'This, Carlo, is what imprints upon the faces of all of you such Hippocratic marks of suffering. You can never give yourselves up to the unrestrained enjoyment of life so long as you breathe an atmosphere of misery, sorrow, and dread. And it is this community of feeling, which connects every man with his surroundings, that enables you here, only just arrived among a society to which this misery, this sorrow, this dread, are totally unknown, to enjoy that cheerful serenity of thought and emotion which is the innate characteristic of every healthy child of nature. And we, who have lived for a generation in the midst of this community from which both misery and the fear of misery are absent--we have almost completely got rid of that gloomy conception of human destiny of which we were the victims so long as the Old World was about us with its self-imposed martyrdom. I use the limiting expression "almost" with reference to those among us who had reached adult manhood before they came to Freeland. We younger ones, who were born and have grown up here without having ever seen misery, differ in this respect very considerably from our elders who in their youth saw the Medusa-head of servility face to face. It is five-and-twenty years since my father and mother, who were both among the first arrivals at the Kenia, escaped from the mephitic atmosphere of human misery, the degradation of man by man. But the recollection of the horrors among which they formerly lived, and which they shared without being able to prevent, will never quite fade out of their minds, and their hearts can never be fully possessed by that godlike calm and cheerful serenity which is the natural heritage of their children, whose hands have never been stained by the sweat and blood of enslaved fellow-men, and who have never had to appropriate for their own enjoyment the fruit of the labour of others--have never stood before the cruel alternative of being either the hammer or the anvil in the struggle for existence.' You know me well enough to imagine what an overpowering impression these words would make upon me. But I recalled by accident at this very moment a conversation I had had with the elder Ney about savings and insurance in Freeland, and it occurred to me that these were both things that did not harmonise with the absence of care of which his son had just been speaking. So I asked David, 'Why do men save in a country in which everyone can reckon with certainty upon a constantly increasing return for his industry, and in which even those who are incapable of work are protected not merely against material want, but even against the lack of higher enjoyments? Does not this thrift prove that anxiety for the morrow is not after all quite unknown here?'