of
its God-given possibilities--achieve a progress unexampled and
marvelous.

It is now twelve years since the writing of 'Looking Backward' changed
one of the most brilliant of the younger American authors into an
impassioned social reformer whose work was destined to have momentous
effect upon the movement of his age. His quality had hitherto been
manifest in romances like 'Doctor Heidenhof's Process' and 'Miss
Ludington's Sister,' and in many short stories exquisite in their
imaginative texture and largely distinguished by a strikingly original
development of psychical themes. Tales like 'The Blindman's World' and
'To Whom This May Come' will long linger in the memory of magazine
readers of the past twenty years.

'Doctor Heidenhof' was at once recognized as a psychological study of
uncommon power. "Its writer," said an English review, "is the lineal
intellectual descendant of Hawthorne." Nor was there in America any
lack of appreciation of that originality and that distinction of style
which mark Edward Bellamy's early work. In all this there was a strong
dominant note prophetic of the author's future activity. That note was
a steadfast faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature, a sense
of the meaning of love in its true and universal sense. 'Looking
Backward,' though ostensibly a romance, is universally recognized as a
great economic treatise in a framework of fiction. Without this guise
it could not have obtained the foothold that it did; there is just
enough of the skillful novelist's touch in its composition to give
plausibility to the book and exert a powerful influence upon the
popular imagination. The ingenious device by which a man of the
nineteenth century is transferred to the end of the twentieth, and the
vivid dramatic quality of the dream at the end of the book, are
instances of the art of the trained novelist which make the work
unique of its kind. Neither could the book have been a success had not
the world been ripe for its reception. The materials were ready and
waiting; the spark struck fire in the midst of them. Little more than
a decade has followed its publication, and the world is filled with
the agitation that it helped kindle. It has given direction to
economic thought and shape to political action.

Edward Bellamy was born in 1850,--almost exactly in the middle of the
century whose closing years he was destined so notably to affect. His
home has always been in his native village o