“At the head of each city is a Local Adviser, selected in the same manner as the High Chief Adviser; and, aided by a corps of from five to fifteen assistants also chosen competitively, he decides those questions not settled in the popular assemblies,--questions such as the amount of energy to be devoted to the erection of new buildings, the time and nature of local festivals, the regulation of local hygienic problems, the number of public physicians required to attend the ill and aged, and a dozen other matters of practical and artistic concern. Equally important theoretically, though in actual practice far less so, is the court of eleven judges which presides in each town, settling all disputes among citizens and reprimanding the law-breakers. No doubt there were frequently such persons as law-breakers three thousand years ago, when these courts were planned, but today such offenders are virtually unknown, for the only crimes are those of impulse and passion, and these are exceedingly rare--fortunately, the congenital criminals have been wiped out along with lunatics and morons by our rigorous birth selection. Occasionally, indeed, some diseased person will break some unwritten rule of society, such as that against trapping or slaying fishes or small animals; but the government hospitals care for such unfortunates, just as they care for the criminals of impulse, and not infrequently effect a cure. As for disputes among individuals, they are as obsolete as embezzlement or highway robbery, for now that the ownership of property has been abolished, what is there left to quarrel about? And so for the most part our courts endure somewhat as the appendix endures in the human body--mere anachronistic reminders of an age that is no more.” At a single sitting I read my book from cover to cover. Even aside from what I have already mentioned, the facts that it told me were innumerable and highly varied: how the great golden lamps of Atlantis were electrically lighted and were switched on and off at specified intervals by country-wide clockwork; how all Atlanteans, old and young, ill and healthy, were cared for by the State, so that no man was weighed down with dependents; how disease had been almost wiped out, since all the commoner noxious germs had been conquered; how religion in the organized sense had ceased to exist, for the reason that each man was expected to arrive at his own philosophy; how the temples that littered the country were without theological meaning, but were sanctuaries of beauty whereto any one might come at any time to worship amid the solitude of his own thoughts; how education was one of the prime pursuits of the people, and was participated in by all from childhood to old age, but was never undertaken by the mob method popular in the upper world.