As we walked back to the town, Taee took a new and circuitous way,
in order to show me what, to use a familiar term, I will call the
‘Station,’ from which emigrants or travellers to other communities
commence their journeys. I had, on a former occasion, expressed a wish
to see their vehicles. These I found to be of two kinds, one for land
journeys, one for aerial voyages: the former were of all sizes and
forms, some not larger than an ordinary carriage, some movable houses of
one story and containing several rooms, furnished according to the ideas
of comfort or luxury which are entertained by the Vril-ya. The aerial
vehicles were of light substances, not the least resembling our
balloons, but rather our boats and pleasure-vessels, with helm and
rudder, with large wings or paddles, and a central machine worked by
vril. All the vehicles both for land or air were indeed worked by that
potent and mysterious agency.
I saw a convoy set out on its journey, but it had few passengers,
containing chiefly articles of merchandise, and was bound to a
neighbouring community; for among all the tribes of the Vril-ya there
is considerable commercial interchange. I may here observe, that their
money currency does not consist of the precious metals, which are too
common among them for that purpose. The smaller coins in ordinary use
are manufactured from a peculiar fossil shell, the comparatively scarce
remnant of some very early deluge, or other convulsion of nature, by
which a species has become extinct. It is minute, and flat as an oyster,
and takes a jewel-like polish. This coinage circulates among all the
tribes of the Vril-ya. Their larger transactions are carried on much
like ours, by bills of exchange, and thin metallic plates which answer
the purpose of our bank-notes.
Let me take this occasion of adding that the taxation among the tribe I
became acquainted with was very considerable, compared with the amount
of population. But I never heard that any one grumbled at it, for it was
devoted to purposes of universal utility, and indeed necessary to the
civilisation of the tribe. The cost of lighting so large a range
of country, of providing for emigration, of maintaining the public
buildings at which the various operations of national intellect were
carried on, from the first education of an infant to the departments in
which the College of Sages were perpetually trying new experiments in
mechanical science; all these involved the necessity for considerable
state funds. To these I must add an item that struck me as very
singular. I have said that all the human labour required by the state is
carried on by children up to the marriageable age. For this labour the
state pays, and at a rate immeasurably higher than our own remuneration
to labour even in the United States. According to their theory, every
child, male or female, on attaining the marriageable age, and there
terminating the period of labour, should have acquired enough for an
independent competence during life. As, no matter what the disparity of
fortune in the parents, all the children must equally serve, so all
are equally paid according to their several ages or the nature of their
work. Where the parents or friends choose to retain a child in their
own service, they must pay into the public fund in the same ratio as the
state pays to the children it employs; and this sum is handed over to
the child when the period of service expires. This practice serves, no
doubt, to render the notion of social equality familiar and agreeable;
and if it may be said that all the children form a democracy, no less
truly it may be said that all the adults form an aristocracy. The
exquisite politeness and refinement of manners among the Vril-ya, the
generosity of their sentiments, the absolute leisure they enjoy for
following out their own private pursuits, the amenities of their
domestic intercourse, in which they seem as members of one noble order
that can have no distrust of each other’s word or deed, all combine to
make the Vril-ya the most perfect nobility which a political disciple
of Plato or Sidney could conceive for the ideal of an aristocratic
republic.