 poverty, every tear of pity, every humane impulse, every generous enthusiasm,
every true religious feeling, every act by which men have given effect to their
mutual sympathy by drawing more closely together for any purpose, have
contributed from the beginnings of civilization. That this long stream of
influence, ever widening and deepening, is at last about to sweep away the
barriers it has so long sapped, is at least one obvious interpretation of the
present universal ferment of men's minds as to the imperfections of present
social arrangements. Not only are the toilers of the world engaged in something
like a world-wide insurrection, but true and humane men and women, of every
degree, are in a mood of exasperation, verging on absolute revolt, against
social conditions that reduce life to a brutal struggle for existence, mock
every dictate of ethics and religion, and render well-nigh futile the efforts of
philanthropy.
    As an iceberg, floating southward from the frozen North, is gradually
undermined by warmer seas, and, become at last unstable, churns the sea to yeast
for miles around by the mighty rockings that portend its overturn, so the
barbaric industrial and social system, which has come down to us from savage
antiquity, undermined by the modern humane spirit, riddled by the criticism of
economic science, is shaking the world with convulsions that presage its
collapse.
    All thoughtful men agree that the present aspect of society is portentous of
great changes. The only question is, whether they will be for the better or the
worse. Those who believe in man's essential nobleness lean to the former view,
those who believe in his essential baseness to the latter. For my part, I hold
to the former opinion. Looking Backward was written in the belief that the
Golden Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not far away. Our children
will surely see it, and we, too, who are already men and women, if we deserve it
by our faith and by our works.
                                                                 EDWARD BELLAMY.
 

                                     Notes

1 In accounting for this state of mind it must be remembered that, except for
the topic of our conversations, there was in my surroundings next to nothing to
suggest what had befallen me. Within a block of my home in the old Boston I
could have found social circles vastly more foreign to me. The speech of the
Bostonians of the twentieth century differs even less from that of their
cultured ancestors of the nineteenth than did that of the latter from the
language of Washington and Franklin, while the differences between the style of
dress and furniture of the two epochs are not
