And then there is literature. The bourgeois recognises the novelist and the poet as a means of amusement somewhat above the prostitute, and about on a level with the music-hall artist; he recognises the essayist, the historian, and the publicist as agents of bourgeois repression equally as necessary as the clergyman and the editor. To all of them he grants the good things of the bourgeois life, a bourgeois home with servants who know their places, and a bourgeois club with smiling and obsequious waiters. They may even, on state occasions, become acquainted with the bourgeois magnates, and touch the gracious fingers of the magnates’ pudgy wives. There is only one condition, so obvious that it hardly needs to be mentioned—they must be bourgeois, they must see life from the bourgeois point of view. Beyond that there is not the least restriction; the novelist, for instance, may roam the whole of space and time—there is nothing in life that he may not treat, provided only that he be bourgeois in his treatment. He may show us the olden time, with noble dames and gallant gentlemen dallying with graceful sentiment. He may entertain us with pictures of the modern world, may dazzle us with visions of high society in all its splendours, may awe us with the wonders of modern civilisation, of steam and electricity, the flying machine and the automobile. He may thrill us with battle, murder, and Sherlock Holmes. He may bring tears to our eyes at the thought of the old folks at home, or at his pictures of the honesty, humility, and sobriety of the common man; he may even go to the slums and show us the ways of Mrs. Wiggs, her patient frugality and beautiful contentment in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call her. In any of these fields the author, if he is worth his salt, may be “entertaining”—and so the royalties will come in. If there is any one whom this does not suit—who is so perverse that the bourgeois do not please him, or so obstinate that he will not learn to please the bourgeois—we send after him our literary policeman, the bourgeois reviewer, and bludgeon him into silence; or better yet, we simply leave him alone, and he moves into a garret. The bourgeois garrets resemble the bourgeois excursion steamers. They are never so crowded that there is not room for as many more as want to come on board; and any young author who imagines that he can bear to starve longer than the world can bear to let him starve, is welcome to try it. Letting things starve is the specialty of the bourgeois society—the vast majority of the creatures in it are starving all the time.
So much for things as they are. The Revolution will, of course, not change our present bourgeois people—except that it will scare them thoroughly, and make them teachable. But it will bring to the front an enormous class of people to whom life is a new and wondrous thing; and their children also will grow up in a different world, and with a different ideal; and so a generation from now there will be a new art public. The people who compose it will not have been forced to consider money the only thing in life, the sole test of excellence and power; they will not have been brought up on the motto, “Do others or they will do you.” They will have been brought up in a world in which no man is able to “do” another man, and in which all men stand as equals as regards money. They will have been brought up in a world in which work and a decent life are the right and duty of every man, and are taken for granted with every man; in which influence, reputation, and command are given for other things than money. If it be true that faith, hope, and charity are greater things than wealth, it is perhaps not altogether Utopian to suppose that these will be the things that the new public will honour and will contrive to promote. The best way in which one can be sure about this is to study the writers who are shaping the ideals of Socialism—such men as Whitman and Thoreau, Ruskin and William Morris, Kropotkin and Carpenter and Gorky. Above all I wish that I could be the cause of the reader’s looking into one book, in which one of the master-spirits of our time has made an attempt to picture this beautiful world that is to be. When I met Mr. H. G. Wells last year, I had not read any of his books; so he sent me a copy of his “Modern Utopia,” graciously inscribing it: “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the next most hopeful!” Afterward, I was asked by Life to name the book which had given me the most pleasure during the last year, and I named this one. It is, in my opinion, one of the great works of our literature; it is worthy to be placed with the visions of Plato and Sir Thomas More. It has three great virtues which are rarely, if ever, found in combination. In the first place, it is characterised by a nobility and loftiness of spirit which makes its reading a religious exercise. In the second place, it is the work of an engineer, a man with the modern sense of reality and acquainted with the whole field of scientific achievement. In the third place, it is written in a a literary style which makes the reading of each paragraph a delight in itself. It is a book to love and to cherish; one leaves it, refreshed and strengthened, to wait with patience and cheerfulness the hour of the Great Change.
CHAPTER VIII
THE COÖPERATIVE HOME
In all that I have outlined concerning the Industrial Republic, I have tried to indicate my belief that it will be the creation of no man’s will, but a product of evolution—the result of many forces which are now at work in our society. These forces we can study and analyse; and in picturing their final product, we are not simply indulging in fantastic speculation, but are making scientific deductions. I believe that we have now in our present world the half-developed embryo of everything which I have pictured in the future; the Revolution, which comes suddenly, and in the midst of strain and agony, is precisely the parallel of a child-birth. In our present “trusts,” for instance, we have perfect examples of the centralising and systematising of production and distribution; absolutely the only thing needed to fit them into the world I have pictured is a change of ownership. Again, in the labour unions, we see the building up of the machinery of industrial self-government. And similarly, in our churches and clubs, our benevolent and artistic and scientific associations, we have the germs of all the coöperative activities of the future. In our public educational system, we have a complete and perfect piece of practical Socialism, ready to fit into the structure of our Industrial Republic. In our Post Office we have still another, while in the army and navy we have examples of industrial paternalism which need only the breath of a new ideal to make them indispensable for all time. We saw after the San Francisco earthquake the real use of standing armies; and for such purposes they will continue to exist, long after war shall have become a nightmare memory.
It has occurred to me that in concluding my argument, it might be well to tell of another such seed of the future, in the planting of which I myself have had the pleasure of assisting. I refer to the Helicon Home Colony, at Englewood, New Jersey, where I have been living while writing this book.
Our industries are organised at present under the competitive system; and I do not believe that any coöperative method of production can drive human beings to the same pitch of effort as they are driven by the lash of wage-slavery. So I consider that any form of coöperation in production is doomed to failure, under present conditions; and I should prefer to watch from the outside any attempt to found “colonies” of the Brook Farm and Ruskin type. The case is quite otherwise, however, when it comes to coöperation in distribution, in the expenditure of one’s income. We are familiar with hundreds of forms of that sort of association—coöperative stores, benevolent fraternities, social clubs and churches. The practicability of any such enterprise depends upon two questions: First, are there a sufficient number of people who want the same thing, and second, can they get it more effectively in combination than otherwise.
The idea of coöperation in domestic industry has been well worked out in theory—notably in Mrs. Gilman’s book “The Home.” The first attempt to realise it in practice, so far as I know, is the Helicon Home Colony.
The plan was broached in an article which I published in The Independent, in June of 1906. In the course of the article, I outlined the situation as follows:
Here am I on my little farm, living as my ancestors lived—like a cave man or a feudal baron. I have my little castle and my retainers and dependants to attend me, and we practise a hundred different trades: the trade of serving meals, and the trade of cleaning dishes, the trade of washing and ironing clothes, of killing and dressing meat, of churning butter, of baking bread, of grinding meal, of raising chickens, of cutting wood, of preserving fruit, of heating a house, of decorating rooms, of training children, and of writing books! And all these crowded into one establishment, in close proximity, and all jarring and clashing with each other! And all carried on in the most primitive and barbarous fashion, upon a small scale, and by unskilled hand labour. It takes a hundred cooks to prepare a hundred meals badly, while twenty cooks could prepare one meal for a hundred families, and do it perfectly. It costs a hundred thousand dollars to build and equip a hundred kitchens; it would cost only five thousand dollars to build one kitchen! But, of course, if you have large-scale cooking at present, you can only have it under capitalist auspices; and so it is associated in your minds with uncleanness, and bad service, and high prices. It takes a hundred churns and a hundred aching backs to make a thousand pounds of butter; it would take only one machine and a man to tend it to make the same thousand pounds, and the cost of making it would be cut ninety-five per cent. But of course you cannot have large-scale butter-making except it is done for profit—and that means adulteration and poisoning! It takes a hundred ignorant nursemaids to take care of the children of a hundred families, and develop every kind of ugliness and badness in them; it would take only twenty or thirty trained nurses and kindergarten teachers to take care of them coöperatively, and bring them up according to the teachings of science.
One could show this same thing in a thousand different forms, if it were necessary; but it has all been reasoned out in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book, “The Home,” and anyone to whom the idea is new may read it there. The purpose of this paper is not to persuade anyone, but to move to action those already persuaded. There must be, in and near New York, thousands of men and women of liberal sympathies, who understand this situation clearly, and are handicapped by its miseries in their own lives—authors, artists and musicians, editors and teachers and professional men, who abhor boarding houses and apartment hotels and yet shrink from managing servants, who have lonely and peevish children like my own, and are no fonder of eating poisons or of wasting their time and strength than I am. There must be a few who, like myself, have realised that it is a question of dragging through life a constantly increasing burden of care, or making an intelligent effort and solving the problem once for all. To such I offer my coöperation. I am not a business man, but circumstances have forced me to take up this problem, and I am not accustomed to failing in what I undertake. I have said that “Socialism is not an experiment in government, but an act of will”; and I say the same of this plan. Having gotten the figures from experts and found out exactly what we can do, the one thing remaining is to go ahead and do it.