"Your contemporaries, with their mutual throat-cutting, knew very well what they were at. The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, he at the same time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental. It was just as feasible and as common to increase one's private hoard by practices injurious to the general welfare. One's worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan of making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the article he produced was what each particular producer desired."
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Ch. 22
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Looking Backward: 2000–1887
Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a utopian science fiction novel (1888) written by Edward Bellamy, a U.S. journalist and writer. It was the third largest bestseller of its time. Over 162 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up to discuss and propagate the book's ideas, in the U.S. alone, stimulating an almost instant political mass movement.
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