the rate of wages and determine just how much
everybody shall earn, from the doctors to the diggers. All I can say is, that
this plan would never have worked with us, and I don't see how it can now unless
human nature has changed. In my day, nobody was satisfied with his wages or
salary. Even if he felt he received enough, he was sure his neighbor had too
much, which was as bad. If the universal discontent on this subject, instead of
being dissipated in curses and strikes directed against innumerable employers,
could have been concentrated upon one, and that the government, the strongest
ever devised would not have seen two pay days.«
    Dr. Leete laughed heartily.
    »Very true, very true,« he said, »a general strike would most probably have
followed the first pay day, and a strike directed against a government is a
revolution.«
    »How, then, do you avoid a revolution every pay day?« I demanded. »Has some
prodigious philosopher devised a new system of calculus satisfactory to all for
determining the exact and comparative value of all sorts of service, whether by
brawn or brain, by hand or voice, by ear or eye? Or has human nature itself
changed, so that no man looks upon his own things but every man on the things of
his neighbor? One or the other of these events must be the explanation.«
    »Neither one nor the other, however, is,« was my host's laughing response.
»And now, Mr. West,« he continued, »you must remember that you are my patient as
well as my guest, and permit me to prescribe sleep for you before we have any
more conversation. It is after three o'clock.«
    »The prescription is, no doubt, a wise one,« I said; »I only hope it can be
filled.«
    »I will see to that,« the doctor replied, and he did, for he gave me a
wineglass of something or other which sent me to sleep as soon as my head
touched the pillow.
 

                                  Chapter VIII

When I awoke I felt greatly refreshed, and lay a considerable time in a dozing
state, enjoying the sensation of bodily comfort. The experiences of the day
previous, my waking to find myself in the year 2000, the sight of the new
Boston, my host and his family, and the wonderful things I had heard, were a
blank in my memory. I thought I was in my bed-chamber at home, and the
half