Looking Backward: 2000-1887

by Edward Bellamy

  THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"

  "We ask To put forth just our strength, our human strength, All starting fairly, 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."

  BROWNING.

  The great poet's lines express Edward Bellamy's aim in writing hisfamous book. That aim would realize in our country's daily being theGreat Declaration that gave us national existence; would, in equalityof opportunity, give man his own earth to stand on, and thereby--therace for the first time enabled to enter unhampered upon the use ofits God-given possibilities--achieve a progress unexampled andmarvelous.

  It is now twelve years since the writing of 'Looking Backward' changedone of the most brilliant of the younger American authors into animpassioned social reformer whose work was destined to have momentouseffect upon the movement of his age. His quality had hitherto beenmanifest in romances like 'Doctor Heidenhof's Process' and 'MissLudington's Sister,' and in many short stories exquisite in theirimaginative texture and largely distinguished by a strikingly originaldevelopment of psychical themes. Tales like 'The Blindman's World' and'To Whom This May Come' will long linger in the memory of magazinereaders of the past twenty years.

  'Doctor Heidenhof' was at once recognized as a psychological study ofuncommon power. "Its writer," said an English review, "is the linealintellectual descendant of Hawthorne." Nor was there in America anylack of appreciation of that originality and that distinction of stylewhich mark Edward Bellamy's early work. In all this there was a strongdominant note prophetic of the author's future activity. That note wasa steadfast faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature, a senseof the meaning of love in its true and universal sense. 'LookingBackward,' though ostensibly a romance, is universally recognized as agreat economic treatise in a framework of fiction. Without this guiseit could not have obtained the foothold that it did; there is justenough of the skillful novelist's touch in its composition to giveplausibility to the book and exert a powerful influence upon thepopular imagination. The ingenious device by which a man of thenineteenth century is transferred to the end of the twentieth, and thevivid dramatic quality of the dream at the end of the book, areinstances of the art of the trained novelist which make the workunique of its kind. Neither could the book have been a success had notthe world been ripe for its reception. The materials were ready andwaiting; the spark struck fire in the midst of them. Little more thana decade has followed its publication, and the world is filled withthe agitation that it helped kindle. It has given direction toeconomic thought and shape to political action.

  Edward Bellamy was born in 1850,--almost exactly in the middle of thecentury whose closing years he was destined so notably to affect. Hishome has always been in his native village of Chicopee Falls,Massachusetts, now a portion of the city of Chicopee, one of the groupof municipalities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He lived onChurch Street in a house long the home of his father, a belovedBaptist clergyman of the town. His clerical ancestry is perhapsresponsible for his essentially religious nature. His maternalgrandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one of the early pastors ofSpringfield, and among his paternal ancestors was Dr. Joseph Bellamyof Bethlehem, Connecticut, a distinguished theologian of revolutionarydays, a friend of Jonathan Edwards, and the preceptor of Aaron Burr.He, however, outgrew with his boyhood all trammels of sect. But thisinherited trait marked his social views with a stronglyanti-materialistic and spiritual cast; an ethical purpose dominatedhis ideas, and he held that a merely material prosperity would not beworth the working for as a social ideal. An equality in materialwell-being, however, he regarded as the soil essential for the truespiritual development of the race.

  Young Bellamy entered Union College at Schenectady, but was notgraduated. 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 firstnewspaper experience was on the staff of the New York 'Evening Post,'and from that journal he went to the Springfield 'Union.' Besides hisEuropean trip, a journey to Hawaii by way of Panama and a returnacross the continent gave a considerable geographical range to hisknowledge of the world at large.

  It is notable that his first public utterance, made before a locallyceum when a youth in his teens, was devoted to sentiments of socialreform that foreshadowed his future work. When 'Looking Backward' wasthe sensation of the year, a newspaper charge brought against Mr.Bellamy was that he was "posing for notoriety." To those who know theretiring, modest, and almost diffident personality of the author,nothing could have been more absurd. All opportunities to make moneyupon the magnificent advertising given by a phenomenal literarysuccess were disregarded. There were offers of lecture engagementsthat would have brought quick fortune, requests from magazine editorsfor articles and stories on any terms that he might name, profferedinducements from publishers to write a new book and to take advantageof the occasion to make a volume of his short stories with theassurance of a magnificent sale,--to all this he was strikinglyindifferent. Two or three public addresses, a few articles in thereviews, and for a while the editorship of 'The New Nation,' a weeklyperiodical which he established in Boston,--this was the sum of hispublic activity until he should have made himself ready for a secondsustained effort. To all sordid incentives he was as indifferent as ifhe had been a child of his new order, a century later. The hosts ofpersonal friends whom his work made for him knew him as a winsomepersonality; and really to know him was to love him. His nature waskeenly sympathetic; his conversation ready and charming, quicklyresponsive to suggestion, illuminated by gentle humor and occasionallya flash of playful satire. He disliked controversy, with its waste ofenergy in profitless discussion, and jestingly averred that if therewere any reformers living in his neighborhood he should move away.

  The cardinal features of 'Looking Backward,' that distinguish it fromthe generality of Utopian literature, lie in its definite scheme ofindustrial organization on a national basis, and the equal shareallotted to all persons in the products of industry, or the publicincome, on the same ground that men share equally in the free gifts ofnature, like air to breathe and water to drink; it being absolutelyimpossible to determine any equitable ratio between individualindustrial effort and individual share in industrial product on agraded basis. The book, however, was little more than an outline ofthe system, and, after an interval devoted to continuous thought andstudy, many points called for elaboration. Mr. Bellamy gave his lastyears and his ripest efforts to an exposition of the economical andethical basis of the new order which he held that the natural courseof social evolution would establish.

  'Equality' is the title of his last book. It is a more elaborate workthan 'Looking Backward,' and in fact is a comprehensive economictreatise upon the subject that gives it its name. It is a sequel toits famous predecessor, and its keynote is given in the remark thatthe immortal preamble of the American Declaration of Independence(characterized as the true constitution of the United States),logically contained the entire statement of universal economicequality guaranteed by the nation collectively to its membersindividually. "The corner-stone of our state is economic equality, andis not that the obvious, necessary, and only adequate pledge of thesethree rights,--life, liberty, and happiness? What is life without itsmaterial basis, and what is an equal right to life but a right to anequal material basis for it? What is liberty? How can men be free whomust ask the right to labor and to live from their fellow-men and seektheir bread from the hands of others? How else can any governmentguarantee liberty to men save by providing them a means of labor andof life coupled with independence; and how could that be done unlessthe government conducted the economic system upon which employment andmaintenance depend? Finally, what is impli
ed in the equal right of allto the pursuit of happiness? What form of happiness, so far as itdepends at all upon material facts, is not bound up with economicconditions; and how shall an equal opportunity for the pursuit ofhappiness be guaranteed to all save by a guarantee of economicequality?"

  The book is so full of ideas, so replete with suggestive aspects, sorich in quotable parts, as to form an arsenal of argument for apostlesof the new democracy. As with 'Looking Backward,' the humane andthoughtful reader will lay down 'Equality' and regard the world abouthim with a feeling akin to that with which the child of the tenementreturns from his "country week" to the foul smells, the discordantnoises, the incessant strife of the wonted environment.

  But the writing of 'Equality' was a task too great for the physicalstrength and vitality of its author. His health, never robust, gaveway completely, and the book was finished by an indomitable andinflexible dominion of the powerful mind over the failing body whichwas nothing short of heroic. Consumption, that common New Englandinheritance, developed suddenly, and in September of 1897 Mr. Bellamywent with his family to Denver, willing to seek the cure which hescarcely hoped to find.

  The welcome accorded to him in the West, where his work had met withwidespread and profound attention, was one of his latest and greatestpleasures. 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 unwillingness to accept any personal and publicrecognition, had perhaps kept him from a realization of the fact thathis fame was international. But the author of a book which in tenyears had sold nearly a million of copies in England and America, andwhich had been translated into German, French, Russian, Italian,Arabic, Bulgarian, and several other languages and dialects, foundhimself not among strangers, although two thousand miles from the homeof his lifetime.

  He greatly appreciated and gratefully acknowledged his welcome toColorado, which he left in April, 1898, when he realized that his lifewas rapidly drawing to a close.

  He died on Sunday morning, May 22, after a month in the old home whichhe had eagerly desired to see again, leaving a widow and two youngchildren.

  At the simple service held there, with his kindred and the friends ofa lifetime about him, the following passages from 'Looking Backward'and 'Equality' were read as a fitting expression, in his own words, ofthat hope for the bettering and uplifting of Humanity, which was thereal passion of his noble life.

  "Said not the serpent in the old story, 'If you eat of the fruit ofthe tree of knowledge you shall be as gods?' The promise was true inwords, but apparently there was some mistake about the tree. Perhapsit 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 toldmen that they might be the sons of God. But he made no mistake as tothe tree he showed them, and the fruit was ripe. It was the fruit oflove, for universal love is at once the seed and fruit, cause andeffect, of the highest and completest knowledge. Through boundlesslove man becomes a god, for thereby is he made conscious of hisoneness with God, and all things are put under his feet. 'If we loveone another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.' 'Hethat loveth his brother dwelleth in the light.' 'If any man say, Ilove God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.' 'He that loveth nothis brother abideth in death.' 'God is love, and he that dwelleth inlove dwelleth in God.' 'Every one that loveth knoweth God.' 'He thatloveth not knoweth not God.'

  "Here is the very distillation of Christ's teaching as to theconditions of entering on the divine life. In this we find thesufficient explanation why the revelation which came to Christ so longago and to other illumined souls could not possibly be received bymankind in general so long as an inhuman social order made a wallbetween man and God, and why, the moment that wall was cast down, therevelation flooded the earth like a sunburst.

  "'If we love one another, God dwelleth in us,' and mark how the wordswere made good in the way by which at last the race found God! It wasnot, remember, by directly, purposely, or consciously seeking God. Thegreat enthusiasm of humanity which overthrew the older and brought inthe fraternal society was not primarily or consciously a Godwardaspiration at all. It was essentially a humane movement. It was amelting and flowing forth of men's hearts toward one another; a rushof contrite, repentant tenderness; an impassioned impulse of mutuallove and self-devotion to the common weal. But 'if we love oneanother, God dwelleth in us,' and so man found it. It appears thatthere came a moment, the most transcendent moment in the history ofthe race of man, when with the fraternal glow of this world ofnew-found embracing brothers there seems to have mingled the ineffablethrill of a divine participation, as if the hand of God were claspedover the joined hands of men. And so it has continued to this day andshall for evermore.

  "Your seers and poets in exalted moments had seen that death was but astep in life, but this seemed to most of you to have been a hardsaying. Nowadays, as life advances toward its close, instead of beingshadowed by gloom, it is marked by an access of impassioned expectancywhich would cause the young to envy the old, but for the knowledgethat in a little while the same door will be opened to them. In yourday the undertone of life seems to have been one of unutterablesadness, which, like the moaning of the sea to those who live near theocean, made itself audible whenever for a moment the noise and bustleof petty engrossments ceased. Now this undertone is so exultant thatwe are still to hear it.

  "Do you ask what we look for when unnumbered generations shall havepassed away? I answer, the way stretches far before us, but the end islost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God, 'who is ourhome,' the return of the individual by the way of death, and thereturn of the race by the fulfillment of its evolution, when thedivine secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. With atear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and,veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the raceis ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. Theheavens are before it."

  There are those who have made strenuous objections to the ideals ofEdward Bellamy on the ground that they are based on nothing betterthan purely material well-being. In the presence of the foregoingutterance can they maintain that attitude?

  SYLVESTER BAXTER.