Note 313 — TABLE I.

Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" is one of the same class of books to which Bacon's "New Atlantis," More's "Utopia," etc., belong, and may be read with much pleasure and profit along with them. It is really a looking forward to an ideal commonwealth, in which the labor troubles and despotisms of to-day shall be adjusted on the same principle as the political troubles and despotisms of the last century were settled; namely, the principle that each citizen shall be industrially the equal of every other, as all are now political equals. It is a very famous book, and has been called the greatest book of the century, which, happily for the immortality of Spencer and Darwin, Carlyle and Ruskin, Parkman and Bancroft, Guizot and Bryce, Goethe and Hugo, Byron and Burns, Scott and Tennyson, Whittier and Lowell, Bulwer and Thackeray, Dickens and Eliot, is only the judgment of personal friendship and blissful ignorance. But while the book cannot feel at home in the society of the great, it is nevertheless a very entertaining story, and one vastly stimulative of thought. The idea of a coming industrial democracy, bearing more or less analogy to the political democracy, the triumph of which we have seen, is one that has probably occurred to every thoughtful person; and in Bellamy's book may be found an ingenious expansion of the idea much preferable to the ordinary socialistic plans of the day, though not wholly free from the injustice that inheres in all social schemes that do not aim to secure to each man the wealth or other advantage that his lawful efforts naturally produce. (U. S., 19th cent.)