Looking Backward | Page 6

giving the
reader some general impression of how we lived then, her family was wealthy. In that age,
when money alone commanded all that was agreeable and refined in life, it was enough
for a woman to be rich to have suitors; but Edith Bartlett was beautiful and graceful also.
My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. "Handsome she might have been," I hear
them saying, "but graceful never, in the costumes which were the fashion at that period,
when the head covering was a dizzy structure a foot tall, and the almost incredible
extension of the skirt behind by means of artificial contrivances more thoroughly
dehumanized the form than any former device of dressmakers. Fancy any one graceful in
such a costume!" The point is certainly well taken, and I can only reply that while the
ladies of the twentieth century are lovely demonstrations of the effect of appropriate
drapery in accenting feminine graces, my recollection of their great-grandmothers
enables me to maintain that no deformity of costume can wholly disguise them.
Our marriage only waited on the completion of the house which I was building for our
occupancy in one of the most desirable parts of the city, that is to say, a part chiefly
inhabited by the rich. For it must be understood that the comparative desirability of
different parts of Boston for residence depended then, not on natural features, but on the
character of the neighboring population. Each class or nation lived by itself, in quarters of
its own. A rich man living among the poor, an educated man among the uneducated, was
like one living in isolation among a jealous and alien race. When the house had been
begun, its completion by the winter of 1886 had been expected. The spring of the
following year found it, however, yet incomplete, and my marriage still a thing of the
future. The cause of a delay calculated to be particularly exasperating to an ardent lover
was a series of strikes, that is to say, concerted refusals to work on the part of the
brick-layers, masons, carpenters, painters, plumbers, and other trades concerned in house
building. What the specific causes of these strikes were I do not remember. Strikes had
become so common at that period that people had ceased to inquire into their particular
grounds. In one department of industry or another, they had been nearly incessant ever
since the great business crisis of 1873. In fact it had come to be the exceptional thing to
see any class of laborers pursue their avocation steadily for more than a few months at a
time.
The reader who observes the dates alluded to will of course recognize in these

disturbances of industry the first and incoherent phase of the great movement which
ended in the establishment of the modern industrial system with all its social
consequences. This is all so plain in the retrospect that a child can understand it, but not
being prophets, we of that day had no clear idea what was happening to us. What we did
see was that industrially the country was in a very queer way. The relation between the
workingman and the employer, between labor and capital, appeared in some
unaccountable manner to have become dislocated. The working classes had quite
suddenly and very generally become infected with a profound discontent with their
condition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only knew how to go about
it. On every side, with one accord, they preferred demands for higher pay, shorter hours,
better dwellings, better educational advantages, and a share in the refinements and
luxuries of life, demands which it was impossible to see the way to granting unless the
world were to become a great deal richer than it then was. Though they knew something
of what they wanted, they knew nothing of how to accomplish it, and the eager
enthusiasm with which they thronged about any one who seemed likely to give them any
light on the subject lent sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, some of whom had
little enough light to give. However chimerical the aspirations of the laboring classes
might be deemed, the devotion with which they supported one another in the strikes,
which were their chief weapon, and the sacrifices which they underwent to carry them
out left no doubt of their dead earnestness.
As to the final outcome of the labor troubles, which was the phrase by which the
movement I have described was most commonly referred to, the opinions of the people of
my class differed according to individual temperament. The sanguine argued very
forcibly that it was in the very nature of things impossible that the new hopes of the
workingmen could be satisfied, simply because