'the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays.' But he did not in the least rejoice at the prospect of supplanting generally the energies of the mind and the skill of the hands by universal ingenuities of mechanism. That way led, he felt, to the eventual decay, not only of our physical faculties, but of our imagination and our moral powers. For this reason the conception of Socialism and life given in Bellamy's 'Looking Backward' filled him with horror. He was not blind to the many merits of that book—the admirable desire to solve practical problems of wealth distribution, and the wonderful fertility of its suggestions for ensuring social justice and equality all round. But he simply could not abide the notion that the object of Socialism was not only to get rid of the present inequalities of work and reward, but to get rid as far as possible of any occasion for work and exertion altogether, and thereby to reduce life so far as possible to a passive experience of sensory and intellectual excitement.
It was in protest against Bellamy's 'Looking Backward' with its notion of making civilisation a mere emporium of artificial contrivances, and life a cram of sensuous experiences, that he wrote his 'News from Nowhere.' He was greatly disturbed by the vogue of Bellamy's book. In one of his letters to me at the time he said 'I suppose you have seen or read, or at least tried to read, "Looking Backward." I had to on Saturday, having promised to lecture on it. Thank you, I wouldn't care to live in such a cockney paradise as he imagines!' and in an early issue of the Commonweal he wrote a formal criticism of the book.
Sam Bullock tells me that he remembers calling, as lecture secretary of the Hammersmith Branch, on Morris one Saturday afternoon, to ask him to lecture in the Kelmscott meeting-room on the Sunday evening in place of the appointed lecturer, who was unable to come. Morris objected that he had nothing new to lecture about, and had already spoken there on any subject upon which he could
