I

VII

THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY

"How will the future reckon with this man,

When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?"

WONDER. The future-what is it? Has it a mind of its own so unlike the mind of the present that it may be considered another and better species of time? Whence hails this high-born aristocrat and judge who is to call the ages before his upper judgment-seat and condemn them for their misdeeds? Or, if too irate to await the culprits' approach, he resolves to play avenger and spring upon the ages from ambush, whence grow his passion and his guile and the power of his attack?

I cannot imagine. Except as the future of the present, and such a future as the present, which is now its womb, will characterize with its own ancestral traits, I see nothing in that time, aloof, but emptiness; too empty to prove it forward. It is time that has as yet no force, no will, no thought; time without a world; time that has not become

time. at all. zero.

Far from being a better time, it is no time
Its whirlwinds are the whirls of an unwritten
How can such a zero, though big as space

and taking all eternity into its lineless circle, ever shake a world? I wonder.

If, on the other hand, the future is the outcome of the present, and such a future as the present makes, it will be what it will be because the present is exactly what it is. The present is the present of that future, its beginning, its process of birth, its presentness or presence. It carries all the prospect, all the energy, all the good, all the reason of the future in its past. It is the only reality the future has. To curse it is to curse the future as well, and all futures which are to become presents, and, hence, just as faulty compared with the judgment-day futures that cannot overawe them. Your curse covers all time and all eternity. It is a devil's doom upon history and hope.

According to my idea, time moves the other way. It does not blow, like a whirlwind, out of the future through the present into the past, but moves from the past into the present, and from the present into a future that will be full, not empty; full of the world that has been, and is now developed to the future's own height and breadth of attainment. It is not a wind, but a life. Its whirls are spires. stead of swooping, it soars. It needs no violence to explain its process or accomplish its aim. Its progress is the progress of order, and becomes more progressive as it becomes more orderly.

In

In such forward-moving time I, too, can dream, but I dream with my eyes open, and so my dreams prove visions. Beyond reality, they are always in sight of it. They are built of its stuff, by its laws, with its forces; and, having its ground-plan,

their more aërial architecture still is safe enough to live in-no thin castellation of night-air with moonbeams for rafters and breezes for streets. I take the household as it is, and by its own innate tendencies construct the better home. I take trade as it is, bringing some tribute of the whole world's wealth to every man's door for his slight trouble to pick it up, and this tribute I enrich while smoothing its avenues for his easier and more participant acceptance of it. I take the State as it is, and, discerning the wisdom implied in its errors, and the burly right that gropes through its darkest wrongs, I listen for the clank of loosened chains, and look for true, clear, divine, educative Throne-light throughout all laws. And these ideals, being seen in realities, idealize the realities themselves, and give them their own radiance, color, charm. My home is already ideal to my love, my trade to my appreciation, my State to my patriotic devotion.

But when you break present and future apart you can no longer idealize realities. The ideals are of one sort, the realities of another. The realities are real because they are unideal; the ideals are ideal because they are unreal; and such ideals, cut off from the conditions and characters of men as men are, and of Society as Society is,-ideals without tests of correspondence,-may be as fantastic as they please. They are set in the future in order to be away from the world of fact. The future is their realm of special license, because it cannot check or criticise their whimsicality. Anything may be or may not be in such a future-anything but fact, law, order, truth, reason, those principles of the

present which it has seceded from in order to enjoy an opposite kind of freedom. If they seem still to stand in the way, it can skip them! The future is future, that they may be skipped. It can set its own fashion of society, its own style of man; can turn Arabian Nights into Arabian Days; can equalize all inequalities, repair all injustices, enlighten all ignorances, content all discontentments, by simply futuring them. Does a perfect society require perfect men? The future will perfect them. Does perfection of manhood require change of character, will, heart? The future will do at once what all time so far has failed to accomplish, and convert the inner and whole man in the twinkling of an eye.

Cataclysmic, of course! Any other mode would be a repetition of time's slow drag with its sequences, which are so lame of progress. Progress, that catchword of the past, has had its era, and can befool no more. Instantaneity, the "Presto, change!" of the conjurer, is the latest law. Achievement by explosion, explosion of wrath or explosion of love, it matters not which, so long as the method be sudden, quick, violent-some kind of cyclonic whirl. Whirl, O future Society, in waltz or wrestle, but whirl! If you are to take any cue from former time, let it be the French Revolution. Was not that revolution a hurricane of liberty, equality, fraternity-the liberty of jails for the freest, the equality of scaffolds for the noblest, the fraternity of universal suspicion and fear—a proud triumvirate of soul whose reign history has named the Reign of Terror?

Terror is wholesome. Terrify the heedless world

if you cannot enchant it-terrify it into hastes and spasms of reform.

For, wild-eyed as was Proudhon, the cooper's son, with his nympholepsy of a perfect individualism which would need no government to regulate its cherubic sport of justice, both innocent and infallible, he had common sense enough to see that socialism, for all its promise of an order no less cherubic, would bring a curse more dire than the calamity of that present order which he hated and assailed as systematic pillage.

"The social revolution [he said] could only end in an immense cataclysm of which the immediate object would be to lay waste the earth, and to strait-jacket society; and, were it possible that such a state of things should last a few weeks, to kill three or four million men by an unforeseen famine. When the Government is bankrupt; when the country is without commerce or produce; when Paris, starving, receives from the provinces that blockade it neither money nor provisions; when the workers, demoralized by the policies of their clubs and the idleness of their shops, seek any sort of hand-to-mouth subsistence; when the state requires the jewels and plate of the citizens for its mint; when house-to-house searches are the only means of collecting taxes; when the first granary is robbed, the first house entered, the first church. profaned, the first torch kindled, the first blood spilt, the first head fallen-when the Abomination of desolation has come upon all France-oh then you will know what social revolution is; an unbridled multitude in arms, drunk with vengeance and with fury, armed with pikes, with hatchets, with naked swords; with cleavers and with hammers; the city mournful and silent; the police at the