ross of oppression, injustice and misery, and I could
hear the anguish-cry of the suffering multitudes, even above the
clanking of my own heavy chains. * * * But all that is different now--I
thought as I left the prison--for have I not been told that the world
had changed, changed so much that, as they put it, "its own mother
wouldn't know it again." And that thought made me _doubly_ happy: happy
at the recovery of my own liberty, and happy in the fond hope that I
should find my own great joy mirrored in, and heightened by the
happiness of my fellow-men.

Then I began to look around, and indeed, I found the world changed; so
changed, in fact, that I am now afraid to cross the street, lest
lightning, in the shape of a horseless car, overtake me and strike me
down; I also found a new race of beings, a race of red
devils--automobiles you call them--and I have been told about the winged
children of thought flying above our heads--talking through the air, you
know, and sometimes also through the hat, perhaps--and here in New York
you can ride on the ground, overground, above ground, underground, and
without any ground at all.

These and a thousand and one other inventions and discoveries have
considerably changed the face of the world. But alas! its face _only_.
For as I looked further, past the outer trappings, down into the heart
of the world, I beheld the old, familiar, yet no less revolting sight of
Mammon, enthroned upon a dais of bleeding hearts, and I saw the ruthless
wheels of the social Juggernaut slowly crushing the beautiful form of
liberty lying prostrate on the ground. * * * I saw men, women and
children, without number, sacrificed on the altar of the capitalistic
Moloch, and I beheld a race of pitiful creatures, stricken with the
modern St. Vitus's dance at the shrine of the Golden Calf.

With an aching heart I realized what I had been told in prison about
the changed condition of the world was but a miserable myth, and my fond
hope of returning into a new, regenerated world lay shattered at my
feet....

No, the world has not changed during my absence; I can find no
improvement in the twentieth-century society over that of the
nineteenth, and in truth, it is not capable of any real improvement, for
this society is the product of a civilization so self-contradictory in
its essential qualities, so stupendously absurd in its results, that the
more we advance in this would-be civilization the less rational, the