"Nowadays everything that is ordered or orderly you worldlings have set out to destroy. Your barbarian hordes broke up the stable Roman Empire; your fanatical reformers and greedy monarchs destroyed the consolidating features of the Middle Ages, which though very far from being perfect yet presented many illuminating features which we deemed expedient to copy in Meleager. In recent years your death-dealing guns and your proselytising emissaries have destroyed wantonly the vast matured civilisations of China and Japan and Burmah, which are now rapidly casting out all their antique virtues and are fast absorbing all the vice and vulgarity of the West. Every community, howsoever poor or insignificant, yet content to work out its own salvation and be governed by its own ancient laws and customs, and consequently happy and healthy according to its own lights, you have disturbed and dismembered.... "Everywhere and every day the beautiful is retreating before the utilitarian; smoke and noise pollute the greenest and loveliest valleys of Europe and America; dirt and disease increase in spite of your undoubted advances in medical science, whose services are given over to the individual who will pay for them rather than to the community at large. One sees the feeble and the cretinous of your world breeding like flies, whilst those of a better condition and in sound health are found too selfish and too tenacious of their ease to undertake the trouble or expense connected with the rearing of a family. Epidemics continue, and in the form of a gift of Western civilisation are allowed to sweep away whole tribes and nations of wholesome primitive peoples; your most loathsome and yet preventable diseases of contagion still hold sway, either by reason of your own indifference or from false ideals of a prudery that, I confess, wholly passes my own comprehension. Over all your Earth the universal craving for wealth at any cost of morals or self-respect has settled like a blight. All pleasures of the intellect are rapidly ceasing to attract, and the extravagance and debauchery of the ostentatious rich are announced by your odious vassal Press as the sole objects worthy of attainment or imitation to-day.... "You slaughter and exterminate your rare animals and your beautiful birds in order that your women may adorn themselves with their pelts and plumage, and even now in this cold weather I have watched your fine ladies daily walking in your noisy, crowded streets of London, half-naked yet wholly unashamed, with their limbs and bosoms exposed equally to the bitter wind and the lascivious eye of the stranger, whilst masses of costly furs, the spoils of innocent and peaceful animals, are heaped upon their pampered bodies....