CHAPTER VII

Le envoi. 148

[Illustration]

INTERMERE.

_BY

WILLIAM

ALEXANDER

TAYLOR,_

COLUMBUS, OHIO.

1901 - - - 1902

THE XX. CENTURY PUB. CO.

COPYRIGHT BY

WM. A. TAYLOR,

1901.

THIS IS THE STRANGE AND REMARKABLE STORY, IN SUBSTANCE, AND LARGELY IN

DETAIL, AS NARRATED BY GILES HENRY ANDERTON, JOURNALIST AND AMERICAN

TOURIST.

I.

THE TOURIST LOST IN MID-OCEAN IS MYSTERIOUSLY INTRODUCED INTO

INTERMERE, AND MEETS THE FIRST CITIZEN AND OTHER CHIEF OFFICIALS.

I.

THE MISTLETOE.

The Mistletoe, staunch, trim and buoyant, steamed across the equator

under the glare of a midday sun from a fleckless sky, and began to

ascend toward the antarctic circle.

Three days later we came in sight of a great bank of fog or mist, which

stood like a gray wall of stone across the entire horizon, plunged into

it and the sun disappeared--disappeared forever to all except one of

the gay and careless crew and passengers.

For days, as was shown by the ship's chronometers, we steamed slowly on

our course, surrounded by an inky midnight, instinct with an oppressive

and fearsome calm. As we approached the fortieth parallel of south

latitude a remarkable change set in. The deathly calm was suddenly

broken by the rush of mighty and boisterous winds, sweeping now from

one point of the compass, and then suddenly veering to another,

churning up the waters and spinning the Mistletoe round and round like

a top.

In the midst of the terror and confusion, heightened by the unheeded

commands of the officers, a glittering sheeny bolt, like a coruscating

column of steel, dropped straight from the zenith, striking the

gyrating Mistletoe amidships.

There was a deafening report, the air was filled with serpentine lines

of flame, followed simultaneously by the dull explosion of the boilers,

the hissing of escaping steam, the groaning of cordage and machinery,

the lurching of the vessel as the water poured in apparently from a

score of openings, a shuddering vibration of all its parts, and then,

amid cries and prayers and imprecations, the wrecked vessel shot like

a plummet to the bottom.

I felt myself being dragged down to the immeasurable watery depths,

confused with roaring sounds and oppressed with terrors indescribable

and horrible. The descent seemed miles and miles. Then I felt myself

slowly rising toward the surface, followed by legions of submarine

monsters of grotesque shapes and terrifying aspects.

With accelerated motion I approached the surface and, shooting like a

cork above the now calm sea, fortunately fell upon a piece of floating

wreckage. Looking upward as I lay upon it, I saw the blue sky and

the brilliant stars far overhead. The fierce winds and inky darkness

and blackness of the night were disappearing beyond the northeastern

horizon.

I tried to concentrate my scattered thoughts and piece out the awful

catastrophe that had befallen the ship and my companions, but the

effort was too great a strain and I ceased to think--perhaps I ceased

to exist.

* * * * *

I seemed to be passing through a vague twilight of sentient existence.

Thought was rudimentary with me, if, indeed, there were any thoughts.

They were mere sensations, perhaps, or impressions imperfectly shaped,

but I remember them now as being so delightful, that I prayed, in

a feeble way, that I might never be awakened from them. And then

gradually the senses of sight, hearing, and full physical and mental

existence returned to me.

At length I was able to determine that I lay on something like a

hammock on the deck of a smoothly gliding vessel. Turning my head first

to the right and then to the left, I imagined that I was indeed in

Paradise, only the reality before me was so infinitely more beautiful

than the most vivid poetic descriptions I had ever read of the longed

for heaven of endless peace and happiness. But this could not be the

Paradise of the disembodied souls, for I realized I was there in all my

physical personal being.

I was sailing through a smooth, shimmering sea, thickly studded with

matchlessly beautiful islands. They lay in charming profusion and

picturesque irregularity of contour on the right and the left, each a

distinct type of beauty and perfection. I could make out houses and

gardens and farms and people on each of them.

Looking to the right I saw what appeared to be a mainland with majestic

and softly modulated mountains and broad valleys, running from the

distance down to the sands of the seashore. Above the mountains shone

the unobscured sun, but not the burning orb I had known of old in the

lower latitudes. It kissed me with a tenderness that was entrancing,

filling my weakened frame with new life.

The breezes toyed with my tangled and unkempt locks, fanned my brow

and whispered such things to me as did the zephyrs when I stood upon

the threshold of guileless boyhood.

Finally I was able to frame a consecutive thought, in the interrogative

form, and it was this:

"Where am I? Is this the Heaven my mother taught me to seek?"

I had as yet seen no one aboard the ship, or whatever it was, although

I had heard the hum of what seemed to be conversation from some point

beyond the line of vision. Again I silently repeated my mental question.

As if in response to my unuttered query, a being, or a man, of striking

and pleasing appearance came to my side and laying his hand softly

on my forehead, addressed me in a tongue at once familiar but wholly

unknown, as paradoxical as that may sound.

I remained silent and he again addressed me.

I did not feel disconcerted or awed by his appearance and said: "I

speak French and German imperfectly; English with some fluency."

His rejoinder was in English: "You speak English, but are not an

Englishman except by partial descent. You are an American. Not a native

of the eastern portion of the continent, but from west of the range of

mountains which separate the Atlantic seaboard from the great central

valley of the continent. You are from the tributary Ohio valley, and

are, therefore, better fitted to comprehend what you will be permitted

to see and hear, than the average habitant of the eastern seashore,

especially of its great cities."

You can possibly imagine, in a faint way, my unbounded surprise to be

thus addressed by one who was more than a stranger to me.

"You asked yourself two questions. I will answer the first: You are in

Intermere."

"And where is Intermere?"

"It lies at your feet and expands on every hand about you. Let that

suffice.

"No, this is not the Heaven to which your mother taught you to aspire.

It is a part of your own planet, inhabited by beings sprung from the

same parent stock as yourself, but differing from all other nations

and peoples; a people who are many steps nearer to the higher and

better life, and is, by comparison, the Paradise or Eden that masks the

gateway of the true Heaven, in a sphere beyond in the great Universe."

He motioned to some one, and two persons appeared with refreshments.

"Partake," he said, "and renew your exhausted physical and mental

powers."

The proffered refreshments and cordials seemed to be the acme of the

gustatorial dreams of my former life: the suggestion of other things,

yet unlike them. After I had partaken, a new life thrilled every nerve

and fibre of my physical being and pulsated through every mental

faculty.

I arose from my recumbent position and was conducted forward upon the

softly carpeted deck and presented to a score of others who received me

with every token of marked respect, unkempt and bedraggled as I was.

They were men of unusual physique, a composite of the highest types of

the human race I had ever seen or read of. Each possessed a distinctive

mien and personality, as individuals, yet presenting a harmonious

whole, taken collectively.

Xamas, as I afterward learned to know him, when I saw him presiding as

First Citizen over this wonderful people, said to his fellows:

"This is Giles Henry Anderton, a citizen of the interior of the great

Republic of North America. I have fathomed him and know that he is

worthy our respect and considerate treatment. He has dreamed longingly

of the things whereof we know, and which he has never even recognized

as a possibility. It will be our mission to show him the grand

possibilities of human life before we restore him to his kindred and

friends.

"Not understanding that Nature had lain all treasures worth possessing

in lavish profusion at his feet in his own land, and guided by merely

commercial instincts, he sought for paltry gold in distant lands and

seas, and, escaping the vortex of death, has been placed in our hands

for some great purpose. He will be addressed in the English tongue

until it is determined whether he is to be admitted to ours."

This was spoken in a language absolutely unknown to me, and not a word

of which I was capable of framing, and yet I understood it as fully as

though spoken in English. So great was my amazement that he should know

my nativity, my name, my hopes, my ambitions and my purposes, I could

scarcely reply to the salutations extended to me.

"Do not be surprised," said Xamas, reading my inmost thoughts, "at what

I say, nor need you ask how I became possessed of your history. All

that will be made plain to you hereafter."

Turning to one who stood near, he said: "Conduct Mr. Anderton to my

apartments and see that he has proper 'tendance and is supplied with

suitable clothing."

With that I was conducted below to a charming suite of apartments lying

amidships, bathed, was massaged and shaven by an attendant, as lofty

of mien as Xamas himself, and furnished with clothing suitable to the

company with which I was to mingle, not more unlike the workmanship

of my American tailor than his would be unlike the handiwork of his

French, English or German fellow-craftsmen, and yet so unlike all of

them as to fit perfectly into the ensemble of the habiliments of my new

friends.

The ship, or Merocar, as I subsequently learned was its general

designation, was a marvellous affair, unlike any water craft I had

ever seen. Its length was fully one hundred and fifty feet, and its

greatest breadth thirty, gently sloping both to stem and stern, where

it rounded in perfect curves. The upper, or proper deck, extended over

all. The lower deck was a succession of suites and apartments, richly

but artistically furnished, opening from either side into a wide and

roomy aisle. All the work was so light, both the woods, and the metals,

that it seemed fragile and unsafe, but its great strength was shown by

the fact that none of its parts yielded to the weight or pressure upon

it.

There was not a mast, a spar nor a sail on board. The light and richly

wrought hammocks swung on lithe and polished frames, apparently

intended to sustain the weight of fifty pounds, yet capable of

sustaining five or ten times as much. They were unprotected by

awnings. Sunlight rather than shade was apparently the desideratum.

In some unaccountable way the long and lithe Merocar was propelled

at any desired rate of speed, and was turned, as on a pivot, at the

will of the man who acted as captain, pilot and engineer. There was

no steam, no furnace belching black volumes of smoke, no whirr of

machinery, no strain or creaking as the craft shot, sometimes swiftly,

sometimes slowly, through the rippling water. Even motion was not

perceptible to the physical senses.

The captain-pilot-engineer did not tug at a wheel in his railed-in

apartment, elevated a few feet above the center of the upper deck. He

placed his hand upon the table before him and it shot forward with

incredible speed; he touched another point and it stood still, without

jar or vibration. A movement of the hand, and the prow of the Merocar

swept gracefully from north to east in less than its length, to pass

between two beautiful islets or round some sharp promontory. Hundreds

of other Merocars, differing in size and form, were visible.

How they were propelled was so incomprehensible to me that I attributed

it to supernatural agencies. I learned that it was a simpler process

than the utilization of oars, or sails, or steam, which the progenitors

of these mariners had abandoned before the days of Tyre and Sidon and

Memphis and Thebes.

Rejoining the company, I endeavored to carry on a conversation with

them, but I fear I made little headway, so deeply was I absorbed in the

wonderful panorama that lay before me.

Raising my eyes from the shimmering, island-studded and beauty-bestrewn

sea to the blue above, I uttered an ejaculation of surprise at what I

beheld. There I saw "the airy navies" of which Tennyson had written

under the spell of an inspiration which must have been wafted from

this unknown land, but marred by the hostile environments of his own.

Every quarter of the heavens disclosed graceful barques sailing hither

and thither, passing and repassing each other, gathering in groups,

filled with people, many of them holding mute communications with

my companions, as though friend were talking with friend, without

utterance, sign or gesture.

"I am beyond the confines of earth," I said to Xamas. "This is a higher

and spiritual sphere, and I am not Giles Henry Anderton, but his

disembodied spirit."

"You are at fault. You are within the mundane sphere, but with a

people infinitely in advance of yours--a people who, by evolutionary

processes, have unlocked a large proportion of the secrets of Nature

and the Universe, and turned them to ennobling ends, not to selfish

purposes. These facts will come to you in time, and you will be

convinced.

"See," he continued, "the city is slowly coming into view across the

horizon."

My glance followed to the point indicated, and I saw a city of

ineffable magnificence, softly rising from the bosom of the deep, as

though obedient to the wand of a master magician.

Soon I could see that it swept around the broad semicircle of the bay,

many miles in extent and artistically perfect in contour, the land

rising gently from the strand into a grand and massive elevation, cut

into great squares and circles, and crowned with noble buildings, great

and small, in a style of architecture which embraced all the beauties

and none of the blemishes of European and American creations. It was

the full and perfect flower of the crude buds of other lands.

For a time my companions remained silent as I contemplated the

entrancing scene and drank in its beauties. Then Xamas interrupted me:

"Yesterday the allied armies of the Western Nations entered the capital

of China, and are now bivouacked in the Forbidden City, from which the

Empress, Emperor and Court have fled."

I shook my head incredulously:

"When I sailed from New York six months ago there was no thought of

war between any of the Western Nations and the Chinese Empire. Russia

may have invaded one of its provinces by way of reprisal. That is a

possibility."

"Great events focus and transpire within six months. What I tell you is

true. The hostile standards of England, Russia, Germany, France, Japan,

and your own Republic, which has departed from its wise traditions,

flout the Yellow Dragon in the precincts of his own citadel and temple.

Is not this true, Maros?" turning to one who looked the prophet and

seer.

"Aye, indeed, and the best loved of this man's kindred fell in the

assault. He will know if I am permitted to name him."

"Shall he be permitted?"

"Freely."

"Albert Marshall, a sergeant of Marines, your playmate and foster

brother, the next beloved of your mother, the son of her deceased

sister; your mother reared him as her own son, and she knows, as

yet, nothing of the disaster which has befallen you nor the loss of

her foster son. He was of your own age, and like you tall, athletic

and vigorous, with fair hair and complexion and blue eyes, the very

counterpart of yourself--a man fit for a higher destiny than butchery."

"O Albert! O unhappy, stricken mother!" I cried in agony.

"Revered sir, I believe your words. They are absolutely convincing.

Tell me how you came into possession of this strange information."

"In time; but be patient. Lament not for the dead; sorrow not for the

living. We must presently debark. Come to my garden tomorrow. It lies

within the shadow of the Temple of Thought, Memory and Hope. My home

is unpretentious, but you will be welcome. There is need that you

should come. Tomorrow your mother will be apprised of the death of your

kinsman; almost simultaneously will come rumors of your shipwreck. She

must be assured of your safety within twenty-four hours, if you hope to

meet her again."

"But how can I com----"

"Peace, patience; sufficient unto tomorrow is the labor and issue

thereof."

The Merocar gently ran into its slip, and we debarked, Xamas carrying

me to his home in a vehicle of strange design and mysterious power of

propulsion.

II.

XAMAS, THE FIRST CITIZEN, EXPLAINS THE POLITY AND PRINCIPLES GOVERNING

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROMOTING THE INTERESTS OF ALL THE PEOPLE OF

INTERMERE.

II.

THE FIRST CITIZEN.

I shall so far anticipate as to say that the city in which I found

myself was known as the Greater City, in contradistinction of the

Lesser City, lying at the opposite end of the inland sea or mere.

This body of water extends in an oval shape or form north and south,

its length being approximately four hundred miles, and its greatest

width at the latitudinal center two hundred miles, gradually narrowing

toward the opposite extremes, where it gently expands into rounded

bays, forming the extended water fronts of both cities.

The Greater City was clearly the original seat of the present

civilization, from which it extended southward along both shores until

it met at the southern apex and became the Lesser City. I was able,

however, to distinguish but little, if any, difference between the two.

The twelve hundred miles of shore line is studded with farms, gardens,

towns, villages, hamlets, private residences and public edifices,

extending over highland and plain, as far as I was permitted to see,

toward the outer boundaries, the location and character of which I can

not even conjecture.

Many rivers, limpid and sparkling, coming through level and spreading

valleys, and from almost every point, contribute their waters to the

mere.

The current of the mere is phenomenal--not violent, but distinctively

marked. Twice within every twenty-four hours it sweeps entirely

around the oval, affecting one-half of the mere as it moves. With the

early hours of the morning and evening it sweeps from north to south

throughout the eastern, and with noon and midnight through the western

half of the sea.

This current may be described as anti- or trans-tidal; that is, the

general water level falls or is lowered on the side where the current

runs, and rises correspondingly in the opposite half.

The effect is this: From 6 a. m. to 12 noon and from 6 p. m. to

midnight, throughout the eastern half, the tide runs in from those

rivers falling in from the east, and correspondingly rises and moves

inland in those falling in from the west, and then the current flows

north on the western side from 12 noon to 6 p. m. and from midnight to

6 a. m., so that for half the time the rivers on either side ebb or

flow into the sea, and for the other twelve hours rise and flow to the

interior, east or west as the case may be.

The effect of this is singular indeed, or it was to me. The rivers

appear to run inland from the sea a part of the time, and then run from

the landward into the sea for twelve hours, or an equal period, while

the sea itself appears to be a subdivided river forever flowing in an

elongated circle along the opposite shores.

The description of the Egyptian high priest, carefully guarded by his

successors for nine thousand years, then revealed to Solon, and by

Solon narrated to Plato, and by Plato transmitted to the modern world,

must have had its basis here. Is not this the Atlantis which enthralled

the Egyptian sage, philosopher and priest more than ten cycles ago?

To the Egyptian the ever-flowing rivers returned to their common source

through valleys and landscapes of ravishing beauty, renewing themselves

forever. They laved the feet of cities, irrigated the endless

succession of farms, gardens and residential demesnes, and mirrored the

mountains, clothed with perpetual verdure and crowned with the stately

monuments of genius, wisdom, art, civilization, learning and human

progress, a century of centuries agone.

* * * * *

I have spoken of the singular vehicle in which, with Xamas, I left

the pier and ascended the gentle slope into the city. It might be

likened, faintly however, to the best types of our automobiles. But the

comparison would be much like that between the ox-cart and the landau.

It more resembled a double-seated chair set upon several small elastic

wheels, scarcely visible beneath the rich trappings which dropped

almost to the smooth street, as scrupulously clean as a ballroom floor.

Xamas pushed a tiny lever, almost hidden in the rich upholstery of the

arm-rest, and it moved swiftly and noiselessly forward without jar or

oscillation. A delicate and a deftly concealed spring guided it along

the graceful curves of the streets, or sent it at a right angle when

the streets crossed at tangents.

An adjustment lowered the speed to a strolling pace; another movement

gave a high speed, while the reversal of the lever brought us to a

standstill that I might silently admire some stately architectural pile

or revel in the contemplation of some lovely private home.

As we journeyed Xamas said: "Ask with all frankness such questions as

you desire. Wisdom is the child of patience, so be neither impatient,

if the answer is not immediate, or if it is at first incomprehensible.

It will be some time before your understanding can grasp all that you

see or all that you hear.

"Your people undertake the impossible feat of putting a gallon of grain

into a pint vase. Result: The vase is crushed and broken and the grain

is spilled and lost. The human mind is the vase; Knowledge is the

grain, from which Wisdom will germinate. The vase expands by a process

too subtle for your comprehension. To crowd it beyond its capacity

with the idea of expanding its receptiveness is a dangerous and fatal

folly. That is why mental dwarfs multiply and mental giants diminish in

proportion to the increase of your people. Two things are uppermost in

your mind:

"First, you believe you are in a supernatural sphere and surrounded by

a supernatural people. In this you are absolutely at fault. Accept this

assurance without reservation. You will tarry with us long enough to

fully comprehend that fact. You will see nothing during your stay that

can not be accounted for on natural and scientific grounds.

"Second, you are consumed with curiosity to know how I propel this

Medocar and make it obey my every wish, so to speak. The full

explanation of that I shall delegate to another, who will acquaint you

with our mechanisms and the principle that moves them.

"When you have patiently and intelligently listened to him you will

know that we have achieved what your wisest and deepest and least

appreciated thinkers have but vaguely dreamed of and hoped for during

long and intermittent periods. But here we are at my residence. Let us

enter and I will introduce you to my family and friends."

The Medocar halted with the last word in front of a two-storied,

many-gabled house with broad verandas, situated in the center of

spacious grounds, beautified with trees and shrubs and flowers and

bubbling fountains.

Ushering me into a spacious reception hall, he presented me to his wife

and children--grown-up sons and daughters--and then to a number of

men and women who had called to greet him, some on social affairs and

some on matters of public business, concluding with: "Mr. Anderton is

a castaway from the other side of the world, who is entitled to our

sympathy and care."

If my newly made acquaintances were curious as to my being, personality

and history, they had masterful control of their feelings. In all

things they treated me with the most refined courtesy and gentle

consideration. They did not embarrass me with expressions of pity or

consolatory suggestions.

They addressed me in my own language, made me feel that I was welcome

to their society. Each extended an invitation to me to visit them at

their homes, some of them in distant provinces, and these invitations

were gratefully accepted. There could be no mistaking the deep

sincerity they implied.

After an hour's pleasant conversation on many and varied subjects with

my host and his guests, Xamas led me to a suite of apartments intended

for my use, and said:

"Attendants will provide you with refreshments and ascertain your

every want. Rest and fully recuperate. Later in the day I shall explain

to you the polity of our Commonwealth, in which I perceive you are

deeply interested."

What a remarkable man! He seemed to read my inmost thoughts.

* * * * *

As the sun was hanging like a softly beaming lamp above a cone-like

mountain beyond the western line of the Greater City, Xamas and I were

alone upon an open veranda, overgrown with clambering vines of many

kinds in full bloom, radiant with exquisite colors and shades. He

abruptly said to me:

"This Commonwealth is a pure democracy. Titles and offices confer no

merely meretricious distinctions. They temporarily impose additional

responsibilities, duties and burdens; the chief distinction of the

citizen is conferred by labor, for labor is honorable and praiseworthy

above all things else. The second is justice. When and where all men

labor and all men are just, there can be no wrong, no sin, no evil.

Where there is labor and not justice, the strong enjoy, the weak suffer

and endure, opulence flourishes for the few, pain and poverty afflict

the many. Where there is neither labor nor justice, where might makes

right, barbarism in its worst form curses the land.

"The ascent from the third condition to the first is a highway leading

through the second, where labor is oppressed and justice is a stranger,

until at last justice and labor join hands and produce a happy and a

great people. I touch only on the three cardinal points. The process of

ascent is slow and purely evolutionary--an evolution that constantly

conforms itself to ever-changing environments.

"Your own so-called Declaration of Independence, which so many of your

people do not care to comprehend, was drawn from the keystone of our

own national arch--Human Equality, the climax of human civilization

and happiness.

"Thousands of years before the feet of the more modern Europeans trode

the soil of your continent we had reached this point, and discovered

that we had but reached the initial period of our usefulness and higher

destiny.

"It required centuries to expel first the animal instincts, and then

the barbarian nature from our race, not by savage repression and

ruthless aggression and slaughter, but by the study and application of

the laws of Nature and the Universe, which at last ultimated in the

principle and entity of Brotherhood and the equality of all men--not

equality of stature, mental equipment or material endowment, but the

equality of common rights and common opportunities. Labor and Justice

maintain and preserve this equality and Brotherhood.

"Thousands of years before Magna Charta we had founded our

Commonwealth on the great principles of human equality and the right of

life, liberty and the pursuit of rational happiness, and my ancestors,

comprehending the profound laws of Nature unknown to yours, wafted

to them these precious seed, trusting that they would fall on genial

and generous soil, and the inspiration thus transmitted through the

agency of our progenitors was inscribed by yours upon rescript of your

national autonomy.

"Its growth, once so promising, has become painful and pitiable. The

upas of human greed and selfishness withers it, and the prophecy

of bloom and fruitage is unfulfilled. The animal instinct and the

barbarous appetite which reaches after the gaud and tinsel of excessive

wealth and accumulation, the two aggressive forms of selfishness

combined in one, hold civilization and human progress in check, and may

in your case, as in a thousand others, lead back to the fen and morass

of primal barbarism.

"No, this is not the Paradise of Socialism, as you call it," said he,

interpreting the thread of my thought. "That is but an idle dream, the

recrudescence of primal, undeveloped and undesirable conditions, which

occasionally flashes through irresolute minds, unfitted to solve the

great problem of human existence and happiness.

"This is the land of absolute individuality as well as absolute

equality. Every man who reaches maturity becomes the individual owner

of property in one or more of its forms, the foundation being the soil

for residence or productive purposes, or both, at his option. All lands

are subject to individual ownership, within clearly defined limits, the

public domain being held in reserve to meet new demands of increasing

population. It is the common property of all until it passes into

individual ownership, to be used for agricultural or other purposes,

under fixed rules, a specific proportion of the product, or its

equivalent, being turned into the common treasury, to prosecute public

improvements and for other public purposes.

"This stands in lieu of taxation in other countries, and it is only

on rare occasions that it is necessary to supplement it with a direct

tax on the people, except as to the municipal and provincial taxes for

local purposes, in which case each man of mature age, or twenty-five

years, pays the one hundredth part of his earnings monthly into the

treasury, the sum thus paid being evenly divided between the treasuries

of the province and municipal division. When a surplus equal to the

previous year's expenditures accumulates this tax is remitted for the

ensuing year.

"A man may own a home and a separate farm or garden, or business or

manufacturing site; nor may he engage in more than one business or

employment, except the public service, at the same time. He may change

from one line of business to another, but may not buy or sell real

estate for mere speculation. He may not acquire property other than his

earnings until he reaches maturity, and designs to marry and become the

head of a family. If his intent fail, or remains unfulfilled for three

years, the home thus acquired becomes public property, and may be sold

to another who assumes the marital relation, and the proceeds divided

equally between the municipal treasury or bank and the former owner.

"Residences may be exchanged, as may farms, gardens, business sites

and factories, including the line of business or manufacturing, but

neither may be alienated by the owner, except with the approval of

the Custodian of the Municipality upon a satisfactory showing of the

reasons therefor.

"All persons of both sexes must take up an occupation at the age of

twenty, and continue therein, or in some other occupation, until sixty

years of age, unless incapacitated, and deposit in the municipal bank

or treasury at least one-twentieth of their monthly earnings. At sixty

they may retire from active life, and their accumulations are subject

to their wants and demands under salutary rules. The residue, along

with their other personal property, is distributed pro rata among their

direct descendants, and if there be none, in is turned into the general

treasury of the Commonwealth.

"Women are entitled to their earnings, but may not own real estate,

the policy being that men shall be the home-makers and women the

home-keepers. The wife is entitled to the prevailing wage from her

husband for attending to his household affairs, in addition to the

other provisions for household matters and economies which he must

make.

"Under our system there is neither opulence nor poverty in the

land. Great wealth has no existence with us, and therefore has no

allurements. Charity is not a gaunt pack-horse, overloaded with

offerings which come after the eleventh hour. The equality of

opportunity closes every inlet to the wolves of Hunger and Poverty

which ravage other lands amid the riotous revelry of the unjustly

opulent. We have had, at intervals, persons who rebelled, through

recurrent heredity perhaps, against our admirable system, and to them

we administer lex dernier--they are transported to some other land, by

methods known only to ourselves, there to mingle with a new people,

with but a faint conception of their nativity. They constitute those

mysterious beings found in all other countries, whose origin is forever

hidden, and as a rule they are excellent and strangely wise citizens,

for they are permitted to carry with them much of the knowledge, with

some of the wisdom, of their ancestry."

I shall abbreviate much that Xamas gave in great detail. From him

I learned that every male is entitled to participate in all public

affairs, including the right of franchise. All are eligible to office.

The Commonwealth is composed of twenty-four provinces, each province

being composed of twelve municipal divisions.

The elective officers are, in their order: 1. First Citizen of the

Commonwealth. 2. Chief Citizen of the Province. 3. Custodian of the

Municipality.

The First Citizen is the executive head of the Commonwealth, serves

but a single year, and is not eligible to re-election. The Chief

Citizens, or executives of the provinces, constitute his Board of

Counselors to determine all matters affecting the public welfare and to

select the various Curators of the divisional interests of the entire

Commonwealth. They meet to perform these duties twice each year,

alternating between the Greater and Lesser Cities.

The Chief Citizens are the executive heads of the Provinces, the

Custodians of the Municipalities constituting their respective Boards

of Counsellors. They, too, meet twice each year to consider and

determine matters of provincial interest, and to decide all questions

of difference which may come up from the Municipalities. Their tenure

of office is two years, and they are not eligible to re-election.

The Custodians are the sole heads of the Municipalities, and decide all

questions arising therein, and appeal lies from their decisions to the

Provincial Board of Counsellors, who determine the question finally.

They hold the office three years, and may not be re-elected. The above

officials appoint all the necessary clerical and other assistants

necessary to carry out the duties imposed on them.

None of the elective officers receive salaries, but are allowed out of

their respective treasuries 20 media per day for all necessary expenses.

The media is equivalent to 20 cents American currency, and is the

unit of exchange. It is divided into four equal parts, the coin being

designated quatro, while a third coin, equivalent to 5 media, is

denominated cinque, so that the three coins are quatro, silver; media,

gold; and cinque, gold and platinum in equal parts, of nearly equal

size and weight, representing five, twenty, and one hundred cents of

our currency, and nearly the size of an American quarter-dollar.

Twenty media is the wage of the master artisan, and 15 media the wage

of all other males. Females receive a wage of from 8 to 15 media. The

master artisan's wage is the compensation of all official assistants

in whatever capacity, as well as the expense allowance of the actual

officials.

In addition to the above officials of the Commonwealth there are:

Curator of Revenues; Curator of Works and Polity; Curator of Learning

and Progress; Curator of Scientific Research and Application, and

Curator of Useful Mechanical Devices. Their duties are suggested by

their titles. They receive the expense allowance, no salaries, are

chosen for terms of seven years, ineligible to a second term, by the

First Citizen and his Counsellors, and appoint their own subordinates

and assistants.

There is a Curator of Revenue appointed by the Chief Citizen of each

Province to care for the provincial, and by the Municipal Custodian to

care for the Municipal revenues.

The marriageable age of men is from 25 to 30, and women from 20 to

25. The offspring of the marriage relation varies from two to six,

seldom less than two, or more than six, the average being four, hence

population increases slowly, while the great majority live from 80 to

100 years, retaining both physical and mental faculties to the last.

"There is no mercenary incentive to hold office," said Xamas, "and it

is absolutely open to all, and men leave it, not with regret, but with

the consciousness of having performed a necessary duty and service.

Three months hence I will leave the chief office of the State, and

resume my occupation as mechanical engineer under one with whom I have

been for a score or more of years. He is now my Secretary, but that is

nothing unusual. It is a leading part of our history.

"But it is time for rest. You have an important engagement with Maros,

our Curator of Scientific Research and Application, tomorrow morning,

and he exacts promptitude."

III.

MAROS PLACES ANDERTON IN COMMUNICATION WITH HIS MOTHER, AND DISSIPATES

HIS SUPERSTITIOUS IDEAS AND OTHERWISE ENLIGHTENS HIM AS TO THE

POSSIBILITIES OF SCIENCE.

III.

A DAY WITH MAROS.

I called on Maros, the Curator of Scientific Research and Application,

as per appointment, and found him surrounded with everything calculated

to contribute to the enjoyments of earthly existence. His residence

differed in many respects from that of Xamas. All its appointments

and environments were in the most exquisite taste. But this may be

said, once for all, of every private residence and public edifice in

Intermere. The taste of architects and occupants differed, but all were

on lines of beauty, comfort and convenience.

There is no luxury in Intermere, as we use the term. Luxury is a

merely comparative term in the rest of the world, distinguishing

those who have much from those who have little or nothing. Here every

rational taste is gratified in all particulars. The people have clearly

discovered the hidden springs of Nature's kindly intentions toward man,

and utilize them at individual and collective will.

"You are prompt," said Maros, seating me in his study. "Let us proceed

with the matter in which you are interested."

He placed before me a perfectly drawn map of a section of the United

States, embracing the place of my nativity, and asked me to point out

the exact vicinity of my mother's home. I found it readily.

"The point you now occupy is the lineal opposite. Turn to the point, or

direction, you have designated, and direct your concentrated thought

there. If a responsive impression comes to you, communicate its purport

to me."

I sat in silent thought a few moments, Maros closely regarding me.

"I am impressed that my mother is prostrated with grief; that she has

just learned of the death of my kinsman; that rumors of the loss of

the Mistletoe have reached her, being first cabled from Singapore to

New York, and from thence transmitted to the press, and that she is

impressed with the belief that I, too, am dead. I fear that she will

not survive the double shock."

"Frame such a thought as you would wish impressed upon your mother's

consciousness and faith, and tell me what follows."

This is the thought I framed: "Mother, I am alive and well in an

unknown land, surrounded by kind friends, and will ere long return to

you."

Later to Maros: "I am convinced. My mother has partially recovered from

the shock. My death would have been the fatal blow. She smiles with

pious resignation, through the tempest of her grief, and extends her

arms as if to embrace me. This, however, is wholly an impression; I

do not see or hear her, but we seem to stand face to face, and both

realize it."

"Give yourself no further concern, nor seek further communication with

her until you meet her in person. She knows you are alive and will

return to her. Nothing she will hear will change that belief."

"Tell me by what divine or celestial power I am thus enabled to project

my thoughts across unknown seas and continents, and receive responsive

thoughts. Only supernatural agencies could accomplish this."

"You have what you call the telephone?"

"Yes."

"You communicate alike with friends and strangers hundreds of miles

distant in an ordinary tone of voice?"

"Yes."

"Is that supernatural?"

"No; it is the result of scientific achievement and natural phenomena."

"Would one, coming out of the depths of absolute ignorance of

scientific achievement, as you call it, regard it as a supernatural

agency?"

"He undoubtedly would."

"What would you think of his conclusion?"

"That it was the result of superstition."

"And yet you who have just stepped out of the dawn into the full day;

you who have transmitted uttered thoughts to remote distances through

a coarse steel or copper wire and received other uttered thoughts in

return, regard with superstitious awe, as supernatural, what you have

just experienced. Wherein do you differ from the untutored barbarian?"

I sat in silence.

"The telephone wire is to the thread of sentient thought which may span

the universe itself, what the horseback mail-rider is to your modern

methods of communication--what the earliest dawn is to the full day."

Maros explained at full length how he became possessed of the knowledge

of my identity, family connections and my misfortunes, summing up:

"When you were found in the remote and outer ocean and brought within

the precincts of Intermere, you were physically unconscious, but still

possessing partially dormant mental faculties; that is, you continued

to think feebly and intermittently. We traced your two intermittent

lines of thought to your mother in America, and to, or rather toward,

your kinsman at some unknown point. Tracing again to your parent we

learned that Marshall had accompanied the American expedition to

China from Manila. Following this clew, we ascertained that he had

been killed, and that that fact would reach his home in due course,

as well as the fact that information of the loss of your ship would

reach America almost simultaneously. What your mother now regards

as premonitions of impending evil or misfortunes were communications

with her consciousness, far more refined and perfect than the

subsequent cable communications, but quite as natural, and in no sense

supernatural."

"This is indeed amazing!" I exclaimed.

He further said that this was an individual case and purely the

result of my condition. "We do not seek, as a rule, knowledge of

individualities in the outside world, but confine our inquiries

to matters of general moment. We know of the steps of progress,

retrogression, of savagery and butchery and wrong and oppression which

dominate an embryotic civilization. Amuse yourself for a time with the

pictures and tapestries, and I will give you a record of the outer

world's important matters of yesterday."

He opened a cabinet, and assumed the mien of expectant inquiry and

meditation. Soon his hands began to move with rhythmic rapidity over

the curiously inlaid center of the flat surface of the open cabinet.

At the end of ten or fifteen minutes his manipulations ceased, a

compartment above noiselessly opened, and eight beautifully printed

pages, four by six inches, bound in the form of a booklet, fell upon

the table.

It was printed in characters more graceful than our own Roman letters,

from which they might have been evolved, or the Roman Alphabet might

have deteriorated from what appeared before me. The English language

was not used, and yet I could readily read and comprehend the lines.

The pages before me comprised a compendium of yesterday's doings of the

entire world, and included a note of my own case.

They told of all the military operations in China, in the Philippines,

in South Africa, in the far East and in the remote West; of labor

troubles in the mining districts of America; the strike of the textile

operatives on our Atlantic border; the unrest of the Finns and Slavs;

of plots and counterplots, and political assassination and revolution,

attempted or accomplished, and the full catalogue of such happenings,

with now and then a flash of loftier civilization.

"What you read is being reproduced in every divisional municipality of

the Commonwealth, with such a number of instantaneous duplications as

may be required for the perusal and study of all who desire to compare

tinseled and ornamented barbarism with true civilization.

"Selfishness, oppression, slaughter, pride, conquest, greed, vanity,

self-adulation and base passions make up ninety-nine one-hundredths

of this record. What a commentary on such humanity! To it love,

brotherhood and mutual helpfulness are too trivial for serious

consideration.

"The nations and their rulers, differing somewhat as to degree, stand

for organized and dominant wrong, based primarily on selfishness--the

exact reverse of the conditions that should exist."

"This," said I, still contemplating the pages, "compares with our

newspapers."

"As two objects may compare with each other as to bulk or form,

but in no other respect. This is to promote wisdom. The newspaper

to feed vicious or depraved appetite, as well as to convey useful

information. This is the cold, colorless, passionless record of facts

and information, from which knowledge and wisdom may be deduced to

some extent. Your newspaper is the opposite, taken in its entirety. It

consists of the inextricable mingling together of the good and the bad,

of the useful and the useless, and the elevating and the degrading,

the latter always in the ascendant.

"It foments discord instead of promoting profitable discussion, which

is the bridle-path leading into the highway of wisdom. It is built upon

the cornerstone of selfishness, the other name of commercialism, and is

thoroughly imbued with the spirit of greed.

"It caters to the public demand regardless of the spirit or the

depravity behind it. 'Quatro! Quatro! Quatro!' is the burden of

its cry, and for quatro it is willing to lead the world forward or

backward, as the case may be. It has been growing in stature and

retrograding in usefulness for fifty years throughout the world, in all

save increasing facilities, and avidity for pandering to the worst and

most uncivilized propensities of mankind, and it will probably continue

to grow worse for a century to come.

"Fifty years ago it was blindly controversial, but there was enough of

reason in its discussions to give hope for the future. Now it is a

mere mental and moral refuse car, and its so-called religious form is

devoted only to a more refined class of refuse, if that expression is

allowable.

"As a whole, it represents classes and not the whole community;

prejudices, and not principles; it advocates selfish, not general

interests; it panders to petty jealousies; it indulges in tittle-tattle

in mere wantonness, and has no aim save the grossly materialistic."

I winced under his fierce arraignment and invective, for I am a

newspaper man myself.

"I know that I have touched you in a sensitive spot, but I speak of

the newspaper in a general sense. There are worthy exceptions, despite

all the untoward environments; but, unfortunately, their influence

is limited. Your masses read and re-read accounts of how two beings

beat each other out of human semblance on a wager, and pass, unread

and unnoticed, the best thoughts of your greatest scientists and

profoundest thinkers. It is not the canaille who do this alone, but

your statesmen and rulers, men of large affairs and men of the learned

professions."

I turned the conversation, saying:

"It is incomprehensible to me how you produced this record of events in

so short a time and without apparent mechanical or physical effort."

"Doubtless, but not more incomprehensible to you than your linotype

machines and perfecting press would have been to Gutenberg. And your

discoveries and inventions would be no more incomprehensible to him

than would his types and crude multiplying press be to the papyrus

writers, scriveners and hieroglyphants of the earlier world.

"The transition from the work of the papyrians to the achievements of

the Intermereans is the result of that evolution known as scientific

research into Nature's beneficence, in which mechanical invention is

a mere incident, and its application to a high, unselfish and noble

purpose, instead of selfish, base and ignoble ends.

"We had outstripped your present ideals ages before the Chinese began

block printing, or Gutenberg fashioned his types and press. Both

these, as well as your own advanced mechanism, as well as your every

other great achievement in science and research, were the result of

the thought-seed sown or diffused from this land, but which fell on

absolutely barren soil, or only grew in puny or defective forms, far

short of ripening or maturity.

"Your Franklin comprehended the supreme and all-pervading power and

genius of the Universe, the knowledge of and the power to utilize which

makes man godlike, but the dense ignorance and gross materialism of his

day prevented him from enlightening his people.

"Your Morse conceived and executed the scheme of telegraphic signals

cycles after we had discarded it.

"Your nameless and unknown discoverers, whose weak but apprehending

genius was utilized by Bell, gave you the telephone ages after it had

been supplanted here by our more nearly perfect system of intelligent

communication with the entire terrestrial world, and we are now

exploring, with it, the adjacent systems of the Universe with promising

results.

"Your Edison and other electrical discoverers are more than a cycle

behind us, and have as yet but touched the outer surface of the great

secret. To them and to others the current of the Universe is a constant

menace and a danger. To us it as gentle and as harmless as the flowers

that bloom by the wayside, and responds to our every wish and use with

absolute tractability.

"The fault of the rest of the world is that all great discoveries,

all the unlockings of Nature's treasure-house, are turned to selfish

ends, to the aggrandizement of the few, and the detriment, if not the

oppression, of the many; hence civil commotions, wars, tyrannies, the

insolence of opulence, and the failure to carry forward the process of

civilization and the elevation of the race by the unselfish application

of attained wisdom. The barbarian spirit of Self is dominant.

"You were about to ask if you might carry this record home. No. You

will be permitted to inspect it and others similar during your sojourn,

and carry their remembrance with you, and thus be enabled to compare

them with your own current records of contemporaneous dates; but that

is all.

"The Western nations have opened their own gates and invited eventual

destruction by this apparently temporary invasion of the East. This

war, if it may be so called, will be of short duration, followed

by the oppression inseparable from selfish greed, commercialism and

the love of conquest and arbitrary power which compels the unwilling

obedience of peoples.

"But the 400,000,000 Chinese and affiliated races, are more insidiously

dangerous than you know. They will cultivate the seed now being sown,

and prepare the dragon's harvest of blood. In the remoter provinces

they will soon breed soldiers and captains, who will eclipse the bloody

and destructive achievements of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, profiting

by your present superior knowledge of mechanism and the arts of war,

which they will appropriate and assimilate, and turn to terrible final

account.

"The commercial greed of the West will be the enemy of the Western

peoples themselves. It will fit and arm the aroused avengers for their

world-wide invasion and conflict. Selfish capitalists will do this

in spite of all inhibitions, under the plea of creating prosperous

conditions and extending commerce, and their people and their posterity

will perish by the enginery which selfish commercial greed placed in

the hands of their enemies."

Maros presented me to another official, and politely dismissed me to

visit the places of interest in the city. Upon my return to America

I compared the contemporaneous history of the world with the daily

records I had been permitted to inspect, the remembrance of which

I vividly retained, and found every fact therein to be absolutely

correct.

IV.

A TRIP BY AIR AND LAND AND WATER THROUGH THE PROVINCES, CITIES,

HAMLETS AND GARDENS, WITH MATCHLESS BEAUTY AND ENJOYMENT ON

EVERY HAND.

IV.

A TOUR OF SIGHT-SEEING.

What a wonderful land is Intermere, and what a wonderful people live

and enjoy life in it to the full!

Twenty days of visiting ten of the interior provinces, bordering

on the mere, was more like a dream of happiness, sight-seeing and

indescribable enjoyment to me than a reality. For reasons not explained

to me I was not carried into the fourteen remaining provinces, which

evidently lay in all directions toward the exterior borders of the

land. I rather suspect that this was because it might have enabled me

to form some definite idea of the geographical location of Intermere.

What I saw and experienced I still retain as a beautiful and

ineffaceable memory, but it is a picture I can not wholly reproduce or

describe in anything like complete details. I can at best only give the

impressions I still retain.

The delightful journey was under the direction of Karmas, the Custodian

of Works and Polity, accompanied by other chief officers, and the

officials of the provinces, the title and character of which had

already been given me by Xamas.

They have three modes of travel: by Medocar, by Aerocar, and by

Merocar. By the first you travel on land; by the second through the

air; by the third on the water. While these vehicles of transportation

are divided into three general classes as designated, they comprise

thousands of beautiful and curious designs, upon which individual names

are bestowed, as we bestow names upon our horses and our ships.

There is no preference as to the mode and method of journeying. Each of

them seems absolutely perfect. There is no physical sense of motion in

either, as we realize it.

They glide over the broad, smooth and perfectly kept roadways,

through the depths of the ether, or along the waters, with the same

imperceptible motion, and can be put to a rate of speed that makes our

limited railway trains seem like lumbering farm wagons. All resistance

of the elements seems absolutely overcome.

The power of propulsion was wholly incomprehensible at first, and

later I was only able to learn as to its principle, and left wholly to

conjecture as to its application.

Roadways, or, perhaps more properly, boulevards, interlace the

whole country. They are the perfection of road-building--smooth,

even-crowned, and free from dust, water or other offensive substance.

The surface is like a newly asphalted street, but hard and impervious,

with no depressions, cracks or flaws. The engineering could hardly be

improved on. Accepting the statements made to me that the most of these

highways have been in use for centuries, with few if any repairs, they

may be looked on as not only permanent but indestructible.

The purpose of each of them is self-evident. Every rod of it is for use

and to meet some requirement that presents itself. They are bordered,

wherever they extend, with beautiful homes, monuments and temples,

commemorative of some great achievement in civilization and progress.

The residential grounds, farms and gardens are marvels of exquisite

taste without an exception, so far as I was able to note, modeled after

countless designs, which give the earth's surface a versatility of

beauty that is enchanting.

There are farms and gardens everywhere except in a limited number of

the compact squares of cities, small and perfectly kept, and productive

in a sense and to a degree absolutely incredible to the dwellers of any

other land.

As to these roadways: They are of the uniform width of two hundred

feet wherever you find them, whether skirting sea, lake or river,

penetrating valleys or clambering around and around the ascent of the

mountains from base to apex, where some monument or temple, or both,

are perched, overlooking hundreds of square miles.

As already stated, they are everywhere as smooth and kept as clean as

a tiled floor, with a sense or quality of elasticity, and seemingly

indestructible. I would have regarded them as natural phenomena had

I not seen a mountain being terraced and a roadway being graded and

finished without any of the paraphernalia of our own methods of

engineering and construction.

Earth and rock seemed to melt and become mobile under the influence of

some unseen power, and gangs of men, following with levelers of light

machinery, modulated the grades and contours of the crumbled rock and

soil. Others followed these, compounding, expanding and laying down

a plastic and rapidly hardening envelope, thus finishing the surface

like the roads over which we were gliding, some of which, I was told,

had been in use for many centuries without the slightest change of

condition.

I expressed a doubt as to their longevity.

Karmas smiled and said:

"You judge by experience. In your cities you import material from some

distant country or island, and by mechanical manipulation and chemical

combination and processes fit it to be laid down as a pavement. When

finished it looks almost as smooth and beautiful as yonder landway

being newly constructed to accommodate the expanding population of the

district. But the resemblance ends here.

"Your chemists and engineers and constructors have only the crudest

ideas of landway or terraneous works. The asphalt is a suggestion, but

the builder's compound turns it in the direction of deterioration.

Instead of going forward, they go backward. They know little of the

character of the materials they seek to utilize, and nothing of the

true principles of chemical combination.

"Our material is at hand, as it is at hand everywhere, containing the

elements which need only to be properly combined and assimilated to

become practically indestructible.

"You take a clay, and by machinery, crude perhaps, reduce it to dust,

then moisten it back into pliable clay, fashion it, subject it to

an intense but unrefined heat, and you have what will retain its

form and consistence for centuries, and resist the elemental attacks

longer even than granite. This is but the dawn of possibilities. The

semi-barbarous, thousands of years ago, went further and made them

flexible as well as durable. Their discoveries were long ago forgotten.

"Your people never go beyond the point of discovery. They stop short

of the possibilities. They lose these possibilities in material and

commercial utilization. Ego stands between the discoverer and the

world, and progress ends.

"While the rest of the world has thus, again and again, stood still on

the threshold, or moved backward or forward intermittently, for obvious

and selfish reasons, we have steadily moved forward in scientific

discovery and research, and the application of great principles.

"The example is before you. Without any of your crude and cumbersome

machinery, the mountain is being terraced and fitted for the abode

of man, the elemental constituents are being disintegrated, properly

disposed, rearranged and the surface recombined in a new form and

proportion by natural laws, and remote generations will find yonder

landway as our workmen will leave it. They could level the mountain as

readily as they terrace it, distributing it over the adjacent plain,

leaving it a level and fertile glebe, instead of a towering height of

rock and sand overspread with soil.

"All that you see or will see is the result of knowledge and wisdom

turned to noble and unselfish ends for the common betterment and

elevation of the race.

"Your progenitors learned to dig the hard and soft ores from the earth

and produce iron, then took a step forward and converted it into

steel, of greater strength and durability, capable of light forms and

high polish, and there you have stopped at the very beginning. You

are incapable of saving your own handiwork from disintegration. The

elements corrode your finest steel products, and they flake away to

the original conditions of the crude ore, losing a large proportion of

their original virtues and constituents. We have, on the contrary, gone

forward to the ultimate.

"You have denuded your lands of forests to use as a cumbersome material

for building, and furniture and other purposes, the wood, which decays

and is soon destroyed. You have, without understanding the process,

macerated and reduced woods to a pulp and fashioned it into paper,

which in several forms you utilize, but you have stopped at the

beginning of the journey.

"We have carried it forward, and a large proportion of the material

used in the construction of our houses and furniture and bridges and

cars are the product of our forests in a new and better and more

enduring form--light and capable of the most graceful fashioning.

This is used in combination with the metals in all departments of our

economies."

I had already noticed the fact that but little of the woodwork was in

the natural form, and that while it was incredulously light, it was

incredibly strong. The same was true of the wrought metals, all of

which differed from our own forms.

In my examinations of the bridges across streams, both large and small,

I noted the fact that they were constructed in about equal parts of

wood, or a substance I took therefor, and metal, differing greatly from

the metals we use, yet not wholly unlike them. Both materials were of

tubular construction, appearing almost fragile in their lightness,

but strong and firm, and showing none of the ravages of time and the

elements.

So far as I was able to judge no paints were used, but everything was

perfectly polished. The bridges were light, airy constructions, swung

from lofty and graceful piers, a span of a thousand feet appearing to

be as firm and strong as one of fifty.

I also noticed that in their construction of cars, furniture, houses,

and the like, the woods and metals were indiscriminately used, more for

beauty and ornamentation, perhaps, than for strengthening purposes or

utility. Lightness and gracefulness were in evidence everywhere. There

were panels and inlays of wood in its natural state, highly wrought and

polished, as hard and impervious as the metals.

"You seem to be able to make everything indestructible," I said to

Karmas.

"It is your privilege to draw your own conclusions," was his reply.

* * * * *

The people I met and mingled with, both men and women, were superb

specimens of the human race, full of life, full of hope, full of high

ambitions, and capable of infinite enjoyments.

Games, sports and social amenities were the order of their daily

life, albeit every one of them engaged in some laborious or business

occupation during a part of each day. I learned that under their system

of economy less than four hours out of the twenty-four were necessary

for the comfort, sustenance and requirements of each adult, so that

labor did not degenerate into slavery. Every fifth day was a holiday,

during which no labor was performed, except such as was necessary for

the enjoyments of the day.

Manufacturing and business of different kinds were diffused in

proportion to the population. There were no great factories or business

houses, but innumerable small ones. No manufacturer employed more

than ten persons, usually but five, and two or three employes were

sufficient for the business houses.

The remarkable discoveries and inventions of the land revolutionized

all our ideas of manual labor and mechanics. Heavy and bulky machinery

is entirely unknown.

There were no smoking furnaces, no clangor of machinery. The factory

was as neat and practically as noiseless as the private home. Useful

and necessary devices and machinery were turned out as quietly as a

housewife disposes of her routine labors. Science had apparently solved

the rough and knotty problem of labor and production.

Nowhere did I see a furnace; in fact, fire was visible nowhere; and yet

I could see its offices performed everywhere. I asked Karmas to explain

the phenomena.

"That," he replied, "will be explained to you by Remo, Custodian of

Useful Mechanical Devices. That is his official sphere."

Another incredible phenomenon presented itself during the journey. We

passed through one province early in that journey, and my attention was

called to the fact that the farmers were sowing their cereals, which,

by the way, greatly resemble our own, but in a much higher state of

cultivation and infinitely more nutritious.

Ten days later we repassed the same spot, and they were harvesting the

ripened grain.

"In my country," I said to Karmas, "from eight to ten months, dependent

upon the season, elapses between the sowing and the harvesting of

wheat. Here the period is reduced to from eight to ten days. I can not

understand the discrepancy."

"But it is an absolute mystery to you?"

"It is."

"And yet your own people have approached the twilight of its solution.

By selection of seeds and combination of soils, and other perfectly

natural processes, they have been able to change the nature of

vegetation and produce new vegetable being. The period for the growth

and maturing of nearly all your grains and vegetables has been

perceptibly shortened, and entirely new forms produced, within the past

century, and largely within the period of your own lifetime.

"Your floriculturists and horticulturists have carried the evolution

the furthest, and yet they do not even faintly comprehend the real

principle which produces results. We understand and intelligently apply

it. Hence with us but ten days elapse between seedtime and harvest, and

shorter periods in the production of our common vegetables.

"We are able to produce flowers of all shapes and colors at will, and

with the absolute certainty of the operation of fixed and immutable

laws, while your florists, groping in the dark, occasionally stumble on

a result, knowing nothing of the law that produces it, and give their

fellows a nine-days' wonder.

"Yesterday you asked me why all the farms were so diminutive--'merely a

ten-acre field,' as you expressed it. The explanation is before you.

Each of these small farms is capable of producing food for one thousand

persons with their constantly duplicated crops. There is room for a

million such farms in the Commonwealth, without impinging upon the

residential demesnes or cities.

"There is no need to put these farms to the full test of their

productiveness. The twentieth part suffices. We have a population of

50,000,000, increasing at the rate of scarcely one per cent each year,

and two-thirds of the Commonwealth is public domain, for the benefit

of the countless generations yet unborn. Each year and each day brings

their immediate needs, and they are met with plenteous fullness."

* * * * *

Karmas later gave me a fuller idea of the general polity of the

Commonwealth.

All men become voters at 25, if they are married, and participate

in the choice of officers. All are eligible to office. On the day

fixed for the election of public officials the voter calls up the

office of the Municipal Custodian and registers his choice in the

ballot-receiver, which automatically records, and at the end of the

balloting announces the result. If for provincial officers, it is

instantaneously transmitted to the capital of the province, and if for

Commonwealth officers to the Greater City. In your land this would open

the door to fraud, but in Intermere there is neither fraud nor chicane.

There are no armies, no warships, no police, no peace or distress

officers, and no courts and no lawyers. Sometimes citizens may differ,

as they differ in other lands, as to their respective rights or

obligations. In such case they repair to the Municipal Custodian and

state the respective sides of their case. The Custodian decides at

once, and that ends forever the controversy, unless one or the other

appeals to the Chief Citizen of the Province and his Counselors, who

consider the original statements submitted to the Custodian and render

the final judgment. It is seldom an appeal is taken, and seldom that an

original decision is revised.

The educational period continues from birth to 20 years of age, in what

may be called a common school, held in the temples, which all enter at

the age of ten.

The spheres of the two sexes are clearly marked, and both live within

them, that of the female being regarded as the highest and most sacred.

The men make the homes and the women care for and beautify them, and

receive the homage universally accorded them.

Neither sex looks upon necessary labor as a drudgery or in any manner

degrading. They all receive a like education, and the superior mental

equipment invariably asserts itself in some appropriate direction.

Almost invariably the children of the household marry in the order of

their birth, being absolutely free to choose their mates. There are no

marriages for convenience and no second marriages. All are the result

of affection and natural affinity.

The last child to marry inherits the homestead at the death of the

father. The surviving mother becomes the Preferred Guest of her child

during the remainder of her life, and is treated as such. If the

father survives, he retains his position as head of the household.

The personal estate of a deceased parent is divided equally among the

children.

"In short," said Karmas, "We aim to dispose the burdens and distribute

the enjoyments of life equally and justly among all.

"Tomorrow we will be accompanied by Alpaz, the Curator of Learning and

Progress, who will answer the other questions in your mind."

V.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE, AND THE FACULTY OF ITS ENJOYMENT AS

PERSONIFIED IN THE PERSONS AND VOCATIONS OF THE ENTERTAINERS.

V.

SOME OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.

The environments of life have much to do with its philosophy. This

thought impressed itself forcibly on me in Intermere.

The environments of its people contribute much, if not most, to their

philosophy, or the faculty of life's enjoyments.

They are pleasantly housed, handsomely habilitated, physically and

intellectually employed, sans the driving spur of necessity or greed,

with profound and earnest aspirations beyond their present stage of

existence. This is not confined to the few, but animates and elevates

all.

Learning, in a loftier sense than we understand the term; art, music

and all the senses of physical and mental enjoyment, and the promotion

of all of them, are pitched in a high and harmonious key.

Personal adornment and physical beauty in both sexes have no tinge

of vanity, and awake no envy in others. Intermerean dress and its

adjuncts are as closely looked after as their wonderful mechanism and

its mysterious soul or motor-spirit, which enables them to travel with

celerity and safety by land or air or sea, or that subtler principle

by which men and women, separated by distance, talk to each other by

thought instead of speech, and would render the clumsy deception of our

own diplomats and other hypocrites an impossibility.

The clothing of the Intermereans, wrought from native materials not

wholly unlike, except an to quality, those utilized by other peoples,

is of a texture and finish beyond the conception of the outer world,

and of such colors and combinations of tints as to breathe, as it

were, both art and aptitude.

The garments of both sexes more nearly resemble those in Europe and

America than any others, and yet they are very unlike in striking

points. Speaking of this similitude, I may say that the polity and

institutions, and mental and physical characteristics of the people

who live under them, more nearly resemble those of America than of any

other nation or people.

But at that, how wide and deep and apparently impassable is the

gulf that separates them. Ours is but the faint promise; theirs the

fulfillment of the completed prophecy.

Did we start on the journey? Have we halted just beyond the first

milestone? Will the journey be resumed? Will our remoter generations

reach the Ultima Thule? What splendid hope or what illimitable despair

and misery depend upon the Sphinx's answer to these questions!

While Intermere is not sown with diamonds and pearls and precious

stones and metals, they were to be seen in profusion everywhere, not

as matters of garish display, but of artistic taste. I doubt not that

the Intermereans, through their successful study of Nature, possess

the Philosopher's Stone, capable of combining and transmuting every

substance into the riches for which men die and women sacrifice more

than life, and nations crush nations, and peoples destroy peoples,

gathering the Dead Sea fruits that turn to bitter ashes on their lips.

These people place no more commercial value upon these than they do

upon the tints of the rainbow, or the purple haze that hangs like a

halo above the mountain tops. To them they are but artistic types of

beauty that add to life's true enjoyments.

In mingling socially with the men and women--they do not speak of them

as ladies and gentlemen--of Intermere, I was struck with their ease

and delicate frankness of entertainment. They were very human indeed in

every way. There was no affectation in speech or manner. They were good

listeners as well as good talkers, fond of art and the lofty literature

in which they were naturally at home; anxious to learn something about

the outside world from their visitor, and yet not inquisitive, never

asking an embarrassing question.

Their literary and social entertainments, many of which I attended,

while altogether new and strange to me, were none the less thoroughly

enjoyable. Their social games were unique--to me--and in all respects

I was struck with their great superiority, and forcibly impressed with

the belief that their lives were indeed worth living.

Their conceptions of art were of the highest and most exalted

character. Their tastes were not only refined but sublimated, and

I felt abashed at my own inability to follow them rapidly, or fully

comprehend them on the moment.

The women were splendid types of physical beauty as well as mental

endowment; the men were trained athletes, and the devotees of physical

as well as mental culture, and I watched with keen zest their prowess

in the athletic games everywhere indulged in. I did not see a physical,

mental or moral derelict in the land. All were robust and perfectly

formed.

There were no classes. Laborers and officials met on an equal footing.

There were no telltale differences in dress to indicate sets, circles,

position or titles among the men. The same was true of the women.

Mental superiority or maturity was discernible to me and recognized on

every hand, not to be envied or decried, but to serve as the guide to

other feet.

And all this was easily reconcilable to me. All were coequal laborers.

All were coequal sharers of the common benefits of their governmental

system, and they all had a common incentive--to ennoble and dignify

the race by ennobling and dignifying themselves individually, but

contributing alike to the common stock of blessings.

Never before did I fully realize the meaning of the Divine Master when

He said: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so

to them." Before me and around me was the literal fulfillment of the

injunction in the form of the model government for mankind, founded

upon the highest attribute of Divinity.

But there was neither cant nor affected solemnity in the never-ending

performance of this duty. It had become absolutely and essentially a

part of their nature, and was at once the cornerstone and the Temple of

their Religion; but their ideas of Religion were widely different from

ours. They never expounded, but lived it.

Delightful people accompanied us if we traveled in Aerocars;

delightful people met us with Medocars when we came to terra firma,

and accompanied us through the bewildering lanes and mazes of beauty

by land; and delightful people met us with fairy-like Merocars when

we sought to thread the enchanting islands of the strange pulsating,

moving sea.

Thus day by day I was carried from province to province, from city to

city, from valley to valley and from mountain to mountain; relays of

entertainers met us at every stopping-point to take the places of those

who had accompanied us thither. Nothing could have seemed more unreal;

nothing could have been more exquisitely enjoyable.

Now we wound through gardens smiling with beauty and redolent with

balm and fragrance; anon we were in orchards plucking the ripened

fruit; then in the harvest fields of the husbandman, and next in shops,

factory or store; I wondering at all I saw, and my conductors kindly

wondering at me, no doubt, but of that they gave no significance or

sign.

Almost literally speaking there is no night in Intermere. With the

twilight myriads of lights flash out everywhere along the streets,

highways, lanes, and from residences, temples and monuments, more

luminous than our electric lamps, diffusing a mellow and pleasing light

everywhere. But one sees no wires, as with us, to feed the lamps of

many sizes and shades of light, each one of which, so far as we can see

and realize, is independent of all others and everything.

Merry parties make moonlight and starlight trips by Aerocar. I enjoyed

one of them, and there are no words adequate to the description of what

I saw and enjoyed. With the moon and stars above and the millions

of lights below, with music, song and laughter ringing through the

ethereal depths, I was in a new world, and one beyond ordinary human

conceptions, much less description. The Aerocars themselves were

studded with countless lights of all the colors and shades, and shone

like trailing meteors at every angle of inclination, singly here,

grouped there, and in processions beyond.

It may be said in this connection that while the Intermereans eat

the flesh of both domestic and wild animals and fowls, resembling in

general features our own, and fish, they subsist chiefly on a vegetable

diet, especially between the age of infancy and twenty years, and after

sixty.

One of the mysteries confronting me was that of cookery. They used no

fire, nor any of our ordinary cooking utensils, and yet they served hot

meals and drinks, prepared in what may be called, for lack of a better

name, chafing dishes and urns, and yet there was no sense of heat or

fire, except when in close contact with the utensils.

In a chafing dish they broiled or roasted or baked; in an adjoining urn

they brewed a delightful hot drink resembling coffee, while in another

near by they made the most delicious ices.

The housewife maintained neither dining-room nor kitchen. Meals were

prepared and served wherever most convenient, on veranda or in the

house proper. The table was spread in beautiful style with exquisite

furnishment, and presided over by the housewife. A woman assistant,

or more than one, according to the requirements of the occasion, had

charge of a suitable sideboard, where the entire meal was prepared, and

from which it was served to the company as desired. There were no odors

from the cooking, and nothing to suggest the kitchen or scullery.

This is so unlike our methods that its appropriateness can not be

realized short of the actual experience. The culinary utensils are

rather ornamental than otherwise, and the preparation of the dishes

occupies an incredibly short period of time.

On our various journeys by land and sea and air, I found that a full

stock of provisions was carried, along with the culinary paraphernalia,

and were served regularly and with as much care and taste as in any

residence. Ices and confections were made as readily in mid-air as on

land or sea, by some mysterious and never-failing process.

One day as we rested in a charming suburb of the Lesser City, Alpaz,

the Curator of Learning and Progress, appeared in a splendidly

appointed Aerocar, accompanied by his entire family and attended by

a fleet of Aerocars carrying his assistants, provincial officials

and men and women, who made up his entourage. It proved to be a most

delightful company.

After sailing overhead for hundreds of miles we descended to an island,

along the beach of which lay a complement of Merocars, to accommodate

the entire party, as well as some of the insular citizens who begged to

accompany us.

Then ensued a voyage the memory of which still lingers with me.

Such dreamlike beauty I never expect to see this side the gates of

eternity. It changed with every moment, and never palled nor paled.

Through this maze of land and water and bewildering enchantment we

journeyed, listening to conversation and music, till finally touching

the mainland, we found the Chief Citizen of the Province, and his

attendants and officials, with Medocars, in which the entire party

was carried to his capital, which crowned a grand elevation some two

hundred miles inland.

Here we were entertained in magnificent simplicity for a day, and here

Alpaz discoursed to me on the many matters in which I was interested,

and which fell within the sphere of his Curatorship. I cannot recount

them all, but shall endeavor to bring out the main points.

"You would learn something of our educational system?" he said, as

though I had plied him with a question.

"It is quite simple. It involves no complexities. We follow only the

path of nature. From birth to the age of ten the infant is in the

exclusive control and tutorship of the mother. She alone is entirely

capable of moulding the infantile mind, and setting its feet aright in

the pathway of manhood and womanhood.

"In your land, as in others, all too often she delegates this great

duty to alien and unfit hands, and reaps the bitter harvest of sorrow

in the afternoon of motherhood.

"At the age of ten, when the mother has fitted the mind for stronger

impressions, the child enters the broader field of learning. Our

temples, which you meet everywhere, are our schoolhouses, our altars of

Learning and Knowledge, the cherubim of Wisdom.

"These temples are the abode of Knowledge and Wisdom, handed down in

the records of the ages, showing each successive step taken and to what

it led. Here they are taught by the older men and women, who having

retired from the activities of life, with a competence assured them,

matured in thought, filled with knowledge and possessed of wisdom,

perform their final labor, a labor of love for the younger generation.

"At the age of fifteen every boy and every girl develops the line of

effort to which they incline in the respective spheres of the sexes,

and thereafter, to the age of twenty for females and twenty-five for

males, they are instructed along these lines by their tutors, in the

meantime devoting a part of their time to some useful occupation. The

result is men and women in every way fitted to fulfill their destiny.

"No; we have no clergy, no ministers as you term them, to teach either

the old or the young in what you name religion. We have no churches.

Reverence for the Supreme Principle of the Universe is instilled into

every mind, from infancy up, and all our people live these teachings.

They do not listen to them one day in seven and neglect to follow all

or the majority of them for six.

"We know nothing, except as lamentable facts, of the various so-called

religious divisions which convulse the rest of the world--Confucianism,

Hindooism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, Judaism,

Polytheism and Christianity, and the many warring or antagonistic

sects into which they divided and subdivided.

"We know only loving reverence for the Supreme Principle of the

Universe, filial love and piety, and justice to all creatures. This

is the soul and essence of your religion, Christianity, and the basic

principle of all others. We prefer the last analysis to the inchoate

mass of contending creeds, that have drenched the earth with blood

for time out of mind, and filled it with doubt and misery; and even

now, in the twilight of your Nineteenth Century, and in the name of

the Child of Nazareth, promulgates Christianization and evangelization

at the cannon's mouth and with the sword and torch, of peoples whose

only offense is that they believe that their God requires thus and so

at their hands as a prerequisite to their entrance into His heavenly

kingdom.

"By gentler and educatory teachings, untainted by the corroding canker

of selfishness, they might be turned in the right direction and their

generations be led into the light, provided that your educational

system moved on a loftier plane than theirs; but blood and violence,

and all the carnal lusts that follow like jackals in their wake, can

only eventuate in driving them into lower depths.

"The spiritual instructors of the outer world, past and present, are

and have been, in the main, sincere and earnest, but with a limited

idea of the spiritualism they essay to teach. Powerful prelacies have

grown up in all the religious divisions, ambitious of temporal power,

and untold evils have resulted, not from the system of religion, but

from the love of power and authority, non-spiritual in its nature, and

as a result the spirit or principle of religion has suffered undeserved

obloquy.

"To us the ideal God of your religious people is strangely

contradictory and irreconcilable. He is portrayed not as a spiritual

being, but as a common mortal in many of the essentials. Their

conception of Deity is that He rules as a king in heaven, before whom

the redeemed and the saints forever prostrate themselves in adoration

or sing praises by voice, and adulate Him with harp and lute and other

musical instruments, confessing hourly their unworthiness to come into

His presence.

"This is an earthly, barbarous conception of the Supreme Power of the

Universe. It was probably of Chinese or Oriental origin in the days of

supreme despotism, when every subject must prostrate himself in the

dust in the presence of majesty.

"This idea was transmitted to Christendom in the West when royalty

proclaimed itself the symbol of Godhood and religion. The subject was

taught that the monarch was the direct representative of God, and his

court was modeled after the court of the King of kings, where homage

and adoration and humiliation were the endless order of all future life.

"We have an entirely different conception of the Supreme Principle,

and do not regard it in the light of a ruler or king, in the mortal

sense, but the embodiment of justice and love, that neither exacts nor

receives adoration of those who pass to the world beyond, the returning

children of the great and enduring Principle which exists everywhere,

strengthened and broadened by a previous state or states of existence,

wherein they were clothed about with mortal and perishable habiliments.

"We look forward to the passage from this world to a better one beyond

with joyous expectation, and with no sense of terror or apprehension,

and there come us no pangs of dissolution. We have sought diligently to

live up to the law of love in this life, and have the fullest assurance

that our efforts will meet the approval of the Supreme Principle,

whose beneficences invite and permit us to enter the broader fields

and more perfect worlds of a higher existence.

"Death, or the exchange of worlds, has neither terrors for those who

go, nor the stings of affliction for those who tarry. It is but the

inevitable and necessary parting of friends and relatives for a little

period, and we know that the shores of reunion lie just beyond the

filmy veil of the future.

"The end or change is never hastened nor retarded by the violation

of Nature's sacred laws. There are but few partings or deaths in the

earlier periods of life. They go with joyful alacrity, as to a feast,

at four or five score, and their memory, works and examples cheer and

sustain those who remain.

"No; we have no physicians. If, perchance, some law of Nature is

violated and mortal ailment ensues, it needs no specialist to discover

that fact, or recommend the proper method of rectifying it. That is a

part of the education of all. Literally, we neither know nor care to

know what physic is. We live simply and in accordance with Nature's

laws, and disease, such as prevails in your land and others, is unknown

in this, and has been for ages. Science and scientific discovery, as we

utilize and employ them, have freed us from disease and made death but

the exchange of lives. We know more than we care to tell of the life

beyond."

He ceased abruptly after saying:

"Tomorrow you will be the guest of Remo, the Curator of Useful

Mechanical Devices. You may learn much from him."

VI.

THE SECRET OF INTERMERE PARTIALLY REVEALED TO ANDERTON, AND WHEN HE

LEAST EXPECTS IT HE IS RESTORED TO HIS HOME AND KINDRED, MUCH TO HIS

REGRET.

VI.

THE SECRET OF INTERMERE.

The secret of Intermere--its great mechanical secret--was revealed to

me, but, alas! only in part. It was as if the sun be pointed out to a

child who is told that it shines and is a prime factor in the growth of

all forms of life, animal and vegetable.

The child realizes that the orb of day shines, but remains wholly in

the dark as to the processes of its rays; why it inspires animals and

vegetation with life and growth, and produces the prismatic colors of

the rainbow.

So with me. I know the fountain-head or cause that gave momentum to all

the mechanism of the land, shortened the period between germination

and maturity in vegetation, banished fire while retaining warmth,

turned the night into a season of beauty equaling the full day, kept

every street and highway free from debris, prevented foul emanations,

with their contaminations, and did countless other things which our

own scientists demonstrate are desirable and necessary, but still

unattainable. But of the details, of the why and the wherefore, of the

effects and the processes by which so many different results emanated

from the same apparent cause, I learned nothing.

One morning, after a season of delicious, invigorating slumber, as

I walked in the spacious grounds of my host, the Chief Citizen of

the Province--grounds sweeter and fairer than the fabled Gardens of

Gulistan--I saw a fleet of Aerocars approaching, led by one of the most

magnificent, and by far the largest, that I had yet seen. It could not

have been less than one hundred feet in length and twenty in breadth

at the midway point, and yet it seemed to float as lightly as a feather

in the aerial depths.

When almost directly overhead the fleet halted, and remained

stationary, as though firmly anchored to some immovable substance, and

then the leading craft slowly sank to the earth at my feet, as lightly

as you have seen a bird alight.

It was the Aerocar of Remo, containing a score of people. I had not

hitherto met Remo, the Curator of Useful Mechanical Devices. However,

he needed no introduction to me or I to him. The recognition was mutual.

He came forward and greeted me cordially, and later presented me to his

fellow voyagers, and said:

"I know you are anxious to learn something of the motive principle of

our mechanisms. That I shall impart to you, at least partially. Our

journey will begin to suit your convenience. We will breakfast en

route."

I hastened to say my adieux to the Chief Citizen, Alpaz, and the

members of the household, and then entered the Aerocar, taking a seat

near Remo. At a signal to the pilot, the craft rose as lightly and

majestically as it had descended.

I looked about me at the passengers, hampers of provisions, culinary

utensils and table equipment, and estimated that the Aerocar was

carrying not less than four thousand pounds of dead weight.

"You are wondering how so much bulk and weight ascend without apparent

cause."

I assented to the proposition.

"When you are at home and see an inflated balloon ascend, carrying a

man weighing one hundred and fifty pounds, with seventy-five pounds of

sand ballast, you can understand how it ascends?"

"Readily."

"By mechanical contrivance of immense comparative bulk, aided by

chemical product, the power of gravitation is sufficiently overcome

or neutralized that a disproportionately small amount of weight is

carried into the upper air. We ascend for the same general reason, the

resultant of a greater, a different and a fixed principle.

"Our pilot, by means of the mechanical and other power at his command,

neutralized the attraction of gravitation, and without the aid of any

other appliance arose, carrying a weight of more than four thousand of

your pounds avoirdupois. It has ascended in a direct or perpendicular

line, despite the breeze, which would otherwise have carried us at a

western angle. I will have the pilot produce an equilibrium, stopping

all movement."

A signal was given the pilot, and, after a slight manipulation, it

stood still.

"Now we will descend, first perpendicularly and then at an angle of

forty-five degrees."

One signal and one manipulation, and the Aerocar described the first

motion. A second signal and manipulation, and it described the other.

"Now we will ascend, first by the reverse angle and then by the

perpendicular."

Again the signals and again the manipulations, and again the exact

movements through space.

"If your flying machine and airship builders could do that, what would

your people think?"

"That the world had been revolutionized."

"But the world will not be thus revolutionized until science is freed

of gross materialism and human aspiration becomes something higher

than selfish greed, commercialism, war, conquest, opulence, and the

despotisms they engender. You must expel all the gods with whom you

most closely commune, before you may commune with the true God or

Supreme Principle of the Universe."

In the meantime the Curator's Aerocar had rejoined its consorts, and we

floated away to the northeast, where a great semicircle of mountains

were dimly outlined, and then descended upon a city looking like a

pearl in a semicircular valley, bisected by a broad river, spanned with

bridges at short intervals as far as the vision reached.

With my watch I had timed the voyage. It had lasted two hours and

thirty minutes.

"How far have we traveled?" I inquired of Remo.

"One thousand of your miles."

"That is four hundred miles to the hour; six and two-thirds miles each

minute."

"The speed might easily have been doubled."

My amazement was unbounded, but I did not doubt Remo's statement then.

Later, I recognized it as an easy possibility.

Remo detained me until the rest of the company had left the Aerocar,

and then said abruptly: "You would learn the secret of the motive

principle that moves our mechanical devices and performs other offices

which seem to you miraculous. It is this: It is the electric current

which we take direct from the atmosphere at will--electricity, which

is the life-giving, life-preserving and life-promoting principle, the

superior and fountain of all law affecting the material Universe and

intervening space. To command that is to command everything.

"This is the capital of my Curatorship. Here all my predecessors have

served the Commonwealth; hither all my successors will come. Here every

mechanical device is tested, approved or rejected, and from hence their

production is directed, as a public right, in every municipal division

of the Commonwealth.

"Nearly every monument you have seen, as you have doubtless noticed,

is dedicated to some Chosen Son of Wisdom, and some of them date back

tens of centuries. Whoever makes a great discovery, such as taking the

electric current direct, or dividing its capabilities into useful and

necessary directions, or perfects some great mechanism, securing the

full beneficence of the current, brings it here and dedicates it to the

Commonwealth and its sons and daughters. Its benefits are common to all.

"His reward is that he is elected by universal acclaim as the Chosen

Son of Wisdom, a monument commemorative of his achievement is erected

at once, and he is installed in a home furnished out of the public

revenues, receives a stipend of fifty or five cinque media daily, and

is the honored guest on all public and private occasions.

"I shall show you many of our devices; some of them will be

self-explanatory, some will, to a degree, be explained, others left to

your conjecture, and for obvious reasons."

With this he led me through a large number of what we would look upon

as diminutive manufacturing establishments. In the first one visited he

exhibited to me two crystalline elongated globes, the size of an egg

each, connected by a small tube or cylinder of the same material two or

three inches in length.

The globes were filled with a whitish substance, or granulation, the

upper intensely white, the lower somewhat shaded. The upper one was

fitted with a movable disk, and could be opened by touching a lever.

A cluster of rather coarse wires, apparently an amalgam of several

metals, rose above the granulated contents. A double coil of wires, of

a different material or combination, running in opposite directions,

filled the connecting cylinder, while a cluster of almost imperceptibly

fine wires, of still a different material or combination, projected

from the bottom of the lower globe.

These globes resembled glass, and were, to all appearances, extremely

fragile. Remo dashed it upon the hard floor, as though he would

destroy it. It rebounded, and he caught it as an urchin would catch a

rebounding ball.

"I did this," he said, "to show you that these appliances are not

amenable to accident. This is the accumulator or receiver of the

current."

He touched the lever and opened a small aperture directly over the

cluster of wires in the upper globe.

"Hold your hand below the lower portion," he said.

I complied, and instantly my hand was moved away with such resistless

force that I was turned completely around and sent across the room.

Remo smiled at my undisguised consternation, and said:

"You will not be harmed. What you experienced was the flow of the

electric current, but it has not harmed you. It is physically

harmless. You would call this a twenty-horse-power motor in your

country, although it looks like a toy. Take it and handle it as I

direct. You may handle it with perfect safety. Place it horizontally

near that fly-wheel and push the lever."

He pointed to a fly-wheel scarcely a foot in diameter, with seven

radiating flanges set slightly at an angle. I did, and opened the

aperture. In less time than it takes to tell it the wheel was revolving

at a rate of speed so high that it seemed like a solid motionless and

polished mirror.

"Close the aperture, go to the side in which direction it is revolving,

and again open it to the current."

I did so, and instantly the wheel was motionless.

He pointed to a huge block of granite, which rested on a metal

framework a dozen inches above the floor, and said: "Banish all

nervousness, invert the accumulator, and hold it under the center of

the block, which weighs five of your tons."

I did so, and it slowly rose toward the ceiling.

"Close the aperture slowly, and finally close it entirely."

This I did, and it settled back to its original place.

"There," said Remo, "you have the direct current and its direct

application to machinery and inert bodies. You know enough about

mechanics to understand what that means. The ascent and flight and

movements and descent of the Aerocar; the running of the Medocar and

the sailing of the Merocar, are not such a profound mystery to you as

they were yesterday."

He conducted me into another factory and exhibited a number of

accumulators, each filled with apparently the same granulated

substance, but of different colors and admixture of colors. Remo opened

the apertures of a long line of them upon a wire rack, and they flashed

into brilliant lamps of every hue and color and shade--a light that was

as steady as that of the stars. He closed them one by one, showing the

absolute independence of each.

"Our lamps, with which we beautify the night, are no longer a mystery

to you--that is, not an absolute mystery."

In another factory he exhibited more accumulators with varicolored

materials in the globes. He opened one and directed its power toward an

ingot of metal. It melted like wax. Turning its force upon a fragment

of rock, it was transformed into the ordinary dust of our roadways.

With another he turned a vessel of water into a solid block of ice.

"Our topographical construction, our culinary economy and the absence

of fire are now plainer than they were."

"But how do you achieve all these different results with apparently the

same means?"

"The first device shown you is the primary; the others are subsequent

discoveries. By the primary medium we were able to produce or secure

the electric current in the form of dynamic power, eminently tractable

and harmless with ordinary prudence. New combinations of the medium

gave us all the other results, at intervals, subsequent to the original

discovery. And the field is not exhausted."

Remo explained that the crystalline substance in the upper globe of

the accumulator induced or gathered the electric current, giving it

controllable direction as well as defined volume, while that in the

lower determined its significance or divisional use.

In the minuter accumulators, for the lamps only, did the current

present itself in the form of light, spark or flame. All the colors,

from pure white to deep purple, with their prismatic variations, were

the direct result of their differing chemical combinations in the lower

globe, each of the silk-like wires throwing off countless rays of

unvarying intensity and steadiness, but gave off no electric phenomena

or effects.

The heat accumulators gave moderate or intense heat, according to the

chemical combinations through which the primary current passed, but

there was neither glow nor light-flash. So, too, the cold accumulators

gave off varying degrees of cold, for the same reason.

In none of them was there either the electric shock or its effects,

and all were tractable and free from danger in what we may term the

electrical sense. The dynamic force of the primary and the intense heat

or cold of the divisional currents, common prudence avoids. Still it

would be easily possible, by chemical combination, to produce a current

destructive of life and capable of annihilating nations, without hope

or possibility of escape.

"Your own scientists know," said Remo, "that with the direct current

all that you have seen, and infinitely more, is but the result of a

simple process, capable of infinite multiplication."

"But what are the constituents of the medium in the accumulator, and

what are the formulas of the various combinations?"

"If you knew that you would know as much as we."

This was the nearest a jest I had heard in Intermere, but I knew from

the character of Remo's speech that the rest of the secret would remain

hidden from me.

As we sat at his table later he said:

"You have been nearer to our secret than any one else in the outer

world, and we shall see whether the seeds will grow into the tree of

Knowledge and produce the fruits of Wisdom. Neither your people nor any

other people could be trusted with this secret in their present moral

condition. A few learned men dependent upon the rulers in one nation,

knowing it, could and would plot the destruction and exploitation of

all others. The sacrifice of human life and the accumulation of human

woe and misery would be appalling.

"If your leaders, with the suddenly awakened hunger for conquest and

dominion, could literally command the thunderbolts and control the

elements as against the rest of the world, they would sack Christendom

in the name of Liberty, Humanity and the Babe of Bethlehem, but in the

spirit of Mammon, Greed and selfish love of power and riches.

"You will make some progress in discoveries along scientific and

mechanical lines, but no real good to the race can result until these

discoveries are turned to a nobler purpose than that of seizing

commercial supremacy, subjugating alien and unwilling peoples,

slaughtering those who resist, exploiting those who lay down their

arms, gathering wealth regardless of justice and the rights of mankind

and building up an artificial race in the form of a ruling class, who

base their right to exclusive privileges on wealth and the perversion

of every principle of justice and the Christianity they profess.

"You have been wondering why, with our great knowledge and

achievements, we do not go forth and dominate the world. What would

it profit us? Could we find anything that would contribute to our

enjoyments, our hopes, our aspirations? No.

"Even we are not proof against the paralyzing touch of deterioration.

We pay more heed to the world's history than do the nations and

peoples who made that history, during the centuries. History is but

the lighthouse which warns against the reefs and rocks where

countless argosies have been lost. The mariners who sail the ships

of state dash recklessly upon the rocks of destruction, despite the

friendly warnings of the dead and engulfed who have gone before."

Turning to lighter themes, Remo spoke of the various economies of

the Commonwealth, and explained how the obstacles which confront our

civilization are overcome. Garbage and all debris, for instance, are

disposed of by instantaneous reduction to original conditions, and

then a recombination and distribution upon the grounds, farms and

gardens. The sewage question, the standing menace of all dense and

even sparse populations, is solved by the same process of purification

and recombination. This work is constantly performed under the eye of

the municipal authorities, and under fixed rules and service. Thus the

absolute cleanliness which prevailed everywhere was readily explained.

In answer to my query why Intermere had so long escaped discovery from

navigators, he said, interrogatively:

"Would it not be possible, with our superior knowledge and wisdom, to

put their reckoning at fault whenever they came within a fixed sphere

of proximity?"

To my question as to the equability of the seasons, the absence of

storms, and the regularity of the descent of moisture in the form of

gentle rains, he said:

"Do not imagine that our scientific knowledge stops with the mere

discovery of the direct electric current or our mechanical devices."

Nothing further could I elicit from him or any other Intermerean on

these or kindred subjects. The Book of Knowledge had been opened and

apparently closed.

After two days' stay in Remo's capital the Aerocars took up a goodly

entourage, and we moved softly and swiftly to the Greater City.

There Xamas and all his officials awaited us, along with every

Intermerean of both sexes I had met in my journeys, as well as every

Municipal Custodian of the realm, and in addition the Chief Citizens of

the fourteen Provinces I had not visited.

A reception fete was given me in the chief temple of the city, hoary

with age and instinct with wisdom. There were songs and music by the

young and happy, and apropos discourses by the older. I essayed the

role of orator, thanked my entertainers for their many courtesies and

the happy hours they had conferred upon a wanderer in a strange land.

The afternoon and evening were a season of unalloyed happiness.

As I dropped into slumber in the house of Xamas I soliloquized: "This

kindness and these honors seem significant. Perhaps the Intermereans

intend to adopt me into all their knowledge and wisdom. Perhaps"----

* * * * *

I felt that I was tossing on the swell of the ocean. Then there was a

sensation of physical pain, as if from long exposure to the elements.

So keen was this sensation that I awoke fully, started up and looked

around me. It was a grayish dawn, purpling in lines near the horizon.

Towering above me I saw the outlines of a great ship, lying at anchor

and lazily nodding as the swells swept into the harbor.

I found myself in one of the individual Merocars, intended for a single

passenger, but the compartments containing the accumulatory motors had

been removed and the marks of removal deftly concealed.

It was one of the most finished Merocars of its class with the

exception of the motor, constructed entirely of prepared wood,

resembling a piece of wicker work, but impervious to the sea, and

floated like a cork or a feather.

I was trying to determine where I was and how I came to be in my

present situation. Then came to me this in the Language of Silence:

"You have been safely delivered to those who will restore you to your

land and home. Discretion is always commendable."

I knew whence this thought came, and soon the increasing light showed

me that I was in the harbor of Singapore, lashed with a silken cord to

the forechains of an East Indian merchantman.

To my infinite regret I found that I was clad in the same clothes I

wore when the Mistletoe went to the bottom. The same trinkets and a few

coins and the other accessories were still in the pockets.

But the handsome and natty garments of Intermere were gone. I was back

in the world just as I left it, how long ago I could not tell, for

the memories of Intermere seemed to cover a decade at least, and I

estimated that those who lived to one hundred enjoyed a thousand years

of life.

The lookout on the ship finally discovered me, and shortly after I and

my curious boat were lifted to the deck and became the center of a

gaping crowd.

As I could not account for myself reasonably, I became merely evasive

and did not account for myself at all, and left the crew and passengers

equally divided as to whether I was a lunatic of a cunning knave.

Among those on board was one whose presence suggested Intermere.

I listened and observed, and learned that he was the Secretary of

a native Rajah on board the ship. He inspected me with curious

disappointment. The Merocar he seemed to worship both with eyes and

soul.

"Sell it to him, for you need money."

That was Maros; I could not be mistaken.

The Secretary motioned me to a distant part of the deck and said

abruptly:

"I will give you five thousand rupees for the--for the"----

"Merocar."

He started as though shocked by a bolt of lightning.

"I dare not talk--I cannot remember--but I dare not talk. Will you sell

it me for five thousand rupees, Sahib? It is all I have, but I will

give it freely."

"It is yours."

He went below and soon returned with the amount in bills of exchange

upon the bank at Hong Kong.

He carried his purchase to his stateroom, amid the laughter of

passengers and sailors, who did not conceal their merriment that any

man would pay such a price for a wicker basket, and my cunning and

hypnotic knavery were thoroughly established.

I remained a few days in Singapore, converting my bills partly into

cash and partly into exchange on London and New York.

Sailing later to Hong Kong, I there fell in with an American military

officer whom I knew, and who gave me the full particulars of Albert

Marshall's death. With him I made arrangements for the shipment of my

cousin's remains to his old home, via San Francisco.

Two days later I sailed for London, and within six weeks reached New

York, and the home of my childhood. I shall not describe the meeting

with my mother, nor speak of what was said in relation to the strange

and brief communications which passed between us months before.

VII.

LE ENVOI.

I HAVE READ THE FOREGOING. IT IS A FAITHFUL REPRODUCTION OF WHAT I WAS

ABLE TO COMMUNICATE TOUCHING MY EXPERIENCES. AND YET THE PICTURE DRAWN

IS FAINT, HAZY AND FAR AWAY. COMPARED WITH THE BEAUTIFUL REALITY, IT

IS "AS MOONLIGHT UNTO SUNLIGHT, AS WATER UNTO WINE." G. H. A.

Glenford, 1901.

* * * * *