 CHAPTER X I sat down and Mrs. Makley continued. I have thought it all out, and I want you to confess that in all practical matters a woman's brain is better than a man's. Mr. Bullion here says it is, and I want you to say so too." Yes, the banker admitted, when it comes down to business a woman is worth any two of us. And we have just been agreeing, I coincided, that the only gentlemen among us are women. Mrs. Makley, I admit, without further dispute, that the most unworldly woman is worldlier than the worldliest man. And that in all practical matters we fade into dreamers and doctrinaires beside you. Now go on. But she did not mean to let me off so easily. She began to brag herself up as women do whenever you make them the slightest concession. Here you men, she said, have been trying for a whole week to get something out of Mr. Homoce about his country, and you have left it to a poor, weak woman at last to think how to manage it. I do believe that you get so much interested in your own talk when you're with him that you don't let him get in a word, and that's the reason you haven't found out anything about Alturia yet from him. In view of the manner in which she had cunned in at Mrs. Camps and stopped Homoce on the very verge of the only full and free confession he had ever been near making about Alturia, I thought this was pretty cool, but for fear of worse, I said, You're quite right, Mrs. Mekli. I'm sorry to say that there has been a shameful want of self-control among us, and that if we learn anything at all from him, it will be because you have taught us how. She could not resist this bit of taffy. She scarcely gave herself time to gulp it before she said, Oh, it's very well to say that now. But where would you have been if I hadn't set my wits to work? Now listen, it just popped into my mind like an inspiration when I was thinking of something altogether different. It flashed upon me in an instant, a good object and a public occasion. Well, I said, finding this explosion an electrical inspiration rather enigmatic. Why, you know the Union Chapel over in the village is in a languishing condition, and the ladies have been talking all summer about doing something for it, getting up something, a concert or theatricals or a dance or something, and applying the proceeds to repainting and papering the visible church. It needs it dreadfully. But of course, those things are not exactly religious, don't you know? And a fair is so much trouble, and such a bore, when you get the articles ready even, and everybody feels swindled, and now people frown on raffles so there is no use thinking of them. What you want is something striking. We did think of a parlor reading or perhaps a ventriloquism, but the performers all charged so much that there wouldn't be anything left after paying expenses. She seemed to expect some sort of prompting at this point, so I said, well? Well, she repeated, that is just where your Mr. Homoes comes in. Oh! How does he come in there? Why get him to deliver a talk on Altruria? As soon as he knows it's for a good object, he will be on fire to do it, and they must live so much in common there that the public occasion will be just the thing that will appeal to him. It did seem a good plan to me, and I said so, but Mrs. Makley was so much in love with it that she was not satisfied with my modest recognition. Good! It's magnificent! It's the very thing! And I have thought it out down to the last detail. Excuse me, I interrupted. Do you think there is sufficient general interest in the subjects outside of the hotel to get a full house for him? I shouldn't like to see him subjected to the mortification of empty benches. What in the world are you thinking of? Why, there isn't a farmhouse anywhere within ten miles where they haven't heard of Mr. Homoes. And there isn't a servant under this roof or in any of the boarding houses who doesn't know something about Altruria and want to know more. It seems that your friend has been much oftener with the porters and the stableboys than he has been with us. I had only two great reasons to fear so. In spite of my warnings and entreaties, he had continued to behave toward every human being he met exactly as if they were equals. He apparently could not conceive of that social difference which difference of occupation creates among us. He owned that he saw it, and from the talk of our little group he knew it existed. But when I expostulated with him upon some act in gross violation of society usage, he only answered that he could not imagine that what he saw and knew could actually be. It was quite impossible to keep him from bowing with the greatest deference to our waitress. He shook hands with the head waiter every morning as well as with me. There was a fearful story current in the house that he had been seen running down one of the corridors to relieve a chambermaid laden with two heavy water-pales which he was carrying to the rooms to fill up the pitchers. This was probably not true, but I myself saw him helping the hotel hayfiel one afternoon, shirts leave like any of the hired men. He said that it was the best possible exercise, and that he was ashamed he could give no better excuse for it than the fact that without something of the kind he would suffer from indigestion. It was grotesque and out of all keeping with a man of his cultivation and breeding. He was a gentleman and a scholar, there was no denying, and yet he did things in contravention of good form at every opportunity, and nothing I could say had any effect with him. I was perplexed beyond measure the day after I had reproached him for his labor in the hayfield to find him in a group of table-girls who were listening while the head waiter read aloud to them in the shade of the house. There was a corner looking toward the stables which was given up to them by tacit consent of the guests during a certain part of the afternoon. I feigned not to see him, but I could not forebear speaking to him about it afterward. He took it in good part, but he said he had been rather disappointed in the kind of literature they liked and the comments they made on it. He had expected that with the education they had received and with their experience of the seriousness of life they would prefer something less trivial. He supposed, however, that a romantic love story where a poor American girl marries an English lord formed a refuge for them from the real world which promised them so little and held them so cheap. It was quite useless for one to try to make him realize his behavior in consorting with servants as a kind of scandal. The worst of it was that his behavior, as I could see, had already begun to demoralize the objects of his misplaced politeness. At first the servants stared and resented it as if it were some tasteless joke. But in an incredibly short time, when they saw that he meant his courtesy in good faith, they took it as their due. I had always had a good understanding with the head-waiter, and I thought I could safely smile with him at the queer conduct of my friend toward himself and his fellow-servants. To my astonishment, he said, I don't see why he shouldn't treat them as if they were ladies and gentlemen. Did he treat you and your friend so? It was impossible to answer this, and I could only suffer in silence and hope that the Alturian would soon go. I had dreaded the moment when the landlord should tell me that his room was wanted. Now I almost desired it, but he never did. On the contrary, the Alturian was in high favor with him. He said he'd like to see a man make himself pleasant with everybody, and that he did not believe he had ever had a guest in the house who was so popular all round. Of course, Mrs. Mekli went on, I don't criticize him, with his peculiar traditions. I presume I should be just so myself if I had been brought up in Alturia, which, thank goodness, I wasn't. But Mr. Homoes is a perfect deer, and all the women in the house are in love with him, from the cook's helpers up and down. No. The only danger is that there won't be room in the hotel parters for all the people that will want to hear him, and we shall have to make the admission something that will be prohibitive in most cases. We shall have to make it a dollar. Well, I said, I think that will settle the question as far as the farming population is concerned. It's twice as much as they ever pay for a reserved seat in the circus, and four times as much as a simple admission. I'm afraid, Mrs. Mekli, you're going to be very few, though fit. Well, I've thought it all over, and I'm going to put the tickets at one dollar. Very good. Have you caught your hair? No, I haven't yet, and I want you to help me catch him. What do you think is the best way to go about it? The banker said he will leave us to the discussion of that question, but Mrs. Mekli could count upon him in everything if she could only get the man to talk. At the end of our conference we decided to interview the Alturian together. I shall always be ashamed of the way that woman weedled the Alturian when we found him the next morning, walking up and down the piazza before breakfast, that is, it was before our breakfast. When we asked him to go in with us, he said he had just had his breakfast and was waiting for Ruben Kamp, who had promised to take him up as he passed with a load of hay for one of the hotels in the village. Ah, that reminds me, Mr. Homoes. The unscrupulous woman began on him at once. We want to interest you in a little movement we're getting up for the Union Chapel in the village. You know it's the church where all the different sects have their services, alternately. Of course it's rather an original way of doing, but there is sense in it where the people are too poor to go into debt for different churches, and— It's admirable, said the Alturian. I have heard about it from the camps. It is an emblem of the unity which ought to prevail among Christians of all professions. How can I help you, Mrs. Makley? I knew you would approve of it, she exalted. Well, it's simply this. The poor little place has got so shabby that I'm almost ashamed to be seen going into it for one, and want to raise money enough to give it a new coat of paint outside and put on some kind of pretty paper of an ecclesiastical pattern on the inside. I declare those staring white walls with the cracks in the plastering zigzagging every which way distract me so that I can't put my mind on the sermon. Don't you think that paper, say of a gothic design, would be a great improvement? I'm sure it would, and it's Mr. Twelve-Mouse idea, too. I learned this fact now for the first time. But with Mrs. Makley's warning eye upon me, I could not say so, and I made what sounded to me like a gothic murmur of acquiescence. It sufficed for Mrs. Makley's purpose at any rate, and she went on, without giving the altruary in a chance to say what he thought the educational effect of wallpaper would be. Well, the long and short of it is, we want you to make this money for us, Mr. Homoes. I? He started in a kind of horror. My dear lady, I never made any money in my life. I should think it wrong to make money. In altruary, yes. We all know how it is in your delightful country, and I assure you that no one could respect your conscientious scruples more than I do. But you must remember that you are in America now. In America you have to make money or else get left. And then you must consider the object, and all the good you can do indirectly by a little talk on Alturia. He answered blandly, A little talk on Alturia. How in the world should I get money by that? She was only too eager to explain, and she did it with so much volubility and at such great length that I, who am good for nothing till I have had my cup of coffee in the morning, almost perished of an elucidation which the Alturian bore with the sweetest patience. She gave him a chance to answer at last. He said, I shall be very happy to do what you wish, madam. Will you? She screamed. Oh, I'm so glad! You have been so slippery about Alturia, you know, that I expected nothing but a point-blank refusal. Of course I knew you would be kind about it. Oh, I can hardly believe my senses. You can't think what a dear you are! I knew she had got that word from some English people who had been in the hotel, and she was working it rather wildly, but it was not my business to check her. Well, then, all you've got to do is to leave the whole thing to me, and not bother a bit about it till I send and tell you we are ready to listen. There comes Rubin with his ox-team. Thank you so much, Mr. Homoes. No one need be ashamed to enter the house of God. He said, God, in an access of piety. After we get that paint and paper on it, and we shall have them on before two Savas have passed over it. She wrung the Alturian's hand. I was only afraid she was going to kiss him. There is but one stipulation I should like to make, he began. Oh, a thousand, she cut in. And that is, there shall be no exclusion from my lecture on a count of occupation or condition. That is a thing that I can in no wise countenance even in America. It is far more abhorrent to me even than money-making, though they are each apart and parcel of the other. I thought it was that. She retorted joyously. And I can assure you, Mr. Homoes, there shall be nothing of that kind. Everyone, I don't care who it is or what they do, shall hear you who buys a ticket. Now will that do? Perfectly, said the Alturian, and he let her ring his hand again. She pushed hers through my arm as we started for the dining-room and leaned over to whisper jubilately, that will fix it. He will see how much his precious lower classes care for Alturia if they have to pay a dollar apiece to hear about it, and I shall keep faith with him to the letter. I could not feel that she would keep it in the spirit, but I could only groan inwardly and chuckle outwardly at the woman's depravity. It seemed to me, though I could not approve of it, a capital joke, and so it seemed to all the members of the little group whom I had made especially acquainted with the Alturian. It is true that the minister was somewhat troubled with the moral question which did not leave me wholly at peace. And the banker effected to find a question of taste involved, which he said he must let me settle, however, as the man's host. If I could stand it, he could. No one said anything against the plan to Mrs. Makley, and this energetic woman made us take two tickets apiece, as soon as she got them printed over in the village. She got little handbills printed and had them scattered about through the neighborhood, at all the hotels, boarding-houses, and summer cottages, to give notice of the time and place of the talk on Alturia. She fixed this for the following Saturday afternoon in our hotel parlor. She had it in the afternoon so as not to interfere with the hop in the evening. She put the tickets on sale at the principal houses and at the village drugstore, and she made me go about with her and help her sell them at some of the cottages in person. I must say I found this extremely distasteful, especially where the people were not very willing to buy and she had to urge them. They all admitted the excellence of the object, but they were not so sure about the means. At several places the ladies asked who was this Mr. Homo anyway, and how did she know he was really from Alturia? He might be an impostor. Then Mrs. Makley would put me forward, and I would be obliged to give such a count of him as I could, and to explain just how and why he came to be my guest. Despite the cumulative effect of bringing back all the misgivings which I had myself felt at the outset concerning him, and which I had dismissed as too fantastic. The tickets went off rather slowly, even in our own hotel. People thought them too dear, and some, as soon as they knew the price, said frankly they had heard enough about Alturia already and were sick of the whole thing. Mrs. Makley said this was quite what she had expected of those people, that they were horrid and stingy and vulgar, and she should see what face they would have to ask her to take tickets when they were trying to get up something. She began to be vexed with herself she confessed that the joke she was playing on Mr. Homo's, and I noticed that she put herself rather defiantly on avidance in his company whenever she could in the presence of these reluctant ladies. She told me she had not the courage to ask the clerk how many of the tickets he had sold out of those she had left at the desk. One morning, the third or fourth, as I was going into breakfast with her, the head waiter stopped her as he opened the door and asked modestly if she could spare him a few tickets, for he thought he could sell some. To my amazement the unprincipled creature said, Why certainly, how many? And instantly took a package out of her pocket, where she seemed always to have them. He asked, Would twenty be more than she could spare? And she answered, Not at all, here are twenty-five, and bestowed the whole package upon him. That afternoon Ruben Kemp came lounging up toward us, where I sat with her on the corner of the piazza, and said that if she would like to let him try his luck with some of the tickets for the talk he would see what he could do. You can have all you want Ruben, she said, and I hope you'll have better luck than I have. I'm perfectly disgusted with people. She fished several packages out of her pocket this time, and he asked, Do you mean that I can have them all? Every one, and a band of music into the bargain, she answered recklessly. But she seemed a little daunted when he quietly took them. You know there are a hundred here. Yes, I should like to see what I can do among the natives. Then there is a construction train over at the junction, and I know a lot of the fellows. I guess some of them would like to come. The tickets are a dollar each, you know, she suggested. That's all right, said Kemp. Well, good afternoon. Mrs. Makley turned to me with a kind of gasp as he shambled away. I don't know about that. About having the whole crew of a construction train at the talk, I daresay it won't be pleasant to the ladies who have brought tickets. Oh! said Mrs. Makley with astonishing contempt. I don't care what they think. But Ruben has got all my tickets, and suppose he keeps them so long that I won't have time to sell any, and then throws them back on my hands. I know, she added joyously, I can go around now and tell people that my tickets are all gone, and I'll go instantly and have the clerk hold all he has left at a premium. She came back looking rather blank. He hasn't got a single one left. He says an old native came in this morning and took every last one of them. He doesn't remember just how many. I believe they're going to speculate on them, and if Ruben Kemp serves me a trick like that, why? She broke off. I believe I'll speculate on them myself. I should like to know why I shouldn't. Oh! I should just like to make some of those creatures pay double or treble for the chances they've refused. Ah! Mrs. Balkum! She called out to a lady who was coming down the veranda toward us. You'll be glad to know I've got rid of all of my tickets. Such a relief! You have, Mrs. Balkum retorted, every one! I thought, said Mrs. Balkum, that you understood I wanted one for my daughter and myself if she came. I certainly didn't, said Mrs. Makley, with a week of concentrated wickedness at me. But if you do, you'll have to say so now, without any ifs or ands about it, and if any of the tickets come back, I let friends have a few on sale, I will give you two. Well, I do, said Mrs. Balkum, after a moment. Very well. It will be five dollars for the two. I feel bound to get all I can for the cause. Will I put your name down? Yes, said Mrs. Balkum, rather crossly. But Mrs. Makley inscribed her name on her tablets with a radiant amiability, which suffered no eclipse when, within the next fifteen minutes, a dozen other ladies hurried up and bought in at the same rate. I could not stand it, and I got up to go away, feeling extremely particips-crimminess. Mrs. Makley seemed to have a conscious as light as air. If Ruben Kamp or the head-waiter don't bring back some of those tickets, I don't know what I shall do. I shall have to put chairs into the aisles and charge five dollars apiece for as many people as I can crowd in there. I never knew anything so perfectly providential. I envy you the ability to see it in that light, Mrs. Makley. I said, faint at heart. Suppose Kamp crowds the place full of his trainmen. How will the ladies that you've sold tickets to at five dollars apiece like it? Poo! What do I care about how they like it? Horrid things! And for repairs on the house of God it's the same as being in church where everybody is equal. The time passed. Mrs. Makley sold chances to all the ladies in the house. On Friday night Ruben Kamp brought her a hundred dollars. The head-waiter had already paid in twenty-five. I didn't dare to ask them if they speculated on them. She confided to me. Do you suppose they would have the conscience? They had secured the large parlor of the hotel, where the young people danced in the evening, and where entertainments were held of the sort usually given in summer hotels. We had already had a dramatic reading, a time with the phonograph, an exhibition of necromancy, a concert by a college glee club, and I do not know what else. The room would hold perhaps two hundred people, if they were closely seated, and, by her own showing, Mrs. Makley had sold above two hundred and fifty tickets and chances. All Saturday forenoon she consoled herself with the belief that a great many people at the other hotels and cottages had bought seats merely to aid the cause and would not really come. She estimated that at least fifty would stay away. But if Ruben Kamp had sold his tickets among the natives we might expect every one of them to come and get his money's worth. She did not dare to ask the head waiter how he had got rid of his twenty-five tickets. The hour set for the talk to begin was three o'clock, so that people could have their naps comfortably over after the one o'clock dinner and be just in the right frame of mind for listening. But long before the appointed time the people who dine at twelve and never taken afternoon nap began to arrive, on foot in farm wagons, smart buggies, mud-crusted carioles, and all manner of ramshackle vehicles. They arrived as if coming to a circus, old husbands and wives, young couples and their children, pretty girls and their fellows, and hitched their horses to the tails of their wagons and began to make a picnic lunch in the shadow of the grove lying between the hotel and the station. About two we heard the snorting of a locomotive at a time when no train was due, and a construction train came in view with the men waving their handkerchiefs from the windows and, apparently, ready for all the fun there was to be in the thing. Some of them had a small flag in each hand, the American stars and stripes and the white flag of Alturia in complement to my guest, I suppose. A good many of the farmers came over to the hotel to buy tickets, which they said they expected to get after they came, and Mrs. Makley was obliged to pacify them with all sorts of lying promises. For moment to moment she was in consultation with the landlord, who decided to throw open the dining room, which connected with the parlor so as to allow the help and the neighbors to hear without incomoting the hotel guests. She said that this took a great burden off her mind, and that now she should feel perfectly easy, for now no one could complain about being mixed up with the servants and the natives, and yet everyone could hear perfectly. She could not rest until she had sent for homos and told him of this admirable arrangement. I did not know whether to be glad or not when he instantly told her that if there was to be any such separation of his auditors in recognition of our class distinctions he must refuse to speak at all. Then what in the world are we to do? She wailed out and the tears came into her eyes. Have you got the money for all your tickets?" he asked, with a sort of disgust for the whole transaction in his tone. Yes, and more too. I don't believe there's a soul in the hotel or out of it that hasn't paid at least a dollar to hear you, and that makes it so very embarrassing. Oh dear, Mr. Homoes, you won't be so implacably high-principled as all that. Think that you were doing it for the house of God! The woman made me sick. Then no one, said the alturian, can feel aggrieved or unfairly used if I say what I have to say in the open air, where all men can listen equally without any manner of preference or distinction. We will go up to the edge of the grove overlooking the tennis court and hold our meeting there, as the alturian meetings are always held, with the sky for a roof and with no walls but the horizon. The very thing, cried Mrs. Mekli. Who would ever have thought you were so practical, Mr. Homoes? I don't believe you're an alturian after all. I believe you're an American in disguise. The alturian turned away, without making any response to this flattering attribution of our nationality to him. But Mrs. Mekli had not waited for any. She had flown off, and I next saw her attacking the landlord, with such apparent success that he slapped himself on the leg and vanished, and immediately the porters and bellboys and all the men-servants began carrying out chairs to the tennis court, which was already well set round with benches. In a little while the whole space was covered, and satis were placed well up the ground toward the grove. By half past two the guests of the hotel came out and took the best seats, as by right, and the different tally-hose and mountain wagons began to arrive from other hotels with their silly hotel cries, and their gay groups dismounted and dispersed themselves over the tennis court until all the chairs were taken. It was fine to see how the natives and the trainmen and the hotel servants, with an instinctive perception of the proprieties, yielded these places to their superiors, and, after the summer folks were all seated, scattered themselves on the grass and the pine needles about the border of the grove. I should have liked to instance the fact to the Alturian, as proof that this sort of subordination was a part of human nature, and that a principle which pervaded our civilization after the democratic training of our whole national life must be divinely implanted. But there was no opportunity for me to speak with him after the fact had accomplished itself, for by this time he had taken his place in front of a little clump of low pines and was waiting for the assembly to quiet itself before he began to speak. I do not think there could have been less than five hundred present, and the scene had that accidental picturesqueness which results from the grouping of all sorts of faces and costumes. Many of our ladies had pretty hats and brilliant parasols, but I must say that the sober tone of some of the old farm-wives' brown calicoes and outdated bonnets contributed to enrich the coloring, and there was a certain gaity in the sunny glisten of the menstrual hats everywhere that was very good. The sky overhead was absolutely stainless, and the light of the cool afternoon sun streamed upon the slopes of the solemn mountains to the east. The tall pines in the background blackened themselves against the horizon. Nearer they showed more and more decidedly their bluish green, and the yellow of the newly fallen needles painted their aisles deep into the airy shadows. A little wind stirred their tops, and for a moment, just before the altruarian began to speak, drew from them an organ tone that melted delicately away as his powerful voice rose. CHAPTER XI of A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA I could not give you a clear account of the present state of things in my country, the altruarian began, without first telling you something of our conditions before the time of our evolution. It seems to be the law of all life that nothing can come to fruition without dying and seeming to make an end. It must be sown in corruption before it can be raised in incorruption. The truth itself must perish to our senses before it can live to our souls. The Son of Man must suffer upon the cross before we can know the Son of God. It was so with his message to the world, which we received in the old time as an ideal realized by the earliest Christians who loved one another and who had all things common. The apostle cast away upon our heathen coasts, won us with the story of this first Christian Republic, and he established a commonwealth of peace and good will among us in its likeness. That commonwealth perished, just as its prototype perished, or seemed to perish, and long ages of civic and economic warfare succeeded, when every man's hand was against his neighbor, and might was the rule that God itself called right. Religion ceased to be the hope of this world, and became the vague promise of the next. We descended into the valley of the shadow, and dwelt amid chaos for ages before we groped again into the light. The first glimmerings were few and indistinct, but men formed themselves about the luminous points here and there, and when these broke and dispersed into lesser gleams, still men formed themselves about each of them. There arose a system of things better indeed than that darkness, but full of war and lust and greed, in which the weak rendered homage to the strong, and served them in the field and in the camp, and the strong in turn gave the weak protection against the other strong. It was a juggle in which the weak did not see that their safety was, after all, from themselves. But it was an image of peace, however false and fitful, and it endured for a time. It endured for a limited time, if we measure by the life of the race. It endured for an unlimited time, if we measure by the lives of the men who were born and died, while it endured. But that disorder, cruel and fierce and stupid, which endured because it sometimes masked itself as order, did at last pass away. Here and there one of the strong overpowered the rest, then the strong became fewer and fewer, and in their turn they all yielded to a supreme lord, and throughout the land there was one rule, as it was called then, or one misrule, as we should call it now. This rule, or this misrule, continued for ages more, and again in the immortality of the race men toiled and struggled and died without the hope of better things. Then the time came when the long nightmare was burst with the vision of a future in which all men were the law and not one man or any less number of men than all. The poor dumb beast of humanity rose, and the throne tumbled, and the scepter was broken, and the crown rolled away into that darkness of the past. We thought that heaven had descended to us, and that liberty, equality, and fraternity were ours. We could not see what should again alienate us from one another, or how one brother could again oppress another. With a free field and no favor we believed we should prosper on together, and there would be peace and plenty for all. We had the Republic again, after so many ages now, and the Republic, as we knew it in our dim annals, was brotherhood and universal happiness. All but a very few who prophesied evil of our lawless freedom were wrapped in a delirium of hope. Men's minds and men's hands were suddenly released to an activity unheard of before. Invention followed invention. Our rivers and seas became the warp of commerce where the steam-sped shuttles carried the wolf of enterprise to and fro with tireless celerity. Machines to save labor multiplied themselves as if they had been procreative forces, and wares of every sort were produced with incredible swiftness and cheapness. Money seemed to flow from the ground. Vast fortunes rose like an exhalation, as your Milton says. At first we did not know that they were the breath of the nethermost pits of hell, and that the love of money, which was becoming universal with us, was filling the earth with the hate of men. It was long before we came to realize that in the depths of our steamships were those who fed the fires with their lives, and that our minds from which we dug our wealth were the graves of those who had died to the free light and air without finding the rest of death. We did not see that the machines for saving labor were monsters that devoured women and children and wasted men at the bidding of the power which no man must touch. That is, we thought we must not touch it, for it called itself prosperity and wealth and the public good, and it said that it gave bread, and it impudently bade the toiling myriads consider what would become of them if it took away their means of wearing themselves out in its service. It demanded of the state absolute immunity and absolute impunity the right to do its will wherever and however it would, without question from the people who were the final law. It had its way, and under its rule we became the richest people under the sun. The accumulation, as we call this power, because we feared to call it by its true name, rewarded its own with gains of twenty of a hundred of a thousand percent, and to satisfy its need to produce the labor that operated its machines there came into existence a hapless race of men who bred their kind for its service and whose little ones were its prey almost from their cradles. Then the infamy became too great and the law, the voice of the people so long guiltily silent, was lifted in behalf of those who had no helper. The accumulation came under control for the first time and could no longer work its slaves twenty hours a day amid perils to life and limb from its machinery and in conditions that forbade them decency and morality. The time of a hundred and a thousand percent passed. But still the accumulation demanded immunity and impunity, and in spite of its conviction of the enormities it had practiced it declared itself the only means of civilization and progress. It began to give out that it was timid, though its history was full of the boldest frauds and crimes, and it threatened to withdraw itself if it were ruled or even crossed, and again it had its way. And we seemed to prosper more and more. The land was filled with cities where the rich flaunted their splendor in palaces and the poor swarmed in squalid tenements. The country was drained of its life and force to feed the centers of commerce and industry. The whole land was bound together with a network of iron roads that linked the factories and foundries to the fields and mines, and blasted the landscape with the enterprise that spoiled the lives of men. Then, all at once, when its work seemed perfect and its dominion sure, the accumulation was stricken with consciousness of the lie always at its heart. It had hitherto cried out for a free field and no favor for unrestricted competition. But in truth it had never prospered except as a monopoly. Whenever and wherever competition had play there had been nothing but disaster to the rival enterprises, till one rose over the rest. Then there was prosperity for that one. The accumulation began to act upon its new consciousness. The iron roads united. The warring industries made peace, each kind under a single leadership. Monopoly, not competition, was seen to be the beneficent means of distributing the favors and blessings of the accumulation to mankind. But, as before, there was alternately a glut and dearth of things, and it often happened that when starving men went ragged through the streets the storehouses were piled full of rotting harvests that the farmers toiled from dawn till dusk to grow, and the warehouses fed the moth with the stuffs that the operative had woven his life into at his loom. Then followed with a blind and mad succession a time of famine when money could not buy the superabundance that vanished. None knew how or why. The money itself vanished from time to time and disappeared into the vaults of the accumulation, for no better reason than that for which it poured itself out at other times. Our theory was that the people, that is to say, the government of the people, made the people's money. But, as a matter of fact, the accumulation made it, and controlled it, and juggled with it. And now you saw it. And now you did not see it. The government made gold coins, but the people had nothing but the paper money that the accumulation made. But whether there was scarcity or plenty, the failures went on with a continuous ruin that nothing could check, while our larger economic life proceeded in a series of violent shocks which we called financial panics, followed by long periods of exhaustion and recuperation. There was no law in our economy, but as the accumulation had never cared for the nature of law it did not trouble itself for its name in our order of things. It had always bought the law it needed for its own use. First through the voter at the polls in the more primitive days, and then as civilization advanced in the legislatures in the courts. But the corruption, even of these methods, was far surpassed when the era of consolidation came, and the necessity for statutes and verdicts and decisions became more stringent. Then we had such a burlesque of, look here, a sharp nasal voice snarled across the rich full pipe of the altruary, and we all instantly looked there. The voice came from an old farmer, holding himself stiffly up, with his hands in his pockets and his lean frame bent toward the speaker. When are you going to get the altruary? We all know about America! He sat down again, and it was a moment before the crowd caught on. Then a yell of delight and a roar of volleyed laughter went up from the lower classes, in which, I am sorry to say, my friend the banker joined, so far as the laughter was concerned. Good! That's it! First rate! came from a hundred vulgar throats. Isn't it a perfect shame? Mrs. Makley demanded. I think some of you gentlemen ought to say something. What will Mr. Homo's think of our civilization if we let such interruptions go unrebuted? She was sitting between the banker and myself, and her indignation made him laugh more and more. Oh! it serves him right, he said. Don't you see that he is hoist with his own petard? Let him alone. He's in the hands of his friends. The altruarian waited for the tumult to die away, and then he said gently, I don't understand. The old farmer jerked himself to his feet again. It's like this. I paid my dollar to hear about a country where there weren't no corporations nor no monopolies nor no buying up coats, and I ain't a-going to have no allegories shield down my throat, instead of a true history, no ways. I know all about how it is here. Fist, run their line through your back yard, and then kill off your cattle, and keep carryin' on it up from coat to coat, till they ain't hide or hear on them left. Oh! sat down! sat down! let the man go on. He'll make it all right with you! One of the construction gang called out, but the farmer stood his ground, and I could hear him through the laughing and shouting, keep saying something from time to time, about not wanting to pay no dollar for no talk about corporations and monopolies that we had right under our own noses the whole while. And you might say, in your very bread-troughs, till at last I saw Rubin Camp make his way toward him, and, after an energetic expostulation, turned to leave him again. Then he faltered out. I guess it's all right! and dropped out of sight in the group he had risen from. I fancied his wife scolding him there, and all but shaking him in public. I should be very sorry, the Alturian proceeded, to have any one believe that I have not been giving you a bona fide account of conditions in my country before the evolution, when we first took the name of Alturia in our great peaceful campaign against the accumulation. As for offering you any allegory or travesty of your own conditions, I will simply say that I do not know them well enough to do so intelligently. But whatever they are, God forbid that the likeness which you seem to recognize should ever go so far as the desperate state of things which we finally reached. I will not trouble you with details. In fact, I have been afraid that I had already treated of our affairs too abstractly. But since your own experience furnishes you the means of seizing my meaning, I will go on as before. You will understand me when I explain that the accumulation had not erected itself into the sovereignty with us unopposed. The working men, who suffered most from its oppression, had early begun to ban themselves against it, with the instinct of self-preservation. First trade by trade, and art by art, and then in congresses and federations of the trades and arts, until finally they enrolled themselves in one vast union, which included all the working men whom their necessity or their interest did not leave on the side of the accumulation. This beneficent and generous association of the weak, for the sake of the weakest, did not accomplish itself fully till the baleful instinct of the accumulation had reduced the monopolies to one vast monopoly, till the stronger had devoured the weaker among its members, and the supreme agent stood at the head of our affairs, in everything but name, our imperial ruler. We had hugged so long the delusion of each man for himself, that we had suffered all realty to be taken from us. The accumulation owned the land as well as the mines under it, and the shops over it. The accumulation owned the seas and the ships that sailed the seas, and the fish that swam in their depths. It owned transportation and distribution, and the wares and products that were to be carried to and fro, and by a logic irresistible and inexorable, the accumulation was, and we, were not. But the accumulation too had forgotten something. It had found it so easy to buy legislatures and courts that it did not trouble itself about the polls. It left us the suffrage, and let us amuse ourselves with the periodical election of the political clay images which it manipulated and molded to any shape and effect at its pleasure. The accumulation knew that it was the sovereignty, whatever figurehead we called President, or Governor, or Mayor. We had other names for these officials, but I used their analogues for the sake of clearness, and I hope my good friend over there will not think I am still talking about America. No, the old farmer called back without rising. We ain't got there quiet. No hurry, said a trainman. All in good time. Go on, he called to the altruarian. The altruarian resumed. There had been from the beginning an almost ceaseless struggle between the accumulation and the proletariat. The accumulation always said that it was the best friend of the proletariat, and it denounced through the press which it controlled the proletarian leaders who taught that it was the enemy of the proletariat and who stirred up strikes and tummels of all sorts for higher wages and fewer hours. But the friend of the proletariat, whenever occasion served, treated the proletariat like a deadly enemy. In seasons of overproduction, as it was called, it locked the workmen out or laid them off and left their families to starve or ran light work and claim the credit of public benefactors for running at all. It sought every chance to reduce wages. It had laws passed to forbid or cripple the workmen in their strikes, and the judges convicted them of conspiracy and rested the statutes to their hurt in cases where there had been no thought of embarrassing them, even among the legislators. God forbid that you should ever come to such a pass in America. But if you ever should, God grant that you may find your way out as simply as we did at last, when freedom had perished in everything but name among us, and justice had become a mockery. The accumulation had advanced so smoothly, so lightly, in all its steps to the supreme power, and had at last so thoroughly quelled the uprising of the proletariat, that it forgot one thing. It forgot the despised and neglected suffrage. The ballot, because it had been so easy to annull its effect, had been left in the people's hands. And when at last the leaders of the proletariat ceased to counsel strikes or any form of resistance to the accumulation that could be tormented into the likeness of insurrection against the government, and began to urge them to attack it in the political way, the deluge that swept the accumulation out of existence came trickling and creeping over the land. It appeared first in the country, a spring from the ground. Then it gathered head in the villages, then it swelled to a torrent in the cities. I cannot stay to trace its course. But suddenly, one day, when the accumulation's abuse of a certain power became too gross, it was voted out of that power. You will perhaps be interested to know that it was with the telegraphs that the rebellion against the accumulation began, and the government was forced by the overwhelming majority which the proletariat sent to our parliament to assume a function which the accumulation had impudently usurped. Then, the transportation of smaller and more perishable wares, yes, a voice called, Express Business, go on! was legislated a function of the post office. The altruarian went on. Then all transportation was taken into the hands of the political government, which had always been accused of great corruption in its administration, but which showed itself immaculately pure compared with the accumulation. The common ownership of mines necessarily followed, with an allotment of lands to anyone who wished to live by tilling the land, but not a foot of the land was remitted to private hands for the purposes of selfish pleasure or the exclusion of any other from the landscape. As all business had been gathered into the grasp of the accumulation, and the manufacture of everything they used and the production of everything that they ate was in the control of the accumulation, its transfer to the government was the work of a single clause in the statute. The accumulation, which had treated the first menaces of resistance with contempt, awoke to its peril too late. When it turned to rest the suffrage from the proletariat at the first election where it attempted to make head against them, it was simply snowed under as your picturesque phrases. The accumulation had no voters except the few men at its head and the creatures devoted to it by interest and ignorance. It seemed at one moment as if it would offer an armed resistance to the popular will, but happily that moment of madness passed. Our evolution was accomplished without a drop of bloodshed, and the first great political brotherhood, the Commonwealth of Altruria, was founded. I wished that I had time to go into a study of some of the curious phases of the transformation from a civility in which the people lived upon each other to one in which they lived for each other. There is a famous passage in the inaugural message of our first Altrurian president, which compares the new civic consciousness with that of a disembodied spirit released to the life beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares and greeds of the flesh. But perhaps I shall give a sufficiently clear notion of the triumph of the change among us when I say that within half a decade after the fall of the old plutocratic oligarchy, one of the chief directors of the accumulation publicly expressed his gratitude to God that the accumulation had passed away forever. You will realize the importance of such an expression in recalling the declarations some of your slaveholders have made since the Civil War, that they would not have slavery restored for any earthly consideration. But now, after this preamble, which has been so much longer than I meant it to be, how shall I give you a sufficiently just conception of the existing Altruria, the actual state from which I come? Yes, came the nasal of the old farmer again. That's what we are here for. I wouldn't give a copper to know all you went for beforehand. It's too dumb like what we have been through ourselves as for as heard from. A shout of laughter went up from most of the crowd, but the Altrurian did not seem to see any fun in it. Well, he resumed, I will tell you as well as I can what Altruria's like, but in the first place you will have to cast out of your minds all images of civilization with which your experience has filled them. For a time the shell of the old accumulation remained for our social habitation and we dwelt in the old competitive and monopolistic forms after the life had gone out of them. That is, we continued to live in populous cities and we toil to heap up riches for the moth to corrupt and we slaved on in making utterly useless things merely because we had the habit of making them to sell. For a while we made the old sham things which pretended to be useful things and were worse than the confessedly useless things. I will give you an illustration from the trades which you will all understand. The proletariat, in the competitive and monopolistic time, used to make a kind of shoes for the proletariat or the women of the proletariat, which looked like fine shoes of the best quality. It took just as much work to make these shoes as to make the best fine shoes, but they were shams through and through. They wore out in a week, and the people call them, because they were bought fresh for every Sunday, Shatter the night shoes, screamed the old farmer. I know them, my girls buy them, half a dollar pair, and not what, the money. Well, said the altruarian, they were a cheat and a lie in every way, and under the new system it was not possible when public attention was called to the fact to continue the falsehood they embodied. As soon as the Saturday night shoes realized itself to the public conscience, an investigation began, and it was found that the principle of the Saturday night shoe underlay half our industries and made half the work that was done. Then an immense reform took place. We renounced in the most solemn convocation of the whole economy the principle of the Saturday night shoe, and those who had spent their lives in producing sham shoes. Yes, said the professor, rising from his seat near us and addressing the speaker. I shall be very glad to know what became of the worthy and industrious operatives who were thrown out of employment by this explosion of economic virtue. Why? the altruarian replied. They were set to work making honest shoes, and as it took no more time to make a pair of honest shoes which lasted a year than it took to make a pair of dishonest shoes that lasted a week, the amount of labor in shoemaking was at once enormously reduced. Yes, said the professor. I understand that. What became of the shoemakers? They joined the vast army of other laborers who had been employed directly or indirectly in the fabrication of fraudulent weirs. These shoemakers, lasters, button-holders, binders, and so on, no longer wore themselves out over their machines. One hour sufficed where twelve hours were needed before, and the operatives were released to the happy labor of the fields, where no one with us toils killingly from dawn till dusk, but does only as much work as is needed to keep the body in health. We had a continent to refine and beautify. We had climates to change and seasons to modify, a whole system of meteorology to readjust, and the public works gave employment to the multitudes emancipated from the sole destroying service of shams. I can scarcely give you a notion of the vastness of the improvements undertaken and carried through, or still in process of accomplishment, but a single one will, perhaps, afford a sufficient illustration. Our southeast coast, from its vicinity to the pole, had always suffered from a winter of Antarctic rigor. But our first president conceived the plan of cutting off a peninsula which kept the equatorial current from making in to our shores, and the work was begun in his term, though the entire strip, twenty miles in width and ninety-three in length, was not severed before the end of the first Outerian decade. Since that time the whole region of our southeastern coast has enjoyed the climate of your Mediterranean countries. It was not only the makers of fraudulent things who were released to these useful and wholesome labors, but those who had spent themselves in contriving ugly and stupid and foolish things were set free to the public employment. The multitude of these monstrosities and iniquities was as great as that of the shams. Here I lost some words, for the professor leaned over and whispered to me, He has got that out of William Morris. Depend upon it. The man is a humbug. He is not an Outerian at all. I confess that my heart misgave me, but I signaled the professor to be silent, and again gave the Outerian. If he was an Outerian, my whole attention. CHAPTER XII PART I And so, the Outerian continued, when the labour of the community was emancipated from the bondage of the false to the free service of the true, it was also by an inevitable implication dedicated to beauty and rescued from the old slavery to the ugly, the stupid, and the trivial. The thing that was honest and useful became, by the operation of a natural law, a beautiful thing. Once we had not time enough to make things beautiful, we were so overworked in making false and hideous things to sell, but now we had all the time there was, and a glad emulation arose among the trades and occupations, to the end that everything should be done finally, as well as done honestly. The artist, the man of genius, who worked from the love of his work, became the normal man, and in the measure of his ability and of his calling, each wrought in the spirit of the artist. We got back the pleasure of doing a thing beautifully, which was God's primal blessing upon all his working children, but which we had lost in the horrible days of our need and greed. There is not a working man within the sound of my voice but has known this divine delight, and would gladly know it always if he only had the time. Well, now we had the time, the evolution had given us the time, and in all Altruria there was not a furrow driven or a swath moan, not a hammer struck on house or on ship, not a stitch sown or a stone laid, not a line written or a sheet printed, not a temple raised or an engine built, but it was done with an eye to beauty as well as to use. As soon as we were freed from the necessity of preying upon one another, we found that there was no hurry. The good work would wait to be well done, and one of the earliest effects of the evolution was the disuse of the swift trains which had traversed the continent night and day that one man might overreach another or make haste to undersell his rival or seize some advantage of him or plot some profit to his loss. Nine-tenths of the railroads, which in the old times had ruinously competed, and then in the hands of the accumulation had been united to impoverish and oppress the people, fell into disuse. The Commonwealth operated the few lines that were necessary for the collection of materials and the distribution of manufacturers, and for pleasure travel and the affairs of state. But the roads that had been built to invest capital or parallel other roads or make work, as it was called, or to develop resources or boom localities were suffered to fall into ruin. The rails were stripped from the landscape which they had bound as with shackles, and the roadbeds became highways for the use of kindly neighborhoods or nature recovered them wholly and hid the memory of their former abuse in grass and flowers and wild vines. The ugly towns that they had forced into being, as Frankenstein was fashioned, from the materials of the charnel and that had no life in or from the good of the community soon tumbled into decay. The administration used parts of them in the construction of the villages in which the Alturians now mostly live. But generally, these towns were built of materials so fraudulent, in form so vile, that it was judged best to burn them. In this way, their sites were at once purified and obliterated. We had, of course, a great many large cities under the old egoistic conditions, which increased and fattened upon the country, and fed their cancerous life with fresh infusions of its blood. We had several cities of half a million, and one of more than a million. We had a score of them with a population of a hundred thousand or more. We were very proud of them and vaunted them as a proof of our unparalleled prosperity. Though really, they never were anything but conjuries of millionaires and the wretched creatures who served them and supplied them. Of course, there was everywhere the appearance of enterprise and activity, but it meant final loss for the great mass of the businessmen, large and small, and final gain for the millionaires. These and their parasites dwelt together, the rich starving the poor, and the poor plundering and misgoverning the rich. And it was the intolerable suffering in the cities that chiefly hastened the fall of the old accumulation and the rise of the Commonwealth. Almost from the moment of the evolution, the competitive and monopolistic centers of population began to decline. In the clear light of the new order, it was seen that they were not fit dwelling places for men, either in the complicated and luxurious palaces where the rich fenced themselves from their kind, or in the vast tenements towering height upon height, ten and twelve stories up, where the swarming poor festered in vice and sickness and famine. If I were to tell you of the fashion of those cities of our egoistic epic, how the construction was one error from the first, and every correction of an error bred a new defect, I should make you laugh. I should make you weep. We let them fall to ruin as quickly as they would, and their sights are still so pestilential after the lapse of centuries that travelers are publicly guarded against them. Ravening beasts and poisonous reptiles lurk in those abodes of the riches and the poverty that are no longer known to our life. A part of one of the less-malarial of the old cities, however, is maintained by the Commonwealth in the form of its prosperity, and is studied by antiquarians for the instruction, and by moralists for the admonition it affords. A section of a street is exposed, and you see the foundations of the houses. You see the filthy drains that belched into the common sewers, trapped and retrapped to keep the poison gases down. You see the sewers that rolled their loathsome tides under the streets amid a tangle of gas pipes, steam pipes, water pipes, telegraph wires, electric lighting wires, electric motor wires, and grip cables, all without a plan, but makeshifts, expedience, devises to repair and evade the fundamental mistake of having any such cities at all. There are now no cities in Outruria, in your meaning, but there are capitals, one for each of the regions of our country, and one for the whole Commonwealth. These capitals are for the transaction of public affairs, in which every citizen of Outruria is schooled, and they are the residences of the administrative officials who are alternated every year from the highest to the lowest. A public employment with us is of no greater honor or profit than any other, for with our absolute economic equality there can be no ambition, and there is no opportunity for one citizen to outshine another. But as the capitals are the centers of all the arts which we consider the chief of our public affairs, they are often as frequented by poets, actors, painters, sculptors, musicians, and architects. We regard all artists, who are, in a sort, creators, as the human type which is likeest the divine, and we try to conform our whole industrial life to the artistic temperament. Even in the labors of the field and shop, which are obligatory upon all, we study the inspiration of this temperament, and in the voluntary pursuits we allow it full control. Each, in these, follows his fancy as to what he shall do, and when he shall do it, or whether he shall do anything at all. In the capitals are the universities, theaters, galleries, museums, cathedrals, laboratories, and conservatories, and the appliances of every art and science, as well as the administration buildings, and beauty as well as use is studied in every edifice. Our capitals are as clean and quiet and healthful as the country, and these advantages are secured simply by the elimination of the horse, an animal which we should be as much surprised to find in the streets of a town as depletiosaurus or the pterodactyl. All transportation in the capitals, whether for pleasure or business, is by electricity, and swift electrical expresses connect the capitol of each region with the villages, which radiate from it to the cardinal points. These expresses run at the rate of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and they enable the artist, the scientist, the literary man of the remotest hamlet to visit the capitol, when he is not actually resident there in some public use, every day after the hours of the obligatory industries. Or, if he likes, he may remain there a whole week or fortnight, giving six hours a day instead of three to the obligatories until the time is made up. In case of very evident merit, or for the purpose of allowing him to complete some work requiring continuous application, a vote of the local agents may release him from the obligatories indefinitely. Generally, however, our artists prefer not to ask this, but avail themselves of the stated means we have of allowing them to work at the obligatories, and get the needed exercise and variety of occupation in the immediate vicinity of the capitol. We do not think it well to connect the hamlets on the different lines of radiation from the capitol, except by the good country roads which traverse each region in every direction. The villages are mainly inhabited by those who prefer a rural life. They are farming villages, but in Alturia it can hardly be said that one man is more a farmer than another. We do not like to distinguish men by their callings. We do not speak of the poet this or the shoemaker that, for the poet may very likely be a shoemaker in the obligatories, and the shoemaker a poet in the voluntaries. If it can be said that one occupation is honored above another with us, it is that which we all share, and that is the cultivation of the earth. We believe that this, when not followed slavishly or for gain, brings man into the closest relations to the deity through a grateful sense of the divine bounty, and that it not only awakens a natural piety in him, but that it endears to the worker of that piece of soil which he tills, and so strengthens his love of home. The home is the very heart of the Alturian system, and we do not think it well that people should be away from their homes very long or very often. In the competitive and monopolistic times men spent half their days in racing back and forth across our continent. Families were scattered by the chase for fortune, and there was a perpetual paying and repaying of visits. One half the income of those railroads, which we let fall into this use, came from the ceaseless unrest. Now a man is born and lives and dies among his own kindred, and the sweet sense of neighborhood, of brotherhood, which blessed the golden age of the first Christian Republic, is ours again. Every year the people of each region meet one another on evolution day in the regionic capital. Once in four years they all visit the national capital. There is no danger of decay of patriotism among us. Our country is our mother, and we love her as it is impossible to love the stepmother that a competitive or monopolistic nation must be to its citizens. I can only touch upon this feature and that of our system as I chance to think of it. If any of you are curious about others, I shall be glad to answer questions as well as I can. We have, of course, the altruarian proceeded after little indefinite pause to let any speak who liked. No money in your sense, as the whole people control affairs. No man works for another, and no man pays another. Every one does his share of labor, and receives his share of food, clothing, and shelter, which is neither more nor less than another's. If you can imagine the justice and impartiality of a well-ordered family, you can conceive of the social and economic life of altruria. We are, properly speaking, a family rather than a nation like yours. Of course, we are somewhat favored by our insular or continental position, but I do not know that we are more so than you are. Certainly, however, we are self-sufficing in a degree unknown to most European countries, and we have within our borders the materials of every comfort and the resources of every need. We have no commerce with the egoistic world, as we call that outside, and I believe that I am the first altruarian to visit foreign countries, avowedly in my national character, though we have always had emissaries living abroad incognito. I hope that I may say without offense that they find it a sorrowful exile, and that the reports of the egoistic world, with its wars, its bankruptcies, its civic commotions, and its social unhappiness, do not make us discontented with our own condition. Before the evolution we had completed the round of your inventions and discoveries, impelled by the force that drives you on, and we have since disused most of them as idle and unfit. But we profit now and then by the advances you make in science, for we are passionately devoted to the study of the natural laws, open or occult, under which all men have their being. Occasionally an emissary returns with a sum of money and explains to the students of the national university the processes by which it is lost and won, and at a certain time there was a movement for its introduction among us, not for its use as you know it, but for a species of counters in games of chance. It was considered, however, to contain an element of danger and the scheme was discouraged. Nothing amuses and puzzles our people more than the accounts our emissaries give of the changes of fashion in the outside world, and of the ruin of soul and body which the love of dress often works. Our own dress for men and for women is studied in one ideal of use and beauty from the antique. Caprice and vagary in it would be thought an effect of vulgar vanity. Nothing is worn that is not simple and honest in texture. We do not know whether a thing is cheap or dear, except as it is easy or hard to come by, and that which is hard to come by is forbidden as wasteful and foolish. The community builds the dwellings of the community, and these, too, are of a classic simplicity, though always beautiful and fit in form. The splendors of the arts are lavished upon the public edifices which we all enjoy in common. Isn't this the greatest rehash of Utopia New Atlantis and City of the Sun that you've ever imagined? The professor whispered across me to the banker. The man is a fraud and a very bungling fraud at that. Well, you must expose him when he gets through, the banker whispered back, but the professor could not wait. He got upon his feet and called out. May I ask the gentleman from Altruia a question? Certainly, the Altruian blandly assented. Make it short, Rubin Camp's voice broke in impatiently. We didn't come here to listen to your questions. The professor contemptuously ignored him. I suppose you occasionally receive emissaries from, as well as send them to, the world outside? Yes, now and then castaways land on our coasts, and ships out of their reckonings put in at our ports for water or provision. And how are they pleased with your system? Why, I cannot better answer than by saying that they mostly refuse to leave us. Ah, just as Bacon reports, cried the professor. You mean in the New Atlantis, returned the Altruian. Yes, it is astonishing how well Bacon in that book, and Sir Thomas Moore in his Utopia, have devined certain phases of our civilization and polity. I think he rather has you, Professor. The banker whispered with a laugh. But all those inspired visionaries, the Altruian continued, while the professor sat grimly silent, watching for another chance, who have borne testimony of us in their dreams, conceived of states perfect without the discipline of a previous competitive condition. What I thought, however, might specially interest you Americans in Altruia, is the fact that our economy was evolved from one so like that in which you actually have your being. I had even hoped you might feel that, in all these points of resemblance, America prophesies another Altruia. I know that to some of you, all that I have told you of my country will seem a baseless fabric with no more foundation, in fact, than Moore's fairy tale of another land, where men dealt kindly and justly by one another, and dwelt a whole nation in the unity and equality of a family. But why should not a part of that fable have come true in our polity, as another part of it has come true in yours? When Sir Thomas Moore wrote that book, he noted with abhorrence the monstrous injustice of the fact that men were hanged for small thefts in England, and in the preliminary conversation between its characters he denounced the killing of men for any sort of thefts. Now you no longer put men to death for theft. You look back upon that cruel code of your mother England with an abhorrence as great as his own. We, for our part, who have realized the utopian dream of brotherly equality, look back with the same abhorrence upon a state where some were rich and some poor, some taught and some untaught, some high and some low, and the hardest toil often failed to supply a sufficiency of the food which luxury wasted in its riots. That state seemed as atrocious to us as the state which hanged a man for stealing a loaf of bread seems to you. But we do not regret the experience of competition and monopoly. They taught us some things in the operation of the industries. The labor-saving inventions which the accumulation perverted to money-making we have restored to the use intended by their inventors and the creator of their inventors. After serving the advantage of socializing the industries which the accumulation affected for its own purposes we continued the work in large mills and shops in the interest of the workers whom we wished to guard against the evil effects of solitude. But our mills and shops are beautiful as well as useful. They look like temples, and they are temples dedicated to that sympathy between the divine and human which expresses itself in honest and exquisite workmanship. They arise amid leafy boscages beside the streams which form their only power, for we have this used steam altogether, with all the offenses to the eye and ear which its use brought into the world. Our life is so simple, and our needs are so few that the handwork of the primitive toilers could easily supply our wants. But machinery works so much more thoroughly and beautifully that we have in great measure retained it. Only the machines that were once the workmen's enemies and masters are now their friends and servants. And, if any man chooses to work alone with his own hands, the state will buy what he makes at the same price that it sells the weirs make collectively. This secures every right of individuality. The farm work, as well as the mill work and the shop work, is done by companies of workers, and there is nothing of that loneliness in our woods and fields which, I understand, is the cause of so much insanity among you. It is not good for man to be alone, was the first thought of his Creator when he considered him. And we act upon this truth in everything. The privacy of the family is sacredly guarded in essentials, but the social instinct is so highly developed with us that we like to eat together in large refectories, and we meet constantly to argue and dispute on questions of aesthetics and metaphysics. We do not, perhaps, read so many books as you do, for most of our reading, when not for special research but for culture and entertainment, is done by public readers to large groups of listeners. We have no social meetings which are not free to all, and we encourage joking and the friendly give-and-take of witty encounters. A little hint from Sparta, suggested the Professor. The banker leaned over to whisper to me, From what I've seen of your friend, when offered a piece of American humor, I should fancy the Alturian article was altogether different. Upon the whole I would rather not be present at one of their witty encounters if I were obliged to stay it out. The Alturian had paused to drink a glass of water, and now he went on. But we try in everything that does not inconvenience or injure others to let everyone live the life he likes best. If a man prefers to dwell apart and have his meals in private for himself alone or for his family, it is freely permitted. Only he must not expect to be served as in public, where service is one of the voluntaries. Private service is not permitted. Those wishing to live alone must wait upon themselves, cook their own food and care for their own tables. Very few, however, wish to withdraw from the public life, for most of the discussions and debates take place at our midday meal, which falls at the end of the obligatory laborers, and is prolonged indefinitely for as long as people like to chat and joke or listen to the reading of some pleasant book. In Alturia there is no hurry, for no one wishes to outstrip another or in any wise surpass him. We are all assured of enough and are forbidden any and every sort of superfluity. If any one, after the obligatories, wishes to be entirely idle, he may be so, but I cannot now think of a single person without some voluntary occupation. Doubtless there are such persons, but I do not know them. It used to be said in the old times that it was human nature to shirk and malinger and loaf, but we have found that it is no such thing. We have found that it is human nature to work cheerfully, willingly, eagerly at the tasks which all share for the supply of the common necessities. In light manner we have found out that it is not human nature to hoard and grudge, but that when the fear and even the imagination of want is taken away, it is human nature to give and to help generously. We used to say, a man will lie or a man will cheat in his own interest, that is human nature, but that is no longer human nature with us, perhaps because no man has any interest to serve, he has only the interests of others to serve, while others serve his. It is in no wise possible for the individual to separate his good from the common good. He is prosperous and happy only as all the rest are so, and therefore it is not human nature with us for anyone to lie in wait to betray another or seize an advantage. That would be un-gentlemanly, and in alphuria every man is a gentleman and every woman a lady. If you will excuse me here for being so frank, I would like to say something by way of illustration which may be offensive if you take it personally. He looked at our little group as if he were addressing himself more especially to us, and the banker called out jollily, go on, I guess we can stand it, and go ahead, came from all sides from all kinds of listeners. It is merely this, that as we look back at the old competitive conditions we do not see how any man could be a gentleman in them, since a gentleman must think first of others, and these conditions compelled every man to think first of himself. There was a silence broken by some conscious and hardy laughter while we each swallowed this pill as we could. What are competitive conditions? Mrs. Makley demanded of me. Well, ours are competitive conditions, I said. Very well, then, she returned. I don't think Mr. Hamos is much of a gentleman to say such a thing to an American audience, or, wait a moment, ask him if the same rule applies to women. I rose, strengthened by the resentment I felt and said, Do I understand that in your former competitive conditions it was also impossible for a woman to be a lady? The professor gave me an applause of nod as I sat down. I envy you the chance of that little dig, he whispered. The altruian was thoughtful a moment, and then he answered, No, I should not say it was. From what we know historically of those conditions in our country, it appears that the great mass of women were not directly affected by them. They constituted an altruistic dominion of the egoistic empire, and, except as they were tainted by social or worldly ambitions, it was possible for every woman to be a lady, even in competitive conditions. Her instincts were unselfish, and her first thoughts were nearly always of others. Mrs. Makley jumped to her feet and clapped violently with her fan on the palm of her left hand. Three chairs for Mr. Hamos! she shrieked, and all the women took up the cry supported by all the natives and the construction gang. I fancied these fellows gave their support largely in a spirit of burlesque, but they gave it robustly, and from that time on Mrs. Makley led the applause, and they roared in after her.