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 22

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 tonight 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 had been dreaming; nor would they ever believe
anything else. In my day, I know that the total annual product of the
nation, although it might have been divided with absolute equality,
would not have come to more than th