 felicity. But they were a very
practical people, my contemporaries, and after expressing their admiration for
the moral beauty and material splendor of the system, they would presently begin
to cipher and ask how you got the money to make everybody so happy; for
certainly, to support the whole nation at a rate of comfort, and even luxury,
such as I see around me, must involve vastly greater wealth than the nation
produced in my day. Now, while I could explain to them pretty nearly everything
else of the main features of your system, I should quite fail to answer this
question, and failing there, they would tell me, for they were very close
cipherers, that I had been dreaming; nor would they ever believe anything else.
In my day, I know that the total annual product of the nation, although it might
have been divided with absolute equality, would not have come to more than three
or four hundred dollars per head, not very much more than enough to supply the
necessities of life with few or any of its comforts. How is it that you have so
much more?«
    »That is a very pertinent question, Mr. West,« replied Dr. Leete, »and I
should not blame your friends, in the case you supposed, if they declared your
story all moonshine, failing a satisfactory reply to it. It is a question which
I cannot answer exhaustively at any one sitting, and as for the exact statistics
to bear out my general statements, I shall have to refer you for them to books
in my library, but it would certainly be a pity to leave you to be put to
confusion by your old acquaintances, in case of the contingency you speak of,
for lack of a few suggestions.
    Let us begin with a number of small items wherein we economize wealth as
compared with you. We have no national, state, county, or municipal debts, or
payments on their account. We have no sort of military or naval expenditures for
men or materials, no army, navy, or militia. We have no revenue service, no
swarm of tax assessors and collectors. As regards our judiciary, police,
sheriffs, and jailers, the force which Massachusetts alone kept on foot in your
day far more than suffices for the nation now. We have no criminal class preying
upon the wealth of society as you had. The number of persons, more or less
absolutely lost to the working force through physical disability, of the lame,
sick, and debilitated, which constituted such a burden on the able-bodied in
your
