said.
    »Your testimony on this point,« he declared, »is invaluable. We believe that
there has been such an improvement as you speak of, but of course it could only
be a matter of theory with us. It is an incident of your unique position that
you alone in the world of to-day can speak with authority on this point. Your
opinion, when you state it publicly, will, I assure you, make a profound
sensation. For the rest it would be strange, certainly, if the race did not show
an improvement. In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind
and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food,
and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on
women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent
circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the
young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is
required of all is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is never
excessive; care for one's self and one's family, anxiety as to livelihood, the
strain of a ceaseless battle for life - all these influences, which once did so
much to wreck the minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more.
Certainly, an improvement of the species ought to follow such a change. In
certain specific respects we know, indeed, that the improvement has taken place.
Insanity, for instance, which in the nineteenth century was so terribly common a
product of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared, with its
alternative, suicide.«
 

                                  Chapter XXII

We had made an appointment to meet the ladies at the dining-hall for dinner,
after which, having some engagement, they left us sitting at table there,
discussing our wine and cigars with a multitude of other matters.
    »Doctor,« said I, in the course of our talk, »morally speaking, your social
system is one which I should be insensate not to admire in comparison with any
previously in vogue in the world, and especially with that of my own most
unhappy century. If I were to fall into a mesmeric sleep to-night as lasting as
that other, and meanwhile the course of time were to take a turn backward
instead of forward, and I were to wake up again in the nineteenth century, when
I had told my friends what I had seen, they would every one admit that your
world was a paradise of order, equity, and