A tone of irony, and at the same time an air of guarded reserve, seemed to pervade all my host’s remarks on this subject, and I perceived that for some reason it was so unpleasant to him that courtesy obliged me to drop it.  I put, therefore, to turn the conversation, some questions as to the political organisation of which his words had afforded me a glimpse; and in reply he undertook to give me a summary of the political history of his planet during the last few hundred generations.

“If,” he said, “in giving you this sketch of the process by which our present social order has been established, I should mention a class or party who have stood at certain times distinctly apart from or in opposition to the majority, I must, in the first place, beg you to ask no questions about them, and in the next not to repeat incautiously the little I may tell you, or to show, by asking questions of others, what you have heard from me.”

I gave my promise frankly, of course, and he then gave me the following sketch of Martial history:—­

We date events from the union of all races and nations in a single State, a union which was formally established 13,218 years ago.  At that time the large majority of the inhabitants of this planet possessed no other property than their houses, clothes, and tools, their furniture, and a few other trifles.  The land was owned by fewer than 400,000 proprietors.  Those who possessed movable wealth may have numbered thrice as many.  Political and social power was in the hands of the owners of property, and of those, generally connected with them by birth or marriage, who were at any rate not dependent on manual labour for their bread.  But among these there were divisions and factions on various questions more or less trivial, none of them approaching in importance or interest to the fundamental and irreconcilable conflict sure one day to arise between those who had accumulated wealth and those who had not.  To gain their ends in one or another of these frivolous quarrels, each party in turn admitted to political influence section after section of what you call the proletariat; till in the year 3278 universal suffrage was granted, every man and woman over the age of twelve years [6] being entitled to a single and equal vote.

About the same time the change in opinion of which I have spoken had taken general effect, and the vast majority of the men, at any rate, had ceased to believe in a future life wherein the inequalities and iniquities of this might be redressed.  It followed that they were fiercely impatient of hardships and suffering, especially such as they thought might be redressed by political and social changes.  The leaders of the multitude, for the most part men belonging to the propertied classes who had either wasted their wealth or never possessed any, demanded the abolition of private ownership, first of land, then of movable wealth; a demand which fiercely excited the passions