into it a hero and a heroine, and
somehow the warm beating of their hearts and the stolen glances in their
eyes breathe into the dry dust of economic argument the breath of life.
Nor was ever a better presentation made of the essential program of
socialism.

It is worth while then, as was said in the preceding chapter, to
consider Mr. Bellamy's commonwealth as the most typical and the most
carefully constructed of all the ready-made socialisms that have been
put forward.

The mere machinery of the story can be lightly passed over. It is
intended simply as the sugar that lures the random bee. The hero, living
in Boston in 1887, is supposed to fall asleep in a deep, underground
chamber which he has made for himself as a remedy against a harassing
insomnia. Unknown to the sleeper the house above his retreat is burned
down. He remains in a trance for a hundred and thirteen years and awakes
to find himself in the Boston of the year 2000 A. D. Kind hands remove
him from his sepulcher. He is revived. He finds himself under the care
of a certain learned and genial Dr. Leete, whose house stands on the
very site where once the sleeper lived. The beautiful daughter of Dr.
Leete looks upon the newcomer from the lost world with eyes in which, to
the mind of the sagacious reader, love is seen at once to dawn. In
reality she is the great-granddaughter of the fiancee whom the sleeper
was to have married in his former life; thus a faint suggestion of the
transmigration of souls illuminates their intercourse. Beyond that there
is no story and at the end of the book the sleeper, in another dream,
is conveniently transported back to 1887 which he can now contrast, in
horror, with the ideal world of 2000 A. D.

And what was this world? The sleeper's first vision of it was given him
by Dr. Leete, who took him to the house top and let him see the Boston
of the future. Wide avenues replace the crowded, noisy streets. There
are no shops but only here and there among the trees great marble
buildings, the emporiums from which the goods are delivered to the
purple public.

And the goods are delivered indeed! Dr. Leete explains it all with
intervals of grateful cigar smoking and of music and promenades with the
beautiful Edith, and meals in wonderful communistic restaurants with
romantic waiters, who feel themselves, _mirabile dictu_, quite
independent.

And this is how the commonwealth operates. Everybody works or at least
works until the a