then a cry that the period was arrived when the title-deeds of
landed property should be given to the flames, and the whole soil of
the earth revert to the public, from whom it had been wrongfully
abstracted and most unequally distributed among individuals.
Another party demanded that all written constitutions, set forms of
government, legislative acts, statute-books, and everything else on
which human invention had endeavored to stamp its arbitrary laws,
should at once be destroyed, leaving the consummated world as free
as the man first created.

Whether any ultimate action was taken with regard to these
propositions is beyond my knowledge; for, just then, some matters
were in progress that concerned my sympathies more nearly.

"See! see! What heaps of books and pamphlets!" cried a fellow, who
did not seem to be a lover of literature. "Now we shall have a
glorious blaze!"

"That's just the thing!" said a modern philosopher. "Now we shall
get rid of the weight of dead men's thought, which has hitherto
pressed so heavily on the living intellect that it has been
incompetent to any effectual self-exertion. Well done, my lads!
Into the fire with them! Now you are enlightening the world
indeed!"

"But what is to become of the trade?" cried a frantic bookseller.

"O, by all means, let them accompany their merchandise," coolly
observed an author. "It will be a noble funeral-pile!"