In Tortirran politics, as in Tamtonian, the population is always divided into two, and sometimes three or four “parties,” each having a “policy” and each conscientiously believing the policy of the other, or others, erroneous and destructive.  In so far as these various and varying policies can be seen to have any relation whatever to practical affairs they can be seen also to be the result of purely selfish considerations.  The self-deluded people flatter themselves that their elections are contests of principles, whereas they are only struggles of interests.  They are very fond of the word slagthrit, “principle”; and when they believe themselves acting from some high moral motive they are capable of almost any monstrous injustice or stupid folly.  This insane devotion to principle is craftily fostered by their political leaders who invent captivating phrases intended to confirm them in it; and these deluding aphorisms are diligently repeated until all the people have them in memory, with no knowledge of the fallacies which they conceal.  One of these phrases is “Principles, not men.”  In the last analysis this is seen to mean that it is better to be governed by scoundrels professing one set of principles than by good men holding another.  That a scoundrel will govern badly, regardless of the principles which he is supposed somehow to “represent,” is a truth which, however obvious to our own enlightened intelligence, has never penetrated the dark understandings of the Tortirrans.  It is chiefly through the dominance of the heresy fostered by this popular phrase that the political leaders are able to put base men into office to serve their own nefarious ends.

I have called the political contests of Tortirra struggles of interests.  In nothing is this more clear (to the looker-on at the game) than in the endless disputes concerning restrictions on commerce.  It must be understood that lying many leagues to the southeast of Tortirra are other groups of islands, also wholly unknown to people of our race.  They are known by the general name of Gropilla-Stron (a term signifying “the Land of the Day-dawn"), though it is impossible to ascertain why, and are inhabited by a powerful and hardy race, many of whom I have met in the capital of Tanga.  The Stronagu, as they are called, are bold navigators and traders, their proas making long and hazardous voyages in all the adjacent seas to exchange commodities with other tribes.  For many years they were welcomed in Tortirra with great hospitality and their goods eagerly purchased.  They took back with them all manner of Tortirran products and nobody thought of questioning the mutual advantages of the exchange.  But early in the present century a powerful Tortirran demagogue named Pragam began to persuade the people that commerce was piracy—­that true prosperity consisted in consumption of domestic products and abstention from foreign.  This extraordinary heresy soon gathered such head that Pragam was appointed