"In my country," I said to Karmas, "from eight to ten months, dependent upon the season, elapses between the sowing and the harvesting of wheat. Here the period is reduced to from eight to ten days. I can not understand the discrepancy." "But it is an absolute mystery to you?" "It is." "And yet your own people have approached the twilight of its solution. By selection of seeds and combination of soils, and other perfectly natural processes, they have been able to change the nature of vegetation and produce new vegetable being. The period for the growth and maturing of nearly all your grains and vegetables has been perceptibly shortened, and entirely new forms produced, within the past century, and largely within the period of your own lifetime. "Your floriculturists and horticulturists have carried the evolution the furthest, and yet they do not even faintly comprehend the real principle which produces results. We understand and intelligently apply it. Hence with us but ten days elapse between seedtime and harvest, and shorter periods in the production of our common vegetables. "We are able to produce flowers of all shapes and colors at will, and with the absolute certainty of the operation of fixed and immutable laws, while your florists, groping in the dark, occasionally stumble on a result, knowing nothing of the law that produces it, and give their fellows a nine-days' wonder. "Yesterday you asked me why all the farms were so diminutive--'merely a ten-acre field,' as you expressed it. The explanation is before you. Each of these small farms is capable of producing food for one thousand persons with their constantly duplicated crops. There is room for a million such farms in the Commonwealth, without impinging upon the residential demesnes or cities. "There is no need to put these farms to the full test of their productiveness. The twentieth part suffices. We have a population of 50,000,000, increasing at the rate of scarcely one per cent each year, and two-thirds of the Commonwealth is public domain, for the benefit of the countless generations yet unborn. Each year and each day brings their immediate needs, and they are met with plenteous fullness." * * * * * Karmas later gave me a fuller idea of the general polity of the Commonwealth. All men become voters at 25, if they are married, and participate in the choice of officers. All are eligible to office. On the day fixed for the election of public officials the voter calls up the office of the Municipal Custodian and registers his choice in the ballot-receiver, which automatically records, and at the end of the balloting announces the result. If for provincial officers, it is instantaneously transmitted to the capital of the province, and if for Commonwealth officers to the Greater City. In your land this would open the door to fraud, but in Intermere there is neither fraud nor chicane.