ments and understandings, loyalty
to the Crown; they had all been capable of the keenest attention
to precedence, all capable of the most complete suppression of
subversive doubts and inquiries, all had their religious emotions
under perfect control. They had seemed protected by invisible but
impenetrable barriers from all the heady and destructive speculations,
the socialistic, republican, and communistic theories that one may
still trace through the literature of the last days of the comet.
But now it was as if the very moment of the awakening those barriers
and defences had vanished, as if the green vapors had washed
through their minds and dissolved and swept away a hundred once
rigid boundaries and obstacles. They had admitted and assimilated
at once all that was good in the ill-dressed propagandas that had
clamored so vehemently and vainly at the doors of their minds in
the former days. It was exactly like the awakening from an absurd
and limiting dream. They had come out together naturally and
inevitably upon the broad daylight platform of obvious and reasonable
agreement upon which we and all the order of our world now stand.

Let me try to give the chief things that had vanished from their
minds. There was, first, the ancient system of "ownership" that
made such an extraordinary tangle of our administration of the
land upon which we lived. In the old time no one believed in that
as either just or ideally convenient, but every one accepted it.
The community which lived upon the land was supposed to have waived
its necessary connection with the land, except in certain limited
instances of highway and common. All the rest of the land was
cut up in the maddest way into patches and oblongs and triangles
of various sizes between a hundred square miles and a few acres,
and placed under the nearly absolute government of a series of
administrators called landowners. They owned the land almost as
a man now owns his hat; they bought it and sold it, and cut it up
like cheese or ham; they were free to ruin it, or leave it waste,
or erect upon it horrible and devastating eyesores. If the community
needed a road or a tramway, if it wanted a town or a village in any
position, nay, even if it wanted to go to and fro, it had to do so
by exorbitant treaties with each of the monarchs whose territory
was involved. No man could find foothold on the face of the earth
until he had paid toll and homage to one of them. They had practic