Bellamy. It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system was made on a higher ethical basis that there was any prospect that it would be achieved.

Encyclopædia. Above all as the tendency of the present order is to give the victory to cheapness it may be asked whether competition, the economic form of the struggle for existence is really such a potent and sure element of progress. Human progress has undoubtedly been attained through the struggle for existence, but the struggle has been essentially one of men united in society of tribe against tribe, city against city, nation against nation, race against race.

Bellamy. The next of the great wastes was that from competition. The producers of the 19th century were not like ours working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community.

So much for the Encyclopædia, and now once more for old Plato himself.

Plato.

Marriages must be strictly regulated, and as in the case of dogs or game fowl we must keep up the purity of the breed. The best must marry the best and the worst the worst, the children of the former being carefully reared, while any offspring of the latter must be exposed.

Bellamy. For the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection with its tendency to transmit the better types of the race and let the inferior types drop out has unhindered operation. Every

generation is sifted through a little finer mesh than the last.

Plato. The intemperate desire of riches and the license and extravagance thus encouraged do their own work in the state until you find grasping misers and ruined spendthrifts. Meanwhile the lower orders grow turbulent and their insubordination soon brings matters to a crisis.

Bellamy. Directly or indirectly the desire for money was the motive of all this crime. Want tempted the poor, lust of greater gains the well-to-do. Looking back we cannot wonder at the desperation of men.

Plato. Marriages are to be strictly regulated; their object is to produce a noble and healthy offspring.

Bellamy. Can you think of any service constituting a stronger claim on the nation's gratitude than bearing and nursing the nation's children?

Plato. Children belong more to the state than to their parents.

Bellamy. The account of every child, you must understand, is always with the nation directly and never through any intermediary, except, of course, to a certain extent parents act for children as guardians. Plato. As it is trade carries with it the stamp of dishonor. There are to be no tricks of trade.

Bellamy. It was the merest chance if persons not experienced in shopping got the value of their money. It was the business of clerks to induce people to buy what they didn't want. They were hired for the purpose of getting rid of goods.

Plato. Crime in a great measure is a sort of moral blindness. We should heal the distemper of the criminal soul.

Bellamy. You now see why the word "ativism" is used for crime. We have no jails nowadays. All cases of ativism are treated in the hospitals.

Plato. The state springs from the mutual needs of men whose simplest outfit will require food, shelter and clothing.

Bellamy. 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.

But worse and worse, and more humiliating if possible for this great and original novelist is the remarkable resemblance in style and feature of his book to a still more recent publication, to wit: "The Diothas, Or a Far Look Ahead," which was published in 1883 by G. P. Putnam's Sons.

In the "Diothas" the author puts his hero by mesmerism into the 96th century just as Bellamy, by a similar process has injected his hero into the 20th, and from that standpoint pictures a new civilization.

How original and fresh it all is, the working over in "Looking Backward" this "Diothian" slush, much of it copied verbatim!

The same sort of common, or coöperative eating house in both, with victuals furnished boarders on orders by telegraph, and then the dirty dishes gathered by machinery and returned to the cleaning depot to be

washed and wiped at the public expense by the National Government! And then the little love story of Ismar Theusan and Reva Diotha, how sweetly it is reproduced, copied, and appropriated in substance by Bellamy in his love episode of West and Edith Bartlett!

And further as the family in "Diotha" after breakfast touch an electric button to bring them sweet harmonic sounds produced by artists from the other side of the globe, so Bellamy on page 273 makes Dr. Leete show how, "you can hear the sermon to-day by going to church or by staying at home." "Most of our preaching, like our musical performances, is not in public but delivered in acoustically prepared chambers connected by wire with the subscribers' houses." And of such is the kingdom of modern novel-making!

But why extend these parallelisms indefinitely? In a note to his lecture, "Alcohol and its Effects," Horace Greeley said: "The writer does not pretend to know anything on the subject of temperance which others have not known and well said before him. He acknowledges his obligations for ideas herein presented to Sylvester Graham, B. Parsons and several others besides those he has expressly quoted in these pages.

Glorious old Reformer! What a worthy example he thus set for Bellamy to follow. Had he done so every idea between the covers of "Looking Backward" would have been credited to some one other than himself.

We hear of Bellamy's theories. Bah! As well might a preacher of the Gospel, taking for his text

Christ's Sermon on the Mount, pose as the inventor of a new religion.

We hear of organizations being made to carry out in practice Bellamy's plans. Bah!

The world has been-full of such schemes from the time of Aristophanes down to the more practical attempted solution of his mad theories that have developed time and time again into coöperative societies having for their object a more unrestrained enjoyment of love, or some charlatan escape from the toil and pain of labor.

Need this comparison of ideas be carried farther?

But this paper was not written in any sense to argue for or against the socialistic theories of "Looking Backward." Communism and socialism may or may not be the final best outcome of the aspirations of mankind. Be that as it may, the fact this article is intended to make clear is that in "Looking Backward" there is nothing whatever except a rehash amounting clearly to plagiarism of the old-time arguments, theories and sophistries of socialism. Beginning with Plato and Aristophanes, and running down through Sir Thomas More and Fourier, to the lesser lights like Owen, the Shakers, and the Brook farm fraternity, the ideas of "Looking Backward" have been worked over and over in every possible shape until it does seem very wonderful that so old a thing can be passed off at this day as new. Of course an old subject may be treated in such an original manner as to merit the praise of originality, but when every idea from beginning to end