Chapter 18

Looking Backward: 2000-1887

by Edward Bellamy

CHAPTER 18, LOOKING BACKWARD: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy


That evening I sat up for some time after the ladies had
retired, talking with Dr. Leete about the effect of the plan of
exempting men from further service to the nation after the age
of forty-five, a point brought up by his account of the part taken
by the retired citizens in the government.

"At forty-five," said I, "a man still has ten years of good
manual labor in him, and twice ten years of good intellectual
service. To be superannuated at that age and laid on the shelf
must be regarded rather as a hardship than a favor by men of
energetic dispositions."

"My dear Mr. West," exclaimed Dr. Leete, beaming upon me,
"you cannot have any idea of the piquancy your nineteenth
century ideas have for us of this day, the rare quaintness of their
effect. Know, O child of another race and yet the same, that the
labor we have to render as our part in securing for the nation the
means of a comfortable physical existence is by no means
regarded as the most important, the most interesting, or the
most dignified employment of our powers. We look upon it as a
necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully devote
ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the intellectual
and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life.
Everything possible is indeed done by the just distribution of
burdens, and by all manner of special attractions and incentives
to relieve our labor of irksomeness, and, except in a comparative
sense, it is not usually irksome, and is often inspiring. But it is
not our labor, but the higher and larger activities which the
performance of our task will leave us free to enter upon, that are
considered the main business of existence.

"Of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific,
artistic, literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one
thing valuable to their possessors. Many look upon the last half
of life chiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts; for travel,
for social relaxation in the company of their life-time friends; a
time for the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies
and special tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of
recreation; in a word, a time for the leisurely and unperturbed
appreciation of the good things of the world which they have
helped to create. But, whatever the differences between our
individual tastes as to the use we shall put our leisure to, we all
agree in looking forward to the date of our discharge as the time
when we shall first enter upon the full enjoyment of our
birthright, the period when we shall first really attain our
majority and become enfranchised from discipline and control,
with the fee of our lives vested in ourselves. As eager boys in
your day anticipated twenty-one, so men nowadays look forward
to forty-five. At twenty-one we become men, but at forty-five we
renew youth. Middle age and what you would have called old
age are considered, rather than youth, the enviable time of life.
Thanks to the better conditions of existence nowadays, and
above all the freedom of every one from care, old age approaches
many years later and has an aspect far more benign than in past
times. Persons of average constitution usually live to eighty-five
or ninety, and at forty-five we are physically and mentally
younger, I fancy, than you were at thirty-five. It is a strange
reflection that at forty-five, when we are just entering upon the
most enjoyable period of life, you already began to think of
growing old and to look backward. With you it was the
forenoon, with us it is the afternoon, which is the brighter half
of life."

After this I remember that our talk branched into the subject
of popular sports and recreations at the present time as com-
pared with those of the nineteenth century.

"In one respect," said Dr. Leete, "there is a marked difference.
The professional sportsmen, which were such a curious feature
of your day, we have nothing answering to, nor are the prizes for
which our athletes contend money prizes, as with you. Our
contests are always for glory only. The generous rivalry existing
between the various guilds, and the loyalty of each worker to his
own, afford a constant stimulation to all sorts of games and
matches by sea and land, in which the young men take scarcely
more interest than the honorary guildsmen who have served
their time. The guild yacht races off Marblehead take place
next week, and you will be able to judge for yourself of the
popular enthusiasm which such events nowadays call out as
compared with your day. The demand for `panem ef circenses'
preferred by the Roman populace is recognized nowadays as a
wholly reasonable one. If bread is the first necessity of life,
recreation is a close second, and the nation caters for both.
Americans of the nineteenth century were as unfortunate in
lacking an adequate provision for the one sort of need as for the
other. Even if the people of that period had enjoyed larger
leisure, they would, I fancy, have often been at a loss how to pass
it agreeably. We are never in that predicament."