in ready money, and this practice has led to a remarkable simplicity in dress.  Marriages are contracted only through mutual inclination; dowries have been abolished.  Education is governed by the ideas of Rousseau, and is directed, in a narrow spirit, to the promotion of morality.  Italian, German, English, and Spanish are taught in schools, but the study of the classical languages has disappeared; Latin does not help a man to virtue.  History too is neglected and discouraged, for it is “the disgrace of humanity, every page being crowded with crimes and follies.”  Theatres are government institutions, and have become the public schools of civic duties and morality. [Footnote:  In 1769 Mercier began to carry out his programme of composing and adapting plays for instruction and edification.  His theory of the true functions of the theatre he explained in a special treatise, Du theatre ou Nouvel Essai sur l’art dramatique (1773).]

The literary records of the past had been almost all deliberately destroyed by fire.  It was found expedient to do away with useless and pernicious books which only obscured truth or contained perpetual repetitions of the same thing.  A small closet in the public library sufficed to hold the ancient books which were permitted to escape the conflagration, and the majority of these were English.  The writings of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre were placed next those of Fenelon.  “His pen was weak, but his heart was sublime.  Seven ages have given to his great and beautiful ideas a just maturity.  His contemporaries regarded him as a visionary; his dreams, however, have become realities.”

The importance of men of letters as a social force was a favourite theme of Mercier, and in A.D. 2440 this will be duly recognised.  But the State control which weighed upon them so heavily in 1770 is not to be entirely abolished.  There is no preventive censorship to hinder publication, but there are censors.  There are no fines or imprisonment, but there are admonitions.  And if any one publishes a book defending principles which are considered dangerous, he is obliged to go about in a black mask.

There is a state religion, Deism.  There is probably no one who does not believe in God.  But if any atheist were discovered, he would be put through a course of experimental physics.  If he remained obdurate in his rejection of a “palpable and salutary truth,” the nation would go into mourning and banish him from its borders.

Every one has to work, but labour no longer resembles slavery.  As there are no monks, nor numerous domestics, nor useless valets, nor work-men employed on the production of childish luxuries, a few daily hours of labour are sufficient for the public wants.  Censors inquire into men’s capacities, assign tasks to the unemployed, and if man be found fit for nothing but the consumption of food he is banished from the city.