imaginary fairy-land, but a part of our planet well-known to modern
geography, which I describe exactly as its discoverers and explorers have
done. The men who appear in my narrative are endowed with no supernatural
properties and virtues, but are spirit of our spirit, flesh of our flesh;
and the motive prompting their economic activity is neither public spirit
nor universal philanthropy, but an ordinary and commonplace self-interest.
Everything in my 'Freeland' is severely real, only one fiction underlies
the whole narrative, namely, that a sufficient number of men possessing a
modicum of capacity and strength have actually been found ready to take the
step that shall deliver them from the bondage of the exploiting system of
economics, and conduct them into the enjoyment of a system of social equity
and freedom. Let this one assumption be but realised--and that it will be,
sooner or later, I have no doubt, though perhaps not exactly as I have
represented--then will 'Freeland' have become a reality, and the
deliverance of mankind will have been accomplished. For the age of bondage
is past; that control over the forces of nature which the founder of modern
natural science, in his 'Nova Atlantis,' predicted as the end of human
misery has now been actually acquired. We are prevented from enjoying the
fruits of this acquisition, from making full use of the discoveries and
inventions of the great intellects of our race, by nothing but the
phlegmatic faculty of persistence in old habits which still keeps laws and
institutions in force when the conditions that gave rise to them have long
since disappeared.

As this book professes to offer, in narrative form, a picture of the actual
social life of the future, it follows as a matter of course that it will be
exposed, in all its essential features, to the severest professional
criticism. To this criticism I submit it, with this observation, that, if
my work is to be regarded as a failure, or as the offspring of frivolous
fancy, it must be demonstrated that men gifted with a normal average