So was it not in this place of which I speak, for all the people were industrious, wealthy, kind, amenable, and free.

I took a ticket for the only town on the railway list whose history I knew, and then in a third-class carriage made entirely of wood I settled down to a conversation with my kind; for though these people were not of my blood—­indeed, I am certain that for some hundreds of years not a drop of their blood has mingled with my own—­yet we understood each other by a common tongue called Lingua Franca, of which I have spoken in another place and am a past master.

As all the people round began their talk of cattle, land, and weather, two men next me, or rather the one next me and the other opposite me, began to talk of the election which had been held in that delightful plain:  by which, as I learnt, a dealer in herds had been defeated by a somewhat usurious and perhaps insignificant attorney.  In this election more than half the voters—­that is, a good third of the families in the plain—­had gone up to the little huts of wood and had made a mark upon a bit of paper, some on one part, some on the other.  About a sixth of the families had desired the dealer in herds to make their laws, and about a sixth the attorney.  Of the rest some could not, some would not, go and make the little mark of which I speak.  Many more could by law make it, and would have made it, if they had thought it useful to any possible purpose under the sun.  One-sixth, I say, had made their mark for the aged and money-lending attorney, and one-sixth for the venerable but avaricious dealer in herds, and since the first sixth was imperceptibly larger than the second it was the lawyer, not the merchant, who stood to make the laws for the people.  But not only to make laws:  he was also in some mystic way the Persona and Representative of all the plain.  The long sun-lit fields; the infinite past—­Carolingian, enormous; the delicate fronds of young trees; the distant sight of the mountains, which is the note of all that land; the invasions it had suffered, the conquests it might yet achieve; its soul and its material self, were all summed up in the solicitor, not in the farmer, and he was to vote on peace or war, on wine or water, on God or no God in the schools.  For the people of the plain were self-governing; they had no lords.

Of my two companions, the one had voted for the cow-buyer, but the other for the scribbler upon parchment, and they discussed their action without heat, gently and with many reasons.

The one said:  “It cannot be doubted that the solidarity of society demands that the homogeneity of economic interests should be recognised by the magistrate.”  The other said:  “The first need is rather that the historic continuity of society should be affirmed by the momentary depositaries of the executive.”

For these two men were of some education, and saw things from a higher standpoint than the peasants around us, who continued to discourse, now angrily, now merrily, but always loudly and rapidly, upon the insignificant matter of their lives:  that is, strong, red, bubbling wine, healthy and well-fed beef, rich land and housing, the marriage of daughters, and the putting forward of sons.