‘LOOKING BACKWARD’

I am happy to see a tribute to Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” However, the book’s protagonist is not, as Dean Stewart describes him, a “bluestocking,” because that word refers specifically to intellectual women, not men.

Also, I think it would be appropriate to include a few quotes from “Looking Backward,” since in the review, only two out of 20 paragraphs were about the ideas in the book itself. Here’s a sampling of quotes:

--”it is an axiom of ethics that to accept a service from another which we would be unwilling to return in kind, if need were, is like borrowing with the intention of not repaying, while to enforce such a service by taking advantage of the poverty or necessity of a person would be an outrage like forcible robbery.”

--” . . . there are three main grounds on which our educational system rests; first, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account as necessary to the enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.”

--”Would they not query since what time the killing of men had been a task so much more important than feeding and clothing them, that a trained army should be deemed alone adequate to the former, while the latter was left to a mob?”

ANDY ALIGNE

TORRANCE, CALIF.