Looking Backward, 2000-1898

Front matter

Google to make the world's books discoverable online.

Il has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one thai was never subject

to copy right or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books

Author's Preface

Lmwa as we do in the dosing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social older at onee so simple and logical that it seems bat the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old. No historical fact is, how* ever, better established than that till nearly the end of the nineteenth century it was the general belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking social consequences, was destined to last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does it seem that so prodigious a moral and material transformation as has taken place since then could have been accomplished in so brief an interval!