A trip to Plutopia by E. Haldeman-Julius
Encovragements, for such as shall have intention to bee vnder-takers in the new… is a satirical political pamphlet written in the early 20th century. The book imagines a so-called utopia where a tiny elite controls a vast labor force, using indoctrination, engineered scarcity, and science to maximize profit. Its likely topic is the critique of plutocracy, industrial exploitation, and the dehumanizing logic of unregulated capitalism. The story visits Plutopia, an island society
with 500 wealthy rulers and 49,500 numbered workers. The workers live in cramped cells, wear paper-sack uniforms, eat three “food pills” a day, and labor twelve-hour shifts; families are separated and children are raised in institutions that drill them to chant “I want to work! Twelve hours a day!” By contrast, each plutocrat lives in a palace, spends only in vast denominations, and boasts that government, courts, and police are unnecessary because psychology keeps the “hands” obedient. A leading plutocrat reveals plans to breed ideal laborers combining brute strength, blind loyalty, and minimal intellect. The narrator tours the training school, where a minor lapse—a child yearning for skates—alarms teachers, and a worker’s quiet wish for an extra pill is treated as subversion to be managed by diluting rations. The piece ends by warning that simple human desires and dissent, however small, threaten the fragile security of this exploiters’ paradise. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77446.html.images | 40 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77446.epub3.images | 275 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77446.epub.images | 274 kB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77446.epub.noimages | 111 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77446.kf8.images | 589 kB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77446.kindle.images | 582 kB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77446.txt.utf-8 | 32 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77446/pg77446-h.zip | 265 kB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Haldeman-Julius, E. (Emanuel), 1888-1951 |
|---|---|
| Title | A trip to Plutopia |
| Original Publication | Girard: Appeal to Reason, 1919. |
| Series Title | The Appeal's pocket series no. 8 |
| Credits | Charlene Taylor, Tom Trussel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Short stories |
| Subject | Satire |
| Subject | Dystopias -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77446 |
| Release Date | Dec 12, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 225 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |