“This amount of overseeing and bookkeeping, by which the government can trace back to the original workman a bad pin or a poorly rolled cigar, enables the administration to provide for its favorites many desirable places, but it certainly lessens the productive power of the industrial force, thus, again, decreasing the production. And at the same time the number of consumers is larger than in your days”.
“How do you account for this?” I inquired.
“Has not Dr. Leete informed you that persons of average constitution usually live to be from eighty-five to ninety years old?”[33]
[33] Page 197.
“Indeed, he has”.
“This accounts for an increased number of consumers who all draw their full share of the products of labor in the form of a credit card”, Mr. Forest continued. “Our people live longer than your contemporaries did. They take life easy, and while the spirit, the energy and the enterprise of our generation are gradually decreasing and degenerating, their bodies last longer”.
“Ah! now at last you are admitting one gain”, I exclaimed.
“If it is a gain, I do”, rejoined Mr. Forest. “But even the favored members of our industrial army do not seem to consider it a very valuable acquisition. Because the only way to secure a desirable position is to sacrifice their own independence and that of their relatives and friends, and even to employ base means of corruption, downright bribery of their superiors with a part of their own credit cards, many of the favorites of the administration are, in fact, enemies of the leaders”.
After a short pause Mr. Forest concluded his arguments. “I suppose I have successfully demonstrated that our organization of society, with its pretended basis of human equality has proved to be a failure, that there prevails to-day an inequality in many respects more oppressive than that of your time, that favoritism and corruption are about as potent under our communistic rule as they were at the end of the nineteenth century, that personal liberty is almost entirely destroyed, that the members of the industrial army, without having the right to vote at the election of their superiors, are at the mercy of their officers, that the members of the industrial force who are considered enemies of the government are leading a life that very properly may be styled as twenty-four years of hell on earth, that since the abolishment of competition the people are mentally degenerating for want of intellectual exercise, and that not even a greater wealth is a consolation for the loss of the greater liberty and independence the people enjoyed in your time. The shortening of both the years and the hours of productive labor, the abolition of competition and the increase in the number of consumers have reduced the average daily income of the inhabitants of the United States to such an extent that the amount inscribed upon our credit card is so small, that it affords only a very frugal living to the people of the twentieth century. And there is no doubt in my mind that a continuation of the present system for a few hundred years more would so degrade and degenerate the people that a relapse into barbarism would ensue”.