great outdoors, as James thought of it, would expose "our gilded youths" to rugged conditions in which they would "get the childishness knocked out of them," so that they could "come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas."

Edward Bellamy conceived his industrial army, in Looking Backward, as a mechanism by means of which labor could be collectivized, performed with the consummate efficiency made possible by an elaborate division of tasks, and thereby reduced to a few hours of the day and a few years out of every life, leaving all the rest of the time free for amusement. James thought of an industrial army, on the other hand, as a means of making work as demanding as possible. For Bellamy, an army was a gigantic machine in which every job was reduced to a routine and the need for individual enterprise and imagination effectively eliminated. For James, enterprise and imagination, along with a sense of "civic honor" and a love of glory, were the very qualities that military life tended to promote. From his point of view, societies that failed to nourish these qualities, either through militarism or through its equivalent, were "fit only for contempt" and could expect "dangerous reactions" against themselves. He seems to have foreseen something like fascism after all; whereas Bellamy, convinced that men and women wish only to enjoy life with a minimum of effort, could foresee only a painless progress toward the celestial city of consumerism.

The introduction of wage labor had destroyed the independence of the small producer (itself originally conceived, by Harrington and other republican theorists, as a moral equivalent of the military calling) and created a permanent class of hirelings. For those who refused to indulge the illusion that wage earners could still become property owners if they set their minds to it, the "social question" now seemed to invite two radically conflicting solutions. The first accepted the wage system, with all its undesirable effects, as the price of economic abundance. The advantages of leisure and comfort would outweigh the moral disadvantages complained of by advocates of the "strenuous life," provided of course that consumer goods were distributed as widely as possible—the only conceivable justification of abundance in the first place. The second solution required the reorganization of work itself, with an eye to the restoration of its character-forming discipline. The first line of attack, exemplified to perfection in Bellamy's utopian novels, conceived of the individual

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