Edward Bellamy

“ About two years ago I had read his book, misleadingly entitled "Looking Backward," when it really looks forward and predicts the status of humanity a hundred years from now. The views presented were so novel, optimistic, and, as I thought, conceivable, that, in spite of my great regret that he should in those halcyon days still represent wine and cigars as luxuries, I wrote to his publishers asking who, where, and what this Edward Bellamy might be. ”

“ A life-long student of the New Testament, I had long since believed that competition was not the higher law, hence not the holy and immutable principle that old-school Presbyterians among political economists claim it to be. ”

“ I believe a man must have a daughter of his own before he really learns how to sympathize with women in their difficult relations to life. Now I do not propose that my boy shall get ahead of his little sister in opportunity, so far as I can influence the forms of society. ”

“ So then I wrote him, saying that his central thought that government should in a future age take the same relation to industry that it now holds to war, namely, afford to every one all of life's comforts in exchange for every one's industrial service, seemed to one most interesting, and not by any means chimerical. ”

“ Our mills are full of children, twelve to fourteen years old, stunted in body and mind. They are required by law to be in school twenty weeks in the year, while well-to-do children have thirty-five; and then these poor creatures stop at fourteen! ”

“ But why not let the municipality be itself that corporation? We want more humane conditions for the employee; corporations don't furnish those conditions, and they will not. We want children kept in school, instead of being sent out to earn money ”

“ Little by little changes will be wrought out, as for instance the nationalization of railways, not by confiscating stocks, as some have ignorantly supposed, but by the United States becoming the great receiver alike of solvent and insolvent, and paying dividends on a reasonable valuation. ”

“ In like manner, coal mines would be turned over, paying a suitable interest to the present owners and doing away with artificial rates. They now have artificial rates because they shut down in order to raise the price of coal ”

“ I learned that his wife is from a W. C. T. U. family, her mother being one of the active workers in Springfield, Mass. It was inevitable that the development of monopolies should develop a movement of this kind. Classes can only be offset by masses. A Jay Gould demands an Edward Bellamy. ”

“ But the working people are confederating: Knights of Labor, Locomotive Engineers, Trainsmen, etc., are going to work together after a little, and thus condense their power. We who believe in nationalism are forming clubs in all the centres, and we have two papers: 'The Dawn,' edited by Rev. ”

“ Both are already self-supporting, and both spread our propaganda far and wide. Women are very friendly to our movement. Miss Anne Whitney, the famous sculptor, opened her parlors on Beacon Street to us ”