Looking Backward | Page 5

take hold of the rope and
help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally
regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat, and the apprehension that this might
happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who
rode.
But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very luxury rendered
intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in the harness,
and the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion for
fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes; commiseration was
frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially
when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a
particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized
leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the
rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called
forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the
passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to
patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the
hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled
and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull,
and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten
over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always
some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats.
It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the misery of the
toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers' sense of the value of their seats upon
the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before. If the
passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever fall
from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and
bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged
the coach.
I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the twentieth century an
incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both very curious, which partly explain it.
In the first place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in
which Society could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and the few rode, and
not only this, but that no very radical improvement even was possible, either in the
harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always been as it
was, and it always would be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy
forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.
The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular hallucination which those on
the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and
sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order
of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once
rode on this very coach and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The

strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from
the ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to
fall under its influence. As for those whose parents and grand-parents before them had
been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the
essential difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute.
The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass
of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only
extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my
own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.
In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried, I was engaged to wed Edith
Bartlett. She, like myself, rode on the top of the coach. That is to say, not to encumber
ourselves further with an illustration which has, I hope, served its purpose of