Book: Freeland

T >> Theodor Hertzka >> Freeland




During these same excursions I learnt more about a number of the
recreations in which the Freelanders specially indulge. With David I
visited the numerous points on the Kenia and the Aberdare mountains from
which one obtains the most charming views. To these points every Sunday the
young people resort for singing and dancing, and as a rule they are treated
to some surprise which the Recreation Committee--a standing institution in
every Freeland town--has organised in celebration of some event or other.
To me the most surprising was the Ice-Festival on the great skating-pool on
the Kenia glacier. Five years before, the united Recreation Committees of
Eden Vale, Dana City, and Upper Lykipia had converted a plateau nearly
14,000 feet above the sea, and covering 5,900 acres, into a pool fed by
water from the adjoining large icefield. From the end of May until the
middle of August there are always at this elevation severe night frosts,
which quickly convert the glacier-water of the pool, already near the
freezing-point, into a solid floor of ice. After surrounding this
magnificent skating-place with luxurious warmable waiting, dressing, and
refreshment rooms, and connecting it with the foot of the mountain by means
of an inclined railway, the united committees handed over their work to the
public for gratuitous use. The large expense of construction was easily
defrayed by voluntary contributions, and the cost of maintenance was more
than covered by the donations of the numerous visitors. During the whole of
the cool season the large ice-pool is covered by skaters, very many of whom
are women, not merely from the Kenia district--that is, from a radius of
sixty or seventy miles--but also from all parts of Freeland. Even from the
shores of the Indian Ocean and of the great lakes men and women who are
fond of this healthy amusement come to participate in the brilliant
ice-festivals. There is at present a project on foot to build at the
skating-place a magnificent hotel, which shall enable the lovers of this
graceful and invigorating exercise to spend the night at an elevation of
nearly 14,000 feet above the sea. Moreover, the great popularity of the
Kenia ice-pool has given occasion to another similar undertaking, which is
nearly completed on the Kilimanjaro, at a level 1,640 feet higher than the
ice-pool of the Kenia. Another projected ice-pool on the Mountains of the
Moon, near the Albert Nyanza, has not yet been begun, as the local
committee have not yet found a site sufficiently high and large.

But all these arrangements for recreation did not excite my admiration and
astonishment so much as the buoyant and--in the best sense of the
word--childlike delight and gladness with which the Freelanders enjoyed not
merely their pleasures, but their whole life. One gets the impression
everywhere that care is unknown in this country. That ingenuous
cheerfulness, which among us in Europe is the enviable privilege of the
early years of youth, here sits upon every brow and beams from every eye.
Go through any other civilised country you please, you will seldom, I might
say never, find an adult upon whose countenance untroubled happiness,
buoyant enjoyment of life, are to be read; with a careful, most often with
an anxious, expression of face men hurry or steal past us, and if there is
anywhere to be seen a gaiety that is real and not counterfeited it is
almost always the gaiety of recklessness. With us it is only the 'poor in
spirit' who are happy; reflection seems to be given us only that we may
ponder upon the want and worry of life. Here for the first time do I find
men's faces which bear the stamp of both conscious reflection and
untroubled happiness. And this spectacle of universal happy contentedness
is to me more exhilarating than all else that there is to be seen here. One
breathes more freely and more vigorously; it is as if I had for the first
time escaped from the oppressive atmosphere of a stifling prison into the
freedom of nature where the air was pure and balmy. 'Whence do you get all
this reflected splendour of sunny joyousness?' I asked David.

'It is the natural result of the serene absence of care which we all
enjoy,' was his answer. 'For it is not a mere appearance, it is a reality,
that care is unknown in this country, at least that most hideous, most
degrading of all care--how to get daily bread. It is not because we are
richer, not even because we are all well-off, but because we--that is,
every individual among us--possess the absolute certainty of continuing to
be well-off. Here one _cannot_ become poor, for everyone has an inalienable
right to his share of the incalculable wealth of the community. To-morrow
lies serene and smiling before us; it cannot bring us evil, for the
well-being of even the last among us is guaranteed and secured by a power
as strong and permanent as the continuance of our race upon this
planet--the power of human progress. In this respect we are really like
children, whom the shelter and protection of the parental house save from
every material care.'

'And are you not afraid,' I interposed, 'that this absence of care will
eventually put an end to that upon which you rely--that is, to progress?
Hitherto at least want and care have been the strongest incentives to human
activity; if these incentives are weakened, if the torturing anxiety about
to-morrow ceases, then will progress be slackened, stagnation and then
degeneration will follow, and together with the consequent inevitable
impoverishment want and care will come again. I must admit that none of
this has so far shown itself among you; but this does not remove my fears.
For at present you in Freeland are enjoying the fruits of the progress of
others. What has been thought out and invented under the pressure of the
want and sorrow of unnumbered centuries, what is still being thought out
and invented under the pressure of the want and sorrow of untold millions
outside the boundaries of your own country--it is all this which makes your
present happiness possible. But how will it be when what you are striving
after has happened, when the whole human race shall have been converted to
your principles? Do you believe that want can completely disappear from off
the face of the earth without taking progress with it?'

'We not only believe that,' was his answer, 'but we know it; and everyone
who does not allow obsolete prejudices to distort his judgment of facts
must agree with us. To struggle for existence is the inexorable command,
upon the observance of which nature has made progress--nay, the very being
of every living thing--to depend: this we understand better than any other
people in the world. But that this struggle must necessarily be prompted by
hunger we deny; and we deny also that it is necessarily a struggle between
individuals of the same species. Even we have to struggle for existence;
for what we require does not fall into our lap without effort and labour.
Yet not _opposed_ but _side by side_ do we stand in our struggle; and it is
on this very account that the result is never doubtful to us. When we are
referred to the conflict to be found everywhere in the animal world, we can
appeal to the fact that man possesses other means of struggling than do his
fellow-creatures which stand on a lower level, and can work out his
evolution in a different manner. But to plead this would be to resort to a
poor and unnecessary subterfuge, for in reality the reverse is the case.
Want and material care are--with very rare exceptions--no natural
stimulants to fight in the competitive struggle for existence. By far the
larger number of animals never suffer lack, never feel any anxiety whatever
about the morrow; and yet from the beginning all things have been subjected
to the great and universal law of progress. Very rarely in the animal world
is there the struggle of antagonism between members of the same species;
the individuals live together in peace and generally without antagonism,
and it is against foes belonging to other species that their weapons are
directed. It is against lions and panthers that the gazelle fights for
existence by its vigilance and speed, not against its own fellows; lions
and panthers employ their cunning and strength against the gazelle and the
buffalo, and not against other lions and panthers. Conflict among ourselves
and against members of our own species was and is the privilege of the
human race. But this sad privilege has sprung from a necessity of
civilisation. In order to develop into what we have become we have been
obliged to demand from nature more than she is in a position voluntarily to
offer us; and for many thousands of years there has been no way of
obtaining it but that of satisfying our higher needs by a system of mutual
plunder and oppression. And in this way want became a stimulus to conflict
in the human struggle for existence. Note, therefore, that the fighting of
man against man, with material care as the sharpest spur to the conflict,
was not and is not the simple transference to human society of a law
everywhere prevalent in nature, but an exceptional distortion of this great
natural law under the influence of a certain phase of human development. We
suffered want not because nature compelled us to do so, but because we
robbed each other; and we robbed each other because with civilisation there
arose a disproportion between our requirements and our natural means of
satisfying them. But now that civilisation has attained to control over the
forces of nature, this disproportion is removed; in order to enjoy plenty
and leisure we no longer need to exploit each other. Thus, to put an end to
the conflict of man with man, and at the same time of material want, is not
to depart from the natural form of the struggle for existence, but in
reality to return to it. The struggle is not ended, but simply the
unnatural form of it. In its endeavour to raise itself above the level of
the merely animal nature, humanity was betrayed into a long-enduring strife
with nature herself; and this strife was the source of all the unspeakable
torture and suffering, crime and cruelty, the unbroken catalogue of which
makes up the history of mankind from the first dawn of civilisation until
now. But this dreadful strife is now ended by a most glorious victory; we
have become what we have endeavoured for thousands of years to become, a
race able to win from nature plenty and leisure for all its members; and by
this very re-acquired harmony between our needs and the means of satisfying
them have we brought ourselves again into unison with nature. We remain
subject to nature's unalterable law of the struggle for existence; but
henceforth we shall engage in this conflict in the same manner as all other
creatures of nature--our struggle will be an external, not an internal one,
not against our fellow-men nor prompted by the sting of material want.'

'But,' I asked, 'what will prompt men to struggle in the cause of progress
when want has lost its sting?'

'Singular question! You show very plainly how difficult it is to understand
things which contradict the views we have drunk in with our mother's milk,
and which we have been accustomed to regard as the foundation-stones of
order and civilisation, even when those views most manifestly contradict
the most conspicuous facts. As if want had ever been the sole, or even the
principal, spring of human progress! The strife with nature, in which the
disproportion between the needs of civilisation and the ability to satisfy
those needs led mankind through a long period of transition from barbarism
to a state of culture worthy of human nature, had, it is true this
result--viz. that the struggle for existence assumed not only its natural
forms, but also forms which were unnatural, and which did violence to the
real and essential character of most of nature's offspring; yet these
latter forms never attained to absolute dominion. In fact, as a rule nature
has shown herself stronger than the human institutions which were in
conflict with her. During the whole of the history of civilisation we owe
the best achievements of the human intellect not to want, but to those
other impulses which are peculiar to our race, and which will remain so as
long as that race dominates the earth. Thrice blind is he who will not see
this! The great thinkers, inventors, and discoverers of all ages and all
nations have not been spurred on by hunger; and in the majority of cases it
may be asserted that they thought and speculated, investigated and
discovered, not _because_ they were hungry, but _in spite_ of it. Yet--so
it may be objected--those men were the elect of our race; the great mass of
ordinary men can be spurred on only by vulgar prosaic hunger to make the
best use of what the elect have discovered and invented. But those who
judge thus are guilty of a most remarkable act of oversight. Only those who
are strongly prejudiced can fail to see that it is just the well-to-do, the
non-hungry, who most zealously press forward. Hunger is certainly a
stimulus to labour, but an unnerving and pernicious one; and those who
would point triumphantly to the wretches who can be spurred on to activity
only by the bitterest need, and sink into apathy again as soon as the pangs
of hunger are stilled, forget that it is this very wretchedness which is
the cause of this demoralisation. The civilised man who has once acquired
higher tastes will the more zealously strive to gratify those tastes the
less his mental and physical energy has been weakened by degrading want,
and the less doubtful the result of his effort is. For all unprejudiced
persons must recognise the most effective stimulus to activity not in
hopeless want, but in rational self-interest cheerfully striving after a
sure aim. Now, _our_ social order, far from blunting this self-interest,
has in reality for the first time given it full scope. You may therefore be
perfectly certain of this: the superiority over other nations in
inventiveness and intellectual energy which you have already noted among us
is no accidental result of any transitory influences, but the necessary
consequence of our institutions. Every nation that adopts these
institutions will have a similar experience. Just as little as we need the
stimulus of the pangs of want to call forth those inventions and
improvements which increase the amount and the variety of our material and
intellectual enjoyments, so little will progress he checked in any other
nation which, like us, finds itself in the happy position of enjoying the
fruits of progress.'

I was deeply moved as my friend thus spoke like an inspired seer. 'When I
look at the matter closely,' I said, 'it seems as if, according to the
contrary conception, there can be progress only where it is to all intents
and purposes useless. For the fundamental difference between you
Freelanders and ourselves lies here--that you enjoy the fruits of progress,
while we merely busy ourselves with the Danaidean vessel of
over-production. No one doubts that Stuart Mill was right when he
complained that all our discoveries and inventions had not been able to
alleviate the sorrow and want of a single working-man; nevertheless, what
terrible folly it would be to believe that that very want was necessary in
order that further discoveries and inventions might be made!

'But,' I continued, 'to return to the point at which we started: you have
not yet fully explained to me all the astonishing, heart-quickening
cheerfulness which prevails everywhere in this land of the happy. Want and
material care are here unknown: admitted. But there are outside of Freeland
hundreds of thousands, nay millions, who are free from oppressive care: why
do they not feel real cheerfulness? Compare, for instance, our respective
fathers. Mine is unquestionably the richer of the two, and yet what deep
furrows care has engraved upon his forehead, what traces of painful
reflection there are about his mouth; but what a gladsome light of eternal
youth shines from every feature of your father! I might almost imagine that
the air which one breathes in this country has a great deal to do with
this; for the folds and wrinkles in my father's features of which I have
just spoken have in the fortnight of our stay here grown noticeably less,
and I myself feel brighter and happier than ever I felt before.'

'You have forgotten the most important thing,' replied David--'the
influence of public feeling upon the feelings of the individual. Man is a
social being whose thoughts and feelings are derived only in part from his
own head and his own heart, whilst a not less important part of them--I
might say the fundamental tone which gives colour and character to the
individual's intellectual and emotional life--has its source in the social
surroundings for the time being. Everyone stands in a not merely external,
but also an internal, indissoluble relation of contact with those who are
around him; he imagines that he thinks and feels and acts as his own
individuality prompts, but he thinks, feels, and acts for the most part in
obedience to an external influence from which he cannot escape--the
influence of the spirit of the age which embraces all heads, all hearts,
and all actions. Had the enlightened humane freethinker of to-day been born
three centuries ago, he would have persecuted those who differed from him
upon the most subtile, and, as he now thinks, ridiculous points of belief,
with the same savage hatred as did all others who were then living. And had
he seen the light yet a few centuries earlier--say, among the pagan Saxons
of the days of Charlemagne--human sacrifices would have shocked him as
little as they did the other worshippers of the goddess Hertha. And the man
who, brought up as a pagan Saxon in the forests of the Weser and the Elbe,
would have held it honourable and praiseworthy to make the altar-stone of
Hertha smoke with the blood of slaughtered captives, would in that same age
have felt invincible horror at such a deed, had he--with exactly the same
personal capabilities--by accident been born in imperial Byzantium instead
of among German barbarians. At Byzantium, on the other hand, he would have
indulged in lying and deceit without scruple, whilst, if surrounded by the
haughty German heroes, he--in other respects the same man from head to
foot--would have been altogether incapable of such weak vices. Since this
is so--since the virtues and vices, the thoughts and the feelings, of those
of our contemporaries among whom we are born and brought up give the
fundamental tone to our own character, it is simply impossible that the
members of a community, maddened by a ceaseless fear of hunger, should pass
their lives in undisturbed serenity. Where an immense majority of the
people never know what the morrow may bring forth--whether it may bring a
continuance of miserable existence or absolute starvation--under the
dominion of a social order which makes one's success in the struggle for
existence depend upon being able to snatch the bread out of the mouth of a
competitor, who in his turn is coveting the bread we have, and is striving
with feverish anxiety to rob us of it--in a society where everyone is
everyone's foe, it is the height of folly to talk of a real gladsome
enjoyment of life. No individual wealth protects a man from the sorrow that
is crushing the community. The man who is a hundredfold a millionaire, and
who cannot himself consume the hundredth part of the interest of his
interest, even he cannot escape the sharp grip of the horrid hunger-spectre
any more than the most wretched of the wretched who wanders, roofless and
cold and hungry, through the streets of your great cities. The difference
between the two lies not in the brain and in the heart, but simply in the
stomach; the second simply endures physical suffering over and above the
psychical and intellectual suffering of the first. But the psychical and
mental suffering is permanent, and therefore more productive of results.
Look at him, your Croesus plagued with a mad hunger-fever; how breathlessly
he rushes after still greater and greater gains; how he sacrifices the
happiness and honour, the enjoyment and peace, of himself and of those who
belong to him to the god from whom he looks to obtain help in the universal
need--the god Mammon. He does not possess his wealth, he is possessed by
it. He heaps estate upon estate, imagining that upon the giddy summit of
untold millions he shall obtain security from the sea of misery which rages
horridly around him. Nay, so blinded is the fool that he does not perceive
how it is merely this ocean of universal misery that fills him with horror;
but he rather cherishes the sad delusion that his dread will become less if
but the abyss below be deeper and farther removed from his giddy seat
above. And let it not be supposed that by this superstitious dread of
hunger merely the foolishness of individuals is referred to. The whole age
is possessed by it, and the best natures most completely so. For the more
sensitive are the head and the heart, the more potent is the influence
exerted by the common consciousness of universal want in contrast with
transitory individual comfort. Only absolutely cold-hearted egoists or
perfect idiots form here and there an exception; they alone are able really
to enjoy their wealth undisturbed by the hunger-spectre which is strangling
millions of their brethren.

'This, Carlo, is what imprints upon the faces of all of you such
Hippocratic marks of suffering. You can never give yourselves up to the
unrestrained enjoyment of life so long as you breathe an atmosphere of
misery, sorrow, and dread. And it is this community of feeling, which
connects every man with his surroundings, that enables you here, only just
arrived among a society to which this misery, this sorrow, this dread, are
totally unknown, to enjoy that cheerful serenity of thought and emotion
which is the innate characteristic of every healthy child of nature. And
we, who have lived for a generation in the midst of this community from
which both misery and the fear of misery are absent--we have almost
completely got rid of that gloomy conception of human destiny of which we
were the victims so long as the Old World was about us with its
self-imposed martyrdom. I use the limiting expression "almost" with
reference to those among us who had reached adult manhood before they came
to Freeland. We younger ones, who were born and have grown up here without
having ever seen misery, differ in this respect very considerably from our
elders who in their youth saw the Medusa-head of servility face to face. It
is five-and-twenty years since my father and mother, who were both among
the first arrivals at the Kenia, escaped from the mephitic atmosphere of
human misery, the degradation of man by man. But the recollection of the
horrors among which they formerly lived, and which they shared without
being able to prevent, will never quite fade out of their minds, and their
hearts can never be fully possessed by that godlike calm and cheerful
serenity which is the natural heritage of their children, whose hands have
never been stained by the sweat and blood of enslaved fellow-men, and who
have never had to appropriate for their own enjoyment the fruit of the
labour of others--have never stood before the cruel alternative of being
either the hammer or the anvil in the struggle for existence.'

You know me well enough to imagine what an overpowering impression these
words would make upon me. But I recalled by accident at this very moment a
conversation I had had with the elder Ney about savings and insurance in
Freeland, and it occurred to me that these were both things that did not
harmonise with the absence of care of which his son had just been speaking.
So I asked David, 'Why do men save in a country in which everyone can
reckon with certainty upon a constantly increasing return for his industry,
and in which even those who are incapable of work are protected not merely
against material want, but even against the lack of higher enjoyments? Does
not this thrift prove that anxiety for the morrow is not after all quite
unknown here?'

'Almost all men save in Freeland,' answered David; 'nay, I can with
certainty say that saving is more general here than in any other country.
The object of this saving is to provide for the future out of the
superfluity of the present; and certainly it follows from this that a
certain kind of care for the morrow is very well known among us also. The
distinction between our saving and the anxious thrift of other peoples lies
merely here, that our saving is intended net to guard us against want, but
simply against the danger of a future diminution of the standard of our
accustomed enjoyments; and that we pursue this aim in our saving with the
same calm certainty as we do our aim in working. A contradiction between
this and what was said just now is found only when you overlook the
equivocal meaning of the _word_ "care." We know no "care" so far as a
_fear_ concerning the morrow is implied by the word; but our whole public
and private life is pervaded by _foresight_, in the sense of making
precautionary arrangements to-day in order that the needs of to-morrow may
be met. Fear and uneasiness about the future, the _atra cura_ of the
Latins, you will look for among us in vain. It is this care which poisons
the pleasure of the present; whilst that other, which can only improperly
be called care, but the real name of which is foresight, by means of the
perfect sense of security which it creates concerning the morrow enhances
the delight of present enjoyment by the foretaste to-day of future
enjoyments already provided for. Herein lies the guarantee of the success
of our institutions, that, while solidarity is secured between the interest
of the individual and the interest of the community, the individual
possesses, together with liberty of action, a part of the responsibility of
his action. Only a part, because the action of the individual is not
altogether without limitations. Everyone in Freeland is hedged in by the
equal rights of all the others, even more and more effectually than
elsewhere. Consequently, everyone's responsibility finds its limitations
just where the responsibility of all can be substituted for his own. And
the guarding against actual deprivation on the part of anyone is one of the
obligations of the whole community, which thereby and at the same time
protects itself. Just as among you, a noble family, acting in its own
well-understood interest, would not allow any of its members to fall into
sordid misery, so long as it could in any way prevent it, so we, who act
upon the principle that all men are brothers of the _one_ noble race
destined to exercise control over the rest of nature, do not allow anyone
who bears our family features to suffer want so far as our means allow us
to save him from it. An existence altogether worthy of man, participation
in all that the highest culture makes _necessary_--this we guarantee to all
who live in our midst, even when they have left off working. But absolute
necessaries do not include the whole of the good things attainable at any
given time; whence it follows that the transition from labour to the ever
so well-earned leisure of age would be connected with the deprivation of a
number of highly prized customary enjoyments, if the copious proceeds of
former labour were not in part laid by for use in this time of leisure.
Take, for example, my father: if he pleased to spend now the 1,440£ which
he receives as one of the Freeland executive, together with the 90£ which
my mother's claim for maintenance amounts to, he could not, after his
retirement from office, with the fifty-five per cent. of the
maintenance-unit to which he and my mother together would be entitled--that
is, with 330£--carry on his household without retrenchments which, though
they might deprive him only of superfluities, would nevertheless be keenly
felt, because they would involve the giving up of what he has accustomed
himself to. It is true that a considerable number of his present expenses
consists of items which in part would cease in the course of time, in
part--_e.g._, his contributions to benevolent objects in other parts of the
world--could not be expected from persons who are receiving a maintenance
from the commonwealth, and in part would no longer accord with the tastes
and capacities of aged persons. But in spite of all this, my parents would
have to forego many things to which they are accustomed; and to avoid this
is the purpose of their saving.

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