Equality

Equality by Edward Bellamy (1897)

In Edward Bellamy's *Equality*, Julian West, a man transported from the nineteenth century into a twentieth-century American society, recounts to Edith Leete a nightmare in which he dreamed his awakening in the new world was itself only a dream and he had returned to preach economic equality to his own contemporaries. Edith questions him closely about why the nineteenth-century masses, who held the ballot and constituted the political majority, never used that power to end their own poverty, and Julian explains that both rich and poor believed equality of wealth impossible, so the poor met reform talk with hopeless disbelief and the rich with mockery or sighs. Edith presses further, showing through relentless Socratic questioning that nineteenth-century "free and equal" citizens were equal only nominally in law and suffrage, while capitalists—unelected and accountable to no one—actually controlled the economic system, bought elections through campaign funds, and dominated officeholders dependent on capital's patronage. Dr. Leete joins them and explains the historical theory behind this: democracy first arose merely as a negative protest against monarchy, and only slowly, through a "positive phase" culminating in the great Revolution of the early twentieth century, did people grasp that popular sovereignty logically demanded collective control of production and distribution, not just political forms. That morning, Congress declares Julian a citizen of the Republic with a guest's exemption from compulsory service, and Dr. Leete takes him to open a citizen's bank account, where the superintendent, Mr. Chapin, explains the credit system: every citizen receives an equal, non-transferable annual credit (Julian's being $1,075.41 for the remainder of the year), unspendable surplus lapsing rather than being hoarded, and accounting vastly simplified compared to nineteenth-century bookkeeping since no debts, interest, or private contracts exist. Feeling a new desire to work, Julian visits the Industrial Exchange, where Dr. Leete describes how young people choose occupations through preference blanks, ranking, and district assignments, with a Transfer Department for later exchanges, and learns that a citizen who refuses all service is simply denied its benefits and may retreat to a reservation, though such cases are now essentially unknown. Edith then spends the day with Julian, revealing that she and her mother wore old-style skirted clothing at first only to avoid startling him, and now she changes into modern dress, delighting him with its ease and grace. They tour paper-process factories, where garments, dishes, and household fabrics are cheap paper products discarded rather than laundered, and a factory superintendent explains that fashion is no longer dictated by class emulation but arises freely from individual taste under conditions of economic equality. Passing a preserved nineteenth-century tenement kept as a grim historical memorial, they retreat to the seashore near Julian's old Nahant property, where he muses that Edith seems like a dream figure brought back with him. That night, after a swim in a warmed, tide-powered sea-water natatorium, Edith promises to keep Julian from dreaming again of his old life. The next morning Julian opens his old bank safe before the assembled Leete family, and Dr. Leete uses its contents—mortgages, factory shares, railroad and government bonds, gold coin—to expound the modern critique of nineteenth-century property and labor relations: that wage labor was in substance a disguised, indirect servitude enforced by economic want rather than force, often worse than chattel slavery in its degradations (industrial deaths, prostitution born of poverty, self-selling for hire); that all wealth's productive power derives overwhelmingly from the "social organism" rather than individual effort, so its fruits rightfully belong to the collective; and that the pre-Revolution property system, resting mainly on unearned inheritance, could claim no genuine moral basis in individual desert. Edith recites a piece of revolutionary-era literature, "the Masters of the Bread," depicting workers, professionals, clergy, women, and children all begging capitalists for the right to serve them in exchange for bread. The doctor recalls how, after the Revolution, the people burned a vast mass of the old financial securities in a symbolic bonfire on the site of the former New York Stock Exchange, a spot now marked by a commemorative pillar and flame, and mildly regrets the archival loss. The conversation closes on the absence of any legal limit under the old system to how much land or wealth a single individual or family might have monopolized, potentially even the whole earth, and on the unresolved question of how the beneficiaries of that system justified it to their own consciences.

By Edward Bellamy · First published 1897 · Genre: Science Fiction, Utopian and Dystopian, Political · 38 chapters · 207,851 words

First lines

With many expressions of sympathy and interest Edith listened to the story of my dream. When, finally, I had made an end, she remained musing.

"What are you thinking about? " I said.

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Equality is listed on Textopian as a novel by Edward Bellamy, dated 1897 CE.

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Utopian Fiction · Social Commentary · Economic Reform · Feminist Themes · Racial Equality · Class Struggle · Progressive Politics · American Literature · 19th Century Novel · Dystopian Elements · Speculative Fiction · Social Justice

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