Dr. Harkness still smiled. “Mr. Pike was in my class ten years ago,” he observed amiably. “I always said he was the brightest young man I had. We are all very proud of Mr. Pike.”
Mr. Pike seemed not over pleased with this communication, and the old gentleman went on:
“He is entirely right. Our idiotic ideas and theories were the main causes of poverty after all. The new views on economics—true social economics, not the ‘dismal science’; with the blaze of the new religion to show what was right and wrong, and the sudden uprising of half the adult world—the new voters—to carry out the new ideas; these were what changed things! There you have it, Mr. Robertson, in a nutshell—rather a large nutshell, a pericarp, as it were—but I think that covers it.”
“We students used always to admire Dr. Harkness’ power of easy generalization,” said Mr. Pike, in a mild, subacid tone, “but if any ground of inquiry is left to you, Mr. Robertson, I could, perhaps, illuminate some special points.”
Dr. Harkness laughed in high good humor, and clapped his whilom pupil on the back.
“You have the floor, Mr. Pike—I shall listen to you with edification.”
The young man looked a little ashamed of his small irony, and continued more genially:
“Our first step—or one of our first steps, for we advanced like a strenuous centipede—was to check the birth of defectives and degenerates. Certain classes of criminals and perverts were rendered incapable of reproducing their kind. In the matter of those diseases most injurious to the young, very stringent measures were taken. It was made a felony to infect wife or child knowingly, and a misdemeanor if it were done unknowingly. Physicians were obliged to report all cases of infectious disease, and young girls were clearly taught the consequence of marriage with infected persons. The immediate result was, of course, a great decrease in marriage; but the increase in population was scarce checked at all because of the lowered death rate among children. It was checked a little; but for twenty years now, it has been recovering itself. We increase a little too fast now, but see every hope of a balanced population long before the resources of the world are exhausted.”
Mr. Brown seized upon a second moment’s pause to suggest that the world’s resources were vastly increased also—and still increasing.
“Let Pike rest a moment and get his breath,” he said, warming to the subject, “I want to tell Mr. Robertson that the productivity of the earth is gaining every year. Here’s this old earth feeding us all—laying golden eggs as it were; and we used to get those eggs by the Caesarian operation! We uniformly exhausted the soil—uniformly! Now a man would no more think of injuring the soil, the soil that feeds him, than he would of hurting his mother. We steadily improve the soil; we improve the seed; we improve methods of culture; we improve everything.”
Mrs. Allerton struck in here, “Not forgetting the methods of transportation, Mr. Robertson. There was one kind of old world folly which made great waste of labor and time; that was our constant desire to eat things out of season. There is now a truer sense of what is really good eating; no one wants to eat asparagus that is not of the best, and asparagus cut five or ten days cannot be really good. We do not carry things about unnecessarily; and the carrying we do is swift, easy and economical. For slow freight we use waterways wherever possible—you will be pleased to see the ‘all-water routes’ that thread the country now. And our roads—you haven’t seen our roads yet! We lead the world.”
“We used to be at the foot of the class as to roads, did we not?” I asked; and Mr. Pike swiftly answered:
“We did, indeed, sir. But that very need of good roads made easy to us the second step in abolishing poverty. Here was a great social need calling for labor; here were thousands of men calling for employment; and here were we keeping the supply from the demand by main strength—merely from those archaic ideas of ours.
“We had a mass of valuable data already collected, and now that the whole country teemed with new ideals of citizenship and statesmanship, it did not take very long to get the two together.”
“We furnished employment for all the women, too,” my sister added. “A Social Service Union was formed the country over; it was part of the new religion. Every town has one—men and women. The same spirit that used to give us crusaders and missionaries now gave plenty of enthusiastic workers.”
“I don’t see yet how you got up any enthusiasm about work,” said I.
“It was not work for oneself,” Nellie explained. “That is what used to make it so sordid; we used really to believe that we were working each for himself. This new idea was overwhelming in its simplicity—and truth; work is social service—social service is religion—that’s about it.”
“Not only so,” Dr. Harkness added, “it made a threefold appeal; to the old, deep-seated religious sense; to the new, vivid intellectual acceptance; and to the very widespread, wholesome appreciation of a clear advantage.
“When a thing was offered to the world that agreed with every social instinct, that appealed to common sense, that was established by the highest scientific authority, and that had the overwhelming sanction of religion—why the world took to it.”
“But it is surely not natural to people to work—much less to like to work!” I protested.
“There’s where the change comes in,” Mr. Pike eagerly explained. “We used to think that people hated work—nothing of the sort! What people hated was too much work, which is death; work they were personally unfit for and therefore disliked, which is torture; work under
