The secret of our Crystal Age Utopia is the secret of the beehive: a queen bee. The Crystallites have done away with the difficulties of mating by appointing one woman, in every house, to be the house-mother, the woman whose capital duty is to carry on the family: the entire burden of each generation falls upon her shoulders, and in return for the sacrifice she is treated with the respect due to divinity, like the young man who was chosen in the Kingdom of Montezuma, as the tales have it, to represent the chief deity until at the end of a year he was disembowelled. The wish of a house-mother is a command; the word of the house-mother is law. For a year before her retirement as mother she is put into communion with the sacred books of the house, and has at her command a store of knowledge which the rest of the hive are not permitted to share. It is she who keeps burning the fires of life. For all except the house-mother sex is a matter of purely physical appearance. The Crystallites, if we may speak irreverently, are “content with a vegetable love--which would certainly not suit me” nor, it appears, did it suit our traveller to the Crystal Age, when he discovers that his passion could never be reciprocated by his beloved, even if she so far transgressed the laws of the household as to give way to him. Against the appearance of passion and all the mortal griefs that it carries with it, the house-mother possesses a remedy. When in the murk of despair our traveller turns to her for advice and consolation, she gives him a phial of liquid. He drinks it in the belief that it will make him as free from passion as his house-mates; and he is not deceived; for--he dies. The social life of the household is not to be wrecked by the storms and stresses of the individual’s passions. The engines of life are no longer dangerous: the fuel has been taken away! A “chill moonlight felicity” is all that remains. 3