Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward

Although work battalions are crammed into flimsy barracks and tents, and although older homes and apartment buildings are falling down for lack of maintenance, forcing more and more families to share their tiny, unheated dwellings—nevertheless, the housing shortage is officially being eliminated. There are no more problems in the economy, because they now are illegal.

VOICES F R O M THE PAST

There is a message flashing on the front panel of our time machine. It reads: Duplicate sequence in memory bank. Check years 1816, 1831, 1904, and 1949. That tells us that the on-board computer has found a similarity between what we are now viewing in the future and something that was recorded in the past. We had better check it out. On your keyboard, type: Send data to printer and press the key labelled Execute.

The first item is coming out of the printer now. It is a warning.

In the year 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Sam Kercheval in which he said:

We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessities and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements,... our people ... must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give our earnings of fifteen of these to the government,... have no time to think, no means of calling our mis-managers to account; but be glad to obtain sustenance by hiring ourselves out to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.... And this is the tendency of all human governments ... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery.... And the forehorse of this frightful team is 554

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public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.1

Here is the second printout. It is a political commentary and a prophesy. In the year 1831, a young Frenchman, named Alexis de Tocqueville, toured the United States to prepare an official report to his government on the American prison system. His real interest, however, was the social and political environment in the New World. He found much to admire in America but he also observed what he thought were the seeds of its destruction. Upon his return to France the following year, he began work on a four-volume analysis of the strengths and weaknesses he found. His perceptivity was remarkable, and his work, entitled Democracy in America, has remained as one of the world's classic works in political science.

This is the part that our computer recognized:

The Americans hold that in every state the supreme power ought to emanate from the people; but when once that power is constituted, they can conceive, as it were, no limits to it, and they are ready to admit that it has the right to do whatever it pleases.... The idea of rights inherent in certain individuals is rapidly disappearing from the minds of men; the idea of the omnipotence and sole authority of society at large rises to fill its place....

The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.

Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind....

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing....

After having thus successively taken each member of the

community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds 1. Basic Writings ( N e w Y o r k : W i l l e y Book Co., 1944), p p . 749-50.

A PESSIMISTIC SCENARIO

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