ng
into falsehoods so positive that they would have been easily detected by
the shrewdness of my listeners) to present our powers and ourselves in
the most flattering point of view,--perpetual subjects of comparison
between our most civilised populations and the meaner subterranean races
which they considered hopelessly plunged in barbarism, and doomed to
gradual if certain extinction. But they both agreed in desiring to
conceal from their community all premature opening into the regions
lighted by the sun; both were humane, and shrunk from the thought of
annihilating so many millions of creatures; and the pictures I drew of
our life, highly coloured as they were, saddened them. In vain I boasted
of our great men--poets, philosophers, orators, generals--and defied the
Vril-ya to produce their equals. "Alas," said Zee, "this predominance
of the few over the many is the surest and most fatal sign of a race
incorrigibly savage. See you not that the primary condition of mortal
happiness consists in the extinction of that strife and competition
between individuals, which, no matter what forms of government they
adopt, render the many subordinate to the few, destroy real liberty to
the individual, whatever may be the nominal liberty of the state, and
annul that calm of existence, without which, felicity, mental or bodily,
cannot be attained? Our notion is, that the more we can assimilate life
to the existence which our noblest ideas can conceive to be that of
spirits on the other side of the grave, why, the more we approximate
to a divine happiness here, and the more easily we glide into the
conditions of being hereafter. For, surely, all we can imagine of the
life of gods, or of blessed immortals, supposes the absence of self-made
cares and contentious passions, such as avarice and ambition. It seems
to us that it must be a life of serene tranquility, not indeed without
active occupations to the intellectual or spiritual powers,
but occupations, of whatsoever nature they be, congenial to the
idiosyncrasies of each, not forced and repugnant--a life gladdened by
the untrammelled interchange of gentle affections, in which the moral
atmosphere utterly kills hate and vengeance, and strife and rivalry.
Such is the political state to which all the tribes and families of
the Vril-ya seek to attain, and towards that goal all our theories of
government are shaped. You see how utterly opposed is such a progress to
that of the uncivilise