A Thousand Years Hence

Front matter

A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE.

A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE.

BEING PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

Chapter 1

A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE.

As I always say, at our present pace of progress, what will things come to a thousand years hence?—Author, passim.

Having to describe, in these pages, a variety of persons and circumstances, connected with myself or my belongings and surroundings, immediate or otherwise, what so natural and fitting as that I should, first of all, treat

"Business first." That is my motto, and my wife and I are entirely at one there. We agree in a good deal more, I am happy to say. If we don't agree just in everything, that is hardly to be expected even of the best of wives. But, taken altogether, we are a happy family, with a happy home. "Home, sweet home," say I, "there's no place like home."

Here, then, is simply the little bit of ground upon which my wife and I do not exactly pull together. Giving, as I do, all due precedence to business, yet, business over and done with for its time, the mind, as I hold, may betake itself to other, nay, call them even higher things. Thus I have a decided turn for statistics and certain departments of science, the marvels of astronomy in particular. But my wife has not, and makes no secret of her impatience with that sort of thing. "My stars! Nunnie," she will say—my Christian name, by the way, is Nunsowe, after my maternal relations—"leave those other stars to their own courses, and stick you to business; you do best at that." Yes, I flatter myself that I do pretty fairly at business, and in that opinion we are also agreed.

But neither wife nor business are to drive me out of science, and I shall have a deal to say on that high score ere we reach my last chapter. If one friend does not appreciate, another does. Thus an influential customer at our shop got me proposed and passed as a member of the Statistical and Astronomical Societies. My wife growled at first at the heavy subscription money. But presently the letters I could put at the end of my name began to take her fancy; and when, at one of the soirees, a live knight actually helped her to coffee, while she occupied a sofa just vacated by, and still warm from, a real countess, I heard no more objections, even upon the money question.

We are both, as I trust and believe, good Church people. She is somewhat High, at any rate as compared with her husband. She regards him, and perhaps, in a comparative sense, truly enough, as Low and Broad, neither quality very savoury to her mind, especially the first, which she always associates with conventicle and nonconformity outbreak, radicalism, and that general upsetting of the "lower orders" of society, which, as she affirms, is now turning everything in Church and State topsy-turvy. Even the late mitigation in Court dress was not at all to her mind. In these times she would surrender nothing to the enemy.

Her temper was sadly ruffled lately in one of those modern upsetting ways. Having helped to start a servants' home in our district, she was elected on the first committee, and was no little gratified by the distinction. But she was so strict with the inmates, ever reminding them of their proper sphere, and the due recognition of their "betters," that at last a mutiny broke out all over the establishment, and was only with difficulty suppressed. And how could it have been suppressed at all, amongst such naturally perverse people, my wife maintained, but for all her disciplinary care in the first instance! And yet at the next election she was dropped out of the committee, her name being at the bottom of the poll. After that, never speak to my wife of the merits of free elective institutions!

White was an old retired coasting skipper, settled down for his life's short remnant in our part of great London, and with whom, in his business day, I had done many a good stroke in freights, or frights, as he always pronounced the word. He was a hearty old cock, always ready for a yarn, and with a romantic turn about travel by land and sea which I greatly enjoyed. He and I used often to forecast the future of travel, and wonder what travelling might come to, say a thousand years hence. White would assert, in his vehement way, and with a slam of our table that would send the tobacco-pipe out of his mouth, that he should not wonder if our descendants got outside the world altogether, and voyaged far and away upon the ether ocean.

Brown, again, was even a still older friend, a near neighbour, and a brother trader in the same line as myself, although happily sufficiently "round the corner" to save mutual business interference. One of his sons being in a stockbroker's office, we were often amused by accounts of the bulling and bearing that went on in the Stock Exchange, and both of us were curious as to how fortunes were made there. But, as fortunes were also lost, we never risked our money. Our two families had been long intimate; and if there has been anything in my wife's late mysteriously significant looks and hints, as regards our eldest girl and another son of Brown's, the said families are, some day soon, to be more intimate still.

Brown and I agreed in most things to a very hair's-breadth. If not very much ever came out of Brown, the amount that went into him was something marvellous. He was the most exemplary listener within all the range of my acquaintance, and I was bound to reward him abundantly in that way. On our half-holiday Saturday excursions, we used to seek out some suburban solitude, by way of change from busy and noisy London, and there I would pour into Brown's ready ear all my ideas about things in general, and our future progress in particular. We remarked how each successive year we had to go further and further out upon the suburban lines to secure this luxury of solitude. Some day London will have overspread the whole country, and some day all the rest of the world will be equally filled. After that where was the increase to find even footroom? How would it be a thousand years hence? We should be filling up the seas, and excavating second and third surfaces beneath our feet.

Lastly, comes myself, in this trio of intimates with White and Brown. My own name is Green, Nunsowe Green, in the cheesemongering and provisioning line, wholesale and retail, and in a business way always at the reader's service.

The estabhshment of "The Shoreditch and Spitalfields Universal Discussion Society" formed quite an era in our locality, and gained me fresh intimacies which I must presently describe, as those, as well as the others already dealt with, have much to do with my present story. That event is now of some little time ago, and our society has attained, in the interval, no small local fame and usefulness amongst us. We discuss freely all questions. But as my particular bent is the future, I turn the tide in that direction on every opportunity; and many a paper I have read, on the question of what our progress, at the present pace, is to do for us. What will things come to a thousand years on? May I be there to see.

Having been myself a leading promoter of the society, and in consequence elected to the first vice-presidency, I was brought in contact with some few others, who have since become also my intimates. I must now introduce these friends to the reader, in connection with the different questions of discussion which they respectively took up and made specially their own.

Black was a superannuated laboratory assistant to a chemical professor; and as electricity and the spectroscope had suddenly flared out upon science just prior to his retirement, and much aroused his curiosity, he had become, in his old age, quite an enthusiast in these questions, electricity in particular. He had pretty well the whole argument to himself amongst us, and was therefore very bold and free in his views. When I had listened for ten minutes to Black, I was ready to unload again for hours upon Brown. Of course we made Black our president, an honour he has ever since maintained.

Yellowly was a skilled artisan, a sensible and thoughtful fellow in his way, an ardent unionist, and zealous in other ways for the influence and well-being of his class. He was our great authority on the future of the working classes, and of society and government in general.

Reed was a merchant of our neighbourhood, a superior sort of man, of good education, and latterly very successful in his business. But although all this and more, he always stuck to his old friends, and continued his leading part in the society's discussions. If somewhat Broad, he was yet, like my wife and self, a good Churchman. This double quality of his—the bad Broad with the good Church, as my wife put it—might have quite neutralized her regards in that direction, were it not for Reed's good social position, which made her always very proud of his and his family's acquaintance. Besides, Reed was a zealous and very successful Sunday-school teacher, and in such high repute in the parish for his method of teaching, that it deserves here a passing notice.

His method was this, that in reading Scripture with his class, he always did it dramatically; that is to say, as though the various parties in the narrative were actually addressing us. The reading in any case was always as though spoken, instead of the monotonous drone of ordinary reading. The boys and girls were each in turn assigned their part, and they were exhorted respectively to perfect themselves so as to deliver their parts naturally and fluently and without the book. The consequence was an intense emulation in all the class, and a fresh interest in the Bible narratives under this natural treatment. Our friend's Sunday evening Scripture readings became quite famous in the district; and his juvenile troupe of actors and actresses, as he purposely called them, would give off the story of Joseph and his brethren, of Ruth, of Esther, and many others, with an effect that sent a thrill through the large audience that at times witnessed the performance.

I have said that Reed purposely called the young pupils his acting troupe. He was wont to deplore the neglect amongst us of the lifelike dramatic method, alike in instruction, recreation, and mere amusement, and the disrepute and injurious and absurd prejudice attaching to everything theatrical. No doubt there had been some good cause in the low quality of most of the past and current theatrical entertainment, and the consequent secondary position of the acting world in general. He advocated even the direct intervention of the State to lift the drama effectually out of the mire into which it had so long fallen, so as to make the profession perfectly respectable, and thus restore to society one of its very best and most powerful resources.

There was lately another incident, characteristic of Reed, at the marriage of one of his daughters. He was for everybody being fully and usefully occupied in the world, and would speak poetically of The Crown of Labour, as that which was to excel and outlive all other earthly crowns. My wife, who had been much gratified by the invitation she received on this happy occasion, had a mind to specially please Reed and the young bride, by saying, in their hearing, something, as she thought, extremely complimentary. Watching, therefore, her opportunity, she dropped the remark that the young lady, with all her expectations, might fairly have aspired even to marry a title. The fair bride was, in fact, to marry only an intelligent young merchant, who had still his way to fight in the world, and who sought a wife to fight it along with him. But judge of the amazement of my better half when Reed replied that he both approved and preferred the choice the girl had made for herself. There were three classes, he went on to say, whom he would rather his daughters avoided, in their laudable efforts to mate themselves suitably. These were—blood relations, soldiers, and noblemen. Not, certainly, that these were worse than other people. But the first involved deterioration of breed, while the others were exposed, in perhaps most instances, to a comparatively unemployed or idling life—a condition which was not favourable either to married happiness or to life's highest or best enjoyment.

Electricity was, as I have said. Black's great hobby. He had a notable theory on the subject, which was entirely his own, as he constantly and proudly assured us; and this was to the effect, that by crossing the electric current, in ways hereafter to be discovered, we should enormously increase the power and quality of the work done by the electric agency. We might some day be able to cross and re-cross and cross yet again, with ever-increasing powers, until our dynamics could send us on the wings of light itself over space, and our chemistry could synthesise, as he learnedly worded it, all the organic as well as the inorganic world, and turn out for us, from the laboratory, a savoury beef-steak as readily as an acid or an alkali.

Our social condition, said Yellowly, was in a course of quiet but really rapid change, and in a direction inevitably democratic. He explained, in accordance, that word of disturbing associations, "Progress." What was the real meaning of the term? It meant substantially the suiting and smoothing of the way to the many who were ill-off, in their everlasting struggle to rise some little towards the condition of the few who were well off. If the hundred of the one class were wearied and worried by its incessant dust and noise, the hundred thousand of the other were refreshed and helped onwards to an improved condition.

Democracy and Progress, then, meant the great social and economic change towards a less unequal condition. Instinctively the ill-off masses called out to expedite the progress, while the comparative few, who were already well-off, as instinctively shirked or deferred the ordeal. In this grudging spirit our upper and well-off classes were liable to lose the lead which they might otherwise retain. All our hereditary preferences are for gentlemen in position, manners, and education to lead us socially and politically, if they will only show the due courage, and not be scared by the shadows of inevitable things. If our leading classes would still lead, they must not grudge the disturbance of progress. But if these will not head the inevitable progress, others must push them aside and take their place. It has been sagely said, "Educate the masses first, and enfranchise them afterwards." But in practice it has been found that the only way to secure the progress was to enfranchise first. Thus an unprecedented race has set in since the great franchise extension of 1832. The further extension of 1867 brought us our General Education Act of 1870, and its succeeding improvements; and the impending still further franchise extension may be expected to give a marked further impetus to society's advance.

Yellowly was an ardent unionist, but he was quite alive to certain vices and defects in unionist views. He was, for instance, utterly opposed to the whole coercion system, which doubtless both prejudiced and limited union life. He thought that unions might be so regulated, that membership would be a privilege, pecuniary and otherwise, of sufficient value to prove self-attractive, and, at the same time, to give the effective whiphand over members in regard to union discipline or personal conduct. One of his great aims was the institution of a permanent great National Representative Union, composed of selected delegates from all the other unions—a sort of Upper House or Senate in union life. Such a body, serving as a final Court of Appeal, might be expected to reject or annul such narrow, selfish, and erroneous views and rules as still lingered in the separate unions. He was encouraged in this idea by the decided progress towards better and more correct views within the unions, even during the last few years.

Yellowly hoped, in short, to see the last prejudices against such inevitable results as the piece-work system die finally away, and along with it that unreasonable and unreasoning fancy about giving to all hands, good, bad, and indifferent, the same rate of wages. More than anything else did he deprecate the narrow and unjust monopoly involved in the apprentice limitation principle, and in other respects also the ungenerous and unbrotherly walls of mutual exclusion which the different trades too jealously built up against each other. As to picketing, rattening, and such like, they were with Yellowly beneath contempt, and hardly to be even spoken of with common patience. At a Brickmakers' Union one evening, when one of the members was recounting his success in so disabling the hands of certain non-unionists, by putting needles into the clay, that their families were likely to starve for some weeks to come, Yellowly, as he told us, could with difficulty resist smashing the teeth of the vulgar ruffian, as he leered complacently over his ghastly and traitorous story.

Yellowly was full of other schemes for the advance of his class, and that of society generally. He had large hopes from the effects of the universal education now being enforced; and again he had further hopes in other directions from all kinds of co-operation, by which, in brief, the present scant comfort of working-class life might be doubled, and at one-half the present expense of working-class living. He fully expected that the unions, under the better regulations of the future, would promote more of a sentiment of honour in regard to conduct and character, and particularly as to the prevalent evil of intemperance. On this subject, he would fain that his class, as the party chiefly affected, took a more leading charge of the great public-house question. His own view was that the public-house proper should not open till the workman's dinnertime. This decision was upon a balance of considerations, in which the temptations and evils that were avoided far outweighed any or all others. He knew the power of the temptation, from having himself formerly given way to it. What rescued him was a friend's advice, always first to quench actual thirst with water. By adopting that practice he recovered completely his self-control, and thus gave new motives and a new joy to his whole life. He would therefore have water at hand everywhere—a tap of the pure element to confront every tap of strong drink, and on such equal terms, to fight sobriety's great battle. Yellowly, however, sympathized far too heartily with his fellows, in their rough and hard life, to set up any mere moralizing on this latter subject. He had more material aims, as he would fain save their hard-earned money, thus so profusely dissipated, for better uses, and for building up the power, credit, and influence of all his class.

He exhorted all his class to honour and respect woman, even if for no higher aim than their credit and influence with society generally. He was a strong advocate of woman's rights. The woman should be equally free with the man to help herself, and help on the world, in all ways suitable to her. The world would advance at a quicker pace by help of her head and hand. He wanted to see the establishment of women's as well as men's clubs; and he once bearded the Lord Mayor himself, in order to get his countenance for clubs of domestic servants, his lordship, however, asserting that unless the day could be prolonged to twenty-five hours he had not a spare moment for further duty. Society would gain in political steadiness, he would say, by extending the franchise to woman. Society would certainly gain moral strength by woman tending her own sex in those delicate medical emergencies, where the intrusion of the other sex is never without sacrifice, and has hitherto been tolerated only as a supposed inevitable necessity.

Yellowly had equally pronounced views on other social questions. He was a strong advocate for every one getting married. If each young man, he would say, were early engaged to each young woman, with purpose of marriage as soon as the respective conditions allowed, society would be, socially and morally, at its very best. Any apprehended difficulties about large families and over population weighed with him as nothing in the scales against the improved morality, and the consequent economy and general vigour of life.

The present aspect of society was in terrible contrast with such a picture. But much of this evil condition was even now somewhat remediable. For instance, he blamed our authorities for their laxity as to the wide prevalence of all kinds of begging, with tramping, gipsying, and vagabondage in general, by which such a huge mass of people were allowed to lapse into idle, useless, and at last, in many cases, criminal life. He considered it a most serious wrong to the poorer classes that they could slip so easily into mendicancy or other useless ways of life, and thus become a nuisance instead of a help to society. This particular evil was now so great and universal, that high government intervention was needed for its thorough cure.

We needed, in fact, quite a new departure, both in this and in criminal jurisdiction. The hardened and hopeless professional criminal, when taken red-handed, should be permanently locked up, as long as he continued such, and for his own good as well as for the due protection of society. Others, of whom there was more or less hope, should be treated with comparative leniency. We should aim, as far as humanity and decency will permit, to prevent the criminal and worthless from leaving families behind, and thus maintaining for society an everlasting battle with professional and hereditary crime.

Yet another subject, and then I have done, for the present, with Yellowly. Discoursing on his great topic, Progress, he would remark that the most necessary and advantageous class of works were those which would surely reimburse all their cost by the lapse of mere value-raising time. This was the now well-known "unearned increment of value" in the country's real estate; and all experience had now proved it so reliable a feature, that he was more than astonished that no one of our successive Governments should as yet have, to any noticeable extent, applied any of its boundless capabilities to the public good. He instanced the crying case of the thorough resanitation of London, which had hitherto been attempted, with such utter inefficiency, by private enterprise, and latterly, but hardly to much better purpose, by the Board of Works. During any thirty years of this century, the complete sanitary reconstruction might have been accomplished, and the cost entirely covered by the rise of value in the interval.

Yellowly's view, in this important direction, was, that the State should undertake the larger works of such progress, and that this would be done too without involving the country in any public debt or direct liability. He was opposed to national debts, as serious hindrances to progress, and gave us at times his ideas about reducing the interest of our present debt and finally extinguishing the principal. His plan for financing the great works in question was by "special trusts," such as that lately proposed in the abortive London Water Works scheme.

Then again, the "Parliamentary block," which rendered any great general progress, such as he contemplated, perfectly hopeless, even under the new prospect of the clôture, as well as anything else in the old ordinary way, he proposed to remove bodily, by substituting for viva voce debate a special parliamentary publication of written views. In this way he thought that opinions and views would be expressed more freely and generally, as well as more calmly and carefully than before, while measure after measure could be quietly, but with all due expedition, told off as the public needs required. As Yellowly was still in the prime of life, and already something of a leading man in his union, and amongst his class, I hardly doubted that, if he lived long enough, he might yet leave his mark, in his own way, amongst his fellows, and upon his time.

Reed, as I have said, took the lead in religious discussion. Churchman as he was, he was opposed to all privilege, and hoped there would some day be realized a great inclusive national Church, based directly and wholly on Scripture, and free alike from any political pecuniary or ecclesiastical privilege or endowment, which other religious bodies could not equally attain. Eeligious interests represented, at best, only sections of the people. The State alone was representative of the whole people, and therefore the State was and ought to be supreme. In those various senses he approved an "Established" Church, and its ultimate appeal to the impartial and consistent dealing of the high national courts. The practice of dissenting bodies of, so to say, contracting themselves out of the ordinary law was, in Reed's view, greatly to be deprecated, as being a disadvantage to all parties, productive of tyrannical and unsteady ways, and promotive of religious dissension generally.

Such was Reed's motto. No religion, he would say, could afford to dispense with either. He regarded extremes in religious doctrine, sentiment, and ritual as mainly answerable for the prevailing scepticism in this age of education, with its inevitable attendants, free thought and criticism, because of their tendency to impart a moral and scientific improbability to religion. The Roman Church he regarded as the great transgressor in that way, as it had succeeded at last, by accumulated superstitious traditions, in making Religion incredible to a vast multitude of educated and thoughtful minds. Even still more hurtful was the ridicule to religion (Rome, however, not being the only offender in that way) by retaining an obsolete lackadaisical phraseology, worthy of the impenetrable serenity of the Dark Ages' mind, as though thus to force the way by defying the ready sense of humour, as well as the ordinary common sense, of modern society. The religion which had satisfied Newton might satisfy ordinary mortals. But this great question in particular could least dispense with judicious presentation. If we would judge surely of the reasonableness of our own religious ways and views, we should transfer them to some other and opposing creed, and see how they looked in that changed light. Our religion—the Protestant section at least—was professedly based exclusively on Scripture; and the open and simple doctrinal statements of Scripture were not wisely recast into hard creeds and confessions, which had ever divided and kept asunder the Christian people. Reed would abolish all creeds, even back to the so-called Apostle's, with its Godhead falling as much short of that of Scripture statement, as that of the so-called Athanasian passed speculatively ahead of it. The terms Trinity and Trinitarian, which now resounded so incessantly through all our faith, were not Scriptural, and should therefore be disused.

The end in religion, as in all else for man in this world, Reed asserted, was righteousness and usefulness of life. The simple doctrinal language of Christ constantly alternated in this practical direction. Amongst the advantages, indispensable indeed to modern society, of a great staff or order of trained clergy, was this one disadvantage, that they were ever apt, by the instincts of their position, to make doctrine supreme, and thus turn the means into the end. And thus we had a permanent heritage of antagonistic religious sects, with the discouraging and almost hopeless feature that each was far more concerned for its hereditary differences, than for the substantial truth of religion.

Although reasonableness and common sense were already decidedly on the advance in religious views, Reed regarded certain extremes of popular orthodoxy as still answerable for much discredit and hindrance to religion. Take, for instance, the future of a literal eternal torment. Was our religion really weighted with so extreme a moral improbability? If we had not been used to such a doctrine in our own religion, what would we have thought of any other religion that possessed it? The most formidable opponent to this dogma, to begin with, is the Bible itself, in the equity, reasonableness, and mercy of its general spirit and tenour. The question here is, how far the exact literal is always to be assumed in the Bible, highly Oriental and figurative as it is throughout, and addressed directly to the Oriental mind. The most effective argument is perhaps to show that we have not hesitated repeatedly to set aside the literal in other directions. Thus nearly all Christendom has resisted the Calvinistic view, in spite of the strong passages in the Epistle to the Romans; while the Real Presence doctrine is, on the ground of patent fact and common sense, summarily dismissed by all sound Protestants, notwithstanding the strongly literal terms in St. John's Gospel. And, again, while but two centuries ago witchcraft and an eternal hell were equally orthodox teaching, humanity and common sense have happily already quite rid us of the former. The laity first dropped it, and finally and grudgingly the clergy; and now, when for like reasons the laity have begun to throw off the latter belief, we must hope that the tenacity of the clergy will prove, as before, but a temporary hindrance.

But let us, continued Reed, directly confront the two great pillars of the dogma in question, namely, the stories of the Sheep and the Goats, and of the Rich Man and Lazarus. In the former we have Heaven and Hell respectively awarded for the performance or neglect of ordinary charities. Well, we have made no scruple whatever to relegate all this charity doctrine to the realm of figure, but we still retain all the literal Hell fire. One might surely say here, with the noble poet, in a slight modification of his words:—