EDWARD BELLAMY Sci-Fi Boxed Set. Edward Bellamy

not give over. Still I strove with them. Tears poured from my eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate. I panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately afterward found myself sitting upright in bed in my room in Dr. Leete’s house, and the morning sun shining through the open window into my eyes. I was gasping. The tears were streaming down my face, and I quivered in every nerve.

      As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to see the heaven’s vault spread above him, so it was with me, as I realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream, and my presence in the twentieth was the reality.

      The cruel sights which I had witnessed in my vision, and could so well confirm from the experience of my former life, though they had, alas! once been, and must in the retrospect to the end of time move the compassionate to tears, were, God be thanked, forever gone by. Long ago oppressor and oppressed, prophet and scorner, had been dust. For generations, rich and poor had been forgotten words.

      But in that moment, while yet I mused with unspeakable thankfulness upon the greatness of the world’s salvation and my privilege in beholding it, there suddenly pierced me like a knife a pang of shame, remorse, and wondering self-reproach, that bowed my head upon my breast and made me wish the grave had hid me with my fellows from the sun. For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help on the deliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived in those cruel, insensate days, what had I done to bring them to an end? I had been every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a worshiper of Chaos and Old Night, as any of my fellows. So far as my personal influence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder than to help forward the enfranchisement of the race which was even then preparing. What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me, to rejoice in a day whose dawning I had mocked?

      “Better for you, better for you,” a voice within me rang, “had this evil dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream; better your part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation, than here, drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose husbandmen you stoned”; and my spirit answered, “Better, truly.”

      When at length I raised my bowed head and looked forth from the window, Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and was gathering flowers. I hastened to descend to her. Kneeling before her, with my face in the dust, I confessed with tears how little was my worth to breathe the air of this golden century, and how infinitely less to wear upon my breast its consummate flower. Fortunate is he who, with a case so desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful.

      Equality

       Table of Contents

Edward Bellamy

Table of Contents

       Preface

       Chapter I. A sharp cross-examiner

       Chapter II. Why the revolution did not come earlier

       Chapter III. I acquire a stake in the country

       Chapter IV. A twentieth-century bank parlor

       Chapter V. I experience a new sensation

       Chapter VI. Honi soit qui mal y pense

       Chapter VII. A string of surprises

       Chapter VIII. The greatest wonder yet-fashion dethroned

       Chapter IX. Something that had not changed

       Chapter X. A midnight plunge

       Chapter XI. Life the basis of the right of property

       Chapter XII. How inequality of wealth destroys liberty

       Chapter XIII. Private capital stolen from the social fund

       Chapter XIV. We look over my collection of harnesses

       Chapter XV. What we were coming to but for the revolution

       Chapter XVI. An excuse that condemned

       Chapter XVII. The revolution saves private property from monopoly

       Chapter XVIII. An echo of the past

       Chapter XIX. "Can a maid forget her ornaments?"

       Chapter XX. What the revolution did for women

       Chapter XXI. At the gymnasium

       Chapter XXII. Economic suicide of the profit system

       Chapter XXIII. "The parable of the water tank"

       Chapter XXIV. I am shown all the kingdoms of the Earth

       Chapter XXV. The strikers

       Chapter XXVI. Foreign commerce under profits; protection and free trade, or between the devil and the deep sea

       Chapter XXVII. Hostility of a system of vested interests to improvement

       Chapter XXVIII. How the profit system nullified the benefit of inventions

       Chapter XXIX. I receive an ovation

       Chapter XXX. What universal culture means

       Chapter XXXI. "Neither in this mountain nor at Jerusalem"