"They are suffering from the endemic disease of their planet, prolonged
and inveterate gaping or yawning, which has ended in dislocation of the
lower jaw. After a time this becomes fixed, and requires a difficult
surgical operation to restore it to its place."

It struck me that, in spite of their boast that they have no paupers, no
thieves, no money, they were a melancholy-looking set of beings.

"What are their amusements?" I asked.

"Intoxication and suicide are their chief recreations. They have a way
of mixing the oxygen which issues in small jets from certain natural
springs with their atmospheric nitrogen in the proportion of about
twenty per cent, which makes very nearly the same thing as the air of
your planet. But to the Saturnians the mixture is highly intoxicating,
and is therefore a relief to the monotony of their every-day life. This
mixture is greatly sought after, but hard to obtain, as the sources
of oxygen are few and scanty. It shortens the lives of those who have
recourse to it; but if it takes too long, they have other ways of
escaping from a life which cuts and dries everything for its miserable
subjects, defeats all the natural instincts, confounds all individual
characteristics, and makes existence such a colossal bore, as your
worldly people say, that self-destruction becomes a luxury."

Number Five stopped here.

Your imaginary wholesale Shakerdom is all very fine, said I. Your
Utopia, your New Atlantis, and the rest are pretty to look at. But your
philosophers are treating the world of living souls as if they were,
each of them, playing a game of solitaire,--all the pegs and all the
holes alike. Life is a very different sort of game. It is a game of
chess, and not of solitaire, nor even of checkers. The men are not all
pawns, but you have your knights, bishops, rooks,--yes, your king and
queen,--to be provided for. Not with these names, of course, but all
looking for their proper places, and having their own laws and modes of
action. You can play solitaire with the members of your own family for
pegs, if you like, and if none of them rebel. You can play checkers with
a little community of meek, like-minded people. But when it comes to the
handling of a great state, you will find that nature has emptied a box
of chessmen before you, and you must play with them so as to give each
its proper move, or sweep them off the board, and come back to the
homely game such as I used to see played with