Let me try to give the chief things that had vanished from their minds.  There was, first, the ancient system of “ownership” that made such an extraordinary tangle of our administration of the land upon which we lived.  In the old time no one believed in that as either just or ideally convenient, but every one accepted it.  The community which lived upon the land was supposed to have waived its necessary connection with the land, except in certain limited instances of highway and common.  All the rest of the land was cut up in the maddest way into patches and oblongs and triangles of various sizes between a hundred square miles and a few acres, and placed under the nearly absolute government of a series of administrators called landowners.  They owned the land almost as a man now owns his hat; they bought it and sold it, and cut it up like cheese or ham; they were free to ruin it, or leave it waste, or erect upon it horrible and devastating eyesores.  If the community needed a road or a tramway, if it wanted a town or a village in any position, nay, even if it wanted to go to and fro, it had to do so by exorbitant treaties with each of the monarchs whose territory was involved.  No man could find foothold on the face of the earth until he had paid toll and homage to one of them.  They had practically no relations and no duties to the nominal, municipal, or national Government amidst whose larger areas their own dominions lay. . . .  This sounds, I know, like a lunatic’s dream, but mankind was that lunatic; and not only in the old countries of Europe and Asia, where this system had arisen out of the rational delegation of local control to territorial magnates, who had in the universal baseness of those times at last altogether evaded and escaped their duties, did it obtain, but the “new countries,” as we called them then—­the United States of America, the Cape Colony, Australia, and New Zealand—­spent much of the nineteenth century in the frantic giving away of land for ever to any casual person who would take it.  Was there coal, was there petroleum or gold, was there rich soil or harborage, or the site for a fine city, these obsessed and witless Governments cried out for scramblers, and a stream of shabby, tricky, and violent adventurers set out to found a new section of the landed aristocracy of the world.  After a brief century of hope and pride, the great republic of the United States of America, the hope as it was deemed of mankind, became for the most part a drifting crowd of landless men; landlords and railway lords, food lords (for the land is food) and mineral lords ruled its life, gave it Universities as one gave coins to a mendicant, and spent its resources upon such vain, tawdry, and foolish luxuries as the world had never seen before.  Here was a thing none of these statesmen before the Change would have regarded as anything but the natural order of the world, which not one of them now regarded as anything but the mad and vanished illusion of a period of dementia.