"By the railway?"
"Oh! by the railway,—that is only an hour and a half."
In Sweden there is a railway which carries regularly three passengers in its three classes, a factory-owner, a bailiff and a clerk. We may live to see them shut up the railway stations for want of coal when the coal strikes have sent up the price, for want of guards when wages rise, and for want of freight when wood and oats can no longer be procured; iron is already too dear to be used for railways, and the old water-ways ought to be tried.
It is no use to preach against civilisation,—that one knows well, but if we observe the currents of the time we shall see that a return to nature is in process of going on. Turgenieff has already described this by the word "simplification." That is the mistake of the evolutionists that in everything which is in motion or course of development they see a progress towards human happiness, forgetting that a sickness may develop to death or recovery.
After all, what a superficial appendage civilisation is! Make a nobleman drunk and he can become like a savage; let a child loose in a wood without any one to look after it (provided that it can feed itself) and it will not learn to speak of itself. Out of a peasant's son who is generally considered so low in the social scale, one can make in a single generation a man of science, a minister, an arch-bishop, or an artist. Here there can be no talk of heredity, for the peasant-father who stood apparently at such a low level, could not have inherited anything from cultivated brains. On the other hand, the children of a genius inherit usually nothing but used-up brains, except occasionally a skill in their father's line of work, which they have acquired by daily intercourse with their father.
The town is the fire-place whither the living fuel from the country is brought and devoured; it is to keep the present social machinery at work, it is true, but in the long run the fuel will prove too dear, and the machine come to a standstill. The society of the future will not need this machine in order to work or they will be more sparing of the fuel. But it is a mistake to conjecture the needs of a future state of society from the present one.
Our present society is perhaps a natural product, but inorganic; the future society will be an organic product and a higher one, for it will not deprive men of the first conditions for an organic existence. There will be the same difference between these two forms of society as between paved streets and grass meadows.
The youth's dream often left artificial society to wander at large in nature. Society had been formed by men doing violence to natural laws, just as one may bleach a plant under a flower-pot and produce an edible salad, but the plant's capacity to live healthily and propagate itself as a plant is destroyed. Such a plant is the civilised man made by artificial bleaching useful for an anæmic society, but, as an individual, wretched and unhealthy. Must the process of bleaching continue in order to insure the existence of this decayed society? Must the individual remain wretched in order to maintain an unhealthy society? For how can society be healthy when its individual members are ailing? A single individual cannot demand that society should be sacrificed for his sake, but a majority of individuals have a right to bring about such changes in the society, which they themselves compose, as may be beneficial to themselves.
Under the simpler conditions of country life John believed he could be happy in an obscure post, without feeling that he had sunk in the social scale. But he could not be so in the town where he would be continually reminded of the height from which he had fallen. To come down voluntarily is not painful if the onlookers can be persuaded that it is voluntarily, but to fall is bitter, especially as a fall always arouses satisfaction in those standing below. To mount, strive upwards and better one's position has become a social instinct, and the youth felt the force of it, though in his view the "upper" was not always higher.
John wished now to realise some result,—an active life which should bring him an income. He looked through many advertisements for teachers in elementary schools. Positions were advertised to which were attached salaries of 300 or 600 kronas, a house, a meadow and a garden. He tried for one of these places after another but obtained no answer.