s by
overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of
children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of
life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the
most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully
nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of all
is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is never
excessive; care for one's self and one's family, anxiety as to
livelihood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life--all these
influences, which once did so much to wreck the minds and bodies of
men and women, are known no more. Certainly, an improvement of the
species ought to follow such a change. In certain specific respects we
know, indeed, that the improvement has taken place. Insanity, for
instance, which in the nineteenth century was so terribly common a
product of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared, with its
alternative, suicide."

CHAPTER XXII.

We had made an appointment to meet the ladies at the dining-hall for
dinner, after which, having some engagement, they left us sitting at
table there, discussing our wine and cigars with a multitude of other
matters.

"Doctor," said I, in the course of our talk, "morally speaking, your
social system is one which I should be insensate not to admire in
comparison with any previously in vogue in the world, and especially
with that of my own most unhappy century. If I were to fall into a
mesmeric sleep to-night as lasting as that other, and meanwhile the
course of time were to take a turn backward instead of forward, and I
were to wake up again in the nineteenth century, when I had told my
friends what I had seen, they would every one admit that your world
was a paradise of order, equity, and felicity. But they were a very
practical people, my contemporaries, and after expressing their
admiration for the moral beauty and material splendor of the system,
they would presently begin to cipher and ask how you got the money to
make everybody so happy; for certainly, to support the whole nation at
a rate of comfort, and even luxury, such as I see around me, must
involve vastly greater wealth than the nation produced in my day. Now,
while I could explain to them pretty nearly everything else of the
main features of your system, I should quite fail to answer this
question, and failing there, they would tell me, for they were very
close cipherers, that I