For just imagine, if you can, that mosquitoes, instead of being a pest about which every man was glad to believe evil, had been the basis of some important industry, or otherwise the source of incalculable advantage to the dominant classes of the community; that universities were endowed, and newspapers owned, and churches and hospitals supported, out of the proceeds of the mosquito monopoly! Are you sure that in that case the discovery of the physicians in Havana would have been hailed as a triumph of Science? Or do you not think that there might have been a strong opposition to the fantastic speculation, and that the men who had published it might have been denounced as enemies of society, and turned out of office for their incendiary teachings? That other physicians of high standing might have been found to ridicule the idea? That newspapers might have refused to print arguments in favour of it—that, in short, the mosquito monopoly might have succeeded in conjuring up before the imaginations of the multitude so horrible an image of this doctrine and its consequences, that they would have looked upon anyone who advocated it as in some way morally deformed? Assuming that this could have been done, there are only two things to be added. The first is that all the while the mosquitoes would have gone right on causing the yellow fever; and the second is that the people would have found it out in the end—that all that the makers of public opinion would have done, would be to put just so many millions of dollars into the pockets of the mosquito monopoly, at a cost of just so much misery to the human race. At the outset of this argument, I very much wish that you, the reader, would commune with yourself prayerfully, as to whether or not it might not possibly be that the ideas you have in your head concerning an “Industrial Republic” are really not ideas of your own at all, but prejudices which other people have put there for purposes known to them. Let me repeat the definition which I gave at the outset of this argument: I mean by an Industrial Republic, an organisation for the production of wealth, whose members are established upon a basis of equality; who elect representatives to govern the organisation; and who share equally in all its advantages.