"In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of all is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is never excessive; care for one's self and one's family, anxiety as to livelihood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life—all these influences, which once did so much to wreck the minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more... Insanity, for instance, which in the nineteenth century was so terribly common a product of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared, with its alternative, suicide."
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Science fiction authors from the United StatesPolitical activistsJournalists from MassachusettsNovelists from MassachusettsChristian socialists
Original Language: English
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Ch. 21.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edward_Bellamy
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Edward Bellamy
2000 – 1887
Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 – May 22, 1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of at least 165 "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's political ideas and working to make them a practical reality.
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