 so light, reduces the number and duties of the
police to a minimum.«
    »But with no state legislatures, and Congress meeting only once in five
years, how do you get your legislation done?«
    »We have no legislation,« replied Dr. Leete, »that is, next to none. It is
rarely that Congress, even when it meets, considers any new laws of consequence,
and then it only has power to commend them to the following Congress, lest
anything be done hastily. If you will consider a moment, Mr. West, you will see
that we have nothing to make laws about. The fundamental principles on which our
society is founded settle for all time the strifes and misunderstandings which
in your day called for legislation.
    Fully ninety-nine hundredths of the laws of that time concerned the
definition and protection of private property and the relations of buyers and
sellers. There is neither private property, beyond personal belongings, now, nor
buying and selling, and therefore the occasion of nearly all the legislation
formerly necessary has passed away. Formerly, society was a pyramid poised on
its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple
it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you will
pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props
and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. A central Congress and forty
state legislatures, turning out some twenty thousand laws a year, could not make
new props fast enough to take the place of those which were constantly breaking
down or becoming ineffectual through some shifting of the strain. Now society
rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial supports as the
everlasting hills.«
    »But you have at least municipal governments besides the one central
authority?«
    »Certainly, and they have important and extensive functions in looking out
for the public comfort and recreation, and the improvement and embellishment of
the villages and cities.«
    »But having no control over the labor of their people, or means of hiring
it, how can they do anything?«
    »Every town or city is conceded the right to retain, for its own public
works, a certain proportion of the quota of labor its citizens contribute to the
nation. This proportion, being assigned it as so much credit, can be applied in
any way desired.«
 

                                   Chapter XX

That afternoon Edith casually inquired if I had yet revisited the underground
chamber in the garden in which I had been found.
    »Not yet,« I replied. »To be frank
