Chapter XIV

. There are other important utopian contributions, such as those by William Morris and Edward Bellamy. In _News from Nowhere_, William Morris (1834–1896), an English artist and socialist, describes his native England as a perfected society under a régime of socialism. Because of its American setting, Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_ will be presented in some detail in the following paragraphs.

In recent decades the utopian postulates of Edward Bellamy (1850–1898), in _Looking Backward_ and _Equality_ have had a wide reading. The author was the first American to command attention in the field of utopian thought. Bellamy presents a plan of industrial organization on a national scale with individuals sharing equally in the products of labor, or in public income, in the same way that “men share equally in the free gifts of nature.” Bellamy protests against an economic order whose chief evil is summed up in the following question: How can men be free who must ask the right to labor and to live from their fellows, and seek their bread from the hand of others?

Society is likened to a gigantic coach to which the masses of humanity are harnessed, toiling along a very hilly and sandy road. The best seats are on top of the coach. The occupants of the elegant seats are constantly in fear of falling from their cushions of ease, splendor, and power,--and hence their interest in the toilers.

In _Looking Backward_ the entire social process is made an expression of service. Service is a matter of course, not of compulsion. No business is so fundamentally the public’s business as the industry and trade on which the livelihood of the public depends.[X-29] Therefore, to intrust industry and commerce to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly “similar to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and nobles for their personal glorification.”

Buying and selling are pronounced anti-social. They are an education in self-seeking at the expense of others.[X-30] Citizens who are so trained are unable to rise above a very low grade of civilization.[X-31] They are sensible chiefly to such motives as fear of want and love of luxury. For buying and selling, credit books are substituted which are good at any public warehouse. In place of higher wages, the chief motives to activity are honor, men’s gratitude, the inspiration of duty, patriotism, the satisfaction of doing one’s work well--in other words, the same motives that now influence, for example, the members of the teaching profession.

The arduousness of the trades are equalized, so that all shall be equally attractive, by making the hours of labor in different trades to differ inversely according to arduousness.[X-32] Everyone works as a common laborer for three years and then chooses an occupation--agriculture, mechanics, the professions, art. The working life is twenty-four years long, from the ages of twenty-one to forty-five, after which all may devote themselves to self-improvement and enjoyment, but subject to emergency calls along industrial and other social service lines.

Bellamy challenges an individualism which incapacitates people for co-operation. He builds his society upon solidarity of race and brotherhood of man. He does not fear corruption in a society “where there is neither poverty to be bribed nor wealth to bribe.”[X-33]

All cases of criminal atavism are treated in hospitals. There are no jails. Under capitalism nineteen-twentieths of misdemeanors are due to economic inequality. The remainder are the outcropping of ancestral traits. In Bellamy’s ideal society there are no private property disputes and no lawyers.

The educational system in _Looking Backward_ does not educate some individuals highly and leave others untrained.[X-34] It gives everyone “the completest education that the nation can give,” in order that individuals may enjoy themselves, in order that they may enjoy one another, and in order that the unborn may be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.

Bellamy holds that human nature in its essential quality is good, not bad, and that men are naturally generous, not selfish; pitiful, not cruel; godlike in aspirations, moved by divine impulses of goodness, images of God and not the travesties upon Him which they have seemed.[X-35] It is our economic order which has fostered shameless self-assertion, mutual depreciation, a stunning clamor of conflicting boasts, and a stupendous system of brazen beggary.

In three utopias, H. G. Wells portrays societary conditions that are kinetic rather than static and world-wide rather than local in scope.[X-36] While the author provides a changed economic system, socialistic in nature, he urges that changed social attitudes are also needed.

In the utopian social thought that has been presented in this chapter and in similar works which are not mentioned here there is generally displayed (1) a common weakness of impracticability under current circumstances, (2) an over-emphasis upon simply changing the economic order, and (3) static rather than dynamic principles. The strength of utopian social thought is found (1) in its drastic criticism of current social evils, (2) in its relative harmlessness at the given time, (3) in the force of its indirect suggestion, (4) in the widespread hearing which it secures, and (5) in its social idealism.

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