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THE
Looking Backward
20001887
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EDWARD BELLAMY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
tEfje &toensfoe $ress Cambcibge
COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY TICKNOR AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1889, BY EDWARD BELLAMY
COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1915, AND 1917, BY EMMA S. BELLAMY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
STACK ANNEX
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INTRODUCTION
BY HEYWOOD BROUN
A GOOD many of my radical friends express a cer-
tain kindly condescension when they speak of
Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward."
"Of course you know," they say, "that it really
isn't first-rate economics."
And yet in further conversation I have known a
very large number of these same somewhat scornful
Socialists to admit, " You know, the first thing that
got me started to thinking about Socialism was
Bellamy's 'Looking Backward.'"
From the beginning it has been a highly provoca-
tive book. It is now. Many of the questions both
of mood and technique are even more pertinent in
the year 1931 than they were in 1887. A critic of
the Boston Transcript said, when the novel first
appeared, that the new State imagined by Bellamy
was all very well, but that the author lost much of
his effectiveness by putting his Utopia a scant fifty
years ahead, and that he might much better have
made it seventy-five centuries.
It is true that the fifty years assigned for changing
the world utterly are almost gone by now. Not
everything which was predicted in "Looking Back-
ward" has come to pass. But the laugh is not
against Bellamy, but against his critic. Some of
11 INTRODUCTION.
the things which must have seemed most improb-
able of all to the Transcript man of 1887 are now
actually in being.
In one respect Edward Bellamy set down a pic-
ture of modern American life which is almost a
hundred per cent realized. It startled me to read
the passage in which Edith shows the musical sched-
ule to Julian West, and tells him to choose which
selection he wishes to have brought through the air
into the music room. It is true that Bellamy
imagined this broadcasting to be done over tele-
phone wires, as is indeed the case today in some phases
of national hook-ups. But consider this quotation :
" He [Dr. Leete] showed how, by turning a screw,
the volume of the music could be made to fill the
room, or die away to an echo so faint and far that
one could scarcely be sure whether he heard or
imagined it."
That might almost have been lifted bodily from
an article in some newspaper radio column.
But Bellamy did see with clear vision things and
factors much more important than the possibility
of hearing a sermon without going to church.
Much which is now established in Soviet Russia
bears at least a likeness to the industrial army
visioned in this prophetic book. However, Com-
munism can scarcely claim Bellamy as its own, for
he emphasizes repeatedly the non-violent features
of the revolution which he imagined. Indeed, at
one point he argues that the left-wingers of his own
INTRODUCTION. ill
day impeded change by the very excesses of their
technical philosophy.
There is in his book no acceptance of a transi-
tional stage of class dictatorship. He sees the change
coming through a general recognition of the failings
of the capitalist system. Indeed, he sees a point hi
economic development where capitalism may not
even be good enough for the capitalist.
To the strict Marxian Socialist this is profound
and ridiculous heresy. To me it does not seem fan-
tastic. And things have happened in the world
already which were not dreamt of in Karl Marx's
philosophy.
The point I wish to stress is the prevalent notion
that all radical movements in America stem from
the writings of foreign authors. Now, Bellamy, of
course, was familiar with the pioneer work of Marx.
And that part of it which he liked he took over.
Nevertheless, he developed a contribution which
was entirely his own. It is irrevelant to say that,
after all, the two men differed largely in their view
of the technique by which the new world was to be
accomplished. A difference in technique, as Trot-
zky knows to his sorrow, may be as profound as a
difference in principle.
Bellamy was essentially a New-Englander. His
background was that of Boston and its remote
suburbs. And when he preaches the necessity of
the cooperative commonwealth, he does it with a
Yankee twang. In fact, he is as essentially native
IV INTRODUCTION.
American as Norman Thomas, the present leader of
the Socialist Party in this country.
I cannot confess any vast interest in the love
story which serves as a thread for Bellamy's vision
of a reconstructed society. But it can be said that
it is so palpably a thread of sugar crystal that it
need not get in the way of any reader.
I am among those who first became interested in
Socialism through reading "Looking Backward"
when I was a freshman in college. It came in the
first half-year of a course which was designed to
prove that all radical panaceas were fundamentally
unsound in their conception. The professor played
fair. He gave us the arguments for the radical
cause in the fall and winter, and proceeded to de-
molish them in spring and early summer.
But what one learns in the winter sticks more
than words uttered in the warmth of drowsy May
and June. Possibly I took more cuts toward the
end of the lecture course. All I can remember is
the arguments in favor of the radical plans. Their
fallacies I have forgotten.
I differ from Bellamy's condescending converts
because I feel that he is close to an entirely practical
and possible scheme of life. Since much of the fan-
tastic quality of his vision has been rubbed down
into reality within half a century, I think there is at
least a fan- chance that another fifty years will con-
firm Edward Bellamy's position as one of the most
authentic prophets of our age.
THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACK-
WARD "
"Weaak
To put forth just our strength, our human strength,
All starting iairly, all equipped alike."
" But when full roused, each giant limb awake,
Each sinew strung, the great heart pulsing fast,
He shall start up and stand on his own earth,
Then shall his long, triumphant march begin,
Thence shall his being date."
BROWNIKO.
THE great poet's lines express Edward Bella-
my's aim in writing his famous book. That aim
would realize in our country's daily being the
Great Declaration that gave us national existence ;
would, in equality of opportunity, give man his
own earth to stand on, and thereby the race for
the first time enabled to enter unhampered upon
the use of its God-given possibilities achieve a
progress unexampled and marvelous.
It is now twelve years since the writing of
* Looking Backward ' changed one of the most
VI THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"
brilliant of the younger American authors into an
impassioned social reformer whose work was des-
tined to have momentous effect upon the move-
ment of his age. His quality had hitherto been
manifest in romances like 'Doctor Heidenhof's
Process ' and ' Miss Ludington's Sister,' and in
many short stories exquisite in their imaginative
texture and largely distinguished by a strikingly
original development of psychical themes. Tales
like 'The Blindman's World' and 'To Whom
This May Come ' will long linger in the memory
of magazine readers of the past twenty years.
' Doctor Heidenhof ' was at once recognized as
a psychological study of uncommon power. " Its
writer," said an English review, "is the lineal in-
tellectual descendant of Hawthorne." Nor was
there in America any lack of appreciation of that
originality and that distinction of style which mark
.Edward Bellamy's early work. In all this there
was a strong dominant note prophetic of the
author's future activity. That note was a stead-
fast faith in the intrinsic goodness of human
nature, a sense of the meaning of love in its
true and universal sense. ' Looking Backward,*
though ostensibly a romance, is universally recog-
nized as a great economic treatise in a framework
of fiction. Without this guise it could not have
THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD." VU
obtained the foothold that it did ; there is just
enough of the skillful novelist's touch in its compo-
sition to give plausibility to the book and exert a
powerful influence upon the popular imagination.
The ingenious device by which a man of the nine-
teenth century is transferred to the end of the
twentieth, and the vivid dramatic quality of the
dream at the end of the book, are instances of the
art of the trained novelist which make the work
unique of its kind. Neither could the book have
been a success had not the world been ripe for its
reception. The materials were ready and waiting;
the spark struck fire in the midst of them. Little
more than a decade has followed its publication,
and the world is filled with the agitation that it
helped kindle. It has given direction to economic
thought and shape to political action.
Edward Bellamy was born in 1850, almost ex-
actly in the middle of the century whose closing
years he was destined so notably to affect. His
home has always been in his native village of
Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, now a portion of
the city of Chicopee, one of the group of munici-
palities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He
lived on Church Street in a house long the home
of his father, a beloved Baptist clergyman of the
town. His clerical ancestry is perhaps responsible
Vlli THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"
for his essentially religious nature. His maternal
grandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one
of the early pastors of Springfield, and among his
paternal ancestors was Dr. Joseph BelJimy of
Bethlehem, Connecticut, a distinguished theolo-
gian of revolutionary days, a friend of Jonathan
Edwards, and the preceptor of Aaron Burr. He,
however, outgrew with his boyhood all trammels
of sect. But this inherited trait marked his social
views with a strongly anti-materialistic and spirit-
ual cast ; an ethical purpose dominated his ideas,
and he held that a merely material prosperity
would not be worth the working for as a social
ideal. An equality in material well-being, how-
ever, he regarded as the soil essential for the true
spiritual development of the race.
Young Bellamy entered Union College at Sche-
nectady, but was not graduated. After a year in
Germany he studied law and entered the bar, but
never practiced. A literary career appealed to
him more strongly, and journalism seemed the
more available gateway thereto. His first news-
paper experience was on the staff of the New York
Evening Post,' and from that journal he went to
the Springfield ' Union.' Besides his European
trip, a journey to Hawaii by way of Panama and a
return across the continent gave a considerable
fHE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD." IX
geographical range to his knowledge of the world
at large.
It is notable that his first public utterance,
made before a local lyceum when a youth in his
teens, was devoted to sentiments of social reform
that foreshadowed his future work. When 'Look-
ing Backward ' was the sensation of the year, a
newspaper charge brought against Mr. Bellamy
was that he was " posing for notoriety." To those
who know the retiring, modest, and almost diffi-
dent personality of the author, nothing could have
been more absurd. All opportunities to make
money upon the magnificent advertising given by
a phenomenal literary success were disregarded.
There were offers of lecture engagements that
would have brought quick fortune, requests from
magazine editors for articles and stories on any
terms that he might name, proffered inducements
from publishers to write a new book and to take
advantage of the occasion to make a volume of his
short stories with the assurance of a magnificent
sale, to all this he was strikingly indifferent.
Two or three public addresses, a few articles in the
reviews, and for a while the editorship of 'The
New Nation,' a weekly periodical which he estab-
lished in Boston, this was the sum of his publio
activity until he should have made himself ready
X THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD*
for a second sustained effort. To all sordid incenv
tives he was as indifferent as if he had been a
child of his new order, a century later. The hosts
of personal friends whom his work made for him
knew him as a winsome personality ; and really to
know him was to love him. His nature was keenly
sympathetic ; his conversation ready and charm-
ing, quickly responsive to suggestion, illuminated
by gentle humor and occasionally a flash of play-
ful satire. He disliked controversy, with its waste
of energy in profitless discussion, and jestingly
averred that if there were any reformers living in
his neighborhood he should move away.
The cardinal features of ' Looking Backward,*
that distinguish it from the generality of Utopian
literature, lie in its definite scheme of industrial
organization on a national basis, and the equal
share allotted to all persons in the products of in-
dustry, or the public income, on the same ground
that men share equally in the free gifts of natur^
like air to breathe and water to drink ; it being
absolutely impossible to determine any equitable
ratio between individual industrial effort and in-
dividual share in industrial product on a graded
basis. The book, however, was little more than
an outline of the system, and, after an interval
devoted to continuous thought and study, many
THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD" Xl
points called for elaboration. Mr. Bellamy gave
his last years and his ripest efforts to an exposi
tion of the economical and ethical basis of the new
order which he held that the natural course of
social evolution would establish.
* Equality ' is the title of his last book. It is a
more elaborate work than * Looking Backward,'
and in fact is a comprehensive economic treatise
upon the subject that gives it its name. It is a
sequel to its famous predecessor, and its keynote is
given in the remark that the immortal preamble of
the American Declaration of Independence (char-
acterized as the true constitution of the United
States), logically contained the entire statement
of universal economic equality guaranteed by the
nation collectively to its members individually.
M The corner-stone of our state is economic equal-
ity, and is not that the obvious, necessary, and only
adequate pledge of these three rights, life, lib-
erty, and happiness? What is life without its
material basis, and what is an equal right to life
but a right to an equal material basis for it?
What is liberty ? How can men be free who must
ask the right to labor and to live from their fel-
low-men and seek their bread from the hands of
others ? How else can any government guarantee
liberty to men save by providing them a means of
XII THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"
labor and of life coupled with independence ; and
how could that be done unless the government con-
ducted the economic system upon which employ-
ment and maintenance depend ? Finally, what is
implied in the equal right of all to the pursuit of
happiness ? What form of happiness, so far as it
depends at all upon material facts, is not bound up
with economic conditions ; and how shall an equal
opportunity for the pursuit of happiness be guar-
anteed to all save by a guarantee of economic
equality ? "
The book is so full of ideas, so replete with sug-
gestive aspects, so rich in quotable parts, as to
form an arsenal of argument for apostles of the
new democracy. As with 4 Looking Backward,'
the humane and thoughtful reader will lay down
* Equality ' and regard the world about him witk
a feeling akin to that with which the child of the
tenement returns from his " country week " to
the foul smells, the discordant noises, the incessant
strife of the wonted environment.
But the writing of 4 Equality ' was a task too
great for the physical strength and vitality of its
author. His health, never robust, gave way com-
pletely, and the book was finished by an indomit-
able and inflexible dominion of the powerful mind
over the failing body which was nothing short of
THE AUTHOR OF " LOOKING BACKWARD."
heroic. Consumption, that common New England
inheritance, developed suddenly, and in September
of 1897 Mr. Bellamy went with his family to Den-
ver, willing to seek the cure which he scarcely
hoped to find.
The welcome accorded to him in the West, where
his work had met with widespread and profound
attention, was one of his latest and greatest plea-
sures. Letters came from mining camps, from
farms and villages, the writers all longing to do
something for him to show their love.
The singular modesty already spoken of as
characterizing Mr. Bellamy, and an entire unwill-
ingness to accept any personal and public recogni-
tion, had perhaps kept him from a realization of
the fact that his fame was international. But the
author of a book which in ten years had sold
nearly a million of copies in England and Amer-
ica, and which had been translated into German,
French, Russian, Italian, Arabic, Bulgarian, and
several other languages and dialects, found him-
self not among strangers, although two thousand
miles from the home of his lifetime.
He greatly appreciated and gratefully acknow-
ledged his welcome to Colorado, which he left in
April, 1898, when he realized that his life was
rapidly drawing to a close.
xiv THE AUTHOR OF " LOOKING BACKWARD"
He died on Sunday morning, May 22, after a
month in the old home which he had eagerly
desired to see again, leaving a widow and two
young children.
At the simple service held there, with his kin-
dred and the friends of a lifetime about him, the
following passages from ' Looking Backward ' and
* Equality ' were read as a fitting expression, in
his own words, of that hope for the bettering and
uplifting of Humanity, which was the real passion
of his noble life.
" Said not the serpent in the old story, * If you
eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge you shall
be as gods ? ' The promise was true in words, but
apparently there was some mistake about the tree.
Perhaps it was the tree of selfish knowledge, or
else the fruit was not ripe. The story is obscure.
Christ later said the same thing when he told men
that they might be the sons of God. But he made
no mistake as to the tree he showed them, and the
fruit was ripe. It was the fruit of love, for uni-
versal love is at once the seed and fruit, cause and
effect, of the highest and completest knowledge.
Through boundless love man becomes a god, for
thereby is he made conscious of his oneness with
God, and all things are put under his feet. * If we
love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love
THE AUTHOR OF " LOOKING BACKWARD." TV
is perfected in us.' 4 He that loveth his brother
dwelleth in the 'igat.' ' If any man say, I love
God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.* 'He
that loveth not his brother abideth in death.'
* God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth
in God.' * Every one that loveth knoweth God.
* He that loveth not knoweth not God.'
" Here is the very distillation of Christ's teach-
ing as to the conditions of entering on the divine
life. In this we find the sufficient explanation
why the revelation which came to Christ so long
ago and to other illumined souls could not possibly
be received by mankind in general so long as an
inhuman social order made a wall between man
and God, and why, the moment that wall was cast
down, the revelation flooded the earth like a sun-
burst
** * If we love one another, God dwelleth in us,'
and mark how the words were made good in the
way by which at last the race found God I It was
not, remember, by directly, purposely, or con-
sciously seeking God. The great enthusiasm of
humanity which overthrew the older and brought
In the fraternal society was not primarily or con-
sciously a Godward aspiration at all. It was
essentially a humane movement. It was a melt-
ing and flowing forth of men's hearts toward one
xvi THE AUTHOR OF " LOOKING BACKWARD."
another ; a rush of contrite, repentant tenderness ;
an impassioned impulse of mr.tual love and self-
devotion to the common weal. But 'if we love
one another, God dwelleth in us,' and so man found
it. It appears that there came a moment, the
most transcendent moment in the history of the
race of man, when with the fraternal glow of
this world of new-found embracing brothers there
seems to have mingled the ineffable thrill of a
divine participation, as if the hand of God were
clasped over the joined hands of men. And so it
has continued to this day and shall for evermore.
" Your seers and poets in exalted moments had
seen that death was but a step in life, but this
seemed to most of you to have been a hard saying.
Nowadays, as life advances toward its close, in-
stead of being shadowed by gloom, it is marked by
an access of impassioned expectancy which would
cause the young to envy the old, but for the know-
ledge that in a little while the same door will be
opened to them, in your day the undertone of life
seems to have been one of unutterable sadness,
which, like the moaning of the sea to those who
live near the ocean, made itself audible when-
ever for a moment the noise and bustle of petty
engrossments ceased. Now this undertone is so
exultant that we are still to hear it.
THE AUTHOR OF " LOOKING BACKWARD." XVll
"Do you ask what we look for when unnum-
bered generations shall have passed away ? I
answer, the way stretches far before us, but the
end is lost in light. For twofold is the return of
man to God, ' who is our home,' the return of the
individual by the way of death, and the return of
the race by the fulfillment of its evolution, when
the divine secret hidden in the germ shall be
perfectly unfolded. With a tear for the dark
past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and,
veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and
weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer
has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis.
The heavens are before it."
There are those who have made strenuous ob-
jections to the ideals of Edward Bellamy on the
ground that they are based on nothing better than
purely material well-being. In the presence of
the foregoing utterance can they maintain that
attitude ?
SYLVESTEB BAXTER.
AUTHOR'S PKEFACE
HISTORICAL SECTION SHAWMCT COLLEGE, BOSTOW,
DECEMBER 26, 2000.
LIVING as we do in the closing year of tLe
twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a
social order at once so simple and logical that it
seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no
doubt difficult for those whose studies have not
been largely historical to realize that the present
organization of society is, in its completeness, less
than a century old. No historical fact is, how-
ever, better established than that till nearly the
end of the nineteenth century it was the general
belief that the ancient industrial system, with all
its shocking social consequences, was destined to
last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of
time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does
it seem that so prodigious a moral and material
transformation as has taken place since then could
have been accomplished in so brief an interval?
3C PREFACE.
The readiness with which men accustom them
mires, as matters of course, to improvements in
their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed
to leave nothing more to be desired, could not be
move strikingly illustrated. What reflection could
be better calculated to moderate the enthusiasm
of reformers who count for their reward on the
lively gratitude of future ages !
The object of this volume is to assist persons
who, while desiring to gain a more definite idea of
the social contrasts between the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, are daunted by the formal
aspect of die histories which treat the subject
Warned by a teacher's experience that learning
is accounted a weariness to the flesh, the author
has sought to alleviate the instructive quality of
the book by casting it in the form of a romantic
narrative, which he would be glad to fancy not
wholly devoid of interest on its own account.
The reader, to whom modern social institutions
and their underlying principles are matters of
course, may at times find Dr. Leete's explana-
tions of them rather trite, but it must be re-
membered that to Dr. Leete's guest they were not
matters of coarse, and that this book is written
for the cjiuieas purpose of inducing the reader tc
PREFA CE. XXI
forget for the nonce that they are so to him. On*
word more. The almost universal theme of the
writers and orators who have celebrated this bi-
millennial epoch has been the future rather than
the past, not the advance that has been made, but
the progress that shall be made, ever onward and
upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable
destiny. This is well, wholly well, but it seems to
me that nowhere can we find more solid ground
for daring anticipations of human development
during the next one thousand years, than by
" Looking Backward " upon the progress of the
last one hundred.
That this volume may be so fortunate as to find
readers whose interest in the subject shall incline
them to overlook the deficiencies of the treatment
is the hope in which the author steps aside aud
leaves Mr. Julian West to speak for him .self.
LOOKING BACKWARD.
CHAPTER T.
I FIEST saw the light in the city of Boston in
the year 1857. " What ! " you say, " eighteen
fifty-seven ? That is an odd slip. He means
nineteen fifty-seven, of course." I beg pardon,
but there is no mistake. It was about four in the
afternoon of December the 26th, one day after
Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first
breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure
the reader, was at that remote period marked by
the same penetrating quality characterizing it in
the present year of grace, 2000.
These statements seem so absurd on their face,
especially when I add that I am a young man ap-
parently of about thirty years of age, that no per-
son can be blamed for refusing to read another
word of what promises to be a mere imposition
npon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly as-
sure the reader that no imposition is intended,
and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few
pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may,
8 LOOKING BACKWARD.
then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of
justifying the assumption, that I know better
than the reader when I was born, I will go on with
my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the
latter part of the nineteenth century the civiliza-
tion of to-day, or anything like it, did not exist,
although the elements which were to develop it
were already in ferment. Nothing had, however,
occurred to modify the immemorial division of
society into the four classes, or nations, as they
may be more fitly called, since the differences be-
tween them were far greater than those between
any nations nowadays, of the rich and the poor,
the educated and the ignorant. I myself was rich
and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the
elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortu-
nate in that age. Living in luxury, and occupied
only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refine-
ments of life, I derived the means of my support
from the labor of others, rendering no sort of ser.
vice in return. My parents and grand-parents had
lived in the same way, and I expected that my de-
scendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like easy
existence.
But how could I live without service to the
world ? you ask. Why should the world have sup-
ported in utter idleness one who was able to ren-
der service ? The answer is that my great-grand-
father had accumulated a sum of money on which
his descendants had ever since lived. The sum,
LOOKING BACKWARD. 9
you will naturally infer, must have been very large
not to have been exhausted in supporting three
generations in idleness. This, however, was not
the fact. The sum had been originally by no
means large. It was, in fact, much larger now
that three generations had been supported upon it
in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of
use without consumption, of warmth without com-
bustion, seems like magic, but was merely an in.
genious application of the art now happily lost but
carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of
shifting the burden of one's support on the shoul-
ders of others. The man who had accomplished
this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live
on the income of his investments. To explain at
this point how the ancient methods of industry
made this possible would delay us too much. I
shall only stop now to say that interest on invest-
ments was a species of tax in perpetuity upon the
product of those engaged in industry which a per-
son possessing or inheriting money was able to
levy. It must not be supposed that an arrange-
ment which seems so unnatural and preposterous
according to modern notions was never criticised
by your ancestors. It had been the effort of law-
givers and prophets from the earliest ages to abol-
ish interest, or at least to limit it to the smallest
possible rate. All these efforts had, however,
failed, as they necessarily must so long as the
ancient social organizations prevailed. At the
10 LOOKING BACKWARD.
time of which I write, the latter part of the nine
teenth century, governments had generally given
up trying to regulate the subject at all.
By way of attempting to give the reader some
general impression of the way people lived to-
gether in those days, and especially of the relar
tions of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps
1 cannot do better than to compare society as it
then was to a prodigious coach which the masses
of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toil-
somely along a very hilly and sandy road. The
driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging,
though the pace was necessarily very slow. De-
spite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all
along so hard a road, the top was covered with
passengers who never got down, even at the steep-
est ascents. These seats on top were very breezy
and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their
occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure,
or critically discuss the merits of the straining
team. Naturally such places were in great de-
mand and the competition for them was keen,
every one seeking as the first end in life to secure
a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to
his child after him. By the rule of the coach a
man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but
on the other hand there were many accidents by
which it might at any time be wholly lost. For
all that they were so easy, the seats were very in-
secure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach par*
LOOKING BACKWARD. 11
sons were slipping out of them and falling to the
ground, where they were instantly compelled to
take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach
on which they had before ridden so pleasantly.
It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune
to lose one's seat, and the apprehension that this
might happen to them or their friends was a con-
stant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.
But did they think only of themselves ? you ask.
Was not their very luxury rendered intolerable to
them by comparison with the lot of their brothers
and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that
their own weight added to their toil ? Had they
no compassion for fellow beings from whom for-
tune only distinguished them ? Oh, yes ; commis-
eration was frequently expressed by those who
rode for those who had to pull the coach, espe-
cially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the
road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particu-
larly steep hill. At such times, the desperate
straining of the team, their agonized leaping and
plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, ths
many who fainted at the rope and were trampled
in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle,
which often called forth highly creditable displays
of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times
the passengers would call down encouragingly to
the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience,
and holding out hopes of possible compensation in
another world for the hardness of their lot, while
12 LOOKING BACKWARD.
others contributed to buy salves and liniments for
the crippled and injured. It was agreed that it
was a great pity that the coach should be so hard
to pull, and there was a sense of general relief
when the specially bad piece of road was gotten
over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on ac-
count of the team, for there was always some
danger at these bad places of a general overturn
in which all would lose their seats.
It must in truth be admitted that the main
effect of the spectacle of the misery of the toilers
at the rope was to enhance the passengers' sense of
the value of their seats upon the coach, and to
cause them to hold on to them more desperately
than before. If the passengers could only have
felt assured that neither they nor their friends
would ever fall from the top, it is probable that,
beyond contributing to the funds for liniments
and bandages, they would have troubled them-
selves extremely little about those who dragged
the coach.
I am well aware that this will appear to the
men and women of the twentieth century an in-
credible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both
very curious, which partly explain it. In the first
place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that
there was no other way in which Society could get
along, except the many pulled at the rope and the
few rode, and not only this, but that no very radi-
cal improvement even was possible, either in the
LOOKING BACKWARD. 13
harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution
of the toil. It had always been as it was, and it
always would be so. It was a pity, but it could
not be helped, and philosophy forbade wasting
compassion on what was beyond remedy.
The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in
a singular hallucination which those on the top ol
the coach generally shared, that they were not
exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled
at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belong-
ing to a higher order of beings who might justly
expect to be drawn. This seems unaccountable,
but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared
that very hallucination, I ought to be believed.
The strangest thing about the hallucination was
that those who had but just climbed up from the
ground, before they had outgrown the marks of
the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its
influence. As for those whose parents and grand-
parents before them had been so fortunate as to
keep their seats on the top, the conviction they
cherished of the essential difference between their
sort of humanity and the common article was
absolute. The effect of such a delusion in mod-
erating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the
mass of men into a distant and philosophical com-
passion is obvious. To it I refer as the only ex-
tenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at
the period I write of, marked my own attitude
toward the misery of my brothers.
14 LOOKING BACKWARD.
In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although
still unmarried, I was engaged to wed Edith Bart
lett. She, like myself, rode on the top of the
coach. That is to say, not to encumber ourselves
further with an illustration which has, I hope,
served its purpose of giving the reader some gen-
eral impression of how we lived then, her family
was wealthy. In that age, when money alone com-
manded all that was agreeable and refined in life,
it was enough for a woman to be rich to have
suitors ; but Edith Bartlett was beautiful and
graceful also.
My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at
this. " Handsome she might have been," I heat
them saying, " but graceful never, in the costumes
which were the fashion at that period, when the
head covering was a dizzy structure a foot tall,
and the almost incredible extension of the skirt
behind by means of artificial contrivances more
thoroughly dehumanized the form than any former
device of dressmakers. Fancy any one graceful in
such a costume ! " The point is certainly well
taken, and I can only reply that while the ladies
of the twentieth century are lovely demonstrations
of the effect of appropriate drapery in accenting
feminine graces, my recollection of their great-
grandmothers enables me to maintain that no de-
formity of costume can wholly disguise them.
Our marriage only waited on the completion of
the house which I was building for our occupancy
LOOKING BACKWARD. 15
ID one of the most desirable parts of the city, that
is to say, a part chiefly inhabited by the rich. For
it must be understood that the comparative de-
sirability of different parts of Boston for residence
depended then, not on natural features, but on the
character of the neighboring population. Each
alass or nation lived by itself, in quarters of its
own. A rich man living among the poor, an edu-
cated man among the uneducated, was like one
living in isolation among a jealous and alien race.
When the house had been begun, its completion
by the winter of 1886 had been expected. The
spring of the following year found it, however, yet
incomplete, and my marriage still a thing of the
future. The cause of a delay calculated to be par-
ticularly exasperating to an ardent lover was a
series of strikes, that is to say, concerted refusals
to work on the part of the brick-layers, masons,
carpenters, painters, plumbers, and other trades
concerned in house building. What the specific
causes of these strikes were I do not remember.
Strikes had become so common at that period that
people had ceased to inquire into their particular
grounds. In one department of industry or an-
other, they had been nearly incessant ever since
the great business crisis of 1873. In fact it had
come to be the exceptional thing to see any class
of laborers pursue their avocation steadily for
more than a few months at a time.
The reader who observes the dates alluded to
16 LOOKING BACKWARD.
will of course recognize in these disturbances of
industry the first and incoherent phase of the great
movement which ended in the establishment of the
modern industrial system with all its social con-
sequences. This is all so plain in the retrospect
that a child can understand it, but not being
prophets, we of that day had no clear idea what
was happening to us. What we did see was that
industrially the country was in a very queer way.
The relation between the workingman and the
employer, between labor and capital, appeared in
some unaccountable manner to have become dis-
located. The working classes had quite suddenly
and very generally become infected with a pro-
found discontent with their condition, and an idea
that it could be greatly bettered if they only knew
how to go about it. On every side, with one
accord, they preferred demands for higher pay,
shorter hours, better dwellings, better educational
advantages, and a share in the refinements and
luxuries of life, demands which it was impossible
to see the way to granting unless the world were
to become a great deal richer than it then was.
Though they knew something of what they wanted,
they knew nothing of how to accomplish it, and
the eager enthusiasm with which they thronged
about any one who seemed likely to give them any
light on the subject lent sudden reputation to
many would-be leaders, some of whom had little
enough light to give. However chimerical the as-
LOOKING BACKWARD. 17
pfrations of the laboring classes might be deemed,
the devotion with which they supported one an-
other in the strikes, which were their chief weapon,
and the sacrifices which they underwent to carry
them out left no doubt of their dead earnestness.
As to the final outcome of the labor troubles,
which was the phrase by which the movement I
have described was most commonly referred to, the
opinions of the people of my class differed accord-
ing to individual temperament. The sanguine
argued very forcibly that it was in the very nature
of things impossible that the new hopes of the
workingnien could be satisfied, simply because the
world had not the wherewithal to satisfy them. It
was only because the masses worked very hard
and lived on short commons that the race did not
starve outright, and no considerable improvement
in their condition was possible while the world, as
a whole, remained so poor. It was not the capital-
ists whom the laboring men were contending with,
these maintained, but the iron-bound environment
of humanity, and it was merely a question of the
thickness of their skulls when they would discover
the fact and make up their minds to endure what
they could not cure.
The less sanguine admitted all this. Of course
the workingmen's aspirations were impossible of
fulfillment for natural reasons, but there
grounds to fear that they would not discover
fact until they had made a sad mess of society
18 LOOKING BACKWARD.
They had the votes and the power to do so if they
pleased, and their leaders meant they should.
Some of these desponding observers went so fai
as to predict an impending social cataclysm. Hu-
manity, they argued, having climbed to the top
round of the ladder of civilization, was about to
take a header into chaos, after which it would
doubtless pick itself up, turn round, and begin to
climb again. Kepeated experiences of this sort in
historic and prehistoric times possibly accounted
for the puzzling bumps on the human cranium.
Human history, like all great movements, was
cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning.
The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was
a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in
nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a
yet better illustration of the career of humanity.
Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion
of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of
civilization only to plunge downward once more to
its nether goal in the regions of chaos.
This, of course, was an extreme opinion, but I
remember serious men among my acquaintances
who, in discussing the signs of the times, adopted
a very similar tone. It was no doubt the common
opinion of thoughtful men that society was ap-
proaching a critical period which might result in
great changes. The labor troubles, their causes,
course, and cure, took lead of all other topics ID
the public prints, and in serious conversation.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 19
The nervous tension of the public mind could
not have been more strikingly illustrated than it
was by the alarm resulting from the talk of a small
band of men who called themselves anarchists, and
proposed to terrify the American people into adopt-
ing their ideas by threats of violence, as if a mighty-
nation which had but just put down a rebellion
of half its own numbers, in order to maintain its
political system, were likely to adopt a new social
system out of fear,,
As one of the wealthy, with a large stake in the
existing order of things, I naturally shared the
apprehensions of my class. The particular griev-
ance I had against the working classes at the time
of which I write, on account of the effect of their
strikes in postponing my wedded bliss, no doubt
lent a special animosity to my feeling toward
them.
CHAPTER H.
THE thirtieth day of May, 1887, fell on a Mon-
day. It was one of the annual holidays of the
nation in the latter third of the nineteenth cen-
tury, being set apart under the name of Decora-
tion Day, for doing honor to the memory of the
soldiers of the North who took part in the war for
the preservation of the union of the States. The
survivors of the war, escorted by military and civic
processions and bands of music, were wont on this
occasion to visit the cemeteries and lay wreaths of
flowers upon the graves of their dead comrades,
the ceremony being a very solemn and touching
one. The eldest brother of Edith Bartlett had
fallen in the war, and on Decoration Day the
family was in the habit of making a visit to Mount
Auburn, where he lay.
I had asked permission to make one of the
party, and, on our return to the city at night-
fall, remained to dine with the family of my be-
trothed. In the drawing-room, after dinner, I
picked up an evening paper and read of a fresh
strike in the building trades, which would prob-
ably still further delay the completion of my
unlucky house. I remember distinctly how ex-
LOOKING BACKWARD. 21
asperated I was at this, and the objurgations, as
forcible as the presence of the ladies permitted,
which I lavished upon workmen in general, and
these strikers in particular. I had abundant sym-
pathy from those about me, and the remarks made
in the desultory conversation which followed, upon
the unprincipled conduct of the labor agitators,
were calculated to make those gentlemen's ears
tingle. It was agreed that affairs were going from
bad to worse very fast, and that there was no tell-
ing what we should come to soon. " The worst of
it," I remember Airs. Bartlett's saying, " is that
the working classes all over the world seem to be
going crazy at once. In Europe it is far worse
even than here. I 'm sure I should not dare to
live there at all. I asked Mr. Bartlett the other
day where we should emigrate to if all the terrible
things took place which those socialists threaten.
He said he did not know any place now where
society could be called stable except Greenland,
Patagonia, and the Chinese Empire." " Those
Chinamen knew what they were about," somebody
added, " when they refused to let in our western
civilization. They knew what it would lead to
better than we did. They saw it was nothing but
dynamite in disguise."
After this, I remember drawing Edith apart and
trying to persuade her that it would be better to be
married at once without waiting for the completion
of the house, spending the time in travel till our
22 LOOKING BACKWARD.
borne was ready for us. She was remarkablj
handsome that evening, the mourning costume
that she wore in recognition of the day setting off
to great advantage the purity of her complexion.
I can see her even now with my mind's eye just as
she looked that night. When I took my leave
she followed me into the hall and I kissed her
good-by as usual. There was no circumstance out
of the common to distinguish this parting from
previous occasions when we had bade each other
good-by for a night or a day. There was abso-
lutely no premonition in my mind, or I am sure in
hers, that this was more than an ordinary separa-
tion.
Ah, well!
The hour at which I had left my betrothed was
a rather early one for a lover, but the fact was no
reflection on my devotion. I was a confirmed suf-
ferer from insomnia, and although otherwise per-
fectly well had been completely fagged out that
day, from having slept scarcely at all the two pre-
vious nights. Edith knew this and had insisted
on sending me home by nine o'clock, with strict
orders to go to bed at once.
The house in which I lived had been occupied
by three generations of the family of which I was
the only living representative in the direct line.
It was a large, ancient wooden mansion, very ele-
gant in an old-fashioned way within, but situated
in a quarter that had long since become undesir*
LOOKING BACKWARD. 23
ble for residence, from its invasion by tenement
houses and manufactories. It was not a house to
which I could think of bringing a bride, much less
so dainty a one as Edith Bartlett. I had adver-
tised it for sale, and meanwhile merely used it for
sleeping purposes, dining at my club. One ser-
vant, a faithful colored man by the name of Saw-
yer, lived with me and attended to my few wants.
One feature of the house I expected to miss
greatly when I should leave it, and this was the
sleeping chamber which I had built under the
foundations. I could not have slept in the city at
all, with its never ceasing nightly noises, if I had
been obliged to use an upstairs chamber. But
to this subterranean room no murmur from the
upper world ever penetrated. When I had en-
tered it and closed the door, I was surrounded by
the silence of the tomb. In order to prevent the
dampness of the subsoil from penetrating the
chamber, the walls had been laid in hydraulic ce-
ment and were very thick, and the floor was like-
wise protected. In order that the room might
serve also as a vault equally proof against violence
and flames, for the storage of valuables, I had
roofed it with stone slabs hermetically sealed, and
the outer door was of iron with a thick coating
of asbestos. A small pipe, communicating with
a wind-mill on the top of the house, insured the
renewal of air.
It might seem that the tenant of such a chamber
24 LOOKING BACKWARD.
ought to be able to command slumber, but it wae
rare that I slept well, even there, two nights in suc-
cession. So accustomed was I to wakefulness that
I minded little the loss of one night's rest. A
second night, however, spent in my reading chair
instead of my bed, tired me out, and I never al-
lowed myself to go longer than that without slum-
ber, from fear of nervous disorder. From this
statement it will be inferred that I had at my
command some artificial means for inducing sleep
in the last resort, and so in fact I had. If after
two sleepless nights I found myself on the ap-
proach of the third without sensations of drowsi-
ness, I called in Dr. Pillsbury.
He was a doctor by courtesy only, what was
called in those days an " irregular " or " quack '*
doctor. He called himself a " Professor of Animal
Magnetism." I had come across him in the course
of some amateur investigations into the phenomena
of animal magnetism. I don't think he knew
anything about medicine, but he was certainly a
remarkable mesmerist. It was for the purpose of
being put to sleep by his manipulations that I
used to send for him when I found a third night of
sleeplessness impending. Let my nervous excite-
ment or mental preoccupation be however greatj
Dr. Pillsbury never failed, after a short time, to
leave me in a deep slumber, which continued till I
was aroused by a reversal of the mesmerizing pro-
cess. The process for awaking the sleeper was
LOOKING BACKWARD. 25
much simpler than that for putting him to sleep,
and for convenience I had made Dr. Pillsbury
teach Sawyer how to do it.
My faithful servant alone knew for what pur-
pose Dr. Pillsbury visited me, or that he did so at
all. Of course, when Edith became my wife I
should have to tell her my secrets. I had not
hitherto told her this, because there was unques-
tionably a slight risk in the mesmeric sleep, and
I knew she would set her face against my practice.
The risk, of course, was that it might become too
profound and pass into a trance beyond the mes-
merizer's power to break, ending in death. Re-
peated experiments had fully convinced me that
the risk was next to nothing if reasonable precau-
tions were exercised, and of this I hoped, though
doubtingly, to convince Edith. I went directly
home after leaving her, and at once sent Sawyer
to fetch Dr. Pillsbury. Meanwhile I sought my
subterranean sleeping chamber, and exchanging
my costume for a comfortable dressing-gown, sat
down to read the letters by the evening mail which
Sawyer had laid on my reading table.
One of them was from the builder of my new
house, and confirmed what I had inferred from the
newspaper item. The new strikes, he said, had
postponed indefinitely the completion of the con-
tract, as neither masters nor workmen would con-
cede the point at issue without a long struggle.
Caligula wished that the Kouian people had but
26 LOOKING BACKWARD.
one neck that he might cut it off, and as I read
this letter I am afraid that for a moment I was
capable of wishing the same thing concerning the
laboring classes of America. The return of Saw*
yer with the doctor interrupted my gloomy med
itations.
It appeared that he had with difficulty been
able to secure his services, as he was preparing to
leave the city that very night. The doctor ex-
plained that since he had seen me last he had
learned of a fine professional opening in a distant
city, and decided to take prompt advantage of it.
On my asking, in some panic, what I was to do for
some one to put me to sleep, he gave me the names
of several mesmerizers in Boston who, he averred,
had quite as great powers as he.
Somewhat relieved on this point, I instructed
Sawyer to rouse me at nine o'clock next morning,
and, lying down on the bed in my dressing-gown,
assumed a comfortable attitude, and surrendered
myself to the manipulations of the mesmerizer.
Owing, perhaps, to my unusually nervous state, I
was slower than common in losing consciousness,
but at length a delicious drowsiness stole over
me,
CHAPTER ECL
" HE is going to open his eyes. He had better
see but one of us at first."
" Promise me, then, that you will not tell him."
The first voice was a man's, the second a woman's >
and both spoke in whispers.
" I will see how he seems," replied the man-
" No, no, promise me," persisted the other.
" Let her have her way," whispered a third voice,
also a woman.
" Well, well, I promise, then," answered the man.
" Quick, go ! He is coming out of it."
There was a rustle of garments and I opened my
eyes. A fine looking man of perhaps sixty was
bending over me, an expression of much benevo-
lence mingled with great curiosity upon his fea-
tures. He was an utter stranger. I raised myself
on an elbow and looked around. The room was
empty. I certainly had never been in it before, or
one furnished like it. I looked back at my com-
panion. He smiled.
" How do you feel ? " he inquired.
" Where am I ? " I demanded.
** You are in my house," was the reply.
" How came I here ? "
28 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" "We will talk about that when you are
stronger. Meanwhile, I beg you will feel no anx-
iety. You are among friends and in good hands.
How do you feel ? "
" A bit queerly," I replied, " but I am well, I
suppose. Will you tell me how I came to be in-
debted to your hospitality ? What has happened
to me ? How came I here ? It was in my own
house that I went to sleep."
"There will be time enough for explanations
later," my unknown host replied, with a reassur-
ing smile. " It will be better to avoid agitating
talk until you are a little more yourself. Will
you oblige me by taking a couple of swallows of
this mixture ? It will do you good. I am a phy-
sician."
I repelled the glass with my hand and sat up on
the couch, although with an effort, for my head
was strangely light.
fc I insist upon knowing at once where I am and
what you have been doing with me," I said.
" My dear sir," responded my companion, " let
me beg that you will not agitate yourself. I would
rather you did not insist upon explanations so
soon, but if you do, I will try to satisfy you, pro-
vided you will first take this draught, which will
strengthen you somewhat."
I thereupon drank what he offered me. Then
he said, " It is not so simple a matter as you evi-
dently suppose to tell you how you came here
LOOKING BACKWARD. 29
You can tell me quite as much on that point as I
can tell you. You have just been roused from a
deep sleep, or, more properly, trance. So much
I can tell you. You say you were in your own
house when yon fell intc thai sleep May ] ask
you when that was ? ''
" When ? " I replied, " when ? Why, last even-
ing, of course, at about ten o'clock. I left my
man Sawyer orders to call me at nine o'clock.
What has become of Sawyer ? "
" I can't precisely tell you that," replied my
companion, regarding me with a curious expres-
sion, " but I am sure that he is excusable for not
being here. And now can you tell me a little
more explicitly when it was that you fell into that
sleep, the date, I mean ? "
" Why, last night, of course ; I said so, did n't
I ? that is, unless I have overslept an entire day.
Great heavens ! that cannot be possible ; and yet
I have an odd sensation of having slept a long
time. It was Decoration Day that I went to
sleep."
"Decoration Day?"
"Yes, Monday, the 30th."
"Pardon me, the 30th of what?'*
"Why, of this month, of course, unless I have
slept into June, but that can't be."
" This month is September."
" September ! You don't mean that I 've slept
since May I God in heaven 1 Why, it is incredi-
ble."
30 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" We shall see," replied my companion ; " you
say that it was May 30th when you went to
sleep?"
"Yes."
" May I ask of what year ? "
I stared blankly at him, incapable of speech, for
some moments.
" Of what year ? " I feebly echoed at last.
" Yes, of what year, if you please ? After yon
have told me that I shall be able to tell you how
long you have slept."
"It was the year 1887," I said.
My companion insisted that I should take an-
other draught from the glass, and felt my pulse.
" My dear sir," he said, " your manner indicates
that you are a man of culture, which I am aware
was by no means the matter of course in your day
it now is. No doubt, then, you have yourself
made the observation that nothing in this world
can be truly said to be more wonderful than any-
thing else. The causes of all phenomena are
equally adequate, and the results equally matters
of course. That you should be startled by what I
shall tell you is to be expected; but I am confi-
dent that you will not permit it to affect your
equanimity unduly. Your appearance is that of
a young man of barely thirty, and your bodily
condition seems not greatly different from that of
one just roused from a somewhat too long and
profound sleep, and yet this is the tenth day of
LOOKING BACKWARD. 81
September in the year 2000, and you have slept
exactly one hundred and thirteen years, three
months, and eleven days."
Feeling partially dazed, I drank a cup of some
sort of broth at my companion's suggestion, and,
immediately afterward becoming very drowsy,
went off into a deep sleep.
When I awoke it was broad daylight in the
room, which had been lighted artificially when I
was awake before. My mysterious host was sit-
ting near. He was not looking at me when I
opened my eyes, and I had a good opportunity to
study him and meditate upon my extraordinary
situation, before he observed that I was awake.
My giddiness was all gone, and my mind perfectly
clear. The story that I had been asleep one hun-
dred and thirteen years, which, in my former weak
and bewildered condition, I had accepted without
question, recurred to me now only to be rejected
as a preposterous attempt at an imposture, the
motive of which it was impossible remotely to
surmise.
Something extraordinary had certainly hap-
pened to account for my waking up in this strange
house with this unknown companion, but my
fancy was utterly impotent to suggest more than
the wildest guess as to what that something might
have been. Could it be that I was the victim of
some sort of conspiracy ? It looked so, certainly ;
and yet, if human lineaments ever gave true evi-
82 LOOKING BACKWARD.
dence, it was certain that this man by my side,
with a face so refined and ingenuous, was no party
to any scheme of crime or outrage. Then it
occurred to me to question if I might not be thb
butt of some elaborate practical joke on the part
of friends who had somehow learned the secret of
my underground chamber and taken this means of
impressing me with the peril of mesmeric experi-
ments. There were great difficulties in the way of
this theory; Sawyer would never have betrayed
me, nor had I any friends at all likely to under-
take such an enterprise; nevertheless the suppo-
sition that I was the victim of a practical joke
seemed on the whole the only one tenable. Half
expecting to catch a glimpse of some familiar
face grinning from behind a chair or curtain, I
looked carefully about the room. When my eyes
next rested on my companion, he was looking
at me.
" You have had a fine nap of twelve hours," he
said briskly, " and I can see that it has done you
good. You look much better. Your color is good
and your eyes are bright. How do you feel ? "
" I never felt better," I said, sitting up.
" You remember your first waking, no doubt,"
he pursued, " and your surprise when I told you
bow long you had been asleep ? "
" You said, I believe, that I had slept one hun.
ired and thirteen years."
* 4 Exactly."
BACKWARD. 33
** You will admit," I said, with an ironical smile*
** that the story was rather an improbable one."
" Extraordinary, I admit," he responded, " but
given the proper conditions, not improbable nor
inconsistent with what we know of the trance state.
When complete, as in your case, the vital func-
tions are absolutely suspended, and there is no
waste of the tissues. No limit can be set to the
possible duration of a trance when the external
conditions protect the body from physical injury.
This trance of yours is indeed the longest of which
there is any positive record, but there is no known
reason wherefore, had you not been discovered and
had the chamber in which we found you continued
intact, you might not have remained in a state of
suspended animation till, at the end of indefinite
ages, the gradual refrigeration of the earth had
destroyed the bodily tissues and set the spirit
free."
I had to admit that, if I were indeed the victim
of a practical joke, its authors had chosen an ad-
mirable agent for carrying out their imposition.
The impressive and even eloquent manner of this
man would have lent dignity to an argument that
the moon was made of cheese. The smile with
which I had regarded him as he advanced his
trance hypothesis did not appear to confuse him
in the slightest degree.
" Perhaps," I said, " you will go on and favor
me with some particulars as to the circumstances
84 LOOKING BACKWARD.
under which you discovered this chamber of which
you speak, and its contents. I enjoy good fiction."
" In this case," was the grave reply, " no fiction
could be so strange as the truth. You must know
that these many years I have been cherishing the
idea of building a laboratory in the large garden
beside this house, for the purpose of chemical ex-
periments for which I have a taste. Last Thurs-
day the excavation for the cellar was at last begun.
It was completed by that night, and Friday the
masons were to have come. Thursday night we
had a tremendous deluge of rain, and Friday morn-
ing I found my cellar a frog-pond and the walls
quite washed down. My daughter, who had come
out to view the disaster with me, called my atten-
tion to a corner of masonry laid bare by the
crumbling away of one of the walls. I cleared a
little earth from it, and, finding that it seemed
part of a large mass, determined to investigate it.
The workmen I sent for unearthed an oblong
vault some eight feet below the surface, and set in
the corner of what had evidently been the founda-
tion walls of an ancient house. A layer of ashes
and charcoal on the top of the vault showed that
the houss above had perished by fire. The vault
itself was perfectly intact, the cement being as
good as when first applied. It had a door, but this
we could not force, and found entrance by remov-
ing one of the flagstones which formed the roof.
Ihe air which came up was stagnant but pure, dry
LOOKING BACKWARD. 85
and not cold. Descending with a lantern, I found
myself in an apartment fitted up as a bedroom in
the style of the nineteenth century. On the bed
lay a young man. That he was dead and must
have been dead a century was of course to be
taken for granted ; but the extraordinary state of
preservation of the body struck me and the medi-
cal colleagues whom I had summoned with amaze-
ment. That the art of such embalming as this
had ever been known we should not have believed,
yet here seemed conclusive testimony that our im-
mediate ancestors had possessed it. My medical
colleagues, whose curiosity was highly excited,
were at once for undertaking experiments to test
the nature of the process employed, but I withheld
them. My motive in so doing, at least the only
motive I now need speak of, was the recollection
of something I once had read about the extent to
which your contemporaries had cultivated the sub-
ject of animal magnetism. It had occurred to me
as just conceivable that you might be in a trance,
and that the secret of your bodily integrity after
so long a time was not the craft of an embahner,
but life. So extremely fanciful did this idea seem,
even to me, that I did not risk the ridicule of my
fellow physicians by mentioning it, but gave some
other reason for postponing their experiments.
No sooner, however, had they left me, than I set
on foot a systematic attempt at resuscitation, of
which you know the result."
86 LOOKING BACKWARD.
Had its theme been yet more incredible, the cir-
cumstantiality of this narrative, as well as the im-
pressive manner and personality of the narrator,
might have staggered a listener, and I had begun
to feel very strangely, when, as he closed, I chanced
to catch a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror
hanging on the wall of the room. I rose and went
up to it. The face I saw was the face to a hair
and a line and not a day older than the one I had
looked at as I tied my cravat before going to
Edith that Decoration Day, which, as this man
would have me believe, was celebrated one hundred
and thirteen years before. At this, the colossal
character of the fraud which was being attempted
on me, came over me afresh. Indignation mastered
my mind as I realized the outrageous liberty that
had been taken.
"You are probably surprised," said my com-
panion, " to see that, although you are a century
older than when you lay down to sleep in that un
derground chamber, your appearance is unchanged.
That should not amaze you. It is by virtue of the
total arrest of the vital functions that you have
survived this great period of time. If your body
could have undergone any change during your
trance, it would long ago have suffered dissolu-
tion."
"Sir," I replied, turning to him, "what your
motive can be in reciting to me with a serious face
fchis remarkable farrago, I am utterly unable to
LOOKING BACKWARD. 87
guess ; but you are surely yourself too intelligent
to suppose that anybody but an imbecile could be
deceived by it. Spare me any more of this elabo-
rate nonsense and once for all tell me whether you
refuse co give me an intelligible account of where
I am and how I came here. If so, I shall proceed
to ascertain my whereabouts for myself, whoever
tnay hinder."
" You do not, then, believe that this is the year
2000?"
" Do you really think it necessary to ask me
that ? " I returned.
"Very well," replied my extraordinary host.
" Since I cannot convince you, you shall convince
yourself. Are you strong enough to follow me up-
stairs?"
" I am as strong as I ever was," I replied angrily,
" as I may have to prove if this jest is carried much
farther."
" I beg, sir," was my companion's response, " that
you will not allow yourself to be too fully persuaded
that you are the victim of a trick, lest the reaction,
when you are convinced of the truth of my state-
ments, should be too great."
The tone of concern, mingled with commisera-
tion, with which he said this, and the entire ab-
sence of any sign of resentment at my hot words,
strangely daunted me, and I followed him from
the room with an extraordinary mixture of emo-
tions. He led the way up two flights of stairs and
88 LOOKING BACKWARD.
then up a shorter one, which landed us upon a
vedere on the house-top. " Be pleased to look
around you," he said, as we reached the platform,
" and tell me if this is the Boston of the nineteenth
century."
At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad
streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine build-
ings, for the most part not in continuous blocks
but set in larger or smaller inclosures, stretched
in every direction. Every quarter contained large
open squares filled with trees, among which statues
glistened and fountains flashed in the late after-
noon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and
an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day
raised their stately piles on every side. Surely 1
had never seen this city nor one comparable to it
before. Raising my eyes at last towards the ho-
rizon, I looked westward. That blue ribbon wind-
ing away to the sunset, was it not the sinuous
Charles ? I looked east ; Boston harbor stretched
before me within its headlands, not one of its green
islets missing.
I knew then that I had been told the truth con-
cerning the prodigious thing which had befaller
ma
CHAPTER IV.
t DID not faint, but the effort to realize my
position made me very giddy, and I remember
that my companion had to give me a strong arm
as he conducted me from the roof to a roomy
apartment on the upper floor of the house, where
he insisted on my drinking a glass or two of good
wine and partaking of a light repast.
" I think you are going to be all right now," he
said cheerily. " I should not have taken so abrupt
a means to convince you of your position if your
course, while perfectly excusable under the ch>
cumstances, had not rather obliged me to do so.
I confess," he added laughing, "I was a little
apprehensive at one time that I should undergo
what I believe you used to call a knockdown
in the nineteenth century, if I did not act rather
promptly. I remembered that the Bostonians of
your day were famous pugilists, and thought best
to lose no time. I take it you are now ready to
acquit me of the charge of hoaxing you."
"If you had told me," I replied, profoundly
awed, ' that a thousand years instead of a hun-
dred had elapsed since I last looked on this city,
I should now believe you."
40 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" Only a century has passed," he answered,
" but many a millennium in the world's history
has seen changes less extraordinary."
" And now," he added, extending his hand with
an air of irresistible cordiality, " let me give you a
hearty welcome to the Boston of the twentieth cen-
tury and to this house. My name is Leete, Dr.
Leete they call me."
"My name," I said as I shook his hand, "is
Julian West."
"I am most happy in making your acquaint-
ance, Mr. West," he responded. " Seeing that
this house is built on the site of your own, I hope
you will find it easy to make yourself at home
in it."
After my refreshment Dr. Leete offered me a
bath and a change of clothing, of which I gladly
availed myself.
It did not appear that any very startling revo-
lution in men's attire had been among the great
changes my host had spoken of, for, barring a few
details, my new habiliments did not puzzle me at
alL
Physically, I was now myself again. But men-
tally, how was it with me, the reader will doubt-
less wonder. What were my intellectual sensa-
tions, he may wish to know, on finding myself so
suddenly dropped as it were into a new world. In
reply let me ask Aim to suppose himself suddenly,
in the twinkling of an eye, transported from earth,
LOOKING BACKWARD. 41
Bay, to Paradise or Hades. What does he fancy
would be his own experience ? Would his thoughts
return at once to the earth he had just left, or
would he, after the first shock, wellnigh forget his
former life for a while, albeit to be remembered
later, in the interest excited by his new surround-
ings? All I can say is, that \$ his experience
were at all like mine in the -transition I am de-
scribing, the latter hypothesis would prove the
correct one. The impressions of amazement and
curiosity which my new surroundings produced
occupied my mind, after the first shock, to the ex-
clusion of all other thoughts. For the time the
memory of my former life was, as it were, in abey-
ance.
No sooner did I find myself physically rehabili-
tated through the kind offices of my host, than I
became eager to return to the house-top ; and pres-
ently we were comfortably established there in
easy-chairs, with the city beneath and around us.
After Dr. Leete had responded to numerous ques-
tions on my part, ac to the ancient landmarks I
missed and the new ones which had replaced them,
he asked me what point of the contrast between
the new and the old city struck me most forcibly.
" To speak of small things before great," I
responded, " I really think that the complete ab-
sence of chimneys and their smoke is the detail
that first impressed me."
** Ah 1 " ejaculated my companion with an air
42 LOOKING BACKWARD.
of much interest, " I had forgotten the chimneys,
it is so long since they went out of use. It is
nearly a century since the crude method of com-
bustion on which you depended for heat became
obsolete."
" In general," I said, " what impresses me most
about the city is the material prosperity on the
part of the people which its magnificence implies."
" I would give a great deal for just one glimpse
of the Boston of your day," replied Dr. Leete.
" No doubt, as you imply, the cities of that period
were rather shabby affairs. If you had the taste to
make them splendid, which I would not be so rude
as to question, the general poverty resulting from
your extraordinary industrial system would not
have given you the means. Moreover, the ex-
cessive individualism which then prevailed was
inconsistent with much public spirit. What little
wealth you had seems almost wholly to have been
lavished in private luxury. Nowadays, on the
contrary, there is no destination of the surplus
wealth so popular as the adornment of the city,
which all enjoy in equal degree."
The sun had been setting as we returned to the
house-top, and as we talked night descended upon
the city.
"It is growing dark," said Dr. Leete. "Let
us descend into the house; I want to introduce
my wife and daughter to you."
His words recalled ir me the feminine voices
LOOKING BACKWARD. 43
which I had heard whispering about me as I was
coming back to conscious life ; and, most curious
to learn what the ladies of the year 2000 were
like, I assented with alacrity to the proposition.
The apartment in which we found the wife and
daughter of my host, as well as the entire interior
of the house, was filled with a mellow light, which
I knew must be artificial, although I could not dis-
cover the source from which it was diffused. Mrs.
Leete was an exceptionally fine looking and well
preserved woman of about her husband's age,
while the daughter, who was in the first blush of
womanhood, was the most beautiful girl I had ever
seen. Her face was as bewitching as deep blue
dyes, delicately tinted complexion, and perfect fea-
tures could make it, but even had her countenance
lacked special charms, the faultless luxuriance of
her figure would have given her place as a beauty
among the women of the nineteenth century.
Feminine softness and delicacy were in this lovely
creature deliciously combined with an appearance
of health and abounding physical vitality too often
lacking in the maidens with whom alone I could
compare her. It was a coincidence trifling in com-
parison with the general strangeness of the situa-
tion, but still striking, that her name should be
Edith.
The evening that followed was certainly unique
in the history of social intercourse, but to suppose
that our conversation was peculiarly strained or
44 LOOKING BACKWARD.
difficult would be a great mistake. I believe in-
deed that it is under what may be called unnat
ural, in the sense of extraordinary, circumstances
that people behave most naturally, for the reason,
no doubt, that such circumstances banish artifi-
ciality. I know at any rate that my intercourse
that evening with these representatives of another
age and world was marked by an ingenuous sin-
cerity and frankness such as but rarely crown
long acquaintance. No doubt the exquisite tact
of my entertainers had much to do with this. Of
course there was nothing we could talk of but the
strange experience by virtue of which I was there,
but they talked of it with an interest so naive and
direct in its expression as to relieve the subject to
a great degree of the element of the weird and the
uncanny which might so easily have been overpow-
ering. One would have supposed that they were
quite in the habit of entertaining waifs from an-
other century, so perfect was their tact.
For my own part, never do I remember the
operations of my mind to have been more alert
and acute than that evening, or my intellectual
sensibilities more keen. Of course I do not mean
that the consciousness of my amazing situation was
for a moment out of mind, but its chief effect thus
far was to produce a feverish elation, a sort o/
meiital intoxication. 1
1 In accounting for this state of mind it must be remembered
that, except for the topic of our conversations, there was in my
LOOKING BACKWARD. 45
Edith Leete took little part in the conversation,
but when several times the magnetism of her
beauty drew my glance to her face, I found her
eyes fixed on me with an absorbed intensity, al-
most like fascination. It was evident that I had
excited her interest to an extraordinary degree, as
was not astonishing, supposing her to be a girl
of imagination. Though I supposed curiosity was
the chief motive of her interest, it could but affect
me as it would not have done had she been less
beautiful.
Dr. Leete, as well as the ladies, seemed greatly
interested in my account of the circumstances
under which I had gone to sleep in the under-
ground chamber. All had suggestions to offer to
account for my having been forgotten there, and
the theory which we finally agreed on offers at
least a plausible explanation, although whether it
be in its details the true one, nobody, of course,
will ever know. The layer of ashes found above
the chamber indicated that the house had been
burned down. Let it be supposed that the con-
surroundings next to nothing to suggest what had befallen me.
Within a block of my home in the old Boston I could have found
social circles vastly more foreign to me. The speech of the Bos-
tonians of the twentieth century differs even less from that of
their cultured ancestors of the nineteenth than did that of the
latter from the language of Washington and Franklin, while the
differences between the style of dress and furniture of the two
epochs are not more marked than I have known fashion to make
"to the time of one generation.
46 LOOKING BACKWARD.
flagration had taken place the night I fell asleejx
It only remains to assume that Sawyer lost his
life in the fire or by some accident connected with
it, and the rest follows naturally enough. No one
but he and Dr. Pillsbury either knew of the ex-
istence of the chamber or that I was in it, and
Dr. Pillsbury, who had gone that night to New
Orleans, had probably never heard of the fire
at alL The conclusion of my friends, and of the
public, must have been that I had perished in the
flames. An excavation of the ruins, unless thor-
ough, would not have disclosed the recess in the
foundation walls connecting with my chamber.
To be sure, if the site had been again built upon,
at least immediately, such an excavation would
have been necessary, but the troublous times and
the undesirable character of the locality might well
have prevented rebuilding. The size of the trees
in the garden now occupying the site indicated
Dr. Leete said, that for more than half a centur*
at least it had been open ground.
CHAPTER V.
WHEN, in the course of the evening the ladies
retired, leaving Dr. Leete and myself alone, he
sounded me as to my disposition for sleep, saying
that if I felt like it my bed was ready for me ;
but if I was inclined to wakef ulness nothing would
please him better than to bear me company. " I
am a late bird, myself," he said, " and, without
suspicion of flattery, I may say that a companion
more interesting than yourself could scarcely be
imagined. It is decidedly not often that one has
a chance to converse with a man of the nineteenth
century."
Now I had been looking forward all the evening
with some dread to the time when I should be
alone, on retiring for the night. Surrounded by
these most friendly strangers, stimulated and sup-
ported by their sympathetic interest, I had been
able to keep my mental balance. Even then, how-
ever, in pauses of the conversation I had had
glimpses, vivid as lightning flashes, of the horror
of strangeness that was waiting to be faced when
I could no longer command diversion. I knew 1
could not sleep that night, and as for lying awake
and thinking, it argues no cowardice. I am sure.
48 LOOKING BACKWARD.
to confess that I was afraid of it. When, in reply
to my host's question, I frankly told him this, he
replied that it would be strange if I did not feel
just so, but that I need have no anxiety about
Bleeping ; ^lienevei 1 wanted to gc to bed, he
would give me a d^/se which would insure me a
sound night's sleep without fail. Next morning,
no doubt, I would awake with the feeling of an
old citizen."
" Before I acquire that," I replied, " I must
Imow a little more about the sort of Boston I
have come back to. You told me when we were
upon the house-top that though a century only had
elapsed since I fell asleep, it had been marked
by greater changes in the conditions of humanity
than many a previous millennium. With the city
before me I could well believe that, but I am very
curious to know what some of the changes have
been. To make a beginning somewhere, for the
subject is doubtless a large one, what solution, if
any, have you found for the labor question ? It
was the Sphinx's riddle of the nineteenth century,
and when I dropped out the Sphinx was threaten-
ing to devour society, because the answer was not
forthcoming. It is well worth sleeping a hundred
years to learn what the right answer was, if, in-
deed, you have found it yet."
" As no such thing as the labor question is
known nowadays," replied Dr. Leete, "and there
is no way in which it could arise, I suppose we
LOOKING BACKWARD. 49
may claim to have solved it. Society would in-
deed have fully deserved being devoured if it had
failed to answer a riddle so entirely simple. In
fact, to speak by the book, it was not necessary for
society to solve the riddle at all. It may be said
to have solved itself. The solution came as the
result of a process of industrial evolution which
could not have terminated otherwise. All that
society had to do was to recognize and cooperate
with that evolution, when its tendency had become
unmistakable."
" I can only say," I answered, " that at the time
I fell asleep no such evolution had been recog-
nized."
" It was in 1887 that you fell into this sleep, I
think you said."
" Yes, May 30th, 1887."
My companion regarded me musingly for some
moments. Then he observed, "And you tell me
that even then there was no general recognition of
the nature of the crisis which society was nearing ?
Of course, I fully credit your statement. The sin-
gular blindness of your contemporaries to the signs
of the times is a phenomenon commented on by
many of our historians, but few facts of history
are more difficult for us to realize, so obvious and
unmistakable as we look back seem the indications,
which must also have come under your eyes, of the
transformation about to come to pass. I should
be interested, Mr. West, if you would give me a
60 LOOKING BACKWARD.
little more definite idea of the view which you and
men of your grade of intellect took of the state
and prospects of society in 1887. You must, at
least, have realized that the widespread industrial
and social troubles, and the underlying dissatisfac-
tion of all classes with the inequalities of society,
and the general misery of mankind, were portents
of great changes of some sort."
" We did, indeed, fully realize that," I replied.
u We felt that society was dragging anchor and in
danger of going adrift. Whither it would drift
nobody could say, but all feared the rocks."
" Nevertheless," said Dr. Leete, " the set of the
current was perfectly perceptible if you had but
taken pains to observe it, and it was not toward
the rocks, but toward a deeper channel."
" We had a popular proverb, " I replied, " that
'hindsight is better than foresight,' the force of
which I shall now, no doubt, appreciate more fully
than ever. All I can say is, that the prospect was
such when I went into that long sleep that I should
not have been surprised had I looked down from
your house-top to-day on a heap of charred and
moss-grown ruins instead of this glorious city."
Dr. Leete had listened to me with close atten-
tion and nodded thoughtfully as I finished speak-
ing. " What you have said," he observed, " will
be regarded as a most valuable vindication of Sto-
riot, whose account of your era has been generally
thought exaggerated in its picture of the gloom
LOOKING BACKWARD. 51
and confusion of men ? s minds. That a period oi
transition like that should be full of excitement
and agitation was indeed to be looked for ; but
seeing how plain was the tendency of the forces
in operation, it was natural to believe that hope
rather than fear would have been the prevriling
temper of the popular mind.'*
" You have not yet told me what was the answer
fco the riddle which you found," I said. "I am
impatient to know by what contradiction of nat-
ural sequence the peace and prosperity which you
now seem to enjoy could have been the outcome of
an era like my own."
" Excuse me," replied my host, " but do you
smoke ? " It was not till our cigars were lighted
and drawing well that he resumed. " Since you
are in the humor to talk rather than to sleep, as I
certainly am, perhaps I cannot do better than to
try to give you enough idea of our modern indus-
trial system to dissipate at least the impression
that there is any mystery about the process of its
evolution. The Bostonians of your day had the
reputation of being great askers of questions, and
I am going to show my descent by asking you one
to begin with. What should you name as the
mot prominent feature of the labor troubles of
/our day ? '*
" Why, the strikes, of course,** I replied.
" Exactly ; but what made the strikes so for
nidable?"
62 LOOKING BACKWARD.
** The great labor organizations."
" And what was the motive of these great organ
izations ? "
" The workmen claimed they had to organize
to get their rights from the big corporations," 1
replied.
" That is just it," said Dr. Leete ; " the organ-
ization of labor and the strikes were an effect,
merely, of the concentration of capital in greater
masses than had ever been known before. Before
this concentration began, while as yet commerce
and industry were conducted by innumerable petty
concerns with small capital, instead of a small num-
ber of great concerns with vast capital, the indi-
vidual workman was relatively important and inde-
pendent in his relations to the employer. More-
over, when a little capital or a new idea was
enough to start a man in business for himself,
workingmen were constantly becoming employer?
and there was no hard and fast line between thi
two classes. Labor unions were needless then, and
general strikes out of the question. But when the
era of small concerns with small capital was suc-
ceeded by that of the great aggregations of capital,
all this was changed. The individual laborer, who
had been relatively important to the small em-
ployer, was reduced to insignificance and power-
lessness over against the great corporation, while
at the same time the way upward to the grade o{
employer was closed to him. Self-defense drove
him to onion with his fellows.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 53
" The records of the period show that the outcry
against the concentration of capital was furious.
Men believed that it threatened society with a
form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever
endured. They believed that the great corpora-
tions were preparing for them the yoke of a baser
servitude than had ever been imposed on the race,
servitude not to men but to soulless machines in-
capable of any motive but insatiable greed. Look-
ing back, we cannot wonder at their desperation,
for certainly humanity was never confronted with
a fate more sordid and hideous than would have
been the era of corporate tyranny which they an-
ticipated.
" Meanwhile, without being in the smallest de-
gree checked by the clamor against it, the absorp.
tion of business by ever larger monopolies contin-
ued. In the United States there was not, after
the beginning of the last quarter of the century,
any opportunity whatever for individual enterprise
in any important field of industry, unless backed
by a great capital. During the last decade of the
century, such small businesses as still remained
were fast-failing survivals of a past epoch, or mere
parasites on the great corporations, or else existed
in fields too small to attract the great capitalists.
Small businesses, as far as they still remained,
were reduced to the condition of rats and mice, liv-
ing in holes and corners, and counting on evading
notice for the enjoyment of existence. The rail-
54 LOOKING BACKWARD.
roads had gone on combining till a few great syn
dicates controlled every rail in the land. In man-
ufactories, every important staple was controlled
by a syndicate. These syndicates, pools, trusts, or
whatever their name, fixed prices and crushed all
competition except when combinations as vast as
themselves arose. Then a struggle, resulting in a
still greater consolidation, ensued. The great city
bazar crushed its country rivals with branch stores,
and in the city itself absorbed its smaller rivals
till the business of a whole quarter was concen-
trated under one roof, with a hundred former pro-
prietors of shops serving as clerks. Having no
business of his own to put his money in, the small
capitalist, at the same time that he took service
under the corporation, found no other investment
for his money but its stocks and bonds, thus be
coming doubly dependent upon it.
" The fact that the desperate popular opposition
to the consolidation of business in a few powerful
hands had no effect to check it proves that there
must have been a strong economical reason for
it. The small capitalists, with their innumerable
petty concerns, had in fact yielded the field to
the great aggregations of capital, because they be-
longed to a day of small things and were totallj
incompetent to the demands of an age of steam
and telegraphs and the gigantic scale of its enter
prises. To restore the former order of things, even
if possible, would have involved returning to the
LOOKING BACKWARD. 55
day of stage-coaches. Oppressive and intolerable
as was the regime of the great consolidations of
capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were
forced to admit the prodigious increase of effi-
ciency which had been imparted to the national
industries, the vast economies effected by concen
tration of management and unity of organization,
and to confess that since the new system had taken
the place of the old the wealth of the world had
increased at a rate before undreamed of. To be
sure this vast increase had gone chiefly to make
the rich richer, increasing the gap between them
and the poor ; but the fact remained that, as a
means merely of producing wealth, capital had
been proved efficient in proportion to its consolida-
tion. The restoration of the old system with the
subdivision of capital, if it were possible, might
indeed bring back a greater equality of conditions,
with more individual dignity and freedom, but it
would be at the price of general poverty and the
arrest of material progress.
" Was there, then, no way of commanding the
services of the mighty wealth-producing principle
of consolidated capital without bowing down to a
plutocracy like that of Carthage ? As soon as
men began to ask themselves these questions, they
found the answer ready for them. The movement
toward the conduct of business by larger an<?
larger aggregations of capital, the tendency to-
vard monopolies, which had been so desperately
66 LOOKING BACKWARD.
and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, in its
true significance, as a process which only needed
to complete its logical evolution to open a golden
future to humanity.
" Early in the last century the evolution was
completed by the final consolidation of the entire
capital of the nation. The industry and com-
merce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by
a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates
of private persons at their caprice and for their
profit, were intrusted to a single syndicate repre-
senting the people, to be conducted in the com-
mon interest for the common profit. The nation,
that is to say, organized as the one great business
corporation in which all other corporations were
absorbed ; it became the one capitalist in the
place of all other capitalists, the sole employer,
the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser
monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the
profits and economies of which all citizens shared.
The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great
Trust. In a word, the people of the United
States concluded to assume the conduct of their
own business, just as one hundred odd years be-
fore they had assumed the conduct of their own
government, organizing now for industrial pur-
poses on precisely the same grounds that they had
then organized for political purposes. At last,
strangely late in the world's history, the obvious
fact was perceived that no business is so essentially
LOOKING BACKWARD. 57
She public business as the industry and commerce
on which the people's livelihood depends, and that
to entrust it to private persons to be managed for
private profit is a folly similar in kind, though
vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrender-
ing the functions of political government to kings
and nobles to be conducted for their personal glo-
rification."
" Such a stupendous change as you describe,"
said I, " did not, of course, take place without
great bloodshed and terrible convulsions.'*
" On the contrary," replied Dr. Leete, " there
aras absolutely no violence. The change had been
long foreseen. Public opinion had become fully
ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was
behind it. There was no more possibility of
opposing it by force than by argument. On the
other hand the popular sentiment toward the great
corporations and those identified with them had
ceased to be one of bitterness, as they came to
realize their necessity as a link, a transition phase,
in the evolution of the true industrial system. The
most violent foes of the great private monopolies
were now forced to recognize how invaluable and
indispensable had been their office in educating
the people up to the point of assuming control of
their own business. Fifty years before, the con-
solidation of the industries of the country under
national control would have seemed a very daring
experiment to the most sanguine. But by a series
68
of object lessons, seen and studied by all men, the
great corporations had taught the people an en-
tirely new set of ideas on this subject. They had
seen for many years syndicates handling revenues
greater than those of states, and directing the
labors of hundreds of thousands of men with an
efficiency and economy unattainable in smaller
operations. It had come to be recognized as an
axiom that the larger the business the simpler the
principles that can be applied to it ; that, as the
machine is truer than the hand, so the system*
which in a great concern does the work of the
master's eye in a small business, turns out more
accurate results. Thus it came about that, thanks
to the corporations themselves, when it was pro-
posed that the nation should assume their func-
tions, the suggestion implied nothing which seemed
impracticable even to the timid. To be sure it
was a step beyond any yet taken, a broader gen-
eralization, but the very fact that the nation would
be the sole corporation in the field would, it was
seen, relieve the undertaking of many difficulties
with which the partial monopolies had contended."
CHAPTER VI
DR. LEETE ceased speaking, and I remained
silent, endeavoring to form some general concep-
tion of the changes in the arrangements of society
implied in the tremendous revolution which he had
described.
Finally I said, " The idea of such an extension
of the functions of government is, to say the least,
rather overwhelming."
** Extension ! " he repeated, " where is the ex-
tension ? "
" In my day," I replied, " it was considered that
the proper functions of government, strictly speak-
ing, were limited to keeping the peace and defend-
ing the people against the public enemy, that is, to
the military and police powers."
"And, in heaven's name, who are the public
enemies ? " exclaimed Dr. Leete. " Are they
France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and
nakedness? In your day governments were ac-
customed, on the slightest international misunder-
standing, to seize upon the bodies of citizens and
deliver them over by hundreds of thousands to
death and mutilation, wasting their treasures the
while like water ; and all this of tenest for no im-
60 LOOKING BACKWARD.
aginable profit to the victims. We have no wan
now, and our governments no war powers, but in
order to protect every citizen against hunger, cold,
and nakedness, and provide for all his physical and
mental needs, the function is assumed of directing
his industry for a term of years. No, Mr. West,
I am sure on reflection you will perceive that it
was in your age, not in ours, that the extension of
the functions of governments was extraordinary.
Not even for the best ends would men now allow
their governments such powers as were then used
for the most maleficent."
"Leaving comparisons aside," I said, "the
demagoguery and corruption of our public men
would have been considered, in my day, insuper-
able objections to any assumption by government
of the charge of the national industries. We
should have thought that no arrangement could be
worse than to entrust the politicians with control
of the wealth-producing machinery of the coun-
try. Its material interests were quite too much
the football of parties as it was."
" No doubt you were right," rejoined Dr. Leete,
" but all that is changed now. We have no parties
or politicians, and as for demagoguery and cor-
ruption, they are words having only an historical
significance."
" Human nature itself must have changed very
^nuch," I said.
"Not at ail," was Dr. Leete's reply, "but the
LOOKING BACKWARD. 61
conditions of human life have changed, and with
them the motives of human action. The organ-
ization of society with you was such that officials
were under a constant temptation to misuse their
power for the private profit of themselves or
others. Under such circumstances it seems almost
strange that you dared entrust them with any of
your affairs. Nowadays, on the contrary, society
is so constituted that there is absolutely no way in
which an official, however ill-disposed, could pos-
sibly make any profit for himself or any one else
by a misuse of his power. Let him be as bad an
official as you please, he cannot be a corrupt one.
There is no motive to be. The social system no
longer offers a premium on dishonesty. But these
are matters which you can only understand as you
come, with time, to know us better."
" But you have not yet told me how you have
settled the labor problem. It is the problem of
capital which we have been discussing," I said,
" After the nation had assumed conduct of the
mills, machinery, railroads, farms, mines, and cap-
ital in general of the country, the labor question
still remained. In assuming the responsibilities of
capital the nation had assumed the difficulties of
the capitalist's position."
" The moment the nation assumed the respon-
sibilities of capital those difficulties vanished," re-
plied Dr. Leete. " The national organization of
labor under one direction was the complete sola-
62 LOOKING BACKWARD.
tion of what was, in your day and under your sys
tern, justly regarded as the insoluble labor prob-
lem. When the nation became the sole employer,
all the citizens, by virtue of their citizenship,
became employees, to be distributed according to
the needs of industry."
" That is," I suggested, " you have simply ap-
plied the principle of universal military service, as
it was understood in our day, to the labor ques-
tion."
" Yes," said Dr. Leete, " that was something
which followed as a matter of course as soon as
the nation had become the sole capitalist. The
people were already accustomed to the idea that
the obligation of every citizen, not physically dis-
abled, to contribute his military services to the de-
fense of the nation was equal and absolute. That
it was equally the duty of every citizen to contri-
bute his quota of industrial or intellectual services
to the maintenance of the nation was equally evi-
dent, though it was not until the nation became
the employer of labor that citizens were able to
render this sort of service with any pretense
either of universality or equity. No organization
of labor was possible when the employing power
was divided among hundreds or thousands of in-
dividuals and corporations, between which concert
of any kind was neither desired, nor indeed feasi-
ble. It constantly happened then that vast num-
bers who desired to labor could find no opportu-
LOOKING BACKWARD. 63
nity, and on the other hand, those who desired to
evade a part or all of their debt could easily do
go."
" Service, now, I suppose, is compulsory upon
all," I suggested.
" It is rather a matter of course than of compul-
sion," replied Dr. Leete. " It is regarded as so
absolutely natural and reasonable that the idea of
its being compulsory has ceased to be thought of.
He would be thought to be an incredibly contempt-
ible person who should need compulsion in such a
case. Nevertheless, to speak of service being com-
pulsory would be a weak way to state its absolute
inevitableness. Our entire social order is so
wholly based upon and deduced from it that if it
were conceivable that a man could escape it, he
would be left with no possible way to provide for
his existence. He would have excluded himself
from the world, cut himself off from his kind, in a
word, committed suicide."
" Is the term of service in this industrial army
for life ? "
" Oh, no ; it both begins later and ends earlier
than the average working period in your day.
Your workshops were filled with children and old
men, but we hold the period of youth sacred to
education, and the period of maturity, when the
physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease
and agreeable relaxation. The period of indus-
trial service is twenty-four years, beginning at the
64 LOOKING BACKWARD.
close of the course of education at twenty-one and
terminating at forty-five. After forty-five, while
discharged from labor, the citizen still remains
liable to special calls, in case of emergencies caus-
ing a sudden great increase in the demand for
labor, till he reaches the age of fifty-five, but such
calls are rarely, in fact almost never, made. The
fifteenth day of October of every year is what we
call Muster Day, because those who have reached
the age of twenty-one are then mustered into the
industrial service, and at the same time those who,
after twenty-four years' service, have reached the
age of forty-five, are honorably mustered out. It
is the great day of the year with us, whence we
reckon all other events, our Olympiad, save that it
is annual."
CHAPTER VIL
" IT is after you have mustered your industrial
army into service," I said, " that I should expect
the chief difficulty to arise, for there its analogy
with a military army must cease. Soldiers have
all the same thing, and a very simple thing, to do,
namely, to practice the manual of arms, to march
and stand guard. But the industrial army must
learn and follow two or three hundred diverse
trades and avocations. What administrative tal-
ent can be equal to determining wisely what trade
or business every individual in a great nation shall
pursue ? "
" The administration has nothing to do with de-
termining that point."
" Who does determine it, then ? " I asked.
" Every man for himself in accordance with his
natural aptitude, the utmost pains being taken to
enable him to find out what his natural aptitude
really is. The principle on which our industrial
army is organized is that a man's natural endow-
ments, mental and physical, determine what he
can work at most profitably to the nation and most
satisfactorily to himself. While the obligation of
service in some form is not to be evaded, volun.
66 LOOKING BACKWARD.
tary election, subject only to necessary regulation,
is depended on to determine the particular sort of
service every man is to render. As an individual's
satisfaction during his term of service depends on
his having an occupation to his taste, parents and
teachers watch from early years for indications ol
special aptitudes in children. A thorough study
of the National industrial system, with the history
and rudiments of all the great trades, is an essen-
tial part of our educational system. While man-
ual training is not allowed to encroach on the gen
era! intellectual culture to which our schools ar$
devoted, it is carried far enough to give our youth,
in addition to their theoretical knowledge of the
national industries, mechanical and agricultural, a
certain familiarity with their tools and methods.
Our schools are constantly visiting our workshops,
and often are taken on long excursions to inspect
particular industrial enterprises. In your day a
man was not ashamed to be grossly ignorant of all
trades except his own, but such ignorance would
not be consistent with our idea of placing every
one in a position to select intelligently the occupa-
tion for which he has most taste. Usually long
before he is mustered into service a young man
has found out the pursuit he wants to follow, has
acquired a great deal of knowledge about it, and
is waiting impatiently the time when he can enlist
in its ranks."
* Surely," I said, " it can hardly be that the
LOOKING BACKWARD. gj
dumber of volunteers for any trade is exactly the
number needed in that trade. It must be geneiv
ally either under or over the demand."
" The supply of volunteers is always expected to
fully equal the demand," replied Dr. Leete. " It
is the business of the administration to see that
this is the case. The rate of volunteering for each
trade is closely watched. If there be a noticeably
greater excess of volunteers over men needed in
any trade, it is inferred that the trade offers
greater attractions than others. On the other
hand, if the number of volunteers for a trade
tends to drop below the demand, it is inferred that
it is thought more arduous. It is the business of
the administration to seek constantly to equalize
the attractions of the trades, so far as the condi-
tions of labor in them are concerned, so that all
trades shall be equally attractive to persons having
natural tastes for them. This is done by making
the hours of labor in different trades to differ ac-
cording to their arduousness. The lighter trades,
prosecuted under the most agreeable circumstances,
have in this way the longest hours, while an ardu-
ous trade, such as mining, has very short hours.
There is no theory, no a priori rule, by which the
respective attractiveness of industries is deter-
mined. The administration, in taking burdens off
one class of workers and adding them to other
classes, simply follows the fluctuations of opinion
among the workers themselves as indicated by the
68 LOOKING BACKWARD.
rate of volunteering. The principle is that no
man's work ought to be, on the whole, harder for
nim than any other man's for him, the workers
themselves to be the judges. There are no limits
to the application of this rule. If any particulai
occupation is in itself so arduous or so oppressive
that, in order to induce volunteers, the day's wori
in it had to be reduced to ten minutes, it would be
done. If, even then, no man was willing to do it.
it would remain undone. But of course, in point
of fact, a moderate reduction in the hours of labor,
or addition of other privileges, suffices to secure
all needed volunteers for any occupation necessary
to men. If, indeed, the unavoidable difficulties
and dangers of such a necessary pursuit were so
great that no inducement of compensating advan-
tages would overcome men's repugnance to it, the
administration would only need to take it out of
the common order of occupations by declaring it
* extra hazardous,' and those who pursued it espe-
cially worthy of the national gratitude, to be over-
run with volunteers. Our young men are very
greedy of honor, and do not let slip such opportu-
nities. Of course you will see that dependence on
the purely voluntary choice of avocations involves
the abolition in all of anything like unhygienic
conditions or special peril to life and limb,
Health and safety are conditions common to all in
dustries. The nation does not maim and slaughtei
its workmen by thousands, as did the private cap-
italists and corporations of your day."
LOOKING BACKWARD. 69
"When there are more who want to enter a par-
ticular trade than there is room for, how do you
decide between the applicants ? " I inquired.
44 Preference is given to those who have acquired
{he most knowledge of the trade they wish to fol-
low. No man, however, who through successive
years remains persistent in his desire to show what
he can do at any particular trade, is in the end de-
nied an opportunity. Meanwhile, if a man cannot
at first win entrance into the business he prefers,
he has usually one or more alternative preferences,
pursuits for which he has some degree of aptitude,
although not the highest. Every one, indeed, is
expected to study his aptitudes so as to have not
only a first choice as to occupation, but a second
or third, so that if, either at the outset of his
career or subsequently, owing to the progress of
invention or changes in demand, he is unable to
follow his first vocation, he can still find reasonably
congenial employment. This principle of second-
ary choices as to occupation is quite important in
our system I should add, in reference to the
counter-possibility of some sudden failure of vol-
unteers in a particular 'trade, or some sudden
necessity of an increased force, that the adminis-
tration, while depending on the voluntary system
for filling up the trades as a rule, holds always in
reserve the power to call for special volunteers, or
iraft any force needed from any quarter. Geneiv
ally, however, all needs of this sort can be met by
70 LOOKING BACKWARD.
details from the class of unskilled or common
laborers."
" How is this class of common laborers re-
cruited ? " I asked. " Surely nobody voluntarily
enters that."
" It is the grade to which all new recruits be
long for the first three years of their service. It
is not till after this period, during which he is as
signable to any work at the discretion of his su-
periors, that the young man is allowed to elect a
special avocation. These three years of stringent
discipline none are exempt from, and very glad
our young men are to pass from this severe school
into the comparative liberty of the trades. If a
man were so stupid as to have no choice as to occu-
pation, he would simply remain a common laborer;
but such cases, as you may suppose, are not com-
mon."
" Having once elected and entered on a trade or
occupation," I remarked, " I suppose he has to
stick to it the rest of his life."
"Not necessarily," replied Dr. Leete; "while
frequent and merely capricious changes of occupa-
tion are not encouraged or even permitted, every
worker is allowed, of course, under certain regula-
tions and in accordance with the exigencies of the
service, to volunteer for another industry which he
thinks would suit him better than his first choice,
In this case his application is received just as ii
he were volunteering for the first time, and '.ID the
LOOKING BACKWARD. 71
same terms. Not only this, but a worker may
likewise, under suitable regulations and not too
frequently, obtain a transfer to an establishment of
the same industry in another part of the country
which for any reason he may prefer. Under your
system a discontented man could indeed leave his
work at will, but he left his means of support at
the same time, and took his chances as to future
livelihood. We find that the number of men who
wish to abandon an accustomed occupation for a new
one, and old friends and associations for strange
ones, is small. It is only the poorer sort of work-
men who desire to change even as frequently as
our regulations permit. Of course transfers or
discharges, when health demands them, are always
given."
" As an industrial system, I should think this
might be extremely efficient," I said, " but I don't
see that it makes any provision for the professional
classes, the men who serve the nation with brains
instead of hands. Of course you can't get along
without the brain-workers. How, then, are they
selected from those who are to serve as farmers and
mechanics ? That must require a very delicate sort
of sifting process, I should say."
" So it does," replied Dr. Leete ; " the most deli-
cate possible test is needed here, and so we leave
the question whether a man shall be a bra'in or
hand worker entirely to him to settle. At the CD*
of the term of three years as a common laborer,
72 LOOKING BACKWARD.
which every man must serve, it is for him to choose,
in accordance to his natural tastes, whether he
will fit himself for an art or profession, or be a
farmer or mechanic. If he feels that he can do
better work with his brains than his muscles, he
finds every facility provided for testing the realitj
of his supposed bent, of cultivating it, and if fit
of pursuing it as his avocation. The schools oi
technology, of medicine, of art, of music, of his-
trionics, and of higher liberal learning are always
open to aspirants without condition."
"Are not the schools flooded with young mer
whose only motive is to avoid work ? "
Dr. Leete smiled a little grimly.
" No one is at all likely to enter the professional
schools for the purpose of avoiding work, I assure
you," he said. " They are intended for those with
special aptitude for the branches they teach, and
any one without it would find it easier to do double
hours at his trade than try to keep up with the
classes. Of course many honestly mistake their
vocation, and, finding themselves unequal to the
requirements of the schools, drop out and return
to the industrial service ; no discredit attaches to
such persons, for the public policy is to encourage
all to develop suspected talents which only actual
ests can prove the reality of. The professiona)
anri scientific schools of your day depended on the
natronage of their pupils for support, and the
practice appears to have been common of giving
LOOKING BACKWARD. 73
Hplomas to unfit persons, who afterwards found
thexj way into the professions. Our schools are
latianal institutions, and to have passed their
tests K. a proof of special abilities not to be ques-
tioned.
** ThL opportunity for a professional training,"
she doctor Continued, " remains open to every man
ftli the age of thirty is reached, after which stu-
dents are ruw received, as there would remain too
brief a period 'Before the age of discharge in which
fco serve the iisjaon in their professions. In your
day young men had to choose their professions
very young, ana therefore, in a large proportion
of instances, whoJUy mistook their vocations. It
is recognized nowau&ys that the natural aptitudes
of some are later thn those of others in develop-
ing, and therefore, wiille the choice of profession
may be made as early as twenty-four, it remains
open for six years long^.%"
A question which had A dozen times before been
on my lips now found utterance, a question which
touched upon what, in rry time, had been regarded
the most vital difficulty m the way of any final set-
tlement of the industii*i problem. " It is an ex-
traordinary thing," I said, " that you should not
yet have said a word about the method of adjust-
ing wages. Since the nation is the sole employer,
die government must fix the rate of wages and
letermine just how much everybody shall earn,
from the doctors to the diggers. All I can say is,
74 LOOKING BACKWARD.
that this plan would never have worked with us,
and I don't see how it can now unless human na-
ture has changed. In my day, nobody was satis-
fied with his wages or salary. Even if he felt he
received enough, he was sure his neighbor had toe
much, which was as bad. If the universal discon-
tent on this subject, instead of being dissipated in
curses and strikes directed against innumerable
employers, could have been concentrated upon one,
and that the government, the strongest ever de*
vised would not have seen two pay days.'*
Dr. Leete laughed heartily.
" Very true, very true," he said, " a general
strike would most probably have followed the first
pay day, and a strike directed against a govern
ment is a revolution."
"How, then, do you avoid a revolution every
pay day ? " I demanded. " Has some prodigious
philosopher devised a new system of calculus sat-
isfactory to all for determining the exact and com-
parative value of all sorts of service, whether by
brawn or brain, by hand or voice, by ear or eye ?
Or has human nature itself changed, so that no
man looks upon his own things but ' every man on
the things of his neighbor ? ' One or the other of
these events must be the explanation."
" Neither one nor the other, however, is," was
my host's laughing response. "And now, Mr
West," he continued, "you must remember that
you are my patient as well as my guest, and pes
LOOKING BACKWARD. 75
nit me to prescribe sleep for you before we have
any more conversation. It is after three o'clock.'*
"The prescription is, no doubt, a wise one," I
said ; " I only hope it can be filled."
" I will see to that," the doctor replied, and he
did, for he gave me a wineglass of something or
other which sent me to sleep as soon as my head
touched the pillow.
CHAPTER VIII,
WHEN I awoke I felt greatly refreshed, and lay
a considerable time in a dozing state, enjoying the
sensation of bodily comfort. The experiences of
the day previous, my waking to find myself in the
year 2000, the sight of the new Boston, my host
and his family, and the wonderful things I had
heard, were a blank in my memory. I thought 1
was in my bed-chamber at home, and the half-
dreaming, half-waking fancies which passed be-
fore my mind related to the incidents and experi-
ences of my former life. Dreamily I reviewed the
incidents of Decoration Day, my trip in company
with Edith and her parents to Mount Auburn,
and my dining with them on our return to the city.
I recalled how extremely well Edith had looked,
and from that fell to thinking of our marriage ;
but scarcely had my imagination begun to develop
this delightful theme than my waking dream was
cut short by the recollection of the letter I had re
ceived the night before from the builder announ
cing that the new strikes might postpone inde
finitely the completion of the new house. The
chagrin which this recollection brought with it
effectually roused me. I remembered that I hau
LOOKING BACKWARD. 77
an appointment with the builder at eleven o'clock,
to discuss the strike, and opening my eyes, looked
up at the clock at the foot of my bed to see what
time it was. But no clock met my glance, and
what was more, I instantly perceived that I was
aot in my room. Starting up on my couch, I
stared wildly round the strange apartment.
I think it must have been many seconds that I
sat up thus in bed staring about, without being
able to regain the clew to my personal identity. I
was no more able to distinguish myself from pure
being during those moments than we may suppose
a soul in the rough to be before it has received the
ear-marks, the individualizing touches which make
it a person. Strange that the sense of this inabil-
ity should be such anguish ! but so we are consti-
tuted. There are no words for the mental torture
I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping for
myself in a boundless void. No other experience
of the mind gives probably anything like the sense
of absolute intellectual arrest from the loss of a
mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which
comes during such a momentary obscuration of
the sense of one's identity. I trust I may never
know what it is again.
T do not know how long this condition had
lasted, it seemed an interminable time, when,
like a flash, the recollection of everything came
back to me. I remembered who and where I was,
and .how I had come here, and that these scenes
78 LOOKING BACKWARD.
as of the life of yesterday which had been pass-
ing before my mind concerned a generation long,
long ago mouldered to dust. Leaping from bed, I
stood in the middle of the room clasping my tem-
ples with all my might between my hands to keep
them from bursting. Then I fell prone on the
couch, and, burying my face in the pillow, lay with
out motion. The reaction which was inevitable
from the mental elation, the fever of the intellect
that had been the first effect of my tremendous
experience, had arrived. The emotional crisis
which had awaited the full realization of my
actual position, and all that it implied, was upon
me, and with set teeth and laboring chest, grip,
ping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay
there and fought for my sanity. In my mind,
all had broken loose, habits of feeling, associations
of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had
dissolved and lost coherence and were seething
together in apparently irretrievable chaos. There
were no rallying points, nothing was left stable.
There only remained the will, and was any human
will strong enough to say to such a weltering sea.
" Peace, be still " ? I dared not think. Every
effort to reason upon what had befallen me, and
realize what it implied, set up an intolerable swim
ming of the brain. The idea that I was two per-
sons, that my identity was double, began to fasci-
nate me with its simple solution of my experience.
I knew that T was on the verge of losing my
LOOKING BACKWARD. 79
mental balance. If I lay there thinking, I was
doomed. Diversion of some sort I must have, at
least the diversion of physical exertion. I sprang
up, and, hastily dressing, opened the door of my
room and went down-stairs. The hour was very
early, it being not yet fairly light, and I found no
one in the lower part of the house. There was a
hat in the hall, and, opening the front door, which
was fastened with a slightness indicating that
burglary was not among the perils of the modern
Boston, I found myself on the street. For two
hours I walked or ran through the streets of the
city, visiting most quarters of the peninsular part
of the town. None but an antiquarian who knows
something of the contrast which the Boston of to-
day offers to the Boston of the nineteenth cen-
tury can begin to appreciate what a series of be-
wildering surprises I underwent during that time.
Viewed from the house-top the day before, the city
had indeed appeared strange to me, but that was
only in its general aspect. How complete the
change had been I first realized now that I walked
the streets. The few old landmarks which still re-
mained only intensified this effect, for without them
I might have imagined myself in a foreign town.
A man may leave his native city in childhood, and
return fifty years later, perhaps, to find it trans-
formed in many features. He is astonished, but
he is not bewildered. He is aware of a great lapse
of time, and of changes likewise occurring in him-
80 LOOKING BACKWARD.
self meanwhile. He but dimly recalls the city as
he knew it when a child. But remember that
there was no sense of any lapse of time with me.
So far as my consciousness was concerned, it was
but yesterday, but a few hours, since I had walked,
these streets in which scarcely a feature had es-
caped a complete metamorphosis. The mental
image of the old city was so fresh and strong that
it did not yield to the impression of the actual
city, but contended with it, so that it was first one
and then the other which seemed the more unreal.
There was nothing I saw which was not blurred in
this way, like the faces of a composite photograph.
Finally, I stood again at the door of the house
from which I had come out. My feet must have
instinctively brought me back to the site of my
old home, for I had no clear idea of returning
thither. It was no more homelike to me than any
other spot in this city of a strange generation,
nor were its inmates less utterly and necessarily
strangers than all the other men and women now on
the earth. Had the door of the house been locked,
I should have been reminded by its resistance that
I had no object in entering, and turned away, but
it yielded to my hand, and advancing with uncer-
tain steps through the hall, I entered one of the
apartments opening from it. Throwing myself
into a chair, I covered my burning eyeballs with
my hands to shut out the horror of strangeness.
My mental confusion was so intense as to produce
LOOKING BACKWARD. 81
actual nausea. The anguish of those moments,
during which my brain seemed melting, or the
abjectness of my sense of helplessness, how can
I describe? In my despair I groaned aloud. I
began to feel that unless some help should come
I was about to lose my mind. And just then it
did come. I heard the rustle of drapery, and
looked up. Edith Leete was standing before me.
Her beautiful face was full of the most poignant
sympathy.
" Oh, what is the matter, Mr. West ? " she said.
44 1 was here when you came in. I saw how dread-
fully distressed you looked, and when I heard you
groan, I could not keep silent. What has hap-
pened to you? Where have you been? Can't
I do something for you ? "
Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands
in a gesture of compassion as she spoke. At any
rate I had caught them in my own and was cling-
ing to them with an impulse as instinctive as that
which prompts the drowning man to seize upon
and cling to the rope which is thrown him as he
sinks for the last time. As I looked up into her
compassionate face and her eyes moist with pity,
my brain ceased to whirl. The tender human
sympathy which thrilled in the soft pressure of her
fingers had brought me the support I needed. Its
effect to calm and soothe was like that of some
wonder-working elixir.
" God bless you," 1 said, after a few moments.
82 LOOKING BACKWARD.
** He must have sent you to me just now. I thini
I was in danger of going crazy if you had not
some." At this the tears came into her eyes.
" Oh, Mr. West ! " she cried. " How heartless
you must have thought us ! How could we leave
you to yourself so long ! But it is over now, is it
not ? You are better, surely."
" Yes," I said, " thanks to you. If you will not
go away quite yet, I shall be myself soon."
" Indeed I will not go away," she said, with a
little quiver of her face, more expressive of her
sympathy than a volume of words. " You must
not think us so heartless as we seemed in leaving
you so by yourself. I scarcely slept last night, for
thinking how strange your waking would be this
morning ; but father said you would sleep till late.
He said that it would be better not to show too
much sympathy with you at first, but to try to
divert your thoughts and make you feel that you
were among friends."
" You have indeed made me feel that," I an-
swered. " But you see it is a good deal of a jolt
to drop a hundred years, and although I did not
seem to feel it so much last night, I have had very
odd sensations this morning." While I held her
hands and kept my eyes on her face, I could al-
ready even jest a little at my plight.
" No one thought of such a thing as your going
out in the city alone so early in the morning," she
went on. " Oh, Mr. West, where have you been ? *
LOOKING BACKWARD. 88
Then I told her of my morning's experience,
from my first waking till the moment I had looked
up to see her before me, just as I have told it
here. She was overcome by distressful pity dur-
ing the recital, and, though I had released one of
her hands, did not try to take from me the other,
seeing, no doubt, how much good it did me to hold
it. " I can think a little what this feeling must
been like," she said. " It must have been terrible.
And to think you were left alone to struggle witl
it ! Can you ever forgive us ? "
" But it is gone now. You have driven it quite
away for the present," I said.
" You will not let it return again," she queried
anxiously.
" I can't quite say that," I replied. " It might
be too early to say that, considering how strange
everything will still be to me."
" But you will not try to contend with it alone
again, at least," she persisted. " Promise that you
will come to us, and let us sympathize with you,
and try to help you. Perhaps we can't do much,
but it will surely be better than to try to bear
such feelings alone."
" I will come to you if you will let me," I said.
" Oh yes, yes, I beg you will," she said eagerly.
w I would do anything to help you that I could."
" All you need do is to be sorry for me, as you
seem to be now," I replied.
** It is understood, then," she said, smiling with
84 LOOKING BACKWARD.
wet eyes, " that you are to come and tell me next
time, and not run all over Boston among stran-
gers."
This assumption that we were not strangers
seemed scarcely strange, so near within these few
minutes had my trouble and her sympathetic tears
brought us.
" I will promise, when you come to me," she
added, with an expression of charming archness,
passing, as she continued, into one of enthusiasm,
" to seem as sorry for you as you wish, but you
must not for a moment suppose that I am really
sorry for you at all, or that I think you will long
be sorry for yourself. I know, as well as I know
that the world now is heaven compared with what
it was in your day, that the only feeling you will
have after a little while will be one of thankful-
ness to God that your life in that age was so
strangely cut off, to be returned to you in this."
CHAPTER IX.
DR. and Mrs. Leete were evidently not a little
startled to learn, when they presently appeared,
that I had been all over the city alone that mon>
ing, and it was apparent that they were agree-
ably surprised to see that I seemed so little agitated
after the experience.
" Your stroll could scarcely have failed to be a
very interesting one," said Mrs. Leete, as we sat
down to table soon after. " You must have seen
a good many new things."
" I saw very little that was not new," I replied.
*' But I think what surprised me as much as any-
tiling was not to find any stores on Washington
Street, or any banks on State. What have you
done with the merchants and bankers? Hung
them all, perhaps, as the anarchists wanted to do
in my day ? "
" Not so bad as that," replied Dr. Leete. " We
have simply dispensed with them. Their functions
are obsolete in the modern world."
" Who sells you things when you want to buy
them ? " I inquired.
" There is neither selling nor buying nowadays ;
the distribution of goods is effected in another
86 LOOKING BACKWARD,
way. As to the bankers, having no money w
have no use for those gentry."
" Miss Leete," said I, turning to Edith, " I am
afraid that your father is making sport of me. I
don't blame him, for the temptation my innocence
offers must be extraordinary. But, really, there
are limits to my credulity as to possible alterations
in the social system."
" Father has no idea of jesting, I am sure," she
replied, with a reassuring smile.
The conversation took another turn then, the
point of ladies' fashions in the nineteenth century
being raised, if I remember rightly, by Mrs. Leete,
and it was not till after breakfast, when the doctor
had invited me up to the house-top, which appeared
to be a favorite resort of his, that he recurred to
ihe subject.
" You were surprised," he said, " at my saying
that we got along without money or trade, but a
moment's reflection will show that trade existed
and money was needed in your day simply be-
cause the business of production was left in private
hands, and that, consequently, they are superfluous
now."
"I do not at once see how that follows," I
replied.
" It is very simple," said Dr. Leete. " When
innumerable different and independent persons
produced the various things needful to life and
comfort, endless exchanges between individual
LOOKING BACKWARD. 87
were requisite in order that they might supply
themselves with what they desired. These ex-
changes constituted trade, and money was essential
as their medium. But as soon as the nation be-
came the sole producer of all sorts of commodities,
there was no need of exchanges between indi-
viduals that they might get what they required.
Everything was procurable from one source, and
nothing could be procured anywhere else. A sys-
tem of direct distribution from the national store-
houses took the place of trade, and for this money
was unnecessary."
" How is this distribution managed ? " I asked.
"On the simplest possible plan," replied Dr.
Leete. " A credit corresponding to his share of
the annual product of the nation is given to every
citizen on the public books at the beginning of
each year, and a credit card issued him with which
he procures at the public storehouses, found in
every community, whatever he desires whenever
he desires it. This arrangement, you will see,
totally obviates the necessity for business transac-
tions of any sort between individuals and con-
sumers. Perhaps you would like to see what our
credit-cards are like.
"You observe," he pursued as I was curiously
examining the piece of pasteboard he gave me,
" that this card is issued for a certain number of
dollars. "We have kept the old word, but not the
substance. The term, as we use it, answers to no
88 LOOKING BACKWARD.
real thing, but merely serves as an algebraical
symbol for comparing the values of products with
one another. For this purpose they are all priced
in dollars and cents, just as in your day. The
value of what I procure on this card is checked off
by the clerk, who pricks out of these tiers of
squares the price of what I order."
" If you wanted to buy something of your neigh-
bor, could you transfer part of your credit to him
as consideration ? " I inquired.
" In the first place," replied Dr. Leete, " our
neighbors have nothing to sell us, but in any event
our credit would not be transferable, being strictly
personal. Before the nation could even think of
honoring any such transfer as you speak of, it
would be bound to inquire into all the circum-
stances of the transaction, so as to be able to
guarantee its absolute equity. It would have been
reason enough, had there been no other, for abol-
ishing money, that its possession was no indication
of rightful title to it. In the hands of the man
who had stolen it or murdered for it, it was as
good as in those which had earned it by industry.
People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out
of friendship, but buying and selling is considered
absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevo-
lence and disinterestedness which should prevail
between citizens and the sense of community of
interest which supports our social system. Ac-
cording to our ideas, buying and selling is essen
LOOKING BACKWARD. 89
tially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an
education in self-seeking at the expense of others,
and no society whose citizens are trained in such a
school can possibly rise above a very low grade of
civilization."
"What if you have to spend more than your
card in any one year ? " I asked.
"The provision is so ample that we are more
likely not to spend it all," replied Dr. Leete.
" But if extraordinary expenses should exhaust it,
we can obtain a limited advance on the next year's
credit, though this practice is not encouraged, and
a heavy discount is charged to check it. Of course
if a man showed himself a reckless spendthrift
he would receive his allowance monthly or weekly
instead of yearly, or if necessary not be permitted
to handle it all."
" If you don't spend your allowance, I suppose
it accumulates ? "
" That is also permitted to a certain extent when
a special outlay is anticipated. But unless notice
to the contrary is given, it is presumed that the
citizen who does not fully expend his credit did
not have occasion to do so, and the balance is
turned into the general surplus."
" Such a system does not encourage saving
habits on the part of citizens," I said.
" It is not intended to," was the reply. " The
nation is rich, and does not wish the people to de-
prive themselves of any good thing. In your day,
90 LOOKING BACKWARD.
men were bound to lay up goods and money
against coming failure of the means of support
and for their children. This necessity made par-
simony a virtue. But now it would have no such
laudable object, and, having lost its utility, it has
ceased to be regarded as a virtue. No man any
more has any care for the morrow, either for him-
self or his children, for the nation guarantees the
nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance
of every citizen from the cradle to the grave."
" That is a sweeping guarantee ! " I said,
" What certainty can there be that the value of a
man's labor will recompense the nation for its out-
lay on him ? On the whole, society may be able
to support all its members, but some must earn
less than enough for their support, and others
more ; and that brings us back once more to the
wages question, on which you have hitherto said
nothing. It was at just this point, if you remem-
ber, that our talk ended last evening ; and I say
again, as I did then, that here I should suppose a
national industrial system like yours would find its
main difficulty. How, I ask once more, can you
adjust satisfactorily the comparative wages or re-
muneration of the multitude of avocations, so un-
like and so incommensurable, which are necessary
for the service of society ? In our day the market
rate determined the price of labor of all sorts, as
well as of goods. The employer paid as little as
he could, and the worker got as much. It was not
LOOKING BACKWARD. 91
a pretty system ethically, I admit ; but it did, at
least, furnish us a rough and ready formula for
settling a question which must be settled ten thou-
sand times a day if the world was ever going to
get forward. There seemed to us no other practi-
cable way of doing it."
"Yes," replied Dr. Leete, "it was the only
practicable way under a system which made the
interests of every individual antagonistic to those
of every other ; but it would have been a pity if
humanity could never have devised a better plan,
for yours was simply the application to the mutual
relations of men of the devil's maxim, * Your neces-
sity is my opportunity.' The reward of any ser-
vice depended not upon its difficulty, danger, or
hardship, for throughout the world it seems that
the most perilous, severe, and repulsive labor was
done by the worst paid classes ; but solely upon
the strait of those who needed the service."
" All that is conceded," I said. " But, with all
its defects, the plan of settling prices by the mar-
ket rate was a practical plan ; and I cannot con-
ceive what satisfactory substitute you can have de-
vised for it. The government being the only pos-
sible employer, there is of course no labor market
or market rate. Wages of all sorts must be arbi-
trarily fixed by the government. I cannot imagine
a more complex and delicate function than that
must be, or one, however performed, more certain
to breed universal dissatisfaction."
92 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" I beg your pardon," replied Dr. Leete, " but
I think you exaggerate the difficulty. Suppose
a board of fairly sensible men were charged with
settling the wages for all sorts of trades under a
system which, like ours, guaranteed employment
to all, while permitting the choice of avocations.
Don't you see that, however unsatisfactory the first
adjustment might be, the mistakes would soon cor-
rect themselves ? The favored trades would have
too many volunteers, and those discriminated
against would lack them till the errors were set
right. But this is aside from the purpose, for,
though this plan would, I fancy, be practicable
enough, it is no part of our system."
" How, then, do you regulate wages ? " I once
more asked.
Dr. Leete did not reply till after several mo-
ments of meditative silence. " I know, of course,"
he finally said, " enough of the old order of things
to understand just what you mean by that ques-
tion ; and yet the present order is so utterly differ-
ent at this point that I am a little at loss how to
answer you best. You ask me how we regulate
wages ; I can only reply that there is no idea in
the modern social economy which at all corre-
sponds with what was meant by wages in your
day."
" I suppose you mean that you have no money
to pay wages in," said I. " But the credit given
the worker at the government storehouse answers
LOOKING BACKWARD. 93
to his wages with us. How is the amount of the
credit given respectively to the workers in differ-
ent lines determined ? By what title does the
individual claim his particular share ? What is
the basis of allotment ? "
" His title," replied Dr. Leete, " is his humanity.
The basis of his claim is the fact that he is a
man."
" The fact that he is a man ! " I repeated, in-
credulously. " Do you possibly mean that all
have the same share ? "
"Most assuredly."
The readers of this book never having practi-
cally known any other arrangement, or perhaps
very carefully considered the historical accounts
of former epochs in which a very different system
prevailed, cannot be expected to appreciate the
stupor of amazement into which Dr. Leete's sim-
ple statement plunged me.
" You see," he said, smiling, " that it is not
merely that we have no money to pay wages in,
but, as I said, we have nothing at all answering to
your idea of wages."
By this time I had pulled myself together suffi-
ciently to voice some of the criticisms which, man
of the nineteenth century as I was, came upper-
most in my mind, upon this to me astounding
arrangement. " Some men do twice the work of
others ! " I exclaimed. " Are the clever workmen
content with a plan that ranks them with the in-
different ? "
94 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" We leave no possible ground for any com-
plaint of injustice," replied Dr. Leete, " by requir-
ing precisely the same measure of service from
all."
" How can you do that, I should like to know,
when no two men's powers are the same ? "
"Nothing could be simpler," was Dr. Leete's
reply. " We require of each that he shall make
the same effort ; that is, we demand of him the
best service it is in his power to give."
" And supposing all do the best they can," I an-
swered, " the amount of the product resulting is
twice greater from one man than from another."
" Very true," replied Dr. Leete ; " but the
amount of the resulting product has nothing what-
ever to do with the question, which is one of de-
sert. Desert is a moral question, and the amount
of the product a material quantity. It would be
an extraordinary sort of logic which should try to
determine a moral question by a material stand-
ard. The amount of the effort alone is pertinent
to the question of desert. All men who do their
best, do the same. A man's endowments, however
godlike, merely fix the measure of his duty. The
man of great endowments who does not do all he
might, though he may do more than a man of
small endowments who does his best, is deemed
a less deserving worker than the latter, and dies
a debtor to his fellows. The Creator sets men's
tasks for them by the faculties he gives them ;
we simply exact their fulfillment."
LOOKING BACKWARD. 96
" No doubt that is very fine philosophy," I said ;
" nevertheless it seems hard that the man who pro-
duces twice as much as another, even if both do
their best, should have only the same share."
" Does it, indeed, seem so to you ? " responded
Dr. Leete. " Now, do you know, that seems very
curious to me ? The way it strikes people nowa
days is, that a man who can produce twice as much
as another with the same effort, instead of being
rewarded for doing so, ought to be punished if he
does not do so. In the nineteenth century, when
a horse pulled a heavier load than a goat, I sup-
pose you rewarded him. Now, we should have
whipped him soundly if he had not, on the ground
that, being much stronger, he ought to. It is sin-
gular how ethical standards change." The doctor
said this with such a twinkle in his eye that I was
obliged to laugh.
" I suppose," I said, " that the real reason that
we rewarded men for their endowments, while we
considered those of horses and goats merely as fix-
ing the service to be severally required of them,
was that the animals, not being reasoning beings,
naturally did the best they could, whereas men
could only be induced to do so by rewarding them
according to the amount of their product. That
brings me to ask why, unless human nature has
mightily changed in a hundred years, you are not
under the same necessity."
" We are," replied Dr. Leete. " I don't think
96 LOOKING BACKWARD.
there has been any change in human nature in that
respect since your day. It is still so constituted
that special incentives in the form of prizes, and
advantages to be gained, are requisite to call out
the best endeavors of the average man in any
direction."
" But what inducement," I asked, " can a man
have to put forth his best endeavors when, how-
ever much or little he accomplishes, his income re-
mains the same ? High characters may be moved
by devotion to the common welfare under such a
system, but does not the average man tend to rest
back on his oar, reasoning that it is of no use to
make a special effort, since the effort will not in-
crease his income, nor its withholding diminish
it?"
"Does it then really seem to you," answered
my companion, " that human nature is insensible
to any motives save fear of want and love of lux-
ury, that you should expect security and equality
of livelihood to leave them without possible incen-
tives to effort? Your contemporaries did not
really think so, though they might fancy they did.
When it was a question of the grandest class of
efforts, the most absolute self-devotion, they de-
pended on quite other incentives. Not higher
wages, but honor and the hope of men's gratitude,
patriotism and the inspiration of duty, were the
motives which they set before their soldiers when
it was a question of dying for the nation, and
LOOKING BACKWARD. 97
never was there an age of the world when those
motives did not call out what is best and noblest
in men. And not only this, but when you come
to analyze the love of money which was the gen-
eral impulse to effort in your day, you find that
the dread of want and desire of luxury was but
one of several motives which the pursuit of money
represented ; the others, and with many the more
influential, being desire of power, of social position,
and reputation for ability and success. So you
see that though we have abolished poverty and
the fear of it, and inordinate luxury with the hope
of it, we have not touched the greater part of the
motives which underlay the love of money in for-
mer times, or any of those which prompted the su-
premer sorts of effort. The coarser motives, which
no longer move us, have been replaced by higher
motives wholly unknown to the mere wage earners
of your age. Now that industry of whatever sort
is no longer self-service, but service of the nation,
patriotism, passion for humanity, impel the worker
as in your day they did the soldier. The army of
industry is an army, not alone by virtue of its per-
fect organization, but by reason also of the ardor
of self-devotion which animates its members.
"But as you used to supplement the motives
of patriotism with the love of glory, in order to
stimulate the valor of your soldiers, so do we.
Based as our industrial system is on the principle
of requiring the same unit of effort from every
98 LOOKING BACKWARD.
man, that is, the best he can do, you will see that
the means by which we spur the workers to do
their best must be a very essential part of OUT*
scheme. With us, diligence in the national ser-
vice is the sole and certain way to public repute,
social distinction, and official power. The value
of a man's services to society fixes his rank in it.
Compared with the effect of our social arrange-
ments in impelling men to be zealous in business,
we deem the object-lessons of biting poverty and
wanton luxury on which you depended a device as
weak and uncertain as it was barbaric. The lust
of honor even in your sordid day notoriously im-
pelled men to more desperate effort than the love
of money could."
" I should be extremely interested," I said, " to
learn something of what these social arrangements
are."
" The scheme in its details," replied the doctor,
M is of course very elaborate, for it underlies the
entire organization of our industrial army ; but a
few words will give you a general idea of it."
At this moment our talk was charmingly in-
terrupted by the emergence upon the aerial plat-
form where we sat of Edith Leete. She was
dressed for the street, and had come to speak to
her father about some commission she was to do
for him.
" By the way, Edith," he exclaimed, as she was
about to leave us to ourselves, " I wonder if
LOOKING BACKWARD. 99
West would not be interested in visiting the store
with you? I have been telling him something
about our system of distribution, and perhaps he
might like to see it in practical operation."
" My daughter," he added, turning to me, " is
an indefatigable shopper, and can tell you more
about the stores than I can."
The proposition was naturally very agreeable to
me, and Edith being good enough to say that she
should be glad to have my company, we left the
house together.
CHAPTER X.
" IF I am going to explain our way of shopping
to you," said my companion, as we walked along
the street, " you must explain your way to me. I
have never been able to understand it from all 1
have read on the subject. For example, when you
had such a vast number of shops, each with its
different assortment, how could a lady ever settle
upon any purchase till she had visited all the
shops? for, until she had, she could not know
what there was to choose from."
*' It was as you suppose ; that was the only way
she could know," I replied.
" Father calls me an indefatigable shopper, but
I should soon be a very fatigued one if I had to
do as they did," was Edith's laughing comment.
44 The loss of time in going from shop to shop
was indeed a waste which the busy bitterly com-
plained of," I said ; " but as for the ladies of the
idle class, though they complained also, I think
the system was really a godsend by furnishing a
device to kill time."
" But say there were a thousand shops in a city,
hundreds, perhaps, of the same sort, how could
ven the idlest find time to make their rounds ? "
LOOKING BACKWARD. 101
M They really could not visit all, of course," I
replied. " Those who did a great deal of buying,
learned in time where they might expect to find
what they wanted. This class had made a science
of the specialties of the shops, and bought at ad-
vantage, always getting the most and best for the
least money. It required, however, long experience
to acquire this knowledge. Those who were too
busy, or bought too little to gain it, took their
chances and were generally unfortunate, getting
the least and worst for the most money. It was
the merest chance if persons not experienced in
shopping received the value of their money."
" But why did you put up with such a shock-
ingly inconvenient arrangement when you saw ita
faults so plainly ? " Edith asked me.
" It was like all our social arrangements," I re-
plied. " You can see their faults scarcely more
plainly than we did, but we saw no remedy for
them."
" Here we are at the store of our ward," said
Edith, as we turned in at the great portal of one
of the magnificent public buildings I had observed
in my morning walk. There was nothing in the
exterior aspect of the edifice to suggest a store to
a representative of the nineteenth century. There
was no display of goods in the great windows, or
any device to advertise wares, or attract custom.
Nor was there any sort of sign or legend on the
front of the building to indicate the character
102 LOOKING BACKWARD.
of the business carried on there ; but instead)
above the portal, standing out from the front
of the building, a majestic life-size group of stat-
uary, the central figure of which was a female
ideal of Plenty, with her cornucopia. Judging
from the composition of the throng passing in and
out, about the same proportion of the sexes among
shoppers obtained as in the nineteenth century.
As we entered, Edith said that there was one of
these great distributing establishments in each
ward of the city, so that no residence was more
than five or ten minutes' walk from one of them.
It was the first interior of a twentieth -century
public building that I had ever beheld, and the
spectacle naturally impressed me deeply. I was
in a vast hall full of light, received not alone from
the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the
point of which was a hundred feet above. Be-
neath it, in the centre of the hall, a magnificent
fountain played, cooling the atmosphere to a de
licious freshness with its spray. The walls and
ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to
soften without absorbing the light which flooded
the interior. Around the fountain was a space
occupied with chairs and sofas, on which many
persons were seated conversing. Legends on the
walls all about the hall indicated to what classes
of commodities the counters below were devoted,
Edith directed her steps towards one of these,
Where samples of muslin of a bewildering variety
displayed, and proceeded to inspect them,
LOOKING BACKWARD. 108
** Where is the clerk ? " I asked, for there was
no one behind the counter, and no one seemed
coming to attend to the customer.
" I have no need of the clerk yet," said Edith ;
** I have not made my selection."
" It was the principal business of clerks to help
people to make their selections in my day," I re-
plied.
" What ! To tell people what they wanted ? "
" Yes ; and of fcener to induce them to buy what
they did n't want."
" But did not ladies find that very imperti-
nent ? " Edith asked, wonderingly. " What con-
cern could it possibly be to the clerks whether
people bought or not ? "
" It was their sole concern," I answered. " They
were hired for the purpose of getting rid of the
goods, and were expected to do their utmost, short
of the use of force, to compass that end."
" Ah, yes ! How stupid I am to forget ! " said
Edith. " The storekeeper and his clerks depended
for their livelihood on selling the goods in your
day. Of course that is all different now. The
goods are the nation's. They are here for those
who want them, and it is the business of the clerks
to wait on people and take their orders ; but it is
not the interest of the clerk or the nation to dis-
pose of a yard or a pound of anything to anybody
who does not want it." She smiled as she added,
"How exceedingly odd it must have seemed to
104 LOOKING BACKWARD.
have clerks trying to induce one to take what one
did not want, or was doubtful about ! "
" But even a twentieth - century clerk might
make himself useful in giving you information
about the goods, though he did not tease you to
buy them," I suggested.
" No," said Edith, " that is not the business of
the clerk. These printed cards, for which the
government authorities are responsible, give us all
the information we can possibly need."
I saw then that there was fastened to each sam-
ple a card containing in succinct form a complete
statement of the make and materials of the goods
and all its qualities, as well as price, leaving abso-
lutely no point to hang a question on.
" The clerk has, then, nothing to say about the
goods he sells ? " I said.
" Nothing at all. It is not necessary that he
should know or profess to know anything about
them. Courtesy and accuracy in taking orders
are all that are required of him."
" What a prodigious amount of lying that simple
arrangement saves ! " I ejaculated.
" Do you mean that all the clerks misrepresented
their goods in your day ? " Edith asked.
" God forbid that I should say so ! " I replied,
" for there were many who did not, and they were
entitled to especial credit, for when one's liveli-
hood and that of his wife and babies depended on
the amount of goods he could dispose of, the temp-
LOOKING BACKWARD. 105
tation to deceive the customer or let him de-
ceive himself was wellnigh overwhelming. But,
Miss Leete, I am distracting you from your task
with my talk."
"Not at all. I have made my selections."
With that she touched a button, and in a moment
a clerk appeared. He took down her order on a
tablet with a pencil which made two copies, of
which he gave one to her, and enclosing the coun-
terpart in a small receptacle, dropped it into a
transmitting tube.
" The duplicate of the order," said Edith as she
turned away from the counter, after the clerk had
punched the value of her purchase out of the
credit card she gave him, " is given to the pur-
chaser, so that any mistakes in filling it can be
easily traced and rectified."
" You were very quick about your selections," I
said. " May I ask how you knew that you might
not have found something to suit you better in
some of the other stores ? But probably you are
required to buy in your own district."
" Oh, no," she replied. " We buy where we
please, though naturally most often near home.
But I should have gained nothing by visiting other
stores. The assortment in all is exactly the same,
representing as it does in each case samples of all
the varieties produced or imported by the United
States. That is why one can decide quickly, and
never need visit two stores."
106 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" And is this merely a sample store ? I see no
clerks cutting off goods or marking bundles."
" All our stores are sample stores, except as to
a few classes of articles. The goods, with these
exceptions, are all at the great central warehouse
of the city, to which they are shipped directly
from the producers. We order from the sample
and the printed statement of texture, make, and
qualities. The orders are sent to the warehouse,
and the goods distributed from there."
" That must be a tremendous saving of handling,"
I said. " By our system, the manufacturer sold to
the wholesaler, the wholesaler to the retailer, and
the retailer to the consumer, and the goods had to
be handled each time. You avoid one handling of
the goods, and eliminate the retailer altogether,
with his big profit and the army of clerks it goes
to support. Why, Miss Leete, this store is merely
the order department of a wholesale house, with
no more than a wholesaler's complement of clerks.
Under our system of handling the goods, persuad-
ing the customer to buy them, cutting them off,
and packing them, ten clerks would not do what
one does here. The saving must be enormous."
" I suppose so," said Edith, " but of course we
have never known any other way. But, Mr. West,
you must not fail to ask father to take you to the
central warehouse some day, where they receive
the orders from the different sample houses all
over the city and parcel out and send the goocii
LOOKING BACKWARD. 107
to their destinations. He took me there not long
ago, and it was a wonderful sight. The system is
certainly perfect ; for example, over yonder in that
sort of cage is the dispatching clerk. The orders,
as they are taken by the different departments in
the store, are sent by transmitters to him. His
assistants sort them and enclose each class in a
carrier-box by itself. The dispatching clerk has
a dozen pneumatic transmitters before him answer-
ing to the general classes of goods, each communi-
cating with the corresponding department at the
warehouse. He drops the box of orders into the
tube it calls for, and in a few moments later it
drops on the proper desk in the warehouse, to-
gether with all the orders of the same sort from
the other sample stores. The orders are read off,
recorded, and sent to be filled, like lightning. The
filling I thought the most interesting part. Bales
of cloth are placed on spindles and turned by ma-
chinery, and the cutter, who also has a machine,
works right through one bale after another till ex-
hausted, when another man takes his place ; and
it is the same with those who fill the orders in any
other staple. The packages are then delivered by
larger tubes to the city districts, and thence dis-
tributed to the houses. You may understand how
quickly it is all done when I tell you that my order
will probably be at home sooner than I could have
carried it from here."
" How do you manage in the thinly settled rural
districts ? " I asked.
108 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" The system is the same," Edith explained
** the village sample shops are connected by trans-
mitters with the central county warehouse, which
may be twenty miles away. The transmission is
BO swift, though, that the time lost on the way is
trifling. But, to save expense, in many counties
one set of tubes connect several villages with the
warehouse, and then there is time lost waiting for
one another. Sometimes it is two or three hours
before goods ordered are received. It was so where
I was staying last summer, and I found it quite
inconvenient. l
"There must be many other respects also, no
doubt, in which the country stores are inferior to
the city stores," I suggested.
" No," Edith answered, " they are otherwise pre-
oisely as good. The sample shop of the smallest
village, just like this one, gives you your choice of
all the varieties of goods the nation has, for the
county warehouse draws on the same source as the
city warehouse."
As we walked home I commented on the great
variety in the size and cost of the houses. " How
is it," I asked, " that this difference is consistent
with the fact that all citizens have the same in
come ? "
1 I am informed since the above is in type that this lack of
perfection in the distributing service of some of the country dis-
tricts is to be remedied, and that soon every village will have its
wn set of tubes.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 109
** Because," Edith explained, " although the in-
come is the same, personal taste determines how
the individual shall spend it. Some like fine
horses ; others, like myself, prefer pretty clothes ;
and still others want an elaborate table. The
rents which the nation receives for these houses
vary, according to size, elegance, and location, so
that everybody can find something to suit. The
larger houses are usuaJy occupied by large fam-
ilies, in which there are several to contribute to
the rent ; while small families, like ours, find
smaller houses more convenient and economical.
It is a matter of taste and convenience wholly. I
have read that in old times people often kept up
establishments and did other things which they
could not afford for ostentation, to make people
think them richer than they were. Was it really
so, Mr. West?"
" I shall have to admit that it was," I replied.
" Well, you see, it could not be so nowadays ;
for everybody's income is known, and it is known
that what is spent one way must be saved another.* 1
CHAPTER XL
WHEN we arrived home, Dr. Leete had not yet
returned, and Mrs. Leete was not visible. " Are
you fond of music, Mr. West ? " Edith asked.
I assured her that it was half of life, according
to my notion.
" I ought to apologize for inquiring," she said.
** It is not a question that we ask one another now-
adays; but I have read that in your day, even
among the oultured class, there were some who did
not care for music."
" You must remember, in excuse," I said, " that
we had some rather absurd kinds of music."
" Yes," she said, " I know that ; I am afraid I
should not have fancied it all myself. Would you
like to hear some of ours now, Mr. West ? "
" Nothing would delight me so much as to listen
to you," I said.
" To me I " she exclaimed, laughing. " Did yon
think I was going to play or sing to you ? "
" I hoped so, certainly," I replied.
Seeing that I was a little abashed, she subdued
her merriment and explained. " Of course, we all
sing nowadays as a matter of course in the train-
ing of the voice, and some learn to play instrm
LOOKING BACKWARD, 111
ments for their private amusement ; but the pro-
fessional music is so much grander and more
perfect than any performance of ours, and so
easily commanded when we wish to hear it, that
we don't think of calling our singing or playing,
music at all. All the really fine singers and play-
ers are in the musical service, and the rest of us
hold our peace for the main part. But would you
really like to hear some music ? "
I assured her once more that I would.
" Come, then, into the music room," she said,
and I followed her into an apartment finished,
without hangings, in wood, with a floor of polished
wood. I was prepared for new devices in musical
instruments, but I saw nothing in the room which
by any stretch of imagination could be conceived
as such. It was evident that my puzzled appear-
ance was affording intense amusement to Edith.
" Please look at to-day's music," she said, hand-
ing me a card, " and tell me what you would pre-
fer. It is now five o'clock, you will remember."
The card bore the date "September 12, 2000,"
and contained the longest programme of music I
had ever seen. It was as various as it was long,
including a most extraordinary range of vocal and
instrumental solos, duets, quartettes, and various
orchestral combinations. I remained bewildered
l>y the prodigious list until Edith's pink finger-tip
indicated a particular section of it, where several
selections were bracketed, with the words " 5 P. M."
112 LOOKING BACKWARD.
against them ; then I observed that this pro
digious programme was an all -day one, divided
into twenty-four sections answering to the hours.
There were but a few pieces of music in the
" 5 P. M." section, and I indicated an organ piece
as my preference.
" I am so glad you like the organ," said she.
" I think there is scarcely any music that suits my
mood oftener."
She made me sit down comfortably, and, cross-
ing the room, so far as I could see, merely touched
one or two screws, and at once the room was filled
with the music of a grand organ anthem ; filled,
not flooded, for, by some means, the volume of
melody had been perfectly graduated to the size of
the apartment. I listened, scarcely breathing, to
the close. Such music, so perfectly rendered, I
had never expected to hear.
" Grand ! " I cried, as the last great wave of
sound broke and ebbed away into silence. " Bach
must be at the keys of that organ ; but where is
the organ ? "
" Wait a moment, please," said Edith ; " I want
to have you listen to this waltz before you ask any
questions. I think it is perfectly charming ; " and
as she spoke the sound of violins filled the room
with the witchery of a summer night. When this
had also ceased, she said : " There is nothing in
the least mysterious about the music, as you seem
to imagine. It is not made by fairies or genii, but
LOOKING BACKWARD. 113
by good, honest, and exceedingly clever human
hands. We have simply carried the idea of labor
saving by cooperation into our musical service as
into everything else. There are a number of music
rooms in the city, perfectly adapted acoustically to
the different sorts of music. These halls are con.
nected by telephone with all the houses of the city
whose people care to pay the small fee, and there
are none, you may be sure, who do not. The corps
of musicians attached to each hall is so large that,
although no individual performer, or group of per-
formers, has more than a brief part, each day's
programme lasts through the twenty-four hours.
There are on that card for to-day, as you will see
if you observe closely, distinct programmes of four
of these concerts, each of a different order of music
from the others, being now simultaneously per-
formed, and any one of the four pieces now going
on that you prefer, you can hear by merely press-
ing the button which will connect your house-wire
with the hall where it is being rendered. The pro-
grammes are so coordinated that the pieces at any
one time simultaneously proceeding in the different
halls usually offer a choice, not only between in-
strumental and vocal, and between different sorts
of instruments ; but also between different motives
from grave to gay, so that all tastes and moods can
be suited."
" It appears to me, Miss Leete," I said, " that
Jf we could have devised an arrangement for pro-
114 LOOKING BACKWARD.
viding everybody with music in their homes, per-
fect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to
every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we
should have considered the limit of human felicity
already attained, and ceased to strive for further
improvements."
" I am sure I never co dd imagine how those
among you who depended at all on music managed
to endure the old-fashioned system for providing it,"
replied Edith. " Music really worth hearing must
have been, I suppose, wholly out of the reach of
the masses, and attainable by the most favored
only occasionally, at great trouble, prodigious ex-
pense, and then for brief periods, arbitrarily fixed
by somebody else, and in connection with all sorts
of undesirable circumstances. Your concerts, for
instance, and operas ! How perfectly exasperating
it must have been, for the sake of a piece or two
of music that suited you, to have to sit for hours
listening to what you did not care for ! Now, at a
dinner one can skip the courses one does not care
for. Who would ever dine, however hungry, if
required to eat everything brought on the table ?
and I am sure one's hearing is quite as sensitive as
one's taste. I suppose it was these difficulties in
the way of commanding really good music which
made you endure so much playing and singing in
your homes by people who had only the rudiments
of the art."
"Yes," I replied, " it was that sort of music of
cone for most of us."
LOOKING BACKWARD. 115
* Ah, well," Edith sighed, " when one really
uonsiders, it is not so strange that people in those
days so often did not care for music. I dare say I
should have detested it, too."
"Did I understand you rightly," I inquired,
"that this musical programme covers the entire
twenty-four hours ? It seems to on this card, cer-
tainly ; but who is there to listen to music between
say midnight and morning ? "
"Oh, many," Edith replied. "Our people
keep all hours; but if the music were provided
from midnight to morning for no others, it still
would be for the sleepless, the sick, and the dying.
All our bedchambers have a telephone attachment
at the head of the bed by which any person who
may be sleepless can command music at pleasure,
of the sort suited to the mood."
" Is there such an arrangement in the room
assigned to me ? "
" Why, certainly ; and how stupid, how very
stupid, of me not to think to tell you of that last
night ! Father will show you about the adjust-
ment before you go to bed to-night, however ; and
with the receiver at your ear, I am quite sure you
will be able to snap your fingers at all sorts of
uncanny feelings if they trouble you again."
That evening Dr. Leete asked us about our visit
to the store, and in the course of the desultory
comparison of the ways of the nineteenth century
and the twentieth, which followed, something
116 LOOKING b^CKWARD.
raised the question of inheritance. " I suppose,**
I said, "the inheritance of property is not now
allowed."
"On the contrary," replied Dr. Leete, "there
is no interference with it. In fact, you will find,
Mr. West, as you come to know us, that there is
far less interference of any sort with personal lib-
erty nowadays than you were accustomed to. We
require, indeed, by law that every man shall serve
the nation for a fixed period, instead of leaving
him his choice, as you did, between working, steal-
ing, or starving. With the exception of this fun-
damental law, which is, indeed, merely a codifica-
tion of the law of nature the edict of Eden
by which it is made equal in its pressure on men>
our system depends in no particular upon legisla-
tion, but is entirely voluntary, the logical outcome
of the operation of human nature under rational
conditions. This question of inheritance illus-
trates just that point. The fact that the nation
is the sole capitalist and land-owner of course re-
stricts the individual's possessions to his annual
credit, and what personal and household belong-
ings he may have procured with it. His credit,
like an annuity in your day, ceases on his death,
wiiih the allowance of a fixed sum for funeral
expenses. His other possessions he leaves as he
pleases."
" What is to prevent, in course of time, such
accumulations of valuable goods and chattels in
LOOKING BACKWARD. llf
the hands of individuals as might seriously inter-
fere with equality in the circumstances of citi-
zens ? " I asked.
" That matter arranges itself very simply," was
the reply. "Under the present organization of
society, accumulations of personal property are
merely burdensome the moment they exceed what
adds to the real comfort. In your day, if a man
had a house crammed full with gold and silver
plate, rare china, expensive furniture, and such
things, he was considered rich, for these things
represented money, and could at any tune be
turned into it. Nowadays a man whom the lega-
cies of a hundred relatives, simultaneously dying,
should place in a similar position, would be con-
sidered very unlucky. The articles, not being
salable, would be of no value to him except for
their actual use or the enjoyment of their beauty.
On the other hand, his income remaining the same,
he would have to deplete his credit to Lire houses
to store the goods in, and still further to pay for
the service of those who took care of tlxjm. You
may be very sure that such a man would lose no
time in scattering among his friends possessions
which only made him the poorer, and that none of
those friends would accept more of them thac. the*
could easily spare room for and time to attend, to.
You see, then, that to prohibit the inheritable u*.
personal property with a view to prevent freat
accumulations would be a superfluous precaution
118 LOOKING BACKWARD.
for the nation. The individual citizen can "ha
trusted to see that he is not overburdened. So
careful is he in this respect, that the relatives usu-
ally waive claim to most of the effects of deceased
friends, reserving only particular objects. The
nation takes charge of the resigned chattels, and
turns such as are of value into the common stock
once more."
" You spoke of paying for service to take care
of your houses," said I ; " that suggests a question
I have several times been on the point of asking.
How have you disposed of the problem of do-
mestic service ? Who are willing to be domestic
servants in a community where all are social
equals ? Our ladies found it hard enough to find
such even when there was little pretense of social
equality."
" It is precisely because we are all social equals
whose equality nothing can compromise, and be-
cause service is honorable, in a society whose
fundamental principle is that all in turn shall
serve the rest, that we could easily provide a corps
of domestic servants such as you never dreamed
of, if we needed them," replied Dr. Leete. " But
vre do not need them."
K " Who does your house-work, then ? " I asked.
* There is none to do," said Mrs. Leete, to
^nom I had addressed this question. " Our wash-
ing is all done at public laundries at excessively
eheap rates, and our cooking at public kitchens
LOOKING BACKWARD. Ill
The making and repairing of all we wear are
done outside in public shops. Electricity, of
course, takes the place of all fires and lighting.
We choose houses no larger than we need, and
furnish them so as to involve the minimum of
trouble to keep them in order. We have no use
for domestic servants."
" The fact," said Dr. Leete, " that you had in
the poorer classes a boundless supply of serfs on
whom you could impose all sorts of painful and
disagreeable tasks, made you indifferent to devices
to avoid the necessity for them. But now that we
all have to do in turn whatever work is done for
society, every individual in the nation has the
same interest, and a personal one, in devices for
lightening the burden. This fact has given a pro-
digious impulse to labor-saving inventions in all
sorts of industry, of which the combination of the
maximum of comfort and minimum of trouble in
household arrangements was one of the earliest
results.
"In case of special emergencies in the house-
hold," pursued Dr. Leete, " such as extensive
cleaning or renovation, or sickness in the family,
we can always secure assistance from the indus-
trial force."
"But how do you recompense these assistants,
since you have no money ? "
" We do not pay them, of course, but the na
iion for them. Their services can be obtained by
120 LOOKING BACKWARD.
application at the proper bureau, and their value
is pricked ofE the credit card of the applicant."
"What a paradise for womankind the world
must be now ! " I exclaimed. " In my day, even
wealth and unlimited servants did not enfranchise
their possessors from household cares, while the
women of the merely well-to-do and poorer classes
lived and died martyrs to them."
" Yes," said Mrs. Leete, " I have read some-
thing of that ; enough to convince me that, badly
off as the men, too, were in your day, they were
more fortunate than their mothers and wives."
" The broad shoulders of the nation," said Dr.
Leete, " bear now like a feather the burden that
broke the backs of the women of your day. Their
misery came, with all your other miseries, from
that incapacity for cooperation which followed
from the individualism on which your social sys-
tem was founded, from your inability to perceive
that you could make ten times more profit out of
your fellow men by uniting with them than by
contending with them. The wonder is, not that
you did not live more comfortably, but that you
were able to live together at all, who were all con-
fessedly bent on making one another your ser-
vants, and securing possession of one another's
goods."
" There, there, father, if you are so vehement,
Mr. West will think you are scolding him," laugh*
ingly interposed Edith.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 121
M When you want a doctor," I asked, " do you
gimply apply to the proper bureau and take any
one that may be sent ? "
" That rule would not work well in the case of
physicians," replied Dr. Leete. " The good a
physician can do a patient depends largely on his
acquaintance with his constitutional tendencies
and condition. The patient must be able, there-
fore, to call in a particular doctor, and he does so
just as patients did in your day. The only differ-
ence is that, instead of collecting his fee for him-
self, the doctor collects it for the nation by prick-
ing off the amount, according to a regular scale
for medical attendance, from the patient's credit
card."
" I can imagine," I said, " that if the fee is al-
ways the same, and a doctor may not turn away
patients, as I suppose he may not, the good doc-
tors are called constantly and the poor doctors left
in idleness."
" In the first place, if you will overlook the ap-
parent conceit of the remark from a retired phy-
sician," replied Dr. Leete, with a smile, " we have
no poor doctors. Anybody who pleases to get a
little smattering of medical terms is not now at
liberty to practice on the bodies of citizens, as in
your day. None but students who have passed
the severe tests of the schools, and clearly proved
their vocation, are permitted to practice. Then,
too, you will observe that there is nowadays no
122 LOOKING BACKWARD.
attempt of doctors to build up their practice at tlte
expense of other doctors. There would be no mo-
tive for that. For the rest, the doctor has to ren-
der regular reports of his work to the medical
bureau, and if he is not reasonably well employed,
work is found for him."
CHAPTER XH
THE questions which I needed to ask before I
could acquire even an outline acquaintance with
the institutions of the twentieth century being end-
less, and Dr. Leete's good-nature appearing equally
so, we sat up talking for several hours after the
ladies left us. Reminding my host of the point at
which our talk had broken off that morning, I ex-
pressed my curiosity to learn how the organization
of the industrial army was made to afford a suffi-
cient stimulus to diligence in the lack of any anxi-
ety on the worker's part as to his livelihood.
" You must understand in the first place," re-
plied the doctor, " that the supply of incentives to
effort is but one of the objects sought in the or-
ganization we have adopted for the army. The
other, and equally important, is to secure for the
file-leaders and captains of the force, and the great
officers of the nation, men of proven abilities, who
are pledged by their own careers to hold their fol-
lowers up to their highest standard of performance
and permit no lagging. With a view to these two
ends the industrial army is organized. First
comes the unclassified grade of common laborers,
men of all work, to which all recruits during their
124 LOOKING BACKWARD.
first three years belong. This grade is a sort of
school, and a very strict one, in which the young
men are taught habits of obedience, subordination,
and devotion to duty. While the miscellaneous
nature of the work done by this force prevents
the systematic grading of the workers which is
afterwards possible, yet individual records are
kept, and excellence receives distinction corre-
sponding with the penalties that negligence incurs.
It is not, however, policy with us to permit youth-
ful recklessness or indiscretion, when not deeply
culpable, to handicap the future careers of young
men, and all who have passed through the unclassi-
fied grade without serious disgrace have an equal
opportunity to choose the life employment they
have most liking for. Having selected this, they
enter upon it as apprentices. The length of the
apprenticeship naturally differs in different occu-
pations. At the end of it the apprentice becomes
a full workman, and a member of his trade or
guild. Now not only are the individual records of
the apprentices for ability and industry strictly
kept, and excellence distinguished by suitable dis-
tinctions, but upon the average of his record dur-
ing apprenticeship the standing given the appren-
tice among the full workmen depends.
"While the internal organizations of different
industries, mechanical and agricultural, differ ac-
cording to their peculiar conditions, they agree
in a general division of their workers into first,
LOOKING BACKWARD. 125
second, and third grades, according to ability, and
these grades are in many cases subdivided into
first and second classes. According to his stand-
ing as an apprentice a young man is assigned his
place as a first, second, or third grade worker. Of
course only young men of unusual ability pass di-
rectly from apprenticeship into the first grade of
the workers. The most fall into the lower grades,
working up as they grow more experienced, at the
periodical regradings. These regradings take
place in each industry at intervals corresponding
with the length of the apprenticeship to that in-
dustry, so that merit never need wait long to rise,
nor can any rest on past achievements unless they
would drop into a lower rank. One of the notable
advantages of a high grading is the privilege it
gives the worker in electing which of the various
branches or processes of his industry he will fol-
low as his specialty. Of course it is not intended
that any of these processes shall be disproportion-
ately arduous, but there is often much difference
between them, and the privilege of election is ac-
cordingly highly prized. So far as possible, indeed,
the preferences even of the poorest workmen are
considered in assigning them their line of work,
because not only their happiness but their useful-
ness is thus enhanced. While, however, the wish
of the lower grade man is consulted so far as the
exigencies of the service permit, he is considered
only after the upper grade men have been pro-
126 LOOKING BACKWARD.
vided for, and often he has to put up with second
or third choice, or even with an arbitrary assign-
ment when help is needed. This privilege of
election attends every regrading, and when a man
loses his grade he also risks having to exchange
the sort of work he likes for some other less to his
taste. The results of each regrading, giving the
standing of every man in his industry, are gazetted
in the public prints, and those who have won pro-
motion since the last regrading receive the nation's
thanks and are publicly invested with the badge of
their new rank."
" What may this badge be ? " I asked.
" Every industry has its emblematic device," re-
plied Dr. Leete, " and this, in the shape of a metal-
lic badge so small that you might not see it unless
you knew where to look, is all the insignia which
the men of the army wear, except where public
convenience demands a distinctive uniform. This
badge is the same in form for all grades of in-
dustry, but while the badge of the third grade is
iron, that of the second grade is silver, and that of
the first is gilt.
"Apart from the grand incentive to endeavor
afforded by the fact that the high places in the
nation are open only to the highest class men, and
that rank in the army constitutes the only mode
of social distinction for the vast majority who are
not aspirants in art, literature, and the profes-
sions, various incitements of a minor, but perhaps
LOOKING BACKWARD. 127
equally effective, sort are provided in the form of
special privileges and immunities in the way of
discipline, which the superior class men enjoy.
These, while intended to be as little as possible
invidious to the less successful, have the effect
of keeping constantly before every man's mind
the great desirability of attaining the grade next
above his own.
"It is obviously important that not only the
good but also the indifferent and poor workmen
should be able to cherish the ambition of rising.
Indeed, the number of the latter being so much
greater, it is even more essential that the ranking
system should not operate to discourage them than
that it should stimulate the others. It is to this
end that the grades are divided into classes. The
grades as well as the classes being made numeri-
cally equal at each regrading, there is not at any
time, counting out the officers and the unclassified
and apprentice grades, over one-ninth of the indus-
trial army in the lowest class, and most of this
number are recent apprentices, all of whom expect
to rise. Those who remain during the entire term
of service in the lowest class are but a trifling
fraction of the industrial army, and likely to be
as deficient in sensibility to their position as in
ability to better it.
" It is not even necessary that a worker should
win promotion to a higher grade to have at least a
taste of glory. While promotion requires a gen-
LOOKING BACKWARD.
end CTCfflVmne of record an a worker, honorahla
mflirtion and various ante of prises are awarded
for excellence leas than sufficient for promotion,
and abo for special feats and single performances
in. the various industries. There are many minor
distinctions of standing, not only within the grades
but within the classes, each of which acts as a spar
to die efforts of a group, It is intended that no
form of merit snail whaDy fail of recognition.
** As for actual neglect of work, positively bad
work, or other orert remissness on the part of men
incapable of generous motives, the discipline of tf*ff
industrial army is far too strict to allow anything
whatever of the sort. A man able to do duty, and
persistently f^fasang, is sentenced to solitary im-
prisonment on bread and water tfll he consents.
"The lowest grade of the officers of the indus-
trial army, that of assistant foremen or lieutenants,
is appointed out of men who have held their place
for two years in the first class of the first grade.
Wine tins leaves too large a range of choice, only
the first group of this class are eligible. No one
tons ffowjffiff to IJM^ "p^Miht of floniE^^?ffMrc^^y WM*M nntu
he is about thirty years old. After a man becomes
an. officer, his rating of coarse no longer depend*
cy of his own work, baft on that of
are appointed front * antmt g
tie issiriMl hraseam, ^7 :.h~ same ex~rc-i>e of dis-
findted to a small eligible class. In the
to the stifl higher grades another
LOOKING BACKWARD. 120
principle is introduced, which it would take too
much time to explain now.
44 Of course such a system of grading as I have
described would hare been impracticable applied
to the small industrial concerns of your day. in
some of which there were hardly enough employees
to have left one apiece for the fl^naBUr You
must remember that, under the national organiza-
tion of labor, all industries are carried on by great
bodies of men, many of your farms or shops being
combined as one. It is also owing solely to die
vast scale on which each industry is organized,
with coordinate establishments in every part of die
country, that we are able by exchanges and trans-
fers to fit every man so nearly with the sort of
work he can do best.
** And now, Mr. West, I will leave it to yon, on
the bare outline of its features which I have given,
if those who need special incentives to do then
best are likely to lack them under our
Does it not seem to you that men who found
selves obliged, whether they wished or not, to
work, would under such a system be strongly im-
pelled to do their best? "
I replied that it seemed to me die iuccuUres
offered were, if any objection were to be made,
too strong ; that the pace set for the young men
was too hot ; and such, indeed, I would add with
deference, still remains my opinion, now that by
longer residence among you I have
acquainted with the whole subject.
180 LOOKING BACKWARD.
Dr. Leete, however, desired me to reflect, and 1
am ready to say that it is perhaps a sufficient
reply to my objection, that the worker's livelihood
is in no way dependent on his ranking, and anxiety
for that never embitters his disappointments ; that
the working hours are short, the vacations regular f
and that all emulation ceases at forty-five, with the
attainment of middle life.
" There are two or three other points I ought
to refer to," he added, " to prevent your getting
mistaken impressions. In the first place, you must
understand that this system of preferment given
the more efficient workers over the less so, in no
way contravenes the fundamental idea of our social
system, that all who do their best are equally de-
serving, whether that best be great or small. I
have shown that the system is arranged to encour-
age the weaker as well as the stronger with the
hope of rising, while the fact that the stronger are
selected for the leaders is in no way a reflection
upon the weaker, but in the interest of the com-
mon weal.
" Do not imagine, either, because emulation is
given free play as an incentive under our system,
that we deem it a motive likely to appeal to the
nobler sort of men, or worthy of them. Such aa
these find their motives within, not without, and
measure their duty by their own endowments, not
by those of others. So long as their achievement
is proportioned to their powers, they would con-
LOOKING BACKWARD. 131
eider it preposterous to expect praise or blame
because it chanced to be great or small. To sucli
natures emulation appears philosophically absurd,
and despicable in a moral aspect by its substi-
tution of envy for admiration, and exultation for
regret, in one's attitude toward the successes and
the failures of others.
" But all men, even in the last year of the twen-
tieth century, are not of this high order, and the
incentives to endeavor requisite for those who are
not must be of a sort adapted to their inferior
natures. For these, then, emulation of the keenest
edge is provided as a constant spur. Those who
need this motive will feel it. Those who are above
its influence do not need it.
" I should not fail to mention," resumed the
doctor, " that for those too deficient in mental or
bodily strength to be fairly graded with the main
body of workers, we have a separate grade, un-
connected with the others, a sort of invalid
corps, the members of which are provided with a
light class of tasks fitted to their strength. All
our sick in mind and body, all our deaf and dumb,
and lame and blind and crippled, and even our
insane, belong to this invalid corps, and bear its
insignia. The strongest often do nearly a man's
work, the feeblest, of course, nothing ; but none
who can do anything are willing quite to give up.
In their lucid intervals, even our insane are eagei
to do what they can."
132 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" That is a pretty idea of the invalid corps," 1
said. " Even a barbarian from the nineteenth cen-
tury can appreciate that. It is a very graceful
way of disguising charity, and must be grateful to
the feelings of its recipients."
" Charity ! " repeated Dr. Leete. " Did you sup-
pose that we consider the incapable class we are
talking of objects of charity ? "
" Why, naturally," I said, " inasmuch as they
are incapable of self-support."
But here the doctor took me up quickly.
"Who is capable of self-support ? " he demanded.
" There is no such thing in a civilized society as
self-support. In a state of society so barbarous as
not even to know family cooperation, each indi-
vidual may possibly support himself, though even
then for a part of his life only; but from the
moment that men begin to live together, and con-
stitute even the rudest sort of society, self-support
becomes impossible. As men grow more civilized,
and the subdivision of occupations and services is
carried out, a complex mutual dependence becomes
the universal rule. Every man, however solitary
may seem his occupation, is a member of a vast
industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as
large as humanity. The necessity of mutual de-
pendence should imply the duty and guarantee of
mutual support ; and that it did not in your day
constituted the essential cruelty and unreason of
your system."
LOOKING BACKWARD. 133
" That may all be so," I replied, " but it does
not touch the case of those who are unable to con-
tribute anything to the product of industry."
" Surely I told you this morning, at least I
thought I did," replied Dr. Leete, " that the right
of a man to maintenance at the nation's table de-
pends on the fact that he is a man, and not on the
amount of health and strength he may have, so
long as he does his best."
" You said so," I answered, " but T supposed the
rule applied only to the workers of different ability.
Does it also hold of those who can do nothing at
all?"
" Are they not also men ? "
" I am to understand, then, that the lame, the
blind, the sick, and the impotent, are as well off as
the most efficient, and have the same income ? "
" Certainly," was the reply.
"The idea of charity on such a scale," I an-
swered, " would have made our most enthusiastic
philanthropists gasp."
" If you had a sick brother at home," replied
Dr. Leete, " unable to work, would you feed him
on less dainty food, and lodge and clothe him more
poorly, than yourself ? More likely far, you would
give him the preference ; nor would you think of
calling it charity. Would not the word, in that
connection, fill you with indignation ? "
" Of course," I replied ; ' but the cases are not
parallel. There is a sense, no doubt, in which all
184 LOOKING BACKWARD.
men are brothers ; but this general sort of brother-
hood is not to be compared, except for rhetorical
purposes, to the brotherhood of blood, either as to
its sentiment or its obligations."
" There speaks the nineteenth century ! " ex-
claimed Dr. Leete. " Ah, Mr. "West, there is no
doubt as to the length of time that you slept. If
I were to give you, in one sentence, a key to what
may seem the mysteries of our civilization as com-
pared with that of your age, I should say that it is
the fact that the solidarity of the race and the
brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine
phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling, ties as
real and as vital as physical fraternity.
" But even setting that consideration aside, I
do not see why it so surprises you that those who
cannot work are conceded the full right to live on
the produce of those who can. Even in your day,
the duty of military service for the protection of
the nation, to which our industrial service corre-
sponds, while obligatory on those able to discharge
it, did not operate to deprive of the privileges of
citizenship those who were unable. They stayed
at home, and were protected by those who fought,
and nobody questioned their right to be, or thought
less of them. So, now, the requirement of indus-
trial service from those able to render it does not
operate to deprive of the privileges of citizenship,
which now implies the citizen's maintenance, him
who cannot work. The worker is not a citizen be-
LOOKING BACKWARD. 135
cause he works, but works because he is a citizen.
As you recognize the duty of the strong to fight
for the weak, we, now that fighting is gone by,
recognize his duty to work for him.
"A solution which leaves an unaccounted-for
residuum is no solution at all ; and our solution of
the problem of human society would have been
none at all had it left the lame, the sick, and the
blind outside with the beasts, to fare as they
might. Better far have left the strong and well
unprovided for than these burdened ones, toward
whom every heart must yearn, and for whom ease
of mind and body should be provided, if for no
others. Therefore it is, as I told you this morn-
ing, that the title of every man, woman, and child
to the means of existence rests on no basis less
plain, broad, and simple than the fact that they are
fellows of one race members of one human fam-
ily. The only coin current is the image of God,
and that is good for all we have.
" I think there is no feature of the civilization
of your epoch so repugnant to modern ideas as the
neglect with which you treated your dependent
classes. Even if you had no pity, no feeling of
brotherhood, how was it that you did not see that
you were robbing the incapable class of their plain
right in leaving them unprovided for ? "
"I don't quite follow you there," I said. "I
admit the claim of this class to our pity, but how
could they who produced nothing claim a share of
the product as a right ? "
136 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" How happened it," was Dr. Leete's reply,
"that your workers were able to produce more
than so many savages would have done ? Was it
not wholly on account of the heritage of the past
knowledge and achievements of the race, the ma-
chinery of society, thousands of years in contriving,
found by you ready-made to your hand? How
did you come to be possessors of this knowledge
and this machinery, which represent nine parts to
one contributed by yourself in the value of your
product? You inherited it, did you not? And
were not these others, these unfortunate and crip-
pled brothers whom you cast out, joint inheritors,
co-heirs with you? What did you do with their
share? Did you not rob them when you put
them off with crusts, who were entitled to sit with
the heirs, and did you not add insult to robbery
when you called the crusts charity ?
" Ah, Mr. West," Dr. Leete continued, as I did
not respond, " what I do not understand is, setting
aside all considerations either of justice or broth,
erly feeling toward the crippled and defective, how
the workers of your day could have had any heart
for their work, knowing that their children, or
grand-children, if unfortunate, would be deprived
of the comforts and even necessities of life. It is
a mystery how men with children could favor a
system under which they were rewarded beyond
those less endowed with bodily strength or mental
power. For, by the same discrimination by which
the father profited, the son, for whom he would
LOOKING BACKWARD. 137
give his life, being perchance weaker than others,
might be reduced to crusts and beggary. How
men dared leave children behind them, I have
never been able to understand."
NOTE. Although in his talk on the previous evening Dr.
Leete had emphasized the pains taken to enable every man to as-
certain and follow his natural bent in choosing an occupation, it
was not till I learned that the worker's income is the same in all
occupations that I realized how absolutely he may be counted
on to do so, and thus, by selecting the harness which sets most
lightly on himself, find that in which he can pull best. The fail-
ure of my age in any systematic or effective way to develop and
utilize the natural aptitudes of men for the industries and intel-
lectual avocations was one of the great wastes, as well as one of
the most common causes of unha^piness in that time. The vast
majority of my contemporaries, though nominally free to do so,
never really chose their occupations at all, but were forced by
circumstances into work for which they were relatively ineffi-
cient, because not naturally fitted for it. The rich, in this respect,
had little advantage over the poor. The latter, indeed, being
generally deprived of education, had no opportunity even to as-
certain the natural aptitudes they might have, and on account
of their poverty were unable to develop them by cultivation
even when ascertained. The liberal and technical professions,
except by favorable accident, were shut to them, to their own
great loss and that of the nation. On the other hand, the well-to-
do, although they could command education and opportunity,
were scarcely less hampered by social prejudice, which forbade
them to pursue manual avocations, even when adapted to them,
and destined them, whether fit or unfit, to the professions, thus
wasting many an excellent handicraftsman. Mercenary consid-
erations, tempting men to pursue money-making occupations for
which they were unfit, instead of less remunerative employments
for which they were fit, were responsible for another vast perver-
sion of talent. All these things now are changed. Equal educa-
tion and opportunity must needs bring to light whatever aptitudes
a man has, and neither social prejudices nor mercenary consider'
atioiis hamper him in the choice of his life work.
CHAPTER XIIL
As Edith had promised he should do, Dr. Leete
accompanied me to my bedroom when I retired, to
instruct me as to the adjustment of the musical
telephone. He showed how, by turning a screw,
the volume of the music could be made to fill the
room, or die away to an echo so faint and far that
one could scarcely be sure whether he heard or
imagined it. If, of two persons side by side, one
desired to listen to music and the other to sleep,
it could be made audible to one and inaudible
to another.
"I should strongly advise you to sleep if you
can to night, Mr. West, in preference to listening
to the finest tunes in the world," the doctor said,
after explaining these points. " In the trying
experience you are just now passing through, sleep
is a nerve tonic for which there is no substitute."
Mindful of what had happened to me that very
morning, I promised to heed his counsel.
" Very well," he said, " then I will set the tele-
phone at eight o'clock."
" What do you mean ? " I asked.
He explained that, by a clock-work combination,
a person could arrange to be awakened at any hour
by the music.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 189
It began to appear, as has since fully proved
to be the case, that I had left my tendency to
"insomnia behind me with the other discomforts
of existence in the nineteenth century ; for though
I took no sleeping draught this time, yet, as the
night before, I had no sooner touched the pillow
than I was asleep.
I dreamed that I sat on the throne of the Aben-
cerrages in the banqueting hall of the Alhambra,
feasting my lords and generals, who next day
were to follow the crescent against the Christian
dogs of Spain. The air, cooled by the spray of
fountains, was heavy with the scent of flowers. A
band of Nautch girls, round-limbed and luscious-
lipped, danced with voluptuous grace to the music
of brazen and stringed instruments. Looking up
to the latticed galleries, one caught a gleam now
and then from the eye of some beauty of the royal
harem, looking down upon the assembled flower of
Moorish chivalry. Louder and louder clashed the
cymbals, wilder and wilder grew the strain, till
the blood of the desert race could no longer resist
the martial delirium, and the swart nobles leaped
to their feet ; a thousand scimetars were bared, and
the cry, " Allah il Allah ! " shook the hall and
awoke me, to find it broad daylight, and the room
tingling with the electric music of the " Turkish
Keveille."
At the breakfast-table, when I told my host of
my morning's experience, I learned that it was not
140 LOOKING BACKWARD.
a mere chance that the piece of music which awak
ened me was a reveille. The airs played at one of
the halls during the waking hours of the morning
were always of an inspiring type.
" By the way," I said, " I have not thought
to ask you anything about the state of Europev
Have the societies of the Old World also been
remodeled ? "
"Yes," replied Dr. Leete, "the great nations
of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts
of South America, are now organized industrially
like the United States, which was the pioneer of
the evolution. The peaceful relations of these na-
tions are assured by a loose form of federal union
of world-wide extent. An international council
regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of
the members of the union and their joint policy
toward the more backward races, which are gradu^
ally being educated up to civilized institutions;
Complete autonomy within its own limits is en-
joyed by every nation."
"How do you carry on commerce without
money ? " I said. " In trading with other nations,
you must use some sort of money, although you dis<
pense with it in the internal affairs of the nation."
" Oh, no; money is as superfluous in our for-
eign as in our internal relations. When foreign
commerce was conducted by private enterprise,
money was necessary to adjust it on account of the
multifarious complexity of the transactions ; but
LOOKING BACKWARD. 141
nowadays it is a function of the nations as units.
There are thus only a dozen or so merchants in
the world, and their business being supervised by
the international council, a simple system of book
accounts serves perfectly to regulate their dealings.
Customs duties of every sort are of course super-
fluous. A nation simply does not import what its
government does not think requisite for the gen-
eral interest. Each nation has a bureau of for-
eign exchange, which manages its trading. For
example, the American bureau, estimating such
and such quantities of French goods necessary to
America for a given year, sends the order to the
French bureau, which in turn sends its order to
our bureau. The same is done mutually by all the
nations."
" But how are the prices of foreign goods set-
tled, since there is no competition ? "
" The price at which one nation supplies another
with goods," replied Dr. Leete, " must be that at
which it supplies its own citizens. So you see
there is no danger of misunderstanding. Of course
no nation is theoretically bound to supply another
with the product of its own labor, but it is for the
interest of all to exchange some commodities. If a
nation is regularly supplying another with certain
goods, notice is required from either side of any
important change in the relation."
" But what if a nation, having a monopoly of some
natural product, should refuse to supply it to the
others, or to one of them ? "
142 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" Such a case has never occurred, and could not
without doing the refusing party vastly more harm
than the others," replied Dr. Leete. " In the first
place, no favoritism could be legally shown. The
law requires that each nation shall deal with the
others, in all respects, on exactly the same footing.
Such a course as you suggest would cut off the
nation adopting it from the remainder of the earth
for all purposes whatever. The contingency is one
that need not give us much anxiety."
"But," said I, "supposing a nation, having a
natural monopoly in some product of which it ex-
ports more than it consumes, should put the price
away up, and thus, without cutting off the supply,
make a profit out of its neighbors' necessities ? Its
own citizens would of course have to pay the higher
price on that commodity, but as a body would make
more out of foreigners than they would be out of
pocket themselves."
" When you come to know how prices of all com-
modities are determined nowadays, you will per-
ceive how impossible it is that they could be altered,
except with reference to the amount or arduousness
of the work required respectively to produce them,"
was Dr. Leete's reply. " This principle is an inter-
national as well as a national guarantee ; but even
without it the sense of community of interest, inter-
national as well as national, and the conviction
of the folly of selfishness, are too deep nowadays to
render possible such a piece of sharp practice ai
LOOKING BACKWARD. 148
you apprehend. You must understand that we all
look forward to an eventual unification of the world
as one nation. That, no doubt, will be the ultimate
form of society, and will realize certain economic
advantages over the present federal system of auto-
nomous nations. Meanwhile, however, the present
system works so nearly perfectly that we are quite
content to leave to posterity the completion of the
scheme. There are, indeed, some who hold that it
never will be completed, on the ground that the
federal plan is not merely a provisional solution of
the problem of human society, but the best ulti-
mate solution."
"How do you manage," I asked, "when the
books of any two nations do not balance ? Sup-
posing we import more from France than we ex-
port to her."
" At the end of each year," replied the doctor,
"the books of every nation are examined. If
France is found in our debt, probably we are in the
debt of some nation which owes France, and so on
with all the nations. The balances that remaii?
after the accounts have been cleared by the inter^
national council should not be large under our
system. Whatever they may be, the council re-
quires them to be settled every few years, and may
require their settlement at any time if they are get-
ting too large ; for it is not intended that any na-
tion shall run largely in debt to another, lest feel-
ings unfavorable to amity should be engendered*
144 LOOKING BACKWARD.
To guard further against this, the international
council inspects the commodities interchanged by
the nations, to see that they are of perfect quality."
" But what are the balances finally settled with,
seeing that you have no money?"
" In national staples ; a basis of agreement as to
what staples shall be accepted, and in what propor-
tions, for settlement of accounts, being a prelim-
inary to trade relations."
" Emigration is another point I want to ask you
about," said I. " With every nation organized as a
close industrial partnership, monopolizing all means
of production in the country, the emigrant, even if
he were permitted to land, would starve. I sup-
pose there is no emigration nowadays."
" On the contrary, there is constant emigration,
by which I suppose you mean removal to foreign
countries for permanent residence," replied Dr.
Leete. " It is arranged on a simple international
arrangement of indemnities. For example, if a
man at twenty-one emigrates from England to
America, England loses all the expense of his main-
tenance and education, and America gets a work-
man for nothing. America accordingly makes
England an allowance. The same principle, varied
to suit the case, applies generally. If the man is
near the term of his labor when he emigrates, the
country receiving him has the allowance. As to im-
becile persons, it is deemed best that each nation
should be responsible for its own, and the emigra-
LOOKING BACKWARD. 145
tion of such must be under full guarantees of sup-
port by his own nation. Subject to these regula-
tions, the right of any man to emigrate at any time
is unrestricted."
" But how about mere pleasure trips ; tours of
observation? How can a stranger travel in a
country whose people do not receive money, and are
themselves supplied with the means of life on a
basis not extended to him ? His own credit card
cannot, of course, be good in other lauds. How
does he pay his way ? "
" An American credit card," replied Dr. Leete,
" is just as good in Europe as American gold used
to be, and on precisely the same condition, namely,
that it be exchanged into the currency of the coun-
try you are traveling in. An American in Berlin
takes his credit card to the local office of the inter-
national council, and receives in exchange for the
whole or part of it a German credit card, the
amount being charged against the United States in
favor of Germany on the international account."
" Perhaps Mr. West would like to dine at the
Elephant to-day," said Edith, as we left the table.
" That is the name we give to the general dining-
house of our ward," explained her father. " Not
only is our cooking done at the public kitchens, as
I told you last night, but the service and quality of
the meals are much more satisfactory if taken at
146 LOOKING BACKWARD.
the dining-house. The two minor meals of the day
are usually taken at home, as not worth the trouble
of going out ; but it is general to go out to dine
We have not done so since you have been with us,
from a notion that it would be better to wait till
you had become a little more familiar with our
ways. What do you think ? Shall we take dinner
at the dining-house to-day ? "
I said that I should be very much pleased to
do so.
Not long after, Edith came to me, smiling, and
said :
" Last night, as I was thinking what I could do
to make you feel at home until you came to be a
little more used to us and our ways, an idea oc-
curred to me. What would you say if I were to
introduce you to some very nice people of your
own times, whom I am sure you used to be well
acquainted with ? "
I replied, rather vaguely, that it would certainly
be very agreeable, but I did not see how she was
going to manage it.
" Come with me," was her smiling reply, " and
see if I am not as good as my word."
My susceptibility to surprise had been pretty
well exhausted by the numerous shocks it had re-
ceived, but it was with some wonderment that I
followed her into a room which I had not before
entered. It was a small, cosy apartment, walled
with cases filled with books.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 14V
" Here are your friends," said Edith, indicating
one of the cases, and as my eye glanced over the
names on the backs of the volumes, Shakespeare
Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Defoe,
Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, Irving, and
a score of other great writers of iny time and all
time, I understood her meaning. She had indeed
made good her promise in a sense compared
with which its literal fulfillment would have been
a disappointment. She had introduced me to
a circle of friends whom the century that had
elapsed since last I communed with them had aged
as little as it had myself. Their spirit was as high,
their wit as keen, their laughter and their tears as
contagious, as when their speech had whiled away
the hours of a former century. Lonely I was not
and could not be more, with this goodly companion-
ship, however wide the gulf of years that gaped
between me and my old life.
" You are glad I brought you here," exclaimed
Edith, radiant, as she read in my face the success
of her experiment. " It was a good idea, was it
not, Mr. West ? How stupid in me not to think
of it before ! I will leave you now with your old
friends, for I know there will be no company for
you like them just now ; but remember you must
not let old friends make you quite forget new
ones ! " and with that smiling caution she left me.
Attracted by the most familiar of the names
before me, I laid my hand on a volume of Dickens,
148 LOOKING BACKWARD.
and sat down to read. He had been my prime
favorite among the book-writers of the century,
I mean the nineteenth century, and a week
had rarely passed in my old life during which I
had not taken up some volume of his works to while
away an idle hour. Any volume with which I had
been familiar would have produced an extraordi-
nary impression, read under my present circum-
stances, but my exceptional familiarity with Dick-
ens, and his consequent power to call up the asso-
ciations of my former life, gave to his writings an
effect no others could have had, to intensify, by
force of contrast, my appreciation of the strange-
ness of my present environment. However new
and astonishing one's surroundings, the tendency is
to become a part of them so soon that almost from
the first the power to see them objectively and fully
measure their strangeness, is lost. That power,
already dulled in my case, the pages of Dickens
restored by carrying me back through their associ-
ations to the standpoint of my former life. With
a clearness which I had not been able before to a^-
tain, I saw now the past and present, like contrast-
ing pictures, side by side.
The genius of the great novelist of the nine-
teenth century, like that of Homer, might indeed
defy time ; but the setting of his pathetic tales, the
^misery of the poor, the wrongs of power, the piti-
less cruelty of the system of society, had passed
away as utterly as Circe and the sirens, Charybdis
and Cyclops.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 149
During the hour or two that I sat there with
Dickens open before me, I did not actually read
more than a couple of pages. Every paragraph,
every phrase, brought up some new aspect of the
world-transformation which had taken place, and
led my thoughts on long and widely ramifying
excursions. As meditating thus in Dr. Leete's
library I gradually attained a more clear and co-
herent idea of the prodigious spectacle which I had
been so strangely enabled to view, I was filled with
a deepening wonder at the seeming caprieiousness
of the fate that had given to one who so little
deserved it, or seemed in any way set apart for
it, the power alone among his contemporaries to
stand upon the earth in this latter day. I had
neither foreseen the new world nor toiled for it, as
many about me had done regardless of the scorn of
fools or the misconstruction of the good. Surely
it would have been more in accordance with the
fitness of things had one of those prophetic and
strenuous soids been enabled to see the travail of
his soul and be satisfied ; he, for example, a thou-
sand times rather than I, who, having beheld in
a vision the world I looked on, sang of it in words
that again and again, during these last wondrous
days, had rung in my mind :
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be ;
Till the war-drum throbhed no longer, and the battle-flags were
furled.
tia the Parliament of man, the federation of the world.
150 LOOKING BACKWARD.
Then the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm uf
awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the
suns.
What though, in his old age, he momentarily
lost faith in his own prediction, as prophets in their
hours of depression and doubt generally do ; the
words had remained eternal testimony to the seer-
ship of a poet's heart, the insight that is given to
faith.
I was still in the library when some hours later
Dr. Leete sought me there. " Edith told me of her
idea," he said, " and I thought it an excellent one.
I had a little curiosity what writer you would first
turn to. Ah, Dickens ! You admired him, then !
That is where we moderns agree with you. Judged
by our standards, he overtops all the writers of his
age, not because his literary genius was highest,
but because his great heart beat for the poor, be-
cause he made the cause of the victims of society
his own, and devoted his pen to exposing its cruel-
ties and shams. No man of his time did so much
as he to turn men's minds to the wrong and wretch-
edness of the old order of things, and open their
eyes to the necessity of the great change that was
coming, although he himself did not clearly foresee
it."
CHAPTER XIV.
A HEAVY rainstorm came up during the day,
and I had concluded that the condition of the
streets would be such that my hosts would have to
give up the idea of going out to dinner, although
the diniug-hall I had understood to be quite near.
I was much surprised when at the dinner hour the
ladies appeared prepared to go out, but without
either rubbers or umbrellas.
The mystery was explained when we found our-
selves on the street, for a continuous waterproof
covering had been let down so as to inclose the
sidewalk and turn it into a well lighted and per-
fectly dry corridor, which was filled with a stream
of ladies and gentlemen dressed for dinner. At
the corners the entire open space was similarly
roofed in. Edith Leete, with whom I walked,
seemed much interested in learning what appeared
to be entirely new to her, that in the stormy
weather the streets of the Boston of my day had
been impassable, except to persons protected by
umbrellas, boots, and heavy clothing. " Were
sidewalk coverings not used at all ? " she asked.
They were used, I explained, but in a scattered
and utterly unsystematic way, being private enter-
152 LOOKING BACKWARD.
prises. She said to me that at the present time
all the streets were provided against inclement
weather in the manner I saw, the apparatus being
rolled out of the way when it was unnecessary.
She intimated that it would be considered an ex-
traordinary imbecility to permit the weather to
have any effect on the social movements of the
people.
Dr. Leete, who was walking ahead, overhearing
something of our talk, turned to say that the dif-
ference between the age of individualism and that
of concert was well characterized by the fact that,
in the nineteenth century, when it rained, the peo-
ple of Boston put up three hundred thousand um-
brellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth
century they put up one umbrella over all the
heads.
As we walked on, Edith said, " The private um-
brella is father's favorite figure to illustrate the
old way when everybody lived for himself and his
family. There is a nineteenth century painting at
the Art Gallery representing a crowd of people in
the rain, each one holding his umbrella over him-
self and his wife, and giving his neighbors the
drippings, which he claims must have been meant
by the artist as a satire on his times."
We now entered a large building into which a
stream of people was pouring. I could not see
the front, owing to the awning, but, if in corre-
spondence with the interior, which was even finer
LOOKING BACKWARD. 153
than the store I visited the day before, it would
have been magnificent. My companion said that
the sculptured group over the entrance was espe-
cially admired. Going up a grand staircase we
walked some distance along a broad corridor with
many doors opening upon it. At one of these,
which bore my host's name, we turned in, and I
found myself in an elegant dining-room contain-
ing a table for four. Windows opened on a court-
yard where a fountain played to a great height
and music made the air electric.
" You seem at home here," I said, as we seated
ourselves at table, and Dr. Leete touched an an-
nunciator.
" This is, in fact, a part of our house, slightly
detached from the rest," he replied. " Every
family in the ward has a room set apart in this
great building for its permanent and exclusive use
for a small annual rental. For transient guests
and individuals there is accommodation on another
floor. If we expect to dine here, we put in our
orders the night before, selecting anything in
market, according to the daily reports in the
papers. The meal is as expensive or as simple
as we please, though of course everything is vastly
cheaper as well as better than it would be if pre-
pared at home. There is actually nothing which
our people take more interest in than the perfection
of the catering and cooking done for them, and I
admit that we are a little vain of the success that
154 LOOKING BACKWARD.
has been attained by tins branch of the service.
Ah, my dear Mr. West, though other aspects of
your civilization were more tragical, I can imagine
that none could have been more depressing than
the poor dinners you had to eat, that is, all of
you who had not great wealth."
" You would have found none of us disposed to
disagree with you on that point," I said.
The waiter, a fine-looking young fellow, wear-
ing a slightly distinctive uniform, now made his
appearance. I observed him closely, as it was the
first time I had been able to study particularly the
bearing of one of the enlisted members of the in-
dustrial army. This young man, I knew from
what I had been told, must be highly educated,
and the equal, socially and in all respects, of those
he served. But it was perfectly evident that to
neither side was the situation in the slightest
degree embarrassing. Dr. Leete addressed the
young man in a tone devoid, of course, as any
gentleman's would be, of superciliousness, but at
the same time not in any way deprecatory, while
the manner of the young man was simply that of
a person intent on discharging correctly the task
he was engaged in, equally without familiarity or
obsequiousness. It was, in fact, the manner of a
soldier on duty, but without the military stiffness.
As the youth left the room, I said, " I cannot get
over my wonder at seeing a young man like that
serving so contentedly in a menial position."
LOOKING BACKWARD. 155
" What is that word ' menial ' ? I never heard
it," said Edith.
" It is obsolete now," remarked her father. " If
I understand it rightly, it applied to persons who
performed particularly disagreeable and unpleas-
ant tasks for others, and carried with it an im-
plication of contempt. Was it not so, Mr. West ? "
** That is about it," I said. " Personal service,
such as waiting on tables, was considered menial,
and held in such contempt, in my day, that per-
sons of culture and refinement would suffer hard-
ship before condescending to it."
"What a strangely artificial idea," exclaimed
Mrs. Leete, wonderingly.
" And yet these services had to be rendered,* 1
said Edith.
" Of course," I replied. " But we imposed them
on the poor, and those who had no alternative but
starvation."
"And increased the burden you imposed on
them by adding your contempt," remarked Dr.
Leete.
" I don't think I clearly understand," said Edith.
" Do you mean that you permitted people to do
things for you which you despised them for doing,
or that you accepted services from them which
you would have been unwilling to render them?
You can't surely mean that, Mr. West ? "
I was obliged to tell her that the fact was just
as she had stated. Dr. Leete, however, came to
my relief.
156 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" To understand why Edith is surprised," lie
said, "you must know that nowadays it is an
axiom of ethics that to accept a service from
another which we would be unwilling to return
in kind, if need were, is like borrowing with the
intention of not repaying, while to enforce such a
service by taking advantage of the poverty or ne-
cessity of a person would be an outrage like forcible
robbery. It is the worst thing about any system
which divides men, or allows them to be divided,
into classes and castes, that it weakens the sense
of a common humanity. Unequal distribution of
wealth, and, still more effectually, unequal oppor-
tunities of education and culture, divided society
in your day into classes which in many respects
regarded each other as distinct races. There is
not, after all, such a difference as might appear
between our ways of looking at this question of
service. Ladies and gentlemen of the cultured
class in your day would no more have permitted
persons of their own class to render them services
they would scorn to return than we would permit
anybody to do so. The poor and the uncultured,
however, they looked upon as of another kind from
themselves. The equal wealth and equal opportu-
nities of culture which all persons now enjoy have
simply made us all members of one class, which
corresponds to the most fortunate class with you.
Until this equality of condition had come to pass,
the idea of the solidarity of humanity, the brother-
LOOKING BACKWARD. 157
hood of all men, could never have become the real
conviction and practical principle of action it is
nowadays. In your day the same phrases were
indeed used, but they were phrases merely."
" Do the waiters, also, volunteer ? "
" No," replied Dr. Leete. " The waiters are
young men in the unclassified grade of the in-
dustrial army who are assignable to all sorts of
miscellaneous occupations not requiring special
skill. Waiting on table is one of these, and every
young recruit is given a taste of it. I myself
served as a waiter for several months in this very
dining-house some forty years ago. Once more
you must remember that there is recognized no
sort of difference between the dignity of the dif-
ferent sorts of work required by the nation. The
individual is never regarded, nor regards himself,
as the servant of those he serves, nor is he in any
way dependent upon them. It is always the nation
which he is serving. No difference is recognized
between a waiter's functions and those of any
other worker. The fact that his is a personal ser-
vice is indifferent from our point of view. So is a
doctor's. I should as soon expect our waiter to-
day to look down on me because I served him as a
doctor, as think of looking down on him because
he serves me as a waiter."
After dinner my entertainers conducted me
about the building, of which the extent, the mag-
nificent architecture and richness of embellishment,
158 LOOKING BACKWARD.
astonished me. It seemed that it was not merely
a dining-hall, but likewise a great pleasure-house
and social rendezvous of the quarter, and no appli-
ance of entertainment or recreation seemed lacking.
"You find illustrated here," said Dr. Leete,
when I had expressed my admiration, "what I
said to you in our first conversation, when you
were looking out over the city, as to the splendor
of our public and common life as compared with
the simplicity of our private and home life, and
the contrast which, in this respect, the twentieth
bears to the nineteenth century. To save our-
selves useless burdens, we have as little gear about
us at home as is consistent with comfort, but the
social side of our life is ornate and luxurious be-
yond anything the world ever knew before. All
the industrial and professional guilds have club-
houses as extensive as this, as well as country,
mountain, and seaside houses for sport and rest in
vacations."
NOTE. In the latter part of the nineteenth century it became a
practice of needy young men at some of the colleges of the coun-
try to earn a little money for their term bills by serving as wait-
ers on tables at hotels during the long summer vacation. It was
claimed, in reply to critics who expressed the prejudices of the
time in asserting that persons voluntarily following such an occu-
pation could not be gentlemen, that they were entitled to praise
for vindicating, by their example, the dignity of all honest and
necessary labor. The use of this argument illustrates a common
confusion in thought on the part of my former contemporaries.
The business of waiting on tables was in no more need of defense
than most of the other ways of getting a living in that day, but
LOOKING BACKWARD. 159
to talk of dignity attaching to labor of any sort nnder the system
then prevailing was absurd. There is no way in which selling
iabor for the highest price it will fetch is more dignified than
selling goods for what can be got. Both were commercial trans-
actions to be judged by the commercial standard. By setting a
price in money on his service, the worker accepted the money
measure for it, and renounced all clear claim to be judged by
any other. The sordid taint which this necessity imparted to the
noblest and the highest sorts of service was bitterly resented by
generous souls, but there was no evading it. There was no ex-
emption, however transcendent the quality of one's service, from
the necessity of haggling for its price in the market-place. The
physician must sell his healing and the apostle his preaching
like the rest. The prophet, who had guessed the 'meaning of
God, must dicker for the price of the revelation, and the poet
hawk his visions in printers' row. If I were asked to name the
most distinguishing 1 felicity of this age, as compared to that in
\rhich I first saw the light, I should say that to me it seems to
consist in the dignity you have given to labor by refusing to set a
price upon it and abolishing the market-place forever. By re-
quiring of every man his best you have made God his task-mas-
ter, and by making honor the sole reward of achievement yon
have imparted to all service the distinction peculiar in my daj
to the soldier's-
CHAPTER XV.
WHEN, in the course of our tour of inspection,
we came to the library, we succumbed to the temp-
tation of the luxurious leather chairs with which it
was furnished, and sat down in one of the book-
lined alcoves to rest and chat awhile. 1
"Edith tells me that you have been in the
library all the morning," said Mrs. Leete. "Do
you know, it seems to me, Mr. West, that you are
the most enviable of mortals."
" I should like to know just why," I replied.
" Because the books of the last hundred years
will be new to you," she answered. "You will
have so much of the most absorbing literature to
read as to leave you scarcely time for meals these
five years to come. Ah, what would I give if I
had not already read Berrian's novels."
" Or Nesmyth's, mamma," added Edith.
" Yes, or Gates' poems, or 4 Past and Present,'
or, * In the Beginning,' or, oh, I could name a
1 I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns
in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with
the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century,
in which the books were jealously railed away from the people,
and obtainable only at an expenditure of time -and red tape cal-
culated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 161
dozen books, each worth a year of one's life," de-
clared Mrs. Leete, enthusiastically.
" I judge, then, that there has been some nota-
ble literature produced in this century."
" Yes," said Dr. Leete. " It has been an era of
unexampled intellectual splendor. Probably hu-
manity never before passed through a moral and
material evolution, at once so vast in its scope and
brief in its time of accomplishment, as that from
the old order to the new in the early part of this
century. When men came to realize the greatness
of the felicity which had befallen them, and that
the change through which they had passed was not
merely an improvement in details of their condi-
tion, but the rise of the race to a new plane of ex-
istence with an illimitable vista of progress, their
minds were affected in all their faculties with a
stimulus, of which the outburst of the mediaeval
renaissance offers a suggestion but faint indeed.
There ensued an era of mechanical invention, sci-
entific discovery, art, musical and literary produc-
tiveness to which no previous age of the world
offers anything comparable."
"By the way," said I, "talking of literature,
how are books published now ? Is that also done
by the nation ? "
" Certainly."
" But how do you manage it ? Does the govern-
ment publish everything that is brought it as a
matter of course, at the public expense, or does it
162 LOOKING BACKWARD.
exercise a censorship and print only what it ap
proves ? "
"Neither way. The printing department has
no censorial powers. It is bound to print all that
is offered it, but prints it only on condition that
the author defray the first cost out of his credit.
He must pay for the privilege of the public ear,
and if he has any message worth hearing we con-
sider that he will be glad to do it. Of course, if
incomes were unequal, as in the old times, this
rule would enable only the rich to be authors, but
the resources of citizens being equal, it merely
measures the strength of the author's motive. The
cost of an edition of an average book can be saved
out of a year's credit by the practice of economy
and some sacrifices. The book, on being published,
is placed on sale by the nation."
" The author receiving a royalty on the sales as
with us, I suppose," I suggested.
" Not as with you, certainly," replied Dr. Leete,
" but nevertheless in one way. The price of every
book is made up of the cost of its publication with
a royalty for the author. The author fixes this
royalty at any figure he pleases. Of course if he
puts it unreasonably high it is his own loss, for
the book will not sell. The amount of this royalty
is set to his credit and he is discharged from other
service to the nation for so long a period as this
credit at the rate of allowance for the support of
citizens shall suffice to support him. If his boot
LOOKING BACKWARD. 168
be moderately successful, he has thus a furlough
for several months, a year, two or three years, and
if he in the mean time produces other successful
work, the remission of service is extended so far
as the sale of that may justify. An author of
much acceptance succeeds in supporting himself
by his pen during the entire period of service, and
the degree of any writer's literary ability, as deter-
mined by the popular voice, is thus the measure
of the opportunity given him to devote his time
to literature. In this respect the outcome of our
system is not very dissimilar to that of yours, but
there are two notable differences. In the first
place, the universally high level of education now-
adays gives the popular verdict a conclusiveness
on the real merit of literary work which in your
day it was as far as possible from having. In the
second place, there is no such thing now as favor-
itism of any sort to interfere with the recognition
of true merit. Every author has precisely the
same facilities for bringing his work before the
popular tribunal. To judge from the complaints
of the writers of your day, this absolute equality
of opportunity would have been greatly prized."
" In the recognition of merit in other fields of
original genius, such as music, art, invention, de-
sign," I said, " I suppose you follow a similar prin-
ciple."
" Yes," he replied, " although the details differ.
In art, for example, as in literature, the people are
164 LOOKING BACKWARD.
the sole judges. They vote upon the acceptance
of statues and paintings for the public buildings,
and their favorable verdict carries with it the art-
ist's remission from other tasks to devote himself
to his vocation. On copies of his work disposed
of, he also derives the same advantage as the
author on sales of his books. In all these lines of
original genius the plan pursued is the same, to
offer a free field to aspirants, and as soon as ex-
ceptional talent is recognized to release it from all
trammels and let it have free course. The remis-
sion of other service in these cases is not intended
as a gift or reward, but as the means of obtaining
more and higher service. Of course there are va-
rious literary, art, and scientific institutes to which
membership comes to the famous and is greatly
prized. The highest of all honors in the nation,
higher than the presidency, which calls merely for
good sense and devotion to duty, is the red ribbon
awarded by the vote of the people to the great
authors, artists, engineers, physicians, and inven-
tors of the generation. Not over a certain number
wear it at any one time, though every bright young
fellow in the country loses innumerable nights'
deep dreaming of it. I even did myself."
" Just as if mamma and I would have thought
any more of you with it," exclaimed Edith ; " not
that it is n't, of course, a very fine thing to have."
" You had no choice, my dear, but to take your
father as you found him and make the best of
LOOKING BACKWARD. 165
him," Dr. Leete replied ; " but as for your mother,
there, she would never have had me if I had not
assured her that I was bound to get the red ribbon
or at least the blue."
On this extravagance Mrs. Leete's only com-
ment was a smile.
"How about periodicals and newspapers?" I
said. " I won't deny that your book publishing
system is a considerable improvement on ours,
both as to its tendency to encourage a real literary
vocation, and, quite as important, to discourage
mere scribblers ; but I don't see how it can be
made to apply to magazines and newspapers. It
is very well to make a man pay for publishing a
book, because the expense will be only occasional ;
but no man could afford the expense of publishing
a newspaper every day in the year. It took the
deep pockets of our private capitalists to do that,
and often exhausted even them before the returns
came in. If you have newspapers at all, they
must, I fancy, be published by the government at
the public expense, with government editors, re-
flecting government opinions. Now, if your sys-
tem is so perfect that there is never anything to
criticise in the conduct of affairs, this arrange-
ment may answer. Otherwise I should think the
lack of an independent unofficial medium for tne
expression of public opinion would have most un-
fortunate results. Confess, Dr. Leete, that a free
newspaper press, with all that it implies, was a
166 LOOKING BACKWARD.
redeeming incident of the old system when capital
was in private hands, and that you have to set off
the loss of that against your gains in other re-
spects."
" I am afraid I can't give you even that consola-
tion," replied Dr. Leete, laughing. " In the first
place, Mr. West, the newspaper press is by no
means the only or, as we look at it, the best vehicle
for serious criticism of public affairs. To us, the
judgments of your newspapers on such themes
seem generally to have been crude and flippant,
as well as deeply tinctured with prejudice and bit-
terness. In so far as they may be taken as ex-
pressing public opinion, they give an unfavorable
impression of the popular intelligence, while so
far as they may have formed public opinion, the
nation was not to be felicitated. Nowadays, when
a citizen desires to make a serious impression upon
the public mind as to any aspect of public affairs,
he comes out with a book or pamphlet, published
as other books are. But this is not because we
lack newspapers and magazines, or that they lack
the most absolute freedom. The newspaper press
is organized so as to be a more perfect expression
of public opinion than it possibly could be in your
day, when private capital controlled and managed
it primarily as a money-making business, and sec-
Jtadarily only as a mouthpiece for the people."
. * But," said I, " if the government prints the
papers at the public expense, how can it fail to
LOOKING BACKWARD. 167
control their policy? Who appoints the editors,
if not the government? "
" The government does not pay the expense of
the papers, nor appoint their editors, nor in any
way exert the slightest influence on their policy,"
replied Dr. Leete. " The people who take the
paper pay the expense of its publication, choose its
editor, and remove him when unsatisfactory. You
will scarcely say, I think, that such a newspaper
press is not a free organ of popular opinion."
" Decidedly I shall not," I replied, " but how
is it practicable ? "
" Nothing could be simpler. Supposing some of
my neighbors or myself think we ought to have a
newspaper reflecting our opinions, and devoted
especially to our locality, trade, or profession. We
go about among the people till we get the names
of such a number that their annual subscriptions
will meet the cost of the paper, which is little or
big according to the largeness of its constituency.
The amount of the subscriptions marked off the
credits of the citizens guarantees the nation against
loss in publishing the paper, its business, you un-
derstand, being that of a publisher purely, with
no option to refuse the duty required. The sub-
scribers to the paper now elect somebody as editor,
who, if he accepts the office, is discharged from
other service during his incumbency. Instead of
paying a salary to him, as in your day, the sub-
scribers pay the nation an indemnity equal to the
168 LOOKING BACKWARD.
cost of his support for taking him away from the
general service. He manages the paper just as
one of your editors did, except that he has no
counting-room to obey, or interests of private
capital as against the public good to defend. At
the end of the first year, the subscribers for the
next either reelect the former editor or choose any
one else to his place. An able editor, of course,
keeps his place indefinitely. As the subscription
list enlarges, the funds of the paper increase, and
it is improved by the securing of more and better
contributors, just as your papers were."
" How is the staff of contributors recompensed,
since they cannot be paid in money."
" The editor settles with them the price of their
wares. The amount is transferred to their in-
dividual credit from the guarantee credit of the
paper, and a remission of service is granted the
contributor for a length of time corresponding to
the amount credited him, just as to other authors.
As to magazines, the system is the same. Those
interested in the prospectus of a new periodical
pledge enough subscriptions to run it for a year $
select their editor, who recompenses his contribu-
tors just as in the other case, the printing bureau
furnishing the necessary force and material for
publication, as a matter of course. When an
editor's services are no longer desired, if he cannot
earn the right to his time by other literary work,
he simply resumes his place in the industrial army.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 169
I should add that, though ordinarily the editor is
elected only at the end of the year, and as a rule
is continued in office for a term of years, in case
of any sudden change he should give to the tone
of the paper, provision is made for taking the
sense of the subscribers as to his removal at any
time."
" However earnestly a man may long for leisure
for purposes of study or meditation," I remarked,
"he cannot get out of the harness, if I under-
stand you rightly, except in these two ways you
have mentioned. He must either by literary, ar-
tistic, or inventive productiveness indemnify the
nation for the loss of his services, or must get a
sufficient number of other people to contribute to
such an indemnity."
" It is most certain," replied Dr. Leete, " that
no able-bodied man nowadays can evade his share
of work and live on the toil of others, whether he
calls himself by the fine name of student or con-
fesses to being simply lazy. At the same time our
system is elastic enough to give free play to every
instinct of human nature which does not aim at
dominating others or living on the fruit of others'
labor. There is not only the remission by indem-
nification but the remission by abnegation. Any
man in his thirty-third year, his term of service
being then half done, can obtain an honorable dis-
charge from the army, provided he accepts for the
rest of his life one half the rate of maintenance
170 LOOKING BACKWARD.
other citizens receive. It is quite possible to lire
on this amount, though one must forego the luxu-
ries and elegancies of life, with some, perhaps, of
its comforts."
When the ladies retired that evening, Edith
brought me a book and said :
" If you should be wakeful to-night, Mr. West,
you might be interested in looking over this story
by Berrian. It is considered his masterpiece, and
will at least give you an idea what the stories now-
adays are like."
I sat up in my room that night reading *' Pen-
thesilia " till it grew gray in the east, and did not
lay it down till I had finished it. And yet let no
admirer of the great romancer of the twentieth
century resent my saying that at the first reading
what most impressed me was not so much what
was in the book as what was left out of it. The
story-writers of my day would have deemed the
making of bricks without straw a light task com-
pared with the construction of a romance from
which should be excluded all effects drawn from
the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and
ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and
low, all motives drawn from social pride and am-
bition, the desire of being richer or the fear of
being poorer, together with sordid anxieties of any
sort for one's self or others ; a romance in which
there should, indeed, be love galore, but love un-
fretted by artificial barriers created by differences
LOOKING BACKWARD. 171
of station or possessions, owning no other law but
that of the heart. The reading of " Penthesilia "
was of more value than almost any amount of ex-
planation would have been in giving me some-
thing like a general impression of the social aspect
of the twentieth century. The information Dr.
Leete had imparted was indeed extensive as to
facts, but they had affected my mind as so many
separate impressions, which I had as yet succeeded
but imperfectly in making cohere. Berrian put
them together for me in a picture.
CHAPTER XVI.
NEXT morning I rose somewhat before the
breakfast hour. As I descended the stairs, Edith
stepped into the hall from the room which had
been the scene of the morning interview between
us described some chapters back.
" Ah ! " she exclaimed, with a charmingly arch
expression, " you thought to slip out unbeknown
for another of those solitary morning rambles
which have such nice effects on you. But you see
I am up too early for you this time. You are
fairly caught."
" You discredit the efficacy of your own cure,"
I said, " by supposing that such a ramble would
now be attended with bad consequences."
" I am very glad to hear that," she said. " I
was in here arranging some flowers for the break-
fast table when I heard you come down, and fan-
cied I detected something surreptitious in your
step on the stairs."
" You did me injustice," I replied. " I had no
idea of going out at all."
Despite her effort to convey an impression that
my interception was purely accidental, I had at
the time a dim suspicion of what I afterwards
LOOKING BACKWARD. 173
learned to be the fact, namely, that this sweet
creature, in pursuance of her self-assumed guard-
ianship over me, had risen for the last two or
three mornings at an unheard-of hour, to insure
against the possibility of my wandering off alone
in case I should be affected as on the former occa-
sion. Receiving permission to assist her in mak-
ing up the breakfast bouquet, I followed her into
the room from which she had emerged.
" Are you sure," she asked, " that you are quite
done with those terrible sensations you had that
morning ? "
" I can't say that I do not have tunes of feeling
decidedly queer," 1 replied, " moments when my
personal identity seems an open question. It
would be too much to expect after my experience
that I should not have such sensations occasion-
ally, but as for being carried entirely off my feet,
as I was on the point of being that morning, I
think the danger is past."
" I shall never forget how you looked that mon>-
ing," she said.
" If you had merely saved my life,"' I continued.
" I might, perhaps, find words to express my grat
itude, but it was my reason you saved, and there
are no words that would not belittle my debt to
you." I spoke with emotion, and her eyes grew
suddenly moist.
" It is too much to believe all this," she said,
"but it is very delightful to hear you say it,
174 LOOKING BACKWARD.
What I did was very little. I was very much
distressed for you, I know. Father never thinks
anything ought to astonish us when it can be ex-
plained scientifically, as I suppose this long sleep
of yours can be, but even to fancy myself in your
place makes my head swim. I know that I could
not have borne it at all."
" That would depend," I replied, " on whether
an angel came to support you with her sympathy
in the crisis of your condition, as one came to me."
If my face at all expressed the feelings I had a
right to have toward this sweet and lovely young
girl, who had played so angelic a r61e toward me,
its expression must have been very worshipful
just then. The expression or the words, or both
together, caused her now to drop her eyes with a
charming blush.
" For the matter of that," I said, " if your expe-
rience has not been as startling as mine, it must
have been rather overwhelming to see a man be-
longing to a strange century, and apparently a
hundred years dead, raised to life."
" It seemed indeed strange beyond any describ-
ing at first," she said, " but when we began to put
ourselves in your place, and realize how much
stranger it must seem to you, I fancy we forgot
our own feelings a good deal, at least I know I
did. It seemed then not so much astounding as
interesting and touching beyond anything ever
heard of before."
LOOKING BACKWARD. 175
" But does it not come over you as astounding
to sit at table with me, seeing who I am ? "
M You must remember that you do not seem so
strange to us as we must to you," she answered.
" We belong to a future of which you could not
form an idea, a generation of which you knew
nothing until you saw us. But you belong to a
generation of which our forefathers were a part.
We know all about it ; the names of many of its
members are household words with us. We have
made a study of your ways of living and thinking ;
nothing you say or do surprises us, while we say
and do nothing which does not seem strange to
you. So you see, Mr. West, that if you feel that
you can, in time, get accustomed to us, you must
not be surprised that from the first we have
scarcely found you strange at all."
" I had not thought of it in that way," I replied.
"There is indeed much in what you say. One
can look back a thousand years easier than for-
ward fifty. A century is not so very long a retro-
spect. I might have known your great-grand-par-
ents. Possibly I did. Did they live in Boston ? "
u I believe so."
" You are not sure, then ? "
" Yes," she replied. " Now I think, they did."
M I had a very large circle of acquaintances ID
the city," I said. " It is not unlikely that I knew
or knew of some of them. Perhaps I may have
known them well Would n't it be interesting if I
176 LOOKING BACKWARD.
should chance to be able to tell you all about your
great-grandfather, for instance ? "
" Very interesting."
" Do you know your genealogy well enough to
tell me who your forbears were in the Boston of
my day?"
" Oh, yes."
" Perhaps, then, you will some time tell me what
some of their names were."
She was engrossed in arranging a troublesome
spray of green, and did not reply at once. Steps
upon the stairway indicated that the other mem-
bers of the family were descending.
" Perhaps, some time," she said.
After breakfast, Dr. Leete suggested taking me
to inspect the central warehouse and observe ac-
tually in operation the machinery of distribution r
which Edith had described to me. As we walked
away from the house I said, " It is now several
days that I have been living in your household on
a most extraordinary footing, or rather on none at
all. I have not spoken of this aspect of my posi-
tion before because there were so many other as-
pects yet more extraordinary. But now that I am
beginning a little to feel my feet under me, and to
realize that, however I came here, I am here, and
must make the best of it, I must speak to you on
this point."
"As for your being a guest in my house,"
replied Dr. Leete, "I pray you not to begin to
LOOKING BACKWARD, 177
be uneasy on that point, for I mean to keep yon
a long time yet. With all your modesty, you can
but realize that such a guest as yourself is an
acquisition not willingly to be parted with."
"Thanks, doctor," I said. "It would be ab-
surd, certainly, for me to affect any oversensitive-
ness about accepting the temporary hospitality of
one to whom I owe it that I am not still awaiting
the end of the world in a living tomb. But if I
am to be a permanent citizen of this century I must
have some standing in it. Now, in my time a per-
son more or less entering the world, however he
got in, would not be noticed in the unorganized
throng of men, and might make a place for himself
anywhere he chose if he were strong enough. But
nowadays everybody is a part of a system with a
distinct place and function. I am outside the sys-
tem, and don't see how I can get in ; there seems
no way to get in, except to be born in or to come
in as an emigrant from some other system."
Dr. Leete laughed heartily.
" I admit," he said, " that our system is defec-
tive in lacking provision for cases like yours, but
you see nobody anticipated additions to the world
except by the usual process. You need, however,
have no fear that we shall be unable to provide
both a place and occupation for you in due time.
You have as yet been brought in contact only with
the members of my family, but yon must not gup-
pose that I have kept your secret. On the COD-
178 LOOKING BACKWARD.
trary, your case, even before your resuscitation,
and vastly more sincf* has excited the profoundest
interest in the nation, In view of your precarious
nervous condition, it was thought best that I
should take exclusive charge of you at first, and
that you should, through me and my family, re-
ceive some general idea of the sort of world you
had come back to before you began to make the
acquaintance generally of its inhabitants. As to
finding a function for you in society, there was no
hesitation as to what that would be. Few of us
have it in our power to confer so great a service
on the nation as you will be able to when you
leave my roof, which, however, you must not think
of doing for a good time yet."
"What can I possibly do?" I asked. "Per-
haps you imagine I have some trade, or art, 01
special skill. I assure you I have none whatever.
I never earned a dollar in my life, or did an hour's
work. I am strong, and migh, be a common
laborer, but nothing more."
"If that were the most efficient service you
were able to render the nation, you would find
that avocation considered quite as respectable as
any other," replied Dr. Leete ; " but you can do
something else better. You are easily the master
of all our historians on questions relating to the
social condition of the latter part of the nineteenth
century, to us one of the most absorbingly interest-
ing periods of history ; and whenever in due time
LOOKING BACKWARD. 179
you have sufficiently familiarized yourself with
our institutions, and are willing to teach us some-
thing concerning those of your day, you will find
an historical lectureship in one of our colleges
awaiting you."
" Very good ! very good indeed,'* I said, much
relieved by so practical a suggestion on a point
which had begun to trouble me. " If your people
are really so much i iterested in the nineteenth
century, there will indeed be an occupation ready-
made for me. I don't think there is anything else
that I could possibly earn my salt at, but I cer-
tainly may claim without conceit to have some
special qualifications for such a post as you de-
scribe."
CHAPTER XVII.
1 POUND the processes at the warehouse quite
as interesting as Edith had described them, and
became even enthusiastic over the truly remark-
able illustration which is seen there of the prodi-
giously multiplied efficiency which perfect organ-
ization can give to labor. It is like a gigantic
mill, into the hopper of which goods are being
constantly poured by the train-load and ship-load,
to issue at the other end in packages of pounda
and ounces, yards and inches, pints and gallons,
corresponding to the infinitely complex personal
needs of half a million people. Dr. Leete, with
the assistance of data furnished by me as to the
way goods were sold in my day, figured out some
astounding results in the way of the economies
effected by the modern system.
As we set out homeward, I said : " After what I
have seen to-day, together with what you have told
me, and what I learned under Miss Leete's tute-
lage at the sample store, I have a tolerably cleai
idea of your system of distribution, and how it
enables you to dispense with a circulating medium.
But I should like very much to know something
more about your system of production, You have
LOOKING BACKWARD. 181
told me in general how your industrial army is
levied and organized, but who directs its efforts?
What supreme authority determines what shall be
done in every department, so that enough of every-
thing is produced and yet no labor wasted? It
seems to me that this must be a wonderfully com-
plex and difficult function, requiring very unusual
endowments."
" Does it indeed seem so to you ? " responded Dr.
Leete. " I assure you that it is nothing of the
kind, but on the other hand so simple, and depend-
ing on principles so obvious and easily applied,
that the functionaries at Washington to whom it
is trusted require to be nothing more than men of
fair abilities to discharge it to the entire satisfac-
tion of the nation. The machine which they direct
is indeed a vast one, but so logical in its princi-
ples and direct and simple in its workings, that it
all but runs itself ; and nobody but a fool could
derange it, as I think you will agree after a few
words of explanation. Since you already have a
pretty good idea of the working of the distributive
system, let us begin at that end. Even in your
day statisticians were able to tell you the number
of yards of cotton, velvet, woolen, the number of
barrels of flour, potatoes, butter, number of pairs o*
shoes, hats, and umbrellas annually consumed by
khe nation. Owing to the fact that production wa?
in private hands, and that there was no way of get-
ting statistics of actual distribution, these figures
LOOKING BACKWARD.
were not exact, but they were nearly so. Now
that every pin which is given out from a national
warehouse is recorded, of course the figures of
consumption for any week, month, or year, in the
possession of the department of distribution at the
end of that period, are precise. On these figures,
allowing for tendencies to increase or decrease and
for any special causes likely to affect demand, the
estimates, say for a year ahead, are based. These
estimates, with a proper margin for security, hav-
ing been accepted by the general administration,
the responsibility of the distributive department
ceases until the goods are delivered to it. I speak
of the estimates being furnished for an entire year
ahead, but in reality they cover that much time
only in case of the great staples for which the de-
mand can be calculated on as steady. In the
great majority of smaller industries for the pro-
duct of which popular taste fluctuates, and novelty
is frequently required, production is kept barely
ahead of consumption, the distributive department
furnishing frequent estimates based on the weekly
state of demand.
" Now the entire field of productive and construc-
tive industry is divided into ten great departments,
each representing a group of allied industries,
each particular industry being in turn represented
by a subordinate bureau, which has a complete
record of the plant and force under its control,
of the present product, and means of increasing
LOOKING BACKWARD. 18$
it. The estimates of the distributive department!
after adoption by the administration, are sent as
mandates to the ten great departments, which
allot them to the subordinate bureaus representing
the particular industries, and these set the men
at work. Each bureau is responsible for the task
given it, and this responsibility is enforced by de-
partmental oversight and that of the administra-
tion ; nor does the distributive department accept
the product without its own inspection ; while even
if in the hands of the consumer an article turns out
unfit, the system enables the fault to be traced back
to the original workman. The production of the
commodities for actual public consumption does not,
of course, require by any means all the national
force of workers. After the necessary contingents
have been detailed for the various industries, the
amount of labor left for other employment is ex-
pended in creating fixed capital, such as buildings,
machinery, engineering works, and so forth."
" One point occurs to me," I said, " on which 1
should think there might be dissatisfaction. Where
there is no opportunity for private enterprise, how
is there any assurance that the claims of small mi-
norities of the people to have articles produced, for
which there is no wide demand, will be respected?
An official decree at any moment may deprive them
of the means of gratifying some special taste, merely
because the majority does not share it."
"That would be tyranny indeed," replied DR
184 LOOKING BACKWARD.
Leete, " ( **d you may be very sure that it does not
happen with us, to whom liberty is as dear as equal*
ity or fraternity. As you come to know our sys-
tem better, you will see that our officials are in
fact, and not merely in name, the agents and ser-
vants of the people. The administration has no
power to stop the production of any commodity for
which there continues to be a demand. Suppose
the demand for any article declines to such a point
that its production becomes very costly. The price
has to be raised in proportion, of course, but as
long as the consumer cares to pay it, the produc-
tion goes on. Again, suppose an article not before
produced is demanded. If the administration
doubts the reality of the demand, a popular peti-
tion guaranteeing a certain basis of consumption
compels it to produce the desired article. A gov-
ernment, or a majority, which should undertake to
tell the people, or a minority, what they were to
eat, drink, or wear, as I believe governments in
America did in your day, would be regarded as
a curious anachronism indeed. Possibly you had
reasons for tolerating these infringements of per-
sonal independence, but we should not think them
endurable. I am glad you raised this point, for it
has given me a chance to show you how much more
direct and efficient is the control over production
exercised by the individual citizen now than it was
in your day, when what you called private initia
tive prevailed,, though it should have been called
LOOKING BACKWARD. 18(>
Capitalist initiative, for the average private citizen
had little enough share in it."
"You speak of raising the price of costly arti-
cles," I said. " How can prices be regulated in a
country where there is no competition between
buyers or sellers ? "
"Just as they were with you," replied Dr.
Leete. " You think that needs explaining," he
added, as I looked incredulous, " but the explana-
tion need not be long ; the cost of the labor which
produced it was recognized as the legitimate basis
of the price of an article in your day, and so it is
in ours. In your day, it was the difference in
wages that made the difference in the cost of labor ;
now it is the relative number of hours constituting
a day's work in different trades, the maintenance of
the worker being equal in all cases. The cost of a
man's work in a trade so difficult that in order to
attract volunteers the hours have to be fixed at four
a day is twice as great as that in a trade where
the men work eight hours. The result as to the
cost of labor, you see, is just the same as if the
man working four hours were paid, under your sys-
tem, twice the wages the other gets. This calcula-
tion applied to the labor employed in the various
processes of a manufactured article gives its price
relatively to other articles. Besides the cost of pro-
duction and transportation, the factor of scarcity
affects the prices of some commodities. As re-
gards the great staples of life, of which an abund-
186 LOOKING BACKWARD.
ance can always be secured, scarcity is eliminated
as a factor. There is always a large surplus kept
on hand from which any fluctuations of demand or
supply can be corrected, even in most cases of bad
crops. The prices of the staples grow less year by
year, but rarely, if ever, rise. There are, however,
certain classes of articles permanently, and others
temporarily, unequal to the demand, as, for ex-
ample, fresh fish or dairy products in the latter
category, and the products of high skill and rare
materials in the other. All that can be done here
is to equalize the inconvenience of the scarcity.
This is done by temporarily raising the price if the
scarcity be temporary, or fixing it high if it be per.
manent. High prices in your day meant restric-
tion of the articles affected to the rich, but now-
adays, when the means of all are the same, the
effect is only that those to whom the articles seem
most desirable are the ones who purchase them.
Of course the nation, as any other caterer for the
public needs must be, is frequently left with small
lots of goods on its hands by changes in taste,
unseasonable weather, and various other causes.
These it has to dispose of at a sacrifice just as mer-
chants often did in your day, charging up the loss
to the expenses of the business. Owing, however,
to the vast body of consumers to which such lota
can be simultaneously offered, there is rarely any
difficulty in getting rid of tbein at trifling losa
have given you now some general notion of out
LOOKING BACKWARD. 187
system of production, as well as distribution. Do
you find it as complex as you expected ? "
I admitted that nothing could be much simpler.
** I am sure," said Dr. Leete, " that it is within
the truth to say that the head of one of the myriad
private businesses of your day, who had to main*
tain sleepless vigilance against the fluctuations of
the market, the machinations of his rivals, and the
failure of his debtors, had a far more trying task
than the group of men at Washington who now-
adays direct the industries of the entire nation.
All this merely shows, my dear fellow, how much
easier it is to do things the right way than the
wrong. It is easier for a general up in a balloon,
with perfect survey of the field, to mano3uvre a mil-
lion men to victory than for a sergeant to manage
a platoon in a thicket."
" The general of this army, including the flower
of the manhood of the nation, must be the fore-
most man in the country, really greater even than
the President of the United States," I said.
"He is the President of the United States,"
replied Dr. Leete, " or rather the most important
function of the presidency is the headship of the
industrial army."
" How is he chosen ? " I asked.
'*! explained to you before," replied Dr.
Leete, "when I was describing the force of the
motive of emulation among all grades of the indus-
trial army, that the line of promotion for the men
188 LOOKING BACKWARD.
torious lies through three grades to the officer 1 !
grade, and thence up through the lieutenancies j*
the captaincy or foremanship, and superinten-
dency or colonel's rank. Next, with an inter-
vening grade in some of the larger trades, come
the general of the guild, under whose immediate
control all the operations of the trade are con-
ducted. This officer is at the head of the national
bureau representing his trade, and is responsible
for its work to the administration. The general
of his guild holds a splendid position, and one
which amply satisfies the ambition of most men,
but above his rank, which may be compared to
follow the military analogies familiar to you to
that of a general of division or major-general, is
that of the chiefs of the ten great departments, or
groups of allied trades. The chiefs of these ten
grand divisions of the industrial army may be
compared to your commanders of army corps, or
lieutenant-generals, each having from a dozen to a
score of generals of separate guilds reporting to
him. Above these ten great officers, who form his
council, is the general-in-chief, who is the Presi
dent of the United States.
" The general-in-chief of the industrial army
must have passed through all the grades below
him, from the common laborers up. Let us see
how he rises. As I have told you, it is simply bj
the excellence of his record as a worker tihat one
rises through the grades of the privates and
LOOKING BACKWARD. 189
becomes a candidate for a lieutenancy. Through
the lieutenancies he rises to the colonelcy, or super-
intendent's position, by appointment from above,
strictly limited to the candidates of the best
records. The general of the guild appoints to the
ranks under him, but he himself is not appointed,
but chosen by suffrage."
" By suffrage ! " I exclaimed. " Is not that
ruinous to the discipline of the guild, by tempting
the candidates to intrigue for the support of the
workers under them ? "
" So it would be, no doubt," replied Dr. Leete,
" if the workers had any suffrage to exercise, or
anything to say about the choice. But they have
nothing. Just here comes in a peculiarity of our
system. The general of the guild is chosen from
among the superintendents by vote of the honor-
ary members of the guild, that is, of those who
have served their time in the guild and received
their discharge. As you know, at the age of
forty-five we are mustered out of the army of
industry, and have the residue of life for the pur-
suit of our own improvement or recreation. Of
course, however, the associations of our active life-
time retain a powerful hold on us. The compan-
ionships we formed then remain our companionships
till the end of life. We always continue honorary
members of our former guilds, and retain the
keenest and most iealous interest in their welfare
etna repute in the hands of the following genera*
190 LOOKING BACKWARD
tion. In the clubs maintained by the honorary
members of the several guilds, in which we meet
socially, there are no topics of conversation so
common as those which relate to these matters,
and the young aspirants for guild leadership who
can pass the criticism of us old fellows are likely
to be pretty well equipped. Recognizing this fact,
the nation entrusts to the honorary members of
each guild the election of its general, and I ven-
ture to claim that no previous form of society
could have developed a body of electors so ideally
adapted to their office, as regards absolute impar-
tiality, knowledge of the special qualifications and
record of candidates, solicitude for the best result,
and complete absence of self-interest.
" Each of the ten lieutenant-generals or heads
of departments is himself elected from among the
generals of the guilds grouped as a department, by
vote of the honorary members of the guilds thus
grouped. Of course there is a tendency on the
part of each guild to vote for its own general, but
no guild of any group has nearly enough votes to
elect a man not supported by most of the others.
I assure you that these elections are exceedingly
lively."
"The President, I suppose, is selected from
among the ten heads of the great departments," 1
suggested.
"Precisely, but the heads of departments are
not eligible to the presidency till they have been A
LOOKING BACKWARD. 191
certain number of years out of office. It is rarely
that a man passes through all the grades to the
headship of a department much before he is forty,
and at the end of a five years' term he is usually
forty-five. If more, he still serves through his
term, and if less, he is nevertheless discharged
from the industrial army at its termination. It
would not do for him to return to the ranks. The
interval before he is a candidate for the presidency
is intended to give time for him to recognize fully
that he has returned into the general mass of the
nation, and is identified with it rather than with
the industrial army. Moreover, it is expected that
he will employ this period in studying the general
condition of the army, instead of that of the
special group of guilds of which he was the head.
From among the former heads of departments who
may be eligible at the time, the President is elected
by vote of all the men of the nation who are not
connected with the industrial army."
" The army is not allowed to vote for Presi-
dent?"
** Certainly not. That would be perilous to its
discipline, which it is the business of the President
to maintain as the representative of the nation at
large. His right hand for this purpose is the in-
spectorate, a highly important department of our
system ; to the inspectorate come all complaints
or information as to defects in goods, insolence or
inefficiency of officials, or dereliction of any sort
192 LOOKING BACKWARD.
in the public service. The inspectorate, however,
does not wait for complaints. Not only is it on
the alert to catch and sift every rumor of a fault
5n the service, but it is its business, by systematic
and constant oversight and inspection of every
branch of the army, to find out what is going
wrong before anybody else does. The President is
usually not far from fifty when elected, and serves
five years, forming an honorable exception to the
rule of retirement at forty-five. At the end of his
term of office, a national Congress is called to re-
ceive his report and approve or condemn it. If it
is approved, Congress usually elects him to repre-
sent the nation for five years more in the inter-
national council. Congress, I should also say,
passes on the reports of the outgoing heads of de-
partments, and a disapproval renders any one of
them ineligible for President. But it is rare, in-
deed, that the nation has occasion for other sen-
timents than those of gratitude toward its high
officers. As to their ability, to have risen from
the ranks, by tests so various and severe, to their
positions, is proof in itself of extraordinary qual-
ities, while as to faithfulness, our social system
leaves them absolutely without any other motive
than that of winning the esteem of their fellow
citizens. Corruption is impossible in a society
where there is neither poverty to be bribed nor
wealth to bribe, while as to demagoguery or i&
trigue for office, the conditions of promotion ren-
der them out of the question."
LOOKING BACKWARD. 193
** One point I do not quite understand," I said.
** Are the members of the liberal professions eligi-
ble to the presidency ? and if so, how are they
ranked with those who pursue the industries
proper ? "
" They have no ranking with them," replied Dr.
Leete. "The members of the technical profes-
sions, such as engineers and architects, have a
anking with the constructive guilds ; but the mem-
bers of the liberal professions, the doctors and
teachers, as well as the artists and men of letters
who obtain remissions of industrial service, do not
belong to the industrial army. On this ground
they vote for the President, but are not eligible to
his office. One of its main duties being the con-
trol and discipline of the industrial army, it is
essential that the President should have passed
through all its grades to understand his business."
" That is reasonable," I said ; " but if the doc-
tors and teachers do not know enough of industry
t be President, neither, I should think, can the
President know enough of medicine and education
to control those departments."
** No more does he," was the reply. " Except
in the general way that he is responsible for the
enforcement of the laws as to all classes, the Pres-
ident has nothing to do with the faculties of med-
icine and education, which are controlled by boards
of regents of their own, in which the President
is ez-officio chairman, and has the casting vote
194 LOOKING BACKWARD
These regents, who, of course, are responsible to
Congress, are chosen by the honorary members oi
the guilds of education and medicine, the retired
teachers and doctors of the country."
" Do you know," I said, " the method of electing
officials by votes of the retired members of the
guilds is nothing more than the application on
a national scale of the plan of government by
alumni, which we used to a slight extent occa-
sionally in the management of our higher educar
tional institutions."
" Did yon, indeed ? *' exclaimed Dr. Leete, witl
animation. " That is quite new to me, and 1
fancy will be to most of us, and of much interest
as well. There has been great discussion as to the
germ of the idea, and we fancied that there was
for once something new under the sun. Well!
well I In your higher educational institutions 1
that is interesting indeed. You must tell me more
of that."
" Truly, there is very little more to tell than I
have lold already," I replied. " If we had the
)f your idea, it was but as a germ,"
CHAPTEB XVIIL
evening I sat up for some time after the
sdies had retired, talking with Dr. Leete about
he effect of the plan of exempting 1 men from fur-
tJher service to the nation after the age of forty-
five, a point brought up by his aocount of the part
taken by the retired citizens in the government.
"At forty-five," said I, "a man still has ten
years of good manual labor in him, and twice ten
years of good intellectual service. To be superan-
nuated at that age and laid on the shelf must be
regarded rather as a hardship than a favor by men
of energetic dispositions."
"My dear Mr. West," exclaimed Dr. Leete,
beaming upon me, " you cannot have any idea of
the piquancy your nineteenth century ideas have
for us of this day, the rare quaiutness of their
effect. Know, O child of another race and yet the
same, that the labor we have to render as our part
in securing for the nation the means of a comfort-
able physical existence is by no means regarded as
the most important, the most interesting, or the
moat dignified employment of our powers. We
look upon it as a necessary duty to be discharged
before we can fully devote ourselves to the higher
196 LOOKING BACKWARD.
exercise of our faculties, the intellectual and spir
itual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean
life. Everything possible is indeed done by the
just distribution of burdens, and by all manner of
special attractions and incentives to relieve our
labor of irksomeness, and, except in a comparative
sense, it is not usually irksome, and is often inspir-
ing. But it is not our labor, but the higher and
larger activities which the performance of our task
will leave us free to enter upon, that are considered
the main business of existence.
" Of course not all, nor the majority, have those
scientific, artistic, literary, or scholarly interests
which make leisure the one thing valuable to their
possessors. Many look upon the last half of life
chiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts ;
for travel, for social relaxation in the company of
their life-time friends ; a time for the cultivation
of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and spe
cial tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable
form of recreation ; in a word, a time for the lei-
surely and unperturbed appreciation of the good
things of the world which they have helped to cre-
ate. But whatever the differences between our
ind'vidual tastes as to the use we shall put our
leisure to, we all agree in looking forward to the
date of our discharge as the time when we shall
first enter upon the full enjoyment of our birth-
right, the period when we shall first really attain
our majority and become enfranchised from discS
LOOKING BACKWARD 19?
pline and control, with the fee of our lives vested
in ourselves. As eager boys in your day antici-
pated twenty-one, so men nowadays look forward
to forty-five. At twenty-one we become men, but
at forty-five we renew youth. Middle age and
what you would have called old age are consid-
ered, rather than youth, the enviable time of life.
Thanks to the better conditions of existence now-
adays, and above all the freedom of every one from
care, old age approaches many years later and has
an aspect far more benign than in past times.
Persons of average constitution usually live to
eighty-five or ninety, and at forty-five we are
physically and mentally younger, I fancy, than you
were at thirty-five. It is a strange reflection that
at forty-five, when we are just entering upon the
most enjoyable period of life, you already began
to think of growing old and to look backward.
With you it was the forenoon, with us it is the
afternoon, which is the brighter half of life."
After this I remember that our talk branched
into the subject of popular sports and recreations
at the present time as compared with those of the
nineteenth century.
"In one respect," said Dr. Leete, "there is a
marked difference. The professional sportsmen,
which were such a curious feature of your day, we
have nothing answering to, nor are the prizes for
which our athletes contend money prizes, as with
you. Our contests are always for glory only. The
198 LOOKING BACKWARD.
generous rivalry existing between the various
guilds, and the loyalty of each worker to his own,
afford a constant stimulation to all sorts of games
and matches by sea and land, in which the young
men take scarcely more interest than the honorary
guildsmen who have served their time. The guild
yacht races off Marblehead take place next week,
and you will be able to judge for yourself of the
popular enthusiasm which such events nowadays
call out as compared with your day. The demand
for t panem et circenses ' preferred by the Roman
populace is recognized nowadays as a wholly rea-
sonable one. If bread is the first necessity of life,
recreation is a close second, and the nation caters for
both. Americans of the nineteenth century were
as unfortunate in lacking an adequate provision
for the one sort of need as for the other. Even ii
the people of that period had enjoyed larger leisure
they would, I fancy, have often been at a loss hovi
to pass it agreeably. We are never in that predie
ament."
CHAPTER XIX.
IN the course of an early morning constitutional
I visited Charlestown. Among the changes, too
numerous to attempt to indicate, which mark the
lapse of a century in that quarter, I particularly
noted the total disappearance of the old state
prison.
"That went before my day, but I remember
hearing about it," said Dr. Leete, when I alluded
to the fact at the breakfast table. " We have no
jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated
in the hospitals."
" Of atavism ! " I exclaimed, staring.
" Why, yes," replied Dr. Leete. " The idea of
dealing punitively with those unfortunates was
given up at least fifty years ago, and I think
more."
" I don't quite understand you," I said. " Ata-
vism in my day was a word applied to the cases
of persons in whom some trait of a remote an-
cestor recurred in a noticeable manner. Am I to
understand that crime is nowadays looked upon
as the recurrence of an ancestral trait ? "
" I beg your pardon," said Dr. Leete with a
smile half humorous, half deprecating, " but since
200 LOOKING BACKWARD.
you have so explicitly asked the question, I anr
forced to say that the fact is precisely that."
After what I had already learned of the moral
contrasts between the nineteenth and the twentieth
centuries, it was doubtless absurd in me to begin
to develop sensitiveness on the subject, and prol>
ably if Dr. Leete had not spoken with that apolo-
getic air and Mrs. Leete and Edith shown a cor-
responding embarrassment, I should not have
flushed, as I was conscious I did.
" I was not in much danger of being vain of my
generation before," I said ; " but, really "
" This is your generation, Mr. West," interposed
Edith. " It is the one in which you are living, you
know, and it is only because we are alive now that
we call it ours."
" Thank you. I will try to think of it so," I
said, and as my eyes met hers their expression
quite cured my senseless sensitiveness, "After
all," I said, with a laugh, " I was brought up a
Calvinist, and ought not to be startled to hear
crime spoken of as an ancestral trait."
" In point of fact," said Dr. Leete, " our use of
the word is no reflection at all on your generation,
if, begging Edith's pardon, we may call it yours,
so far as seeming to imply that we think ourselves,
apart from our circumstances, better than you
were. In your day fully nineteen twentieths of the
crime, using the word broadly to include all sorts
of misdemeanors, resulted from the inequality ir
LOOKING BACKWARD 201
the possessions of individuals ; want tempted the
poor, lust of greater gains, or the desire to preserve
former gains, tempted the well-to-do. Directly or
indirectly, the desire for money, which then meant
every good thing, was the motive of all this crime,
the taproot of a vast poison growth, which the
machinery of law, courts, and police could barely
prevent from choking your civilization outright.
When we made the nation the sole trustee of the
wealth of the people, and guaranteed to all abun-
iant maintenance, on the one hand abolishing
want, and on the other checking the accumulation
of riches, we cut this root, and the poison tree
that overshadowed your society withered, like
Jonah's g 'ird, in a day. As for the comparatively
small class of violent crimes against persons, un-
connected with any idea of gain, they were almost
wholly confined, even in your day, to the ignorant
and bestial ; and in these days, when education and
good manners are not the monopoly of a few, but
universal, such atrocities are scarcely ever heard
of. You now see why the word " atavism " is used
for crime. It is because nearly all forms of crime
known to you are motiveless now, and when they
appear can only be explained as the outcropping
of ancestral traits. You used to call persons who
stole, evidently without any rational motive, klep-
tomaniacs, and when the case was clear deemed it
bsnrd to punish them as thieves. Your attitude
toward cue genuine kleptomaniac is precisely ours
202 LOOKING BACKWARD.
toward the victim of atavism, an attitude of com-
passion and firm but gentle restraint.
" Your courts must have an easy time of it," I
observed. " With no private property to spes-k
of, no disputes between citizens over business rela-
tions, no real estate to divide or debts to collect,
there must be absolutely ao civil business at all
for them ; and with no offenses against property,
and mighty few of any sort to provide criminal
cases, I should think you might almost do without
judges and lawyers altogether."
"We do without the lawyers, certainly," was
Dr. Leete's reply. " It would not seem reasonable
to us, in a case where the only interest of the na-
tion is to find out the truth, that persons should
take part in the proceedings who had an acknow
ledged motive to color it."
" But who defends the accused ? "
" If he is a criminal he needs nc defense, for
he pleads guilty in most instances," replied Dr.
Leete. "The plea of the accused is not a mere
formality with us, as with you. It is usually the
end of the case."
" You don't mean that the man who pleads not
guilty is thereupon discharged ? "
" No, I do not mean that. He is not accused on
light grounds, and if he denies his guilt, must still
be tried. But trials are few, for in most cases
the guilty man pleads guilty. When he makes a
false plea and is clearly proved guilty, his penalty
LOOKING BACKWARD 203
is doubled. Falsehood is, however, so despised
among us that few offenders would lie to save
themselves."
** That is the most astounding thing you have
yet told me," I exclaimed. " If lying has gone
out of fashion, this is indeed the ' new heavens
and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteous-
ness,' which the prophet foretold."
" Such is, in fact, the belief of some persons
nowadays," was the doctor's answer. " They hold
that we have entered upon the millennium, and
the theory from their point of view does not lack
plausibility. But as to your astonishment at find-
ing that the world has outgrown lying, there is
really no ground for it. Falsehood, even in your
day, was not common between gentlemen and
ladies, social equals. The lie of fear was the re-
fuge of cowardice, and the lie of fraud the device
of the cheat. The inequalities of men and the
lust of acquisition offered a constant premium on
lying at that time. Yet even then, the man who
neither feared another nor desired to defraud him
scorned falsehood. Because we are now all social
equals, and no man either has anything to fear
from another or can gain anything by deceiving
him, the contempt of falsehood is so universal that
it is rarely, as I told you, that even a criminal in
other respects will be found willing to lie. When,
however, a plea of not guilty is returned, the judge
Appoints two colleagues to state the opposite sides
204 LOOKING BACKWARD,
of the case. How far these men are from being
like your hired advocates and prosecutors, deter-
mined to acquit or convict, may appear from the
fact that unless both agree that the verdict found
is just, the case is tried over, while anything like
bias in the tone of either of the judges stating the
case would be a shocking scandal."
" Do I understand," I said, " that it is a judge
who states each side of the case as well as a judge
who hears it ? "
" Certainly. The judges take turns in serving
on the bench and at the bar, and are expected to
maintain the judicial temper equally whether in
stating or deciding a case. The system is indeed
in effect that of trial by three judges occupying
different points of view as to the case. When
they agree upon a verdict, we believe it to be as
near to absolute truth as men well can come."
" You have given up the jury system, then ? "
" It was well enough as a corrective in the days
of hired advocates, and a bench sometimes venal,
and often with a tenure that made it dependent,
but is needless now. No conceivable motive but
justice could actuate our judges."
" How are these magistrates selected ? "
" They are an honorable exception to the rule
which discharges all men from service at the age
of forty-five. The President of the nation appoints
the necessary judges year by year from the class
reaching that age. The number appointed is, of
LOOKING BACKWARD. 205
course, exceedingly few, and the honor so high
that it is held an offset to the additional term
of service which follows, and though a judge's ap-
pointment may be declined, it rarely is. The term
is five years, without eligibility to reappoiutment.
The members of the Supreme Court, which is
the guardian of the constitution, are selected from
among the lower judges. When a vacancy in that
court occurs, those of the lower judges, whose
terms expire that year, select, as their last official
act, the one of their colleagues left on the bench
whom they deem fittest to fill it."
" There being no legal profession to serve as a
school for judges," I said, " they must, of course,
come directly from the law school to the bench."
" We have no such things as law schools," re-
plied the doctor, smiling. " The law as a special
science is obsolete. It was a system of casuistry
which the elaborate artificiality of the old order of
society absolutely required to interpret it, but only
a few of the plainest and simplest legal maxims
have any application to the existing state of the
world. Everything touching the relations of men
to one another is now simpler, beyond any com-
parison, than in your day. We should have no
sort of use for the hair-splitting experts who pre-
sided and argued in your courts. You must not
imagine, however, that we have any disrespect
for those ancient worthies because we have no use
for them. On the contrary, we entertain an
206 LOOKING BACKWARD.
unfeigned respect, amounting almost to awe, fof
the men who alone understood and were able to
expound the interminable complexity of the rights
of property, and the relations of commercial and
personal dependence involved in your system.
What, indeed, could possibly give a more powerful
impression of the intricacy and artificiality of that
system than the fact that it was necessary to set
apart from other pursuits the cream of the intel-
lect of every generation, in order to provide a
body of pundits able to make it even vaguely in-
telligible to those whose fates it determined. The
treatises of your great lawyers, the works of Black-
stone and Chitty, of Story and Parsons, stand in
our museums, side by side with the tomes of Duns
Scotus a^id his fellow scholastics, as curious monu-
ments of intellectual subtlety devoted to subjects
equally remote from the interests of modern men.
Our judges are simply widely informed, judicious,
and discreet men of ripe years.
"I should not fail to speak of one important
function of the minor judges," added Dr. Leete.
" This is to adjudicate all cases where a private of
the industrial army makes a complaint of unfair-
ness against an officer. All such questions are
heard and settled without appeal by a single judge,
three judges being required only in graver cases.
The efficiency of industry requires the strictest
discipline in the army of labor, but the claim of
the workman to just and considerate treatment is
LOOKING BACKWARD. 207
backed by the whole power of the nation. The
officer commands and the private obeys, but no
officer is so high that he would dare display an
overbearing manner toward a workman of the
lowest class. As for churlishness or rudeness by
an official of any sort, in his relations to the pub-
lic, not one among minor offenses is more sure of
a prompt penalty than this. Not only justice but
civility is enforced by our judges in all sorts of
intercourse. No value of service is accepted as a
set-off to boorish or offensive manners."
It occurred to me, as Dr. Lrete was speaking,
that in all his talk I had heard much of the nation
and nothing of the state governments. Had the
organization of the nation as an industrial unit
done away with the states ? I asked.
" Necessarily," he replied. " The state govern-
ments would have interfered with the control and
discipline of the industrial army, which, of course,
required to be central and uniform. Even if the
state governments had not become inconvenient
for other reasons, they were rendered superfluous
by the prodigious simplification in the task of gov-
ernment since your day. Almost the sole function
of the administration now is that of directing the
industries of the country. Most of the purposes
for which governments formerly existed no longer
remain to be subserved. We have no army or
navy, and no military organization. We have
ao departments of state or treasury, no excise or
208 LOOKING BACKWARD.
revenue services, no taxes or tax collectors. The
only function proper of government, as known to
you, which still remains, is the judiciary and police
system. I have already explained to you how
simple is our judicial system as compared with
your huge and complex machine. Of course the
same absence of crime and temptation to it, which
make the duties of judges so light, reduces the
number and duties of the police to a minimum."
" But with no state legislatures, and Congress
meeting only once in five years, how do you get
your legislation done ? "
" We have no legislation,'* replied Dr. Leete,
" that is, next to none. It is rarely that Congress,
even when it meets, considers any new laws of con-
sequence, and then it only has power to commend
them to the following Congress, lest anything be
done hastily. If you will consider a moment, Mr.
West, you will see that we have nothing to make
laws about. The fundamental principles on which
our society is founded settle for all time the strifes
and misunderstandings which in your day called
for legislation.
u Fully ninety-nine hundredth? of the laws of
that time concerned the definition and protection
of private property and the relations of buyers and
sellers. There is neither private property, beyond
personal belongings, now, nor buying and selling,
and therefore the occasion of nearly all the legis-
lation formerly necessary has passed away. Foi*
LOOKING BACKWARD.
merly, society was a pyramid poised on its apex.
All the gravitations of human nature were con-
stantly tending to topple it over, and it could be
maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you
will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate
system of constantly renewed props and buttresses
and guy-ropes in the form of laws. A central
Congress and forty state legislatures, turning out
some twenty thousand laws a year, could not make
new props fast enough to take the place of those
which were constantly breaking down or becoming
ineffectual through some shifting of the strain.
Now society rests on its base, and is in as little
need of artificial supports as the everlasting hills. '
" But you have at least municipal governments
besides the one central authority ? "
" Certainly, and they have important and exten-
sive functions in looking out tor the public comfort
and recreation, and the improvement and embel-
lishment of the villages and cities."
" But having no control over the labor of their
people, or means of hiring it, how can they do
anything ? "
" Every town or city is conceded the right to
retain, for its own public works, a certain propor-
tion of the quota of labor its citizens contribute to
the nation. This proportion, being assigned it as
so much credit, can be applied in any way desired."
CHAPTER XX.
THAT afternoon Edith casually inquired if I had
yet revisited the underground chamber in the gar-
den in which I had been found.
"Not yet," I replied. "To be frank, I have
shrunk thus far from doing so, lest the visit might
revive old associations rather too strongly for my
mental equilibrium."
" Ah, yes ! " she said, " I can imagine that you
have done well to stay away. I ought to have
thought of that."
" No," I said, " I am glad you spoke of it. The
danger, if there was any, existed only during the
first day or two. Thanks to you, chiefly and al-
ways, I feel my footing now so firm in this new
world, that if you will go with me to keep the
ghosts off, I should really like to visit the place
this afternoon."
Edith demurred at first, but, finding that I was
tn earnest, consented to accompany me. The ram-
part of earth thrown up from the excavation was
risible among the trees from the house, and a few
steps brought us to the spot. All remained as it
was at the point when work was interrupted by the
discovery of the tenant of the chamber, ave that
LOOKING BACKWARD. 211
the door had been opened and the slab from the
roof replaced. Descending the sloping sides of
the excavation, we went hi at the door and stood
within the dimly-lighted room.
Everything was just as I had beheld it last on
that evening one hundred and thirteen years pre-
vious, just before closing my eyes for that long
sleep. I stood for some time silently looking about
me. I saw that iny companion was furtively re-
garding me with an expression of awed and sym-
pathetic curiosity. I put out my hand to her and
she placed hers in ii, the soft fingers responding
with a reassuring pressure to my clasp. Finally
she whispered, " Had we not better go out now ?
You must not try yourself too far. Oh, how
strange it must be to you ! "
" On the contrary," I replied, " it does not seem
strange ; that is the strangest part of it."
" Not strange ? " she echoed.
"Even so," I replied. "The emotions with
which you evidently credit me, and which I antici-
pated would attend this visit, I simply do not feel.
I realize all that these surroundings suggest, but
without the agitation I expected. You can't be
nearly as much surprised at this as I am myself.
Ever since that terrible morning when you came
to my help, I have tried to avoid thinking of my
former life, just as I have avoided coming here, for
fear of the agitating effects. I am for all the
world like a man who has permitted an injured
212 LOOKING BACKWARD.
limb to lie motionless under the impression that it
is exquisitely sensitive, and on trying to move it
finds that it is paralyzed."
" Do you mean your memory is gone ? "
"Not at all. I remember everything connected
with my former life, but with a total lack of keen
sensation. I remember it for clearness as if it had
been but a day since then, but my feelings about
what I remember are as faint as if to my conscious-
ness, as well as in fact, a hundred years had inter-
vened. Perhaps it is possible to explain this, too.
The effect of change in surroundings is like that
of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.
When I first woke from that trance, my former
life appeared as yesterday, but now, since I have
learned to know my new surroundings, and to real-
ize the prodigious changes that have transformed
the world, I no longer find it hard, but very easy,
to realize that I have slept a century. Can you
conceive of such a thing as living a hundred years
in four days ? It really seems to me that I have
done just that, and that it is this experience which
has given so remote and unreal an appearance to
my former life. Can you see how such a thing
might be?"
"I can conceive it," replied Edith, medita-
tively, " and I think we ought all to be thankful
that it is so, for it will save you much suffering, I
<un sure."
" Imagine/* I said, in an effort tc explain, as
LOOKING BACKWARD, 213
much to myself as to her, the strangeness of my
mental condition, "that a man first heard of a
bereavement many, many years, half a lifetime
perhaps, after the event occurred. I fancy his
feeling would be perhaps something as mine is.
When I think of my friends in the world of that
former day, and the sorrow they must have felt
for me, it is with a pensive pity, rather than keen
anguish, as of a sorrow long, long ago ended."
" You have told us nothing yet of your friends,* 1
said Edith. " Had you many to mourn you ? "
"Thank God, I had very few relatives, none
nearer than cousins," I replied. " But there was
one, not a relative, but dearer to me than any kin
of blood. She had your name. She was to have
been my wife soon. Ah me ! "
" Ah me ! " sighed the Edith by my side.
" Think of the heartache she must have had."
Something in the deep feeling of this gentle
girl touched a chord in my benumbed heart. My
eyes, before so dry, were flooded with the tears
that had till now refused to come. "When I had
regained my composure, I saw that she too had
been weeping freely.
" God bless your tender heart," I said. " Would
you like to see her picture ? "
A small locket with Edith Bartlett's picture,
secured about my neck with a gold chain, had lain
upon my breast all through that long sleep, and
removing this I opened and gave it to my com
214 LOOKING BACKWARD.
panion. She took it with eagerness, and after por-
ing long over the sweet face, touched the picture
with her lips.
" I know that she was good and lovely enough
to well deserve your tears," she said ; " but remem-
ber her heartache was over long ago, and she has
been in heaven for nearly a century."
It was indeed so. Whatever her sorrow had
once been, for nearly a century she had ceased to
weep, and, my sudden passion spent, my own tears
dried away. I had loved her very dearly in my
other life, but it was a hundred years ago ! I do
not know but some may find in this confession
evidence of lack of feeling, but I think, perhaps,
that none can have had an experience sufficiently
like mine to enable them to judge me. As we
were about to leave the chamber, my eye rested
upon the great iron safe which stood in one
corner. Calling my companion's attention to it, I
said:
** This was my strong room as well as my sleep-
ing room. In the safe yonder are several thousand
dollars in gold, and any amount of securities. If
I had known when I went to sleep that night just
how long my nap would be, I should still have
thought that the gold was a safe provision for my
aeeds in any country or any century, however dis
tant. That a time would ever come when it would
lose its purchasing power, I should have considered
the wildest of fancies. Nevertheless, here I wake
LOOKING BACKWARD. 215
ap to find myself among a people of whom a cart-
load of gold will not procure a loaf of bread.'*
As might be expected, I did not succeed in im-
pressing Edith that there was anything remark-
able in this fact. ' Why in the wvld should it ? *
she merely askec
CHAPTER XXI.
IT had been suggested by Dr. Leete that we
should devote the next morning to an inspection
of the schools and colleges of the city, with some
attempt on his own part at an explanation of the
educational system of the twentieth century.
"You will see," said he, as we set out after
breakfast, " many very important differences be-
tween our methods of education and yours, but
the main difference is that nowadays all persons
equally have those opportunities of higher educa-
tion which in your day only an infinitesimal por-
tion of the population enjoyed. We should think
we had gained nothing worth speaking of, in equal*
izing the physical comfort of men, without this
educational equality."
" The cost must be very great," I said.
" If it took half the revenue of the nation, no-
body would grudge it," replied Dr. Leete, " nor
even if it took it all save a bare pittance. But in
truth the expense of educating ten thousand youth
is not ten nor five times that of educating one
thousand. The principle which makes all op
erations on a large scale proportionally cheaper
than on a. small scale holds as to education also,"
LOOKING BACKWARD, 217
44 College education was terribly expensive in
my day," said I.
" If I have not been misinformed by our his-
torians," Dr. Leete answered, " it was not college
education but college dissipation and extravagance
which cost so highly. The actual expense of your
colleges appears to have been very low, and would
have been far lower if their patronage had been
greater. The higher education nowadays is as
cheap as the lower, as all grades of teachers, like
all other workers, receive the same support. We
have simply added to the common school system of
compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts
a hundred years ago, a half dozen higher grades,
carrying the youth to the age of twenty-one and
giving him what you used to call the education of
a gentleman, instead of turning him loose at four-
teen or fifteen with no mental equipment beyond
reading, writing, and the multiplication table."
"Setting aside the actual cost of these addi-
tional years of education," I replied, " we should
not have thought we could afford the loss of time
from industrial pursuits. Boys of the poorer
classes usually went to work at sixteen or younger,
and knew their trade at twenty."
44 We should not concede you any gain even in
material product by that plan," Dr. Leete replied.
44 The greater efficiency which education gives to
all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up hi a
short period for the tune lost in acquiring it."
218 LOOKING BACKWARD.
"We should also have been afraid," said I,
" that a high education, while it adapted men tc
the professions, would set them against manual
labor of all sorts.'*
" That was the effect of high education in your
day, I have read," replied the doctor ; " and it was
no wonder, for manual labor meant association
with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people.
There is no such class now. It was inevitable that
such a feeling should exist then, for the further
reason that all men receiving a high education
were understood to be destined for the professions
or for wealthy leisure, and such an education in
one neither rich nor professional was a proof of
disappointed aspirations, an evidence of failure, a
badge of inferiority rather than superiority. Now-
adays, of course, when the highest education is
deemed necessary to fit a man merely to live, with-
out any reference to the sort of work he may do,
its possession conveys no such implication."
" After all," I remarked, " no amount of educa-
tion can cure natural dullness or make up for
original mental deficiencies. Unless the average
natural mental capacity of men is much above its
level in my day, a high education must be pretty
nearly thrown away on a large element of the pop-
ulation. We used to hold that a certain amount
of susceptibility to educational influences is re-
quired to make a mind worth cultivating, just as a
certain natural fertility in soil is required if it Is
to repay tilling."
LOOKING BACKWARD. 219
" Ah," said Dr. Leete, "I am glad you used
that illustration, for it is just the one I would have
chosen to set forth the modern view of education.
You say that land so poor that the product will not
repay the labor of tilling is not cultivated. Nev-
ertheless, much land that does not begin to repay
tilling by its product was cultivated in your day
ind is in ours. I refer to gardens, parks, lawns,
and, in general, to pieces of land so situated that,
were they left to grow up to weeds and briers,
they would be eyesores and inconveniencies to all
about. They are therefore tilled, and though their
product is little, there is yet no land that, in a
wider sense, better repays cultivation. So it is
with the men and women with whom we mingle in
the relations of society, whose voices are always in
our ears, whose behavior in innumerable wayt
affects our enjoyment, who are, in fact, as muck
conditions of our lives as the air we breathe, ov
any of the physical elements on which we depend,
If, indeed, we could not afford to educate every-
body, we should choose the coarsest and dullest by
nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what
education we could give. The naturally refined
and intellectual can better dispense with aids to
culture than those less fortunate in natural endow
ments.
" To borrow a phrase which was often used i
your day, we should not consider life worth living
if we had to be surrounded by a population of
220 LOOKING BACKWARD.
ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men
and women, as was the plight of the few educated
in your day. Is a man satisfied, merely because
he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodor-
ous crowd ? Could he take more than a very lim-
ited satisfaction, even in a palatial apartment, if
the windows on all four sides opened into stable
yards? And yet just that was the situation of
those considered most fortunate as to culture and
refinement in your day. I know that the poor and
ignorant envied the rich and cultured then ; but
to us the latter, living as they did, surrounded by
squalor and brutishness, seem little better off than
the former. The cultured man in your age was
like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing
himself with a smelling bottle. You see, perhaps,
now, how we look at this question of universal
high education. No single thing is so important
to every man as to have for neighbors intelligent,
companionable persons. There is nothing, there-
fore, which the nation can do for him that will
enhance so much his own happiness as to educate
his neighbors. When it fails to do so, the value
of his own education to him is reduced by half,
and many of the tastes he has cultivated are made
positive sources of pain.
44 To educate some to the highest degree, and
leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you did,
made the gap between them almost like tha*
between different natural species, which have no
LOOKING BACKWARD. 221
means of communication. What could be more
inhuman than this consequence of a partial enjoy-
ment of education ! Its universal and equal en-
joyment leaves, indeed, the differences between
men as to natural endowments as marked as in
a state of nature, but the level of the lowest is
vastly raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have
some inkling of the humanities, some appreciation
of the things of the mind, and an admiration for
the still higher culture they have fallen short of.
They have become capable of receiving and im-
parting, in various degrees, but all in some meas-
ure, the pleasures and inspirations of a refined
social life. The cultured society of the nineteenth
century, what did it consist of but here and
there a few microscopic oases in a vast, unbroken
wilderness ? The proportion of individuals capable
of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse,
to the mass of their contemporaries, used to be
BO infinitesimal as to be in any broad view of
humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One gen-
eration of the world to-day represents a greater
volume of intellectual life than any five centuries
ever did before.
" There is still another point I should mention
in stating the grounds on which nothing less than
the universality of the best education could now
be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, " and that is,
the interest of the coming generation in having
educated parents. To put the matter in a nut-
222 LOOKING BACKWARD.
shell, there are three main grounds on which our
educational system rests : first, the right of every
man to the completest education the nation can
give him on his own account, as necessary to his
enjoyment of himself ; second, the right of his fel-
low-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to
their enjoyment of his society ; third, the right of
the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and
refined parentage."
I shall not describe in detail what I saw in the
schools that day. Having taken but slight interest
in educational matters in my former life, I could
offer few comparisons of interest. Next to the
fact of the universality of the higher as well as the
lower education, I was most struck with the prom-
inence given to physical culture, and the fact that
proficiency in athletic feats and games as well as
in scholarship had a place in the rating of the
youth.
" The faculty of education," Dr. Leete explained,
" is held to the same responsibility for the bodies
as for the minds of its charges. The highest pos-
sible physical, as well as mental, development of
every one is the double object of a curriculum
which lasts from the age of six to that of twenty-
one."
The magnificent health of the young people in
the schools impressed me strongly. My previous
observations, not only of the notable personal
endowments of the family of my host, but of the
LOOKING BACKWARD. 223
people I had seen in my walks abroad, had already
suggested the idea that there must have been
something like a general improvement in the physi-
cal standard of the race since my day, and now, as
I compared these stalwart young men and fresh,
vigorous maidens with the young people I had
seen in the schools of the nineteenth century, I
was moved to impart my thought to Dr. Leete.
He listened with great interest to what I said.
" Your testimony on this point," he declared,
"is invaluable. We believe that there has been
such an improvement as you speak of, but of
course it could only be a matter of theory with
us. It is an incident of your unique position that
you alone in the world of to-day can speak with
authority on this point. Your opinion, when you
state it publicly, will, I assure you, make a pro-
found sensation. For the rest it would be strange,
certainly, if the race did not show an improve-
ment. In your day, riches debauched one class with
idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the
vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and
pestilent homes. The labor required of children,
and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the
very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent
circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable
conditions of physical life ; the young are care-
fully nurtured and studiously cared for ; the labor
which is required of all is limited to the period of
greatest bodily vigor, and is never excessive ; care
224 LOOKING BACKWARD.
for rule's self and one's family, anxiety as to liveli-
hood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life all
theso influences, which once did so much to wreck
the minds and bodies of men and women, are
known no more. Certainly, an improvement of
the species ought to follow such a change. ID
certain specific respects we know, indeed, that the
improvement has taken place. Insanity, for in-
stance, which in the nineteenth century was so
terribly common a product of your insane mode of
life, has almost disappeared, with its alternative,
suicide."
CHAPTER XXIL
WE had made an appointment to meet the ladies
at the diniug-hall for dinner, after which, having
some engagement, they left us sitting at table there,
discussing our wine and cigars with a multitude of
other matters.
"Doctor," said I, in the course of our talk,
" morally speaking, your social system is one which
I should be insensate not to admire in comparison
with any previously in vogue in the world, and
especially with that of my own most unhappy cen-
tury. If I were to fall into a mesmeric sleep to-
night as lasting as that other, and meanwhile the
course of time were to take a turn backward in-
stead of forward, and I were to wake up again in
the nineteenth century, when I had told my friends
what I had seen, they would every one admit that
your world was a paradise of order, equity, and
felicity. But they were a very practical people, my
contemporaries, and after expressing their admira-
tion for the moral beauty and material splendor of
the system, they would presently begin to cipher
and ask how you got the money to make everybody
so happy ; for certainly, to support the whole nation
at < rate of comfort, and even luxury, such as I see
226 LOOKING BACKWARD.
around ine, must involve vastly greater wealth than
the nation produced in my day. Now, while I
could explain to them pretty nearly everything else
of the main features of your system, I should quite
fail to answer this question, and failing there, they
would tell me, for they were very close cipherers,
that I had been dreaming; nor would they ever
believe anything else. In my day, I know that the
total annual product of the nation, although it
might have been divided with absolute equality,
would not have come to more than three or four
hundred dollars per head, not very much more than
enough to supply the necessities of life with few or
any of its comforts. How is it that you have so
much more ? "
" That is a very pertinent question, Mr. West,"
replied Dr. Leete, " and I should not blame your
friends, in the case you supposed, if they declared
your story all moonshine, failing a satisfactory
reply to it. It is a question which I cannot answer
exhaustively at any one sitting, and as for the exact
statistics to bear out my general statements, I shall
have to refer you for them to books in my library,
but it would certainly be a pity to leave you to be
put to confusion by your old acquaintances, in case
of the contingency you speak of, for lack of a few
suggestions.
" Let us begin with a number of small items
wherein we economize wealth as compared with you.
We have no national, state, county, or municipal
LOOKING BACKWARD. 227
debts, or payments on their account. We have no
sort of military or naval expenditures for men or
materials, no army, navy, or militia. We have no
revenue service, no swarm of tax assessors and col-
lectors. As regards our judiciary, police, sheriffs,
and jailers, the force which Massachusetts alone
kept on foot in your day far more than suffices for
the nation now. We have no criminal class prey-
ing upon the wealth of society as you had. The
number of persons, more or less absolutely lost to
the working force through physical disability, of
the lame, sick, and debilitated, which constituted
such a burden on the able-bodied in your day, now
that all live under conditions of health and comfort,
has shrunk to scarcely perceptible proportions, and
with every generation is becoming more completely
aliminated.
" Another item wherein we save is the disuse of
money and the thousand occupations connected
with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an
army of men was formerly taken away from useful
employments. Also consider that the waste of the
very rich in your day on inordinate personal luxury
has ceased, though, indeed, this item might easily
be over-estimated. Again, consider that there are
no idlers now, rich or poor, no drones.
" A very important cause of former poverty was
the vast waste of labor and materials which
resulted from domestic washing and cooking, and
the performing separately of innumerable other
tasks to which we apply the cooperative plan.
228 LOOKING BACKWARD.
" A larger economy than any of these yes, of
all together is effected by the organization of our
distributing system, by which the work done once
by the merchants, traders, storekeepers, with their
various grades of jobbers, wholesalers, retailers,
agents, commercial travelers, and middlemen of all
sorts, with an excessive waste of energy in need-
less transportation and interminable handlings,
is performed by one -tenth the number of hands
and an unnecessary turn of not one wheel. Some-
thing of what our distributing system is like you
know. Our statisticians calculate that one eightieth
part of our workers suffices for all the processes
of distribution which in your day required one
eighth of the population, so much being withdrawn
from the force engaged in productive labor."
" I begin to see," I said, " where you get your
greater wealth."
" I beg your pardon," replied Dr. Leete, " but
you scarcely do as yet. The economies I have
mentioned thus far, in the aggregate, considering
the labor they would save directly and indirectly
through saving of material, might possibly be
equivalent to the addition to your annual produc-
tion of wealth of one-half its former total. These
items are, however, scarcely worth mentioning in
comparison with other prodigious wastes, now saved,
which resulted inevitably from leaving the indus-
tries of the nation to private enterprise. How-
ever great the economies your contemporaries might
LOOKING BACKWARD. 229
'iiave devised in the consumption of products, and
however marvelous the progress of mechanical in-
vention, they could never have raised themselves
out of the slough of poverty so long as they held
to that system.
" No mode more wasteful for utilizing human
energy could be devised, and for the credit of the
human intellect it should be remembered that the
system never was devised, but was merely a survival
from the rude ages when the lack of social organi-
zation made any sort of cooperation impossible."
" I will readily admit," I said, " that our indus-
trial system was ethically very bad, but as a mere
wealth-making machine, apart from moral aspects,
it seemed to us admirable."
" As I said," responded the doctor, " the subject
is too large to discuss at length now, but if you
are really interested to know the main criticisms
which we moderns make on your industrial system
as compared with our own, I can touch briefly on
some of them.
" The wastes which resulted from leaving the
conduct of industry to irresponsible individuals,
wholly without mutual understanding or concert,
were mainly four: first, the waste by mistaken
undertakings ; second, the waste from the compe-
tition and mutual hostility of those engaged in
industry ; third, the waste by periodical gluts and
crises, with the consequent interruptions of indus-
try ? fourth, the waste from idle capital and labor,
230 LOOKING BACKWARD.
at all times. Any one of these four great leaks,
were all the others stopped, would suffice to make
the difference between wealth and poverty on the
part of a nation.
" Take the waste by mistaken undertakings, to
begin with. In your day the production and dis-
tribution of commodities being without concept or
organization, there was no means of knowing just
what demand there was for any class of products,
or what was the rate of supply. Therefore, any
enterprise by a private capitalist was always a
doubtful experiment. The projector having no
general view of the field of industry and consump-
tion, such as our government has, could never be
sure either what the people wanted, or what
arrangements other capitalists were making to sup-
ply them. In view of this, we are not surprised
to learn that the chances were considered several
to one in favor of the failure of any given busi-
ness enterprise, and that it was common for per-
sons who at last succeeded in making a hit to have
failed repeatedly. If a shoemaker, for every pair
of shoes he succeeded in completing, spoiled the
leather of four or five pair, besides losing the time
spent on them, he would stand about the same
chance of getting rich as your contemporaries did
with their system of private enterprise, and its
average of four or five failures to one success.
"The next of the great wastes was that from
competition. The field of industry was a battle
LOOKING BACKWARD. 231
field as wide as the world, in which the workers
wasted, in assailing one another, energies which, if
expended in concerted effort, as to-day, would have
snriched all. As for mercy or quarter in this war-
fare, there was absolutely no suggestion of it. To
deliberately enter a field of business and destroy
the enterprises of those who had occupied it previ-
ously, in order to plant one's own enterprise on
their ruins, was an achievement which never failed
to command popular admiration. Nor is there any
stretch of fancy in comparing this sort of struggle
with actual warfare, so far as concerns the mental
agony and physical suffering which attended the
struggle, and the misery which overwhelmed the
defeated and those dependent on them. Now
nothing about your age is, at first sight, more
astounding to a man of modern times than the fact
that men engaged in the same industry, instead of
fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to a com-
mon end, should have regarded each other as rivals
and enemies to be throttled and overthrown. This
certainly seems like sheer madness, a scene from
bedlam. But more closely regarded, it is seen to
be no such thing. Your contemporaries, with their
mutual throat-cutting, knew very well what they
were at. The producers of the nineteenth century
were not, like ours, working together for the main-
tenance of the community, but each solely for his
own maintenance at the expense of the community.
If, in working to this end, he at the same time in-
232 LOOKING BACKWARD.
creased the aggregate wealth, that was merely i
dental. It was just as feasible and as common to
increase one's private hoard by practices injurious
to the general welfare. One's worst enemies were
necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your
plan of making private profit the motive of produc-
tion, a scarcity of the article he produced was what
each particular producer desired. It was for his
interest that no more of it should be produced than
he himself could produce. To secure this consum-
mation as far as circumstances permitted, by killing
off and discouraging those engaged in his line of
industry, was his constant effort. When he had
killed off all he could, his policy was to combine
with those he could not kill, and convert their
mutual warfare into a warfare upon the public at
large by cornering the market, as I believe you
used to call it, and putting up prices to the highest
point people would stand before going without the
goods. The day dream of the nineteenth century
producer was to gain absolute control of the supply
of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the
public at the verge of starvation, and always com-
mand famine prices for what he supplied. This,
Mr. West, is what was called in the nineteenth
century a system of production. I will leave it to
you if it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a
great deal more like a system for preventing pro-
duction. Some time when we have plenty of leisure
I am going to ask you to sit down with me and try
LOOKING BACKWARD, 233
to make me comprehend, as I never yet could,
though I have studied the matter a great deal, how
such shrewd fellows as your contemporaries appear
to have been in many respects ever came to entrust
the business of providing for the community to a
class whose interest it was to starve it. I assure
you that the wonder with us is, not that the world
did not get rich under such a system, but that it
did not perish outright from want. This wonder
increases as we go on to consider some of the other
prodigious wastes that characterized it
" Apart from the waste of labor and capital by
misdirected industry, and that from the constant
bloodletting of your industrial warfare, your sys-
tem was liable to periodical convulsions, over-
whelming alike the wise and unwise, the successful
cut-throat as well as his victim. I refer to the
business crises at intervals of five to ten years,
which wrecked the industries of the nation, pros-
trating all weak enterprises and crippling the
strongest, and were followed by long periods, often
of many years, of so-called dull times, during
which the capitalists slowly regathered their dissi-
pated strength while the laboring classes starved
and rioted. Then would ensue another brief sea-
son of prosperity, followed in turn by another
crisis and ihe ensuing years of exhaustion. As
commerce developed, making the nations mutually
dependent, these crises became world-wide, while
the obstinacy of the ensuing state of collapse in-
234 LOOKING BACKWARD.
creased with the area affected by the convulsions,
and the consequent lack of rallying centres. In
proportion as the industries of the world multi-
plied and became complex, and the volume of
capital involved was increased, these business cat>
aclysms became more frequent, till, in the latter
part of the nineteenth centuiy, there were two
years of bad times to one of good, and the system
of industry, never before so extended or so impos-
ing, seemed in danger of collapsing by its own
weight. After endless discussions, your economists
appear by that time to have settled down to the
despairing conclusion that there was no more pos-
sibility of preventing or controlling these crises
than if they had been drouths or hurricanes. It
only remained to endure them as necessary evils,
and when they had passed over to build up again
the shattered structure of industry, as dwellers in
an earthquake country keep on rebuilding their
cities on the same site.
" So far as considering the causes of the trouble
inherent in their industrial system, your contem-
poraries were certainly correct. They were in its
very basis, and must needs become more and more
maleficent as the business fabric grew in size and
complexity. One of these causes was the lack of
any common control of the different industries,
and the consequent impossibility of their orderly
and coordinate development. It inevitably re-
sulted from this lack that they were continually
r,r)OXING BACKWAhb. 235
getting owe oi step with one another and out of
relation with the demand.
" Of the latter there was no criterion such as
organized distribution gives us, and the first notice
that it had been exceeded in any group of in-
dustries was a crash of prices, bankruptcy of pro-
ducers, stoppage of production, reduction of wages,
or discharge of workmen. This process was con-
stantly going on in many industries, even in what
were called good times, but a crisis took place only
when the industries affected were extensive. The
markets then were glutted with goods, of which
nobody wanted beyond a sufficiency at any price.
The wages and profits of those making the glutted
classes of goods being reduced or wholly stopped,
their purchasing power as consumers of other
classes of goods, of which there was no natural
glut, was taken away, and, as a consequence, goods
of which there was no natural glut became arti-
ficially glutted, till their prices also were broken
down, and their makers thrown out of work and
deprived of income. The crisis was by this time
fairly under way, and nothing could check it till a
nation's ransom had been wasted.
"A cause, also inherent in your system, which
often produced and always terribly aggravated
crises, was the machinery of money and credit.
Money was essential when production was in many
private hands, and buying and selling was neces-
sary to secure what one wanted. It was, however,
236 BOOKING BACKWARD.
opet to the obvious objection of substituting fos
food, clothing, and other tilings a merely conven*
tional representative of them. The confusion of
mind which this favored, between goods and their
representative, led the way to the credit system and
its prodigious illusions. Already accustomed to
accept money for commodities, the people next
accepted promises for money, and ceased to look
at all behind the representative for the thing rep-
resented. Money was a sign of real commodities,
but credit was but the sign of a sign. There
was a natural limit to gold and silver, that is,
money proper, but none to credit, and the result
was that the volume of credit, that is, the promises
of money, ceased to bear any ascertainable proper*
tion to the money, still less to the commodities, act-
ually in existence. Under such a system, frequent
and periodical crises were necessitated by a law as
absolute as that which brings to the ground a struc-
ture overhanging its centre of gravity. It was one
of your fictions that the government and the banks
authorized by it alone issued money; but every-
body who gave a dollar's credit issued money to
that extent, which was as good as any to swell the
circulation till the next crises. The great extension
of the credit system was a characteristic of the lat-
ter part of the nineteenth century, and accounts
largely for the almost incessant business crises
which marked that period. Perilous as credit was,
you could not dispense with its use, for, lacking any
LOOKING BACKWARD. 237
national or other public organization of the capital
of the country, it was the only means you had for
concentrating and directing it upon industrial en-
terprises. It was in this way a most potent meaiia
for exaggerating the chief peril of the private enter-
prise system of industry by enabling particular in-
dustries to absorb disproportionate amounts of the
disposable capital of the country, and thus prepare
disaster. Business enterprises were always vastly in
debt for advances of credit, both to one another
and to the banks and capitalists, and the prompt
withdrawal of this credit at the first sign of a
crisis was generally the precipitating cause of it.
" It was the misfortune of your contemporaries
that they had to cement their business fabric with
a material which an accident might at any moment
turn into an explosive. They were in the plight of
a man building a house with dynamite for mortar,
for credit can be compared with nothing else.
" If you would see how needless were these con-
vulsions of business which I have been speaking
of, and how entirely they resulted from leaving
industry to private and unorganized management,
just consider the working of our system. Over-
production in special lines, which was the great
hobgoblin of your day, is impossible now, for by
the connection between distribution and production
supply is geared to demand like an engine to the
governor which regulates its speed. Even suppose
by an error of judgment an excessive production of
238 LOOKING BACKWARD.
some commodity. The consequent slackening o
cessation of production in that line throws nobody
out of employment. The suspended workers are at
once found occupation in seme other department of
the vast workshop and lose only the time spent in
changing, while, as for the glut, the business of the
nation is large enough to carry any amount of pro-
duct manufactured in excess of demand till the lat
ter overtakes it. In such a case of over-production,
as I have supposed, there is not with us, as with
you, any complex machinery to get out of order
and magnify a thousand times the original mistake.
Of course, having not even money, we still less
have credit. All estimates deal directly with the
real things, the flour, iron, wood, wool, and labor,
of which money and credit were for you the very
misleading representatives. In our calculations of
cost there can be no mistakes. Out of the annual
product the amount necessary for the support of
the people is taken, and the requisite labor to pro-
duce the next year's consumption provided for.
The residue of the material and labor represents
what can be safely expended in improvements. If
the crops are bad, the surplus for that year is less
than usual, that is all. Except for slight occasional
effects of such natural causes, there are no fluctua-
tions of business ; the material prosperity of the
nation flows on uninterruptedly from generation to
generation, like an ever broadening and deepening
river.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 288
*< Your business crises, Mr. West, "* continued
hhe doctor, " like either of the great wastes I men-
tioned before, were enough, alone, to have kept
your noses to the grindstone forever ; but I have
still to speak of one other great cause of your
poverty, and that was the idleness of a great part
of your capital and labor. With us it is the busi-
ness of the administration to keep in constant em-
ployment every ounce of available capital and
labor in the country. In your day there was no
general control of either capital or labor, and a
large part of both failed to find employment.
* Capital,' you used to say, ' is naturally timid,'
and it would certainly have been reckless if it had
not been timid in an epoch when there was a large
preponderance of probability that any particular
business venture would end in failure. There was
no time when, if security could have been guaran-
teed it, the amount of capital devoted to productive
industry could not have been greatly increased.
The proportion of it so employed underwent con-
stant extraordinary fluctuations, according to the
greater or less feeling of uncertainty as to the
stability of the industrial situation, so that the out-
put of the national industries greatly varied in
different years. But for the same reason that the
amount of capital employed at times of special in-
security was far less than at times of somewhat
greater security, a very large proportion was never
employed at all, because the hazard of business
was always very great in the best of tiroes.
240 LOOKING BACKWARD,
" It should be also noted that the great amount
of capital always seeking employment where toler-
able safety could be insured terribly embittered
the competition between capitalists when a promis-
ing opening presented itself. The idleness of cap-
ital, the result of its timidity, of course meant the
idleness of labor in corresponding degree. More-
over, every change in the adjustments of business,
every slightest alteration in the condition of com-
merce or manufactures, not to speak of the in-
numerable business failures that took place yearly,
even in the best of times, were constantly throw-
ing a multitude of men out of employment for
periods of weeks or months, or even years. A
great number of these seekers after employment
were constantly traversing the country, becoming
in time professional vagabonds, then criminals.
* Give us work I ' was the cry of an army of the
unemployed at nearly all seasons, and in seasons
of dullness in business this army swelled to a host
so vast and desperate as to threaten the stability
of the government. Could there conceivably be a
more conclusive demonstration of the imbecility of
the system of private enterprise as a method for
enriching a nation than the fact that, in an age of
such general poverty and want of everything,
capitalists had to throttle one another to find a
safe chance to invest their capital and workmen
rioted and burned because they could find no wori>
to do?
LOOKING BACKWARD, 241
"Now, Mr. West," continued Dr. Leete, "I
want you to bear in mind that these points oi
?hich I have been speaking indicate only neg-
atively the advantages of the national organization
of industry by showing certain fatal defects and
prodigious imbecilities of the systems of private
enterprise which are not found in it. These alone,
you must admit, would pretty well explain why
the nation is so much richer than in your day*
But the larger half of our advantage over you, the
positive side of it, I have yet barely spoken of.
Supposing the system of private enterprise in in-
dustry were without any of the great leaks I have
mentioned ; that there were no waste on account
of misdirected effort growing out of mistakes as
to the demand, and inability to command a gen-
eral view of the industrial field. Suppose, also,
*here were no neutralizing and duplicating of effort
from competition. Suppose, also, there were no
waste from business panics and crises through
bankruptcy and long interruptions of industry,
and also none from the idleness of capital and
labor. Supposing these evils, which are essential
to the conduct of industry by capital in private
hands, could all be miraculously prevented, and
the system yet retained ; even then the superiority
of the results attained by the modern industrial
system of national control would remain over-
whelming.
"You used to have some pretty large textile
242 LOOKING BACKWARD.
manufacturing establishments, even in your day,
although not comparable with ours. No doubt
you have visited these great mills in your time,
covering acres of ground, employing thousands of
hands, and combining under one roof, under one
control, the hundred distinct processes between,
say, the cotton bale and the bale of glossy calicoes.
You have admired the vast economy of labor as
of mechanical force resulting from the perfect in-
terworking with the rest of every wheel and every
hand. No doubt you have reflected how much
less the same force of workers employed in that
factory would accomplish if they were scattered,
each man working independently. Would you
think it an exaggeration to say that the utmost
product of those workers, working thus apart, how-
ever amicable their relations might be, was in-
creased not merely by a percentage, but many
fold, when their efforts were organized under one
control? Well now, Mr. West, the organization
of the industry of the nation under a single con-
trol, so that all its processes interlock, has mul-
tiplied the total product over the utmost that could
be done under the former system, even leaving out
of account the four great wastes mentioned, in the
same proportion that the product of those mill-
workers was increased by cooperation. The effec-
tiveness of the working force of a nation, under the
myriad-headed leadership of private capital, even if
the leaders were not mutual enemies, as compared
LOOKING BACKWARD. 213
srith that which it attains under a single head,
may be likened to the military efficiency of a mob,
or a horde of barbarians with a thousand petty
chiefs, as compared with that of a disciplined army
under one general such a fighting machine, for
example, as the German army in the time of Von
Moltke."
" After what you have told me,*' I said, M I do
not so much wonder that the nation is richer now
than then, but that you are not all Cro3suses."
44 Well,** replied Dr. Leete, " we are pretty weE
off. The rate at which we live is as luxurious as
we could wish. The rivalry of ostentation, which
in your day led to extravagance in no way con-
ducive to comfort, finds no place, of course, in a
society of people absolutely equal in resources,
and our ambition stops at the surroundings which
minister to the enjoyment of life. We might,
indeed, have much larger incomes, individually,
if we chose so to use the surplus of our pro-
duct, but we prefer to expend it upon public works
and pleasures in which all share, upon public
haJls and buildings, art galleries, bridges, statuary,
means or transit, and the conveniences of our cities,
great musical and theatrical exhibitions, and in
providing on a vast scale for the recreations of
the people. You have not begun to see how w*
live yet, Mr. West. At home we have comfort^
but the splendor of our life is, on its social side,
which we share with our fellows. When you
244 LOOKING BACKWARD.
know more of it you will see where the mone^
goes, as you used to say, and I think you will agree
that we do well so to expend it."
" I suppose," observed Dr. Leete, as we strolled
homeward from the dining hall, " that no reflection
would have cut the men of your wealth-worshiping
century more keenly than the suggestion that they
did not know how to make money. Nevertheless,
that is just the verdict history has passed on them.
Their system of unorganized and antagonistic
industries was as absurd economically as it was
morally abominable. Selfishness was their only
science, and in industrial production selfishness i.i
suicide. Competition, which is the instinct of sel-
fishness, is another word for dissipation of energy,
while combination is the secret of efficient produc-
tion; and not till the idea of increasing the indi-
vidual hoard gives place to the idea of increasing
the common stock can industrial combination be
realized, and the acquisition of wealth really begin.
Even if the principle of share and share alike for
all men were not the only humane and rational
basis for a society, we should still enforce it as
economically expedient, seeing that until the disin-
tegrating influence of self-seeking is suppressed ut
concert of industry is possible.*'
TfiAT evening, as I sat with Edith in the musm
room, listening to some pieces in the programme
of that day which had attracted my notice, I took
advantage of an interval in the music to say, " 1
have a question to ask you which I fear is rather
indiscreet."
"I am quite sure it is not that," she replied,
encouragingly.
"I am in the position of an eavesdropper," I
Continued, " who, having overheard a little of a
natter not intended for him, though seeming to
Concern him, has the impudence to come to the
speaker for the rest."
" An eavesdropper ! " she repeated, looking puz-
zled.
"Yes," I said, "but an excusable one, as I
think you will admit."
" This is very mysterious," she replied.
" Yes," said I, " so mysterious that often I have
doubted whether I really overheard at all what I
am going to ask you about, or only dreamed it. I
want you to tell me. The matter is this : When
t was coming out of that sleep of a century, the
impression of which I was conscious was of
246 LOOKING BACKWARD.
voices talking around me, voices that afterwards 1
recognized as your father's, your mother's, and
your own. First, I remember your father's voice
saying, * He is going to open his eyes. He had
better see but one person at first.' Then you said,
if I did not dream it all, 4 Promise me, then, that
you will not tell him.' Your father seemed to hes-
itate about promising, but you insisted, and your
mother inter uosing, ne rmally promised, and when
I opened my eyes x saw only him."
I had been quire serious when I said that I was
not sure that I had not dreamed the conversation
I fancied I had overheard, so incomprehensible
was it that these people should know anything of
me, a contemporary of their great-grandparents,
which I did not know myself. But when I saw
the effect of my words upon Edith, I knew that it
was no dream, but another mystery, and a more
puzzling one than any I had before encountered.
For from the moment that the drift of my question
became apparent, she showed indications of the
most acute embarrassment. Her eyes, always so
frank and direct in expression, had dropped in a
panic before mine, while her face crimsoned from
neck to forehead.
" Pardon me," I said, as soon as I had recov-
ered from bewilderment at the extraordinary effect
of my words. " It seems, tnen, tnat I was not
dreaming. There is some secret, something about
<ne, which you are withholding from me. Really,
LOOKING BACKWARD. 247
does n't it seem a little hard that a person in my
position should not be given all the information
possible concerning himself ? "
" It does not concern you that is, not directly.
It is not about you exactly," she replied, scarcely
audibly.
" But it concerns me in some way," I persisted.
" It must be something that would interest me."
" I don't know even that," she replied, ventur-
ing a momentary glance at my face, furiously
blushing, and yet with a quaint smile flickering
about her lips which betrayed a certain perception
of humor in the situation despite its embarrass-
ment, "I am not sure that it would even inter-
est you."
" Your father would have told me," I insisted,
with an accent of reproach. "It was you who
forbade him. He thought I ought to know."
She did not reply. She was so entirely charm-
ing in her confusion that I was now prompted, as
much by the desire to prolong the situation as by
my original curiosity, to importune her further.
"Am I never to know? Will you never tell
me ? " I said.
" It depends," she answered, after a long pause.
" On what? " I persisted.
" Ah, you ask too much," she replied. Then,
raising to mine a face which inscrutable eyes,
flushed cheeks, and smiling lips combined to ren-
der perfectly bewitching, she added, " What should
248 LOOKING BACKWARD.
you think if I said that it depended on your-
self?"
" On myself ? " I echoed. " How can that pos-
sibly be?"
"Mr. West, we are losing some charming
music," was her only reply to this, and turning to
the telephone, at a touch of her finger she set the
air to swaying to the rhythm of an adagio. After
that she took good care that the music should
leave no opportunity for conversation. She kept
her face averted from me, and pretended to be ab-
sorbed in the airs, but that it was a mere pretense
the crimson tide standing at flood in her cheeks
sufficiently betrayed.
When at length she suggested that I might have
heard all I cared to, for that time, and we rose to
leave the room, she came straight up to me and
said, without raising her eyes, " Mr. West, you
say I have been good to you. I have not been
particularly so, but if you think I have, I want
you to promise me that you will not try again to
make me tell you this thing you have asked to-
night, and that you will not try to find it out from
any one else, my father or mother, for instance."
To such an appeal there was but one reply pos
sible. " Forgive me for distressing you. Of
course I will promise," I said. "I would never
have asked you if I had fancied it could distress
you. But do you blame me for being curious ? "
* I do not blame you at alL"
LOOKING BACKWARD. 249
" And some time," I added, " if I do not tease
you, you may tell me of your own accord. May I
not hoDe so ? "
" Perhaps," she murmured.
" Only perhaps ? "
Looking up, she read my face with a quick,
deep glance. " Yes," she said, " I think I may
tell you some time ; " and so our conversation
ended, for she gave me no chance to say anything
more.
That night I don't think even Dr. Pillsbury
could have put me to sleep, till toward morning
at least. Mysteries had been my accustomed food
for days now, but none had before confronted me
at once so mysterious and so fascinating as this,
the solution of which Edith Leete had forbidden
me even to seek. It was a double mystery. How,
in the first place, was it conceivable that she
should know any secret about me, a stranger from
a strange age ? In the second place, even if she
should know such a secret, how account for the
agitating effect which the knowledge of it seemed
to have upon her? There are puzzles so difficult
that one cannot even get so far as a conjecture as
to the solution, and this seemed one of them. I
am usually of too practical a turn to waste time on
such conundrums ; but the difficulty of a riddle
embodied in a beautiful young girl does not de-
tract from its fascination. In general, no doubt,
maidens' blushes may be safely assumed to tell the
250 LOOKING BACKWARD.
same tale to young men in all ages and races, but
to give that interpretation to Edith's crimson
cheeks would, considering my position and the
length of time I had known her, and still more the
fact that this mystery dated from before I had
known her at all, be a piece of utter fatuity. And
yet she was an angel, and I should not have been
a young man if reason and common sense had
been able quite to banish a roseate tinge frorn my
dreams that night.
CHAPTER XXIV.
IN the morning I went down stairs early in the
hope of seeing Edith alone. In this, however, I
was disappointed. Not finding her in the house,
I sought her in the garden, but she was not there.
In the course of my wanderings I visited the un-
derground chamber, and sat down there to rest.
Upon the reading table in the chamber several
periodicals and newspapers lay, and thinking that
Dr. Leete might be interested in glancing over a
Boston daily of 1887, I brought one of the papers
with me into the house when I came.
At breakfast I met Edith. She blushed as she
greeted me, but was perfectly self-possessed. As
we sat at table, Dr. Leete amused himself with
looking over the paper I had brought in. There
was in it, as in all the newspapers of that date, a
great deal about the labor troubles, strikes, lock-
outs, boycotts, the programmes of labor parties,
and the wild threats of the anarchists.
" By the way," said I, as the doctor read aloud
to us some of these items, " what part did the fol-
lowers of the red flag take in the establishment of
the new order of things? They were making con-
fiiderable noise the last thins: that I knew-"
252 LOOKING BACKWARD
" They had nothing to do with it except to hin-
der it, of course,' 5 replied Dr. Leete. " They did
that very effectually while they lasted, for their
talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best con
sidered projects for social reform of a hearing,
The subsidizing of those fellows was one of the
shrewdest moves of the opponents oi reform."
" Subsidizing them ! " I exclaimed in astonish
ment.
" Certainly," replied Dr. Leete. " No historical
authority nowadays doubts that they were paid by
the great monopolies to wave the red flag and talk
about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in
order, by alarming the timid, to head off any real
reforms. What astonishes me most is that you
should have fallen into the trap so unsuspectingly.'*
" What are your grounds for believing that the
red flag party was subsidized ? " I inquired.
" Why simply because they must have seen that
their course made a thousand enemies of their pro
fessed cause to one friend. Not to suppose that
they were hired for the work is to credit them with
an inconceivable folly. 1 In the United States, of
all countries, no party could intelligently expect to
carry its point without first winning over to its
1 I fully admit the difficulty of accounting for the course of
She anarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidized
by the capitalists, but, at the same time, there is no doubt thai
the theory is wholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at thf
time by any one, though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect
LOOKING BACKWARD. 253
ideas a majority of the nation, as the national
party eventually did."
u The national party ! " I exclaimed. " That
must have arisen after my day. I suppose it was
one of the labor parties/'
" Oh no ! " replied the doctor. " The labor par-
ties, as such, never could have accomplished any-
thing on a large or permanent scale. For purposes
of national scope, their basis as merely class organ-
izations was too narrow. It was not till a rear-
rangement of the industrial and social system on
a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient
production of wealth, was recognized as the inter-
est, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of
rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and
young, weak and strong, men and women, that
there was any prospect that it would be achieved.
Then the national party arose to carry it out by
political methods. It probably took that name
because its aim was to nationalize the functions of
production and distribution. Indeed, it could not
well have had any other name, for its purpose was
to realize the idea, of the nation with a grandeur
and completeness never before conceived, not as an
association of men for certain merely political func-
tions affecting their happiness only remotely and
superficially, but as a family, a vital union, a com-
mon life, a mighty heaven-touching tree whose
leaves are its people, fed from its veins, and feed-
ing it in tana. The most patriotic of all possible
254 LOOKING BACKWARD.
parties, it sought to justify patriotism and raise it
from an instinct to a rational devotion, by making
the native land truly a father land, a father who
kept the people alive and was not merely an ido 1
for which they were expected to die."
CHAPTER
personality of Edith Leete had naturally
oppressed me strongly ever since I had come, in so
strange a manner, to be an inmate of her father's
honse, and it was to be expected that after what
had happened the night previous, I should be
more than ever preoccupied with thoughts of her.
From the first I had been struck with the air of
serene frankness and ingenuous directness, more
like that of a noble and innocent boy than any girl
I had ever known, which characterized her. I
was curious to know how far this charming quality
might be peculiar to herself, and how far possibly
a result of alterations in the social position of
women which might have taken place since my
time. Finding an opportunity that day, when
alone with Dr. Leete, I turned the conversation in
that direction.
** I suppose," I said, *' that women nowadays,
having been relieved of the burden of housework,
have no employment but the cultivation of their
charms and graces."
* So far as we men are concerned," replied Dr.
Leete, " we should consider that they amply paid
their way, to use one of your forms of expression,
256 LOOKING BACKWARD,
if they confined themselves to that occupation, but
you may be very sure that they have quite too much
spirit to consent to be mere beneficiaries of society,
even as a return f 01- ornamenting it. They did,
indeed, welcome their riddance from housework,
because that was not only exceptionally wearing
in itself, but also wasteful, in the extreme, of
energy, as compared with the cooperative plan;
but they accepted relief from that sort of work
only that they might contribute in other and more
effectual, as well as more agreeable, ways to the
common weal. Our women, as well as our men,
are members of the industrial army, and leave it
only when maternal duties claim them. The result
is that most women, at one time or another of their
lives, serve industrially some five or ten or fifteen
years, while those who have no children fill out
the full term."
" A woman does not, then, necessarily leave the
industrial service on marriage ? " I queried.
"No more than a man," replied the doctor.
"Why on earth should she? Married women
have no housekeeping responsibilities now, you
know, and a husband is not a baby that he should
be cared for."
" It was thought one of the most grievous fea-
tures of our civilization that we required so much
toil from women," I said ; " but it seems to me
you get more out of them than we did."
Dr= Leete laughed. " Indeed we do, just as we
LOOKING BACKWARD. 257
do out of our men. Yet the women of this age
are very happy, and those of the nineteenth cen-
tury, unless contemporary references greatly mis-
lead us, were very miserable. The reason that
women nowadays are so much more efficient co-
laborers with the men, and at the same time are so
happy, is that, in regard to their work as well as
men's, we follow the principle of providing every
cue the kind of occupation he or she is best
adapted to. Women being inferior in strength to
men, and further disqualified industrially in special
ways, the kinds of occupation reserved for them,
and the conditions under which they pursue them,
have reference to these facts. The heavier sorts
of work are everywhere reserved for men, the
lighter occupations for women. Under no circum-
stances is a woman permitted to follow any em-
ployment not perfectly adapted, both as to kind
and degree of labor, to her sex. Moreover, the
hours of women's work are considerably shorter
than those of men's, more frequent vacations are
granted, and the most careful provision is made
for rest when needed. The men of this day so
well appreciate that they owe to the beauty and
grace of women the chief zest of their lives and
their main incentive to effort, that they permit
them to work at all only because it is fully under-
stood that a certain regular requirement of labor,
of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body
mind, during the period of maximum physical
268 LOOKING BACKWARD.
vigor. We believe that the magnificent health
which distinguishes our women from those of youi
day, who seem to have been so generally sickly, i8
owing largely to the fact that all alike are fur-
nished with healthful and inspiriting occupation."
44 1 understood you," I said, " that the women-
vrorkers belong to the army of industry, but how
can they be under the same system of ranking and
discipline with the men, when the conditions of
their labor are so different.'*
"They are under an entirely different disci,
pline," replied Dr. Leete, " and constitute rather
an allied force than an integral part of the army
of the men. They have a woman general-in-chief
and are under exclusively feminine regime. This
general, as also the higher officers, is chosen by
the body of women who have passed the time of
service, in correspondence with the manner in
which the chiefs of the masculine army and the
President of the nation are elected. The general
of the women's army sits in the cabinet of the
President and has a veto on measures respecting
women's work, pending appeals to Congress. I
should have said, in speaking of the judiciary,
that we have women on the bench, appointed by
the general of the women, as well as men. Causes
in which both parties are women are determined
by women judges, and where a man and a woman
are parties to a case, a judge of either sex must
consent to the verdict."
LOOKING BACKWARD. 269
* Womanhood seems to be organized as a sort
jrf imperium in imperio in your system," I said.
" To some extent," Dr. Leete replied ; " but the
inner imperium is one from which you will admit
there is not likely to be much danger to the nation.
The lack of some such recognition of the distinct
individuality of the sexes was one of the innumer.
able defects of your society. The passional attrac-
tion between men and women has too often pre-
vented a perception of the profound differences
which make the members of each sex in many
things strange to the other, and capable of sym-
pathy only with their own. It is in giving full play
to the differences of sex rather than in seeking to
obliterate them, as was apparently the effort of
some reformers in your day, that the enjoyment of
each by itself and the piquancy which each has fov
the other, are alike enhanced. In your day there
was no career for women except in an unnatural
rivalry with men. We have given them a world
of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and
careers, and I assure you they are very happy in
it. It seems to us that women were more than any
other class the victims of your civilization. There
is something which, even at this distance of time,
penetrates one with pathos in the spectacle of their
enuuied, undeveloped lives, stunted at marriage,
their narrow horizon, bounded so often, physically,
by the four walls of home, and morally by a petty
of personal interests. I speak now, not of
260 LOOKING BACKWARD,
the poorer classes, who were generally worked t*
death, but also of the well-to-do and rich. From
the great sorrows, as well as the petty frets of life,
they had no refuge in the breezy outdoor world of
human affairs, nor any interests save those of the
family. Such an existence would have softened
men's brains or driven them mad. All that is
changed to-day. No woman is heard nowadays
wishing she were a man, nor parents desiring boy
rather than girl children. Our girls are as full of
ambition for their careers as our boys. Marriage,
when it comes, does not mean incarceration for
them, nor does it separate them in any way from
the larger interests of society, the bustling life of
the world. Only when maternity fills a woman's
mind with new interests does she withdraw from
the world for a time. Afterwards, and at any
time, she may return to her place among her com-
rades, nor need she ever lose touch with them.
Women are a very happy race nowadays, as com-
pared with what they ever were before in the
world's history, and their power of giving happi-
ness to men has been of course increased in pro-
portion."
"I should imagine it possible," I said, "that
the interest which girls take in their careers as
members of the industrial army and candidates
for its distinctions might have an effect to detei
them from marriage."
Dr. Lecte smiled, " Have no anxiety oo that
LOOKING BACKWARD. 261
score, Mr. West," he replied. " The Creator took
very good care that whatever other modifications
the dispositions of men and women might with
time take on, their attraction for each other should
remain constant. The mere fact that in an age
like yours, when the struggle for existence must
have left people little time for other thoughts, and
the future was so uncertain that to assume parental
responsibilities must have often seemed like a
criminal risk, there was even then marrying and
giving in marriage, should be conclusive on this
point. As for love nowadays, one of our authors
says that the vacuum left in the minds of men and
women by the absence of care for one's livelihood
has been entirely taken up by the tender passion.
That, however, 1 beg you to believe, is something
of an exaggeration. For the rest, so far is mar-
riage from being an interference with a woman's
career, that the higher positions in the feminine
army of industry j*re intrusted only to women who
have been both wives and mothers, as they alone
fully represent their sex."
" Are credit cards issued to the women just as
to the men ? "
" Certainly."
" The credits of the women, I suppose, are for
smaller sums, owing to the frequent suspension of
their labor on account of family responsibilities."
" Smaller ! " exclaimed Dr. Leete, " oh, no !
The maintenance of all our people is the same.
262 LOOKING BACKWARD*
There are no exceptions to that rule, but if anj
difference were made on account of the interrup-
tions you speak of, it would be by making th
woman's credit larger, not smaller. Can you think
of any service constituting a stronger claim on the
nation's gratitude than bearing and nursing the
nation's children? According to our view, none
deserve so well of the world as good parents.
There is no task so unselfish, so necessarily with-
out return, though the heart is well rewarded, as
the nurture of the children who are to make the
world for one another when we are gone."
" It would seem to follow, from what you have
said, that wives are in no way dependent on their
husbands for maintenance."
" Of course they are not," replied Dr. Leete,
" nor children on their parents either, that is, foi
means of support, though of course they are fo>
the offices of affection. The child's labor, when
he grows up, will go to increase the common stock,
not his parents', who will be dead, and therefore
he is properly nurtured out of the common stock.
The account of every person, man, woman, and
child, you must understand, is always with the
nation directly, and never through any interme-
diary, except, of course, that parents, to a certair
extent, act for children as their guardians. You
see that it is by virtue of the relation of individ-
uals to the nation, of their membership in it, that
they are entitled to support ; and this title is in no
LOOKING BACKWARD. 263
way connected with or affected by their relations
to other individuals who are fellow members of
the nation with them. That any person should be
dependent for the means of support upon another
would be shocking to the moral sense as well as
indefensible on any rational social theory. What
would become of personal liberty and dignity
cinder such an arrangement ? I am aware that
you called yourselves free in the nineteenth century.
The meaning of the word could not then, however,
have been at all what it is at present, or you cer-
tainly would not have applied it to a society of
which nearly every member was in a position of
galling personal dependence upon others as to the
very means of life, the poor upon the rich, or em-
ployed upon employer, women upon men, children
upon parents. Instead of distributing the product
of the nation directly to its members, which would
Beem the most natural and obvious method, it
would actually appear that you had given your
minds to devising a plan of hand to hand distribu-
tion, involving the maximum of personal humilia-
tion to all classes of recipients.
"As regards the dependence of women upon
men for support, which then was usual, of course.,
natural attraction in case of marriages of love nu^
often have madfe it endurable, though for spirited
women I should fancy it must always have re-
mained humiliating. What, then, must it have
been in the innumerable cases where women, with
264 LOOKING BACKWARD.
or without the form of marriage, had to sell then,
selves to men to get their living ? Even your con-
temporaries, callous as they were to most of the
revolting aspects of their society, seem to have had
an idea that this was not quite as it should be ;
but, it was still only for pity's sake that they
deplored the lot of the women. It did not occur
to them that it was robbery as well as cruelty when
men seized for themselves the whole product of the
world and left women to beg and wheedle for their
share. Why but bless me, Mr. West, I am
really running on at a remarkable rate, just as if
the robbery, the sorrow, and the shame which those
poor women endured were not over a century since,
or as if you were responsible for what you no doubt
deplored as much as I do."
" I must bear my share of responsibility for the
world as it then was," I replied. " All I can say
in extenuation is that until the nation was ripe for
the present system of organized production and
distribution, no radical improvement in the posi-
tion of woman was possible. The root of her dis-
ability, as you say, was her personal dependence
upon man for her livelihood, and I can imagine no
other mode of social organization than that you
*ave adopted, which would have set woman free of
man at the same time that it set men free of one
another. I suppose, by the way, that so entire a
change in the position of women cannot have taker
place without affecting in marked ways the social
LOOKING BACKWARD, 265
relations of the sexes. That will be a very inter-
esting study for me."
" The change you will observe," said Dr. Leete,
u will chiefly be, I think, the entire frankness and
unconstraint which now characterizes those rela-
tions, as compared with the artificiality which seems
to have marked them in your time. The sexes
now meet with the ease of perfect equals, suitors
to each other for nothing but love. In your time
the fact that women were dependent for support
on men made the woman in reality the one chiefly
benefited by marriage. This fact, so far as we can
judge from contemporary records, appears to have
been coarsely enough recognized among the lower
classes, while among the more polished it was
glossed over by a system of elaborate convention-
alities which aimed to carry the precisely opposite
meaning, namely, that the man was the party
chiefly benefited. To keep up this convention it
was essential that he should always seem the suitor.
Nothing was therefore considered more shocking
to the proprieties than that a woman should betray
a fondness for a man before he had indicated a
desire to marry her. Why, we actually have in
our libraries books, by authors of your day, writ-
ten for no other purpose than to discuss the ques-
tion whether, under any conceivable circumstances,
a woman might, without discredit to her sex, reveal
an unsolicited love. All this seems exquisitely
absurd to us, and yet we know that, girer. your
266 LOOKING BACKWARD.
circumstances, the problem might have a serio
side. When for a woman to proffer her love to a
man was in effect to invite him to assume the bur
den of her support, it is easy to see that pride and
delicacy might well have checked the promptings
of the heart. When you go out into our society,
Mr. West, you must be prepared to be often cross-
questioned on this point by our young people, who
are naturally much interested in this aspect of old-
fashioned manners." l
" And so the girls of the twentieth century tell
their love."
"If they choose,*' replied Dr. Leete,. "There
is no more pretense of a concealment of feeling on
their part than on the part of their lovers. Co-
quetry would be as much despised in a girl as in ?
man. Affected coldness, which in your day rarely
deceived a lover, would deceive him wholly now,
for no one thinks of practicing it."
" One result which must follow from the inde-
pendence of women I can see for myself,'* I said.
" There can be no marriages now except those of
inclination."
" That is a matter of course," replied Dr. Leete.
44 Think of a world in which there are nothing
but matches of pure love ! Ah me, Dr. Leete,
1 I may say that Dr. Leete 's warning has been fnHy justified
by my experience. The amount and intensity of amusement
which the young people of this day, and the young women espe
sally, are able to extract from what they are pleased to call the
dditiea of courtship in the nineteenth century, appear unlimited
LOOKING BACKWARD. 267
low far you are from being able to understand
what an astonishing phenomenon such a world
reems to a man of the nineteenth century I "
" I can, however, to some extent, imagine it,"
replied the doctor. " But the fact you celebrate,
that there are nothing but love matches, means
even more, perhaps, than you probably at first re-
alize. It means that for the first time in human
history the principle of sexual selection, with its
tendency to preserve and transmit the better types
of the race, and let the inferior types drop out,
has unhindered operation. The necessities of pov-
erty, the need of having a home, no longer tempt
women to accept as the fathers of their children
men whom they neither can love nor respect.
Wealth and rank no longer divert attention from
personal qualities. Gold no longer ' gilds the
straitened forehead of the fool.' The gifts of per-
son, mind, and disposition ; beauty, wit, eloquence,
kindness, generosity, geniality, courage, are sure
of transmission to posterity. Every generation is
sifted through a little finer mesh than the last.
The attributes that human nature admires are pre-
served, those that repel it are left behind. There
are, of course, a great many women who with love
must mingle admiration, and seek to wed greatly,
but these not the less obey the same law, for to
<ved greatly now is not to marry men of fortune or
title, but those who have risen above their fellows
by the solidity or brilliance of their services to
268 LOOKING BACKWARD.
humanity. These form nowadays the only aris
tocracy with which alliance is distinction.
" You were speaking, a day or two ago, of the
physical superiority of our people to your contem-
poraries. Perhaps more important than any of
the causes I mentioned then as tending to race pu-
rification has been the effect of untrammeled sex-
ual selection upon the quality of two or three suc-
cessive generations. I believe that when you have
made a fuller study of our people you will find in
them not only a physical, but a mental and moral
improvement. It would be strange if it were not
so, for not only is one of the great laws of nature
now freely working out the salvation of the race,
but a profound moral sentiment has come to its
support. Individualism, which in your day was
the animating idea of society, not only was fatal
to any vital sentiment of brotherhood and common
interest among living men, but equally to any real-
ization of the responsibility of the living for the
generation to follow. To-day this sense of respon-
sibility, practically unrecognized in all previous
ages, has become one of the great ethical ideas of
the race, reinforcing, with an intense conviction of
duty, the natural impulse to seek in marriage the
best and noblest of the other sex. The result is,
that not all the encouragements and incentives of
every sort which we have provided to develop in-
dustry, talent, genius, excellence of whatever kind,
are comparable in their effect on our young men
LOOKING BACKWARD. 269
with the fact that our women sit aloft as judges
of the race and reserve themselves to reward the
winners. Of all the whips, and spurs, and baits,
and prizes, there is none like the thought of the
radiant faces which the laggards will find averted.
" Celibates nowadays are almost invariably men
who have failed to acquit themselves creditably in
the work of life. The woman must be a courage-
ous one, with a very evil sort of courage, too, whom
pity for one of these unfortunates should lead to
defy the opinion of her generation for otherwise
she is free so far as to accept him for a husband*
I should add that, more exacting and difficult to
resist than any other element in that opinion, she
would find the sentiment of her own sex. Our
women have risen to the full height of their re-
sponsibility as the wardens of the world to come,
to whose keeping the keys of the future are con-
fided. Their feeling of duty in this respect
amounts to a sense of religious consecration. It is
a cult in which they educate their daughters from
childhood."
After going to my room that night, I sat up late
to read a romance of Berrian, handed me by Dr.
Leete, the plot of which turned on a situation sug-
gested by his last words, concerning the modern
view of parental responsibility. A similar situa-
tion would almost certainly have been treated by
a nineteenth century romancist so as to excite the
morbid sympathy of the reader with the sentimental
270 LOOKING BACKWARD.
selfishness of the lovers, and his resentment toward
the unwritten law which they outraged. 1 need
not describe for who has not read " Kuth El-
ton ? " how different is the course which Berrian
takes, and with what tremendous effect he enforces
the principle which he states : " Over the unborn
our power is that of God, and our responsibility
like His toward us. As we acquit ourselves toward
them, so let Him deal with us."
CHAPTER XXVI.
T. THINK if a person were ever excusable for los-
ing track of the days of the week, the circum-
stances excused me. Indeed, if I had been told
that the method of reckoning time had been wholly
changed and the days were now counted in lots of
five, ten, or fifteen instead of seven, I should have
been in no way surprised after what I had already
heard and seen of the twentieth century. The first
time that any inquiry as to the days of the week
occurred to me was the morning following the
conversation related in the last chapter. At the
breakfast table Dr. Leete asked me if I would
care to hear a sermon.
" Is it Sunday, then ? " I exclaimed.
"Yes," he replied. "It was on Friday, you see,
when we made the lucky discovery of the buried
chamber to which we owe your society this morn-
ing. It was on Saturday morning, soon after mid-
night, that you first awoke, and Sunday afternoon
when you awoke the second time with faculties
fully regained."
"So you still have Sundays and sermons," I
said. " We had prophets who foretold that long
before this time the world would have dispensed
272 LOOKING BACKWARD
with both. I am very curious to know how the
ecclesiastical systems fit in with the rest of your
social arrangements. I suppose you have a sort
of national church with official clergymen."
Dr. Leete laughed, and Mrs. Leete and Edith
seemed greatly amused.
" Why, Mr. West," Edith said, "what odd peo-
pie you must think us. You were quite done with
national religious establishments in the nineteenth
century, and did you fancy we had gone back to
them?"
" But how can voluntary churches and an unoffi
cial clerical profession be reconciled with national
ownership of all buildings, and the industrial ser-
vice required of all men?" I answered.
" The religious practices of the people have nat-
urally changed considerably in a century," replied
Dr. Leete ; " but supposing them to have remained
unchanged, our social system would accommodate
them perfectly. The nation supplies any person
or number of persons with buildings on guarantee
of the rent, and they remain tenants while they pay
it. As for the clergymen, if a number of persons
wish the services of an individual for any parti-
cular end of their own, apart from the general ser-
vice of the nation, they can always secure it, with
that individual's own consent, of course, just as we
secure the service of our editors, by contributing
from their credit-cards an indemnity to the nation
for the loss of his services in general industry.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 273
This indemnity paid the nation for the individual
answers to the salary in your day paid to the indi-
vidual himself ; and the various applications of this
principle leave private initiative full play in all
details to which national control is not applicable.
Now, as to hearing a sermon to-day, if you wish to
do so, you can either go to a church to hear it or
stay at home."
" How am I to hear it if I stay at home ? "
" Simply by accompanying us to the music room
at the proper hour and selecting an easy chair.
There are some who still prefer to hear sermons in
church, but most of our preaching, like our musi-
cal performances, is not in public, but delivered
in acoustically prepared chambers, connected by
wire with subscribers' houses. If you prefer to go
to a church I shall be glad to accompany you, but
I really don't believe you are likely to hear any-
where a better discourse than you will at home. I
see by the paper that Mr. Barton is to preach this
morning, and he preaches only by telephone, and
to audiences often reaching 150,000."
" The novelty of the experience of hearing a ser-
mon under such circumstances would incline me
to be one of Mr. Barton's hearers, if for no other
reason," I said.
An hour or two later, as I sat reading in the
library, Edith came for me, and I followed her to
the music room, where Dr. and Mrs. Leete were
waiting. We had not more than seated ourselves
274 LOOKING BACKWARD.
comfortably when the tinkle of a bell was heard,
and a few moments after the voice of a man, at the
pitch of ordinary conversation, addressed us, with
an effect of proceeding from an invisible person in
the room. This was what the voice said :
MR. BARTON'S SERMON.
"We have had among us, during the past week,
a critic from the nineteenth century, a living rep-
resentative of the epoch of our great-grandparents.
It would be strange if a fact so extraordinary had
not somewhat strongly affected our imaginations.
Perhaps most of us have been stimulated to some
effort to realize the society of a century ago, and
figure to ourselves what it must have been like to
live then. In inviting you now to consider certain
reflections upon this subject which have occurred
to me, I presume that I shall rather follow than
divert the course of your own thoughts."
Edith whispered something to her father at this
point, to which he nodded assent and turned to
me.
" Mr. West," he said, " Edith suggests that you
may find it slightly embarrassing to listen to a dis-
course on the lines Mr. Barton is laying down, and
if so, you need not be cheated out of a sermon.
She will connect us with Mr. Sweetser's speaking
room if you say so, and I can still promise you n
very good discourse."
BOOKING BACKWARD. 275
" No, no," I said. " Believe me, I would much
rather hear what Mr. Barton has to say.*'
" As you please," replied my host.
When her father spoke to me Edith had touched
a screw, and the voice of Mr. Barton had ceased
abruptly. Now at another touch the room was once
more filled with the earnest sympathetic tones
which had already impressed me most favorably.
" I venture to assume that one effect has been
common with us as a result of this effort at retro-
spection, and that it has been to leave us more
than ever amazed at the stupendous change which
one brief century has made in the material and
moral conditions of humanity.
" Still, as regards the contrast between the pov-
erty of the nation and the world in the nineteenth
century and their wealth now, it is not greater,
possibly, than had been before seen in human his-
tory, perhaps not greater, for example, than that
between the poverty of this country during the
earliest colonial period of the seventeenth century
and the relatively great wealth it had attained at
the close of the nineteenth, or between the England
of William the Conqueror and that of Victoria.
Although the aggregate riches of a nation did not
bhen, as now, afford any accurate criterion of the
masses of its people, yet instances like these afford
partial parallels for the merely material side of the
contrast between the nineteenth and the twentieth
276 LOOKING BACKWARD.
centuries. It is when we contemplate the moral
aspect of that contrast that we find ourselves in the
presence of a phenomenon for which history offers
no precedent, however far back we may cast our
eye. One might almost be excused who should
exclaim, ' Here, surely, is something like a mir-
acle I ' Nevertheless, when we give over idle
wonder, and begin to examine the seeming prodigy
critically, we find it no prodigy at all, much less
a miracle. It is not necessary to suppose a moral
new birth of humanity, or a wholesale destruction
of the wicked and survival of the good, to account
for the fact before us. It finds its simple and
obvious explanation in the reaction of a changed
environment upon human nature. It means merely
that a form of society which was founded on the
pseudo self-interest of selfishness, and appealed
solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human
nature, has been replaced by institutions based on
the true self-interest of a rational unselfishness,
and appealing to the social and generous instincts
of men.
" My friends, if you would see men again tht
beasts of prey they seemed in the nineteenth cen
tury, all you have to do is to restore the old social
and industrial system, which taught them to view
their natural prey in their fellow-men, and find
their gain in the loss of others. No doubt it seems
to you that no necessity, however dire, would have
tempted you to subsist on what superior skill 01
LOOKING BACKWARD. 277
strength enabled you to wrest from others equally
needy. But suppose it were not merely your own
Kfe that you were responsible for. I know well
that there muat have been many a man among our
ancestors who, if it had been merely a question of
his own life, would sooner have given it up than
nourished it by bread snatched from others. But
this he was not permitted to do. He had dear
lives dependent on him. Men loved women in
those days, as now. God knows how they dared
be fathers, but they had babies as sweet, no doubt,
to them as ours to us, whom they must feed, clothe,
educate. The gentlest creatures are fierce when
they have young to provide for, and in that wolfish
society the struggle for bread borrowed a peculiar
desperation from the tenderest sentiments. For
the sake of those dependent on him, a man might
not choose, but must plunge into the foul fight,
cheat, overreach, supplant, defraud, buy below
worth and sell above, break down the business by
which his neighbor fed his young ones, tempt men
to buy what they ought not and to sell what they
should not, grind his laborers, sweat his debtors,
cozen his creditors. Though a man sought it care-
fully with tears, it was hard to find a way in which
he could earn a living and provide for his family
except by pressing in before some weaker rival
and taking the food from his mouth. Even the
ministers of religion were not exempt from this
cruel necessity. While they warned their flocks
278 LOOKING BACKWARD,
against the love of money, regard for their families
compelled them to keep an outlook for the pecu-
niary prizes of their calling. Poor fellows, theirs
was indeed a trying business, preaching to men
a generosity and unselfishness which they and
everybody knew would, in the existing state of the
world, reduce to poverty those who should practice
them, laying down laws of conduct which the law
of self - preservation compelled men to break.
Looking on the inhuman spectacle of society, these
worthy men bitterly bemoaned the depravity of
human nature ; as if angelic nature would not
have been debauched in such a devil's school !
Ah, my friends, believe me, it is not now in this
happy age that humanity is proving the divinity
within it. It was rather in those evil days when
not even the fight for life with one another, the
struggle for mere existence, in which mercy was
folly, could wholly banisL generosity and kindness
from the earth.
" It is not hard to understand the desperation
with which men and women, who under other con-
ditions would have been full of gentleness and
ruth, fought and tore each other in the scramble
for gold, when we realize what it meant to miss it,
what poverty was in that day. For the body it
was hunger and thirst, torment by heat and frost,
in sickness neglect, in health unremitting toil ;
for the moral nature it meant oppression, con-
tempt, and the patient endurance of indignity,
LOOKING BACKWARD. 279
brutish associations from infancy, the loss of all
the innocence of childhood, the grace of woman-
hood, the dignity of manhood ; for the mind it
meant the death of ignorance, the torpor of all
those faculties which distinguish us from brutes,
the reduction of life to a round of bodily func-
tions.
" Ah, my friends, if such a fate as this were
offered you and your children as the only alterna-
tive of success in the accumulation of wealth, how
long do you fancy would you be in sinking to the
moral level of your ancestors ?
" Some two or three centuries ago an act of
barbarity was committed in India, which, though
the number of lives destroyed was but a few score,
was attended by such peculiar horrors that its
memory is likely to be perpetual. A number of
English prisoners were shut up in a room contain-
ing not enough air to supply one-tenth their num-
ber. The unfortunates were gallant men, devoted
comrades in service, but, as the agonies of suffoca-
tion began to take hold on them, they forgot all
else, and became involved in a hideous struggle,
each one for himself, and against all others, to
force a way to one of the small apertures of the
prison at which alone it was possible to get a
breath of air. It was a struggle in which men
became beasts, and the recital of its horrors by the
few survivors so shocked our forefathers that for
a century later we find it a stock reference in
280 LOOKING BACKWARD,
their literature as a typical illustration of the ex
treme possibilities of human misery, as shocking
in its moral as its physical aspect. They could
scarcely have anticipated that to us the Black
Hole of Calcutta, with its press of maddened men
tearing and trampling one another in the struggle
to win a place at the breathing holes, would seem
a striking type of the society of their age. It
lacked something of being a complete type, how-
ever, for in the Calcutta Black Hole there were
no tender women, no little children and old men
and women, no cripples. They were at least all
men, strong to bear, who suffered.
"When we reflect that the ancient order of
which I have been speaking was prevalent up tc
the end of the nineteenth century, while to us the
new order which succeeded it already seems an-
tique, even our parents having known no other, we
cannot fail to be astounded at the suddenness with
which a transition so profound beyond all previous
experience of the race must have been effected.
Some observation of the state of men's minds dur-
ing the last quarter of the nineteenth century will,
however, in great measure, dissipate this astonish-
ment. Though general intelligence in the moderu
sense could not be said to exist in any community
at that time, yet, as compared with previous gen-
erations, the one then on the stage was intelligent
The inevitable consequence of even this compara
tr.'B degree of intelligence had been a perception
LOOKING BACKWARD- 281
of the evils of society, such as had never before
been general. It is quite true that these evils had
been even worse, much worse, in previous ages.
It was the increased intelligence of the masses
which made the difference, as the dawn reveals the
squalor of surroundings which in the darkness
may have seemed tolerable. The key-note of the
literature of the period was one of compassion for
the poor and unfortunate, and indignant outcry
against the failure of the social machinery to
ameliorate the miseries of men. It is plain from
these outbursts that the moral hideousness of the
spectacle about them was, at least by flashes, fully
realized by the best of the men of that time, and
that the lives of some of the more sensitive and
generous hearted of them were rendered well-
nigh unendurable by the intensity of their sym-
pathies.
" Although the idea of the vital unity of the
family of mankind, the reality of human brother-
hood, was very far from being apprehended by
them as the moral axiom it seems to us, yet it is
a mistake to suppose that there was no feeling at
all corresponding to it. I could read you pas-
sages of great beauty from some of their writers
which show that the conception was clearly at-
tained by a few, and no doubt vaguely by many
more. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that
the nineteenth century was in name Christian, and
the fact that the entire commercial and industrial
282 LOOKING BACKWARD.
frame of society was the embodiment of the antt
Christian spirit must have had some weight,
though I admit it was strangely little, with the
nominal followers of Jesus Christ.
" When we inquire why it did not have more,
why, in general, long after a vast majority of men
had agreed as to the crying abuses of the existing
social arrangement, they still tolerated it, or con-
tented themselves with talking of petty reforms in
it, we come upon an extraordinary fact. It was
the sincere belief of even the best of men at that
epoch that the only stable elements in human
nature, on which a social system could be safely
founded, were its worst propensities. They had
been taught and believed that greed and self-seek-
ing were all that held mankind together, and that
all human associations would fall to pieces if any-
thing were done to blunt the edge of these motives
or curb their operation. In a word, they believed
even those who longed to believe otherwise
the exact reverse of what seems to us self-evident ;
they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualities
of men, and not their social qualities, were what
furnished the cohesive force of society. It seemed
reasonable to them that men lived together solely
for the purpose of overreaching and oppressing one
another, and of being overreached and oppressed,
and that while a society that gave full scope to
these propensities could stand, there would be little
chance for one based on the idea of cooperation
LOOKING BACKWARD. 283
for the benefit of all. It seems absurd to expect
any one to believe that convictions like these were
ever seriously entertained by men ; but that they
were not only entertained by our great-grand-
fathers, but were responsible for the long delay in
doing away with the ancient order, after a convio
tion of its intolerable abuses had become general,
is as well established as any fact in history can be.
Just here you will find the explanation of the pro-
found pessimism of the literature of the last quar-
ter of the nineteenth century, the note of melan-
choly in its poetry, and the cynicism of its humor.
44 Feeling that the condition of the race was un-
endurable, they had no clear hope of anything
better. They believed that the evolution of hu-
manity had resulted in leading it into a cul de sac,
and that there was no way of getting forward.
The frame of men's minds at this time is strikingly
illustrated by treatises which have come down to
us, and may even now be consulted in our librariei
by the curious, in which laborious arguments are
pursued to prove that despite the evil plight of
men, life was still, by some slight preponderance
of considerations, probably better worth living than
leaving. Despising themselves, they despised their
Creator. There was a general decay of religious
belief. Pale and watery gleams, from skies thickly
veiled by doubt and dread, alone lighted up the
chaos of earth. That men should doubt Hiir
whose breath is in their nostrils, or dread tht
284 LOOKING BACKWARD.
hands that moulded them, seems to us indeed a
pitiable insanity; but we must remember that
children who are brave by day have sometimes
foolish fears at night. The dawn has come since
then. It is very easy to believe in the fatherhood
of God in the twentieth century.
" Briefly, as must needs be in a discourse of this
character, I have adverted to some of the causeE
which had prepared men's minds for the change
from the old to the new order, as well as some
causes of the conservatism of despair which for a
while held it back after the time was ripe. To
wonder at the rapidity with which the change was
completed after its possibility was first entertained
is to forget the intoxicating effect of hope upon
minds long accustomed to despair. The sunburst,
after so long and dark a night, must needs have
had a dazzling effect. From the moment men
allowed themselves to believe that humanity after
all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squat
stature was not the measure of its possible growth,
but that it stood upon the verge of an avatar of
limitless development, the reaction must needs have
been overwhelming. It is evident that nothing
was able to stand against the enthusiasm which the
new faith inspired.
" Here, at last, men must have felt, was a cause
compared with which the grandest of historic causes
had been trivial. It was doubtless because it could
have commanded millions of martyrs, that none
LOOKING BACKWARD. 285
were needed. The change of a dynasty in a petty
kingdom of the old world often cost more lives
than did the revolution which set the feet of the
human race at last in the right way.
" Doubtless it ill beseems one to whom the boon
of life in our resplendent age has been vouchsafed
to wish his destiny other, and yet I have often
thought that I would fain exchange my share in
this serene and golden day for a place in that
stormy epoch of transition, when heroes burst the
barred gate of the future and revealed to the kind-
ling gaze of a hopeless race, in place of the blank
wall that had closed its path, a vista of progress
whose end, for very excess of light, still dazzles us.
Ah, my friends ! who will say that to have lived
then, when the weakest influence was a lever to
whose touch the centuries trembled, was not worth
a share even in this era of fruition ?
" You know the story of that last, greatest, and
most bloodless of revolutions. In the time of one
generation men laid aside the social traditions and
practices of barbarians, and assumed a social order
worthy of rational and human beings. Ceasing to
be predatory in their habits, they became co-work-
ers, and found in fraternity, at once, the science of
wealth and happiness. ' What shall I eat and
drink, and wherewithal shall I be clothed ? ' stated
as a problem beginning and ending in self, had
been an anxious and an endless one. But when
vice it was conceived, not from the individual, but
286 LOOKING BACKWARD.
the fraternal standpoint, ' What shall we eat and
drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed ? ' its
difficulties vanished.
" Poverty with servitude had been the result, for
the mass of humanity, of attempting to solve the
problem of maintenance from the individual stand-
point, but no sooner had the nation become the sole
capitalist and employer than not alone did plenty
replace poverty, but the last vestige of the serfdom
of man to man disappeared from earth. Human
slavery, so often vainly scotched, at last was killed.
The means of subsistence no longer doled out by
men to women, by employer to employed, by rich
to poor, was distributed from a common stock as
among children at the father's table. It was im-
possible for a man any longer to use his fellow-men
as tools for his own profit. His esteem was the
only sort of gain he could thenceforth make out of
him. There was no more either arrogance or ser-
vility in the relations of human beings to one
another. For the first time since the creation every
man stood up straight before God. The fear of
want and the lust of gain became extinct motives
when abundance was assured to all and immoderate
possessions made impossible of attainment. There
were no more beggars nor almoners. Equity left
charity without an occupation. The ten command-
ments became well-nigh obsolete in a world where
there was no temptation to theft, no occasion to lie
sitber for fear or favor* no room for envy where all
LOOKING BACKWARD. 28?
were equal, and little provocation to violence where
men were disarmed of power to injure one another.
Humanity's ancient dream of liberty, equality, fra-
ternity, mocked by so many ages, at last was
realized.
" As in the old society the generous, the just, the
tender-hearted had been placed at a disadvantage
by the possession of those qualities, so in the new
society the cold-hearted, the greedy, and self-seeking
found themselves out of joint with the world.
Now that the conditions of life for the first time
ceased to operate as a forcing process to develop
the brutal qualities of human nature, and the pre-
mium which had heretofore encouraged selfishness
was not only removed, but placed upon unselfish-
ness, it was for the first time possible to see what
tinperverted human nature really was like. The
depraved tendencies, which had previously over-
grown and obscured the better to so large an ex-
tent, now withered like cellar fungi in the open air,
and the nobler qualities showed a sudden luxuriance
which turned cynics into panegyrists and for the
first time in human history tempted mankind to
fall in love with itself. Soon was fully revealed,
what the divines and philosophers of the old world
never would have believed, that human nature in
its essential qualities is good, not bad, that men by
their natural intention and structure are generous,
not selfish, pitiful, not cruel, sympathetic, not arro-
gant, godlike in aspirations, instinct with divinest
288 LOOKING BACKWARD.
impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice, images of
God indeed, not the travesties upon Him they had
seemed. The constant pressure, through number-
less generations, of conditions of life which might
have perverted angels, had not been able to essen-
tially alter the natural nobility of the stock, and
these conditions once removed, like a bent tree, it
had sprung back to its normal uprightness.
" To put the whole matter in the nutshell of a
parable, let me compare humanity in the olden
time to a rosebush planted in a swamp, watered
with black bog-water, breathing miasmatic fogs by
day, and chilled with poison dews at night. In-
numerable generations of gardeners had done their
best to make it bloom, but beyond an occasional
half-opened bud with a worm at the heart, their
efforts had been unsuccessful Many, indeed,
claimed that the bush was no rosebush at all, but
a noxious shrub, fit only to be uprooted and
burned. The gardeners, for the most part, how-
ever, held that the bush belonged to the rose fam-
ily, but had some ineradicable taint about it, which
prevented the buds from coming out, and accounted
for its generally sickly condition. There were a
few, indeed, who maintained that the stock was
good enough, tha 1 ; the trouble was in the bog, and
that under more favorable conditions the plant
might be expected to do better. But these persons
we*e not regular gardeners, and being condemned by
thft latter as mere theorists and day dreamers, were,
LOOKING BACKWARD. 289
for the most part, so regarded by the people.
Moreover, urged some eminent moral philosophers,
even conceding for the sake of the argument that
the bush might possibly do better elsewhere, it was
a more valuable discipline for the buds to try to
bloom in a bog than it would be under more favor-
able conditions. The buds that succeeded in open-
ing might indeed be very rare, and the flowers pale
and scentless, but they represented far more moral
effort than if they had bloomed spontaneously in a
garden.
" The regular gardeners and the moral philoso-
phers had their way. The bush remained rooted
in the bog, and the old course of treatment went
on. Continually new varieties of forcing mixtures
were applied to the roots, and more recipes than
could be numbered, each declared by its advocates
the best and only suitable preparation, were used
to kill the vermin and remove the mildew. This
went on a very long time. Occasionally some one
claimed to observe a slight improvement in the
appearance of the bush, but there were quite as
many who declared that it did not look so well as
it used to. On the whole there could not be said
to be any marked change. Finally, during a period
of general despondency as to the prospects of the
bush where it was, the idea of transplanting it was
again mooted, and this time found favor. * Let us
try it,' was the general voice. * Perhaps it may
thrive better elsewhere, and here it is certainty
290 LOOKING BACKWARD.
doubtful if it be worth cultivating longer.' So il
came about that the rosebush of humanity was
transplanted, and set in sweet, warm, dry earth,
where the sun bathed it, the stars wooed it, and the
south wind caressed it. Then it appeared that it
was indeed a rosebush. The vermin and the mil-
dew disappeared, and the bush was covered with
most beautiful red roses, whose fragrance filled the
world.
" It is a pledge of the destiny appointed for us
that the Creator has set in our hearts an infinite
standard of achievement, judged by which our past
attainments seem always insignificant, and the
goal never nearer. Had our forefathers conceived
a state of society in which men should live to-
gether like Brethren dwelling in unity, without
strifes or envying, violence or overreaching, and
where, at the price of a degree of labor not greater
than health demands, in their chosen occupations,
they should be wholly freed from care for the mor-
row and left with no more concern for their live-
lihood than trees which are watered by unfailing
streams, had they conceived such a condition,
I say, it would have seemed to them nothing less
than paradise. They would have confounded it
with their idea of heaven, nor dreamed that there
could possibly lie further beyond anything to be
desired or striven for.
" But how is it with us who stand on this height
which they gazed up to ? Already we have well-
nigh forgotten, except when it is especially called
LOOKING BACKWARD. 29t
to our minds by some occasion like the present,
that it was not always with men as it is now. It
is a strain on our imaginations to conceive the
social arrangements of our immediate ancestors.
We find them grotesque. The solution of the
problem of physical maintenance so as to banish
care and crime, so far from seeming to us an ulti-
mate attainment, appears but as a preliminary to
anything like real human progress. We have but
relieved ourselves of an impertinent and needless
harassment which hindered our ancestors from
undertaking the real ends of existence. We are
merely stripped for the race ; no more. We are
like a child which has just learned to stand up-
right and to walk. It is a great event, from the
child's point of view, when he first walks. Per-
haps he fancies that there can be little beyond
that achievement, but a year later he has for-
gotten that he could not always walk. His horizon
did but widen when he rose, and enlarge as he
moved. A great event indeed, in one sense, was
his first step, but only as a beginning, not as the
end. His true career was but then first entered
on. The enfranchisement of humanity in the last
century, from mental and physical absorption in
working and scheming for the mere bodily neces-
sities, may be regarded as a species of second birth
of the race, without which its first birth to an
existence that was but a burden would forever
have remained unjustified, but whereby it is now
abundantly vindicated. Since then, humanity has
292 LOOKING BACKWARD.
entered on a new phase of spiritual development,
an evolution of higher faculties, the very exist-
ence of which in human nature our ancestors
scarcely suspected. In place of the dreary hope-
lessness of the nineteenth century, its profound
pessimism as to the future of humanity, the ani-
mating idea of the present age is an enthusiastic
conception of the opportunities of our earthly ex-
istence, and the unbounded possibilities of human
nature. The betterment of mankind from genera-
tion to generation, physically, mentally, morally,
is recognized as the one great object supremely
worthy of effort and of sacrifice. We believe the
race for the first time to have entered on the reali-
zation of God's ideal of it, and each generation
must now be a step upward.
" Do you ask what we look for when unnum-
bered generations shall have passed away? I an-
swer, the way stretches far before us, but the end
is lost in light. For twofold is the return of man
to God 4 who is our home,' the return of 'ihe in-
dividual by the way of death, and the return of
the race by the fulfilment of the evolution, when
the divine secret hidden in the germ shall be per-
fectly unfolded. With a tear for the dark past,
turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling
our eyes, press forward. The long and weary
winter of the race is ended. Its summer has
begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The
Heavens are before it/'
CHAPTER XXVIL
I NEVER could tell just why, but Sunday after-
noon during my old life had been a time when I
was peculiarly subject to melancholy, when the
color unaccountably faded out of all the aspects of
life, and everything appeared pathetically unin-
teresting. The hours, which in general were wont
to bear me easily on their wings, lost the power of
flight, and toward the close of the day, drooping
quite to earth, had fairly to be dragged along by
main strength. Perhaps it was partly owing to
the established association of ideas that, despite
the utter change in my circumstances, I fell into
a state of profound depression on the afternoon
of this my first Sunday in the twentieth century.
It was not, however, on the present occasion a
depression without specific cause, the mere vague
melancholy I have spoken of, but a sentiment sug-
gested and certainly quite justified by my posi-
tion. The sermon of Mr. Barton, with its constant
implication of the vast moral gap between the
century to which I belonged and that in which
I found myself, had had an effect strongly to
accentuate my sense of loneliness in it. Consid-
erately and philosophically as ho had spoken, hi I
294 LOOKING BACKWARD.
words could scarcely have failed to leave upon my
mind a strong impression of the mingled pity,
curiosity, and aversion which I, as a representative
of an abhorred epoch, must excite in all around
me.
The extraordinary kindness with which I had
been treated by Dr. Leete and his family, and
especially the goodness of Edith, had hitherto pre-
vented my fully realizing that their real sentiment
toward me must necessarily be that of the whole
generation to which they belonged. The recog-
nition of this, as regarded Dr. Leete and his
amiable wife, however painful, I might have en-
dured, but the conviction that Edith must share
their feeling was more than I could bear.
The crushing effect with which this belated per-
ception of a fact so obvious came to me opened
my eyes fully to something which perhaps the
reader has already suspected, I loved Edith.
Was it strange that 1 did ? The affecting occa-
sion on which our intimacy had begun, when her
hands had drawn me out of the whirlpool of mad
ness ; the fact that her sympathy was the vital
breath which had set me up in this new life and
enabled me to support it ; my habit of looking to
her as the mediator between me and the world
around in a sense that even her father was not,
these were circumstances that had predetermined
a result which her remarkable loveliness of person
and disposition would alone have accounted for.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 295
It was quite inevitable that she should have come
to seem to me, in a sense quite different from the
usual experience of lovers, the only woman in this
world. Now that I had become suddenly sensible
of the fatuity of the hopes I had begun to cherish,
I suffered not merely what another lover might,
but in addition a desolate loneliness, an utter for-
lornness, such as no other lover, however unhappy,
could have felt.
My hosts evidently saw that I was depressed in
spirits, and did their best to divert me. Edith
especially, I could see, was distressed for me, but
according to the usual perversity of lovers, having
once been so mad as to dream of receiving some-
thing more from her, there was no longer any
virtue for me in a kindness that I knew was only
sympathy.
Toward nightfall, after secluding myself in my
room most of the afternoon, I went into the gar-
den to walk about. The day was overcast, with
an autumnal flavor in the warm, still air. Find-
ing myself near the excavation, I entered the sub-
terranean chamber and sat down there. " This,"
I muttered to myself, " is the only home I have.
Let me stay here, and not go forth any more."
Seeking aid from the familiar surroundings, I
endeavored to find a sad sort of consolation in re-
viving the past and summoning up the forms and
laces that were about me in my former life. It
993 in vain. There was no longer any life in
296 LOOKING BACKWARD.
them. For nearly one hundred years the stars had
been looking down on Edith Bartlett's grave, and
the graves of all my generation.
The past was dead, crushed beneath a century's
weight, and from the present I was shut out.
There was no place for me anywhere. I was
neither dead nor properly alive.
" Forgive me for following you."
I looked up. Edith stood in the door of the
subterranean room, regarding me smilingly, but
with eyes full of sympathetic distress.
" Send me away if I am intruding on you," she
said ; " but we saw that you were out of spirits,
and you know you promised to let me know if that
were so. You have not kept your word."
I rose and came to the door, trying to smile, but
making, I fancy, rather sorry work of it, for the
sight of her loveliness brought home to me the
more poignantly the cause of my wretchedness.
" I was feeling a little lonely, that is all," I said.
" Has it never occurred to you that my position is
so much more utterly alone than any human be-
ing's ever was before that a new word is really
needed to describe it ? "
" Oh, you must not talk that way, you must
not let yourself feel that way, you must not!"
she exclaimed, with moistened eyes. " Are we not
your friends ? It is your own fault if you will
not let us be. You need not be lonely."
"You are good to me beyond my power of
LOOKING BACKWARD. 297
nnderstanding," I said, " but don't you suppose
that I know it is pity merely, sweet pity, but pity
only. I should be a fool not to know that I can-
not seem to you as other men of your own genera-
tion do, but as some strange uncanny being, a
stranded creature of an unknown sea, whose forlorn-
ness touches your compassion despite its grotesque-
ness. I have been so foolish, you were so kind,
as to almost forget that this must needs be so, and
to fancy I might in time become naturalized, as we
used to say, in this age, so as to feel like one of
you and to seem to you like the other men about
you. But Mr. Barton's sermon taught me how
vain such a fancy is, how great the gulf between
us must seem to you."
" Oh that miserable sermon ! " she exclaimed,
fairly crying now in her sympathy, " I wanted you
not to hear it. What does he know of you ? He
has read in old musty books about your times, that
is alL What do you care about him, to let your-
self be vexed by anything he said ? Is n't it any-
thing to you, that we who know you feel differ-
ently ? Don't you care more about what we think
of you than what he does who never saw you?
Oh, Mr. West ! you don't know, you can't think,
how it makes me feel to see you so forlorn. I
can't have it so. What can I say to you ? How
can I convince you how different our feeling for
you is from what you think ? "
As before, in that other crisis of my fate when
298 LOOKING BACKWARD.
she had come to me, she extended her hands to
wards me in a gesture of helpfulness, and, as then,
I caught and held them in my own ; her bosom
heaved with strong emotion, and little tremors in
the fingers which I clasped emphasized the depth
of her feeling. In her face, pity contended in a
sort of divine spite against the obstacles which
reduced it to impotence. Womanly compassion
surely never wore a guise more lovely.
Such beauty and such goodness quite melted me,
and it seemed that the only fitting response I could
make was to tell her just the truth. Of course I
had not a spark of hope, but on the other hand
I had no fear that she would be angry. She was
too pitiful for that. So I said presently, " It is
very ungrateful in me not to be satisfied with such
kindness as you have shown me, and are showing
me now. But are you so blind as not to see why
they are not enough to make me happy ? Don't
you see that it is because I have been mad enough
to love you ? "
At my last words she blushed deeply and her
eyes fell before mine, but she made no effort to
withdraw her hands from my clasp. For some
moments she stood so, panting a little. Then
blushing deeper than ever, but with a dazzling
flmile, she looked up.
" Are you sure it is not you who are blind ? "
yhe said.
That was all, but it was enough, for it told me
LOOKING BACKWARD. 299
imt, unaccountable, incredible as it was, this radi-
ant daughter of a golden age had bestowed upon
me not alone her pity, but her love. Still, I half
believed I must be under some blissful hallucina-
tion even as I clasped her in my arms. " If I am
beside myself," I cried, " let me remain so."
" It is I whom you must think beside myself,"
she panted, escaping from my arms when I had
barely tasted the sweetness of her lips. " Oh ! oh !
what must you think of me almost to throw myself
in the arms of one I have known but a week ? I
did not mean that you should find it out so soon,
but I was so sorry for you I forgot what I was say-
ing. No, no; you must not touch me again till
you know who I am. After that, sir, you shall
apologize to me very humbly for thinking, as I
know you do, that I have been over quick to fall
in love with you. After you know who I am, you
will be bound to confess that it was nothing less
than my duty to fall in love with you at first sight,
and that no girl of proper feeling in my place
could do otherwise."
As may be supposed, I would have been quite
content to waive explanations, but Edith was reso-
lute that there should be no more kisses until she
had been vindicated from all suspicion of precip-
itancy in the bestowal of her affections, and I was
fain to follow the lovely enigma into the house.
Having come where her mother was, she blush-
ingly whispered something in her ear and ran
away, leaving us together.
300 LOOKING BACKWARD,
It then appeared that, strange as my experience
had been, I was now first to know what was per-
haps its strangest feature. From Mrs. Leete I
learned that Edith was the great-granddaughter of
no other than my lost love, Edith Bartlett. After
mourning me for fourteen years, she had made a
marriage of esteem, and left a son who had been
Mrs. Leete's father. Mrs. Leete had never seen
her grandmother, but had heard much of her, and,
when her daughter was born, gave her the name
of Edith. This fact might have tended to increase
the interest which the girl took, as she grew up, in
all that concerned her ancestress, and especially
the tragic story of the supposed death of the lover,
whose wife she expected to be, in the conflagration
of his house. It was a tale well calculated to
touch the sympathy of a romantic girl, and the
fact that the blood of the unfortunate heroine was
in her own veins naturally heightened Edith's in-
terest in it. A portrait of Edith Bartlett and
some of her papers, including a packet of my own
letters, were among the family heirlooms. The
picture represented a very beautiful young woman
about whom it was easy to imagine all manner of
tender and romantic things. My letters gave
Edith some material for forming a distinct idea
of my personality, and both together sufficed to
make the sad old story very real to her. She used
to tell her parents, half jestingly, that she would
never marry till she found a lover like Julian
West, and there were none such nowadays.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 301
Now all this, of course, was merely the day-
dreaming of a girl whose mind had never been
taken up by a love affair of her own, and would
have had no serious consequence but for the dis-
covery that morning of the buried vault in her
father's garden and the revelation of the identity
of its inmate. For when the apparently lifeless
form had been borne into the house, the face in
the locket found upon the breast was instantly
recognized as that of Edith Bartlett, and by that
fact, taken in connection with the other circum-
stances, they knew that I was no other than Julian
West. Even had there been no thought, as at
first there was not, of my resuscitation, Mrs. Leete
said she believed that this event would have
affected her daughter in a critical and life-long
manner. The presumption of some subtle order-
ing of destiny, involving her fate with mine, wotdd
under all circumstances have possessed an irre-
sistible fascination for almost any woman.
Whether when I came back to life a few hours
afterward, and from the first seemed to turn to
her with a peculiar dependence and to find a
special solace in her company, she had been too
quick in giving her love at the first sign of mine,
I could now, her mother said, judge for myself.
If I thought so, I must remember that this, after
all, was the twentieth and not the nineteenth cen-
tury, and love was, no doubt, now quicker in
growth, as well as franker in utterance than then.
302 LOOKING BACKWARD.
From Mrs. Leete I went to Edith. When )
found her, it was first of all to take her by both
hands and stand a long time in rapt contempla-
tion of her face. As I gazed, the memory of that
other Edith, which had been affected as with a
benumbing shock by the tremendous experience
that had parted us, revived, and my heart was dis-
solved with tender and pitiful emotions, but also
very blissful ones. For she who brought to me so
poignantly the sense of my loss was to make that
loss good. It was as if from her eyes Edith Bart-
lett looked into mine, and smiled consolation to
me. My fate was not alone the strangest, but the
most fortunate that ever befell a man. A double
miracle had been wrought for me. I had not been
stranded upon the shore of this strange world to
find myself alone and companionless. My love,
whom I had dreamed lost, had been reembodied
for my consolation. When at last, in an ecstasy
of gratitude and tenderness, I folded the lovely
girl in my arms, the two Ediths were blended in
my thought, nor have they ever smce been clearly
distinguished. I was not long in finding that on
Edith's part there was a corresponding confusion
of identities. Never, surely, was there between
freshly united lovers a stranger talk than ours that
afternoon. She seemed more anxious to have me
speak of Edith Bartlett than of herself, of how I
had loved her than how I loved herself, reward-
ing my fond words concerning another womau
LOOKING BACKWARD. 308
with tears and tender smiles and pressures of the
hand.
" You must not love me too much for myself,"
she said. " I shall be very jealous for her. I
shall not let you forget her. I am going to tell
you something which you may think strange. Do
you not believe thai; spirits sometimes come back to
the world to fulfill some work that lay near their
hearts ? What if I were to tell you that I have
sometimes thought that her spirit lives in me,
that Edith Bartlett, not Edith Leete, is my real
name. I cannot know it ; of course none of us
can know who we really are ; but I can feel it.
Can you wonder that I have such a feeling, seeing
how my life was affected by her and by you, even
before you came. So you see you need not trouble
to love me at all, if only you are true to her. I
shall not be likely to be jealous."
Dr. Leete had gone out that afternoon, and I
did not have an interview with him till later. He
was not, apparently, wholly unprepared for the in-
telligence I conveyed, and shook my hand heartily.
" Under any ordinary circumstances, Mr. West,
I should say that this step had been taken on
rather short acquaintance ; but these are decidedly
not ordinary circumstances. In fairness, perhaps
I ought to tell you," he added, smilingly, " that
while I cheerfully consent to the proposed arrange-
ment, you must not feel too much indebted to me,
as I judge my consent is a mere formality. From
804 LOOKING BACKWARD.
the moment the secret of the locket was out, it had
to be, I fancy. Why, bless me, if Edith had not
been there to redeem her great-grandmother's
pledge, I really apprehend that Mrs. Leete's loy-
alty to me would have suffered a severe strain."
That evening the garden was bathed in moon-
light, and till midnight Edith and I wandered to
and fro there, trying to grow accustomed to our
happiness.
" What should I have done if you had not cared
for me ? " she exclaimed. " I was afraid you were
not going to. What should I have done then,
when I felt I was consecrated to you ! As soon as
you came back to life, I was as sure as if she had
told me that I was to be to you what she could not
be, but that could only be if you would let me.
Oh, how I wanted to tell you that morning, when
you felt so terribly strange among us, who I was,
but dared not open my lips about that, or let father
or mother "
" That must have been what you would not let
your father tell me ! " I exclaimed, referring to the
conversation I had overheard as I came out of my
trance.
" Of course it was," Edith laughed. " Did you
only just guess that ? Father being only a man,
thought that it would make you feel among friends
to tell you who we were. He did not think of me
at all. But mother knew what I meant, and so I
had my way. I could never have looked you in the
LOOKING BACKWARD. 305
face if you had known who I was. It would have
been forcing myself on you quite too boldly. I am
afraid you think I did that to-day, as it was. I am
sure I did not mean to, for I know girls were ex-
pected to hide their feelings in your day, and I
was dreadfully afraid of shocking you. Ah me,
how hard it must have been for them to have al-
ways had to conceal their love like a fault. Why
did they think it such a shame to love any one till
they had been given permission ? It is so odd to
think of waiting for permission to fall in love.
Was it because men in those days were angry when
girls loved them? That is not the way women
would feel, I am sure, or men either, I think, now.
I don't understand it at all. That will bo one of
the curious things about the women of those days
that you will have to explain to me. I don't be-
lieve Edith Bartlett was so foolish as the others."
After sundry ineffectual attempts at parting, she
finally insisted that we must say good night. I was
about to imprint upon her lips the positively last
kiss, when she said, with an indescribable arch-
ness :
"One thing troubles me. Are you sure that
you quite forgive Edith Bartlett for marrying any
one else ? The books that have come down to us
make out lovers of your time more jealous than
fond, and that is what makes me ask. It would
be a great relief to me if I could feel sure that
you were not in the least jealous of my great-
806 LOOKING BACKWARD.
grandfather for marrying your sweetheart. May
I tell my great-grandmother's picture when I go
to my room that you quite forgive her for proving
false to you ? "
"Will the reader believe it, this coquettish quip,
whether the speaker herself had any idea of it or
not, actually touched and with the touching cured
a preposterous ache of something like jealousy
which I had been vaguely conscious of ever since
Mrs. Leete had told me of Edith Bartlett's mar-
riage. Even while I had been holding Edith
Bartlett's great-granddaughter in my arms, I had
not, till this moment, so illogical are some of our
feelings, distinctly realized that but for that mai
riage I could not have done so. The absurdity of
this frame of mind could only be equalled by the
abruptness with which it dissolved as Edith's
roguish query cleared the fog from my perceptions.
I laughed as I kissed her.
" You may assure her of my entire forgiveness,"
I said, " although if it had been any man but your
great-grandfather whom she married, it would
have been a very different matter."
On reaching my chamber that night I did not
open the musical telephone that I might be lulled
to sleep with soothing tulies, as had become my
habit. For once my thoughts made better music
than even twentieth century orchestras discourse,
and it held me enchanted till well toward morning,
when I fell asleep.
CHAPTER XXVIIL
a lT*8 a little after the time you told me to
jvake you, sir. You did not come out of it as
^uick as common, sir."
The voice was the voice of my man Sawyer.
I started bolt upright in bed and stared around.
I was in my underground chamber. The mellow
light of the lamp which always burned in the
room when I occupied it illumined the familiar
walls and furnishings. By my bedside, with the
glass of sherry in his hand which Dr. Pillsbury
prescribed on first rousing from a mesmeric sleep,
by way of awakening the torpid physical functions,
stood Sawyer.
" Better take this right off, sir," he said, as I
stared blankly at him. " You look kind of flushed
like, sir, and you need it."
I tossed off the liquor and began to realize what
had happened to me. It was, of course, very
plain. All that about the twentieth century had
been a dream. I had but dreamed of that enlight-
ened and care -free race of men and their in-
geniously simple institutions, of the glorious new
Boston with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens
and fountains, and its universal reign of comfort.
808 LOOKING BACKWARD.
The amiable family which I haa learned to know
so well, my genial host and Mentor, Dr. Leete, his
wife, and their daughter, the second and more
beauteous Edith, my betrothed, these, too, had
been but figments of a vision.
For a considerable time I remained in the atti-
tude in which this conviction had come over me,
sitting up in bed gazing at vacancy, absorbed in
recalling the scenes and incidents of my fantastic
experience. Sawyer, alarmed at my looks, was
meanwhile anxiously inquiring what was the mat-
ter with me. Roused at length by his importuni-
ties to a recognition of my surroundings, I pulled
myself together with an effort and assured the
faithful fellow that I was all right. " I have had
an extraordinary dream, that 's all, Sawyer," I
said, " a most-ex-traor-dinary-dream."
I dressed in a mechanical way, feeling light-
headed and oddly uncertain of myself, and sat
down to the coffee and rolls which Sawyer was
in the habit of providing for my refreshment be-
fore I left the house. The morning newspaper
lay by the plate. I took it up, and my eye fell on
the date, May 31, 1887. I had known, of course,
from the moment I opened my eyes that my long
and detailed experience in another century had
been a dream, and yet it was startling to have it
so conclusively demonstrated that the world was
but a few hours older than when I had lain down
*o sleep.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 809
Glancing at the table of contents at the head of
die paper, which reviewed the news of the morn-
ing, I read the following summary :
" FOREIGN AFFAIRS. The impending war
between France and Germany. The French
Chambers asked for new military credits to meet
Germany's increase of her army. Probability
that all Europe will be involved in case of war.
Great suffering among the unemployed in London.
They demand work. Monster demonstration to
be made. The authorities uneasy. Great strikes
in Belgium. The government preparing to re-
press outbreaks. Shocking facts in regard to the
employment of girls in Belgium coal mines.
Wholesale evictions in Ireland.
" HOME AFFAIRS. The epidemic of fraud un-
checked. Embezzlement of half a million in New
York. Misappropriation of a trust fund by exec-
utors. Orphans left penniless. Clever system
of thefts by a bank teller ; 150,000 gone. The
coal barons decide to advance the price of coal
and reduce production. Speculators engineering
a great wheat corner at Chicago. A clique for-
cing up the price of coffee. Enormous land-orabs
of Western syndicates. Revelations of shocking
corruption among Chicago officials. Systematic
bribery. The trials of the Boodle aldermen to
go on at New York. Large failures of business
houses. Fears of a business crisis. A large grist
810 LOOKING BACKWARD.
of burglaries and larcenies. A woman murdered
in cold blood for her money at New Haven. A
householder shot by a burglar in this city last
night. A man shoots himself in Worcester be-
cause he could not get work. A large family left
destitute. An aged couple in New Jersey com-
mit suicide rather than go to the poor-house.
Pitiable destitution among the women wage-work-
ers in the great cities. Startling growth of illit-
eracy in Massachusetts. More insane asylums
wanted. Decoration Day addresses. Professor
Brown's oration on the moral grandeur of nine-
teenth century civilization."
It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I
had awaked ; there could be no kind of doubt
about that. Its complete microcosm this summary
of the day's news had presented, even to that last
unmistakable touch of fatuous self-complacency.
Coming after such a damning indictment of the
age as that one day's chronicle of world-wide
bloodshed, greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cyni-
cism worthy of Mephistopheles, and yet of all
whose eyes it had met this morning I was, per-
^ps, the only one who perceived the cynicism,
and but yesterday I should have perceived it no
more than the others. That strange dream it was
which had made all the difference. For I know
not hovr long, I forgot my surroundings after this,
and was again in fancy moving in ihat vivid
LOOKING BACKWARD. 811
dream-world, in that glorious city, with its homes
of simple comfort and its gorgeous public palaces.
Around me were again faces unmarred by arro-
gance or servility, by envy or greed, by anxious
care or feverish ambition, and stately forms of
men and women who had never known fear of a
fellow man or depended on his favor, but always,
in the words of that sermon which still rang in my
ears, had " stood up straight before God."
With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable
loss, not the less poignant that it was a loss of
what had never really been, I roused at last from
my reverie, and soon after left the house.
A dozen times between my door and Washing-
ton Street I had to stop and pull myself together,
such power had been in that vision of the Boston
of the future to make the real Boston strange.
The squalor and malodorousness of the town struck
me, from the moment I stood upon the street, as
facts T had never before observed. But yesterday,
me eover, it had seemed quite a matter of course
that some of my fellow-citizens should wear silks,
and others rags, that some should look well fed,
and others hungry. Now on the contrary the glar-
ing disparities in the dress and condition of the
men and women who brushed each other on the
sidewalks shocked me at every step, and yet more
the entire indifference which the prosperous showed
to the plight of the unfortunate. Were these hu-
\ian beings, who could behold the wretchedness of
812 LOOKING BACKWARD.
their fellows without so much as a change of coun-
tenance ? And yet, all the while, I knew well that
it was I who had changed, and not my contem-
poraries. I had dreamed of a city whose people
fared all alike as children of one family and were
one another's keepers in all things.
Another feature of the real Boston, which as-
sumed the extraordinary effect of strangeness that
marks familiar things seen in a new light, was the
prevalence of advertising. There had been no
personal advertising in the Boston of the twentieth
century, because there was no need of any, but
here the walls of the buildings, the windows, the
broadsides of the newspapers in every hand, the
very pavements, everything in fact in sight, save
the sky, were covered with the appeals of individ-
uals who sought, under innumerable pretexts, to
attract the contributions of others to their support.
However the wording might vary, the tenor of all
these appeals was the same :
"Help John Jones. Never mind the *est.
They are frauds. I, John Jones, am the right
one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear
me, John Jones. Look at me. Make no mistake,
John Jones is the man and nobody else. Let the
rest starve, but for God's sake remember John
Jones I "
Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness
of the spectacle most impressed me, so suddenly
become a stranger in my own city, I know not.
LOOKING BACKWARD. 313
Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because
they will not learn to be helpers of one another,
are doomed to be beggars of one another from
the least to the greatest ! This horrible babei of
shameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation,
this stunning clamor of conflicting boasts, appeals,
and adjurations, this stupendous system of brazen
beggary, what was it all but the necessity of a soci-
ety in which the opportunity to serve the world ac-
cording to his gifts, instead of being secured to
every man as the first object of social organization,
had to be fought for I
I reached Washington Street at the busiest
point, and there I stood and laughed aloud, to the
scandal of the passers-by. For my life I could not
have helped it, with such a mad humor was I
moved at sight of the interminable rows of stores
on either side, up and down the street so far as
I could see, scores of them, to make the spec-
tacle more utterly preposterous, within a stone's
throw devoted to selling the same sort of goods.
Stores ! stores ! stores ! miles of stores ! ten thou-
sand stores to distribute the goods needed by this
one city, which in my dream had been supplied
with all things from a single warehouse, as they
were ordered through one great store in every
quarter, where the buyer, without waste of time or
labor, found under one roof the world's assortment
in whatever line he desired. There the labor of
distribution had been so slight as to add but a
814 LOOKING BACKWARD.
scarcely perceptible fraction to the cost of com
modities to the user. The cost of production was
virtually all he paid. But here the mere distribu-
tion of the goods, their handling alone, added %
fourth, a third, a half and more, to the cost. All
these ten thousand plants must be paid for, their
rent, their staffs of superintendence, their platoons
of salesmen, their ten thousand sets of account-
ants, jobbers, and business dependents, with all
they spent in advertising themselves and fighting
one another, and the consumers must do the pay-
ing. What a famous process for beggaring a
nation !
Were these serious men I saw about me, or
children, who did their business on such a plan ?
Could they be reasoning beings, who did not see
the folly which, when the product is made and
ready for use, wastes so much of it in getting it to
the user ? If people eat with a spoon that leaks
half its contents between bowl and lip, are they
not likely to go hungry ?
I had passed through Washington Street thou-
sands of times before and viewed the ways of
those who sold merchandise, but my curiosity con-
cerning them was as if I had never gone by their
way before. I took wondering note of the show
windows of the stores, filled with goods arranged
with a wealth of pains and artistic device to attract
the eye. I saw the throngs of ladies looking in,
and the proprietors eagerly watching the effect of
BOOKING BACKWARD. 315
the bait. I went within and noted the hawk-eyed
floor-walker watching for business, overlooking; the
clerks, keeping them up to their task of inducing
the customers to buy, buy, buy, for money if they
had it, for credit if they had it not, to buy what
they wanted not, more than they wanted, what
they could not afford. At times I momentarily
lost the clue and was confused by the sight. Why
this effort to induce people to buy ? Surely that
had nothing to do with the legitimate business of
distributing products to those who needed them.
Surely it was the sheerest waste to force upon
people what they did not want, but what might be
useful to another. The nation was so much the
poorer for every such achievement. What were
these clerks thinking of? Then I would remem-
ber that they were not acting as distributors like
those in the store I had visited in the dream Bos-
ton. They were not serving the public interest,
but their immediate personal interest, and it was
nothing to them what the ultimate effect of their
course on the general prosperity might be, if but
they increased their own hoard, for these goods
were their own, and the more they sold and the
more they got for them, the greater their gain.
The more wasteful the people were, the more
articles they did not want which they could be
induced to buy, the better for these sellers. To
encourage prodigality was the express aim of the
ten thousand stores of Boston.
816 LOOKING BACKWARD.
Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a whit
worse men than any others in Boston. They must
earn a living and support their families, and how
were they to find a trade to do it by which did
not necessitate placing their individual interests
before those of others and that of all? They
could not be asked to starve while they waited for
an order of things such as I had seen in my
dream, in which the interest of each and that of
all were identical. But, God in heaven ! what
wonder, under such a system as this about me
what wonder that the city was so shabby, and the
people so meanly dressed, and so many of them
ragged and hungry !
Some time after this it was that I drifted over
into South Boston and found myself among the
manufacturing establishments. I had been in this
quarter of the city a hundred times before, just
as I had been on Washington Street, but here, as
well as there, I now first perceived the true sig-
nificance of what I witnessed. Formerly I had
taken pride in the fact that, by actual count, Bos-
ton had some four thousand independent manu-
facturing establishments ; but in this very multi-
plicity and independence I recognized now the
secret of the insignificant total product of their
industry.
If Washington Street had been like a lane in
Bedlam, this was a spectacle as much more melan-
eholy as production is a more vital function than
LOOKING BACKWARD. 317
distribution. For not only were these four thou-
sand establishments not working in concert, and
for that reason alone operating at prodigious dis-
advantage, but, as if this did not involve a suffi-
ciently disastrous loss of power, they were using'
their utmost skill to frustrate one another's effort,
praying by night and working by day for the de-
struction of one another's enterprises.
The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers re-
sounding from every side was not the hum of a
peaceful industry, but the clangor of swords wielded
by foemen. These mills and shops were so many
forts, each under its own flag, its guns trained on
the mills and shops about it, and its sappers busy
below, undermining them.
Within each one of these forts the strictest or-
ganization of industry was insisted on ; the sepa-
rate gangs worked under a single central author-
ity. No interference and no duplicating of work
were permitted. Each had his allotted task, and
none were idle. By what hiatus in the logical fac-
ulty, by what lost link of reasoning, account, then,
for the failure to recognize the necessity of apply-
ing the same principle to the organization of the
national industries as a whole, to see that if lack
of organization could impair the efficiency of a
shop, it must have effects as much more disastroua
in disabling the industries of the nation at large as
the latter are vaster in volume and more complex
in the relationship of their parts.
818 LOOKING BACKWARD.
People would be prompt enough to ridicule an
army in which there were neither companies, bat-
talions, regiments, brigades, divisions, or army
corps, no unit of organization, in fact, larger
than the corporal's squad, with no officer higher
than a corporal, and all the corporals equal in
authority. And yet just such an army were the
manufacturing industries of nineteenth century
Boston, an army of four thousand independent
squads led by four thousand independent corpo-
rals, each with a separate plan of campaign.
Knots of idle men were to be seen here and
there on every side, some idle because they could
find no work at any price, others because they
could not get what they thought a fair price.
I accosted some of the latter, and they told
me their grievances. It was very little comfort
I could give them. " I am sorry for you," I said.
"You get little enough, certainly, and yet the
wonder to me is, not that industries conducted as
these are do not pay you living wages, but that
they are able to pay you any wages at all."
Making my way back again after this to the
peninsular city, toward three o'clock I stood on
State Street, staring, as if I had never seen them
before, at the banks and brokers' offices, and other
financial institutions, of which there had been in
the State Street of my vision no vestige. Business
men, confidential clerks, and errand boys were
thronging in and out of the banks, for it wanted
LOOKING BACKWARD. 319
but a few minutes of the closing hour. Opposite
me was the bank where I did business, and pres-
ently I crossed the street, and, going in with the
crowd, stood in a recess of the wall looking on
at the army of clerks handling money, and the
cues of depositors at the tellers' windows. An old
gentleman whom I knew, a director of the bank,
passing me ar.d observing my contemplative atti-
tude, stopped a moment.
" Interesting sight, is n't it, Mr. "West," he said.
" Wonderful piece of mechanism ; I find it so my-
self. I like sometimes to stand and look on at it
just as you are doing. It 's a poem, sir, a poem,
that 's what I call it. Did you ever think, Mr.
West, that the bank is the heart of the business
system? From it and to it, in endless flux and
reflux, the life blood goes. It is flowing in now.
It will flow out again in the morning ; " and
pleased with his little conceit, the old man passed
on smiling.
Yesterday I shotdd have considered the simile
apt enough, but since then I had visited a world
incomparably more affluent than this, in which
money was unknown and without conceivable use.
I had learned that it had a use in the world around
ine only because the work of producing the nation's
livelihood, instead of being regarded as the most
strictly public and common of all concerns, and as
such conducted by the nation, was abandoned to
the hap-hazard efforts of individuals, This origi-
820 LOOKING BACKWARD,
nal mistake necessitated endless exchanges to bring
about any sort of general distribution of products.
These exchanges money effected how equitably,
might be seen in a walk from the tenement house
districts to the Back Bay at the cost of an army
of men taken from productive labor to manage it.
with constant ruinous breakdowns of its machin-
ery, and a generally debauching influence on matt
kind which had justified its description, from an-
cient time, as the " root of all eviL"
Alas for the poor old bank director with his
poem I He had mistaken the throbbing of an
abscess for the beating of the heart. What he
called " a wonderful piece of mechanism " was au
imperfect device to remedy an unnecessary defect,
the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.
After the banks had closed I wandered aim-
lessly about the business quarter for an hour or
two, and later sat a while on one of the benches of
the Common, finding an interest merely in watch-
ing the throngs that passed, such as one has in
studying the populace of a foreign city, so strange
since yesterday had my fellow citizens and their
ways become to me. For thirty years 1 haxl lived
among them, and yet I seemed to have never noted
before how drawn and anxious were their faces,
of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute faces
of the educated as well as the dull masks of the ig-
norant. And well it might be so, for I saw now,
as never before I had seen so plaj*ly, that each as
LOOKING BACKWARD. 321
he walked constantly turned to catch the whispers
of a spectre at his ear, the spectre of Uncertainty.
"' Do your work never so well," the spectre was
whispering, " rise early and toil till late, rob
cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never know
security. Rich you may be now and still come to
poverty at last. Leave never so much wealth to
your children, you cannot buy the assurance that
your son may not be the servant of your servant,
or that your daughter will not have to sell her-
self for bread."
A man passing by thrust an advertising card in
my hand, which set forth the merits of some new
scheme of life insurance. The incident reminded
me of the only device, pathetic in its admission of
the universal need it so poorly supplied, which of-
fered these tired and hunted men and women even
a partial protection from uncertainty. By this
means, those already well-to-do, I remembered,
might purchase a precarious confidence that after
their death their loved ones would not, for a while
at least, be trampled under the feet of men. But
tnis was all, and this was only for those who could
pay well for it. What idea was possible to these
wretched dwellers in the land of Ishmael, where
every man's hand was against each and the hand
of each against every other, of true life insurance
as I had seen it among the people of that dream
land, each of whom, by virtue merely of his mem-
bership in the national family, was guaranteed
822 LOOKING BACKWARD,
against need of any sort, by a policy underwriter
by one hundred million fellow countrymen.
Some time after this it was that I recall a
glimpse of myself standing on the steps of a build
ing on Tremont Street, looking at a military pa
tade. A regiment was passing. It was the first
sight in that dreary day which had inspired me
with any other emotions than wondering pity and
amazement. Here at last were order and reason,
an exhibition of what intelligent cooperation can
accomplish. The people who stood looking on
with kindling faces, could it be that the sight
had for them no more than but a spectacular inter-
est ? Could they fail to see that it was their per-
fect concert of action, their organization under one
control, which made these men the tremendous en-
gine they were, able to vanquish a mob ten times
as numerous ? Seeing this so plainly, could they
fail to compare the scientific manner in which the
nation went to war with the unscientific manner
in which it went to work ? Would they not query
since what time the killing of men had been a
task so much more important than feeding and
clothing them, that a trained army should be
deemed alone adequate to the former, while the
latter was left to a mob ?
It was now toward nightfall, and the streets
were thronged with the workers from the stores,
the shops, and mills. Carried along with the
stronger part of the current, I found myself, as it
LOOKING BACKWARD. 323
to grow dark, in the midst of a scene of
squalor and human degradation such as only the
South Cove tenement district could present. I
had seen the mad wasting of human labor ; here I
saw in direst shape the want that waste had bred.
From the black doorways and windows of the
rookeries on every side came gusts of fetid air.
The streets and alleys reeked with the effluvia of
a slave ship's between-decks. As I passed I had
glimpses within of pale babies gasping out their
lives amid sultry stenches, of hopeless-faced women
deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood no
trait save weakness, while from the windows leered
girls with brows of brass. Like the starving bands
of mongrel curs that infest the streets of Moslem
towns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children
filled the air with shrieks and curses as they
fought and tumbled among the garbage that lit-
tered the court-yards.
There was nothing in all this that was new to me.
Often had I passed through this part of the city
and witnessed its sights with feelings of disgust
mingled with a certain philosophical wonder at
the extremities mortals will endure and still cling
to life. But not alone as regarded the economical
follies of this age, but equally as touched its moral
abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since
that vision of another century. No more did I
look upon the woful dwellers in this Inferno with
a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human 1
S24 LOOKING BACKWARD.
in them my brothers and sisters, my parents
my children, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.
The festering mass of human wretchedness about
me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced
my heart like a knife, so that I could not repress
sighs and groans. . I not only saw but felt in my
body all that I saw.
Presently, too, as I observed the wretched be
ings about me more closely, I perceived that they
were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many
living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was
plainly written the hicjacet of a soul dead within.
As I looked, horror struck, from one death's
head to another, I was affected by a singular hal-
lucination. Like a wavering translucent spirit
face superimposed upon each of these brutish
masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that
would have been the actual if mind and soul had
lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly
faces, and of the reproach that could not be gain-
said which was in their eyes, that the full piteous-
ness of the ruin that had been wrought was re-
vealed to me. I was moved with contrition as
with a strong agony, for I had been one of those
who had endured that these things should be. I
had been one of those who, well knowing that
they were, had not desired to hear or be compelled
to think much of them, but had gone on as if they
were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit
Therefore now I found upon my garments the
LOOKING BACKWARD. 825
blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of
my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out
against me from the ground. Every stone of the
reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential
rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as 1
fled : What hast thou done with thy brother
Abel ?
I have no clear recollection of anything after
this till I found myself standing on the carved
stone steps of the magnificent home of my
betrothed in Commonwealth avenue. Amid the
tumult of my thoughts that day, I had scarcely
once thought of her, but now obeying some uncon-
scious impulse my feet had found the familiar way
to her door. I was told that the family were at
dinner, but word was sent out that I should join
them at table. Besides the family, I found several
guests present, all known to me. The table glit-
tered with plate and costly china. The ladies were
sumptuously dressed and wore the jewels of queens.
The scene was one of costly elegance and lavish
luxury. The company was in excellent spirits,
and there was plentiful laughter and a running fire
of jests.
To me it was as if , in wandering through the
place of doom, my blood turned to tears by its
sights, and my spirit attuned to sorrow, pity, and
despair, I had happened in some glade upon a
merry party of roisterers. I sat in silence until
Edith began to rally me upon my sombre looks,
826 LOOKING BACKWARD.
What ailed me ? The others presently joined in
the playful assault, and I became a target for
quips and jests. Where had I been, and what ha<?
I seen to make such a dull fellow of me ?
" I have been in Golgotha,'* at last I answered.
" I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross ! Do
none of you know what sights the sun and stars
look down on in this city, that you can think and
talk of anything else ? Do you not know that
close to your doors a great multitude of men and
women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one
agony from birth to death ? Listen I their dwell-
ings are so near that if you hush your laughter
you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous
crying of the little ones that suckle poverty, the
hoarse curses of men sodden in misery, turned
half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an army
of women selling themselves for bread. With
what have you stopped your ears that you do not
hear these doleful sounds? For me, I can hear
nothing else."
Silence followed my words. A passion of pity
had shaken me as I spoke, but when I looked
around upon the company, I saw that, far from
being stirred as I was, their faces expressed a o*ld
and hard astonishment, mingled in Edith's with
extreme mortification, in her father's with anger.
The ladies were exchanging scandalized loolss,
while one of the gentlemen had put up his eye-
glass and was studying me with an air of scientific
LOOKING BACKWARD. 32T
onriosity, When I saw that things which were to
me so intolerable moved them not at all, that words
that melted my heart to speak had only offended
them with the speaker, I was at first stunned and
then overcome with a desperate sickness and faint-
ness at the heart. What hope was there for the
wretched, for the world, if thoughtful men and
tender women were not moved by things like these I
Then I bethought myself that it must be because
I had not spoken aright. No doubt I had put the
case badly. They were angry because they thought
1 was berating them, when God knew I was merely
thinking of the horror of the fact without any at-
tempt to assign the responsibility for it.
I restrained my passion, and tried to speak
calmly and logically that I might correct this im-
pression. I told them that I had not meant to
accuse them, as if they, or the rich in general,
were responsible for the misery of the world.
True indeed it was, that the superfluity which they
wasted would, otherwise bestowed, relieve much
bitter suffering. These costly viands, these rich
wines, these gorgeous fabrics and glistening jewels
represented the ransom of many lives. They
were verily not without the guiltiness of those
who waste in a land stricken with famine. Nev-
ertheless, all the waste of all the rich, were it
saved, would go but a little way to cure the pov-
erty of the world. There was so little to divide
that evp.n tf the rich went share and share with
328 LOOKING BACKWARD.
the poor, there would be but a common fare oi
crusts, albeit made very sweet then by brotherly
love.
The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness,
was the great cause of the world's poverty. It
was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men,
that made the race so miserable, but a hideous,
ghastly mistake, a colossal world-darkening blun-
der. And then I showed them how four fifths of
the labor of men was utterly wasted by the mutual
warfare, the lack of organization and concert
among the workers. Seeking to make the matter
very plain, I instanced the case of arid lands where
the soil yielded the means of life only by careful
use of the watercourses for irrigation. I showed
how in such countries it was counted the most im-
portant function of the government to see that the
water was not wasted by the selfishness or igno-
rance of individuals, since otherwise there would be
famine. To this end its use was strictly regulated
and systematized, and individuals of their mere
caprice were not permitted to dam it or divert it,
or in any way to tamper with it.
The labor of men, I explained, was the fertiliz-
ing stream which alone rendered earth habitable.
It was but a scanty stream at best, and its use re-
quired to be regulated by a system which expended
every drop to the best advantage, if the world were
to be supported in abundance. But how far from
any system was the actual practice I Every mau
LOOKING BACKWARD. 329
wasted the precious fluid as he wished, animated
only by the equal motives of saving his own crop
and spoiling his neighbor's, that his might sell the
better. What with greed and what with spite some
fields were flooded while others were parched, and
half the water ran wholly to waste. In such a
land, though a few by strength or cunning might
win the means of luxury, the lot of the great mass
must be poverty, and of the weak and ignorant bit-
ter want and perennial famine.
Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the
function it had neglected, and regulate for the com-
mon good the course of the life-giving stream, and
the earth would bloom like one garden, and none
of its children lack any good thing. I described
the physical felicity, mental enlightenment, and
moral elevation which would then attend the lives
of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new
world, blessed with plenty, purified by justice and
sweetened by brotherly kindness, the world of
which I had indeed but dreamed, but which might
so easily be made real. But when I had expected
now surely the faces around me to light up with
emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more dark,
angry, and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the
ladies showed only aversion and dread, while the
men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation
and contempt. ** Madman I " " Pestilent fellow I "
u Fanatic ! " " Enemy of society ! " were some of
their cries, and the one who had before taken his
330 LOOKING BACKWARD.
eyeglass to me exclaimed, "He says we sore to
have no more poor. Ha ! ha ! "
" Put the fellow out ! " exclaimed the father of
my betrothed, and at the signal the men sprang
from their chairs and advanced upon me.
It seemed to me that my heart would burst with
the anguish of finding that what was to me so
plain and so all-important was to them meaning
less, and that I was powerless to make it other.
So hot had been my heart that I had thought to
melt an iceberg with its glow, only to find at last
the overmastering chill seizing my own vitals. It
was not enmity that I felt toward them as they
thronged me, but pity only, for them and for the
world.
Although despairing, I could not give over.
Still I strove with them. Tears poured from my
eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate.
I panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately
afterward found myself sitting upright in bed in
my room in Dr. Leete's house, and the morning
sun shining through the open window into my
eyes. I was gasping. The tears were streaming
down my face, and I quivered in every nerve,
As with an escaped convict who dreams that he
has been recaptured and brought back to his dark
and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to see
the heaven's vault spread above him, so it was
with me, as I realized that my return to the oine
LOOKING BACKWARD. 331
teenth century had been the dream, and my pres-
Bnce in the twentieth was the reality.
The cruel sights which I had witnessed in my
vision, and could so well confirm from the expe-
rience of my former life, though they had, alas f
once been, and must in the retrospect to the end
of time move the compassionate to tears, were,
God be thanked, forever gone by. Long ago op
pressor and oppressed, prophet and scorner, had
been dust. For generations, rich and poor had
been forgotten words.
But in that moment, while yet I mused with un-
speakable thankfulness upon the greatness of the
world's salvation and my privilege in beholding it,
there suddenly pierced me like a knife a pang of
shame, remorse, and wondering self-reproach, that
bowed my head upon my breast and made me wish
the grave had hid me with my fellows from the
sun. For I had been a man of that former time.
What had I done to help on the deliverance
whereat I now presumed to rejoice ? I who had
lived in those cruel, insensate days, what had I
done to bring them to an end ? I had been every
whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my
brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things,
as besotted a worshipper of Chaos and Old Night,
as any of my fellows. So far as my personal in-
fluence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder
than to help forward the enfranchisement of the
race which was even then preparing. What right
832 LOOKING BACKWARD.
had 1 to hail a salvation which reproached me, to
rejoice in a day whose dawning I had mocked ?
" Better for you, better for you," a voice within
me rang, " had this evil dream been the reality,
and this fair reality the dream ; better your part
pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing
generation, than here, drinking of wells you digged
not, and eating of trees whose husbandmen you
stoned ; " and my spirit answered, " Better, truly."
When at length I raised my bowed head and
looked forth from the window, Edith, fresh as the
morning, had come into the garden and was gath-
ering flowers. I hastened to descend to her.
Kneeling before her, with my face in the dust, I
confessed with tears how little was my worth to
breathe the air of this golden century, and how in-
finitely less to wear upon my breast its consum-
mate flower. Fortunate is he who, with a case sc
desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful
POSTSCRIPT.
THE RATE OF THE WORLD*? PROGRESS.
To the Editor of the Boston Transcript :
Transcript of March 30, 1888, contained a review
of Looking Backward, in response to which I beg
to be allowed a word. The description to which
the book is devoted, of the radically new social
and industrial institutions and arrangements sup-
posed to be enjoyed by the people of the United
States in the twentieth century, is not objected to
as depicting a degree of human felicity and moral
development necessarily unattainable by the race,
provided time enough had been allowed for its
evolution from the present chaotic state of society.
In failing to allow this, the reviewer thinks that
the author has made an absurd mistake, which
seriously detracts from the value of the book as a
work of realistic imagination. Instead of placing
the realization of the ideal social state a scant
fifty years ahead, it is suggested that he should
have made his figure seventy-five centuries. There
is certainly a large discrepancy between seventy-
five centuries and fifty years, and if the reviewer
is correct in his estimate of the probable rate of
834 LOOKING BACKWARD.
human progress, the outlook of the world is decid-
edly discouraging. But is he right ? I thiuk not.
Looking Backward, although in form a fanciful
romance, is intended, in all seriousness, as a fore-
cast, in accordance with the principles of evolution,
of the next stage in the industrial and social de-
velopment of humanity, especially in this country ;
and no part of it is believed by the author to be
better supported by the indications of probability
than the implied prediction that the dawn of the
new era is already near at hand, and that the full
day will swiftly follow. Does this seem at first
thought incredible, in view of the vastness of the
changes presupposed? What is the teaching of
history, but that great national transformations,
while ages in unnoticed preparation, when once in-
augurated, are accomplished with a rapidity and
resistless momentum proportioned to their magni-
tude, not limited by it ?
In 1759, when Quebec fell, the might of Eng-
land in America seemed irresistible, and the vas-
salage of the colonies assured. Nevertheless, thirty
years later, the first President of the American
Republic was inaugurated. In 1849, after Novara,
Italian prospects appeared as hopeless as at any
time since the Middle Ages ; yet only fifteen years
after, Victor Emmanuel was crowned King of
United Italy. In 1864, the fulfillment of the thou-
sand-year dream of German unity was apparently
as for off as ever. Seven years later it had been
LOOKING BACKWARD. 835
realized, and William had assumed at Versailles
the Crown of Barbarossa. In 1832, the original
Anti-slavery Society was formed in Boston by a few
so-called visionaries. Thirty-eight years later, in
1870, the society disbanded, its programme fully
carried out.
These precedents do not, of course, prove that
any such industrial and social transformation as is
outlined in Looking Backward is impending ; but
they do show that, when the moral and economi-
cal conditions for it are ripe, it may be expected
to go forward with great rapidity. On no other
stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so
like magic as on the great stage of history when
once the hour strikes. The question is not, then,
how extensive the scene-shifting must be to set
the stage for the new fraternal civilization, but
whether there are any special indications that
a social transformation is at hand. The causes
that have been bringing it ever nearer have
been at work from immemorial time. To the
stream of tendency setting toward an ultimate
realization of a form of society which, while vastly
more efficient for material prosperity, should also
satisfy and not outrage the moral instincts, every
sigh of poverty, every tear of pity, every humane
impulse, every generous enthusiasm, every true
religious feeling, every act by which men have
given effect to their mutual sympathy by drawing
more closely together for any purpose, have con-
836 LOOKING BACKWARD.
tributed from the beginnings of civilization. That
this long stream of influence, ever widening and
deepening, is at last about to sweep away the
barriers it has so long sapped, is at least one obvi-
ous interpretation of the present universal ferment
of men's minds as to the imperfections of present
social arrangements. Not only are the toilers of
the world engaged in something like a world-wide
insurrection, but true and humane men and wo-
men, of every degree, are in a mood of exaspera-
tion, verging on absolute revolt, against social con-
ditions that reduce life to a brutal struggle for
existence, mock every dictate of ethics and reli-
gion, and render well-nigh futile the efforts of
philanthropy.
As an iceberg, floating southward from the
frozen North, is gradually undermined by warmer
seas, and, become at last unstable, churns the sea
to yeast for miles around by the mighty rockings
that portend its overturn, so the barbaric indus-
trial and social system, which has come down to us
from savage antiquity, undermined by the modern
humane spirit, riddled by the criticism of economic
science, is shaking the world with convulsions that
presage its collapse.
All thoughtful men agree that the present aspect
of society is portentous of great changes. The
only question is, whether they will be for the better
or the worse. Those who believe in man's essen-
tial nobleness lean to the former view, those who
LOOKING BACKWARD. 837
believe in his essential baseness to the latter. For
my part, i hold to the former opinion. Looking
Backward was written in the belief that the Golden
Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not
far away. Our children will surely see it, and we,
too, who are already men and women, if we deserve
it by our faith and by our works.
EDWARD BELLAMY
University of California
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