CHAPTER VI. NATIONALISM IN THE UNITED STATES. THE so-called "Nationalist movement in the United States furnishes a pertinent occasion for applying, in a critical manner, the conclusions to which we have arrived concerning the American spirit. This specific movement originated in the ingenious and widely known novel, "Looking Backward," picturing life as it may be in Boston in the year 2000 A. D. Mr. Edward Bellamy is, or was, a novelist by profession; he has continued the line of literary men who, for more than a century, have had great influence in calling public attention to social questions. Prof. William Graham, in "The Social Problem,' declares that this problem largely owes its existence, under its present form in modern society, to men of letters from Rousseau to Carlyle, and from Shelley to Victor Hugo; they have exercised the function of prophets of a higher, more moral civilization with rare power and great effect. A previous chapter has made sufficiently plain, I trust, my appreciation of the important part played by literature in social progress. "Nationalism" in this country is, thus far, largely a literary and personal matter, centring round Mr. Bellamy, who has written its one book of consequence and now edits its most important newspaper: he is the recognized father of the Nationalist Clubs formed after the book was published in January, 1888, and has supplied much of the inspiration of the movement since. Edward Bellamy was born, in 1850, in Chicopee, Mass., of clerical stock, his father and his maternal grandfather having been Baptist ministers. Dr. Joseph Bellamy, the friend of Jonathan Edwards and the instructor of Aaron Burr, was his Revolutionary ancestor. Mr. Bellamy took a partial course at Union College, studied for a year in Germany, read law and was admitted to the bar. He soon found more congenial work on the staff of the "Evening Post," of New York, which he left in 1872 to become assistant - editor of the Springfield "Union." He abandoned journalism in 1876, and devoted himself for the ensuing twelve years to the writing of fiction. His first book, "Six to One: A Nantucket Idyl," had some strong touches indicating the writer's special talent as a story-teller; this lies more in depicting peculiar characters and describing strange situations than in the artistic reproduction of common life. In "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process," a second novel, for instance, the hero dreams of procuring the extirpation of certain memories by passing a current of electricity through a portion of the brain. In "Miss Ludington's Sister" the author develops with remarkable ingenuity his heroine's notion that each human being, in the course of his life, has a number of selves, corresponding to the various periods, and that these are all immortal. Mr. Bellamy has been prolific of short stories, which have been printed in the leading American magazines. In these, as in the 1 In the Quarterly Journal of Economics for October, 1889, may be found an article which I have reproduced to some extent in this chap ter. novels, the felicity of expression is often great; the situations described are usually peculiar, if not fantastic, and the portraiture of character is external. Fond of pursuing an odd idea to its remotest consequences, the writer fails to set before us, as a rule, the full personality of his men and women, with the force of life. They are more or less wooden puppets operated to develop a curious dream or an outré conception. Ingenuity, occasionally somewhat strained, is the note of Mr. Bellamy's earlier literary product. The writings just mentioned belong chiefly to the school of fanciful idealism, rather than to that of careful realism. They rightly procured for their author a high place as a writer of short stories in a country noted for the excellence of its literary product in this direction, but they did not indicate the advent of a great novelist. "Looking Backward," judged from a literary point of view, does not lead to any reversal of this estimate. The characters are few and rather mechanical; the romantic interest of the story was deliberately sacrificed to the philanthropic purpose, and the book would have been more effective, from any point of view, had it been shorter., Published in January, 1888, the novel had but a limited circulation for some months, although highly commended by the literary critics. But the earnest feeling with which it was written coincided remarkably with a new and pronounced public interest in social problems; after a time it began to sell largely, and its author soon became a notoriety. The ingenuity with which the story was developed within the narrow limits of its meagre plot and its few characters, and, much more, the forcible expression given to its conceptions of a new society, painted in roseate colors, attracted a great multitude of readers. In the next two years the publishers sold over 350,000 copies of the book, most of them in paper covers. The story was "the book of the hour" in the United States; regarded simply as a literary sensation, it succeeded "Robert Elsmere" and was followed by "The Kreutzer Sonata." How much more than a literary sensation it should be considered is a question: the sensation subsided, and "Looking Backward" has had a moderate sale in the last two years. America has thus had the distinction of having produced the socialistic romance of modern times which has been read and talked about by millions of people, in the Old World as in the New. In the United States, indeed, the book made socialism run for some time the course of a “fad.” Mr. Bellamy became an extreme convert to his own doctrine, as he was writing his romance, and there were not lacking persons who were convinced, by the sale of a third of a million copies of "Looking Backward," that there were at least a million, if not two million, thoroughgoing socialists in the United States,—all of whom might be considered ready to inaugurate "nationalism" at the earliest possible moment. Such methods of taking the intellectual census of a civilized people were sufficiently amusing at the time; only a few months have been needed to convince even the takers that they were over-hasty in substituting a simple process of multiplication for a house-to-house canvass. Very slight reflection shows any one acquainted with American life that the enormous sale of "Looking Backward" indicated the existence of a million or two of convinced socialists no more than the larger sale of "Robert Elsmere " indicated that countless Americans were ready to join a new sect, in Christianity, holding the beliefs of the author. "Looking Backward" was issued at a time when public attention was eagerly directed toward social questions; and sixty millions of people, readers of the newspapers and patrons of the railway bookstands, soon absorbed many editions of a volume written with fervor and conviction. It has led to the production of a very considerable number of imitations and supplements by authors much less talented than Mr. Bellamy, who considered that the interest in "Looking Backward" was a plain invitation to the sentimentalists to come to the front and take charge of modern civilization. - The book soon led to the "Nationalist" movement, - a movement which has probably, through Mr. Bellamy's notoriety and the adhesion of a considerable number of young journalists in the East,[made more noise with less reason for it than any other agitation of the day. Its name is appropriate to its ultimate aim, — the entire control of production by the Nation, but very inappropriate to its present working programme of enlarging the functions of the towns, cities and commonwealths of the Union. Its present intellectual capital is chiefly borrowed from writers like Prof. R. T. Ely, who have no sympathy with its ideal of complete state socialism; the membership of the clubs devoted to its propaganda is small and of little weight, and the movement, so far as it has any specific life of its own, is steadily losing ground. As an intellectual ferment, it has had its part to play. The confusion of logical distinctions which leads its speakers and writers to label as a "Nationalist" any person who believes in social and |