o?"

"My friend," he said, "we like these pieces of wild nature, and can
afford them, so we have them; let alone that as to the forests, we need a
great deal of timber, and suppose that our sons and sons' sons will do
the like. As to the land being a garden, I have heard that they used to
have shrubberies and rockeries in gardens once; and though I might not
like the artificial ones, I assure you that some of the natural rockeries
of our garden are worth seeing. Go north this summer and look at the
Cumberland and Westmoreland ones,--where, by the way, you will see some
sheep-feeding, so that they are not so wasteful as you think; not so
wasteful as forcing-grounds for fruit out of season, _I_ think. Go and
have a look at the sheep-walks high up the slopes between Ingleborough
and Pen-y-gwent, and tell me if you think we _waste_ the land there by
not covering it with factories for making things that nobody wants, which
was the chief business of the nineteenth century."

"I will try to go there," said I.

"It won't take much trying," said he.

CHAPTER XI: CONCERNING GOVERNMENT

"Now," said I, "I have come to the point of asking questions which I
suppose will be dry for you to answer and difficult for you to explain;
but I have foreseen for some time past that I must ask them, will I 'nill
I. What kind of a government have you? Has republicanism finally
triumphed? or have you come to a mere dictatorship, which some persons in
the nineteenth century used to prophesy as the ultimate outcome of
democracy? Indeed, this last question does not seem so very
unreasonable, since you have turned your Parliament House into a dung-
market. Or where do you house your present Parliament?"

The old man answered my smile with a hearty laugh, and said: "Well, well,
dung is not the worst kind of corruption; fertility may come of that,
whereas mere dearth came from the other kind, of which those walls once
held the great supporters. Now, dear guest, let me tell you that our
present parliament would be hard to house in one place, because the whole
people is our parliament."

"I don't understand," said I.

"No, I suppose not," said he. "I must now shock you by telling you that
we have no longer anything which you, a native of another planet, would
call a government."

"I am not so much shocked as you might think," said I, "as I know
something about governments. But tell me, how do you manage, and how
have you come