It is the same with every other institution. There is a big communal restaurant in which each family of the neighborhood has a private room; this is the place where the principal meal is ordered by the family, and served by young conscript waiters. Am I at fault if I point out that this universal hostelry is a little too elaborate and mechanical; that there is more promise of a genuine utopia in Plato’s olives and cheese and beans, simply served, than in the “perfection of catering and cooking” which the new age boasts. So one could go down the line and enumerate the mechanical marvels which take the place of a fully humanized life; marvels like the telephone concerts and sermons which astoundingly anticipate by thirty-odd years the radio broadcasting service which is now a prevalent mania in America. Are these things, as Aristotle would have said, the material bases of the good life, or are they substitutes for the good life? There may have been some doubt as to the answer in Bellamy’s time; but I think there need not be any at present. In so far as these instruments are consonant with humanized purposes they are good; in so far as they are irrelevant they are so much rubbish--idiotic rubbish. A free public library is a good thing; but a free public library devoted exclusively to distributing the novels of Gene Stratton Porter and the uplift books of Mr. Orison Swett Marden would not contribute so much as a useful platitude towards a vivid and stimulating society. There is no escaping the problem of ends and the problem of ends, if I may be permitted a pun, belongs at the beginning. Subordinate to humanized ends, machinery and organization--yes, complicated machinery and organization--have undoubtedly a useful contribution to make towards a good community; unsubordinated, or subordinated only to the engineer’s conceptions of an efficient industrial equipment and personnel, the most innocent machine may be as humanly devastating as a Lewis gun. All this Bellamy overlooked in Looking Backward, and yet--something remains.