My intense delight at making this discovery robbed me of the calm necessary to the prosecution of the abstract investigations upon which I was engaged. Before my mind's eye arose scenes which the reader will find in the following pages--tangible, living pictures of a commonwealth based upon the most perfect freedom and equity, and which needs nothing to convert it into a reality but the will of a number of resolute men. It happened to me as it may have happened to Bacon of Verulam when his studies for the 'Novum Organon' were interrupted by the vision of his 'Nova Atlantis'--with this difference, however, that his prophetic glance saw the land of social freedom and justice when centuries of bondage still separated him from it, whilst I see it when mankind is already actually equipped ready to step over its threshold. Like him, I felt an irresistible impulse vividly to depict what agitated my mind. Thus, putting aside for awhile the abstract and systematic treatise which I had begun, I wrote this book, which can justly be called 'a political romance,' though it differs from all its predecessors of that category in introducing no unknown and mysterious human powers and characteristics, but throughout keeps to the firm ground of the soberest reality. The scene of the occurrences described by me is no imaginary fairy-land, but a part of our planet well-known to modern geography, which I describe exactly as its discoverers and explorers have done. The men who appear in my narrative are endowed with no supernatural properties and virtues, but are spirit of our spirit, flesh of our flesh; and the motive prompting their economic activity is neither public spirit nor universal philanthropy, but an ordinary and commonplace self-interest. Everything in my 'Freeland' is severely real, only one fiction underlies the whole narrative, namely, that a sufficient number of men possessing a modicum of capacity and strength have actually been found ready to take the step that shall deliver them from the bondage of the exploiting system of economics, and conduct them into the enjoyment of a system of social equity and freedom. Let this one assumption be but realised--and that it will be, sooner or later, I have no doubt, though perhaps not exactly as I have represented--then will 'Freeland' have become a reality, and the deliverance of mankind will have been accomplished. For the age of bondage is past; that control over the forces of nature which the founder of modern natural science, in his 'Nova Atlantis,' predicted as the end of human misery has now been actually acquired. We are prevented from enjoying the fruits of this acquisition, from making full use of the discoveries and inventions of the great intellects of our race, by nothing but the phlegmatic faculty of persistence in old habits which still keeps laws and institutions in force when the conditions that gave rise to them have long since disappeared.