The preface to Looking Backward is dated: “Historical Section Shawmut College, Boston, December 26, 2000.” In that preface the work is presented as an avowed romance which will enable the readers of 2000 to realize the gaps that separate them from their ancestors, and to value the prodigious “moral and material” transformation that has taken place in a few generations. Julius West is a person whom our Shawmut historian invents, to bridge the gap between the two eras. Julius West, a young man of wealth, sensitive to the ignominy of his position, and feeling that, as a “rich man living among the poor, an educated man among the uneducated,” he “was like one living in isolation among a jealous and alien race.” In order to overcome his insomnia West sleeps in a vaulted room in the foundations of his house, and gets put to sleep by a hypnotist; and so by a dramatic oversight he hibernates for 113 years, and awakens among strange faces. Needless to say, West has a love affair in the old world which is carried on in the new, through a descendant of the girl he meant to marry; and it is equally needless to observe that he reawakens to the world of 1887 as soon as the institutions of 2000 have been described and the love affair has been resolved. Let us take West’s muzziness, his amazement, and his sense of isolation for granted, and follow him as he explores his new environment. 5 If Plato cavalierly disposes of the labor problem of the Republic by permitting things to remain pretty much as they were, Bellamy makes the solution of labor organization and the distribution of wealth the key to every other institution in his utopia. In the United States of 1887 the growing organization of labor and the aggregation of capital into trusts were the two chief economic factors: Dr. Leete, Julius West’s host, pictures how this aggregation and combination were continued until, by a mere shift of gears, “the epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust.” In a word, “the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they had organized for political purposes.” Was there any violence in this transition? Ah no! everything had been prepared beforehand by public opinion, the great corporations had gradually trained everybody into an acceptance of large-scale organization, and the final step of merging all the big corporations into a national corporation occurred without a jar. With the assumption by the nation of the mills, machinery, railroads, farms, mines, and capital in general, all the difficulties of labor vanished, for every citizen became by virtue of his citizenship an employee of the government, and was distributed according to the needs of industry.