st President of Aureataland, his Excellency, President Marcus
W. Whittingham, a native of Virginia. Having enjoyed a personal
friendship (not, unhappily, extended to public affairs) with that
talented man, as will subsequently appear, I have great pleasure
in publicly indorsing the professor's eulogium. Not only did the
President bring Aureataland into being, but he molded her whole
constitution. "It was his genius" (as the professor observes with
propriety) "which was fired with the idea of creating a truly modern
state, instinct with the progressive spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race.
It was his genius which cast aside the worn-out traditions of European
dominion, and taught his fellow-citizens that they were, if not all by
birth, yet one and all by adoption, the sons of freedom." Any mistakes
in the execution of this fine conception must be set down to the fact
that the President's great powers were rather the happy gift of nature
than the result of culture. To this truth he was himself in no way
blind, and he was accustomed to attribute his want of a liberal
education to the social ruin brought upon his family by the American
Civil War, and to the dislocation thereby produced in his studies. As
the President was, when I had the honor of making his acquaintance
in the year 1880, fifty years old if he was a day, this explanation
hardly agrees with dates, unless it is to be supposed that the
President was still pursuing his education when the war began, being
then of the age of thirty-five, or thereabouts.

Starting under the auspices of such a gifted leader, and imbued with
so noble a zeal for progress, Aureataland was, at the beginning of her
history as a nation, the object of many fond and proud hopes. But in
spite of the blaze of glory in which her sun had risen (to be seen
duly reflected in the professor's work), her prosperity, as I have
said, was not maintained. The country was well suited for agriculture
and grazing, but the population--a very queer mixture of races--was
indolent, and more given to keeping holidays and festivals than
to honest labor. Most of them were unintelligent; those who were
intelligent made their living out of those who weren't, a method of
subsistence satisfactory to the individual, but adding little to the
aggregate of national wealth. Only two classes made fortunes of any
size, Government officials and bar-keepers, and even in their case the
wealth was not great, looked at by an English o