The professor contemptuously ignored him. “I suppose you occasionally receive emissaries from, as well as send them to, the world outside?” “Yes, now and then castaways land on our coasts, and ships out of their reckonings put in at our ports for water or provision.” “And how are they pleased with your system?” “Why, I cannot better answer than by saying that they mostly refuse to leave us.” “Ah, just as Bacon reports!” cried the professor. “You mean in the _New Atlantis_?” returned the Altrurian. “Yes; it is astonishing how well Bacon in that book, and Sir Thomas More in his _Utopia_, have divined certain phases of our civilization and polity.” “I think he rather _has_ you, professor,” the banker whispered, with a laugh. “But all those inspired visionaries,” the Altrurian continued, while the professor sat grimly silent, watching for another chance, “who have borne testimony of us in their dreams, conceived of states perfect without the discipline of a previous competitive condition. What I thought, however, might specially interest you Americans in Altruria is the fact that our economy was evolved from one so like that in which you actually have your being. I had even hoped you might feel that, in all these points of resemblance, America prophesies another Altruria. I know that to some of you all that I have told of my country will seem a baseless fabric, with no more foundation, in fact, than More’s fairy-tale of another land where men dealt kindly and justly by one another, and dwelt, a whole nation, in the unity and equality of a family. But why should not a part of that fable have come true in our polity, as another part of it has come true in yours? When Sir Thomas More wrote that book, he noted with abhorrence the monstrous injustice of the fact that men were hanged for small thefts in England; and in the preliminary conversation between its characters he denounced the killing of men for any sort of thefts. Now you no longer put men to death for theft; you look back upon that cruel code of your mother England with an abhorrence as great as his own. We, for our part, who have realized the Utopian dream of brotherly equality, look back with the same abhorrence upon a state where some were rich and some poor, some taught and some untaught, some high and some low, and the hardest toil often failed to supply a sufficiency of the food which luxury wasted in its riots. That state seems as atrocious to us as the state which hanged a man for stealing a loaf of bread seems to you.