# Quote — Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

> What we did see was that industrially the country was in a very queer way. The relation between the workingman and the employer, between labor and capital, appeared in some unaccountable manner to have become dislocated. The working classes had quite suddenly and very generally become infected with a profound discontent with their condition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only knew how to go about it. On every side, with one accord, they preferred demands for higher pay, shorter hours, better dwellings, better educational advantages, and a share in the refinements and luxuries of life, demands which it was impossible to see the way to granting unless the world were to become a great deal richer than it then was.

- 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/what-we-did

## 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)