Curiously enough, my dear fellow, the very next day after dispatching my last, I found my self involved in a long and most interesting conversation with the daughter of one of the city residents. I had brought letters of introduction to a certain gentleman, and after a search of some hours through the eternal labyrinth of these unending streets, found the house to which I had been directed. The gentleman, or rather citizen, as all men are called here, was not at home. I was, however, received by his daughter, a plain but seemingly agreeable, intelligent young woman. The women dress so exactly like the men in this country that it is somewhat difficult to tell the sexes apart. Women, however, usually betray themselves as soon as they speak, by their voices.
This young lady had an unusually pleasant voice and manner, and we were soon deep in the agreeable intricacies of a lengthy conversation. I had any number of questions to ask, and she appeared to be most willing to answer them.
My first question, I remember, was an eminently practical one. It was on the subject of chimneys and cooking. I had noticed almost immediately on my arrival that, throughout the entire city, not a chimney was to be seen. It was this fact more than any other that gave the city the appearance of a plain, and made the houses seem curiously deformed. It naturally followed that, there being no chimneys, there was also no smoke, which therefore made this already sufficiently clear atmosphere as pure as the air on a mountain-top. All very beautiful, I said to myself, but how do the people get along without cooking? I, in my quality of stranger and foreigner, had made the interesting discovery that my own meals were prepared to my taste by specially appointed State cooks—a law only recently passed to facilitate international relations. The latter, it appears, had become somewhat strained, when travelers had found themselves forced to abide by the rules and regulations governing the socialists’ diet. But what was this diet? This was the mystery which had been puzzling me ever since my arrival. When therefore I found myself face to face with my young lady, I promptly implored her to solve my dilemma. “Oh,” she replied, “cooking has gone out long ago. To do any cooking is considered dreadfully old-fashioned.”
“Has eating also gone out of fashion in this wonderful country?” I asked in amazement.
She laughed as she replied, “Eating hasn’t, but we do it in a more refined way. Instead of kitchens we now have conduits, culinary conduits.”
“Culinary conduits?” I asked, still in a daze of wonderment.
“Oh, I see you don’t understand,” she answered; “you haven’t been here long enough to know how such things are arranged. Let me explain. The State scientists now regulate all such matters. Once a month our Officer of Hygiene comes and examines each member of the household. He then prescribes the kind of food he thinks you require for the next few weeks, whether it shall be more or less phosphates, or cereals, or carnivorous preparations. He leaves a paper with you. You then touch this spring—see?” and here she put her pretty white finger on a button in the wall. “You whistle through the aperture to the Culinary Board, put in the paper, and it is sent to the main office. You then receive supplies for the ensuing month.”
“And where is this wonderful board?”
“It is in Chicago, where all the great granaries are. You know Chicago supplies the food for the entire United Community.”
“But Chicago is a thousand miles off. Isn’t all the food stale by the time it reaches you?”
Here she laughed, although I could see she tried very hard not to do so. But my ignorance was evidently too amazingly funny. When she had regained composure she answered: “The food is sent to us by electricity through the culinary conduits. Every thing is blown to us in a few minutes’ time, if it be necessary, if the food is to be eaten hot. If the food be cereals or condensed meats, it is sent by pneumatic express, done up in bottles or in pellets. All such food is carried about in one’s pocket. We take our food as we drink water, wherever we may happen to be, when it’s handy and when we need it. Although,” she added with a sigh, “I sometimes do wish I had lived in the good old times, in the nineteenth century, for instance, when such dear old-fashioned customs were in vogue as having four-hour dinners, and the ladies were taken into dinner by the gentlemen and every one wore full dress—the dress of the period, and they used to flirt—wasn’t that the old word? over their wine and dessert. How changed every thing is now! However,” she quickly added, “if kitchens and cooking and long dinners hadn’t been abolished, the final emancipation of women could never have been accomplished. The perfecting of the woman movement was retarded for hundreds of years, as you know, doubtless, by the slavish desire of women to please their husbands by dressing and cooking to suit them. When the last pie was made into the first pellet, woman’s true freedom began. She could then cast off her subordination both to her husband and to her servants. Women were only free, indeed, when the State prohibited the hiring of servants. Of course, the hiring of servants at all was as degrading to the oppressed class as it was a clog to the progress of their mistresses’ freedom. The only way to raise the race was to put every one on the same level, to make even degrees of servitude impossible.”
“But how, may I be permitted to ask, is the rest of the housework accomplished, if no servants exist to take charge of so pretty a house as this one?” (The house, my dear Hannevig, was in reality hideous, as bare and as plain as are all the houses here. Each is furnished by state law, exactly alike).
“Oh, every thing is done by machinery, as at your hotel. Every thing, the sweeping, bed making, window scrubbing and washing. Each separate department has its various appliances and apparatus. The women of every household are taught the use and management of the various machines, you know, at the expense of the state, during their youth; when they take the management of a house they can run it single-handed. Most of the machinery goes by electricity. A house can be kept in perfect order by two hours’ work daily. The only hard work which we still have to do is dusting. No invention has yet been effected which dusts satisfactorily without breakage to ornaments, which accounts for the fact, also, that the fashion of having odds and ends about a home has gone out. It was voted years ago by the largest women’s vote ever polled, that since men could not invent self-adjusting, non-destructive dusters, their homes must suffer. Women were not to be degraded to hand machines for the sake of ministering to men’s Æsthetic tastes. So you see we have only the necessary chairs and tables. If men want to see pictures they can go to the museums.”
Perhaps it is this latter fact which accounts for my never being able to find the good citizen A—— at home. He is gone to the public club, or to the bath, or to the Communal Theater, I am told, when I appear again and again. This wonderful community has done much, of that I am convinced, in the development of ideal freedom; but there appears to be a fatal blight somewhere in its principles, a blight which seems to have destroyed all delight in domestic life. In my next I will tell you more and at length, of the peculiar development which the race has attained under these now well-established emancipation doctrines, and of their results on the two sexes.
I hope you are not wearying of my somewhat lengthy descriptions, but you yourself are to blame, as you bound me to such rigid promises of detail and accuracy.
Farewell, dear companion, would you were here to use your wiser philosopher’s eyes.
I am yours, Wolfgang.
