What remains in Looking Backward is the honest passion that inspired the man; the play of generous impulses; the insistence that there is no fun for an ordinarily imaginative person in dining with Dives whilst Lazarus hangs around the table. Bellamy wanted everyone to be equally educated, so that everyone might be his companion; he wanted everyone to be decently fed and sheltered; he wanted to take his share in the dirty work and to see that accidents of wealth did not keep other people from taking theirs. He wanted private life to be simple and public life to be splendid. He wanted men and women to mate with each other without permitting this relationship to be compromised by obligations to a father, a mother, or the butcher, the baker, and the grocer. He wanted the generous, the just, and the tender-hearted to be as well endowed as the cold-hearted, the greedy, and the self-seeking. He pleaded for an absence of artificiality and restraint in the relations of the sexes; for such a candor as has perhaps come into fashion again--thank heaven!--today, a candor which permits women physical freedom in dress, and a spiritual freedom in exhibiting their love, and giving it freely. All this is to the good. I do not question Bellamy’s fine motives; I question only the outlets he imagined for them. There is a breach between Bellamy’s conception of the good life and the structure he erected to shelter it. This breach is due, I believe, to an over-emphasis of the part that wholesale mechanical organization, directed by a handful of people, would play in such a reconstruction. If Bellamy sometimes exaggerated the bad in modern society, with its muddle of competitive privileges, he likewise overestimated the good that it contained; and he was more than fair to the present order of things when he made the future so closely in its image. CHAPTER NINE How William Morris and W. H. Hudson renew the classic tradition of utopias; and how, finally, Mr. H. G. Wells sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings them into contact with the world of the present. CHAPTER NINE 1 It would be a pretty sad thing if the Utopias of the nineteenth century were all of a piece with those of Buckingham and Bellamy. In general we may say that all the utopias of reconstruction had a deadly sameness of purpose and a depressing singleness of interest; and although they saw society whole, they saw the problem of reconstructing society as a simple problem of industrial reorganization. Fortunately, the utopias of escape have something to contribute which the utopias of reconstruction lack; and if William Morris, for example, seems too remote from Manchester and Minneapolis to be of any use, he is by that token a little nearer the essential human realities: he knows that the chief dignity of man lies not in what he consumes but in what he creates, and that the Manchester ideal is--devastatingly consumptive.