We met in the Auditorium over the Department of Public Printing. Many
had already arrived and were gathered into groups in various portions
of the vast hall conversing with each other. I took a seat on one
side by myself to contemplate the scene before me. I was by nature
a student, and here I was among, as it were, a nation of competent
instructors, and in a country where everything demonstrated the power
to control the great potent forces which govern the external world,
and the innate force of our higher moral and spiritual concepts of
what should be our relations toward each other in order to convert
this earth into a heaven of blissful, happy contentment. I was among
a people who universally regarded "an injury to one as the concern
of all," and hence health, happiness and abundance for all was their
normal condition.
I could hardly realize that this country had once been the abode of
poverty and all of its consequences of ignorance, vice and crime; that
here where equal rights, equal opportunities and an equal share in
the unlimited abundance which nature places within the easy reach of
intelligent labor were the universal and unquestioned law of being,
there had once been a grasping and cruel financial and commercial power
that condemned the wealth-producing millions to lives of unrequited
toil. But such, I was repeatedly told, had been the fact, and Norrena,
at this meeting was to give an oral lesson from that period and
describe the power that had oppressed and degraded the people in those
early ages.
But a short time had gone by since my first meeting with these people
and yet I had become thoroughly absorbed in their mental, moral and
spiritual life. I felt myself to be to all intents and purposes one
of them. What was it that had so entirely taken possession of my
consciousness? In all my life I had never felt so completely at home,
and at peace with myself and all the world. I was fully satisfied.
Norrena broke in upon my reverie by asking:
"What is it Nequa, that so absorbs your attention that you seem to be
utterly oblivious of the presence of this large assemblage of teachers
from all parts of the country to talk over the history of the olden
time when 'wealth accumulated and men decayed?' Have you forgotten
what I told you last evening? Oqua will report the lesson from the
Transition Period in English for you and you can afford to give some
attention to your old friends, Iola, MacNair, Polaris, Dione and your
comrades of the Ice King."
I looked around and found that while I had been musing, our party
had all gathered near me without attracting my attention and I said
apologetically: "I must have been dreaming."
"Then you were dreaming with your eyes wide open," said Oqua. "I
noticed that you seemed to be unusually absorbed. What were you
thinking about?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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