Equality

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.

“I was thinking,” she answered, “how it would have been if your dream had been true.”

“True!” I exclaimed. “How could it have been true?”

“I mean,” she said, “if it had all been a dream, as you supposed it was in your nightmare, and you had never really seen our Republic of the Golden Rule or me, but had only slept a night and dreamed the whole thing about us. And suppose you had gone forth just as you did in your dream, and had passed up and down telling men of the terrible folly and wickedness of their way of life and how much nobler and happier a way there was. Just think what good you might have done, how you might have helped people in those days when they needed help so much. It seems to me you must be almost sorry you came back to us.”

— Edward Bellamy, Equality

Equality (1897) is Edward Bellamy‘s less well-remembered sequel to Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888).

What a pity Bellamy has not lived longer! He would have produced other excellent books. I am positive that were Bellamy to have met an Anarchist who could have explained to him our ideal, he would have accepted it. The authoritarianism which he introduced to his Utopia was useless there and contradictory to the system. It was simply a survival, a concession, a tribute to the past.

— Peter Kropotkin, 1898

Sources

• Bellamy, Edward (1888) Looking Backward 2000-1887
• — (1897) Equality
• Kropotkin, Peter (1898) Obituary for Edward Bellamy, Les Temps Nouveaux (translated in Freedom)