proximate model of all dress. And as for pleasures, they will keep their trite simplicity like a well-set merry-go-round that runs to the same ever-recurrent steam-clack of tunes that have lost all vital tuneliness. Dead music for dead souls! As good luck, or God's luck, will have it, the mandarin State can never come to pass. It cannot arrive at the same hour at every national port. The nation that first adopted it would have to compete, in the markets of the world, with capitalistic products. It would have to buy those products with money good in foreign banks. Such money it could obtain only by exchange of exports for imports, and hence it would have to sell as well as buy. It would thus be brought into competitions of sale and purchase with industrial systems which, under the management of capital, paid lower wages, held larger reserves, renewed worn machinery more promptly, improved processes of manufacture more rapidly, thereby increasing the productivity of labor, while lowering the price of wares. How long could your collectivistic nation keep its labor days short and its wages high and its reserve fund low-so low that consumption might match production nearly enough to satisfy the workman who, having no prospect of private capital and no cause for thrift, would not care to make more than he might liberally eat and wear? Yet this collectivist nation, which could not undersell the other nations, would have to buy from them; and buy it could not without selling its own products below cost. Such sales could not go on without lowering wages and multiplying hours of labor to escape industrial ruin. The ruin escaped, the longer, harder labor might try to amass a national surplus; but foreign nations would undercut its vain effort, and chuckle over their own common sense as too shrewd for communistic traps. Suppose, however, the collective system to be adopted everywhere at once. Still the nations must buy from each other, each having some special product which would entitle it alone, or in a syndicate of other nations with the same specialty, to a good share of the world-market. How long would it be before this particular share became a monopoly by the power of the nation, or syndicate of nations, to control output and price; and so, instead of a monopoly by corporations, you would confront a monopoly by States, a world-wide trust with no Overworld law to regulate it. Once more, suppose that to prevent an international war of monopolies, all States should combine into one, with every kind of land, climate, and mine. No more competition now. No need of capital or surplus fund. Henceforth inventions are impertinences. Wealth is consumed as fast as produced. Population grows apace. The new-comers must have places, tasks. To give them tasks as fast as they come, the hours of work must be reduced, and the wage-share of production as well. At last the wages sink below personal and domestic wants. Marriages become less frequent, and population falls off until the length of labor day and the share of labor pay grow again. Now you feel the iron law indeed. In capitalistic society it bound loosely, if it bound at all; for there the lowest degree of consumption steadily rose by taking up former luxuries as prime necessities, which in fact outstripped the comfort of feudal squires or ancient kings. But in the universal trust of nations there can be, according to its economic charter, no amassment of capital, no call for the spirit of invention to create new wants by machinery, and make them common by cheapening their supply. Even though the wage rise, it no longer overlaps fresh luxuries. But when it sinks; it sinks below a base of comfort which life has learned as the very bottom of all that makes life life to a man. Above pauperism, above poverty, above medieval wealth, that bottom is still beneath the lowest modern manhood, and the modern man feels it as the bottom of an open grave. Better die as a man than live as a brute. So, the man dies in your universal trust of a nation, while the brute lives and breeds his brutehood more and more. Under the old system it was the brute that died, and the man that lived; and in order to live, that man had to become more and more of a man as his necessities rose with social progress, which bound all men together as the chord of an Alp guide binds his company for common ascent. But now increase of population pulls downward, and cramps while it pulls. Its iron law rusts as it rubs, and the rubrust gangrenes, and the gangrene spreads through all social and individual character. Is this the best grade of manhood you can grind out, O grand milleniac sausage-mill of souls! Give me rather the old nation with all its faults. Let me be heir to a nation's history, with a freeman's royalty of price-current on the products of the whole world around it. It was a nation's free pioneers who explored unknown lands on horseback, swam wintry streams, cleared away forests, that the haunt of the wild beast and savage might be my park and garden. Its generations of free enterprise levelled mountains, lifted valleys, bridged rivers to prepare ways of travel whereby my hours might transcend their days, and my sleep their waking. From all climes under the sun the tides of commerce flowed through the free streets of my city as if it were their Venice and I had a Doge's share in their fulness. For me a thousand battles have been fought; for me countless martyrdoms suffered by free patriots and saints, and by free lone thinkers who died outworn before their time and made no sign. And therefore freely mine now are the discoveries of science, the counsels of sages, the eloquence of orators, the wordless songs of music, the silent melodies of poetry, and the espial, as from a closet in her chamber, of Nature's unattired beauty, so chaste it hallows the eye of Art, and makes Art's life a long St. Agnes's Eve. 66 They wasted not their brain in schemes Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere, As if he must be other than he seems Because he was not what he should be here, Postponing Time's slow proof to petulant dreams— Yet herein were they great Beyond the incredulous lawgivers of yore, LOWELL. VIII THE “ANGELUS"; OR, MAN'S "REPLY TO GOD" "When this dumb terror shall reply to God After the silence of the centuries." SINCE INCE I began this course of sermons I have read Sensier's Life of Millet. I could not accept the American poet's interpretation of the picture, and sought the artist's own. It did not seem to me possible that the most masculine of nineteenth-century painters could have sighed so effeminate and querulous a mood into color. The man who, when his children were hungry, and his hearth-fire burnt low, and the bailiff looked in through the window, swore that he would paint sign-boards before he would "prettify" his art, could not, I felt sure, prettify his brave, clear-seeing, stalwart soul by the spineless poses and puffy-cheeked pallors and goggleeyed reveries and creaky, theatric rant of sentimental socialism. One long, slow tragedy, as his life was, it was a tragedy without a murmur of lip or brush. Peasant to the last, Millet was proud of his peasant stock, and painted his pride in every look and gesture of peasant toil. His women were his mother, his men himself. Their rags showed the patchwork |