Looking Backward

by Edward Bellamy

the conditions of human life have changed, and with them the motives of human action. The organization of society with you was such that officials were under a constant temptation to misuse their power for the private profit of themselves or others. Under such circumstances it seems almost strange that you dared entrust them with any of your affairs.

Your workshops were filled with children and old men, but we hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation. The period of industrial service is twenty-four years, beginning at the close

of the course of education at twenty-one and terminating at forty-five. After forty-five, while discharged from labor, the citizen still remains liable to special calls, in case of emergencies causing a sudden great increase in the demand for labor, till he reaches the age of fifty-five,

The fifteenth day of October of every year is what we...

It is the business of the administration to seek constantly to equalize the attractions of the trades, so far as the conditions of labor in them are concerned, so that all trades shall be equally attractive to persons having natural tastes for them. This is done by making the hours of labor in different trades to differ according to their arduousness.

all in turn shall serve the rest,

how was it that you did not see that you were robbing the incapable class of their plain right in leaving them unprovided for?”

It is the worst thing about any system which divides men, or allows them to be divided, into classes and castes, that it weakens the sense of a common humanity.

the newspaper press is by no means the only or, as we look at

it, the best vehicle for serious criticism of public affairs.

how much easier it is to do things the right way than the wrong.

the desire for money, which then meant every good thing, was the motive of all this crime,

So it is with the men and women with whom we mingle in the relations of society, whose voices are always in our ears, whose behavior in innumerable ways affects our enjoyment, — who are, in fact, as much conditions of our lives as the air we breathe, or any of the physical elements on which we depend.

“To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that between different natural species, which have no means of communication.

there are three main grounds on which our educational system rests: first, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.”

The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community.

Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy, while combination is the secret of efficient production;

That any person should be dependent for the means of support upon another would be shocking to the moral sense as well as indefensible on any rational social theory.

the

rich in general, were responsible for the misery of the world.