conditions so unlike our own that they cannot be reported to us with
absolute intelligence, or else there is in every experience of them an
essential vagueness and uncertainty.


PART FIRST



Through the Eye of the Needle




I


If I spoke with Altrurian breadth of the way New-Yorkers live, my dear
Cyril, I should begin by saying that the New-Yorkers did not live at all.
But outside of our happy country one learns to distinguish, and to allow
that there are several degrees of living, all indeed hateful to us, if we
knew them, and yet none without some saving grace in it. You would say
that in conditions where men were embattled against one another by the
greed and the envy and the ambition which these conditions perpetually
appeal to here, there could be no grace in life; but we must remember
that men have always been better than their conditions, and that
otherwise they would have remained savages without the instinct or the
wish to advance. Indeed, our own state is testimony of a potential
civility in all states, which we must keep in mind when we judge the
peoples of the plutocratic world, and especially the American people, who