But even such a demand for high intelligence Freeland was determined to
meet out of its own resources. In the third year, therefore, a high school
was founded, in which all those branches of knowledge were taught which in
Europe can be learnt at the universities, academies, and technical
colleges. All the faculties were endowed with a liberality of which those
outside of Freeland can have scarcely any conception. Our observatories,
laboratories, and museums had command of almost unlimited means, and no
stipend was too high to attract and retain a brilliant teacher. The same
held good of the technical, and not less of the agricultural and
commercial, professorial chairs and apparatus for teaching in our high
school. The instruction in all faculties was absolutely untrammelled, and,
like that in the lower schools, gratuitous. In the fifth year of the
settlement the high school had 7,500 students, the number of its chairs was
215; its annual budget reached as high as 2,500,000£, and was rapidly
increasing.
The means for all this enormous outlay was furnished in rich abundance by
the tax levied on the total income of all producers; for this income grew
amazingly under the double influence of the increasing population and the
increasing productiveness of labour. When the railway to the coast was
finished and its results had begun to make themselves felt, the value of
the average profit of a labour-hour quickly rose to 6s.; and as at this
time, the end of the fifth year in Freeland, 280,000 workers were
productively engaged for an average of six hours a day--that is, for 1,800
hours in the year--the total value of the profit of labour that year in
Freeland amounted to 280,000 × 1,800 × 6s.--that is, to a round sum of
150,000,000£. Of this the commonwealth reserved thirty-five per cent. as
tax--that is, in round figures, 52,500,000£; and this was the source from
which, after meeting the claims for the maintenance allowances--which
certainly absorbed more than half--all the expenses it was held desirable
to indulge in were defrayed.
In fact, the growth of revenue was so certain and had reached such large
proportions that, at the end of the fifth year, the executive resolved to
place before the representative bodies, meeting together for the purpose,
two measures of great importance: first, to make the granting of credits to
the associations independent of the central authority; and, secondly, to
return the free contributions of the members who had already joined, and in
future to accept no such contributions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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