By FRANCIS A. WALKER in the Atlantic Monthly.
Such is the mechanism which Mr. Bellamy proposes for carrying on the industry of the nation and providing for its material wants. What are the advantages which, in his view, would result from thus organising the productive forces of the country ? These may be grouped, in a general way, as follows :—
1. Since no man is to be allowed to enjoy more of good things than others, those who stand at the lower end of the scale of industrial efficiency, moral energy, physical force, and technical skill would obtain a dividend from a body of comforts, luxuries, and necessaries of life to the production of which their own force or industry would not be competent. Here, of course is clearly seen an opportunity to improve the condition of the less fortunate members of the community, as at present constituted provided only and provided always that this lavishing away of the fruits of exceptional intelligence, industry, and skill should not diminish the zeal with which those qualities will be applied in future production Should the latter prove to be the case, the less fortunate members of the community would not be better off, but worse off,—indeed, indefinitely worse off, by reason of such a confiscation.
But while Mr. Bellamy's scheme thus offers an opportunity (subject to the important proviso just now indicated) to divide up the superfluity of the rich, the author has to admit that with so huge a divisor as the total number of the people, the addition made thereby to the income of each man, woman, and child would, at the most, be but a few cents a day. Whence, then, is to come that abundance of good things which is depicted in this romance ?—an abundance so great of all the comforts, decencies, and wholesome luxuries of life including the best of wines and cigars, and opera twenty-four hours a day, that it is stated to be not unlikely that any man would care to use less than the amount of purchasing power placed at his disposal. In order to provide the abundance, Mr. Bellamy is obliged to leave the distribution of what we now call wealth, and undertake to show that the production would be enormously increased under his proposed scheme.
2. In meeting this exigency of his argument, the author indulges in an extravagance of exaggeration which is hardly to be equalled in the myths of any people, from Scandinavia to the Indian Peninsula According to his exhibit, only an insignificant portion of the labour and capital power of a thousand million of toilers, the world over is now really applied to the satisfaction of human wants. His statement of the evil effects of excessive competition and ill-directed enterprise rises into the realm of the marvellous. All this is to be saved and turned to the most beneficent use in his industrial state. There is to be no waste of substance and no duplication of effort. No man or woman is to be obliged to labour after the age of 45 with exceptions too inconsiderable to be noticed, and no child before 21; yet all are to have enough and to spare.
3. Having thus shown that much can be added to the good things to be enjoyed by the community, though what he regards as an improved system of production, Mr. Bellamy proceeds to show that in the consumption of what we now call wealth, a vast saving is to be effected. Property having been virtually abolished, all crimes against property disappear, by the necessity of the case. As no man has anything of which he could be robbed, and is no man has any wants unsatisfied which could lead him to robbery, a very beautiful order of things is immediately instituted. Moreover, in such a happy state, all vicious and malignant instincts and impulses will be so acted upon by general forces, making for intelligence and morality, that crimes against the person and against the community will practically disappear and society will thus be relieved from the expense of providing policemen, Judges, and gaols.
Such are the three modes in which Mr. Bellamy proposes to afford the world that abundance of good things which is depicted so appetisingly in his now famous novel, " Looking Backward."
I do not know that I could give in a brief space, a better idea of the degree of discretion and moderation with which Mr. Bellamy deals with obstacles to his scheme than by saying that he settles in a single line the greatest of human problems. "We have," says this light and airy human providence, no wars and our governments have no war powers." Is it wonderful that a novelist who in one line can dispose of a question which has baffled the power of statesmen, diplomats and philanthropists through the course of centuries, should in a few chapters put you together a social order from which vice, crime pauperism and every form of human selfishness altogether disappear?
Yet even after such a masterly disposition of the problems which have taxed the powers of the greatest minds of the race, even after the tremendous assumptions which he permits himself on his mere fancy to make, Mr. Bellamy is well aware that he has still to deal with a difficulty of colossal magnitude. Conceding all he would be disposed to claim for his system, if erected and put into operation, it still remains to be shown how this industrial army shall be officered ; how "the administration" which is to set and keep millions of persons at work, each in the place and in the way best suiting his capacity, to order and control this gigantic industrial machine without friction, without waste and without loss shall be chosen or elected, or otherwise constituted. If the choice of rulers and administrators for governments which exercise but a tenth of a hundredth part of the power and authority that is to be placed in the hands of the officers of the industrial army gives rise to parties and factions which are ready to tear each other asunder, generates intrigues and cabals which threaten the existence of government itself, and creates a large class of professional politicians what may we expect when "the administration" controls all the activities of life, sets every man of the community at work and in place according to its pleasure, and undertakes to redress the balance of advantages and disadvantages among hundreds of occupations and thousands of considerable communities ?
I have said that Mr. Bellamy is aware of this difficulty. He proposes a scheme for the choice of those who are to exercise these tremendous powers, which may safely be claimed by his admirers to be without a parallel in political speculation. This is, in truth, the great original feature of Mr. Bellamy's plan. The analogy of an industrial to a military army has been suggested by other writers ; many philosophers have risen to the conception of a comprehensive socialism in which the State should be all and in all ; but Mr. Bellamy alone has undertaken to show how seeking and striving for office can be entirely eliminated, and how an "administration," exercising a hundred times the power of an ordinary government can be secured so purely and so peacefully that demagoguery and corruption shall become words of an historical significance only. Such a discovery constitutes his chief claim to destruction as a social and political philosopher.
Mr. Bellamy's project is unique and grand in its simplicity. It consists solely in bestowing the choice of the officers of the industrial army upon those who have already been discharged from service, at 45. The constituency thus composed, being themselves exempted from further service in the industrial army, can have no possible interest other than the selection of the altogether best man for each place of command ; and they will proceed to exercise their function of choice, in this momentous matter, disinterestedly, dispassionately, and with the highest intelligence. Among a body thus constituted intrigues and cabals can, of course, not originate, the tremendous powers of patronage they are to wield cannot possibly give rise to favouritism or partisanship.
Mr. Bellamy's notion of the composition of an electoral constituency has an interest and a value for us, as citizens deeply concerned in public affairs, even under the present benighted organisation of society We need not wait for the complete realisation of the scheme to put this feature of it into operation for the improvement of current politics. The choice of legislators and governors now causes a great deal of trouble, gives rise to office-seeking and offensive partisanship, provokes intrigues and cabals, generates demagoguery and corruption. Is it not clear that we need to seek some constituency within the common wealth whose members are free from interest in the government and can derive no personal benefit from the choice of officials? It is in this view that I venture to supplement Mr. Bellamy's suggestions. Is there anywhere in Massachusetts such a constituency, to which might be intrusted the selection of our governors and legislators? Clearly there is. We have certain highly populous institutions in which are to be found no inconsiderable number of persons who are definitely relieved from further participation in public affairs. Sequestered for the remainder of their existence, by act of law, from activity and agency within the Commonwealth, why should not these persons, familiarly known as Convicts for Life, be intrusted with the choice of magistrates and rulers? They can have no selfish interest in the matter; and since Mr. Bellamy assures us that it is not necessary that human nature should be changed, but only a right organisation of existing forces seemed, why might not such a confidence properly be proposed in the discretion of these gentlemen—and ladies ?
Such is Mr. Bellamy's scheme as completed by the mechanism he proposes for the choice of officers for his new nation. I am sanguine enough to believe that the simplest statement will answer most of the purposes of a laborious refutation. I will only touch upon a few points.
In the first place, the constituency which Mr. Bellamy would create for the choice of "the administration," under his system, is about the worst which could possibly be devised. A more meddlesome mischief-making, and altogether pestilent body of electors was never called into being. It is a mistake to suppose that a man's selfish interest in a service ceases because he has himself retired from it. There was a time, after the war, when it was almost impossible for the Secretary of the Navy to administer his department, on account of the intermeddling of twenty or thirty retired admirals living in Washington. Men may still have friends and relatives and dependents to promote, leaders and champions to push, not to speak of enemies to punish, long after they have themselves gone upon the retired list.
Equally unreasonable is it to assume that the great mass of ordinary people would be free from selfish, sectional, and partisan impulses in such a system as Mr. Bellamy proposes. Instead of politics being abolished, it would be found that, with 5,000,000 of men over 45 years in the United States having nothing else to attend to, politics would become the great business of the nation. Parties and factions would be formed under sectional, moral,* or personal impulses, and would carry their contents to a pitch of fury impossible to constituencies, most of whose members have a great deal else to do and that of a very engrossing nature. " Magnetic" leaders would come to the front ; "issues" would arise, and all the combativeness and creature pugnacity of fallen humanity, refused longer occupation in war or in industry
would find full scope in the contests of politics. Doubtless the whole 5,000,000 of veteran male electors, being perfectly free to live where they pleased and to draw then rations where they lived, would at once move to Washington, to be as near the source of power as possible. Doubtless, also, the 5,000,000 female electors would follow them, to take a hand, to the best possible effect, in the choice of the "woman general in chief." Under such attractions, and with no practical business remaining in life, the whole voting population would speedily join the throng at the capital, where power and place were to be fought for With 10,000,000 of discharged industrial soldiers, having no other business but politics, Washington would become a city in comparison with which, in the fury of its partisanship and factional strife, Rome, under the later Empire, would not deserve to be mentioned.
Secondly, Mr. Bellamy's assumption that, were selfish pecuniary interests to be altogether removed as a motive to action, the sense of duty and the desire of applause would enter fully to take thou place, and would inspire all the members of the community to the due exertion of all their powers and faculties for the general good, is utterly gratuitous.
Nothing that we read in human history, nothing that we see among existing societies, justifies such a supposition. From the origin of mankind to the present time the main spur to exertion has been want, and while, with the growth of small-brained into large-brained races the desire of applause and consideration for the public weal have steadily grown in force as motives to human action, and while among the higher individuals of the higher races, a delight in labour has even, in a certain degree, come to replace the barbarous indisposition to all kinds of work, it is still in this age of the world, little short of downright madness to assume that disinterested motives can be altogether trusted to take the place of selfish motives in human society.
Thirdly, like Mr. Georges great work, "Looking Backward" shows, through its whole structure, the perverting effect of a single false notion, having the power to twist out of shape and out of due relation every fact which comes, in any way, at any point, within the field of its influence. It is the notion that military discipline applied to production would work miracles, both in gain and in saving, which has led Mr Bellamy astray. In sooth, Mr. Bellamy did not turn to the military system of organisation because he was a Socialist. He became a Socialist because he had been moonstruck with a fancy for the military organisation and discipline itself. So that in a sense, militarism is, with him, an end rather than a means. A very funny end one must admit.
It would be difficult to prove what has been thus asserted, were one left to his book alone, though the domination exerted over the author's mind by this "fixed idea" would suggest that it was the passion for militarism which had made the author a Socialist. But we are not left to that source of information In the May, 1889 number of " The Nationalist," Mr. Bellamy has told us "how he [I] came to write 'Looking Backward.' " He there says that he had, at the outset, " no idea of attempting a serious contribution to the movement of social reform." Indeed, he had never had any affiliations with any class or sect of industrial or social reformers, "nor any particular sympathy with undertaking of the sort." To make the picture he proposed to draw as unreal as possible, to secure plenty of elbow room for the fancy and prevent awkward collisions between the ideal structure and the hard facts of the real world, he fixed the date of his story in the year AD 3000. Starting thus without any distinct social intention ; with " no thought of constructing a house in which practical men might live, but merely of hanging in mid-air, far out of the reach of the sordid and material world of the present, a cloud palace for an ideal humanity." Mr. Bellamy began "Looking Backward."
The opening scene, he tells us, was a grand parade of a departmental division of the industrial army, on the occasion of the annual muster day, when the young men coming of age that year were mustered into the national service, and those who that year had reached the age of exemption were mustered out. "The solemn pageantry of the great festival of the year; the impressive ceremonial of the oath of duty, taken by the new recruits in the presence of the world standard ; the formal return of the thanks of humanity to the veterans who received their honourable dismissal from service ; the review and the march past of the entire body of the local industrial forces, each battalion with its appropriate insignia ; the triumphal arches, the garlanded streets, the banquets, the music, the open theatres and pleasure gardens, with all the features of a gala day sacred to the civic virtues and the enthusiasm of humanity, furnished materials for a picture exhilarating at least to the painter." No wonder he was fired with martial ardour at his own conception, and felt at once like running away to enlist.
Observe: this is the real germ of Mr. Bellamy's social scheme. He goes on to tell us that, enraptured by the contemplation of the grand review, he began to dwell more and more on the feasibility of applying the modern military system of Europe to the industrial life of every country, by turns and finally of the world.
More and more as he dwelt on this theme the possibilities of the subject expanded before him ; the difficulties vanished ; the time for such a consummation drew near. † Whereas he had at first only thought of utilising the military system as furnishing "an analogy to lend an effect of feasibility to the fancy sketch he [I] had in hand," he at last, after much working over details "perceived the full potency of the instrument he [I] misusing, and recognised in the modern military system, not merely a rhetorical analogy for a national industrial service, but its prototype, furnishing at once a complete working model for its organisation, an arsenal of patriotic and national motives and arguments for its animation and the unanswerable demonstration of its feasibility drawn from the actual experience of whole nations organised and manoeuvred as armies."
Fired, as well he might be, by a discovery so momentous, Mr. Bellamy, like Archimedes, rushed from his bath into the streets shouting Eureka. The date 3000 was incontinently dropped, and that of 2000 substituted, the details of the new scheme were wrought out, even at the sacrifice, as Mr Bellamy confesses, with a tinge of regret not unbecoming a professional novelist, of some of the doubts and hopes and fears of the predestinated lovers ; and Looking Backward was put to press as the Koran of a new faith.
* For example Mr. Bellamy represents his favourite characters as using wine freely. Can anyone doubt that within the first few years the industrial army would be convulsed by contests between a prohibition and a license party ; and that when this question was settled if it ever should be, tea, coffee and tobacco would come in for the passionate attentions of the Miners and Faxons of that day? Mr. Bellamy's "open theatres" continue all the possibilities of a whole century of active politics.
† Instead of a mere fairy tale of social perfection, it ( Looking Backward) became the vehicle of a definite scheme of industrial reorganisation.
I http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article52338016 III http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article67948537
The Brisbane Courier 1890,http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article3515222
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