“It is not difficult for you to imagine the beauty and grandeur of some of these overhead scenes. Of course the power used is electricity, and it is used liberally and freely since its cost is merely nominal. Heat as well as light is supplied through the same means and used for all purposes, domestic, industrial and public. Our houses are very tasteful and often highly ornamental. The architecture is light and graceful and suited to a mild and quiet climate, for we have the pleasant air of your tropics without their storms or excessive heat. A slight sprinkle of rain is all we ever have in the shape of a storm in any part of the interior continent, and these sprinkles are rendered periodical by artificial means. There are no wide agricultural tracts with us, nor densely populated cities, but the population is distributed in towns, and continuous villages line the roads, each of which is devoted to some principal productive industry. There are principal streets that run miles, passing through and connecting these towns, and often bending so as to make a complete circuit. The streets are wide and we are always furnished with a number of rail tracks, and paved with a hard smooth material—sometimes stone and sometimes iron or alumina. The only vehicles used on the streets, besides the rail cars are light, private and pleasure carriages, propelled by storage batteries. The roads that unite the various internal provinces to each other and to the external continent, are chiefly the gravity roads, that I have already described to you. In some cases to save room, the roads are built in stories, one track above another. The work shops and farms, are situated conveniently near on streets parallel to the main thoroughfares, and their products are conveyed from them, and their materials to them, on roads laid on those streets.” “I should like to know something about your social and political arrangements, your industrial economy and your form of government,” said I. “If the government controls the increase of population, I suppose it must control labor and production; and consumption too—how is that?” “The sort of control, which the government exercise is almost exclusively advisory. There is no government control in the sense of the term as used on earth. All productive labor is expended for the creation of common property, to which, when created, every individual has equal title. Not the slightest compulsion however is put upon labor, nor the least prohibition upon consumption.” “Do you mean to say that nobody is obliged to work, and yet everyone can take what he wants from the common stock?” “Yes.” “Then yours is an angelic race, truly. We have not anything like that on this earth, and I reckon, we never will have.”