V
Peace will be the main desideratum, and its cultivation will be the most honored science of the age. A happy blending of generosity and firmness will characterize all dealings with open discontent; but the prevention of discontent will be the prior study, to which the intellect and the energies of the nobles and their legates will be ever bent. To that end the teachings of the schools and colleges, the sermons, the editorials, the stump orations, and even the plays at the theatres will be skilfully moulded; and the questioning heart of the poor, which perpetually seeks some answer to the painful riddle of the earth, will meet with a multitude of mollifying responses. These will be: from the churches, that discontent is the fruit of atheism, and that religion alone is a solace for earthly woe; from the colleges, that discontent is ignorant and irrational, since conditions have certainly bettered in the last one hundred years; from the newspapers, that discontent is anarchy; and from the stump orators that it is unpatriotic, since this nation is the greatest and most glorious that ever the sun shone upon. As of old, these reasons will for the time suffice; and against the possibility of recurrent questionings new apologetics will be skilfully formulated, to be put forth as occasion requires.
Crises will come, as in the life of all nations and societies; but these will be happily surmounted, and the régime will continue, the stronger for its trial. A crisis of some moment will follow upon the large displacements of labor soon to result from the shutting up of needless factories and the concentration of production in the larger workshops. Discontent will spread, and it will be fomented, to some extent, by agitation. But the agitation will be guarded in expression and action, and it will be relatively barren of result. For most ills there is somewhere a remedy, if only it can be discovered and made known. The disease of sedition is one whose every symptom and indication will be known by rote to our social pathologists of to-morrow, and the possible dangers of an epidemic will, in all cases, be provided against. In such a crisis as that following upon the displacement of labor a host of economists, preachers, and editors will be ready to show indisputably that the evolution taking place is for the best interests of all; that it follows a “natural and inevitable law”; that those who have been thrown out of work have only their own incompetency to blame; that all who really want work can get it, and that any interference with the prevailing régime will be sure to bring on a panic, which will only make matters worse. Hearing this, the multitude will hesitatingly acquiesce and thereupon subside; and though occasionally a radical journal or a radical agitator will counsel revolt, the mass will remain quiescent. Gradually, too, by one method or another, sometimes by the direct action of the nobility, the greater part of the displaced workers will find some means of getting bread, while those who cannot will be eliminated from the struggle and cease to be a potential factor for trouble. Crises of other kinds and from other causes will arise, only to be checkmated and overcome. What the barons will most dread will be the collective assertion of the villeins at the polls; but this, too, from experience, they will know to be something which, while dangerous, may yet be thwarted. By the putting forward of a hundred irrelevant issues they can hopelessly divide the voters at each election; or, that failing, there is always to be trusted as a last resort the cry of impending panic.