ally
no relations and no duties to the nominal, municipal, or national
Government amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay. . . .
This sounds, I know, like a lunatic's dream, but mankind was that
lunatic; and not only in the old countries of Europe and Asia,
where this system had arisen out of the rational delegation of local
control to territorial magnates, who had in the universal baseness
of those times at last altogether evaded and escaped their duties,
did it obtain, but the "new countries," as we called them then--the
United States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and New
Zealand--spent much of the nineteenth century in the frantic giving
away of land for ever to any casual person who would take it. Was
there coal, was there petroleum or gold, was there rich soil or
harborage, or the site for a fine city, these obsessed and witless
Governments cried out for scramblers, and a stream of shabby,
tricky, and violent adventurers set out to found a new section of
the landed aristocracy of the world. After a brief century of hope
and pride, the great republic of the United States of America,
the hope as it was deemed of mankind, became for the most part a
drifting crowd of landless men; landlords and railway lords, food
lords (for the land is food) and mineral lords ruled its life,
gave it Universities as one gave coins to a mendicant, and spent
its resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuries as the
world had never seen before. Here was a thing none of these statesmen
before the Change would have regarded as anything but the natural
order of the world, which not one of them now regarded as anything
but the mad and vanished illusion of a period of dementia.

And as it was with the question of the land, so was it also
with a hundred other systems and institutions and complicated and
disingenuous factors in the life of man. They spoke of trade, and
I realized for the first time there could be buying and selling
that was no loss to any man; they spoke of industrial organization,
and one saw it under captains who sought no base advantages. The
haze of old associations, of personal entanglements and habitual
recognitions had been dispelled from every stage and process of
the social training of men. Things long hidden appeared discovered
with an amazing clearness and nakedness. These men who had
awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools
and colleges, books and traditions, th