This reply set me thinking.  I reminded myself of that little state of Athens, with only twenty thousand free citizens, and which to this day our mightiest nations regard as the supreme guide and model in all departments of intellect.  But then Athens permitted fierce rivalry and perpetual change, and was certainly not happy.  Rousing myself from the reverie into which these reflections had plunged me, I brought back our talk to the subjects connected with emigration.

“But,” said I, “when, I suppose yearly, a certain number among you agree to quit home and found a new community elsewhere, they must necessarily be very few, and scarcely sufficient, even with the help of the machines they take with them, to clear the ground, and build towns, and form a civilised state with the comforts and luxuries in which they had been reared.”

“You mistake.  All the tribes of the Vril-ya are in constant communication with each other, and settle amongst themselves each year what proportion of one community will unite with the emigrants of another, so as to form a state of sufficient size; and the place for emigration is agreed upon at least a year before, and pioneers sent from each state to level rocks, and embank waters, and construct houses; so that when the emigrants at last go, they find a city already made, and a country around it at least partially cleared.  Our hardy life as children make us take cheerfully to travel and adventure.  I mean to emigrate myself when of age.”

“Do the emigrants always select places hitherto uninhabited and barren?”

“As yet generally, because it is our rule never to destroy except when necessary to our well-being.  Of course, we cannot settle in lands already occupied by the Vril-ya; and if we take the cultivated lands of the other races of Ana, we must utterly destroy the previous inhabitants.  Sometimes, as it is, we take waste spots, and find that a troublesome, quarrelsome race of Ana, especially if under the administration of Koom-Posh or Glek-Nas, resents our vicinity, and picks a quarrel with us; then, of course, as menacing our welfare, we destroy it:  there is no coming to terms of peace with a race so idiotic that it is always changing the form of government which represents it.  Koom-Posh,” said the child, emphatically, “is bad enough, still it has brains, though at the back of its head, and is not without a heart; but in Glek-Nas the brain and heart of the creatures disappear, and they become all jaws, claws, and belly.”  “You express yourself strongly.  Allow me to inform you that I myself, and I am proud to say it, am the citizen of a Koom-Posh.”

“I no longer,” answered Taee, “wonder to see you here so far from your home.  What was the condition of your native community before it became a Koom-Posh?”

“A settlement of emigrants—­like those settlements which your tribe sends forth—­but so far unlike your settlements, that it was dependent on the state from which it came.  It shook off that yoke, and, crowned with eternal glory, became a Koom-Posh.”