Time Will Run Back

Chapter 43

THERE were wild celebrations everywhere. For a few weeks the world was intoxicated with peace and liberty. Orators spoke as if humanity were about to enter the gates of paradise.

Peter shared at first in the general elation. But when he began to realize that everyone else was depending on him to justify these millennial hopes, the sense of responsibility fell back on him like a heavy weight.

Before victory it had been easy enough to talk eloquently of the better world to come. But when the problem was actually before one, when it came to the actual task of deciding on the means, spelling out the details, and above all of doing.... “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.”... Where had he heard that?... Ah, yes, Edith Robinson had read it to him in that rediscovered bourgeois writer, Shakespeare. How wise! And how simply it called attention to the inescapable scarcity of means to achieve all our ends! If only all the noisy and self-complacent reformers who were now intoxicated by their own rhetoric could be got to take this sobering cathartic!...

The tremendous problems he faced now were dominantly political. The world was too fantastically big to be run by any single group from any single center. The only solution was to give self-rule to all the provinces—to England, France, Wales, Texas—and to use the central government only to maintain peaceful and free relations among them. But how could he prevent each of these provinces from falling into the hands of some petty tyrant or dictator? He must first of all put the choice of leaders and the form of government into the hands of the peoples of these provinces. The leaders must be freely chosen, and peaceably removable, by the people.

But how could he consistently ask for this when he himself had never been chosen by the people?

He must begin by making the central government of Freeworld a model of a popular representative government. He must begin by risking his own leadership.

He drafted a provisional constitution. It struck him as a happy idea to guard the freedom of future minorities against the possible tyranny of future majorities themselves by setting self-denying limits, in this constitution, to the power of the new government. He knew that a future majority, if sufficiently determined, could disregard these limits or interpret them away; but their action in doing so, he hoped, would be a clearer warning signal than otherwise that they were embarking on a dangerous path.

Next he decided that the people would have neither the time nor the special knowledge to decide technical problems of legislation for themselves, but only to choose a body of representatives to decide these problems for them.

Even this body, he decided, would be too awkward to initiate a detailed legislative program. It should only be asked to ratify or reject the program submitted to it. The real function of this popular assembly would not be to legislate but to choose and keep an executive. It would select its own leader, and ratify or reject the laws and policies he proposed. If it rejected them, then the rejected leader could either resign and let the popular assembly choose some other leader that it would follow, or he could force the legislative assembly to go back to the people for a new election, and go back himself, so that the people could decide between them.

This de facto government-policy-maker Peter decided to call the Majority Leader; and because his tenure might be temporary and insecure he decided to create a more permanent head of the government, called the President, also to be chosen by the representative assembly, who would be the titular head but who would perform honorary and ceremonial functions and act as a moderator among political factions.

Peter provided a procedure by which his provisional constitution could be amended by the assembly and a popular referendum.

He set a date for an election three months off, and indicated ways in which candidates might be nominated.

Telegrams poured in from local groups suggesting candidates to support Peter’s policies. No one dared to suggest any rival candidates.

There was only one way, Peter decided, to remedy this. He withdrew himself as a candidate for any office whatever, and asked Adams to assume the leadership of a Freedom Party.

Rival candidates began to appear. They represented, at first, all shades of doctrine, but leadership among the candidates who were not adherents of the Freedom Party began to gravitate toward a Chinese, Wang Ching-li, a man of remarkable presence and even more remarkable eloquence.

“I hesitate to predict it, chief,” Adams said, “but I’m afraid this fellow Wang, and not myself, will become the first Majority Leader.”

“But his ideas are so vague you can’t do anything with them,” complained Peter. “He has started to talk mysteriously about a ‘Third Way’ that is neither ‘capitalism’ nor socialism, but he never says what this Third Way is. I can’t believe people will vote for anything as cloudy as that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Adams. “It isn’t his ideas that are going to elect him.”

“Then what is?”

“The Chinese vote.”

“You mean people are going to vote on mere racial grounds, after national boundaries have long been broken down, after centuries of indoctrination in our common humanity and the brotherhood of man?”

Adams shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe I’m cynical. But there are more Chinese than anybody else, and the whole Orient envies the Occident. We never did succeed in reducing Occidental poverty to the level of Oriental poverty, even under egalitarian communism.”

“That’s because Oriental impoverishment kept increasing, because the Orientals kept overpopulating—”

“Ah, and now, chief, is when the overpopulation is at last going to pay dividends. Power will now be decided by votes. The Orient has the votes; and it will use them to rule the Occident and share the wealth by taxing the West to subsidize the East—”

“Always the black view,” said Peter. “But I don’t believe it. People will be convinced by reason. I will take the stump for your party, Adams, and we will defeat Wang by argument.”

But Wang proved to be a very skillful as well as eloquent debater. He talked constantly against “monopoly.” He talked against “bigness.” He was against bigness everywhere and in everything, against congestion, overcrowding, and what he called “proletarianization.” He was against giant overgrown cities, giant overgrown buildings, giant overgrown factories. He was against the Cult of the Colossal. He wanted everybody to have a balanced, human life; he wanted everybody to have his own house and to work in his own garden.

He said he didn’t like factories that employed more than 100 people. He demanded equality of opportunity and education for the children of the poor with the children of the rich. He demanded a stiff inheritance tax.

Peter was kept busy answering him. What did Wang mean by monopoly? he asked. Was it always bad? Everybody had a monopoly of his own peculiar talent or genius. Wherever people or products were not completely alike in all respects, competition could not be perfect. But what did that matter? Wasn’t it enough if competition dominated economic life, so that every product or method of production that was inferior was constantly being, or on the verge of being, supplanted by something better?

And did Wang want competition in every field? Did he want half a dozen competing telephone companies in the same city? Half a dozen railroads paralleling each other over the same routes?

Did Wang want to forbid the existence of factories or companies employing more than 100 men? Did he know how much such a law might cost the public in preventing the enormous economies of large-scale production?

He himself had always been uncompromisingly opposed, Peter insisted, to coercive monopoly, to monopoly built up or sustained by any form of force, fraud or misrepresentation, duplicity or unfair practice, and he had already labored to define these coercive practices in the law. He had already illegalized every form of conspiracy or secret agreement to reduce output or fix prices. Did Wang want to go further than that? And with what measures? Let him be specific!

Peter agreed with Wang, he said, so far as his personal preference was concerned, in not liking big cities. But did Wang intend to force his personal preferences on everyone else? Would he forbid a city to grow beyond 50,000 inhabitants, say? Who would select who was and who was not to be permitted to live in a city that had reached its legal population limit?

The biggest debate was on the question of inheritance. Wouldn’t a denial of the right of inheritance, Peter asked, or even an abridgment of it, open up the door to a gradual denial or abridgment of all property rights? Private property, Peter contended, was not only one of the great pillars of individual freedom, but the main incentive to the accumulation of capital.

But when the great debate was finished, and the election results rolled in, they gave Wang’s Unity Party a thin majority.

The Uldanov-Adams Freedom Party ran second.

At the first meeting of the new Parliament next week Wang would be chosen as the first majority leader of the new democratic world. Adams would be named leader of the Opposition.

Peter was crushed. He was even more bewildered by the verdict than resentful of it. It was he, Peter, who by a voluntary abdication of power and even at the risk of his life had given the world freedom. It was he who had set up a system under which the individual was at last freed from terror of the State, at last made secure in the possession of some property of his own; and this system had produced wealth on a scale hitherto undreamed of. It was he, Peter, who had made this very election possible. And the people had used it to repudiate his principles—in effect, to repudiate him!

He had failed! The people would use their new power to destroy the system he had given them, to destroy even their own new-found liberties!

But Adams had a different interpretation.

“The result had very little to do with principles, chief. I told you what would happen from the start. You had the solid Chinese vote against you—and the solid Indian vote, and the solid African vote. All these people are tired of being ruled by the West. It was you who gave the East the chance to throw us out. I was always against it!”

Yet the next day an almost unanimous demand arose in the press that Peter Uldanov be named the first constitutional President of the Republic of Freeworld. Wang himself called on Peter and urged him to accept.

“No,” said Peter. “I am deeply touched by your magnanimity; but I’ve disqualified myself by campaigning against you, and I’m already labeled as a partisan.”

“But I’m as deeply attached to a free market system as you are,” Wang insisted. “There is no real difference of principle between us. We differ only on details. The only problem is, how can we best purify and perfect that system?”

“I’m immensely relieved to hear you talk like that,” said Peter. “But I’ve had my share of public life. You know, I was thrown into it against my will, and my fiancee wants me to give it up—”

“Think it over,” said Wang, “and let me know after the week end.”

Peter and Edith Robinson spent the week end as Adams’ guests at his country home high in the Berkshires. Edith went to bed early on the first evening, but Adams and Peter sat before the open fire—it was April—and talked late into the night.

“You ought to accept Wang’s offer,” Adams said. “It’s a tremendous honor.”

“No, Adams. You know, when the election results first came in I got a jolt. Then I got depressed. But it’s all over in two days. Now I feel immensely relieved. For the first time in my life I’m free. And now that Wang has announced his program, I’m convinced that I did succeed. After all, I wouldn’t have discovered much of a system if only one man could be trusted to operate it. I was beginning to get the obsession that only I understood how to keep the system from going on the rocks. The election cured me.”

“Tell me,” Adams said: “now that we have achieved a free system, do you think mankind will at last be happy? Will people not only be enterprising, but just, generous, kind?”

Peter gazed thoughtfully into the fire. “We can’t tell whether man, now that he is free, will turn out to be wholly admirable. No system, I suppose, can be any better than the men and women who operate it. If they are selfish, stupid, unjust, hungry for power at the expense of their fellows, I don’t suppose our new system, or any conceivable system, can wipe out such vices or save people from themselves. But under a free system man has the opportunity, at least, to do his best, and to show the moral and intellectual stature to which he is capable of growing....”

Adams put a new log on the fire.

“No,” Peter went on, “we can’t be sure that man, now that he is free, will use his freedom only for acts that are praiseworthy. He may even begin to develop social theories that present his own shortcomings as the shortcomings of the system under which he lives. He may call his own faults the faults of the system. Free man may come even to blame his own freedom, to blame the very system that makes him free, to imagine that there is some other possible system, some other arrangement or distribution of human rights and powers, under which he might be completely perfect and everlastingly happy.”

“That isn’t the most optimistic conclusion to arrive at, Peter, concerning your own accomplishment.”

“But while we don’t know, Adams, whether free men will necessarily be noble and magnanimous, one thing we do know—that unfree man has been, and will always be, contemptible and wretched....”

The new log suddenly burst into flame. Both men watched it in silence.

“Tell me,” Adams resumed at last: “If you are not going to take Wang’s offer, what are you going to do.”

Peter smiled. “I told you I was free. Edith and I are planning to get married next month—quietly, if that is possible—and then we plan to live in the nearest thing to paradise, and to raise a family. We have found a house in Nantucket on a cliff overlooking the sea—”

“Is that all?”

“Not quite. You know, I was trained as a pianist, and until my father—and Bolshekov—forced me into politics my one ambition was to be a great pianist. It hasn’t quite left me. I intend to compose music, and to play the piano.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough? To try to play with perfection, and never succeed, but always to feel one’s self getting better; to help to enlarge, if I can, that great manmade world of harmony that seems to be beyond the vicissitudes of nature itself; to walk along the beach, to look out on the sea, to—” he felt embarrassed—“to love and be loved—to raise a family. Isn’t that enough to fill out the rest of my life?”

“How old are you now, Peter?”

“Twenty-eight.”

Adams smiled. “And so you are old, and wish to retire.”

“No: and so I am young, and wish to live. Of course your definition of life is politics. But even on that definition you’ll have to admit that I’ve lived a pretty full political life in the last nine years!”

“Tell me honestly. Do you really think it possible that you can ever stop worrying about political problems?”

“I hope so. After all, the better political and economic conditions get, the less interest I will have to take in them. Things have arrived at the point, it seems to me, where I can safely leave politics and economics to those who have a predominant taste for such matters. I will play Mozart.”

“But suppose there is a crisis? Suppose Wang makes a mess of things, or is voted out of power, and the people turn to you as the Elder Statesman and demand that you return from your retirement?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, which I hope we never do. You are assuming things will go wrong; I am assuming they will go right. And if they go right, I need have no feeling of guilt for not taking part in them. After all, my new definition of a good society is simple: it is one in which it is possible for a man who loves Mozart to devote himself to Mozart. In other words, it is one in which an artist can feel free to devote himself exclusively to his art. And, you know, I’m particularly blessed in that respect, for Edith not only wants me to be a musician but she herself wants seriously to take up the violin—”

“You know,” broke in Adams, “in our old Marxist histories, which may or may not be true, they tell about an emperor who fiddled while Rome burned.”

“The story may even be true, Adams. But let’s not get mixed up. The real disaster was not the fiddling but the burning. After all, it’s up to you politicians not to go around starting any more fires-”

Edith broke into the room. She looked fresh and sparkling, and had on a neat tweed suit.

“Good heavens! What does this mean? Have you two been up talking the whole night long? It’s after five o’clock. Haven’t you heard the news? It was just on the radio a few minutes ago. Do you know what’s happened? You’ve won! The count has just been completed from the Chinese and Indian country districts; the result on six seats in Parliament is changed—enough to give the Freedom Party an absolute majority of two seats!”

“That can’t be so—” began Adams.

The telephone rang. Adams answered. “Really?... No!... Astounding!... No, you didn’t wake me up. I appreciate your generosity.... I’m very grateful for your call.

“You know who that was?” he said to Peter. “Wang. He called up to tell me that the radio reports are right, and that he’s conceded our victory! My first act is going to be to ask the new Parliament, when it meets tomorrow, to name you as the first President. I’m sure the election will be unanimous. You must accept! It’s your absolute duty to accept!”

“After all I’ve just said?”

“After all you’ve just said. This is your program that we’re going to put into effect. You can’t walk out on responsibility for it.”

“And Mozart?”

“Mozart can wait. Others will play him. So far as that’s concerned, there’s nothing to prevent you from playing him all you want, in private, in your leisure moments.”

“But,” protested Peter, “the President’s term is ten years!”

“And so you’ll be an old man of thirty-eight when you get out,” said Adams sarcastically, “all used up and ready to be thrown on the scrap heap!”

Peter looked appealingly at Edith.

“You’ve got to accept, darling!” she said. “You know you do. Adams is right: it’s your duty.”

“You too think I’m a better politician than I am a pianoplayer?”

She laughed. “I know you’re a better pianist than I am a violinist. It will take me at least ten years’ hard practice before I’m fit to accompany you.”

Peter sighed, and then smiled. “All right, Adams, make your announcement. But I warn you—I’m not going to be a mere figurehead. I accept on condition that you promise to ask my advice on all serious matters, and even to weigh it carefully.”

“Why do you think I’m asking you to serve?” asked Adams.

Edith kissed them both. “Don’t you boys know yet that it’s after five o’clock? Look at those streaks of light,” she said, pointing toward the picture window, “just above that range of mountains. Come, darling,” she continued, taking Peter by the arm, “as long as you’ve stayed up this long, you’re going with me on the terrace to see the dawn.”

And they watched the sun come up in all its glory.