# Quote — Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

> The industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for their profit, were entrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to say, organized as the one great business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared.

- Author: [Edward Bellamy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy.md)
- Book: [Looking Backward](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Looking_Backward:_2000%E2%80%931887#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/the-industry-and

## More from this book

> The actual expense of your colleges appears to have been very low, and would have been far lower if their patronage had been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheap as the lower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers, receive the same support. We have simply added to the common school system of compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred years ago, a half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age of twenty-one and giving him what you used to call the education of a gentleman, instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no mental equipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplication table.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/the-actual-expense.md)

> The greater efficiency which education gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short period for the time lost in acquiring it.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/the-greater-efficiency.md)

> Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a soul dead within.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edward-bellamy/looking-backward/presently-too-as-i-observed.md)