Equality & Looking Backward. Edward Bellamy
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can you do that, I should like to know, when no two men’s powers are the same?”
“Nothing could be simpler,” was Dr. Leete’s reply. “We require of each that he shall make the same effort; that is, we demand of him the best service it is in his power to give.”
“And supposing all do the best they can,” I answered, “the amount of the product resulting is twice greater from one man than from another.”
“Very true,” replied Dr. Leete; “but the amount of the resulting product has nothing whatever to do with the question, which is one of desert. Desert is a moral question, and the amount of the product a material quantity. It would be an extraordinary sort of logic which should try to determine a moral question by a material standard. The amount of the effort alone is pertinent to the question of desert. All men who do their best, do the same. A man’s endowments, however godlike, merely fix the measure of his duty. The man of great endowments who does not do all he might, though he may do more than a man of small endowments who does his best, is deemed a less deserving worker than the latter, and dies a debtor to his fellows. The Creator sets men’s tasks for them by the faculties he gives them; we simply exact their fulfillment.”
“No doubt that is very fine philosophy,” I said; “nevertheless it seems hard that the man who produces twice as much as another, even if both do their best, should have only the same share.”
“Does it, indeed, seem so to you?” responded Dr. Leete. “Now, do you know, that seems very curious to me? The way it strikes people nowadays is, that a man who can produce twice as much as another with the same effort, instead of being rewarded for doing so, ought to be punished if he does not do so. In the nineteenth century, when a horse pulled a heavier load than a goat, I suppose you rewarded him. Now, we should have whipped him soundly if he had not, on the ground that, being much stronger, he ought to. It is singular how ethical standards change.” The doctor said this with such a twinkle in his eye that I was obliged to laugh.
“I suppose,” I said, “that the real reason that we rewarded men for their endowments, while we considered those of horses and goats merely as fixing the service to be severally required of them, was that the animals, not being reasoning beings, naturally did the best they could, whereas men could only be induced to do so by rewarding them according to the amount of their product. That brings me to ask why, unless human nature has mightily changed in a hundred years, you are not under the same necessity.”
“We are,” replied Dr. Leete. “I don’t think there has been any change in human nature in that respect since your day. It is still so constituted that special incentives in the form of prizes, and advantages to be gained, are requisite to call out the best endeavors of the average man in any direction.”
“But what inducement,” I asked, “can a man have to put forth his best endeavors when, however much or little he accomplishes, his income remains the same? High characters may be moved by devotion to the common welfare under such a system, but does not the average man tend to rest back on his oar, reasoning that it is of no use to make a special effort, since the effort will not increase his income, nor its withholding diminish it?”
“Does it then really seem to you,” answered my companion, “that human nature is insensible to any motives save fear of want and love of luxury, that you should expect security and equality of livelihood to leave them without possible incentives to effort? Your contemporaries did not really think so, though they might fancy they did. When it was a question of the grandest class of efforts, the most absolute self-devotion, they depended on quite other incentives. Not higher wages, but honor and the hope of men’s gratitude, patriotism and the inspiration of duty, were the motives which they set before their soldiers when it was a question of dying for the nation, and never was there an age of the world when those motives did not call out what is best and noblest in men. And not only this, but when you come to analyze the love of money which was the general impulse to effort in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the others, and with many the more influential, being desire of power, of social position, and reputation for ability and success. So you see that though we have abolished poverty and the fear of it, and inordinate luxury with the hope of it, we have not touched the greater part of the motives which underlay the love of money in former times, or any of those which prompted the supremer sorts of effort. The coarser motives, which no longer move us, have been replaced by higher motives wholly unknown to the mere wage earners of your age. Now that industry of whatever sort is no longer self-service, but service of the nation, patriotism, passion for humanity, impel the worker as in your day they did the soldier. The army of industry is an army, not alone by virtue of its perfect organization, but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion which animates its members.
“But as you used to supplement the motives of patriotism with the love of glory, in order to stimulate the valor of your soldiers, so do we. Based as our industrial system is on the principle of requiring the same unit of effort from every man, that is, the best he can do, you will see that the means by which we spur the workers to do their best must be a very essential part of our scheme. With us, diligence in the national service is the sole and certain way to public repute, social distinction, and official power. The value of a man’s services to society fixes his rank in it. Compared with the effect of our social arrangements in impelling men to be zealous in business, we deem the object-lessons of biting poverty and wanton luxury on which you depended a device as weak and uncertain as it was barbaric. The lust of honor even in your sordid day notoriously impelled men to more desperate effort than the love of money could.”
“I should be extremely interested,” I said, “to learn something of what these social arrangements are.”
“The scheme in its details,” replied the doctor, “is of course very elaborate, for it underlies the entire organization of our industrial army; but a few words will give you a general idea of it.”
At this moment our talk was charmingly interrupted by the emergence upon the aerial platform where we sat of Edith Leete. She was dressed for the street, and had come to speak to her father about some commission she was to do for him.
“By the way, Edith,” he exclaimed, as she was about to leave us to ourselves, “I wonder if Mr. West would not be interested in visiting the store with you? I have been telling him something about our system of distribution, and perhaps he might like to see it in practical operation.”
“My daughter,” he added, turning to me, “is an indefatigable shopper, and can tell you more about the stores than I can.”
The proposition was naturally very agreeable to me, and Edith being good enough to say that she should be glad to have my company, we left the house together.
Chapter 10
“If I am going to explain our way of shopping to you,” said my companion, as we walked along the street, “you must explain your way to me. I have never been able to understand it from all I have read on the subject. For example, when you had such a vast number of shops, each with its different assortment, how could a lady ever settle upon any purchase till she had visited all the shops? for, until she had, she could not know what there was to choose from.”
“It was as you suppose; that was the only way she could know,” I replied.
“Father calls me an indefatigable shopper, but I should soon be a very fatigued one if I had to do as they did,” was Edith’s laughing comment.
“The loss of time in going from shop to shop was indeed a waste which the busy bitterly complained of,” I said; “but as for the ladies of the idle class, though they complained also, I think the system was really a godsend by furnishing a device to kill time.”
“But say there were a thousand shops in a city, hundreds, perhaps, of the same sort, how could even the idlest find time to make their rounds?”