Looking Backward

accepted the money measure for it, and renounced all clear claim to be judged by any other. The sordid taint which this necessity imparted to the noblest and the highest sorts of service was bitterly resented by generous souls, but there was no evading it. There was no exemption, however transcendent the quality of one’s service, from the necessity of haggling for its price in the marketplace. The physician must sell his healing and the apostle his preaching like the rest. The prophet, who had guessed the meaning of God, must dicker for the price of the revelation, and the poet hawk his visions in printers’ row. If I were asked to name the most distinguishing felicity of this age, as compared to that in which I first saw the light, I should say that to me it seems to consist in the dignity you have given to labor by refusing to set a price upon it and abolishing the marketplace forever. By requiring of every man his best you have made God his taskmaster, and by making honor the sole reward of achievement you have imparted to all service the distinction peculiar in my day to the soldier’s. ↩

I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the people, and obtainable only at an expenditure of time and red tape calculated to discourage any ordinary taste for literature. ↩

I fully admit the difficulty of accounting for the course of the anarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidized by the capitalists, but at the same time, there is no doubt that the theory is wholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at the time by anyone, though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect. ↩

I may say that Dr. Leete’s warning has been fully justified by my experience. The amount and intensity of amusement which the young people of this day, and the young women especially, are able to extract from what they are pleased to call the oddities of courtship in the nineteenth century, appear unlimited. ↩

Colophon

Looking Backward
was published in 1888 by
Edward Bellamy.

This ebook was produced for
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by
Allen Shull,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2008 by
Jana Srna, David T. Jones, Alexander Bauer, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
The Willimantic Thread Factory,
a painting completed circa 1893 by
Julian Alden Weir.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

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