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

contrivances more thoroughly dehumanized the form than any
former device of dressmakers. Fancy any one graceful in such a
costume!" The point is certainly well taken, and I can only reply
that while the ladies of the twentieth century are lovely demonstrations
of the effect of appropriate drapery in accenting feminine
graces, my recollection of their great-grandmothers enables
me to maintain that no deformity of costume can wholly
disguise them.

Our marriage only waited on the completion of the house
which I was building for our occupancy in one of the most
desirable parts of the city, that is to say, a part chiefly inhabited
by the rich. For it must be understood that the comparative
desirability of different parts of Boston for residence depended
then, not on natural features, but on the character of the
neighboring population. Each class or nation lived by itself, in
quarters of its own. A rich man living among the poor, an
educated man among the uneducated, was like one living in
isolation among a jealous and alien race. When the house had
been begun, its completion by the winter of 1886 had been
expected. The spring of the following year found it, however, yet
incomplete, and my marriage still a thing of the future. The
cause of a delay calculated to be particularly exasperating to an
ardent lover was a series of strikes, that is to say, concerted
refusals to work on the part of the brick-layers, masons, carpenters,
painters, plumbers, and other trades concerned in house
building. What the specific causes of these strikes were I do not
remember. Strikes had become so common at that period that
people had ceased to inquire into their particular grounds. In
one department of industry or another, they had been nearly
incessant ever since the great business crisis of 1873. In fact it
had come to be the exceptional thing to see any class of laborers
pursue their avocation steadily for more than a few months at a
time.

The reader who observes the dates alluded to will of course
recognize in these disturbances of industry the first and incoherent
phase of the great movement which ended in the establishment
of the modern industrial system with all its social consequences.
This is all so plain in the retrospect that a child can
understand it, but not being prophets, we of that day had no
clear idea what was happening to us. What we did see was that
industrially the country was in a very queer way. The relation
between the workingman and the employer, between labor and
capital, appeared in some unaccountable manner to have become
dislocated. The working classes had quite suddenly and very
generally become infected with a profound discontent with their
condition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they
only knew how to go about it. On every side, with one accord,
they preferred demands for higher pay, shorter hours, better