FLAPDRAGON.

AN INDUSTRIAL UTOPIA, OR BOSTON A.D. 2000.

Surely it is very characteristic of the days in which we live that their accumulating labour agonies should have impelled an American to try his hand at an industrial Revelation, with Boston as a centre, the year 2000 A.D. as a date, and, as mouthpiece, a demesmerized Bostonian, roused from a trance of 118 years 3 months and 11 days, in an underground water and fire-proof bedroom, by a retired physician, in the presence of his wife and their beautiful daughter. When Plato gave mankind that immortal dialogue known as The Republic, with its ideal of a state whose kings were philosophers and philosophers kings, with its community of women and goods, he had not hit upon the exquisite plan of weaving bis philosophy round a love story ; and we may observe the same defect in Bacon's New Atlantis, More's Utopia, and Harrington's Oceana. Indeed, so far as I know, it was reserved for Edward Bellamy to sweeten the story of an ideal community to the reader's palate by the most human of all things human. "Looking Backward," if not founded on love, is at all events supported on its pinions ; and it matters nothing that the swain is nearly a century and a-half old, while the lady is in the early bloom of maidenhood. I should be sorry to think that, of the many thousands of solid, practical people who have read Mr. Bellamy's little disquisition, anything like the majority have been decoyed into those portions which novel-reading young ladies call the "thick bits," by the interesting scenes between Julian, when released from his trance, and Dr. Leete's daughter ; but I am bound to confess for myself that I waded through a good many of those thick bits in the hope of being suddenly surprised by revelations of love making as practised by Bostonians of the year 2000. I am not at all sure that the book could not have been improved if these revelations had been a little more freely scattered through the treatise, even if the result had been that the Rev. Mr. Barton's sermon had been thereby squeezed out ; for Mr. Bellamy's dialogue has neither grandeur of imagination nor any steadfast dramatic power. He is ingenious, and, in a sense, graphic ; but his flight is near the ground, and he seems to be absolutely destitute of humour. A few " bulls " may probably be ascribed to the atavism which his name suggests, and some not infrequent inelegancies and solecisms may be the result of haste, rapture, or in- tensity, for Mr. Bellamy writes with all the freedom and unconventionality of earnestness. He is indeed not far from believing in his own allegory, and in its defence he has already taken up arms more than once. He is an enthusiastic champion of the doctrines of the New Nationalist Party, the party of revolt from the Triumphant Democrats or Carnegies of the States, and he begins where Henry George leaves off. He maintains that every human being is born into the world a debtor to society for all he or she can do—a creditor to society for all he or she needs. To devise a plan for giving effect to these reciprocal obligations is the problem which the New Nationalists have taken it to be their business to solve. Mr. Bellamy, improving prodigiously on Plato's trance-vision of Er, the son of Armenius, solves the problem by simply mesmerising Mr. Julian West from 1887 to 2000, A.D., and making society slide quietly in the interval into an industrial millennium, which is duly explained to the reader by dialogues carried on with no stint of platitudinous confidence and complacency. It has been objected to the social evolution described by Mr. Bellamy, that it is one which would take about 75 centuries rather than a single century to accomplish. I can see no force in the objection. Seventy-five centuries, or, for that matter, 7500 centuries, would be as impotent to produce the inconceivable change in man's nature postulated by Mr. Bellamy as necessary to permit the operations of his industrial army, as one century. On the other hand, Dr. Leete might have found it a particularly hard job to bring back to consciousness a gentleman who had been in the trance state between seven and eight thousand years.

The introduction to Boston society in the year 2000 is by no means the worst part of the book. Mr. Julian West is a well-to-do young resident of that city, who is engaged to marry an equally well-to-do Bostonienne (Edith Bartlett), but first one strike in one building trade, then another in another, and finally a sequence of such strikes, compel him to defer his marriage, while to marry before his new house is ready for occupation is not to be thought of. Wherefore, one evening, after saying good-bye to Edith, he repairs to his underground tank, summons his regular animal magnetiser to prescribe for his   insomnia, and does not wake up until the 10th of September, 2000.

To get up with one's senses fit for use after a good sound slumber of ordinary length is hard enough ; and but few of his readers, therefore, will find fault with Mr. Bellamy for making Julian West's awakening a most delicate and protracted affair. He succeeds, however, in getting his eyes wide open at the 15th page of the book, and, with hardly any intermissions worth mentioning, keeps them open to the end, when he wakes up from a rather tedious nightmare to find Edith (not Edith Bartlett, but Edith Leete) in the garden "fresh as the morning and gathering flowers." To her he swiftly descends, and kneeling before her with his face in the dust, confesses with tears how little he was worthy, &c, &c... The allegory of the Coach most of Mr. Bellamy's readers agree in thinking very happy. Society at the end of the nineteenth century is compared to a "prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road." The driver was Hunger, and the breezy and comfortable top seats were occupied by passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. The competition for these seats was very keen, everyone seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself, and leave it to his child after him. Though easy, the seats were insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons would slip off and fall to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and drag the coach on which they had ridden so pleasantly before. Those who rode on the coach frequently expressed commiseration for those who had to pull it, especially when they came to a bad place in the road, or to a particularly steep hill. " At such times the desperate straining of the team, their agonised leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope, and were trampled in the mire, makes a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured." From these fragments the philosophic reader who is not familiar with Mr. Bellamy's allegory of the coach will he able to judge for himself how far nineteenth century society presented in Æsopian guise for the contemplation of those who live in it, has been truthfully fabled or feebly caricatured : but it needs no philosophic tum of mind to recognise some really masterful touches in the picture—touches, indeed, which, apart from the love making episodes already adverted to, should be enough to encourage the generous reader to explore all the crazy dialogue which follows, in the hope of making further discoveries of hidden treasures. The dialogue is generally held on the top of Dr. Leete's house, built on the site of that inhabited by Julian West, which had been destroyed by a fire during the early part of his trance, which, however, had not extended to the underground bed- chamber. It is satisfactory, at this early stage of the revelation, to be told that men will drink wine and smoke cigars, and dress in the year 2000, pretty much as they did a century before ; likewise that there will be no chimneys and no smoke in the transfigured Boston ; that wars and rumours of wars will be things of the degraded past, that there will be no soldiers (in our sense of the word) and no armaments, military or naval; furthermore, that there will be no lawyers of either branch of the profession, no politicians, no  parties, no demagoguery, no corruption, no log-rolling, no private stores, no banks, no merchants, no such things as wages, or money, bank or promissory notes, cheques, or bills of exchange, or credit, no street musicians, or next door pianos, no housework, and therefore no domestic servants, no   fires or lighting (electricity being the substitute for both), no beggars, no gaols (all criminal cases being treated as cases of inherited taint and sent to the hospitals). Property in land is to be utterly abolished, and nobody is to own any chattel property beyond a few personal belongings. If umbrellas will not be wholly abolished, there will be but little need for them as protection against rain, for one comprehensive umbrella will be unfolded across the streets from building line to building line whenever the heavens threaten a downpour, and under this vast awning the Boston utopians will ply their necessary avocations, and be able to "do their block" in a thunder storm. These are some of the relics of the barbarous nineteenth century which Mr. Julian West is able to look backward on; but if one may hazard an opinion on the strength of the things included in this list, Boston A.D. 2000 will not be a place either for a local optionist or a single taxer to live in except under dire compulsion, and with much violence to his conscience. Nor will the followers of Mona Caird, if there be any then, be happy in the Boston of that time, for the institution of marriage is to be retained, and concubinal option will have no show.   And as a man on strike there will be an impossibility, we must infer that the unions are now in their millennial or perihelion period and are to disappear one by one into the void like bad meteors or comets portending only trouble to man and beast.

Those who read "Looking Backward" for edification, instruction, support, or sympathy in the laying of a new basis in social life will pass lightly over the episodes which attract others, and fasten on the expositions of Dr. Leete, the philosophic interlocutor. They will oftentimes recognise the doctrines of advanced socialist writers of the present century, living and dead, thrown into a dramatic form, and in the Boston society of the chosen epoch, they will have no difficulty in detecting the phalanstere of Fourier on an enlarged scale. The fundamental principle in the Bellamian Boston-Utopia is that all American human beings are to be organised as one solid industrial army, graded according to capacities, for working in higher or lower planes. This army is divided into 10 corps d'armée, each under a general of division, and these 10 generals form a Council of Industrial Peace and over them presides the President of the United States. Each division of the army is subdivided into so many guilds, or battalions, of workmen, with a general allotted to each. A group of allied trades is an industrial department, and furnishes a general of division to the army and the Council of the President. The President rises from the ranks, from private to lieutenant thence to colonel (there never were any captains in America, nor majors, and it appears that there never will be), and so upward. Retired members of these guilds over service age (45) elect these 10 generals of division from the generals of guilds, and the President himself is elected from this decemvirate by votes of all the men of the nation (women are not to be on the supreme roll) who are net connected with the industrial army, for reasons which are difficult to understand. And once in every five years the president makes a report to congress, which is called to receive it, and is then dissolved. This quisquennial report seems to be a cut-and dried sort of thing—something like a collection of departmental reports in one volume. If congress approves of the report, congress (not the original electors) elects the reporter for a further term (the presidential term is five years). Service in this industrial army, as Dr. Leete tells us, is rather a matter of course than of compulsion. "It is regarded as so absolutely natural and reasonable that the idea of its being compulsory has ceased to be thought of," adding "that the entire social order is so wholly based upon and deduced from it that if it were conceivable that a man could escape from it, he could be left with no possible way to provide for his existence." His fellow-citizens would not boycott him, but he would boycott himself into suicide. A private in this army begins service at the age of 21; the Education Department claiming him up to that age; and the period of service is 21 years, i.e., up to 45 years of age. "After 45, while  discharged from labour, the citizen still remains liable to special calls in case of emergencies, till he reaches the age of 55. To prevent too large a number of young men from following any particular industrial avocation, the administration is to be ever on the alert to watch the current, and by making the hours of labour in different trades to vary according to their arduousness, the attractions of all trades are equalised. The class of common labourers is recruited from the novices, and everybody has to spend three years in this class. If at the end of this term any citizen feels that he can do better with his brains than his muscles, the professions are open to him, and he can enter the school of technology, medicine, art, music, histrionics, and higher liberal learning. But the professional curriculum is made so stiff, and the discipline and training so strict, that no one enters a professional school for the purpose of avoiding hard work. The principal business of the army is to keep the national storehouses sufficiently well supplied to provide for the whole community. As there was neither trading nor money, a substitute was discovered in the form of " Credits," which are pasteboard cards issued for a certain number of dollars : not that the substantial dollar really existed, but it was necessary to adopt some denomination as a sort of symbol, and dollars and cents were the readiest. Every citizen's purchases at the National stores are pricked off out of certain tiers of squares in these cards. This "credit" corresponds to the holder's share of the annual product of the nation, and Is given at the beginning of the year to every citizen; but if any very extravagant Bostonian should spend more than the value of his credit in any year, he is able by suffering a heavy discount to obtain a limited advance on his next year's share. There is much other interesting detail respecting the working of the "Credit Card" system, the shopping arrangements at the National Stores, the operation of the "sample" method of distributing goods from the stores, the very ingenious and economical contrivances for laying on State music by telephone to every house, the musical entertainments lasting all day and all night, and the citizen having only to turn a button near his bed, if in bed, or in his drawing-room if not, to fill the room with any kind of vocal or instrumental melodies he may desire to hear. Then there is the institute of the Public Washhouse and Cuisine, the Public Refectory, where all dine, though many take the minor meals at home, and the telephonic sermon which a lazy or invalid citizen is able to enjoy in bed, if he is so minded. Again, there is the State system of publishing newspapers and books, and paying pressmen and authors by credit cards and remission from industrial service, the editor of every newspaper being elected—altogether a highly ingenious series of devices. The citizen goes in for athletic sports, for yachting, baseball, and similar recreations, not during boyhood or youth, but after he is mustered out of the army ; consequently, all people look forward to old age as the period of enjoyment. The average age is 85 or 90.   The Boston utopian criminal System is simplicity itself. There is only one crime known, and it is treated in hospitals, there being no such thing as a gaol in the country. This crime is "Atavism," or the recurrence of an ancestral taint ; and when any person is so unfortunate as to be accused of this offence, he generally pleads guilty, for such a thing is hardly known as for a man to tell a lie, even in a plea. If he pleads not guilty he is tried by Judges without a jury, one Judge prosecuting, the other defending him; and it is necessary that both prosecutor and advocate agree to the verdict. After this it is easy to believe that there are no law schools among this happy people, also that the lot of a Boston policeman may be a happy one, and equally easy to believe that no legislation is required. But perhaps of all the social and economic difficulties solved in "Looking Backward," the evolution of large businesses—of syndicates, pools, and trusts, and all other combinations whereby capital was able in the nineteenth century to crush all smaller rivals and to absorb others—into one vast State co- operative organisation, will at this present time attract most attention. The amazing point in the evolution is that it is settled without bloodshed or violence of any kind.

DUCDAME.

 The Sydney Morning Herald  6 September 1890,