f Chicopee Falls,
Massachusetts, now a portion of the city of Chicopee, one of the group
of municipalities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He lived on
Church Street in a house long the home of his father, a beloved
Baptist clergyman of the town. His clerical ancestry is perhaps
responsible for his essentially religious nature. His maternal
grandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one of the early pastors of
Springfield, and among his paternal ancestors was Dr. Joseph Bellamy
of Bethlehem, Connecticut, a distinguished theologian of revolutionary
days, a friend of Jonathan Edwards, and the preceptor of Aaron Burr.
He, however, outgrew with his boyhood all trammels of sect. But this
inherited trait marked his social views with a strongly
anti-materialistic and spiritual cast; an ethical purpose dominated
his ideas, and he held that a merely material prosperity would not be
worth the working for as a social ideal. An equality in material
well-being, however, he regarded as the soil essential for the true
spiritual development of the race.

Young Bellamy entered Union College at Schenectady, but was not
graduated. After a year in Germany he studied law and entered the bar,
but never practiced. A literary career appealed to him more strongly,
and journalism seemed the more available gateway thereto. His first
newspaper experience was on the staff of the New York 'Evening Post,'
and from that journal he went to the Springfield 'Union.' Besides his
European trip, a journey to Hawaii by way of Panama and a return
across the continent gave a considerable geographical range to his
knowledge of the world at large.

It is notable that his first public utterance, made before a local
lyceum when a youth in his teens, was devoted to sentiments of social
reform that foreshadowed his future work. When 'Looking Backward' was
the sensation of the year, a newspaper charge brought against Mr.
Bellamy was that he was "posing for notoriety." To those who know the
retiring, modest, and almost diffident personality of the author,
nothing could have been more absurd. All opportunities to make money
upon the magnificent advertising given by a phenomenal literary
success were disregarded. There were offers of lecture engagements
that would have brought quick fortune, requests from magazine editors
for articles and stories on any terms that he might name, proffered
inducements from publishers to write a new book and to take advantage
of the