How the Change Came Dick broke the silence at last, saying: "Guest, forgive us for a little after-dinner dulness. What would you like to do? Shall we have out Greylocks and trot back to Hammersmith? or will you come with us and hear some Welsh folk sing in a hall close by here? or would you like presently to come with me into the City and see some really fine building? or--what shall it be?""Well," said I "as I am a stranger, I must let you choose for me."In point of fact, I did not by any means want to be "amused" just then; and also I rather felt as if the old man, with his knowledge of past times, and even a kind of inverted sympathy for them caused by his active hatred of them, was as it were a blanket for me against the cold of this very new world, where I was, so to say, stripped bare of every habitual thought and way of acting; and I did not want to leave him too soon. He came to my rescue at once, and said:
"Wait a bit, Dick; there is some one else to be consulted besides you and the guest here, and that is I. I am not going to lose the pleasure of his company just now, especially since I know he has something else to ask me. So go to your Welshmen, by all means; but first bring us another bottle of wine to this nook, and then be off as soon as you like; and come again and fetch our friend to go westward, but not too soon."Dick nodded smilingly, and the old man and I were soon alone in the great hall, the afternoon sun was gleaming on the red wine in our tall quaint-shaped glasses. Then said Hammond:
"Does anything especially puzzle you about our way of living, now you have heard a good deal and seen a little of it?"Said I: "I think what puzzles me most is how it all came about.""It well may," said he, "so great as the change is. It would be difficult indeed to tell you the whole story, perhaps impossible:
knowledge, discontent, treachery, disappointment, ruin, misery, despair--those who worked for the change because they could see further than other people went through all these phases of suffering;and doubtless all the time the most of men looked on, not knowing what was doing, thinking it all a matter of course, like the rising and setting of the sun--and indeed it was so.""Tell me one thing, if you can," said I. "Did the change, the `revolution' it used to be called, come peacefully?""Peacefully?" said he; "what peace was there amongst those poor confused wretches of the nineteenth century? It was war from beginning to end: bitter war, till hope and pleasure put an end to it.""Do you mean actual fighting with weapons?" said I, "or the strikes and lock-outs and starvation of which we have heard?""Both, both," he said. "As a matter of fact, the history of the terrible period of transition from commercial slavery to freedom may thus be summarised. When the hope of realising a communal condition of life for all men arose, quite late in the nineteenth century, the power of the middle classes, the then tyrants of society, was so enormous and crushing, that to almost all men, even those who had, you may say despite themselves, despite their reason and judgement, conceived such hopes, it seemed a dream. So much was this the case that some of those more enlightened men who were then called Socialists, although they well knew, and even stated in public, that the only reasonable condition of Society was that of pure Communism (such as you now see around you), yet shrunk from what seemed to them the barren task of preaching the realism of a happy dream. Looking back now, we can see that the great motive-power of the change was a longing for freedom and equality, akin if you please to the unreasonable passion of a lover; a sickness of heart that rejected with loathing the aimless solitary life of the well-educated men of that time: phrases, my dear friend, which have lost their meaning to us of the present day; so far removed we are from the dreadful facts which they represent.""Well, these men, though conscious of this feeling, had no faith in it, as a means of bringing about the change. Nor was that wonderful:
for looking around them they saw the huge mass of the oppressed classes too much burdened with the misery of their lives, and too much overwhelmed by the selfishness of misery to be able to form a conception of any escape from it except by the ordinary way prescribed by the system of slavery under which they lived; which was nothing more than a remote chance of climbing out of the oppressed into the oppressing class.""Therefore, though they knew that the only reasonable aim for those who would better the world was a condition of equality; in their impatience and despair they managed to convince themselves that if they could by hook or by crook get the machinery of production and the management of property so altered that the `lower classes'(so the horrible word ran) might have their slavery somewhat ameliorated, they would be ready to fit into this machinery, and would use it for bettering their condition still more and still more, until at last the result would be a practical equality (they were very fond of using the word `practical'), because `the rich' would be forced to pay so much for keeping `the poor' in a tolerable condition that the condition of riches would become no longer valuable and would gradually die out. Do you follow me?""Partly," said I. "Go on."Said old Hammond: "Well, since you follow me, you will see that as a theory this was not altogether unreasonable; but `practically', it turned out a failure.""How so?" said I.
