The speaker in the fragments (which may almost be said to take the form of an autobiography) was the son of one of the twelve kings, who by his genius and worth became “Tootmanyoso,” or supreme Ruler.  In the planet his name is mentioned with even more reverence than, by different peoples, is paid to that of Zoroaster, Solon, Lycurgus, or Alfred; but he has this peculiarity that he does not fade, like many other great legislators, into mythical indistinctness, but is himself the exponent of his own polity.

It must not, however, be supposed that this great legislator was the first to rescue his world from mere barbarism.  The founder of civilization in Montalluyah seems to have been a very ancient sage named Elikoia, to whom brief reference is made in the following pages.  Prior to the reign of our Tootmanyoso the people had passed through various stages of civilization, under the guidance of many wise and good men.  Still the polity was defective, for the country remained subject to crime, misery, and disease.

The proverb that “Prevention is better than cure,” to which everybody gives unhesitating assent, but which is often forgotten in practice, lies at the root of most of the reforms, both moral and physical, effected by the Tootmanyoso.  The policy of prevention—­that is, of destroying maladies of mind and body in the germ, before they had been allowed to spread their poison—­was one of his leading principles.  Under his influence, the physicians of Montalluyah made it less their duty to cure than to prevent disease, therein differing widely from our practitioners, who are not usually called to exercise their skill until a malady has been developed, and has perhaps assumed large proportions.

Under his influence likewise it was thought better to diminish moral evil by extirpating faults in the child, rather than by punishing crimes in the man.

Another prominent feature in the polity of the great Legislator of Montalluyah is the occupation of every person in the intellectual or physical pursuit for which he has been fitted by natural qualifications, developed and fortified by culture.  Nobility, position, and wealth are made to depend on merit alone, ascertained by a mechanism which neither favouritism, ignorance, nor accident can affect.  These laws may for an instant seem to partake of a democratic tinge; but it will be clearly perceived that the regulations concerning the institutions of property and marriage are diametrically opposite to those which have rendered the theories of Communists so generally hateful.

Many of the Tootmanyoso’s reforms resulted from an application of extraordinary scientific discoveries to the purposes of life.  Under the law which determined that the “right man” should, in the most extensive sense of the phrase, always be in the “right place,” discoveries were made of which the most acute investigators of earlier times had had no conception, and the newly-acquired ability of wielding electrical, mechanical, and other forces had momentous political consequences.  Armed with powers previously unknown, the Tootmanyoso found comparatively easy the successive steps towards the happiness and well-being of his world, where a series of insuperable obstacles would have been presented to the wisest of his predecessors.