I consider the theoretical and practical importance of these new truths to
be incalculable. Not merely do they at once give to the theory of social
evolution the unity and harmony of a definitive whole, but, what is more,
they show the way to an immediate practical realisation of the principles
formulated by this theory. If it is possible for the community to provide
the capital for production with out thereby doing injury to either the
principle of perfect individual freedom or to that of justice, _if interest
can be dispensed with without introducing communistic control in its stead,
then there no longer stands any positive obstacle in the way of the
establishment of the free social order_.

My intense delight at making this discovery robbed me of the calm necessary
to the prosecution of the abstract investigations upon which I was engaged.
Before my mind's eye arose scenes which the reader will find in the
following pages--tangible, living pictures of a commonwealth based upon the
most perfect freedom and equity, and which needs nothing to convert it into
a reality but the will of a number of resolute men. It happened to me as it
may have happened to Bacon of Verulam when his studies for the 'Novum
Organon' were interrupted by the vision of his 'Nova Atlantis'--with this
difference, however, that his prophetic glance saw the land of social
freedom and justice when centuries of bondage still separated him from it,
whilst I see it when mankind is already actually equipped ready to step
over its threshold. Like him, I felt an irresistible impulse vividly to
depict what agitated my mind. Thus, putting aside for awhile the abstract
and systematic treatise which I had begun, I wrote this book, which can
justly be called 'a political romance,' though it differs from all its
predecessors of that category in introducing no unknown and mysterious
human powers and characteristics, but throughout keeps to the firm ground
of the soberest reality. The scene of the occurrences described by me is no