THE COLLECTED WORKS OF CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN: Short Stories, Novels, Poems & Essays. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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hasn’t any,” she answered.
“Hasn’t any? What do they call it? the Believers, I mean?”
“They call it ‘Living’ and ‘Life’ — that’s all.”
“Hm! and what’s their specialty?”
Nellie gave a funny little laugh, part sad, part tender, part amused.
“I had no idea it would be so hard to tell you things,” she said. “You’ll have to just see for yourself, I guess.”
“Do go on, Nellie. I’ll be good. You were going to tell me, in a nutshell, what had happened — please do.”
“The thing that has happened,” said she, slowly, “is just this. The world has come alive. We are doing in a pleasant, practical way, all the things which we could have done, at any time before — only we never thought so. The real change is this: we have changed our minds. This happened very soon after you left. Ah! that was a time! To think that you should have missed it!” She gave my hand another sympathetic squeeze and went on. “After that it was only a question of time, of how soon we could do things. And we’ve been doing them ever since, faster and faster.”
This seemed rather flat and disappointing.
“I don’t see that you make out anything wonderful — so far. A new Religion which seems to consist only in behaving better; and a gradual improvement of social conditions — all that was going on when I left.”
Nellie regarded me with a considering eye.
“I see how you interpret it,” she said, “behaving better in our early days was a small personal affair; either a pathetically inadequate failure to do what one could not, or a pharisaic, self-righteous success in doing what one could. All personal — personal!”
“Good behavior has to be a personal affair, hasn’t it?” I mildly protested.
“Not by any means!” said Nellie with decision. “That was precisely what kept us so small and bad, so miserably confined and discouraged. Like a lot of well-meaning soldiers imagining that their evolutions were ‘a personal affair’ — or an orchestra plaintively protesting that if each man played a correct tune of his own choosing, the result would be perfect! Dear! dear! No, Sir” she continued with some fierceness, “that’s just where we changed our minds! Humanity has come alive, I tell you and we have reason to be proud of our race!”
She held her head high, there was a glad triumphant look in her eyes — not in the least religious. Said she: “You’ll see results. That will make it clearer to you than anything I can say. But if I may remark that we have no longer the fear of death — much less of damnation, and no such thing as ‘sin’; that the only kind of prison left is called a quarantine — that punishment is unknown but preventive means are of a drastic and sweeping nature such as we never dared think of before — that there is no such thing in the civilized world as poverty — no labor problem — no color problem — no sex problem — almost no disease — very little accident — practically no fires — that the world is rapidly being reforested — the soil improved; the output growing in quantity and quality; that no one needs to work over two hours a day and most people work four — that we have no graft — no adulteration of goods — no malpractice — no crime.”
“Nellie,” said I, “you are a woman and my sister. I’m very sorry, but I don’t believe it.”
“I thought you wouldn’t,” said she. Women always will have the last word.
Chapter 3
THE blue shore line of one’s own land always brings a thrill of the heart; to me, buried exile as I had been, the heart-leap was choking.
Ours was a slow steamer, and we did not stop at Montauk where the mail and the swiftest travelers landed, nor in Jamaica Harbor with the immigrants.
As we swept along the sunny, level spaces of the South shore, Nellie told me how Long Island was now the “Reception Room” of our country, instead of poor, brutal little Ellis Island.
“The shores are still mostly summer places,” she said. “One of the most convincing of our early lines of advance was started on the South shore; and there are plenty of Country Clubs, Home Parks and things like that; but the bulk of the island toward the western end is an experiment station in applied sociology.
I was watching the bright shore hungrily. With a glass I could see many large buildings, not too closely set.
“I should think it would spoil the place for homes,” I said.
Nellie had a way of listening to my remarks, kindly and pleasantly, but as if I were somehow a long way off and she was trying to grasp what I said.
“In a way it did — at first;” she explained presently, “but even then it meant just as many homes for other people, and now it means so much more!”
She hesitated a moment and then plunged in resolutely.
“You’re in for a steady course of instructive remarks from now on. Everybody will be explaining things and bragging about them. We haven’t outgrown some of the smaller vices, you see. As to this ‘Immigration Problem’ — we woke up to this fact among others, that the ‘reintegration of peoples’ as Ward called it, was a sociological process not possible to stop, but quite possible to assist and to guide to great advantage. And here in America we recognized our own special place — “the melting pot you know?”
Yes, I remembered the phrase, I never liked it. Our family were pure English stock, and rightly proud of their descent.
“I begin to see, my dear sister, that while receiving the torrent of instructive remarks you foretell, the way of wisdom for me is steadfastly to withhold my own opinions.”
Nellie laughed appreciatively.
“You always had a long head, John. Well, whether you like it or not, our people saw their place and power at last and rose to it. We refuse no one. We have discovered as many ways of utilizing human waste as we used to have for the waste products of coal tar.”
“You don’t mean to say idiots and criminals?” I protested.
“Idiots, hopeless ones, we don’t keep any more,” she answered gently. “They are very rare now. The grade of average humanity is steadily rising; and we have the proud satisfaction of knowing we have helped it rise. We organized a permanent ‘reception committee’ for the whole country, one station here and one in California. Anybody could come — but they had to submit to our handling when they did come.”
“We used to have physical examination, didn’t we?”
“A rudimentary one. What we have now is Compulsory Socialization.”
I stared at her.
“Yes, I know! You are thinking of that geological kind of evolution people used to talk about, and ‘you can’t alter human nature.’ In the first place, we can. In the second place, we do. In the third place, there isn’t so much alteration needed as we used to think. Human nature is a pretty good thing. No immigrant is turned loose on the community till he or she is up to a certain standard, and the children we educate.”
“We always did, didn’t we?”
“Always did? Why brother, we didn’t know what the word meant in your time.”
“I shall be glad to follow that up,” I assured her. “Education was improving even in the old days, I remember. I shall be glad to see the schools.”
“Some of them you won’t know when you do see them,” said Nellie. “On Long Island we have agricultural and industrial stations like — like — I think we had something like it in some of our Western colleges,