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LOOKING BACKWARD
From 2000 to 1887
by
Edward Bellamy
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
Historical Section Shawmut College, Boston,
December 26, 2000
Living as we do in the closing year of the 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, however, 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! The
readiness with which men accustom themselves, as matters of course, to
improvements in their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed to
leave nothing more to be desired, could not be more 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
the 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
explanations of them rather trite--but it must be remembered that to
Dr. Leete's guest they were not matters of course, and that this book
is written for the express purpose of inducing the reader to forget for
the nonce that they are so to him. One word more. The almost universal
theme of the writers and orators who have celebrated this bimillennial
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 and leaves Mr.
Julian West to speak for himself.
JTABLE 5 28 1
Chapter 1
I first 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 apparently of about thirty years of age, that no
person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises
to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly
assure 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, 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 civilization 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 between 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 fortunate in that age. Living in luxury, and
occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of
life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others,
rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grand-parents
had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, 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 supported in utter idleness one who was able to render
service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum
of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, 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 combustion, seems like magic, but was
merely an ingenious 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 shoulders 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 investments was a species of tax in
perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in industry which a person
possessing or inheriting money was able to levy. It must not be
supposed that an arrangement which seems so unnatural and preposterous
according to modern notions was never criticized by your ancestors. It
had been the effort of lawgivers and prophets from the earliest ages to
abolish 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 time of
which I write, the latter part of the nineteenth 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 together in those days, and especially of the
relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I 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 toilsomely
along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted
no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite 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 steepest
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 demand 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
insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons 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 constant 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 fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes; commiseration was
frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the
coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as
it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such
times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and
plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the 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 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 account 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 themselves
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 incredible 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 radical improvement even was
possible, either in the 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 of 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 belonging 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 moderating fellow feeling
for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical
compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can
offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my
own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.
In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried, I was
engaged to wed Edith Bartlett. 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 general impression of how we lived then, her family was wealthy.
In that age, when money alone commanded 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 hear 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 deformity of costume can wholly disguise them.
Our marriage only waited on the completion of the house which I was
building for our occupancy in 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 desirability of different parts of
Boston for residence depended then, not on natural features, but on the
character of the neighboring population. Each class or nation lived by
itself, in quarters of its own. A rich man living among the poor, an
educated 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
particularly 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 another, 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 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 consequences. 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
dislocated. The working classes had quite suddenly and very generally
become infected with a profound 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 aspirations of the
laboring classes might be deemed, the devotion with which they
supported one another 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 according to individual
temperament. The sanguine argued very forcibly that it was in the very
nature of things impossible that the new hopes of the workingmen 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 capitalists 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 were grounds to fear that they would not discover this fact until
they had made a sad mess of society. 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 far as to predict an impending
social cataclysm. Humanity, 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. Repeated 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 approaching a critical period which
might result in great changes. The labor troubles, their causes,
course, and cure, took lead of all other topics in the public prints,
and in serious conversation.
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 adopting 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 grievance 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.