"Well, isn't it so?" I said. "Your children are sorted out while they are at school, their play is turned into useful employment, their careers are decided for them; hardly any of them rise out of their original class. Then everybody is under the eye of the Time Department, everybody is inspected and looked after from the cradle to the grave. It is almost impossible to commit a real crime or to set up any independent institution. There is, you must admit, a certain want of freedom in your arrangements." "But of what people are you speaking?" said Count Krafft. "You seem to have confined your attention to the lower classes. For them, in all countries, something of a strait-jacket is needed surely. Certainly it is for ours. We know our own people. When they are properly drilled and led they do wonders, but left to themselves they have always relapsed into laziness and barbarism, or else have burst out into anarchy and revolutionary fury." "But what scope does your system allow for their energies?" I asked. "Every aspect of life seems confined by your meticulous regulations." "That is an illusion," he replied. "You see, we are a highly intellectual people and it is quite natural for us to formulate regulations. Modern life is necessarily complex, and the chief difference between us and other nations is that we recognise the complexity and organise our activities accordingly. We are simply in advance of other nations, that is all. Take a simple thing like Railways. We organised our Railway system to suit our national purposes instead of leaving them to commercial enterprise. Take the Education of the people. The State took charge of it fifty years before other nations recognised its vital importance. Take the question of Public Health; even those States which prate about individual liberty have had to follow in our wake and organise the medical service. Besides, it is only by organising the activities of the lower classes that the State can maintain its supremacy." "I see," I replied, "the strait-jacket is for the lower classes. I thought it was a garment worn by everybody." "The expression was yours," he said, with an indulgent smile. "We certainly do not regard it as a strait-jacket." "That is perhaps because the ruling classes do not wear it," I replied. "We do not recognise any classes as ruling classes," he said suavely. "It is an obsolete expression." "But I thought you liked to recognise facts and call things by their proper names," I replied. "Certainly we do," he answered. "But which are the ruling classes? The Super-State is the supreme and only ruler in Meccania." "Even in a Super-State," I said, "I should have thought, from what you have said, that some groups of persons really wielded the power of the State."