excavations, which unduly reduced the number of supports,
swallowed up whole towns during the first two centuries. They will serve
for our descendants as Pompeii to rediscover. At the least shock
produced by earthquakes (the only natural plague which engages our
attention), a few cases of crushing to death still occur here and there,
but such accidents are very rare.

To return to our subject. Each of our cities in founding colonies in the
region round it, has become the mother of cities similar to itself, in
which its own peculiar colour has been multiplied in different tints
which reflect and render it more beautiful. It is thus with us that
nations are formed whose differences no longer correspond to
geographical accidents but to the diversity of the social aptitudes of
human nature and of nothing else. Nay, more, in each of them the
division of cities is founded on that of schools, the most flourishing
of which, at any given moment, raises its particular town to the rank of
capital, thanks to the all-powerful favour of the public.

The beginnings and devolution of power, questions which have so deeply
agitated humanity of yore, arise with us in the most natural way in the
world. There is always amid the crowd of our genius, a superior genius
who is hailed as such by the almost unanimous acclamation of his pupils
at first, and next of his comrades. A man is judged in fact by his peers
and according to his productions, not by the incompetent or according to
his electoral exploits. In the light of the intimate sense of corporate
life which binds and cements us one to another, the elevation of such a
dictator to the supreme magistracy has nothing humiliating about it for
the pride of the senators who have elected him, and who are the chiefs
of all the leading schools they themselves have created. The elector who
is a pupil, the elector who is an intelligent and sympathetic admirer
identifies himself with the object of his choice. Now it is the
particular characteristic of a "Geniocratic" Republic to be based on
admiration, not on envy, on sympathy, and not on dislike--on
enlightenment, not on illusion.

Nothing is more delightful than a tour through our domains. Our towns,
which are quite close to one another are severally connected by broad
roads which are always illuminated and dotted with light and graceful
monocycles, with trains without smoke or whistle, with pretty electric
carriages which glide silently along,