Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887

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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.

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.

Chapter 2

The thirtieth day of May, 1887, fell on a Monday. It was one
of the annual holidays of the nation in the latter third of the
nineteenth century, being set apart under the name of Decoration
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 nightfall, remained to dine with the family
of my betrothed. In the drawing-room, after dinner, I picked up
an evening paper and read of a fresh strike in the building trades,
which would probably still further delay the completion of my
unlucky house. I remember distinctly how exasperated 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 sympathy 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 telling what we should come to soon.
"The worst of it," I remember Mrs. 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, Patago-
nia, 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 home was ready for us. She was remarkably
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 absolutely no premonition in my
mind, or I am sure in hers, that this was more than an ordinary
separation.

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 sufferer from insomnia, and although otherwise
perfectly well had been completely fagged out that day, from
having slept scarcely at all the two previous 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 elegant in an old-fashioned way within, but
situated in a quarter that had long since become undesirable 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
advertised it for sale, and meanwhile merely used it for sleeping
purposes, dining at my club. One servant, a faithful colored man
by the name of Sawyer, 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 entered
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
cement and were very thick, and the floor was likewise 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.

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