sed to rest the halcyon life of Mr. Bellamy's charming
commonwealth.

_VI.--How Mr. Bellamy Looked Backward_

THE reading public is as wayward and as fickle as a bee among the
flowers. It will not long pause anywhere, and it easily leaves each
blossom for a better. But like the bee, while impelled by an instinct
that makes it search for sugar, it sucks in therewith its solid
sustenance.

I am not quite certain that the bee does exactly do this; but it is just
the kind of thing that the bee is likely to do. And in any case it is
precisely the thing which the reading public does. It will not read
unless it is tempted by the sugary sweetness of the romantic interest.
It must have its hero and its heroine and its course of love that never
will run smooth. For information the reader cares nothing. If he absorbs
it, it must be by accident, and unawares. He passes over the heavy tomes
filled with valuable fact, and settles like the random bee upon the
bright flowers of contemporary romance.

Hence if the reader is to be ensnared into absorbing something useful,
it must be hidden somehow among the flowers. A treatise on religion must
be disguised as a love story in which a young clergyman, sworn into holy
orders, falls in love with an actress. The facts of history are imparted
by a love story centering around the adventures of a hitherto unknown
son of Louis the Fourteenth. And a discussion of the relations of labor
and capital takes the form of a romance in which the daughter of a
multi-millionaire steps voluntarily out of her Fifth Avenue home to work
in a steam laundry.

Such is the recognized method by which the great unthinking public is
taught to think. Slavery was not fully known till Mrs. Stowe wrote
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the slow tyranny of the law's delay was taught
to the world for ever in the pages of "Bleak House."

So it has been with socialism. No single influence ever brought its
ideas and its propaganda so forcibly and clearly before the public mind
as Mr. Edward Bellamy's brilliant novel, "Looking Backward," published
some thirty years ago. The task was arduous. Social and economic theory
is heavy to the verge of being indigestible. There is no such thing as a
gay book on political economy for reading in a hammock. Yet Mr. Bellamy
succeeded. His book is in cold reality nothing but a series of
conversations explaining how a socialist commonwealth is supposed to
work. Yet he contrives to bring