True: corruption and bribe-taking and all the dirty scandals that we associate today with a financial oligarchy would be wiped out in utopia; but this merely means that the defects of the old order would disappear along with its virtues. What would remain would be the defects that arise when a nation is in arms, and when there is no escape, by travel or mental withdrawal, from its institutions; in short, the defects of a state of war. To call this a peaceful community is absurd: one might as well call a battleship a pleasure-craft because a modern one possesses a band and shows motion pictures to the crew. The organization of this utopia is an organization for war; and the one rule that such a community would not tolerate is “live and let live.” If this is the peace that “industrial preparedness” ensures it is scarcely worth having. Any community that liked this state of life would scarcely need the constant exhortation of the recruiting sergeant or the final compulsion of a conscription act. 6 The great part of Looking Backward is a discussion of this perfected form of industrial organization; the manner in which it is worked; and the effects of complete economic equality in doing away with the necessity for the greater part of the legal machinery of the present day, since crimes with an economic motive would almost, according to Bellamy, be unthinkable. Here and there however we have glimpses of the social life of this new age. First of all, there floats before our eyes the picture of a vast body of superannuated persons, who for the most part spend their time in a sort of country-club existence. They can travel, because the other countries in the world are likewise nationalized, and by a simple system of book-keeping foreign credit for goods and personal services can be transferred from one country to another; and they can take up special vocations and hobbies during their superannuated years; but it is equally plain that their work has not done very much to foster intellectual or emotional maturity, since in relation to the citizens the state exists as a “Great White Father”; and there is good reason perhaps for the great interest in sport which characterizes Bellamy’s utopia. Games are organized, apparently, upon lines of industrial guild rivalry; just as one has sports nowadays between rival battleship squadrons perhaps; for “if bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a second, and the nation caters for both.” The demand for bread and circuses, our guide explains, is recognized in the year 2000 as a wholly reasonable one. Both work and play are external to the citizen’s inner trends and interests; and we should not be surprised if an infantile element predominated in the character of this happy republic.