“Briefly then, in this country, where everything consistent with the right of others is already constitutionally conceded to each one, the attempt to give anything more to anyone, is an encroachment on liberty. For it is plain that if among ten people everything is granted to each one which is consistent with the liberty of the other nine, then to grant more to five of the ten is to encroach on the other five, and at once converts the favored five into masters, and fixes the status of the other five as slaves. This has been done. The result is, liberty has been dethroned, and licentiousness is set up in her place.” “But,” said Elkhorn, “if it were agreed to all around, for the sake of peace?” “It would be an agreement to dethrone liberty, and the compactors would be traitors and self-made slaves; and war, not peace, would be the result. But it has never been agreed to all around. I never agreed to it. It was done by trickery and the feebleness of the enslaved, with the result that for the lack of courage to stand by the law of liberty, we have all become the slaves of license, and not peace, but war prevails concerning every question which is before the country, yes, before the world,—Europe, Asia, Africa, America and the islands of the sea.” “Miss Daksha,” said Palmer, “according to your opinion, how did all this muss creep in?” “In this era it practically was never out,” said Ethel. “Liberty, as formulated in the preamble of our Constitution, has failed of practicalization, because people were not, and are not, up to the level, requisite to even mentally grasp the idea. It is God-like, and far beyond the popular ideal of what God is like. And what makes matters worse, it is beyond what the average pulpit now claims God is like. But shall we feel badly about all this? No; let us rather say, that as yet we have not had time, conveniences nor methods adequate to the evolution of the ideal commonwealth of the United States, into which individual intelligence will be presently annealed.” The power of her thought reached every mind there, poorly as these words convey it on paper. But to invite fuller explanations, Mrs. Daksha said: “Ethel, what precisely do you mean by commonwealth? Anything in the ordinary communistic line, or on the Bellamy idea?” “Please take from my words the simplest dictionary sense of them, quite unrelated to any elaborated theory,” said Ethel, with that comfortable assurance which comes to each of us, that anyone ought to know what _we_ are talking about, however misapprehended other theorists have chosen to make themselves to be, by their play upon words. “According to my idea,” said Ethel, “commonwealth consists in the common services which each can perform to others, in releasing and distributing those natural commodities which earth, water, air and the spiritual substance-of-the-universe put potentially into the possession of each individual.”