1 • Edward Bellamy and “Looking Backward”
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Parrington, Vernon Louis
The labor of men, I explained, was the fertilizing stream which alone rendered earth habitable. It was but a scanty stream at best, and its use required 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! Every man 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 bitter want and perennial famine.
Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it had neglected, and regulate for the common 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!” “Pestilent fellow!” “Fanatic!” “Enemy of society!” were some of their cries, and the one who had before taken his eyeglass to me exclaimed, “He says we are 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.[19]
Like Henry George’s noble study of social poverty, Looking Backward is a suggestive document of a generation that saw its finer spirits repelled by the vulgar individualism of the Gilded Age. In the long run, no doubt, its influence was slight and the hopes of the Bellamy Nationalists, like the hopes of the Single-taxers, were doomed to disappointment. Nevertheless it remains as a testimony to the fact that in a blatant world of preëmption, exploitation, and progress, were some who were concerned for a juster social order than the Gilded Age dreamed of—a true commonwealth that free men might build if they would.[20]
Source notes
Footnotes
[1] Allyn B. Forbes, The Literary Quest for Utopia, 1880–1900. “Social Forces,” Vol. VI, No. 2, December, 1927.
[2]Nationalist, Vol. I, p. 18.
[3]Ibid., Vol. I, p. 1.
[4]The Duke of Stockbridge, Chapter II, pp. 22, 28.
[5]Ibid., Chapter XXVI, p. 349.
[6]Equality, Chapter XXII, p. 189.
[7]Ibid., p. 189.
[8]Looking Backward, Chapter XXVIII, p. 314.
[9]Equality, Chapter XXII.
[10]Equality, Chapter XXIII, p. 195.
[11]Equality, Chapter II, p. 21.
[12]Ibid., Chapter II, pp. 19, 20, 21, 22.
[13]Ibid., Chapter III, p. 26.
[14]Looking Backward, Chapter VI, p. 59.
[15]Equality, Chapter XI, p. 74.
[16]Looking Backward, Chapter XXIV.
[17] See Equality, Chapter XIII—“Private Capital Stolen from the Social Fund.”
[18]Looking Backward, Chapter XXVIII, p. 328.
[19]Ibid., pp. 328–9.
[20] At this point was to come a second section entitled “After Bellamy; ‘Naturalism’; Tourgée’s Murvale Eastman.”—Publisher.