is written for the express purpose of inducing the reader to forget
for the nonce that they are so to him. One word more. The almost
universal theme of the writers and orators who have celebrated this
bi-millennial epoch has been the future rather than the past, not the
advance that has been made, but the progress that shall be made, ever
onward and upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable destiny.
This is well, wholly well, but it seems to me that nowhere can we find
more solid ground for daring anticipations of human development during
the next one thousand years, than by "Looking Backward" upon the
progress of the last one hundred.

That this volume may be so fortunate as to find readers whose interest
in the subject shall incline them to overlook the deficiencies of the
treatment is the hope in which the author steps aside and leaves Mr.
Julian West to speak for himself.

LOOKING BACKWARD.

CHAPTER I.

I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. "What!"
you say, "eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen
fifty-seven, of course." I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was
about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after
Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east
wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period
marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the
present year of grace, 2000.

These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add
that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no
person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what
promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I
earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will
undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him
of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of
justifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when I
was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in
the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day,
or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were
to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred
to modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or
nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences
between them were far greater than those between