“I was just coming to that,” said he. “Yes they made lots of money if they could only have got it, but that was the rub. For a few years while the amount of the acreage of the canals was small, it was comparatively easy to raise and pay over the five per cent due the Lunarians, but by the time the first great canal was completed through at a width of 200 feet, their interest amounted to 375,000 kiks per annum. By this time the king had discovered a good many new uses for money, and it went very much against the grain to pay over this interest. He began to think the Lunarians were going to be rather too well paid for the services and “investment,” they had talked about; and he congratulated himself that they had not availed themselves of his effusive offer, of ten per cent instead of five. However while he grumbled, he paid; and continued to do so as long as he lived, although towards the last the interest amounted to the very handsome sum of 1,000,000 kiks per annum. But that is all, after the death of that king who is yet affectionately referred to by the Martians as the “father of the canals,” the Lunarians for 7,000 years never got a kik. However, what they had already received was enough to make every member of the colony many times a millionaire if they had divided it amongst them. But this they did not do. The Lunarians are socialists and they regarded this money as belonging to the whole Lunarian race, to those at home on the moon as much as to themselves. They invested it to the best advantage in various enterprises, consuming on themselves only what their simple and modest personal wants required. The bonus or subsidy of 100 kiks per acre generally paid the entire cost of construction and the Lunarians had their interest money. At the death of the king there was one year’s interest due amounting to 1,000,000 kiks. The successor to the throne was not satisfied with the contract to pay a dividend on the stock the Lunarians held in the canals, and in fact repudiated it all except the 1,000,000 kiks then due which he said he would pay when he got around to it. But he never did, and the claim continued to draw interest which was computed and audited at the beginning of each subsequent reign, but always put off for some reason or other and not paid.” “Why didn’t they foreclose their mortgage?” I asked. “Well they did not want to do that until they were ready to improve the property so as to make it earn something. They reasoned that the canal claim, as it was called, was making money at a tremendous rate. The interest on it 2,000 years ago or, over 6,000 years after the work on the canals was commenced, amounted to thousands of millions of kiks every minute, and they had not been able to devise any plan by which they could make any satisfactory use of the mortgaged property; and so they let the money remain in the canal fund.”