kward

Edward Bellamy, American social reformer, who sprang into fame in
the last decade of the nineteenth century by his book, "Looking
Backward," was born in Massachusetts, on March 25, 1850. Trained
for the Bar, he became a journalist, and devoted his pen to the
propaganda of socialism. After the unprecedented success of his
socialist novel, in which he describes a suppositious twentieth
century revolution from the standpoint of a hypnotised sleeper
awakened in 2000 A.D., his modest home at Chicopee Falls became a
recognised centre of the socialist movement in the United States.
"Looking Backward" was published in 1888, and was followed by
"Equality," in which he expounded his political doctrines in
dialogue form, the story being treated merely as a sequel to the
earlier book, and entirely subordinated to the more serious aim. We
have here preferred to classify "Looking Backward" as a work of
philosophy, and not as fiction. Bellamy's championship of the
rights of the disinherited, and his enlightened ideas, conveyed in
a by no means unimaginative style, gained him many friends and
sympathisers. Bellamy died on May 22, 1898.

_I.--The Great Change_

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 26, one day after
Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I, Julian West, first
breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at
that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterising
it in the present year of grace, 2000.

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
labour of others, rendering no sort of service in return. Why, you ask,
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 the yield of which his descendants had ever since
lived. "Interest on investments" was a species of tax on industry which
a person possessing or inheriting money was then able to levy, in spite
of all the efforts to put down usury.

I cannot do better than compare society as it then was to a prodigious