In all that I have outlined concerning the Industrial Republic, I have tried to indicate my belief that it will be the creation of no man’s will, but a product of evolution—the result of many forces which are now at work in our society. These forces we can study and analyse; and in picturing their final product, we are not simply indulging in fantastic speculation, but are making scientific deductions. I believe that we have now in our present world the half-developed embryo of everything which I have pictured in the future; the Revolution, which comes suddenly, and in the midst of strain and agony, is precisely the parallel of a child-birth. In our present “trusts,” for instance, we have perfect examples of the centralising and systematising of production and distribution; absolutely the only thing needed to fit them into the world I have pictured is a change of ownership. Again, in the labour unions, we see the building up of the machinery of industrial self-government. And similarly, in our churches and clubs, our benevolent and artistic and scientific associations, we have the germs of all the coöperative activities of the future. In our public educational system, we have a complete and perfect piece of practical Socialism, ready to fit into the structure of our Industrial Republic. In our Post Office we have still another, while in the army and navy we have examples of industrial paternalism which need only the breath of a new ideal to make them indispensable for all time. We saw after the San Francisco earthquake the real use of standing armies; and for such purposes they will continue to exist, long after war shall have become a nightmare memory.

It has occurred to me that in concluding my argument, it might be well to tell of another such seed of the future, in the planting of which I myself have had the pleasure of assisting. I refer to the Helicon Home Colony, at Englewood, New Jersey, where I have been living while writing this book.

Our industries are organised at present under the competitive system; and I do not believe that any coöperative method of production can drive human beings to the same pitch of effort as they are driven by the lash of wage-slavery. So I consider that any form of coöperation in production is doomed to failure, under present conditions; and I should prefer to watch from the outside any attempt to found “colonies” of the Brook Farm and Ruskin type. The case is quite otherwise, however, when it comes to coöperation in distribution, in the expenditure of one’s income. We are familiar with hundreds of forms of that sort of association—coöperative stores, benevolent fraternities, social clubs and churches. The practicability of any such enterprise depends upon two questions: First, are there a sufficient number of people who want the same thing, and second, can they get it more effectively in combination than otherwise.

The idea of coöperation in domestic industry has been well worked out in theory—notably in Mrs. Gilman’s book “The Home.” The first attempt to realise it in practice, so far as I know, is the Helicon Home Colony.

The plan was broached in an article which I published in The Independent, in June of 1906. In the course of the article, I outlined the situation as follows:

Here am I on my little farm, living as my ancestors lived—like a cave man or a feudal baron. I have my little castle and my retainers and dependants to attend me, and we practise a hundred different trades: the trade of serving meals, and the trade of cleaning dishes, the trade of washing and ironing clothes, of killing and dressing meat, of churning butter, of baking bread, of grinding meal, of raising chickens, of cutting wood, of preserving fruit, of heating a house, of decorating rooms, of training children, and of writing books! And all these crowded into one establishment, in close proximity, and all jarring and clashing with each other! And all carried on in the most primitive and barbarous fashion, upon a small scale, and by unskilled hand labour. It takes a hundred cooks to prepare a hundred meals badly, while twenty cooks could prepare one meal for a hundred families, and do it perfectly. It costs a hundred thousand dollars to build and equip a hundred kitchens; it would cost only five thousand dollars to build one kitchen! But, of course, if you have large-scale cooking at present, you can only have it under capitalist auspices; and so it is associated in your minds with uncleanness, and bad service, and high prices. It takes a hundred churns and a hundred aching backs to make a thousand pounds of butter; it would take only one machine and a man to tend it to make the same thousand pounds, and the cost of making it would be cut ninety-five per cent. But of course you cannot have large-scale butter-making except it is done for profit—and that means adulteration and poisoning! It takes a hundred ignorant nursemaids to take care of the children of a hundred families, and develop every kind of ugliness and badness in them; it would take only twenty or thirty trained nurses and kindergarten teachers to take care of them coöperatively, and bring them up according to the teachings of science.

One could show this same thing in a thousand different forms, if it were necessary; but it has all been reasoned out in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book, “The Home,” and anyone to whom the idea is new may read it there. The purpose of this paper is not to persuade anyone, but to move to action those already persuaded. There must be, in and near New York, thousands of men and women of liberal sympathies, who understand this situation clearly, and are handicapped by its miseries in their own lives—authors, artists and musicians, editors and teachers and professional men, who abhor boarding houses and apartment hotels and yet shrink from managing servants, who have lonely and peevish children like my own, and are no fonder of eating poisons or of wasting their time and strength than I am. There must be a few who, like myself, have realised that it is a question of dragging through life a constantly increasing burden of care, or making an intelligent effort and solving the problem once for all. To such I offer my coöperation. I am not a business man, but circumstances have forced me to take up this problem, and I am not accustomed to failing in what I undertake. I have said that “Socialism is not an experiment in government, but an act of will”; and I say the same of this plan. Having gotten the figures from experts and found out exactly what we can do, the one thing remaining is to go ahead and do it.

I suppose that the average professional man invests ten thousand dollars in a home (or else pays rent equal to interest upon that sum); and that he pays two thousand dollars a year living expenses for his family. Let a hundred such families combine to found a coöperative home, and there would be a million dollars for building and equipment, and two hundred thousand dollars a year for running expenses; I believe that for half the outlay five hundred people could live and enjoy comforts at present possible only to millionaires. I have, however, no intention of asking anyone to risk his money upon such a guess. I write this to find out if there are people disposed to consider the project; and if there are enough, I will have the plan figured upon by architects, contractors, stewards, and other qualified experts, and have prepared a definite business proposition, and a plan of organisation for a stock company.

The following embodies my own conception of what such a “home colony” should be. It would be located within an hour of New York, and would have one hundred families, and three or four hundred acres of land, healthfully located, near some body of water, and as unspoiled by the hand of man as possible. It should have an abundant water supply and a filtering plant; an electric light and power plant, and a large garden and farm, raising its own stock, meat, poultry, fruit and vegetables, and canning the last for winter use. It should be administered by a board of directors, democratically elected. For the management of its various departments salaried experts should be employed; machinery should be installed wherever it could be made to pay, and the best modern methods should be applied in every industry. All its purchases should be in bulk and tested for quality; and, so far as the preparation and serving of food is concerned, the processes should be kept as aseptic as a surgical operation.

We are accustomed to having our buildings for public purposes endowed by persons with a great deal of money and few ideals; and so we consume much space and material and accomplish little, exactly typifying our civilisation. The buildings of this home colony should be of frame at the outset, of simple and expressive design, each structure exactly adapted to its specific purpose. The buildings should be conveniently grouped—those for the children in one place, those for cooking and eating in another, those for reading, for music and social intercourse, for recreation and exercise, in still other places. The greater part of the land would of course be given up to farm and woodland, and to the individual dwellings of the families. The ground available for this latter purpose should be divided into lots, priced according to size and location, and eased to stockholders for long terms. Each would erect his own home, according to his own taste—a home, of course, of a kind hitherto unknown, with no provision for the cooking of food, or the training of children, or other trades and professions. It would be a place where the family met, to rest and play and sleep. It might be large or small, anything that the owner chose to make it—my own would be a four- or five-room cottage, of rustic design, and it would cost from six to eight hundred dollars. Besides these there should be apartment buildings, owned by the colony, and dormitories with rooms for single men and women.

As to the public buildings, there should be a large and beautiful dining hall, and a modern, scientifically constructed kitchen. There should be separate tables for each family, or for congenial groups of people. The service should be unexceptionable, the food simple, but perfect in quality and preparation; there should be a vegetarian service for those who prefer this cheaper mode of life, and the charge for board should be based upon the cost of the service. As to what the cost would be, with a colony raising nearly all its own food upon the premises, I can only submit three experiences of my own: First, it cost me for my family of three to board in New York City, in one room and in the cheapest way, a thousand dollars a year. Second, it cost us, living in a three-room cottage in the country, doing our own work and buying our food from a farmer at wholesale prices, seven hundred dollars a year. Third, it cost us, living upon a sixty-acre farm, which represented a total investment of four thousand dollars, doing no work ourselves but the managing, paying a man and woman five hundred and forty dollars a year, having a horse and carriage, and feeding five persons instead of three, a total of less than six hundred dollars a year. Lest this should be unbelievable, I put it in another form—the total expenses of the farm, including labour, were less than twelve hundred dollars, the income was six hundred dollars, and the net loss, or the cost to us of a year’s living, was less than six hundred. And these figures, it should be explained, included not merely board, but also household supplies and repairs of all sorts, items which would appear in other places in the community’s accounts. I will probably be laughed at, but I believe that, granting the land, horses and machinery, buildings, equipment and capital, the members of such a colony as I describe could be provided with perfect service and an abundance of food of the best quality at a total cost of one hundred dollars a year per person.

So much for the coöperative preparation of food. And now for the caring for children. There should be two separate establishments, one for infants, who like to sleep, and one for children, who like to run and shout. Both should be scientifically constructed and ventilated and kept as clean as an up-to-date hospital; the food should be prepared under the general direction of a physician. No building for children should be over two stories high, and the upper windows should be beyond the reach of children; no matches or exposed fire should be permitted, and there should be a night watchman, fire extinguishers, and an automatic sprinkling apparatus. These establishments should be under the supervision of a board of women directors; and the actual work of caring for the children, washing, dressing and feeding them, playing with them and teaching them, should be done by trained nurses and kindergarten teachers who live in the colony as the friends and social equals, of its members. In other words, it is my idea that the caring for children should be recognised as a profession, and that servants should have nothing to do with it; it is my idea that it should be done in a place built for the purpose, with floors for babies to crawl where there is no dirt for them to eat, with playgrounds for children where there are no stoves and no boiling water, no staircases and wells, no cats and dogs, no workbaskets, lamps, pianos, sewing machines, jam closets, inkstands, and authors’ writing tables. Instead, there should be sleeping rooms and bedrooms, and sun parlours for nursing mothers; a separate building for the sick; kindergarten rooms and indoor playgrounds for bad weather, and a big all-outdoors romping ground, with sunny places and shady places, swings, rocking horses, sand piles, and all other accessories of a children’s heaven. Of course, any mother should come and play with or care for her own children just as much as she pleased, or take them home, as she chose; though I think that no one would care to assist this plan who did not believe that children should be cared for in accordance with the principles of science, and preserved from the corrupting influence of grandmothers and aunts. Of course, any mother who believed that her work in the world was caring for children, and who wished to care for her own and others, according to the methods of the commonwealth, would be free to do so, and to earn her living by doing it.

I have already explained that I should not regard this as an experiment in Socialism; but I do think that those who undertook it would have to be in sympathy with the spirit of Socialism, which is the spirit of brotherhood and democracy. Whenever I have mentioned this plan to friends they have always said: “The great difficulty would be to get together a community of congenial people.” It does not seem to me that this would be a difficulty at all. Every member of the community would have his own home, to which he would invite his personal friends as he chose; and the other members of the community he would meet in the same way that he meets acquaintances in business and politics, in theatres, restaurants, and clubs. I myself am the most unsociable of human beings when I am busy, and have no idea of giving up my hermit’s tastes. In a colony of a hundred families there ought to be persons of every kind of inclination, and it would not be in the least necessary for anyone to associate with those who were not congenial.

Of course there are people in the world whom we should not want near us at all; but such people, I think, would not care to join our colony. Vulgar and snobbish people get along very well in the world as it is, and do not find it a task to give orders to servants. Those who would be interested in such a plan would be men and women who wished to practise “plain living and high thinking”; and they would naturally wish to get as far as possible from every suggestion of ostentation and conventionality. They would establish the shirt-waist and the short skirt as en règle, and would, I trust, allow me in without a dress suit. They would be all hard-working people themselves, and they would not look down upon honest labour. This spirit, if wisely and earnestly cultivated, would solve the “servant problem” for the colony, and solve the health problem for its members as well. I know business and professional men who, when they need exercise, have to go down into the basement and lift weights and pull at rubber straps; and they envy me my farm, where I can hoe the garden, or pitch hay, or pick fruit, and not merely benefit my body, but also put money in my purse. In this community every member would be credited for the time he worked; and it ought to become the custom for the men to help with the harvests, and the women with the preserving of fruit, and the children with the berry picking and the weeding of the gardens. I have no doubt that there are thousands of young men and women in New York City, students of art and music and the professions, who would be glad of a chance to earn their way in a community where class feeling did not make labour degrading. I appreciate the difficulties in the way of such a project; the chances at present are against a coal-heaver’s being a socially possible person, and I am not insisting that the day labourers should share in the privileges of the community. But I do think that this should certainly be the case with those whom we select to care for and teach our children, and also, if possible, with those whom we permit to prepare and serve our food; if I am not willing to shake a man’s hand or sit next to him in a reading-room, I do not see why I should be willing to eat what he has cooked. I personally know a young man who is studying art, and who earns his living by washing dishes in a downtown restaurant, because it takes only two or three hours a day of his time. In Memorial Hall at Harvard University, in the sanitarium at Battle Creek, and in many other places I might name, those who wait upon the tables are college students; and anyone who knows the difference which there is in the atmosphere of such a dining hall knows what I should wish to attain.

The above article brought me replies from four or five hundred persons; and committees were named, which met all through the summer to work out the details of the plan. In October of the same year the purchase of Helicon Hall was made, and the “Colony” began its career. Six months after the publication of my first article, I contributed to The Independent an account of how the experiment was succeeding; I quote from it the following paragraphs:

We made many mistakes; I shall tell about some of them in due course, for the benefit of future pioneers. But there is one thing to be said here at the start: we made no mistake in believing in democratic institutions. It was a point about which the critics of our plan were all agreed, that it could not possibly work, because people could never decide what they wanted. That dreadful bugaboo called “human nature” would wreck us in the end. I, for my part, believed that people in America were used to the methods of majority government, and I believed that if we should apply those same methods in a coöperative home, a group of intelligent and sincere people could manage to solve all their problems. From the beginning our policy was publicity and democracy; and from the beginning it brought us through. At the committee meetings everyone had his say. And little by little you would see a majority opinion taking shape on the question at issue, until, finally, when all had been heard, the matter was put to a vote. There was no case where the minority did not give way with all courtesy. And now that the colony really exists we sit round the fireside and talk out our questions, and as a rule we do not even have to take a vote—an informal discussion is enough to make clear to everyone what is fair and right.

I am a believer in the materialistic conception of history; I am accustomed to interpret the characters of men from this position—to say that competition has made them selfish and deceitful, and that coöperation will make them beautiful and sincere. I think that I can see it working out in this colony. We have founded it upon justice and truth; socially we stand upon terms of equality, and economically we pay for exactly what we get. These are the principles we have built upon, and all take them for granted, and no other idea ever enters their thought.

“But will this last?” you ask. I do not see how it can fail to last, and to grow—admitting, of course, that my analysis of the cause is correct. We did not start out with any enthusiasms and religious ecstasies; we had simply cold common sense; we employed lawyers and business men to put us on a sound basis. Our only real peril was at the beginning, before the colony spirit was well developed in our members, and some of us were tired and overworked; and even then there were no misunderstandings that a little discussion could not clear up. Now things are beginning to run smoothly, and we are realising some of the benefits.

We are as yet in our infancy, of course; there is no one of the departments in which we do not intend to make numerous improvements; but we have got over the roughest parts of the road, and we can begin to look about us a little. We are living in what I think is the most beautiful suburban town near New York. We have nine and a half acres of land, sloping down from the western brow of the Palisades, and commanding a view of thirty miles, and we have only half a mile to walk to come out upon the Hudson, where there is scenery which tourists would travel many miles to look at, if they only knew about it. The hall itself has nearly six thousand square feet of floor space on the ground floor alone, devoted to rooms for social purposes; there is a central court filled with palms and rubber trees, which have grown to the very top of the three-story building. We have a large pipe-organ, a swimming pool and bowling alley, a theatre, and a billiard room. We have thirty-five bedrooms, ranged in galleries about the court, so that we can look out of our windows in the morning and see the sun rise, and then look out of our door and see the tropics. We have the finest heating system in the world—we pump fresh air in from outside, heat it in a three-thousand-foot steam coil, and then distribute it to all the rooms, with the result that we feel as well all the time as other people feel when they take a trip to Arizona or the Adirondacks. In such a place as this we have a comfortable bedroom or study, where we can go and be by ourselves and never be disturbed, for $3 a week. And downstairs we have a huge fireplace, where, if we happen to feel in a sociable humour, we can sit and talk with our friends. And also, we have a dining-room, where a group of cultivated people meet three times a day to partake of wholesome and pleasant-tasting food, prepared by other members of our big family, whose cleanliness and honesty are matters of common knowledge to us. This last-named privilege costs us $5 a week, or $4 if we only eat two meals; and we do not have to add to this price any care or worry, because the price includes the salary of a superintendent and a manager, who work sixteen hours a day each to straighten out all the kinks and keep the machine running.

Finally, this magical building contains a dormitory and a children’s dining-room and play-room, where ten happy and healthy children receive their lessons in practical coöperation at a cost of four dollars a week for each child. It was over these “institutionalised infants” of ours that the critics of our plan were most incensed. Several dear ladies who had read my books and conceived a liking for me, sat down and wrote me tearful letters to point out the wickedness of “separating the mother from her children.” As a matter of fact, we have five mothers in the colony, and the work of caring for the children is divided among four of them. (The fifth is studying medicine in New York.) By the simple process of combining the care of the ten children we accomplish the following results: First, the labour and trouble of caring for each child is reduced about two-thirds; second, the child has playmates, and is happy all day long; third, we can afford to keep the child in a more hygienic place than the average nursery—we have a pump driving fresh air into his play-room all day; and, fourth, we can dispense with the services of nurse maids, and go away, leaving the child in the care of a friend.

Of course we cannot have everything that we should like in the “children’s department.” We have to wait for more colonists for that. With only ten children we have to dispense with a resident physician; we cannot even afford a kindergarten. And, of course, we have not the scientifically constructed dormitory of which we dream; we have only a converted theatre, and instead of the uniform cots and the dustproof walls and all the rest, we have to make apologies to visitors. However, our children are all enjoying it meantime; and our five mothers are holding meetings and learning to coöperate.

The other big problem which we promised to tackle is the servant problem. All the world is waiting to hear about this, so we are told; even the aristocracy of Englewood is waiting; the ladies come in and tell us their troubles and ask if we will feed them in cases of emergency. They were even going to invite me to lecture them about it—until one of them recollected that I was a Socialist “of a particularly dangerous type.”

We have been only a few months at it; and we have still a great deal left to accomplish. But we think that we have got far enough to claim to have proven our thesis—that by means of coöperation, with the saving which it implies, the introduction of system and of labour-saving machinery, household labour can be lifted to the rank of a profession, and people found to do it who can be admitted to the colony as members. Those who wish to make fun of the idea have assumed this to mean that we insist upon college diplomas from our cooks and chambermaids. It does not mean that at all; as a matter of fact, we prefer to employ people who have always earned their living by doing the work they do for us. It means simply that we look for people who are cleanly and courteous and honest; and that then, when they come into the colony, we treat them, simply and as a matter of course, exactly as we treat everyone else. So far as I know, there is no one here who has experienced the least difficulty or unpleasantness in consequence.

There remains to explain the financial organisation of the colony. The property is owned by the Home Colony Company, a separate corporation, which was formed to raise the necessary capital. The company puts the building in thorough repair and equips it for use as a residence, and the colony rents it upon a three-year lease, assuming responsibility for the interest on the mortgages, the insurance, taxes, and other charges, and paying eight per cent. dividends upon the company stock. The ownership of stock is thus entirely optional. One may live in the colony without contributing any capital.

The Helicon Home Colony is a membership corporation. It is governed by a board of directors, elected every six months by secret ballot. The only conditions to residence in the colony are “congeniality” and freedom from contagious disease; one may reside in the colony indefinitely without becoming a member, but only members have the right to vote. The conditions of membership are one month’s residence, election by a four-fifths vote, and the payment of an initiation fee of $25. The constitution of the colony provides for initiative, referendum and recall of members of the board of directors; also for a complete statement of the financial affairs of the colony, to be rendered every three months.

I have quoted this at length because, as I said before, I believe that it is the seed from which mighty forests are destined to grow. We should never have given the time and strength which we have given to this experiment, but for our certainty that all the world will some day be following in our footsteps. We are living in a coöperative home because we wish to do it—but some day you will be doing it because you have to. You get along badly enough with your servants, you admit; still you get along somehow or other. But has it ever occurred to you what your plight would be if, when you went to the “intelligence-office,” instead of getting a bad servant, you got no servant at all? When that time comes, you will be grateful to us pioneer “home-colonists.”

It is a most interesting thing to watch; it is the Industrial Republic in the making. We care nothing whatever about the intellectual opinions of the people who come to live in the colony; but I have observed that nearly every non-Socialist who has come here has been turned into a Socialist in the course of a month or two. And that is not because we argue with him, or bother him; it is simply because facts are facts. What becomes of the old shop-worn argument that it would be necessary to change human nature—when human nature is suddenly discovered to be so kindly and considerate as it is in this big home of ours? And what becomes of the ponderous platitudes about “Socialism versus Individualism” in a place where so many different kinds of individuals are developing their individualities.

I am often moved to use this experiment of ours as an illustration of what I said in the previous chapter, concerning the difference between material and intellectual production. Here in Helicon Hall we have all the dreadful machinery of paternalism which frightens our capitalist editors and college presidents whenever they contemplate Socialism; we submit ourselves to the blind rule of majorities—we allow a majority to decide what we shall pay for our rooms, and when we shall pay it; to lay out our menu, and refuse to give us pie for breakfast; to forbid our giving tips, or whistling in the halls, or dancing after a certain hour at night. And we have all the symbols of oppression—constitution and by-laws and boards of directors and managers. And yet somehow, we are freer than we ever were in the world before; because, by means of these little concessions, we have made possible a system—and so flung from our shoulders all at once the burden of care which used to wear the life out of us.

And in consequence of that, for the first time in our experience we find ourselves really free with regard to the real things of life. We have absolutely not a convention in the place. We do as we please, and we wear what we please. We are free to come and go, where we please and whenever we please. We have each our own rooms or apartments, to which we retire, and it never comes into anyone’s mind to ask what we are doing there. We may work all night and sleep all day, if we feel like it—so little do we bother with each others’ affairs that I have known people to be away for a day or two without being missed.

And on the other hand, if we feel like company, we can have it; there is always a group around our wonderful four-sided fireplace in the evening, and you can always find someone willing to play billiards or go for a walk. And as for our intellectual freedom—you should see the sparks scatter when our half-score assorted varieties of “Fabians” and “impossibilists,” “individualists” and “communist-anarchists,” all get together after dinner! There are so many typewriters in Helicon Hall that as you wander about the galleries in the morning you can fancy you hear a distant battle with rapid-firing guns; and the products of the industry vary from discussions of Yogi philosophy and modern psychic research to magazine fiction, woman’s suffrage debates, and Jungle “muck-raking.” And yet all these people share amicably in the ownership of the fireplace and the swimming-pool and the tennis-court; providing thereby a most beautiful illustration of the working out of the formula laid down by Kautsky for the society of the future: “Communism in material production, anarchism in intellectual.”

It is working out so beautifully, that the spirit of it has got hold of even our children, and they are holding meetings and deciding things. Of our nine youngsters seven are under six years of age; and last night I attended a meeting of the whole nine, at which a grave question was gravely discussed: “When a child wakes up early in the dormitory, is it proper to wake the other children, or should the child lie still?” After a long debate, Master David (aged five) remarked: “All in favour, please say Aye.” Everybody said “Aye.”

The above was written in the middle of December, 1906. On March 16, 1907, at four o’clock in the morning, Helicon Hall was burned to the ground, and forty-six adults and fifteen children were turned out homeless upon the snow. The story of our ill-fated experiment is left to stand as it was first printed.