Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Future

Introduction by Arthur Desmond

A dangerously revolutionary futuristic novel with a dystopian theme in a New York setting.

The book is luridly fascinating. 1988, New York, the scene of the story, is an earthly heaven, where man (or rather, capitalism) has brought nature under foot, and chained science to his car as a slave. Airships scour the atmosphere. Electricity threads the earth. Money is the only god, and human brotherhood has perished from off the face of the earth. One-seventh of the entire population riot in soulless luxury. The great bulk of the people lead and live the lives of brutes lower than the beasts that perish. Then comes the inevitable crash. Civilisation in the twentieth century totters over the brink of Tophet, and falls into an abyss of chaotic Sheol, in which all art, science, beauty and loveliness perish together. The French Revolution is a child’s dream compared to the horrors conjured up by the writer of Caesar’s Column. The outlook for humanity for thousands of years afterwards is blacker than midnight. To-day the ignorant mob triumphs over the brutal plutocracy. To-morrow it will starve. The day after it will devour its own flesh and blood; and civil government of the rudest kind will take long, long centuries to re-establish itself.