ave to
define it; and as to this Good, there appears to be no difficulty,
for we who pursue it are also the people who get it That is so, is it
not?"

He agreed.

"But now," I continued, "we come to the point of dispute. For besides
this Good of our own, we have also, according to the theory, to
consider a Good in which we have no share, that of those who are to be
born in some indefinite future. And to this remote and alien Good we
have even, on occasion, to sacrifice our own."

"Certainly," he said, "all good citizens will think so."

"I believe," I admitted, "that they will. And yet, how strange it
seems! For consider it in this way. Imagine that the successive
generations can somehow be viewed as contemporaneous--being projected,
as it were, from the plane of time into that of space."

"It's rather hard," he said, "to imagine that."

"Well, but try, for the sake of argument; and consider what we shall
have. We shall have a society divided into two classes, composed, the
one of all the generations who, if they followed one another in
time, would precede the first millenarian one; the other of all the
millenarian-generations themselves. And of these two classes the first
would be perpetually engaged in working for the second, sacrificing to
it, if need be, on occasion, all its own Good, but without any hope
or prospect of ever entering itself into that other Good which is the
monopoly of the other class, but to the production of which its own
efforts are directed. What should we say of such a society? Should we
not say that it was founded on injustice and inequality, and all those
other phrases with which we are wont to denounce a system of serfdom
or slavery?"

"But," he objected, "your projection of time into space has falsified
the whole situation. For in fact the millenarian generation would not
come into being until the others had ceased to be; and therefore the
latter would not be being sacrificed to it."

"No," I said, "but they would have been sacrificed; and surely it
comes to the same thing?"

"I am not sure," he replied, "and anyhow, I don't think sacrifice is
the right word. In a society every man's interest is in the Whole; and
when he works for the Whole he is also working for himself."

"No doubt that is true," I replied, "in a society properly
constituted, but I question whether it would be true in such a society
as I have described. And then there is a further difficulty--and here,
I con