said the Altrurian. "You are truly a practical people. The ladies come early in the

"But I thought you told me awhile ago that as soon as a husband could afford it he relieved his wife and

"From care. It is not work alone that kills. They are not relieved from household care even when they are

relieved from household work. There is nothing so killing as household care. Besides, the sex seems to be

born tired. To be sure, there are some observers of our life who contend that with the advance of athletics

among our ladies, with boating and bathing, and lawntennis and mountain climbing and freedom from care,

and these long summers of repose, our women are likely to become as superior to the men physically as they

now are intellectually. It is all right. We should like to, see it happen. It would be part of the national joke."

"Oh, have you a national joke?" asked the Altrurian. "But, of course! You have so much humor. I wish you

"Well, it is rather damaging to any joke to explain it," I replied, "and your only hope of getting at ours is to

live into it. One feature of it is the confusion of foreigners at the sight of our men's willingness to subordinate

"Oh, I don't find that very bewildering," said the Altrurian. "It seems to me a generous and manly trait of the

American character. I'm proud to say, that is one of the points at which your civilization and our own touch,

There can be no doubt that the influence of women in your public affairs must be of the greatest advantage to

I turned and stared at him, but he remained insensible to my astonishment perhaps because it was now too

dark for him to see it. "Our women have no influence in public affairs," I said quietly, after a moment.

"They haven't? Is it possible? But didn't I understand you to imply just now that your women were better

"Well, I suppose that, taking all sorts and conditions among us, the women are as a rule better schooled, if not

"In a sense you might say they were. They certainly go in for a lot of things: art and music, and Browning and

the drama, and foreign travel and psychology, and political economy and heaven knows what all. They have

more leisure for it; they have all the leisure there is, in fact; our young men have to go into business. I

suppose you may say our women are more cultivated than our men; yes, I think there's no questioning that.

They are the great readers among us. We poor devils of authors would be badly off if it were not for our

women. In fact, no author could make a reputation among us without them. American literature exists

"Some of them; not many, comparatively. You will often hear a complacent ass of a husband and father say

to an author: 'My wife and daughters know your books, but I can't find time for anything but the papers

nowadays. I skim them over at breakfast, or when I'm going in to business on the train.' He isn't the least

"Well, in the presence of four or five thousand journalists with drawn scalping knives I should not like to say

"No, but really," the Altrurian persisted, "you think that the literature of a book is more carefully pondered

"Well, I suppose that even the four or five thousand journalists with drawn scalping knives would hardly

"And it stands to reason, doesn't it, that the habitual reader of carefully pondered literature ought to be more

thoughtful than the readers of literature which is not carefully pondered, and which they merely skim over on

"I believe we began by assuming the superior culture of our women, didn't we? You'll hardly find an

"Then," said the Altrurian, "if your women are generally better schooled than your men, and more cultivated

and more thoughtful, and are relieved of household work in such great measure, and even of domestic cares,

I laughed, for I thought I had my friend at last. "For the best of all possible reasons: they don't want it."

"Really," I said, out of all patience, "I think I must let you ask the ladies themselves," and I turned and moved

Mayst hear the merry din,' "Come in and see the young people dance!" "Wait," he entreated, "tell me a little

more about the old people first. This digression about the ladies has been very interesting, but I thought you

"Why, as I said before, they are all business men and professional men; people who spend their days in

studies and counting rooms and offices, and have come up here for a few weeks or a few hours of

wellearned repose. They are of all kinds of occupations: they are lawyers and doctors and clergymen and

merchants and brokers and bankers. There's hardly any calling you won't find represented among them. As I

was thinking just now, our hotel is a sort of microcosm of the American republic."

"I am most fortunate in finding you here, where I can avail myself of your intelligence in making my

observations of your life under such advantageous circumstances. It seems to me that with your help I might

penetrate the fact of American life, possess myself of the mystery of your national joke, without stirring

beyond the piazza of your hospitable hotel," said my friend. I doubted it, but one does not lightly put aside a

compliment like that to one's intelligence, and I said I should be very happy to be of use to him. He thanked

me, and said, "Then, to begin with, I understand that these gentlemen are here because they are all

"Of course. You can have no conception of how hard our business men and our professional men work. I

suppose there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. But, as I said before, we are beginning to find that

we cannot burn the candle at both ends and have it last long. So we put one end out for a little while every

summer. Still, there are frightful wrecks of men strewn all along the course of our prosperity, wrecks of mind

and body. Our insane asylums are full of madmen who have broken under the tremendous strain, and every

country in Europe abounds in our dyspeptics." I was rather proud of this terrible fact; there is no doubt but we

The Altrurian murmured, "Awful! Shocking!" but I thought somehow he had not really followed me very

attentively in my celebration of our national violation of the laws of life and its consequences. "I am glad," he

went on, "that your business men and professional men are beginning to realize the folly and wickedness of

"What other weary workers?" I asked in turn, for I imagined I had gone over pretty much the whole list.

"Why," said the Altrurian, "your mechanics and day laborers, your iron moulders and glass blowers, your

miners and farmers, your printers and mill operatives, your trainmen and quarry hands. Or do they prefer to

IT was not easy to make sure of such innocence as prompted this inquiry of my Altrurian friend. The doubt

whether he could really be in earnest was something that I had already felt; and it was destined to beset me,

as it did now again and again. My first thought was that of course he was trying a bit of cheap irony on me, a

mixture of the feeble sarcasm and false sentiment that makes us smile when we find it in the philippics of the

industrial agitators. For a moment I did not know but I had fallen victim to a walkingdelegate on his

vacation, who was employing his summer leisure in going about the country in the guise of a traveller from

Altruria, and foisting himself upon people who would have had nothing to do with him in his real character.

But in another moment I perceived that this was impossible. I could not suppose that the friend who had

introduced him to me would be capable of seconding so poor a joke, and besides I could not imagine why a

walkingdelegate should wish to address his clumsy satire to me particularly. For the present, at least, there

was nothing for it but to deal with this inquiry as if it were made in good faith, and in the pursuit of useful

information. It struck me as grotesque; but it would not have been decent to treat it as if it were so. I was

obliged to regard it seriously, and so I decided to shirk it. "Well," I said, "that opens up rather a large field,

which lies somewhat outside of the province of my own activities. You know, I am a writer of romantic

fiction, and my time is so fully occupied in manipulating the destinies of the good oldfashioned hero and

heroine, and trying always to make them end in a happy marriage, that I have hardly had a chance to look

much into the lives of agriculturists or artisans; and to tell you the truth I don't know what they do with their

leisure. I'm pretty certain, though, you won't meet any of them in this hotel; they couldn't afford it, and I

fancy they would find themselves out of their element among our guests. We respect them thoroughly; every

American does; and we know that the prosperity of the country rests with them; we have a theory that they

are politically sovereign, but we see very little of them, and we don't associate with them. In fact, our

cultivated people have so little interest in them socially that they don't like to meet them, even in fiction; they

prefer refined and polished ladies and gentlemen, whom they can have some sympathy with; and I always go

to the upper classes for my types. It won't do to suppose, though, that we are indifferent to the

workingclasses in their place. Their condition is studied a good deal just now, and there are several persons

here who will be able to satisfy your curiosity on the points you have made, I think. I will introduce you to

The Altrurian did not try to detain me this time. He said he should be very glad indeed to meet my friends,

and I led the way toward a little group at the corner of the piazza. They were men whom I particularly liked,

for one reason or another; they were intelligent and openminded, and they were thoroughly American. One

was a banker; another was a minister; there was a lawyer, and there was a doctor; there was a professor in one

of our colleges, the political economist whom I had in view for the enlightenment of my friend; and there was

a retired manufacturerI do not know what he used to manufacture; cotton or iron, or something like that.

They all rose politely as I came up with my Altrurian, and I fancied in them a sensation of expectancy created

by the rumor of his eccentric behavior which must have spread through the hotel. But they controlled this if

they had it, and I could see, as the light fell upon his face from a spray of electrics on the nearest pillar, that

I said, "Gentlemen, I wish to introduce my friend, Mr. Homos," and then I presented them severally to him by

name. We all sat down, and I explained: "Mr. Homos is from Altruria. He is visiting our country for the first

time, and is greatly interested in the working of our institutions. He has been asking me some rather hard

questions about certain phases of our civilization " and the fact is I have launched him upon you because I

They all laughed civilly at this sally of mine, but the professor asked, with a sarcasm that I thought I hardly

merited, "What point in our polity can be obscure to the author of 'Glove and Gauntlet' and 'Airs and

They all laughed again, not so civilly, I felt, and then the banker asked my friend, "Is it long since you left

"It seems a great while ago," the Altrurian answered, "but it is really only a few weeks."

"The tariff has killed our shipbuilding," said the professor. No one took up this firebrand, and the professor

"And do you think," asked the lawyer, who, like most lawyers, was a lover of romance, and was well read in

legendary lore especially, "that there is any reason for supposing that Altruria is identical with the fabled

"No, I can't say that I do. We have no traditions of a submergence of the continent, and there are only the

usual evidences of a glacial epoch which you find everywhere to support such a theory. Besides, our

civilization is strictly Christian, and dates back to no earlier period than that of the first Christian commune

after Christ. It is a matter of history with us that one of these communists, when they were dispersed, brought

the gospel to our continent; he was cast away on our eastern coast on his way to Britain."

"Yes, we know that," the minister intervened, "but it is perfectly astonishing that an island so large as Altruria

should have been lost to the knowledge of the rest of the world ever since the beginning of our era. You

would hardly think that there was a space of the ocean's surface a mile square which had not been traversed

"No, you wouldn't. And I wish," the doctor suggested in his turn, "that Mr. Homos would tell us something

"Yes," I coincided, "I'm sure we should all find it a good deal easier. At least I should; but I brought our

friend up in the hope that the professor would like nothing better than to train a battery of hard facts upon a

defenceless stranger." Since the professor had given me that little stab, I was rather anxious to see how he

would handle the desire for information in the Altrurian which I found so prickly.

This turned the laugh on the professor, and he pretended to be as curious about Altruria as the rest, and said

he would rather hear of it. But the Altrurian said, "I hope you will excuse me. Sometime I shall be glad to talk

of Altruria as long as you like; or if you come to us, I shall be still happier to show you many things that I

couldn't make you understand at a distance. But I am in America to learn, not to teach, and I hope you will

have patience with my ignorance. I begin to be afraid that it is so great as to seem a little incredible. I have

fancied in my friend here," he went on, with a smile toward me, "a suspicion that I was not entirely single in

some of the inquiries I have made, but that I had some ulterior motive, some wish to censure or satirize."

"Oh, not at all!" I protested, for it was not polite or in any wise possible to admit a conjecture so accurate.

"We are so well satisfied with our condition that we have nothing but pity for the darkened mind of the

My friends laughed, and the Altrurian continued: "I am very glad to hear it, for I feel myself at a peculiar

disadvantage among you. I am not only a foreigner, but I am so alien to you in all the traditions and habitudes

that I find it very difficult to get upon common ground with you. Of course I know theoretically what you are,

but to realize it practically is another thing. I had read so much about America and understood so little that I

could not rest without coming to see for myself. Some of the apparent contradictions were so colossal"

"We have everything on a large scale here," said the banker, breaking off the ash of his cigar with the end of

his little finger, "and we rather pride ourselves on the size of our inconsistencies even. I know something of

the state of things in Altruria, and, to be frank with you, I will say that it seems to me preposterous. I should

say it was impossible, if it were not an accomplished fact; but I always feel bound to recognize the thing

done. You have hitched your wagon to a star and you have made the star go; there is never any trouble with

wagons, but stars are not easily broken to harness, and you have managed to get yours well in hand. As I said,

I don't believe in you, but I respect you." I thought this charming, myselfperhaps because it stated my own

"Pretty good," said the doctor, in a murmur of satisfaction, at my ear, "for a bloated bondholder."

"Yes," I whispered back; "I wish I had said it. What an American way of putting it! Emerson would have

"He must have thought so from the way we kept stoning him," said the doctor, with a soft laugh.

"Which of our contradictions," asked the banker, in the same tone of gentle bonhomie, "has given you and

The Altrurian answered after a moment: "I am not sure that it is a contradiction, for as yet I have not

ascertained the facts I was seeking. Our friend was telling me of the great change that had taken place in

regard to work, and the increased leisure that your professional people are now allowing themselves; and I

He went over the list of those he had specified, and I hung my head in shame and pity; it really had such an

effect of mawkish sentimentality. But my friends received it in the best possible way. They did not laugh;

they heard him out, and then they quietly deferred to the banker, who made answer for us all:

"Well, I can be almost as brief as the historian of Iceland in his chapter on snakes: those people have no

"Except when they go out on a strike," said the manufacturer, with a certain grim humor of his own; I never

heard anything more dramatic than the account he once gave of the way he broke up a laborunion. "I have

"Yes," the doctor chimed in, "and in my younger days, when I necessarily had a good deal of

charitypractice, I used to find them at leisure when they were 'laid off.' It always struck me as such a pretty

euphemism. It seemed to minify the harm of the thing so. It seemed to take all the hunger and cold and

sickness out of the fact. To be simply 'laid off' was so different from losing your work and having to face

"Those people," said the professor, "never put anything by. They are wasteful and improvident, almost to a

man; and they learn nothing by experience, though they know as well as we do that it is simply a question of

demand and supply, and that the day of overproduction is sure to come, when their work must stop unless the

"And I've seen them lose it, sometimes, rather than shut down," the manufacturer remarked; "lose it hand

over hand, to keep the men at work; and then as soon as the tide turned the men would strike for higher

wages. You have no idea of the ingratitude of those people." He said this towards the minister, as if he did not

"Yes," replied the minister, "that is one of the most sinister features of the situation. They seem really to

"I know how it would end if I had my way," said the professor. "There wouldn't be any unions, and there

"That is all very well," said the lawyer, from that judicial mind which I always liked in him, "as far as the

strikes are concerned, but I don't understand that the abolition of the unions would affect the impersonal

process of layingoff. The law of demand and supply I respect as much as any oneit's something like the

constitution; but all the same I should object extremely to have my income stopped by it every now and then.

I'm probably not so wasteful as a workingman generally is; still I haven't laid by enough to make it a matter

of indifference to me whether my income went on or not. Perhaps the professor has." The professor did not

say, and we all took leave to laugh. The lawyer concluded, "I don't see how those fellows stand it."

"They don't, all of them," said the doctor. "Or their wives and children don't. Some of them die."

"I wonder," the lawyer pursued, "what has become of the good old American fact that there is always work

for those who are willing to work? I notice that wherever 5000 men strike in the forenoon, there are 5000

men to take their places in the afternoonand not men who are turning their hands to something new, but

"That is one of the things that teach the futility of strikes," the professor made haste to interpose, as if he had

not quite liked to appear averse to the interests of the workingman; no one likes to do that. "If there were

"Why, I supposed," said the banker, "it was the question how the workingclasses amused their elegant

We all applauded the neat touch, but the Altrurian eagerly entreated; "No, no! never mind that, now. That is a

matter of comparatively little interest. I would so much rather know something about the status of the

"I don't mean that. I suppose that in America you have learned, as we have in Altruria, that equal political

rights are only means to an end, and as an end have no value or reality. I meant the economic status of the

I do not know why we were so long girding up our loins to meet this simple question. I myself could not have

hopefully undertaken to answer it; but the others were each in their way men of affairs, and practically

acquainted with the facts, except perhaps the professor; but he had devoted a great deal of thought to them,

and ought to have been qualified to make some sort of response. But even he was silent; and I had a vague

feeling that they were all somehow reluctant to formulate their knowledge, as if it were uncomfortable or

discreditable. The banker continued to smoke quietly on for a moment; then he suddenly threw his cigar

"I like to free my mind of cant," he said, with a short laugh, "when I can afford it, and I propose to cast all

sorts of American cant out of it, in answering your question. The economic status of the workingman among

us is essentially the same as that of the workingman over the civilized world. You will find plenty of people

here, especially about election time, to tell you differently, but they will not be telling you the truth, though a

great many of them think the are. In fact, I suppose most American honestly believe because we have a

republican form of government, and manhoodsuffrage, and so on, that our economic conditions are peculiar,

and that our workingman has a status higher and better than that of the workingman anywhere else. But be

has nothing of the kind. His circumstances are better, and provisionally his wages are higher, but it is only a

question of years or decades when his circumstances will be the same and his wages the same as the

"Yes, I understood from our friend here," said the Altrurian, nodding toward me, "that you had broken only

with the political tradition of Europe, in your revolution; and he has explained to me that you do not hold all

"Why, I understood him to say that if America meant anything at all it meant the honor of work, but that you

distinguished and did not honor some kinds of work so much as others; for instance, domestic service, or

The banker laughed again. "Oh, he drew the line there, did he? Well, we all have to draw the line somewhere.

Our friend is a novelist, and I will tell you in strict confidence that the line he has drawn is imaginary. We

don't honor any kind of work any more than any other people. If a fellow gets up, the papers make a great ado

over his having been a woodchopper, or a bobbinboy, or something of that kind, but I doubt if the fellow

himself likes it; he doesn't if he's got any sense. The rest of us feel that it's infra dig., and hope nobody will

find out that we ever worked with our hands for a living. I'll go farther," said the banker, with the effect of

whistling prudence down the wind, "and I will challenge any of you to gainsay me from his own experience

or observation. How does esteem usually express itself? When we wish to honor a man, what do we do?"

"Exactly. We offer him some sort of social recognition. Well, as soon as a fellow gets up, if he gets up high

enough, we offer him some sort of social recognition; in fact, all sorts; but upon condition that he has left off

working with his hands for a living. We forgive all you please to his past on account of the present. But there

isn't a workingman, I venture to say, in any city, or town, or even large village, in the whole length and

breadth of the United States who has any social recognition, if he is still working at his trade. I don't mean,

merely, that he is excluded from rich and fashionable society, but from the society of the average educated

and cultivated people. I'm not saying he is fit for it; but I don't care how intelligent and agreeable he might

beand some of them are astonishingly intelligent, and so agreeable in their tone of mind and their original

way of looking at things that I like nothing better than to talk with themall of our invisible fences are up

The minister said: "I wonder if that sort of exclusiveness is quite natural? Children seem to feel no sort of

"We can hardly go to children for a type of social order," the Professor suggested.

"True," the minister meekly admitted. "But somehow there is a protest in us somewhere against these

arbitrary distinctions; something that questions whether they are altogether right. We know that they must be,

and always have been, and always will be, and yetwell, I will confess itI never feel at peace when I face

"Oh," said the banker, "if you come to the question of right and wrong, that is another matter. I don't say it's

right. I'm not discussing that question; though I'm certainly not proposing to level the fences; I should be the

last to take my own down. I say simply that you are no more likely to meet a workingman in American

society than you are to meet a colored man. Now you can judge," he ended, turning directly to the Altrurian,

"how much we honor labor. And I hope I have indirectly satisfied your curiosity as to the social status of the

We were all silent. Perhaps the others were occupied like myself in trying to recall some instance of a

workingman whom they had met in society, and perhaps we said nothing because we all failed.

"You have been so very full and explicit that I feel as if it were almost unseemly to press any further inquiry;

but I should very much like to know how your workingmen bear this social exclusion."

"I'm sure I can't say," returned the banker. "A man does not care much to get into society until he has

something to eat, and how to get that is always the first question with the workingman."

"No, certainly, I shouldn't like it myself. I shouldn't complain of not being asked to people's houses, and the

workingmen don't; you can't do that; but I should feel it an incalculable loss. We may laugh at the emptiness

of society, or pretend to be sick of it, but there is no doubt that society is the flower of civilization, and to be

shut out from it is to be denied the best privilege of a civilized man. There are societywomenwe have all

met themwhose graciousness and refinement of presence are something of incomparable value; it is more

than a liberal education to have been admitted to it, but it is as inaccessible to the workingman aswhat shall

I say? The thing is too grotesquely impossible for any sort of comparison. Merely to conceive of its

"I don't know," the banker continued, "how the notion of our social equality originated, but I think it has been

fostered mainly by the expectation of foreigners, who argued it from our political equality. As a matter of

fact, it never existed, except in our poorest and most primitive communities, in the pioneer days of the West,

and among the goldhunters of California. It was not dreamt of in our colonial society, either in Virginia, or

Pennsylvania, or New York, or Massachusetts; and the fathers of the republic, who were mostly slaveholders,

were practically as stiffnecked aristocrats as any people of their day. We have not a political aristocracy, that

is all; but there is as absolute a division between the orders of men, and as little love, in this country as in any

country on the globe. The severance of the man who works for his living with his hands from the man who

does not work for his living with his hands is so complete, and apparently so final, that nobody even imagines

anything else, not even in fiction. Or, how is that?" he asked, turning to me. "Do you fellows still put the

intelligent, highspirited, handsome young artisan who wins the millionaire's daughter into your books? I

"You might still find him in the fiction of the weekly storypapers; but," I was obliged to own, "he would not

go down with my readers. Even in the storypaper fiction he would leave off working as soon as he married

the millionaire's daughter, and go to Europe, or he would stay here and become a social leader, but he would

The others rewarded my humor with a smile, but the banker said: "Then I wonder you were not ashamed of

filling our friend up with that stuff about our honoring some kinds of labor. It is true that we don't go about

openly and explicitly despising any kind of honest toilpeople do not do that anywhere now; but we

contemn it in terms quite as unmistakable. The workingman acquiesces as completely as anybody else. He

does not remain a workingman a moment longer than he can help; and after he gets up, if he is weak enough

to be proud of having been one it is because he feels that his low origin is a proof of his prowess in rising to

the top against unusual odds. I don't suppose there is a man in the whole civilized worldoutside of Altruria,

of coursewho is proud of working at a trade, except the shoemaker Tolstoi, and he is a count, and he does

We all laughed again; those shoes of Count Tolstoi's are always such an infallible joke. The Altrurian,

however, was. cocked and primed with another question; he instantly exploded it. "But are all the

workingmen in America eager to rise above their condition? Is there none willing to remain among the mass

because the rest could not rise with him, and from the hope of yet bringing labor to honor?"

The banker answered: "I never heard of any. No, the American ideal is not to change the conditions for all,

The banker answered: "Bad? Do you call that bad? I thought it was very good. But good or bad, I don't think

you'll find it deniable, if you look into the facts. There may be workingmen willing to remain so for other

workingmen's sake, but I have never met anyperhaps because the workingman never goes into society."

The unfailing question of the Altrurian broke the silence which ensued: "Are there many of your workingmen

"Perhaps," said the banker, "I had better refer you to one of our friends here, who has had a great deal more to

do with them than I have. He is a manufacturer and he has had to do with all kinds of workpeople."

"Yes, for my sins," the manufacturer assented; and he added, "They are often confoundedly intelligent,

though I haven't often found them very agreeable, either in their tone of mind or their original way of looking

The banker amiably acknowledged his thrust, and the Altrurian asked, "Ah, they are opposed to your own?"

"Well, we have the same trouble here that you must have heard of in England. As you know now that the

"But the conditions," the Altrurian pursued; "do you expect them always to continue the same?"

"Well, I don't know," said the manufacturer. "We can't expect them to change of themselves, and I shouldn't

know how to change them. It was expected that the rise of the trusts and the syndicates would break the

unions, but somehow they haven't. The situation remains the same. The unions are not cutting one another's

"Then let me see," said the Altrurian, "whether I clearly understand the situation, as regards the workingman

in America. He is dependent upon the employer for his chance to earn a living, and he is never sure of this.

He may be thrown out of work by his employer's disfavor or disaster, and his willingness to work goes for

nothing; there is no public provision of work for him; there is nothing to keep him from want, nor the

"But some of us have provisioned ourselves rather better and can generally weather it through till we are

"But his economical status," the Altrurian pursued, "is a state of perpetual uncertainty, and to save himself in

some measure he has organized, and so has constituted himself a danger to the public peace?"

The Altrurian turned with this question to the banker, who said, "He is certainly not in society."

"Then," said my guest, "if the workingmen's wages are provisionally so much better here than in Europe, why

I have always been suspicious, in the company of practical men, of an atmosphere of condescension to men

of my calling, if nothing worse. I fancy they commonly regard artists of all kinds as a sort of harmless

eccentrics, and that literary people they look upon as something droll, as weak and soft, as not quite right. I

believed that this particular group, indeed, was rather abler to conceive of me as a rational person than most

others, but I knew that if even they had expected me to be as reasonable as themselves they would not have

been greatly disappointed if I were not; and it seemed to me that I had put myself wrong with them in

imparting to the Altrurian that romantic impression that we hold labor in honor here. I had really thought so,

but I could not say so now, and I wished to retrieve myself somehow. I wished to show that I was a practical

man, too, and so I made answer: "What is the cause of the workingman's discontent? It is very simple: the

I suppose I could not have fairly claimed any great originality for my notion that the walkingdelegate was

the cause of the labor troubles: he is regularly assigned as the reason of a strike in the newspapers, and

reprobated for his evil agency by the editors, who do not fail to read the workingmen many solemn lessons,

and fervently warn them against him, as soon as the strike begins to go wrongas it nearly always does. I

understand from them that the walkingdelegate is an irresponsible tyrant, who emerges from the mystery

that habitually hides him and from time to time orders a strike in mere rancor of spirit and sovereign

plenitude of power, and then leaves the workingmen and their families to suffer the consequences, while he

goes off somewhere and rolls in the lap of luxury, careless of the misery he has created. Between his

debauches of vicious idleness and his accesses of baleful activity he is employed in poisoning the mind of the

workingman against his real interests and real friends. This is perfectly easy, because the American

workingman, though singularly shrewd and sensible in other respects, is the victim of an unaccountable

obliquity of vision which keeps him from seeing his real interests and real friendsor at least from knowing

There could be no doubt, I thought, in the mind of any reasonable person that the walkingdelegate was the

source of the discontent among our proletariat, and I alleged him with a confidence which met the approval of

the professor, apparently, for he nodded, as if to say that I had hit the nail on the head this time; and the

minister seemed to be freshly impressed with a notion that could not be new to him. The lawyer and the

doctor were silent, as if waiting for the banker to speak again; but he was silent, too. The manufacturer, to my

chagrin, broke into a laugh. "I'm afraid," he said, with sardonic levity which surprised me; "you'll have to go

a good deal deeper than the walkingdelegate. He's a symptom; he isn't the disease. The thing keeps on and

on, and it seems to be always about wages; but it isn't about wages at the bottom. Some of those fellows

know it and some of them don't, but the real discontent is with the whole system, with the nature of things. I

had a curious revelation on that point the last time I tried to deal with my men as a union. They were always

bothering me about this and about that, and there was no end to the bickering. I yielded point after point, but

it didn't make any difference. It seemed as if the more I gave the more they asked. At last I made up my mind

to try to get at the real inwardness of the matter, and I didn't wait for their committee to come to meI sent

for their leading man, and said I wanted to have it out with him. He wasn't a bad fellow, and when I got at

him, man to man that way, I found he had sense, and he had ideasit's no use pretending those fellows are

fools; he had thought about his side of the question, anyway. I said: 'Now what does it all mean? Do you want

the earth, or don't you? When is it going to end?' I offered him something to take, but he said he didn't drink,

and we compromised on cigars. 'Now when is it going to end?' said I, and I pressed it home, and wouldn't let

him fight off from the point. 'Do you mean when is it all going to end?' said he. 'Yes,' said I, 'all. I'm sick of

it. If there's any way out I'd like to know it.' 'Well,' said he, 'I'll tell you, if you want to know. It's all going to

end when you get the same amount of money for the same amount of work as we do.'"

We all laughed uproariously. The thing was deliciously comical; and nothing, I thought, attested the

Altrurian's want of humor like his failure to appreciate this tremendous joke. He did not even smile in asking,

"Well," returned the manufacturer, with cosy enjoyment, "I asked him if the men would take the concern and

run it themselves." We laughed again; this seemed even better than the other joke. "But he said 'No,' they

would not like to do that. And then I asked him just what they would like, if they could have their own way,

and he said that they would like to have me run the business, and all share alike. I asked him what was the

sense of that, and why if I could do something that all of them put together couldn't do I shouldn't be paid

more than all of them put together; and he said that if a man did his best he ought to be paid as much as the

best man. I asked him if that was the principle their union was founded on, and he said 'Yes,' that the very

meaning of their union was the protection of the weak by the strong, and the equalization of earnings among

all who did their best." We waited for the manufacturer to go on, but he made a dramatic pause at this point,

as if to let it sink into our minds; and he did not speak until the Altrurian prompted him with the

"I saw there was only one way out for me, and I told the fellow I did not think I could do business on that

principle. We parted friends, but the next Saturday I locked them out, and smashed their union. They came

back, most of themthey had tobut I've treated with them ever since 'as individuals'."

"And they're much better off in your hands than they were in the union," said the professor.

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

"And is it your opinion, from what you know of the workingmen generally, that they all have this twist in

"They have, till they begin to rise. Then they get rid of it mighty soon. Let a man save somethingenough to

get a house of his own, and take a boarder or two, and perhaps have a little money at interestand he sees

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

"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 nobody could do business on. It strikes

me as idyllicit's a touch of real poetry in the roughandtumble 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

"I hope so," said the minister, with the gratitude 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

"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

"Still, I would rather not venture upon it first," said the lawyer. "Professor, what should you say was the first

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

"We will pass 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

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

"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

tradesunions are not as businesslike as the syndicates in their dealings with all those outside of themselves.

Within themselves they practice 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.

"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 the union the workingman

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 economical liberty among the workingmen

themselves, and they had to practice great cruelties against those who refused to join them or who rebelled

"Well," said the lawyer, from his judicial mind, "the great syndicates have no scruple 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

undersell him and freeze him out; they don't break his head, but they bankrupt himthe principle is the

"Don't interrupt Mr. Homos," the banker entreated; "I am very curious to know just how they got rid of labor

"We had syndicates, too, and finally we had the reductio ad absurdumwe had a federation of labor unions

and a federation of syndicates, that divided the nation into two camps. The situation was not only impossible,

"Isn't it in a fair way to become so?" asked the doctor; and he turned to the lawyer: "What should you say was

"There's nothing so capricious as the logic of events. It's like a woman's reasoningyou 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

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

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

The lawyer said: "That seems to dispose of the question of the workingman 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

The Altrurian seemed to be sensible of the kindly skepticism which persisted in our reception of his

statements, after all we had read of Altruria. He smiled indulgently, and said: "You musn'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

"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"

'Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail' his novels probably wouldn't be worth reading." "Ah!" said the

Altrurian, as if he did not quite follow this jokingand to tell the truth, I never find the personal thing in

very good taste. "You will understand, then, how extremely difficult it is for me to imagine a condition of

things like yoursalthough I have it under my very eyeswhere the money consideration is the first

"I beg your pardon," said the Altrurian, sweetly; "you can see how easily I go astray."

"Why, I don't know," the banker interposed, "that you are so far out in what you say. If you had said that

money was always the first motive, I should have been inclined to dispute you, too; but when you say that

money is the first consideration, I think you are quite right. Unless a man secures his financial basis for his

work, he can't do his work. It's nonsense to pretend otherwise. So the money consideration is the first

consideration. People here have to live by their work, and to live they must have money. Of course, we all

recognize a difference in the qualities, as well as in the kinds, of work. The work of the laborer may roughly

be defined as the necessity of life; the work of the business man as the means, and the work of the artist and

scientist as the end. We might refine upon these definitions and make them closer, but they will serve for

illustration as they are. I don't think there can be any question as to which is the highest kind of work; some

truths are selfevident. He is a fortunate man whose work is an end, and every business man sees this, owns

it to himself at least when he meets some man of an �sthetic or scientific occupation. He knows that this

luckier fellow has a joy in his work, which he can never feel in business; that his success in it can never be

embittered by the thought that it is the failure of another; that if he does it well, it is pure good; that there

cannot be any competition in itthere can be only a noble emulation, as far as the work itself is concerned.

He can always look up to his work, for it is something above him; and a business man often has to look down

upon his business, for it is often beneath him, unless he is a pretty low fellow."

I listened to all this in surprise; I knew that the banker was a cultivated man, a man of university training, and

that he was a reader and a thinker; but he had always kept a certain reserve in his talk, which he now seemed

to have thrown aside for the sake of the Altrurian, or because the subject had a charm that lured him out of

himself. "Well, now," he continued, "the question is of the money consideration, which is the first

consideration with us all: does it, or doesn't it degrade the work, which is the life, of those among us whose

work is the highest? I understand that this is the misgiving which troubles you in view of our conditions?"

The Altrurian assented, and I thought it a proof of the banker's innate delicacy that he did not refer the matter,

so far as it concerned the �sthetic life and work, to me; I was afraid he was going to do so. But he

courteously proposed to keep the question impersonal, and he went on to consider it himself. "Well, I don't

suppose any one can satisfy you fully. But I should say that it put such men under a double strain, and

perhaps that is the reason why so many of them break down in a life that is certainly far less exhausting than

business. On one side, the artist is kept to the level of the workingman, of the animal, of the creature whose

sole affair is to get something to eat and somewhere to sleep. This is through his necessity. On the other side,

he is exalted to the height of beings who have no concern but with the excellence of their work, which they

were born and divinely authorized to do. This is through his purpose. Between the two, I should say that he

None of the others said anything, and since I had not been personally appealed to, I felt the freer to speak. "If

you will suppose me to be speaking from observation rather than experience," I began.

"By all means," said the banker, "go on," and the rest made haste in various forms to yield me the word.

"I should say that such a man certainly got mixed, but that his work kept itself pure from the money

consideration, as it were, in spite of him. A painter, or actor, or even a novelist, is glad to get all he can for his

work, and, such is our fallen nature, he does get all he knows how to get; but when he has once fairly got into

his work, he loses himself in it. He does not think whether it will pay or not, whether it will be popular or not,

"Well, that is conceivable," said the banker. "But doesn't the money consideration influence his choice of

subject? Wouldn't he rather do something he would get less for, if he could afford it, than the thing he knows

"Oddly enough, I don't believe it does," I answered, after a moment's reflection. "A man makes his choice

once for all when he embraces the �sthetic life, or rather it is made for him; no other life seems possible. I

know there is a general belief that an artist does the kind of thing he has made go because it pays; but this

only shows the prevalence of business ideals. If he did not love to do the thing he does he could not do it

"I am glad to hear it," said the banker, and he added to the Altrurian: "So you see we are not so bad as one

"Yes," the other assented. "I knew something of your literature as well as your conditions before I left home,

and I perceived that by some anomaly, the one was not tainted by the other. It is a miraculous proof of the

"And the popular novelist," the lawyer whispered in my ear, but loud enough for the rest to hear, and they all

The Altrurian, with his weak sense of humor, passed the joke. "It shows no signs of corruption from greed,

but I can't help thinking that fine as it is, it might have been much finer if the authors who produced it had

"Are they absolutely freed to it in Altruria?" asked the professor. "I understood you that everybody had to

"That is a mistake. Nobody works for his living in Altruria; he works for others' living."

"Ah, that is precisely what our workingmen object to doing here!" said the manufacturer. "In that last

interview of mine with the walkingdelegate he had the impudence to ask me why my men should work for

"He couldn't imagine that you were giving them the work to dothe very means of life," said the professor.

"Perhaps," the Altrurian suggested, "they might not have found it such a hardship to work for your living if

their own had been assured, as it is with us. If you will excuse my saying it, we should think it monstrous in

Altruria for any man to have another's means of life in his power; and in our conditions it is hardly

imaginable. Do you really have it in your power to take away a man's opportunity to earn a living?"

"It is in my power to take away his life; but I don't habitually shoot my fellowmen, and I never dismissed a

"Oh, I beg your pardon," said the Altrurian. "I didn't dream of accusing you of such inhumanity. But you see

our whole system is so very different that, as I said, it is hard for me to conceive of yours, and I am very

curious to understand its workings. If you shot your fellowman as you say, the law would punish you; but if

for some reason that you decided to be good you took away his means of living, and he actually starved to

"Then the law would have nothing to do with it," the professor replied for the manufacturer, who did not

seem ready to answer. "But that is not the way things fall out. The man would be supported in idleness,

probably, till he got another job, by his union, which would take the matter up."

"But I thought that our friend did not employ union labor," returned the Altrurian.

I found all this very uncomfortable, and tried to turn the talk back to a point that I felt curious about. "But in

Altruria, if the literary class is not exempt from the rule of manual labor where do they find time and strength

"Why, you must realize that our manual labor is never engrossing or exhausting. It is no more than is

necessary to keep the body in health. I do not see how you remain well here, you people of sedentary

"Oh, we all take some sort of exercise. We walk several hours a day, or we row, or we ride a bicycle, or a

"But to us," returned the Altrurian, with a growing frankness, which nothing but the sweetness of his manner

would have excused, "exercise for exercise would appear stupid. The barren expenditure of force that began

and ended in itself, and produced nothing, we shouldif you will excuse my saying solook upon as

AT this moment, the lady who had hailed me so gaily from the top of the coach while I stood waiting for the

Altrurian to help the porter with the baggage, just after the arrival of the train, came up with her husband to

our little group and said to me: "I want to introduce my husband to you. He adores your books." She went on

much longer to this effect, while the other men grinned round and her husband tried to look as if it were all

true, and her eyes wandered to the Altrurian, who listened gravely. I knew perfectly well that she was using

her husband's zeal for my fiction to make me present my friend; but I did not mind that, and I introduced him

to both of them. She took possession of him at once and began walking him off down the piazza, while her

husband remained with me and the members of our late conference drifted apart. I was not sorry to have it

broken up for the present; it seemed to me that it had lasted quite long enough, and I lighted a cigar with the

He began, apparently in compliment to literature in my person, "Yes, I like to have a book where I can get at

it when we're not going out to the theatre, and I want to quiet my mind down after business. I don't care much

what the book is; my wife reads to me till I drop off, and then she finishes the book herself and tells me the

rest of the story. You see, business takes it out of you so! Well, I let my wife do most of the reading, anyway.

She knows pretty much everything that's going in that line. We haven't got any children, and it occupies her

mind. She's up to all sorts of thingsshe's artistic, and she's musical, and she's dramatic, and she's literary.

He was a goodlooking, goodnatured, average American of the moneymaking type; I believe he was some

sort of broker, but I do not quite know what his business was. As we walked up and down the piazza, keeping

a discreet little distance from the corner his wife had run off to with her capture, he said he wished he could

get more time with her in the summerbut he supposed I knew what business was. He was glad she could

"By the way," he asked, "who is this friend of yours? The women are all crazy about him, and it's been an

even thing between my wife and Miss Groundsel which would fetch him first. But I'll bet on my wife every

time, when it comes to a thing like that. He's a goodlooking fellowsome kind of foreigner, I believe;

I told him, and he said: "Oh, yes. Well, if we are going to restrict immigration. I suppose we sha'n't see many

I do not know why this innocent pleasantry piqued me to say: "If I understand the Altrurians, my dear fellow,

nothing could induce them to emigrate to America. As far as I can make out, they would regard it very much

"Really, I can't say, and I don't know that I've explicit authority for my statement."

"They are worse than the English used to be," he went on. "I didn't know that there were any foreigners who

I sighed. "There are a good many things that the War didn't settle so definitely as we've been used to thinking,

I'm afraid. But for that matter, I fancy an Altrurian would regard the English as a little lower in the scale of

"Is that so? Well, that's pretty good on the English, anyway," said my companion, and he laughed with an

"My dear!" his wife called to him from where she was sitting with the Altrurian, " I wish you would go for

"I'll go if you'll tell me where," he said, and he confided to me, "Never knows where her shawl is,

"Well, I think I left it in the office somewhere. You might ask at the desk; or, perhaps it's in the rack by the

"I thought so," said her husband, with another glance at me, as if it were the greatest fun in the world, and he

I went and took a chair by the lady and the Altrurian, and she began at once: "Oh, I'm so glad you've come! I

have been trying to enlighten Mr. Homos about some of the little social peculiarities among us, that he finds

it so hard to understand. He was just now," the lady continued, "wanting to know why all the natives out here

were not invited to go in and join our young people in the dance, and I've been trying to tell him that we

consider it a great favor to let them come and take up so much of the piazza and look in at the windows."

She gave a little laugh of superiority, and twitched her pretty head in the direction of the young country girls

and country fellows who were thronging the place that night in rather unusual numbers. They were well

enough looking, and as it was Saturday night they were in their best. I suppose their dress could have been

criticised; the young fellows were clothed by the readymade clothing store, and the young girls after their

own devices from the fashionpapers: but their general effect was good and their behavior was

irreproachable; they were very quietif anything, too quiet. They took up a part of the piazza that was

yielded them by common usage, and sat watching the hop inside, not so much enviously, I thought, as

wistfully; and for the first time it struck me as odd that they should have no part in the gayety. I had often

seen them there before, but I had never thought it strange they should be shut out. It had always seemed quite

normal, and now, suddenly, for one baleful moment, it seemed abnormal. I suppose it was the talk we had

been having about the workingmen in society which caused me to see the thing as the Altrurian must have

seen it; but I was, nevertheless, vexed with him for having asked such a question, after he had been so fully

instructed upon the point. It was malicious of him, or it was stupid. I hardened my heart and answered: "You

might have told him, for one thing, that they were not dancing because they had not paid the piper."

"Then the money consideration enters even into your social pleasures?" asked the Altrurian.

He evaded this question, as he evaded all straightforward questions concerning his country: "We have no

money consideration, you know. But do I understand that all your social entertainments are paid for by the

"Oh, no, not so bad as that, quite, There are a great many that the host pays for. Even here, in a hotel, the host

"Oh, yes, people are welcome from all the other hotels and boardinghouses and the private cottages. The

young men are especially welcome; there are not enough young men in the hotel to go round, you see." In

fact, we could see that some the pretty girls within were dancing with other girls; halfgrown boys were

"It's grotesque!" I said, and I felt ashamed of it. "But what are you to do? The young men are hard at work in

the cities, as many as can get work there, and the rest are out West, growing up with the country. There are

"But what would happen if these young farmersI suppose they are farmerswere invited in to take part in

"Oh, yes," the Altrurian entreated, with unwonted perception of the humor. "I know that I must be very

trying, with my questions; but do not abandon me to the solitude of my own conjectures. They are dreadful!"

"Well, I won't," said the lady, with another laugh. "And I will try to tell you what would happen if those

farmers or farm hands, or whatever they are, were asked in. The mammas would be very indignant, and the

young ladies would be seared, and nobody would know what to do, and the dance would stop."

"No, they prefer to dance with young men of their own station; they would rather not dance at all than dance

with people beneath them. I don't say anything against these natives here; they seem very civil and decent.

But they have not the same social traditions as the young ladies; they would be out of place with them, and

"Yes, I can see that they are not fit to associate with them," said the Altrurian, with a gleam of common sense

that surprised me, "and that as long as your present conditions endure, they never can be. You must excuse

the confusion which the difference between your political ideals and your economic ideals constantly creates

in me. I always think of you politically first, and realize you as a perfect democracy; then come these other

facts, in which I cannot perceive that you differ from the aristocratic countries of Europe in theory or

practice. It is very puzzling. Am I right in supposing that the effect of your economy is to establish

insuperable inequalities among you, and to forbid the hope of the brotherhood which your polity proclaims?"

Mrs. Makely looked at me, as if she were helpless to grapple with his meaning, and for fear of worse, I

thought best to evade it. I said, "I don't believe that anybody is troubled by those distinctions. We are used to

them, and everybody acquiesces in them, which is a proof that they are a very good thing."

Mrs. Makely now came to my support. "The Americans are very highspirited, in every class, and I don't

believe one of those nice farm boys would like being asked in any better than the young ladies. You can't

"Oh, I assure you they don't feel themselves inferior! They consider themselves as good as anybody. There

are some very interesting characters among them. Now, there is a young girl sitting at the first window, with

her profile outlined by the light, whom I feel it an honor to speak to. That's her brother, standing there with

herthat tall, gaunt young man with a Roman face; it's such a common type here in the mountains. Their

father was a soldier, and he distinguished himself so in one of the last battles that he was promoted. He was

badly wounded, but he never took a pension; he just came back to his farm and worked on till he died. Now

the son has the farm, and he and his sister live there with their mother. The daughter takes in sewing, and in

that way they manage to make both ends meet. The girl is really a firstrate sempstress, and so cheap! I give

her a good deal of my work in the summer, and we are quite friends. She's very fond of reading; the mother is

an invalid, but she reads aloud while the daughter sews, and you've no idea how many books they get

through. When she comes for sewing, I like to talk with her about them; I always have her sit down; it's hard

to realize that she isn't a lady. I'm a good deal criticised, I know, and I suppose I do spoil her a little; it puts

notions into such people's heads, if you meet them in that way; they're pretty free and independent as it is. But

when I'm with Lizzie I forget that there is any difference between us; I can't help loving the child. You must

take Mr. Homos to see them, Mr. Twelvemough. They've got the father's sword hung up over the head of the

Mrs. Makely sighed, and there fell a little pause, which she broke with a question she had the effect of having

"There is one thing I should like to ask you, too, Mr. Homos. Is it true that everybody in Altruria does some

I thought this rather offensive, but I could not see that the Altrurian had taken it ill. "Perhaps we had better try

to understand each other clearly before I answer that question. You have no titles of nobility as they have in

"No, indeed! I hope we have outgrown those superstitions," said Mrs. Makely, with a republican fervor that

did my heart good. "It is a word that we apply first of all to the moral qualities of a person."

"But you said just now that at you sometimes forgot your semptress was not a lady. Just what did you mean

Mrs. Makely hesitated. "I meantI suppose I meantthat she had not the surroundings of a lady; the social

"Then it has something to do with social as well as moral qualitieswith ranks and classes?"

"Classes, yes; but as you know, we have no ranks in America." The Altrurian took off his hat and rubbed an

imaginable perspiration from his forehead. He sighed deeply. "It is all very difficult."

"Yes," Mrs. Makely assented, "I suppose it is. All foreigners find it so. In fact it is something that you have to

"Well, then, my dear madam, will you tell me without further question, what you understand by a lady, and

"I will do my best," said Mrs. Makely. "But it would be so much easier to tell you who was or who was not a

lady! However, your acquaintance is so limited yet, that I must try to do something in the abstract and

impersonal for you. In the first place, a lady must be above the sordid anxieties in every way. She need not be

very rich, but she must have enough, so that she need not be harrassed about making both ends meet, when

she ought to be devoting herself to her social duties. The time is past with us when a lady could look after the

dinner, and perhaps cook part of it herself, and then rush in to receive her guests, and do the amenities. She

must have a certain kind of house, so that her entourage won't seem cramped and mean, and she must have

nice frocks, of course, and plenty of them. She needn't be of the smart set; that isn't at all necessary; but she

can't afford to be out of the fashion. Of course she must have a certain training. She must have cultivated

tastes; she must know about art, and literature, and music, and all those kind of things, and though it isn't

necessary to go in for anything in particular, it won't hurt her to have a fad or two. The nicest kind of fad is

charity; and people go in for that a great deal. I think sometimes they use it to work up with, and there are

some who use religion in the same way; I think it's horrid; but it's perfectly safe; you can't accuse them of

doing it. I'm happy to say, though, that mere church association doesn't count socially so much as it used to.

Charity is a great deal more insidious. But you see how hard it is to define a lady. So much has to be left to

the nerves, in all these things! And then it's changing all the time; Europe's coming in, and the old American

ideals are passing away. Things that people did ten years ago would be impossible now, or at least ridiculous.

You wouldn't be considered vulgar, quite, but you would certainly be considered a back number, and that's

almost as bad. Really," said Mrs. Makely, "I don't believe I can tell you what a lady is."

We all laughed together at her confession. The Altrurian asked, "But do I understand that one of her

"Nothing to do!" cried Mrs. Makely. "A lady is busy from morning till night! She always goes to bed

"With making herself agreeable and her house attractive, with going to lunches, and teas, and dinners, and

concerts, and theatres, and art exhibitions, and charity meetings, and receptions, and with writing a thousand

and one notes about them, and accepting and declining, and giving lunches and dinners, and making calls and

receiving them, and I don't know what all. It's the most hideous slavery!" Her voice rose into a something like

a shriek; one could see that her nerves were going at the mere thought of it all. "You don't have a moment to

"Work! Don't you call all that work, and useful? I'm sure I envy the cook in my kitchen at times; I envy the

woman that scrubs my floors. Stop! Don't ask why I don't go into my kitchen, or get down on my knees with

the mop! It isn't possible! You simply can't! Perhaps you could if you were very grande dame, but if you're

anywhere near the line of necessity, or ever have been, you can't. Besides, if we did do our own household

work, as I understand your Altrurian ladies do, what would become of the servant class? We should be taking

"It would certainly be wrong to take away the living of a fellowcreature," the Altrurian gravely admitted,

"It's a mountain," said the lady, with exhaustion in her voice, but a returning amiability; his forbearance must

"Then you are shut up to a hideous slavery without use, except to kill time and you cannot escape from it

"Yes," I put in, "and that is a difficulty that meets us at every turn. It is something that Matthew Arnold urged

with great effect in his paper on that crank of a Tolstoi. He asked what would become of the people who

needed the work, if we served and waited on ourselves, as Tolstoi preached. The question is unanswerable."

"Oh, I don't presume to censure you. And if you believe that your conditions are the best"

"We believe them the best in the best of all possible worlds," I said, devoutly; and it struck me that if ever we

came to have a national church, some such affirmation as that concerning our economical conditions ought to

The Altrurian's mind had not followed mine so far. "And your young girls?" he asked of Mrs. Makely, "how

She seemed to reflect. "I don't know that it is very differently occupied. Of course, they have their own

amusements; they have their dances, and little clubs, and their sewing societies. I suppose that even an

Altrurian would applaud their sewing for the poor?" Mrs. Makely asked rather satirically.

"Yes," he answered; and then he asked, "Isn't it taking work away from some needy sempstress, though? But

"What I find it so hard to understand is how you ladies can endure a life of mere nervous exertion, such as

"We don't keep well," said Mrs. Makely, with the greatest amusement. "I don't suppose that when you get

above the working classes, till you reach the very rich, you would find a perfectly well woman in America."

"No," said Mrs. Makely, "it's shamefully moderate," and she seemed to delight in having made out such a bad

case for her sex. You cannot stop a woman of that kind when she gets started; I had better have left it alone.

"But," said the Altrurian, "if you are forbidden by motives of humanity from doing any sort of manual labor,

which you must leave to those who live by it, I suppose you take some sort of exercise?"

"You must approve of that," I said to the Altrurian, "as you consider exercise for its own sake insane or

immoral. But, Mrs. Makely," I entreated, "you are giving me away at a tremendous rate. I have just been

telling Mr. Homos that you ladies go in for athletics so much, now, in your summer outings, that there is

danger of your becoming physically as well as intellectually superior to us poor fellows. Don't take that

"I won't, altogether," she said. "I couldn't have the heart to, after the pretty way you've put it. I don't call it

very athletic, sitting round on hotel piazzas all summer long, as nineteentwentieths of us do. But I don't

deny that there is a Remnant, as Matthew Arnold calls them, who do go in for tennis, and boating, and

bathing, and tramping and climbing." She paused, and then she concluded gleefully. "And you ought to see

The joke was on me; I could not help laughing, though I felt rather sheepish before the Altrurian. Fortunately,

he did not pursue the inquiry; his curiosity had been given a slant aside from it.

"But your ladies," he asked, "they have the summer for rest, however they use it. Do they generally leave

town? I understood Mr. Twelvemough to say so," he added with a deferential glance at me.

"Yes, you may say it is the universal custom in the class that can afford it," said Mrs. Makely. She proceeded

as if she felt a tacit censure in his question. "It wouldn't be the least use for us to stay and fry through our

summers in the city, simply because our fathers and brothers had to. Besides, we are worn out at the end of

"Ah, I have always heard that the Americans are beautiful in their attitude towards women."

"They are perfect dears," said Mrs. Makely, "and here comes one of the best of them."

At that moment her husband came up and laid her shawl across her shoulders. "Whose character is that you're

"It was where you left it: on the sofa, in the side parlor. I had to take my life in my hand, when I crossed

among all those waltzers in there. There must have been as many as three couples on the floor. Poor girls! I

pity them, off at these places. The fellows in town have a good deal better time. They've got their clubs, and

they've got the theatres, and when the weather gets too much for them, they can run off down to the shore for

the night. The places anywhere within an hour's ride are full of fellows, The don't have to dance with one

another there, or with little boys. Of course, that's all right, if they like it better." He laughed at his wife, and

"Then the young gentlemen whom the young ladies here usually meet in society, are all at work in the

"Yes, those who are not out West, growing up with the country, except, of course, the fellows who have

"But why do your young men go West to grow up with the country?" pursued my friend.

"Because the East is grown up. They have got to hustle, and the West is the place to hustle. To make money,"

"Oh, we must have it, I suppose," she sighed. "They used to say about the girls who grew into old maids just

after the Rebellion that they had lost their chance in the war for the union. I think quite as many lose their

"Mars hath slain his thousands, but Mammon hath slain his tens of thousands, " I suggested lightly; we all

like to recognize the facts, so long as we are not expected to do anything about them; then, we deny them.

"Well, my dear, you are expensive, you know," said her husband, "and if we want to have you, why we've got

"Oh, I don't blame you, you poor things! There's nothing to be done about it; it's just got to go on and on; I

The Altrurian had been following us with that air of polite mystification which I had begun to dread in him.

"Then, in your good society you postpone, and even forego, the happiness of life in the struggle to be rich?"

"Well, you see," said Makely, "a fellow don't like to ask a girl to share a home that isn't as nice as the home

"Sometimes," his wife put in, rather sadly, "I think that it's all a mistake, and that we'd be willing to share the

I laughed with him, but his wife did not, and in the silence that ensued there was nothing to prevent the

Altrurian from coming in with another of his questions. "How far does this state of things extend downward?

"Oh, no!" we all answered together, and Mrs. Makely said: "With your Altrurian ideas I suppose you would

naturally sympathize a great deal more with the lower classes, and think they had to endure all the hardships

in our system; but if you could realize how the struggle goes on in the best society, and how we all have to

fight for what we get, or don't get, you would be disposed to pity our upper classes, too."

Makely remarked, "I used to hear my father say that slavery was harder on the whites than it was on the

Makely rather faltered in conclusion, as if he were not quite satisfied with his remark, and I distinctly felt a

want of proportion in it; but I did not wish to say anything. His wife had no reluctance.

"Well, there's no comparison between the two things, but the struggle certainly doesn't affect the working

classes as it does us. They go on marrying and giving in marriage in the old way. They have nothing to lose,

"Blessed am dem what don't expect nuffin! Oh, I tell you it's a workingman's country," said Makely, through

his cigar smoke. "You ought to see them in town, these summer nights, in the parks and squares and the

cheap theatres. Their girls are not off for their health, anywhere, and their fellows are not off growing up with

the country. Their day's work is over and they're going in for a good time. And, then, walk through the streets

where they live, and see them out on the stoops with their wives and children! I tell you, it's enough to make a

"Yes," said Mrs. Makely, "it's astonishing how strong and well those women keep, with their great families

"Do you suppose," said the Altrurian, "that they are aware of the sacrifices which the ladies of the upper

classes make in leaving all the work to them, and suffering from the nervous debility which seems to be the

"They have not the remotest idea of it! They have no conception of what a society woman goes through with.

They think we do nothing. They envy us, too, and sometimes they're so ungrateful and indifferent, if you try

"Yes, though I don't know that they are really more ignorant of us than we are of them. It's the other half on

"Of course it's a pity, but what can you do? You can't know what people are like unless you live like them,

and then the question is whether the game is worth the candle. I should like to know how you manage in

"Why, we have solved the problem in the only way, as you say, that it can be solved. We all live alike."

"Isn't that a little, just a very trifling little bit monotonous?" Mrs. Makely asked, with a smile. "But there is

everything, of course, in being used to it. To an unregenerate spiritlike mine, for exampleit seems

"But why? When you were younger, before you were married, you all lived at home together.Or, perhaps,

"Now, excuse me, Mr. Homos, that is all nonsense. You cannot have the family feeling without love, and it is

impossible to love other people. That talk about the neighbor, and all that, is all well enough" She

stopped herself, as if she dimly remembered Who began that talk, and then went on: "Of course, I accept it as

a matter of faith, and the spirit of it, nobody denies that; but what I mean is, that you must have frightful

quarrels all the time." She tried to look as if this were where she really meant to bring up, and he took her on

Makely and I burst into a laugh at her magnanimous frankness. The Altrurian remained serious. "But because

you lived alike, you knew each other; and so you easily made up your quarrels. It is quite as simple with us,

This notion of a human family seemed to amuse Mrs. Makely more and more; she laughed and laughed

again. "You must excuse me!" she panted, at last. "But I cannot imagine it! No, it is too ludicrous! just fancy

the jars of an ordinary family multiplied by the population of a whole continent! Why, you must be in a

perpetual squabble! You can't have any peace of your lives! It's worse, far worse, than our way!"

"But, madam," he began, "you are supposing our family to be made up of people with all the antagonistic

"No, no! I know human nature, Mr. Homos!" She suddenly jumped up an gave him her hand. "Good night!"

she said, sweetly, and as she drifted off on her husband's arm, she looked back at us and nodded in gay

The Altrurian turned upon me with unabated interest. "And have you no provision in your system for finally

making the lower classes understand the sufferings and sacrifices of the upper classes in their behalf? Do you

"Well, not this evening, " I said, throwing the end of my cigar away. "I'm going to bed, aren't you?"

I left my guest abruptly, with a feeling of vexation not very easily definable. His repetition of questions about

questions which society has so often answered, and always in the same way, was not so bad in him as it

would have been in a person of our civilization; he represented a wholly different state of things, the

inversion of our own, and much could be forgiven him for that reason, just as in Russia much could be

forgiven to an American, if he formulated his curiosity concerning imperialism from a purely republican

experience. I knew that in Altruria, for instance, the possession of great gifts, of any kind of superiority,

involved the sense of obligation to others, and the wish to identify one's self with the great mass of men,

rather than the ambition to distinguish one's self from them; and that the Altrurians honored their gifted men

in the measure they did this. A man reared in such a civilization must naturally find it difficult to get our

point of view; with social inclusion as the ideal, he could with difficulty conceive of our ideal of social

exclusion; but I think we had all been very patient with him; we should have made short work with an

American who had approached us with the same inquiries. Even from a foreigner, the citizen of a republic

founded on the notion, elsewhere exploded ever since Cain, that one is his brother's keeper, the things he

asked seemed inoffensive only because they were puerile; but they certainly were puerile. I felt that it ought

to have been selfevident to him that when a commonwealth of 60,000,000 Americans based itself upon the

great principle of selfseeking, selfseeking was the best thing, and whatever hardship it seemed to work, it

must carry with it unseen blessings in tenfold measure. If a few hundred thousand favored Americans

enjoyed the privilege of socially contemning all the rest, it was as clearly right and just that they should do so,

as that 4000 American millionaires should be richer than all the other Americans put together. Such a status,

growing out of our political equality and our material prosperity must evince a divine purpose to anyone

intimate with the designs of providence, and it seemed a kind of impiety to doubt its perfection. I excused the

misgivings which I could not help seeing in the Altrurian to his alien traditions, and I was aware that my

friends had done so, too. But if I could judge from myself he must have left them all sensible of their effort;

and this was not pleasant. I could not blink the fact that although I had openly disagreed with him on every

point of ethics and economics, I was still responsible for him as a guest. It was as if an English gentleman had

introduced a blatant American democrat into tory society; or, rather, as if a southerner of the olden time had

harbored a northern abolitionist, and permitted him to inquire into the workings of slavery among his

neighbors. People would tolerate him as my guest for a time, but there must be an end of their patience with

the tacit enmity of his sentiments, and the explicit vulgarity of his ideals, and when the end came, I must be

I did not like the notion of this, and I meant to escape it if I could. I confess that I would have willingly

disowned him, as I had already disavowed his opinions, but there was no way of doing it short of telling him

to go away, and I was not ready to do that. Something in the man, I do not know what, mysteriously appealed

to me. He was not contemptibly puerile without being lovably childlike, and I could only make up my mind

to be more and more frank with him, and to try and shield him, as well as myself, from the effects I dreaded.

I fell asleep planning an excursion further into the mountains, which should take up the rest of the week that I

expected him to stay with me, and would keep him from following up his studies of American life where they

A knock at my door roused me, and I sent a drowsy "Come in!" towards it from the bedclothes without

"Good morning!" came back in the rich, gentle voice of the Altrurian. I lifted my head with a jerk from the

pillow, and saw him standing against the closed door, with my shoes in his hand. "Oh, I am sorry I waked

"Not at all, not at all!" I said. "It's quite time, I dare say. But you oughtn't to have taken the trouble to bring

"I wasn't altogether disinterested in it," he returned. "I wished you to compliment me on them. Don't you

think they are pretty well done, for an amateur?" He came toward my bed, and turned them about in his

"Yes," he returned, easily. "I thought I would go into the baggageroom, after we parted last night, to look

for a piece of mine that had not been taken to my room, and I found the porter there, with his wrist bound up.

He said he had strained it in handling a lady's Saratogahe said it was a large trunkand I begged him to

let me relieve him at the boots he was blacking. He refused, at first, but I insisted upon trying my hand at a

pair, and then he let me go on with the men's boots; he said he could varnish the ladies' without hurting his

wrist. I found that it required less skill than I supposed, and after I had done a few pairs he said I could black

"Did anybody see you?" I gasped, and I felt a cold perspiration break out on me.

"No, we had the whole midnight hour to ourselves. The porter's work with the baggage was all over, and

there was nothing to interrupt the delightful chat we fell into. He is a very intelligent man, and he told me all

about that custom of feeing which you deprecate. He says that the servants hate it as much as the guests; they

have to take the tips, now, because the landlords figure on them in the wages, and they cannot live without

"Mr. Homos," I broke in, with the strength I found in his assurance that no one had seen him helping the

porter black boots, "I want to speak very seriously with you, and I hope you will not be hurt if I speak very

plainly about a matter in which I have your good solely at heart." This was not quite true, I winced inwardly a

little when he thank me with that confounded sincerity of his, which was so much like irony; but I went on:

"It is my duty to you, as my guest, to tell you that this matter of doing for others is not such a simple matter

here, as your peculiar training leads you to think. You have been deceived by a superficial likeness; but,

really, I do not understand how you could have read all you have done about us, and not realized before

coming here that America and Altruria are absolutely distinct and diverse in their actuating principles. They

are both republics, I know; but America is a republic where every man is for himself, and you cannot help

others as you do at home; it is dangerousit is ridiculous. You must keep this fact in mind, or you will fall

into errors that will be very embarrassing to you in your stay among us, and," I was forced to add, "to all your

friends. Now, I certainly hoped, after what I had said to you, and what my friends had explained of our

civilization, that you would not have done a thing of this kind. I will see the porter, as soon as I am up, and

ask him not to mention the matter to anyone, but I confess I don't like to take an apologetic tone with him;

your conditions are so alien to ours that they will seem incredible to him, and he will think I am stuffing

"I don't believe he will think that," said the Altrurian, "and I hope you won't find the case so bad as it seems

"Oh, the thing wasn't wrong in itself. It was only wrong under the circumstances. Abstractly, it is quite right

to help a fellowbeing who needs help; no one denies that, even in a country where every one is for himself."

"I am so glad to hear it," said the Altrurian . "Then, at least, I have not gone radically astray; and I do not

think you need take the trouble to explain the Altrurian ideas to the porter. I have done that already, and they

seemed quite conceivable to him; he said that poor folks had to act upon them, even here, more or less, and

that if they did not act upon them, there would be no chance for them at all. He says they have to help each

other, very much as we do at home, and that it is only the rich folks among you who are independent. I really

don't think you need speak to him at all, unless you wish; and I was very careful to guard my offer of help at

the point where I understood from you and your friends that it might do harm. I asked him if there was not

someone who would help him out with his bootblacking for money, because in that case I would be glad to

pay him; but he said there was no one about who would take the job: that he had to agree to black the boots,

or else he could not have got the place of porter, but that all the rest of the help would consider it a disgrace,

and would not help him for love or money. So it seemed quite safe to offer him my services."

I felt that the matter was almost hopeless, but I asked, , "And what he said, didn't that suggest anything else to

"Didn't it occur to you that if none of his fellow servants were willing to help him black boots, and if he did it

"Why, no," said the Altrurian, with absolute simplicity. He must have perceived the despair I fell into at this

answer, for he asked, "Why should I have minded doing for others what I should have been willing to do for

"There are a great many things we are willing to do for ourselves that we are not willing to do for others. But

even on that principle, which I think false and illogical, you could not be justified. A gentleman is not willing

to black his own boots. It is offensive to his feelings, to his selfrespect; it is something he will not do if he

"Then, in America," said the Altrurian, "it is not offensive to the feelings of a gentleman to let another do for

"Ah," he returned, "then we understand something altogether different by the word gentleman in Altruria. I

I thought I had better leave the subject, and, "By the way," I said, "how would you like to take a little tramp

"I should be delighted," said the Altrurian, so gratefully, that I was ashamed to think why I was proposing the

"Well, then, I shall be ready to start as soon as we have had breakfast. I will join you down stairs in half an

He left me at this hint, though really I was half afraid he might stay and offer to lend me a hand at my toilet,

in the expression of his national character. I found him with Mrs. Makely, when I went down, and she began,

with a parenthetical tribute to the beauty of the mountains in the morning light, "Don't be surprised to see me

up at this unnatural hour. I don't know whether it was the excitement of our talk last night, or what it was, but

my sulfonal wouldn't act, though I took fifteen grains, and I was up with the lark, or should have been, if

there had been any lark outside of literature to be up with. However, this air is so glorious that I don't mind

losing a night's sleep, now and then. I believe that with a little practice one could get along without any sleep

at all, here; at least I could. I'm sorry to say, poor Mr. Makely can't, apparently. He's making up for his share

of my vigils, and I'm going to breakfast without him. Do you know, I've done a very bold thing: I've got the

head waiter to give you places at our table; I know you'll hate it, Mr. Twelvemough, because you naturally

want to keep Mr. Homos to yourself, and I don't blame you at all; but I'm simply not going to let you, and

The pleasure I felt at this announcement was not unmixed, but I tried to keep Mrs. Makely from thinking so,

and I was immensely relieved when she found a chance to say to me in a low voice, "I know just how you're

feeling, Mr. Twelvemough, and I'm going to help you keep him from doing anything ridiculous, if I can. I

like him, and I think it's a perfect shame to have people laughing at him. I know we can manage him between

We so far failed, however, that the Altrurian shook hands with the head waiter, when he pressed open the

wire netting door to let us into the diningroom, and made a bow to our waitress of the sort one makes to a

lady. But we thought it best to ignore these little errors of his, and reserve our moral strength for anything

more spectacular. Fortunately we got through our breakfast with nothing worse than his jumping up, and

stooping to hand the waitress a spoon she let fall; but this could easily pass for some attention to Mrs. Makely

at a little distance. There were not many people down to breakfast, yet; but I could see that there was a good

deal of subdued sensation among the waitresses, standing with folded arms behind their tables, and that the

Mrs. Makely asked if we were going to church. She said she was driving that way and would be glad to drop

us. "I'm not going myself," she explained, "because I couldn't make anything of the sermon, with my head in

the state it is, and I'm going to compromise on a good action. I want to carry some books and papers over to

"I should venture to hope it," he said, with a tolerant seriousness not altogether out of keeping with her

"Lizzie's mother. You know I told you about them last night. I think she must have got through the books I

lent her, and I know Lizzie didn't like to ask me for more, because she saw me talking with you and didn't

want to interrupt us. Such a nice girl! I think the Sunday papers must have come, and I'll take them over, too;

Mrs. Camp is always so glad to get them, and she is so delightful when she gets going about public events.

"I'm sure I don't know, madam. I haven't seen them yet. You know this is the first Sunday I've been in

"Well, I'm sorry to say you won't see the old Puritan Sabbath," said Mrs. Makely, with an abrupt deflection

from the question of the Sunday papers. "Though you ought to, up in these hills. The only thing left of it is

She was a woman who tended to levity, and I was a little afraid she might be going to say something

irreverent, but if she were, she was forestalled by the Altrurian asking, "Would it be very indiscreet, madam,

"The Camps?" she returned. "Not at all. I should be perfectly delighted. The thought seemed to strike her, and

she asked, "Why not go with me this morning, unless you are inflexibly on going to church, you and Mr.

The Altrurian glanced at me, and, said I should be only too glad, if I could carry some books, so that I could

compromise on a good action, too. "Take one of your own," she instantly suggested.

"Well, Mrs. Camp might," Mrs. Makely consented, with a smile. "She goes in for rather serious fiction; but I

think Lizzie would enjoy a good, oldfashion lovestory, where everybody got married, as they do in your

I winced a little, for everyone likes to be regarded seriously, and I did not enjoy being remanded to the

younggirl public; but I put a bold face on it, and said, "My good action shall be done in behalf of Miss

Half an hour later, Mrs. Makely having left word with the clerk where we were gone, so that her husband

need not alarmed when he got up, we were striking into the hills on a twoseated buckboard, with one of the

best teams of our hotel, and one of the most taciturn drivers. Mrs. Makely had the Altrurian get into the back

seat with her, and, after some attempts to make talk with the driver, I leaned over and joined in their talk. The

Altrurian was greatly interested, not so much in the landscapethough he owned its beauty, when we cried

out over it from point to pointbut in the human incidents and features. He noticed the cattle in the fields,

and the horses we met on the road, and the taste and comfort of the buildings, the variety of the crops, and the

promise of the harvest. I was glad of the respite his questions gave me from the study of the intimate

character of our civilization, for they were directed now at these more material facts, and I willingly joined

Mrs. Makely in answering them. We explained that the finest teams we met were from the different hotels or

boardinghouses, or at least from the farms where the people took city people to board; and that certain

shabby equipages belonged to the natives who lived solely by cultivating the soil. There was not very much

of the soil cultivated, for the chief crop was hay, with here and there a patch of potatoes or beans, and a few

acres in sweetcorn. The houses of the natives, when they were for their use only, were no better than their

turnouts; it was where the city boarder had found shelter that they were modern and pleasant. Now and then

we came to a deserted homestead, and I tried to make the Altrurian understand how farming in New England

had yielded to the competition of the immense agricultural operations of the west. "You know," I said, "that

agriculture is really an operation out there, as much as coalmining is in Pennsylvania, or finance in Wall

street; you have no idea of the vastness of the scale." Perhaps I swelled a little with pride in my celebration of

the national prosperity, as it flowed from our western farms of five, and ten, and twenty thousand acres; I

could not very well help putting on the pedal in these passages. Mrs. Makely listened almost as eagerly as the

Altrurian, for, as a cultivated American woman, she was necessarily quite ignorant of her own country,

geographically, politically and historically. "The only people left in the hill country in New England," I

concluded, "are those who are too old or too lazy to get away. Any young man of energy would be ashamed

to stay, unless he wanted to keep a boardinghouse or live on the city vacationists in summer. If he doesn't,

he goes west and takes up some of the new land, and comes back in middlelife, and buys a deserted farm to

"Dear me!" said the Altrurian, "Is it so simple as that? Then we can hardly wonder at their owners leaving

these wornout farms; though I suppose it must be with the pang of exile, sometime."

"Whoa!" said Mrs. Makely, speaking to the horses, before she spoke to the driver, as some women will. He

"Isn't that Reuben Camp, now, over there by that house?" she asked, as if we had been talking of him; that is

"Oh, well, then!" and "Reuben!" she called to the young man, who was prowling about the dooryard of a

sadcolored old farmhouse, and peering into a window here and there. "Come here a momentwon't you,

He lifted his head and looked round, and when he had located the appeal made to him, he came down the

walk to the gate and leaned over it, waiting for further instructions. I saw that it was the young man whom we

had noticed with the girl Mrs. Makely called Lizzie, on the hotel piazza, the night before.

"Yes, she's there with mother," said the young fellow quietly and with neither liking nor disliking in his tone.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" said the lady. "I didn't know but she might be at church. What in the world has happened

"No, I was just looking to see if it was all right. The folks wanted I should come round."

"Yes; gone west. They've left the old place, because they couldn't make a living here, any longer."

"Why, this is quite a case in point," I said. "Now, Mr. Homos, here is a chance to inform yourself at first hand

about a very interesting fact of our civilization;" and I added, in a low voice, to Mrs. Makely, "Won't you

"Oh, yes! Mr. Camp, this is Mr. Twelvemough, the authoryou know his books, of course; and Mr. Homos,

The young fellow opened the gate he leaned on, and came out to us. He took no notice of me, but he seized

the Altrurian's hand and wrung it. "I've heard of you," he said. "Mrs. Makely, were you going to our place?

"So do, then! Mother would give almost anything to see Mr. Homos. We've heard of Altruria, over our way,"

he added, to our friend. "Mother's been reading up all she can about it. She'll want to talk with you, and she

"Oh, I shall be glad to see her," said the Altrurian, "and to tell her everything I can. But won't you explain to

me first something about your deserted farms here? It's quite a new thing to me."

"It isn't a new thing to us," said the young fellow, with a short laugh. "And there isn't much to explain about

it. You'll see them all through New England. When a man finds he can't get his funeral expenses out of the

"But people used to get their living expenses here," I suggested. "Why can't they now?"

"Well, they didn't use to have western prices to fight with; and then the land wasn't wornout so, and the taxes

were not so heavy. How would you like to pay twenty to thirty dollars on the thousand, and assessed up to the

"Schools and roads. We've got to have schools, and you city folks want good roads when you come here in

the summer, don't you? Then the season is short, and sometimes we can't make a crop. The frost catches the

corn in the field, and you have your our trouble for your pains. Potatoes are the only thing we can count on,

except grass, and when everybody raises potatoes, you know where the price goes."

"Oh, but now, Mr. Camp, " said Mrs. Makely, leaning over towards him, and speaking in a cosey and coaxing

tone, as if he must not really keep the truth from an old friend like her, "isn't it a good deal because the

farmers' daughters want pianos, and the farmers' sons want buggies? I heard Professor Lumen saying, the

other day, that if the farmers were willing to work, as they used to work, they could still get a good living off

their farms, and that they gave up their places because they were too lazy, in many cases, to farm them

"He'd better not let me hear him saying that," said the young fellow, while a hot flush passed over his face.

He added bitterly, "If he wants to see how easy is to make a living up here, he can take this place and try, for

a year or two; he can get it cheap. But I guess he wouldn't want it the year round; he'd only want it a few

months in the summer, when he could enjoy the sightliness of it, and see me working over there on my farm,

while he smoked on his front porch." He turned round and looked at the old house, in silence a moment.

Then, as he went on, his voice lost its angry ring. "The folks here bought this place from the Indians, and

they'd been here more than two hundred years. Do you think they left it because they were too lazy to run it,

or couldn't get pianos and buggies out of it, or were such fools as not to know whether they were well off? It

was their home; they were born, and lived and died here. There is the family burying ground, over there."

Neither Mrs. Makely nor myself was ready with a reply, and we left the word with the Altrurian, who

suggested, "I suppose they will be more prosperous in the west, on the new land they take up?"

The young fellow leaned his arms on the wheel by which he stood. "What do you mean by taking up land?"

"There ain't any public domain that's worth having. All the good land is on the hands of railroads, and farm

syndicates, and speculators; and if you want a farm in the west you've got to buy it; the east is the only place

where folks give them away, because they ain't worth keeping. If you haven't got the ready money, you can

buy on credit, and pay ten, twenty and thirty per cent. interest, and live in a dugout on the plainstill your

The young man lifted his arms from the wheel and moved a few steps backwards, as he added, "I'll see you

The driver touched his horses, and we started briskly off again. But I confess I had quite enough of his

pessimism, and as we drove away I leaned back toward the Altrurian, and said, "Now, it is all perfect

nonsense to pretend that things are at that pass with us. There are more millionaires in America, probably,

than there are in all the other civilized countries of the globe, and it is not possible that the farming

population should be in such a hopeless condition. All wealth comes out of the earth, and you may be sure

"I am glad to hear you say so," said the Altrurian. "What is the meaning of this new party in the west that

seems to have held a convention lately? I read something of it in the train yesterday."

"Oh, that is a lot of crazy Hayseeds who don't want to pay back the money they have borrowed, or who find

themselves unable to meet their interest. It will soon blow over. We are always having those political flurries.

"But is it true that they have to pay such rates of interest as our young friend mentioned?"

"Well," I said, seeing the thing in the humorous light, which softens for us Americans so many of the

hardships of others, "I suppose that man likes to squeeze his brother man, when he gets him in his grip. That's

It seemed to me that he had asked something like that before when I alleged human nature in defence of some

piece of everyday selfishness. But I thought best not to notice it, and I went on: "The land is so rich out

"Is it possible?" cried the Altrurian. "Then I suppose it seldom really happens that a mortgage is foreclosed,

"Well, I can't say that exactly," and having admitted so much, I did not feel bound to impart a fact that

popped perversely into my mind. I was once talking with a western moneylender, a very good sort of

fellow, frank and open as the day; I asked him whether the farmers generally paid off their mortgages, and he

answered me that if the mortgage was to the value of a fourth of the land, the farmer might pay it off, but if it

were to a half, or a third even, he never paid it, but slaved on and died in his debts. "You may be sure,

however," I concluded, "that our young friend takes a jaundiced view of the situation."

"Now, really," said Mrs. Makely, "I must insist upon dropping this everlasting talk about money. I think it is

perfectly disgusting, and I believe it was Mr. Makely's account of his speculations that kept me awake last

night. My brain got to running on figures till the dark seemed to be all sown with dollar marks, like the stars

in the milky way. IUgh! What in the world is it? Oh, you dreadful little things!"

Mrs. Makely passed swiftly from terror to hysterical laughter as the driver pulled short up, and a group of

barefooted children broke in front of his horses, and scuttled out of the dust into the roadside bushes like a

covey of quails. There seemed to be a dozen of them, nearly all the same in size, but there turned out to be

only five or six; or at least there were no more showed their gleaming eyes and teeth through the underbrush

"Don't you know that you might have got killed?" she demanded with that severity good women feel for

people who have just escaped with their lives. "How lovely the dirty little dears are!" she added, in the next

wave of emotion. One bold fellow of six showed a half length above the bushes, and she asked, "Don't you

know that you oughtn't to play in the road when there are so many teams passing? Are all those your brothers

He ignored the first question. "One's my cousin." I pulled out a half dozen coppers, and held my hand toward

him. "See if there is one for each." They had no difficulty in solving the simple mathematical problem, except

the smallest girl, who cried for fear and baffled longing. I tossed the coin to her, and a little fat dog darted out

at her feet and caught it up in his mouth. "Oh, good gracious!" I called out in my light, humorous way. "Do

you suppose he's going to spend it for candy?" The little people thought that a famous joke, and they laughed

with the gratitude that even small favors inspire. "Bring your sister here," I said to the boldest boy, and when

he came up with the small woman, I put another copper into her hand. "Look out that the greedy dog doesn't

get it," I said, and my gaiety met with fresh applause. "Where do you live?" I asked with some vague purpose

of showing the Altrurian the kindliness that exists between our upper and lower classes.

"Over there," said the boy, and following the twist of his head, I glimpsed a wooden cottage on the border of

the forest, so very new that the sheathing had not yet been covered with clapboards. I stood up in the

buckboard and saw that it was a story and a half high, and could have had four or five rooms in it. The bare,

curtainless windows were set in the unpainted frames, but the front door seemed not to be hung yet. The

people meant to winter there, however, for the sod was banked up against the wooden underpinning; a

stovepipe stuck out of the roof of a little wing behind. While I gazed, a younglooking woman came to the

door, as if she had been drawn by our talk with the children, and then she jumped down from the threshhold,

which still wanted its doorstep, and came slowly out to us. The children ran to her with their coppers, and

Mrs. Makely called to her before she reached us, "I hope you weren't frightened. We didn't drive over any of

"Oh, I wasn't frightened," said the young woman. "It's a very safe place to bring up children, in the country,

"Yes, if they are not under the horses' feet," said Mrs. Makely, mingling instruction and amusement very

"Only five," said the mother, and she pointed to the alien in her flock. "He's my sister's. She lives just below

here." Her children had grouped themselves about her, and she kept passing her hands caressingly over their

little heads as she talked. "My sister has nine children, but she has the rest at church with her today."

"No, we're English. Our husbands work in the quarry. That's my little palace." The woman nodded her head

"It's going to be very nice," said Mrs. Makely, with an evident perception her pride in it.

"Oh, it was this gentleman." Mrs. Makely indicated me, and I bore the merit of my good action as modestly

"Then, thank you, sir," said the woman, and she asked Mrs. Makely, "You're not living about here, ma'am?"

"Yes, it is expensive," said Mrs. Makely, with a note of that satisfaction in her voice which we all feel in

"But I suppose you can afford it," said the woman, whose eye was running hungrily over Mrs. Makely's

pretty costume. "Some are poor, and some, rich. That's the way the world has to be made up, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Makely, very dryly, and the talk languished from this point, so that the driver felt warranted

in starting up his horses. When we had driven beyond earshot she said, "I knew she was not an American, as

soon as spoke, by her accent, and then those foreigners have no selfrespect. That was a pretty bold bid for a

contribution to finish up her 'little palace!' I'm glad I didn't give her anything, Mr. Twelvemough. I was afraid

"Oh, not at all!" I answered. "I saw the mischief I had done with the children."

The Altrurian, who had not asked anything for a long time, but had listened with eager interest to all that

passed, now came up smiling with his question: "Will you kindly tell me what harm could have been done by

I did not allow Mrs. Makely to answer, I was so eager to air my political economy."The very greatest harm. It

would have pauperized her. You have no idea how quickly they give way to the poison of that sort of thing.

As soon as they get any sort of help they expect more; they count upon it, and they begin to live upon it. The

sight of those coppers which I gave her childrenmore out of joke than charitydemoralized the woman.

She took us for rich people, and wanted us to build her a house. You have to guard against every approach to

"I don't believe," said Mrs. Makely, "that an American would have hinted as she did."

"No, an American would not have done that, I'm thankful to say. They take fees, but they don't ask charity,

yet." We went on to exult in the noble independence of the American character in all classes, at some length.

We talked at the Altrurian, but he did not seem to hear us. At last, he asked with a faint sigh, "Then, in your

conditions, a kindly impulse to aid one who needs your help, is something to be guarded against as possibly

"Exactly," I said, "And now you see what difficulties beset us in dealing with the problem of poverty. We

cannot let people suffer, for that would be cruel; and we cannot relieve their need without pauperizing them."

"I wish," said Mrs. Makely, ,that you would just tell us how you manage with the poor in Altruria."

"Well then, if you will excuse me, Mr. Homos," she said, "I think that is simply impossible. There must be

rich and there must be poor. There always have been, and there always will be. That woman said it as well as

THE Altrurian looked at Mrs. Makely with an amazement visibly heightened by the air of complacency she

put on after delivering this poser: "Do you really think Christ meant that you ought always to have the poor

"Why, of course," she answered triumphantly. "How else are the sympathies of the rich to be cultivated? The

poverty of some and the wealth of others, isn't that what forms the great tie of human brotherhood? If we

were all comfortable, or all shared alike, there would not be anything like charity, and Paul said, 'the greatest

of these is charity.' I believe it's 'love,' in the new version, but it comes to the same thing."

The Altrurian gave a kind of gasp and then lapsed into a silence that held until we came in sight of the Camp

farmhouse. It stood on the crest of a roadside upland, and looked down the beautiful valley, bathed in Sabbath

sunlight, and away to the ranges of hills, so far that it was hard to say whether it was sun or shadow that

dimmed their distance. Decidedly, the place was what the country people call sightly. The old house, once

painted a Brandon red, crouched low to the ground, with its leanto in the rear, and its flatarched

woodsheds and wagonhouses, stretching away at the side to the barn, and covering the approach to it with

an unbroken roof. There were flowers in beds along the underpinning of the house, which stood close to the

street, and on one side of the door was a clump of Spanish willow; an oldfashioned June rose climbed over

it from the other. An aged dog got stiffly to his feet from the threshold stone, and whimpered, as our

buckboard drew up; the poultry picking about the path and among the chips, lazily made way for us, and as

our wheels ceased to crunch upon the gravel, we heard hasty steps, and Reuben Camp came round the corner

of the house in time to give Mrs. Makely his hand, and help her spring to the ground, which she did very

lightly; her remarkable mind had kept her body in a sort of sympathetic activity, and at thirtyfive she had the

"Ah, Reuben," she sighed, permitting herself to call him by his first name, with the emotion which expressed

itself more definitely in the words that followed, "how I envy you all this dear, old, homelike place! I never

come here without thinking of my grandfather's farm in Massachusetts, where I used to go every summer

"Well, Mrs. Makely," said young Camp, "you can have this place cheap, if you really want it. Or almost any

"Don't say such a thing!" she returned. "It makes one feel as if the foundations of the great deep were giving

way. I don't know what that means, exactly, but I suppose it's equivalent to mislaying George's hatchet, and

Camp seemed to have lost his bitter mood, and he answered pleasantly, "The Declaration is all right, as far as

"Why, you believe every one was born free and equal, don't you?" Mrs. Makely asked.

The young fellow laughed, and said, as he opened the door for us: "Walk right into the parlor, please. Mother

will be ready for you in a minute." He added, "I guess she's putting on her best cap for you, Mr. Homos. It's a

great event for her, your coming here. It is for all us. We're glad to have you."

"And I'm glad to be here," said the Altrurian, as simply as the other. He looked about the best room of a

farmhouse that had never adapted itself to the tastes or needs of the city boarder, and was as stiffly repellant

in its upholstery, and as uncompromisingly severe in its decoration as haircloth chairs and dark brown

wallpaper of a trellispattern, with drab roses, could make it. The windows were shut tight, and our host did

not offer to open them. A fly or two crossed the doorway into the hall, but made no attempt to penetrate the

interior, where we sat in an obscurity that left the highhung family photographs on the walls vague and

uncertain. I made a mental note of it as a place where it would be very characteristic to have a rustic funeral

take place; and I was pleased to have Mrs. Makely drop into a sort of mortuary murmur, as she said: "I hope

your mother is as well as usual, this morning?" I perceived that this murmur was produced by the sepulchral

"Oh, yes," said Camp, and at that moment a door opened from the room across the hall, and his sister seemed

to bring in some of the light from it in to us, where we sat. She shook hands with Mrs. Makely, who

introduced me to her, and then presented the Altrurian. She bowed very civilly to me, but with a touch of

severity, such as country people find necessary for the assertion of their selfrespect with strangers. I thought

it very pretty, and instantly saw that I could work it into some picture of character; and I was not at all sorry

"Mother will be so glad to see you," she said to him, and, "Won't you come right in?" she added to us all.

We followed her and found ourselves in a large, low, sunny room on the southeast corner of the house, which

had no doubt once been the livingroom, but which was now given up to the bedridden invalid; a door

opened into the kitchen behind, where the table was already laid for the midday meal, with the plates turned

down in the country fashion, and some netting drawn over the dishes to keep the flies away.

Mrs. Makely bustled up to the bedside with her energetic, patronizing cheerfulness. "Ah, Mrs. Camp, I am

glad to see you looking so well this morning. I've been meaning to run over for several days past, but I

couldn't find a moment till this morning, and I knew you didn't object to Sunday visits." She took the invalid's

hand in hers, and with the air of showing how little she felt any inequality between them, she leaned over and

kissed her, where Mrs. Camp sat propped again her pillows. She had a large, noblymoulded face of rather

masculine contour, and at the same time the most motherly look in the world. Mrs. Makely bubbled and

babbled on, and every one waited till she had done, and turned toward the Altrurian: "I have ventured to bring

my friend, Mr. Homos, with me. He is from Altruria." Then she turned to me, and said, "Mr. Twelvemough,

you know already through his delightful books;" but although she paid me this perfunctory compliment, it

was perfectly apparent to me that in the esteem of this disingenuous woman the distinguished stranger was a

far more important person than the distinguished author. Whether Mrs. Camp read my perception of the fact

in my face or not, I cannot say, but she was evidently determined that I should not feel a difference in her.

She held out her hand to me first, and said that I never could know how many heavy hours I had helped to

lighten for her, and then she turned to the Altrurian, and took his hand. "Oh!" she said, with a long deep,

drawn sigh, as if that were the supreme moment of her life. "And are you really from Altruria? It seems to

good to be true!" Her devout look an her earnest tone gave the commonplace words a quality that did not

"Yes, doesn't it?" she made haste to interpose, before the Altrurian could say anything. "That is just the way

we all feel about it, Mrs. Camp. I assure you if it were not for the accounts in the papers, and the talk about it

everywhere, I couldn't believe there was any such place as Altruria; and if it were not for Mr. Twelvemough

herewho has to keep all his inventions for his novels as a mere matter of business routine,I might really

The Altrurian smiled vaguely, but politely, as if he had not quite caught her meaning, and I made answer for

both: "I am sure, Mrs. Makely, if you could understand my peculiar state of mind about Mr. Homos, you

would never believe that I was in collusion with him. I find him quite as incredible as you do. There are

moments when he seems so entirely subjective with me, that I feel as if he were no more definite or tangible

"Exactly!" said Mrs. Makely, and she laughed out her delight in my illustration.

The Altrurian must have perceived that we were joking, though the Camps all remained soberly silent. "I

hope it isn't so bad as that," he said, "though I have noticed that I seem to affect you all with a kind of

misgiving. I don't know just what it is; but if I could remove it, I should be very glad to do so."

Mrs. Makely very promptly seized her chance: "Well, then, in the first place, my husband and I were talking

it over last night, after we left you, and that was one of the things that kept us awake; it turned into money

afterwards, It isn't so much that a whole continent, as big as Australia, remained undiscovered till within such

a very few years, as it is the condition of things among you: this sort of all living for one another, and not

each one for himself. My husband says that is simply moonshine; such a thing never was and never can be; it

is opposed to human nature, and would take away incentive, and all motive for exertion and advancement and

enterprise. I don't know what he didn't say against it; but one thing: he says it's perfectly unAmerican." The

Altrurian remained silent, gravely smiling, and Mrs. Makely added, with her most engaging little manner: "I

hope you won't feel hurt, personally or patriotically, by what I've repeated to you. I know my husband is

awfully Philistine, though he is such a good fellow, and I don't, by any means, agree with him on all those

points; but I would like to know what you think of them. The trouble is, Mrs. Camp," she said, turning to the

invalid, "that Mr. Homos is so dreadfully reticent about his own country, and I am so curious to hear of it at

first hands, that I consider it justifiable to use any means to make him open up about it."

"There is no offense," the Altrurian answered for himself, "in what Mr. Makely says, though, from the

Altrurian point of view, there is a good deal of error. Does it seem so strange to you," he asked, addressing

himself to Mrs. Camp, "that people should found a civilization on the idea of living for one another, instead

"No, indeed!" she answered. "Poor people have always had to live that way, or they could not have lived at

"That was what I understood your porter to say last night," said the Altrurian to me. He added, to the

company generally: "I suppose that even in America there are more poor people than there are rich people?"

"Well, I don't know about that," I said. "I suppose there are more people independently rich than there are

"We will let that formulation of it stand. If it is true, I do not see why the Altrurian system should be

considered so very unAmerican. Then, as to whether there is or ever was really a practical altruism, a civic

expression of it, I think it cannot be denied that among the first Christians, those who immediately followed

Christ, and might be supposed to be directly influenced by his life, there was an altruism practised, as radical

as that which we have organized into a national polity and a working economy in Altruria."

"Ah, but you know," said Mrs. Makely, with the air of advancing a point not to be put aside, "they had to

drop that. It was a dead failure. They found that they couldn't make it go at all, among cultivated people, and

that, if Christianity was to advance, they would have to give up all that crankish kind of idolatry of the mere

letter. At any rate," she went on, with the satisfaction we all feel in getting an opponent into close quarters,

Before the Altrurian could reply, young Camp said: "If you want to see American individuality, the real,

simonpure article, you ought to go down to one of our big factory towns, and look at the millhands coming

home in droves after a day's work, young girls and old women, boys and men, all fluffed over with cotton,

and so deadtired that they can hardly walk. They come shambling along with all the individuality of a flock

"Some," said Mrs. Makely, heroically, as if she were one of these, "must be sacrificed. Of course, some are

"A great deal more depends upon capital," said Camp, with an offensive laugh. "If you have capital in

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

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 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

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 homemade 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

A pleased intelligence showed itself in her face, and she answered: "Yes, it is a real oldfashioned

farmhouse. We have never taken boarders and so we have kept it as it was built, pretty much, and only made

"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

"Is it possible!" cried the Altrurian, with an air of utter astonishment; and when I found the fact appeared so

"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

"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 traveller from Altruria to exploit every day, and so we have no business to come into

"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

"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

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 countrythe 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,

"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 front 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

that 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

"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

"I hadn't formed any conclusion in regard to the matter, which is quite new to me," said the Altrurian, mildly.

"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 the natives 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

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

"I should be perfectly delighted!" said Mrs. Makely. "And I should receive them with the greatest possible

"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

"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

"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

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

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

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

"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 should respect the feelings of

"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

Mrs. Camp wore a bewildered look. "Perhaps we have said more than we ought. But I couldn't help it, and I

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 each other? 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 gaiety: "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 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 class, we are all Americans, and if we haven't the same opinions

"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 to 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

"Well, a kind of man that 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

"Excuse me, Mr. Camp," I interposed, "but isn't a blacklisted man usually a man who has made himself

"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.

"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

"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

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

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

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

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 loathsomelooking 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

"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 be'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 the 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

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 the town life? I have read that the cities in America are draining the country of

"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

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

"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."

"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 it. 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."

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

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.

The invalid looked at her a moment without replying, and just then the do of the kitchen opened, and young

"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

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 weekdays?"

"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 afterwards.

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

"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

"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 welldressed, strong young fellows from town, that go

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

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. Twelvemoughperhaps I did not make myself clearwas 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 someone 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

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

The Altrurian looked round 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

"My next door neighbor!" she cried. "But I don't know the people next door! We live in a large apartment

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

The Altrurian looked so blank and baffled that I could hardly help laughing. "Then I should not know how to

"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 each other, 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 each other,

"Well, everyone to his taste," said Mrs. Makely. "I wish you would tell us how people manage with you,

"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 each other oftener?" he

"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 saving about the blacklisted men, and their

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

"No matter! What I am trying to get at is this: if a workman has made himself a nuisance to the employers,

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

"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."

"The 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?"

"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.

"Why, simply because it is," said the lady, but she did not say why, and although I agreed with her, I was glad

that 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 nightI sha'nt have time to read them at

onceand 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

goodhumor 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 besthearted 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 wrongheaded,

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

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

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

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

"Why, you know that 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 defense 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

"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 sellerincomparably worse. I suppose you are not troubled

"Oh, no!" said the Altrurian, with an utter horror, which no repetition of his words can give the sense of. "It

"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.

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

"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

"Thank you," said the other, "if you mean me, I would rather not invest." He was silent a moment, and then

he went on, as if the notion were beginning to win upon him: "It may come to something like that, though. If

it does, the natural course, I should think, would be through the railroads. It would be a very easy matter for

them to buy up all the good farms along their lines and put tenants on them, and run them in their own

interest. Really, it isn't a bad scheme. The waste in the present method is enormous, and there is no reason

why the roads should not own the farms, as they are beginning to own the mines. They could manage them

better than the small farmers do, in every way. I wonder the thing hasn't occurred to some smart railroad

We all laughed a little, perceiving the semiironical 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?

"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, every now and then, in the mills, that threw

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

"Speaking of the poorhouse," 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?"

"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 the capitalists. What does he propose to do about it?"

"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

"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, unAmerican."

"I am not so sure that it would be unChristian," the minister timidly ventured, in the face of such an

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

An 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 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 in a 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

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

"Well," said the other, "they can console themselves with the reflection that going into business isn't

"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 to have gone to college at all. They said he would be none the

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 incompatability, 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. It 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 gentlemen 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

by undeceiving him. That would not be business. I suppose you think that is dreadful?" He turned smilingly

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

"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

We all laughed, except the minister and the Altrurian, and the manufacturer said, "Twentyfive years hence,

the fellow who is going into business, may be pitying 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. Ninetyfive times out of a hundred he fails. To be sure, he picks

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

"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! The time was when we cut the

knot of the difficulty pretty sharply; we said a college education was wrong; or, the hot and hot American

spreadeaglers did. Business is the national ideal, and the successful business man is the American type. It is a

"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 businesslife distasteful. The

"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

The banker turned to the manufacturer with this question, and the other said, "The theory is, that we give

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

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

"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

"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

I could not quite make out whether the banker was serious or not in all this talk; sometimes I suspected him

"I hardly know whether it is or not. The question of wealth does not enter into our scheme. I can say that we

"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 practice upon his patriotism. It was a great relief to find that he

had been joking in so much that seemed a dead giveaway of our economical position. "In Altruria," he

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 numbersome artist, or poet, or inventor, or

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,

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 within a generation

that our ideal had 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

The Altrurian turned curiously toward me, and I did my best to tell him what a cakewalk was. When I had

finished, the banker resumed, only to say, as he rose from his chair to bid us goodnight, "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

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

"I should think 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 he

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

"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 I doubt it. If it is

so, it is because we are merely in what is called a 'transition state.' Hamlet must be cruel to be kind; the

darkest hour comes before dawn; and so on. No doubt 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 the tremendous changes which

have taken place 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, preempted 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

"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

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

"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

fortunesthe business men who have never had the disadvantage of a university educationI 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 interestI won't say financial, but political, or moral, or socialon 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

"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

"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

ninetyfive 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 longestheaded 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 endorse it. I suppose that the average American citizen feels

that they wouldn't endorse a thing unless it was safe; and the average American citizen likes to be safehe is

cautious. As a matter of fact, business men are always taking risks, and business is a game of chance, in a

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

No one else spoke. The banker lighted a cigar, and when he began again he resumed at the point where he left

off when I ventured to enter upon the defense 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 selfesteem. 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

"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 workingman 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.

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

"Well, then," the banker resumed, "take the lower education. This 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 textbooks are furnished by the state, we have only to go a

step farther, 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 workingclasses. 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 meantime, 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

"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 workingman 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

"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

"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 see 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 round about it. There was a

"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

The minister answered, with modest pride: "I am not sure of that; but our society is certainly a very large

"Well, and how many of the lower classes are there in itpeople who work for their living with their

The minister stirred uneasily in his chair, and at last he said, with evident unhappiness: "TheyI

supposethey 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 peoplesocially and financiallywith me in the wish that there might

"I cannot think of any," returned the minister, so miserably that the banker forebore 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 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 towards the fellows who are still

down. And the best of us have been up only a generation or twoand the fellows who are still down know

"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 cigarash 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 sangfroid of the soldier; these things are

"What makes you think we should beat?" asked the manufacturer, not anxiously, but 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 generaled, 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 that we needn't be any more afraid of that than we are

of the fighting. It's astonishing how shortsighted and illogical they are. They have no conception of any cure

"Of course not, as a business man," said the banker. "If I were a workingman, 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 it 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 workingmen 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 businessthe 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

"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 as simple if their leaders should ever persuade the workingmen to leave

"No, not quite as simple," the banker admitted. "Still, the fight would be always comparatively simple. In the

first place, I doubtthough I won't be certain about itwhether there are a great many workingmen in the

militia now. I rather fancy it is made up, for the most part, of clerks and small tradesmen, and bookkeepers,

and such employ�s 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 is so in the city companies and regiments, at any rate, and that if every workingman

left them, it would not seriously impair their effectiveness. But when the workingmen 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. Oh, no! Their only hope for mischief is to remain in the militia and weaken

it by their disaffection in the event of a fight. But they have always managed so badly that I should not be

surprised if they threw away this advantage too. Why," the banker exclaimed, with his goodhumored 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

eighthour 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

"I suppose," I said, "that they are misled by the unAmerican principles and methods of the socialists among

"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 workingmen, although 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 thought

himself into a socialist. He generally knows that until the workingmen stop fighting, and get down to

votinguntil they consent to be the majoritythere 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 that

"And what," the minister faintly said, "do yon 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 thoughI forget just what he calls itthat 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

"Oh, I don't believe that will ever happen in America," I protested, from chauvanism deeper even than my

"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 proletariat 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

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 philosopherswell, call them philanthropists; I don't mindof my way of thinking

"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

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

"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

He was not in the least offended at my boldness, as I feared he might be, but he said with that jolly laugh of

his, "Capital! Well, perhaps I have worked my frankness 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

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

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,

"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

"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,

"You're quite right, Mrs. Makely. I'm sorry to say that there has been a shameful want of selfcontrol 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.

"Well?" I said, finding this explosive 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 somethinga concert, or theatricals, or a

dance, or somethingand 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's no one thinking of them. What you want is something striking. We did

think of a parlorreading, or perhaps ventriloquism; but the performers all charge so much that there wouldn't

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

"Yes. 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

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

"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 farmhouse, 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 boardinghouses, who

doesn't know something about Altruria and want to know more. It seems that your friend has been much

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 utmost 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 waterpails,

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 hayfield one afternoon, shirtsleeved 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 hayfield, to find him in

a group of tablegirls, who were listening while the head waiter read aloud to them in the shade of the house;

there was a corner looking towards 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. 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

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 resolve to suffer in silence, and hope that the Altrurian

would soon go. At first I dreaded the moment when the landlord should come and 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

"Of course," Mrs. Makely went on, "I don't criticise himwith 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 wont 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

"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 to the

noblest form of entertainment that they have known. I'm afraid, Mrs. Makely, you're going to be very few,

"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

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 something about it from the Camps. It is an outward

emblem of the unity which ought to prevail among Christians of all professions. How can I help you, Mrs.

"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 what we want is to raise money enough to give

it a new coat of paint outsideit's never had but oneand 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 paper,

say of a gothic design, would be a great improvement? I'm sure it would; and it's Mr. Twelvemough's idea,

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 devotional

"Well, the long and the short of it is that we want you to make this money for us, Mr. Homos."

"I?" He started in a kind of horror. "My dear lady, I never made any money in my life! I should think it wrong

"In Altruria, yes. We all know how it is in your delightful country, and I assure you that no one could respect

your conscientious scruples more than I do. But you must remember that you are in America, now. In

America you have to make money, or elseget left. And then you must consider the object, and all the good

He answered, blandly: "A little Talk on Altruria? How in the world should I get money by that?"

She was only too eager to explain, and she did it with so much volubility and at such great length, that I, who

am good for nothing till I have had my cup of coffee in the morning, almost perished of an elucidation which

When she gave him a chance to answer, at last, he said: "I shall be very happy to do what you wish, madam."

"Will you?" she screamed. "Oh, I'm so glad! You have been so slippery about Altruria, you know, that I

expected nothing but a pointblank refusal. Of course, I knew you would be kind about it. Oh, I can hardly

believe my senses! You can't think what a dear you are." I knew she had got that word from some English

people who had been in the hotel; and she was working it rather wildly, but it was not my business to check

her. "Well, then, all you have got to do is to leave the whole thing to me, and not bother about it a bit till I

send and tell you we are ready to listen. There comes Reuben with his oxteam! Thank you so much, Mr.

Homos. No one need be ashamed to enter the house of God"she said Gawd, in an access of piety"after

we get that paint and paper on it; and we shall have them on before two Sabbaths have passed over it."

"And that is, there shall be no exclusion from my lecture on account of occupation or condition. That is a

thing that I can in no wise countenance, even in America; it is far more abhorrent to me even than

"I thought it was that!" she retorted joyously. "And I can assure you, Mr. Homos, there shall be nothing of

that kind. Every oneI don't care who it is, or what they doshall hear you who buys a ticket. Now, will

She pushed hers through my arm as we started for the diningroom, and leaned over to whisper jubilantly:

"That will fix it! He will see how much his precious lower classes care for Altruria if they have to pay a

I could not feel that she would keep it to the spirit; but I could only groan inwardly and chuckle outwardly at

It seemed to me though, I could not approve of it, a capital joke, and so it seemed to all the members of the

little group whom I had made especially acquainted with the Altrurian. It is true that the minister was

somewhat troubled with the moral question, which did not leave me wholly at peace; and the banker affected

to find a question of taste involved, which he said he must let me settle, however, as the man's host; if I could

stand it, he could. No one said anything against the plan to Mrs. Makely, and this energetic woman made us

take two tickets apiece, as soon as she got them printed, over in the village. She got little handbills printed,

and had them scattered about through the neighborhood, at all the hotels, boardinghouses and summer

cottages, to give notice of the time and place of the talk on Altruria. She fixed this for the following Saturday

afternoon, in our hotel parlor; she had it in the afternoon so as not to interfere with the hop in the evening;

and she got tickets on sale at the principal houses, and at the village drugstore, and she made me go about

I must say I found this extremely distasteful, especially in cases where the people were not very willing to

buy, and she had to urge them. They all admitted the excellence of the object, but they were not so sure about

the means. At several places the ladies asked who was this Mr. Homos, anyway; and how did she know that

Then Mrs. Makely would put me forward, and I would be obliged to give such account of him as I could, and

to explain just how and why he came to be my guest; with the cumulative effect of bringing back all the

misgivings which I had myself felt at the outset concerning him, and which I had dismissed as too fantastic.

The tickets went off rather slowly, even in our own hotel; people thought them too dear; and some, as soon as

they knew the price, said frankly they had heard enough about Altruria already, and were sick of the whole

Mrs. Makely said this was quite what she had expected of those people; that they were horrid, and stingy and

vulgar; and she should see what face they would have to ask her to take tickets when they were trying to get

up something. She began to be vexed with herself, she confessed, at the joke she was playing on Mr. Homos,

and I noticed that she put herself rather defiantly en �vidence in his company, whenever she could in the

presence of these reluctant ladies. She told me she had not the courage to ask the clerk how many of the

tickets he had sold out of those she had left at the desk. One morning, the third or fourth, as I was going in to

breakfast with her, the head waiter stopped her as he opened the door, and asked modestly if she could spare

him a few tickets, for he thought he could sell some. To my amazement the unprincipled creature said, "Why,

certainly. How many?" and instantly took a package out of her pocket, where she seemed always to have

them. He asked, Would twenty be more than she could spare? and she answered, "Not at all! Here are

That afternoon Reuben Camp came lounging up toward us, where I sat with her on the corner of the piazza,

and said that if she would like to let him try his luck with some tickets for the talk he would see what he

"You can have all you want, Reuben," she said, "and I hope you'll have better luck than I have. I'm perfectly

She fished several packages out of her pocket this time and he asked, "Do you mean that I can have them

"Every one, and a band of music into the bargain," she answered recklessly. But she seemed a little daunted

"Yes, I should like to see what I can do amongst the natives. Then, there is a construction train over at the

junction, and I know a lot of the fellows. I guess some of 'em would like to come."

Mrs. Makely turned to me with a kind of gasp, so he shambled away. "I don't know about that!"

"About having the whole crew of a construction train at the Talk? I dare say it wont be pleasant to the ladies

"Oh!" said Mrs. Makely with astonishing contempt, "I don't care what they think. But Reuben has got all my

tickets, and suppose he keeps them so long that I wont have time to sell any, and then throws them back on

my hands? I know!" she added joyously. "I can go round now, and tell people that my tickets are all gone;

"He hasn't got a single one left. He says an old native came in this morning and took every last one of

themhe doesn't remember just how many. I believe they're going to speculate on them; and if Reuben

Camp serves me a trick like thatWhy!" she broke off, "I believe I'll speculate on them myself! I should like

to know why I shouldn't! Oh, I should just like to make some of those creatures pay double or treble for the

chances they've refused. Ah, Mrs. Bulkham," she called out to a lady who was coming down the veranda

toward us, "you'll be glad to know I've got rid of all my tickets! Such a relief!"

"I thought," said Mrs. Bulkham, "that you understood I wanted one for my daughter and myself, if she came."

"I certainly didn't," said Mrs. Makely, with a wink of concentrated wickedness at me. "But if you do, you will

have to say so now, without any ifs or ands about it; and if any of the tickets come backI let friends have a

"Very well, it will be five dollars for the two. I feel bound to get all I can for the cause. Shall I put your name

"Yes," said Mrs. Bulkham, rather crossly; but Mrs. Makely inscribed her name on her tablets with a radiant

amiability, which suffered no eclipse, when within the next fifteen minutes a dozen other ladies hurried up,

I could not stand it, and I got up to go away, feeling extremely particeps criminis. Mrs. Makely seemed to

"If Reuben Camp or the head waiter don't bring back some of those tickets I don't know what I shall do. I

shall have to put chairs into the aisles, and charge five dollars apiece for as many people as I can crowd in

"I envy you the ability to see it in that light, Mrs. Makely," I said, faint at heart. "Suppose Camp crowds the

place full of his train men, how will the ladies that you've sold tickets to at five dollars apiece like it?"

"Pooh! What do I care how they like it? Horrid things! And for repairs on the house of Gawd, it's the same as

The time passed. Mrs. Makely sold chances to all the ladies in the house; and on Friday night Reuben Camp

"I didn't dare to ask them if they speculated on them," she confided to me. "Do you suppose they would have

She had secured the large parlor of the hotel, where the young people danced in the evening, and where

entertainments were held, of the sort usually given in summer hotels; we had already had a dramatic reading,

a s�ance with the phonograph, an exhibition of necromancy, a concert by a college glee club, and I do not

know what else. The room would hold perhaps two hundred people, if they were closely seated, and by her

own showing, Mrs. Makely had sold above two hundred and fifty tickets and chances. All Saturday forenoon

she consoled herself with the belief that a great many people at the other hotels and cottages had bought seats

merely to aid the cause, and would not really come; she estimated that at least fifty would stay away; but if

Reuben Camp had sold his tickets among the natives, we might expect every one of them to come and get his

money's worth; she did not dare to ask the head waiter how he had got rid of his twentyfive tickets.

The hour set for the Talk to begin was three o'clock, so that people could have their naps comfortably over,

after the one o'clock lunch, and be just in the right frame of mind for listening. But long before the appointed

time, the people who dine at twelve, and never take an afterdinner nap, began to arrive, on foot, in

farmwagons, smart buggies, mudcrusted carryalls, and all manner of ramshackle vehicles. They arrived as

if coming to a circus, old husbands and wives, young couples and their children, pretty girls and their fellows,

and hitched their horses to the tails of their wagons, and began to make a picnic lunch in the shadow of the

grove lying between the hotel and the station. About two, we heard the snorting of a locomotive at a time

when no train was due, and a construction train came in view, with the men waving their handkerchiefs from

the windows, and apparently ready for all the fun there was to be in the thing. Some of them had a small flag

in each hand, the American stars and stripes, and the flag of Altruria, in compliment to my guest, I suppose.

A good many of the farmers came over to the hotel to buy tickets, which they said they had expected to get

after they came, and Mrs. Makely was obliged to pacify them with all sorts of lying promises. From moment

to moment she was in consultation with the landlord, who decided to throw open the diningroom, which

connected with the parlor, so as to allow the help and the neighbors to hear, without incommoding the hotel

guests. She said that this took a great burden off her mind, and that now she should feel perfectly easy, for no

one could complain about being mixed up with the servants and the natives, and yet everyone could hear

She could not rest till she had sent for Homos and told him of this admirable arrangement. I did not know

whether to be glad or not, when he instantly told her that, if there was to be any such separation of his

auditors, in recognition of our class distinctions, he must refuse to speak at all.

"Then, what in the world are we to do?" she wailed out, and the tears came into her eyes.

"Have you got the money for all your tickets?" he asked, with a sort of disgust for the whole transaction in his

"Yes, and more, too. I don't believe there's a soul, in the hotel or out of it, that hasn't paid at least a dollar to

hear you: and that makes it so very embarrassing. Oh, dear Mr. Homos! you won't be so implacably

"Then, no one," said the Altrurian, "can feel aggrieved, or unfairly used, if I say what I have to say in the

open air, where all can listen equally, without any manner of preference or distinction. We will go up to the

edge of the grove overlooking the tenniscourt, and hold our meeting there, as the Altrurian meetings have

"The very thing!" cried Mrs. Makely. "Who would ever have thought you were so practical, Mr. Homos? I

don't believe you're an Altrurian, after all; I believe you are an American in disguise."

The Altrurian turned away, without making any response to this flattering attribution of our nationality to

him; but Mrs. Makely had not waited for any. She had flown off, and I next saw her attacking the landlord,

with such apparent success that he slapped himself on the leg and vanished, and immediately the porters and

bellboys and all the menservants began carrying out chairs to the tenniscourt, which was already well set

round with benches. In a little while the whole space was covered, and settees were placed well up the ground

By half past two, the guests of the hotel came out, and took the best seats, as by right, and the different

tallyhoes and mountain wagons began to arrive from the other hotels, with their silly hotelcries, and their

gay groups dismounted and dispersed themselves over the tenniscourt until all the chairs were taken. It was

fine to see how the natives and the trainmen and the hotel servants, with an instinctive perception of the

proprieties, yielded these places to their superiors, and, after the summer folks were all seated, scattered

themselves on the grass and the pineneedles about the border of the grove. I should have liked to instance

the fact to the Altrurian, as a proof that this sort of subordination was a part of human nature, and that a

principle which pervaded our civilization, after the democratic training of our whole national life, must be

divinely implanted. But there was no opportunity for me to speak with him after the fact had accomplished

itself, for by this time he had taken his place in front of a little clump of low pines and was waiting for the

assembly to quiet itself before he began to speak. I do not think there could have been less than five hundred

present, and the scene had that accidental picturesqueness which results from the grouping of all sorts of

faces and costumes. Many of our ladies had pretty hats and brilliant parasols, but I must say that the soberer

tone of some of the old farmwives' brown calicoes and outdated bonnets contributed to enrich the coloring,

and here and there the faded blue of an ancient cottonblouse on a farmer's back had the distinction and

poetry of a bit from Millet. There was a certain gayety in the sunny glisten of the men's strawhats,

The sky overhead was absolutely stainless, and the light of the cool afternoon sun dreamed upon the slopes of

the solemn mountains to the east. The tall pines in the background blackened themselves against the horizon;

nearer they showed more and more decidedly their bluish green, and the brown of the newlyfallen needles

A little wind stirred their tops, and for a moment, just before the Altrurian began to speak, drew from them an

"I could not give you a clear account of the present state of things in my country," the Altrurian began,

"without first telling you something of our conditions before the time of our evolution. It seems to be the law

of all life, that nothing can come to fruition without dying and seeming to making an end. It must be sown in

corruption before it can be raised in incorruption. The truth itself must perish to our senses before it can live

to our souls; the Son of Man must suffer upon the cross before we can know the Son of God.

"It was so with His message to the world, which we received in the old time as an ideal realized by the

earliest Christians, who loved one another and who had all things common. The apostle cast away upon our

heathen coasts, won us with the story of this first Christian republic, and he established a commonwealth of

peace and goodwill among us in its likeness. That commonwealth perished, just as its prototype perished, or

seemed to perish; and long ages of civic and economic warfare succeeded, when every man's hand was

against his neighbor, and might was the rule that got itself called right. Religion ceased to be the hope of this

world, and became the vague promise of the next. We descended into the valley of the shadow, and dwelt

"The first glimmerings were few and indistinct, but men formed themselves about the luminous points here

and there, and when these broke and dispersed into lesser gleams, still men formed themselves about each of

them. There arose a system of things, better, indeed, than that darkness, but full of war, and lust, and greed, in

which the weak rendered homage to the strong, and served them in the field and in the camp, and the strong

in turn gave the weak protection against the other strong. It was a juggle in which the weak did not see that

their safety was after all from themselves; but it was an image of peace, however false and fitful, and it

endured for a time. It endured for a limited time, if we measure by the life of the race; it endured for an

unlimited time if we measure by the lives of the men who were born and died while it endured.

"But that disorder, cruel and fierce and stupid, which endured because it sometimes masked itself as order,

did at last pass away. Here and there one of the strong overpowered the rest; then the strong became fewer

and fewer, and in their turn they all yielded to a supreme lord, and throughout the land there was one rule, as

it was called then, or one misrule, as we should call it now. This rule, or this misrule, continued for ages

more; and again, in the immortality of the race, men toiled and struggled, and died without the hope of better

"Then the time came when the long nightmare was burst with the vision of a future in which all men were the

"The poor, dumb beast of humanity rose, and the throne tumbled, and the sceptre was broken, and the crown

rolled away into that darkness of the past. We thought that heaven had descended to us, and that liberty,

equality and fraternity were ours. We could not see what should again alienate us from one another, or how

one brother could again oppress another. With a free field and no favor, we believed we should prosper on

together, and there would be peace and plenty for all. We had the republic, again, after so many ages now,

and the republic, as we knew it in our dim annals was brotherhood and universal happiness. All but a very

few who prophesied evil of our lawless freedom, were rapt in a delirium of hope. Men's minds and men's

hands were suddenly released to an activity unheard of before. Invention followed invention; our rivers and

seas became the woof of commerce where the steamsped shuttles carried the warp of enterprise to and fro

with tireless celerity. Machines to save labor multiplied themselves as if they had been procreative forces;

and wares of every sort were produced with incredible swiftness and cheapness. Money seemed to flow from

"At first we did not know that they were the breath of the nethermost pits of hell, and that the love of money

which was becoming universal with us, was filling the earth with the hate of men. It was long before we came

to realize that in the depths of our steamships were those who fed the fires with their lives, and that our mines

from which we dug our wealth were the graves of those who had died to the free light and air, without finding

the rest of death. We did not see that the machines for saving labor were monsters that devoured women and

"That is, we thought we must not touch it, for it called itself prosperity, and wealth, and the public good, and

it said that it gave bread, and it impudently bade the toiling myriads consider what would become of them, if

it took away their means of wearing themselves out in its service. It demanded of the state absolute immunity

and absolute impunity, the right to do its will wherever and however it would, without question from the

people who were the final law. It had its way, and under its rule we became the richest people under the sun.

The Accumulation, as we called this power, because we feared to call it by its true name, rewarded its own

with gains of twenty, of a hundred, of a thousand per cent., and to satisfy its need, to produce the labor that

operated its machines, there came into existence a hapless race of men who bred their kind for its service, and

whose little ones were its prey, almost from their cradles. Then the infamy became too great, and the law, the

voice of the people, so long guiltily silent, was lifted in behalf of those who had no helper. The Accumulation

came under control, for the first time, and could no longer work its slaves twenty hours a day amid perils to

life and limb from its machinery and in conditions that forbade them decency and morality. The time of a

hundred and a thousand per cent. passed; but still the Accumulation demanded immunity and impunity, and

in spite of its conviction of the enormities it had practiced, it declared itself the only means of civilization and

progress. It began to give out that it was timid, though its history was full of the boldest frauds and crimes,

and it threatened to withdraw itself if it were ruled or even crossed; and again it had its way, and we seemed

to prosper more and more. The land was filled with cities, where the rich flaunted their splendor in palaces,

and the poor swarmed in squalid tenements. The country was drained of its life and force, to feed the centers

of commerce and industry. The whole land was bound together with a network of iron roads that linked the

factories and foundries to the fields and mines, and blasted the landscape with the enterprise that spoiled the

"Then, all at once, when its work seemed perfect and its dominion sure, the Accumulation was stricken with

consciousness of the lie always at its heart. It had hitherto cried out for a free field and no favor, for

unrestricted competition; but, in truth, it had never prospered except as a monopoly. Whenever and wherever

competition had play, there had been nothing but disaster to the rival enterprises, till one rose over the rest.

"The Accumulation began to act upon its new consciousness. The iron roads united, the warring industries

made peace, each kind under a single leadership. Monopoly, not competition, was seen to be the benificent

means of distributing the favor and blessings of the Accumulation to mankind. But as before, there was

alternately a glut and dearth of things, and it often happened that when starving men went ragged through the

streets, storehouses were piled full of rotting harvests that the farmers toiled from dawn to dusk to grow, and

the warehouses fed the moth with the stuffs that the operator had woven his life into at his loom. Then

followed, with a blind and mad succession, a time of famine, when money could not buy the superabundance

"The money itself vanished from time to time, and disappeared into the vault of the Accumulation, for no

better reason than that for which it poured itself out at other times. Our theory was that the people, that is to

say the government of the people, made the people's money, but, as a matter of fact, the Accumulation made

it, and controlled it, and juggled with it; and now you saw it, and now you did not see it. The government

made gold coins, but the people had nothing but the paper money that the Accumulation made. But whether

there was scarcity or plenty, the failures went on with a continuous ruin that nothing could check, while our

larger economic life proceeded in a series of violent shocks, which we called financial panics, followed by

long periods of exhaustion and recuperation. There was no law in our economy, but as the Accumulation had

never cared for the nature of law, it did not trouble itself for its name in our order of things. It had always

bought the law it needed for its own use, first through the voter at the polls in the more primitive days, and

then, as civilization advanced, in the legislatures and the courts. But the corruption even of these more

enlightened methods was far surpassed when the era of consolidation came, and the necessity for statutes and

"Look here!" a sharp nasal voice snarled across the rich, full pipe of the Altrurian, and we all instantly looked

there. The voice came from an old farmer, holding himself stiffly up, with his hands in his pockets and his

lean frame bent toward the speaker. "When are you goin' to git to Altrury? We know all about Ameriky."

He sat down again, and it was a moment before the crowd caught on. Then a yell of delight and a roar of

volleyed laughter went up from the lower classes, in which, I am sorry to say, my friend, the banker, joined,

so far as the laughter was concerned. "Good! That's it! Firstrate!" came from a hundred vulgar throats.

"Isn't it a perfect shame?" Mrs. Makely demanded. "I think some of you gentlemen ought to say something!

What will Mr. Homos think of our civilization if we let such interruptions go unrebuked!"

She was sitting between the banker and myself, and her indignation made him laugh more and more. "Oh, it

serves him right," he said. "Don't you see that he is hoist with his own petard? Let him alone. He's in the

The Altrurian waited for the tumult to die away, and then he said, gently: "I don't understand."

The old farmer jerked himself to his feet again: "It's like this: I paid my dolla' to hear about a country where

there wa'n't no co'perations, and no monop'lies, nor no buyin' up cou'ts; and I ain't agoin' to have no allegory

shoved down my throat, instead of a true history, noways. I know all about how it is here. Fi'st, run their line

through your backya'd, and then kill off your cattle, and keep kerryin' on it up from cou't to cou't, till there

"Oh, set down, set down! Let the man go on! He'll make it all right with you," one of the construction gang

called out; but the farmer stood his ground, and I could hear him through the laughing and shouting, keep

saying something, from time to time, about not wanting to pay no dolla' for no talk about co'perations and

monop'lies that we had right under our own noses the whole while, and you might say in your very

breadtroughs; till, at last, I saw Reuben Camp make his way towards him, and, after an energetic

Then he faltered out, "I guess it's all right," and dropped out of sight in the group he had risen from. I fancied

"I should be very sorry," the Altrurian proceeded, "to have anyone believe that I have not been giving you a

bona fide account of conditions in my country before the evolution, when we first took the name of Altruria

in our great, peaceful campaign against the Accumulation. As for offering you any allegory or travesty of

your own conditions, I will simply say that I do not know them well enough to do so intelligently. But,

whatever they are, God forbid that the likeness which you seem to recognize should ever go so far as the

desperate state of things which we finally reached. I will not trouble you with details; in fact, I have been

afraid that I had already treated of our affairs too abstractly; but, since your own experience furnishes you the

"You will understand me when I explain that the Accumulation had not erected itself into the sovereignty

with us unopposed. The workingmen who suffered most from its oppression had early begun to band

themselves against it, with the instinct of selfpreservation, first trade by trade, and art by art, and then in

congresses and federations of the trades and arts, until finally they enrolled themselves in one vast union,

which included all the workingmen whom their necessity or their interest did not leave on the side of the

Accumulation. This beneficent and generous association of the weak for the sake of the weakest did not

accomplish itself fully till the baleful instinct of the Accumulation had reduced the monopolies to one vast

monopoly, till the stronger had devoured the weaker among its members, and the supreme agent stood at the

head of our affairs, in everything but name our imperial ruler. We had hugged so long the delusion of each

man for himself, that we had suffered all realty to be taken from us. The Accumulation owned the land as

well as the mines under it and the shops over it; the Accumulation owned the seas and the ships that sailed

the seas, and the fish that swam in their depths; it owned transportation and distribution, and the wares and

products that were to be carried to and fro; and, by a logic irresistible and inexorable, the Accumulation was,

"But the Accumulation, too, had forgotten something. It had found it so easy to buy legislatures and courts,

that it did not trouble itself about the polls. It left us the suffrage, and let us amuse ourselves with the

periodical election of the political clay images which it manipulated and moulded to any shape and effect, at

its pleasure. The Accumulation knew that it was the sovereignty, whatever figurehead we called president,

or governor, or mayor: we had other names for these officials, but I use their analogues for the sake of

clearness, and I hope my good friend over there will not think I am still talking about America."

"No," the old farmer called back, without rising, "we hain't got there, quite, yit."

"No hurry," said a trainman. "All in good time. Go on!" he called to the Altrurian.

"There had been, from the beginning, an almost ceaseless struggle between the Accumulation and the

proletariate. The Accumulation always said that it was the best friend of the proletariate, and it denounced,

through the press which it controlled, the proletarian leaders who taught, that it was the enemy of the

proletariate, and who stirred up strikes and tumults, of all sorts, for higher wages and fewer hours. But the

friend of the proletariate, whenever occasion served, treated the proletariate like a deadly enemy. In season of

overproduction, as it was called, it locked the workmen out, or laid them off, and left their families to starve,

or ran light work, and claimed the credit of public benefactors for running at all. It sought every chance to

reduce wages; had laws passed to forbid or cripple the workmen in their strikes; and the judges convicted

them of conspiracy, and wrested the statutes to their hurt in cases where there had been no thought of

embarrassing them even among the legislators. God forbid that you should ever come to such a pass in

America; but, if you ever should, God grant that you may find your way out as simply as we did at last, when

freedom had perished in everything but name among us, and justice had become a mockery.

"The Accumulation had advanced so smoothly, so lightly, in all its steps to the supreme power, and had at

last so thoroughly quelled the uprisings of the proletariate, that it forgot one thing: it forgot the despised and

neglected suffrage. The ballot, because it had been so easy to annul its effect, had been left in the people's

hands; and when, at last, the leaders of the proletariate ceased to counsel strikes, or any form of resistance to

the Accumulation that could be tormented into the likeness of insurrection against the government, and began

to urge them to attack it in the political way, the deluge that swept the Accumulation out of existence came

trickling and creeping over the land. It appeared first in the country, a spring from the ground; then it

gathered head in the villages; then it swelled to a torrent in the cities. I cannot stay to trace its course; but

suddenly, one day, when the Accumulation's abuse of a certain power became too gross, it was voted out of

that power. You will perhaps be interested to know that it was with the telegraphs that the rebellion against

the Accumulation began, and the government was forced by the overwhelming majority which the

proletariate sent to our parliament, to assume a function which the Accumulation had impudently usurped.

"Was legislated a function of the post office," the Altrurian went on. "Then all transportation was taken into

the hands of the political government, which had always been accused of great corruption in its

administration, but which showed itself immaculately pure, compared with the Accumulation. The common

ownership of mines necessarily followed, with an allotment of lands to anyone who wished to live by tilling

the land; but not a foot of the land was remitted to private hands for purposes of selfish pleasure or the

exclusion of any other from the landscape. As all businesses had been gathered into the grasp of the

Accumulation, and the manufacture of everything they used and the production of everything that they ate

was in the control of the Accumulation, its transfer to the government was the work of a single clause in the

"The Accumulation, which had treated the first menaces of resistance with contempt, awoke to its peril too

late. When it turned to wrest the suffrage from the proletariate, at the first election where it attempted to make

head against them, it was simply snowed under, as your picturesque phrase is. The Accumulation had no

voters, except the few men at its head, and the creatures devoted to it by interest and ignorance. It seemed, at

one moment, as if it would offer an armed resistance to the popular will, but, happily, that moment of

madness passed. Our evolution was accomplished without a drop of bloodshed, and the first great political

"I wish that I had time to go into a study of some of the curious phases of the transformation from a civility in

which the people lived upon each other to one in which they lived for each other. There is a famous passage

in the inaugural message of our first Altrurian president, which compares the new civic consciousness with

that of a disembodied spirit released to the life beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares and greeds of

the flesh. But perhaps I shall give a sufficiently clear notion of the triumph of the change among us, when I

say that within half a decade after the fall of the old plutocratic oligarchy one of the chief directors of the

Accumulation publicly expressed his gratitude to God that the Accumulation had passed away forever. You

will realize the importance of such an expression in recalling the declarations some of your slaveholders have

made since the civil war, that they would not have slavery restored for any earthly consideration.

"But now, after this preamble, which has been so much longer than I meant it to be, how shall I give you a

sufficiently just conception of the existing Altruria, the actual state from which I come?"

"Yes," came the nasal of the old farmer, again, "that's what we are here fur. I wouldn't give a copper to know

all that you went through beforehand. It's too dumn like what we have been through ourselves, as fur as heard

A shout of laughter went up from most of the crowd, but the Altrurian did not seem to see any fun in it.

"Well," he resumed, "I will tell you, as well as I can, what Altruria is like, but, in the first place, you will have

to cast out of your minds all images of civilization with which your experience has filled them. For a time,

the shell of the old Accumulation remained for our social habitation, and we dwelt in the old competitive and

monopolistic forms after the life had gone out of them. That is, we continued to live in populous cities, and

we toiled to heap up riches for the moth to corrupt, and we slaved on in making utterly useless things, merely

because we had the habit of making them to sell. For a while we made the old sham things, which pretended

to be useful things and were worse than the confessedly useless things. I will give you an illustration in one

of the trades, which you will all understand. The proletariate, in the competitive and monopolistic time, used

to make a kind of shoes for the proletariate, or the women of the proletariate, which looked like fine shoes of

the best quality. It took just as much work to make these shoes as to make the best fine shoes; but they were

shams through and through. They wore out in a week, and the people called them, because they were bought

"Sat'd'y night shoes!" screamed the old farmer. "I know 'em. My gals buy 'em. Half dolla' a pai', and not wo'th

"Well," said the Altrurian, "they were a cheat and a lie, in every way, and under the new system it was not

possible, when public attention was called to the fact, to continue the falsehood they embodied. As soon as

the Saturday night shoe realized itself to the public conscience, an investigation began, and it was found that

the principle of the Saturday night shoe underlay half our industries and made half the work that was done.

Then an immense reform took place. We renounced, in the most solemn convocation of the whole economy,

the principle of the Saturday night shoe, and those who had spent their lives in producing shams"

"Yes," said the professor, rising from his seat near us, and addressing the speaker, "I shall be very glad to

know what became of the worthy and industrious operatives who were thrown out of employment by this

"Why," the Altrurian replied, "they were set to work making honest shoes; and as it took no more time to

make a pair of honest shoes, which lasted a year, than it took to make a pair of shoes that lasted a week, the

"They joined the vast army of other laborers who had been employed, directly or indirectly, in the fabrication

of fraudulent wares. These shoemakerslasters, buttonholers, binders, and so onno longer wore

themselves out over their machines. One hour sufficed where twelve hours were needed before, and the

operatives were released to the happy labor of the fields, where no one with us toils killingly, from dawn till

dusk, but does only as much work as is needed to keep the body in health. We had a continent to refine and

beautify; we had climates to change, and seasons to modify, a whole system of meteorology to readjust, and

the public works gave employment to the multitudes emancipated from the souldestroying service of shams.

I can scarcely give you a notion of the vastness of the improvements undertaken and carried through, or still

in process of accomplishment. But a single one will, perhaps, afford a sufficient illustration. Our southeast

coast, from its vicinity to the pole, had always suffered from a winter of antarctic vigor; but our first president

conceived the plan of cutting off a peninsula, which kept the equatorial current from making in to our shores;

and the work was begun in his term, though the entire strip, twenty miles in width and ninetythree in length,

was not severed before the end of the first Altrurian decade. Since that time the whole region of our

"It was not only the makers of fraudulent things who were released to these useful and wholesome labors, but

those who had spent themselves in contriving ugly and stupid and foolish things were set free to the public

employments. The multitude of these monstrosities and iniquities was as great as that of the shams"

Here I lost some words, for the professor leaned over and whispered to me: "He has got that out of William

I confess that my heart misgave me, but I signalled the professor to be silent, and again gave the

"AND so," the Altrurian continued, "when the labor of the community was emancipated from the bondage of

the false to the free service of the true, it was also, by an inevitable implication, dedicated to beauty and

rescued from the old slavery to the ugly, the stupid and the trivial. The thing that was honest and useful

became by the operation of a natural law, a beautiful thing. Once we had not time enough to make things

beautiful, we were so overworked in making false and hideous things to sell; but now we had all the time

there was, and a glad emulation arose among the trades and occupations to the end that everything done

should be done finely as well as done honestly. The artist, the man of genius, who worked from the love of

his work became the normal man, and in the measure of his ability and of his calling each wrought in the

spirit of the artist. We got back the pleasure of doing a thing beautifully, which was God's primal blessing

upon all his working children, but which we had lost in the horrible days of our need and greed. There is not a

working man within the sound of my voice, but has known this divine delight, and would gladly know it

always if he only had the time. Well, now we had the time, the Evolution had given us the time, and in all

Altruria there was not a furrow driven or a swarth mown, not a hammer struck on house or on ship, not a

stitch sewn or a stone laid, not a book written or a sheet printed, not a temple raised or an engine built, but it

"As soon as we were freed from the necessity of preying upon one another, we found that there was no hurry.

The good work would wait to be well done, and one of the earliest effects of the Evolution was the disuse of

the swift trains which had traversed the continent, night and day, that one man might overreach another, or

make haste to undersell his rival, or seize some advantage of him, or plot some profit to his loss. Ninetenths

of the railroads, which in the old times had ruinously competed, and then in the hands of the Accumulation

had been united to impoverish and oppress the people, fell into disuse. The commonwealth operated the few

lines that were necessary for the collection of materials and the distribution of manufactures, and for pleasure

travel and the affairs of State; but the roads that had been built to invest capital, or parallel other roads, or

'make work,' as it was called, or to develop resources, or boom localities, were suffered to fall into ruin; the

rails were stripped from the landscape, which they had bound as with shackles, and the roadbeds became

highways for the use of kindly neighborhoods, or nature recovered them wholly and hid the memory of their

former abuse in grass and flowers and wild vines. The ugly towns that they had forced into being, as

Frankenstein was fashioned, from the materials of the charnel, and that had no life in or from the good of the

community, soon tumbled into decay. The administration used parts of them in the construction of the

villages in which the Altrurians now mostly live; but generally these towns were built of materials so

fraudulent, in forms so vile, that it was judged best to burn them. In this way their sites were at once purified

"We had, of course, a great many large cities under the old egoistic conditions, which increased and fattened

upon the country, and fed their cancerous life with fresh infusions of its blood. We had several cities of half a

million, and one of more than a million; we had a score of them, each with a population of a hundred

thousand or more. We were very proud of them, and vaunted them as a proof of our unparalleled prosperity,

though really they never were anything but congeries of millionaires and the wretched creatures who served

them and supplied them. Of course, there was everywhere the appearance of enterprise and activity, but it

meant final loss for the great mass of the business men, large and small, and final gain for the millionaires.

These, and their parasites and necessary concomitants, dwelt together, the rich starving the poor and the poor

plundering and misgoverning the rich; and it was the intolerable suffering in the cities that chiefly hastened

"Almost from the moment of the Evolution the competitive and monopolistic centers of population began to

decline. In the clear light of the new order it was seen that they were not fit dwellingplaces for men, either

in the complicated and luxurious palaces where the rich fenced themselves from their kind, or in the vast

tenements, towering height upon height, ten and twelve stories up, where the swarming poor festered in vice

and sickness and famine. If I were to tell you of the fashion of those cities of our egoistic epoch, how the

construction was one error from the first, and every correction of an error bred a new defect, I should make

you weep, I should make you laugh. We let them fall to ruin as quickly as they would, and their sites are still

so pestilential, after the lapse of centuries, that travellers are publicly guarded against them. Ravening beasts

and poisonous reptiles lurk in those abodes of the riches and the poverty that are no longer known to our life.

A part of one of the less malarial of the old cities, however, is maintained by the commonwealth in the form

of its prosperity, and is studied by antiquarians for the instruction, and by moralists for the admonition it

affords. A section of a street is exposed, and you see the foundations of the houses built one upon the bases of

another; you see the filthy drains that belched into the common sewers, trapped and retrapped to keep the

poison gases down; you see the sewers that rolled their loathsome tides under the streets, amidst a tangle of

gas pipes, steam pipes, water pipes, telegraph wires, electric lighting wires, electric motor wires and

gripcables; all without a plan, but makeshifts, expedients, devices, to repair and evade the fundamental

"There are now no cities in Altruria, in your meaning, but there are capitals, one for each of the Regions of

our country, and one for the whole commonwealth. These capitals are for the transaction of public affairs, in

which every citizen of Altruria is schooled, and they are the residences of the administrative officials, who

are alternated every year, from the highest to the lowest. A public employment with us is of no greater honor

or profit than any other, for with our absolute economic equality, there can be no ambition, and there is no

opportunity for one citizen to outshine another. But as the capitals are the centers of all the arts, which we

consider the chief of our public affairs, they are oftenest frequented by poets, actors, painters, sculptors,

musicians and architects. We regard all artists, who are in a sort creators, as the human type which is likest

the divine, and we try to conform our whole industrial life to the artistic temperament. Even in the labors of

the field and shop, which are obligatory upon all, we study the inspirations of this temperament, and in the

voluntary pursuits we allow it full control. Each, in these, follows his fancy as to what he shall do, when he

shall do it, or whether he shall do anything at all. In the capitals are the universities, theaters, galleries,

museums, cathedrals, laboratories and conservatories, and the appliances of every art and science, as well as

the administration buildings; and beauty as well as use is studied in every edifice. Our capitals are as clean

and quiet and healthful as the country, and these advantages are secured simply by the elimination of the

horse, an animal which we should be as much surprised to find in the streets of a town as the plesiosaurus or

the pterodactyl. All transportation in the capitals, whether for pleasure or business, is by electricity, and swift

electrical expresses connect the capital of each region with the villages which radiate from it on cruciform

lines, to the cardinal points. These expresses run at the rate of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and they

enable the artist, the scientist, the litt�rateur, of the remotest hamlet, to visit the capital (when he is not

actually resident there in some public use) every day, after the hours of the obligatory industries; or, if he

likes, he may remain there a whole week or fortnight, giving six hours a day instead of three to the

obligatories, until the time is made up. In case of very evident merit, or for the purpose of allowing him to

complete some work requiring continuous application, a vote of the local agents may release him from the

obligatories indefinitely. Generally, however, our artists prefer not to ask this, but avail themselves of the

stated means we have of allowing them to work at the obligatories, and get the needed exercise and variety of

"We do not think it well to connect the hamlets on the different lines of radiation from the capital, except by

the good country roads which traverse each region in every direction. The villages are mainly inhabited by

those who prefer a rural life; they are farming villages; but in Altruria it can hardly be said that one man is

more a farmer than another. We do not like to distinguish men by their callings; we do not speak of the poet

This or the shoemaker That, for the poet may very likely be a shoemaker in the obligatories, and the

shoemaker a poet in the voluntaries. If it can be said that one occupation is honored above another with us, it

is that which we all share, and that is the cultivation of the earth. We believe that this, when not followed

slavishly, or for gain, brings man into the closest relations to the deity, through a grateful sense of the divine

bounty, and that it not only awakens a natural piety in him, but that it endears to the worker that piece of soil

which he tills, and so strengthens his love of home. The home is the very heart of the Altrurian system, and

we do not think it well that people should be away from their homes very long or very often. In the

competitive and monopolistic times men spent half their days in racing back and forth across our continent;

families were scattered by the chase for fortune, and there was a perpetual paying and repaying of visits.

Onehalf the income of those railroads which we let fall into disuse came from the ceaseless unrest. Now a

man is born and lives and dies among his own kindred, and the sweet sense of neighborhood, of brotherhood,

which blessed the golden age of the first Christian republic is ours again. Every year the people of each

Region meet one another on Evolution day, in the regionic capital; once in four years they all visit the

national capital. There is no danger of the decay of patriotism among us; our country is our mother, and we

love her as it is impossible to love the stepmother that a competitive or monopolistic nation must be to its

"I can only touch upon this feature, and that of our system, as I chance to think of it. If any of you are curious

about others, I shall be glad to answer questions as well as I can. We have, of course," the Altrurian

proceeded, after little indefinite pause, to let any speak who liked, "no sort of money. As the whole people

control affairs, no man works for another, and no man pays another. Every one does his share of labor, and

receives his share of food, clothing and shelter, which is neither more nor less than another's. If you can

imagine the justice and impartiality of a wellordered family, you can conceive of the social and economic

life of Altruria. We are, properly speaking, a family rather than a nation in your sense.

"Of course, we are somewhat favored by our insular, or continental position; but I do not know that we are

more so than you are. Certainly, however, we are selfsufficing in a degree unknown to most European

countries; and we have within our borders the materials of every comfort and the resources of every need. We

have no commerce with the egoistic world, as we call that outside, and I believe that I am the first Altrurian

to visit foreign countries avowedly in my national character, though we have always had emissaries living

abroad incognito. I hope that I may say without offense that they find it a sorrowful exile, and that the reports

of the egoistic world, with its wars, its bankruptcies, its civic commotions and its social unhappiness, do not

make us discontented with our own condition. Before the Evolution we had completed the round of your

inventions and discoveries, impelled by the force that drives you on; and we have since disused most of them

as idle and unfit. But we profit, now and then, by the advances you make in science, for we are passionately

devoted to the study of the natural laws, open or occult, under which all men have their being. Occasionally

an emissary returns with a sum of money, and explains to the students of the national university the processes

by which it is lost and won; and at a certain time there was a movement for its introduction among us, not for

its use as you know it, but for a species of counters in games of chance. It was considered, however, to

"Nothing amuses and puzzles our people more than the accounts our emissaries give of the changes of

fashion in the outside world, and of the ruin of soul and body which the love of dress often works. Our own

dress, for men and for women, is studied in one ideal of use and beauty, from the antique; caprice and vagary

in it would bethought an effect of vulgar vanity. Nothing is worn that is not simple and honest in texture; we

do not know whether a thing is cheap or dear, except as it is easy or hard to come by, and that which is hard

to come by is forbidden as wasteful and foolish. The community builds the dwellings of the community, and

these, too, are of a classic simplicity, though always beautiful and fit in form; the splendors of the arts are

"Isn't this the greatest r�chauff� of Utopia, New Atlantis, and City of the Sun, that you ever imagined?" the

professor whispered across me to the banker. "The man is a fraud, and a very bungling fraud at that."

But the professor could not wait. He got upon his feet, and called out: "May I ask the gentleman from Altruria

"Make it short!" Reuben Camp's voice broke in, impatiently. "We didn't come here to listen to your

The professor contemptuously ignored him. "I suppose you occasionally receive emissaries from, as well as

"Yes, now and then castaways land on our coasts, and ships out of their reckoning put in at our ports, for

"Why, I cannot better answer than by saying that they mostly refuse to leave us."

"You mean in the New Atlantis?" returned the Altrurian. "Yes; it is astonishing how well Bacon in that book,

and Sir Thomas More in his Utopia, have divined certain phases of our civilization and polity."

"But all those inspired visionaries," the Altrurian continued, while the professor sat grimly silent, watching

for another chance, "who have borne testimony of us in their dreams, conceived of states perfect without the

discipline of a previous competitive condition. What I thought, however, might specially interest you

Americans in Altruria is the fact that our economy was evolved from one so like that in which you actually

have your being. I had even hoped you might feel that, in all these points of resemblance, America prophesies

another Altruria. I know that to some of you all that I have told of my country will seem a baseless fabric,

with no more foundation, in fact, than More's fairy tale of another land where men dealt kindly and justly by

one another, and dwelt, a whole nation, in the unity and equality of a family. But why should not part of that

fable have come true in our polity, as another part of it has come true in yours? When Sir Thomas More

wrote that book, he noted with abhorrence the monstrous injustice of the fact that men were hanged for small

thefts in England; and in the preliminary conversation between its characters he denounced the killing of men

for any sort of thefts. Now you no longer put men to death for theft; you look back upon that cruel code of

your mother England with an abhorrence as great as his own. We, for our part, who have realized the Utopian

dream of brotherly equality, look back with the same abhorrence upon a state where some were rich and some

poor, some taught and some untaught, some high and some low, and the hardest toil often failed to supply a

sufficiency of the food which luxury wasted in its riots. That state seems as atrocious to us as the state which

"But we do not regret the experience of competition and monopoly. They taught us some things in the

operation of the industries. The laborsaving inventions which the Accumulation perverted to

moneymaking, we have restored to the use intended by their inventors and the Creator of their inventors.

After serving the advantage of socializing the industries which the Accumulation effected for its own

purposes, we continued the work in large mills and shops, in the interest of the workers, whom we wish to

guard against the evil effects of solitude. But our mills and shops are beautiful as well as useful. They look

like temples, and they are temples, dedicated to that sympathy between the divine and the human which

expresses itself in honest and exquisite workmanship. They rise amid leafy boscages beside the streams,

which form their only power; for we have disused steam altogether, with all the offenses to the eye and ear

which its use brought into the world. Our life is so simple and our needs are so few that the handwork of the

primitive toilers could easily supply our wants; but machinery works, so much more thoroughly and

beautifully, that we have in great measure retained it. Only, the machines that were once the workman's

"The farm work, as well as the mill work and the shop work, is done by parties of workers; and there is

nothing of that loneliness in our woods and fields which, I understand, is the cause of much insanity among

you. It is not good for man to be alone, was the thought of his Creator when he considered him, and we act

upon this truth in everything. The privacy of the family is sacredly guarded in essentials, but the social

instinct is so highly developed with us that we like to eat together in large refectories, and we meet constantly

to argue and dispute on questions of �sthetics and metaphysics, We do not, perhaps, read so many books as

you do, for most of our reading, when not for special research, but for culture and entertainment, is done by

public readings to large groups of listeners. We have no social meetings which are not free to all, and we

The banker leaned over to say to me, "From what I have seen of your friend when offered a piece of

American humor, I should fancy the Altrurian article was altogether different. Upon the whole I would rather

not be present at one of their witty encounters, if I were obliged to stay it out."

The Altrurian had paused to drink a glass of water, and now he went on. "But we try, in everything that does

not inconvenience or injure others, to let everyone live the life he likes best. If a man prefers to dwell apart

and have his meals in private for himself alone, or for his family, it is freely permitted; only, he must not

expect to be served as in public, where service is one of the voluntaries; private service is not permitted; those

wishing to live alone must wait upon themselves, cook their own food and care for their own tables. Very

few, however, wish to withdraw from the public life, for most of the discussions and debates take place at our

midday meal, which falls at the end of the obligatory labors, and is prolonged indefinitely, or as long as

"In Altruria there is no hurry, for no one wishes to outstrip another, or in any wise surpass him. We are all

assured of enough, and are forbidden any and every sort of superfluity. If anyone, after the obligatories,

wishes to be entirely idle, he may be so, but I cannot now think of a single person without some voluntary

occupation; doubtless there are such persons, but I do not know them. It used to be said, in the old times, that

'it was human nature' to shirk, and malinger and loaf, but we have found that it is no such thing. We have

found that it is human nature to work cheerfully, willingly, eagerly, at the tasks which all share for the supply

of the common necessities. In like manner we have found out that it is not human nature to hoard and grudge,

but that when the fear, and even the imagination, of want is taken away, it is human nature to give and to help

generously. We used to say, 'A man will lie, or a man will cheat in his own interest; that is human nature,' but

that is no longer human nature with us, perhaps, because no man has any longer any interest of his own to

serve; he has only the interests of others to serve, while others serve his. It is in nowise possible for the

individual to separate his good from the common good; he is prosperous and happy only as all the rest are so;

and therefore it is not human nature with us for any one to lie in wait to betray another or seize an advantage.

That would be ungentlemanly, and in Altruria every man is a gentleman, and every woman a lady. If you will

excuse me here, for being so frank, I would like to say something by way of illustration, which may be

He looked at our little group, as if he were addressing himself more especially to us, and the banker called out

jollily: "Go on! I guess we can stand it," and "Go ahead!" came from all sides, from all kinds of listeners.

"It is merely this: that as we look back at the old competitive conditions we do not see how any man could be

a gentleman in them, since a gentleman must think first of others, and those conditions compelled every man

There was a silence broken by some conscious and hardy laughter, while we each swallowed this pill as we

"Very well, then," she returned, "I don't think Mr. Homos is much of a gentleman to say such a thing to an

American audience. Or, wait a moment! Ask him if the same rule applies to women!"

I rose, strengthened by the resentment I felt, and said, "Do I understand that in your former competitive

The professor gave me an applausive nod as I sat down. "I envy you the chance of that little dig," he

The Altrurian was thoughtful a moment, and then he answered: "No, I should not say it was. From what we

know historically of those conditions in our own country, it appears that the great mass of women were not

directly affected by them. They constituted an altruistic imperium in the egoistic imperio, and except as they

were tainted by social or worldly ambitions, it was possible for every woman to be a lady, even in

competitive conditions. Her instincts were unselfish, and her first thoughts were nearly always of others."

Mrs. Makely jumped to her feet, and clapped violently with her fan on the palm of her left hand. "Three

cheers for Mr. Homos!" she shrieked, and all the women took up the cry, supported by all the natives and the

construction gang. I fancied these fellows gave their support largely in a spirit of burlesque; but they gave it

robustly, and from that time on, at every possible point, Mrs. Makely led the applause, and they roared in

It is impossible to follow closely the course of the Altrurian's account of his country, which grew more and

more incredible as he went on, and implied every insulting criticism of ours. Some one asked him about war

in Altruria, and he said, "The very name of our country implies the absence of war. At the time of the

Evolution our country bore to the rest of our continent the same relative proportions that your country bears

to your continent. The egoistic nations to the north and the south of us entered into an offensive and defensive

alliance to put down the new altruistic commonwealth, and declared war against us. Their forces were met at

the frontier by our entire population in arms, and full of the martial spirit bred of the constant hostilities of the

competitive and monopolistic epoch just ended. Negotiations began in the face of the imposing

demonstration we made, and we were never afterwards molested by our neighbors, who finally yielded to the

spectacle of our civilization and united their political and social fate with ours. At present, our whole

continent is Altrurian. For a long time we kept up a system of coast defenses, but it is also a long time since

we abandoned these; for it is a maxim with us that where every citizen's life is a pledge of the public safety,

"In this, as in all other things, we believe ourselves the true followers of Christ, whose doctrine we seek to

make our life, as He made it His. We have several forms of ritual, but no form of creed, and our religious

differences may be said to be �sthetic and temperamental rather than theologic and essential. We have no

denominations, for we fear in this as in other matters to give names to things lest we should cling to the

names instead of the things. We have the realities, and for this reason we look at the life of a man rather than

"I have been several times asked, during my sojourn among you, what are the sources of compassion, of

sympathy, of humanity, of charity with us, if we have not only no want, or fear of want, but not even any

economic inequality. I suppose this is because you are so constantly struck by the misery arising from

economic inequality, and want, or the fear of want, among yourselves, that you instinctively look in that

direction. But have you ever seen sweeter compassion, tenderer sympathy, warmer humanity, heavenlier

charity, than that shown in the family, where all are economically equal, and no one can want while any other

has to give? Altruria, I say again, is a family, and as we are mortal, are still subject to those nobler sorrows

which God has appointed to men, and which are so different from the squalid accidents that they have made

for themselves. Sickness and death call out the most angelic ministries of love; and those who wish to give

themselves to others may do so without hindrance from those cares, and even those duties, resting upon men

where each must look out first for himself and for his own. Oh, believe me, believe me, you can know

nothing of the divine rapture of selfsacrifice while you must dread the sacrifice of another in it! You are not

free, as we are, to do everything for others, for it is your duty to do rather for those of your own household!

"There is something," he continued, "which I hardly know how to speak of," and here we all began to prick

our ears. I prepared myself as well as I could for another affront, though I shuddered when the banker hardily

called out: "Don't hesitate to say anything you wish, Mr. Homos. I, for one, should like to hear you express

It was always the unexpected, certainly, that happened from the Altrurian. "It is merely this," he said.

"Having come to live rightly upon earth, as we believe, or having at least ceased to deny God in our statutes

and customs, the fear of death, as it once weighed upon us, has been lifted from our souls. The mystery of it

has so far been taken away that we perceive it as something just and natural. Now that all unkindness has

been banished from among us, we can conceive of no such cruelty as death once seemed. If we do not know

yet the full meaning of death, we know that the Creator of it and of us meant mercy and blessing by it. When

one dies, we grieve, but not as those without hope. We do not say that the dead have gone to a better place,

and then selfishly bewail them; for we have the kingdom of heaven upon the earth, already, and we know that

wherever they go they will be homesick for Altruria, and we think of the years that may pass before we meet

them again, and our hearts ache, as they must. But the presence of the risen Christ in our daily lives is our

assurance that no one ceases to be, and that we shall see our dead again. I cannot explain this to you; I can

The Altrurian spoke very solemnly, at a reverent hush fell upon the assembly. It was broken by the voice of a

woman wailing out: "Oh, do you suppose, if we lived so, we should feel so, too? That I should know my little

To my vast astonishment, the manufacturer, who sat the farthest from me in the same line with Mrs. Makely,

the professor and the banker, rose and asked tremulously: "And havehave you had any direct

communication with the other world? Has any disembodied spirit returned to testify of the life beyond the

The professor nodded significantly across Mrs. Makely to me, and then frowned and shook his head. I asked

her if she knew what he meant. "Why didn't you know that spiritualism was that poor man's foible? He lost

She stopped and gave her attention to the Altrurian, who was replying to the manufacturer's question.

"We do not need any such testimony. Our life here makes us sure of the life there. At any rate, no externation

of the supernatural, no objective miracle, has been wrought in our behalf. We have had faith to do what we

The manufacturer asked, as the bereaved mother had asked: "And if I lived so, should I feel so?"

The manufacturer shook his head sorrowfully, and sat down, and remained there, looking at the ground.

"I am aware," the Altrurian went on, "that what I have said as to our realizing the kingdom of heaven on the

earth must seem boastful and arrogant. That is what you pray for every day, but you do not believe it possible

for God's will to be done on earth as it is done in heaven; that is, you do not if you are like the competitive

and monopolistic people we once were. We once regarded that petition as a formula vaguely pleasing to the

Deity, but we no more expected His kingdom to come than we expected Him to give us each day our daily

bread; we knew that if we wanted something to eat we should have to hustle for it, and get there first; I use

"But now everything is changed, and the change has taken place chiefly from one cause, namely, the disuse

of money. At first, it was thought that some sort of circulating medium must be used, that life could not be

transacted without it. But life began to go on perfectly well, when each dwelt in the place assigned him,

which was no better and no worse than any other; and when, after he had given his three hours a day to the

obligatory labors, he had a right to his share of food, light, heat and raiment; the voluntary labors, to which he

gave much time or little, brought him no increase of those necessaries, but only credit and affection. We had

always heard it said that the love of money was the root of all evil, but we had taken this for a saying, merely;

now we realized it as an active, vital truth. As soon as money was abolished, the power to purchase was gone,

and even if there had been any means of buying beyond the daily needs, with overwork, the community had

no power to sell to the individual. No man owned anything, but every man had the right to anything that he

"With the expropriation of the individual, the whole vast catalogue of crimes against property shrank to

nothing. The thief could steal only from the community; but if he stole, what could he do with his booty? It

was still possible for a depredator to destroy, but few men's hate is so comprehensive as to include all other

men, and when the individual could no longer hurt some other individual in his property, destruction ceased.

"All the many murders done from love of money, or of what money could buy, were at an end. Where there

was no want, men no longer bartered their souls, or women their bodies, for the means to keep themselves

alive. The vices vanished with the crimes, and the diseases almost as largely disappeared. People were no

longer sickened with sloth and surfeit, or deformed and depleted by overwork and famine. They were

wholesomely housed in healthful places, and they were fitly clad for their labor and fitly for their leisure; the

caprices of vanity were not suffered to attaint the beauty of the national dress.

"With the stress of superfluous social and business duties, and the perpetual fear of want which all classes

felt, more or less; with the tumult of the cities and the solitude of the country, insanity had increased among

us till the whole land was dotted with asylums, and the mad were numbered by the hundreds of thousands. In

every region they were an army, an awful army of anguish and despair. Now they have decreased to a number

so small, and are of a type so mild, that we can hardly count insanity among our causes of unhappiness.

"We have totally eliminated chance from our economic life. There is still a chance that a man will be tall or

short, in Altruria, that he will be strong or weak, well or ill, gay or grave, happy or unhappy in love, but none

that he will be rich or poor, busy or idle, live splendidly or meanly. These stupid and vulgar accidents of

human contrivance cannot befall us; but I shall not be able to tell you just how or why, or to detail the process

of eliminating chance. I may say, however, that it began with the nationalization of telegraphs, expresses,

railroads, mines and all large industries operated by stock companies. This at once struck a fatal blow at the

speculation in values, real and unreal, and at the stock exchange, or bourse; we had our own name for that

gambler's paradise, or gambler's hell, whose baleful influence penetrated every branch of business.

"There were still business fluctuations, as long as we had business, but they were on a smaller and smaller

scale, and with the final lapse of business they necessarily vanished; all economic chance vanished. The

founders of the commonwealth understood perfectly that business was the sterile activity of the function

interposed between the demand and the supply; that it was nothing structural; and they intended its

"This is all pretty tiresome," said the professor, to our immediate party. "I don't see why we oblige ourselves

to listen to that fellow's stuff. As if a civilized state could exist for a day without money or business!"

He went on to give his opinion of the Altrurian's pretended description, in a tone so audible that it attracted

the notice of the nearest group of railroad hands, who were listening closely to Homos, and one of them sang

out to the professor: "Can't you wait and let the first man finish?" and another yelled: "Put him out!" and then

they all laughed, with a humorous perception of the impossibility of literally executing the suggestion.

By the time all was quiet again I heard the Altrurian saying: "As to our social life, I cannot describe it in

detail, but I can give you some notion of its spirit. We make our pleasures civic and public as far as possible,

and the ideal is inclusive, and not exclusive. There are, of course, festivities which all cannot share, but our

distribution into small communities favors the possibility of all doing so. Our daily life, however, is so

largely social that we seldom meet by special invitation or engagement. When we do, it is with the perfect

understanding that the assemblage confers no social distinction, but is for a momentary convenience. In fact,

these occasions are rather avoided, recalling as they do the vapid and tedious entertainments of the

competitive epoch, the receptions and balls and dinners of a semibarbaric people striving for social

distinction by shutting a certain number in and a certain number out, and overdressing, overfeeding and

overdrinking. Anything premeditated in the way of a pleasure we think stupid and mistaken; we like to meet

suddenly, or on the spur of the moment, out of doors, if possible, and arrange a picnic, or a dance, or a play;

and let people come and go without ceremony. No one is more host than guest; all are hosts and guests.

People consort much according to their tastesliterary, musical, artistic, scientific, or mechanicalbut

these tastes are made approaches, and not barriers; and we find out that we have many more tastes in

"But, after all, our life is serious, and no one among us is quite happy, in the general esteem, unless he has

dedicated himself, in some special way, to the general good. Our ideal is not rights, but duties."

"The greatest distinction which anyone can enjoy with us is to have found out some new and signal way of

serving the community; and then it is not good form for him to seek recognition. The doing any fine thing is

the purest pleasure it can give; applause flatters, but it hurts, too, and our benefactors, as we call them, have

"We are still far from thinking our civilization perfect; but we are sure that our civic ideals are perfect. What

we have already accomplished is to have given a whole continent perpetual peace; to have founded an

economy in which there is no possibility of want; to have filled out political and social ambition; to have

disused money and eliminated chance; to have realized the brotherhood of the race, and to have outlived the

The Altrurian suddenly stopped with these words, and sat down. He had spoken a long time, and with a

fullness which my report gives little notion of; but, though most of his cultivated listeners were weary, and a

good many ladies had left their seats and gone back to the hotel, not one of the natives, or the workpeople of

any sort, had stirred; now they remained a moment motionless and silent, before they rose from all parts of

I saw Reuben Camp climb the shoulders of a big fellow near where the Altrurian had stood; he waved the

crowd to silence with outspread arms. "He isn't going to say anything more; he's tired. But if any man don't

think he's got his dollar's worth, let him walk up to the door and the ticketagent will refund him his money."

Camp continued: "But our friend here will shake the hand of any man, woman or child, that wants to speak to

him; and you needn't wipe it on the grass, first, either. He's a man! And I want to say that he's going to spend

the next week with us, at my mother's house, and we shall be glad to have you call."

The crowd, the rustic and ruder part of it, cheered and cheered till the mountain echoes answered; then a

railroader called for three times three, with a tiger, and got it. The guests of the hotel broke away and went

toward the house, over the long shadows of the meadow. The lower classes pressed forward, on Camp's

"Well, did you ever hear a more disgusting rigmarole?" asked Mrs. Makely, as our little group halted

"With all those imaginary commonwealths to draw upon, from Plato, through More, Bacon, and Campanella,

down to Bellamy and Morris, he has constructed the shakiest effigy ever made of old clothes stuffed with

The manufacturer was silent. The banker said: "I don't know. He grappled pretty boldly with your

insinuations. That frank declaration that Altruria was all these pretty soapbubble worlds solidified, was

"It was splendid!" cried Mrs. Makely. The lawyer and the minister came towards us from where they had

been sitting together. She called out to them: "Why in the world didn't one of you gentlemen get up and

"The difficulty with me is," continued the banker, "that he has rendered Altruria incredible. I have no doubt

that he is an Altrurian, but I doubt very much if he comes from anywhere in particular, and I find this quite a

blow, for we had got Altruria nicely located on the map, and were beginning to get accounts of it in the

"Yes, that is just exactly the way I feel about it," sighed Mrs. Makely. "But still, don't you think there ought

"Why, certainly. The fellow was immensely amusing, and you must have got a lot of money by him. It was

an oversight not to make him a formal acknowledgment of some kind. If we offered him money, he would

"Just as we do when we go to heaven," I suggested; the banker did not answer, and I instantly felt that in the

"Well, then, don't you think," said Mrs. Makely, who had a leathery insensibility to everything but the

purpose possessing her, "that we ought at least to go and say something to him personally?"

"Yes, I think we ought," said the banker, and we all walked up to where the Altrurian stood, still thickly

surrounded by the lower classes, who were shaking hands with him, and getting in a word with him, now and

One of the construction gang said, carelessly : "No allrail route to Altruria, I suppose?"

"Well, I shouldn't mind working my passage, if you think they'd let me stay after I got there."

"Ah, you mustn't go to Altruria! You must let Altruria come to you," returned Homos, with that confounded

"Yes," shouted Reuben Camp, whose thin face was red with excitement, "that's the word! Have Altruria right

The old farmer, who had several times spoken, cackled out: "I didn't know, one while, when you was talk'n'

about not havin' any money, but what some on us had had Altrury here for quite a spell, already. I don't pass

A laugh went up, and then, at sight of Mrs. Makely heading our little party, the people round Homos civilly

made way for us. She rushed upon him, and seized his hand in both of hers ; she dropped her fan, parasol,

gloves, handkerchief and vinaigrette in the grass to do so. "Oh, Mr. Homos!" she fluted, and the tears came

into her eyes, "it was beautiful, beautiful, every word of it! I sat in a perfect trance from beginning to end, and

I felt that it was all as true as it was beautiful. People all round me were breathless with interest, and I don't

"Yes, indeed," the professor hastened to say, before the Altrurian could answer, and he beamed malignantly

upon him through his spectacles while he spoke, "it was all like some strange romance."

"I don't know that I should go so far as that," said the banker, in his turn, "but it certainly seemed too good to

"Yes," the Altrurian responded simply, but a little sadly, "now that I am away from it all, and in conditions so

different, I sometimes had to ask myself, as I went on, if my whole life had not hitherto been a dream, and

"Then you know how to account for a feeling which I must acknowledge, too?" the lawyer asked,

"The kingdom of God upon earth," said the minister, "it ought not to be incredible; but that, more than

"Yes," said the minister, with a certain dejection, "when I remember what I have seen of men, when I reflect

what human nature is, how can I believe that the kingdom of God will ever come upon the earth?"

"But in heaven, where He reigns, who is it does His will? The spirits of men?" pursued the Altrurian.

"Now, I can't let you two good people get into a theological dispute," Mrs. Makely pushed in. "Here is Mr.

Twelvemough dying to shake hands with Mr. Homos and compliment his distinguished guest! "

"Ah, Mr. Homos knows what I must have thought of his talk without my telling him," I began, skilfully. "But

Reuben Camp broke out: "That was my blunder, Mr. Twelvemough. Mr. Honlos and I had talked it over,

conditionally, and I was not to speak of it till he had told you; but it slipped out in the excitement of the

"Oh, it's all right," I said, and I shook hands cordially with both of them. "It will be the greatest possible

advantage for Mr. Homos to see certain phases of American life at close range, and he couldn't possibly see

"Yes, I'm going to drive him through the hill country, after haying, and then I'm going to take him down and

I believe this was done, but finally the Altrurian went on to New York, where he was to pass the winter. We

parted friends; I even offered him some introductions; but his acquaintance had become more and more

difficult, and I was not sorry to part with him. That taste of his for low company was incurable, and I was

glad that I was not to be responsible any longer for whatever strange thing he might do next. I think he

remained very popular with the classes he most affected; a throng of natives, construction hands and

tablegirls saw him off on his train; and he left large numbers of such admirers in our house and

neighborhood, devout in the faith that there was such a commonwealth as Altruria, and that he was really an

Altrurian. As for the more cultivated, people who had met him, they continued of two minds upon both