Aristopia/Introduction
Books giving us a history of the future—a future bright with the millennial dawn of the optimist or dark with the goblin-haunted night of the pessimist—books in French, with a future French and fantastic, and books in English, with a future Anglo-Saxon and matter-of-fact—are much in vogue. But of books giving a history of the past as it might have been if the current of events had been turned at a critical point by some man with sufficient virtue and mental power, combined with the power which some fortunate material circumstance might have given him, I know not one.
Alas for the world that the makers of history who have had the greatest powers combined with the greatest opportunities have been men whose selfish aims have made their utmost efforts recoil in ruin on their own heads!
Washington, indeed, had great virtues, a great opportunity, and good talents; but neither was his opportunity the greatest that history has furnished, nor his mental power so vast, nor his vision of the future so far-reaching and clairvoyant as that of many who have lived before him and since, nor was his devotion to the welfare of mankind so ardent and all-absorbing.
The "Fathers of the Constitution" have been much praised for their wisdom and foresight, and with justice; but there have been men with no opportunities like theirs who were able to look much farther into the future, and who were much more in advance of their age. There were evils which the leaders of the Revolution ought to have foreseen and probably did not, and others they may have foreseen but had no power to avert.
Their power was limited, and the materials with which they had to work were refractory. Old evils were so deeply imbedded in the customs, prejudices, and thoughts of men when our government was forming that the influence of a Washington, a Jefferson, and an Adams would have striven in vain to eradicate them. Then, too, there were evils of which they could have had no conception. They could not have foreseen the application of steam-power to transportation and manufacturing, making a few men of great wealth as much the lords of the great highways as were the robber barons of the Middle Ages, with their castles in every mountain pass and on every river ford, taking ruinous toll of every traveler; and the owners of vast "plants" of machinery as absolutely lords of the workmen who attend the machines and the greater number who are displaced by the machines as ever the feudal baron was lord of the serfs and villeins on his estates. Even if they had foreseen these evils it is hard to see how they could have prevented them; they came too late; their power was too small.
And from these evils it has come that this great republic of the new world, so long the hope of the poor and oppressed of the old world, is fast becoming like Europe socially, and threatens to become even worse than Europe. Now, when the bounties of nature, which a little while ago seemed exhaustless, have been all appropriated, this favored land presents the most violent contrasts of wealth with its pitiless power, and poverty with its abject weakness. The disinherited begin to feel their doom: their blind and hopeless but strong and desperate struggles against that doom have already begun in wasting strikes and bloody riots; and at every new outburst the wave of fire and blood spreads wider and rises higher.
We reproach the nations of Europe with their millions of armed men, but those millions are levied to repel the invasion of foreign foes. In our land it is hardly a secret that the millions of militia are mustering and drilling for the principal purpose of suppressing insurrection against the plutocracy by the "lower classes"—the laboring class of our own citizens. In every American city are rising the castles of the plutocracy in the shape of great armories for the militia.
But why, some may ask, should we turn from a future thus dark and threatening, to look vainly on a past which might have been, but which, alas! never was? Well, I could never quite agree with the philosophy of Whittier's oft-quoted couplet:
The saddest are these: It might have been."
or Dante's despairing cry of a lost soul:
Che ricordarse del tempo felice
Nella miseria."
Let us, then, take what pleasure we may in figuring a man of great wisdom, foresight, and genius, with an unselfish devotion to the welfare of humanity, placed with immense power at the parting of the ways in the course of human events, seizing the opportunity to turn the march of bewildered and struggling humanity into the path leading up and away from the dangerous marshes over which dance the deluding ignes fatui of ancient errors, and under which lie the black quagmires of antique evils. Thus to contemplate the past which might have been may in some small measure teach us to discern in the future the opportunity, to seize which—if there be no one man with sufficient wisdom, power, and virtue—there may be found a combination of men whose aggregate wisdom, power, and virtue may be sufficient to turn the march of events out of the night of civilization's destruction which some prophets see close ahead, into the brighter day foreseen by the seers of the Millennium.
I cannot afford, as some greater story-tellers have calmly and confidently done, to ignore the possibilities, not to mention the probabilities. But, some may say, your story of the mass of gold is an utter impossibility. Not so. That such a mass of gold has never been found is true; that it does not exist and cannot be discovered by no means follows. If the theory is true that the surface of the earth was once molten and liquid, the gold, by its immense weight, must have sunk below the lighter elements so far that when the crust of the earth became solid it could have come to the surface only by means of an eruption from a great depth. That the amount of gold in the whole globe is so small, in comparison with the rest of the materials, as seems from the amount found upon the surface is not at all probable. In the depths of the earth are probably hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of gold. An eruption from so great a depth as to throw up a few hundred cubic feet of gold in a single mass would be by no means a marvel; and a few hundred cubic feet of gold, although of almost incalculable value, would be of trifling bulk compared with the mass of lighter materials thrown out at every volcanic eruption.
The region in which this narrative locates the mine contains numerous quartz dikes in which some gold has been found.
The world has had many men with even greater virtues, clearer foresight, and more entire devotion to the good of humanity than have been ascribed to Ralph Morton. That the opportunity of a new continent on which a new civilization could be wrought out existed three hundred years ago is a matter of history. Given then, the man, the means, and the opportunity, the natural result would be as follows: