EDWARD BELLAMY Sci-Fi Boxed Set. Edward Bellamy
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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
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 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 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 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