co-operation. We had to choose between taking advantage of the economic
system to live on other people or have them take advantage of it to live
on us. We had to climb on their backs as the only way of preventing them
from climbing on our backs. We had the alternative of profiting by an
unjust system or being its victims. There being no more moral
satisfaction in the one alternative than the other, we naturally
preferred the first. By glimpses all the more decent of us realized the
ineffable meanness of sponging our living out of the toilers, but our
consciences were completely bedeviled by an economic system which seemed
a hopeless muddle that nobody could see through or set right or do right
under. I will undertake to say that there was not a man of my set,
certainly not of my friends, who, placed just as I am this morning in
presence of an absolutely simple, just, and equal system for distributing
the industrial burden, would not feel just as I do the impulse to roll up
his sleeves and take hold."

"I am quite sure of it," said the doctor. "Your experience strikingly
confirms the chapter of revolutionary history which tells us that when
the present economic order was established those who had been under the
old system the most irreclaimable loafers and vagabonds, responding to
the absolute justice and fairness of the new arrangements, rallied to the
service of the state with enthusiasm. But talking of what you are to do,
why was not my former suggestion a good one, that you should tell our
people in lectures about the nineteenth century?"

"I thought at first that it would be a good idea," I replied, "but our
talk in the garden this morning has about convinced me that the very last
people who had any intelligent idea of the nineteenth century, what it
meant, and what it was leading to, were just myself and my contemporaries
of that time. After I have been with you a few years I may learn enough