d nations from which you come, and which aim at
a systematic perpetuity of troubles, and cares, and warring passions
aggravated more and more as their progress storms its way onward. The
most powerful of all the races in our world, beyond the pale of the
Vril-ya, esteems itself the best governed of all political societies,
and to have reached in that respect the extreme end at which political
wisdom can arrive, so that the other nations should tend more or less to
copy it. It has established, on its broadest base, the Koom-Posh--viz.,
the government of the ignorant upon the principle of being the most
numerous. It has placed the supreme bliss in the vying with each other
in all things, so that the evil passions are never in repose--vying for
power, for wealth, for eminence of some kind; and in this rivalry it
is horrible to hear the vituperation, the slanders, and calumnies which
even the best and mildest among them heap on each other without remorse
or shame."

"Some years ago," said Aph-Lin, "I visited this people, and their
misery and degradation were the more appalling because they were always
boasting of their felicity and grandeur as compared with the rest of
their species. And there is no hope that this people, which evidently
resembles your own, can improve, because all their notions tend to
further deterioration. They desire to enlarge their dominion more and
more, in direct antagonism to the truth that, beyond a very limited
range, it is impossible to secure to a community the happiness which
belongs to a well-ordered family; and the more they mature a system
by which a few individuals are heated and swollen to a size above the
standard slenderness of the millions, the more they chuckle and exact,
and cry out, 'See by what great exceptions to the common littleness of
our race we prove the magnificent results of our system!'"

"In fact," resumed Zee, "if the wisdom of human life be to approximate
to the serene equality of immortals, there can be no more direct flying
off into the opposite direction than a system which aims at carrying
to the utmost the inequalities and turbulences of mortals. Nor do I see
how, by any forms of religious belief, mortals, so acting, could fit
themselves even to appreciate the joys of immortals to which they still
expect to be transferred by the mere act of dying. On the contrary,
minds accustomed to place happiness in things so much the reverse of
godlike, would find the happines