Christmas Day.

My Good Hannevig: I have only just time to send you one more incident and scene. It being, as you may have observed at the top of my letter, Christmas Day, I was curious to see how this festival would be observed here. Somewhat to my surprise I observed that the population went about their avocations just as usual. Then I reflected, in a country, where every day after eleven in the morning a true holiday sets in, there being nothing for any one to do except to enjoy himself, it would be difficult fitly to celebrate any special fete day. In point of fact, there are none such. The people voted them out of the calendar, saying they had all they could do to kill the ordinary enjoyment hours of each week without having to invent new games or occupations for a dozen different feast days. So all holidays are prescribed by law except Christmas. This day is kept up for two reasons—because it is thought to be an excellent time to show off the children brought up by the State to the people, and also because on Christmas Day each child is allowed to spend the day at home.

The exercises of the day began at the great Ethical Temple. Here ten thousand children were gathered to listen first to a lecture on the history of Christmas. There was a play in which Santa Claus appeared and a number of other legendary characters, to show the children in what mythological, absurd beings the children of the unenlightened nineteenth century believed in. Then ten thousand toys were distributed, dolls and whips and tops, and sleighs and skates. But as all were distributed indiscriminately by State officers to the children as they passed out on review, of course all the boys got the dolls and the girls the whips and tops. An hour afterward, outside the great building, I saw groups of the children doing a tremendous exchange, far more interested in bartering damaged dolls for shining skates than in endeavoring to establish the identity of their own parents, whom, indeed, having only seen a few times in the course of their lives, they barely know by sight.

I was slowly walking homeward, speculating on these and other revelations made by a more intimate knowledge of the workings of this great community, when I encountered a familiar face. It was that of my young lady-friend, whose conversation I reported to you above. She joined me and we walked on together.

“I hear you are going back to Sweden; is it true?” she asked.

“Yes, I return in a few days.”

“But you have enjoyed your trip—and—us?”

“Immensely. You are a wonderful country.”

“That, if I remember, is just what foreigners said to Americans two hundred years ago.” (I like this young girl particularly. She is more intelligent than most of the women one meets here. She is allowed to be, she told me, because she was so much less good-looking than others, which is true. But in this land of dead equality one is grateful for a little intelligence, even if it be served up with ugliness.)

“There is one thing I can not become accustomed to,” I said not wishing to be called to closer account for my impressions, “and that is that there are no church steeples or spires. The absence of them gives such a uniform look to all your cities.”

“Churches? Oh, they went out long ago, you know. Religion, it was found, brought about discussion. It was voted immoral.”

“Yes, I know. Only I thought a few spires or churches might possibly have been preserved in a kind of sentimental pickle, as castles and ruins are kept in England, to add what an old writer calls ‘the necessary element of decay to the landscape.’”“That was Ruskin, was it not? What a quaint old writer! His books read as if they were written in a dead language. As for the churches, they were all destroyed, you know, in the war between the radicals and the orthodox, and not a stone was left standing. Since then the State has erected these huge Ethical Temples, where all the religions are explained and where the philosophy of ethics is taught the people. The finest of all these temples is the Temple of the Liberators; have you seen it yet?”—she asked.

“I have not, but I should like to do so. Will you be my guide?”

She led me thither.

We soon came to a structure which being smaller, and of fairly good and symmetrical proportions, was a little less hideous than the other temples I had seen. Inside, in the center of the building was a colossal statue—a portrait it is said—of the founder, Henry George. Around the sides of the wall, were niches where portrait busts of the martyrs stand—the nihilists, early anarchists, and socialists who endured persecution and often death in the early days of socialism. A book I noticed was placed near the Henry George statue. It was the socialistic bible “Poverty and Progress” which with a number of other such books forms the chief literature of the people. Once a year, my young friend told me, there is a sacred reading to the people from this book.

As we turned to pursue our way homeward she again began to question me—“But you haven’t told me yet what you think of us—as a country and a people,” she persisted.

“Well, since you will have it I will tell you. You are a great and surprising people. I mean great in the sense of numbers, however, for great, politically and morally, you can never be again. You appear to have attained a certain order of perfection which, however, is only relative. You think you have solved all the great problems; but you have only begun to solve them. In attempting to make the people happy by insuring equality of goods and equal division of property, you have found it necessary to stultify ambition and to kill aspiration. Therefore a healthy, vigorous morale has ceased to exist. In making leisure a law you have robbed it of its sweetness. Ennui is the curse of the land. The arts languish, because the arts depend on the imagination, and imagination has been declared illegal, since all are not born with it. Your libraries and museums are open, but who sees them filled with readers and students? In other words, man having been born heir to all things, has ceased to value them. And so I leave you, well content to go back to my barbaric Sweden, where the forms of political government are so bad that men wrestle like gods to remedy them, and where men themselves are still born so unequal that they have to fight like demons to live at all. We are still chaotic, and unformed, and unredeemed, and unregenerate. But we are tremendously alive. And so I return with eager joy to take my part in the strife, to be a man, in other words, and not a part of a colossal machine. Why not go back with me? It will be a great experience, you would go back at least two hundred years.”

She sighed and murmured: “We are not allowed to travel. It is forbidden. It breeds dissatisfaction. But I wish we were. It sounds so very beautiful and strange.” And so I left her, as I must you, for my letter is a volume. In a few days I shall be telling you all I can not write. Adieu,

Yours,
Wolfgang.