en the conspiracy against him broke out.

"We have had scarcely any original composer for some ages. Our favorite
airs are very ancient in substance, but have admitted many complicated
variations by inferior, though ingenious, musicians."

"Are there no political societies among the Ana which are animated
by those passions, subjected to those crimes, and admitting those
disparities in condition, in intellect, and in morality, which the state
of your tribe, or indeed of the Vril-ya generally, has left behind in
its progress to perfection? If so, among such societies perhaps Poetry
and her sister arts still continue to be honoured and to improve?"

"There are such societies in remote regions, but we do not admit them
within the pale of civilised communities; we scarcely even give them the
name of Ana, and certainly not that of Vril-ya. They are savages, living
chiefly in that low stage of being, Koom-Posh, tending necessarily to
its own hideous dissolution in Glek-Nas. Their wretched existence is
passed in perpetual contest and perpetual change. When they do not fight
with their neighbours, they fight among themselves. They are divided
into sections, which abuse, plunder, and sometimes murder each
other, and on the most frivolous points of difference that would be
unintelligible to us if we had not read history, and seen that we too
have passed through the same early state of ignorance and barbarism. Any
trifle is sufficient to set them together by the ears. They pretend to
be all equals, and the more they have struggled to be so, by removing
old distinctions, and starting afresh, the more glaring and intolerable
the disparity becomes, because nothing in hereditary affections and
associations is left to soften the one naked distinction between the
many who have nothing and the few who have much. Of course the many hate
the few, but without the few they could not live. The many are always
assailing the few; sometimes they exterminate the few; but as soon as
they have done so, a new few starts out of the many, and is harder
to deal with than the old few. For where societies are large, and
competition to have something is the predominant fever, there must be
always many losers and few gainers. In short, they are savages groping
their way in the dark towards some gleam of light, and would demand our
commiseration for their infirmities, if, like all savages, they did not
provoke their own destruction by their arrogance and cr