If I have been criticizing Icaria in terms of the last century of political experience, I can only plead that it is because Icaria is so little like Utopia and so much like the actual order of things. It must be prepared to stand fire as a _fait accompli_: indeed, in the early days of the second Russian revolution it came near to being a _fait accompli_--there was more of Cabet than of Marx perhaps in embryonic Soviet Russia! Icaria is essentially not an ideal but an idealization; and it is in order to keep the two from being confused that I have emphasized its little weaknesses. What is good in Icaria is what is good in the institution of an army; what is bad is what is bad in the execution of a war. If the good life could be perpetrated by a junta of busybodies, as Plato would call them, Icaria would be a model community. 4 Looking backward into the future: that was the paradox by which a young New England romancer, Edward Bellamy, concerned like Thoreau and Emerson and the rest of the great Concord school with the well-being of his community, descended from literature to sociology; and stirred the minds of thousands of people in America in much the same fashion that Theodor Hertzka, writing at the same time, stirred his European contemporaries. Having begun to romanticize about reality, Bellamy during the decade that followed the publication of Looking Backward, devoted himself to realizing his romance. In a later work, Equality, he set forth his picture of the New Society of the year 2000 in much greater detail; just as if the popularity of his first work committed him to take up seriously the tasks of the economist and the statesman. The chief pleasure, nowadays, in both of these books is the familiar one of recognition; for if Bellamy did not portray a better future he at any rate, like Mr. H. G. Wells, in his early romances, outlined many parts of a future that has for us, in the twentieth century, become an actuality; a fact which makes us realize very poignantly the limitations of his utopia. In spite of a thin-lipped style, Bellamy handles his story in a neat, workmanlike way, with a certain plausibility and familiarity which doubtless explains the fact that it can still be found, without any difficulty, on the fiction shelves of our circulating public libraries.