Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887

orm some general conception of the changes in the arrangements of

ension of the functions of government is

epeated, "where i

nment, strictly speaking, were limited to keeping the peace and defending the

mutilation, wasting their treasures the while like water; and all this oftenest for no imaginable profit to the victims. We have no wars now, and our governments no war powers, but in order to protect every citizen against hunger, cold, and nakedness, and provide for all his physical and mental needs, the function is assumed of

any assumption by government of the charge of the national industries. We should have thought that no arrangement could be worse than to entrust the p

ged now. We have no parties or politicians, and as for demagoguery a

f must have changed

ers. Under such circumstances it seems almost strange that you dared entrust them with any of your affairs. Nowadays, on the contrary, society is so constituted that there is absolutely no way in which an official, however ill-disposed, could possibly make any profit for himself or any

"After the nation had assumed conduct of the mills, machinery, railroads, farms, mines, and capital in general of the country, the labor

er one direction was the complete solution of what was, in your day and under your system, justly regarded as the insoluble labor problem. When the nat

he principle of universal military service, as it

duty of every citizen to contribute his quota of industrial or intellectual services to the maintenance of the nation was equally evident, though it was not until the nation became the employer of labor that citizens were able to render this sort of service with any pretense either of universality or equity. No organization of labor was possible when the

ose, is compulsory up

contemptible person who should need compulsion in such a case. Nevertheless, to speak of service being compulsory would be a weak way to state its absolute inevitableness. Our entire social order is so wholly based upon and deduced from

vice in this indust

the close of the course of education at twenty-one and terminating at forty-five. After forty-five, while discharged from labor, the citizen still remains liable to special calls, in case of emergencies causing a sudden great increase in the demand for labor, till he reaches the age of fifty-five, but such calls are rarely, in fact almost never, made. The fifteenth day of October o