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THE ENDLESS HISTORY
Alca is becoming Americanised.--M. Daniset.
And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of
the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.--Genesis xix. 25
{greek here](Herodotus, Histories, VII cii.)
Poverty hast ever been familiar to Greece, but virtue has been acquired,
having been accomplished by wisdom and firm laws.-- Henry Cary's Translation.
You have not seen angels then.--Liber Terribilis.
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We are now beginning to study a chemistry which will deal with effects
produced by bodies containing a quantity of concentrated energy the like of
which we have not yet had at our disposal.--Sir William Ramsay.
S. 1
The houses were never high enough to satisfy them; they kept on making them
still higher and built them of thirty or forty storeys: with offices, shops,
banks, societies one above another; they dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper
downwards.
Fifteen millions of men laboured in a giant town by the light of beacons which
shed forth their glare both day and night. No light of heaven pierced through
the smoke of the factories with which the town was girt, but sometimes the red
disk of a rayless sun might be seen riding in the black firmament through
which iron bridges ploughed their way, and from which there descended a
continual shower of soot and cinders. It was the most industrial of all the
cities in the world and the richest. Its organisation seemed perfect. None of
the ancient aristocratic or democratic forms remained; everything was
subordinated to the interests of the trusts. This environment gave rise to
what anthropologists called the multi-millionaire type. The men of this type
were at once energetic and frail, capable of great activity in forming mental
combinations and of prolonged labour in offices, but men whose nervous
irritability suffered from hereditary troubles which increased as time went
on.
Like all true aristocrats, like the patricians of republican Rome or the
squires of old England, these powerful men affected a great severity in their
habits and customs. They were the ascetics of wealth. At the meetings of the
trusts an observer would have noticed their smooth and puffy faces, their
lantern cheeks, their sunken eyes and wrinkled brows. With bodies more
withered, complexions yellower, lips drier, and eyes filled with a more
burning fanaticism than those of the old Spanish monks, these
multimillionaires gave themselves up with inextinguishable ardour to the
austerities of banking and industry. Several, denying themselves all
happiness, all pleasure, and all rest, spent their miserable lives in rooms
without light or air, furnished only with electrical apparatus, living on eggs
and milk, and sleeping on camp beds. By doing nothing except pressing nickel
buttons with their fingers, these mystics heaped up riches of which they never
even saw the signs, and acquired the vain possibility of gratifying desires
that they never experienced.
The worship of wealth had its martyrs. One of these multi-millionaires, the
famous Samuel Box, preferred to die rather than surrender the smallest atom of
his property. One of his workmen, the victim of an accident while at work,
being refused any indemnity by his employer, obtained a verdict in the courts,
but repelled by innumerable obstacles of procedure, he fell into the direst
poverty. Being thus reduced to despair, he succeeded by dint of cunning and
audacity in confronting his employer with a loaded revolver in his hand, and
threatened to blow out his brains if he did not give him some assistance.
Samuel Box gave nothing, and let himself be killed for the sake of principle.
Examples that come from high quarters are followed. Those who possessed some
small capital (and they were necessarily the greater number), affected the
ideas and habits of the multi-millionaires, in order that they might be
classed among them. All passions which injured the increase or the
preservation of wealth, were regarded as dishonourable; neither indolence, nor
idleness, nor the taste for disinterested study, nor love of the arts, nor,
above all, extravagance, was ever forgiven; pity was condemned as a dangerous
weakness. Whilst every inclination to licentiousness excited public
reprobation, the violent and brutal satisfaction of an appetite was, on the
contrary, excused; violence, in truth, was regarded as less injurious to
morality, since it manifested a form of social energy. The State was firmly
based on two great public virtues: respect for the rich and contempt for the
poor. Feeble spirits who were still moved by human suffering had no other
resource than to take refuge in a hypocrisy which it was impossible to blame,
since it contributed to the maintenance of order and the solidity of
institutions.
Thus, among the rich, all were devoted to their social order, or seemed to be
so; all gave good examples, if all did not follow them. Some felt the gravity
of their position cruelly; but they endured it either from pride or from duty.
Some attempted, in secret and by subterfuge, to escape from it for a moment.
One of these, Edward Martin, the President, of the Steel Trust, sometimes
dressed himself as a poor man, went: forth to beg his bread, and allowed
himself to be jostled by the passers-by. One day, as he asked alms on a
bridge, he engaged in a quarrel with a real beggar, and filled with a fury of
envy, he strangled him.
As they devoted their whole intelligence to business, they sought no
intellectual pleasures. The theatre, which had formerly been very flourishing
among them, was now reduced to pantomimes and comic dances. Even the pieces in
which women acted were given up; the taste for pretty forms and brilliant
toilettes had been lost; the somersaults of clowns and the music of negroes
were preferred above them, and what roused enthusiasm was the sight of women
upon the stage whose necks were bedizened with diamonds, or processions
carrying golden bars in triumph. Ladies of wealth were as much compelled as
the men to lead a respectable life. According to a tendency common to all
civilizations, public feeling set them up as symbols; they were, by their
austere magnificence, to represent both the splendour of wealth and its
intangible . The old habits of gallantry had been reformed, Tut fashionable
lovers were now secretly replaced by muscular labourers or stray grooms.
Nevertheless, scandals were rare, a foreign journey concealed nearly all of
them, and the Princesses of the Trusts remained objects of universal esteem.
The rich formed only a small minority, but their collaborators, who composed
the entire people, had been completely won over or completely subjugated by
them. They formed two classes, the agents of commerce or banking, and workers
in the factories. The former contributed an immense amount of work and
received large salaries. Some of them succeeded in founding establishments of
their own; for in the constant increase of the public wealth the more
intelligent and audacious could hope for anything. Doubtless it would have
been possible to find a certain number of discontented and rebellious persons
among the immense crowd of engineers and accountants, but this powerful
society had imprinted its firm discipline even on the minds of its opponents.
The very anarchists were laborious and regular.
As for the workmen who toiled in the factories that surrounded the town, their
decadence, both physical and moral, was terrible; they were examples of the
type of poverty as it is set forth by anthropology. Although the development
among them of certain muscles, due to the particular nature of their work,
might give a false idea of their strength, they presented sure signs of morbid
debility. Of low stature, with small heads and narrow chests, they were
further distinguished from the comfortable classes by a multitude of
physiological anomalies, and, in particular, by a common want of symmetry
between the head and the limbs. And they were destined to a gradual and
continuous degeneration, for the State made soldiers of the more robust among
them, and the health of these did not long withstand the brothels and the
drink-shops that sprang up around their barracks. The proletarians became more
and more feeble in mind. The continued weakening of their intellectual
faculties was not entirely due to their manner of life; it resulted also from
a methodical selection carried out by the employers. The latter, fearing that
workmen of too great ability might be inclined to put forward legitimate
demands, took care to eliminate them by every possible means, and preferred to
engage ignorant and stupid labourers, who were incapable of defending their
rights, but were yet intelligent enough to perform their toil, which highly
perfected machines rendered extremely simple. Thus the proletarians were
unable to do anything to improve their lot. With difficulty did they succeed
by means of strikes in maintaining the rate of their wages. Even this means
began to fail them. The alternations of production inherent in the capitalist
system caused such cessations of work that, in several branches of industry,
as soon as a strike was declared, the accumulation of products allowed the
employers to dispense with the strikers. In a word, these miserable employees
were plunged in a gloomy apathy that nothing enlightened and nothing
exasperated. They were necessary instruments for the social order and well
adapted to their purpose.
Upon the whole, this social order seemed the most firmly established that had
yet been seen, at least amon kind, for that of bees and ants is incomparably
more stable. Nothing could foreshadow the ruin of a system founded on what is
strongest in human nature, pride and cupidity. However, keen observers
discovered several grounds for uneasiness. The most certain, although the
least apparent, were of an economic order, and consisted in the continually
increasing amount of over-production, which entailed long and cruel
interruptions of labour, though these were, it is true, utilized by the
manufacturers as a means of breaking the power of the workmen, by facing them
with the prospect of a lock-out. A more obvious peril resulted from the
physiological state of almost the entire population. "The health of the poor
is what it must be," said the experts in hygiene, "but that of the rich leaves
much to be desired." It was not difficult to find the causes of this. The
supply of oxygen necessary for life was insufficient in the city, and men
breathed in an artificial air. The food trusts, by means of the most daring
chemical syntheses, produced artificial wines, meat, milk, fruit, and
vegetables, and the diet thus imposed gave rise to stomach and brain troubles.
The multi-millionaires were bald at the age of eighteen; some showed from time
to time a dangerous weakness of mind. Over-strung and enfeebled, they gave
enormous sums to ignorant charlatans; and it was a common thing for some
bath-attendant or other trumpery who turned healer or prophet, to make a rapid
fortune by the practice of medicine or theology. The number of lunatics
increased continually; suicides multiplied in the world of wealth, and many of
them were accompanied by atrocious and extraordinary circumstances, which bore
witness to an unheard o perversion of intelligence and sensibility.
Another fatal symptom created a strong impression upon average minds. Terrible
accidents, henceforth periodical and regular, entered into people's
calculations, and kept mounting higher and higher in statistical tables. Every
day, machines burst into fragments, houses fell down, trains laden with
merchandise fell on to the streets, demolishing entire buildings and crushing
hundreds of passers-by. Through the ground, honey-combed with tunnels, two or
three storeys of work-shops would often crash, engulfing all those who worked
in them.
Read next: BOOK VIII - FUTURE TIMES#CHAPTER S2
Read previous: BOOK VII - MODERN TIMES#CHAPTER X - THE ZENITH OF PENGUIN CIVILIZATION
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