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"I have already said that the state could not control
intellectual production. The state might say that it had taken a
year to write the book, and the author might say it had taken
thirty. Goethe said that every bon mot of his had cost a purse
of gold. What I outline here is a national, or rather
international, system for the providing of the material needs of
men. Since a man has intellectual needs also, he will work
longer, earn more, and provide for them to his own taste and in
his own way. I live on the same earth as the majority, I wear
the same kind of shoes and sleep in the same kind of bed; but I
do not think the same kind of thoughts, and I do not wish to pay
for such thinkers as the majority selects. I wish such things to
be left to free effort, as at present. If people want to listen
to a certain preacher, they get together and contribute what they
please, and pay for a church and support the preacher, and then
listen to him; I, who do not want to listen to him, stay away,
and it costs me nothing. In the same way there are magazines
about Egyptian coins, and Catholic saints, and flying machines,
and athletic records, and I know nothing about any of them. On
the other hand, if wage slavery were abolished, and I could earn
some spare money without paying tribute to an exploiting
capitalist, then there would be a magazine for the purpose of
interpreting and popularizing the gospel of Friedrich Nietzsche,
the prophet of Evolution, and also of Horace Fletcher, the
inventor of the noble science of clean eating; and incidentally,
perhaps, for the discouraging of long skirts, and the scientific
breeding of men and women, and the establishing of divorce by
mutual consent."
Dr. Schliemann paused for a moment. "That was a lecture," he
said with a laugh, "and yet I am only begun!"
"What else is there?" asked Maynard.
"I have pointed out some of the negative wastes of competition,"
answered the other. "I have hardly mentioned the positive
economies of co-operation. Allowing five to a family, there are
fifteen million families in this country; and at least ten
million of these live separately, the domestic drudge being
either the wife or a wage slave. Now set aside the modern system
of pneumatic house-cleaning, and the economies of co-operative
cooking; and consider one single item, the washing of dishes.
Surely it is moderate to say that the dishwashing for a family of
five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day's work, it
takes, therefore, half a million able-bodied persons--mostly
women to do the dishwashing of the country. And note that this
is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a
cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of
prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and
degenerate children--for all of which things the community has
naturally to pay. And now consider that in each of my little
free communities there would be a machine which would wash and
dry the dishes, and do it, not merely to the eye and the touch,
but scientifically--sterilizing them--and do it at a saving of
all the drudgery and nine-tenths of the time! All of these
things you may find in the books of Mrs. Gilman; and then take
Kropotkin's Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and read about the
new science of agriculture, which has been built up in the last
ten years; by which, with made soils and intensive culture, a
gardener can raise ten or twelve crops in a season, and two
hundred tons of vegetables upon a single acre; by which the
population of the whole globe could be supported on the soil now
cultivated in the United States alone! It is impossible to apply
such methods now, owing to the ignorance and poverty of our
scattered farming population; but imagine the problem of
providing the food supply of our nation once taken in hand
systematically and rationally, by scientists! All the poor and
rocky land set apart for a national timber reserve, in which our
children play, and our young men hunt, and our poets dwell! The
most favorable climate and soil for each product selected;
the exact requirements of the community known, and the acreage
figured accordingly; the most improved machinery employed, under
the direction of expert agricultural chemists! I was brought up
on a farm, and I know the awful deadliness of farm work; and I
like to picture it all as it will be after the revolution. To
picture the great potato-planting machine, drawn by four horses,
or an electric motor, ploughing the furrow, cutting and dropping
and covering the potatoes, and planting a score of acres a day!
To picture the great potato-digging machine, run by electricity,
perhaps, and moving across a thousand-acre field, scooping up
earth and potatoes, and dropping the latter into sacks! To every
other kind of vegetable and fruit handled in the same way--apples
and oranges picked by machinery, cows milked by
electricity--things which are already done, as you may know. To
picture the harvest fields of the future, to which millions of
happy men and women come for a summer holiday, brought by special
trains, the exactly needful number to each place! And to
contrast all this with our present agonizing system of
independent small farming,--a stunted, haggard, ignorant man,
mated with a yellow, lean, and sad-eyed drudge, and toiling from
four o'clock in the morning until nine at night, working the
children as soon as they are able to walk, scratching the soil
with its primitive tools, and shut out from all knowledge and
hope, from all their benefits of science and invention, and all
the joys of the spirit--held to a bare existence by competition
in labor, and boasting of his freedom because he is too blind to
see his chains!"
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