Without Prejudice

wife one day and said, 'Libes Gretchen, could you not make me a pudding such as Peterkin is always boasting his wife makes him? I am dying of envy to taste it. Every time he talks of it my chops water.' 'It is not impossible I could make you one,' said Gretchen good-naturedly; 'I will go and ask Frau Peterkin how she makes it.' When Johannes returned that evening from the workshop, where Peterkin had been raving more than ever over his wife's pudding, Gretchen said gleefully, 'I have been to Frau Peterkin: she has a good heart, and she gave me the whole recipe for Peterkin's pudding.' Johannes rubbed his hands, and his mouth watered already in anticipation. 'It is made with raisins,' began Gretchen. Johannes's jaw fell. 'We can scarcely afford raisins,' he interrupted: 'couldn't you manage without raisins?' 'Oh, I dare say,' said Gretchen, doubtfully. 'There is also candied lemon-peel.' Johannes whistled. 'Ach, we can't run to that,' he said. 'No, indeed,' assented Gretchen; 'but we must have suet and yeast.' 'I don't see the necessity,' quoth Johannes. 'A good cook like you'-here he gave her a sounding kiss-'can get along without such trifles as those.' 'Well, I will try,' said the good Gretchen, as cheerfully as she could; and so next morning Johannes went to work light-hearted and gay. When he returned home, lo! the long-desired dainty stood on the supper-table, beautifully brown. He ran to embrace his wife in gratitude and joy; then he tremblingly broke off a hunch of pudding and took a huge bite. His wife, anxiously watching his face, saw it assume a look of perplexity, followed by one of disgust. Johannes gave a great snort of contempt. 'Lieber Gott!' he cried, 'and this is what Peterkin is always bragging about!'

XIII. THE ABOLITION OF MONEY

The Cynic was very old and very wise and very unpopular. I was the only person at his 'At Home' that afternoon. I gave him my views on Bi-metallism, having just read the leader in the 'Times.' He yawned obtrusively, and growled, 'Bi-metallism, indeed! The only remedy for modern civilisation is A-metallism. Money must be abolished. The root of all evil must be pulled up.'

'Money abolished!' I echoed in amaze. 'Why, any student of political economy will tell you we could not live without it. Lacking a common measure of value, we-'

'So it has always been held by students when answering political-economy papers,' he interrupted impatiently. 'Yet I dreamt once of a land where the currency was called in, and the morning stars sang together.'

'But the exchange of commodities-' I began.

'Was effected by the sublime simplicity of barter. At one sweep were swept away all that monstrous credit system which had created an army of accountants and a Court of bankruptcy; all that chaos of single and double- faced entry-all that sleight-of-hand abracadabra of signatures-all those paper phantoms of capital. The Stock Exchange and other gambling-hells shrivelled up. There was a vast saving of clerical labour, and there were few loopholes for fraud. Everything was too simple. Swift retribution overtook the man who shirked his obligations to his fellows. Nobody could juggle with bits of paper at the North Pole and ruin people at the South. The windows of human Society were cleared of the gigantic complex cobweb full of dead flies. One could look inside and see what was going on. 'Gentlemen' could not flourish in the light. They were like the fungi that grew in cellars. Every man became both a worker and a trader.'

'Not an unmixed gain, that,' I protested.

'I grant you,' said the Cynic. 'Some of the finer shades of fine gentlemanliness were lost: the honourable feeling of cheating one's tradesmen, the noble scorn of tailors, the lofty despisal of duns. When all men were tradesmen, these higher class distinctions fused into one another. There arose a clannish feeling which prevented the tradesman from defrauding one of his own class. But there was an even graver evil to be placed to the debit side of the new system. For the professors of political economy (who had thrown up their posts as a conscientious protest against the abolition of money and of salaries) proved to be right. So clumsy was the mechanism of exchange that men were actually driven to doing more than one kind of work. All those advantages of specialisation which Adam Smith, supplemented by Babbage, had so laboriously pointed out were completely lost to a wasteful world. Rather than be without certain luxuries and necessaries men gave up moving their legs all day up and down in time with iron treadles, or feeding machines with bits of material exactly alike, or remaining doubled up underground, or making marks from hour to hour and from year to year on pieces of ruled paper. The waste by friction became enormous. Some of the least thrifty even made their own furniture, and wove their own clothes, and carved out rude ornaments for themselves. Whether from a natural want of economy, or from an unwillingness to encounter the difficulties of traffic, or from a mere spirit of independence, these men deliberately reverted to the condition from which mankind had so painfully emerged.

'Some even pretended to enjoy it, and, rather paradoxically, asserted that the abolition of gold had brought about the golden age of primitive legend. Others who felt keenly the falling-off in production, and the absence of those huge stores of unsold commodities which glutted the ancient markets, and gave a nation a sense of wealth in the midst of poverty; the esthetic spirits who lamented the disappearance of the ancient mansions and palaces, which, although they were empty three parts of the year, yet afforded men the consolation of knowing that they were ample enough to shelter the majority of the homeless-men of this stamp were chagrined by the cumbersome mechanism of exchange, which made these glories of the past impracticable, and they were for introducing counters. But counters, although they had the advantage of lacking intrinsic value, would be quite as bad as actual coins if men could entirely trust one another never to repudiate their obligations. Unfortunately Society had grown so honest under the new regime that this condition was fulfilled, and the operation of counters would have been identical with that of money. Moreover, counters would have brought back card-playing, horse-racing, fire and life assurance, and other forms of gambling, which without them involved such complex calculations and valuations of loaves and fishes that all the pleasure was spoilt. When these things were pointed out to the esthetic and the economical, they were convinced and remained of the same opinion.

'But even with all these deficits, the balance in favour of the status quo was eminently satisfactory. It was rediscovered that man really wanted very little here below, and that it was better for all to get it than for some to continue to want it; and, taking into account also the general freedom from war, newspapers, and other evils of a moneyed civilisation, it must be conceded that the common people had very little to grumble at.'

'But what of the uncommon people?' I interrupted at last. 'They must have been martyred.'

'Certainly, for the good of the common people. You see, everything was topsy-turvey. Besides, they suffered only during the earlier stages of transition. There was, for instance, the poet who went round among the workmen to chaffer verses. But there were few willing to barter solid goods for poetry. Here and there an intelligent artisan in love purchased a serenade, and an occasional lunatic (for Nature hath her aberrations under any system) became the proprietor of an epic. But the sons of toil drove few bargains or hard with the sons of the Muses. The best poets fared worst, for the crowd sympathised not with their temper, nor with their diction, and they were like to die of starvation and so achieve speedy recognition. But the minor poets, too, were in sore strait. The market was exceedingly limited. Sellers were many and buyers few. Rondeaux were hawked about from butcher to baker, at ten to the joint, or three to the four-pound loaf, and triolets were going at a hollow-toothful of brandy. A ballade-worth of butter would hardly cover a luncheon biscuit, while a five-act blank-verse tragedy was given away for a pound of tea, and that only when the characters were incestuous and the cesuras irreproachable. A famous female poet was reduced to pawning her best sonnet for a glass of lemonade and a bun.

'Times were no less hard for the comic writer. Hitherto he had only to outrage his mother-tongue, or to debase the moral currency, to find the land ready to accord him of the fat thereof. He used to sit in a room in Fleet street and make or steal jokes in return for gold. By the wonderful mechanism of the old Society other men and women, in whatever part of the world he might stray, would rush to feed and clothe and house him, and play and sing and dance to him, and physic him, and drive him about in carriages, and tell him the news and shave him, and press upon him aromatic mixtures to smoke, and love him, and kowtow to him, and beg of him, and even laugh at his jokes, all in return for making or stealing jokes in Fleet street. Some of these men and women would detest jokes, or have a blindness to their points; nevertheless, not one but would be eager to express in the most practical form his or her sense of the services rendered to Society by the joker. But now that people saw with open eyes through the transparent mechanism of exchange, they were extremely loth to part with their tangible commodities in return for mere flashes of wit or vulgarity. Previously they had only half realised that they were soberly and seriously making coats, or working machines, or smelting iron, while these jesters were merely cudgelling their brains or consulting back files. The complexity of the thing had disguised the facts. But now that they saw exactly what was