"Edward Bellamy. Lookimg Backward From 2000 to 1887" - читать интересную книгу автора

they would have troubled themselves extremely little about
those who dragged the coach.

I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women
of the twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are
two facts, both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first
place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other
way in which Society could get along, except the many pulled at
the rope and the few rode, and not only this, but that no very
radical improvement even was possible, either in the harness, the
coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always
been as it was, and it always would be so. It was a pity, but it
could not be helped, and philosophy forbade wasting compassion
on what was beyond remedy.

The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular
hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally
shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters
who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging
to a higher order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn.
This seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach
and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The
strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had
but just climbed up from the ground, before they had outgrown
the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its
influence. As for those whose parents and grand-parents before
them had been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the
conviction they cherished of the essential difference between
their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute.
The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for
the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical
compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I
can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of,
marked my own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.

In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried,
I was engaged to wed Edith Bartlett. She, like myself, rode on
the top of the coach. That is to say, not to encumber ourselves
further with an illustration which has, I hope, served its purpose
of giving the reader some general impression of how we lived
then, her family was wealthy. In that age, when money alone
commanded all that was agreeable and refined in life, it was
enough for a woman to be rich to have suitors; but Edith
Bartlett was beautiful and graceful also.

My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. "Handsome
she might have been," I hear them saying, "but graceful never,
in the costumes which were the fashion at that period, when the
head covering was a dizzy structure a foot tall, and the almost
incredible extension of the skirt behind by means of artificial