A remarkable feature of the crude and primitive civilization of the Americans was their religion.  This was polytheistic, as is that of all backward peoples, and among their minor deities were their own women.  This has been disputed by respectable authorities, among them Gunkux and the younger Kekler, but the weight of archaeological testimony is against them, for, as Sagab-Joffy ingeniously points out, none of less than divine rank would by even the lowest tribes be given unrestricted license to kill.  Among the Americans woman, as already pointed out, indubitably had that freedom, and exercised it with terrible effect, a fact which makes the matter of their religion pertinent to the purpose of this monograph.  If ever an American woman was punished by law for murder of a man no record of the fact is found; whereas, such American literature as we possess is full of the most enthusiastic adulation of the impossible virtues and imaginary graces of the human female.  One writer even goes to the length of affirming that respect for the sex is the foundation of political stability, the cornerstone of civil and religious liberty!  After the break-up of the republic and the savage intertribal wars that followed, Gyneolatry was an exhausted cult and woman was relegated to her old state of benign subjection.

Unfortunately, we know little of the means of travel in ancient America, other than the names.  It seems to have been done mainly by what were called “railroads,” upon which wealthy associations of men transported their fellow-citizens in some kind of vehicle at a low speed, seldom exceeding fifty or sixty miles an hour, as distance and time were then reckoned—­about equal to seven kaltabs a grillog.  Notwithstanding this slow movement of the vehicles, the number and fatality of accidents were incredible.  In the Zopetroq Museum of Archaeology is preserved an official report (found in the excavations made by Droyhors on the supposed site of Washington) of a Government Commission of the Connected States.  From that document we learn that in the year 1907 of their era the railroads of the country killed 5,000 persons and wounded 72,286—­a mortality which is said by the commissioners to be twice that of the battle of Gettysburg, concerning which we know nothing but the name.  This was about the annual average of railroad casualties of the period, and if it provoked comment it at least led to no reform, for at a later period we find the mortality even greater.  That it was preventable is shown by the fact that in the same year the railroads of Great Britain, where the speed was greater and the intervals between vehicles less, killed only one passenger.  It was a difference of government:  Great Britain had a government that governed; America had not.  Happily for humanity, the kind of government that does not govern, self-government, “government of the people, by the people and for the people” (to use a meaningless paradox of that time) has perished from the face of the earth.