and within a week all that was left of
insurance in America was the record of a monstrous and cruel delusion
written in the blood of its promoters.

A remarkable feature of the crude and primitive civilization of the
Americans was their religion. This was polytheistic, as is that of all
backward peoples, and among their minor deities were their own women. This
has been disputed by respectable authorities, among them Gunkux and the
younger Kekler, but the weight of archaeological testimony is against them,
for, as Sagab-Joffy ingeniously points out, none of less than divine rank
would by even the lowest tribes be given unrestricted license to kill.
Among the Americans woman, as already pointed out, indubitably had that
freedom, and exercised it with terrible effect, a fact which makes the
matter of their religion pertinent to the purpose of this monograph. If
ever an American woman was punished by law for murder of a man no record
of the fact is found; whereas, such American literature as we possess is
full of the most enthusiastic adulation of the impossible virtues and
imaginary graces of the human female. One writer even goes to the length
of affirming that respect for the sex is the foundation of political
stability, the cornerstone of civil and religious liberty! After the
break-up of the republic and the savage intertribal wars that followed,
Gyneolatry was an exhausted cult and woman was relegated to her old state
of benign subjection.

Unfortunately, we know little of the means of travel in ancient America,
other than the names. It seems to have been done mainly by what were
called "railroads," upon which wealthy associations of men transported
their fellow-citizens in some kind of vehicle at a low speed, seldom
exceeding fifty or sixty miles an hour, as distance and time were then
reckoned--about equal to seven _kaltabs_ a _grillog_. Notwithstanding this
slow movement of the vehicles, the number and fatality of accidents were
incredible. In the Zopetroq Museum of Archaeology is preserved an official
report (found in the excavations made by Droyhors on the supposed site of
Washington) of a Government Commission of the Connected States. From that
document we learn that in the year 1907 of their era the railroads of the
country killed 5,000 persons and wounded 72,286--a mortality which is said
by the commissioners to be twice that of the battle of Gettysburg,
concerning which we know nothing but the name. This was