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Looking Backward

            
             Edward Bellamy describes a utopian Commonwealth in the year 2000. In many ways this society counters many of the issues of his day in 1887 such as the problems of the poor workers doing manual work and getting nowhere and the problems of tariffs from nation to nation. While many of his solutions are very helpful, some of his solutions are extremely radical.
             In Looking Backward, Julian describes the society he lives in to a big coach. A majority of the people, the working class, was harnessed to it and forced to carry it along a rough road. Some people sat on the coach and never got off or fell off, even when the people below tried to knock them off by going through bumpy parts of the road. These people up top were the rich. Seats on top were hard to get and usually were only attained if you were a child of a person on top since seat were reserved for them. When you did get on top, the seat was hard to keep, it was very unstable and sometimes you would be thrown off and again be pulling the coach trying to get to the top. This example that Julian West gives is a very accurate description of the society of the time.
             The society Bellamy describes to us would have helped with problems of the time. In this new society, everyone is given the same salary a year. This is a good solution for the time, but a better solution would be a minimum wage. Bellamy also talks of a maximum work period. Each man shall work only twenty-four years from the time he is twenty-one till he turns forty-five. The people with the harder jobs work less than the people with the easier jobs. I believe this is also a good concept because you should be able to enjoy the latter parts of your life in leisure. In 1887, there was a huge problem with tariffs. Some countries were forced out of the U.S. market because trading wasn't beneficial to them because of the high tariffs U.S. put on them. This eliminated competition.


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3. Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy

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