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Funtestiq!
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Bellamy was born in 1850 in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. The son of a Baptist minster, he studied law, entered the bar, but never practiced. He worked as a journalist, writer and editor for the Springfield Union. He later moved to the New York Evening Post.The Nationalist (1889-91) and the New Nation. The ideas he advocated in his novel Looking Backward, written in 1881 and published 1887, contributed a great deal to the populist and socialist movement. Among his other works were The Duke of Stockbridge, Dr. Heidenhoff's Process, Miss Ludington's Sister, and Equality. "One would have taken for granted that as December 25th drew near the police would be doubled and detectives in citizens' clothes stationed on every corner to arrest any who should so much as whisper that tremendous name of Jesus. For what treason so black could there be to the social state of that day as any act in honor of the mighty leveler who laid the axe at the root of all forms of inequality by declaring that no one should think anything good enough for another which he did not think good enough for himself, and who struck at the heart of the lust of mastery when He said that our strength measured our duties to others, not our claims on them, and that there was no field for greatness but in serving? It would plainly be the only reasonable supposition that if there were any who loved this revolutionary doctrine, so irreconcilable with the existing order, they must live in hiding. "How, then, shall we imagine the stupefaction of our contemporary, who, thus expectant, should awaken on Christmas morning to hear the day ushered in by a chorus of jubilant bells and popular rejoicing? How shall we measure his mounting amazement on going forth to find the disciples of the Golden Rule celebrating the praises of its author, not in caves or forest depths, but in lordly temples in the high places of the city, and what, above all, shall he say when he observes that the rich and the rulers not only permit, but encourage, the toiling masses who serve them to render homage to the memory of Him who came expressly to preach deliverance to the captive, to set at liberty them that are bruised, and to break every yoke save that of love? "But no. In that day of which I write, one had but to pause a moment and listen to catch the deep voice of perpetual lamentation, the cry of the blood of Abel against his brother, which ceasing not from the beginning, has only in these last days been hushed in blessed silence. And if our contemporary, for this reason, did not recognize the dolorous sound, yet he would need but to look about him to see that this generation which so loudly cried, 'Lord, Lord!' had yet no more mind to do the things Christ said than the generation He addressed. On every hand the contrast of pomp and poverty, the full and the hungry, the clothed and the naked -- the picture that broke Christ's heart--remained. "Our whole order is but an application of that rule so simple that a child could not fail to deduce the result from the terms. What is the rule? Simply that if people would live well together every one should see that every other fares as well as he. Individual efforts are inadequate to secure this end. If the Golden Rule is to be realized in society the only method is a collective guarantee from all to each of what each owed individually to every other, namely, as good treatment as he himself had, which means as applied practically, the guarantee by all to all of equality in everything that touches material and moral conditions. So our state is founded, and ingrates, indeed, should we be found if we did not celebrate Christmas as founder's day in honor of Him who gave us in a phrase the master--key of the political, the humane and the economic problems. "In a society such as that of the 19th century, based upon inequalities and existing for the benefit of the few at the cost of the many, it was, of course, out of the question to celebrate Christmas in the way we do, as the world's great emancipation day and feast of all the liberties." |
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