SOURCE: Becker, George J. “Edward Bellamy: Utopia, American Plan.” The Antioch Review 14, no. 2 (June 1954): 181-94.

[In the following essay, Becker traces the relationship between materialism and social equality in Looking Backward and presents some of the opposing arguments to Bellamy's ideas.]

To us today Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) is the author of one novel and a tract. All his other work has lost interest for us, but Looking Backward (1888), supported by the elaborated arguments contained in Equality a decade later, remains to please, to challenge, or to dismay. Though that book has meant many things to different readers, its enduring significance is based on its presentation of two related concepts and a corollary drawn from them. The first idea is that of the economy of abundance; the second is that of economic democracy, while the corollary states that basic human nature is good but can be caused to deteriorate or improve by changes in the material environment. None of these ideas is original with Bellamy, but he was wonderfully timely and persuasive in his presentation of them. For, unlike his critical contemporaries, such as William Dean Howells, he sought the humane values of an older America not in a return to simplicity but in the regnant materialism itself, and he believed that by harnessing the forces of the new society the full promise of the American experiment might be achieved.

The fundamental fact about the world of the year 2000 into which Julian West, the hero of Looking Backward, emerges after his long mesmeric sleep is that everybody has not merely enough to keep body and soul together but a sense of margin and luxury, in short, freedom, not from economic responsibility but from the fears engendered by economic scarcity. Such a freedom struck some readers as impossible or immoral, but it remains the fundamental fact which Bellamy presented to his country and the world, a fact squarely in opposition to classical economic theory and current practice, one to which we have only partially accommodated our institutions after sixty years of gradual verification, but one to which our deepest and most spontaneous hopes are tied.

The first way to get more goods, the author discerned, is for more people to be employed in production. At a stroke he doubles the potential producing force by abolishing domestic labor and taking women out into the world. Next he rationalizes the system, reducing duplication and waste in production, and finally he virtually eliminates distributive and promotional activities. He is so confident of the ability of this system to produce in abundance that he is then willing to reduce its productivity in the interest of human well-being. He eliminates the labor of the young: duty to society does not begin until the age of twenty-one. He reduces the working life, making forty-five the normal terminus of a man's working years. He reduces the workday, the work-week, and the work-year in something of the fashion and degree in which reduction has actually taken place since his day. Thus he postulates a national community in which by far the larger part of its members are engaged in productive work only from twenty-one to forty-five at hours and under conditions which in their humanity are completely at variance with those existing in his own time.

It is doubtful that Bellamy knew very much about industrial organization; his remarks about it are notably general, just as his whole approach is theoretical and unbendingly logical. Yet it is to be observed that he is remarkably prescient as to the course of industrial efficiency. Witness such a book as Stuart Chase's The Tragedy of Waste, based largely on experiences of industrial practice and malpractice of the 1920's, which is nonetheless pure Bellamy in its essential ideas of industrial rationalization. Bellamy's most dramatic instances of the elimination of waste are in the areas of retail distribution and domestic economy. Today we go him one better by eliminating even the clerk who writes down the order and we make the customer carry his purchase home, though we have not standardized products or eliminated competing retail outlets to anything like the extent he had in mind. Similarly the household has lost much of its production function, though the communal kitchen seems unlikely of realization, and it is an interesting speculation as to how Bellamy would react to a Bendix. As yet we do not apply electricity to all farm operations by means of cables leading to every field, but certainly farm operations have become notably assimilated to the general industrial pattern.

The result of all this rationalized and streamlined organization as Bellamy envisaged it is a national product permitting the allocation of a credit of about ＄4,000 a year to each adult. When one takes into account various free services and utilities, this ＄4000 represents perhaps as much as ＄6000 in purchasing power of the author's own day and considerably nearer ＄15,000 in terms of our own. Admittedly such figures are of no importance, since Bellamy had no way of accurately assessing what the total national product was or could be. They represent merely his conviction that under proper organization the total would be such that the share of every adult would be large enough to put him beyond want and to give him a condition of life approaching luxury.

At first blush this is the most materialistic of dreams, since the immediate emphasis is on physical abundance and the appeal inevitably is to the desire of most people for the many things they cannot have under actual conditions. The author leads the average reader to the mountaintop and shows him all the good things of the earth, or nearly all, offering them in exchange for allegiance to a new ethic. What is often overlooked, however, is that Bellamy assumes a withering away of the desire for possessions under conditions of economic security. Generous as the annual credit is, the citizen will be unable to purchase things which he does not use without being forced to forego other and more satisfactory expenditures.

In other words, both the pack-rat mentality and the psychology of conspicuous consumption are eliminated under these new conditions. The instant goods no longer represent a store of value, an investment against a rainy day, a hedge against inflation, they lose all value except what they have for use, and it is Bellamy's contention that the individual will need surprisingly few things for use, especially since he will have access to expensive and only occasionally used equipment through rental or some plan of group ownership. From another point of view, to the extent that the pack-rat mentality is an adjunct of conspicuous consumption, it will disappear along with the latter. Collections of diamonds or of postage stamps are made from motives both of investment and of snobbery, but the value of the investment depends upon the continuance of snobbery, and Bellamy's world is a living indictment of the latter, his cardinal point being that there is no longer any need for conspicuous consumption, since there is no one to ape or to impress. Each individual has the same claim on the national product as any other. Thus if he spends all on dress, he has given proof of no special superiority or affluence but merely of an inordinate interest in dress, legitimate if he derives sufficient satisfaction from it, but of no significance otherwise.

Here indeed is contained one of Bellamy's chief indictments of his own society. He charges it with a crude and meaningless materialism. Houses are crammed with a multitude of furnishings which are tasteless and unhealthful. Personal comfort and appearance are sacrificed to the rule of fashion in dress. Human lives are sacrificed and degraded so that a few may have greater accumulations of jewels on their fingers or more gilt on their chairs. The cure, however, is not an austere regimen in the manner of Thomas More, with gold relegated to the manufacture of chamber pots, but more materialism, a generally diffused access to wealth in the real sense, with a consequent recognition of the true valuation of things.

Assuming, then, that the people in Bellamy's world have all reached the level of well-being of Floral Heights or the Little Main Line, the important thing is that they have so wide a margin that they can give up a considerable part of their share of the material product of their society for the sake of self-development. Here again the author's approach is logical and amazingly simple. If, for example, a group of citizens desire to support a magazine catering to their views and interests, they may do so if they abstain from a claim on the national product corresponding to what is lost by withdrawing the magazine's staff from production. The same principle applies to the practice of the arts. There is no provision for subsidized residence in Paris or Greenwich Village. The young writer must produce his first work on his own time. Thereafter he may withdraw from the labor force so long as the public supports him by purchase of his books. Clergymen, artists, writers and lecturers on public affairs and various kinds of entertainers are all maintained in this fashion by groups of supporters who value their services sufficiently to be willing to pay the nation for their withdrawal from production. Educators, physicians, research scientists and other essential nonproducers of tangible goods are maintained directly by the nation, the annual credit of the entire community being reduced proportionately.

So much for the external appearance of the Bellamy economy. It recognizes what the Industrial Revolution has made possible, accepts it gladly as a desirable condition for all, but provides its own brake on overwhelming materialism by showing that there is a level of material well-being beyond which the interest of men will, under normal conditions, shift to nonmaterial activities. It insists that such a condition of self-cultivation can come only after material security has been assured and asserts tacitly that the unhealthful materialism of the late nineteenth century is merely a product of scarcity and would disappear if scarcity were replaced by universal abundance.

Fundamental to a world so organized is the doctrine of equality, the second of Bellamy's major ideas. Whatever its Marxian parallels, this belief springs from a religious, almost mystical, conviction about the brotherhood of man. But unlike others who drank at the Transcendental spring, Bellamy does not place his emphasis on spiritual regeneration of the individual as the first step. Instead he believes in a remolding of the physical conditions of life as a necessary preliminary to the spiritualization of the individual. It is here that faith supersedes reason, with the declaration that by one fundamental change the social corpus can be made whole and sane again. It is here that the author attacks with a vigor astonishing from a man of his gentle nature the abuses which he sees about him and which he believes inescapable because of the existent economic inequality.

This attack is embodied in the most telling rhetorical passages in the two works under discussion, the famous parables or similes. Looking Backward early sets before us a comparison of nineteenth-century society to “a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road” while a few privileged beings rode idly on top. Equally pointed is the parable of the water tank, which is part of the schoolroom discussion of the suicide of the old order in Equality, which contrasts the unwholesome effects of the old economic system with the brotherhood and consequent well-being of the new.

The latter parable contains the kernel of what has come to be called “the religion of solidarity,” which is at the heart of Bellamy's social criticism and social vision. Although it is true that before Looking Backward there is no evidence of explicit and detailed social speculation on his part, this more general aspiration was part of the current of his thought from the very beginning. There is an interesting manuscript printed by A. E. Morgan under the title of “The Religion of Solidarity,” which a marginal comment declares to have been written in 1874, and to set forth “what has been ever since my philosophy of life.” Sentences in it indicate the tenor of Bellamy's thought at that early age and underline the mystical basis of his later writings. It is easy to see how he reaches a doctrine of economic equality from a general statement such as the following: “There is a conscious solidarity of the universe toward the intuition of which we must struggle, that it may become to us, not a logical abstraction, but a felt and living fact. As individuals we shall never be complete. The completest man lacks the completion of the rest of the universe.”

From this fundamental belief both Bellamy's criticism of contemporary society and his concrete program for its regeneration can be seen to flow. An immediate evidence of inequality which he attacks is that between the favored few with seats on the coach and the many who must draw it along the highway—that is, the inequality by which some are allowed to escape their responsibility toward the community and do no productive work, in fact, no work of any kind whatever. Julian West, the phoenix from the ashes of the nineteenth century, has been a man of wealth and leisure. He brings into the twenty-first century a sheaf of securities worth a million dollars which had been his passport to idleness in the nineteenth, only to find such a passport invalid under the new dispensation. Once he is convinced that there is no such thing in civilized society as self-support, he eagerly goes to work, seeking a stake in society in the true sense of doing his part in the gigantic community effort.

While we must admit that Julian's conversion is much too easy, the significant point is that the concept of the social stake has changed from one of privileged ownership setting the owner apart from the nonowner, to one of right flowing from the essential worth and dignity of the individual. The older arrangement is seen to be “a divisive and anti-social influence,” while the virtue of the new interpretation is that it “makes it impossible to hurt another's interest without hurting one's own, or to help one's own interest without promoting equally all other interest.” There can be no inequalities of artificial condition which open certain vocations to some and not to others. While there is an inescapable biological inequality among human beings, it is not compounded by artificial superadditions. True competition is for the first time possible, and all who are able to succeed in any area are allowed to do so.

Equally emphatic is Bellamy's insistence that ownership of wealth must not give superior political advantage to those so endowed. He is at one with the Muckrakers in harping on the fact that wealth confers privilege and begets corruption. The opening chapter of Equality is a textbook demonstration of the impossibility of political equality without economic equality. Julian makes such a poor defense of the former system that his interlocutor at last declares that the capitalists appear to be worse than kings, since the latter at least professed to govern for the welfare of their people. As the argument is developed, we are shown that economic equality is the necessary, obvious, and only basis for the three birthrights promised by the Declaration of Independence. For, asks the author,

What is life without its material basis, and what is an equal right to life but a right to an equal material basis for it? What is liberty? How can men be free who ask the right to labor and life from their fellow-men and seek their bread from the hands of others? … Finally, what is implied in the equal right of all to the pursuit of happiness? What form of happiness, so far as it depends on material facts, is not bound up with economic conditions; and how shall an equal opportunity for the pursuit of happiness be guaranteed to all save by a guarantee of economic equality?

The important lesson to be drawn from history, Bellamy says, is that the American Revolution was negative and incomplete. It and similar uprisings elsewhere sought to rid men of kings and to relieve them of subjection to arbitrary political power, but such an overthrow left no check upon the power of wealth, which became supreme, as it had been striving to become for centuries. Thus the nineteenth century is to be viewed as a period of struggle toward true democracy, the atmosphere becoming more turbulent as it became increasingly apparent that revolutions securing political democracy were only a first step. Bellamy, who is able to float comfortably upon the wave of pseudo-Darwinian optimism, asserts serenely that democracy was not an experiment which could be abandoned, but was rather an evolution which had to be fulfilled. That fulfillment is exemplified in his Utopia, in which there is at last “the use of the collective social machinery for the indefinite promotion of the welfare of the people at large.”

Here we come face to face with the corollary of Bellamy's two major ideas. He is, so far as the chain of causality goes, an out-and-out materialist. Instead of seeking refuge in the concept of some elusive and unchanging entity called human nature, he asserts with wholehearted optimism that material conditions are effective forces and that human nature will vary with them. At a stroke he wipes out the distinction, the opposition, between the ideal and the real which vitiated the effectiveness of much of the social discussion of his day. Instead, he insists that materiality is the inescapable bedrock on which ideality must rest. His conception of the good condition for mankind is one builded upon that rock, and not an elusive will-o'-the-wisp never to be captured because it never comes to earth.

Early in Looking Backward this idea is first introduced when Julian West suggests that there must have been a great change in human nature, only to have Dr. Leete reply that it is the conditions of human life which have changed, and with them the motives of human action. This theme is constantly reiterated. Since it confers security, the new society need not appeal to greed for gain, but can call out the best efforts of its citizens by other types of reward and incentive. Crime, called atavism, has become almost nonexistent, now that the economic taproot of crime has been pulled up. Universal education is justified on the grounds that it eliminates the so-called differences in human nature and gives all men access to a better life, thus making the world better not only for them but for those who live with them. Bellamy is insistent that what he is advocating is merely an extension of a condition that has traditionally existed among members of the privileged castes, a noblesse oblige that now bears upon the whole human race.

What he is saying, in fact, is that what is usually bodied forth by critics, clerical and social, as human nature, is not human nature at all but a degredation of it. His strategy is to summon up the full force of the horrible conditions under which that human nature has had to exist and manifest itself in his own day, calling the society about him a moral Black Hole of Calcutta. The Reverend Mr. Barton characterizes the nineteenth-century man as one who had to “plunge into the foul fight—cheat, overreach, supplant, defraud, buy below worth and sell above, break down the business by which his neighbor fed his young ones, tempt men to buy what they ought not and to sell what they should not, grind his laborers, sweat his debtors, cozen his creditors.” This lesson is brought home by the third of the parables, which likens humanity to a rosebush which has long been weakly struggling for life in a miasmatic bog. Once it is set in “sweet, warm, dry earth,” the vermin and mildew disappear and the bush is covered with beautiful roses whose fragrance fills the world.

This idea is given dramatic statement at the end of Looking Backward, when Julian dreams that his experience of the world of the year 2000 has been itself only a dream and that he is back in the actuality of the earlier Boston. Not only is he dismayed by the physical squalor which he sees as he wanders the streets in agony; it is the sight of the people which breaks his heart: “Their bodies were so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a dead soul within.” The positive side of this contrast is further emphasized in Equality, when the motto of the new civilization is said to be Eritis sicut Deus: thou shalt be like a god.

It is here that the most serious misreading of Bellamy's thought has occurred. Because of the ingenuity and the accuracy of his predictions about the course of material welfare in the future, he has been assailed for his materialism, for setting down a Utopia to which every department store clerk could subscribe. What he actually has in mind is the withering away of absorption in material concerns. His Utopia is not static, as often charged, though its machinery may be static, for it assumes an indefinite expansion and development of the human personality. He builds on the belief that not only is human nature good, given the proper environmental conditions, but that it is capable of endless improvement, and that such development is the proper business of mankind. What is wrong with society as constituted is that it does not permit this growth to the many, whom it has bound to the wheel of a relentless system. Even to the few who are the ostensible beneficiaries of the system, it has denied ultimate grace, since they are hopelessly enmeshed in the false values of their society. Both the imaginative structure of Looking Backward and the careful reasoning of Equality show the primary vision of Edward Bellamy to be that of a human nature capable of flowering beyond ordinary imagination, a human nature which, he lays it down emphatically, it is impossible to define, since it has never had a chance to manifest itself.

Nearly ten years after the publication of the first of these books and a few weeks before the author's death, a reviewer in The Critic declared that no other novel of modern times—not even Trilby—had been so successful, citing the nearly half million copies already sold in the United States alone. Another reviewer in The Chapbook during that year, giving further testimony as to the influence of the book, asserted that nine-tenths of the socialism preached outside the ranks of the labor unions was based on Looking Backward. These remarks are perhaps an understatement. Bellamy's ideas were immediately carried into the public forum and the political arena as a prescription for action. Seeing a world in which many of the wrongs of which they were painfully conscious were put right, his readers clamored that this vision be made fact. The movement of Nationalism which grew out of Looking Backward under the leadership of Thomas Wentworth Higginson was independent of the author, but he could not escape identification with it. As a matter of fact, he wrote frequently for The Nationalist (a monthly magazine first issued by the Nationalist Educational Association in May, 1889, under the editorship of Henry Wallace Austin) and did all that he could, while maintaining his independent position, to advance the movement, which in the economic doldrums of the 1890's became a kind of crusade, contributing no one knows how much to the general movement of Progressivism before the first World War.

One interesting memento of Bellamy's public embroilment is a hastily scrawled copy of a letter sent to John Lloyd Thomas of Chicopee Falls on July 29, 1889, which is among the papers deposited in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. From this we gather that Bellamy had been asked to modify certain passages of his book which were offensive to the Prohibitionists, with the promise that Thomas would then give the book a special recommendation and push it among his followers. Bellamy replies that he thinks it indefensible to modify a view once publicly stated without change of conviction and merely for advantage. He points out that he has already had correspondence on this subject with Frances Willard and that it is his conviction that “Nationalism will offer a more radical cure to the causes of intemperance than could be hoped from any mere legislation. As to whether the nation of the future will or will not interfere with the use of intoxicants by its members, we can safely afford to differ in opinion.” Finally, he insists that the platforms of the Prohibition and other splinter parties are much too narrow, suggesting that from the addition of the principle of human brotherhood in industry “you will command a support you never dreamed of!”

As the Nationalist movement grew in numbers and enthusiasm, Bellamy was bound to attack immediate problems of social legislation and organization. The most notable instance of this sort is a little pamphlet entitled How to Employ the Unemployed in Mutual Maintenance, prepared on the lines of an article which appeared in the Boston Traveller for November 8, 1893, and issued by the Boston Public Library. What he advocated here was later embodied in Equality as a description of how the peaceful economic revolution came about. What is more interesting is the fact that this program bears a striking similarity to the EPIC plan of self-help cooperatives advocated by Upton Sinclair in California during the next major depression.

Crying out against charity for the unemployed, Bellamy in this pamphlet states that all they need in order to be fed, clothed, and sheltered is to be set to work to support one another. Their product is not to go into the general market in competition with goods produced under the wage system but is to be wholly consumed within the group of the unemployed and their families. For this imperium in imperio scrip is to be used, the individual receiving purchasing power only within the special system. As production increases so will the rate of maintenance, though only those who have worked above a specified minimum period will be allowed to share in excess production. The author recognizes that at the outset some discrimination in favor of legal residents of a state may have to be made, but he believes that once the system becomes self-sustaining no such discrimination will be necessary. He lays down the requirement that persons so employed must be considered free and equal citizens with no onus of charity or pauperdom placed upon them. He admits that, “This contemplates a permanent establishment, for it is nonsense to regard the problem of the unemployed as anything but a permanent problem.” He looks forward to a union of farm, factory, store, and dwellings in each settlement, and from the start he proposes that the allowance of each worker be the same without regard for specific performance, women, of course, to share equally with men.

One little known instance of the impact of the Nationalist movement in the area of legislation is worth attention. In 1889 a bill was proposed to the House of Representatives of Massachusetts to allow cities and towns to manufacture and sell gas, a proposal, we are told, “advocated chiefly by representatives of an association known as ‘Nationalists,’ no one appearing for any municipality.” The committee of manufactures of the House studied the proposal and published a report entitled Municipal Control of Commercial Lighting, “Nationalism” Analyzed, under the editorship of its chairman, Alfred Dupont Chandler. One section reports the testimony of Colonel Higginson that the line between Nationalism and Socialism was not clearly drawn. Says the report plaintively: “It seems that already its advocates are hardly agreed as to the meaning of nationalism. And when we bear in mind the schools of socialism, communism, Owenism, Fourierism, Chartism, liberalism, imperialism, anarchism, scientific anarchism, individual anarchism, nihilism, perfectionism, nationalism, and other isms, why should practical legislators be concerned with the reconciliations of all or any of them?”

In the general forum of ideas the impact of Looking Backward was very great. It was frequently discussed in the magazines for some years, and it provoked a large number of rejoinders in book form. Only one of these, William Morris's News from Nowhere, has won a permanent place in literature, but the multitude of others gives testimony to the stir which Bellamy's book made in the world. One of the most serious answers is contained in Looking Forward, published in 1890 by Richard Michaelis, editor of the Chicago Freie Presse. It is a narrative which accepts but debunks the Bellamy world. Specifically, there are charges of graft and favoritism, enslavement of the entire working population, and gross inefficiency, the annual product being only ＄204 per person as against the official figure of ＄4000. Lest these charges appear insufficient, the author tosses in a charge of widespread sexual immorality and ends the book with a scene of spectacular violence. Julian West, needless to say, is relieved to wake up in the Boston of 1887 after all. Completely flippant is My Afterdream, a Sequel to the Late Mr. Edward Bellamy's ‘Looking Backward’, published in London in 1890 under the pseudonym of Julian West. Among many glaring imperfections is the fact that job opportunities are not at all what they are made out to be. Julian finds that his choice is between being an ordinary seaman on a smack in the Newfoundland cod fisheries or becoming an apprentice to the Sewer Board. Even more lamentable, we are tipped off to the fact that the beautiful Edith Leete is a laundress, a condition too ignominious for mention in Looking Backward.

Many of the current discussions took exception to the book as quickening the pulse of economic unrest or contributing to attitudes of pessimism. One of the sharpest criticisms was that of Charles Dudley Warner (Mark Twain's collaborator in The Gilded Age) which appeared in “The Editor's Study” in Harper's for October, 1897. It is Warner's opinion that while Looking Backward was begun as a literary lark, it is now to be feared that the author has come to take himself seriously, though his description of and attack on nineteenth-century society in Equality is “as fantastic as the description of the society into which he awoke.” The book is addressed to the spirit of revolt and the author seems to think that the best way of achieving brotherly love is “to excite the most rancorous hatred of class against class.” Bellamy seems to overlook the existence of an overruling Providence or of design in the universe. “But every era since Christ came has been better than that which preceded it. … Every human being in a civilized society is or may be, but for his vices, better off than he could have been fifty years ago.” Flying in the face of Bellamy's convictions about human nature, Warner continues:

Equality is a mischievous book, because it tends to divert the attention from the serious and awful social and political problems we have to solve, and which we should go at like men and Christians, to the dreams, the impossible fantasies, of feather-headed socialism. … We must have better men and women before we have a much better world. And human nature is not going to be essentially changed by any economic formula.

These are the terms of the perennial debate over Bellamy's ideas and the cause of social amelioration generally. The name of Bellamy may not often be invoked in discussions of economic and social policy today, but his thesis is one to which partial subscription at least is almost universal. All our attention, all our dreaming, looks toward the proliferation of material goods. We have not the slightest intention of turning our backs and taking the alternative road offered by William Morris. We cannot conceive of a good condition for mankind without the gadgetry which stares out at us from the advertisements of every slick-paper magazine. We pity, and on the whole despise, other cultures whose values are perforce erected on a foundation of scarcity. Our own imaginings of Utopia are in terms of a bottle of milk delivered every morning on the doorstep of every Hottentot, and by implication of an electric refrigerator in which to keep it.

We are in less thorough agreement on the second principle of Bellamy's formula, that of economic equality, though we move toward it in devious ways. We attempt to put floors under wages and ceilings on incomes, to take away by taxation what we permit through profit and unearned increment. Our system is neither as neat and logical as Bellamy's, nor, of course, is it by any means as comprehensive as his. But we do move in that direction, inspired less by logic and enthusiasm for principle than by necessity of equilibrium. The whole social security structure of cradle-to-the-grave insurance is in line with the aspiration he set down. Whether he influenced the dreams of people living today is without importance, since it is clear that here too he caught hold of the wave of the future long before it broke upon the shore.

What we lack is the most important ingredient of all, his mystical sense of human solidarity, his religion of humanity. In fact, the current vogue is to be somewhat cynical of the perfectibility of human nature. We are inclined to say that if greed is eliminated as prime motive, it will be replaced by the will to power; that whatever the social matrix of personality, it will never take on the heavenly hues of altruism. But as Burris, the psychologist in Walden Two, the latest American Utopia, would say: That is an experimental question. It is always possible that Edward Bellamy was right in this assumption also, and that experience buttressing faith will vindicate him in the future.