Looking Ahead! A tale, etc. (Second edition, corrected.)

Front matter

A TALE OF ADVENTURE. NOT BY THE AUTHOR OF " LOOKING BA CKIVARD. " SECOND EDITION LONDON: HENRY & CO., 6, BOUVERIE STREET, E.C. PRICE ONE SHILLING. PRINTED IN ENGLAND. LOOKING AHEAD! A TALE OF ADVENTURE. SECOND EDITION.— Corrected and Revised. LOOKING AHEAD! A TALE OF ADVENTURE. (Not by the Author of " Looking Backward.") ILLUSTRATED BY W. G. R. BROWNE. London : HENRY & CO., 6, Bouverie Street, E.C. PRICE ONE SHILLING. The rights of reproduction and translation are reserved. ,

Preface

TO THE SECOND EDITION. In gratefully acknowledging the generally favorable reception accorded to the first edition of this little effort to oppose the advancing tide of Philosophical Socialism, I may confess myself indebted to certain candid friends for some of that wholesome criticism which goes far to enable an author to see himself as others see him. One suggestion only of those that have been made seems of sufficient weight to justify me in offering a few words of preface to this second edition. It is this : " that the last three chapters should be re-written on the ground that they are laboured ; that the conclusions drawn from the application of Socialistic principles to Society, as we have known it, are too arbitrary, and that, even if it be admitted that the effect would be to plunge us back into feudalism, it is unlikely that such a result would be developed within the limits of a human life, however pro longed."

All this I humbly and regretfully concede, and venture to offer the following apology for my sins : I have felt constrained, however unwillingly, to assume the mantle of definite prophecy, not from any ambition to play the part of prophet — that I dis claim utterly — but because any conclusions expressed in vague

PREFACE.

. VI. generalities would obviously have laid me open to the retort that I had not offered, and could not offer, any practical evidence that the application of Socialistic principles would have any deleterious effect at all upon Society. Feeling myself thus constrained to develop a definite scheme of result, I had it, further, open to me to choose any one of the various schemes which leap, almost uncalled, to the imagination, in circumstances like those that are under contemplation in this book. I chose the scheme which seemed to me not only to be the most reasonable and probable in itself, but also to possess by far the strongest historical sanction. Of many instances that might be quoted, let us take the more prominent case of Eome. The fall of that splendid civilization — by a process somewhat akin to, though less sudden than, that imagined in my tale— led to as deep and degraded a feudalism in Italy as can be paralleled in any other European country, having no such height to fall from.

That I have suggested the accomplishment in fifty or sixty years of a process which, in the case of Eome, occupied an infinitely longer time, may, I hope, be accepted as an exercise of that artist's license which, in certain cases, is I believe extended to authors ; the more so as the structural necessities of my story and not my will constrained me. ALFEED MOERIS. London, April, 1892. CONTENTS. PACK CHAPTER T. A Norfolk Farm-hand ...... i

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