# Quote — Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

> The next of the great wastes was that from competition. The field of industry was a battlefield as wide as the world, in which the workers wasted, in assailing one another, energies which, if expended in concerted effort, as to-day, would have enriched all. As for mercy or quarter in this warfare, there was absolutely no suggestion of it. To deliberately enter a field of business and destroy the enterprises of those who had occupied it previously, in order to plant one's own enterprise on their ruins, was an achievement which never failed to command popular admiration. Nor is there any stretch of fancy in comparing this sort of struggle with actual warfare, so far as concerns the mental agony and physical suffering which attended the struggle, and the misery which overwhelmed the defeated and those dependent on them. Now nothing about your age is, at first sight, more astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in the same industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to a common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be throttled and overthrown. This certainly seems like sheer madness, a scene from bedlam.

- 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-next-of-the

## 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)