py that you are
carried away to England?"

"Had it done so, I don't know whether I should have gone--alive."

"They said that when it was suggested, you promised to be ready in
two days."

"I did say so--because it suited me. But I can hardly imagine that
they would have carried me on board with violence, or that they would
have put all Gladstonopolis to the sword because I declined to go on
board."

"Brown had told us that we were to bring you off dead or alive; and
dead or alive, I think we should have had you. If the soldiers had
not succeeded, the sailors would have taken you in hand." When I
asked him why there was this great necessity for kidnapping me, he
assured me that feeling in England had run very high on the matter,
and that sundry bishops had declared that anything so barbarous could
not be permitted in the twentieth century. "It would be as bad, they
said, as the cannibals of New Zealand."

"That shows the absolute ignorance of the bishops on the subject."

"I daresay; but there is a prejudice about killing an old man, or a
woman. Young men don't matter."

"Allow me to assure you, Mr Crosstrees," said I, "that your sentiment
is carrying you far away from reason. To the State the life of a
woman should be just the same as that of a man. The State cannot
allow itself to indulge in romance."

"You get a sailor, and tell him to strike a woman, and see what he'll
say."

"The sailor is irrational. Of course, we are supposing that it
is for the public benefit that the woman should be struck. It is
the same with an old man. The good of the commonwealth,--and his
own,--requires that, beyond a certain age, he shall not be allowed
to exist. He does not work, and he cannot enjoy living. He wastes
more than his share of the necessaries of life, and becomes, on the
aggregate, an intolerable burden. Read Shakespeare's description of
man in his last stage--

'Second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything;'

and the stage before is merely that of the 'lean and slippered
pantaloon.' For his own sake, would you not save mankind from having
to encounter such miseries as these?"

"You can't do it, Mr President."

"I very nearly did do it. The Britannulist Assembly, in the majesty
of its wisdom, passed a law to that effect." I was sorry afterwards
that I had spoken of the majesty of the Assembly's wisdom, because
it savoured of buncombe. Our Assembly's