Chapter 24

Looking Backward: 2000-1887

by Edward Bellamy

CHAPTER 24, LOOKING BACKWARD: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy


In the morning I went down stairs early in the hope of seeing
Edith alone. In this, however, I was disappointed. Not finding
her in the house, I sought her in the garden, but she was not
there. In the course of my wanderings I visited the underground
chamber, and sat down there to rest. Upon the reading table in
the chamber several periodicals and newspapers lay, and thinking
that Dr. Leete might be interested in glancing over a Boston
daily of 1887, I brought one of the papers with me into the
house when I came.

At breakfast I met Edith. She blushed as she greeted me, but
was perfectly self-possessed. As we sat at table, Dr. Leete amused
himself with looking over the paper I had brought in. There was
in it, as in all the newspapers of that date, a great deal about the
labor troubles, strikes, lockouts, boycotts, the programmes of
labor parties, and the wild threats of the anarchists.

"By the way," said I, as the doctor read aloud to us some of
these items, "what part did the followers of the red flag take in
the establishment of the new order of things? They were making
considerable noise the last thing that I knew."

"They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of
course," replied Dr. Leete. "They did that very effectually while
they lasted, for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the
best considered projects for social reform of a hearing. The
subsidizing of those fellows was one of the shrewdest moves of
the opponents of reform."

"Subsidizing them!" I exclaimed in astonishment.

"Certainly," replied Dr. Leete. "No historical authority nowadays
doubts that they were paid by the great monopolies to wave
the red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people
up, in order, by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms.
What astonishes me most is that you should have fallen into the
trap so unsuspectingly."

"What are your grounds for believing that the red flag party
was subsidized?" I inquired.

"Why simply because they must have seen that their course
made a thousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend.
Not to suppose that they were hired for the work is to credit
them with an inconceivable folly.[4] In the United States, of all
countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point
without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation, as
the national party eventually did."


[4] 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
any one, though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect.


"The national party!" I exclaimed. "That must have arisen
after my day. I suppose it was one of the labor parties."

"Oh no!" replied the doctor. "The labor parties, as such, never
could have accomplished anything on a large or permanent scale.
For purposes of national scope, their basis as merely class
organizations was too narrow. It was not till a rearrangement of
the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for
the more efficient production of wealth, was recognized as the
interest, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of rich and
poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong,
men and women, that there was any prospect that it would be
achieved. Then the national party arose to carry it out by
political methods. It probably took that name because its aim
was to nationalize the functions of production and distribution.
Indeed, it could not well have had any other name, for its
purpose was to realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur and
completeness never before conceived, not as an association of
men for certain merely political functions affecting their happiness
only remotely and superficially, but as a family, a vital
union, a common life, a mighty heaven-touching tree whose
leaves are its people, fed from its veins, and feeding it in turn.
The most patriotic of all possible parties, it sought to justify
patriotism and raise it from an instinct to a rational devotion, by
making the native land truly a father land, a father who kept the
people alive and was not merely an idol for which they were
expected to die."